Anti-Neoliberal Populisms in Comparative Perspective: A Latinamericanisation of Southern Europe? 2020026554, 2020026555, 9780367322151, 9780367322168, 9781000220667, 9781000220698, 9781000220728

Citation preview

Anti-­Neoliberal Populisms in Comparative Perspective

In this book, Enrico Padoan proposes an original middle-­range theory to explain the emergence and the internal organisation of anti-­neoliberal populist parties in Latin America and Southern Europe, and the relationships between these parties and the organised working class. Padoan begins by tracing the diverging evolution of the electoral Lefts in Latin America and Southern Europe in the aftermath of economic crises, and during the implementation of austerity measures within many of these nations. A causal typology for interpreting the possible outcomes of the realignments within the electoral Lefts is proposed. Hereafter, the volume features five empirical chapters, four of which focus on the rise of anti-­neoliberal populist parties in Bolivia, Argentina, Spain and Italy, while a fifth offers an analysis on four ‘shadow cases’ in Venezuela, Uruguay, Portugal and Greece. Scholars of Latin America and Comparative Politics will find Anti-­Neoliberal Populisms in Comparative Perspective a highly valuable resource, offering a distinctive perspective on the impact of different populisms on party systems and on the challenges that such populisms posed to syndicalism and to traditional left-­of-­centre parties. Enrico Padoan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Social and Political Studies of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy. He had his PhD in Comparative Politics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Chile. His research interests focus on populism, labor politics and social movements.

Routledge Studies in Latin American Politics

26 Public Debt and the Common Good Philosophical and Institutional Implications of Fiscal Imbalance James Odom 27 The Media Commons and Social Movements Grassroots Mediations Against Neoliberal Politics Jorge Utman Saavedra 28 The Mobilization and Demobilization of Middle-­Class Revolt Comparative Insights from Argentina Daniel Ozarow 29 Latin America and Policy Diffusion From Import to Export Edited by Osmany Porto de Oliveira, Cecilia Osorio Gonnet, Sergio Montero and Cristiane Kerches da Silva Leite 30 Crime, Violence and the State in Latin America Jonathan D. Rosen and Hanna Samir Kassab 31 Democracy and Brazil Collapse and Regression Edited by Bernardo Bianch, Jorge Chaloub, Patricia Rangel and Frieder Otto Wolf 32 Peace and Rural Development in Colombia The Window for Distributive Change in Negotiated Transitions Andrés García Trujillo 33 Anti-­Neoliberal Populisms in Comparative Perspective A Latinamericanisation of Southern Europe? Enrico Padoan www.routledge.com/Routledge-­Studies-­in-­Latin-­American-­Politics/book­series/RSLAP

Anti-­Neoliberal Populisms in Comparative Perspective A Latinamericanisation of Southern Europe? Enrico Padoan

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Enrico Padoan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Padoan, Enrico, author. Title: Anti-neoliberal populisms in comparative perspective : a Latinamericanisation of Southern Europe? / Enrico Padoan. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge studies in latin american politics; Volume 33 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020026554 (print) | LCCN 2020026555 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367322151 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367322168 (ebook) | ISBN 9781000220667 (adobe pdf ) | ISBN 9781000220698 (mobi) | ISBN 9781000220728 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Populism—Latin America. | Populism—Europe, Southern. | Left-wing extremists—Latin America. | Left-wing extremists—Europe, Southern. | Latin America—Politics and government. | Europe, Southern—Politics and government. Classification: LCC JL966 .P33 2021 (print) | LCC JL966 (ebook) | DDC 324.2/17094—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026554 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026555 ISBN: 978-­0-­367-­32215-­1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-­0-­367-­32216-­8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figuresvi List of Tablesvii Acknowledgmentsviii List of Abbreviationsx 1 Introduction

1

2 The Argument

25

3 Bolivia: Movement-­Based Populism in Power

54

4 Argentina’s Kirchnerism: A Party-­Rooted Populist Project Incorporating New Social Actors

92

5

Podemos: The Left-­Wing Movement Populism That Renewed the Spanish Left

124

6 The Italian M5S: A Leader-­Initiated Populism Against All the Existing Structures of Socio-­Political Intermediation

162

7 Venezuela, Uruguay, Portugal and Greece

209

8 Conclusions

253

Index

286

Figures

2.1 The Insider-­Outsider Divide and the Crisis of the Old Structures of Socio-­Political Intermediation. 2.2 The Argument. 2.3 A Typology of the Successful Political Projects Shaping the National Lefts in the Aftermath of a Crisis of Neoliberalism. 4.1 Spatial Political Position of the Main Leftist and/or Peronist Social and Political Organisations During Néstor Kirchner’s Presidency (2003–2007). 5.1 Voting Shares by Educational Level and Age Group (CIS 2015). 6.1 Evolution of the Italian Partisan Left (1991–2008). 6.2 Union Density in Italy (Total Union Density and Membership Share of the Three Main Peak Unions). 6.3 The Influences of M5S’ ‘Organisational Linkages’ on its Electoral Linkages. 6.4 Sociological and Ideological Characteristics of M5S’ Electorate (ITANES 2013). 7.1 FA Voting Share by Job Category. 7.2 Electoral Evolution of the Portuguese Left Since the First Electoral Participation of the Bloco de Esquerda (1999–2015).

33 37 40 114 153 165 166 190 195 225 235

Tables

1.1 Summary of Four Main Theoretical Approaches to Populism 1.2 Varieties of ‘Populist Waves’ in Latin America and Western Europe (1930–Onward) 2.1 The ‘Critical Antecedent’: Party-­Union Alignments at the Threshold of the Critical Juncture, and the Risks and Opportunities for Left-­of-­Centre Parties in Leading Opposition to Austerity 3.1 MAS’ Percentages of the Votes in General Elections (2002–2014) 3.2 Determinants of the Vote for MAS-­IPSP (2009 Elections, Probit Models) 4.1 Determinants of the Vote for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007 Elections, Probit Models) 5.1 Determinants of Voting Choice, 2015 General Elections (Multinomial Logit Models. Reference Category: Voting for the PSOE) 6.1 Voting Share of the Main Italian Parties by Job Category: 2008 General Elections 6.2 Opinions Regarding M5S’ Ideological Positioning According to Party Voted for and Individual Ideological Self-­Placement (ITANES 2013) 6.3 Determinants of Voting Choice, 2013 General Elections (Multinomial Logit Models. Reference Category: Voting for the PD) 7.1 Determinants of Voting for Tabaré Vázquez, 2004 Presidential Elections (Logit Model) 7.2 Determinants of Voting Choice, 2015 Portuguese Legislative Elections (Logit Models) 7.3 Vote Shares (%) for Syriza According to Different Sociological Variables (June 2012 and June 2014 Elections) 7.4 Determinants of Voting for Syriza, June 2012 Legislative Elections and June 2014 European Elections (Logit Models) 8.1 ‘Starting Conditions’ of Left-­of-­Centre Parties in the Eight Selected Countries

8 14

31 72 83 116 155 169 197 198 225 234 245 246 255

Acknowledgments

This book would have never been possible without the help of many brilliant scholars and colleagues. Manuela Caiani and Pierre Ostiguy greatly supervised my doctoral dissertation, from which this book derives. Manuela’s systematic thinking and Pierre’s insightful and numerous comments have been decisive for this enterprise. Their support convinced me to never give up. My thesis committee was composed of great scholars and people such as Juan Pablo Luna, Carla Alberti, Julia Lynch and Ken Roberts. All of them, as well as Lorenzo Mosca and Sydney Tarrow, spent much, much, much time to revise and comment early drafts and versions of my doctoral dissertation, thus helping me to clarify the argument and to strengthen it. Furthermore, the influence of their works on my modest reflections is really difficult to overstate. I want also to thank those scholars that decisively helped me during my fieldwork in Bolivia and Argentina with their great suggestions and reflections: Moira Zuazo, Marité Zegada, Fernando Mayorga and Sebastián Etchemendy. I am also extremely grateful to all the interviewees that made this research possible; my fieldwork has been much easier – and more fun! – than I could have imaged. Pierre and Ken deserve a special mention, for having widely shared with me their immense expertise and skills in long and exciting discussions, and for having accompanied me throughout the entire adventure. Of course, the usual disclaimer applies: all the limits of this research and of these reflections are my sole responsibility. My fellows at the Pontificia Universidad Católica, as well as the wonderful academic staff, made my doctoral period an exciting adventure, and surely contributed to bear the distance from my loved ones. A special mention to David Altman, Valeria Palanza, Andreas Feldmann, Rodrigo Espinoza, María Cristina Escudero, Anita Perricone, José Lugo, María Marta Maroto and Caro Acevedo. Many thanks also to my colleagues and the academic staff from the Scuola Normale Superiore, where I have currently the fortune to work, in a very stimulating environment. Tiago Carvalho and Giorgos Venizelos deserve to be mentioned here, for the time they spent with me in infinite discussions. I  am also extremely grateful to Natalja Mortensen for her careful editing.

Acknowledgments ix I have always felt the support and the patience from my family. This has been incredibly rewarding. They are the strongest source of motivation to live up to the task of giving my daughter the same great and warm support for her future. My wife Silvia has been stoic during all these long years of research, plenty of long periods of physical separation and too little time for us. The original plan was to dedicate this book to her. I think Silvia will not complain if she has to share the dedication with our loved Elena.

Abbreviations

15-­M AD ADEDY ADN ANEL AP APRA ARI ASP AU AUH BE BONOSOL CC.OO CCC CCZ CDS-­PP CEPS CGIL CGT

Indignados Movement (Spain) Acción Democrática – Democratic Action (Venezuela) Anotati Diikisi Enoseon Dimosion Ypallilon – Confederation of Civil Servants’ Unions (Greece) Acción Democrática Nacional – National Democratic Action (Bolivia) Anexartitoi Ellines – Independent Greeks (Greece) Alianza Popular – Popular Alliance (Spain) Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana – American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (Peru) Afirmación para una República Igualitaria – Initiative for an Egalitarian Republic (Argentina) Asamblea para la Soberanía de los Pueblos – Assembly for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (Bolivia) Asamblea Uruguay Asignación Universal por Hijo – Universal Allowance per Child (Argentina) Bloco de Esquerda – Leftist Bloc (Portugal) Bono Solidario – Solidarian Cash-­Transfer (Bolivia) Comisiones Obreras – Workers’ Commissions (Spain) Corriente Clasista y Combativa – Combative Classist Current (Argentina) Centro Comunal de Zona – Local Municipal Centre (Uruguay) Partido do Centro Democrático Social – Partido Popular – Centrist Social Democratic Party-­Popular Party (Portugal) Centro de Estudios Políticos y Sociales – Centre of Political and Social Studies (Spain) Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro – Italian General Confederation of Work (Italy) Confederación General del Trabajo – General Confederation of the Work (Argentina)

Abbreviations xi CGT CGT CGTP CIDOB CIES-­ISCTE

CISL CMS COB COMIBOL CONACRE CONAIE CONAMAQ CONDEPA COPEI COR CP CPE CSCB CSCIOB CSI

Confederación General del Trabajo – General Confederation of the Work (Spain) Confédération Générale du Travail – General Confederation of the Work (France) Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses – General Confederation of the Portuguese Workers (Portugal) Confederación Indígena del Oriente Boliviano – Indigenous Confederation of the Bolivian Orient (Bolivia) Centro De Investigação De Estudos De Sociologia–Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa– Research Center for Sociological Studies–Higher Institute of Business and Labour Sciences (Portugal) Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori – Workers’ Unions’ Italian Confederation (Italy) Coordinadora de Movimientos Sociales – Coordinator of the Social Movements (Ecuador) Central Obrera de Bolivia – Bolivian Workers’ Union (Bolivia) Corporación Minera de Bolivia – Bolivian Mining Corporation (Bolivia) Concertación Nacional para el Crecimiento – National Coordination for the Growth (Uruguay) Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador – Confederation of Ecuadorean Indigenous Nations (Ecuador) Confederación Nacional de las Markas y Ayllus del Qulla’suyu – National Confederation of Markas and Ayllus of Qulla’suyu (Bolivia) Conciencia de Patria – Fatherland Consciousness (Bolivia) Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente – Committee of Independent Political-­Electoral Organisation (Venezuela) Central Obrera Regional – Regional Workers’ Union (Bolivia) Círculo Patriótico – Patriotic Circle (Venezuela) Constitución Política del Estado – State Political Constitution (Bolivia) Confederación Sindical de los Colonizadores de Bolivia – Bolivian Settlers Unions’ Confederation (Bolivia) Confederación Sindical de las Comunidades Interculturales Originarias de Bolivia – Confederation of the Bolivian Intercultural Communities (Bolivia) Corriente Sindical de Izquierda – Leftist Unionist Faction (Spain)

xii  Abbreviations CSUTCB

Confederación Sindical Única de los Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia – Confederation of Bolivian Peasants’ Unions (Bolivia) CTA Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos – Argentine Workers’ Central (Argentina) CTD Coordinadoras de Trabajadores Desocupados – Unemployed Workers’ Coordinators (Argentina) CTEP Confederación de los Trabajadores de la Economía Popular – Popular Economy’s Workers’ Confederation (Argentina) CTV Confederación de los Trabajadores Venezolanos – Venezuelan Workers’ Confederation (Venezuela) CUT Central Única dos Trabalhadores – Workers’ Peak Union (Brazil) DAKE Democratic Independent Employees’ Movement (Greece) DC Democrazia Cristiana – Christian Democracy (Italy) DRY ¡Democracia Real YA! – Real Democracy Now! (Spain) DS Democratici di Sinistra – Leftist Democrats (Italy) ECB European Central Bank EFDD Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (European Union Parliamentary Group) EMS European Monetary System ESK Ezker Sindikalaren Konbergentzia – Leftist Unionist Convergence (Spain) EU European Union FA Frente Amplio – Broad Front (Uruguay) FADI Frente Amplio de Izquierda – Leftist Broad Front (Ecuador) FBT Fuerza Bolivariana de los Trabajadores – Workers’ Bolivarian Force (Venezuela) FdG Front de Gauche – Front of the Left (France) FDS Federazione della Sinistra – Federation of the Left (Italy) FEDECAMARAS Federación de Cámaras y Asociaciones de Comercio y Producción de Venezuela – Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce (Venezuela) FEDECOR Federación Departamental Cochabambina de Regantes – Cochabamba’s Federation of the Water Suppliers (Bolivia) FEJUVE Federación de Juntas Vecinales – Neighbourhood Assembles’ Federation (Bolivia) FENCOMIN Federación Nacional de los Cooperativistas Mineros de Bolivia – National Federation of Bolivian Cooperativist Mineworkers (Bolivia) FER Frente de Esquerda Revolucionária – Front of Revolutionary Left (Portugal)

Abbreviations xiii FERVE FETCTC FIOM FPOe FpV FRENAPO FREPASO FSTMB FSTPB FTV FUT GJM GSEE IDV IMF INRA ISI IU IU KKE LAE LAOS LCC LCR LFI LIPU LN

Fartas/os d’Estes Recibos Verdes – Fed Up with False Green Receipts (Portugal) Federación Especial de los Trabajadores Campesinos del Trópico de Cochabamba – Special Federation of the Peasant Workers of the Cochabamba Tropic (Bolivia) Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici – Steelworkers’ Federation (Italy) Freiheitliche Partei Oesterreichs – Austrian Freedom Party (Austria) Frente para la Victoria – Victory Front (Argentina) Frente Nacional contra la Pobreza – National Front Against Poverty (Argentina) Frente para un País Solidario – Front for a Solidary Country (Argentina) Federación Sindical de los Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia – Union Federation of Bolivian Mineworkers (Bolivia) Federación Sindical de los Trabajadores Petroleros de Bolivia – Union Federation of Bolivian Oilworkers (Bolivia) Federación Tierra, Vivienda y Hábitat – Habitat, Land and Housing Federation (Argentina) Frente Unitario de Trabajadores – Workers’ Unitarian Front (Ecuador) Global Justice Movement Geniki Synomospondia Ergaton Ellados – General Confederation of Greek Workers (Greece) Italia dei Valori – Italy of Values (Italy) International Monetary Fund Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria – National Institute of the Agrarian Reform (Bolivia) Import Substitution Industrialization Izquierda Unida – United Left (Bolivia) Izquierda Unida – United Left (Spain) Kommounistiko Komma Elladas – Greek Communist Party (Greece) Laiki Enotita – Popular Unity (Greece) Laikos Orthodoxos Synagermos – Orthodox Popular Group (Greece) Liste CiViche Certificate – Certified Civic Slates (Italy) La Causa Radical – The Radical Cause (Venezuela) La France Insoumise – Unsubmissive France (France) Lega Italiana Protezione Uccelli – Italian League for Birds’ Protection (Italy) Lega Nord – Northern League (Italy)

xiv  Abbreviations LPP M5S MAS MAS-­U MAS-­IPSP

MBL MBR-­200 MEP MGP MIP MIR MLN-­Tupamaros MNR MNRI MP MPP MRTKL MST MTA MTD MVR ND NEP

Ley de Participación Popular – Law of Popular Participation (Bolivia) MoVimento Cinque Stelle – Five Star Movement (Italy) Movimiento Al Socialismo – Movement Towards Socialism (Venezuela) Movimiento al Socialismo-­ Unzaguista – Movement Towards Socialism-­‘Unzaguist’ (Bolivia) Movimiento al Socialismo-­ Instrumento Político para la Soberanía de los Pueblos – Movement Towards Socialism-­Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (Bolivia) Movimiento Bolivia Libre – Free Bolivia Movement (Bolivia) Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionario – Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement (Venezuela) Movimiento Electoral del Pueblo – Electoral Movement of the People (Venezuela) Movimiento por el Gobierno del Pueblo – Movement for People’s Government (Uruguay) Movimiento Indígena Pachakutik – Indigenous Movement Pachakutik (Bolivia) Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria – Revolutionary Left Movement (Bolivia) Movimiento de Liberación Nacional – Tupamaros (Uruguay) Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario – Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (Bolivia) Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario de Izquierda – Leftist Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (Bolivia) Member of Parliament Movimiento de Participación Popular – Popular Participation Movement (Uruguay) Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Katari de Liberación – Tupac Katari Revolutionary Movement of Liberation (Bolivia) Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (Brazil) Movimiento de Trabajadores Argentinos – Argentine Workers’ Movement (Argentina) Movimientos de Trabajadores Desocupados – Unemployed Workers’ Movement (Argentina) Movimiento Quinta República – Fifth Republic Movement (Venezuela) Nea Dimokratia – New Democracy (Greece) New Economic Policy (Bolivia)

Abbreviations xv NIDIL No MUOS No TAP No TAV PAH PAIS PASKE PASOK PBA PC PCE PCF PCI PCP PCR PCU PCV PD PdCI PdG PDL PDS PDVSA PER PI PIT-­CNT

Nuove Identità di Lavoro – New Identities of Work (Italy) Movement Against the Mobile User Objective System (Italy) Movement Against the Trans-­Adriatic Pipeline (Italy) Movement Against High Speed Railway (Italy) Plataforma de Afectados por las Hipotécas – Platform of Victims of Banks’ Evictions (Spain) Patria Altiva i Soberana – Proud and Sovereign Fatherland (Ecuador) Panhellenic Struggling Unionist Employees’ Movement (Greece) Panellinio Sosialistiko Kinima – Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Greece) Provincia de Buenos Aires – Buenos Aires’ Province (Argentina) Partido Colorado (Uruguay) Partido Comunista de España – Spanish Communist Party (Spain) Parti Communiste Français – French Communist Party (France) Partito Comunista Italiano – Italian Communist Party (Italy) Partido Comunista Português – Portuguese Communist Party (Portugal) Partido Comunista Revolucionario – Revolutionary Communist Party (Argentina) Partido Comunista de Uruguay – Communist Party of Uruguay (Uruguay) Partido Comunista de Venezuela – Communist Party of Venezuela (Venezuela) Partito Democratico – Democratic Party (Italy) Partito dei Comunisti Italiani – Party of the Italian Communists (Italy) Parti de Gauche – Party of the Left (France) Popolo delle Libertà – People of the Freedom (Italy) Partito Democratico della Sinistra – Democratic Party of the Left (Italy) Petróleos de Venezuela Sociedad Anónima – Venezuelan Oil Ltd. (Venezuela) Programa de Empleo Rural – Rural Work Program (Spain) Precários Inflexíveis – The Inflexible Precarious (Portugal) Plenario Intersindical de los Trabajadores – Convención Nacional de los Trabajadores – Workers’ Intersyndicalist Group-­Workers’ National Convention (Uruguay)

xvi  Abbreviations PJ PJJHD PN PP PPT PRC PRIST PRO PS PS PSD PSE PSOE PSR PT PU PVV QLT SA SAT SEL SYN SYRIZA TCO TIPNIS UCD UCR UCS

Partido Justicialista – Justicialist Party (Argentina) Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar Desocupados – Unemployed Households’ Plan (Argentina) Partido Nacional – National Party (Uruguay) Partido Popular – Popular Party (Spain) Patria Para Todos – Fatherland for All (Venezuela) Partito della Rifondazione Comunista – Communist Refoundation Party (Italy) Programa Ingreso Social con Trabajo – ‘Social Income with Job’ Program (Argentina) Propuesta Republicana – Republican Proposal (Argentina) Partido Socialista – Socialist Party (Portugal) Partido Socialista – Socialist Party (Uruguay) Partido Social Democrata – Social Democratic Party (Portugal) Partido Socialista Ecuatoriano – Ecuadorean Socialist Party (Ecuador) Partido Socialista Obrero Español – Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Spain) Partido Socialista Revolucionário – Socialist Revolutionary Party (Portugal) Partido dos Trabalhadores – Workers’ Party (Brazil) Pacto de Unidad – Unity Pact (Bolivia) Partij voor de Vrijheid – Party for Freedom (Netherlands) Que se Lixe a Troika – Fuck the Troika! (Portugal) Sinistra Arcobaleno – Rainbow Left (Italy) Sindicato Andaluz de los Trabajadores – Andalusian Workers’ Union (Spain) Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà – Left, Ecology and Freedom (Italy) Synaspismos tis Aristeras ton Kinimaton kai tis Oikologias – Coalition of the Left, of the Movements and of Ecology (Greece) Synaspismos Rizospastikis Aristeras – Coalition of the Radical Left (Greece) Tierras Comunitarias de Orígen – Originary Communitarian Land (Bolivia) Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro-­Sécure – Indigenous Territory of the Isiboro-­Sécure National Park (Bolivia) Unión de Centro Democrático (Spain) Unión Cívica Radical – Radical Civic Union (Argentina) Unión Cívica de Solidaridad – Civic Union of Solidarity (Bolivia)

Abbreviations xvii UDC UDC UDP UDP UGT UGT UIL UKIP URD USB VA YPFB

Unione Democratica di Centro – Centrist Democratic Union (Italy) Unione Democratica di Centro – Centrist Democratic Union (Switzerland) União Democrática Popular – Popular Democratic Union (Portugal) Unión Democrática Popular – Democratic Popular Union (Bolivia) União Geral de Trabalhadores – Workers’ General Union (Portugal) Unión General de los Trabajadores – Workers’ General Union (Spain) Unione Italiana del Lavoro – Italian Union of the Work (Italy) United Kingdom Independence Party (United Kingdom) Unión Republicana Democrática – Democratic Republican Union (Venezuela) Unione Sindacale di Base – Bases’ Unionist Union (Italy) Vertiente Artiguista Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos – Bolivian state-­owned oil company (Bolivia)

1 Introduction

In Cas Mudde’s The Populist Zeitgeist (2004), one the most cited and influential academic articles on populism, the author cautions leftist parties against pushing for forms of ‘deliberative democracy’ and for a ‘participation revolution’ in order to successfully react to the mounting populist wave, because ‘contemporary populists [focus on the] output over the input [of democracy], and leadership over participation’ (2004: 563). Thus, mainstream (and, particularly, progressive) politicians should explain and defend the democratic limitations of the liberal democratic systems . . . instead of emphasizing almost exclusively the importance of the popular aspects, i.e. the democratic side. . . . Typical are the debates about the (alleged) ‘gap between the citizen and politics’ . . . or the ‘democratic deficit’ in the European Union. (2004: 562–563) Some years after these considerations were written, the Great Recession and its consequences shook more than just the economies of Southern Europe. Austerity measures, promoted as remedies for the struggling economies, fed discontent that blossomed into calls for an end to the restrictive measures and for ‘real’ democracy to supersede the will of domestic and supranational elites. New parties – many populist – made important electoral breakthroughs in 2012 (Syriza, in Greece), 2013 (the M5S, in Italy) and 2014 (Podemos, in Spain). These populist movements were concerned with democratic inputs. According to the first statute of the Italian Five Star Movement (2009), one of the party’s goals was to ‘recognise to the totality of web-­users, the role of government, and of political direction usually attributed to the few’ (M5S, 2009: article 4). The manifesto Mover Ficha (Monedero et al., 2014), which laid the groundwork of the Spanish political party Podemos, emphatically declared: ‘after many decades, the time to take our decisions by ourselves and to answer by ourselves to our questions has come’ (2014: 2). Faced with permanent austerity and democratic deficits at both national and supranational levels, defending the unsatisfactory outputs of liberal democratic systems became even more difficult for both incumbents and mainstream challengers.

