The tandem of populism and Euroscepticism: a comparative perspective in the light of the European crises

Although populism does not constitute a new phenomenon per se, the recent success of older and the proliferation of new populist parties bring them a renewed attention. It is an obvious assumption that the multiple crises that Europe experienced in the last decade had a major impact on the development of populist and Eurosceptic parties. This article explicitly focuses the mélange of populist and Eurosceptic parties in the context of the European debt and refugee crisis, and aims to unravel which impact each of the crises had on the demand side, namely the voters’ support to populist-Eurosceptic parties. The analysis presents a differentiated perspective on the effects of each of the European crisis. Thus, only few of the older populists benefitted from the debt crisis whereas they could mobilize voters’ votes during the refugee crisis. New populist parties however mostly emerged during the debt crisis. Beyond these diverging effects of the European crises, one unifying feature of all successful populist parties is their increases Eurosceptic and even nationalist stance. This result supports the assumption of the formation of a new transnational cleavage. Moreover, it supports that this cleavage running along inclusive versus exclusive and European/cosmopolite versus nationalist orientation cross-cuts the ideological axis.