Shifting Grounds? How NGEU Funding Shapes Party-Based Euroscepticism in Southern Europe

The adoption of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) marks a major turning point in the evolution of EU economic governance, but its consequences extend well beyond the supranational sphere. Equally important are its implications for domestic politics within member states. This article contributes to this emerging literature by examining how the substantial financial transfers associated with National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) have shaped parliamentary debates in three of the largest RRF beneficiaries - Italy, Portugal, and Spain - using Germany as a shadow case. Employing multilingual large language models, we investigate whether and in what ways traditionally Eurosceptic parties have adjusted their rhetoric toward the EU in response to unprecedented EU-level redistributive policies. We expect that political parties will increase their support for the EU following the rollout of the RRF, but that their responses will be conditioned by their ideological orientation along the left–right and mainstream–populist dimensions, as well as by their incumbency status. Our findings hold significance for both academic and policy debates. Academically, they shed new light on the factors structuring party-level support for or opposition to the EU. From a policy perspective, our analysis provides the first comparative assessment of whether the EU’s new “carrot-and-stick” approach has influenced domestic party discourse toward the Union.