Diverging References to Populism in French and Spanish Public Discourse

The first session at IAMCR 2023 this hot Tuesday morning starts with Raül Nuevo Gascó, and his focus is on populism. But this term is being used in very different ways by different scholars as well as in mainstream media, and instead Raül is moving from an essentialist to a constructivist perspective, and from an inductive to a deductive approach. This accepts that populism can have different meanings; that these differ between different national contexts; and that these meanings are collectively constructed in each case. So, how and where is this done in each case?

Meaning construction operates through the circulation of possible meanings: messages are transposed, re-elaborated, and produce different conceptions; and this happens in different arenas of discourse. Raül explored this by exploring the uses of populism in French and Spanish parliament, as well as in leading media in each country. Especially in the press, such uses of the term often also referred to occurrences of populism in other countries.

In the press, there are multiple conceptions of populism coexisting – even within the same newspaper. For instance, the same newspaper may see populism as existing on the left of the right of another country – and populism thus simply becomes a label for parties and politicians in other countries that journalists apply as a kind of short-cut in their writing. In parliaments, on the other hand, populism is employed to designate countries where populism is on the rise and may be seen as a threat to democracy.

This shows that circulation of the term is scarce, and often refers to third countries from an exogenous point of view; France and Spain construct the term through their own lenses, while a more nuanced understanding of the term emerges mainly from an EU perspective.