Populism and international affairs: The case of Spain

Both left-wing and right-wing populists share a variant of the worldview that society is fundamentally in a state of conflict between ordinary people and the corrupt elite, adding that the former must recover sovereignty which, populists claim, was usurped by domestic elites colluding with international ones. ¹ This leads to some predictable foreign policy positions (with several qualifications), such as the primacy of national or the “people's” sovereignty as an organizing principle of international affairs ² ; preference for a multipolar world ³ ; suspicion of, or cynicism toward, multilateral governance institutions ⁴ ; and, particularly among populists in the Mediterranean region, sympathy toward, or an instrumental approach to, Russia and/or China. ⁵ Scholars around the world have noticed, hence the burgeoning literature on the intersections between populism and international affairs. ⁶

This trend matters for the future of international politics. Ministries of foreign affairs, diplomats, and internationalist civic-society organizations would benefit from research that deepens our knowledge on how populists of both the left and right understand and behave toward other actors in the international system. On the scholarly plane, this line of inquiry can potentially answer questions relevant to the field, such as: what are some of the ontological features of populism and how are these elements connected to some of their preferences in the realm of international relations? This essay aims to provide tentative answers to these questions with a focus on Spain, which, like other southern European countries, has experienced a rise of right- and left-wing populism since 2010. The article is the fruit of research conducted in Madrid during the spring and summer of 2022, mainly in the Spanish National Library. ⁷

Theoretical reflections on the character of ideologies

Populists are often on opposite sides of the political spectrum; it is for this reason that many claim that populism is a “discourse,” ⁸ a “political logic,” ⁹ or a “thin ideology.” ¹⁰ Scholars in the latter camp often build on the work of Cass Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, ¹¹ who posit the thin ideology thesis to explain the tendency of populists to attach to, and derive policy proposals from, underlying host ideologies, such as liberalism, socialism, and conservatism. A different group of scholars argues that populism has distinct ideological elements which distinguish them from traditional parties. ¹² In a similar vein, Chantal Mouffe ¹³ posits a populist core with the purpose of highlighting how left and right populists can potentially combine to challenge the neoliberal oligarchy which, it is claimed, has undermined democracy in many Western countries. This paper concords with the latter position in the debate, but not for normative reasons à la Mouffe. Rather, the purpose is to analytically connect populist ideology to patterns in foreign policy, and some reflections on the character of ideology will assist the endeavor.

Micheal Freeden ¹⁴ has outlined features that, in general, ideologies share: a recurring pattern of ideas, beliefs, or opinions, and a consequent pattern of policy preferences that contest existing political arrangements. Ralph Schroeder ¹⁵ helpfully adds that another feature of ideologies is that they are usually born as a result of historical or social changes that give rise to new conflicts which existing political forces do not adequately accommodate. This sociological underpinning is crucial to understanding the persistence of ideologies.

In the case of populism, financial and/or migratory crises related to globalization and consequently, representative democracy, lead to new conflicts and political programs which can transcend left and right. Scholars have noticed this pattern in several contexts. Paolo Mosseti ¹⁶ focuses on populism in Italy, particularly the crises which gave rise to it, and the sociological features of voters of both the Five Star Movement (5SM) and Lega (League). On this basis, he develops what he calls an “organic theory of populism,” by which he means it arose in part out of new conflicts in Italian society which the system did not adequately represent. Angelos Chryssogelos's ¹⁷ analysis of Greece's populist coalition, Syriza and ANEL, in 2015 is evidence of what he calls a “core populist logic” that transcends left and right and which, in that case at least, the thin ideology thesis does not fully account for. Lastly, Schroeder ¹⁸ observed how Trump's foreign policies represented a populist core that transcended left and right.

Most scholars agree that a core element of populism is the contention that the main division in society is between the “elite” and the “people.” Scholars who defend the thin ideology thesis claim that this division lacks an objective sociological basis, since, they argue, this Manichean divide between two ostensibly homogenous blocks denies the pluralism inherent in modern society. Populism, consequently, usually attaches itself to underlying “thick,” or host, ideologies, with purportedly clearer or more rigid social bases of support, mainly extreme right or extreme left. ¹⁹ The implication is that underlying thicker ideologies have more precise, stable, or identifiable sociological bases with clear programs of action which involve distributional consequences, economic and/or political, that are favorable to supporters. The left would be expected to pursue policies that favor the disadvantaged, while the right would do the same for the privileged. Populists’ discursive or thin-ideological elite-people divide, goes the reasoning, would then attach itself to one of these thicker ideologies if circumstances are propitious.

