Party Competition in Portugal under Foul Weather: Understanding the Effects on Relations with the EU and Europeanisation

In a time of multiple crises across Europe, Europeanisation has been under pressure. According to Saurugger (2014), this is so due to the growing salience of EU-related issues. As result, the politicization of the EU has increased and contestation intensified at the domestic level. Generally, contestation is led by Eurosceptic actors that see crises as political opportunities to change the modes/mechanisms of Europeanisation. They have done so by rising moral polarization and contestation over Europeanisation with political discourses revealing a growing tension between the supporters of EU-optimism and the opponents of the EU, by challenging the fundamentals of European project. Thus, Europeanisation understood as the construction of political consent about rules, procedures and institutions of the European Union (Radaelli 2004), seems to be seriously at risk in face of the EU-crises. Against this background, Portugal features as an exceptional case both regarding the rise of Euroscepticism and the resulting challenges to Europeanisation. According to Lisi (2020), during the period of the Great Recession, although left parties – the Communist Party and the Left Bloc – have intensified their opposition to the EU, this did not “impact on the party-voter alignments nor the dynamics of the party system”. Taking this finding as a starting point, this paper aims to answer the following research question: How party competition during the economic and coronavirus crises has affected Europeanisation in Portugal? To this end, we will draw on Taggart’s work (2020) to examine the different ways in which the issues of European integration – namely the economic factors, the immigration issues, the sovereignty/democracy concerns (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2018) and the GAL/TAN values (Hooghe and Marks 2018) – were politicized in the Portuguese party politics during the last decade of EU-crises. To this end, the study will attempt to operationalize three dimensions of analysis – the presence, the salience and the impact of Euroscepticism. By looking at these analytical dimensions, we expect to identify the type of contestation in Portugal among those proposed by Taggart (2020: 357): limited contestation, constrained contestation, open contestation or embedded contestation. Whilst this study will rely methodologically on a single case study, the selected time frame will allow us to engage in a comparative exercise based on three moments: a) the Portuguese bailout between 2011 and 2014; b) the innovative governmental left solution called ‘geringonça’ between 2015 and 2019; c) and the Coronavirus pandemic between 2020 and 2022. The expectation is that such comparative analysis allows us to explain the effects of party competition during the successive crises on the country’s relations with the EU and its Europeanisation dynamics. Therefore, we will conclude that as long as Portugal evinces a system of limited contestation, the resulting counter-effects on the country’s Europeanisation dynamics will remain exiguous. These results allow one to understand what has changed in Portugal’s relationship with the EU upon the impact of economic and health crises, while assessing to which extent less EU-politicized and contested systems contains trends of de-Europeanisation.