2  Introduction One of the targets of Mudde’s arguments was a much lesser known article by René Cuperus, The Populist Deficiency of European Social Democracy (2003). Cuperus, who was as concerned as Mudde by the rise of populism in Europe, pointed out that ‘social democracy has refused to side with the anti-­ globalization movement, yet it has also failed to develop its own model of globalization which differs substantially from that favored by neoliberalism’ (2003: 100). Cuperus had his sights set on Tony Blair’s Third Way and Gerhard Schroeder’s Neue Mitte, or the ideological renewal that had been adopted by practically all centre-­left European tendencies since the nineties – and in some cases, as in the Spanish Socialist Party under Felipe González’s leadership, even before. The adoption of the Third Way, according to Cuperus, provoked a rupture along class lines, breaking an already fragile alliance within social democracy between the proletariat and the professionals, between the working and middle classes, between the intellectuals and the managers. . . . As soon as the impression set in that only foreigners and marginal groups were still profiting from the slimmed-­down welfare state, the authoritarian face of ‘worker culture’ appeared. (2003: 100–102) Despite their differences, both Cuperus and Mudde used the concept of populism to understand the rise of a ‘renewed’ radical Right. This understanding has been – and still is – dominant amongst (European) scholars and pundits. Populists are considered a ‘challenge’ for democracy in general and for left-­of-­centre parties in particular because of their potential to ‘conquer’ less well-­to-­do sectors by appealing to the ‘authoritarian face of “worker culture” ’. Following 2008, parties such as the M5S, Podemos or Syriza did effectively exploit the window of opportunity that the Great Recession opened and obtained major electoral results, mostly at the expense of the traditional left, be it moderate or radical. It would, however, be reductive to claim that those parties reached such impressive levels of support by primarily appealing to ‘working-­class authoritarianism’ (Lipset, 1959). How, then, can we explain the rise of Southern Europe’s anti-­neoliberal populisms, so evidently different from the populist radical right? Many (mostly European) scholars of populist phenomena have de facto accepted and reproduced a TINA (‘there is no alternative’) stance. Until a few years ago, most of the European academic debate on populism actually provided additional theoretical foundations to the ideological turn of the European Social Democracy, which was suffering, indeed, from a populist deficiency (Cuperus, 2003). Once TINA discourse became accepted in the broader public debate, it was perfectly reasonable to argue that the left-­right cleavage in the policy domain mapped on to a materialist/post-­materialist cleavage, or the so-­called GAL-­TAN dimension (Green/Alternative/

Introduction 3 Libertarian versus Traditionalist/Authoritarian/Nationalist). Given TINA’s premises, it was rational – and for a while electorally rewarding – for left-­ of-­centre parties to focus their political appeals on post-­materialist issues and rebuild their policy platforms and political identities accordingly. But when the Great Recession erupted, the Transformation of European Social Democracy (Herbert Kitschelt [1996]) took its toll. Mudde’s analysis is accurate for its time (the pre-­crisis decade in Western Europe), and it remains extremely valuable for understanding the European populist radical right, which still seems quite strong. Cuperus, in turn, offers useful insights for comprehending the post-­crisis political evolution in Southern Europe. It was the demise of social-­democratic thinking by European social democracies and their acceptance of neoliberal tenets that paved the way for the emergence and success of populisms and confined left-­of-­centre parties to difficult positions. What Cuperus, among others, failed to foresee was that the ‘populist challenge’ to the social-­democratic (and radical) left could come not only from the right; at least in Southern Europe, the Achilles’ heel of the ‘traditional’ left was its moderation in socioeconomic issues and not its ‘post-­ materialist’ stances. Cuperus’ article also brilliantly exposed one of the biggest achievements of European social democracy in the post-­war period: bringing together different social sectors and building a durable, albeit uneasy, social alliance. Handlin and Collier (2008) called the organisational roots of this alliance ‘union-­party hubs’, or mass parties allied with powerful trade unions. Social transformations brought about by post-­industrialism, free market hegemony, labour market fragmentation and stratification all undermined the party-­union alliance. The parties lost their mass character in an increasingly ‘liquid’, individualistic and atomised society. Politics in the era of ‘party cartelization’ became (and had to become) a matter for professionals and technocrats (Katz and Mair, 1995). The unions, despite their declining memberships and inability to represent the increasing precarious labour force, still mobilised core voters for left-­of-­centre parties. Nevertheless, they lost the policy-­making clout that they enjoyed during the ‘golden age’ of social democracy and could no longer play a proactive political role. Their highest ambitions were confined to being a secondary part of ‘social dialogue’, working to salvage some influence in political exchanges and limiting the erosion of permanent employment protection (e.g., Hyman, 2001; Rigby and García Calavia, 2017). In sum, once-­powerful and encompassing unions became vestiges of a world that no longer existed. Social-­democratic parties were no longer social-­ democratic (Lavelle, 2008). They fully believed the ‘End of the History’ thesis: there is no alternative. Then, when the Great Recession erupted, exhausted people from different social sectors began protesting and advancing different – sometimes contradictory – demands. Decisively, those sectors began listening to new, anti-­neoliberal, populist political projects that validated them, proposed answers to their demands and assured them that the history was not, in fact, over. Indeed, populism – understood as a pejorative more often than not – has

4  Introduction also been praised (and feared) for ‘calling people beyond the horizons of the here and now’ (Grattan, 2016). Understanding populism in general, and anti-­neoliberal populism in particular, as a political project (see also Jansen, 2011), as this book does, focuses on how agency interacts with structure. I concentrate on which ideological and organisational strategies populist politicians adopt to craft and consolidate new political and social alliances in the aftermath of a ‘critical juncture’ (in this case, a socioeconomic crisis produced by the contradictions of the neoliberal model). I focus on the sociological bases of political projects and on the organisational tools employed to articulate different grievances and shape them into winning electoral formulas. Even today, this sociological and organisational perspective may seem novel to European scholars of populist phenomena. However, Latin American scholars have used this framework for understanding populism for decades; a ‘cross-­class’ movement (Dix, 1989) acted as the agent for the political incorporation1 of the organised working class and other ‘marginalised’ popular sectors in the polity domain (Collier and Collier, 1991; Jansen, 2011; Silva and Rossi, 2018). This structural understanding of ‘classic’ populisms (e.g., Peronism in Argentina, or Varguism in Brazil) has been criticized for its functionalism. During the nineties, the populist label began to be attached to quite different phenomena, such as new, ‘neoliberal’ populisms (Menem in Argentina, Collor in Brazil, Fujimori in Peru and Bucaram in Ecuador). However, populism turned to be, for Latinoamericanists, a key concept to interpret the mobilizing potential of several, political projects – mostly rooted amongst popular, ‘marginalized’ sectors  – which advanced social and economic platforms overtly challenging the Washington Consensus, whose hegemony had been questioned by the explosion of major socioeconomic crises. Hugo Chávez in Venezuela was the first, followed by the Kirchners in Argentina, Evo Morales in Bolivia and then Rafael Correa in Ecuador, among others; all of them inaugurated ‘political eras’ and repeatedly won presidential races in their respective countries. They appealed to the ‘sovereign people’, railed against foreign and domestic elites, created and/or consolidated formidable grassroots support and proposed economic policies based on state intervention and major social redistributive measures. The rise of some of these anti-­neoliberal populist projects, particularly in Venezuela and Bolivia, made the traditional left in those countries electorally irrelevant, an outcome that also transpired much more recently in Greece. There, the party system was shaped by the rise of Syriza – a fringe radical left party that opted (successfully) for pursuing a populist strategy. In Italy and Spain, where the Great Recession provoked a significant increase in unemployment and poverty rates, new parties like the M5S and Podemos gained more than 20% of the vote in their first appearances in elections and severely eroded the support of existing left-­of-­centre parties. However, the rise of anti-­neoliberal populisms in the wake of neoliberal crises is not necessarily a death sentence for the traditional left in either Latin

Introduction 5 America or Southern Europe: in Uruguay, which also experienced a socioeconomic crisis in 2002, and in Portugal, no populist challengers arouse, and left-­ of-­centre governments representing a vast ideological space endured. The goal of this book is to provide a theoretical framework that accounts for the variety of political realignments within national lefts following crises of neoliberalism in South America and Southern Europe. I aim to bridge different strands of literature and advance an argument that travels between two regions that are obviously quite different in many respects. I propose that the complex interplay between the political-­electoral arena, social mobilisations against austerity and union movements explain the different paths followed by national lefts and the different kinds of anti-­neoliberal populisms that emerged in the countries that I analyse. The premise, here, is that ‘in extraordinary times the long-­term perspective of party system change needs to be incorporated into the analysis’ (Hernández and Kriesi, 2015: 204). The entire volume is devoted to demonstrating how the structural transformations brought about by neoliberalism, its crisis and the implementation of draconian austerity reforms prepared the terrain for the emergence of the anti-­neoliberal populist phenomena in Southern Europe in a way that closely resembles the path followed by several Latin American countries nearly 15 years before, when the period marked by the Washington Consensus came to an end. A first ‘Latinamericanisation’ of Southern Europe, or comparable changes at the socio-­structural and political levels under neoliberalism, led to a second ‘Latinamericanisation’ consisting of the rise of different kinds of anti-­neoliberal populisms that replicated (organisationally and sociologically) Latin American patterns that emerged during the so-­called ‘Pink Tide’. Latin America and Southern Europe seem to be the only regions in which anti-­neoliberal populisms have achieved notable electoral relevance. But these similar outcomes transpired autonomously, that is without strong or direct intra-­and inter-­regional diffusion effects. Each of these anti-­neoliberal populist projects stemmed from and adapted to their respective national contexts, with just a few exceptions (most evidently in the case of Podemos, which incorporated, mostly at the discursive level, some ideological lessons from South America). I focus, thus, on the electoral realignments within the left, and on the eventual successful emergence of anti-­neoliberal populisms in Latin America (since the end of the nineties) and in Southern Europe (since the beginning of the Great Recession). During the apex of neoliberal hegemony, labour market dualisation and social exclusion increased, reaching unprecedented levels at the time of both regions’ respective crises. Under neoliberalism, old alliances between left-­of-­centre parties and unions persisted, despite the evident ideological moderation of the former. Eventually, these party-­union blocs abdicated their historical role of providing a socio-­political incorporation of the popular sectors in the face of austerity. When national and international responses to crises led to the implementation of these measures, popular resentment exploded. New

6  Introduction social actors took the spotlight and advanced new social and political demands. Then, through strikingly similar mechanisms, different kinds of anti-­neoliberal populist projects shaped the political lefts in both regions. This book offers several contributions. First, it constitutes a comprehensive study of anti-­neoliberal populisms in the regions in which they became major political phenomena, namely Latin America and Southern Europe. I rely on the vast theoretical literature on populism to stress the strategic, ideological-­ programmatic and organisational resources that made populisms so strong in the aftermath of neoliberal crises. Moreover, I investigate variation within the anti-­neoliberal populist category by differentiating their internal party organisations, relationships with social movements and unions and sociological profiles of their electorates; I avoid putting very different political phenomena like Chavismo, Kirchnerismo, the Bolivian MAS-­IPSP, Syriza, Podemos and the M5S in the same box. Rather, I give a novel account of their emergence by deploying an original typology that elucidates how their organisational and ideological characteristics enabled them to be highly adaptive in the aftermath of the crisis, and how each evolution of the political Lefts in Southern Europe had its ‘precursor’ in a specific Latin American case 15 years earlier. This typology is also relevant for the debates over the relationship between populisms and democracy, since the different linkage2 strategies that these populisms adopted led to different consequences in terms of both the quality of democracy and of representation. Second, I propose a middle-­range theory intended to work in countries where a certain set of scope conditions (Slater and Simmons, 2010) hold. Such scope conditions refer to the way the union movement historically acceded to the polity domain. To my knowledge, these conditions have never explicitly been proposed to provide a comprehensive explanation of the rise of anti-­neoliberal populisms in South America and Southern Europe. Despite their declining memberships, the national union movements in all of my cases (Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece) were still major players in civil society, even in the pre-­crisis neoliberal period. Moreover, they maintained strong links with leftist or labour-­based (Levitsky, 2003) political parties, with the partial exception of Bolivia. As unions lost much of their organisational and structural powers (Gumbrell-­McCormick and Hyman, 2013; Rigby and García Calavia, 2017) due to trade and financial international integration and changes to systems of production, the importance of defending these partisan links and maintaining access increased, particularly in Southern Europe and South America, where labour market issues are regulated by law rather than through corporatist arrangements. However, left-­of-­centre and labour-­based parties often opted for centrist strategies, which placed many of the historical gains of the labour movement at risk. The unions therefore faced a trade-­off (Hyman, 2001) between ideological purity and concrete political influence (from a subaltern position). The strategic choices made by the bloc of parties and unions during the pre-­crisis period play a key role in affecting both

Introduction 7 the credibility of existing left-­of-­centre parties in the aftermath of the crisis and the patterns of anti-­austerity protest cycles that the crises triggered. Third, the book contributes to the literature regarding the effects of social movements on electoral politics, at least in terms of the emergence of various kinds of populisms. The literature on social movements and on party politics and organisations have become siloed, despite recent attempts at integration (e.g., MacAdam and Tarrow, 2010; Della Porta et al., 2017). This book offers a perspective on the relationship between non-­institutional and electoral politics during times of crisis. Fourth, the extensive fieldwork – more than 100 in-­depth, semi-­structured interviews with political leaders, social movements activists, union leaders and country experts that I conducted in four different countries (Bolivia, Argentina, Italy and Spain) – provides fresh qualitative data that contribute to a better understanding of the political projects under analysis. This is particularly true of the cases of the Bolivian MAS-­IPSP and for the most recent experiences of the Spanish Podemos and the Italian M5S. The rest of this chapter is devoted to adequately conceptualising populism, describing the very different forms it has assumed in different geographical and historical contexts in Latin America and Western Europe, and why it, in its anti-­neoliberal form(s), proved to be a successful political project during contentious times in highly stratified, fragmented, impoverished and mobilised societies. Finally, the concluding section of this chapter presents the plan of the rest of the book.

1.1 Why Populism? Between Movementism and Sovereigntism Populism has been variously defined as an ideology (Taggart, 2000; Mudde, 2004; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013), a discourse (De La Torre, 2010; Hawkins, 2010), a logic (Laclau, 2005; Panizza, 2005; in a different sense, Canovan, 1999), a frame (Aslanidis, 2016), a style (Barr, 2009; Moffitt, 2016), a strategy (Weyland, 2001), a form of political incorporation (Collier and Collier, 1991; Rossi, 2015) and political integration (Germani, 1965). More complex definitions portray it as a discursive and mobilisational project (Jansen, 2011) or as a ‘form of political relationship (articulated through socio-­cultural appeals) between political leaders and a social basis’ (Ostiguy, 2017). Part of the reason for this polyphony is the fact that the adjective ‘populist’ has been employed in research and writing on very different units of analysis, including political regimes, political parties, political leaders, economic policies, voters and social movements (Gidron and Bonikowski, 2013). Some of these approaches sometimes barely differ from one another substantively, besides some specific – though sometimes important – nuances. To use quantitative terminology, I would say that all the approaches stress different, but highly correlated, dimensions of the concept (see Table 1.1).

8  Introduction Table 1.1 Summary of Four Main Theoretical Approaches to Populism Theoretical Approach to Populism

Founding Main Strengths Scholars

Ideological

Mudde

Organisational Weyland (Populism as Unmediated Relationship) Populism as a Laclau Logic

CulturalStylistic and Relational

Ostiguy

Weaknesses

Focus on ‘the will of the Undertheorised relationship People’. It stresses between ‘populism’ and the populist ability to ‘pluralism’. It overlooks unify atomised and/ the articulating ability or heterogeneous of populisms. It fails to constituencies. Wellcapture participativesuited for describing mobilising populisms. electoral-delegative ­ populisms. Focus on populist ‘search Entirely skewed towards the for power’ and on its electoral-delegative pole. ­ anti-status quo potential. Focus on the ability to It overstates the articulate different ‘politicising’ role of (unexpressed or populism. It overlooks expressed) demands. (and even discards) It captures populism’s sociological-structural ­ potential regenerative explanations for the rise role for democracy. of populisms. Focus on the populist Too much skewed towards creation of collective an electoral-delegative ­ identities and on understanding of the role the ‘populist way’ of leadership. of understanding representation. It captures the informality proper of populisms and helps to understand its ‘movementist’ side.

Source: Author’s Elaboration.

For instance, the politically incorrect style populist leaders often portray (Ostiguy, 2017) is functional to the creation (and, crucially, the reproduction) of the antagonism between ‘the people’ and its ‘enemy’ that is constitutive of the populist phenomena. Through this ‘flaunting’ (Ostiguy, 2017), followers recognize the leader as ‘one of the [true] people’, and thus able to legitimately express their will (Mudde, 2004); this also contributes to explaining why populism is often highly personalistic (Weyland, 2001). The creation and reproduction of this antagonism inevitably ‘emphasises similarities and downplays difference’ (Jansen, 2011: 84) among ‘the people’, thus portraying them as a

Introduction 9 homogeneous entity, as Mudde stresses. Because the leader’s pretension to represent a homogeneous ‘people’ and its ‘will’ can generate tensions with the institutional checks and balances (considered, alternatively, as ‘unnecessary brakes’ or even ‘enclaves’ occupied by the ‘people’s enemy’ who boycott the populist project), it is not surprising that populism has been equated with democratic illiberalism. I must adopt a precise definition for the purpose of this research. For this, I  have chosen to provide an original definition of the concept. The purpose of this novel definition is not to add an additional conceptualisation of such a disputed term to the academic literature. Instead, the aim is to create an operational definition, which is the result of a deep analysis of the existing literature and which intends to highlight some attributes of populism that have unsystematically emerged from the literature and explain why anti-­neoliberal populist projects have found such fertile terrain in the countries analysed here. I thus define populism as a ‘political project’ aiming at occupying the public institutions through electoral means in order to allow ‘the people’ to recuperate or achieve its sovereignty, while relying on an antagonistic, polarising political discourse to generate new collective identities and on varying organisational resources to overcome the problems of collective action that could arise among dispersed and/or heterogeneous constituencies. This definition introduces five key attributes of populism that have made it particularly well-­suited to the post-­crisis socio-­political scenarios: i. a particular process of articulation of the demands of ‘the people’; ii. a primary focus on the search for power; iii. peculiar interpretations of the concepts of representation, accountability and sovereignty; iv. a specific understanding of the concept of participation, which is present in some populist phenomena; v. organisational traits of some of the parties labelled populist. The first point refers to the populist ability to articulate heterogeneous demands (Laclau, 2005) through well-­known discursive mechanisms such as identification of a common enemy and a polarising political discourse with a certain ideological vagueness – or, at least, a kind of ‘agnosticism’ toward ‘thicker’ ideologies. These mechanisms are useful to ‘emphasise similarities and downplay differences’ (Jansen, 2011: 84) within atomised or fragmented constituencies that usually receive class-­or interest-­based rhetoric appeals. This unifying and polarising function has proven to be particularly well-­suited to the contentious (and often chaotic) phase triggered by the shortcomings of the neoliberal model. The second point is about the importance of occupying public institutions as a necessary step for providing solutions to the demands of ‘the people’.

10  Introduction This has three immediate implications. First, populisms aim to govern, not merely influence the policy-­making process. Second, the ‘battlefield’ of populist projects is the nation-­state, whose structures populisms try to revive, often in contrast to supranational and international institutions. Third, populisms have strong anti-­status quo potential, which can provoke tensions in liberal democratic institutions. All populisms conceive the capture of governmental offices as the conditio sine qua non for the pursuit of their policy goals. Despite the processes of global integration – and, in fact, in reaction to them – populists assign a central role to the structures of the nation-­state.3 For them, it is inconceivable that real change could be implemented without directly assuming governmental responsibilities through democratic processes. This political ascension represents their main strategy for giving sovereignty back to ‘the people’. The third and fourth points are linked to the previous one: populism is about the restoration or achievement of ‘the people’s’ sovereignty  – of its right to decide. The implications of sovereignty vary, however, depending on the necessary ‘requirements’ of membership to ‘the people’ (ethnicity, citizenship or low socioeconomic status – ethnos, demos or plebs) and on the priority assigned to the goals of national sovereignty (in reaction to foreign pressures) or popular sovereignty (if the ‘enemy’ is mainly understood as a political and economic caste that illegitimately occupies public institutions). Moreover, populisms vary according to the specific solution provided for making sovereignty effective. Some cases typify what I  call electoral-­ delegative populisms, in which a strong leader represents and embodies her/ his ‘people’ and enacts its supposed will. Alternatively, ‘the people’ directly occupy the public institutions, and populism becomes a political project calling for popular participation and mobilisation, while the leader still provides a crucial unifying and mediating function; these are what I call participative-­ mobilising populisms (Padoan, 2017). This latter variety is well-­suited to the socio-­ political context considered here, marked by loss of national sovereignty – due to foreign pressure to implement austerity measures – and declining legitimacy of old structures of political intermediation. Populism has been nicely described as ‘a way to shorten the distances between the legitimate authority and the people’ (Ostiguy, 2017). This goal may be pursued through very different strategies. It is not always true that populism simply suggests ‘a correction [of democracy] based on enhanced accountability rather than increased participation’ (Barr, 2009); several populist projects pursue precisely the direct participation of their ‘people’ in order to diminish the gap between the representatives and the represented. In fact, populists sometimes call for the introduction of several mechanisms of direct and/or participative democracy at both the institutional and party levels, and thus come closer to the introduction of an imperative mandate and revocatory tools, therefore institutionalising the ‘feedback loop’ between the leader(s) and the people. Of course, it would be disingenuous to overlook the manipulative and opportunistic features of these practices, as well as the plebiscitarian direction

Introduction 11 that populisms can and often do take. Nonetheless, populisms are not necessarily against representative democracy; they are, however, completely at odds with a formalistic understanding of representation. For populist leaders, parties, movements or voters, representative democracy must not be equated with the simple election of MPs (Members of Parliament) every two, three or more years, waiting for the next elections to express a judgement on their behaviour and eventually to punish them through the ballot box. By strictly equating popular sovereignty with accountability, populisms are likely to attack governments that are perceived as distant and technocratic (such as EU institutions), often portraying them as servants of obscure economic elites or forces. Populist projects also often criticise supranational institutions for their poor electoral legitimacy and perceived attacks on sovereignty. The populist focus on vertical accountability (O’Donnell, 1994) often casts doubt on the impartiality of institutional checks and balances. Here, the plebiscitarian potential (and the possibility of democratic backslides) of populisms is fully displayed. Some populist movements, however, defend these institutions when their target is a corrupted political and economic elite perceived to be unaccountable to the law. To pursue giving sovereignty back to ‘the people’, different populisms advance different – and often contradictory – solutions. One option is delegating management of the state to a leader and limiting (and attacking) the influence of institutional checks and balances. This leader, consequently, would be in a position to embody the ‘popular general will’ against the multiple inertial points of resistance that favour the status quo. Typically, the leader establishes direct, charismatic linkages with her/his ‘people’ and gains perceived legitimacy from their mandate and by his/her claim to be ‘one of the people’. In contrast to a purely authoritarian solution, electoral-­delegative populisms may attempt to augment their electoral legitimacy, for example by calling popular referenda to ‘give the voice to the people’ (and, admittedly, to avoid the blame for unpopular measures). At the same time, because of her/his claim to embody the popular will, the leader of this sort of populism will display a decisionist style of dealing with the problems s/he is meant to fix, dismissing the institutions devoted to horizontal accountability. This is clearly the case of the ‘neopopulisms’ of the nineties in Latin America, the Western European populist right and the on-­going presidency of Donald Trump. In all of these contexts, the leader embodies, more than represents, her/his ‘people’, who belong to a socially constructed ‘heartland’ (Taggart, 2000), are oppressed by high taxation, menaced by immigrants or are not adequately represented by other parties, unions, or organisations. While all these examples of electoral-­delegative populisms belong to the exclusionary, right wing populist category, it is important to notice that Latin America saw the rise of left-­oriented electoral-­delegative populisms in Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution and Correa and his Citizen Revolution. The centralising and technocratic features of Correa’s governments have been widely noted (Becker, 2013; Collins, 2014), as has the difficult relationship between

12  Introduction Correa and the lively Ecuadorean indigenous social movements (see Chapter 8). The case of Chavism is more complex. One would be hard-­pressed to consider the emergence of Chavism as a ‘participative’ experience. Nevertheless, even since the very beginning of his first electoral campaign, Chávez has flaunted a strongly participative rhetoric, which was soon reflected in the new Constitution that he promulgated once in power and in the spread of Bolivarian Circles (see Chapter 7). Participative-­mobilising populisms look quite different. Instead of delegating political decisions to a strong leader, these populisms advance quite different proposals for correcting the inadequacies of existing representative democracies. Participative-­mobilising populisms criticise the lack of control that ‘the people’ have over their representatives in public offices. In this case, ‘the people’ should mobilise (‘put into motion’, as Roberts [2006] puts it) and directly occupy public institutions, becoming directly involved in political decisions. Such reasoning often leads participative-­mobilising populisms to articulate dissatisfaction with political parties. In this sub-­type, mainstream political parties are viewed as self-­referential organisations that do not provide satisfactory channels for participation because of their ‘cartelisation’; the parties have abandoned their function of promoting the political socialisation of the masses. Participative-­mobilising populist projects call for genuine popular participation in politics in order to re-­appropriate public institutions. They claim that strong popular mobilisation is necessary to oppose the elites. Far from pursuing their struggle solely in the electoral arena, participative-­ mobilising populisms call for a popular resurrection to decide from below and to control the institutions. Leaders are still important in these movements, but they are mostly perceived as ‘deciders of last resort,; her/his most important function is to prevent internal divisions and struggles that might translate into fatal internal conflicts. At the same time, the participative-­mobilising populist subtype often shows top-­down, even militarised forms of popular mobilisations, requiring discipline and dedication to the cause, which can possibly lean in totalitarian directions. The Bolivarian Circles and their involvement in the anti-­poverty programs known as Missions in Chavista represent a well-­known example (Hawkins, 2010). As we will see in Chapters 3 and 6, party discipline is also very strong in very different parties like the Bolivian MAS-­IPSP and the Italian M5S. Nevertheless, in all these populisms, examples of spontaneous consolidation of grass-­roots movements have emerged, sometimes with great strength. These grassroots groups can display poor horizontal and vertical coordination, particularly during the inception phase of a populist movement, and, in fact, this ‘institutional disorder’ favours the rapid spread of the movement. Electoral-­delegative and participative-­mobilising populisms are two opposite ends of a continuum. While each phenomenon is closer to one of these poles, some electoral-­delegative populisms may rely on mobilising tools typical of the other populist subtype, or some participative-­mobilising populisms can develop a certain centralisation of power, allowing the leader to ‘do the

Introduction 13 right things’ in the interests of ‘the people’. However, one clarification is necessary: electoral-­delegative populisms focus mainly on concretely delivering political goods to ‘the people’, relying on mobilisation as a tactic. In contrast, participative-­mobilising populisms put a strong emphasis on the direct occupation of public institutions by ’the people’, and refer to a strong leader as a tactic. The fifth point focuses on the organisational characteristics of populist projects. Although scholars generally agree on the impossibility of defining populism according to its organisational features, I argue that there are important similarities between participative-­mobilising populisms and the organisation of the ‘charismatic parties’ – particularly in their ‘genetic phases’ (Angelo Panebianco, 1988). Both are characterised by the co-­ existence of centralising and decentralising tendencies: a strong leadership coexists with a decentralised structure, in which the periphery enjoys high autonomy and the barriers between the party and its environment are porous. This autonomy, along with the ideological vagueness mentioned previously, makes populist projects well suited for adapting to contentious and fluid socio-­political situations. The relationship between populism and party organisation is an under-­ researched topic. By defining populism as a ‘direct and unmediated relationship between a leader and his masses’, Weyland (2001) makes the lack of organisation and institutionalisation two definitional features. However, Latin American ‘classic populisms’ do not support this definition (see Table 1.2). Roberts (2006) argues that a strong organisational density becomes necessary for and utilised by populist parties only when their projects challenge structural inequalities. In this sense, political organisation is a weapon of the weak; a ‘means of collective empowerment, particularly for working-­and lower-­class groups, [to countervail] power to the concentrated economic or institutional resources of elite groups’ (Roberts, 2006: 136). Roberts then can account for the weak organisational density of neoliberal populist parties (see Table 1.2) in comparison to left-­oriented populisms. However, the risk of underestimating the incorporation potential of populist projects is that by exclusively focusing on top-­down linkage strategies, we overlook the capacity of populisms to adapt to their environments by subsuming or allying with existing movements (see also Aslanidis, 2016). While it is useful for capturing the mobilising features of some populist phenomena, Roberts’s argument overlooks the participative, adaptive and articulating aspects of populist projects. Panebianco identified several common traits of charismatic parties that are also present in all of the anti-­neoliberal parties analysed in this book. First, a cohesive elite channels the unquestionable volonté of the leader. Second, competition within the party elite for higher offices does not involve the highest position; the most important criterion for mobility is the degree of loyalty and devotion to the leader, who makes the final decision on practically all internal matters. The charismatic party is consequently a centralised and anti-­bureaucratic organisation, in which any extant internal rules

Perón’s Peronism, Cárdenas’ PRI (Mexico), APRA (Peru), MNR (Bolivia [1952]), AD (Venezuela), PASOK (Greece)

Classic Populism

Typical Social Bases

Developing countries Organised working-class, ­ breaking away from sometimes peasantry. oligarchic regimes. Unorganised support of the poor.

Historical Context Labour-­based mass party.

Most Likely Organisation ­ Electoral-delegative. Organised constituencies mobilised from above, through (empowered) corporatist unions. Purely electoraldelegative.

Populist ‘Subtype’

Source: Author ’s Elaboration.

50s: Uomo Qualunque (Italy), Countries affected by Popular sectors suffering from Personalist or Poujadisme (France). 70s: high public debt and hyperinflation; petty-borgeoisie clientelistic Progress Party (Denmark, hyperinflation and/ lacking representation within electoral Norway). 90s: Menemism or characterised by processes of political exchange. machine. (Argentina), Collor logics of political (Brazil), Fujimorism (Peru), exchange between Berlusconism (Italy) state, parties and social actors. FPOe (Austria), Vlaams Generally affluent ‘National’ working-class and Mass party. Radical Electoral-delegative, ­ Belang (Belgium), National societies petty bourgeoisie attracted Right-W sometimes mediated ­ ing Front (France); League experiencing by welfare chauvinism and Populism by strong partisan (Italy), UDC (Switzerland), large immigration (mainly) cultural conservatism. structures. UKIP (United Kingdom) processes. Chavism (Venezuela), Societies experiencing Sectors excluded from welfare Charismatic AntiThe more organised Kirchnerism (Argentina), social costs of regimes (unemployed, Party Neoliberal its constituencies, MAS-IPSP (Bolivia), drastic neoliberal/ precarious workers) and affected (Panebianco); the closer to the Populism Correism (Ecuador), austerity measures by privatizations, austerity and social participativePodemos (Spain), Syriza (in a structural cuts in social spending; civil movement mobilising (Greece), M5S (Italy) context of dualised society mobilised against the organisations. populism. societies). above. Varying relationship with organised labour.

