Exploring mainstream Euroscepticism: Similarities and differences between Eurosceptic claims of centre-right and radical right parties

Abstract

Euroscepticism has traditionally occurred among radical left and radical right parties. But opposition to European integration has recently also spread to the political mainstream, especially to centre-right parties. Yet, we know comparatively little about the nature of Eurosceptic claims made by these parties. Do they rely on the same repertoire as radical parties, or do they develop their own specific versions of Euroscepticism? A comparative content analysis of Eurosceptic claims in the 2014 and 2019 European election manifestos of centre-right and radical right parties in Austria, France, Germany and the Netherlands shows that centre-right parties do not draw to a significant extent on the existing discourse of radical right parties. Instead, they predominantly create their own Eurosceptic claims, which are tailor-made to their entrenched programmatic brands. These findings resonate well with the assumptions of saliency approaches to party competition.

Introduction

Euroscepticism has primarily occurred among extremist political parties. The relationship between left-right placement and support for European integration has been shown to form an inverted U curve, with centrist parties most in favour and radical left and radical right parties most opposed to European integration (Bakker et al., 2015; Hooghe et al., 2002). However, Euroscepticism has recently moved ‘from the margins to the mainstream’ (Brack and Startin, 2015). This has predominantly affected moderate right parties, which make up a significant share of Eurosceptic parties in the European Parliament (EP) (Treib, 2014, 2020). At the same time, it seems that also some generally pro-integrationist centre-right parties have begun to take a more critical stance towards the European Union (EU) and to demand more national autonomy within the EU’s system of multilevel governance (Ray, 2007).

It is not the goal of the present article to establish whether this tendency of mainstream parties to develop more critical stances towards the EU is a strategic reaction to the electoral success of Eurosceptic challenger parties (Meijers, 2017) or whether it is the upshot of increasing levels of politicization of European integration and, thus, a reaction of mainstream parties to increasingly Eurosceptic voters. Instead, the goal of this article is to explore the nature of the Eurosceptic claims made by mainstream parties. More specifically, the analysis seeks to find out how these claims relate to the well-established Eurosceptic discourses of radical parties. Do mainstream parties rely on the same Eurosceptic repertoire as radical parties, or do they develop their own specific versions of Euroscepticism?

Theories of party competition can help elucidate which of these programmatic approaches mainstream parties are likely to pursue. Even if adopting more Eurosceptic positions may not necessarily be caused by competitive pressures, it certainly has an impact on party competition. Therefore, political parties have to consider how voters will perceive such programmatic changes and how their electoral odds may be influenced by them.

Theories of spatial competition stress that voters predominantly pay attention to how close a given party’s programme is to their own preferences (Downs, 1957; Enelow and Hinich, 1984). Seen from this perspective, parties would not have to worry about perceived programmatic originality. Therefore, they could easily pick some of the more prominent Eurosceptic claims and integrate them into their programmes. Saliency theories of party competition, in contrast, assume that voters care about issues, picking parties that ‘own’ the issues they consider to be most important (Budge and Farlie, 1983; Petrocik, 1996). In this view, mainstream parties would have to worry about their programmatic trademarks when moving into a more Eurosceptic direction. They are thus likely to invent their own specific versions of Euroscepticism, which fit the programmatic brands for which they stand.

Empirically, the article focuses on the Eurosceptic claims made by four centre-right mainstream parties that belong to the more Eurosceptic in their respective party families. These are centre-right parties from Austria, France, Germany and the Netherlands. The article compares the Eurosceptic claims of these parties to the main radical Eurosceptic parties in each country, all of which belong to the radical right party family.

Results from a content analysis of the programmatic claims these eight party dyads made in their manifestos for the EP elections in 2014 and 2019 suggest, first, that centre-right parties have indeed devoted notable shares of their manifestos to Eurosceptic claims. Second, there was little direct overlap between centre-right and radical right Eurosceptic claims. Instead, centre-right parties and radical right parties pursued their very own flavours of Euroscepticism. Centre-right parties thus sought to attune their Eurosceptic claims to their traditional programmatic brands. These results resonate well with saliency approaches to party competition.

Theorizing the adoption of Eurosceptic claims by mainstream parties

Mainstream parties have traditionally held pro-integrationist stances. As governing parties, centre-right, liberal and centre-left parties were responsible for instigating the process of European integration in the 1950s, and they were also at the helm when successive intergovernmental conferences negotiated steps to deepen European integration in the decades since the 1980s. In general, mainstream parties are still the parties with the highest levels of support for European integration (Bakker et al., 2015; Hooghe et al., 2002). However, some parties, especially on the centre-right, have become less enthusiastic about the EU and European integration in recent years (Ray, 2007).

