From Cohesion to Contagion? Populist Radical Right Contestation of EU Enlargement

Abstract

The rise of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) in a growing number of European Union (EU) member states and inside the European Parliament (EP) has triggered concern over their ability to drive further contestation of European integration. Using EU enlargement as a test case, we analyse an original dataset of over 20700 hand-coded statements from the last three EP mandates to trace the emergence of an increasingly coherent, oppositional discourse by PRRPs towards a further widening of the EU. We show that PRRPs contribute to a generalized hardening of opposition towards enlargement, but fail to impose their identity-focused framing upon other parliamentary actors. Instead, we suggest that mainstream party groups accommodate PRRPs' essentialist discourse by shifting from technical, conditionality-based reasoning towards more political arguments articulated around human rights and democracy. Our findings feed into debates about the transnational cooperation of PRRPs and the political impact of Euroscepticism.

The Changing Discourses of EU Enlargement: A Longitudinal Analysis of National Parliamentary Debates

“…The figure shows how challenger parties from the RR are significantly more likely to refer to identity when discussing enlargement than other party families. Consistent with Bélanger and Wunsch (2022), these results support the view that challenger parties, specifically radical right parties, mobilise issues of identity to drive a wedge within mainstream parties (De Vries and Hobolt 2020). Model 9 in figure 6 plots the results using governance tokens as the dependent variable.…”

“…It lacks a general, longer‐term perspective on change and its causes. A recent study (Bélanger and Wunsch 2022) is a rare exception in charting how the enlargement issue has entered party politics. Their focus is limited, however, to the European Parliament – showing primarily an increasing cohesion amongst populist radical right parties.…”

Measuring Receptivity to Eurosceptic Media Discourses in the Vicinity of War: Evidence from Romania

“…backgrounds fuse. The second one represents resistance to decisions taken in Brussels which then must be implemented at the national level, questioning the legitimacy of EU institutions; this is an expression of the idea that the EU should limit integration (Styczyńska, 2017) and enlargement (Bélanger & Wunsch, 2022). For our study, we will refer to the first as attitudes towards EU politics and to the latter as attitudes towards EU policies.…”