Contesting Ukraine’s EU Accession: Challenger Party Ideologies, Interests, and Imaginaries in France, Germany, and Poland (2021–2025)

My PhD project investigates the narratives and the discursive strategies through which political challenger parties in France, Germany, and Poland construct and contest the idea of Ukraine’s EU accession. It explores how identity, memory, ideology, geopolitics, and strategic political approaches intersect in these discourses, and how external influences in a wider context with significant others such as Russia, the United States, and Ukraine (in this case), are localized and recontextualized within domestic party politics. Ukraine‘s liminality, its in-between position with transitional dynamics, can produce uncertainty and ambiguity that is problematized by radical actors in the EU. The case of Ukraine’s potential EU accession is a defining question linking external geopolitical rupture with internal political transformations. Given these varying levels of public support and growing party- political contestation, enlargement can be seen as a symbolic battleground where challenger parties mobilize competing ideological, spatial, and temporal images and visions of Europe and diverse grievances related to the war. This project is guided by the research question: “Why, when, and how do challenger parties in France, Germany, and Poland construct and articulate skepticism or rejection toward Ukraine’s potential EU accession?” The project thereby addresses these gaps by conceptualising enlargement as a dynamic field of geopolitical meaning-making and aims to integrate why (causal), when (temporal), and how (discursive) perspectives. Answering it contributes to ongoing academic and political debates on EU enlargement after the critical juncture of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 by offering a critical lens on how war, external influences, spatial imaginations, and domestic party- political contestation may impact a central aspect of the EU’s future trajectory. Methodologically, the project proposes a mixed-methods design that combines an initial corpus linguistic text analysis, the discourse-historical approach, and semi-structured elite interviews. The comparative design offers analytical insights into different political cultures, historical experiences, and party systems. By linking debates on EU widening to meaning-making mechanisms, the project seeks to explain how radical-right and radical-left actors reinterpret a decisive element of European integration and its future trajectory under conditions of war, crisis, and uncertainty. Empirically, it provides a post- 2022 comparative analysis of radical-right and radical-left discourses on Ukraine’s EU accession, covering ideological supply side, geographic imaginaries, mnemonic cues, and populist styled choices for party strategies.