Europeanized Eurosceptics? Radical Right Parties and European Integration

Abstract

As a potential catalyzer of political dissent, European integration has provided radical right parties with a new and powerful issue to compete on. The article assesses the impact of European integration on radical right parties by examining the adaptive strategies deployed by this party family in order to operate within a multilevel polity. Based on the record of transnational coalition-building and data on legislative activities in the European Parliament, the analysis reveals that the radical right has failed to establish itself as a relevant actor at the European level. The limited Europeanization of radical right parties is explained by the non-involvement in European policy-making and the inability to engage in durable paths of transnational cooperation resulting from divergent domestic party strategies.

Key Words:

• Radical right parties
• Europeanization
• European Union
• transnational party cooperation

Notes

Since 1979, 10 out of the 14 radical right parties with elected MEPs were represented in at least one legislature by the party's president or secretary general. Rather than a symptom of Europeanization, the high proportion of leading party personnel in the EP results from the limited access of radical right parties to representation in national legislatures, especially in countries featuring majoritarian electoral systems or threshold clauses.

Note that notwithstanding its programmatic affinities with radical right parties, this article does not consider the League of Polish Families as a representative of the radical right but rather as a national-catholic fundamentalist party.

All translations are mine.

The group's acronym GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne) illustrates its neo-pagan orientation.

Although mainstream political parties are argued to have strategically evicted the issue of European integration from national electoral arenas (Mair, 2000), expert surveys and the quantitative content analysis of national election manifestos converge in indicating that the vote-weighted systemic salience of European integration has increased in the post-Maastricht era (Hooghe & Marks, 2006, p. 248; 2009, p. 8).

Data on report allocation, amendment proposals and plenary interventions were extracted from the European Parliament's website (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/).

The vast majority of unsuccessful amendments submitted during the existence of ITS related to key policy areas of the radical right, such as the refusal of Turkey's EU accession, calls for stricter immigration and asylum policies, the condemnation of anti-discrimination laws and opposition to the European Constitution.

Gollnisch's portrayal of the ITS suggests that radical right MEPs conform to the role of the rebellious ‘outsiders’ identified in Navarro's (2009) typology of MEP roles and representational practices, a type characterized by a low involvement in legislative activities in terms of reports, resolutions and committee chairmanships, a highly critical stance on the legitimacy and functioning of European institutions and the simultaneous use of the EP as a forum for expressing anti-establishment positions through plenary speeches. The conspicuous inactivity of MEPs from the ITS group in shaping European policy-making does indeed stand in contrast to their record of plenary speeches. During the existence of the ITS group, the mean number of plenary interventions (including one minute speeches, explanations of votes and personal statements) per MEP was 14.27 (std. dev.: 20.22) as compared to 15.77 (std. dev.: 18.75) for ITS members. However, the figures for the radical left European United Left/Nordic Green Left (mean: 23.90, std. dev.: 31.02) and the right-wing Eurosceptic Independence/Democracy Group (mean: 20.46, std. dev.: 21.18) were clearly above the mean number of interventions made by ITS MEPs suggesting that other Eurosceptic MEPs outperformed the ITS members in their role as outsiders.