Upon closer examination, however, we may see that populism contains many of the same elements as ideologies which, by common agreement, are considered thick. The first is the circumstances, usually social structures and crises, which give rise to new ideological paradigms. Liberalism, for example, emerged as a response to the inequalities generated by feudalism and aristocracy; Marxism, in turn, arose out of the inequalities generated by capitalism. Second, these ideologies, like populism, have Manichean features in that they posit the existence of some central conflict between two entities. Liberals say it is between the individual and the state; for Marxists, between capital and workers. We can apply similar reasoning, mutatis mutandis, to populism. It usually arises out of a crisis of democratic representation, which itself is often driven by crises, financial and/or migratory, which exacerbate inequality and highlight that globalization has distributional consequences, economic and/or political, with winners and losers who correspond with empirically identifiable social groups. ²⁰ The divide between people and the elite is an interpretive scheme that gives meaning, and a program of action, to these crises.

For example, in Spain during the financial crisis, to ensure the country's solvency, governments were pressured to enact austerity by foreign actors, particularly financial markets, the IMF, Brussels, Berlin, and Frankfurt, with whom mainstream parties cooperated. This convergence between domestic and international elites represented an ideological hollowing out of traditional parties of right and left—Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) and Partito Popular (PP) in Spain—and during this crisis, at least these ideological categories were emptied of substantive meaning (or “thin,” if you will). Austerity and the need for (neoliberal) “structural reforms” were presented by centre-right and centre-left in de-political technocratic terms, as a kind of scientific conclusion among experts which could not be challenged. In reality, these parties were enacting the ideological program of technocratic liberalism.

In this context, the people-elite divide is more than just a discourse. It is a politicized analysis that posits a clash of interests between sociologically distinct groups. On the one side are the “elites,” who are understood as cosmopolitan technocrats, actors in supranational agencies, the financial industry, and perhaps most importantly, mainstream members of legislatures and executives; on the other side are “ordinary” citizens who face rising precarity, joblessness, and neighborhood decay. This clash of interests informs preferences for policies, domestic and international, with distributional consequences unfavorable to the beneficiaries of globalization and favorable to those more likely to be lower on the social hierarchy. And it is this which partly explains why populists of the left and right at times agree on some crucial foreign policy positions, such as the primacy of national or the people's sovereignty, rather than the International Liberal Order, as an organizing principle of international relations; the consequent suspicion of multilateral and supranational forums, and preference for a multipolar and state-centric order. The preference for sovereigntism is shared by Russia, which helps to account for populists’ sympathy with Moscow. Another contributing factor in sympathy toward Russia is that for populists the “enemy” is the Western liberal technocratic elite, domestic and international, and not Russia. These positions are opposed by the “establishment” who tend to favor globalization underwritten by American hegemony and see Russia as a threat.

In the following section, we will briefly trace the rise of populism in Spain, highlighting how it grew partly because of new societal conflicts, and proceed to distill some lessons about a shared populist core that helps to make sense of patterns of foreign policy preferences.

Hasta la Victoria

Many readers may be familiar with Spain's main populist parties, Vox and Podemos, but populism in the country precedes them. ²¹ The first and second waves petered out ²² in part because the country's democratization, enshrined in the constitutional settlement of 1978 after the death of Franco and Spain's subsequent integration into the European project, contributed to almost three decades of a stable biparty system characterized with alternating centre-right (PP) and centre-left (PSOE) parties, as well as increased living standards.

