The populist politics of Euroscepticism in times of crisis: Comparative conclusions

Abstract

This article offers comparative findings of the nature of populist Euroscepticism in political parties in contemporary Europe in the face of the Great Recession, migrant crisis, and Brexit. Drawing on case studies included in the Special Issue on France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom, the article presents summary cross-national data on the positions of parties, the relative importance of the crisis, the framing of Euroscepticism, and the impact of Euroscepticism in different country cases. We use this data to conclude that there are important differences between left- and right-wing variants of populist Euroscepticism, and that although there is diversity across the cases, there is an overall picture of resilience against populist Euroscepticism.

Euro Skepticism and Right Wing Populism

“…It received an increase of 14%, during this campaign, because it had a major supporting party with itself. However, the Populist Party headed by Sinn Fein did not perform to expectations, and in 2015, they lost a significant vote scale (Pirro, Taggart and van Kessel 2018). It is really astonishing to see that these parties lost a significant number of votes when these elections took place.…”

EU Political System’s Resilience in the Age of Politicization: Lessons From the 2019 European Parliament Elections

“…RPP have become the most successful new party family in Europe over the last quarter of a century (Painter, 2013: 9). The conceptual core of right-wing populism includes not only antielitism and nativism, but Euroscepticism (Pirro et al, 2018;Vasilopoulou, 2018;Szöcsik and Polyakova, 2018) and anti-pluralism (Taggart, 2012), which threaten the results of the European integration project and the institutions of EU multilevel political construction.…”

“…Besides the strong and stable link between RPP and Euroscepticism (Pirro et al, 2018: Vasilopoulouand, 2009, the dynamics of the relationship between RPP and Euroscepticism vary nationally, and are based on "a careful balance between interest representation, electoral politics and party competition" (Vasilopoulouand, 2009: 4). The Eurosceptics are more evenly spread across the left-right divide in the party systems of EU member-states (Taggart, Szczerbiak, 2002:10).…”

¿Condiciona la ideología de acogida las actitudes de los partidos populistas hacia la UE? Los vínculos entre populismo y euroescepticismo en el sur de Europa

“…Therefore, Euroscepticism expresses the idea of contingent or qualified opposition, but also incorporates outright and unqualified opposition to the process of European integration. Both populism and Euroscepticism have increased their importance after the Great Recession (Pirro, Taggart and van Kessel 2018), but their coincidence does not seem to be purely temporal.…”

“…Contemporary research suggests that populism is one of the driving forces behind a profound process of realignment taking place in European party systems since the 2008 Great Recession (Kriesi 2014;Pirro, Taggart and Van Kessel 2018). At the national level, populist forces have been able to capitalize on the crisis of representation triggered by governments' loss of legitimacy, and this environment of "disconformity" has paved the way to campaign against the political establishment who assured that "Europe is good" (Duff 2013: 141).…”