Introduction
In 1967, at a conference entitled ‘To Define Populism’ held at the London School of Economics, Isaiah Berlin asserted:
We must not suffer from a Cinderella complex, by which I mean the following: that there exists a shoe – the word ‘populism’ – for which somewhere there must exist a foot. There are all kinds of feet which it nearly fits, but we must not be trapped by these nearly-fitting feet. The prince is always wandering about with the shoe; and somewhere, we feel sure, there awaits it a limb called pure populism. This is the nucleus of populism, its essence. All other populisms are derivations of it, deviations from it and variants of it, but somewhere there lurks true, perfect populism, which may have lasted only six months, or [occurred] in only one place. …
At the same time, we must not be tempted in the other direction, which some have taken, to suppose that the word ‘populism’ is simply a homonym; that there are movements in America, in Russia, in the Balkans and in Africa, that they are all called populism owing to confusions in human heads, but that they have too little in common (Berlin Reference Berlin1967, 8).
Considered by many scholars to be principally a catch-all concept, and hence a ubiquitous and inaccurate tool for historical and critical analysis, until the 1990s populism rarely went hand-in-hand with historical reflection. On the one hand, it was used by scholars to signal and explain the various regimes in Latin America, especially Peronism in Argentina or that of president Getúlio Vargas in Brazil (McGee Deutsch Reference McGee Deutsch1999; see also Finchelstein Reference Finchelstein2017, ch. 2). It also appeared frequently with reference to the convulsive processes of political transition in the so-called Third World (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2011). On the other hand, it was used to refer to the People's Party in the US or the Narodniks, the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries from which the concept originates, as seen, for instance, in the pioneering study by Italian historian Franco Venturi (Reference Venturi1966; cf. Ricuperati Reference Ricuperati1997; for the American populist movement see Goodwyn Reference Goodwyn1976; cf. Formisano Reference Formisano2008). Starting from the early 1980s, the term was also applied to connected movements and ideas of antagonistic political actions which were taking shape in Europe, and especially in Italy.
While in post-Second World War Europe the term ‘populism’ was reserved for fringe parties seen as a sort of relic of pre-modern politics, such as poujadisme in France or the Finnish Rural Party (Campani and Pajnik Reference Campani, Pajnik, Lazaridis and Campani2017) and, above all, Umberto Giannini's Uomo Qualunque movement in Italy (Setta Reference Setta2005; Corduwener Reference Corduwener2017; Gambarota Reference Gambarota2019), by contrast from the 1980s onwards the category of populism moved from the academic debate to the centre of public and political discourse. Yet again, the case of Italy was central in this discursive shift (for a critical overview, see Tarchi Reference Tarchi2015a) and since then the country has been labelled as epitomising populism's triumph over the traditional political parties (Hermet Reference Hermet2001). This poses many questions: how can a phenomenon, which historically emerged in countries experiencing a phase of transition towards modernisation, have appeared in various forms in the context of Italian history? Why, after a relatively long period of democratic government, has Italian politics once again become ensnared in populism? What is the relationship between modern populism, which was born from the defeat of fascism, and the historical experience of Italian Fascism? Or is populism specific to the Italian republican political system, whether considered as a mentality or a style of communication? To what extent is the new wave of populism transforming Italian representative democracy? Or is it the opposite: a reconfiguration driven by a bottom-up call for diverse representation?
Whether the focus is on the considerable legacy of over 20 years of Fascism – a regime that, it must be remembered, cannot be identified with the category of populism (Finchelstein Reference Finchelstein2020; Müller Reference Müller2016) – or on the widespread anti-politics of the so-called Second Republic (Cantarano Reference Cantarano2000), populism has appeared with different forms and levels of intensity in Italy. Indeed, all the trademark features of populism can be distinguished in the country: the tendency of the leaders to present themselves as the ‘real’ interpreters of the people's will; a subtle tendency to reject the practice of liberal democracy and the traditional right-left ideological cleavage; and repeated appeals to the common sense of ordinary people. From a long-term perspective, therefore, the case of Italy assumes a paradigmatic position in which the fundamental characteristics of the phenomenon have been reorganised into various shapes and repositioned in different times.