This mini-golden era began to fray at the seams with the onset of the financial crisis in 2007, which in Spain included the collapse of a housing bubble and the consequent need for international assistance to finance bank bailouts. Subsequently, unemployment and economic inequality rose in Spain more than elsewhere, ²³ and the left-wing government of José Zapatero's implementation of austerity demanded by creditor countries was perceived as a betrayal. ²⁴ His successor on the center-right, Mariano Rajoy, continued to implement the demands of international creditors and was plagued by corruption to boot. Under these circumstances, the two main parties were perceived to be unrepresentative. ²⁵

This sense of powerless, on top of the economic distress, led to a spontaneous uprising and occupation of public squares in Madrid, known as the 15-M, ²⁶ whose main slogan was “they don’t represent us!” ²⁷ Facts on the ground bore this out: polls showed that 81 percent of Spaniards agreed with the demands made by the protesters, while 75 percent lost confidence in the PP and the PSOE, the country's two main parties. Consequently, those main parties went from obtaining 80 percent of the vote in 2011 to 49 percent in 2015. ²⁸

Podemos was able to channel these demands with a populist diagnosis of what went awry. Borrowing concepts from Italy's arch-populist Beppe Grillo, Podemos claimed that the cause was the clash of interests between “la casta” and “la gente.” This message resonated not only because of the widespread economic distress but was also a not-inaccurate perception that the country was effectively being governed by international financial markets ²⁹ and creditor countries in northern Europe while wealthy insiders continued to prosper. ³⁰ A group of progressive professors at the University of Complutense in Madrid who had experience with populist politics in Latin America ³¹ saw this as an opportunity and formed Podemos. Led by the charismatic Pablo Iglesias, Podemos’ first breakthrough occurred in the European elections in 2013. By 2015, it had gained an unprecedented 20.7 percent, a few points shy of second place. In 2019, it entered government as the minor coalition partner of the PSOE, with which it will govern until general elections in the fall of 2023.

Vox rose to prominence later. The party was fuelled in part by opposition to the independence movement in Cataluña, but equally important were the accumulated grievances resulting from the financial crisis. ³² When the party emerged, it displayed typical right-wing free-market preferences, but with the passage of time it went toward the direction of other right-wing populists, particularly Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National, and promoted various forms of protectionism for workers. ³³ This strategy paid off in electoral terms, and a breakthrough occurred when they entered the regional assemblies of Madrid in 2019 and Castilla-Leon in 2021. In the 2019 general elections, they won an unprecedented 52 seats in the legislature and have been polling between 13 percent and 19 percent ever since. This trend contributed to the end of a biparty system in Spain, and in the national elections of 2023, there is a distinct possibility that Vox will enter government as the minor coalition partner of the PP.

A populist core

Although both Vox and Podemos can be considered populist, there are important differences between the parties, particularly regarding domestic policy. One is peculiar to Spain, namely, the question of Cataluña and the Basque country: Vox is unambiguously nationalist, while Podemos has expressed sympathy for their demands for independence. Another is on social issues, such as rights for sexual and racial minorities, which reflect differences in the classical right-left axis. On domestic economic policy, it is more ambiguous, given that both oppose Spain's tourist-based economy which has been partly generated by economic globalization, and that both want to reindustrialize the country. ³⁴ Also important in this regard are shifts in policy proposals, particularly Vox's adoption of protectionist positions of right-wing populists elsewhere in Europe to gain the support of workers who have lost from deindustrialization and economic globalization. ³⁵

In the realm of foreign policy, we can see more similarities. As with their populist cousins elsewhere, for both Vox and Podemos national or popular sovereignty should be the foundation of international relations. ³⁶ Both are also suspicious of international organizations, as a key part of their worldview is that these institutions are often occupied by elites who are disconnected from ordinary people. There is, however, some nuance on who the elites are: for Podemos, they are agents of neoliberalism, ³⁷ and for Vox they are orchestrating a multiculturalist agenda. The connecting ideological thread is anti-technocratic liberalism. ³⁸ This does not mean that both parties will not try to seize opportunities to use multilateral institutions to promote domestic objectives. Podemos, for example, has called for a more social Europe, ³⁹ while Vox has demanded more European action on the migration crises. ⁴⁰ But in other contexts, both have interpreted the EU in terms of the clash between the “people” and the “oligarchy,” ⁴¹ or as an instrument of German hegemony. ⁴²

