Months after the death of Ernesto Laclau in 2014, the 'post-Marxist' theory he developed with Chantal Mouffe was being cited as a blueprint by so-called 'left populist' electoral projects across the west. The varieties of failure awaiting these projects by the end of the decade present scholars with the unusual opportunity to revisit a political theory, having observed it 'in practice' in several contexts simultaneously. Further, the rise and fall of electoral left populism allows us to test the pertinence of earlier critiques of that theory, when it was still at the 'hypothesis' stage. This essay selects the famous early accusation that Laclau/Mouffe's theory of populism constituted an illegitimate 'retreat from class,' and asks whether this purported weakness is borne out in analogous failures to contend with class effectively by 2010s left populists. It introduces a differentiation between the 1980s first-generation post-Marxists, who were 'populists of choice,' welcoming the exciting opportunities delinking from class politics could offer the left, as opposed to the 2010s 'populists of necessity': millennial and Gen Z socialists who have turned to Laclau/Mouffe for solutions to the peculiar challenges of navigating class in the 21st century.
The article introduces two versions of a long-lost documentary film, recently discovered in the archive of the Czech Military History Institute, depicting Tibet shortly after the self-proclaimed 'peaceful liberation' by the Chinese People's Liberation Army. In 1953, the Czechoslovak film director Vladim & iacute;r S & iacute;s and cameraman Josef Vani & scaron; were invited to participate in the shooting of a film documenting an enormous construction project symbolizing the beginning of the Chinese civilizing mission in Tibet: building a 2,250 km long road from Sichuan Province to Lhasa. After more than one-year's trip, the two Czechoslovak citizens eventually reached Lhasa in December 1954. As a result of this collaboration, two versions of the film documentary were made, reflecting serious disparities concerning the intended objectives between the Chinese and Czechoslovak sides. This study provides a comparative analysis of the two versions and their respective ideological backgrounds, taking advantage of behind-the-scenes information preserved in thus far undisclosed diaries of the two filmmakers.
Radical right populism represents a multidimensional and transforming ideology. This contribution tackles the complexity of radical right populism by drawing a theoretical framework based upon two related concepts: producerism and reproducerism. While the first is a well-known notion in the literature on populism, the second is introduced here as a complementary concept that involves reproductive politics, including natality and the family. This paper aims to highlight the theoretical advantage afforded by the related concepts of producerism and reproducerism, first by connecting the economic, cultural, and demographic dimensions of radical right populism. Then, it will illustrate their usefulness in capturing the contextually sensitive configurations of producerism and reproducerism enacted by current political and social actors in Europe and the United States.
Ideologies can be understood as assemblages of concepts. But this 'morphological' account of ideologies has only been conceived in relation to Michael Freeden's seminal work. Here, an alternative approach to mapping ideologies is developed. This approach is concerned with the functions that ideologies serve. An ideology, it is theorized, will prioritize concepts that help it to serve their 'first-order' functions, and these concepts will often relate to similar domains of knowledge. To demonstrate the implications of the approach, the article will employ it to analyze the 'Blue Labour' and 'Red Tory' traditions that have emerged in contemporary Britain.
This paper examines the ideological struggles and transformations that have shaped educational discourse and practice in Chile. Through a critical analysis of key agents' narratives, the study identified five distinct ideological configurations, highlighting the interplay between individual agency, institutional structures, and educational policy. Moving beyond the simplistic public-private dichotomy, it explores how individuals navigate and negotiate educational ideologies within material and institutional constraints. By analyzing the pervasive influence of market-driven logics on educational decision-making, the paper uncovers the mechanisms through which neoliberal ideas are embedded in and transformed by social practices. The study emphasizes the importance of understanding the interaction between ideational struggles and material conditions in shaping educational experiences. Ultimately, it calls for reimagining educational frameworks that transcend market-based mechanisms to foster more inclusive and contextually responsive approaches to public education.
