When the Populist Radical Right Turns European

In this article, we address the question of how the nationalist and populist discourses of populist radical right parties are expressed when they cooperate at the European level. As a crucial case, we investigate the Identity and Democracy Group, which was formed after the 2019 European elections and represents the strongest assembly of radical right populist parties in the history of the European Parliament. We propose an analytical framework that distinguishes between different types of nationalist and populist discourses regarding their international dimensions. Empirically, we explore the rhetoric of members of the Identity and Democracy Group during the first half of the current European Parliament legislature (2019-2021), applying qualitative content analysis on a sample of 153 speeches. Our analysis identifies a withdrawal of the Identity and Democracy Group from the well-known radical right populist narrative of ‘My Country First’. Instead, we show that internationalised forms of addressing the people(s) of Europe make up the greatest share of Identity and Democracy’s populist and nationalist rhetoric.