Neoliberal Populism

Examples

Populist ‘Wave’

Table 1.2 Varieties of ‘Populist Waves’ in Latin America and Western Europe (1930–Onward)

14 Introduction

Introduction 15 are subject to the interpretation of the leader. Furthermore, the charismatic party is often located in the middle of a galaxy formed by groups and organisations, whose boundaries are ill-­defined, and which surrounds the party and the leader. Thus, the conflicts below the leaders are often inter-­organisational struggles between the leaders of the formally autonomous organisations that form the ‘movement’. (1988: 269, my translation) Ostiguy’s theory of populism (2017) also highlights the anti-­bureaucratic, exception-­prone and personalistic decision-­making process of populist parties, as well as their movimientista character. Panebianco’s observations regarding the inter-­organisational struggles that often occur within the populist camp also describe many Latin American populisms, such as the Bolivian MAS-­IPSP (Chapter 3) and Peronism (Chapter 4). The boundaries between populist projects and allied but largely autonomous organisations are poorly defined, allowing for rapid and deep expansion. Although these features may assist populist movements in their early stages, they also contribute to organisational disorder. Nevertheless, there is a key difference: in participative-­mobilising populisms, the disorganisation, particularly at the periphery, becomes an asset, while in Panebianco’s charismatic parties, disorganisation at the periphery is something to be reduced and eventually suppressed. While in the latter the main collective incentive for joining the movement is a common faith in the leader, in the former it is the possibility of contributing to and taking part in the movement itself (and have an influence, either concrete or perceived). Populisms are thus often organised and disorganised, particularly at the peripheral levels, thereby facilitating affiliation, expansion, and adaptability. Their ideological amorphousness allows members to have their own, idiosyncratic opinions about the movement’s goals, and even definition (as we will see in Chapter 6, which is dedicated to the Italian M5S). In turn, there are some resemblances between the institutionalisation process of Panebianco’s charismatic parties and some electoral-­delegative populisms. Panebianco, hypothesised that a charismatic party is generally unlikely to survive its leader; if this occurs, the party will likely become a strongly institutionalised party, both in terms of centralisation and internal coherence. This is precisely what Heinisch and Mazzoleni (2016) found in their analysis of European populist radical right parties: they ‘converge on a highly articulated organization close to the mass party legacy’ (Heinisch and Mazzoleni, 2016: 241). The centrality of the leadership and the relative absence, in this kind of populism, of a ‘participative ideology’, preclude the development of either meaningful bottom-­up influences or partisan decentralisation.

***

16  Introduction Given the wide variety of definitions, organisations and goals, I prefer to talk about ‘varieties of populisms’ (e.g., Caiani and Graziano, 2019) instead of ‘populism’ in the singular. One goal of this book is to stress the differences within the anti-­neoliberal populist category (see in particular Chapter 2). However, it is also necessary to distinguish this category from other forms of populism that respond to very different social, political and historical contexts. Populist phenomena are about different ‘peoples’. Scholars have repeatedly attempted to describe and explain populist social bases, but due to the ‘chameleonic’ (Taggart, 2000) character of populism, it is unsurprising that both theoretical and empirical studies have provided mixed results. Recently, Rooduijn (2017) compared contemporaneous right-­ and left-­wing populist parties and their electorates across Western Europe and concluded that ‘ “the” populist voter does not exist’, although there was a discernable right/left split. In addition to differentiating between different populist subtypes, I also consider different ‘waves’ (briefly summarised in Table 1.2). Dependency theorists like Cardoso and Faletto (1969) and O’Donnell (1973) saw the populist regimes that emerged throughout Latin America  – and in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil in particular  – as ‘historical agents’ in a dependent development model. In their view, the national bourgeoisie and blue-­collar workers benefitted, while the rural oligarchies that had ruled for decades suffered. These Latin American populist regimes incorporated the industrial working class into political regimes (Collier and Collier, 1991). ‘Classic’ populisms were inspired by nationalist ideologies and implemented protectionist policies. They also developed the corporatist, segmented welfare states typical of the region by both co-­opting and strengthening the trade union movements. These movements represented the organisational and electoral backbone of those populisms in countries as diverse as Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela and (to a lesser degree) Peru. In contrast to Marxist tendencies on the left, the ‘populist ISI’ model contributed to a national capitalism: a sort of Latin American social pact. Nearly all the most important, well-­organised and long-­lasting mass political parties in the region – such as the Peruvian APRA, the Bolivian MNR, the Argentine Peronism or the Mexican PRI – represent the partisan legacy of the era of classic populism. Latin American ‘neopopulists’ (i.e., neoliberal populists) differed from classic populists; they promised permanent solutions to the macroeconomic disequilibria inherited from the ‘lost decade’ of the eighties and sought an absolute, delegative (O’Donnell, 1994) mandate to ‘fix’ their countries and bypass the resistance of privileged, rent-­seeking groups that allegedly slowed economic recovery.4 New populist leaders, often political mavericks, attracted huge support through a mixture of programmatic features (Baker, 2009), charismatic appeal and clientelist linkages. They also differed from the classic populists organisationally, relying on personalist parties (Weyland, 2001) or clientelist machines (Levitsky, 2003) and bypassing or weakening the unions.

Introduction 17 In Europe, Silvio Berlusconi exemplified neopopulism; the Italian petty bourgeoisie was his core constituency, although the electorate of his personalist party Forza Italia was quite heterogeneous. The petty bourgeoisie also formed the core constituency of earlier populist experiences in Western Europe after the Second World War: the Italian qualunquismo and the French poujadisme (whose official name was Union for the Defence of Tradesmen and Artisans) in the fifties, and of the New Right that emerged in Denmark and Norway during the seventies. All these European neopopulists claimed to be the voice of a ‘silent majority’ oppressed by high taxation (Mastropaolo, 2005). Some European radical right parties, such as the Austrian FPOE, the LN, the Belgian Vlaams Blok and Vlaams Belang and the French Front National, have long been associated (and even equated, at least in the European debate) with the concept of populism. According to Mudde (2008), these parties’ core attributes include nationalism, xenophobia and authoritarianism. Their economic agenda is characterised, in contrast to neopopulisms, by an opportunistic embrace of neoliberalism. They propose lowering taxes – particularly for small-­ and medium-­sized enterprises and petty bourgeoisie in general – and sometimes advance an anti-­statist agenda. However, the true core of their economic platform is welfare chauvinism, or the defence of the generous extant welfare provisions and simultaneous exclusion of non-­natives from those benefits (Mudde, 2008: 130–132). Mudde, though, argues that economics is not the main issue characterising the platforms of these parties, but that it is rather their utter rejection of multiculturalism (see also Hausermann and Kriesi, 2015). It is clear that the anti-­neoliberal populisms analysed in this book depart markedly from the xenophobic stances of the European populist radical right. When the union-­party hubs lost their legitimacy (Handlin and Collier, 2008), social movements and organisations with different agendas became the new leading actors in the contentious periods caused by socioeconomic crisis. Some movements unified, established demands and crafted strong alliances (or ‘meganetworks’ in the words of Goldstone [2011]), while others remained much more fragmented. In both cases, the profusion of demands and mobilised social sectors required new political responses; organisationally and sociologically heterogeneous protests and institutional reactions resulted. Anti-­neoliberal populist projects offered protesters and ‘unheard’ constituencies a unifying political platform, alternative economic narratives, new and concrete solutions to deal with the crisis of neoliberalism through novel channels of political representation and participation and with the specific aim of taking power at the nation-­state level. Because austerity measures were implemented at the national level  – although under evident foreign or supranational financial pressures – framing the protests as a form of anti-­colonial or anti-­imperialist resistance (Filc, 2015) proved effective. This frame led to the revival of a nationalistic discourse by several anti-­neoliberal populisms (the Bolivian MAS, Venezuelan Chavism, Argentine Kirchnerism, the Greek Syriza and even the Spanish

18  Introduction Podemos), but with a meaning distinct from that of the xenophobic right-­ wing populisms. Latin American Andean ethno-­populisms (De La Madrid, 2008), Podemos and Syriza revived a nationalistic (or, in the case of Podemos, ‘patriotic’) discourse in order to attack the ‘colonial relationship’ between their countries and the US or the EU (Filc, 2015; Stavrakakis and Siomos, 2016). In the Bolivian case, the struggle against colonialism was two-­fold, as it addressed the white (q’aras) Bolivian political and economic elites and US imperialism. In the Spanish case, Podemos has revived the concept of plurinationalism to appeal to the nationalistic regional identities, calling for their democratic self-­determination. The new Southern European populisms adapted and expanded the old Latin American leftist critiques of imperialism and colonialism. Crucially, in both regions, anti-­neoliberal populist projects could present themselves as appropriate political representatives thanks to several conditions: the representational failures of the union-­party hubs, the segmented characteristics of their welfare regimes and the increase in the size of outsider sectors (i.e., unemployed and precarious workers, see Chapter 2). Leader-­initiated populisms (Venezuelan Chavismo and the Italian M5S) clearly developed anti-­ unionist stances. These populisms practised an issue-­owning strategy towards the demands of the fragmented ‘micro-­publics’ (Spanakos, 2011), and gained popularity among marginalised sectors through programmatic and charismatic appeal. These unmediated forms of political appeals tend to appear more in leader-­initiated populisms that display more electoral-­delegative and plebiscitarian characteristics. In general, the greater the autonomous organisational capacity of the movements, the closer the anti-­neoliberal populist party will be to the participative-­mobilising pole and the stronger the movements’ influence within the party will be. At the discursive level, anti-­neoliberal populist projects usually skew toward a socioeconomic specification of their ‘people’. In Latin America, these groups flaunted their ‘plebeian’ character and struggled for the political incorporation of the poorest strata (Rossi, 2015); in Southern Europe they typically claimed to represent ‘the 99% against the 1%’. This formulation stresses the movement’s majoritarian and deprived condition (Gerbaudo, 2017). However, the reaction against the inadequate old structures of political intermediation has – particularly in Italy and Spain – promoted a conceptualisation of ‘the people’ that is closer to the concept of demos, or of an ‘informed citizenship’ that aims to take possession of public institutions and be actively involved in political activities. In Latin America, bringing ‘the people’ into the polity was achieved more through the intermediation of the popular social movements and organisations than on an individual basis. The notions of plebs and ethnos, two collective concepts with communitarian and anti-­imperialist intentions, prevailed. As I will elaborate through case studies, Southern European citizenism was better able to attract disillusioned middle class sectors ‘rediscovering’ the political sphere, while the poorest sectors politically sustained Latin American (plebeian) populism.

Introduction 19

1.2  Plan of the Book The book is divided into eight chapters. After this introduction to the concept of populism and review of additional relevant literature in Chapter 2, I will present my argument in detail, address methodological issues and clarify my decisions regarding case selection. I outline a typology of anti-­austerity political projects that achieved electorally relevant positions within the lefts of selected countries in Latin America and Southern Europe following major socioeconomic crises. The typology is built on three variables: the existence or lack of a political party and/or of partisan structures the relationship between the populist parties and the national unions and the degree of influence social movements have in crucial internal activities of the parties. Different combinations of these variables lead to several outcomes. The labour-­based left may remain resilient (Uruguay and Portugal), or different types of anti-­neoliberal populisms may emerge: movement(-­based) populism (Bolivia and Spain), party-­rooted populism (Argentina and Greece) or leader-­initiated populism (Venezuela and Italy). The following five chapters, all empirical, apply the framework to eight countries. I extensively examine Bolivia in Chapter 3, Argentina in Chapter 4, Spain in Chapter 5 and Italy in Chapter 6, and more briefly discuss Uruguay, Venezuela, Greece and Portugal in Chapter 7. Chapter 3 analyses the rise, consolidation and internal functioning of the MAS-­IPSP – a clear instance of ‘movement-­based populism’ – in Bolivia. The chapter begins with an analysis of the causally relevant antecedents: the adoption of neoliberal discourse by all the mainstream Bolivian parties in the pre-­ crisis era and the inability of Bolivian syndicalism to take the lead the long and violent protest cycle triggered by the crisis. Then the chapter focuses on the impressive alliances built by peasant and indigenist social movements, which animated the protests against neoliberal governments and developed their own electoral strategies to reach power. I then discuss MAS-­IPSP’s origins, organisation, early strategies and governmental experience. The analysis demonstrates how underground tensions within the movements’ coalition finally emerged, triggering several inter-­organisational struggles, as well as how the movements gradually lost their autonomy vis-­à-­vis the partisan and governmental elites. Chapter 4 provides an interpretation of the rise and consolidation of Argentine Kirchnerism, an instance of ‘party-­rooted populism’. It outlines how the Peronist Justicialist Party, in contrast to other political projects, was able to maintain its linkages with labour market outsiders, although they were penalised by precisely the neoliberal policies implemented by the Peronists in the nineties. Identitarian and organisational factors explain this apparent paradox. The chapter gives an account of the reasons for the success of Néstor Kirchner’s party-­rooted populist political project: he patiently built a vast governmental coalition by recycling the statist ideology of the old Peronism. Kirchner retained most of the Peronist apparatus, which was crucial for

20  Introduction electoral purposes. He also retained both mainstream and dissident unions and some moderate social movements by satisfying most of their particularistic demands and offering them unprecedented political weight. The chapter then focuses on the evolution of Kirchnerism during Cristina Fernández’s two terms and explores how her ‘leaderistic’ strategy decisively contributed to the final rupture of the broad and heterogeneous coalition patiently built by her husband and predecessor. Chapter 5 focuses on the rise of Podemos, a populist project that brought protesters into Spanish institutions. Pablo Iglesias’s party exploited some favourable conditions, such as the weakness of the radical left and of the union-­party hub led by the Socialists, who were trapped in the government’s management of the crisis. The chapter first analyses the organisational, sociological and discursive characteristics of the protest cycle that began with the Indignados’s demonstrations, and then stresses how Podemos’s leaders took ownership of and re-­launched the frames elaborated by the Spanish protest cycle to direct them toward an ‘electoral assault’ on the public institutions. Chapter 6 focuses on the trajectory of the M5S in Italy. It begins by exploring the advanced cartelisation and ideological moderation of the political left and the inconsistent linkages between Italian social movements and the radical left during the early 2000s. Then the chapter focuses on the fragmentation of the Italian cycle of anti-­austerity mobilisations along ideological and partisan lines. It also highlights other mobilisations that, while not directly linked to austerity, contributed to developing inclusive frames calling for the restoration of popular sovereignty – characteristics striking similar to the ‘core-­values’ of the M5S, which I identify as an instance of ‘leader-­initiated populism’. The chapter then describes the (post-­) ideology of the Movement and its organisational characteristics, which proved to be particularly well-­suited to the fragmented Italian social and political context. Chapter 7 rounds out the case studies. It focuses on the rise of Chavismo in Venezuela (leader-­initiated populism) and of Syriza in Greece (party-­rooted populism). The chapter thus emphasises how Chávez’s and Syriza’s projects exploited ideological and organisation resources and fragmented social scenarios laid bare by crises. The chapter also offers a theory-­driven account of the two ‘negative cases’, i.e., those countries where the existing labour-­based left grew stronger in the aftermath of the socioeconomic crisis, and no populist challengers arose: Uruguay (with the electoral victory of the FA in 2005) and Portugal (where moderate and radical left parties have held a governmental alliance since 2015). In both countries, union-­party hubs dominated the anti-­ austerity mobilisations and successfully channelled popular discontent through institutional avenues. The last chapter offers a comprehensive assessment of the theoretical argument and its application to eight cases. It also assesses the external validity of the argument through a brief analysis of the evolution of the leftist segments of party systems in the aftermath of major neoliberal crises in Brazil, Ecuador and France. I conclude with some reflections on the effects of the emergence

Introduction 21 of anti-­neoliberal populisms on the quality of democracy and of democratic representation, and I suggest avenues for future exploration.

Notes 1. Castillo and Barrenechea (2016) nicely define ‘political incorporation’ as ‘a process through which a previously excluded actor acquires policy benefits and (new forms of) representation in the state’. 2. For a discussion of the concept of linkage, see Chapter 2, Section 1. 3. Populism is thus at odds with those movements and parties inspired by Marxist autonomism (Negri and Hardt, 2000; Holloway, 2002) and, in general, with all ‘counter-­power’ theories (see also Gerbaudo, 2017). 4. Failed attempts to solve the public debt crisis – itself a product of the trade and financial openness pursued by bureaucratic-­authoritarian regimes – through the defence of old ISI models or through heterodox measures all ended in dramatic hyperinflationary crises. See, for example, the cases of Bolivia (1982–1985), Peru during Alan García’s first term (1985–1990) or Argentina during Alfonsín’s presidency (1983–1989).

References Aslanidis, Paris. 2016. “Populist Social Movements of the Great Recession”, Mobilization: An International Quarterly 21 (3), 301–321. Baker, Andy. 2009. The Market and the Masses in Latin America: Policy Reform and Consumption in Liberalizing Economies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Barr, Robert. 2009. “Populists, Outsiders and Anti-­Establishment Politics”, Party Politics 15 (1), 29–48. Becker, Marc. 2013. “The Stormy Relations Between Rafael Correa and Social Movements in Ecuador”, Latin American Perspectives 40 (3), 43–62. Caiani, Manuela and Paolo Graziano. 2019. “Understanding Varieties of Populism in Times of Crises”, West European Politics 42 (6), 1141–1158. Canovan, Margaret. 1999. “ ‘Trust the People!’ Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy”, Political Studies 47 (1), 2–16. Cardoso, Fernando Enrique and Enzo Faletto. 1969. Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina. Ensayo de interpretación sociológica. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Castillo, Isabel and Rodrigo Barrenechea. 2016. “Political Incorporation (in Latin America). The Concept, the Variations, and the Cases”, documentos de Trabajo ICSO 26/2016. Collier, David and Ruth Collier. 1991. Shaping the Political Arena. New York: Princeton University Press. Collins, Jennifer. 2014. “New Left Experiences in Bolivia and Ecuador and the Challenge to Theories of Populism”, Journal of Latin American Studies 46 (1), 59–86. Cuperus, René. 2003. “The Populist Deficiency of European Social Democracy”, International Politics & Society 3, 83–109. De La Torre, Carlos. 2010. Populist Seduction in Latin America. The Ecuadorean Experience. Athens: Ohio University Press. Della Porta, Donatella, Joseba Fernández, Hara Kouki and Lorenzo Mosca. 2017. Movement Parties Against Austerity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dix, Robert. 1989. “Cleavage Structures and Party Systems in Latin America”, Comparative Politics 22 (1), 23–37.

22  Introduction Filc, Dani. 2015. “Latin American Inclusive and European Exclusionary Populism: Colonialism as an Explanation”, Journal of Political Ideologies 20 (3), 263–283. Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2017. The Mask and the Flag. Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest. London: Hurst. Germani, Gino. 1965. Politica y sociedad en una época de transición: De la sociedad tradicional a la sociedad de masas. Buenos Aires: Paidos. Gidron, Noam and Bart Bonikowski. 2013. “Varieties of Populism: Literature Review and Research Agenda”, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University 13 (4) Working Paper Series. Goldstone, Jack. 2011. “Cross-­class Coalitions and the Making of the Arab Revolts of 2011”, Swiss Political Science Review 17 (4), 457–462. Grattan, Laura. 2016. Populism’s Power: Radical Grassroots Democracy in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gumbrell-­McCormick, Rebecca and Richard Hyman. 2013. Trade Unions in Western Europe. Hard Times, Hard Choices. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Handlin, Samuel and Ruth Collier. 2008. Reorganizing Popular Politics: Participation and the New Interest Regime in Latin America. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. Hausermann, Silja and Hanspeter Kriesi. 2015. “What Do Voters Want? Dimensions and Configurations in Individual-­Level Preferences and Party Choice”, in P. Beramendi, S. Haeusermann, H. Kitschelt and H. Kriesi (Eds.), The Politics of Advanced Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawkins, Kirk. 2010. Venezuela’s Chavismo and Populism in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. Heinisch, Reinhard and Oscar Mazzoleni (Eds.). 2016. Understanding Populist Party Organisation: The Radical Right in Western Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hernández, Enrique and Hanspeter Kriesi. 2015. “The Electoral Consequences of the Financial and Economic Crisis in Europe”, European Journal of Political Research 55 (2), 203–224. Holloway, John. 2002. Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. London: Pluto Press. Hyman, Richard. 2001. Understanding European Trade Unionism. Between Market, Class & Society. London: Sage Publications. Jansen, Robert. 2011. “Populist Mobilization. A  New Theoretical Approach to Populism”, Sociological Theory 29 (2), 75–96. Katz, Richard and Peter Mair. 1995. “Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of Cartel Party”, Party Politics 1 (1), 5–28. Kitschelt, Herbert. 1996. The Transformation of European Social Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. La razón populista. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultural Económica. Lavelle, Ashley. 2008. The Death of Social Democracy. Political Consequences in the 21st Century. London: Routledge. Levitsky, Steven. 2003. Transforming Labor-­Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lipset, Seymour. 1959. “Democracy and Working-­Class Authoritarianism”, American Sociological Review 24 (4), 482–501. M5S. 2009. Non Statuto (Party’s statute). [retrieved from https://www.politicalpartydb. org/wp-­content/uploads/Statutes/Italy/IT_M5S_2009.pdf, 31 July 2020].

Introduction 23 MacAdam, Doug and Sydney Tarrow. 2010. “Ballots and Barricades: On the Reciprocal Relationship Between Elections and Social Movements”, Perspective on Politics 8 (2), 529–542. Madrid, Raúl. 2008. “The Rise of Ethnopopulism in Latin America”, World Politics 60 (3), 475–508. Mastropaolo, Alfio. 2005. La Mucca Pazza della Democrazia. Nuove destre, populismo, antipolitica. Milano: Bollati Boringhieri. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism. Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Monedero, Juan Carlos et al. 2014. Mover ficha. Convertir la indignación en cambio politico. [retrieved from https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7FJvjogUel3d2FjTl95dnZFZFE/ edit, 31 July 2020]. Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The Populist Zeitgeist”, Government and Opposition 39 (4), 541–563. Mudde, Cas. 2008. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. “Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America”, Government and Opposition 47 (2), 147–174. Negri, Antonio and M. Hardt. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1973. Modernization and Bureaucratic-­Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics. Berkeley: Institute of International Studies. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1994. “Delegative Democracy”, Journal of Democracy 5 (1), 55–69. Ostiguy, Pierre. 2017. “Populism: A Socio-­Cultural Approach”, in P. Taggart, C. Rovira, P. Ochoa and P. Ostiguy (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Padoan, Enrico. 2017. “The Populist Re-­Politicization. Some Lessons from South America and Southern Europe”, Partecipazione e Conflitto 10 (2). Panebianco, Angelo. 1988. Modelli di partito. Organizzazione e potere nei partiti politici. Bologna: Il Mulino. Panizza, Francisco (Ed.). 2005. Populism and The Mirror of Democracy. London: Verso. Rigby, Mike and Miguel Ángel García Calavia. 2017. “Institutional Resources as a Source of Trade Union Power in Southern Europe”, European Journal of Industrial Relations, https://doi.org/10.1177/0959680117708369. Roberts, Kenneth. 2006. “Populism, Political Conflict and Grass-­Roots Organization in Latin America”, Comparative Politics 38 (2), 127–148. Rooduijn, Matthijs. 2017. “What Unites the Voter Bases of Populist Parties? Comparing the Electorates of 15 Populist Parties”, European Political Science Review, 1–18, doi: 10.1017/S1755773917000145 [published online]. Rossi, Federico. 2015. “The Second Wave of Incorporation in Latin America: A Conceptualization of the Quest for Inclusion Applied to Argentina”, Latin American Politics and Society 57 (1), 1–28. Silva, Eduardo and F. Rossi (Eds.). 2018. Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America: From Resisting Neoliberalism to the Second Incorporation. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Slater, Dan and E. Simmons. 2010. “Informative Regress: Critical Antecedents in Comparative Politics”, Comparative Political Studies 43 (7), 886–917. Spanakos, Anthony Peter. 2011. “Citizen Chávez. The State, Social Movements, and Publics”, Latin American Perspectives 38 (1), 14–27.

24  Introduction Stavrakakis, Yannis and Thomas Siomos. 2016. “Syriza’s Populism: Testing and Extending an Essex School Perspective”, paper presented at the ECPR General Conference, Prague, September. Taggart, Paul. 2000. Populism. London: Open University Press. Weyland, Kurt. 2001. “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics”, Comparative Politics 34 (1), 1–22.

2 The Argument

2.1  The State of the Art Comparative studies of the Pink Tide, focusing on the rise and characteristics of Latin American left-­wing populist parties, abound (e.g., Cameron and Hershberg, 2010; Weyland et al., 2010; Levitsky and Roberts, 2011). These studies all contrast the moderation and the internal pluralism of the ‘institutionalised’, ‘social-­democratic’ Lefts of Chile, Uruguay and Brazil with the ‘populist’ Lefts of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. These works, however, tend to overlook variation within the broad category of ‘populism’, consigning those very different experiences to the same category. In contrast to the profusion of studies on the Pink Tide, comparative analyses of the emergence of different kinds of anti-­neoliberal populist parties in Southern Europe are scarce (Della Porta et al., 2017 is a major exception). Academic research has mostly focused on descriptive accounts of ideological and discursive differences within the family of the European Radical Left in the aftermath of the Great Recession (e.g., Katsambekis and Kioupkiolis, 2018) or within Southern European ‘inclusionary’ populisms (e.g., Font et al., 2019). It does not develop causal accounts for these variations; this book aims to fill that gap. Among the comparative studies focused on the political changes triggered by the neoliberal crisis in Latin America, Kenneth Roberts’s volume (2014) is especially useful. Roberts (2017) has also tentatively applied his theoretical framework to Southern Europe and shows that left wing populisms have emerged only in those countries coming from an ISI (Import Substitution Industrialisation) tradition where left-­of-­centre or ‘labour-­based’ (Levitsky, 2003) parties implemented neoliberal reforms. According to this interpretation, party systems proved to be resilient where conservative forces drove the transition toward neoliberalism. One of the main merits of Roberts’s work is that it analyses the differences between Latin American countries that experienced ISI and those that did not, thus taking long-­term sociological transformations into account. The hallmarks of ISI echoed through social, economic and political levels, such as a persistent and active role for the state in the economy, a more institutionalised party system and stronger union movements with well-­established linkages to the polity. Roberts demonstrates that former-­ISI countries underwent much

26  The Argument more contentious transitions to neoliberalism than their non-­ISI counterparts, and that if left-­of-­centre or labour-­based parties led the transition, they were electorally punished for their betrayal. Despite its great strengths, Roberts’ analysis has three main shortcomings, all of which this book addresses. First, his account does not satisfactorily explain the Argentine case, where Peronists led both the transition to neoliberalism and the post-­crisis, progressive period. Nor does he provide an explanation for the varieties of anti-­neoliberal populist experiences that emerged in the late nineties. This book’s explanatory model accounts for both. Roberts also identifies the neoliberal turn, rather than the neoliberal crisis, as a critical juncture. I, on the other hand, focus on the impact of the social resistance triggered by the shortcomings of the neoliberal model because they – not market-­friendly measures per se – generated change at the political level. Donatella Della Porta and colleagues (2017) make several additional contributions: first, that understanding anti-­austerity mobilisations in Southern Europe is crucial for explaining the following party system-­level changes and second, that both social exclusion and lack of access to real political participation triggered those protests. Della Porta and colleagues do not discuss the concept of ‘populism’ extensively, and treat it as a ‘frame’ that forges new collective and inclusive identities among the protesters, in opposition to a common enemy (see also Aslanidis, 2016). They treated the Greek Syriza, the Spanish Podemos and the Italian M5S as what Herbert Kitschelt (2006) would term movement parties, or ‘coalitions of political activists who emanate from social movements and try to apply the organizational and strategic practices of social movements in the arena of party competition’ (280) that arise when low institutional barriers to electoral politics and the belief that some unsatisfied constituencies can be drawn away from existing parties meet the politicisation of new cleavages that the existing party systems cannot absorb. Parties such as the Greek Syriza, the Spanish Podemos and the Italian M5S (as well as the Bolivian MAS-­IPSP, or the Chavist experience) are all considered as different instances of ‘movement parties’. Kitschelt differentiates between social movements and interest groups, as the former politicise issues that are potentially attractive to broad constituencies and then enter electoral politics by adopting loose membership structures and horizontal organisational forms. However, many anti-­neoliberal endeavours made use of contentious repertoires and developed stable organisational forms, but were generated by particularistic, local or specific demands.1 Because these ‘particularistic’ movements are thus more like contentious interest groups than social movements, focusing on the kinds of demands these groups advance is useful to analyse the relationship between the social and the political arenas. Regardless of the non-­institutional group’s repertoires or organisational stability, the characteristics of its demands define its political options;2 social movements can reasonably aspire to be represented in the electoral arena through either a movement party or a charismatic/populist party or leader, and interest groups find political representation either in a special interest party or

The Argument 27 in a clientelist party (Kitschelt, 2006: 281). Thus, according to Kitschelt, the bigger the movement’s potential constituency the more salient the issue(s) and the more policy areas related to the movement’s goals, the greater the opportunities and the incentives for a movement to create its own electoral project. This type of movement party occurs only when these three criteria are met, so it is only one of several possible outcomes of strong protest cycles, such as the anti-­austerity protests. In fact, MacAdam and Tarrow (2010: 534) identify five other possible mechanisms of reciprocal relationships between social movements and the electoral arena, such as the introduction of new organisational forms, or participation in election campaigns. Focusing solely on movement parties is therefore too restrictive; instead, analysing party-­society linkages is more useful and encompassing (see also Morgan, 2011). Two facets of ‘linkage’ are relevant: organisational and electoral. Organisational linkages refer to the relationship between a party and organised groups in civil society (environmental linkages) and the relationship between party leadership and party members and sympathisers (participatory linkages; see Tsakatika and Lisi, 2013). Electoral linkage is the relationship between the party and the electorate (Kitschelt, 2000, 2006; Luna, 2014), and it can be programmatic (the representation of policies and preferences of specific constituencies), identitarian (the importance of party identification or political identities) or charismatic (the emotional identification with a leader or politician). In the wake of the crises of neoliberalism, popular discontent mounted and led to new forms of contentious collective actions built on new kinds of demands. The neoliberal period and the post-­crisis phase imperilled extant party-­society linkages, at both organisational and electoral levels. New grievances emerged in the public sphere, thanks to the organisational capacity of emergent social movements that shaped the socio-­political scenario and introduced novel ways of framing the crisis (Aslanidis, 2016). At the electoral level, a growing number of social sectors failed to receive convincing responses (programmatic or particularistic) to their demands. Political parties, particularly on the left, had to deal with societies in turmoil. Their ability to adapt to the new and contentious situation was crucial to determining their electoral resilience and preventing the rise of new, fitter, populist competitors.

