In What Sense Does Right-Wing Populism Pose a Democratic Challenge for the European Union?

Abstract

What kind of challenge is right-wing populism for the European Union (EU)? The EU has been frequently criticized by populists and non-populists alike for being a remote technocracy that suffers from serious democratic defects. Democratization relies on popular (and system insider) feedback, to spell out where the shortcomings are, and how these can be rectified. Does populism play this role—is it capable of playing this role—in the EU today? I discuss that under three headings: (1) Is populism a democratizing challenge for the EU? (2) Is populism a democratic challenge for the EU? (3) Is populism an existential threat to the EU? The article finds that populists dismiss the prospects for EU democracy and espouse conceptions of people, community, and values that are out of synch with the EU. Today's populists appear less concerned with abolishing the EU and more bent on altering it to serve their ends.

Right‐Wing Sovereignism in the European Union: Definition, Features and Implications

“…However, sovereignism does not necessarily coincide with populism, as populists are against elites (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017), whilst our RWS actors opposed supranational elites trumping national elites (especially if they themselves were members of the latter). As Fossum (2023, p. 11) puts it, populism is ‘unconcerned with balancing responsibility and responsiveness (…) in today's Europeanized and globalized context’, whilst RWS actors focused their criticism on supranational elites taking the place of national elites. RWS actors criticized the supranational institutions of the EU [the European Commission, hereinafter the Commission; the EP; the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU); and the European Central Bank (ECB)] but not those representing national governments.…”