Populism and exclusionary narratives: The ‘other’ in Podemos’ 2014 European Union election campaign

Introduction

Across Europe, increasing numbers of immigrant inflows have been accompanied by the growing strength of so-called ‘populist’ right-wing political parties such as the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain and Le Front National in France. Concern about immigration or outright hostility to it is integral to their political rhetoric. However, this has not been the case in Spain.

The onset of economic recession from the end of 2007 – with an unemployment rate of 27% by 2013 – together with generally negative media representations of immigrants created conditions that could have contributed to the development of support for right-wing, anti-immigrant politics seen in other European countries in similar circumstances. In Spain, however, not only has no right-wing, anti-immigrant party attracted significant support (Alonso and Kaltwasser, 2014) but also the party considered populist (Sanders et al., 2017) and self-described as such (Fort Apache, 2014), Podemos, proposes economic and social policies which seek to remove barriers for immigrants to settle in Spain (see Podemos, 2014). Podemos appears not to share right-wing populism’s exclusionary and often stigmatizing rhetoric.

‘Excluding’ populism has been taken by a number of scholars (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2013) as the defining characteristic of radical right-wing populism. The findings of this study challenge that assumption. We take as our starting point Jagers and Walgrave’s typology of populist communication in order to assess whether Podemos’ 2014 electoral communication was populist or not. Our study suggests that the conceptual distinction made by Jagers and Walgrave (2007) between anti-elitist and excluding populism obscures the fact that both kinds of populist communication display a rhetoric of exclusion which stigmatizes and scapegoats. The study contributes to an understanding of populism which suggests that anti-elitism and the exclusion of out-groups are ‘implicit in any construction and mention of the “people”’ (Reinemann et al., 2017: 20), acting as ‘functional equivalents that make explicit the standard to which “the people” are contrasted and … contribute to strengthening identification with the in-group’ (p. 21).

Populism and political communication

Populism is a highly contested political concept (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007: 321; Reinemann et al., 2017: 12–13.). In the European context, it has been usually associated with the rise of radical right parties such as Le Pen’s Front National in France (Mudde, 2007). In Latin America, however, populism has been associated with the development of left-wing political movements led by charismatic politicians, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who employ a Manichean discourse of ‘us/them’, ‘people/elite’, positioning themselves as ‘outsiders’ who reject traditional political structures (Rivas and Araque, 2004). Mudde and Kaltwasser (2013) have suggested that there are two regional populism subtypes, exclusionary populism in Europe and inclusionary populism in Latin America, based on a conceptual framework proposed by Filc (2010) in which inclusion and exclusion are defined in material, political and symbolic terms.

Jagers and Walgrave (2007) propose a typology that encompasses both left- and right-wing populist politics and depends on an understanding of populism as a political communication style or a ‘communication frame that appeals to and identifies with the people and pretends to speak in their name’ (p. 322). They propose a thin definition of populism ‘as a political communication style of political actors that refers to the people’ (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007: 322). A thick definition of populism contains two further elements, namely, the expression of anti-elite feelings and the promotion of the idea that the people are a monolithic, homogeneous group positioned against other categories (ethnic or religious groups, for example) which should be excluded (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007: 322). The typology is fourfold: complete populism characterized by reference and appeals to the people, anti-elitism and exclusion of out-groups; excluding populism defined by reference and appeals to the people and exclusion of out-groups; anti-elitist populism which includes reference and appeals to the people and anti-elitism; and finally, empty populism defined by reference and appeals to the people. Jagers and Walgrave’s typology of populism with reference to a style of political communication is useful. It allows us to examine the characteristics of political actors in accordance with a parsimonious, non-normative definition of populism. It also avoids the difficulties of defining populism as ideology (Aslanidis, 2015), although there are good arguments to suggest that populism can be conceptualized as a ‘thin’-centred ideology with key anti-liberal characteristics (see Abts and Rummens, 2007; Reinemann et al., 2017).