Rather than looking at the populist phenomenon through the lens of its potential misrepresentation or overrepresentation – although the critical importance of this has been highlighted accurately in most recent scholarship on the issue – this article will examine the conceptual nature of populism in connection with its presence in recent Italian history. Building upon ‘the need to return populism to history’ (Finchelstein Reference Finchelstein2017, 2; see also Tarragoni, Reference Tarragoni2021) and at the intersection between conceptual history (Koselleck Reference Koselleck1988, Reference Koselleck2002; Stråth Reference Stråth2006), democratic theory and discourse-historical analysis (Freeden Reference Freeden2021; Krzyżanowski Reference Krzyżanowski and Wodak2013; Wodak et al. Reference Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl and Liebhart2009), this article offers an overview of the reasons why populism as a concept and as a potential sequence of historical events seems to fit well in post-Second World War Italy, and aims to suggest areas for further research.
Italy's populism and Italian Populisms
The warning offered by Isaiah Berlin has today been fully superseded. Populism and populist studies have grown immensely and established themselves as a distinct discipline, with specific academic journals and ongoing public conversation on the nature of the interweaving of democracy and populism.Footnote 1 The pioneering London conference opened the door to useful categorisations of populism, recognising that alongside the term with an initial capital letter, referring to the American or Russian episodes, it is also helpful to introduce the term ‘populism’ with a small ‘p’, indicating the epistemological concept.Footnote 2 Nonetheless, Berlin's argument against a rigid theoretical approach to the concept remains intact.
Over the last three decades, the category of populism has reappeared ‘under new guises’, generating new theoretical and analytical challenges about how to conceptualise the political landscape and how to understand the transformation of the traditional (Western and Eurocentric) political world. Populism no longer immediately recalls distant practices, but on the contrary conceptualises a pervasive feature of contemporary life, played out by actors familiar to European political cultures (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2015b; Wejnert and Woods Reference Wejnert and Woods2014). Accordingly, populism as an analytical category has been approached by scholars as a dichotomic discourse along the lines of a down/up antagonism, in which ‘the people’ are juxtaposed against ‘the elite’, conceived as a small and, to various degrees, illegitimately powerful group. The epistemological centre of gravity of this angle of analysis is, on the one hand, the transformation of traditional European political systems along the trajectory of anti-politics and anti-partyism (Albertazzi and Zulianello Reference Albertazzi and Zulianello2021; Moffit Reference Moffit2016) and, on the other, the surge of sovereignism and Euroscepticism (Brusenbauch Meislova and Buckledee Reference Brusenbauch Meislova and Buckledee2021; Caiani and Guerra Reference Caiani and Guerra2017) and populism as a discourse (De Cleen, Glynos and Mondon Reference De Cleen, Glynos and Mondon2018). Here too, Italy's recent historical experience has been considered ‘a laboratory’ in which the most innovative and effective formulas of the populist phenomenon have been tested (Mammone and Veltri Reference Mammone and Veltri2010; Maccaferri and Newth Reference Maccaferri and Newth2022; Orsina Reference Orsina2018; Zappettini and Maccaferri Reference Zappettini and Maccaferri2021).
Most of the literature on populism in Europe focuses on a translation of the dichotomous relationship between the people and the elites in terms of allies and enemies (Mény and Surel Reference Mény, Surel, Meny and Surel2002; Panizza Reference Panizza2005), while other studies rely on charismatic (Kissas Reference Kissas2020; Mudde and Kaltwasser Reference Mudde, Rovira Kaltwasser, Rhodes and Hart2014; Reference Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser2018; Pappas Reference Pappas2016) or technocratic types of populist leadership (Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti Reference Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti2021), and eventually converge on ethno-nationalist transformation, analysing the processes of retraditionalisation and the xenophobic attitude of populist actors (Froio and Ganesh Reference Froio and Ganesh2019; Mudde and Kaltwasser Reference Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser2018). The coexistence of the plebiscitary transformation of democracy (Urbinati, Reference Urbinati2019) – in some cases including changes to the rule of law – with the formal institutions and practices of the democratic model has led recent research on populism to focus predominantly on the right of the political spectrum, presenting an array of different conceptualisations from the new populist right and right-wing populism (Ruzza Reference Ruzza and de la Torre2018; Mondon and Winter Reference Mondon and Winter2020) to nationalist populism (De Cleen and Stravrakakis Reference De Cleen and Stavrakakis2017; Heinisch, Masetti and Mazzoleni Reference Heinisch, Masetti and Mazzoleni2020). Despite powerful theorisations of a left-wing populism as a social logic in which the construction of the people corresponds to the political (Laclau Reference Laclau2005), populism as a theoretical category risks being identified as a byword for fascism, as Finchelstein has warned (Reference Finchelstein2017).
