DiEM25

Populist constitutionalism is an increasingly discussed topic, but so far the analysis of the interrelation between populism and constitutionalism lacks a more systematic and comparative approach, able to bring out significant variety. Most of the recent literature on the phenomenon focuses on (right-wing) populism as a threat to constitutional democracy. This Article sets out to contribute to a more comparative and comprehensive discussion of the relation between varieties of populism-situated on a continuum from left-to right-wing, but also from national to transnational-with varieties of constitutional projects. The objective of this Article is threefold. First, I argue that it is problematic to consider legal constitution-alism as exhausting the possibilities of constitutionalism. Second, if populism is reduced to right-wing projects and as an unequivocal threat to liberal democracy, it becomes difficult to distinguish between dissimilar manifestations of populist projects, in particular regarding constituent politics. Third, while hardly any attention has been paid to constitutionalism and populist claims on the transnational level, in the European context, transnational forms of populism and constituent politics manifest themselves frequently, articulating an incisive critique on the European constitutional and political status quo, and contributing to a re-imagination and democratization of the European constitutional reality. Populist constitutionalism is an increasingly discussed topic, but the interrelation between pop-ulism and constitutionalism still lacks a more systematic and comparative analysis. Much of the emerging literature on the phenomenon focuses on (right-wing) populism as a threat to constitutional democracy. 1 As such, a comparative and theoretical treatment of populist constitutionalism, which is able to deal with the different manifestations of the phenomenon, is as yet absent. In contrast to a relatively narrow focus on right-wing populism and its relation to constitutional change, this Article sets out to contribute to a more comparative and comprehensive discussion of the relation between varieties of populism-situated on a continuum from left-to right-wing, but also from national to transnational-with varieties of constitutional projects.

Etienne Balibar (2010) sees in a pan-European populism a chance for the rebirth of Europe's democracy. DiEM25, launched by Yanis Varoufakis, is a transnational European movement that seeks to democratize the European Union and save it from itself. This paper argues that DiEM can be perceived as a positive response to Balibar's call. By utilizing the methodology of the so-called Essex School of Discourse Analysis, I examine the aforementioned hypothesis. What we are witnessing, I claim, is a case of transnational populism, a paradoxical combination for those who identify populism with nationalism. Laclau's formal approach, adopted in this paper, conceives populism as a particular logic detached from certain contents which implies that populism can be anything, and thus there is no contradiction in a transnational populism. What are the possibilities of DiEM's transnational populism for Europe's democratic politics? Is DiEM a chance for European democracy?

Today more than ever, the idea of Europe is demonstrating its distinctly discursive character. In a European Union marked by the wound of Brexit, the re-emergence of nationalism and a growing criticism of its management and institutional set-up, in fact, the signifier “Europe” is endowed with several (and sometimes antithetical) meanings. According with the political projects within which it is articulated, Europe may represent be a symbol of harmony or division, prosperity or decay, freedom or constraint.
Among those political projects, however, the pan-European movements Democracy in Europe Movement 25 (DiEM25) and Volt Europa have given to the idea of Europe a new and undisputable centrality. Founded in 2016 and 2017 respectively, these movements consider Europe as both their field of action and their central objective. In fact, while differing ideologically, they share the common goals of democratizing the EU through a transnational organization, enhancing popular participation and promoting the tenets of progressivism, environmentalism, and greater social justice.
Within this framework, the objective of my research is to analyse the idea of Europe lying at the heart of DiEM25 and Volt discourses through a qualitative analysis of their manifestos, policy papers and statements of their leaders. Specifically, building on the discourse-theoretical approach of Laclau and Mouffe and the Essex School of Discourse Analysis, I will interpret the signifier “Europe” in DiEM25 and Volt’s discourse through the categories of empty signifier and nodal point. Although with some differences, in fact, in both cases the idea of Europe appears as the symbol of a lack and a desire of fullness (empty signifier) and the privileged signifier for defining and fixing the meaning of the other discursive elements (nodal point) of DiEM25 and Volt discourses: the movements’ identities, the political subjectivities they refer to, the antagonistic other that they picture as an obstacle in the realization of their political project.

The article examines how the contestation of policy in the European Union increasingly depends on a willingness to break rules. It develops an account of what a politics of disobedience in this context may look like, the kinds of political agent that can lead it, and the normative basis on which to distinguish it from illegitimate forms of extra-legality.