Europeanisation of the populist far-right - the political crisis of the EU and the emergence of a populist far-right European project

lzop-2026-02-24_10_45_14-europeanisation-of-the-populist-far-right-the-political-crisis-of-the-eu-and-the-emergence-of-a-populist-far-right-european-project.pdf

Europeanisation of the populist far-right - the political crisis of the EU and the emergence of a populist far-right European project

Europeanisation of the populist far-right - the political crisis of the EU and the emergence of a populist far-right European project

This article traces contradictory developments in the Europeanisation of the populist far right. Based on state and hegemony theory, it analyses the development of a European far-right project between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty-four. Five events are central to this analysis: the twenty nineteen European elections, the COVID-nineteen pandemic, the Conference on the Future of Europe, Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine and the European Elections twenty twenty-five. During this period, a European far-right project developed based on the idea of a 'true Europe'. However, this was not a linear process but was characterized by many contradictions and differences within the far-right. This suggests that the European scale plays a much more important role and requires greater attention in research.

Introduction - the Europeanisation of the far right

Since the twenty nineteen European elections, the political landscape in Europe has changed significantly. In the far-right spectrum, processes that have been looming since Brexit have accelerated and multiplied in the wake of the twenty nineteen elections. Although Brexit came as a shock to the EU and initially led to euphoria among the far-right and populist radical right parties, it did not lead to further exit campaigns. Rather, parties such as the Rassemblement National (RN, formerly the Front National) changed their position towards the EU and the euro. This post-Brexit tendency has often been understood as a transition from hard to soft Euroscepticism, or as a redefinition of the far-right's relationship to European integration, now accepting 'the logic of European interdependence' and a chance to 'endogenize nationalism within the EU'. However, both approaches show the limitations of the terminology of Euroscepticism. We criticize that the categories of hard and soft Euroscepticism are too rigid to capture the contradictions of positioning within far-right parties, which is why the term equivocal Euroscepticism has been proposed. It refers to analyses of far-right parties that take the acceptance of various, sometimes even contradictory, policy positions into account and understand this as strategic or programmatic ambivalence. Given the euro ambivalence of the populist radical right parties, a strict categorization into soft and hard euroscepticism proves inadequate. On the one hand, populist internationalists seek European cooperation because it can yield domestic benefits. On the other hand, they simultaneously develop their own European imagination, constructing a pre-political Europe beyond the EU. This ambivalence towards the EU also points to the hidden history of a Euro-nationalism that developed alongside the genuine nationalism of the populist radical right party. This assumption is supported by recent research on the European concepts of the populist radical right party, and on the Europeanisation of far-right extra-parliamentary movements such as the Identitarian Movement. Building on this research, the present article assumes that the concept of Euroscepticism frames the relationship of the populist radical right parties to the EU too narrowly and is unable to capture many contradictions and ambivalences, since this relationship is dichotomized at its core as nationalism versus European integration. Rather, far-right Europeanism must be understood as a redefinition of the strategic-populist dichotomy of people versus elite within the paradigm of European nativism. The Europeanisation of the populist radical right parties and the development of a European Nativism must

CONTACT Daniel Keil daniel.keil@uni-koeln.de Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany @ twenty twenty-six Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group be analysed in the context of the EU's political crisis and the crisis-driven re-ordering of the scales of political arenas in Europe.

The analysis will be conducted in four steps. First, the concept of project, which is taken from critical European studies, will be theoretically grounded. Second, the crisis of the EU will be described as the social context for the Europeanisation of the far-right project. Third, the process of its development will be analysed based on five events: the twenty nineteen European elections, the Covid pandemic, the Conference on the Future of Europe, the Russian attack on Ukraine in twenty twenty-two and the twenty twenty-four European elections. These events represent shifts, contradictions and reorientations of the far-right project. Fourth, the central elements of the European imaginary are identified. The rationality and structure of this imaginary form a deep-seated commonality between the various actors of the far-right project that transcends contradictions.

The basic material for the analysis consists of press reports, speeches made during the election campaign twenty nineteen and in the European Parliament between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty-four, manifestos and party statements. Inspired by a hegemonic theory adaptation of critical discourse analysis and ideology-critical considerations, on the production of knowledge about society, the specificity of the far-right European imaginary is elaborated, which is seen as an expression of a strategy to rearticulate the populist opposition between the people and the elite on a European scale. The aim of this analysis is to determine the specific far-right way of adapting to and helping to shape the European re-ordering of the political space through forming its own European project.