2.2 ‘Critical Antecedents’: Neoliberalism, Crisis and Social Reactions in Latin America and Southern Europe A number of works (Zanotti and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2016; Roberts, 2017) have already noted many similarities between the Latin American (in the late nineties) and Southern European (since 2008) social and economic crises, so the lack of comprehensive research on the subsequent rise of anti-­austerity, progressive populisms in the two regions particularly surprising. In fact, both crises garnered similar consequences. Socially, the costs were enormous: poverty rose, unemployment increased and social exclusion grew. Policy-­wise,

28  The Argument both underwent ‘orthodox’, pro-­cyclical measures involving cuts to public social spending and – particularly, but not exclusively, in Southern Europe – tax increases that often affected the less well-­off. In both regions, pressures from international (such as the IMF) and supranational (in the case of Southern Europe) institutions were decisive for the implementation of pro-­cyclical economic policies (Farthing and Kohl, 2006; Streeck, 2011). Both crises, moreover, came after a time of neoliberal hegemony, known in Latin America as the period of the Washington Consensus and inspired by EU accession in Southern Europe. Characterised by the abandonment of the old, ‘state-­centric matrix’ (Filgueira et al., 2012), the Washington Consensus demanded the implementation of market-­friendly measures (including but not limited to the privatisation of strategic public firms and social protection systems, trade and financial openness, administrative decentralisation and labour market reform). Young Southern European democracies rapidly adopted the structural adjustments required to join the EU, and the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty further fostered the acceptance of tight macroeconomic criteria that reduced budgetary autonomy at the national level (e.g., Gunther et al., 2006: 357). Other important similarities include Latin American and Southern European labour markets and welfare regimes. Ferrera (1996) authoritatively added a fourth ‘Mediterranean’ category to the ‘three welfare regime’s worlds’ theory (Esping-­Andersen, 1990). This set of countries was characterised by higher degrees of segmentation (according to job status) in the provision of social rights, weak or non-­existent universalist safety-­net schemes and weak state institutions that were much more clientelism-­prone than other European systems. A number of studies have also analysed the stratifying effects of Latin American welfare regimes (e.g., Filgueira et al., 2012), sometimes with the aim of adapting Esping-­Andersen’s typology to that context (Gough and Woof, 2004). Recently, Rueda and colleagues (2015) stressed the similarities between ISI-­shaped Latin American regimes and Southern European countries in terms of segmentation of social provisions and comparatively higher permanent employment protections, and called for a cross-­regional integration of the discussion of the electoral consequences of dualising regimes. The triumph of free market ideology and accompanying structural changes put European left-­of-­centre political parties and trade unions in a difficult situation, as the defence of the labour rights of their traditional constituencies clashed with the deregulated international financial markets. According to Przeworski and Sprague (1986) and Kitschelt (1996), the winning strategy of the European left-­of-­centre parties was to ‘free’ themselves from union influence, to embrace economic liberalism, and to differentiate themselves from the Right by emphasising the materialist/ post-­materialist dimension. Political parties committed to neoliberalism typically argue that the increased flexibility of labour markets represents the solution to the rise of unemployment. Although left-­of-­centre parties and unions sometimes accepted selective labour market deregulation, they largely focused (Rueda, 2007) on defending the labour rights of insiders (salaried workers with open-­ended, full-­time contracts),

The Argument 29 leaving outsiders (who we can define as the unemployed, involuntary part-­time and/or fixed-­term employed workers, as well as the vast, particularly in Latin America, masses of workers occupied in the informal sectors, often in the condition of self-­employment) to bear the brunt of the adaptation to neoliberalism. I use precisely this lens of the insider-­outsider divide to examine the rise of anti-­neoliberal populist projects. However, my argument departs from the methodological individualism implicit in most of the literature on welfare regime dualisation. I argue instead that the insider-­outsider divide engenders consequences at distinct but interrelated micro and macro levels. The micro level refers to individual policy and partisan preferences of the insider and outsider groups. Research on micro-­level effects offers contrasting results; in some cases, the insider-­outsider divide predicts voting and policy preferences (Rueda, 2005; Guillaud and Marx, 2014; Rovny and Rovny, 2017), while other works (Emmenegger, 2009; Brito Vieira and Carreira da Silva, 2016; Berens, 2015) have not found it to be so. Moreover, the empirical analyses that show divergences between the two groups’ preferences overwhelmingly refer to the pre-­crisis period.3 This book focuses instead on the macro level, and, consequently, on the organisations aggregating the interests of both the insider and outsider camps, and on their relationships with political parties during the pre-­crisis and post-­crisis periods. In Latin America, some left-­of-­centre parties’ switch to neoliberal was more drastic (as with the Bolivian MNR and MIR or the Argentine PJ) than others (as in Brazil and Uruguay). This latter group maintained a leftist profile, taking advantage of their prolonged oppositional status. The old labour-­based parties employed various programmatic (such as economic stabilisation and the implementation of means-­tested cash transfers), identitarian and clientelist linkages (Kitschelt, 2000) to address the poorest sectors, with mixed results. At the same time, the resilient but declining organisational linkages with the unions partially helped those parties to retain their core constituencies, although the rise of casual employment during the neoliberal era further reduced the size of the formal and salaried sectors. During the nineties – the apex of the Washington Consensus – the once-­powerful Latin American union movements weakened everywhere, both in terms of membership and of political influence. Why did so many mainstream unions in both South America and Southern Europe continue to support left-­of-­centre or labour-­based parties that opted for a neoliberal renewal? To be fair, the task was extremely difficult. Unions remained in alliances with left-­of-­centre and labour-­based parties to ensure their voices would be heard in the policy-­making process (Molina and Rhodes, 2008; Etchemendy, 2011) in exchange for the continued protection of labour market insiders (Rueda, 2007; Baccaro, 2009; Etchemendy, 2011) and mobilizing key voters (Allern and Bale, 2017). This arrangement often jeopardized the credibility of both the parties and the unions as viable political alternatives when the crisis erupted. To use Hyman’s terminology (2001), unions faced the classic choice between a role as an economic, classist or social actor. The unions that chose a

30  The Argument classist strategy ran the risk of exclusion from any form of social partnership, condemning them to irrelevance and rendering them unable to deliver any concrete, if limited, benefits to their constituencies. They could, however, position themselves better vis-­à-­vis the working class and civil society in the early aftermath of the crisis. Those that had pursued a more conciliatory strategy suffered in that period, as social dialogue ‘had come to mean sharing responsibility for the dismantling of many of the previous gains – acting as “mediators of transnational economic pressures” ’ (Hyman, 2001: 52). The retrenchment of the state during the neoliberal era and subsequent crisis and austerity measures diminished parties’ ability to provide targeted and/or particularistic answers to the demands of the poorest strata of society (Luna, 2014; Afonso et al., 2015). In times of crisis, clientelist linkages are imperilled for obvious reasons; these strategies can be counterproductive for political parties’ reputations, since clientelism and corruption become salient issues in the face of economic hardship (e.g., Morgan, 2011). At the same time, weakening social, cultural and organisational dimensions of old political cleavages threaten party identification. Another related source of discontent with old political parties, both in South America and Southern Europe, is their progressive detachment from society. Processes such as cartelisation (Katz and Mair, 1995), the transition to the ‘electoral-­professional party’ model (in the case of Southern Europe: Panebianco, 1988) or the transformation into ‘clientelistic machines’ (Levitsky, 2003) increased the autonomy of the partisan elites, changing the locus of power from the central offices to the party in the public office. The perception that political parties are self-­referential organisations scarcely open to civil society (and thus no longer enabling the socio-­political integration of citizens) contributes to their declining legitimacy. In both Southern Europe and Latin America, even some unions experienced a kind of cartelisation, in that they exploited their linkages with their political partners to defend their organisational (Etchemendy, 2011) and institutional (Rigby and García Calavia, 2017) power at the cost of a more flexible labour market. Overall, the political legitimacy of left-­of-­centre parties and unions suffered because of their poor capacity for dealing with the crisis and their involvement in governments that implemented austerity reforms (Roberts, 2014, 2017). Many centre-­left parties were not able to differentiate their economic proposals from those of rightists. The ‘liberal’ turn of the Southern European left-­of-­centre parties may have prevented them from re-­attracting those parts of society who were most affected by the crisis when economic, ‘materialist’ issues became salient once again. 2.2.1  Configuration of the Critical Antecedents The presence or absence of these main factors enabled different strategies for leftist or labour-­based parties to take advantage of – or simply survive – the crisis, or our critical juncture (Table 2.1). I focus on three variables that

Source: Author ’s elaboration.

Weak

Mainstream and Dialoguist

Medium to High

OPPORTUNITIES: networking during the mobilisations

Leftist Party Allied with Mainstream Union RISK: being perceived as an ‘insider party’

No

PARTY “COMPROMISED” TO NEOLIBERALISM

Labour-Based Mainstream Party RISK: ‘encapsulation’ around its core-constituency; loss of working-class vote; being targeted as representative of ‘old politics’ OPPORTUNITIES: resilience of identitarian or clientelistic linkages; size of its core-constituency; moving towards the Left Unlikely Empirical Combination

Yes

Mainstream Oppositional Union-Party Hub and RISK: ‘workerist’ ideology and inability of expanding Oppositional towards outsiders OPPORTUNITIES: unions are credible anti-austerity actors, well-positioned to dialogue with the movements Minoritarian Minoritarian Union-Party Hub Unlikely Empirical Combination and RISK: ‘workerist’ ideology; sectarianism; inability of Oppositional expanding towards outsiders OPPORTUNITIES: networking during the mobilisations; not associable with ‘conicliatory’ unions Radical ‘New Left’ Party Centre-Left with Plural Constituency RISK: poor credibility in ‘materialist’ issues RISK: competition from both the Left and the Right; being targeted as representative of ‘old politics’ OPPORTUNITIES: networking during the mobilisations; OPPORTUNITIES: moving towards the Left not associable with ‘conciliatory’ unions

UNION TYPE

TIGHTNESS OF PARTY-UNION LINKS

FOR EXISTING LEFT-OF-CENTER PARTIES

Table 2.1 The ‘Critical Antecedent’: Party-Union Alignments at the Threshold of the Critical Juncture, and the Risks and Opportunities for Left-of-Centre Parties in Leading Opposition to Austerity

The Argument 31

32  The Argument describe the pre-­crisis status quo: the eventual ‘complicity’ with neoliberal policies, the degree of collaboration with union organisations and the strength and combativeness (against neoliberalism) of the specific union(s) tied to each party. It is certainly possible that some leftist parties did not have any organisational linkages with the unions, possibly because they emerged from the ‘post-­materialistic’ dimension or because they represented a ‘fringe party’ with poor electoral relevance and social roots. Moreover, particularly in countries where organised labour is highly fragmented, we may observe the existence of ‘exclusive linkages’ between a party and a radical, albeit minoritarian, union. As Murillo (2001) argues, these different configurations can influence unions’ behaviour during a contentious phase. In order to sketch the different strategies available to left-­leaning parties, it is also necessary to consider the composition of their main electoral constituencies, particularly in the case of Southern Europe. The composition of their constituencies is crucial because it has a direct effect on the parties’ programmatic options; likewise, new political projects may be better or worse at attracting ‘excluded sectors’ depending on their sociological characteristics. Understanding these features allows us to map left-­of-­centre parties’ strategic alternatives and the structural conditions of the emergence of new political projects. Left-­of-­centre parties involved in the implementation of austerity measures and those that nearly exclusively appealed to insiders are likely to suffer the deepest electoral losses. The size of their core constituency and their ability to attract sectors beyond it are crucial to explaining their electoral fortunes. They can even choose to assume a ‘responsible’, centrist position, if they are confident about their capacity of retention through other (identitarian or clientelist) linkages. To appeal programmatically to labour market outsiders is not an easy task. The outsider category is heterogeneous in terms of socioeconomic standing and educational attainment. In Southern Europe, it comprises many young people, often highly skilled and with an above average education, as well as precariously employed or unemployed low-­skilled workers, and even many self-­employed workers – a sort of ‘poor petty bourgeoisie’. In Latin America, unemployed or employed workers in the informal sector and self-­employed urban workers form most of the vast outsider category. In addition to their common precarious condition, these sectors are likely to be especially hard hit by tax or fare increases and public spending cuts. Consequently, they hold stronger anti-­tax stances, as they gain fewer benefits from welfare regimes that are increasingly skewed toward insider sectors (Fernández-­Albertos and Manzano, 2015). They look for rapid improvements in terms of social protection and net incomes. The latter goal is not necessarily addressed by the defence of permanent employment protection and by wage increases through collective bargaining, but universal social protection and a stimulus for economic recovery could represent a satisfactory platform for the entire outsider category (Oxhorn, 1998). But when resources are scarce, universalist welfare measures may become alternatives (and not complementary) to the protections and benefits reserved

The Argument 33 for insiders. In turn, expansionary economic proposals could potentially harm the interests of the middle classes, particularly when these proposals could erode their incomes or their savings through inflation or currency devaluation. External pressures may also make the adoption of anti-­cyclical policies even more difficult. In sum, the insider-­outsider divide – during hard times and when mobility across the divide is almost exclusively downwards – could become a divide between those having something to lose and those trapped in the loss domain.4 A progressive political project may exploit the possibility of cooperation between outsiders and insiders discontent with the union-­party hubs because of the losses (in terms of income or social protection) imposed on them by austerity and because of their dissatisfaction with the management of the crisis. A labour-­based party that coherently opposes market-­friendly measures enjoys more opportunities for growth in the post-­crisis scenario, but it still needs to broaden its appeal to outsiders. If the relationship between the party and the unions is weaker, the party faces a more fluid scenario. In particular, if the party maintained an antagonistic stance during the neoliberal era, its position is more promising, although it would need to build its credibility as an actor involved in materialist issues and appeal to the organised working-­class. Credibility  – determined by pre-­crisis political positioning  – is important to determining political parties’ options for appeasing or attracting protestors, as their demands relate to both economic issues and their lack of meaningful political participation. These perceptions and relationships facilitate the ‘networking’ (in Table 2.1) that animates the protest cycles (discussed further in later sections). Therefore, it is parties’ ideological and organisational resources that are crucial to adapting to the situations created by the anti-­ austerity protest cycles, not just the different interests and preferences held by insiders and outsiders (which help us to understand different programmatic paths; see Figure 2.1).

SOURCES OF GRIEVANCES

CONSEQUENCES

DEMANDS

Underrepresentation

Union-Party hubs’ discredit due to its ‘dualising behaviour’

Demands for universalist social policies and expansive economic policies

Unions’ political discredit due to its ‘conciliatory’ strategy

Demands for new forms of political participation

of Outsiders’ interests by the Union-Party Hubs

OUTSIDERS

INSIDERS Unions’ linkages with centre-left or labourbased parties implementing marketfriendly reforms

Figure 2.1 The Insider-­Outsider Divide and the Crisis of the Old Structures of Socio-­ Political Intermediation. Source: Author’s elaboration.

34  The Argument

2.3  ‘Critical Juncture’: The Crises and the Protests The crises of the neoliberal model triggered large cycles of protests in both Latin America (during the 1990s and early 2000s) and in Southern Europe (since 2008). In all the countries I examine in this book, the unions, representing insider sectors par excellence, historically played a central, mediating role between left-­of-­centre or labour-­based political parties and society (e.g., Morlino, 1998; Handlin and Collier, 2008). When the crises erupted, trade unions predictably reacted against public spending cuts and attacks on labour rights, but new kinds of protests and protestors also emerged, with goals, concerns, repertoires, organisational forms and membership profiles that were different from those of the mainstream unions. While not necessarily at odds with the unions’ demands, these social mobilisations brought different concerns to the public debate – some more specific (in their sectorial or geographical scope) and some more general (such as strong criticisms directed at representative democracy and the current structures of political intermediation, including parties and unions). In some cases, particularly in Latin America, these movements belonged fully to the outsider camp, both in terms of their demands and their membership profiles; think, for example, of the peasant movements and the constellation of urban associations in Bolivia (Chapter 3), or of the Argentine piqueteros (Chapter 4). In other cases, protest movements cut across the insider-­outsider divide, focusing on issues that only partially overlapped with job-­related grievances (ranging from specific territorial concerns and policy measures to more general demands regarding privatisation and democratic representation). Della Porta’s analysis (2015) identifies two main sources of grievances that fuel these cycles of protest. The first is a ‘crisis of responsiveness’ (see Mair, 2009) that provokes a sense of political exclusion among the majority of citizens, paving the way for groups like the acampadas in Puerta del Sol and Syntagma Square (see also Gerbaudo, 2017). The second is a weakening of social protection, which fuels the desire for a return to a social-­democratic (or, in Latin America, populist) ‘golden age’, in a sort of Polanyian reaction against the dominance of market regulation of social relations (Silva, 2009). Handlin and Collier (2008) previously noted the diffusion of new Latin American associational networks that complemented (and even replaced) older union-­party hub-­linked structures of socialisation and intermediation (such as CGT-­PJ in Argentina, or CTV-­AD in Venezuela). They observed how the process of deindustrialisation and ‘informalisation’ of the economy during the neoliberal period limited the representative capacity of the unions, while neighbourhood associations and self-­help networks assumed a greater role. As I show in detail later, some of these local organisations were major actors during the protest cycles in Bolivia, Argentina and Venezuela. Silva (2009) argues their ability to bring concrete changes at the partisan level was directly linked to their capacity for alliance building – a crucial variable in my own argument. These and other popular organisations supported by non-­salaried

The Argument 35 workers (such as unemployed workers’ organisations or peasant unions) did not appear, or at least not with comparable strength, in Southern Europe. There, the demands and members of groups leading the protests were very different. Southern European anti-­austerity mobilisations were not restricted to movements like Spanish and Greek Indignados though. Other kinds of movements, advancing more particularistic claims, came to the fore, although traditional actors – particularly the unions – sometimes maintained an important role in the protest. But in both Latin America and Southern Europe, union-­party hubs’ participation during the pre-­crisis, neoliberal era and throughout the implementation of austerity measures damaged their ability to credibly articulate or channel protesters’ demands. Recognising different movements’ various demands helps to explain how they influence social and political arenas. The first step is to distinguish between universalist, local, sectorial demands. Universalist issues address a broad public and typically target national and supranational institutions in order to influence the law-­making process and/or to advocate for broad political change. These issues might address social spending, corruption, gender equality, participative democracy or a radical rejection of the current political class. They are universalist because they refer to broad constituencies  – sometimes even the entire population – and they often refer to the defence of public goods and services. ‘Populist social movements’ (Aslanidis, 2016) such as the Spanish Indignados or the Greek Aganaktismenoi clearly led universalist mobilisations, generally focusing on severe criticisms of the political class and on demanding new forms of popular participation; by contrast, the Spanish Mareas and the Argentine Frente Nacional contra la Pobreza concentrated on defending social rights. In some contexts, different social movements and organisations converged on advancing universalist claims. In Bolivia, the campaign for a new Constituent Assembly served to solidify the alliance between very different peasant and indigenous organisations that often had divergent priorities. In a similar vein, the Indignados imposed an anti-­caste rhetoric that served as a master frame for other mobilisations around more specific goals. However, this type of broad alliance did not flourish in Italy (Zamponi, 2012) or Greece (Vogiatzoglou, 2017a), where ideological divisions within the leftist milieu prevented universalist anti-­austerity movements from finding a lowest common denominator. Campaigns around local issues aim to provoke concrete and immediate changes or responses to grievances pertinent to a specific territory. Many of these movements do frame their struggles as a form of resistance against the neoliberal socioeconomic model, and their targets are often public (even national and supranational) institutions, but their activists claim to speak on behalf of a geographically concentrated constituency. These movements can flourish around very different issues, such as contested public infrastructures (the No TAV/No TAP/No MUOS or anti-­incinerators movements in Italy; the Greek protests over the gold mine in Chalkidiki), common goods or natural resources (the Water War in Cochabamba and the Gas War in El Alto, Bolivia;

36  The Argument see Silva, 2009), inadequate responses to local unemployment rates or dismissals (which triggered the piqueteros movement in Argentina; see Pereyra and Svampa, 2003) and others. Finally, activists advancing sectorial demands claim to defend a constituency defined on a non-­geographic basis. These demands can emanate from the spheres of production (such as a conflict over wage increases for a specific job sector) or consumption (such as campaigns against increases in rents or tariffs, like those in Greece, Venezuela and Bolivia). Both local and sectorial demands are more amenable to ad hoc solutions and finding institutional allies who can provide immediate responses. Of course, the border between universalist, sectorial and local demands and mobilisations is blurry, and that many movements advances a mix of demands. Although the distinction is more analytical than empirical, it is useful for understanding the different strategies available to political parties for responding to movements’ demands. Empirically, union movements have been important participants in anti-­ austerity protest cycles almost everywhere, in one way or another (e.g., Ancelovici, 2014). However, the relationships between social movements and trade unions are often difficult and full of suspicion. Movements often depict the unions as discredited or bureaucratised actors (as in Venezuela, Argentina, Greece and Spain, where the links with equally discredited parties were more evident) that focus predominantly on the interests of their core constituencies. In Bolivia, for instance, the political dominancy of miners and salaried workers within the COB (the Bolivian peak union confederation) finally forced powerful organisations like the peasant unions to organise by themselves outside (and sometimes against) the COB (García Linera et al., 2004). However, unions often prove to be important institutional allies that help to sustain protests over time, as Portos (2016) shows in the Spanish case. Dismissals, wage freezes and political attacks on labour rights opened a window of opportunity for collaboration between outraged outsider and insider workers; a window that was exploited, for instance, by the Portuguese CGTP (in alliance with anti-­austerity and precarious workers’ movements; Baumgarten 2013) and by the Argentine CTA, a new leading confederation of unions organising both public sector and unemployed workers (Retamozo and Morris, 2015). It is also worthwhile to take a wider view in order to describe the macro-­ characteristics of social mobilisations against neoliberalism and austerity. These macro-­types of patterns of mobilisation are: (i.) union-­led, (ii.) unified and (iii.) fragmented (see Figure 2.2). i. The union-­led pattern emerged where the unions and, in general, the institutional left defended their primacy in the streets and remained the most important political articulator of different segments of popular sectors, thanks to their institutional and organisational resources and their combative and coherent political stances.

O

N

YES

Source: Author’s elaboration.

Figure 2.2  The Argument.

Time

Fragmented or Unified Mobilizations?

Major Role Played by the Union

Existing Party with Ideological and Organizational Resources to deal with Protest Cycle? NO

Y

ES

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SOCIAL MOBILIZATIONS

CRITICAL JUNCTURE (Economic Crisis and Implementation of Austerity Measures)

UNION-PARTY HUB’S STARTING CONDITIONS - Organizational resources of parties - Electoral linkages of parties - Social compositions of parties’ electorate

Anti-Neoliberal Stance (of the Union-Party Hub) During the Neoliberal Era?

CRITICAL ANTECEDENTS

Movement (Based) Populism

Leader-Initiated Populism

Party-Rooted Populism

Labour-Based Left

The Argument 37

38  The Argument In the other cases, the unions represented at best a suspicious ally and, in some cases, even an explicit enemy of the movements dominating the public sphere. These patterns can exhibit either unified or fragmented tendencies. ii. The unified pattern can be described as a broad cycle of protests where different social movements build close-­knit alliances and networks advancing broad economic, social and political claims, typically around inclusive, populist frames (Aslanidis, 2016). These common frames unify the main struggles against an multifaceted enemy and help their agendas converge. In this pattern, even movements built around sectorial or local demands become part of a broader cycle of protest by exploiting the resonant frames the mobilisations generate. The unified pattern of mobilisation provides the perfect foundation for the emergence of movement (-­based) populisms. It generates resonant, antagonistic frames that produce strong collective identities and articulate the boundaries between the victims and the culprits of the crisis. By defining the difference between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, the movements prepare the terrain for ‘up-­scaling’ the polarisation from the social to the political-­electoral sphere via populist discourse. The mobilisations also create a cadre of militants, ready to be involved in electoral politics if a proper political project emerges (like Podemos in Spain) or  – if the social movements are sufficiently motivated, strong and organised – they enter electoral competition themselves (like the Bolivian peasant movements that founded the MAS-­IPSP). iii. Fragmented mobilisation occurs when different movements and organisations do not experience a process of convergence. They mainly focus either on local or sectorial issues, without coordinating their demands at a broader level (and sometimes competing for scarce resources), or they find themselves divided along ideological lines, which makes even convergence around universalist campaigns difficult. In the absence of a common front, individual movements may look for institutional allies that can provide solutions to particularistic grievances. If a mediating party utilises their organisational resources to broker between the different demands and expresses them with populist frames, party-­rooted populism results. If no such party exists, the fragmented protest cycle creates the perfect opportunity for a political outsider to occupy the vacuum and position himself or herself as a radical alternative to the party system; this is leader-­initiated populism (see Figure 2.2).

