The Spanish Case

In their recent work, our left-patriotic authors argue that the so-called “populist moment” of the 2010s emerged because traditional left parties had abandoned the working class, leaving a vacuum that “outsider” movements like Podemos and Más País could fill by articulating a discourse of revolt from below. However, these movements didn’t live up to their potential. These authors seek to explain why.

Drawing on Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau, and an understanding of populism in terms of “performance,” they diagnose the failure of Spain’s populist left as the result of an elitism that prevented it from mobilizing its “natural addressees.” They distinguish between two types of elitism.

Elitism of form refers to a style of communication that was too intellectual and polished to resonate with popular audiences. They claim that while left-wingers like Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón had populist ambitions, they remained trapped in overly academic ways of speaking that made them sound “inauthentic” and detached from everyday life. This was, in their words, a “populism made in a laboratory,” far-removed from the exuberant populisms of Latin America.

Yet this captures only part of the story. Populism is not simply about “performing the low,” in the sense of everyday “low culture.” Recent research shows that populist identification lies in the tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary: leaders must appear close to the people while embodying a form of exceptionality. Populism isn’t just about playing the everyman but about a mix of relatability and larger-than-life authority. In that balance, intellectualism may be a resource rather than a flaw. It can offer a way to weave together contradictions to forge a connection that feels both authentic and aspirational.

Elitism of content, meanwhile, concerns the growing embrace of “minority” or “identitarian” causes seen as incompatible with populism. For Rojas-Andrés, Mazzolini, and Custodi, these demands prioritize particularism over universalism, require high cultural capital, and create a fragmented discourse unable to speak to a social majority. They dub this shift the Left’s “woke” turn.

Building on this critique, they argue that the Spanish left’s withdrawal from patriotic references further eroded its capacity to speak to broad sectors of society. Drawing on Gramsci, they claim that any movement aspiring to universality must acquire a national-popular character. Rather condescendingly, they insist that the working class finds it hard to imagine a popular interest except in “national” terms. From this perspective, the Left’s revival among the “common people” depends on reappropriating patriotic symbols long monopolized by the far right. This involves emphasizing sovereignty and a unifying “people” over divisive cultural or identity-based struggles.

This diagnosis has resonated far beyond Spain, however. It echoes through debates in Italy, Britain, Germany, and France. It suggests that to rebuild a majoritarian bloc, the populist left must speak the idiom of nationhood and drop alienating “identitarian” excesses over race, gender, and migration.

French Left Patriotism

Yet the experience of France tells a more complicated story. The split between repeat presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his critic François Ruffin reveals two opposing paths — and shows how the left-patriotic strategy often misses its target.

In its early years, Mélenchon’s LFI seemed to follow an approach close to the one defended by Rojas-Andrés, Mazzolini, and Custodi. It adopted national themes and appeals to French sovereignty, while maintaining a cautious stance toward so-called “minority” struggles.

The diagnosis, however, was somewhat different. While these authors argue that a left-patriotic strategy could help attract nonvoting abstainers, LFI’s early ambition was to win back far-right voters. As Mélenchon often said, the far right had captured much of the disenfranchised working class during the “populist moment.” His movement’s task, therefore, was to appeal to the “fâchés pas fachos” — the “angry, not fascist” voters disillusioned with the establishment. To achieve this, Mélenchon’s style fused erudition with fiery oratory and a visceral performance of indignation that unsettled elites.

This was the line that first attracted Ruffin, a journalist and filmmaker from northern France, where deindustrialization and social dislocation have fueled the far right’s rise. Elected to the National Assembly in 2017 from a working-class district where Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has become dominant, Ruffin has consistently defended a left-patriotic approach.