While prevailing accounts portray social democratic parties as liberal-democratic bulwarks eroded by rising illiberal populism, this article highlights the emergence of anti-liberal ideological projects from within the center-left itself. It does so by examining the ideological innovation of the post-communist social democratic left in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), focusing on the cases of Czechia and Slovakia. In both countries, over the decade following EU accession in 2004, some politicians and ideological entrepreneurs developed a culturally conservative vision of post-communist social democracy that critiqued West European social democratic models. This alternative emphasized national sovereignty, cultural and national cohesion, and the reassertion of the state's developmental role, often aligning rhetorically and politically with right-wing populist and conservative forces. Drawing on speeches, interviews and writings, this article examines how the project reframed East-West relationships and framed social liberalism, immigration and multiculturalism as threats to social democratic concepts of solidarity and fairness. The article situates these developments within broader ideological shifts in CEE and contrasts them with parallel debates on the West European left. It concludes by reflecting on whether such conservative variants of social democracy marked a turn toward illiberalism - or an ideological current with democratic potential in a post-liberal era.
This paper provides a critical analysis of the 2023 Israeli protests against judicial reform and the subsequent Israel-Gaza war, framing the events through the lens of the populist-anti-populist dynamic. It argues that the crises were actively constructed and performed through competing discourses, each shaping and reshaping the other. It highlights how both sides strategically deployed narratives, symbols, and events to advance their agendas and undermine their opponents. The October 7th attacks are analyzed as a pivotal moment that disrupted the existing dynamic, accelerating the populist-anti-populist cycle. The initial condemnation of reservists who threatened to suspend their service was quickly replaced by the protest movement's transition to providing humanitarian aid, recasting protesters as patriotic contributors. The dance continued as the protesters shifted their focus to the plight of the hostages and Haredi recruitment, prompting the government to strategically pivot its war goals away from the immediate return of the hostages. The paper illustrates the importance of theoretical frameworks that allow for the flexibility and fluidity of the populist-anti-populist dance. The intense polarization, exacerbated by the performative nature of populist and anti-populist rhetoric, presents significant challenges to democratic stability as each side entrenches its position and demonizes the other.
It has been argued that the French national identity after World War II demanded a future Algeria within the French colonial empire. And that the political elite at the outbreak of war in 1954 was incapable of interpreting the war in Algeria as a fight for national independence. My claim is that the picture is not as clear-cut as this. Using private and official documents from the time, I explore how the conflicting views within the ruling elite were expressed in internal discussions and letters.Although Prime Minister Mend & egrave;s France in the wake of the war expressed that Algeria was a part of France, it did not entail colonial authority from Paris toward Algeria. However, this starting point was alien for most of the advisors and colleagues surrounding him at that time. These ideological differences were crucial for the continuation of the war.In my study, I show that the conflict over national identity was present not only between the ruling parties and the political opposition but also within the steering political elite. Whether in the cabinets or outside them, there were discursive fights over who was to be included in a French and/or Algerian nation, citizenry and community.
The objective of this article is to examine the Champigny Manifesto of the French Communist Party, adopted during the meeting of the Central Committee on 5th and 6th of December, 1968. I argue that it was intended to serve a dual purpose: to recuperate the leftist ideas of 1968 and thereby reposition itself as a revolutionary force within the political landscape, and simultaneously to lay the groundwork for a left-wing alliance in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. This goal was achieved by reworking three of the watchwords of 1968: democracy, socialism, and revolution, and in particular by introducing and elaborating upon the concept of advanced democracy as a transitional phase between the Gaullist regime and socialism. The shift in political language exemplified by the manifesto resulted in reimagining socialism and socialist transition in democratic terms, which then became a stepping-stone toward a subsequent theoretical evolution that led to the development of Eurocommunism in the 1970s and to the communists' coming to terms with liberal democracy decades later.
This paper examines Bulgaria's post-communist political landscape through the lens of Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony. It explores how the country's transition from communism has increased susceptibility to false and misleading information. The study posits that the failure to establish a cohesive hegemonic order has led to a fragmented ideological landscape where competing narratives vie for dominance. This landscape facilitates the erosion of trust in democratic and political institutions and significant contamination of the informational environment. By analyzing key political moments from 1997 to 2020, the paper outlines indicators of weak hegemony, including fragmented consensus, counter-hegemonic forces, recurring crises of authority, reliance on coercion rather than consent and, in the absence of moral and intellectual leadership, the paper explains how false and misleading information exploits these societal antagonisms, further undermining democratic institutions, entrenching public disillusionment and perpetuating elite control. The paper concludes that Bulgaria's political trajectory reflects a prolonged 'war of position', where ideological struggles and external pressures complicate the path to genuine democratic reform.
