Abstract
The article explores a key aspect in the development of contemporary European populist parties: the celebrity dynamics of their leadership. It presents a systematic comparison of leaders from the main populist parties, exploring the correlation between leadership visibility, fame, and the ideological and organisational characteristics of parties. Furthermore, it investigates the subset of leaders whose public notoriety predates their political involvement, with a view to establishing how they balance the demands of political responsibility and authenticity of character, both in terms of organisational control and communicative strategy. Analytically, the study helps illuminate the mechanisms through which populist parties adapt to participation in the political game while continuing to mark their ideological difference. Empirically, the findings highlight the uniqueness of an outlier case, Beppe Grillo’s leadership of Italy’s Five-Star Movement, in which celebrity is leveraged into a kingmaker role, while still retaining the public persona of an outside observer.
Introduction
Contemporary politics in Europe has seen a pronounced shift in the direction of personalisation, a dynamic that implies the use of communication strategies and public personas typically associated with celebrities and the star system. At the same time, the ‘populist wave’ is perhaps the largest change in macro equilibria in European politics in a generation. It is often argued that there is some form of ‘elective affinity’ between various different aspects of personalised and celebritised politics on one hand, and populist leaders on the other (Waisboard, 2018). We take such affinities as a starting point for a systematic analysis of populist leaders, in order to show how those among them who exhibit celebrity traits differ from their professional-politician brethren. In this way, we use populist parties as a microcosm in order to learn more about celebrity politics more broadly.
Our argument is intended as a contribution in an ongoing conversation hosted by The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (Street, 2004, 2012; Wheeler, 2012; Wood et al., 2016) on typologies of celebrity politicians and their role within changing political systems. Our specific contribution to this debate lies in showing the relationship between celebrity dynamics and the more traditional variables of ideological and organisational analysis of political parties. Indeed, we believe that, in order to move our understanding of these political phenomena forward, it is necessary to place the literature on celebrity politics in communication with scholarship on the rise of populism and political personalisation.
The rise of populist forces is a key development in contemporary European politics (Mudde, 2004; Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2008). The literature on populism is divided on how to categorise its object of study. Some see populism as a type of behaviour available potentially to all politicians in varying degrees based on circumstances, the audience, and the communication medium. Others (Rooduijn, 2018; Van Kessel, 2015) see populism as a question of kind, which at least in principle clearly separates populist and non-populist political forces, and provides a ‘family resemblance’ among all populists, in spite of their differences. For the purposes of this study, we adopt the latter approach, which allows us to isolate a group of cases of recognisably populist leaders within which we can observe the operation of celebrity dynamics.
Of course, political celebrity is nothing new: at least since the presidency of John F. Kennedy, explicit parallels have been drawn between the appeal of political leaders and the functioning of the entertainment star system; the theme of charisma in politics has even deeper historical roots in democratic politics (Michael et al., 2015). However, the past two decades have seen a qualitative leap in the prominence of such attributes (Lawrence and Boydstun, 2017: 47–49): personal visibility is now a necessity for all political careers. Leaders seek new, non-technical forms of expression to address their constituents, new media systems reward innovative communication techniques, new personal parties are born, and traditional parties tend to highlight the figure of their leader over collective decision-making. Individuals who prove adept at this new style of politics reap significant rewards. The present article aims to study the intersection of these two phenomena, populism and personalisation, by analysing how the leaders of populist parties harness the power of personalised politics for political advantage. In particular, we focus on a subgroup of such leaders, who epitomise this new politics by being able to claim a distance, a separation from traditional political life, an outsider persona.
Methodologically, our study follows a mixed-methods approach, analysing quantitative data on a set of European populist parties and leaders (n = 66), which we then complement with three case studies, two of them (Andrej Babiš of the Czech Republic and Frank Stronach of Austria) representative of the main types of outsider leadership and one (Beppe Grillo of Italy), a very specific and unique outlier, in terms both of organisational/leadership model and of party ideology. With these means, we seek to find empirical corroboration (within the subset of European populism) for hypotheses originally formulated by ’t Hart and Tindall (2009) with regard to celebrity politicians in general: specifically, linking the rise of celebrities in politics with public disaffection and predicting a shorter length of their tenure at the helm of their parties compared to professional politicians.
Our main findings are that, within the typology of populist leadership we develop, celebrities tend to cluster in certain types rather than in others, in ways that distinguish them from professional politicians. We find empirical corroboration for ’t Hart and Tindall’s hypotheses. We witness the importance of structural constraints in the communication system on their political career, but the quantitative results in this area are inconclusive. Hence, we find it necessary to explore this aspect qualitatively, by means of targeted case studies. Finally, the overall comparative framework serves to highlight the extreme peculiarity of the outlier case we discuss, that of Grillo and the Italian Five-Star Movement.
The article is structured as follows. In the next section, we survey the political science literature on populism, personalisation, and celebrities and set out our main theoretical argument concerning outsiders, political involvement, and populist rhetoric. Subsequently, we present the results of our analysis, including both a quantitative-based taxonomy and qualitative descriptions of two representative cases and one outlier. The final section concludes by reiterating our main findings and suggesting directions for further research.
