Movement Parties: New Breed of Radical Democratic Politics?

Movement Parties:

New Breed of Radical Democratic Politics?

// by Marina Prentoulis and Lasse Thomassen

After the financial crisis and the square movements of2011 and beyond, we have seen the emergence of a new breed of political parties: movement parties. These parties include SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Left Unityin Sloveniaand Alternativet in Denmark. Even traditional parties such as the British Labour Party has a claim as a ‘movement party’ thanks to Momentum, the group that sprang from Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign and is now one of the most powerful formations within Labour. While these partiesareoftengroupedtogetherbylaypersonsandacademics, there are, however, important differences between them.

The first thing to note is that movement parties are not an entirely new phenomenon. In a chapter published more than a decade ago, Herbert Kitschelt defined movement parties as a hybrid between movements and parties, havingin mind the Northern European Green parties. 1 The Green parties rose out of the environmental movement, which, like other new formations, was critical of the ways in which the state, as well as traditional parties and interest groups, did politics. Their concern with a more horizontalist and participatory form ofpolitics was brought into the Green parties. For Kitschelt, movement parties were transitional phenomena: they were basically movements on their way to becoming parties. The German Greens would be a case in point. After the financial crisis and the square movements of 2011, the relationship between movements and formal politics has been reinvigorated, and a new phenomenon is emerging: movement parties. Such parties can be seen as a response to a general crisis ofrepresentation, 2 the crisis that some associate with the post-democratic condition ofthe last thirty years, 3 but they differ from the movements ofthe preceding decade byacceptingthe need to engage with formal political representative institutions. This new phenomenon raises a host of ques

1 Herbert Kitschelt (2006), ‘Movement Parties’, in Richard S. Katz and William J. Crotty (eds.),

Handbook of Party Politics (New York, Sage), pp. 278-90. tions, including whether it is possible to combine radical politics with formal political institutions.

Like Kitschelt, Donatella della Porta and others define movement parties as hybrids ofmovements and parties where organisational and environmental linkages between the two are close. 4 Their main examples are SYRIZA, Podemos and the Italian Five Star Movement. Movement parties thus differ from traditional (non-movement) parties. For instance, historically, socialist and social-democratic parties have emerged from social movements, most ofall from trade unions. But, in these cases, parties quickly emerged as hierarchical structures firmly embedded within political institutions, even when retaining close links to trade unions. Movement parties differ with their insistence on keeping the links to social movements and organising in a more horizontal and participatoryway. While itis useful to define movementparties in this way, we argue that there are important differences among them. Those differences are important when we assess the strategies developed by, and available to, these parties, and when we assess their future prospects. While there are right-wingvariants ofmovement parties–suchas the TeaPartyMovementandthe RepublicanParty in the US –here we focus only on left-wing variants. The brief typology we develop here is developed in a bottom-up fashion. Rather than providing a set ofclear-cut distinctions, we use the typologyto raise anumberofquestions aboutthe nature andprospects of movement parties, based on how their relationship with social movements was shaped at the point oforigin.

The first type ofmovement partyarises when a particular movement becomes a party but self-consciously seeks to retain key characteristics of a movement. The Green parties would be an earlier example ofthis, as are the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) and the African National Congress (ANC), the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and possibly the United Front (UF) in South Africa. As it is also clear from this list, the risk ofreproducing the logic ofthe

formal political system –verticality, closure, and so on –are huge, and thequestionistowhatextenttheydifferfromsocialistandsocial-democratic parties with their background in the labour movement. In the European context, the Five Star Movement in Italy would be an example as it has emerged out ofdifferent protest movements, amongthem the protests against the privatisation ofwater. But, at the same time, the movement/party has centred on the personality of Grillo, and it is not exactlya partyofthe Left. Whatever the case maybe, the choices they are facing after the March 2018 elections regarding forming a governmentreflectthestrategicdilemmasofmost, ifnotall, movement parties. These dilemmas are accentuated because this type of movement party undergoes a mutation from movement to movement party, and therefore the identities of activists and potential voters are tied to the grassroots nature ofthe movement.