Populism is not a new political phenomenon, as recent scholarship has quite correctly pointed out (see, among many others, Kazin Reference Kazin1995). It arose and developed in parallel with the democratisation process and the establishment of mass politics, which resulted from the ambivalence and intrinsic duality of the democratic model as it emerged in the French Revolution. Depending on which aspect, modalities or practices one focuses on, populism can be considered a legitimate member of the democratic club (Arditi Reference Arditi2007; Canovan Reference Canovan1999) or an inverse perversion of the procedures of democracy (Rosanvallon Reference Rosanvallon2009; Reference Rosanvallon2012; Taguieff Reference Taguieff2002). This dual register continues to challenge the study of the phenomenon (Canovan Reference Canovan, Mény and Surel2002; Taggart Reference Taggart2004). Both narodnichestvo and the People's Party should be grouped under ‘agrarian populism’, as both considered peasants the bearers of unrecognised moral virtues, thus representing the ‘real’ people and, most importantly, they were left behind and excluded from democratic representation. This runs contrary to the Marxist version, which places the proletariat at the heart of society's emancipation (Canovan Reference Canovan1981). In the context of this historical and epistemological conundrum, we should also incorporate the appearance in Italy in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War of the Uomo Qualunque movement (Corduwener Reference Corduwener2017). Whether Giannini's experiment should be considered mostly an exercise in political style (referring here to Mudde's analytical category, Reference Mudde2004) rather than a consistent political strategy or a coherent political project, is not the main concern. The only way to escape Berlin's Cinderella complex we mentioned earlier is to analyse the different experiences, the political conflicts and the discursive processes used to construct ‘the people’ and its intertwining with the historical and theoretical dimensions of constitutional democracy (Germani Reference Germani1978; cf. Campani and Pajnik Reference Campani, Pajnik, Lazaridis and Campani2017; Müller Reference Müller2011).
The reappearance of populism as a political project with new dynamics in contemporary politics therefore poses different and novel questions regarding the origins, alterations and recontextualisation of populism and its relationship with the historical experience of fascism and right-wing ideologies. At the same time, by focusing on the process of its relegitimisation, populism recovers its left-wing prerogative; within this perspective it can thus be interpreted in the framework of the nature and transformation of constitutional and representative democracy. Unpacking and understanding the rebirth of populism in different guises in the context of post-Fordist European (and Italian) politics therefore entails confronting the process of its adoption and reformulation over time, its discursive resemioticisation, and its new cultural appropriations. Once again, the historical case of Italy is of central importance. The discursive reallocation of populism has not only been configured as a resemioticisation of frames and topics of the past, such as the legacy of Fascism as a form of anti-politics, but also as a process of repositioning anti-democratic arguments and antagonisms across spatio-temporal levels. The reappearance of the phenomenon in the context of Italian politics therefore must be understood as an act of ideological formation which accelerated specific discourses and recontextualised old topics (Krzyżanowski Reference Krzyżanowski2016).
Italy's populism and civil society
If we apply a normative approach, there is no doubt that the history of post-Second World War Italy has been dotted with many different examples of populism and populist parties, which shared a fundamental understanding of politics as a simplified dichotomy between the people and the elite, in which both subjects see the elite in very different terms (Caiani and Graziano Reference Caiani and Graziano2016). Before the recent electoral success of Matteo Salvini's Lega or the previous performance of the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement – M5S), inspired and led by Beppe Grillo, populism assumed the form of an organised, mass movement on two occasions: first with Umberto Giannini's Uomo Qualunque and then with Umberto Bossi's secessionist Northern League party. At the same time, if we take into account the fundamental characteristics of populism identified by scholars, it is equally undeniable that the history of Silvio Berlusconi's political venture displays a good degree of those elements (Donovan Reference Donovan2015; Newell Reference Newell2019). However, while most of the commentators and populist scholars considered Berlusconi's government to be ‘populist’, identifying Berlusconi's party Forza Italia within the same category has been challenged on various grounds (Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti Reference Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti2014; McDonnell Reference McDonnell2013).