Populism, personalisation, and celebrities
Populist leaders and parties are making headlines worldwide. As two recent handbooks on populism have documented (Heinisch and Saxonberg, 2017; Rovira Kaltwasser et al., 2017), over the last two decades, the literature on populism has literally skyrocketed. However, neither of these two handbooks devotes specific attention to populism and celebrity. Although they analyse the role of communication, and the media as a mobilisation resource, the literature on celebrity remains very much in the background. One of the reasons for this neglect might be the prevalence of the ideational approach to populism (that is, conceiving of populism as a ‘thin ideology’) over the strategic-relational and especially the socio-cultural one (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2018; Kaltwasser et al., 2017). Despite its general usefulness, the ideational conception is not appropriate for understanding the extent to which ‘leadership and organisation matter’ (Hawkins and Kaltwasser, 2017: 533).
This gap in the literature is the one in which we situate our article. In tracing its boundaries in the conceptual landscape, we limit our focus to works in which populism intersects with other key research agendas, namely, those on the personalisation of political leadership and the ‘celebritisation’ of politics. In this respect, Moffitt’s (2016) book is innovative both for its global scope and for its peculiar focus on how leaders perform. Analysing populism as a political style, Moffitt stresses the importance of the mediatisation of politics (Mazzoleni and Schulz, 1999) as a prerequisite for ‘performing the crisis’ (which in turn is a precondition for the rise of populism). As he claims, ‘it is the leader that should be our main focus when studying the phenomenon, given that they are the figures that ultimately “do” populism’ (Moffitt, 2016: 51–52). But while Moffitt focuses on the way in which leaders perform the crisis, we articulate our comparative analysis of populism on more structural grounds, by looking at systemic and organisational variables which this author has not considered.
In doing so, we aim to utilise the insights derived from the literature on the role and visibility of leaders in two key subfields of political research: party politics and political participation. In the first, scholars agree on emphasising the increasing importance of leaders for party organisation, for parties in government, and for orienting the electorate more in general (Costa Lobo and Curtice, 2015; Poguntke and Webb, 2005; Webb and Poguntke, 2013; see also Rhodes and ’t Hart, 2014). In the second, recent advances with the introduction of the notions of ‘everyday maker’ (Henrik Bang) and ‘monitory democracy’ (John Keane) are especially notable. As Wheeler (2012: 413) recently remarked, according to Bang, ‘political activity is no longer based on ideology and membership [and] politicians need to engage on a continuing basis with citizens to persuade them to participate’. Similarly, for Keane (2009), the shift towards ‘monitory democracy’ is marked by new communication technologies and the emergence of horizontal flows of information, in which politics becomes more and more disintermediated (see also Rosanvallon, 2008). Hence, while leaders have become more powerful vis-a-vis the parties they lead, they are also facing a more independent-minded, less traditionally loyal, and more atomised general electorate.
These works have influenced the emergence of a political science literature on celebrity, which, however, often lacks a comparative perspective (Street, 2012: 352). We have very few empirical studies on the determinants and consequences of the emergence of celebrities in politics. As we document in this article, celebrity has been an important component in the rise of many new populist (and challenger) parties. All in all, as Marsh et al. point out: the academic literature on celebrity politics is rarely systematic; more often it is superficial and anecdotal. In addition, most of the literature focuses either upon classifying different types/categories of celebrity politician and their roles in politics or upon the question of whether the growth of celebrity politics undermines or enhances democracy. (Marsh et al., 2010: 322)
We would argue that the shortcomings of the celebritisation-of-politics literature stem from a failure to account for broader changes in party politics, because the object of study itself has changed over time. Going back several decades, traditionally the incorporation of celebrities within the political process has been understood in purely instrumental terms. Celebrities, the argument ran, are able to communicate with strata of the population that normally shun political debate and involvement, because they can access channels of communication with the broader public that are normally foreclosed to political speech, institutional rhetoric, and party advertising (Alberoni, 1973). Therefore, they can present to such disconnected and apathetic social strata a non-ideological reason for choosing the party the celebrities support; in other words, celebrities can offer a heuristic to disengaged and inattentive citizens with regard to their own political preferences (see Street, 2016). They are in a position to do so because, with regard to celebrity, the role of public interest is reversed: while politics (it is argued) is akin to advertising in that it must compete for the attention of a public that by default is ill-inclined to listen, celebrities are akin to content because the public is independently drawn to demand, and consume, information about them. Such differentials in visibility and attraction of attention are the reason for the political realm’s interest in celebrity.
In this traditional equilibrium, celebrities were typically part of the ‘front-end’, or front stage of politics, the communication façade of it, as opposed to the backstage of power-politics and policy-making. Hence, in the words of our title, traditional celebrities were ‘jesters’, with ‘kings’ bringing them in to the political arena and ‘kingmakers’ outside of the limelight judiciously employing their assets for the maximum benefit of the party. A classic case of this form of celebrity politics was the co-optation of former athletes, such as Olympic champion Sebastian Coe, as members of parliament (MPs).
What we are interested in specifically in this article, however, is a much more direct involvement of celebrities within partisan political organisation: their leadership of populist parties. The assumption by highly visible, non-politician outsiders of political power within populist movements is premised on precisely the characteristics that made celebrity traditionally appealing to the political sphere (and would – incidentally– have made celebrities lose any distinctive appeal if they had forsworn them).