2.4 Varieties of Anti-­Neoliberal Populisms in Latin America and Southern Europe In the first chapter, I proposed the following definition of populism: a ‘political project’ aiming at occupying the public institutions through electoral means in order to allow ‘the people’ to recuperate or achieve

The Argument 39 its sovereignty, while relying on an antagonistic, polarising political discourse to generate new collective identities and on varying organisational resources to overcome the problems of collective action that could arise among dispersed and/or heterogeneous constituencies. In most of the countries analysed here, albeit not everywhere, populism became the anti-­neoliberal winning strategy for achieving major positive electoral results, decisively shaping the leftist political scenarios. However, anti-­ neoliberal populisms assumed very different characteristics. I propose a typology of possible outcomes, or the different kinds of anti-­ austerity political projects that achieved a dominant  – or at least electorally relevant  – position within the Lefts in the aftermath of crisis. In the cases I examine, the Bolivian MAS-­IPSP, Venezuelan Chavism, Argentine Kirchnerism, the Uruguayan FA, the Spanish Podemos, the Italian MoVimento 5 Stelle, the Greek Syriza and the Portuguese far-­Left (composed by two different parties, the Portuguese Communist Party and the Leftist Bloc) are the clear successful political projects. I categorise the different successful projects according to three branching variables, namely: the existence or lack of political party and/or partisan structures; their relationship with the national unions; and the degree of influence social movements have in crucial internal activities of the parties, such as candidates selection, elaboration of party manifestos and, when in government, policy-­making process. This leads to the typology illustrated in Figure 2.3. The first outcome illustrates a pattern of political stability. The existing Left, strongly linked to the organised working-­class, is not only able to resist but even to take electoral advantage of the crisis. The first outcome implies the resilience of the old Left; it is perceived as a credible alternative to neoliberalism and can play a leading role in protests and achieve important electoral results. This is what transpired in Uruguay and in Portugal. The other three outcomes represent ‘populist paths’ to realignments within and beyond the national Lefts. In terms of internal organisation, they tend to approximate the Panebianco’s (1988) charismatic party model, in which a strong leadership coexists with organisational decentralisation and low autonomy from the environment (i.e., strong organisational linkages and an overlap in membership between the party and civil society, including contentious social movements); however, anti-­neoliberal populisms have also introduced original (albeit limited) forms of participatory linkages (Tsakatika and Lisi, 2013). In anti-­neoliberal populisms, the leader, in addition to performing a communicative, even theatrical function – quite necessary in our era of mediatised politics – is an arbiter between different interests, whether organised or not, pursued by heterogeneous social sectors and actors who are discontent with the previous neoliberal order and potential components of the populist coalition. In contrast to the Labour-­based Left, anti-­neoliberal populist projects do not retain or seek any special relationship with the unions. In terms of political discourse, anti-­neoliberal populisms do not identify with an encompassing

Unions at best as ‘subordinated’ allies.

Party retains control of candidates selections process.

fragmented social scenario, through a ‘Cooperativecooptational’ strategy towards the movements.

Strong influences of the movements over the party, in terms of political platform and candidates selection, also thanks to high overlapping membership between movements and party.

Strong top-down internal organization, but introduction of different bottom-up procedures.

The fragmented social scenario opens a window of opportunity for the rise of a political ‘maverick’ appealing to atomised constituencies (typically, outsider sectors) with strong plebiscitarian traits. ‘Issue-owning’ strategy towards social movements.

Antagonistic relationship with the unions, considered fully aligned with the ‘old regime’.

LEADERINITIATED POPULISM

Source: Author’s elaboration.

Figure 2.3 A Typology of the Successful Political Projects Shaping the National Lefts in the Aftermath of a Crisis of Neoliberalism.

Party retains control of candidates selection process. Party System’s stability.

‘Union-led’ mobilizations and openness to outsiders’ demands allowed to expand support amongst outsiders.

Relationship with the unions depends on conjunctural factors. This can have an influence over party’s core constituency.

Unions remain the most important organizational linkage.

MOVEMENT (BASED) POPULISM

New Partisan Structures

The party exploited the populist frames and the vast militancy produced by the protest c ycle. Thanks to ideological vagueness/ Party’s core-constituency reflects pluralism and to populist rhetoric, the sociological composition of the party adapted to the the protesters.

PARTY-ROOTED POPULISM

LABOUR-BASED LEFT

Pre-Existing Partisan Structures

40  The Argument

The Argument 41 or coherent ideology and typically advance inter-­class appeals by claiming to represent ‘the people’ who are exploited by rapacious political and economic elites. Anti-­neoliberal populisms focus on restoring popular and national sovereignty, through ‘the People’s’ re-­occupation and strengthening of state institutions, which are seen as illegitimately occupied by unresponsive politicians and controlled by international markets and supranational institutions (Padoan, 2017). In the lighter boxes of Figure 2.3, we find the two theoretically and empirically possible winning political projects that rely on existing political parties: the labour-­based Left described previously and party-­rooted populism. In the populist case, an existing party establishes strong electoral linkages with multiple social sectors and effective organisational linkages with protesters, by assuming an inclusive and antagonistic populist discourse. Kirchnerism in Argentina and Syriza in Greece fall into this category. Ideologically, these parties tolerate internal differences and avoid sectarianism; organisationally, they present some forms of power decentralisation (particularly in the Kirchnerist project, which strongly relied on Peronist electoral machinery), which was crucial to their brokering role. In party-­rooted populism, old partisan structures retain a strong influence on the candidate selection process. However, the leader retains and strengthens control over strategic choices and eventually coordinates the distribution of particularistic incentives (either programmatic or – in the case of Kirchnerism – clientelist) to maintain the loyalty of different organised actors. The last two outcomes entail the rise of a new anti-­neoliberal populist party. Nevertheless, these outcomes also differ in terms of their relationship with union movements and – particularly – in their internal organisation. In leader-­ initiated populism (Venezuelan Chavismo and the Italian M5S), the new party focuses around its founder and leader, a political maverick who exploits the window of opportunity generated by the crisis. The party possesses an extremely loose and weak internal organisation, in which strong control from above coexists with very low barriers to entry and grassroots autonomy at the periphery, in terms of both political platform and candidate selection. Because the leader presents himself as a ‘radical Outsider’ from the old socio-­political system and does not initially control any mass movement or organisation, he is much more likely to appeal to quite dispersed and disorganised constituencies through both programmatic and charismatic linkages. Leaders champion the promise for ‘democratic regeneration’ through the implementation of new participatory tools, as well as the promise of universalist social policies to deal with the social emergency provoked by the crisis. Thanks to its loose, decentralised organisation and ideological ambiguity, leader-­initiated populisms establish important organisational linkages with extra-­institutional movements and interest groups. Leader-­initiated populisms mainly practise a strategy of ‘issue-­owning’, consisting of the ability to collect and connect different demands, while claiming to be the only ‘true supporter’ of all of these micro-­publics (Spanakos, 2011). Their enmity to all

42  The Argument representatives of the ‘old regime’ explains their highly antagonistic stances toward the ‘union-­party hubs’ that dominated the left of the political spectrum in the pre-­crisis period. Finally, movement (-­based) populism is informed by its consistent movements’ demands, but contains two subtypes: movement-­based parties and movement parties. We can conceive of the possibility that the main social movements leading the protests decide to enter electoral competition by themselves (as in the case of the MAS-­IPSP in Bolivia), or the possibility that social activists create a political project that aims to advance the main demands emerging from the protest cycle (as in the case of Podemos in Spain). In the first case, we observe the creation of a movement-­based party (e.g., Anria, 2014), which acts as the instrument of the founding movements. Due to its purely bottom-­up foundational process, the influence of the movements is at its highest, particularly in the candidate selection process. The second case almost perfectly corresponds to the movement parties theorised by Kitschelt (2006); although the party is not a direct emanation of the movement’s decisions, it does open itself to the influence of the movements, which converge in the party’s socio-­political space. The movements maintain a special relationship with the party (quite visible in their overlapping memberships and in their involvement in programmatic elaboration; see Podemos, 2015), and they provide political energy for the electoral project. However, in both cases, centralisation degree of centralised power limits both inter-­organisational and factional disputes and strengthens electoral linkages. In both types of movement (-­based) populist cases, the movement’s relationship with the unions is not necessarily smooth, as their demands and core constituencies may not overlap. Movements tend to be more antagonistic toward or suspicious of unions when unions enjoyed strong links to the old parties or privileged the interests of the salaried sectors, as was the case for the Bolivian MAS-­IPSP (e.g., García Linera et al., 2004; Trujillo and Spronk, 2018).

2.5  Research Design, Methods and Data Methods: Comparative Historical Analysis. Comparative historical research lets us investigate big and important questions (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer, 2003: 6–8), like those posed by this volume. By analysing historical sequences in the context of similar and contrasting cases, I use this method to explain and identify ‘causal configurations’ (11–13). Comparative historical researchers sacrifice ambition to look for ‘ahistorical’, ‘lawlike statements’ (20), while carefully assessing the conditions of applicability of their theories. These analyses typically aim to build middle-­range, context-­based theories (Falleti and Lynch, 2008), in the sense that the hypothesised causal mechanisms only occur when interacting with ‘relevant contextual factors’. Therefore, following Slater and Simmons (2010), I begin by identifying the relevant contextual factors and dividing them into ‘background similarities’ and ‘critical antecedents’

The Argument 43 (explanatory variables that interact with other causal forces during or in reaction to the critical juncture). In this book, the main ‘background similarities’ (or ‘scope conditions’) consist of the existence of an important, union movement that, for a long time, acted as the main socio-­political organisation of the working-­class (and particularly of the salaried sectors), with historical linkages to a left-­of-­centre or labour-­based party. This commonality allows for a structured comparison between the cases selected, which obviously possess other very different features. The in-­depth analysis of the cases selected allows us to identify idiosyncratic features (which, of course, always play an important role) and to discard the relevance of additional, hypothetical variables or factors (such as, diffusion effects). The main ‘critical antecedent’ is the political positioning of these union-­ party hubs during the neoliberal era (see Figure 2.2). The organisational characteristics of the parties, their organisational and electoral linkages during the pre-­crisis period and the composition of their electorates also contribute to the conditions that influence their opportunities to adapt to the post-­crisis scenario. Comparative historical analysis is often accused of relying on a ‘deterministic’ understanding of causation (for a discussion, see Mahoney, 2003: 341–344), reducing the impact of contingency and prohibiting any notion of measurement error. While my model is deterministic in its precise identification of the different paths leading to each category of populism (i.e., the kind of successful anti-­neoliberal political project), it also assigns very high importance to the agency of the political actors involved. Outcomes depend on the strategies and practices of party leaderships. Although ideological and organisational resources are relevant critical antecedents, they are also aspects that party leaderships have the opportunity to modify in order to adapt to changing demands. Likewise, political parties that seem better positioned to take electoral advantage of the crisis may fail to exploit their resources (on this, see, for example, the analysis of Argentine FREPASO in Chapter 4, Italian PRC in Chapter  6 and Venezuelan LCR in Chapter 7). The qualitative nature of this work allows for a better description of the adaptive strategies used by successful parties – old and new – and of the limitations of other political projects that failed to take advantage of the post-­crisis scenario. Furthermore, the comparison of successful political projects with other left-­of-­centre or labour-­based political projects unable to achieve consistent electoral gains (and sometimes decline) makes it possible to minimise the degrees of freedom problem that allegedly prevents ‘small N research’ from drawing valid causal inferences. Research Design and Case Selection. I have deliberately taken inspiration from Collier and Collier’s path-­breaking work Shaping the Political Arena in developing the research design of this enterprise. In Shaping the Political Arena, the authors examine how the process through which the organised working-­class was incorporated into the polity domain shaped subsequent

44  The Argument regime dynamics and party systems in the eight Latin American countries with the longest history of urban, commercial and industrial development. They identify four different pairs of countries, each of which followed a specific path toward political incorporation of the working-­class. The cases that I compare in this book are the eight in Latin America and Southern Europe in which the scope condition (the important union movement with party linkages) holds. These countries are Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Portugal, Greece, Spain and Italy. In both the Latin American and Southern European subsets, each national party system followed a different path, leading to one of the outcomes that I presented graphically in Figure 2.3. Because each region holds one example of each path, pairs consist of one example from each region. Thus, the argument works consistently well cross-­regionally. All four Latin American countries selected came out of an ISI era that decisively influenced state-­society relationships and fostered the consolidation of strong union movements linked to labour-­based political parties (Collier and Collier, 1991; Roberts, 2014). All these Latin American countries experienced a neoliberal turn during the nineties, mainly motivated by the economic shortcomings of the old state-­centric matrix. In all cases, the limitations of this neoliberal model became evident within a few years. Because strong unions are central to my argument, I must exclude other Latin American countries such as Colombia, Ecuador,5 Peru, Chile and Paraguay from the case selection. I briefly consider the rise and characteristics of the Brazilian PT in the concluding chapter, which highlights some parallels between the stabilising function played by the PT during the nineties and the experience of FA in Uruguay, thereby providing tentative confirmation of the external validity of my argument. The reasons for the specific case selection in Europe are equally self-­evident. The four Southern European countries included here are those that were most affected by the Great Recession, and their welfare regimes and party-­union relationships share very important similarities. Other countries hit particularly hard by the Great Recession, such as Iceland or Ireland, do not share the same background similarities. France is sometimes included within the Southern European welfare regime family (e.g., Hausermann and Kriesi, 2015), but the crisis did not hit it as hard as it hit the rest of Southern Europe,6 and its union system is quite different. However, I will discuss the relevance of my argument to the recent evolutions of the French political Left in the concluding chapter. I have also selected a subset of cases for in-­depth analysis. I focus on four anti-­neoliberal political projects: the MAS-­IPSP (Bolivia), Kirchnerism (Argentina), Podemos (Spain) and the M5S (Italy). Time and financial resources are – as all researchers know – limited, so it was not realistic for me to conduct an in-­depth analysis through qualitative data (mainly elite interviews) for all eight cases selected. The case studies focus on the different kinds of populist projects that I identify: party-­rooted populism (Kirchnerism), leader-­initiated populism (M5S)

The Argument 45 and movement (-­based) populisms. I analyse both the MAS-­IPSP and Podemos in depth to highlight the organisational differences between a movement-­based populism such as the MAS-­IPSP and a movement populism such as Podemos. Although an in-­depth analysis of a case (either Uruguay or Portugal) with a non-­populist outcome would have provided even stronger support for the argument, time and financial limitations – as well as considerations about the book’s length  – dissuaded me from undertaking additional fieldwork. The Portuguese, Uruguayan, Venezuelan and Greek cases will therefore be treated briefly in Chapter 7 of this book, as shadow cases.7 Data Collection. Most of this research relies on qualitative data. I conducted approximately 100 in-­depth, semi-­structured interviews8 during fieldwork in Bolivia (March-­April  2016, 35 interviews), Argentina (May-­June  2016, 17 interviews), Spain (October  2016-­February  2017, 24 interviews) and Italy (October 2016-­March 2017, 23 interviews). The research also relies, of course, on secondary literature, and other primary sources, such as party statutes and manifestos or biographies of partisan leaders. For seven9 out of the eight cases, I use post-­electoral survey data to describe, through descriptive statistics and multivariate analyses, the sociological characteristics of the electorates of the most successful political projects. The semi-­structured interviews that I conducted served to clarify the adaptive strategies of the successful political projects in the different socio-­political post-­crisis scenarios. Interviews with party officials and leaders of social movements and unions offered crucial information about the genesis of the new political parties and their concrete internal functioning beyond the provisions detailed in their formal statutes. I focused on important indicators such as candidate selection10 and the internal elaboration of manifestos and policies, the latter providing important insights regarding the existence of core constituencies to which party representatives felt the need to be particularly responsive. The interviews helped clarify, among other things: internal divisions, political ideologies and discourses underlining the partisan activity, relationships between the parties and other social actors – namely, movements and unions – and how social movements and their characteristics influenced the genesis and/ or adaptive strategies of their respective political projects. I used a purposive sampling design to select the potential interviewees and minimise the risk of significant bias that comes with non-­random selection. Because purposive sampling requires ‘knowing enough about the characteristics of the population to know what characteristics are likely to be relevant for the research project’ (Lynch, 2013: 41), I spent several months deepening my understanding of the cases (mainly through secondary literature) before starting the fieldwork and contacting the potential interviewees. Particularly at the beginning of fieldwork, I also relied to an extent on snowball sampling. Snowball sampling is useful because it concretely facilitates the collection of interviews and helps to identify relevant new actors, but it is also likely to bias the process of interview collection, as the researcher runs the risks of being trapped in a network of actors sharing the same positions about

46  The Argument a particular topic (Bleich and Pekkanen, 2013). I adopted a strategy aimed at minimising this risk by relying on different chains of respondents from the outset. In Bolivia and Argentina, I contacted several country experts before beginning fieldwork in order to have a preliminary overview of the topics under investigation. Once I arrived in each country, I proceeded to contact relevant social organisations and political actors. I collected interviews for the Bolivian case study in the four major cities (La Paz, El Alto, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz). In Bolivia, time and resources forced me to limit the research to urban areas; however, I was able to collect interviews from the national leaders of peasant and mineworkers’ organisations (all of which have their headquarters in La Paz), NGOs involved in rural issues and experts on indigenous questions. I was also able to gain access to important MPs of the MAS-­IPSP, governmental figures, activists and experts on the Bolivian anti-­neoliberal protest cycle. In Bolivia, my interviewees were largely accessible, and the interviews were often truly ‘in-­depth’, as they lasted more than an hour on average and, in some cases, two or three hours (even more than I  sometimes desired). I  was able to collect opinions on the past two decades’ evolution of the MAS-­IPSP – in terms of its genesis, internal organisation, significant policy decisions and its relationship with the movements and the unions – from very different points of view, ranging from MAS-­IPSP insiders to representatives of the social and political opposition. In Argentina, I followed the same strategy, although with somewhat less satisfactory results. The fieldwork was entirely carried out in the City of Buenos Aires (CABA), although most of the interviewees belonged to different social and political groups operating in the Buenos Aires Province (by far the most populous Argentine province and the most politically and electorally relevant). It was possible to allocate fewer resources to the collection of primary sources there, as so much relevant secondary literature is available. I  interviewed important representatives of different contentious groups and unions (both aligned with and opposed to, Kirchnerism) that animated the long Argentine anti-­neoliberal protest cycle, together with representatives of different factions within Kirchnerism (at the governmental and legislative levels). In both Bolivia and in Argentina, I occasionally attended partisan rallies and meetings,11 which represented an important source of contacts and provided further information on the relationship between partisan leaders, cadres and the rank-­and-­file. The lack of interviews with leading figures of the CGT (the most encompassing Argentine union), due to the complex political situation12 at the time of my fieldwork, is the most severe limitation of my fieldwork in Argentina. Nevertheless, I interviewed representatives from other political, social and union organisations and country experts to integrate the vast secondary literature regarding the CGT’s internal conflicts as well as its political strategies during both the contentious cycle and the Kirchnerist governments. I followed a similar strategy in Europe to investigate the genesis of Podemos in Spain and M5S in Italy, their adaptive strategies and their relationships with

The Argument 47 social movements and unions. I contacted several party representatives who served on commissions regarding labour and social issues at the municipal, regional and national levels, aiming to diversify the sample by covering different regions.13 I also interviewed senior officials from the most relevant leading union confederations (the Spanish UGT and CC.OO, and the Italian CGIL, all with strong links with specific left-­of-­centre parties). This amalgamation of views provided valuable primary data on the relationships (at the local and national levels) between the parties analysed and the union movements, as well as the partisan platforms regarding social and labour issues. I also obtained opinions of activists (both affiliated and unaffiliated with the M5S or Podemos) from several14 anti-­austerity and anti-­neoliberal movements, which contributed to my understanding of the parties’ post-­crisis adaptive strategies. Often relying on snowball sampling, I was also able to contact regionally and even nationally important figures, allowing me to obtain informed opinions regarding the evolution of the organisation of both parties and their ideological roots. I used Skype to conduct most of the interviews for the Italian case, several with party representatives in six Comunidades Autónomas in the Spanish periphery. I  also conducted brief fieldwork (lasting one month and a half, from February to March  2017) in Catalonia and in Madrid in order to obtain face-­to-­face interviews with local partisan officers (working in Podemos’s Secretaries for Citizen Participation), militants and senior union officials. I interviewed senior officials from UGT and CC.OO, as well the leader of CGT15 Catalonia, in order to collect opinions about the relationship between union organisations and Podemos and about the role played by the unions in the Spanish anti-­austerity protest cycles. I interviewed some leaders of Podemos’s local circles in popular (and populous) working-­class areas, such as L’Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona) and Vallecas (Madrid). These interviews provided interesting views regarding the sociological characteristics of Podemos’s electorate and militancy in two traditional Leftist strongholds, where union density is still higher than in the rest of Spain and where Podemos displays electoral strength. I also spent a week in Madrid, in September 2016, attending the Podemos Summer School at the Complutense University, where I became acquainted with the political discourse of Podemos and contacted some of my first interviewees. Most importantly, I attended the Second Podemos Citizen Congress (Vistalegre II) in March  2017, which was a useful opportunity to exchange informal political views with party members, further improving my understanding of the party’s evolution and its lively internal debate. I also attended the M5S national meeting Italia a 5 Stelle, organised in Rimini in October 2017, when Luigi Di Maio was appointed as political leader in the run-­up to the 2018 general election. During Italia a 5 Stelle, I was able to attend several workshops organised by M5S MPs, allowing for informative conversations about the party’s institutional activity.

48  The Argument

Notes   1. An example may be a conflict over ‘LULUs’ (Locally Unwanted Land Uses), often related to major infrastructures.   2. Goldstone’s seminal work (2003: 8) also called for a deeper focus on the different kinds of demands advanced by the movements: Protest and associational actions can focus on particular issues, giving greater specificity to actions; indeed, protests can shape party behavior in this respect. . . . This is not always the case; . . . prodemocratic movements have very broad goals.   3. Higher employment protection and stronger organisational capacity could have insulated the insiders from the harshest effects of the crisis, possibly extending the differences between the two groups in terms of policy and partisan preferences. However, austerity and market-­friendly measures – which often also imply strong reductions in permanent employment protection – could well have provoked a certain convergence of the preferences held by individuals in the two segments, eventually convincing many insiders to oppose the neoliberal status quo.   4. This could explain the conservative (or overtly xenophobic) stances assumed by many insiders in Western Europe against immigrants and towards forms of welfare chauvinism (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013).   5. However, I  will briefly examine some considerations regarding the Ecuadorean case in the concluding chapter.   6. Nor did France experience a serious public debt crisis motivating a direct (in the Greek, Portuguese and Spanish cases) or indirect (in the Italian case) intervention by the Troika.   7. My own linguistic limitations convinced me to rely on secondary literature for the Portuguese and Greek cases. The current problematic conjuncture discouraged me from conducting fieldwork in Venezuela. As I am most interested in the rise and early consolidation of the Chavist project, I believe that interviews with politicians and social activists about events that occurred 15 or more years ago would not have been reliable, particularly in a polarised and changing context.   8. Semi-­structured interviews are commonly used in social science for elite interviews, as they ‘can provide detail, depth, and an insider’s perspective, while at the same time allowing hypothesis testing’ (Leech, 2002: 665). Interviews are often used for process tracing, a methodology that ‘involves the examination of “diagnostic” pieces of evidence within a case that contribute to supporting or overturning alternative explanatory hypotheses’ (Bennett, 2010: 208) and that can (and should) be used in conjunction with comparative methods.   9. The exception is Venezuela, because of the extensive literature available over the sociological composition of Chavista electorate. 10. As Schattschneider (1942: 64) notes, the candidate selection process is ‘one of the best points at which to observe the distribution of power within the party’, and is thus extremely useful for the purposes of this research. For a review of the literature stressing the relevance of the candidate selection process for understanding intra-­ party power relations, see Anria (2014). 11. For example, I  attended a conference in La Paz held by several national figures in MAS-­IPSP on the occasion of the launch of a book about the history of the party. During that conference, a lively debate arose between numerous discontent militants and important partisan leaders. In Santa Cruz, I participated in a meeting between the local MAS-­IPSP representative and social movement members (a sort of cyclical report of the activities carried on by the MP elected from the district). In Moreno, a working class municipality in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, I attended a party rally organised by several Kirchnerist mayors and the

The Argument 49 main organisations forming part of the so-­called ‘Kirchnerist national and popular movement’. In Buenos Aires’ Plaza de la Constitución, I attended a meeting organised by the social leader Luís D’Elía, attended by important national figures within Kirchnerism and left-­wing Peronism. This meeting was particularly important for my purposes, as it gave me a better understanding of the complex political alignments within the Argentine Peronist Left during the last 15 years. 12. Most CGT officials reported to me that they had a very busy agenda at the time, largely due to the negotiations between the right-­wing government and the unions over wage increases and a legislative bill aiming to make laying off workers more difficult (proposed by Kirchnerist opposition). 13. In total, I conducted interviews with Podemos and M5S representatives from eight Comunidades Autónomas (including six of the seven most populous: Madrid, Catalonia, Galicia, Asturias, Basque Country, Valencian Community, Extremadura and Andalusia) and ten Regioni (including seven of the eight most populous: Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Veneto, Friuli Venezia-­Giulia, Umbria, Lazio, Apulia, Campania and Sicily). The majority of the interviewees held public posts at the provincial and regional level, and thus provided important opinions focused on their respective territories. This made it possible to draw a complex portrait of the parties while taking local idiosyncrasies into account. 14. In particular, I interviewed militants from two well-­known Italian local movements (NO MUOS in Sicily and NO TAV in Piedmont), as well as Vittorio Agnoletto (the former speaker of the Genoa Social Forum) and some Catalonian militants from the Spanish PAH. Moreover, most of the Podemos interviewees were (and often still are) active in several different anti-­neoliberal grassroots movements, while most of the M5S interviewees joined the party during its ‘movementist’ (i.e., non-­electoral) phase, participating in civic campaigns against corruption, water privatisation or over local issues. 15. The CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo) is the third largest Spanish union, and the most important radical one, with historical anarcho-­syndicalist roots.

References Afonso, Alexandre, Sotirios Zartaloudis and Yannis Papadopoulos. 2015. “How Party Linkages Shape Austerity Politics: Clientelism and Fiscal Adjustment in Greece and Portugal During the Eurozone Crisis”, Journal of European Public Policy 22 (3), 315–334. Allern, Elin and Tim Bale (Eds.). 2017. Left-­of-­Centre Parties and Trade Unions in the Twenty-­First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ancelovici, Marcos. 2014. “Crisis and Contention in Europe: A Political Process Account of Anti-­Austerity Protests”, in H.-­J. Trenz, V. Guiraudon and C. Ruzza (Eds.), The European Crisis: Contributions from Political Sociology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Anria, Santiago. 2014. “Social Movements, Parties, and the Left in Latin America: The Bolivian MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) in Comparative Perspective”, Doctoral Dissertation at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Aslanidis, Paris. 2016. “Populist Social Movements of the Great Recession”, Mobilization: An International Quarterly 21 (3), 301–321. Baccaro, Lucio. 2009. “Similar Structures, Different Outcomes: Corporatism’s Resilience and Transformation (1974–2005)”, Review of Keynesian Economics 2 (2), 207–233. Baumgarten, Britta. 2013. “Geração à Rasca and Beyond: Mobilizations in Portugal After 12 March 2011”, Current Sociology 61 (4), 457–473.

