Bucharest to Brussels: AUR’s Eurorealist Parliamentary Diplomacy Amid Sovereignist Shifts in Europe

Abstract Due to their major influence on the process of democratic backsliding in numerous countries around the world, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, populist and nationalist parties have been extensively explored in academic literature in recent years. While these parties’ domestic dynamics have been thoroughly studied, both independently and in comparative designs, their foreign relations have largely gone unnoticed. This is a shortcoming in the literature, especially when it comes to the European Union, where these parties have the ability to collaborate in the European Parliament and influence European policies. As a result, the purpose of this study is to examine nationalist parties’ parliamentary diplomacy by exploring the case of a new and ambitious newcomer, Romania’s Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR). Based on interviews with party members and netnography, our findings demonstrate that AUR’s parliamentary diplomacy is organised around three important objectives: Eastern and Central Europe, Western Europe and the EU level. While their focus on the EU is explained by their successful ambition to enter the European Parliament in 2024, and their focus on Eastern Europe by their desire to do so by strengtening collaboration with ideologically similar parties in Poland, AUR’s focus on diaspora is unlike any other Romanian political party: they not only try to forge ties with the Romanian diaspora in the West, but they also open the black box of Romanian historical diasporas, particularly the ones in Serbia and Ukraine. Preliminary findings contribute to the literature in political science and international relations on autocratization (Luhrmann, Anna, and Staffan I. Lindberg. 2019. “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New about It?” Democratization 26 (7): 1095–1113. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2019.1582029.) and democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe (Bozoki, Andras, and Daniel Hegedűs. 2018. “An Externally Constrained Hybrid Regime: Hungary in the European Union.” Democratization 25 (7): 1173–1189. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2018.1455664.), both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, this paper contributes by opening up the research on the parliamentary diplomacy of nationalist parties, while empirically I contribute by exploring the case of AUR.