ABSTRACT
Traditional class-oriented communist language has ‘antibodies’ against populist rhetorical constructions, because at its core are the social classes and not the people as an undifferentiated whole. Populism is not considered hereto be a self-contained ideology but rather a specific political-rhetorical style that can be linked to any ideology, even an ideology as coherent and resilient as the communist one. The chapter shows that although the populist temptation was present from the outset in this major reorientation that aspired to making the anti-systemic and sometimes marginal communist parties into political forces national in range and governmental in orientation, this nevertheless never became the predominant mood in their politics. The French Communists were equally inclined to employ the extremism of the time as a lever for shifting to more pragmatic positions. The chapter discusses the relationship between left-wing politics and populism through the case of Eurocommunism, the last glimmering of the European Left before the onset of the post-Communist era.