50  The Argument Bennett, Andrew. 2010. “Process Tracing and Causal Inference”, in H. Brady and D. Collier (Eds.), Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher, 207–220. Berens, Sarah. 2015. “Preferences on Redistribution in Fragmented Labor Markets in Latin America and the Caribbean”, Journal of Politics in Latin America 7 (3), 117–156. Bleich, Erik and Robert Pekkanen. 2013. “How to Report Interview Data”, in L. Mosley (Ed.), Interview in Political Science Research. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 84–108. Brito Vieira, Mónica and Filipe Carreira da Silva. 2016. “Waiting for Godot? Welfare Attitudes in Portugal Before and After the Financial Crisis”, Political Studies 65 (3), 535–558. Cameron, Maxwell and Eric Hershberg (Eds.). 2010. Latin America’s Left Turns. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Collier, David and Ruth Collier. 1991. Shaping the Political Arena. New York: Princeton University Press. Della Porta, Donatella. 2015. Social Movements in Times of Austerity: Bringing Capitalism Back into Protest Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Della Porta, Donatella, Joseba Fernández, Hara Kouki and Lorenzo Mosca. 2017. Movement Parties Against Austerity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Emmenegger, Patrick. 2009. “Barriers to Entry: Insider/Outsider Politics and the Political Determinants of Job Security Regulations”, Journal European of Social Policy 19 (2), 131–146. Esping-­Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Etchemendy, Sebastián. 2011. Models of Economic Liberalization. Business, Workers and Compensation in Latin America, Spain and Portugal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Falleti, Tulia and Julia Lynch. 2008. “Context and Causal Mechanisms in Political Analysis”, Comparative Political Studies 42 (9), 1143–1166. Farthing, Linda and Benjamin Kohl. 2006. Impasse in Bolivia. Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Resistance. New York: Zed Books. Fernández-­Albertos, José and Dulce Manzano. 2015. “Dualism and Support for the Welfare State”, Comparative European Politics 14 (3), 349–375. Ferrera, Maurizio. 1996. “The ‘Southern Model’ of Welfare in Social Europe”, Journal of European Social Policy 17 (6), 17–37. Filgueira, Fernando, Luís Reygadas, Juan Pablo Luna and Pablo Alegre. 2012. “Shallow States, Deep Inequalities, and the Limits of Conservative Modernization: The Politics and Policies of Incorporation in Latin America”, in Blofield Merike (Ed.), The Great Gap. University Park: Penn State University Press, 245–277. Font, Nuria, Paolo Graziano and Myrto Tsakatika. 2019. “Varieties of Inclusionary Populism? SYRIZA, Podemos and Five Star Movement Compared”, Government and Opposition, advanced online publication, http://doi:10.1017/gov.2019.17. García Linera, Álvaro, Marxa Chávez León and Patricia Costas Monje. 2004. Sociología de los Movimientos Sociales en Bolivia. La Paz: Editorial Plural. Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2017. The Mask and the Flag. Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest. London: Hurst. Goldstone, Jack (Eds.). 2003. States, Parties and Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Argument 51 Gough, Ian and G. Woof (Eds.). 2004. Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guillaud, Elvire and Paul Marx. 2014. “Preferences for Employment Protection and the Insider – Outsider Divide: Evidence from France”, West European Politics 37 (5), 1177–1186. Gunther, Richard, Nikiforos Diamandouros and Dimitri Sotiropoulos. 2006. Democracy and the State in New Southern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Handlin, Samuel and Ruth Collier. 2008. Reorganizing Popular Politics: Participation and the New Interest Regime in Latin America. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. Hausermann, Silja and Hanspeter Kriesi. 2015. “What Do Voters Want? Dimensions and Configurations in Individual-­Level Preferences and Party Choice”, in P. Beramendi, S. Haeusermann, H. Kitschelt and H. Kriesi (Eds.), The Politics of Advanced Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hyman, Richard. 2001. Understanding European Trade Unionism. Between Market, Class & Society. London: Sage Publications. Katsambekis, Giorgos and Alexandros Kioupkiolis (Eds.). 2018. The Populist Radical Left in Europe. London: Routledge. Katz, Richard and Peter Mair. 1995. “Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of Cartel Party”, Party Politics 1 (1), 5–28. Kitschelt, Herbert. 1996. The Transformation of European Social Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kitschelt, Herbert. 2000. “Linkages Between Citizens and Politicians in Democratic Polities”, Comparative Political Studies 33 (6–7), 845–879. Kitschelt, Herbert. 2006. “Movement Parties”, in R. Katz and W. Crotty (Eds.), Handbook of Party Politics. London: Sage, 278–290. Leech, Beth. 2002. “Asking Questions: Techniques for Semi Structured Interviews”, PS: Political Science and Politics 35 (4), 665–668. Levitsky, Steven. 2003. Transforming Labor-­Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levitsky, Steven and Kenneth Roberts (Eds.). 2011. The Resurgence of the Latin American Left. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Luna, Juan Pablo. 2014. Segmented Representation. Political Party Strategies in Unequal Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lynch, Julia. 2013. “Aligning Sampling Strategies with Analytic Goals”, in L. Mosley (Ed.), Interview Research in Political Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 31–44. MacAdam, Doug and Sydney Tarrow. 2010. “Ballots and Barricades: On the Reciprocal Relationship Between Elections and Social Movements”, Perspective on Politics 8 (2), 529–542. Mahoney, James. 2003. “Strategies of Causal Assessment in Comparative Historical Analysis”, in J. Mahoney and D. Rueschemeyer (Eds.), Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 337–372. Mahoney, James and Dietrich Rueschemeyer. 2003. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mair, Peter. 2009. “Representative Versus Responsible Government”, MPIfG Working Paper 09/8. Molina, Óscar and Martin Rhodes. 2008. “The Reform of Social Protection Systems in Mixed Market Economies”, Pôle Sud 28 (1), 9–33.

52  The Argument Morgan, Jana. 2011. Bankrupt Representation and Party System Collapse. University Park: Penn State University Press. Morlino, Leonardo. 1998. Democracy Between Consolidation and Crisis: Parties, Groups, and Citizens in Southern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. “Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America”, Government and Opposition 47 (2), 147–174. Murillo, Maria Victoria. 2001. Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oxhorn, Philip. 1998. “Social Inequality, Civil Society and the Limits of Citizenship in Latin America”, paper prepared for delivery at the 1998 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, The Palmer House Hilton Hotel, Chicago, September 24–26. Padoan, Enrico. 2017. “The Populist Re-­Politicization. Some Lessons from South America and Southern Europe”, Partecipazione e conflitto 10 (2), 517–543. Panebianco, Angelo. 1988. Modelli di partito. Organizzazione e potere nei partiti politici. Bologna: Il Mulino. Pereyra, Sebastián and Maristella Svampa. 2003. Entre la ruta y el barrio. La experiencia de las organizaciones piqueteras. Buenos Aires: Biblos. Podemos. 2015. Programa Electoral para las Elecciones del 20-­D. [retrieved from https://lasonrisadeunpais.es/wp-­content/plugins/programa/data/programa-­es.pdf, 17 March 2018]. Portos, Martín. 2016. “Movilización social en tiempos de recesión: un análisis de eventos de protesta en España, 2007–2015”, Revista Española de Ciencia Política 41, 4–28. Przeworski, Adam and John Sprague. 1986. Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Retamozo, Martín and Belén Morris. 2015. “Sindicalismo y política. La Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina en tiempos kirchneristas”, Estudios Sociológicos 33 (1), 63–87. Rigby, Mike and Miguel Ángel García Calavia. 2017. “Institutional Resources as a Source of Trade Union Power in Southern Europe”, European Journal of Industrial Relations, https://doi.org/10.1177/0959680117708369. Roberts, Kenneth. 2014. Changing Course in Latin America: Party Systems in the Neoliberal Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, Kenneth. 2017. “Party Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Perspectives on the European and Latin American Economic Crises”, European Journal of Political Research 56 (2), 218–233. Rovny, Allison and Jan Rovny. 2017. “Outsiders at the Ballot Box: Operationalizations and Political Consequences of the Insider  – Outsider Dualism”, Socio-­Economic Review 15 (1), 161–185. Rueda, David. 2005. “Insider-­Outsider Politics in Industrialized Democracies: The Challenge to Social Democratic Parties”, American Political Science Review 99 (1), 61–74. Rueda, David. 2007. Social Democracy Inside Out. Partisanship and Labor Market Policy in Advanced Industrialized Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rueda, David, Erik Wibbels and Melina Altamirano. 2015. “The Origin of Dualism”, in P. Beramendi, S. Haeusermann, H. Kitschelt and H. Kriesi (Eds.), The Politics of Advanced Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 89–111. Schattschneider, Elmer Eric. 1942. Party Government. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.

The Argument 53 Silva, Eduardo. 2009. Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slater, D. and E. Simmons. 2010. “Informative Regress: Critical Antecedents in Comparative Politics”, Comparative Political Studies 43 (7), 886–917. Spanakos, Anthony Peter. 2011. “Citizen Chávez. The State, Social Movements, and Publics”, Latin American Perspectives 38 (1), 14–27. Streeck, Wolfgang. 2011. Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. London: Verso. Trujillo, Jorge León and Susan Spronk. 2018. “Socialism Without Workers? Trade Unions and the New Left in Bolivia and Ecuador”, in E. Silva and F. Rossi (Eds.), Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America: From Resisting Neoliberalism to the Second Incorporation. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 129–156. Tsakatika, Myrto and Marco Lisi. 2013. “ ‘Zippin’ Up My Boots, Goin’ Back to My Roots’: Radical Left Parties in Southern Europe”, South European Society and Politics 18 (1), 1–19. Vogiatzoglou, Marcos. 2017a. “Turbulent Flow: Anti-­ Austerity Mobilization in Greece”, in D. Della Porta, M. Andretta, T. Fernandes, F. O’Connor, E. Romanos and M. Vogiatzoglou (Eds.), Late Neoliberalism and Its Discontents in the Economic Crisis. Comparing Social Movements in the European Periphery. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 99–130. Weyland, Kurt, Raúl De La Madrid and Wendy Hunter. 2010. Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and Shortcomings. New York: Cambridge University Press. Zamponi, Lorenzo. 2012. “ ‘Why Don’t Italians Occupy?’ Hypotheses on a Failed Mobilisation”, Social Movement Studies 11 (3–4), 416–426. Zanotti, Lisa and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2017. “The Comparative (Party) Politics of the Great Recession: Causes, Consequences and Future Research Agenda”, Comparative European Politics, doi: 10.1057/cep.2016.22.

3 Bolivia Movement-­Based Populism in Power

3.1 Introduction In December 2005, Evo Morales, a former cocalero (coca leaf grower) from the tropical region of Chapare, obtained 54% of the vote in the general election and became the first indigenous President of Bolivia. For the first time since the transition back to democracy in 1982, a presidential candidate obtained an absolute majority of the votes. Morales and his Vice-­President, the former guerrillero Álvaro García Linera, ran as candidates of the MAS-­IPSP. MAS-­ IPSP’s origins go back to 1995, when several peasant and indigenous organisations founded the ASP. Nobody could expect that this new and peculiar political ‘party’, a clear instance of a movement-­based populist political project, would have been able to become Bolivia’s leading party just 10 years later. This chapter analyses the rise, the consolidation and the internal functioning of the MAS-­IPSP through the lens provided by the theoretical framework described in Chapter 2. In section 3.2, I focus on the causally relevant ‘critical antecedents’. The involvement of all the Bolivian mainstream parties in neoliberal governments limited their credibility as eventual proponents of an alternative model when neoliberalism lost its hegemony. I also highlight the factors explaining the inability of the COB to act as a leading actor in the long and violent protest cycle triggered by the crisis and popular discontent, despite COB’s historical role in Bolivian politics. In particular, I provide evidence for: i.

the loss of structural power suffered by the COB as a consequence of the deep changes that occurred in Bolivia during the neoliberal era; ii. the resilient links between some cobistas leaders and the older parties; iii. the unwillingness of the salaried sectors dominating the COB to give more influence to the powerful outsider, peasant organisations, who finally built ‘their own Political Instrument’ and relegated the COB into a secondary position. In section 3.3, I focus on the impressive capacity of alliance building by the social movements animating the protests against neoliberal governments. I describe the powerful, inclusive frames that aggregate the various movements and social sectors in their struggles. The main frame undoubtedly was

Bolivia 55 the ‘restoration of the Sovereignty of the People’, albeit interpreted in very different forms by different movements. The unity of the movements was assured until universalist demands (such as the recuperation of the control over natural resources and the demand for a Constituent Assembly) prevented the fragmentation of the mobilisations along with more particularistic claims. Restoring the ‘Sovereignty of the People’ was the ‘mission’ of the MAS-­ IPSP from the beginning; their origins, organisation and early strategies form the topic of section 3.4. I describe the social and ideological roots of this party, whose birth predated the ‘critical juncture’ (i.e., the economic and political crisis of the Bolivian neoliberal era) and facilitated the task of alliance building that brought the anti-­neoliberal struggle to its victory. I stress how the MAS-­ IPSP, despite its inclusive indigenous rhetoric, cannot be considered an indigenist party. Instead, it represents a mixture of a ‘charismatic’ and a (peasant) ‘movement-­based’ party, in which – since the beginning – a populist discourse (according to the definition proposed in Chapter 2) clearly emerged: the ‘restoration of sovereignty’ was not separable from the immediate goal of ‘conquering the state’. Electoral reasons and the rise of other struggles convinced the peasant movements to expand their coalition to include other social actors and sectors, whose interests sometimes later proved to be incompatible. Section 3.5 focuses on the governmental experience of the MAS-­IPSP. This section is central for at least two reasons. First, it further shows the importance of the inclusive coalitional strategy of the MAS-­IPSP, not only for facilitating its first electoral victory, but also for defending its government from attacks from the political and economic Right during the Morales’ first term. Second, once the MAS-­IPSP consolidated its control, the underground tensions within the coalition finally emerged, thus triggering several ‘inter-­organisational struggles’, typical of participative-­mobilising populisms. The analysis discloses the instrumental support of some social actors to the governmental coalition and the selective incentives used by the government to prevent further divisions, the increasing autonomy of the partisan elite and the role of Morales as ‘decider of last resort’, the rupture between the ruling party and some indigenous movements and the subordinated position assumed by the main ‘insider’ organisation, the COB. In the sixth section, a quantitative analysis based on LAPOP survey data describes the sociological characteristics of the masistas voters and highlights the ‘plebeian’ features of the core-­constituencies of the MAS-­IPSP. A brief concluding section summarises the findings.

3.2  The Critical Antecedents 3.2.1  Party-­Union Entrenchment: The Social and Political Isolation of the Bolivian Labour Movement The Bolivian National Revolution of 1952, led by a typical ‘classic populist’ party (the MNR –led by Víctor Paz Estenssoro) with the support of the leading union confederation (the COB, dominated by the mineworkers’ federation),

56  Bolivia was the starting point of the construction of the so-­called Estado del ’52 (State of 1952): a statist, developmentalist and corporatist socioeconomic model that marked a long phase of Bolivian history, during which the organised working-­ class assumed a major political role in Bolivia. The COB, despite its ‘co-­governmental’ position, maintained its autonomy from the MNR; internal and external political pressures to limit the labour unions’ power led to the final rupture between the MNR and the COB, with the former moving steadily towards the right (Klein, 2011). After 2 years of social unrest and economic distress, a coup d’état in 1964 led to General Barrientos becoming president, inaugurating a long phase of alternation between various military dictatorships (1964–1982) and brief democratic interludes. Right-­wing dictatorships were not able to decisively weaken the Bolivian mineworkers’ movement. During the chaotic phase characterised by the alternation of civilian and highly repressive military dictatorships (1978–1982), the COB played a crucial role in advocating for democratic transition (BO8; BO15). The COB supported the first democratic (and left-­wing) government led by Hernán Siles Zuazo (1982–1985), backed by the UDP,1 a coalition between the MNRI (a leftist split from MNR) and the MIR2 (BO8; Klein, 2011). UDP’s governmental experience unwillingly led the ‘State of 1952’ to its final collapse. Siles Zuazo’s term was destabilised by a cycle of labour struggles and social unrest. UDP’s government then chose to pursue a disastrous expansionary monetary policy that led the country into a five-­digit hyperinflationary crisis and fully discredited the political Left (BO8; BO13; Klein, 2011). Siles Zuazo’s resignation opened the way to early elections, which were won by MNR’s long-­term leader Paz Estenssoro. The very same figure who built the Bolivian corporatist and ISI state then took the responsibility for dismantling it and leading the country towards neoliberalism (Farthing and Kohl, 2006). Presidential Decree 21060, elaborated with the advice of IMF officials, marked a turning point in Bolivian history; it put into motion a draconian adjustment programme (including dollarisation, a wage freeze, cuts in public spending through extensive privatisation and the dismissal of public workers) that, while successfully eradicating hyperinflation, imposed high social costs on the population. This so-­called NEP was supposed to attract private investment and transform Bolivia into an export-­oriented, liberalised economy (Farthing and Kohl, 2006; Silva, 2009). COMIBOL (the public company in the mining sector) was reduced from 30,000 to 7,000 workers (Farthing and Kohl, 2006; Crabtree and Chaplin, 2013), a measure that deliberately decimated the once powerful mineworkers’ movement (BO8; BO13; Farthing and Kohl, 2006). Its leaders were sent into internal exile and many workers were ‘redistributed’ to remote areas of the country. During the nineties, political divisions and allegations of corruption continuously contributed to weakening the once powerful COB (García Linera et al., 2004; McNelly, 2019b). The recovery of the employment rate was limited to the informal sector or to small proto-­industrial enterprises, where

Bolivia 57 worker unionisation was weaker. Structural reforms reduced the size of the public sector, including former state-­owned enterprises such as COMIBOL and YPFB (the oil and gas public company), which were the strongholds of the COB (García Linera et al., 2004; Farthing and Kohl, 2006; Silva, 2009). In summary, the COB, weakened by partisan co-­optation and the structural changes produced by the neoliberal governments, had lost much of its legitimacy as the main articulator of the demands of the heterogeneous Bolivian popular sectors. In addition, as section 3.2.3 will clarify, weakened ‘proletarian vanguards’ kept precisely those sectors that were showing a very high capacity of organisation and that represented much broader constituencies, such as the peasantry, in a secondary position within the leading union confederation. 3.2.2  Party Linkages to Outsider Sectors (1). Clientelism, Co-­Optation and Ineffective Universalism If neoliberalism was the economic component of the post-­ISI era, so-­called ‘Pacted Democracy’ was its political one (Zegada, 2013). The Bolivian party system became pluralised and centripetal, as all three ‘mainstream parties’ (MNR, MIR and ADN)3 embraced neoliberalism and alternated in coalition governments that assured the continuity of the economic model. These arrangements opened a political space for new ‘neopopulist’ parties such as CONDEPA or UCS, which both served as electoral machines supporting charismatic, popular figures (an actor and an entrepreneur, respectively). Bolivian neopopulisms, without questioning neoliberalism, launched strong attacks on the ‘traditional parties’ and achieved non-­negligible electoral strength (Alenda, 2003).4 Nonetheless, both parties soon became involved in the governmental ‘mega-­coalitions’ and in the same clientelist practices of the ‘traditional parties’; more importantly, they did not survive the death of their founders in 1997. In 1993, the American-­Bolivian entrepreneur Sánchez de Losada (MNR) won the elections and gave a further boost to the neoliberal project, through his so-­called Plan for All, consisting in several reforms that shaped Bolivia’s economic, judicial, educational and institutional systems (Farthing and Kohl, 2006). The pace of privatisation further accelerated, leading to new lay-­offs, while the pension system was redesigned, drawing heavily on the ‘Chilean (private) model’. Sánchez de Losada also launched BONOSOL, an annual payment of US$ 250 to all citizens older than 65. BONOSOL was financed by revenue from privatisation and the dividends on the stocks of the former state-­owned enterprises still retained by the state. Despite its high popularity, BONOSOL soon proved to be unsustainable, due to the poor performance of the privatised companies. The following Bánzer government (1997–2001) suspended it, and Sánchez de Losada’s second government (2002–2003) briefly reintroduced it in a reduced form. BONOSOL was the most emblematic ‘programmatic linkage’ designed by the neoliberal parties to target the Bolivian lower classes.

58  Bolivia The LPP reformed electoral law relating to Congress through the partial introduction of uninominal districts. It also introduced popular elections for the mayors and of communal councils of all 337 Bolivian municipalities (Zuazo, 2008). The LPP also favoured the inclusion of civil society and neighbourhoods’ organisations (juntas vecinales) in budgetary decisions. Such decentralising reforms aimed to ‘make the state smaller’ and closer to local communities; in the short term, it made the organisational weakness of the ‘traditional’ national parties patently clear. The LPP offered an important point of access to policy making to local élites, and fostered new attempts to co-­opt the juntas vecinales through clientelist exchanges. However, crucially, it also provided new political opportunities for new challengers and grassroots movements (Zuazo, 2008). The successful eradication of hyperinflation, the timid economic recovery experienced by the country during the nineties and clientelist and programmatic linkages provided some legitimacy to the ‘neoliberal parties’ and ensured political stability for a decade. The end of the expansionary phase and the persistent social and political exclusion of the peasantry (see section 3.2.3) triggered angry reactions from the population, while political reforms contributed to lowering the institutional barriers for anti-­system political projects. 3.2.3  Party Linkages to Outsider Sectors (II). The Rise of Indigenous and Peasant Social Movements A major consequence of the 1952 National Revolution was the social and political enfranchisement of the peasantry, who made up the great majority of the Bolivian population. The MNR government was forced by a cycle of land occupations to promulgate National Agrarian Reform (1953), which gradually reassigned one-­third of Bolivian land – almost exclusively in the Highland and Cochabamba regions – to former colonos through individual or collective titles (Colque et al., 2015). The MNR favoured the creation of agrarian ‘unions’ in the Western Highlands, partly to control and co-­opt the peasantry through clientelist and corporatist arrangements. Latifundios continued to dominate the Eastern agrarian structure, where an export-­oriented ‘agro-­business’ developed (Yashar, 2005; Klein, 2011). The sindicatos rurales represent probably the most important organisational legacy of the State of 1952. Rural unions in the Aymara-­speaking Highlands, particularly in the La Paz’s region, often overlapped with the traditional indigenous communities (ayllus), from which they borrowed several organisational features. In Quechua-­speaking tropical regions, they became the only undisputed form of peasant organisation (Rivera, 2010). Despite their hierarchical structure, consisting of sindicatos, subcentrales, centrales and federaciones (from the lower to the upper level), rural unions were very different from labour unions. Rural unions, formed by peasants owning, individually or collectively, their small (or very small) parcels, enjoyed strong legitimacy within their communities from the beginning. Their functions included the administration of

Bolivia 59 justice, the resolution of disputes between their affiliates and the management of communitarian works. They acted both as functional substitutes for the state and as intermediaries between the community-­level and the State (García Linera et al., 2004; García Yapur et al., 2014). The (partial) implementation of the Agrarian Reform, and the control that the MNR was able to exert over the leaders of the sindicatos, for a long time ensured the support of the peasantry for the central government. Nevertheless, in 1974, the army broke the ‘Military-­ Peasant Pact’ and violently repressed peaceful peasant protests in the Cochabamba region. This event strengthened the appeal of radical and autonomous Aymaras peasant unions in the Highlands (Van Cott, 2005; Rivera, 2010). From the late 1960s onwards, Katarism, a heterogeneous cultural and syndicalist movement, had grown amongst Highlands’ peasant unions. Katarism was a loose and highly diversified ideology that called for a recovery of the Indian identity and for the merging of ethnic (as Aymaras) and class (as peasants) struggles (Rivera, 2010). Katarism therefore rejected both the MNR’s nationalist project, which aimed at ‘Bolivianising’ the peasantry, and the attitude of the Marxist Left (and particularly of the COB), which persistently displayed a diffident and paternalistic stance towards the uncivilised and de-­ideologized ‘rural petty bourgeoisie’ (Rivera, 2010; BO3; BO7; BO12). Katarist unions were gradually able to defeat both pro-­MNR and leftist factions and to form a peak peasant union confederation, the CSUTCB,5 which became a major national organisation (García Linera et al., 2004; Burgoa Moya, 2016). The CSUTCB formally joined the COB, although it maintained an autonomous position. During the neoliberal era, the CSUTCB suffered from repeated attempts by the political parties to control the organisation, which debilitated the ‘autonomist’ direction of the Katarist faction (Van Cott, 2005; BO7; BO20). However, a Katarist strategic legacy survived: that is, the idea of creating indigenous and peasant political parties to compete in the national elections and to challenge the political power of the q’aras (‘Urban [and thus white] peoples’), without relying on the intermediation of ‘colonialist’ parties. In fact, several indigenous political parties were founded during the eighties. The most important of them was the MRTKL, a small but quite well-­structured party, with linkages to some sectors of the CSUTCB and an appeal directed at urban indigenous immigrants. The CSUTCB approached the Cárdenas, the leader of the MRTKL, to run for president in the 1993 elections; instead, Cárdenas preferred to ally with the MNR. Cárdenas’ ‘betrayal’ (Burgoa Moya, 2016) was one of the many factors that definitively convinced the indigenous and peasant movements from the Highlands and from the Cochabamba region to create their own ‘political instrument’ to represent indigenous and peasant populations, without resorting to the ‘intermediation’ of existing parties (García Yapur et al., 2014; BO7; BO14). In 1990, an additional actor appeared on the political scene and had a pronounced political impact: the CIDOB, which represented the indigenous peoples from the Lowlands (i.e., 33 of the 36 Bolivian ethnicities). Lowlands

60  Bolivia indigenous peoples called for the recognition of their cultural right, the environmental protection of their territories from exploitation by multinationals and extractive industries and for concrete guarantees regarding their educational rights. Several marches and demonstrations contributed to bringing the ‘indigenous question’ to the political debate. However, the Bolivian dominant parties possessed both organisational and ideological resources that enabled them to deal successfully with indigenous movements. First, they began to include several leaders of indigenous organisations in their electoral lists. Moreover, the constitutional reforms implemented by Sánchez de Losada (1993–1997) were partially inspired by a liberal and multicultural vision – although this vision was not directed at the structural problems that prevented real improvement in the concrete life conditions of the peasantry and indigenous peoples (Farthing and Kohl, 2006). Much the same can be said for the INRA Law, a governmental attempt to reform and relaunch the historic 1953 Agrarian Reform. These reforms, as Rivera (2010) argues, framed the indigenous question as a matter of defending the rights of ethnic minorities and their ancestral practices of social and cultural (re)production. The protection of these ‘minorities’ seemed a satisfactory strategy for Eastern indigenous peoples, who were numerically small, but were certainly not for Aymaras and Quechuas, who dominated the demographics of the Highlands (Garcés, 2010). This contrast between the ‘communitarian cosmovision’ of the indigenous peoples and the economic and pragmatic motivations proper of the CSUTCB and the CSCB is crucial for understanding the agrarian policy of Evo Morales’ governments and, more generally, the wider goals of the MAS-­IPSP political project. 3.2.4  Unintended Consequences of the Neoliberal Era: The Rise of the Cocaleros Movement In the aftermath of the National Revolution, the government began to promote the colonisation of some remote areas of the country by peasants who lacked sufficient land in the Highlands. Santa Cruz, Beni and Cochabamba departments were the main destinations for the new settlers, who began organising through sindicatos (García Linera et al., 2004). These unions later coordinated themselves through the CSCB (Confederación Sindical de los Colonizadores de Bolivia, now CSCIOB), which is one of the most important social movements ‘organic’ to the MAS-­IPSP, and the only one with strong roots in Eastern Bolivia. The Chapare region, located in the Cochabamba department, was one of the colonised areas where the cultivation of the coca leaf was practiced. The cultivation of the coca leaf in the Yungas (a tropical region across the departments of La Paz and Cochabamba) has a millenia-­old history. Chapare was also a traditional area for coca leaf cultivation, but it contributed only meagrely to national production until the fifties. From the seventies onwards, the Chaparean coca leaf production skyrocketed, due mainly to the spread of cocaine

Bolivia  61 in more developed countries; in contrast to the Yungas, the Chaparean coca leaf was particularly suited for being processed for drug production (Klein, 2011). Coca leaf is a highly productive crop, and its prices experienced a huge increase due to the growing demand for its illicit processing (Farthing and Kohl, 2006). The history of the Chaparean cocaleros unions had begun in 1971, when the FETCTC was founded. The huge increase in the number of local unions led to the creation of five other federations in the Tropic of Cochabamba. By 1988, the Six Federations created a Coordinator Committee, led (and still led today) by Evo Morales, a cocalero immigrant from the Quechua-­speaking Oruro department. Cocaleros unions resemble the sindicatos campesinos and the sindicatos de colonizadores: Cocaleros unions were created to assign the occupied lands to their affiliates and to manage bureaucratic tasks, to solve litigation among members, to organise marches, demonstrations, road-­blockages and provide self-­defence and to build public infrastructures (García Linera et al., 2004). The cocaleros, because of the very adverse conditions they faced and their geographical concentration, built a very effective and coordinated organisation, and they soon achieved a prominent, national role within the CSUTCB and the CSCB.6 Due to the worsening of the Bolivian economic condition and the effects of the 21060 Law, many laid-­off miners chose to join Chaparean colonies and the coca economy. The miners brought further organisational experience and decisively contributed to strengthening the cocalero union system (Calderón Gutiérrez, 2002; BO30). Since the nineties, US aid for the liberalisation and recovery of Bolivian economy was made conditional on the reduction (and progressive dismantlement) of the cultivation of the coca leaf. This led to a period of violent confrontation between the national government (with the political and military support of US agencies) and the cocaleros. The peak of the violence was reached during Bánzer’s democratic government (1997– 2001), whose Dignity Plan aimed at the total eradication of coca leaf cultivation (Silva, 2009; BO23); the cohesion of the cocalero movement, as well as the popularity of its ‘heroic’ struggle, was then further strengthened by several years of armed resistance against the eradication policies implemented by the neoliberal governments and their US allies.