Podemos emerged on the Spanish political scene with a project deliberately defined as populist (Fort Apache, 2014). In the words of Pablo Iglesias, elected leader of Podemos in 2015, the Eurozone crisis had created a situation in which it was ‘possible to alter the parameters of Spanish politics in a way that hasn’t happened since the post-Franco Transition’ (Iglesias, 2015: 13); the new common sense was ‘rejection of the dominant political and economic elites, systematically signalled as corrupt’. Podemos positioned itself against these ‘dominant elites’ or ‘caste’ (la casta) who were accused of defending their own narrow interests against those of the people (Errejón, 2014; Stobart, 2014). This formed part of what Iglesias described as ‘the Podemos hypothesis’, according to which the party would ‘aggregate the new demands generated by the crisis around a mediatic (sic) leadership, capable of dichotomizing the political space’ (Iglesias, 2015: 14), making extensive use of social media to engage and communicate with citizens (see Casero-Ripolles et al., 2016).

Led by one of their chief ideologues, Iñigo Errejón, Podemos adopted the thinking of the political theorist Ernesto Laclau (2007) about the emergence of a populist moment in times of crisis, looking to examples in Latin America for inspiration. Key to this thinking is the use and understanding of the media and their logic in order to define the terms of the ideological conversation (see Errejón, 2014; Casero-Ripolles et al., 2016). The political scientists leading the Podemos project developed cable television programmes, La Tuerka (The Screw) and Fort Apache, which acted as ‘our preparatory school, teaching us how to intervene most effectively on mainstream television talk shows’ (Iglesias, 2015: 14). They understood that the TV talk shows were the mediapolis where they could gain name recognition and forge a new political discourse. Iglesias very deliberately aimed to attain visibility and become the symbolic representation of and voice for the victims of the crisis in Spain or – in the language of Laclau – an empty or floating signifier, condensing all the meaning of the crisis in his self-presentation as man of the people. Podemos’ strategy for the 2014 European Parliament election campaign was (Iglesias, 2015: 17)

… to explain that ‘the guy with the pony-tail’ on TV was taking part in the elections. That’s why we opted for something that had never been done before in Spain: using the candidate’s face on the ballot. The ‘People of the Television’ – el pueblo de la televisión, or the TV nation, so to speak – didn’t know about a new political party called Podemos, but they knew about the guy with the pony-tail.

Iglesias’ analysis makes clear his party’s aim: to generate a political discourse that crosses ideological boundaries, resisting the imposition of political categories by the mainstream media and by political parties intent on preventing Podemos’ electoral success.

Immigration, public opinion and populist politics

From the end of the 1990s up to the crisis, the Spanish economic and demographic context appeared to be developing into a propitious one for the development of right-wing populism. The country experienced significant increases in immigrant inflows: from constituting 1.3% of the total population in 1996, immigrants constituted 12% of the total population of Spain by 2012, an influx of 5.7 million people in little over a decade.

Most were economic migrants with the biggest group coming from Morocco, the second from Ecuador and the third from Romania (Zoragastua, 2016: 29). In relative terms, however, the greatest percentage increases in migrant numbers over the decade were those from Latin America, comprising 25% of economic migrants by 2012 (Zoragastua, 2016: 35). From 2000 onwards, immigration was consistently listed as among the first five principal problems that most worried Spanish citizens (Zoragastua, 2016: 70). Opinion poll data overall suggested that ‘anti-immigrant attitudes are similar to those in other European countries with more successful PRR [populist radical right] parties’ (Alonso and Kaltwasser, 2014: 21), and media research (Diezhandino, 2009) confirmed that Spanish newspapers tended to transmit a negative view of immigration, linking it to problems of crime and poverty.

Despite the negative media framing of immigration, the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008, leading to record levels of unemployment of 27% in 2013, and the rapid influx of large numbers of immigrants, populist radical right-wing (PRR) or extreme right-wing parties failed to attract significant public support in Spain (Mudde, 2007; Casals, 2013). As Alonso and Kaltwasser (2014) point out, ‘there are only two countries in which PRR parties have never obtained more than one per cent of the vote in any national election: Portugal and Spain’ (p. 23). Founded in 2002, Platform for Catalonia was the principal PRR party in Spain at the height of immigration to the country. It verbally attacked Muslim residents in the main Catalan cities with slogans calling ‘For better control of immigrants’ and ‘Nationals first’ (Hernández-Carr, 2011, 2013). The party was characterized by an excluding style of populism where references and appeals are made to the people in the context of the exclusion of out-groups (Casals, 2009). Its electoral base was strongest in Catalan cities with high rates of immigration (Hernández-Carr, 2011, 2013; Fortuny, 2015). At a national level, the party failed to win any seats in the 2011 Spanish general elections and did not present any candidates for the 2015 general elections (E-noticies, 2016).

