The case against left populism is that it is too leader-centric. When Podemos launched in Spain it wasn’t long before it was accused of betraying the protest movement that helped set the scene for anti-establishment politics. In 2015, the party’s leader Pablo Iglesias made a bet on overtaking PSOE, the centrist socialist party. When he failed to do so, Podemos appeared, for a moment, to be too top-heavy to endure.

La France Insoumise is another example. In this case its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has built an organizationcentered around his idiosyncratic persona. Critics, both left and right, have pointed out the hollowness of LFI’s internal democracy.

The case in favor of left populism is that few things other than a decisive leader who is capable of deploying a friend-enemy distinction have had the capacity to unite a deeply fragmented society of the kind now common in a postindustrial age.

Left Populism and Its Discontents

In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has proven to be the only available lightning rod capable of uniting the Left and leading the New Popular Front, a coalition of left parties, against a persistent far-right threat.

In Spain, while Iglesias may have failed in his earlier ambitions to “storm the heavens,” his party has sustained a political agenda that has enabled PSOE, under the rebooted leadership of Pedro Sánchez, to govern from the center left. In the context of a rightward march in much of Europe today, Spain emits a faint light of progress.

In the UK, the xenophobic right has come to dominate political discourse, with both Labour and the Conservative Party maneuvering in the slipstream of Nigel Farage, the head of the far-right populist Reform party. From the referendum on leaving the EU in 2016 up to the end of negotiations in 2021, Farage’s successful Brexit campaign dominated government policy in the UK as well.

Reform (formerly known as the Brexit Party) has been Farage’s political vehicle since 2018. It was initially set up as a private limited company with Farage as its major shareholder. According to polling, Reform is on track to become Britain’s largest party — although we still have over three years before a general election must be held.

By contrast, the Labour Party in Britain has long been a machine of moderation, one held together by a first-past-the-post electoral system that wipes out the gains of smaller parties. A web of institutional actors, from trade unions to affiliated societies operating at various levels and through various bodies, both local and national, are supposed to mediate the relationship between Labour voters, party supporters, and the Labour Party leader.

Traditionally, Labour produced leaders capable of balancing these interests. The Left has often criticized Labour for its lack of internal democracy and its refusal to allow members to hold parliamentarians accountable. Unlike the Democratic Party in the United States, Labour does not have open primaries. However, the extent of centralization today is extreme, even by the standards of the postwar past.

The Return of the Left?

Tony Blair, the author of New Laborism, Britain’s equivalent of Bill Clinton’s Third Way, was Labour’s first populist leader — that is, if we understand the term as describing a relatively direct relationship between a leader and the electorate mediated by the idea of the people. Blair, who championed disastrous humanitarian intervention in the Middle East, parachuted compliant members of parliament into safe seats, bypassed decisions taken by Labour Party conferences, sidelined affiliated trade unions, hollowed out party committees, and prioritized his addresses to members and potential voters via the Murdoch-owned press.

Jeremy Corbyn, who led Labour for four years from 2015, has always been a radical Labourist democrat living in a populist world. The strategic outlooks of some of his key supporters are collected in a new book, Your Party: The Return of the Left, which makes a common cause for grassroots democracy quite clear.

The New Left Review’s Oliver Eagleton has assembled the thoughts of important actors in the founding of a new political party — provisionally called Your Party. Ejection from Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party prompted Corbyn to establish an alternative political vehicle.

Several statements in the book share Corbyn’s commitment to grassroots democracy and empowering social movements to create political change from the bottom up. James Schneider, a senior press officer under Corbyn and, until recently, a key figure in the new Your Party initiative, sees the lack of a “social base” as a primary reason Corbynism failed.

The left-wing MP Zarah Sultana, who, earlier this year, quit Labour to play a leading role in Corbyn’s new party, calls for links to be forged with tenant unions, labor struggles, and protest movements. “We don’t just want electoralism” she explains to Eagleton in her interview.

From the South African anti-apartheid campaigner Andrew Feinstein, who ran a strong campaign as an independent in Starmer’s seat in the general election of 2024, we hear that the registration of interest in Your Party – eight hundred thousand people signed up to the mailing list when it launched in July – “shows there is a basis for a mass politics of the left.”

“There are certain people on the left who want a strong degree of centralized control,” Feinstein says, taking a pop at some of Corbyn’s inner circle of advisers. “But neither Jeremy nor Zarah has that view.” Feinstein desires a new party that “reflects a radically democratic ethos,” one capable of “building real institutional power.”