If a historical reading of the recent resurgence in populism means combining evidence with interpretation, and contingencies with multiple sources, reclaiming the role of historical perspective for the study of modern Italian populism thus pushes the scope of the analysis further back in time, to the question of Fascism and its legacy. In this case, the angle is how the past has been resemioticised and explained through discourse of continuities and discontinuities over time (Finchelstein, Reference Finchelstein2010; Mammone Reference Mammone2015; Mastropaolo Reference Mastropaolo2020). Clearly, the end of the Cold War represents a clear watershed in terms of the discursive reorganisation of specific aspects of the narration of the past. Certain themes of Italy's historical fascism – for instance anti-partyism; the desire for a supposed organic re-composition of society vis-à-vis the social conflicts of ideology or class; trust in the personal qualities of a leader much more than in the applicability of a political manifesto – found widespread new resonance within Italian public discourse in the post-Cold War era (Tranfaglia Reference Tranfaglia1999). At the same time, the definitive crisis of the ‘Repubblica dei partiti’ (Scoppola Reference Scoppola1997), which culminated in the early 1990s with Tangentopoli, the investigations into the corruption of governing politicians on both a local and national level, accelerated the process. Populist rhetoric and themes were exploited with the aim of delegitimising Italian political institutions and traditional political parties, and legitimising new political actors who claimed to be able to better represent popular sentiment (Rhodes Reference Rhodes, Jones and Pasquino2015).
One of the most impactful legacies of the frenetic years of Mani pulite was, in fact, the introjection of the language of populism. On the one hand, the process of resemioticisation was initiated by the institutionalisation of the myth of civil society. One of the inputs which prepared the ground for re-elaborating a new populist discourse during Tangentopoli was the Radical Party's anti-party campaign in the 1970s and 1980s (Bonfreschi, Reference Bonfreschi2022). By promoting referenda as a bottom-up tool to unhinge a fossilised Italian political system, the Radicals shifted the public spectrum from the strategies of the political parties and political leaders, identified as the corridors of power (‘il palazzo’), to the street and the angry citizens. Although the two trajectories are theoretically different – citizen activism fostering a critical attitude, in the case of the latter, vis-à-vis a discourse that induces a resentful and suspicious attitude towards politics, in the case of the former – the public discourse around Tangentopoli, which called for civil society to be a ‘community of the honest’ (‘popolo degli onesti’) in contrast to the traditional (and corrupt) political elite, made a considerable contribution to the success of populist formations (Mastropaolo Reference Mastropaolo2005). By oversimplifying politics as a dichotomy between the dishonest establishment and the honourable working people, the anti-corruption discourse favoured the success of outsiders, political actors not stained by the past and capable of showing that, without any mediation, they were ‘in touch’ with the sentiments of common people. In the 1990s, cultural platforms such as talk shows or the phenomenon of the ‘fax people’ (‘popolo dei fax’), who sent messages via fax to newspapers in support of the judiciary, represented a new kind of public space where the anti-political sentiments of the ‘man in the street’ could find a mouthpiece; both episodes are expressions of a value shift (Mazzoleni Reference Mazzoleni, Albertazzi and McDonnell2008; Padovani Reference Padovani2015). In terms of the transformation of political practice, the clearest aspect was the exhausting search for local government candidates ‘untainted’ by career politics: all these were further symptoms of this evolution, brought about by the real crisis of legitimacy that was shaking the Italian system (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2015a).
On the other hand, the glorification of Italian civil society, presented as the ‘victim’ of corrupt and clientelist elites, became the discursive field for a resemioticisation of the right-wing themes that had been excluded from the political mainstream debate during the so-called First Republic (Orsina Reference Orsina2014). This process was indicated by the national media and in public discourse in general with the verb ‘sdoganare’ (literally ‘to clear through customs’), an expression that has since entered everyday Italian language (Treccani, n.d). The right-wing discourse thus became the sounding board for this rearticulation, not only by returning to elements of ‘traditional anti-politics’ á la Guglielmo Giannini or Achille Lauro (Orsina Reference Orsina2019), such as a tendency to make claims about the leader's extraordinary abilities or to call repeatedly for the common sense of ordinary people, but also, in light of the beginning of the new post-Cold War world, putting the historical question of fascism at the heart of the new Italian populist experiment.