In Spain, the left-wing Podemos emerged as the ‘populist’ party from the 2011 indignados (‘the outraged’) movement which began as a series of protest meetings calling for more participatory politics, the end of corruption, of austerity policies and of the two mainstream parties’ dominance of public life (Alcaide, 2011). The centre-right Popular Party (PP – Partido Popular) and the centre-left Socialist Party (PSOE – Partido Socialista Obrero Español) had governed Spain since the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1982 after General Franco’s death in 1975. First registered in March 2014, Podemos was founded in the midst of high unemployment, corruption and the growth of Catalan demands for independence. With a crowd-funded budget of just €150,000, Podemos presented candidates in the May 2014 European Parliament elections and won five seats and 1.2 million votes. Two years later, it obtained, with its allies, 20.66% of the votes for the Spanish congress in the 2016 general elections, coming third just behind the Socialist Party who won 22% of the vote.

Research questions and design

The 2014 European election marked the introduction of Podemos onto the Spanish campaign stage and provided a unique opportunity to study its communication in the first stage of its political life. This study examines the presence or not of the three features of populist communication identified by Jagers and Walgrave (2007) as associated with ‘complete populism’, namely, in-groups and excluded out-groups, anti-elitism and references and appeals to the people. Given the salience of the issue of immigration for much of Europe’s populist communication, we also examine Podemos’ positioning of this issue in its communication.

Our principal research question, then, asks whether in-groups and out-groups were present in Podemos’ communication during the 2014 European Parliamentary election campaign and, if they were, how they were represented. By identifying in-groups, we were able to respond to the question as to whether or not Podemos identifies itself with the people, the preselector for populist communication. By examining out-groups, we were able to explore whether Podemos exhibits excluding populism and/or anti-elitism. In order to do this, we employed Van Dijk’s (1996) approach to discourse analysis through which he locates the ‘ideological square’ of characters in discourse. He argues that relations among characters are often established in a binary opposition through the use of a number of specific linguistic devices (Van Dijk’s, 1996: 43), a dichotomy of ‘We’, ‘Ourselves’ and ‘Us’, associated with positive values and norms, and ‘the Others’ considered as in some way excluded or undesirable.

Van Dijk’s identification of binary oppositions chimes in part with Jagers and Walgrave’s description of in-groups and out-groups (a terminology he also uses). Van Dijk’s approach seems particularly suited to capture the possible presence of this feature of populist communication content and flexible enough to deal with the heterogeneity of the material analysed (speeches, texts, interviews, advertising).

We wished to obtain a rich picture of Podemos’ communication which would not only examine textual content but would also examine the aesthetics and style of communication produced and controlled by the party in rallies, manifestos, electoral spots and party-run media (La Tuerka and Fort Apache). Jagers and Walgrave (2007: 232) point to the particular aesthetics of populist communication including demotic self-presentation through clothes and hairstyle. Burke’s (1969) model of the dramatistic pentad studies communication acts from a rich range of categories including the analysis of the scene or setting chosen for the communication act, the means used to communicate (agency), the agent (Who is acting?), the act itself (What is happening?) and the purpose (Why do the agents act? What do they want?). In order to explore the aesthetic dimensions of Podemos’ communication, we included in our coding frame the Burkean categories of setting (What is the location and mise en scéne of the communication?) and agent (Who is communicating and how do they self-present in terms of dress style, etc.?).

Our finalized coding frame included categories for analysing the identity of in- and out-groups, for identifying mentions of elites and immigrants, for examining the use of personal and possessive pronouns and for the positive and negative language (hyperbole, negative lexicalization and compassion and altruism moves) associated with the different groups. Communication settings and communicators’ personal styles were also coded. The code was piloted and subsequently corrected to ensure an acceptable level of reliability in coding decisions and consistency in analysis. The study was carried out in Spanish by two researchers, one a native Spanish speaker and the other a native English and fluent Spanish speaker.