3.3 The Critical Juncture: The Neoliberal Crisis and the Unified Popular Mobilisations (2000–2003) The effects of the Brazilian crisis (1997) provoked a sudden economic deterioration, which had a direct effect on the capacity of various governments – led by Bánzer (1997–2001), Quiroga (2001–2002) and Sánchez de Losada (2002–2003) – to sustain the pro-­poor policies (such as BONOSOL) launched during the nineties. The participation of all the mainstream political parties in one or the other of these unpopular governments, the irreversible decline of

62  Bolivia the short-­lived ‘neo-­populist’ parties and the lack of any alternative project represented factors that favoured the rise of radical and well-­rooted political challengers. A new protest cycle stemmed from both the urban and the rural sectors. Neither the CIDOB nor the COB assumed a leading role in these protests. However, the CIDOB decisively contributed to the inclusion of an ‘indigenous lexicon’ in the political debate, thus favouring its appropriation by organisations in the Tropic Valleys and Highlands. The most combative sectors within the COB actively supported the struggles during the 2000–2003 period, but they did not lead them politically. The COB, riven by internal struggles, weakened by structural transformations, subjected to the influence of the ‘mainstream parties’ and unwilling to cede a central role to the rural movements, lost its traditional position as the most important social actor within the Bolivian Left. As García Linera noticed, during these social struggles, which triggered an era of the re-­emergence of social mobilisations and popular leaderships, the COB played a secondary role . . . indigenous discourses and leaders have strengthened, replacing the old, leftist analyses that prevailed for a long time inside the COB. The socio-­political victories of organisations formally belonging to the COB, but, in fact, articulating mobilising demands and social alliances very different from those of the COB, have created a social scenario in which the COB only represents the educational and health public sector, the pensioners, and the weakened industrial and mining sectors. It has become just a social organisation amongst others, such as the CSUTCB, the cocaleros or the Water Coordinator, which are much stronger. . . . The relationship between the COB and these organisations [varied] between subordination, mutual support and competition. (García Linera et al., 2004: 80, my translation) The 2000–2003 period represented a ‘revolutionary epoch’ (Webber, 2008) that favoured the electoral rise of anti-­neoliberal parties who took advantage of this socio-­political climate. The leaders of the MAS-­IPSP (Evo Morales) and of the Indigenous Movement Pachakutik (Felipe Quispe) were important actors during the protests. While previous indigenous or Katarist parties had never reached double-­digit percentages of the national vote, in the 2002 general elections the MAS obtained an astonishing 20%, and the MIP a respectable 6%, concentrated in the Aymara region and in El Alto. The ‘anti-­system vote’ surpassed the percentage (22%) gained by the winner Sánchez de Losada. The 2002 elections represented a turning point and marked the last transitional phase towards the final victory of the MAS. A brief, somewhat more detailed analysis of this ‘revolutionary’ phase is useful to shed light on the social sectors that animated the struggles and on the ‘plebeian’ constituencies that would hand victory to the MAS in the following decade (Do Alto and Stefanoni, 2010). As we shall see, it appeared that the

Bolivia  63 various revolts shared similar frames, such as the recovery of ‘sovereignty’ and of the ‘national and popular’ control of Bolivian natural resources. The following analysis also stresses the impressive alliance networks that the movements were able to build in order to sustain the protests both over time and throughout the entire country. 3.3.1  The Cochabamba Water War The national government and the municipality of Cochabamba negotiated the concession of a monopoly licence for the exploitation and the distribution of water resources to the newly-­constituted company Agua del Tunari, controlled by the multinational Bechtel (Farthing and Kohl, 2006). This represented a menace to the customary management of the water sources and to the network of urban associations that distributed the water in the poor neighbourhoods. In November 1999, the new consortium Agua del Tunari immediately applied draconian tariff increases: 35% on average, with a peak of 300% (Linsalata, 2015). During the negotiations between the government and the private consortium, a network of environmental activists, urban social leaders and the ‘Federation of the Water Suppliers’, in alliance with rural union leaders, started a campaign to inform the citizenry about the privatisation of the public company. When the tariff increases were made public, even the middle classes joined the protests. The protesters founded the Coordinating Committee for the Defence of the Water (Coordinadora), which worked as an ‘organisation of organisations’, providing a common platform for sustaining the rebellion, starting with road-­blockages organised by the peasants surrounding Cochabamba (Silva, 2009; Linsalata, 2015). A period of social turbulence began, very visible in the numerous assemblies and gatherings throughout the rural villages and the city. There was a reactivation of the juntas vecinales, which entered the Coordinadora and provided the associational structure for building and sustaining the resistance. The COB did not actively support the Coordinadora (Silva, 2009; Linsalata, 2015), because of its unwillingness to be ‘outbid’ by ‘de-­politicised’ associations, thereby showing once more its inability to ‘read’ the febrile Bolivian social context. The Coordinadora facilitated the transmission of the information and the coordination of the protests, whose repertoire consisted in road-­blockages, indefinite strikes, marches and open assemblies throughout the city. Road-­blockages and strikes literally paralysed the entire country (thanks to the CSUTCB’s support) until April, when the government finally cancelled the contract with Bechtel (Farthing and Kohl, 2006). Evo Morales led the column of cocaleros that helped the protestors in Cochabamba to resist the military repression. Morales did not play any role in the Coordinadora, but his support during the protests was considered crucial (BO6; BO13). The cocaleros followed a strategy that had been in use since the mid-­nineties; a strategy consisting of supporting every kind of anti-­neoliberal

64  Bolivia struggle, of building alliances and escaping from their ‘pariah’ condition that had been caused by media and government campaigns against ‘Chaparean drug traffickers’ (BO6; BO19). 3.3.2  The El Alto Gas War The worsening economic conditions convinced the newly elected government to implement new, immediately unpopular, IMF-­backed austerity plans. Despite huge protests in February 2003, Sánchez de Losada continued with his ‘autonomous’ political platform and further isolated himself. The governmental project to build a pipeline to transport Bolivian gas towards the Chilean port of Antofagasta, and from there to California, came to symbolise, in the eyes of the people, all the negative characteristics of the ruling class: ‘antinationalist’, ‘sellers of their fatherland’ (vendepatria), corrupt and inattentive to the interests of ‘The People’. This was the cause of the protests that exploded in El Alto, the third largest Bolivian city, during September and October 2003. Most of the Aymara population in El Alto works in the informal sector and is enrolled in local sindicatos and juntas, often spending various periods of the year cultivating a small minifundio and then selling (or consuming) their crops in the city. El Alto’s citizens have thus developed a peculiar two-­fold identity, both as Aymara peasants and as urban citizen neighbours (vecinos). The inability of the Bolivian state to meet with many of the practical necessities of the new settlers favoured the consolidation of the juntas system (Lazar, 2013).7 The indigenous identity of the alteños surely facilitated the alliance between urban and rural sectors against ‘neoliberalism’ and against the exclusion of the popular sectors from the institutional sphere. However, the framing of the ‘gas issue’ as a matter of ‘defending national resources’ proved to be very effective; it not only resonated well with the defence of the water or of the ‘ancestral’ coca leaf, but also contributed to the revival of the old, statist ideology that represented the backbone of the ‘State of 1952’ (Mayorga, 2010). Popular urban organisations and peasant social movements share a complex evaluation of the ‘Bolivian colonial State’ and what it is expected to do. The state must guarantee basic services and decent life standards. In line with the statist ideology well rooted in Bolivia  – the long neoliberal parenthesis notwithstanding  – it is also expected to favour the economic and industrial development of the country, and land and credit access for the peasantry (BO4; BO12; BO18; BO22). The state is also expected to guarantee that the national natural resources are used and exploited for the ‘interest of the people’. This could imply that natural resources must be controlled by the people living in resources-­rich territories (as many indigenous communities argue), but, in a dramatically different view, it might also imply that the state can and must dispose of these resources for the economic development of the country and in order to increase social and infrastructural spending. That being said, the state is simultaneously expected to be ‘smaller’, in the sense that it cannot violate the right of the people to self-­organisation and autonomy. This concerns not

Bolivia  65 only the indigenous and rural unions and communities but also the informal, commercial sectors that stem from the (legal or illegal) ‘interstices’ left by weak public institutions (Tassi et al., 2012). In this sense, it was no coincidence that the direct antecedents of the ‘black October’ (Octubre Negro) of 2003 consisted of popular protests around very specific issues, strongly related to the defence of ‘autonomy’ and ‘sovereignty’ by both rural and urban communities; the gas issue simply acted as the ultimate articulation of the protests. In September 2003, peasants from the Highlands, led by Quispe’s supporters within the CSUTCB, protested (through extensive roadblocks) against the arrest of a union leader who executed a man ‘in application of communitarian justice’ (García Linera et al., 2004). Meanwhile, in El Alto, the juntas, fearing new tax burdens, were already mobilising against a municipal campaign for housing registration. The juntas and the sindicatos of El Alto, as well as all the popular social movements, immediately expressed their solidarity with the Aymara protests, and made a decisive contribution through setting up roadblocks that completely isolated La Paz. In the context of protests and roadblocks throughout the country, the army bloodily repressed El Alto’s protesters, killing 50 (12–13 October 2003). The situation was out of control, and protesters demanded the resignation of Sánchez de Losada, who had lost the support of several ministers and MPs. Concessions were made, but from October 15th onwards, columns of armed miners from Oruro and Potosí, Chaparean cocaleros, Aymara peasants and alteños neighbours converged on La Paz. Even large numbers of the middle-­classes and intellectuals overtly contested the government and joined the protests. In the end, Sánchez de Losada resigned and fled the country on October 17th, and Vice-­President Carlos Mesa assumed the presidency. 3.3.3  The Agenda De Octubre and the Demand for a Constituent Assembly The Gas War unified not only the peasantry and urban informal workers but also the miners and middle-­class sectors in a common struggle against the discredited Sánchez de Losada government and the entire ‘neoliberal political class’. The movements put forward an informal and unifying political agenda – ‘October Agenda’: Agenda de Octubre – which included the resignation and prosecution of Sánchez de Losada, the demand for a Constituent Assembly to be set up and the nationalisation of the hydrocarbon sector (Mayorga, 2010). In the early aftermath of the Gas War, the main indigenous and peasant organisations (CIDOB, CSUTCB, CSCB, CONAMAQ8 and the ‘Bartolinas’ [the Women Peasant Federation]) decided to formalise a stable alliance, the PU, in order to have a permanent forum and to prepare a common platform for a new Constitution (CPE). The PU would achieve an enormous importance during the first MAS government (2006–2009), when it served as a mobilising organisation against the counter-­reaction of the Bolivian Right. It also played a central role in drafting the new CPE.

66  Bolivia

3.4 The Rise and Consolidation of a Movement-­Based Populism 3.4.1  From the ASP to the MAS-­IPSP: The Consolidation of Evo Morales’ Leadership The decision to create a ‘Political Instrument’ was the result of a long debate amongst union leaders over the best strategy for putting an end to the political exclusion of rural and indigenous sectors. They finally agreed on building something different from the ‘classic’ political parties: an ‘electoral tool’ for the rural social movements. The union leaders who founded the Political Instrument recognised that the political organisations that they often led or represented were additional sources of division within the social movements (and particularly the CSUTCB: BO7; García Yapur et al., 2015). Instead of looking for the support of political parties, which were prone to ‘betray’ the movements, the time to ‘vote for ourselves’ (votar para nosotros mismos) had come (BO7; BO23; García Yapur et al., 2014, 2015). In March 1995, the ASP was founded by the CSUTCB (peasant unions), the CSCB (settlers’ unions), the Six Federations of the Tropic of Cochabamba and the CIDOB (representing the Lowland indigenous communities). The ASP, then, stemmed from places that differed from the COB’s strongholds (BO7). The political goals of the cocaleros and those of Aymara union leaders were initially very different (BO1; BO7; BO14). The Aymara unions aimed at building a sort of an ‘autonomous Aymara state’, ‘like the Palestine PLO’ (BO7), by relying on the social and territorial control they exerted in the Highlands, with a view to a progressive ‘displacement’ of the ‘colonial’ state structures from their territories. The cocaleros, in turn, saw the necessity (and political opportunity) of ‘conquering’ the Bolivian state through electoral means. Therefore, the cocaleros had a much more pragmatic (and populist, according to my own definition) project from the beginning, which aimed to conquer political power from the control of the state (BO14). In the 1995 founding congress, the cocalero thinking won out. Alejo Véliz, a peasant union leader from Cochabamba, became the first President of the ASP (Van Cott, 2005; Burgoa Moya, 2016). The Electoral National Court repeatedly refused to legally register the ASP, due to technical irregularities in the signatures required. The ASP’s candidates therefore ran in the 1995 municipal elections under the banner of IU, a coalition composed of small leftist parties. IU obtained 11 mayoralties and 49 municipal councillors, and came third in the department of Cochabamba due to its strong results in Chapare. This promising debut was confirmed in the 1997 general elections, when four MPs, all of them from the Cochabamba department, were elected. Evo Morales obtained the highest percentage of personal preferences in the entire country (more than 60% of the valid votes in his district; see Van Cott, 2005: 86) and rapidly challenged Véliz’s leadership within the ASP.

Bolivia  67 The final rupture between Morales and Véliz occurred in 1999, when Véliz expelled Morales and other cocalero union leaders from the ASP (Burgoa Moya, 2016). Morales, in search of a registered party label under whose banner he could run, accepted the ‘offer’ of David Añez Pedraza, the legal owner of the moribund MAS-­U. In the MAS-­U Congress held in Cochabamba (22–24 January 1999), Añez Pedraza transferred the legal use of the brand to Morales’ IPSP. In the first MAS-­IPSP Congress, the most senior officials of the settlers’ CSCB, of the ‘Bartolinas’ and of the CSUTCB, at that time led by Felipe Quispe, were present. These were the founding organisations of the MAS-­IPSP and soon became known as the trillizas (the ‘Triplets’) because of their close alliance. In turn, the cocaleros unions were the true ‘core’ of this movement-­ based party. Since the foundation of the MAS-­IPSP, then, and even since its first promising electoral victories in Chapare, Evo Morales built his own unquestionable leadership. This was due mainly to his enormous, personal political capital. His mediation skills were initially forged by the necessity to ‘govern’ the different federaciones cocaleras. Morales provided them with a political direction and contributed to giving them cohesion, effectiveness and combativeness (BO6; BO10; BO19; BO23). All of these factors favoured the first local electoral victories, and facilitated the ‘brokerage’ strategy put into motion by the cocaleros and the other founder organisations with many  – often very different – contentious actors, who gradually came to understand the importance of a strategy of ‘unity of action’ to effectively challenge Bolivian neoliberal governments. 3.4.2  The Origins of the MAS-­IPSP: The Internal Organisation of a Movement-­Based Party The centrality of Morales’ leadership notwithstanding, describing the MAS-­ IPSP as a purely ‘charismatic party’ would be quite erroneous. The MAS-­IPSP and the trillizas work in a perennial, complex, but  – usually – stable equilibrium between the ‘leadership’ and the ‘organic bases’. The trillizas (the CSUTCB, the CSCB and the ‘Bartolinas’) consider the instrumento politico as their instrument, their ‘political arm’, often referring to it as their son. As a recent book was entitled, a common statement is that ‘we are not masistas, the MAS is our’ (No somos del MAS, el MAS es nuestro: García Yapur et al., 2015). This metaphor explains very clearly what the MAS is (and what it is intended to be), and how it organises internally. According to the statute of the MAS-­IPSP, approved in 1999, all candidates for public office, as well as for internal office, must be elected by the members of the ‘organic movements’, who, in practice, are the trillizas and the cocaleros. In fact, partisan structures are completely non-­existent in the Bolivian regions where the trillizas are particularly rooted (Anria, 2014), as the MAS-­IPSP consists of them. MAS-­IPSP’s candidates, like union leaders, are

68  Bolivia expected to be simply ‘speakers’ for the base and to deliver ‘concrete’ returns to those they represent. In the political culture of the MAS-­IPSP, the centrality of the bottom-­up process of candidate selection based on the unions’ organisational structures is difficult to overstate. Both formal and informal rules make a long period of activism within the unions the conditio sine qua non to be a MAS-­IPSP candidate. For each electoral district or public office (mayors, municipal and regional councillors, MPs.  .  .), each trilliza (sometimes together with other ‘allied’ movements; see next section) proceeds to nominate its candidate, before the three then converge on a single name, through informal arrangements that are generally based on a complex system involving quotas and rotations. When consensus is not reached, the upper levels of the organisation (and often Morales himself) impose a solution (BO2; BO15; BO26). Several masistas MPs (see also Zuazo, 2008; García Yapur et al., 2015) flaunted their syndicalist origins and their ‘careers’ within their union. All of them motivated (even ‘justified’) their ‘jump’ to politics (something inherently ‘dirty’ and ‘bad’) because the MAS-­IPSP, in contrast to other parties, represents a mere ‘political instrument’ controlled by, and accountable to, the organised bases. According to its statute, the MAS-­IPSP’s sub-­national levels overlaps with those of the Bolivian state (municipality, province and departments), thus making clear its raison d’être: running for public elections. Formally, the highest organ of the MAS is the National Congress, which selects the National Directorate, which, in turn, elects the President of the party. Seven senior officials (among them, the President and the Vice-­President) form the Executive Committee. The Ampliados – official meetings at the national, regional or provincial level including IPSP’s delegates from lower territorial levels – represent another deliberative organ, which is common to all the Bolivian movements. However, the party statute is a poor guide to understanding how MAS-­IPSP concretely works. Hierarchical structures notwithstanding, the Bolivian movements that founded and form the MAS-­IPSP are built at the community level. When more senior levels agree on political actions or decisions, these are approved by consensus, after a deliberative process, during which the delegates of each territory keep their bases informed about the issues at stake and persuade them of the benefits of the decision taken. For a local leader, delivering ‘concrete’ results to their constituencies, or proving their personal commitment to the sindicato, are the most efficient ways of maintaining power and prestige (BO4; BO17). The fact that members identify primarily with their local sindicato explains why the mobilising capacity of the trillizas relies on the lowest (community) levels, although the latter are required to obey the ‘organic’ decisions of more senior figures within the party, whose legitimacy derives precisely from the ‘imperative mandate’ obtained from the lower levels. This contributes to explaining why the real locus of the political power within the MAS-­IPSP, at least in its origins, lay in the trillizas (BO5; BO29). Party bureaucracy is

Bolivia  69 extremely weak or even non-­existent, and, as Ximena Centellas, key advisor to the National Directorate, commented: The formal party organs at the local, departmental, and national levels are ‘political’ bodies, and for the most part they do not have the strength or the experience to propose anything, really. Their work focuses more on dealing with intraparty conflicts, and with the conflicts that arise within allied social organisations over power struggles (quoted from Anria, 2014: 182) The ‘ASP’ and the ‘MAS’, then, were conceived as little more than an electoral brand (BO21) controlled by the trillizas to conquer the state, and therefore, quite literally, as ‘instruments’ of the social movements. 3.4.3.  The Transition From a Movement-­Based Party to a Participative-­Mobilising Populism: Strengthened Leadership and the Inclusion of Other Sectors The MAS-­IPSP progressively abandoned its pure ‘movement-­based’ functioning in favour of a more ‘impure’, populist direction. Two factors account for this evolution. First, the necessity of expanding its electorate beyond the ‘core-­constituencies’ of the political instrument; the electorate had partially acquired a more popular, ‘plebeian’ profile  – albeit with a non-­negligible middle-­class base – than a purely peasant one. Second, and partially related to the first point, the consolidation of an ‘autonomous’, ‘white’ and intellectual faction, first within MAS-­IPSP’s congressional bench and then, decisively, in the government. The MAS-­IPSP achieved its first electoral victories exactly where the trillizas and the cocaleros were most rooted: Chapare, vast territories in the Highlands and some ‘colonised’ areas in the East of Bolivia, the Bolivian Orient. These zones remain the political bastions of the MAS-­IPSP. However, the party soon found it necessary to expand its partisan appeal to other rural zones and, crucially, urban centres. While maintaining strong roots through peasant social movements, the MAS-­IPSP thus began including new social actors and appealing to other sectors; meanwhile, the leadership strengthened its autonomy, allowing it to articulate (through ‘sovereigntist’, statist and anti-­ neoliberal appeals) and mediate the demands coming from its highly heterogeneous bases. Although the MAS-­IPSP is the political instrument of the trillizas and of the cocaleros, its explicit aim, since the beginning, was to represent ‘all the exploited popular sectors’, including workers, the urban poor, miners, teachers and even ‘middle-­class intellectuals’ (Burgoa Moya, 2016). From its origins in the cocalero zone, the MAS-­IPSP first expanded into the areas of the Highlands controlled by the pro-­Morales CSUTCB faction – that is, the Oruro and Potosí departments. In the 2002 general elections, the MAS-­IPSP was the

70  Bolivia most popular party in 76% of the municipalities of Oruro and in 58% of the municipalities of Potosí (García Yapur et al., 2014). The ‘political instrument’ also strengthened its control in Cochabamba (89% of the municipalities won), whereas in the La Paz (where it suffered from the competition of the MIP, the Aymara nationalist party led by the peasant union leader Felipe Quispe), Chuquisaca and Santa Cruz departments, it won 35%, 32% and 12% of the municipalities, respectively. Interestingly, in the territories populated by Lowland indigenous peoples, the MAS-­IPSP did not obtain significantly successful results; this was due also to the CIDOB’s alliance with other parties (Van Cott, 2005). The cooperativistas mineros (the workers in ‘mining cooperatives’) were one of the most numerous social sectors – other than the peasantry affiliated to the trillizas – that switched their votes en masse to the MAS-­IPSP. The evolution of the Bolivian mining sector had assumed dual traits since the beginning of the neoliberal era. On the one side was the private sector, which was more productive but contributed poorly to job creation. On the other side, a constellation of mining cooperatives (organised nationally through the FENCOMIN)9 flourished. These cooperatives were associations of individual ‘producers’, which exploited salaried workers who lacked any social rights and worked in conditions ‘similar to those existing in the 16th century’, with rudimentary technologies and very low productivity (Crabtree and Chaplin, 2013). Nearly 500,000 Bolivian citizens depend on the cooperativas mineras, concentrated in the departments of Oruro, Potosí and La Paz. They are an extremely well organised and electorally relevant constituency, thanks also to their geographic concentration. Only a tiny minority of the cooperativistas achieve high economic status, while the majority live and work in drastically poor conditions (Crabtree and Chaplin, 2013). During the neoliberal era, the cooperatives exploited the least productive and most exhausted mines. With the ‘commodity boom’, the cooperativistas began to contend with the salaried miners of private and public enterprises for the exploitation of more viable mines, provoking violent clashes, as in the case of Huanuni, in October 2006. The rapprochement between the MAS-­IPSP and the FENCOMIN further complicated the relationship between the party and the salaried mineworkers, who historically played a prominent role within the COB. In contrast, the organisational and numerical strength of the cooperativistas (the outsiders of the mining sector) opened a great political opportunity for the MAS to increase its electoral power in the Oruro and Potosí departments. The alliance between the trillizas and the FENCOMIN had always been tactical and instrumental; nevertheless, the cooperativistas mineros progressively achieved a higher status within the ‘political instrument’, at least at the local level, in competition with the trillizas (BO13; BO31). Many cooperativistas are also small landholders; it is not unusual that some FENCOMIN leaders also acted as representatives of the local CSUTCB, and vice versa (Zuazo, 2008). The MAS-­IPSP also pursued, with great success, a specific strategy to expand its support in urban areas. Before 2005, the party had never won any

Bolivia 71 departmental capital, in either municipal or general elections. In the 2002 general elections, the ‘political instrument’ topped the polls in only one big city, El Alto, thanks to the peculiar indigenous identity of that city and to the final decline of the neopopulist party CONDEPA (Lazar, 2013; BO30). The MAS-­ IPSP strengthened its organisational linkages with the juntas vecinales and the sindicatos urbanos during the 2003–2005 period, when El Alto hosted the Gas War and several revolts against the privatisation of the local water company. In 2006, this strategy culminated with the appointment of Abel Mamani, a FEJUVE leader, as Minister of Water and Environment (Zegada et al., 2007; Anria, 2014). However, the relationship between the MAS-­IPSP and the alteñas (and, in general, urban) organisations was (and remains) very different from that between the ‘political instrument’ and the trillizas. The MAS-­IPSP employed the same clientelist strategy of co-­optation traditionally used by the ‘traditional parties’ vis-­à-­vis urban organisations (Anria, 2014). Although candidate selection formally occurs through bottom-­up processes, the nominations have progressively come from organisation leaders who are, in fact, activists within the MAS who respond fully to the party’s directives. Juntas and sindicatos have been progressively weakened by internal divisions along partisan lines (BO5). In its early years, the MAS-­IPSP was unable to successfully appeal to the urban middle classes, who tended to see the cocaleros (and, more broadly, the peasant movements) as a danger to the stability of the country. To broaden its appeal in the urban centres (BO4; BO15; BO21), the MAS-­IPSP opted to ‘invite’ middle-­class intellectuals and other ‘urban’ figures onto its electoral lists; more than half the MPs elected under the MAS-­IPSP banner in 2002 were not ‘organic’ candidates (Van Cott, 2005). The invitados were (and still are) viewed with suspicion by the trillizas, whose representatives have typically argued that they lack the ‘commitment’ to the goals and the ‘spirit’ of the political instrument (BO17; BO23; García Yapur et al., 2015). The influence of the invitados within the party has grown persistently, as the MAS-­IPSP, once it had consolidated its control of rural areas, further deepened its ‘urban strategy’ in 2005 and in 2009, when it achieved absolute majorities of the national vote (54% and 64%, respectively). The appointment of its candidate for the Vice-­Presidency is illustrative of the ‘urban strategy’ of the MAS. In 2002, Morales opted for Antonio Peredo, the brother of Inti and Coco, two soldiers of the Guevarist guerrilla in 1967 (Burgoa Moya, 2016). This was a clear attempt to build a ‘worker-­peasant’ alliance, a strategy partially reversed in the following years, when the ‘number two’ of the political instrument became Álvaro García Linera, a prominent intellectual born in Cochabamba in an upper middle-­class family. Linera was expected to represent the ‘respectable face’ of the MAS in the eyes of the urban middle classes, in order to build a government in which ‘the ponchos and the ties would share the power’ (Zegada et al., 2007: 43). He soon became the main strategist of Morales’ governments, exerting an enormous influence over the MAS-­IPSP’s economic and political decisions.

72  Bolivia Table 3.1 MAS’ Percentages of the Votes in General Elections (2002–2014)

Chuquisaca La Paz Cochabamba Oruro Potosí Tarija Santa Cruz Beni Pando Total

2002

2005

2009

2014

17 22 38 29 27 6 10 3 3 21

54 67 65 63 58 32 33 16 21 54

56 80 69 79 78 51 41 38 45 64

61 67 65 67 65 48 50 44 54 51

Source: Author’s elaboration, using data from Atlas Electoral de Bolivia (2010) and the website of the National Electoral Court. In grey: Media Luna’s departments.