The main assumption on which our analysis rests can be stated thus: celebrities (the ‘star system’) have ‘elective affinities’ with the way of doing and communicating politics typical of populism (as variously defined). The communicative characteristics celebrities and populists share are apparent and numerous: disintermediation; transparency; a different, non-technical, layman’s way of speaking about politics; a claim of (existential) difference with respect to professional politicians; an incompatibility with the technocratic elite; a celebration of charisma and leadership.
Indeed, because of general factors influencing all contemporary political life (but compounded in the case of populist parties), most party leaders nowadays tend to assume certain aspects of celebrity (for instance, a type of media visibility that blurs public and private life). However, as Street (2004) has noted, we can distinguish politicians who have achieved some measure of celebrity through politics from celebrities who have achieved some measure of political power through celebrity. Our goal in these pages will be to focus exclusively on the latter category: political outsiders who have moved to positions of political power, within the context of the Continent-wide populist wave.
The first step in this process is to identify clearly what we mean by celebrity. The literature on celebrities in general, and on the celebritisation of politics in particular, has offered different definitions of the concept. For authors such as Heinich (2012), for instance, celebrity, or fame, is foremost a social quantity, a ratio between how many people one knows and by how many one is known. Others, such as Petrovová and Eibl (2018), have a much more profession-based operationalisation of the term, including entertainers, sportspeople, media personalities, and the like, as being ‘in the business of being known’. We agree in part with the former, in the sense that we conceive of the general concept of visibility as standing at the centre of the notion of celebrity (Brighenti, 2007), an approach also borne out by recent studies in political theory (Green, 2010). However, we also recognise the need for an operationalisation of the term that permits easy recognisability (Driessens, 2013).
Consequently, within this work, we have decided to define celebrities quite simply as individuals possessed of external social capital, in the form of name recognition, public visibility, and – in a certain sense – charisma. This charisma is typically not the charisma of office (such as, say, the British Royal Family or the Pope possess): hence, in a way, celebrity herein is interpreted as a sanction of meritocracy, a recognition of the celebrity being, in some form, an individual who is out of the ordinary. Such social capital can originate in many different walks of life: in sports, business, the military, entertainment. Its minimum common denominator is the production of networks of public visibility that predate political engagement, and it typically assumes a mediated form for public diffusion, in which the means of mass communication decisively shape the perception of individual personality. From an analytical point of view, therefore, celebrities in politics are a specific instance of the general phenomenon of transferral of forms of social capital from other spheres into the political sphere.
When considering the set of leaders of European populist parties, therefore, our definition of celebrities coincides with outsiders, with individuals who are not the products of the political machine and who have initially achieved notoriety in life outside of politics. They are the category of interest by definition, because this external social capital, in the form of a pre-political network of visibility, is precisely the asset they contribute to the political realm, on the basis of which their elevation to the leadership is premised. Given populism’s specific permeability to personalisation and celebrities, studying populist leadership can be considered a most-likely case for observing these ‘outsider’ dynamics.
We recognise the limitations of this approach: beyond including certain outsiders that other definitions of celebrity would exclude, we purposefully do not discuss cases of how insiders might become celebrities. In other words, we do not consider the political field as an independent mechanism of celebritisation; therefore, we cannot claim we are offering a general account of the celebritisation of politics. However, in keeping with the low (and falling) social status of politics as a profession, we are focusing on the most empirically relevant part of the phenomenon by studying how politics attempts to co-opt the popularity and notoriety originating in other social spheres. Moreover, we do not think we are emptying out celebrity of its specificity, in that we are focusing on visibility, the key of its importance for politics.
We focus, as we mentioned, on a new generation of political celebrities, who are at the helm of their political organisations. In orienting our inquiry, though, we rely on a traditional study on celebrities. In attempting to understand what sets this group of outsider populist leaders apart from their professional-politician populist brethren, we seek to find empirical corroboration for hypotheses originally formulated by ’t Hart and Tindall (2009) regarding the conditions for the rise of celebrity politicians. These hypotheses (which were developed by the authors as part of a broader analysis of celebrity activism) are (1) the more endemic public disaffection with ‘politics as usual’, the bigger the political space for even the most unlikely types of celebrities to run for office successfully and (2) in established democracies, the average tenure of celebrity politicians is shorter than that of professional ones.
Classifying populist celebrities
We have collected data on more than five dozen European populist parties active in the period 1999–2018 and their leaders. We have identified a series of indicators at three different levels, relating to the party (performance, ideology, organisation), the leaders, and the country (prevalent attitudes within the electorate, national media system, party system). The full description is provided in the Supplemental Appendix. We use such data in two ways. First, we examine what distinguishes the subset of leaders who have not spent their whole life in politics from populist leaders as a whole. Then, we offer an inductive taxonomy of populist leadership. The distribution of ‘outsider’ leaders not being uniform across such groups, we use the taxonomy as a guide in choosing the qualitative case studies that complete our analysis.
