Politics as Usual? Populist Governments and the Negotiation of EU’s Accession to the Istanbul Convention in the Council of the European Union

According to recent scholarship, populist governments engage in unpolitics, a repudiation of politics as the process of resolving conflict (Taggart, 2018), including on the level of the European Union (Zaun and Ripoll Servent, 2022). This behaviour is theorized to be even more pronounced in so-called ‘high gain, low risk’ policy areas such as gender equality (Zaun and Ripoll Servent, 2024). We test this argument by tracing the process of the accession of the European Union to the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, concluded in June 2023. Since right-wing populist governments have employed the populist critique of the Istanbul Convention arguments in the national context, the emergence of unpolitics on the European Union level seems to be likely. However, based on the literature on the Council of the EU, we develop a competing theory, claiming that behaviour associated with unpolitics will not emerge due to the technocratic nature of the negotiations and processes of socialisation in the Council working groups. We analyse multiple sources of data, interviews with negotiators in the Council of the European Union, official EU documents, and news in search of three tenets of unpolitics: the rejection of formal and informal rules of decision-making, the undermining of traditional methods used to reach compromises and refusal of adoption of any policy that would potentially resolve major conflicts. We find little evidence of unpolitics, neither by populist nor mainstream governments. We suggest that institutional factors, such as the negotiation culture in the working groups of the EU, hamper the emergence of unpolitics when opportunities to move a discussion from the technical to the political level are limited.