According to Finchelstein (Reference Finchelstein2017), post-Second World War populism started with the recognition that fascism was part of the past. In a new age of affluent democracy and liberalism, it replaced fascism as the most significant challenge to liberal democracy and as a post-fascist response to the left. It was not a rupture with the past, and ‘populism was not engendered outside a historical continuum’ (19). While for peronism – the first modern populist movement – ‘fascism was an unrepeatable phenomenon’, and General Peron did not want to align his political regime with a defeated past (22), this component clearly assumed a different and major cleavage in the context of Italy, where fascism originated.
In the early 1990s, the Movimento Sociale Italiano and its leader Gianfranco Fini attempted to ‘convert’ the party into a populist formation: they described themselves as no longer being neofascists, but postfascists (Griffin Reference Griffin1996; Traverso Reference Traverso2019). The same discourse has recently been reproposed by Matteo Salvini's Lega (Maccaferri and Newth Reference Maccaferri and Newth2022). This specific postfascist historical dimension of Italian populism, which may risk being lost in the various theoretical reconfigurations if not historically contextualised (cf. Rummens Reference Rummens, Rovira Kaltwasser, Taggart, Ochoa Espejo and Ostiguy2017), represents a key moment for modern Italian populism. A copious literature makes a binary distinction between fascism and populism (Eatwell Reference Eatwell, Rovira Kaltwasser, Taggart, Ochoa Espejo and Ostiguy2017), and post-Second World War Italian populism stands in clear opposition to the Italian fascist experience that preceded the Cold War. However, the need to understand the ambivalent, democratic nature of the populist experience must not be separated from the resemioticisation of fascism. Although they are different theoretical and historical formations, they are nonetheless contextually connected. In this sense, Italian populism remains close to Italy's Fascist past because it offers old (and sometimes undemocratic) solutions to new problems. For instance, the identification of the people, leader and country as one was a central element of traditional fascism, and this has been brought back by modern Italian populism. In both the Lega and the M5S, and to a lesser extent in Berlusconism, the leader is constructed as the representative or vehicle and embodiment of the people. But while for Fascism the fulfilment of political representation did not require any rational or procedural mediation and was achieved by delegating the will of the people and the enactment of the nation to the leader (Griffin Reference Griffin2018; Paxton Reference Paxton2004), modern populism requires the ‘mediation’ of elections in order to perform. Representative democracy has an endogenous disposition to generate dissent and conflict along partisan lines; voting temporarily ‘regulates’ this dissent but never resolves or overcomes it (Urbinati Reference Urbinati2019). Populism as a political project fits into this apparent void by refuting dissent as a constructive element of how democracy works and by claiming to be the only representative of the people. From this perspective, then, the populist phenomenon can be examined and understood as a perverse form of representative democracy (Arditi Reference Arditi and Panizza2005; Urbinati, Reference Urbinati2014).
The slogan ‘Politica del buonsenso’ (‘common sense politics’) upon which Matteo Salvini based his EU election campaign in 2019 encapsulates the process of resemioticisation I have outlined above. Salvini enacted several attributes of populism through this trope of ‘common sense’. Firstly, he claimed to be the true representative of civil society, strategically able to present himself as determined and reasonable. At the same time, by basing his policies on a generic, amorphous and non-conflictual concept of common sense, he rejected the very idea of dissent as a constitutive part of the democratic process. His populist discourse thus appeared to aim at a dual construction of himself as a tough, yet approachable, people's man, or ‘one of us’ (Zappettini and Maccaferri, Reference Zappettini and Maccaferri2021). It is worth noting that the same discursive dynamic characterised the style in which Berlusconi presented himself in the 1990s. Although an apparent contradiction might be detected between his party Forza Italia, which can be described as a traditional conservative or old-centrist party, and his populist appeal, his choices of topics and arguments leave no doubt. Berlusconi's discourse made use of appeals to the common people, for instance reiterating slogans during his speeches in which he posed as ‘one of you’ and as ‘a person on temporary loan to politics’. The claim of being a ‘foreigner and external’ to professional politics was a key element in his populist repertoire. At the same time, his manifest aversion to the supposed ‘slowness of the political process’ and the ‘abstract principles’ of party politics embodied a further component of the populist phenomenon (Tarchi Reference Tarchi, Albertazzi and McDonnell2007). As Finchelstein correctly points out: ‘In its classical, postwar form, populism became a chimera between two distinct traditions of representation: the electoral and the dictatorial. This combination constituted the new populist modernity’ (Reference Finchelstein2017, 254).