We analysed electoral and party communication and any party communication focused specifically on immigration published on Podemos’ YouTube channel or Party website from Podemos’ registration in March 2014 until the European Parliament elections on 25 May 2014. In order to analyse Podemos’ communication as distinct from others’ interpretations of it, we analysed only unmediated material in which the communicators and/or authors were Podemos’ spokespeople or representatives. Social media communication on Twitter and Facebook was not included in the study. The material consisted of the Party’s founding document, its election manifesto, the campaign video released on YouTube (only one was produced), election and party rallies and interviews on Podemos-controlled media conducted by Party members. Our analysis examined all this material with one exception: out of the total of 25 rallies held, six were selected on the basis of their prominence. These included the party’s presentation after its registration in March 2014 (Zaragoza), the party’s launch rally (Jerez de la Frontera), the opening and closing election rallies (Valencia and Seville) together with two of the campaign’s main rallies (Zaragoza and Almeria). ¹ The rallies featured Pablo Iglesias as the main communicator and the campaign video, as we shall see, centred on Iglesias as the central character of the video narrative. The Podemos-controlled media interviews featured the Podemos immigration spokeswoman, Paulina Requelme.

The narrative of ‘Us’ and the ‘Other’

From the outset, Podemos’ party and campaign communication underlined in images and language the ‘Others’ as identified with the political and economic establishment or la casta (the caste or political and economic elites) and ‘Us’ as the people. In-groups (see Appendix 1, Table 1) were ‘ordinary’, ‘decent’ people, ‘pensioners’, ‘immigrants’ who are treated as victims. The use of personal and possessive pronouns (see Appendix 1, Table 3) situated we/us as those ‘who study and work hard’ against those who ‘install themselves in power and privilege’. The in-group consisted of ‘citizens’ like Pablo Iglesias and voters were told that he is a ‘normal person like you and so we can change things’.

The main Podemos electoral video for the 2014 European Parliamentary elections (Podemos, 2014) encapsulated in just over 4 minutes these different themes: deeply personal, it contrasts the life stories of the candidates for PSOE and PP with that of Pablo Iglesias. Iglesias himself tells his own story of a life of effort engaged in the world of ordinary people compared to that of his two main rivals. They are depicted as having lives of privilege, enjoying ‘official cars’ and expensive meals, part of Spain’s ruling class. Members of the two mainstream parties are shown enjoying the good life with well-paid positions on company boards, complacent and willing to sell out the country and its people to Angela Merkel. Iglesias, however, is represented as a normal citizen, catching a bus, doing his washing, filling out his tax return, a man who believes that change is possible and who invites us as ordinary people to participate in that change. Out-groups (see Appendix 1, Table 2) are the corrupt and elite political mainstream who ‘have brought the country to misery’ and ‘have broken all their promises’ and ‘are frightened of ordinary people’. They have made Spain ‘a colony of Germany, of the troika’ who ‘blame and crucify the immigrants’.

In his speech at Podemos’ May 2014 campaign launch in Valencia, Iglesias vividly communicated these messages through stories, props and symbolic gestures: the Spanish political landscape is like ‘the land of mice who vote for the parties of the black cats or the white cats who then proceed to govern in favour of cats with obvious consequences for the mice’; holding up a bottle of Coca Cola and of Pepsi Cola, he compared the electoral choice in Spain as similar to the choice between the two beverages; at the close of his speech, he held up to the audience an upside down photo of Angela Merkel.

Podemos’ election rallies in Jerez de la Frontera, Almeria, Zaragoza and Seville hammered home the themes of the campaign video and launch: ‘our lives or their privileges’, ‘the old caste’, ‘traitors’, ‘rabble’, ‘thieves’, ‘rogues’ and ‘shameless’. In Iglesias’ words, ‘All of them have only one country, money, and they should be judged as enemies of the rest of the people’ and ‘They’re a ruling class who are leading us to disaster’. ‘They’re not affected by cutbacks. They have scandalous salaries, private education for their children, private health; they don’t know what it is not to get to the end of the month because the wage is not enough; they don’t know what unemployment is’. Podemos’ narrative was consistent across all campaign acts and shared by all speakers: the ruling classes are situated as the out-group and as being frightened of the people and contemptuous of democracy. The phrase ‘they say’ was used in all the campaign material to point to all those who are considered to be against the people as in, for example, ‘They say that it’s not possible to stand up to Merkel; they say that it is normal to live in fear: they say that it’s not possible to do anything else but choose between them or them’. The ideological square is set up using ‘Us’ as those who can change the status quo: ‘We’re much more; we can put first the needs of the people, that’s democracy… we can, of course, we can’ against “Them”, the elite ruling class’ (see Appendix 1, Table 4).

