Understanding Public Euroscepticism

While analyses generally examine the confluence of populism and Euroscepticism at the party level (Pirro and Taggart 2018), research on the public sphere, or the lack of it, and how it relates to civic attitudes towards European integration, can explain citizens’ views. This paper examines Euroscepticism and its emotions, after the 2016 British EU referendum. British citizens felt, in their words, ‘bullied because of [their] political correctness’ and pointed their anger and dissatisfaction against the EU (and Merkel’s) 'obsession for open borders'. The analysis underlines that these emotions and narratives have remained embedded in the post-Brexit days, they are characterizing the agreement to leave the EU and go back not just to Billig's banal nationalism (1995). Voting Leave represented respect towards true British values, the ‘core country’ as conceptualised by Taggart (2000), while Powellism (Hampshire 2018) and Wright's 'encroanchment' of Englishness (2017), can help understand the Eurosceptic narrative in Britain, but also how public Euroscepticism has changed in the contemporary contested domestic debates.