Seizing power destroys the ambiguity that sustained a leader’s unifying role
Evidence
Once in Argentina, Perón could no longer be an empty signifier: he was the President of the Republic and, as such, he had to take decisions and opt between alternatives. The game of the years of exile – by which each group reinterpreted his word according to his own political orientation, while Perón himself maintained a cautious distance from all interpretation – could not be pursued once he was in power. The consequences unfolded rapidly. The right-wing trade-union bureaucracy, on the one hand, and the Peronist youth and the ‘special formations’, on the other, had nothing in common – they saw each other as deadly enemies. No equivalence between them had been internalized, and the only thing which kept them within the same political camp was the common identification with Perón as leader. This amounted to very little, for Perón embodied for each faction totally incompatible political principles. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 437
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: An entirely empty signifier yields fragile popular unity held by leader love alone — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 430; Leadership derives from reciprocal imitation that frees the leader from individual obedience demands