Special Issue: The Populist Politics of Euroscepticism in Times of Crisis

The European Union (EU) has been exposed to multiple stresses during the past decade. Virtually every EU member state has been affected (albeit to varying degree) by the negative consequences of the economic and financial crisis that unfolded after 2008. While the actual causes of this crisis are manifold, its occurrence primarily emphasised the structural limits of the Eurozone as a currency union without fiscal coordination. Just as the economies of member states were exiting the most severe phase of the crisis and finally undergoing recovery, a new crisis struck the EU. Amid an increasingly instable international political scenario, asylum seekers from near East and African countries reached EU borders in exceptional numbers. The 2015 refugee crisis put under considerable strain the internal decision-making of the EU – not to mention the consensus about international principles of solidarity. In June 2016, finally, the decision of the UK’s referendum to opt for ‘Brexit’ has the potential to be at least difficult, and at worst a full–blown crisis for EU crisis in terms of its legitimacy and need for reform. Already in the months preceding the 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections, a number of journalistic accounts anticipated a populist Eurosceptic landslide as one of the likeliest outcomes of the vote. While this alarmist scenario did not materialise in full (e.g. Mudde 2014), the reason for assuming a populist takeover in times of crisis rests both in the ideological persuasion(s) of these actors and the loss of legitimacy that recently affected the EU. Populist organisations traditionally voiced their opposition to ‘Europe’ on the basis of a composite series of arguments (Taggart 1998; Hooghe et al. 2002; de Vries and Edwards 2009); moreover, their ability to profit from moments of (real or perceived) crisis instinctively elevated them to potential beneficiaries of these particular junctures. With the proposed special issue, we set out to investigate and systematically tackle the intersection of populism and Euroscepticism in the face of the multiple European crises. Populism and Euroscepticism have surged to the level of becoming empty signifiers in public debates (e.g. Bale et al. 2011); as we argue, the relationship between populism and Euroscepticism is neither necessary, nor consequential. Most importantly, even when these features are found in unison, they are liable to adapt to changing socioeconomic, cultural, and political circumstances. We believe that the crises that have hit the EU over the past decade offer critical instances of change – and it is indeed the crucial element of ‘crisis’ that we intend to factor into the equation. Crises have been long interpreted as macro-level background conditions favouring the surge of populist parties (e.g. Taggart 2000); however, very little attempts have been made to address how populists perform crises (Moffitt 2015). The special issue critically connects the unfolding of the Great Recession, the refugee crisis, and Brexit to the Eurosceptic discourse of populist parties across a number of cases. As it stands, the special issue comes across as the very first attempt to coherently link these three aspects through comparative and empirical contributions. Straying from accounts on the performance of these parties in the electoral market, we aim to contribute to the existing literature on the ‘supply side’ of populist Eurosceptic politics in two ways. First, by ascertaining if and how the ideological contours of Euroscepticism have changed as a result of these crises (i.e. the ‘inward’ aspect). Second, by establishing if and how these discourses have reverberated across the party-political arena, releasing effects in the political process (i.e. the ‘outward’ aspect). The recent economic, financial, refugee, and Brexit crises offer an unprecedented opportunity to delve deeper into these aspects. While we are generally agnostic about the possibility that populist actors may have substantively altered the content of their oppositional discourses as a result of these crises, we nevertheless think that parties expressing Euroscepticism might strategically harden their opposition to the EU, and/or frame the issue differently according to changing circumstances (Pirro and van Kessel, forthcoming). For the second aspect of our enquiry, we are partly motivated by a growing body of literature pointing to the increasing relevance of populist parties in their respective national arenas (e.g. van Spanje 2010; Minkenberg 2015). Assuming that populist (in this case, radical right) actors have effectively managed to exert influence on policy dimensions such as immigration or minority politics, we are interested to address the question of changing/additional dimensions of contestation (Pirro 2015). In other words, what competition dynamics unfold following the co-optation of populist radical issues by mainstream political parties? Does competition shift towards other (i.e. EU-related) policy dimensions? And what are the effects released by populist Eurosceptic actors in the political process?