How can we understand the integration of Eurosceptic elements into the programmes of these parties? I assume that theories of party competition can help us elucidate this process. Any programmatic change, no matter whether it is the result of competitive pressures, of changes in voter preferences, or of a change in leadership, has a bearing on a party’s competitive position vis-à-vis other parties. Therefore, theories of party competition are relevant for understanding how mainstream parties integrate Eurosceptic claims into their programmes.

Building on the work by Downs (1957), spatial approaches to party competition assume that parties compete by offering alternative positions on the same sets of issues (Enelow and Hinich, 1984). In this logic, mainstream parties that seek to become more Eurosceptic would not have to worry about the originality of their programmes in relation to other parties. All they would have to do is change their position on European integration. In other words, they could easily pick existing Eurosceptic claims, which were previously advanced by other parties, and incorporate them into their own programmes.

Saliency approaches, by contrast, assume that parties compete with each other by selectively stressing different issues. They emphasize issues they ‘own’, i.e. on which they are seen as the party with the highest problem-solving capacity by the electorate, and they de-emphasize issues on which other parties possess issue ownership (Budge and Farlie, 1983; Petrocik, 1996). A mainstream party that seeks to move into new programmatic territory, especially with regard to an issue like European integration, which is usually ‘owned’ by radical Eurosceptic parties, would have to make sure that it sticks as much as possible to its own programmatic brand. It would thus have to fit Eurosceptic messages into its pre-existing programmatic storyline. This means that simply relying on other parties’ Eurosceptic claims would not be credible. Instead, mainstream parties would have to invent their very own varieties of Euroscepticism, which are attuned to their established programmatic brands.

Having said that, we should not over-emphasize the differences between both approaches to party competition: issue-based shifts can also lead to changes in the positions of parties in spatial models of competition (Meyer and Wagner, 2019). What is important for the present analysis, however, is that issue-based programmatic shifts of mainstream parties will come in the specific ‘colours’ of these parties rather than rely on the pre-existing repertoire of more radical Eurosceptic parties.

Case selection and data

The empirical analysis focuses on four centre-right parties for which available data suggest that they have come to belong to the more Eurosceptic parties in their respective party families. These are the Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP) in Austria, Les Républicains (LR, until 2015 called Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, UMP) in France, the Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU) in Germany and the Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD) in the Netherlands. The Eurosceptic claims of these parties are compared to the Eurosceptic claims of the main radical Eurosceptic parties in each of the four countries, all of which belong to the group of radical right parties. These are the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) in Austria, the Rassemblement National (RN, until 2018 called Front National, FN) in France, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany and the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) in the Netherlands (see Table A1 in the Online Appendix for more details on the case selection).

In order to analyze the similarity between the programmatic stances of these four party dyads, I conducted a comparative content analysis of the manifestos of all eight parties for the 2014 and 2019 EP elections. The CSU produced a separate manifesto only for the 2014 election. In 2019, the party, under its new leader Markus Söder and its Spitzenkandidat Manfred Weber, decided to conduct its campaign on the basis of a joint manifesto with its significantly more pro-integrationist sister party, CDU. As the FN did not issue a European manifesto in 2014, I selected the manifesto issued by Marine Le Pen for her presidential campaign in 2017 instead. ¹ And as the Austrian FPÖ did not issue a formal manifesto in 2019, the analysis was based on an extensive overview of the party’s priorities for the election from the FPÖ website, which is comparable to a formal manifesto. Finally, due to limits in language proficiency, the Dutch and French manifestos were translated into English using the automatic DeepL translation service (www.deepl.com). Segments of the translated texts and the underlying original passages were checked by native French and Dutch speakers, who confirmed that the translations were of a sufficient quality to convey the main messages enshrined in the original texts.

Coding focused on the EU positions laid down in the manifestos. More precisely, I looked at everything that could be classified as a Eurosceptic claim. Euroscepticism, in this context, was defined as a political position that combines (a) criticism of the current state of affairs at the EU level with (b) a reform outlook that seeks to roll back European integration in favour of more national or regional autonomy (Treib, 2020). This definition seeks to turn the rather broad definitions that have been used in the previous literature (for an overview, see Vasilopoulou, 2018) into a conceptualization that is more specific and thus more workable for an analysis of party manifestos seeking to code individual Eurosceptic statements. The most widely used definitions consider Euroscepticism as opposition to the process of European integration (Taggart, 1998: 366) or as opposition to European integration and/or the EU (Kopecký and Mudde, 2002). However, it remains unclear what ‘opposition’ amounts to. That is why the present analysis concentrates on statements that criticize the EU and at the same time aim to roll back the degree of integration. Of course, this definition encompasses a wide variety of potential statements, from soft Eurosceptic criticism of individual aspects of the EU to hard Eurosceptic rejection of the current EU or the whole idea of European integration. It is not the primary goal of this analysis to categorize different types or degrees of Euroscepticism. But the individual statements will be compared to each other, and this will show to what extent the different parties put forward similar or different ideas about the EU.

