Institutional change, sovereigntist contestation and the limits of populism: evidence from southern Europe

Abstract It is widely recognized that populists oppose the delegation of more decision-making to supranational actors and that this tendency can be constrained by other branches of government, geopolitical power pressures or factors such as whether populists are minor or major members of coalitions. The literature, however, has not elaborated on how the transformation of international organizations can affect populist politics. We aim to fill this gap with an examination of how the NextGenerationEU (NGEU), a redistributionist and solidaristic form of supranational governance, undermined populist opposition to the European Union in selected beneficiary countries. To demonstrate this, we explore populist discourses in France, Italy and Spain during four successive crises in the EU's history in which its structure and identity were at stake and which prompted debates on the future in/of the EU: the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty of 2005, the Greek referendum of 2015, the Brexit referendum of 2016 and the COVID–19 crisis, followed by the Recovery Fund/NGEU of 2020. Observing populist discourses during the acute phases of these four crises allows us to observe a consolidated trend of populist contestation until 2020, when the NGEU was announced, and supports the conclusion that populists, especially in Spain and Italy, went in a less sovereigntist direction as a result of the NGEU.