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Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum
Edited by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 83] 2019
► pp. 73–100

Chapter 3
European populism(s) as a counter-hegemonic discourse?

The rise of Podemos and M5S in the wake of the crisis

In this chapter, we compare the discourse of Podemos and Movimento Cinque Stelle in order to answer the following question: to what extent do these movements pertain to the same political phenomenon? Based on Laclau’s definition of populism, we provide a “snapshot” of both parties’ discourse between 2012 and 2016 by carrying out a corpus-based analysis that combines lexicography and metaphor analysis. The results show that they display a populist logic and represent two counter-discourses against neoliberal hegemony. However, they also display important differences that could prove to be decisive when it comes to seizing political power and building an alternative to the hegemonic order they challenge, as their recent evolutions have shown.

Keywords: populism, discourse, Podemos, Movimento Cinque Stelle, neoliberalism, lexicography, metaphors
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Populism as a reaction against the hegemonic order in a context of crisis
    • Populism as a political logic
    • Populism against neoliberal hegemony in times of austerity: “Re-politicizing” and “Re-nationalizing” politics
  • Corpus and methods
  • Similarities between Podemos and M5S’: Two populist counter-discourses against neoliberal hegemony
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 13 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.83.04bor
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