What sets outsiders apart
Our first series of observations about the data concern the comparison between the group of populist leaders as a whole and the subset of outsiders. The data are quite noisy, with large variance, but some general information can be gleaned. In many ways, the two groups are similar. For instance, the best result of the parties is virtually indistinguishable (15.7% vs 15.5% of vote share, and 3.8 vs 4.0 in party rank, although outsider-led parties are significantly more likely, 30% to 21%, to be the first party). Participation in government is similarly close (45% for populist parties, 47% for outsider-led ones), as is ideological orientation (6.56 vs 6.3 on ParlGov’s L-R index). Outsiders, however, are more likely to be the founders of the party they lead (86% vs 69% for all populist parties), which is corroborated by the fact that 91% of their parties are new parties in the period under consideration (vs 75% overall).
Furthermore, the measure of anti-establishment attitudes in the countries with outsider-led parties at time of entry is higher (27.91) than the average for all countries in the study (24.42). Similarly, outsider leaders come from political contexts with less societal trust towards politics: the averages for all three Eurobarometer trust indicators are lower in the case of outsider-led parties than among all cases, most notably in terms of trust in parliaments. Finally, taking 2008 as the conventional date for the beginning of the global financial crisis, outsider-led parties are more likely to have entered parliament after this date (43%) than are populist parties overall (39%). All these findings suggest that ’t Hart and Tindall’s hypothesis (1) is corroborated by our data.
A finer look at the data suggests other differences setting the subgroup apart. For one thing, geographically, the outsider-led populist party phenomenon is concentrated in post-Communist countries (60% of the cases in eastern Europe fall into this category, vs 45% overall, and an outsider-led populist party is present in nine out of 15 countries in eastern Europe, but only in 11 out of 28 overall). It is also the case that outsider-led populist parties flourish in party ecosystems in which there is more than one populist party: of the 12 countries with only one populist party (about 43% of the whole), only one has an outsider leader. This condition of outsider-friendliness in competitive populist markets holds in eastern Europe (only three of 11 countries in our survey have only one populist party) more than in western Europe (nine of 17).
Moreover, outsiders tend to have shorter tenures as leaders: the average length of their stint atop the party is 10.5 years vs 12.5 overall, a tendency heightened at the extremes, with only 13% of outsiders having maintained leadership for over 20 years (vs 20% overall), while 26% have led for less than 5 years (vs 16% overall – although many are still ongoing). Hence, it appears that ’t Hart and Tindall’s hypothesis (2) is also corroborated by our data.
With regard to the communication patterns of populist leaders, the systemic variables of national media environment (Hallin and Mancini, 2004; Herrero et al., 2017) would appear anecdotally quite pertinent. However, investigation of the quantitative data (not shown – see replication materials online) failed to uncover significant differences between insider and outsider leaders in this regard. Hence, in order to explore the distinctive aspects of outsider leaders’ communicative strategies, we focused on qualitative accounts of three different types of outsiders (sec. 4, infra).
Types of populist leaders
Our second order of considerations attempts to produce a taxonomy of populist party leadership models based on an extrapolation from clustering in our data along the axes of electoral success, government participation, leadership length, and ideological orientation. We contend that contemporary European populist leaders can be grouped into five ideal-typical models. Table 1 summarises them by organising all the cases spatially along two dimensions, length of leadership (decreasing top to bottom) and access to governmental power (decreasing left to right), and observing the clustering in the other two elements (leadership length and ideology).
Types of populist leadership.
Italics = outsiders; * = ongoing leadership; # = external support to government. Two-letter superscripts are standard European country identifiers.
The first group can be labelled ‘long-term marginals’: these parties are never in government, have extremist ideologies, have a very long term leadership, and typically hail from countries with a competitive national market for populist parties. Examples are Nikolaos Michaloliakos of Golden Dawn (Greece), Daniel Féret of the Belgian National Front, or Rudolf Keller of the Swiss Democrats. As a slightly divergent subgroup, we can identify a distinct Nordic model, with slightly better electoral results, occasional participation in government (but not leadership of it), and typically a monopoly of the national market for populism (for example, Pia Kjærsgaard of Denmark or Carl Hagen of Norway).
The second group is labelled ‘East European headmen’, and is characterised by strong electoral success, first party rank, leadership in government, and typically medium-length leadership, in the 10–20 year range (such as Jarosław Kaczyński or Robert Fico). A subset of ‘survivors’ shares such qualities, while exhibiting even longer leadership careers (Viktor Orban being the classic case, to which Western politicians such as Silvio Berlusconi and Christoph Blocher may be assimilated).
The third group is that of the ‘dealmakers’, long-term leaders who control sizable reservoirs of votes and regularly participate in government as junior partners (examples include Joerg Haider and Andrzej Lepper).
Among populists who have participated in government, the dealmakers and the headmen can be contrasted with a fourth group, the ‘managers’, who have significantly shorter leadership tenures. Typical cases are Rolandas Paksas in Lithuania or Joseph Bucher of the Austrian Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ). A subset of this fourth group (‘executives’) has achieved even greater success, leading governments, as in the case of Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic or Juhan Parts in Estonia.
Finally, a group of ‘meteors’, can be identified, in which short leadership and mediocre electoral success are matched with opposition status in parliament (for instance, Frank Stronach, Dan Diaconescu).
Among the leaders who do not fit easily within these categories, none have entered government. Many of these outliers have obtained significant electoral results (>10%), but their success is not correlated with their leadership tenure, as many have not enjoyed careers longer than a decade.
