The Potentials and Difficulties of Transnational Populism: The Case of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25)
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719847576 |
| Author | Panos Panayotu,Benjamin De Cleen,Benjamin Moffitt,Yannis Stavrakakis |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719847576
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(1) 146 –166
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719847576
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The Potentials and
Difficulties of Transnational
Populism: The Case of
the Democracy in Europe
Movement 2025 (DiEM25)
Benjamin De Cleen1, Benjamin Moffitt2,
Panos Panayotu3 and Yannis Stavrakakis4
Abstract
The Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), launched by former Greek Finance Minister
Yanis Varoufakis, seeks to construct a transnational left political project to ‘democratise Europe’. Its
construction of a European ‘people’ against an international elite raises questions about the potentials
of populism beyond the nation-state. Building on a discourse-theoretical distinction between populism
and nationalism, the article asks whether DiEM25 is a truly transnational populist movement. Through
an analysis of the movement’s manifestoes, speeches, press releases and published interviews with
DiEM25 leaders, the article shows how DiEM25 constructs a ‘European people’ in opposition to an
international ‘elite’, how DiEM25 oscillates between speaking for national ‘peoples’ and a transnational
‘people’, and how it negotiates its populism, nationalism and transnationalism. The article contributes
to the theorisation of populism beyond the usually assumed nation-state level and shines a light on the
potentials and limitations of transnational populism as an as-yet understudied political development.
Keywords
populism, transnational populism, nationalism, democracy, European Union
Accepted: 8 February 2019
Introduction
On 9 February 2016, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis assembled an
Avengers-like team of luminaries of the European left – including Mayor of Barcelona
Ada Colau, British Green MP Caroline Lucas, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and musician
1Department of Communication Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
2School of Arts, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
3School of Social Political and Geographical Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
4Department of Political Science, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
Corresponding author:
Benjamin De Cleen, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium.
Email: bdecleen@vub.be
847576PSX0010.1177/0032321719847576Political StudiesDe Cleen et al.
research-article2019
Article
De Cleen et al. 147
Brian Eno – in Berlin’s Volksbühne (Theatre of the People) to launch the Democracy in
Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25). DiEM25’s mission was not a modest one: indeed, it
aimed to ‘shake Europe – gently, compassionately, but firmly’ (Varoufakis, 2016e) by
bringing about its democratisation and convening a constitutional assembly for Europe by
2025. Otherwise, Varoufakis claimed, the whole European project could disintegrate. In
claiming to speak for ‘we, the people of Europe’ against ‘unaccountable “technocrats,”
complicit politicians and shadowy institutions’ (DiEM25, 2016a: 6), and making this
antagonistic divide between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ core to its discourse, DiEM25 set
itself up as a populist movement.1 Most importantly, DiEM25 is an explicitly transna-
tional project, as ‘the people’ it purports to speak for are not nationally-bound, but rather
‘the people of Europe’. In the European context, such a move is novel: while populism on
the continent is usually associated with ethnic nativism (on the right), national sovereignty
(on the right, but increasingly also on the left (Kallis, 2018) and at the very least with
nationally-bound ‘people’, here was a case of populism that – in a political conjuncture
characterised by a return to the nation rather than increasing supranational cooperation –
explicitly sought to throw off the shackles of the nation-state in its construction of ‘the
people’.
The explicitly transnational dimension of DiEM25 almost immediately led to concerns
from voices on the left that the national level was being abandoned. George Souvlis and
Samuele Mazzolini (2016) worried that:
DiEM has put all its bets on the European dimension, entirely bypassing the national one […] Is
it really necessary to delete the state from the map as a locus of progressive democratic reforms
and to consider it as outdated and old-fashioned obsession? We do not think so!
John Malamatinas (2016) argued that ‘[m]ovements are not made from the top’ and con-
cluded that ‘[t]he initiative to create a Pan-European movement to change existing condi-
tions is correct, but existing structures should also be associated with this’. Varoufakis
(2016g) shook off such criticisms by arguing that ‘[o]ur view on the Europe-Nation jux-
taposition is a dialectical one’ and that ‘prioritising the nation-state and calling for a
retreat from Europe into its bosom is, indeed, a retrograde step’. Drawing on DiEM25’s
Manifesto, he noted that change must come primarily from the transnational level:
‘European democrats must come together first, forge a common agenda, and then find
ways of connecting it with local communities and at the regional and national level’
(DiEM25, 2016a: 5).
These discussions about the ‘proper’ place of the national and transnational levels are
not new for the left. What is new, however, and worthy of analysis is how these national/
transnational tensions operate in the case of populism. This article thus seeks to examine
the case of DiEM25 and ask: can it truly be considered a transnational populist move-
ment, or does it remain tethered to the national level? Combining a discourse-theoretical
conceptual framework with qualitative content analysis, it examines the manifestoes,
speeches, press releases and published interviews with DiEM25 leaders (especially
Varoufakis himself, who has been and remains by far the most prominent figure of the
movement – a fact that has attracted a fair degree of criticism) to track:
Its speaking in the name of national ‘peoples’ and/or a singular European
‘people’;
The subject position/s it offers for identification for potential followers;
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