In What Sense Does Right-Wing Populism Pose a Democratic Challenge for the European Union?

What kind of challenge is right-wing populism for the European Union (EU)? The EU has been frequently criticized by populists and non-populists alike for being a remote technocracy that suffers from serious democratic defects. Democratization relies on popular (and system insider) feedback, to spell out where the shortcomings are, and how these can be rectified. Does populism play this role—is it capable of playing this role—in the EU today? I discuss that under three headings: (1) Is populism a democratizing challenge for the EU? (2) Is populism a democratic challenge for the EU? (3) Is populism an existential threat to the EU? The article finds that populists dismiss the prospects for EU democracy and espouse conceptions of people, community, and values that are out of synch with the EU. Today's populists appear less concerned with abolishing the EU and more bent on altering it to serve their ends.


Introduction
According to Mudde (2004), we are witnessing a populist Zeitgeist in Europe, as populist movements, parties, and policies not only gain political traction and influence but also increasingly set political agendas and play a key role in governments.The rise of right-wing populism in Europe, both in the most recent rounds of the European Parliament (EP) elections and in the central role that populists play in many of the European Union's (EU) member states, is bound to affect the EU's nature and future development.
What kind of challenge does this form of populism pose for the EU?A great many discussions have focused on the erosion of the rule of law-European law and EU member states' law-as a result of the actions of populist governments (for a brief selection, see: European Commission, 2021; European Parliament, 2020;Kelemen and Pech, 2019;Landau, 2018;Sadurski, 2019;Scheppele, 2018). 1 In this article, I complement these analyses with focus on the impact of right-wing populist movements on the democratic character of the EU.Democracy cannot function without law; hence the erosion of the rule of law is a democratic problem.At the same time, democratic decline has serious implications for law. 2 Law can turn authoritarian without the rotation in political leadership that democracy presupposes. 3It is this latter democratic challenge for law that this article focuses on.
Populist movements stake their legitimacy, above all, on their claims to democratic representation. 4Born as popular-democratic protests against privileged elites, a key defining feature of populist movements is the distinction between elites and people.Populists claim to speak on behalf of the people, and as Webber underlines, "not a segment or class but the people in its totality".Further, populists claim to be more similar to ordinary people and more responsive to people's needs than remote elites (Caramani, 2017;Huber et al., 2020).It follows that populist claims are claims to democracy.
The EU has been frequently criticized by populists and non-populists alike for being a remote technocracy that suffers from serious democratic defects (Chalmers et al., 2016;Habermas, 2012).Indeed, Eurosceptic critiques of the EU were important in ensuring an ongoing attention to democracy as the EU was integrating. 5Democratization relies on popular (and system insider) feedback, to spell out where the shortcomings are, and how these can be rectified.Does populism play this role-is it capable of playing this role-in the EU today?
There are numerous accounts of today's rise of populism that see it as a threat to liberal democracy.Core populist figures such as Hungary's prime minister (PM) Victor Orbán have denounced liberal and argued for "illiberal" democracy."The doctrine that 'democracy can only be liberal'that golden calf, that monumental fetishhas been toppled", Orbán has noted (Bayer, 2020).Moreover, some populists have advocated the need to abolish the EU as the only way that, in their view, democracy and sovereignty can be restored in today's Europe.A case in point is the United Kingdom's Nigel Farage who hoped-and actively worked to ensure-that the UK's exit from the EU would trigger a process of EU dismantling.
Populism has historically speaking had a democratic orientation.Hence, it is important for our understanding of the contemporary right-wing variant to discuss populism's challenge for democracy at the supranational level in the EU under three very different headings: (1) Is populism a democratizing challenge for the EU? (2) Is populism a democratic challenge for the EU? (3) Is populism an existential threat to the EU?The assessment will show that right-wing populism is a democratic challenge for the EU, and it can also turn into an existential threat, although the democratic challenge and the existential threat should not be equated, since populists can instrumentalize the EU to serve their authoritarian ends.Further, we need to be careful not to put all the explanatory weight of democratic decline on the rise of populism.The article is designed to contextualize populism within the broader context of the debate on democracy in Europe.That approach permits a broader assessment of the salience of the populist challenge in relation to other challenges facing European law and constitutional democracy.In short, this article addresses the populist challenge not only on its own terms but also in terms of what it reveals about the state of legally entrenched democracy and its possible future within today's EU.

Is Populism a Democratizing Challenge for the EU?
Is the populist critique of the EU an incitement to further EU democratization?The EU is committed to democracy, as noted in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU): The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail (Consolidated Version of the Treaty on European Union, 2016: Article 2).
In principle, criticism can be a spur to remedial action.Nevertheless, it matters whether the criticism is "constructive", in the sense of taking what is already there as its point of departure and seeking to improve on that, or whether the criticism is aimed at replacing the EU's existing legal-institutional system with something radically different.
