United they Fight the EU: Exploring Radical Right-wing Parties’ Opposition to the EU in the EP

According to Mudde (2014) fifty-two members of the European Parliament coming from radical right wing parties have been elected during the last EP elections. However, the predominately media-driven thesis that cooperation among such actors is only led by financial incentives deriving from EP internal rules is still widespread. This is mainly due to the fact that the core reason for the existence of radical right wing parties is largely based on concerns regarding national sovereignty and identity. This last observation nevertheless goes hand in hand with a feature that equates such forces: their rejection of the EU, their euroscepticism. In other words, having different national origins, all of them contest the EU, its policies, its establishment, its institutions and its values in a pan-European environment (the one of the EP). This paper proposes to explore the activity of the major components of the Europe of Nations and Freedoms (ENF) party group in the EP starting from a reconceptualised definition of euroscepticism as EU-opposition and applying a method of content analysis on the speeches they deliver during the plenary sittings of the EP. The main objective of this work is to observe how much similar are these parties in their stances toward the EU and to understand if their criticism toward the EU may play a major role in their cooperation in the EP.