In sum, the Podemos narrative focused relentlessly on the need to eradicate the corrupt system run by ‘Them’ in order to create a new fairer real democracy run by ‘Us’. In the words of Iglesias in Almeria,

Whoever is for fiscal reform, the banning of revolving doors, for an audit of the debt so that the waste of the banks is paid for by the bankers, whoever agrees in telling Mrs Merkel that we don’t want to be a colony is with us.

Errejón, one of Podemos’ founding members, put it succinctly in the campaign launch: ‘Our crisis is called the ruling class (la casta)’.

The possibility of a new honest politics was emphasized and exemplified in actions such as the announcement at Podemos’ campaign launch: ‘Let’s show that there can be other kinds of politicians. While the Euro MPs are putting 8,000 euros in their pockets every month, we have committed to receiving three times the Spanish minimum wage which is 1,900 euros’.

There were no specific mentions of immigration and migrants in the campaign itself. The party’s manifesto for the European elections dedicated two of its 29 pages to immigration policy with a section titled ‘The right to have rights. Recognition of the rights of immigrants’. It stated that Podemos will ban detention centres, end the immigration control programme, overturn the ‘Directive of shame’ (Spain’s return policy) and end the deportation of immigrants. The manifesto included a number of proposals concerning immigrants’ civil rights and the establishment of a network of reception centres to help the victims of people trafficking.

Immigration was also the theme of two party-related events. The first was an interview of the chair of Podemos circle on immigration, Paulina Requelme (2014), who also participated in a special edition of the programme La Tuerka dedicated to the theme of immigration. In the interview, Requelme, an immigrant herself, accused PSOE and PP of acting like the rest of Europe in maintaining ‘repressive laws against immigrants which damage our rights’. She accused the mainstream parties of considering foreigners to be ‘second class citizens and often not even citizens’. She suggested that the ‘traditional parties blame immigrants for all society’s problems’. Podemos, on the other hand, gives voice to immigrants, ‘giving us the right in this society in which we live’.

These themes were repeated in the one and a half-hour special edition on immigration of La Tuerka, a panel discussion programme. Chaired by one of Podemos’ chief ideologues, Juan Carlos Monedero, he positioned Podemos as the only political group on the side of immigrants, asking viewers to ‘understand that the immigrants are ourselves and that they are own human reality’. However, the theme of immigration was not mentioned in any of the rallies or in the electoral video. This is in keeping with the strategy outlined by Iglesias (2015) to focus on issues such as corruption, inequality and the effects of the austerity policies to draw widespread voter support because ‘without the machinery of institutional power, it makes no sense at this point to focus on zones of struggle that would alienate us from the majority, who are not “on the left”’ (p. 16).

The people, agent and scene

Podemos’ positioning of itself as ‘the people’ was aesthetically expressed in both the sartorial and rhetorical style of its leaders. As Jagers and Walgrave (2007: 322–323) point out, populist communication involves ‘a conspicuous exhibition of closeness to (ordinary) citizens’, and this self-presentation ‘can take different guises – using casual or colloquial language or adopting an informal dress code’.

In contrast to the generally formal dress style of the candidates from the two mainstream parties, Miguel Arias Cañete and Elena Valenciano, Pablo Iglesias and his companions dressed informally and spoke in simple, direct language. Iglesias’ youthful style was reinforced by a ponytail and usually tie-less appearance. The locations for the various campaign acts also eloquently expressed the ordinariness of Podemos and its members. Podemos’ campaign launch took place in a state school: during the launch, Iglesias himself pointed out the symbolic importance of this location, comparing it to the hotels where the mainstream parties usually hold their launches, and stating that ‘[o]ur spaces are state schools’. As mentioned earlier, the campaign video is constructed chiefly around images of Iglesias at home engaged in normal activities. The interview with the immigration spokeswoman is conducted from a small bedroom with a Romanian flag and posters of Lenin, Che Guevara, La Pasionaria and Simón Bolívar on the wall and a guitar lying on the bed.

Discussion and conclusion

This analysis of Podemos’ communication during the 2014 European Parliamentary elections shows that it conforms to Jagers and Walgrave’s (2007: 322) definition of populism as ‘a communication frame that appeals to and identifies with the people, and pretends to speak in their name’. Messaging – content – and aesthetic and dramatistic elements were aligned with this frame. In Burkean terms, scene and agent were deployed as forms of symbolic action that enacted the populist discourse.