The following assessment will query whether or the extent to which populists' criticisms of the EU can be understood as spurs to further EU democratization, in other words, whether they are "constructive" in the sense of improving on the existing system rather than dismissing it outright.The first populist criticism is that the EU suffers from a democratic deficit.The second is that the EU is based on a conception of community and espouses a set of values that are out of synch with those of EU member states.The third is that populists and populist parties are more responsive than the mainstream parties in the EU's member states and in the EP.
In assessing these populist criticisms, we need to keep in mind that the first two populist criticisms are not unique to or distinctive of Europe's populists.For instance, it is widely recognized that the EU harbors a democratic deficit.Further, the notion that the EU is too diverse and inchoate ever to foster a European demos (or democratic people), has figured as a central topic among leading legal scholars for decades already. 6It is therefore necessary to consider whether populists hold positions that diverge from those espoused in ongoing debates within law and social science.A complicating factor is that the EU is a fundamentally contested polity.There is no agreement among Europe's "constitutional chaperons", the EU's member states, on what type of political system the EU is or should be.The debate on EU democracy has been trying to fill this gap.From the EU's inception, politicians, publics, and academics within law and social science have debated whether the EU is a distinct type of intergovernmental organization (aimed at rescuing the European states system, cf.Milward, 1992); or whether the EU is a federal state-in-the-making (Mancini, 1998); or whether the EU is a distinct system of transnational governance (Bohman, 2007); or whether the EU is a subset of a fledgling global cosmopolitan order (Archibugi, 2008;Habermas, 2001).Each such conception of the EU has a distinct understanding of the nature and location of democracy.
Populist Positioning Within Debates Over the Nature of the EU In light of that broad debate, it is easy to conclude that populist criticisms will almost by necessity fall into a decades-long debate over whether the EU should be confined to a single market without strong supranational institutions, or whether the EU should develop into a democratic polity, state-based or not. 7Where do populists locate themselves in these debates?To what extent do they cohere with mainstream positions and to what extent do they deviate or take extreme positions that do not figure in these debates?
On the first criticism, that of EU democracy, Hungarian PM, Victor Orbán, has recently argued that: Instead of a Europe of nations, in Brussels we see the construction of a European superstate, for which no one has given a mandate.There is no such thing as a European demos: there are only nations.And without a demos, it is impossible to build a democracy; therefore the construction of the Brussels empire is necessarily leading to a democratic deficit.We want something utterly different: we want a democracy of democracies, the basis of which is formed by the nations of Europe.Let us not be afraid to say this out loud: we democrats, who stand on national foundations, are confronting the empire builderswho are also, in fact, the opponents of democracy.(Orbán, 2021) Orbán both refers to the EU's democratic deficit as well as dismisses the EU as a viable site for democracy.The two arguments do not necessarily cohere.Deficit refers to the shortfall, not unsuitability.The EU debate on the democratic deficit underlines that the effort to develop viable democracy at the EU level, with the EP as a key component, has failed to catch up properly with an integration process that is driven by government elites and experts.In other words, the democratic deficit debate refers to a democratic shortfall at the EU level, not that the EU level is unsuitable for installing viable democracy.
With that in mind, it is clear that the main thrust of Orbán's criticism is of the dismissive kind.He argues that the process of European integration that we are currently witnessing represents a serious threat to democracy because the EU is developing into an undemocratic juggernaut. 8Populists such as Orbán do not support the EP (Orbán, 2021), and do not endorse strengthening EU-level democracy.Their main concern is that EU integration has hollowed out national democracy and that the appropriate strategy is therefore to roll back integration.
If we look at Orbán's claim in relation to the EU's development in the past decades, we find that an important development is the subversion of supranational arrangements rather than their strengthening.As the proponents of the "new intergovernmentalism" (Bickerton et al., 2015) have shown, the EU's development since the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s is marked by an "integration paradox": since Maastricht, the EU has seen a significant increase in integration but without supranationalism.The additional EU integration, the argument goes, has taken the shape of more policy coordination through intergovernmental means rather than through uploading to the supranational EU institutions.This is not about European-level empire building but about an ever-increasing interweaving of levels of governing that could even subvert government by law.
Even if not alone, right-wing populists' criticisms of the EU are particularly vociferous in claiming that the EU is not the appropriate level for locating democracy, and further, that EU integration weakens national democracy.In addition, they largely reject the form or shape of representative democracy that the EU seeks to establish, because they see it as a remote system of representative democracy bolstered by a strong judicial component with little or no space for direct democracy.