He cultivated the image of a simple, common man and embraced a rhetorically combative style, arguing that the Left must reclaim national symbols and speak to “les petits blancs [ordinary white people]” in a language they recognize and understand. Although he often showcased the everyday lives of workers in a subaltern condition, such as black women in the cleaning sector, he tended to dismiss “minority” struggles as secondary. For instance, he refused to join the 2019 march against Islamophobia, claiming he had “a football match,” and criticized the Spanish populist left for embracing trans rights, which he saw as divisive.

As the years passed, however, Ruffin increasingly drifted away from LFI, as Mélenchon and his team came to recognize the limits of this approach. The disappointing results of the 2019 European elections revealed the exhaustion of the “fâché pas facho” strategy. The attempt to rebuild a majoritarian bloc through patriotic appeals had failed to reach those it aimed to convince.

The Limitations of Left Patriotism

To understand why, we must look at what populism really mobilizes. Populism is not just a style of leadership but a way of giving voice to those who feel unseen in politics. But these “invisibles” aren’t a homogeneous group and can’t be reduced to those who vote for the far right. Rojas-Andrés, Mazzolini, and Custodi do not call for courting far-right voters. Yet they assume that abstentionists and far-right voters share similar cultural habits, as the supposed “natural addressees” of populism. This overlooks the fact that invisibility has many forms. It cuts across groups marked by economic precarity, racial and gender hierarchies, and other mechanisms of exclusion that cannot be reduced to the image of the disaffected worker — implicitly assumed to be white.

Missing its target, the left-patriotic approach fails on three fronts. First, it struggles to pull back voters from the far right. In practice, many disaffected white working-class voters remain captive to xenophobic nationalism and few switch sides when offered a left-wing alternative. Second, rather than contesting the common sense increasingly shaped by the far right, it ends up reproducing and normalizing it. Third, it alienates key constituencies the Left needs to mobilize.

This is what Mélenchon eventually understood. The untapped reservoir of votes did not lie in rural white resentments. It lay, rather, among the abstentionists — and in France, more specifically, among the habitually nonvoting marginalized populations of the urban peripheries where increasing precarity intertwines with other forms of exclusion. That is, his movement needed to mobilize ethnic-minority, queer, immigrant, and working-class youth. In the French context, as LFI campaign strategists argued, even a slight increase in their turnout could tip the balance toward a left-wing majority.

Under Mélenchon’s leadership, and in contrast to Ruffin’s sovereigntist position, LFI began to reposition itself. In September 2020, Mélenchon introduced a new concept into his political vocabulary: creolization. Drawing on the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, creolization rejects the idea of a pure and original identity, instead seeing a popular subject as emerging through the encounters between cultures.

The term itself originates in colonial societies where languages and traditions mixed under conditions of domination, giving rise to new, hybrid forms of expression and resistance. From a creole perspective, “the people” is not a pre-given entity but is constantly in the making, shaped by relations that are often conflictual, marked by migration and colonial legacies, yet animated by histories of entanglement and creativity. As Mélenchon often repeats, creolization is not a project to be realized but a lived reality, a condition already shaping everyday life. It is neither “made in a laboratory” nor “high culture” but instead carries a “dirty,” grassroots, unruly side.

Custodi has referred to creolization as a promising way to rethink national identity. However, his account stopped short of recognizing its full implications. For if taken seriously, creolization entails embracing precisely the “minority” struggles that left-patriotic populism tends to downplay. For France Insoumise, embracing creolization meant embracing anti-racism, feminism, and queer rights explicitly. It reframed “the people” not as a static national mass. Instead, the movement started to claim that the French people and the French nation were the product of an ongoing process of cultural encounter, conflict, and reinvention.

Creolization vs. Republican Universalism

France Insoumise’s renewed approach has made waves because it strikes at one of the cornerstones of French political culture: a rigid republican universalism built on color-blind citizenship and strict secularism. The Republic claims to be neutral, but its so-called universalism has always had a face. In practice, it centers a white, male, heterosexual, and secularized Christianity — a dominant norm that defines who belongs and who is made invisible.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the suburbs surrounding France’s cities, known as the banlieues.  Officially, there are no minorities in France, only equal citizens. In reality, these working-class suburbs, home to racialized residents, are treated as internal frontiers of the Republic: subjected to aggressive policing, stigmatized, and largely voiceless.

