Better no agreement than a European agreement: The role of populism in policymaking on refugee distribution in the EU

Populist parties are increasingly part of member states’ government. However, while there is a growing literature on the bottom-up politicisation of EU policy-making as well as on the responsiveness of governments in the Council to public opinion and voter preferences, we still know very little about the interplay between populist and mainstream governments at the EU level and how it ultimately affects EU policymaking and policy outputs. This paper closes this gap by providing a closer look into the strategies of populist parties and governments when engaging in EU policymaking. We do so by studying the case of recent negotiations around refugee redistribution in the EU. A particular focus lies on the negotiations on the Dublin IV Regulation, which have been deadlocked since June 2018 over the issue of refugee quotas. The case allows us to study differences between populist and mainstream governments along two essential conflict lines: a substantive conflict line on migration politics and an integration conflict line on the competence and power of the EU. We argue that the long-term paralysis in this area can be understood by the active efforts of populist governments to maintain the EU in a state of permanent crisis, on the one hand, and the willingness of mainstream governments to sacrifice reform for the sake of maintaining a fragile equilibrium on EU integration, on the other hand. Our analysis relies on 19 semi-structured expert interviews conducted in 2019 with actors involved in the decision-making process, relevant EU documents and press.