Populists' criticisms of representative democracy and their penchant for more direct forms of democracy and more direct links between leaders and people show that populists are bent on reversing an important historically rooted trait that marks the postwar European political-legal scene, namely that when viewed from a democratic standpoint, the Europe of which the EU is an integral part is democracy constrained: Europeans created something new, a democracy that was highly constrained (mostly by unelected institutions, such as constitutional courts).The constitutionalist ethos that came with such democracies was positively hostile to ideals of unlimited popular sovereignty, as well as the "people's democracies" and later "socialist democracies" in the East […] European integration […] was meant to place further constraints on nation-state democracies through unelected institutions.(Müller, 2011: 5) The interwar takeover of fragile democratic regimes by various types of "strong men" had impressed on postwar leaders that it was necessary to institute constitutional constraints on majoritarian systems of governing.The rule of law and systems of minority protection had to be buffered against undue political intervention and partisan political manipulation and orchestration.Precisely where to strike the balance between law and politics has been a matter of debate throughout the entire postwar period.Nevertheless, today's politically motivated undermining of the rule of law in Hungary and Poland are clear examples of de-constitutionalization.
Populists of all stripes, within and without government, generally claim that the EU has integrated too far, and that the EU is undermining nation-state-based democracy.That the EU therefore should be downscaled is a stance that resonates with what many intergovernmentalists 9 and realists argue.Nevertheless, the right-wing populist position deviates clearly from these once we look more closely at their conception of the people and the nation; community; and basic values.

Populists' Conceptions of Elites, Peoples, Community, and Values
As noted, a defining feature of populism is the distinction between elites and people.That distinction of course figures centrally in key populist politicians' renditions of the EU.
Hungarian PM Victor Orbán noted on 28 July 2018, that: "(t)he European elite has failed, and this failure's symbol is the European Commission […] The good news is that the Commission's days are numbered" (Bayer, 2018).In a similar manner, Gert Wilders' PVV notes in its party program (2021)(2022)(2023)(2024)(2025) that "the PVV wants a Netherlands that can determine its own course.Not bothered by Brussels dictates that undermine our democracy.With a government that is there for its citizensnot just for those belonging to the left-liberal elite."(PVV, 2021: 32). 10  The populist criticism of the EU is not only directed at the EU's institutional make-up and the integration process; it is directed at the EU as a community-the understanding of community and the values that the EU espouses.This rhymes well with a more general observation about populists to the effect that they-especially right-wing populistsoperate with a rather specific conception of democracy that is wholly associated with their notion of nation.Ruth Wodak notes that, "the 'nation' as defined by right-wing populist parties is a limited and sovereign community that exists and persists through time and is tied to a specific territory (space), inherently and essentially constructed through an in/out (member/non-member) opposition and its out-groups" (Wodak, 2015: 77).
In this connection, it is interesting to note how some of Europe's populists are presenting today's Europe and the EU's role within it.If we look at Poland, we see that the PiS party's populism is cast by its leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski as a necessary corrective to a negative development of community and family, where the EU is "preparing to carry out a cultural revolution that will destroy social structures, starting with the family and traditions, and create a new man" (Moskwa, 2021)."We don't want this revolution, which we believe will bring unhappiness and a drastic decline in the freedoms of individuals and countries" (Moskwa, 2021). 11 This is part of a theme that runs through much of contemporary European populist discourse, namely that Europe's history is Christian, and that Europe's future must be Christian, with Christianity being conceived in distinctly conservative terms.This theme is often paired with a very strong anti-Muslim rhetoric.Geert Wilders, for instance, in a speech on 27 October 2020, asked the government to declare Islam a "violent ideology, one that comes with hate and terror" (OpIndia, 2021).This propensity to define immigrants and asylum seekers as security threats is part of the populists' efforts, especially during the so-called refugee crisis, to redefine the crisis from a humanitarian crisis to a matter of security, as part of a securitization logic (for this notion, see Huysmans, 2000).The fact that so many of the immigrants and asylum seekers during the refugee crisis were Muslims, was significant given Orbán's and PiS' insistence on the need to protect and preserve their respective countries and Europe as Christian.The securitization logic has also been linked to the need to protect a conservative Christian family structure.Judit Varga, Hungary's justice minister hit back at the EU's 2021 rule of law report (European Commission, 2021).She noted that: With its second rule of law report, the commission sticks to a role it has defined for itself, delivering a highly-politicised document based on double standards and vaguely founded criticisms and lacking the factual and impartial legal evaluation that its authors claim.The underlying motivation is obvious: this self-serving political smear campaign disguised as a legal assessment is directed against Hungary simply because we prioritise protecting our children and families and are unwilling to allow the LGBT+ lobby into our schools and kindergartens, as expected by certain interest groups… It is unfortunate that rule of law has become a tool of frustrated political will and ideological blackmail.We hit a nerve in Brussels simply because we consider the protection of children more important than pampering the LGBTQ lobby.(Varga, 2021) The minister rejects the European Commission's constitutional right to intervene; claims that the Commission is pursuing a mere political partisan agenda; argues that it is necessary to protect the children from abuse by LGBTs; as part of the government's denial of LGBTs' rights and recognition.