From populism to left-wing populism (Italian style)
If, following Laclau (Reference Laclau2005), we consider populism to be opposition to an existing order, albeit through an oversimplified reading of the political sphere, modern Italian populism must also be understood in the context of the so-called neo-liberal moment and the structural conditions behind the different experiences in the process of socio-economic transformations (Traverso Reference Traverso2019). Accordingly, populism is not only a symptom of impatience with the establishment but also a legitimate call for power by the ‘ordinary multitude’ (Gianolla Reference Gianolla2017; Mouffe Reference Mouffe and Panizza2005; Urbinati Reference Urbinati2019). Recent literature has suggested that populism is undergoing a metamorphosis or a return to its origins, depending on which ideological angle one selects, by putting ‘the people’ in the stead of the proletariat as the protagonists of progressive historical change (Arato Reference Arato2019). These interpretations of populism remain valid from a political theory perspective and have given shape to various left-wing populist political projects (see for instance Mouffe Reference Mouffe2018). Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell have gone even further by suggesting that the equivalence between populism and the right wing is misleading, because ‘the claim that the people (however defined) are the only legitimate sovereign and have been deprived of power can sit quite easily with leftist ideologies’ (Reference Albertazzi, McDonnell, Albertazzi and McDonnell2008, 3). Nonetheless, if we question it through the lens of the Italian historical experience, the centre of analysis shifts from the paradigm of populism as a thin-centred ideology (Mudde Reference Mudde2004; cf. Schroeder Reference Schroeder2020) or as a mentality (Tarchi Reference Tarchi, Albertazzi and McDonnell2007; Stathi and Guerra, Reference Stathi and Guerra2021) to the question of its relationship with government and constitutional democracy.
The exaltation of the role and function played by civil society, which started with the increasing dissatisfaction with Italian democracy, poses questions regarding the growth of populism on the left, which has been identified (it is not important in this context whether from a theoretical perspective this is correct or not) with Beppe Grillo and Gianroberto Casaleggio's political creature: the M5S. In a still uncertain period, when Berlusconi's success had begun to fade without any signs yet appearing of a successor emerging, a new version of populism, presenting itself as lying beyond the old-fashioned left-right cleavage, appeared thanks to the evangelism of Beppe Grillo (Biorcio and Natale Reference Biorcio and Natale2013; Corbetta and Gualmini Reference Corbetta and Gualmini2013). In its early stages, the movement thrived as the ultimate protest group for those segments of Italian civil society that felt they had been left behind by a corrupt and sclerotic political class. Thanks to a carefully crafted communication strategy that insisted on considering the M5S as neither left- nor right-wing (Orazi & Socci Reference Orazi and Socci2014), the M5S was capable of drawing from both areas of the protest vote. Although the label of digital party or digital populism no longer represents what the M5S is today, following the departure of Grillo and the private IT company owned by Casaleggio that had participated in the formation of the movement (cf. Gerbaudo Reference Gerbaudo2018), there is no doubt that the novel element it offered was its relation to the internet (Mosca, Vaccari, and Valeriani, Reference Mosca, Vaccari, Valeriani and Tronconi2015). In the context of the crisis of the Italian political system, the internet and the potentially unlimited opportunities for representation it provides took on the role of the ‘real’ exemplification of Italian civil society (Musso and Maccaferri Reference Musso and Maccaferri2018).