A major weakness of the MAS-­IPSP in its early phase was its poor support in the Eastern departments (the Media Luna or ‘Half Moon’: Tarija, Santa Cruz, Beni and Pando; see Table 3.1), which are the richest in terms of economic structures and natural resources. In 2002, the MAS-­IPSP topped the polls in just six Eastern municipalities, located in ‘colonised’ areas, thanks to the local presence of the CSCB, the only trilliza effectively rooted in all nine Bolivia departments. The departments of Santa Cruz, Beni and Pando were (and, with the partial exception of Pando, still are) characterised by a socioeconomic structure based on latifundios.10 The eastern economic oligarchy maintained enormous political influence through links with political parties and civil organisations like the ‘Civic Committee for Santa Cruz’ (Comité Cívico pro Santa Cruz), a ‘non-­political’ association dominated by the export-­oriented agro-­business (Marca et al., 2013). When the crisis of the neoliberal state became clear, these sectors, fearing the increasing strength of the indigenous people of the Highlands and of social movements, reacted through an autonomist discourse against the ‘centralist’ Bolivian state. Such a ‘counter-­hegemonic’ (and ‘counter-­revolutionary’) reaction marked Morales’ first presidential term dramatically.

3.5  The MAS-­IPSP in Power 3.5.1  The First MAS Government: New and Unified Mobilisations Against ‘the Right’ Historical Context: A Polarising Phase The triumph of Evo Morales, Álvaro García Linera and the MAS-­IPSP in the 2005 general elections, which followed two interim presidencies marked by

Bolivia 73 massive ongoing protests, assumed unexpected proportions; Morales obtained 53.7% of the valid votes cast, and the MAS-­IPSP obtained an absolute majority in the lower house, though not in the Senate. Before his official appointment by Congress, Morales was proclaimed President of the State and Apu Mallku (‘Supreme Leader’) in an evocative ceremony in the indigenous archaeological site of Tiwanaku. The implementation of the MAS’ ambitious governmental programme, summarised in the so-­called ‘Ten Commandments’11 (Zegada et al., 2007: 42), triggered – as expected – a strong reaction from the opposition. The first economic decisions of the new government, together with the call for the Constituent Assembly, inaugurated a long, chaotic and violent polarising phase of Bolivian history, which only ended in 2009, when Morales obtained a landslide victory over his opponents. From its first year in office, the new government showed great dynamism. Following the spirit of the Agenda de Octubre, in May 2006 Morales promulgated the Law Decree 28701, which ‘nationalised’12 the hydrocarbon sector. In March 2006, Morales called for the election of the Constituent Assembly: the MAS won those elections, but it did not obtain two-­thirds of the seats, thus giving a ‘veto power’ to the opposition within the Assembly. This work is not the place to provide a detailed account of the political events that marked the first Morales term. Certainly, that phase was the most actively polarised period of recent Bolivian history. The country broke into two social and ideological camps, while the impact of extra-­institutional politics (both pro-­and anti-­government) was enormous. The process leading to the drafting of the new Constitution (Constitución Política del Estado, CPE) was marked by severe tensions between the masista socio-­political coalition and the opposition, which were exacerbated by the government’s decision to cut the transfers of the hydrocarbon revenues to the departments in order to finance a new universal pension (Renta Dignidad), provoking pro-­autonomist reactions from Media Luna’s governors (Zegada et al., 2007; Mayorga, 2010). Political tensions paralysed the work of the Constituent Assembly for several months, and popular riots provoked by opposition militants were a constant threat to the safety of the masistas delegates. A first draft of the CPE, backed by the masistas, was approved on 10 December 2007. This whole period was marked by several violent protests and numerous demonstrations by each camp. The approval of the CPE triggered the most violent period of Morales’ first term. Morales enjoyed the support of the majority of the Highlands while the opposition had the support of most of the Media Luna population. The solution to this impasse (the ‘catastrophic gridlock’, to use the words of García Linera, 2011) came from an old proposal made by the opposition, which was surprisingly adopted by Morales: a call for popular recall referendums against the President. Morales understood that many citizens, not necessarily masistas, were tired of the sabotage practices of the opposition (Romero et al., 2009; Mayorga, 2010; Marca et al., 2013). The gamble paid off; Morales, in the recall

74  Bolivia referendum that was organised (10 August, 2008), obtained 67% of the popular vote. Popular support for the MAS-­IPSP increased even in the Media Luna. The ‘change in power relations’ (García Linera, 2011) between the government and the opposition forced the moderate antimasistas factions to negotiate (while the radical factions made use of terrorist practices). The government agreed to negotiate relevant modifications with the parliamentary opposition, which related to over 100 articles of the CPE approved in Oruro. The amended CPE was approved by a popular referendum in January  2009, with 61% of voters in favour. The Zenith of Communitarian Discourse: The New Constitution and the Ley de Reconducción Comunitaria It is impossible to overstate the relevance of the organised bases of the MAS-­ IPSP for the defence of the ‘process of change’ and for government during the first Morales term; the participative-­mobilising features of the MAS-­IPSP’s movement-­based populist project emerged in their entirety during the 2006– 2009 period. However, the role of the social movements began to change. The trillizas had their political instrument in government, while the indigenous movements, as parts of the Unity Pact, identified their primary political goal as the construction of a new CPE, i.e., a new country. Both the government and the masista congressional bench included intellectuals, as well as figures coming from the trillizas and from other organisations, each of them with particular demands and sometimes different ‘country projects’. Differing demands had to be satisfied while preserving political unity. The MAS-­IPSP’s populist project proved to be perfectly adept for achieving such potentially contrasting goals, at least until the government consolidated its position vis-­ à-­vis the opposition. To increase its electoral strength in the urban centres, Morales continued with the strategy of ‘inviting’ candidates to run in the MAS-­IPSP’s lists, instead of relying entirely on the multilevel, ‘organic’ process of candidate selection.13 Despite the partial loss of control suffered by the trillizas over their ‘instrument’, in 2006 the Bolivian Congress experienced a true ‘revolution’: indigenous people, peasants and settlers dramatically altered its sociological composition, thus making it a much closer ‘mirror’ of the multicultural, multi-­ ethnic and complex Bolivian society (Zegada and Komadina, 2011). Nevertheless, the 2006–2009 period was characterised by a very strong influence on the part of the indigenist discourses and movements. This was reflected both in the process that led to the drafting of the CPE and in the elaboration of the Ley de Reconducción Comunitaria, a sort of ‘Second Agrarian Reform’ (discussed later). During Morales’ first term, the situation of political polarisation insured a central role to the social movements and cemented the Unity Pact between the trillizas and the indigenist organisations (CIDOB and CONAMAQ), thus reviving the ‘unified mobilisations’ of the pre-­governmental phase.

Bolivia 75 The Pact prepared a comprehensive draft of the CPE, which served as the basis of discussion in the Constituent Assembly (Zegada et al., 2007; Garcés, 2010). The drafting process probably represented the most creative, deliberative and participatory moment in recent Bolivian history (BO9; BO13). Long discussions took place in the plenary Assemblies  – or in the various commissions  – with continuous consultations with the rank-­and-­file of each movement to evaluate the proposals coming from the other organisations and to choose the strategies to follow (BO9). In fact, different organisations had different projects in mind. The (Aymara) statist and nationalist project of the trillizas was radically different from the ‘multicultural’ vision of the indigenist organisations, which were clearly interested in the protection of ethnic and cultural minorities from an omnipotent state and in defending their ancestral rights over their lands (BO1; BO9; BO25). The final draft of the CPE included the right for indigenous peoples living in ‘protected areas’ to achieve high degrees of autonomy, and to be consulted if the state wished to exploit local natural resources. As a leader of the CSUTCB commented: ‘so, is this the famous plurinational state? So, we have fought for such a long time to conquer the power, and now we have to share it . . .’ (BO9; my translation). The first approval of the CPE represented the peak of the revolutionary moment in Bolivia; but it also marked the beginning of a process of centralisation and ‘institutionalisation’ of the ‘process of change’. The changes introduced by the Congress (with the participation of the opposition) limited the achievements of the ‘indigenist’ wing of the Unity Pact; yet, the CPE proclaimed the coexistence of ‘representative’, ‘direct-­participative’ and ‘communitarian’ democracy in the Bolivian Plurinational State.14 Indigenous organisations also had a significant influence on the drafting of the Ley de Reconducción Comunitaria, whose main architect was Alejandro Almaraz, a prominent sociologist and an early member of the ‘intellectual wing’ of the MAS-­IPSP. His respected status among the indigenist movements and the trillizas’ bases allowed him to design and implement a reform inspired much more by a ‘communitarian’ vision than the ‘individualist’ and ‘productivist’ expectations of the CSUTCB and of the CSCB (BO1; BO9). The most ‘communitarian’ provision, which Almaraz was able to defend against pressure from the trillizas and the government, was the prohibition of individual assignments of state-­owned lands, for which only collective title was admitted. Therefore, both the CPE and the Ley de Reconducción Comunitaria were clearly inspired by an ‘indigenist’, ‘communitarian’ vision that came mainly from the CONAMAQ and the CIDOB. In contrast, the government and the trillizas were much more determined to design the general features of the socioeconomic model to implement. The economic programme prepared for the 2005 elections, under the decisive influence of the Minister of the Economy Arce Catacora, posited three quite general goals: ‘dignity, sovereignty and productivity’. This implied that control over national resources (sovereignty) meant statist intervention in the economy to foster industrialisation and

76  Bolivia welfare (productivity, in order to ‘vivir bien’) and to eradicate extreme poverty (dignity). Such a statist project assigned strong control over the policy-­making process to the governmental wing of the MAS. The economic bonanza boosted public revenues, which financed generous social policies and substantial investment in public infrastructures, particularly in rural areas. The political initiative steadily moved towards the government, while the movements – and, particularly, the trillizas – rapidly changed their function, becoming ‘intermediaries’ between their communities and the government to attract public spending towards developmental projects and infrastructural works. This evolution became clear during Morales’s second term (2010–2014). After winning the 2009 general elections, the ‘organic’ movements firmly expected that ‘their turn’ for ‘receiving dividends’ had come (BO5; BO13; BO20; BO21). Morales and his government thus began acting as a ‘chamber of compensation’ for the various popular demands coming from the organisations that formed part of the masista coalition, a sort of ‘populist-­corporatist’ system of interest aggregation. This evolution was symbolised by the creation in 2008 of the CONALCAM (Comisión Nacional por el Cambio – National Commission for Change), an informal umbrella made up of the government and the leaders of the social movements sustaining the ‘process of change’: the trillizas, the CIDOB, the CONAMAQ, the most important juntas vecinales and several other unions (street vendors, transportation workers, cooperativist miners and, some years later, also the COB; Mayorga, 2010). The CONALCAM was created to mobilise and coordinate the various ‘popular sectors’ during the struggle for the CPE and, later, for electoral campaigning (BO5; BO29). Its creation reflected the growing institutionalisation of the ‘process of change’, and the diminished autonomy of the social movements in relation to the government. 3.5.2  The Second MAS Government. Winners and Losers of the Proceso De Cambio From the beginning, the MAS-­IPSP aimed to build a social alliance encompassing all the ‘exploited’ and ‘excluded’ Bolivian social sectors. In fact, particularly since 2005, the MAS-­IPSP opened its lists to candidates who came from ‘non-­core’ organisations such as the FENCOMIN, the COB, the transportation workers’ and street vendors’ unions or the juntas vecinales. Several scholars (e.g., Zegada et al., 2007; Do Alto and Stefanoni, 2010; Mayorga, 2014) warned of the potential problems created by the extreme social heterogeneity of the masista alliance, which prefigured a certain hierarchisation of the MAS-­IPSP. Indeed, ‘presidential decisionism’ (Mayorga, 2014) has undoubtedly increased. Morales has the last word on the solution to the ‘creative tensions’ (García Linera, 2011) that erupt amongst the different sectors participating in the proceso de cambio. The figure of ‘Evo’ is almost never criticised by grassroot masistas, who in the end tend to blame his ‘intellectual

Bolivia 77 entourage’ for having weakened the links between the government and the movement (BO16; BO17). Nevertheless, the empowerment of the Bolivian popular, ‘marginal’ (Zegada et al., 2007) sectors and the improvement of their living conditions are also unquestionable. The heterogeneous movements and interest groups participating in the proceso de cambio occupy very different positions within the galaxia oficialista. A central feature of the participative-­mobilising populisms, as defined in Chapter 2, is the existence of inter-­organisational conflicts between the different movements or organisations, and the MAS-­IPSP is a paradigmatic case in this sense. Particularly since its triumph in the 2011 elections, which temporarily weakened the ‘common enemy’ (the political Right) and made a reverse of the proceso unlikely, strong contrasts around distributive issues have emerged. Some organisations, each of them representing specific social sectors of the complex and lively Bolivian society, have been more able than others to have their demands better satisfied. The direction taken by the proceso de cambio in socioeconomic issues represents a reliable indicator of the ‘power relations’ within masismo, because the masista socioeconomic model provoked unequal gains amongst the social sectors represented by different organisations. The Masista Socioeconomic Model. An Overview Economic development and redistributive social policies were, from the beginning, the real priorities of the masistas governments. Bolivia experienced a sustained economic boom, thanks in part to the rise of the international prices of its commodities – mainly hydrocarbons, minerals and soybean. The choice of ‘nationalising’ (i.e., increasing the public participation in hydrocarbon and extractive activities) Bolivian non-­renewable resources allowed for a huge increase in social spending and in public investments, the results of which were immediately visible. Between 2005 and 2014, GDP per capita tripled (from US $1,037 to US $3,116), the percentage of people living in extreme poverty fell from 38.2% to 17.8%, and the minimum wage increased from 440 to 1,440 Bolivianos. There was a steep increase in international financial reserves and a strong reduction in inequality, as the Gini index fell from 0.63 to 0.47 during the 2005–2011 period. According to the MAS-­IPSP’s ‘socio-­communitarian and productive economic programme’, largely set out by Arce Catacora, the Minister of Economy, the restoration of sovereignty in the exploitation of the natural resources was to bring dignity and productivity for all Bolivians, through rural and industrial developmental projects and higher social spending. The basic idea, then, was to take advantage of the resources produced by sectors that contribute poorly to the employment rate but are characterised by high productivity, and to reinvest the revenues in labour-­intensive agricultural and industrial sectors. Economic sovereignty was also pursued through the nationalisation of several utility companies (water, electricity, air transports and telecommunications), while making tariff control possible through public subsidies.

78  Bolivia Public investments have effectively increased.15 However, the modification of the economic structure has been, at best, very limited. Large parts of Bolivian society have benefitted from important subsidies in the prices of basic goods and from extensive social policies, as well as from new public infrastructure. However, the project of ‘industrialising Bolivia’ seems to have failed, while agro-­industrial and tertiary (mainly commercial) sectors have experienced impressive growth. In fact, during the 2001–2011 period, the contribution of the industrial sector and the agricultural sector both slightly decreased (from 20.4% to 19.6% and 15.8% to 14.9% of GDP, respectively), whereas the contribution of the extractive sectors increased from 25.9% to 28.7% of GDP. Nearly half of the Bolivian GDP is currently produced by the commercial and transportation sectors, which have experienced a spectacular boom in recent years (Tassi et al., 2012: 64). Most of these activities consist in small and very small economic units, usually active in the so-­called ‘informal’ economy, which employ two-­thirds of Bolivians. Because this proportion has continued to grow during the masistas governments, the project of ‘formalising’ the Bolivian economy and its labour market has substantially failed (BO12; BO18; BO22; McNelly, 2019a). Safety-­net social programs financed through oil and gas revenues  – such as the minimum pension scheme Renta Dignidad, or the monthly allowance to prevent truancy (Bono Juancito Pinto) or child malnutrition (Bono Juana Azurduy) – soon became extremely popular, despite their quite limited size.16 Another popular measure, negotiated with the COB, was the nationalisation (in 2010) of the pension system, which reversed the ‘Chilean’ reform implemented by Sánchez de Losada. A very popular programme, Evo Cumple (‘Evo Accomplishes’), delivers infrastructural work at the community level, in educational, wealth or sport areas, among others. In addition, 35% of oil revenue is paid directly to the municipalities, further fostering the development of local infrastructural programs. As an NGO consultant reported: About the social programs, here, in the Highlands, they have been decisive . . . when you go to a reunion, people perceive them clearly . . . comrades come and tell you, ‘you know that until ten years ago we were SO poor’ . . . they can’t believe it. . . . when you go to a community, people notice that a road was built, they have . . . new stuffs, which can’t seem very important, such as . . . a football pitch . . . more possibilities to go to the city . . . even the very possibility to can go to a city! (BO25) After the dramatic events of the 2006–2009 period, Morales’ government was also able to find a modus vivendi with its old ‘archenemies’, the agro-­industrial élites of Santa Cruz (BO1; BO21; Saavedra, 2015). Morales acknowledged the importance of this sector for food provision for the growing urban population, the revenues coming from the exportation of soybean and for the ‘trickle-­down’ effects for the small and medium peasantry (organised

Bolivia 79 into the CSUTCB and  – mostly – the CSCIOB) in the Lowlands (Colque et al., 2015). The “Trillizas Government” in Power The masista rhetoric usually referred to Morales’ executive as the ‘government of the social movements’ (el gobierno de los movimientos sociales). Like many slogans, this one contains a grain of truth, but was also far from fully describing the reality (Zuazo, 2010). Not even the trillizas completely directed their ‘instrument’. This was mainly due to the process of ‘autonomisation’ of the government from its ‘social bases’, and due to its ‘technocratisation’.17 Obviously, governmental tasks necessarily gave the executive greater autonomy. Moreover, as most of the leaders of the social movements moved to occupy political positions, this provoked a difficult renewal of the leaderships of the movements (BO13). The concentration of power produced stronger top-­down influences on the selection of the movements’ leaders (BO6; BO17; BO29), further restraining the autonomy of the social movements, limiting the ‘bottom-­up’ features of the MAS-­IPSP and distorting the concept of ‘political instrument’. As Anria stresses (2014: 168–177), and as confirmed by several interviewees, the political direction of the proceso was fully controlled by the government. The drafting of policy proposals relied on sectorial experts engaging in direct dialogue with the Ministries, while the contribution of the MAS-­IPSP’s congressional bench was often negligible (BO21; Zegada and Komadina, 2011). However, this did not imply that the trillizas were fully excluded from the policy-­making process, since they remained highly influential in the negotiations regarding the concrete distribution of public funding for social and economic spending. Such political exchanges tended to occur outside the parliamentary arena; the detailed legislation was continuously discussed during informal reunions between Morales and his ministries and the representatives of the social organisations. As the leader of the CSCIOB reported: In the past, who cared about us? To approve a bill, a project, a decree, who dialogued with us? Nobody. When they implemented coca zero policies, who dialogued with us? . . . The government now goes to hear even the furthest Bolivian community; it receives many proposals. For instance, yesterday, I had a meeting with the President. I specified all of our claims: ‘organic’, political, productive claims. And I am sure that all the social organisations do this. Through these reunions, these ampliados, the ‘Patriotic Agenda’ was drafted. It is not true that the ‘Patriotic Agenda’ comes from the government. This is the rhetoric of the Right. They want to divide the government from us. (BO15) The obvious consequence was that the role of MAS-­IPSP’s legislators, and particularly of those ‘organically’ elected and belonging to the trillizas, was

80  Bolivia strongly circumscribed and subject to contrasting tensions. MAS-­IPSP MPs were expected to obey governmental directives and the leader, whose legitimacy derived from being the highest expression of the ‘government of the social movements’; as García Linera famously stated, ‘the MAS is not a party formed by free thinkers’ (quoted in Zegada and Komadina, 2011). Although MAS-­IPSP representatives used to claim to be, first of all, accountable to their own constituencies (BO17; Zegada and Komadina, 2011), the ‘orders from above’ tended to be the most compelling, because the trillizas were highly conscious of their key priority: backing ‘their government’ in power and defending their institutional power. The trillizas thus assumed two main roles. First, they became the ‘intermediaries’ between their communities and the state. The border at the municipal level between the union and public administration was extremely porous, due to the complete hegemony achieved by the MAS-­IPSP in rural areas (Oikonomakis and Espinoza, 2014; BO9). Second, they tended to represent the most dynamic and ‘productivist’ peasantry, who benefitted from the booms in soybean (in the East), quinoa (in the Highlands) and coca18 crops (BO1), in sharp contrast with the communitarian and traditionalist rhetoric.19 To quote the words of a CSUTCB leader: Our goals are freedom and social justice; thus we do not fight for small things. The CSUTCB go much beyond these small things, these ‘sops’ [tajaditas] that we could obtain. We do not care about doble aguinaldo [the compulsory ‘second bonus’ introduced by Morales for formal, salaried workers], we don’t care about the salary, because the salary could end, a job could end, a mine could end, but our work will never end. Therefore, our claims, as peasants, have more to do with productive issues, something that we were not allowed to discuss with the neoliberal governments. Now we can talk about a lot, a lot, a lot of projects and programs related with production, irrigation, roads, genetic improvements that we are discussing now. . . (BO4) Non-­Core Organisations. The MAS-­IPSP as the ‘Political Instrument’ of Non-­Salaried Sectors? We coordinate [with the COB] about some policies, such as the universal health system, . . . the education system, we have to coordinate, it is necessary . . . because teachers depend on the COB, but also depend on the peasantry, because, if there are no peasants, there are no children, and the teacher will lose his job. (BO4)

The COB depends on salaried workers . . . but we, as peasants, are also affiliated to it! Now, the COB has realised it. . . . the COB cannot still say that it

Bolivia 81 represents only the salaried workers, it represents also peasants, merchants, street vendors . . . the COB is the Father of all of us! (BO23)

The relations between the organisations representing the Bolivian insiders (the salaried workers employed in the formal sectors) and the MAS-­IPSP government were not free from tension. Of course, the COB was aware that its political condition has dramatically improved, when compared with the neoliberal era (BO11; BO12). However, the policy results of the Morales governments were often less than satisfactory for the unions, such as, for example, in the case of the negotiations regarding the Pension Law reform, in which salaried workers were forced to dramatically lower their demands (BO22). Despite the inclusion of several cobistas within the electoral lists of the MAS-­IPSP, union officials complained that the COB was highly underrepresented at the governmental and parliamentary levels (BO12). An effective governmental intervention to ‘industrialise’ and ‘formalise’ the economy (a central goal of the COB: BO18; BO22) would have affected several interest groups that were important core-­constituencies for the MAS-­ IPSP (Tassi et al., 2012) – for example, those involved in commercial activities related to smuggling, which directly damage Bolivian small artisan industries. This and other kinds of illegal trafficking, including that linked with the coca economy, are very difficult to eradicate. The illegal importing of basic consumer goods has fostered the emergence of a well-­to-­do ‘indigenous bourgeoisie’ (burguesía chola) who play a leading role within the sindicatos urbanos, which were closely linked to the MAS-­IPSP (Tassi et al., 2012). In the same vein, the Congress passed several ‘perdonazos’ bills, legalising the selling of cars and trucks illegally imported from Chile, to appease the powerful transportation unions (Crabtree and Chaplin, 2013). The COB portrayed itself as a ‘critical friend’ of the MAS-­IPSP (BO12). However, some unions representing specific salaried sectors (such as urban teachers) overtly opposed the MAS-­IPSP; the latter points to their ‘selfishness’, ‘laziness’ and their supposed links with right-­wing parties (BO23; BO26). During the last years of Morales’ governments, the COB had assumed a more critical stance, partially in response to the growing dissatisfaction of its rank-­and-­files. The numerous corruption scandals that involved rural unions increased working-­class discontent. While the statist, desarrollista inspiration of Morales’ inner circle within the government did have some points in common with cobistas’ ideologies and interests, other features of the governmental project were much more akin to the interests of rural and urban self-­employed workers (Do Alto and Stefanoni, 2010) and were clearly at odds with the expectations of the COB. Another source of tension between the salaried and non-­salaried sectors included in the broad masista social coalition was the long (and often violent) conflict between salaried miners and cooperativistas. The FSTMB (the salaried mineworkers federation) used to dub the cooperativistas ‘bloodsuckers’

82  Bolivia who take advantage of a favourable fiscal regime. The FENCOMIN replied that the FSTMB was simply defending the ‘privileges’ of the salaried miners, whose wages were well above the Bolivian average (BO3; BO12; BO31). All attempts on the part of the MAS-­IPSP government to limit the privileges of the cooperativistas were unsuccessful because of their high mobilising capacity and their ability to act as a legislative (and social) bloc (BO32). Other organisations representing outsider sectors, such as transportation unions and other sindicatos urbanos representing informal workers, also worked as effective ‘veto blocs’ within the masista coalition. However, the process of co-­opting union leaders provoked important tensions with rank-­ and-­file union members. Several masistas union leaders had been severely criticised for cronyism and other clientelist practices, which contributed to discrediting the unions and thereby to the declining effectiveness of the MAS-­ IPSP’s organisational linkages, particularly in urban areas (BO16; BO18).

3.6 Who Votes for the MAS-­IPSP? Sociological Determinants of the Masista Vote The qualitative evidence presented above described the inter-­organisational struggles between the Bolivian popular organisations that made up part of the proceso de cambio led by the MAS. To assess the extent to which social cleavages had repercussions on voting choices, here I  offer (see Table 3.2) a quantitative analysis, using survey data, referring to the 2009 elections,20 from LAPOP (Latin American Public Opinion Project). I present the results of basic multivariate analyses through probit regression models. The regressors, apart from employment, education, income, age and self-­declared ethnicity,21 include: ideology (in a 1–10 scale: 1=Left, 10=Right); gender; a dichotomous variable called ‘Half Moon’, indicating whether the respondent lives in the Media Luna; and a ‘Participation Index’ (whose range is from 0 to 4, measuring the participation of the respondents, in the past 12 months, in neighbourhood committees, junta vecinal, asociación de padres de familia or sindicatos). I included also a dichotomous variable called Bono, which indicates whether the respondent, or a family member, is a recipient of a social policy program, such as Renta Dignidad, Bono Juancito Pinto or Bono Juana Azurduy. One could argue that the relationship between voting for Evo Morales and both self-­placement on the left-­right axis and self-­declared ethnicity is endogenous. This seems highly likely, as the politicisation of the ‘indigenous question’, together with the strong anti-­imperialist and anti-­neoliberal rhetoric of the MAS-­IPSP, could have pushed the masista electorate towards the Left, and towards a greater ‘proudness’ about their ethnic origins. This is the main reason for proposing a second model that does not include ethnicity and ideology among the regressors. I also report a third model, which further reduces the number of the regressors, to reduce multicollinearity. Some interesting patterns clearly emerge even in the first probit model, which includes ethnicity and ideology among the regressors. Peasants and

Bolivia 83 Table 3.2 Determinants of the Vote for MAS-IPSP (2009 Elections, Probit Models)

Ideology White Indigenous Female Age – First Tercile Age – Third Tercile Low Education High Education Urban Peasant Unemployed Self-Employed Worker ­ Retired Worker Blue-Collar ­ Salaried Worker Merchant Unpaid Domestic Worker Student Income – First Quartile Income – Second Quartile Income – Fourth Quartile Participation Index Half Moon Bono‘s Recipient Constant N Log-Likelihood ­ Pseudo R²

Model 1

Model 2

−0.21** −0.65** 0.49** −0.01 −0.01 −0.01 0.22* −0.19 −0.05 0.19 −0.13 0.15 −0.15 0.08 0.22 0.21 0.03 −0.19 0.14 −0.05 −0.07 −0.01 −0.83** 0.22** 1.69** 1389 −644.74 0.25

−0.07 0.05 0.00 0.27** −0.22** −0.06 0.48** −0.12 0.22 −0.06 0.29 0.11 0.37** 0.13 −0.26 0.29** 0.01 −0.13 0.03 −1.02** 0.14* 0.56** 1697 −885.84 0.18

Model 3

0.98** 0.14 0.46** 0.29 0.60** 0.38 0.66** 0.43** 0.00

0.03 −1.13** 0.22** 0.26** 1918 −1044.19 0.17

Source: Author’s elaboration, using data from LAPOP (2010). *=p