The chief advantage of the proposed taxonomy is that, while based on objective electoral, governmental, and biographical data, it also closely tracks distinctive leadership styles. Moreover, it significantly distinguishes between the overall population of populist leaders and the subset of outsider leaders previously discussed. While the latter represent about 35% of the populist leader population as a whole, their distribution among the leader groups is significantly skewed: they comprise only 9% of the long-term marginals group (one single case, that of Giuliano Bignasca of the Swiss Lega dei Ticinesi) and are underrepresented among the headmen, but they are slightly over-represented among the meteors (38%) and most notably are a disproportionate amount – a full 50% – of the managers group (while being roughly proportional in the outlier group).
Thus, an empirical tendency in the political participation of outsider figures in the leadership of populist parties seems to emerge from the data. The two most characteristic options for outsider leadership appear to belong to the manager and meteor group. Therefore, in order to explore these options more in depth, a representative case of each will be discussed as a pole of a continuum along which outsider leadership most often manifests itself.
Case studies
Our purpose, in offering qualitative case studies along with the broader quantitative analysis, is to assess how different types of outsider populist leaders make use of their extra-political credentials, as discussed in the first part of the article, and whether and to what extent they manage to maintain their perceived authenticity, their outsider persona, and appear separate from politics-as-usual. For this reason, in each case, we take into account not only structural elements of the political makeup of the countries in question, such as generalised social trust or party system crisis, but also more specific accounts of populist party organisation and communication strategies. By exploring the idiosyncratic path that led these individuals to politics, it also becomes possible to shed some light on the different aspects of leadership that come into play in the different political strategies.
Table 2 summarises our findings in the qualitative case studies. As with our quantitative analysis, the comparison is carried out at the level of the political system, the party, and the individual leader. The case studies however allow us to go beyond the large-n analysis in demonstrating how different types of outsiders wielded the tools at their disposal in different ways. In investigating leadership styles, we consider the origin of outsider appeal, the type of populism being performed, and the media strategy adopted as producing distinct types of populist parties and populist politics, responding to specific national environments. The final row presents the outcomes of these leadership experiences in terms of relative success in preserving the appearance of outsider authenticity. In extreme synthesis, Frank Stronach was unable to capitalise on his numerous tactical advantages: he was perceived as insufficiently committed to the political project, and his party quickly collapsed once he withdrew support; moreover, his antagonistic relationship with the media was contained by placing him within a familiar trope, in which his outsider persona was validated but his ideological points were muted. The opposite happened with Andrej Babiš, who has succeeded in gaining power through a shrewd transferral of his managerial capacities into the political arena: his party organisation and media strategy both bear the decisive imprint of this background. The main challenge, however, is for Babiš to retain credibility for his outsider persona once in government. As for Grillo, the various dimensions of our analysis attest to his uniqueness: not only is he a leader but not a candidate; the centrality of new technologies infuse both the organisation and the communication of his party, setting it apart from other European populist experiments.
Case studies.
MSM = Mainstream Media.
Representative cases
Manager/executive: Andrej Babiš
The Czech Republic, the country that over the past half-decade has witnessed the striking rise to power of Andrej Babiš and his outsider party ANO (which is the Czech word for ‘yes’ as well as an acronym for ‘Action of dissatisfied citizens’), presents the typical characteristics of weak institutionalisation of a party system that facilitates the rise of populism. It has one of the lowest scores in our sample of trust in parliament as measured by Eurobarometer (12%), and an above-average DEREX anti-establishment attitudes score. Moreover, net satisfaction with democracy declined between 2004 and 2010. Despite a relatively mild influence of the international financial crisis on national economic growth, the party system was upended in the 2013 election, and the disruption was compounded in the following election of 2017. The crisis was chiefly due to the allegations of corruption tainting the establishment parties, the mainstream-left Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) and the centre-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS), who had between them always led governments and provided Prime Ministers ever since the Velvet Revolution.
Andrej Babiš, a very successful businessman of Slovak origins who won his fortune by creating an agribusiness conglomerate (Agrofert) out of the privatisation of State assets during the transition to capitalism, founded ANO at the height of the anti-political mobilisation of Czech civil society against the political class (Brunclík and Kubát, 2016: n29; Havlík and Voda, 2016: 125). The centrality of the fight against corruption to the party is borne out by the Manifesto project data. Beyond that, the party has a fluid ideological profile (its R-L ParlGov score of 6 places it among mainstream European liberals, congruently with its joining the Liberal (ALDE) group in the European Parliament, while the Manifesto project RiLe would seem to suggest a slightly left-of-centre slant). At first, the party banked on the outsider image of its leader, deploying a fairly pragmatic attitude towards topics that are heavily ideological elsewhere in the region, such as Euroscepticism, relations with Russia, or the refugee crisis.
Babiš’s leadership itself displays the characteristics of the ‘manager’/‘executive’ group, as described above. In 2017, ANO improved on its already impressive score of 2013 by becoming the first party in the country, with more than twice the votes (29%) of its nearest competitor. As a consequence, Babiš was nominated Prime Minister (although his attempts to form a minority government ran into considerable difficulties in parliament). His political career, however, has so far been comparatively short, well under a decade. If Babiš proved capable of consolidating his position, he might be on the way to institutionalising his role within the political system in the manner of the ‘East-European headman’ group. On the contrary, he could fall victim to the phenomenon of populist party churn (Stanley, 2017).