These populist statements show how populists insert themselves into the ongoing struggle over people-forming in contemporary Europe.Even if contested, European integration-where a significant driver is integration through law-could be said to be aimed at fostering a sense of community through institution-building, economic and political integration, and cultural accommodation across Europe. 12The EU integration process has been mainly oriented along economic and political lines.In cultural terms, it has a strong element of built-in "deep diversity". 13That is apparent in the European Charter's stance on religion where Article 10 states that: "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.This right includes freedom to change religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or in private, to manifest religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance" (EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, 2012: Article 10).This is of course an individual (or a group-based) right and stands in marked contrast to the right-wing populists' attempts to define the collective identity of their states and of the EU as distinctly Christian.
These populist attempts as we shall see are necessarily oppressive of persons' rights and of religious pluralism.They also suggest that right-wing populists seek to redefine the "recognition order" within states and societies across Europe.By "recognition order", I refer with Axel Honneth to "a framework within which individuals and groups are learning to see themselves as recognized with respect to certain characteristics" (Honneth, 2003: 249).It is important to underline that recognition order expresses cultural values and worldviews but must also, according to Honneth, be institutionally embedded in law and basic rights.Recognition order is an arrangement that gives meaning and direction to the expectations that citizens are inculcated to hold of themselves, that they hold in relation to their fellow citizens, and that they hold to the groups and communities that they form part of.In order to understand this, we need to look more closely at what it means to be recognized and at the conditions under which people experience failure or denial of recognition.Honneth operates with three categories of recognition: self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem.For our purposes only the latter two matter.Self-respect refers to personal autonomy, which is intrinsic to positive law.Legal rights are founded on the notion of recognition because we can only come to understand ourselves as the bearers of rights when we know, in turn, what various normative obligations we must keep vis-à-vis others: only once we have taken the perspective of the "generalized other", which teaches us to recognize the other members of the community as the bearers of rights, can we also understand ourselves to be legal persons, in the sense that we can be sure that certain of our claims will be met.(Honneth, 1995: 108).
The EU, through the European Charter and other instruments (amplified by the European Convention of Human Rights) seeks to foster a recognition order that relies very heavily on law.Claims for cultural distinctness are "tested" against rights of individuals and groups.This legally embedded recognition order is bent on constraining political leaders' ability to define the nature of national identity and community.
Honneth's notion of self-esteem on the other hand refers to how a given societal culture highlights certain personality traits and downplays others.Put bluntly, right-wing populists seek to replace the EU's recognition order which relied heavily on rights with a recognition order that is far more esteem-based and exclusive, privileging Christianity and heterosexual conceptions of the family.As will be developed further below, this recognition order is based on an approach to rights as the privilege of that segment of the population that the populist leaders define as the authentic people; others, notably immigrants and Muslims and other sexual orientations, are considered aberrations that should be denied recognition and excluded.

Populist Parties' Claim to be Responsive to the People
Populist parties claim that they are more responsive than mainstream political parties.In the European context, the claim refers both to parties at the EU level and at the member state level. 14Responsiveness can be understood in terms of policies being better aligned with the interests of voters/constituents (acting for) and/or in terms of more accurately reflecting or mirroring the voters/constituents (standing for).On the former, a recent study has shown that "in the 21st century Western European mainstream parties respond to their partisan constituents.Parties adjust their policy positions to eliminate previous incongruence between themselves and their constituents and follow the shifts in supporters' positions."(Ibenskas and Polk, 2021: 201) On the latter, populists claim that they are the best and the most accurate reflections of the "authentic" people (Urbinati, 2019).Further, populist leaders and parties, the argument goes, stand out in that they are particularly good at picking up popular sentiments.That is, for instance, manifested in the propensity to "say things as they are", and relates to populism's particular style and onus on "authenticity".This is a form of mirror representation that is bent on persuading people to consider a populist leader as "one of our own"; hence remove the psychological distance from leaders to led.Changes in media (such as for instance increased commercialization and the rise of so-called social media) have altered the pattern of communication between leaders and people in the sense that leaders have more outlets to relate directly to people without the editorial intermediaries that for instance quality broadsheets represent.Benjamin Moffitt notes that populism's "appeal to 'the people' versus 'the elite' and associated Others plays into media logic's dramatization, polarization and prioritization of conflict; its 'bad manners' line up with media logic's personalization, stereotypisation and emotionalisation; while its focus on crisis plays into media logic's tendency toward intensification and simplification" (Moffitt, 2016: 77) Populist leaders would claim that they in contrast to mainstream leaders are much more adept at picking up popular sentiments, so that the relationship is a bottom-up one.How to square that with the fact that the literature on populism underlines the role of populist leaders?As Hanspeter Kriesi has noted: "there is nothing inevitable about the politicization of European integration.It takes partisan operators who are capable and willing to mobilize the latent structural potentials for Euroskepticism to become politically and electorally relevant" (Kriesi, 2016: 1).Recent theorizing on representation underlines that representatives to a large extent construct the representative relationship by claiming to represent certain people in certain distinctive manners (Saward, 2006(Saward, , 2010)).In developing that, we may consider three different roles for leaders: -Reactive-respond to socially generated political action.
-Proactive-seek to encourage political action and popular mobilization.