Such views are an echo of Corbyn’s Labour leadership elections in 2015 and 2016, in which the bearded teetotaler promised to empower party members and social movements. But that wasn’t how things worked out. While some two hundred fifty thousand people became Labour members to support Corbyn’s leadership, almost all of this energy went into conventional electoral campaigns.

In 2019 the Conservatives under Boris Johnson used Brexit to win votes in strategic seats in the UK’s electoral map, causing disaster for Corbyn’s Labour at Westminster. Starmer, who pushed Labour in this direction by promising to overturn the referendum result, cynically used the crisis to gain control of the party and launched a campaign against the Corbynite left.

With nowhere to go, Corbyn’s supporters had been waiting for an alternative to emerge. Your Party was meant to be just that. The collection of essays in this new book is a testament to the excitement that accompanied its launch.

Marching Through Treacle

Is this the return of the Left, as the subtitle of the book proposes? Eagleton’s coruscating introduction lays out the extent to which Starmer has isolated his party from popular sentiments of anti-racism, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-austerity. “The Labour Party today has no future orientation, no conception of ‘progress,’” Eagleton writes.

That there is a huge opportunity for the Left in the UK is beyond doubt. Yet, as Eagleton outlines, Your Party has got off to a catastrophic start.

Factionalism between Corbyn and Sultana was manifest in public displays of ineptitude: Sultana announced she had the authority to colead Your Party, but Corbyn didn’t agree; a membership portal was launched by Sultana, but Corbyn told supporters it was fraudulent. Sultana consulted defamation lawyers while Corbyn’s side reported her to a government regulator. While Corbyn and Sultana have since tried to appear united, a report in the Guardian suggests that the fight over membership data and money is being taken to the courts. The public spat continues.

Those who had seen Your Party as the alternative to what, over the summer, became the establishment’s near consensus on jingoistic, anti-migrant, pro-austerity politics were forced to look on in despair.

Meanwhile, two weeks before Your Party’s false start, Zack Polanski was elected leader of the Green Party on a ticket of ecopopulism, a term he promotes. Polanski does not have the same socialist credentials as Corbyn or Sultana. (In 2015, he stood as councilor for the Liberal Democrats in an election following a Lib Dem-Tory coalition that oversaw the greatest fall in living standards the UK had seen in decades.)

In a series of adept media performances, he has called for an end to the UK’s support for the genocide in Gaza, he has raised the issue of wealth taxes, and defended multiculturalism. By any measure, the Greens have so far done more than Your Party to stem the rising tide of right-wing chauvinism.

The Greens, who gained three MPs in the last general election, bringing their total up to four, have already seen polls put them ahead of Labour. Membership of the party under Polanski has more than doubled to over one hundred forty thousand. Your Party, by contrast, has been quiet about its membership figures.

Sultana, despite claiming to want Your Party to be led by its grassroots members, has been happy to take to the media when it suits her. Recently she has tried to carve out a slim political space to the left of Polanski on a position of withdrawal from NATO and ending all diplomatic ties with Israel. But the electoral benefits of drawing such a cleavage would be doubtful. A faultline that could be pressed to productive effect would be to distinguish between a liberal green and a blue-collar, and former blue-collar, wing of the Left. Were Your Party to make this second group their base, they could target a much sought-after section of the electorate, yet one that has had no meaningful economic offer from all the major parties, excluding the Greens.

Your Party has begun a process of consultative regional assemblies, with a view to a national conference next month and a leadership election early next year. Might this all be too late, however? Interpersonal factionalism at the top combined with a contradictory desire for maximum participation at the grassroots has resulted in a forward march through treacle, one that, contra the lightning flashes of left-populism, has so far been much too slow.

As it stands, Your Party lacks not only clear leadership but even a name. Like Mélenchon, Corbyn was one of the few people in the British left with enough name recognition to launch a new initiative. Yet at present it appears that his characteristic lack of decisive leadership, his instinct to defer all decisions to someone else — above all his small team of advisers — combined with Sultana’s lack of discipline, may have blown the party’s chances.

As Eagleton points out, the wrangling between Corbyn and Sultana has meant that Your Party has lost sight of the salient questions of strategy. The book that he has edited should help return such questions to the fore. A lot will be learned here, as much in the outlooks expressed in this book as in what is currently occurring in practice.