Eager to leave? Populist radical right parties’ responses to the UK’s Brexit vote
| Author | Patricia Rodi,Helen Drake,Juan Roch,Stijn van Kessel,Nicola Chelotti |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148119886213 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148119886213
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2020, Vol. 22(1) 65 –84
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148119886213
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Eager to leave? Populist radical
right parties’ responses to the
UK’s Brexit vote
Stijn van Kessel1, Nicola Chelotti2,
Helen Drake2, Juan Roch3
and Patricia Rodi1
Abstract
Populist radical right parties are naturally Eurosceptic. Many responded positively to the British
referendum vote to leave the European Union; various observers even spoke of a potential
populist radical right-instigated ‘domino effect’. We ask whether this Brexit-enthusiasm prevailed
in the proximate aftermath of the UK referendum, by means of a comparative analysis of populist
radical right parties’ national election campaigns in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy.
The analysis considers whether the UK referendum result served as an external stimulus for
populist radical right parties to harden their Euroscepticism and politicise the issue of European
integration. The results show that this has, generally speaking, not been the case, and that Brexit
has also not stimulated or amplified calls for leaving the European Union. Relating our findings to
literature on the politicisation of European integration and strategic party behaviour, we argue
that populist radical right parties had few incentives to act differently given the uninviting political
opportunity structure.
Keywords
Brexit, Euroscepticism, party competition, politicisation, populism, radical right
Introduction
The UK’s referendum of 23 June 2016 resulted in a narrow vote for leaving the European
Union (EU). Eurosceptic parties across the continent either celebrated this ‘Brexit’ vote,
or at least saw it as a necessary warning signal that the EU was in need of structural
reform. Several observers expected such parties to push for similar in-out referendums in
other countries. One day after the Brexit vote, the British newspaper Telegraph (2016)
1School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
2Institute for Diplomacy and International Governance, Loughborough University London, London, UK
3Otto-Suhr Institut for Political Science, Center for Transnational Studies, Foreign- and Security Policy, Freie
Universitat Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Corresponding author:
Stijn van Kessel, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End
Road, London E1 4NS, UK.
Email: s.vankessel@qmul.ac.uk
886213BPI0010.1177/1369148119886213The British Journal of Politics and International Relationsvan Kessel et al.
research-article2020
Original Article
66 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22(1)
published an article under the header ‘EU faces Brexit “contagion” as populist parties
across Europe call for referendums’. The Independent (2016) predicted that ‘the British
vote seems certain to make exit referendums a central issue in French and Dutch elections
next year’.
This article investigates whether Eurosceptic parties outside of Britain indeed treated
the Brexit vote as an opportunity to bolster and emphasise their opposition to the EU.
Our analysis specifically focuses on the most Eurosceptic party family: the populist
radical right (PRR). PRR parties oppose the EU for various reasons, yet previous stud-
ies have indicated that they are not united in the intensity of their Euroscepticism, and
do not all (consistently) treat European integration as a core issue (Pirro et al., 2018;
Vasilopoulou, 2018). This raises questions about the extent to which they treated the
Brexit vote as an opportunity for mobilising support on the basis of a reinvigorated
Eurosceptic agenda.
We study PRR parties in four founding EU member states across different parts of
Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands). We ask whether they
hardened their position on EU membership, and sought to politicise European integration,
during national election campaigns in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. In doing so, we
aim to contribute to knowledge about how, in the relatively short run, the Brexit process
has affected other countries’ domestic party competition (see also Adler-Nissen et al.,
2017; Taggart and Szczerbiak, 2018). Our findings are also relevant to the more general
literature on the politicisation of, and strategic party behaviour around, European
integration.
We find that, despite having initially reacted to the referendum result with enthusiasm,
the selected PRR parties shared a reluctance to prioritise EU membership, or European
integration more generally, in their campaigns. They also did not converge around an
appeal to follow the British example in leaving the EU. Notwithstanding variations in
PRR parties’ responses to Brexit, their appetite for politicising European integration was
generally low already prior to the unfolding of the difficult negotiation process between
the EU-27 and the United Kingdom.
In other words, the Brexit vote as such did not serve as a clear incentive for PRR
parties to harden their positions or to politicise ‘Europe’. We argue that most of them
had few reasons to act differently, considering conditions related to their political
opportunity structure. Crucially, support for ending EU membership remained limited
in our cases, issues related to European integration lacked genuine salience among
voters, and PRR parties thus had good reasons to focus primarily on more tried-and-
tested issues such as immigration and cultural change (Hoeglinger, 2016; McDonnell
and Werner, 2018). The difficulties in the Brexit process, which are likely to have
further dampened public demand for leaving the EU elsewhere in Europe, have prob-
ably reduced the viability of a PRR ‘exit strategy’ also in the medium term. Whether
most PRR parties will continue to shy away from a hard Eurosceptic strategy in the
future depends, inter alia, on the (perceived) consequences of Brexit in the longer run
(de Vries, 2017).
The next sections proceed with a discussion, first, of PRR parties and European inte-
gration, and, second, of theories concerning the politicisation of European integration.
Accordingly, we identify four sets of factors that may be expected to influence the
responses of PRR parties to Brexit. We then explore these in each of our four case studies.
In the final section we offer a set of conclusions.
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