-Preparative-work for a long time to prepare the ground for political action; political mobilization is a result of a lengthy period of careful planning and orchestration. 15  The more party leaders tend toward the preparative end, the more they seek to operate as shapers of constituents and constituencies, that is, of those they claim to represent.In effect, they will claim to be filling a void that they themselves have actively worked to create.The claim that populist parties are more responsive comes down to populist leaders' ability to form a political message that people will find persuasive.That is quite different from populist leaders being mere recipients of societal demands and sentiments.With the causal process almost reversed, the role of populist leaders and the issue of populist leadership enters center stage.I will say more on that below in connection with Farage's role in staging Brexit.
Thus far, we have seen that there are good grounds for questioning populists' claims to responsiveness, both in terms of acting for as well as in terms of standing for.Populist leaders and parties' active role in framing and mobilizing those they claim to represent is also apparent in the manner in which populist leaders single out certain issues that they want their supporters to associate with them.They use these issues to mobilize the constituency and to drum up support.That is closely related to the fact that political parties are creative organizations.They "create, not just reflect, political interests and opinions.They formulate 'issues' and give them political relevance.Party antagonism 'stages the battle'; parties create a system of conflict and draw the lines of division […] Modern party politics is the ordinary not (ordinarily) extraordinary locus of political creativity" (Rosenblum, 2008: 7).Further, as any organization, the populist party seeks to structure and control its environment, and especially its constituency of loyal supporters.One way of harnessing this relationship is to systematically espouse certain issues and issue-frames that serve as points of identification: "This is what partisans do: they remember.What they remember and the way they carry what they remember to the present is what defines the party-in-the-electorate" (Muirhead, 2014: 134) This has to do with specific issues or incidents, and with how they are framed: populist parties are typically associated with anti-immigration or Euroskepticism; this is what the partisans remember and how the party-in-the electorate appears.Right-wing populist parties' antiimmigration stance should be considered in light of the efforts by right-wing populists to reconfigure the recognition orders in Europe by forging policies to exclude in particular Muslim migrants.
Populist leaders and parties thus rely on strategies for connecting with citizens that all parties avail themselves of, but as we shall see, structural changes in the social rooting of parties have made it easier for them to gain support for their particular strategies.
Another important point is that responsiveness is not all there is to the role of parties.In effect, for parties to play the role of intermediaries between the political system and its citizens, they need to balance responsibility and responsiveness.Responsibility has several important facets.One set of facets relates directly to partisanship.A critical function of political parties is that of "civilizing conflicts (Rosenblum, 2008); a complementary function is to transform social ills and discontents to a form and shape that is "digestible" for the political system, and by serving as the institutional organism capable of carrying that through all the stages of the political process.These functions require that parties exercise self-restraint and are willing to seek compromise across political divides.The populist style is clearly not geared toward this form of responsibility which makes populist parties very difficult to handle.The link to policy and knowledge is much weaker and much easier to sever.Populist parties are not overly concerned with balancing responsibility and responsiveness.
In today's world, populists are aided by important structural changes in party systems that make it easier to delink responsiveness from responsibility.In today's world, there is a significant decline in the social rootedness of political parties, which entails that parties' ability to anchor governing institutions in society is weakened and makes it more difficult for mainstream parties to balance responsibility and responsiveness.This has implications for the EU; the EU even plays a role in this very development.
During the age of mass politics, political parties were socially rooted.Then political parties strove to establish more or less closed political communities, sustained by reasonably homogeneous electoral constituencies, strong and often hierarchical organizational structures and a coherent sense of partisan political identity.Voters, at least in the majority of cases, were believed to 'belong' to their parties, and rather than reflecting the outcome of a reasoned choice between the competing alternatives, the act of voting was seen instead as an expression of identity and commitment.(Mair, 2013: 78).
Social rootedness facilitated parties' balancing of governing responsibility and societal responsiveness.
Today's structural changes refer to the "unfreezing" of parties from their social roots, and the delinking of parties from a relatively fixed constellation of societal cleavages.Populism may help redirect cleavage structures along green/alternative/libertarian (GAL) and traditionalism/authority/nationalism (TAN) lines.Socio-structural changes in party allegiance and support may broadly speaking produce two quite different directional pulls on parties.One is that governing parties have been pulled closer to the state and have become cartel parties (Katz andMair, 1995, 2009).The other is the rise of populist parties that are less firmly organized and often organized around certain key figures.The two developments yield a far more fragmented political scene with political parties' role as channels connecting persons to the political system clearly weakened.This, as we shall see, has profound implications for parties' role in and ability to channel demands to the political system, and to parties' ability to explain policies and institutional arrangements to the people.
