Introduction: imagining populism and the people in Europe

This volume was intended as an exploration of the new political order arising in Europe and its immediate neighbours in the wake of the crisis of 2008, with a particular focus on the way ‘the people’ is being represented in the discourses of parties that challenge the established order. The range of countries covered – United Kingdom, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Romania, Hungary, Germany, Turkey – serves as evidence of the way in which ‘the people’ is indeed a central point in current debates, acting to anchor identities and project antagonisms in a multitude of settings, and thereby fixing a political logic that is driven by an up/ down opposition between the elite and the people. These chapters examine the extent to which this focus is unique to so-called ‘populist’ parties, and explore the degree of commonality in people-centred discourses across (or at both ends of) the political spectrum, questions that most previous accounts equating claims to stand for ‘the people’ with radical politics on the right or left have failed to account for satisfactorily. This book thus represents an attempt to revisit the issue of populist discourse in the context of cases emerging across today’s fraught European landscape. The range of methodologies applied, and the tensions between different analytical approaches and different understandings of populism, make this volume a stimulating contribution to current debates.