Defending Consensus Against the Bullies: The EU's Resilience Against Populist Radical Right Governments Using Unpolitics During the COVID-19 Crisis

Populist radical right (PRR) governments have frequently undermined key mechanisms of intergovernmental consensus-building in the European Union (EU), raising concerns about the EU’s ability to respond to crises collectively. However, recent crises have highlighted the resilience of consensus-oriented actors in EU governance against such acts of unpolitics. Fighting the economic implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Commission and mainstream governments secured the timely adoption of the EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) and the Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF), overcoming threats from Hungary and Poland to block these fiscal measures over the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism. This paper aims to theorise, assess, and explain the resilience of consensus-oriented actors in EU crisis governance against attempts by PRR governments to undermine intergovernmental consensus-building through unpolitics. Resilience is conceptualised as the capacity to withstand populist disruptions minimising their impact on governance processes and outcomes. Procedural norms, institutional environments, and crisis-specific conditions moderate this capacity, as they shape the availability and effectiveness of countermeasures. The empirical analysis proceeds in two steps. First, I use counterfactual analysis to assess the capacity of consensus-oriented actors to contain the negative effects the Hungarian and Polish threats. Second, to explain their resilience in this episode of the COVID-19 crisis, I map the countermeasures that consensus-oriented actors employed regarding elite behaviour, policy design, and public communication and discuss their effectiveness in mitigating the impact of the populist disruption. Preliminary findings suggest that mainstream governments framed the disruptive behaviour of the Hungarian and Polish governments as inappropriate and harmful to their populations. Additionally, the European Commission created a credible threat to exclude the two countries from the RRF, leveraging their high dependence on EU subsidies. This paper has relevance beyond EU studies, offering insights into how institutions of multilateral cooperation can better prepare for the global rise of populism.