Populist discourse across the political spectrum in Belgium: towards a scaled understanding of populist varieties

This paper proposes to understand populism as a discourse that may be articulated and performed across the political spectrum. It shows how we can distinguish between more and less successful populists and how core features of populist discourse can be distinguished from populist epiphenomena. At its core, we find features that have been identified across a multiplicity of approaches such as: (1) an antagonistic understanding of the relationship between left or right wing elites on the one hand and a people on the other hand; (2) implicit and explicit performances of a vox populi through which politicians claim a monopoly on a homogenized national-popular will; and (3) attempts to occupy the ‘empty spaces of power’ without consideration of minority political positions; and (4) a discourse marked by a focus on systemic political crisis. Populist discourses may or may not feature anti-intellectualism, xenophobic or racist tropes, Euro-critical stances, as well as nationalist, socialist or neoliberal statements depending on the ‘thicker’ ideologies with and within which populism is articulated and performed. In order to explore this idea of populism as a mode of discourse that is performed across the political spectrum, the author focuses on the way notions of ‘populism’ have been discussed in the Flemish press and on the way ‘the people’ (i.e. de mensen) has been imagined within Flemish political party programs since the Black Sunday of 1981 when the far right Vlaams Blok scored an important electoral victory. The author understands discourse as a multidimensional practice of articulation that operates simultaneously at different levels of multimodal text, talk, and socio-political organisation. It cannot be reduced to language use alone.