The second type of movement party consists of parties that emerge on the back ofsocial movements or protests with the aim of tapping the energies ofthe latter and transpose them into electoral politics. Podemos would be an example, although there is an important time-lapse between the 2011 Spanish Indignados Movement and the emergence ofPodemos in 2014. The United Left in Slovenia would be another example. The dilemmas facingapartylike Podemos are slightly different. On the one hand, they are not a movement that became a party, and so they are not tied to a movement identity. On the other hand, they presented themselves as a different kind of party from the very beginning: more horizontal, more participatory and more inclusive. Perhaps more importantly, they presented themselves as the partyofthe Indignados, or at least the partythat would carryforward the spirit ofthe Indignados movement. This is also the reason why today so many people have become disillusioned with Podemos. The Indignados movement opened up space for an alternative form ofpolitics, and Podemos took advantage ofit occupying that space. In the case ofPodemos, we have a highly mediatised (but unconventional) leadership who connects with the broader population in a direct manner through mainstream and non-mainstream media and through new social media, including platforms for direct voting on policies. This allows for a combination of vertical and horizontal structures, but it does not rely on the active participation (and influence) oflarge numbers ofactivists. While Podemos initiallyrelied on local andthematic “circles”, these have graduallylostinfluence. (Having said that, there is a marked difference between Podemos at the national level and some of the political movements at the municipal level, such as Barcelona en Comú, which has retained more of the horizontalist and participatory structure.) This is perhaps one way in which Podemos differs from movement parties that have emerged more graduallyand organicallyfrom social movements.

The thirdtype, often associatedwithPodemos butquite different, is the case ofSYRIZA. In Greece, we are dealing with a party that pre-existedtheprotestsandmovementsofthesquares. Fromitsinception, SYRIZA sought relations with social movements, and especially the youth wing ofthe partywas verymuch involved in the European Social Fora, leading to the formation ofthe Greek Social Forum in 2003, and finally the hosting ofthe 4 th European Social Forum in Athens in 2006. 5 In this respect, SYRIZA already had problematized the relationshipbetweenpartyandmovementswhile activelyengaged in the latter. The link between party and movements was reaffirmed in the declaration of the Founding Congress of SYRIZA in 2013 when itwas statedthatSYRIZA’s aim was notonlythe parliamentary presence of the movements of the squares but also the involvement in the creation andsupportofastrongunitedpopularmovement. Thus, when the 2011 protests erupted, SYRIZA sought to tap the energies of the protests and transpose them into electoral politics, similarly to what Podemos attempted, but with a time-lag. However, SYRIZA has experienced the same disjuncture between leadership and activists faced by Podemos, especially after the formation ofthe Greek government. The 2013 SYRIZA Congress Declaration states that “the transference of powers to elected representatives leads sooner or later to stagnation and retreat, ifnot destruction: those who entrust them are transformed into passive accepters of a policy that opposes their interests and desires, while those who assume the responsibility of suchanassignmentare mutatedandcorrupted.” 6 Despite this attempt to materialise a more horizontal and participatory structure inside and outside the party, the Congress did not represent a break from traditional forms ofpartyorganization: the resolutions were voted by delegates elected from SYRIZA’s local groups.

The finaltypeofmovementpartyisthe case ofapartybeingtaken over from within by a movement, using the party as a platform and trying to change the party’s structure, in order to promote its own line and a more participatory form of politics. This is the case of Momentum and the Labour Party in the UK and, to a lesser extent, of Sanders and the Democratic Partyin the US. In these cases, the shift is not from the movement to aparty; instead, activists enterthe arena offormal partypolitics in orderto change the partyinto amovement, both in their politics and in their structure. As a result, those involved have usually accepted the vertical logic ofthe political system from the start, as theytryto influence these parties in amore horizontalist direction, amplifying their influence within these structures.

This typology opens up an interesting field of inquiry regardingthe different expressions ofmovement parties, and the difficulties they face in bridging electoral with grassroots politics. Although the typologyrefers to the origins ofmovement parties, we claim that this shapes how the movement party engages with participatory structures and electoral politics. The typologyis not the final word on the differences we can observe between different movement parties. We have also not considered a number of new phenomena such as Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! and Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise. Both share characteristics with movement parties but may be seen more as electoral machines supporting a particular political leader, even ifMelenchon’s movement draws on the anti-labour law protests. There is also the question of the relationship between movement parties and populism. Many of the movement parties mentioned here are also (seen as) populist, which raises the question of what populism shares with a movement party. In particular, one would have to ask how the vertical relationship between leader and masses interacts with the horizontal organisation ofmovement parties. What is clear is that the appearance of movement parties constitutes a challenge to those who associate radical politics and radical democracy with horizontalism, but also to those who insist that radical politics is onlyeffective insofar as it works through existing institutions.

Praxis of Rebellion