The Phenomenology of Left-wing Populism. An Ideal- typical Model

Whilst the 20th Century was certainly the Century of ideologies, the 21st started in the spirit of Populisms. In this regard, the literature of contemporary politics has paid great attention towards Right-wing Populisms, keeping an eye on and describing the features of a long list of political actors with particular scientific rigour (Mudde 2007, Akkerman, de Lange and Rooduijn 2012). However, besides the Populisms of reactionary nature, another type of party came onto the European political scene, defined as left wing populist. Although some of these already existed, the emergence of the main parties of this category can be put down to the critical outcome determined by the financial and economic crisis of the early 2000s. As regards their theoretical framework, these organisations started a progressive drift from the history of traditional socialism, which centred on the class struggle between the proletariat and the capitalists, with the intention of providing new contents and new forms of political representation and organisation to the conflicts which broke out in the post-ideological and post-Fordist age. Although still constituted around egalitarian claims, due to the profound processes of capitalistic redevelopment recorded after the end of “The Short Twentieth Century” (Hobsdawm 1994), the left-wing populist parties proposed a reading of history centred on a new political cleavage (conceived in an integrative form, not as an alternative to the traditional Marxist one), founded on the top/bottom juxtaposition