Babiš’s successful entry into politics was predicated on an interesting balance of organisational and communication strategies.
From the point of view of party structure, ANO managed to guarantee cohesion and discipline mainly through its recruitment strategy. While some of its candidates had previous political experience, especially at the municipal level, and some civil society figures were persuaded to join the ranks of the party, the strategic positions within the organisation were controlled by managers transferred from Babiš’s business concerns (Cirhan and Kopecký, 2017: 132–135; Hloušek and Kopeček, 2017). Hence, party institutionalisation was underwritten by pre-political, business-firm loyalty ties, in what might be termed the ‘Fininvest model’, after Berlusconi’s holding company.
In terms of communication strategy, it should first of all be noted that, 2 years after the founding of ANO, Agrofert acquired the media holding Mafra, which controls inter alia the storied and prestigious newspaper Lidové noviny; one of the largest-circulation popular dailies, MF DNES; as well as the most-visited Internet news portal in Czech, iDNES. Although such outlets have not been employed for crude propaganda purposes, they guaranteed an at least equitable coverage of news regarding ANO and its leader. In parallel, Babiš launched a series of weekly interviews, carried on the Web, either in the form of monologues or as conversations with scripted, softball questions. This protracted media exposure allowed him to frame a public persona removed from the perceived verbiage and duplicitousness of the political class: a mixture of business authoritativeness (Cirhan and Kopecký, 2017) and outsider common-sense fused in the mould of a national trope, the traditional Czech everyman. Such a media reputation was solidified with savvy in-person PR blitzes, such as manning pop-up soup kitchens in busy thoroughfares. By such means, Babiš was capable of maintaining his outsider, populist credibility even while participating as a junior partner in government. The preservation of an aura of authenticity was all the more remarkable, considering the numerous allegations of conflict of interest and corruption levelled at Babiš himself, which, his detractors claim, represented the real motive behind his political engagement in the first place. Whether the balancing act is compatible with the occupation of the Prime Ministership is perhaps the most crucial question for Babiš’s future political prospects.
Meteor: Frank Stronach
The underlying characteristics of public opinion in Austria set the country apart from its Czech neighbour. For instance, trust in parliament, at 64%, is one of the highest in our sample, on a par with Scandinavian countries. Similarly, the DEREX Anti-establishment attitudes index is much lower (14) than average. Moreover, net satisfaction with democracy, as measured by Eurobarometer, actually increased in the period 2004–2010. Such structural conditions notwithstanding, Austria also underwent a ‘change’ election in 2013 fuelled by dissatisfaction with the status quo, witnessing the emergence of a series of new parties, chief among which was Team Stronach.
Frank Stronach, an Austrian immigrant to Canada after the Second World War and self-made billionaire in the auto parts industry, had already dabbled with electoral politics in his adopted country in the late-1980s. However, at the beginning of the present decade, he made his country of birth the target of his political ambitions. The Austrian political scene had already been destabilised around the turn of the century, as the rise of the Freedom Party (FPÖ) had successfully challenged the cosy duopoly of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats that had dominated the country in the post-war period. However, according to Stronach, a political space within the ideological spectrum still remained underrepresented: classical laissez-faire liberalism. Stronach therefore wished to challenge the status quo in economic matters, while not necessarily endorsing the social conservatism of the FPÖ. Such a position is reflected in the quantitative data: if the R-L ParlGov score is the same as ANO’s, the Manifesto project RiLe of 0.971 is much more moderate. In terms of the other issues we tracked through the Manifesto project data, while corruption was the chief concern for Team Stronach as well, the party was also Eurosceptic (the European Union being accused of corporatism and business-stifling red tape), as well as outspoken about immigration.
Stronach’s leadership epitomises the characteristics of the meteor group. He led his party for only 4 years. His general election score of 2013 (5.7%), while quite remarkable for a new party, did not offer any chance of entering the executive branch. His abandonment of the leadership role triggered a quick organisational collapse, such that the party dissolved prior to the subsequent elections, consigning it to posterity as a flash phenomenon, a one-term wonder. Ultimately, given the relatively late phase within Stronach’s life cycle of his political engagement, combined with the multiplicity of other business and social activities outside of the country, he lacked credibility in his commitment to the political sphere in the medium run (Austrian electoral study, Jenny, 2014: 35, 2015: 28). This outcome was in part facilitated by a particular equilibrium of organisational and communication strategy decisions.
Team Stronach was initially constituted as a parliamentary group in 2012, the year before the elections, through the defection of a handful of MPs originally elected with the Social Democrats and the BZÖ (Dolezal and Zeglovits, 2014: 645). This tactic allowed the party to side-step the requirement for new political forces to collect large numbers of citizen signatures in order to be placed on the ballot. However, the recycling of political personnel left Team Stronach with a permanently lukewarm loyalty among its cadres, who sought individual escape routes for their political careers once it became clear that the leader was abandoning active engagement (Austrian electoral study, Jenny, 2013: 28).