Creolization directly challenges this illusion. It insists that the supposedly “neutral” terrain of the Republic is in fact racialized, gendered, and culturally coded. Yet it does not seek to reject universalism altogether. Saying that racism, sexism, and homophobia exist, and fighting against them, does not threaten universality. Instead, it reveals its hidden exclusions and provides the means to rebuild it on more inclusive grounds. In this sense, France Insoumise’s approach seeks to bring together demands for social equality, racial justice, and queer rights into a broader and more plural identity of “the people.”

Like Rojas-Andrés, Mazzolini, and Custodi, we do not deny that “the people” and “the nation” are often entangled. But a creolized populism involves a different understanding of the national-popular. In fact, the creole perspective also implies what we might call a creole patriotism that marked historical populism in Latin America, in which national liberation could not be separated from subaltern struggles.

Getúlio Vargas’s use of samba as a Brazilian national symbol and elevation of the Black Madonna; Juan Domingo Perón’s embrace of the racialized poor known as “cabecitas negras”; and Evo Morales’s calls for plurinational sovereignty all expressed the same creolizing impulse. They each sought to weave together popular sovereignty, cultural encounter, and subaltern struggle into a plural sense of belonging. These projects were uneven, contradictory, and imperfect. However, they already practiced a form of creolized universalism that Europe still struggles to imagine.

We would argue that this was also Laclau’s and Gramsci’s perspective. For Laclau, populism was not about imposing a universal discourse that erases difference but about constructing what he called an elusive universality, which constantly questions its own limits in order to include the underdogs. Gramsci, too, can be read in this light. He is the theorist of the national-popular, but also of subalternity. When Gramsci speaks about the national-popular, this is not a call to adapt to an existing common sense or national identity. Rather, it is a strategy for subaltern groups to construct a new, inclusionary counter-hegemony.

Implications for the European Left

The French case offers several lessons for the broader left across Europe. First, far-right voters should not be seen as easily convertible. While the support for the far right among working people is surely not irreversible, imitating far-right nationalist tropes neither wins back these voters nor mobilizes the abstentionists who feel excluded from politics.

Second, the Left must learn to embrace difference as a strategic strength, not a distraction. Queer, anti-racist, and feminist claims are not optional add-ons. They are crucial fronts for mobilizing abstentionists and for rebuilding a broad popular identity grounded in plurality.

Third, a renewed left project must foster what might be called a plural universalism from below. This means building coalitions that federate struggles, translate claims across divides, and let an open universal emerge from the grassroots.

Fourth, the Left must envision a creole nation. Patriotic references are not timeless or pure. Nations are living composites shaped by encounter, conflict, and reinvention. Embracing their creole dimension means seeing the nation as an unfinished, ongoing experiment.

Finally, the Left should never underestimate people’s intelligence. Populism is not just about drinking a pint or speaking plainly. Superficially parroting the codes of the working class can quickly feel inauthentic if it is not accompanied with a solid vision for a new society.

Remaking the People, Reimagining the Nation

To put it briefly, the split between Ruffin and Mélenchon crystallized around France Insoumise’s turn away from “left patriotism.” Yet this shift did not mean that the party abandoned the idea of the national-popular. The real difference lies in how each conceives the nation: the sovereigntist path views it as fixed, homogeneous, and sanitized, while the creolizing approach imagines a people-nation in motion, in friction, in creation.

To move from sovereigntism to creolization may sound ambitious. Yet it is necessary in two senses. One is ethical: if the Left yields to exclusionary common sense, what remains of the Left? It is also strategically wise. A creolizing populism can reach those the sovereigntist imaginary leaves behind: the abstentionists, the precarious, the racialized, and the queer. For the European left today, it may well be the only path forward.