National, Popular And… Individual Sovereignism? The Challenge of the Populist Right

The literature on European populism and the radical right has increasingly emphasized the centrality of sovereignty claims (Kallis, 2018; Basile & Mazzoleni, 2018). Existing research has primarily focused on popular and national sovereignty—approached from political and economic perspectives and analyzed from both supply- and demand-side angles—showing that sovereigntism constitutes a core component of populist and radical right mobilization. By contrast, individual sovereignty has received far less scholarly attention. Traditionally associated with libertarian ideologies, individual sovereignty appears at odds with both populist conceptions of “the people” and with sovereignty understood as collective self-rule. In European contexts in particular, populism has tended to frame the people as a homogeneous collective, thereby marginalizing the individual as a sovereign political actor (Canovan, 2005). However, recent developments—most notably the neoliberal transformation of Western societies and the mobilizations against pandemic-related restrictions—challenge this assumption and point to growing tensions within the very notion of “the people” (Amlinger & Nachtwey, 2025). Against this background, this paper asks: to what extent is the populist right able to attract citizens who are concerned not only with perceived threats to national and popular sovereignty, but also with threats to individual sovereignty? Using original survey data collected in Switzerland in 2025, the paper explores whether and how individual-sovereigntist concerns resonate with right-wing populist support. By bringing individual sovereignty into the analysis of populist voting, the study contributes to ongoing debates on the heterogeneity of populist constituencies and on the evolving meaning of sovereignty in contemporary European democracies.