For our purpose, it is particularly important to consider how the social uprooting of parties affects their ability to balance or reconcile responsibility and responsiveness.In a Europeanized and legally regulated world, an important aspect of partisan responsibility is "to act prudently and consistently and to follow accepted procedural norms and practices […] responsibility involves an acceptance that, in certain areas and in certain procedures, the leaders' hands will be tied" (Mair, 2009: 12) That is directly related to what was said above about European integration as an intrinsic part of a postwar constellation deemed democracy constrained by legal-constitutional arrangements.The populist claim to responsiveness seriously downplays the dilemma parties face in reconciling responsibility and responsiveness.
International and European-level juridification as well as neoliberal global capitalism work together to alter the relationship between responsibility and responsiveness for all political parties.A main line of criticism of the EU is that it systematically stacks the political game in favor of responsibility.In doing so at the EU level, it reshapes the political games also in the member states.The upshot is for this to play into the hands of populists' criticism of unresponsive mainstream political parties.It would be far-fetched to argue that the EU has contributed to the rise of populism.The rise of populism is more the result of important structural changes in parties and party systems.Nevertheless, the EU exacerbates the problem of working out a viable balance between responsibility and responsiveness.Further, an important problem facing the EU is that the combination of social uprooting of parties and the growth of cartel parties make it more difficult to establish a viable party democracy for the EU.
To sum up thus far, the populist conception of EU democracy does not itself deviate from the debate on EU democracy, if that is considered in isolation from the populists' views of the nature and constitution of people and community.Once we take the latter into account, we see that the populist position is quite distinct given that many of the right-wing populists espouse a highly selective and illiberal conception of people and community.The populist claim to societal responsiveness appears entirely unfounded in terms of policies (acting for) and the claim to authenticity ignores how populists manipulate their constituencies.As pointed out, and will be further developed below, populist leaders play a central role in defining and shaping the people's conceptions of themselves and their community.Thus, insofar as populist parties are responsive, they are responsive only to a select segment of the population.Finally, populist parties appear quite unconcerned with balancing responsibility and responsiveness, which is an inherently difficult balancing act, and one rendered more complex in today's Europeanized and globalized context.

Is Populism a Democratic Challenge for the EU?
The previous section has shown that populists do not support the EU's ongoing process of democratizing politics and policymaking at the EU level, but want to revert democracy to the national level.Right-wing populists are dismissive of the project of EU democratization.And, insofar as populism forms a "constraining dissensus" (Hooghe and Marks, 2009), it will likely prevent EU-level democratic reforms.A reconfigured cleavage structure based on the opposition between GAL and TAN places constraints on and bars the EU from taking remedial actions to address its democratic deficit.In a similar vein, insofar as the traditional left-right cleavage is being replaced by a divide between communitarians (including populists) and cosmopolitans (of political and economic stripes), pitting cosmopolitan national and, in particular, European elites against more communitarian masses (De Wilde et al., 2019), that will give added grist to the mill to populist accounts of the EU as a site for remote and unresponsive elites.
The argument thus far is that the rise of populism can block needed EU-level democratizing reforms.The more prominent the populist thrust the stronger the constraint, especially insofar as it manifests itself in EP elections but also in elections in major EU member states.
The concern was readily apparent in the French presidential elections, and even more so in the Italian elections (both in 2022) which brought a populist government to power.The populist onslaught on democracy in Europe is not confined to what is going on at the EU level.Of particular concern has been the serious undermining of law and democracy in Hungary and Poland.These developments are frequently associated with the rise to power of authoritarians and parallels are drawn to the interwar period where democratic regimes were replaced by Fascist and Nazi regimes.What is, however, notable is that both Hungary's Orbán and Poland's PiS leaders are couching their regimes in democratic terms and rely on standard populist tropes in doing so.This suggests that rather than outright replacement of democratic regimes with authoritarian ones we see a more subtle subversion of democracy from within.In that sense democracy becomes a Potemkin Village, a mere shell, or a façade.As long as democracy remains the main legitimation principle, this kind of subversion from inside can be as serious a threat to democracy as a turn to authoritarianism in some countries, because the line between what is democratic and what is not can become blurred also in states that are not associated with explicit efforts at democratic backsliding.
In this connection, it is important to look closer at Nadia Urbinati's distinction in her latest book Me the People (2019) between populism in opposition and populism in power because she is interested in examining whether the rise to power of populists such as Orbán is mainly about changes in parties and party systems, or whether in effect the very institution of representative party democracy is at stake.
Urbinati notes that when populism is in power it seeks to establish a new form of representative government that is at the same time a disfigured version of democracy.The new form of government typically draws on the key populist distinction between the people and the elite.The populist leader plays a central role in shaping this distinction and in the process transforms the political system from party democracy to populist democracy.The populist leader espouses an anti-establishment position and rhetoric that presents the people as pure and the established political elite as morally corrupt.The leader plays a central role in "people-forming" because the leader seeks to establish a close connection to a part of the people that the leader seeks to sustain in an ongoing manner.In doing so, the leader claims to incarnate the people against a treasonous political elite (the political establishment).
