Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

Germany 121
framework, the history of the democratic system, the political culture underlying
it, and the range of political matters that can be influenced in the
short term, given the governing constellations and strategic abilities of the
established parties, all restrict the scope for right-wing populism in Germany
and thereby make life difficult for challengers. These restrictions will be
discussed below. As will why right-wing extremist and populist actors have
also failed to grasp those opportunities that have been presented to them.
The spotlight here falls on organizational problems and a lack of professionalism
within the new parties, in addition to the absence of charismatic leaders
and, finally, the rivalry between them. I shall then try to gauge the
extent to which the prospects for right-wing populism in Germany have
been impaired by the emergence of a protest alternative on the Left, in the
form of the PDS and The Left Party. It would have been equally consistent
with the structure of the chapter to deal with this point previously, during
the examination of the structural factors affecting the parties of the far
Right. However, it owes its inclusion among the factors related to agency due
to the fact that, in my view, the PDS and Left Party embody key populist
attributes, some of which they share with the parties of the Right, and can
therefore be analysed as populist players on the political stage.
This mooted existence of a left-wing brand of populism raises the question
of whether populism is a concept that can be clearly and fully defined
and what value it possesses as a label for a newly emerged family of political
parties in Western democracies. I examine these questions later, focusing
attention on the alleged affinity of populism with the ideological Right.
This analysis culminates in a working definition of the concept of populism,
which makes an analytical distinction between three levels:
(1) the social background from which populist parties emerge;
(2) their ideological characteristics;
(3) their organizational forms and the techniques deployed to appeal to
voters.
Right-wing populism as a party label
Long established in academic discussion to denote a new breed of party and
politician, the term ‘right-wing populism’ is now increasingly used by journalists
and politicians too. There are probably two main reasons for this:
first, right-wing populism is the sort of term that is equally at home as an
explanatory scientific formula and as a political battle cry; second, the term
is remarkably non-committal. Although it is employed in a critical sense, it
is not truly condemnatory or stigmatizing. Indeed, this may be the reason
why the accusation of populism is so ubiquitous in public debate.
The characteristics of populism as a political formula, however − namely
its heavily value-laden nature and semantic imprecision − pose problems for