‘I want my sovereignty back!’ A comparative analysis of the populist discourses of Podemos, the 5 Star Movement, the FN and UKIP during the economic and migration crises

The multiple crises that the EU has faced over the last decade haveprovided fertile ground for the emergence of new political movements,often labelled as ‘anti-system’, ‘populist’ and ‘Eurosceptics’.One defining characteristic of these parties is their claim to represent‘the people’ and their reliance on the idea of sovereignty. Thisarticle aims at examining how these populist parties have framedsovereignty in relation to the economic and migration crises. Itargues that the binary opposition between EU integration andnational sovereignty does not tell the whole story, and that thepopulist upsurge reflects instead competing versions of sovereigntyat the national level. To test this hypothesis, we conducta corpus-based analysis of the discourse of four leading populistparties between 2012 and 2017: the Front National, the UKIndependence Party, the Movimento cinque Stelle and Podemos.
info:eu-repo/semantics/published