Business as Usual? Impact of Populist Governments on the Negotiation of EU’s Accession to the Istanbul Convention in the Council of the European Union

While the scholarship on populism has consolidated over the last years, some of the specific dangers of populism, including its influence on the concept of representative politics, remain less well understood. Following Taggart’s introduction of the idea of “unpolitics”, researchers have applied the concept to study the impact of populist actors on the quality of EU policymaking and, more specifically, decision-making in the Council. Most notably, studies on asylum and migration policies have shown the importance of populists’ expedient use of both informal practices that shape the democratic debate in EU institutions and procedural rules to displace deliberation, compromise, and consensus. However, these arguments have been based mainly on high-profile examples, while less salient policy realms remain understudied. One such medium-to-low salient realm is violence against women (VAW), a notoriously slow-progressing policy area in the EU. Possibly the most important piece of international regulation in this area, the Istanbul Convention, was ratified by the EU in 2023, following nine years of negotiations and challenges related to the legal basis and the lack of a common accord among Member States. It remains unclear why the progress has been so slow: Is it due to the usual suspects, such as the EU’s competence limitations or lack of political will? Or can other factors, including populist actors “perpetuating the crisis”, explain the slow progress of the EU? This paper addresses these questions by tracing the progress of the EU’s accession to the Istanbul Convention. Using secondary document analysis of relevant EU documents, media coverage, and expert interviews, we explore the behaviour of populist actors in the Council and its preparatory bodies and, consequently, its impact on VAW policymaking in the EU. Specifically, we uncover whether unpolitics actually took place in some shape or form due to populist efforts to maintain the EU in a state of permacrisis or whether other structural factors explain slow developments in this policy area.