Jagers and Walgrave suggest that identifying with the people in language and style is a necessary condition for the claim that a political actor is populist, acting as a ‘preselector’ for thick populism that is defined by two additional characteristics, anti-elitism and exclusion of out-groups. Podemos also adopted an anti-elite rhetoric in the 2014 campaign. Political, state, media, supranational and economic elites were blamed for society’s ills. They were considered to show a lack of concern for the ordinary people of Spain. Agents and settings reinforced these messages.

Finally, we have to consider whether Podemos was also populist in the sense that it used an exclusionary discourse. Exclusionary discourses are at the heart of the third constitutive, horizontal dimension of populism, as defined by Jagers and Walgrave, that consists in seeking to exclude certain population categories such as immigrants from the pure group of the ‘people’.

In the way in which Jagers and Walgrave define it, this last dimension was not present in Podemos’ 2014 political communication. The people were not defined against a social or ethnic out-group as is the case with much right-wing populism. In the specific case of immigrants, Podemos positioned them as victims of the elites, as part of the people exploited by the ruling class and as those whom the elites treat as second-class citizens, regard as scapegoats and exclude from the people.

Left-wing populist communication does not appear to exhibit the straightforward exclusionary politics of the right. However, this study and work by Reinemann et al. (2017: 24) suggest that all populist communication explicitly entails the construction of an in-group of the ‘people’, thus implicitly requiring the construction of an out-group. Therefore, ‘a consensus seems to be growing that references to, or the communicative construction of, “the people” should be regarded as the key component of populist messages’ (Reinemann et al., 2017: 23). In Podemos’ communication, we can see what could be termed a reverse exclusionary dynamic: the elites are accused of and represented as attempting to exclude others such as immigrants from being part of the people and, indeed, of seeking to hijack democracy itself for their own ends. Anti-elitism can be understood as being the functional equivalent to the exclusion of out-groups, as argued by Reinemann et al. (2017). While recognizing the limitations related to sample size, the short period of time analysed and the focus on only one country and party, the evidence presented in this study supports the argument that exclusionary narratives are a defining element of all populist communication of whatever political stripe. Abts and Rummens (2007: 418) have also advanced this view, referencing Carl Schmitt’s definition of the essence of the political as ‘the distinction between friend and enemy’. Laclau (2007: 154) himself states that the ‘construction of the “people”’ is ‘the political operation par excellence’ requiring ‘the constitution of antagonistic frontiers’, partially achieved through the deployment of appropriate rhetorical resources.

To conclude, we would like to suggest that future work might explore the extent to which a scapegoating dynamic is at work in populist communication. The concept of scapegoating, so richly explored in the work of René Girard (1989), suggests that, at times of social and economic crisis, certain groups or individuals are blamed and stigmatized for a community’s ills, enabling public outrage to be discharged and an uneasy peace to be restored (see Sanders, 2009). Girard’s analysis suggests that from time immemorial, we have sought to control or defuse the violence which accompanies humans’ attempts to live in society by creating scapegoats. Scapegoats can help create ‘difference’ in society and consequently restore unity; they contribute to the founding, preservation and unification of culture. The scapegoat appears throughout human history as both a literal creature and as a terrible human reality. When human groups are divided and fragmented during periods of crisis and conflict, they can be reconciled again by finding a scapegoat/victim.

While mentioned in Jagers and Walgrave’s typology and briefly in Reinemann et al.’s (2017) discussion (p. 21), scapegoating is not explicitly conceptualized as being part of the populist narrative. Although we cannot do justice to this question in the confines of this article, we propose that the concept of scapegoating may form a more central role in populist communication than has previously been recognized.

Podemos appears to be following the populist path discussed by Laclau (2007) who considered populism as ‘the very essence of the political’ (p. 222). Furthermore, while Spain may differ from other parts of Europe in having not seen the development of radical right-wing populism, Spain’s own brand of populism may have more in common with its neighbours than appears at first glance. Identity politics is replaced by an anti-elite politics which espouses elements of a narrative that scapegoats undesirable groups; the theme of exclusion is used to make the people (and associated groups) the victims of exclusion by the out-group that includes mainstream political parties, non-state educational and health institutions, northern Europeans and Angela Merkel. In this way, the exclusive elites become the ‘Other’, responsible for all the country’s problems.