Following Syriza’s capitulation in Greece, Podemos’s compromises in Spain, and then the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in December 2019, skepticism seems to be spreading within left-wing circles as to the viability of populism as a political strategy for the Left. Similar discussions had already developed with regard to Latin American countries, especially as right-wing administrations replaced the left-populist governments associated with the “Pink Tide” of the 2000s.

This skepticism is often accompanied by the argument that the populist moment for the Left is now over. Even many of those once sympathetic toward the left-populist strategy now doubt its effectiveness, sometimes instead advocating a return to the purity of a class-based strategy. Recently, Jacobin dedicated a whole issue to left populism, in which it discussed Europe’s “short-lived and cruel . . . experiment in left populism [which] had ground to a halt”. The Italian version of the same issue of Jacobin was entitled “Where populism ended up.”

But even without ignoring populism’s limitations, we would like to scrutinize the claim that it has failed. Declarations of such end points often betray a linear and determinist logic — and thus seem to ignore the fluidity and contingency of the political and the continually reactivated cycles of political antagonism. Consider, for example, Argentina, where the populist left returned to power in 2019 after a four-year break — or Latin America more broadly, a continent that seems to be experiencing another “populist moment.” We would argue that these cycles of decline and reactivation are embedded in the political struggle itself — and thus demand a more open-ended perspective.