Urbinati's stance is entirely consistent with the notion that people-forming is a quintessentially political act.The broader issue, as Sofia Näsström puts it, is that: "(t)he constitution of the people is not a historical event.It is an ongoing claim that we make" (Näsström, 2007: 645).People-forming is a legal and political act, and representation plays a fundamental, constitutive role in people-forming.People-forming is a function of someone claiming to represent the people, and the people takes shape when those addressed by the claim are able and willing to redeem such a claim by seeing themselves as a people and subjecting themselves to a system of rule.People-forming is an ongoing matter because those addressed as the people must be able to redeem that claim.
Viewed from this perspective, it is quite clear that populism is a very distinctive and selective-with a strong exclusivist thrust-claim to represent the people.
Urbinati underlines that in her view populism is "not an ideology or a specific political regime but rather a representative process, through which a collective subject is constructed so that it can achieve power" (Urbinati, 2019: 5).This collective subject is not the entire people, but only a part of the people.
Populists want to replace party democracy with populist democracy; when they succeed, they stabilize their rule through unrestrained use of the means and procedures that party democracy offers.Specifically, populists promote a permanent mobilization of the public (the audience) in support of the elected leader in government; or they amend the existing constitution in ways that reduce constraints on the decision-making power of the majority.(Urbinati, 2019: 4) This process represents a revocation of party democracy: the populist party is clearly a vehicle for the leader to ascend to power.Nevertheless, once in power, the relationship between the leader and the audience or adherents is what matters.The party is placed on the backburner, and elections are mere acclamations or declarations of support for the leader.New media aid the leader in establishing and sustaining this direct relationship with the audience.
Populism, Urbinati underlines, is "a new form of mixed government in which one part of the population achieves a preeminent power over the other(s).As such, populism competes with (and if possible, modifies) constitutional democracy in putting forth a specific and distinctive representation of the people and the sovereignty of the people" (Urbinati, 2019: 35).This fosters a form of anti-politics, which is hostile to the political pluralism and contestation that is intrinsic to modern democracy.The democratic disfiguring is apparent given that: Populism does not use the majority as a method to detect the victorious part of a competition for government and the size of the opposition.Instead, it uses it as a force that claims to be the expression of the right peopleand that is legitimized to dwarf and humiliate the opposition… populism identifies the people with "a part" of society, making the majority the ruling force of that part against the other part(s) (Urbinati, 2019: 36) This resonates with populism's distinction between people and elite.Populism redefines what the people is, in the sense that populists operate with a "possessive conception of the people": "(w)henever populists come to power, they treat procedures and political cultures as a matter of property and possession" (Urbinati, 2019: 12).That also applies to rights.Populists do not reject rights; they instead: [U]se the language of rights in a way that subverts their proper function.They use the language of rights to state and reclaim the absolute power of the many over their 'civilization,', and thereby over rights, which become a power that only the members of the ruling people possess and are allowed to enjoy.At the very moment they are detached from their equal and impartial (that is, universalist and procedural) meaning, rights become a privilege […] A possessive practice of rights robs rights of their aspirational character and turns them into a means to protect the status that a part of the population has gained […] The suspension of universalism is a direct consequence of a possessive and thus relative conception of rights.(Urbinati, 2019: 13) We can understand this in light of the right-wing populist attempt to institute a different recognition order, one steeped more in self-esteem and a selective and possessive approach to rights.In this circumstance, the persons that make up the minority may not be deprived of the right to vote, but their act of voting has no consequence for the system of governing.
Consider what the EP's Civil Liberties Committee in July 2020 reported on Poland: -"the constitutional revision powers taken on by the parliament since 2015, the use of expedited legislative procedures, as well as recent developments pertaining to changes to the electoral law and elections organized during a public emergency; broad changes to the country's judiciary, enacted during the last few years, ranging from the way appointments are made, to disciplinary procedures, posing a serious risk to judicial independence; the situation of fundamental rights, particularly freedom of expression, media freedom and pluralism, academic freedom, freedom of assembly, and association; and the de facto criminalization of sexual education, as well as hate speech, public discrimination, violence against women, domestic violence and intolerant behavior against minorities and other vulnerable groups, including LGBTI persons, and the drastic limitation, coming close to de facto banning of abortion and limiting access to emergency contraceptive pills."(European Parliament, 2020).
The transgressions in Hungary are if anything considerably more extensive (Wahl, 2020).
Populist democracy as well as illiberal democracy reflect the decline of democracy because the phenomena they depict abrogate the necessary pluralism and scope for alternation of power that is intrinsic to democracy.Democracy cannot function without the basic rights that liberals underline.The appropriate distinction is not liberal-nonliberal but whether democracy is anchored in a constitutional arrangement that ensures basic rights.If majoritarianism is thus not "tamed" there is no viable democracy.