With regard to communication strategy, Team Stronach represented an attempt to apply the principles of North American political advertising to a Continental European audience in an unmediated fashion. The results were mixed. The party certainly relied on its leader’s charisma (Schlögl and Maireder, 2014), to the exclusion of most other means, and when it did not, as in the notorious case of its attempt at viral marketing, the hip-hop campaign song its MPs were induced to film, it arguably did not serve its best interests. The party focused heavily on the ‘air war’ of television presence over the ‘ground war’ of retail politics. Frank Stronach embodied the populist persona, especially in his pugnacious relationship with the mainstream media. A part of his appeal and claim to authenticity depended on adversarial, antagonistic behaviour aimed to shake the citizenry from its status quo-induced torpor. His disruptive participation in TV shows (populist ‘bad manners’) generated attention, but it cannot be said that it meaningfully advanced the conversation or swayed public opinion in favour of the party’s ideological positions, for instance, in terms of orthodox economic liberalism. Furthermore, certain characteristics of the candidate, such as his strong anglophone accent in German, stood in the way of symbolic representation of, and unmediated contact with, ‘the People’. Ultimately, and perhaps against the plans and expectations of his communication team, Stronach was cast into the public role of the cantankerous uncle, whose verbal extremism was essentially neutralised by a likeable, avuncular style. In conclusion, Stronach was able to maintain his outsider credentials and defend his authenticity, but at the price of failing to attain any real influence on the political decision-making process in Austria.
Outlier case: Beppe Grillo
Grillo is in many ways an astonishing case, an outlier in the group of outsiders-turned-politicians we have studied, chiefly in that he declines to run directly for office. In this sense, he fits our title’s description of kingmaker, preferring to ‘inspire’ his party from outside the institutions, while retaining a very real power over strategic decision-making. The party he founded in 2009, the Five-Star Movement (M5S), went on to win the 2018 Italian general election, with almost a third of the valid votes (32.7%). Our data allow us to examine Grillo’s numerous other peculiarities, which are also affected by long-term systemic factors at the national level.
In the last 25 years, Italy is the only country with as many as three elections in the list of most ‘volatile’ elections in western Europe since 1945 (with levels above 25; see Baldini and Giglioli, 2019). When compared to other west European countries that voted in 2017 (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Austria), Italy shows an unparalleled electoral salience of issues such as corruption and the costs of politics. Eurobarometer data on trust in parliament (12%) and the index of anti-establishment attitudes (33) are comparable with the Czech Republic, and Italy is more generally close to east European trends in these systemic elements (Rupnik, 2016).
The M5S’s success is built on the historical layering of dynamics of discontent towards the political system. If in the past Italy was notable in western Europe for long-term popular dissatisfaction with the working of democracy (Morlino and Tarchi, 1996), the perception of the failure of the parties born in the 1990s to solve the problems of the country was instrumental for the rise of Grillo’s political initiative. Indeed, Grillo’s success lies in channelling this dissatisfaction by – in his own words – acting like a ‘megaphone’ for the citizen, oppressed by the greed of the political class.
Grillo first came to public notoriety as a comedian: his TV shows became very popular in the 1980s, but he also got into trouble for mocking politicians. As a consequence, Grillo turned his attention to live shows, which grew increasingly into a form of civic activism. His first real political breakthrough came in 2007, when he organised a ‘V-day’ (that is, a ‘F_k-off day’) in Bologna for citizens to vent their angst at the status quo. The same year, La Casta, a journalistic exposé co-authored by Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella on the privileges of the political class, was, with over 1 million copies sold, the Italian-language best-seller. Within this milieu of general dissatisfaction, the M5S was born. In a context dominated by an increasing distrust towards politics, Grillo built the M5S on the success of his personal blog, which in 2008 was among the top 10 most influential worldwide. In his political initiative, he has successfully combined a rhetoric of ‘horizontalism’ with an authoritarian assertion of internal discipline.
In tracing the organisational evolution of the party, Tronconi (2018) refers to an ‘elusive organisational model’. In order to implement the core goal of horizontalism and the primacy of the Web, the ROUSSEAU platform was created in 2016 to coordinate the Movement’s activities and conduct consultations it considers politically binding with its base. However, ROUSSEAU is a peculiar instantiation of online democracy, being a one-way tool that allows for no feedback. While certain blog-posts can receive several thousand comments, there is never a reply by the author. Horizontalism and ‘citizenism’ are represented in the blog mainly in that most of the topics analysed are framed along an attempt to defend citizen rights, and more specifically the ‘common man’. This consistently repeated anti-political rhetoric persists a half-decade after the movement first entered the Italian parliament.
With regard to media strategy, Grillo’s personal attitudes are marked by a significant ambivalence (Cosenza, 2014): he has long refused TV interviews as part of his crusade against the establishment but has often made himself available to foreign press and TV. For several years, M5S MPs were ordered not to appear on TV without specific permission. This ambivalence towards the media mirrors Grillo’s ambivalent role: the leader and true inspirer of a political movement who still commands significant popular confidence in opinion polls but who has apparently taken a decisive step back from personal involvement.
