Populist ‘Unpolitics’: How Populist Governments Affect EU Policymaking

Populist parties have gained substantial ground in many European member states, especially since the various polycrisis (notably the Eurozone and refugee crises). Yet, we still do not know how they have affected EU politics and whether they have changed policymaking processes and output in any significant way. Scholars of populism have usually argued that populist parties differ from mainstream ones in many important ways. For instance, they tend to present themselves as defenders of the interest of the ‘pure people’ as opposed to the ‘corrupt [Brussel’s] elite’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017, p. 6). This would suggest that they are more likely to block decisions at the EU level and and engage in traditional politics involving horse-trading; instead, we expect them to stick to their pure and uncompromised positions. Indeed, our own research in the area of migration policies (Zaun and Ripoll Servent 2023) has shown that populist governments sometimes block policies that would benefit their own countries in order to keep crises alive. Thus, we invite papers using different methodologies to explore systematically across different policy areas whether and how populist governments differ in EU policymaking and to jointly develop a more coherent framework on the role of populist governments in EU politics. Our aim is to find the scope conditions under which populist governments engage in ‘unpolitics’, understood as instances where populist actors ‘engage[ ] with politics but in a way that is at odds with that politics’ (Taggart, 2018, p. 81).

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1: Do populist governments differ from mainstream ones in EU policymaking? If yes, how?
2: Do they take a different approach to policymaking (unpolitics) or is it situational (depends on further conditions)?
3: How has the ascent of populist governments in the EU affected EU policy outputs and outcomes?
4: How do mainstream actors deal with the presence of populist governments in EU policymaking?
5: Are all populist governments the same in their behaviour or do we see differences depending on their host ideology?

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