The Populist-Eurosceptic Mix: Conceptual Distinctions, Ideational Linkages and Internal Differentiation

Although populism is a political phenomenon that originated out of Europe and emerged long before the start of European integration, in the post-World War II European context, it has developed in conjunction with Euroscepticism. Actually, since the creation of the European Union (EU) in the early 1990s, the two phenomena have gradually come to coincide. Nowadays, with few exceptions, all populist parties are also Eurosceptic and vice versa. This coincidence, far from being casual, can be explained by the core features of the populist (thin-centred) ideology and by the nature of both the integration process and the EU governance. Indeed, while populism has been commonly defined as an anti-elitist ideology, European integration and the EU system of governance are widely seen as quintessentially elitist. Under these conditions, opposition to/in the EU tends to be inherently populist. Nonetheless, this ‘populist/Eurosceptic compound’ can manifest itself in rather different shapes, depending on the types of populism (inclusive vs. exclusive) and the types of Euroscepticism (hard vs. soft) that are adopted by individual parties. The chapter highlights both conceptual and empirical overlaps between populism and Euroscepticism, also referring to intermediated concepts, such as ‘national sovereignty’ and ‘economic nationalism’, that work as traits d’union between the two phenomena.