This freedom from responsibility is also a freedom of movement: it allows Grillo to combine his use of on-stage performances around the country, with ‘each one counts as one’ (‘uno vale uno’) as its most distinctive motto and recruiting slogan on the Web. Grillo’s capacity to show spontaneity is facilitated by his position: not running for representative office, he has a less stringent need to prove he is ‘one of us’. Grillo does not need to be a coherent leader, and he can candidly accept the populist label with which professional politicians have charged him. Indeed, Grillo is a self-proclaimed qualunquista, an expression which comes from the Movement of the ‘Common Man’ (Uomo Qualunque), an anti-establishment flash party from the early post-war years, which was very successful in southern Italy and later was a source of inspiration for poujadisme in France (Shields, 2004).
This admission on qualunquismo is consistent with a marketing technique (see again Wood et al., 2016) marked by Grillo’s ambivalent combination of informal leadership of the Movement with the preservation of styles and attitudes typical of his job as a comedian. Hence ‘swear words, insults, rude gestures, caustic jokes, contradictions, and continuous coups de theatre’ form his normal repertoire (Cosenza, 2014: 90). Grillo’s marketing technique differs from that of traditional politicians: Besides [the] repetitive use of the singular [informal] pronoun tu, Grillo’s complete, almost physical fusion with his audience depends on his extreme body language: he is not content with looking at his interlocutors, but if there are just a few he gets very close to them, touching and hugging them; whereas when he is on stage in front of thousands of people, he always leans forward as if he wanted to fling himself into the crowd. (Cosenza, 2014)
Hence, Grillo’s authenticity is of a very peculiar kind. His communication strategy is built on the ambiguous combination of a never-abandoned comedic persona, the fusion with his audience-turned-electorate, and his role as a maverick and castigator of the vices of the political class.
Conclusion
In the foregoing pages, we endeavoured to show how outsider and celebrity dynamics shape populist party leadership in Europe. On the basis of a dataset of 65 populist leaders in 28 European countries, we discussed the characteristics (status as party founders, geographical concentration, competitiveness of the populist ecosystem, length of leadership) that set outsider leaders apart. Perhaps most importantly, we found empirical corroboration for research hypotheses proposed in the secondary literature, according to which low levels of systemic trust and a destabilisation of the political system favour the successful entry of outsider, celebrity politicians in the electoral arena, and the tenure of celebrity politicians is shorter ceteris paribus than the career of their professional counterparts.
Furthermore, we proposed an inductive taxonomy of populist leadership types, based on infra-organisational and broader political measures of success, and observed that outsider politicians tend to cluster in some leadership types rather than others. On this basis, we examined two representative cases (Andrej Babiš and Frank Stronach) of outsider populist leadership, and for each, we discussed the interplay of organisational, ideological, and communication strategy variables in the leaders’ bid to leverage outsider credentials for political advantage. Finally, we considered an outlier case, that of Beppe Grillo, completely unique along the organisational, ideological, and communication dimensions.
Much remains to be done in this field of inquiry, and we hope our study prompts further gathering and analysis of empirical evidence. Future research on populist celebrities with more granular data on the determinants of the media sphere would be extremely welcome, in order to determine quantitatively whether certain types of outsiders might be associated with specific media strategies.
The issues raised here are, after all, hardly of mere academic interest. The large-scale entry of non-professionals into the sphere of political leadership is a major development in our democracies, marking a decisive shift in importance, from the ‘backstage’ of party organisation to the ‘frontstage’ of media presence. The omnipresent focus on dynamics of visibility is profoundly reshaping the distribution of power among social actors, and these changes seem to be here to stay.
Outsider, celebrity politicians are increasingly not simple jesters, brought in by political professionals for propaganda purposes. They can be kings in their own right, and in contemporary populist political movements across Europe, they have in many ways found a profoundly congenial ideological and discursive environment. But the possibility exists for a third option, which optimally preserves perceived authenticity of character while maximising political influence: whether the role of a celebrity populist kingmaker will remain an Italian anomaly or whether it has the potential to attract epigones elsewhere is a question with significant implications for the future spread of populism and the nature of its leadership.
Supplemental Material
BPI844494_Appendix – Supplemental material for Kings, jesters, or kingmakers? European populist parties as a microcosm for celebrity politics
Supplemental material, BPI844494_Appendix for Kings, jesters, or kingmakers? European populist parties as a microcosm for celebrity politics by Matteo Giglioli and Gianfranco Baldini in The British Journal of Politics and International Relations
Supplemental Material
BPI844494_Populist_celebrities_database – Supplemental material for Kings, jesters, or kingmakers? European populist parties as a microcosm for celebrity politics
Supplemental material, BPI844494_Populist_celebrities_database for Kings, jesters, or kingmakers? European populist parties as a microcosm for celebrity politics by Matteo Giglioli and Gianfranco Baldini in The British Journal of Politics and International Relations
Supplemental Material
BPI844494_supplemental_table – Supplemental material for Kings, jesters, or kingmakers? European populist parties as a microcosm for celebrity politics
Supplemental material, BPI844494_supplemental_table for Kings, jesters, or kingmakers? European populist parties as a microcosm for celebrity politics by Matteo Giglioli and Gianfranco Baldini in The British Journal of Politics and International Relations
Footnotes
An early version of this project was presented at the 4th Prague Populism Conference ‘Current Populism in Europe: Culture, History, Identity’ on 22 May 2018. In writing this article, Baldini contributed the first and last section and the Grillo case study; the second section was written jointly, and Giglioli provided the rest. The authors share joint responsibility for all parts of this work.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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References
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