Commissioned Book Review: Giorgos Katsambekis and Alexandros Kioupkiolis, The Populist Radical Left in Europe
| Author | Petar Bankov |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919891331 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2020, Vol. 18(4) NP19 –NP20
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
891331PSW0010.1177/1478929919891331Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2019
Commissioned Book Review
The Populist Radical Left in Europe by
Giorgos Katsambekis and Alexandros
Kioupkiolis (eds) Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. 216
pp., £105.00 (h/b), ISBN: 9781138744806
Time flies fast for the European radical left.
About 5 years ago, parties of and to the left of
social democracy (March, 2011: 1) were flying
high with Syriza rising to power in Greece and
Podemos making major electoral gains in
Spain. Nothing of this remained by 2019 with
the majority of those parties being clearly in
electoral retreat. This allows us to recap and
reflect on their experiences so far. The Populist
Radical Left in Europe, edited by Giorgos
Katsambekis and Alexandros Kioupkiolis, pro-
vides an important contribution in this respect,
as it focuses on the nexus between the radical
left and populism.
The book explores a number of case studies
of left-wing populism. Five of those are
devoted to political parties, including Syriza,
Podemos, the Left Party (Germany), the
Socialist Party (The Netherlands) and the Left
(Slovenia), whereas the remainder focuses on
individual persons (Jean-Luc Mélenchon in
France and Jeremy Corbyn in the United
Kingdom) and new forms of leaderless politi-
cal organisations (e.g. 15-M in Spain). While
the introduction argues for the use of a pluralist
approach for studying these cases, where each
author relies on their own definition of pop-
ulism, the majority of chapters took a clear dis-
cursive perspective in the tradition of the Essex
School. In this respect, the book makes a good
effort to bridge the current divide between dis-
cursive and ideational approaches of studying
populism. Yet, as not all chapters based their
findings on the discursive perspective, the
book seems to struggle in providing a coherent
understanding of the populist radical left.
A major disadvantage of this book is its
exclusive focus on West and South European
cases of left-wing populism. While this reflects
the predominance of such cases in the limited
universe of the populist radical left in Europe,
it rather omits the experiences of Eastern
Europe. In this respect, Eastern Europe can
provide insights on the distinction between
left-wing populism and what March terms as
‘social populists’ (March, 2011: 19), that is,
organisations emphasising at their core the
divide between the people and the corrupt elite
by fusing left-wing and right-wing messages.
For example, Poland includes the cases of,
both, the social populist Self-Defense and the
left-wing populist Left Together, which would
have been an interesting comparison to under-
stand where left-wing populism ends and
where social populism starts. Such an omis-
sion, therefore, limits the contribution of this
book in highlighting some of the main compo-
nents of left-wing populism.
Nevertheless, the main argument of the
book is a compelling one. The chapters reveal
the amorphous and diverse character of the
populist radical left in Europe. This diversity is
visible in two main ways. First, on an ideologi-
cal level, the populist radical left differs in its
understanding of ‘the people’. The book chap-
ters highlight that whereas entities with clear
left-wing self-identification define the people
as a social class (usually, the working class),
those that reject the traditional left–right divide
rather depict the people as a coalition of diverse
social groups. This is an important contribution
to the research on populism as it indicates that
populism can be pluralist and does not neces-
sarily homogenise the people, as previously
theorised (Mudde, 2004).
Second, the populist radical left finds itself
in the strategic dilemma of balancing the hori-
zontality of a pluralist, open and networked
engagement between organisations at equal
footing with the verticality of hierarchical cen-
tralisation around a single entity. Often, the
populist radical left abandons this fragile bal-
ance by entangling itself closely with either
option. As the book reveals, these decisions
often underpin the process of ideological,
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