When radical left parties tone down their Euroscepticism - why, how and where?

Literature has vastly treated the objection to the European Union (EU) and European integration by radical parties as the study of deviation. This article, instead, explores the acknowledged rapprochement of the radical left to supranational European politics and assesses why many parties have toned down their Euroscepticism after Maastricht. In recent years, scholars have begun to pay attention to the changing nature of Euroscepticism and have found that this phenomenon is not static. Moreover, some have argued that because of the often diametric positions of the left and the right, a ‘united in diversity’ approach that merely infers common objections when there is little in common leads to overgeneralisation and thus trivial results. This article shares this approach and examines the changing nature of radical left Euroscepticism in detail, adding to the limited research on the ambivalent relationship between the EU and radical left parties. By analysing the electoral programmes of six radical left parties in EU member states between 1989 and 2019, this article aims to contribute to a neglected topic - the study of why Eurosceptic parties are increasingly supportive of the EU and European integration. This novel method is not only a contribution to the literature on the causes of Euroscepticism and on the reasons why radical parties object to the EU, European integration or both, but it also seeks to find out at what point and why radical left parties are moving closer to the existing system and normatively to European integration, which they previously rejected as such. The cases are first determined by analysing the quantitative data sets of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the Manifesto Project. The selection of cases also takes into account geographical and economic differences as well as different national party systems, thus contributing to the ideology-strategy debate. We then select the radical left parties for which advocacy of the EU and European integration has increased strongly over time and propose a manual coding scheme to be applied to both European Parliament elections and general election manifestos. The observations thus provide new insights into when, where and why attitudes towards the EU and European integration increase and whether this is strategic or ideological.