Coding was done inductively in order to capture the individual parties’ Eurosceptic statements with as little scholarly bias as possible. Coding was structured by only two prior decisions. First, each individual claim was subsumed under a set of broad thematic areas. The four most important and most frequently used thematic areas were (a) general EU-related claims (about competencies, decision-making procedures, the democratic quality of the EU, etc.), (b) claims about the euro or the Eurozone, (c) EU-related claims about the economy, including social policy, and (d) EU-related claims about migration. The results reported in the remainder of this article concentrate on these four main thematic areas. Second, claims were classified according to whether they criticized an aspect of the current EU or whether they called for reforming the EU or some of its policies (critical claims and reform claims).

Coding units were individual statements in which the respective party expressed a particular idea or argument about the EU – an EU-related claim. These varied in length, but mostly equalled a paragraph. If a paragraph or longer sentence contained more than one statement and the text passage could not be separated neatly, more than one code was assigned to the same passage. Table A2 in the Online Appendix provides coding examples to clarify the procedure.

In a first step, each EU-related claim was assigned a code that expressed its essence. Codes were defined relatively specifically in order to capture even small differences in the type of criticism or the type of reform proposal issued by parties. This resulted in an overall number of 335 different codes. In a second step, codes addressing similar issues were grouped into a set of topics. Table A3 in the Online Appendix gives an overview of all 29 topics.

In the end, therefore, the coding scheme had four levels: thematic area, topic, individual claim and critical or reform-oriented type of claim.

Empirical results

The first interesting empirical information to be reported is the share of Eurosceptic claims in relation to the overall length of the respective manifesto. This was calculated by summing up the characters of the coded text and dividing this number by the overall number of characters of the whole manifesto (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Share of Eurosceptic claims in four main thematic areas.

As was to be expected, the manifestos of radical right Eurosceptic parties on average had a much higher share of Eurosceptic claims. At the same time, the results also demonstrated that the electoral platforms of centre-right parties still contained notable shares of Eurosceptic statements.

There were even a few examples where centre-right parties devoted more space to Eurosceptic messages than their radical right competitors. This was true for the 2014 manifesto of the German CSU, which had a much higher share of Eurosceptic claims than all other centre-right manifestos. The manifestos of the French FN/RN contained significantly fewer Eurosceptic claims than the manifestos of the other radical right parties, which put them on a par with or even below their centre-right competitors. The 2017 situation can be explained by the fact that the FN manifesto was issued for a national election and thus contained many more statements not directly related to the EU. The 2019 RN manifesto, however, did focus heavily on the EU. The surprisingly low share of coded text here stemmed from the often rather prolix style of the manifesto, where claims were often embellished by lengthy descriptive elaborations and examples.

Having established that there was a notable amount of Eurosceptic claims in centre-right parties’ manifestos, the next step in the analysis was to explore how similar or dissimilar the Eurosceptic claims of centre-right and radical right parties were.

In a first step, I analyzed the distribution of the 335 specific claims identified in our eight manifestos. Figure 2 shows to what extent parties’ specific claims overlapped.

Figure 2.

Similarity based on individual Eurosceptic claims.

Panel A demonstrates that more than two-thirds of the claims were unique, i.e. they were made by only one party in one manifesto. Of the claims that were found in at least two manifestos, moreover, the majority of these overlapping claims pertained exclusively to either radical right or centre-right parties. Only a total of 15 per cent of all claims were made by both radical right and centre-right parties (see Table A4 in the Online Appendix for a list of these claims).

Panel B takes a closer look at the overlapping claims between centre-right and radical right parties in each country and for each election. The results are similar. In most cases, only a small percentage of the Eurosceptic claims of the party dyads were identical. The highest percentage of co-occurring claims was registered in Germany in 2014: 20% of the Eurosceptic claims by the CSU and the AfD were identical.

Since coding was done in a rather fine-grained manner, sceptical readers may argue that the results presented in Figure 2 systematically underestimate the degree to which parties made similar statements in their manifestos. To address these concerns, I looked at the degree to which parties’ manifestos addressed the same topics. Based on the 29 topics inductively created from the 335 individual codes, I looked at the similarity of topic coverage between radical right and centre-right parties (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Similarity based on Eurosceptic topics.

