The leftwing movements that emerged across Western Europe in the 2010s like La France Insoumise, Spain’s Podemos and UK’s Labour (under Corbyn) hoped to spend their time under the spotlight addressing the structural inequalities that had arisen from several decades of neoliberal economic policies. These united two largely urban constituencies: a progressive middle-class and an ethnically-diverse working-class that had been neglected in mainstream politics over several decades. However, the analysis here demonstrates how ordinary politics (and especially economic debates) were systematically displaced by ‘metapolitical’ disputes, most notably the ‘Labour Antisemitism Crisis’, during the period 2018-19 in which the opposition Labour Party stood on the brink of power. ‘Metapolitical’ here refers to discourse about who counts as legitimate or worthy to participate in politics, potentially to govern. Metapolitics punishes its subjects twice: first, by focusing attention on features of a political movement considered problematic (“Populist”/ “Pro-Russian”/“Antisemitic”) by those with the resources to frame the debate and second by withholding attention from their actual political programme (“redistribution”/ “climate justice”).
To date, this strategy for containing the left appears to have worked: in no “West” European country, save perhaps Syriza in Greece in 2015, has a party come to power with a mandate to address economic injustice. Nevertheless, the 2010s have changed the political landscape in a manner that elites cannot ignore. An analysis of the subsequent UK General Election in 2024 reveals that the fissures opened up both by the rise of the left and its quasi-authoritarian containment remain very much open. The leftwing publics socialised in the 2010s will continue to present a significant threat to the neoliberal consensus of mainstream politics in the years to come.
James Dawson is Assistant Professor in Politics at Coventry University, UK. His academic research has mainly focused on the ideological project of (liberal) democratization in Central and Eastern Europe and how it shapes both elite politics and citizens’ everyday lives.