Review of Your Party: The Return of the Left, edited by Oliver Eagleton (Verso Books, 2025).
The case against left populism is that it is too leader-centric. When Podemos launched in Spain it wasn’t long before it was accused of betraying the protest movement that helped set the scene for anti-establishment politics. In 2015, the party’s leader Pablo Iglesias made a bet on overtaking PSOE, the centrist socialist party. When he failed to do so, Podemos appeared, for a moment, to be too top-heavy to endure.
La France Insoumise is another example. In this case its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has built an organization centered around his idiosyncratic persona. Critics, both left and right, have pointed out the hollowness of LFI’s internal democracy.
The case in favor of left populism is that few things other than a decisive leader who is capable of deploying a friend-enemy distinction have had the capacity to unite a deeply fragmented society of the kind now common in a postindustrial age.
In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has proven to be the only available lightning rod capable of uniting the Left and leading the New Popular Front, a coalition of left parties, against a persistent far-right threat.
In Spain, while Iglesias may have failed in his earlier ambitions to “storm the heavens,” his party has sustained a political agenda that has enabled PSOE, under the rebooted leadership of Pedro Sánchez, to govern from the center left. In the context of a rightward march in much of Europe today, Spain emits a faint light of progress.
In the UK, the xenophobic right has come to dominate political discourse, with both Labour and the Conservative Party maneuvering in the slipstream of Nigel Farage, the head of the far-right populist Reform party. From the referendum on leaving the EU in 2016 up to the end of negotiations in 2021, Farage’s successful Brexit campaign dominated government policy in the UK as well.
The Labour Party in Britain has long been a machine…
Auteur: Lewis Bassett
