Sovereignty in Political Discourses of the European Populist Radical Right: The Right of the People and the Right of the Peoples

Abstract

The populist radical right (PRR) in the European Union so frequently evokes sovereignty as one of the indispensable rights of the people(s) that it becomes urgent to examine the relationship between the concept of sovereignty and the concept of rights in PRR political discourses. The chapter explores how in practice the PRR discursively instrumentalises references to rights to construct its vision(s) of sovereignty in the EU context(s). By applying instruments of critical discourse analysis to the electoral speeches of Marine Le Pen and Jarosław Kaczyński, the leaders of two very dissimilar EU PRR parties, the Rassemblement National and the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, the chapter outlines concrete discursive strategies containing references to rights used by the PRR in the EU. The analysis shows that the PRR uses references to rights to advance exclusionary conceptions of popular (the right of the people) and national (the right of the peoples) sovereignty built upon the idea of a monocultural and ethnically homogenous majoritarian democracy, thus discursively challenging the foundational legitimacy of today’s European project as well as its current institutional configuration.