The results yield a nuanced, but not altogether different picture. In overall terms, more than three-quarters of the topics were addressed by both party families (Panel A). Yet, a closer look at the individual party dyads reveals a much lower degree of similarity (Panel B). On average, less than a quarter of all topics were congruent. The only major outlier was, again, the CSU manifesto of 2014, which had half of all topics in common with the 2014 AfD manifesto.

Two further pieces of evidence complete the empirical picture presented so far. First, radical right parties used claims that criticize the status quo in the EU much more frequently than centre-right parties (see Figure A1 in the Online Appendix). If centre-right parties issued Eurosceptic claims, they did so in a more constructive, reform-oriented way, whereas the Euroscepticism of radical right parties was more strongly shaped by negative statements about the status quo.

Second, a closer look at the concrete claims made by the parties strongly suggests that centre-right parties pursued different approaches than radical right parties. One of the main themes highlighted by several centre-right parties was the fight against overregulation and the need for the EU to concentrate on issues that member states could not solve on their own. Proposed measures included an improved subsidiarity control by national parliaments, a generally more restrained legislative agenda by the Commission, reducing unnecessary red tape for businesses by boosting the better regulation agenda, and regular reviews to identify and repeal unnecessary laws. This theme played an important role in all centre-right party manifestos. It fits perfectly with the centre-right’s general pro-market, pro-business and light regulation agenda, producing a credible message for the voters of centre-right parties.

The radical right parties in the four countries also touched upon this topic but in a much more negative way. For example, the AfD’s 2019 manifesto criticized economic competition being increasingly ‘stymied by burgeoning EU regulation’ and that the EU threatened national sovereignty. The FPÖ’s 2014 manifesto called for an end to the EU’s ‘regulation frenzy’, leading to ‘insane’ laws such as the ban on traditional light bulbs or the regulation on curved cucumbers. The 2019 RN manifesto talked of the EU’s ‘despotic’ intrusion into people’s daily lives, arguing that nations needed to free themselves from these ‘paralyzing burdens’. Moreover, radical right parties did not content themselves with gradual reforms to this situation. Rather, they called for far-reaching institutional reforms such as a general return to unanimity, a large-scale repatriation of legislative competences, a veto against unwanted laws for each national parliament or, in the case of the PVV, an end to EU membership altogether.

Similar differences in both substance and style could also be found in other areas. Due to space constraints, not all of these qualitative findings can be reported here. Suffice it to say that a qualitative look at the individual claims corroborates the main finding of this analysis: centre-right parties did address Eurosceptic themes, but they did so in a markedly different way from the radical right. Centre-right Euroscepticism was typically much softer, less negative, and more pragmatic than radical right Euroscepticism, and it was typically geared towards fitting in with other, more traditional, programmatic stances of centre-right parties.

Discussion and conclusions

What type of Eurosceptic claims do mainstream parties make? Do they rely on the established repertoire of more radical Eurosceptic parties, or do they develop their own specific versions of Euroscepticism?

This article focused on the Eurosceptic claims made by a selection of four Austrian, French, German and Dutch centre-right parties that belong to the more Eurosceptic parties in their respective party families, comparing these claims to the Eurosceptic discourse offered by the main radical right Eurosceptic parties in each of the four countries. A content analysis of the manifestos these four party dyads published for the 2014 and 2019 EP elections produced little evidence suggesting that centre-right parties drew on the Eurosceptic repertoire of the radical right. Centre-right parties did issue Eurosceptic claims, but they did so in an entirely different fashion from their more radical counterparts. Among the eight party dyads analyzed, only one showed significant overlap, the Eurosceptic claims made by the German CSU and its radical right counterpart AfD in 2014. Instead, centre-right parties tended to produce their own Eurosceptic claims and sought to frame them in a way that allowed for an alignment with their traditional programmatic narratives.

These results are in line with the expectations of saliency theory. When moving in the direction of more Euroscepticism, centre-right parties appeared to make an effort to invent their own specific Eurosceptic messages which fit into their entrenched programmatic brands and were thus credible to their voters. If they, contrary to the general trend, drew on the radical right repertoire, like the CSU did in 2014, they were punished by voters, who seemed to favour the original over the copy. Apparently, the CSU has learned from this experience, as the party deliberately chose to team up with its sister party CDU for the 2019 election, which resulted in a significantly more pro-integrationist manifesto that had much fewer Eurosceptic claims in common with the AfD than in 2014. In future, the party could, however, also follow the example of some of its centre-right counterparts and seek to present its very own version of Euroscepticism.

Supplemental Material

Appendix – Supplemental material for Exploring mainstream Euroscepticism: Similarities and differences between Eurosceptic claims of centre-right and radical right parties

Supplemental material, Appendix for Exploring mainstream Euroscepticism: Similarities and differences between Eurosceptic claims of centre-right and radical right parties by Oliver Treib in Research & Politics