The Stabilising Effect of Left Populism in the Democracy Movement-'Together Against the Right, for Democracy and Diversity'

Triggered by the Correctiv investigation into a meeting of far-right actors in Potsdam, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across Germany in early 2024. In Munich, too, the demonstration 'Together Against the Right, For Democracy and Diversity' mobilised an exceptionally large number of participants. We explain the mobilisation of these many demonstrators through the discourse and populism theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the transfer of which into protest research has so far been scarcely applied in a systematic manner. Based on a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles, press releases, and social media posts, we identify the empty signifiers used for mobilisation in the run-up to the protest. We then analyse how these terms were concretised in the speeches and musical contributions, as well as in 65 exclusively available feedback emails from participants. Our findings show that empty signifiers such as 'against the right', 'for democracy', and 'for diversity' enabled broad mobilisation, yet their concretisation during the demonstration revealed agonistic conflicts and moments of dislocation. Although the demonstration exhibited left-populist elements (the construction of in- and outgroups, the use of a democratic symbol, and emotional rhetoric), it did not operate in a transformative sense according to Mouffe, but rather in a stabilising one. Thereby we demonstrate how left populism in civil-society mobilisation can function as a force stabilising the liberal-democratic system.