Can there be a political current to the right of a regime often described as fascist and as eliminating or crowding out all dissent? We argue that differences in Russia's political landscape are still discernible and important: distinguishing between the regime and currents to its right allows understanding the ideologization of the Putin regime as the outcome of a dynamic interaction between the regime and factions acting simultaneously as loyalists and critics. The right is an autonomous actor with a historically constituted agenda and ideological coherence that the regime only recently matched. It has provided the Putin regime with many of the concepts and narratives that justify Russia's current aggressive international posture - while at the same time constituting the country's most important source of pro-war regime criticism. We explain how the right was able to achieve such influence by discussing how the "geopolitical" current gradually subordinated ethnonationalist positions in the 2010s while joining forces with Russia's Christian Right.
'Crisis' is a word of ancient coinage whose purchase in modern politics is frequently taken to be diminished in discourses of 'crisis pessimism.' This pessimism argues that the proliferation of 'crisis' into new realms has led to its loss of meaning. This article challenges crisis pessimism by examining its reliance on Reinhart Koselleck's genealogy of crisis in modernity (the Neuzeit), which emphasizes the acceleration of historical time. I advocate for late modernity as a periodization distinct from the Neuzeit, in which technological-industrial acceleration lives side-by-side with political deceleration in states' confrontation with crises. Deceleration arises from the disjuncture between three layers of historical time: democratic time, financial time, and Anthropocene time. Rather than a growing gap between experience and expectation, I identify the inversion of the two where future expectation is parasitic on past experience and historical memory, leading in extremis to 'futureless futures.'
Focusing on understanding the role of metaphors in discrediting political ideologies, this paper argues that purposeful and ideological metaphors are employed strategically by the right-wing Greek politician Adonis Georgiadis to undermine, challenge, and ultimately debunk what he calls the 'ideological hegemony of the left' that has dominated Greece since 1981. He does so by schematically (de)constructing it through the identification of a sanctification and a boosting phase. Having explained how this hegemony has been established, in his deconstruction thereof he exposes the inherent contradictions pertinent to and the specific actions and policies that the radical left SYRIZA-led coalition government engaged in during its governance between 2015 and 2019. The findings of this paper add to existing scholarship by applying Critical Metaphor Analysis to right-wing discourse in modern Greece, which is a fairly under-researched political context.
The objective of this study is to contrast the influence that ideological biases have on citizens' satisfaction with public health care services in Spain. A data pool of 40 000 individuals surveyed in Spain between 2010 and 2017 was used. The data analysis consisted of two multilevel linear regression models. The variable of interest was ideological distance, which was considered linearly and absolutely to quantify the difference between an individual's ideology and that of their regional government. Greater ideological distance is associated with lower citizen satisfaction (0.053, p < 0.001; -0.040, p < 0.05). This variable can condition individual satisfaction by up to 1/6 of variability. Citizens' responses appear to be affected by ideological biases when evaluating their satisfaction with health care services.
Erdo & gbreve;an's master discourse, 'the servant of the nation,' has long served as one of the ideological pillars in establishing the hegemonic power of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk & imath;nma Partisi, AKP). However, the COVID-19 pandemic crisis dislocated the AKP's hegemonic regime of serving the people. Following the victory of the Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) in metropolitan cities in the 2019 local elections, the mayors of the metropolitan municipalities independently launched relief campaigns for citizens in lockdown. In response, the AKP government authorized central state agents to deliver aid and meet the needs of the people. They went even further in obstructing local efforts by blocking citizen donations to opposition municipalities. This paper problematizes the transformation of pandemic social services into public contestation between the AKP-state government and the CHP municipalities. In doing so, we analyze data from online national media outlets by tracing logics of equivalence and difference in the discourse of both pro-AKP and opposition media. We further identify the convergent and divergent discursive strategies of both parties, squarely placing them within the debates surrounding authoritarianism and the historical context of hegemonic struggle.
National conservatism has become a buzzword in right-wing politics in recent years, characterized by high-profile gatherings and universalist aspirations. Due to its relative newness, however, it has not gained appropriate academic attention so far. This article fills this lacuna by offering one of the first sketches of the most typical features of the national conservatism as a novel hegemonic paradigm and transnational phenomenon of the Right. By conceptualizing its ideational grounding, the article sheds light on its evolution as a coherent political ideology. It does so against the backdrop of the most recent scholarly debate on the ideological value and epistemology of contemporary conservatism. It is highlighted that, thanks to its anti-liberal ethos, national conservatism represents one of the best recent examples of the so-called conservative backlash.
