of left-wing populist tendencies. Laclau stressed that, “as a condition of its emergence, populism requires verticality of a new type. The people, as a collective actor, has to shape itself around a certain identity. But that identity is not automatic: it must be constructed.”8 This means, for Laclau, that alongside the “horizontal expressions of democratic equivalencies” there has to be a “vertical articulation around a hegemonic signifier that, in most cases, is the name of a leader.”9 Mouffe has the same view: “To turn heterogeneous demands into a collective will it’s necessary to have a figure who can represent that unity, and I don’t think there can be a populist movement without leadership, that’s for sure.”10
Formulated by writers on the left, these assertions provoked a certain discomfort. But they were vigorously defended by their authors, who contrasted the type of leadership they were calling for with “the very authoritarian relation” that characterized, as they saw it, the relationships between a people and its leader in right-wing forms of populism. But that is a weak argument, based simply on a priori circumstances. Their thoughts about the specificity of the leader embodying the people are more interesting. For Laclau and Mouffe and others, this is a leader who exists as such only if he effectively embodies the lives and demands of those he represents: in short, only if he manifests a real power of embodiment. In that case, he can be said to be ideally a depersonalized leader, a pure representative, a figure totally absorbed in his role, thus far removed from the expression of a personality cult and from the relation of domination that such a cult implies.11 I emphasize “ideally” here: from this standpoint the leader can be viewed as a pure organ of the people.12 He is not only the chosen one or the delegate, that is, the representative in the procedural sense of the term: it is he who renders the people present in the figurative sense; it is he who gives the people a form and a face. If increased personalization of political life is a universal phenomenon tied to the preeminence acquired by the executive authority (whereas the legislative authority is always vested in a plural body), there is a properly populist specificity in the figure of the leader as organ.
In this regard, the straightforward declarations of a Jean-Luc Mélenchon are significant: “I am of the people. That is all I want to be, and I feel only scorn for those who would like to be something more.”13 The same Mélenchon exclaimed, while visiting the Forum in Rome in 2017: “Caesar was close to the people. The patricians, the enemies of the people, were the ones who assassinated him. It is interesting to see Caesar as a figure of the people.”14 Here Mélenchon is observing that politics implies more than ever the need to “construct a collective affect” even while deeming it necessary at the same time to “deconstruct it in order to anchor rational choices.” This is a Mélenchon finding the personalization of power sincerely “intolerable” and simultaneously seeking to keep on plowing the “tribunist furrow,” a Mélenchon at once hesitant and determined to resume the garb of leader embodying a people with which he had entered politics. Questioned about how he thought he could enlist the support of ordinary people, he answered: “[As] myself. You can identify with me . . . The people I meet in the street, on the bus, in the metro, feel instinctively the one who is ‘with us.’”15 This way of conceiving representation via embodiment is found throughout the populist galaxy. Even Donald Trump did not hesitate to say, during his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican Convention: “I am your voice.”16 Laying claim to such an identification is a program in itself. Beyond the formulation of proposals for reform, the defining feature of populist policy is thus that it is grounded in embodied speech that has what might be called an existential dimension, speech that is addressed to the emotions as much as to reason. We shall come back to this crucial point.
Notes
1 1 Jean-Luc Mélenchon notes about La France Insoumise, significantly: “We do not want to be a party. A party is a tool of a class. A movement is the organized form of the people.” L’Hebdo, no. 174 (October 18, 2017).
2 2 On this point, see my book Le peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 1998).
3 3 See Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Escritos politicos (Bogotá: El Ancore Editores, 1985).
4 4 Juan Domingo Perón, El modelo argentino (Gualeguychú: Tolemia, 2011), p. 11.
5 5 Hugo Chávez, in a speech delivered 12 July 2012; the same formulas were repeated verbatim September 9 and 24, 2012.
6 6 Let us note that Subcomandante Marcos adopted the same approach, from his refuge in Chiapas, Mexico, to justify wearing a face-covering hood at all times. When anyone asked him what was hiding under the mask, he would answer: “If you want to know who Marcos is, get a mirror; the face you’ll see is Marcos’s. Because Marcos is you, a woman; he is you, a man; he is you, an indigenous person, a farmer, a soldier, a student . . . We are all Marcos, a whole insurgent people” (cited by Ignacio Ramonet in Marcos, la dignité rebelle: Conversations avec le sous-commandant Marcos [Paris: Galilée, 2001]; emphasis added).
7 7 Hugo Chávez, Seis discorsos del Presidente constitutional de Venezuela (Caracas: Ediciones de la Presidencia de la República, 2000), p. 47.
8 8 Ernesto Laclau, “Logiques de la construction politique et identités populaires,” in Jean-Louis Laville and José Luis Coraggio, eds., Les gauches du XXIe siècle: Un dialogue Nord–Sud (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2016), p. 153.
9 9 Ibid., p. 156.
10 10 Chantal Mouffe and Íñigo Errejón, Podemos: In the Name of the People, trans. Sirio Canós Donnay (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2016), p. 109.
11 11 On the issue of the introduction of a leader into left-wing political thought, see for example the work of Jean-Claude Monod, Qu’est-ce qu’un chef en démocratie? Politiques du charisme (Paris: Seuil, 2012). See also the postface written for the second edition of that work in the “Points” series (Paris: Seuil, 2017).
12 12 To pursue this notion further, one can turn to Raymond Carré de Malberg, who presents the organ theory in German public law in the late nineteenth century in his comprehensive Contribution à la théorie générale de l’Etat, 2 vols. (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1920–2). In populism, then, there is an implicit transposition of the theory of the organ into the figure of the leader (whereas Carré de Malberg made Parliament the organ of a nation, an entity that was unrepresentable in itself).
13 13 Jean-Luc Mélenchon, citing Robespierre, in L’ère du peuple (Paris: Fayard, 2014), p. 31.
14 14 Remarks reported in Lilian Alemagna and Stéphane Alliés, Mélenchon à la conquête du peuple (Paris: Robert Laffont, [2012] 2018), p. 410. The citations that follow are from the same text.
15 15 Interview in Le 1 Hebdo, no. 174 (October 18, 2017). Let us also recall that during the contested search of the France Insoumise headquarters on October 16, 2018, he did not hesitate to say “I am the Republic” (tweaking a formula attributed to Louis XIV), “My person is sacred,” and “I am more than Jean-Luc Mélenchon, I am 7 million persons” (remarks reported in Le Monde, October 19, 2018).
16 16 Donald J. Trump, near the end of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on 22 July 2016. Transcript published by The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/us/politics/trump-transcript-rnc-address.html.
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