Demos
 

Background

The new political parties and movements that have emerged in recent years are often characterized as "populist". However, the use of words such as "people" or "popular" does not necessarily make a speech "populist", since practically all political formations appeal to the "people" in one way or another. In Laclau's words, the people "is never a primary datum but a construct" (2005), and the elaboration of this construct is of utmost importance in today's democracies, where there are always numerous groups of people who do not feel represented. In this political scenario, new political movements often try to attract citizens with emotionally charged populist discourses, in which they present themselves as the only reliable representatives of the people on the street. In this way they offer citizens new ways of understanding themselves and of understanding the configuration of the public space and the entities that constitute it.

Populism, on the other hand, can also be understood as a speech regime (Blommaert 2004), a set of norms that define the way of communicating and positioning oneself in the public sphere. Concrete populist projects are embodied in performances, vocabularies and mediatized practices, which give primacy to a specific image of the "people" and their relationship with groups and individuals that supposedly make up a homogeneous class (intellectuals, elites, banks, etc.).

Although populist discourses entail certain contradictions - obviously, in democratic states, strictly speaking, "the people" always rule, since their wishes are expressed in elections - they still seem to have great appeal. Unlike the populist discourses of pre-democratic times, in which the "demos" was defined in contrast to authoritarian monarchies, or those of colonized countries, which contrasted the popular will with the pretensions of oppressor nations (Billig 1995), the new populist discourses have to resort to more complex arguments to define the "we" and the "other," necessary to construct the self-concept of "people" or demos. According to Wodak (2013), the populist speech based on simple dichotomies and identity assertions is characteristic of extreme right-wing populism. However, the same author notes that parties that are more akin to the traditional left also employ the "ad populum" appeal. It seems evident, then, that the dichotomies habitually employed in the last century do not offer a stable framework to interpret the new political groups in relation to the "people" on the one hand, and the "establishment" on the other.

The project is therefore intended to be useful for the understanding of the new political discourses in the European public sphere and for the design of future European integration policies, since there is a concern - widely spread in the media of the respective countries - that the rise of ill-defined, radical or even extremist groups may further destabilize the complex status that European democracies are currently facing. From this perspective, it is essential to gain a deeper understanding of the new political parties that have emerged in the various countries of Europe and to understand how these groups manage to communicate with the citizenry.

Likewise, this project will undoubtedly converge with other research beyond our borders in order to offer a broad overview of the speech of the new political parties in Spain and Europe.