Right-Wing Sovereignism in the European Union: Definition, Features and Implications

Abstract

This article investigates how traditionally anti-European Union (EU) right-wing parties and leaders in four EU member states reinterpreted their relation with the EU in the post-Brexit period (2016–2022). Either for the political opportunity structure's constraints or for the costs triggered by Brexit, right-wing European nationalists had to redefine their role in remaining in the EU. We conceptualize as ‘sovereignism’ their attempt to endogenize nationalism in the EU. Relying on discourse analysis, this article shows that right-wing sovereignism criticized the supranational character and the centralized policy system that developed within the EU. However, right-wing sovereignism differed in the rationale of its criticism, based more on an economic discourse in Western Europe and more on a cultural discourse in Eastern Europe, as well as on the policies to repatriate. The sovereignist approach of nationalist right-wing parties and leaders would lead to the nationally differentiated disintegration of the EU.