European populism(s) as a counter-hegemonic discourse? The rise of Podemos and M5S in the wake of the crisis

In this chapter, we compare the discourse of Podemos and Movimento Cinque Stelle in order to answer the following question: to what extent do these movements pertain to the same political phenomenon? Based on Laclau’s definition of populism, we provide a “snapshot” of both parties’ discourse between 2012 and 2016 by carrying out a corpus-based analysis that combines lexicography and metaphor analysis. The results show that they display a populist logic and represent two counter-discourses against neoliberal hegemony. However, they also display important differences that could prove to be decisive when it comes to seizing political power and building an alternative to the hegemonic order they challenge, as their recent evolutions have shown.