Costruire il «popolo». Il contributo teorico di Ernesto Laclau e le prospettive dei populismi contemporanei

Populism is a relevant topic in current political debates and analysis. The global financial and social crisis is fostering a reshaping of representative and liberal democracies. Particularly in Europe, as a result of this crisis of democratic politics, various authoritarian, xenophobic, radical and potentially violent movements, parties and leaders, generally labelled as «populist», are springing up in several countries. Populism is a complex and protean political phenomenon. Thus, using the label «populist » just for authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies does not allow us to grasp all the various expressions of populism in contemporary politics, as well as the ambivalent relationship between democracy and populism, grounded on the re-definition of some key concepts for the democratic politics, like «people» and «popular sovereignty ». The authors of the article quest for the development of a non-evaluative theoretical toolkit, in order to take into account all the different nuances, varieties and ambivalences of the populist phenomenon emerging in the European political landscapes. In this effort, Ernesto Laclau’s approach to populism is considered as a substantial starting point. The article provides a critical assessment of Laclau’s approach, synthetically describing its main features and arguments, and assessing them with some of the main critics that, mainly within the post-Marxist field, have been engaged in a fruitful debate with Laclau. Lately, the article provides a first sample of the potential of the use of a laclausian approach to populism for the analysis of three cases of social and political movements that have been emerging in Italy during the last years, in order to outline a possible research agenda for the future: the «Five Star Movement»; the movement against the high speed train in Val Susa, in the Piedmont region; the movement in defence of water resources as «commons»