Pop-socialism: A new radical left politics? Evaluating the rise and fall of the British and Italian left in the anti-austerity age
| Author | Bradley Ward,Marco Guglielmo |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211044643 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211044643
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2022, Vol. 24(4) 686 –701
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481211044643
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Pop-socialism: A new radical
left politics? Evaluating the
rise and fall of the British
and Italian left in the
anti-austerity age
Bradley Ward and Marco Guglielmo
Abstract
This article draws from primary research – including 46 semi-structured interviews – to provide
a comparative analysis of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party between 2015
and 2020, and Nichi Vendola’s leadership of the Italian radical left between 2010 and 2015. It is
claimed that both cases represent a new form of left politics – which we term pop-socialism – that
combines popular-democratic appeals to the ‘people’ with the traditional class-based demands of
democratic socialism. This contributes to recent literature on radical left politics and left populism
by providing an insight into the underexplored relationship between popular-democratic and class
politics. Moreover, the article provides an important empirical account of Corbyn and Vendola’s
rapid mobilisation but also their equally abrupt decline.
Keywords
Corbynism, democratic socialism, Italian radical left, left parties, populism
Introduction
The 2010s were a tumultuous decade for the radical left in the Global North. New leftist
‘outsider’ leaders emerged such as Nichi Vendola in Italy, Alexis Tsipras in Greece, Pablo
Iglesias in Spain, Bernie Sanders in the United States, and Jeremy Corbyn in the United
Kingdom. Some achieved unexpected success: Syriza won the 2015 Greek general elec-
tion, Podemos came third in the 2015 Spanish general election less than 2 years after they
were launched, and leftist Jeremy Corbyn came from obscurity to win the 2015 Labour
leadership contest. However, by the end of the decade, the radical left had not been estab-
lished as ‘mainstream’ (see March and Keith, 2016). In July 2019, Syriza had lost a gen-
eral election and fallen back into opposition. Podemos, meanwhile, were only able to win
12.9% of the vote in the November 2019 general election. Corbyn, moreover, had been
Department of Political Science and International Studies, School of Government, University of Birmingham,
Birmingham, UK
Corresponding author:
Bradley Ward, Department of Political Science and International Studies, School of Government, University
of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK.
Email: B.Ward.2@pgr.bham.ac.uk
1044643BPI0010.1177/13691481211044643The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsWard and Guglielmo
research-article2021
Original Article
Ward and Guglielmo 687
replaced as leader after a devastating defeat at the 2019 general election. Ultimately, the
radical left have not taken advantage of the supposedly golden opportunities arising from
the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), despite the decline of social democratic parties
(Manwaring and Kennedy, 2018).
Many authors have described these parties and their leaders as examples of left-wing
populism (Damiani, 2020; Katsambekis and Kioupkiolis, 2019; Santana and Rama, 2018;
Smith, 2019). This literature mainly contends that populist appeals to the ‘people’ and the
‘elite’ have replaced the traditional focus on class cleavages. However, left populist
scholarship sometimes conflates instances of rhetoric for a fully developed populist poli-
tics (Dean and Maiguashca, 2020), and subsequently downplays the variety of ways in
which appeals to the ‘people’ can be combined with class politics. In some cases, appeals
to the ‘people’ might contribute to the renewal, and not the replacement, of the traditional
class-based demands of democratic socialism.
We propose ‘pop-socialism’ as a different conceptualisation for interpreting the rela-
tionship between popular-democratic appeals and class politics among some left parties.
The first section explores the main features of pop-socialism – we claim that it emerged
on the intersection between democratic socialist groups orbiting left parties, and left
groups in the anti-austerity movement seeking party representation. The second section
describes the research design and methodology. The third section draws from empirical
research to explore two cases of pop-socialism. In British politics, leftist Jeremy Corbyn
defied expectations to win the 2015 Labour leadership contest, and guided the party
through a successful 2017 general election in which they increased their share of the vote
by 9.6%, the biggest swing since 1945 (Dorey, 2017). Corbyn’s rise, however, was
matched by an equally abrupt decline; at the 2019 general election, the Labour Party
plummeted to its lowest share of seats since 1935 and Corbyn was replaced as leader. In
Italy, Nichi Vendola, a former member of the parliament (MP) of the Communist
Refoundation Party (CRP), emerged as a national leader in 2005 when he won the centre-
left primaries for the regional elections in Apulia. In late 2009, Vendola abandoned CRP
to create a new party, ‘Left, Environment, Freedom’ (LEF), and formed a satellite organi-
sation alongside LEF, ‘Nichi’s Factories’ (Damiani, 2011: 87). However, Vendola went
through a rapid decline after the formation of Mario Monti’s technocratic government in
2011, leading to the end of his career in 2015 after his term as president of Apulia ended.
In the concluding remarks, we discuss two primary reasons for the decline of pop-social-
ism. First, we identify an ‘insider-outsider’ dynamic between supporters that focused on
forming a Praetorian Guard around the leader against hostile party factions, and other
activists who demanded the introduction of movement-like and innovative forms of par-
ticipation (see Muldoon and Rye, 2020: 10–13). Second, we argue that overdependence
on the leader led to a rapid demobilisation after that leaders’ popularity declined.
What is pop-socialism?
This section identifies the three main features of pop-socialism. First, pop-socialism fore-
grounds appeals to the ‘people’ as part of a renewal of conventional socialist politics,
rather than the replacement of it that some left populist scholars call for. Second, pop-
socialism aims to activate its ‘people’ as a ‘popular-democratic’ challenge to representa-
tive democratic structures, in distinction from ‘authoritarian populists’ who mobilise the
‘people’ as a passive audience to insulate elites from the checks and balances of
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