Both were also, to varying and shifting degrees, sympathetic toward Putin's Russia, ⁴³ a position which flowed from their opposition to domestic elites, although here, too, Russia's role in the people-elite divide was interpreted differently; for Podemos, Russia was a bulwark against Western imperialism. ⁴⁴ Another nontrivial aspect of Russia is its close ties with countries of the Global South, particularly visible in the invasion of Ukraine, ⁴⁵ where most of Africa, Latin America, and Asia declined to join the West's attempts to isolate Russia. For Vox, Russia symbolized a country that defends its civilization and national sovereignty against the machinations of globalists. Although both Vox and Podemos condemned the invasion of Ukraine, the latter's true colors were shown in its opposition to sending offensive weapons to that beleaguered country. Podemos also opposed the NATO summit of June 2022 and the decision demanded by NATO partners to increase defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, although as a minor member of the coalition government, its room for maneuvering is limited. Vox, meanwhile, used the invasion of Ukraine tendentiously, as a tool with which to bludgeon Brussels, accusing it of inordinately focusing on environmental and gender issues rather than energy security, and to attack Berlin for its energy dependence on Russia.

Implications for research on populism

This paper focuses on Spain, which presents distinct features similar to other southern European countries such as Greece and Italy, where crises, financial and/or migratory, led to new societal conflicts unaccommodated by the existing system. Under these conditions, populists helped to fill the gap. In the realm of domestic policy, there are important differences between Vox and Podemos, apart from economics, as both in general are skeptical of Spain's comparative advantage in tourism, an outcome partly generated by economic globalization and the institutions which underwrite it. In international affairs, there are other similarities that suggest a shared logic not reducible to left and right and which is connected to the presumed clash between the people and the elite; this populist core can be usefully called a thick ideology, a key feature of which is opposition to the perceived agents or beneficiaries of technocratic liberalism (or what populists often call “oligarchy”). This pattern suggests that the thin-ideology thesis which dominates the literature does not tell the whole story, or at least, that it misses important features of populism which can help to make sense of patterns of foreign policy preferences, particularly during times of crises when mainstream parties converge. This does not imply that populists of the left and right are identical; only that they share some important features which distinguish them from mainstream parties, particularly vis-à-vis international affairs. Future research can test this hypothesis in different contexts, and where it is found that populists’ foreign policy positions resemble each other more than those of mainstream parties, it can be concluded as evidence of an underlying shared ideological core. Conversely, the thin-ideology thesis will have more explanatory value in those cases where, say, left-wing populists’ foreign policies resemble those of social democrats, while right-wing populists’ foreign policies align with those of conservatives.

Policy implications

Populists may win or lose elections, but the phenomenon is here to stay for the foreseeable future. There are different mixes of underlying causes in various parts of the world, but some patterns which influence all, to various degrees, include the rise of economic inequality ⁴⁶ and rapid cultural change induced by globalization, immigration, and technological shifts. ⁴⁷ Both contribute to the crisis of the institutions of liberal democracy, ⁴⁸ and as these trends will continue, there are strong possibilities that populists will continue to make major gains, likely in the American presidential elections of 2024, the French ones of 2027, and the Spanish general elections of 2023. Canada has, so far, been among the Western countries that have avoided this trend, but the People's Party of Canada's impressive gains in 2021 and the popularity of Pierre Poilievre show that the country is not immune.

Given their continued relevance, it is incumbent among policymakers to obtain a deeper understanding of the character of populism, and how populists’ distinct worldview translates to political action in the international system. Accusing populists of racism or of being Putin puppets is not helpful; if anything, it increases their sense of victimization and prosecution. A more constructive approach would be to address the underlying social and economic causes which have increased the distance between voters and their representatives. More direct and participative forms of democracy could help to restore the sense of democratic agency. Also important is reducing the economic frustrations generated by the gig economy. In this regard, the Spanish government led by Pedro Sánchez has shown leadership by passing legislation that limits contractual work to three years, in effect preventing employers from exploiting precarious labor. His government also increased the minimum wage and augmented pension payments to seniors. This generous social policy was assisted by the EU's unprecedented decision to adopt the Recovery Fund, ⁴⁹ of which Spain is a major beneficiary. On migration, he has taken a balanced approach, avoiding the xenophobia of his opponents while enforcing Spanish laws to help ensure that it is regularized and legal. The next few years will reveal if this Spanish experiment takes the wind out of the populist sails.