The sublimation of Italian civil society was expressed on the one hand through the traditional demands for constitutional reforms, with the most successful proposal being the cut in the number of parliamentarians (‘il taglio dei parlamentari’), which passed in 2019. On the other hand, the process was enacted via a generic call for direct democracy, made possible by the internet. It is interesting to note that this ‘political use of the web’ as a direct expression of the people's will has actually encouraged the opposite. Rather than being employed a tool for direct participation, the M5S's use of the internet, presented as a strong top-down policy (through its Rousseau Web platform where the activists can vote and participate in the life of the party, and also through Beppe Grillo's famous blog) proved in actual fact to be an instrument used to rubber-stamp decisions already taken by central figures (Musso and Maccaferri Reference Musso and Maccaferri2018). As leader of the movement, Grillo stepped into the vacuum of Italy's social crisis created by the final phase of Berlusconism and operated as a conventional populist ‘anti-political’ actor. As a progressive populist project, the M5S has shown both limits and contradictions, and the movement is now considered to be centrist and ‘moderate’ (Biorcio and Natale Reference Biorcio and Natale2018).
Conclusion: Italian Populism(s)
Populism is a controversial concept, a descriptive term used with very different meanings in different political contexts. The literature largely explores the fact that populism is not a rigid political category, but instead identifies a range of concepts and features that are generally and unsystematically bundled together to describe different phenomena (Taggart Reference Taggart2000). Often standardised by a comprehensive perspective, theories of populism risk being detached from the tangled and complex history of particular populisms in specific times and spaces. In this excursus, I have proposed some reflections on the richness offered by an approach that recaptures the historicity of the concept of populism, without contesting or opposing the theoretical and analytical contribution of the recent scholarship.
Adopting Ryo (Reference Ryo2017)'s argument, I have emphasised how it is ahistorical to separate Populism(s) from populism in Italian history. The focus of this article has been the post-Second World War period, and especially the continuities and discontinuities in the transition towards the so-called Second Republic. While the turning point of Tangentopoli and the consequent crisis in the Italian political and party systems gave impetus to a resemioticisation of the concept of civil society, at the same time the vacuum left by the end of the Cold War freed the Italian political and historical discourse to explore new and different ways to signify the political. In the context of Italian history, a discursive relocation of the legacy of Fascism played a pivotal role and captured elements of the Italian fascist experience that had been excluded from Italian political discourse for a long time. The second wave of Italian populism is closely linked with these processes.
Relating modern Italian populisms exclusively to their historical-discursive constructions on the legacy of Fascism, however, presents liabilities and must be handled with caution. On the one hand, from a historiographical point of view, one risks ‘inverting’ Benedetto Croce's parenthesis thesis and considering the history of the Italian Republic as a sort of interpolation between phases and eras of populist mentalities or populist styles of communications or populistic leaders. On the other hand, the need to expand and integrate the historical research on populism in all its political facets and cultural practices must be interpreted as a response to the stereotyping of populism. Recent public debate has considered populism as something plainly negative and uses the concept as a polemical tool to stigmatise political movements and leaders who criticise the status quo and reclaim a ‘different’ and more advanced system of representation. With the recent introduction of ‘sovereignism’ and ‘anti-Europeanism’ in the phenomenology of Italian populism as its main characteristics (Castelli Gattinara and Froio Reference Castelli Gattinara and Froio2014), the parallel oversimplifies the populist dyad, and populism risks becoming synonymous with opposition. Nadia Urbinati notes that a predictable side effect of this polemical approach is that ‘it reduces politics to a contest between populism and governability, where “governability” is … simply an issue of institutional management’ (Reference Urbinati2019, 2). It is therefore essential to return populism to history and to contextualise the different Populism(s) in different times and places. The search for the historical roots of populisms in the case of Italy should question not only right-wing and neo- and post-fascist formations and discourses, narratives or practices, but also the history of the appearance of the populist project and the left-wing discourse.
Competing interests
The author has declared none.
Marzia Maccaferri is Lecturer in Political History at the Department of Politics and IR, Goldsmiths, University of London and research associate at Queen Mary. Her research intersects intellectual and European history with political theory; at the moment she works on the reception and recontextualisation of Gramsci's Notebooks into British Cultural Marxism; she also studies the discursive recontextualisation of populism in contemporary Italy and Britain. Recent publications are: ‘Euroscepticism between Populism and Technocracy: The Case of Italian Lega and Movimento 5 Stelle’ with Franco Zappettini, in Journal of Contemporary European Research; ‘Splendid Isolation Again? Brexit and the Role of the Press and Online Media in Re-narrating the European Discourse’ in ‘Brexit’ as a Social and Political Crisis. Discourses in Media and Politics, edited by F. Zappettini and M. Krzyzanowski (Routledge 2021).