I would argue that it is useful to supplement Urbinati's distinction between populists in government and populists outside of government with a further distinction between populists in government and populist ideas or programs shaping governing.The latter refers to those situations where populist parties are not in government but where other parties in government adopt populist policies and policy prescriptions, increasingly start to label them their own, and carry them out.This often happens in consensual democracies, such as Denmark where the then-ruling liberals were dependent on parliamentary support from the right-wing populist Danish People's Party, but the populist party never entered government.The Danish People's Party's stance on asylum seekers and immigrants effectively became the governing orthodoxy.This very restrictive stance on asylum and immigration that Denmark has adopted has led it on a collision course with international law and EU law (Reuters in Copenhagen, 2021).From this, we could argue that in consensual democracies with a strong populist presence and fragile coalition governments, the onus on forging consensus can make the other parties and the public administration adopt populist policies or policy stances.Populists then find themselves virtually represented in governing.Such forms of anticipated action can become system-wide so that established parties in government refrain from taking measures that spark populist uproar (including from these parties' sympathizers through social media).In this case, the effect on policies is similar to when populists are in government.
The right-wing populist onslaughts on democracy and constitutionalism in Hungary and Poland raise the question of what the EU can do to counter these developments.An example is the ruling by the Polish Constitutional Tribunal: a direct attack on the supremacy of EU law (Thiele, 2021) and the question of the end of rule of law in Poland.It is obvious however that this is not an issue that can be left to the institutions at the EU level.The EU's member states claim to be the EU's "constitutional chaperons" and if they do not own up to this challenge, they will be complicit in the decline of democracy in Europe.Further, Kelemen (2020: 481) in referring to Europe's authoritarian equilibrium, notes how the EU inadvertently sustains the democratic backsliding: First, the EU's half-baked system of party politics and its ingrained reluctance to interfere in the domestic politics of its member states help shield national autocrats from EU intervention.Second, funding and investment from the EU helps sustain these regimes.Third, the free movement of persons in the EU facilitates the exit of dissatisfied citizens, which depletes the opposition and generates remittances, thereby helping these regimes endure.While more fully developed democratic federations have the capacity to eventually steer autocratic member states back toward democracy, the EU appears to be stuck in an autocracy trap.(Kelemen, 2020: 481) To sum up, populists-notably right-wing populists-can constrain and contain EU democratization.They can also when in government or when governing parties adopt their ideas and policy stances seriously undermine constitutional democracy in EU member states.Since the member states are still the mainstay of democracy in Europe, the larger and more influential the member and the greater the number of states that undermine constitutional democracy the more serious the challenge.These developments might suggest that populism is an existential threat to the EU.
Is Populism an Existential Threat to the EU? Do populists want to abolish the EU?One approach would be to advocate in favor of dismantling the EU entirely in one fell swoop.Another approach is for populists to push for their member state to leave the EU.The more states that leave, the weaker the EU becomes, especially if large member states withdraw.The third approach would be for populists to redefine the role of the EU so that it comes to serve the member states.That, as was noted above, was Milward's (1992) reading of the EU's basic rationale, and which he framed as "the European rescue of the Nation-State".Nevertheless, as we have seen above, right-wing populists such as Orbán and the Polish PiS party are on a very different track from that of Milward, given that they are actively undermining constitutional democracy in their respective nation-states.Insofar as they manage to direct the EU to serve their aims-whether by downscaling the EU or even worse by empowering it-the effect will be deeply detrimental both at the EU level and across the EU's member states.
In relation to the first approach listed above, it is apparent that there are populists that want to abolish the EU.Geert Wilders noted on 17 February 2017 that: "I'm against the European Union […] The European Union is a political bureaucratic organization that took away our identity and our national sovereignty.So, I would get rid of the European Union and be a nation-state again" (Hurd, 2017).The question is whether this is a widely shared view.I will return to this below.
On the second approach listed above, there were forces in the UK and across Europe that saw Brexit as a possible first step toward the EU's unraveling.In connection with the UK referendum on Brexit a UK newspaper article noted that: "Nigel Farage realised lifelong dream after 25 years of Eurosceptic politics". 16The article went on to detail how Nigel Farage had throughout his career actively worked for the UK to leave the EU, an organization he dismisses as useless and that should be disbanded.In other words, the article depicts how Nigel Farage sought to prepare the ground for Brexit.This aspect of the Brexit saga is an excellent illustration of how such active long-term preparative work matters to political outcomes.Farage did not simply respond to the UK population's Euroskepticism; he played an active role in fostering it, as well as trying to show how so many other issues and concerns would be properly dealt with by getting the UK out of the EU.After the referendum, Farage toured Europe in order to drum up support for more countries to leave the EU.There have appeared concerted attempts by right-wing populists in several countries to have their countries exit the EU.The Dutch Geert Wilders (PVV) and the French Marine Le Pen have advocated EU exit referendums in their respective countries (Spiegel, 2016).On 25 December 2020, the leader of the Danish People's Party advocated a Danish referendum on Dexit (Denmark's departure from the EU) (Larsen, 2020).
Nevertheless, there are also important analyses that suggest that the last few years may have seen a change in populist sentiments.As Sergio Fabbrini and Tiziano Zgaga note, "[a]fter Brexit, nationalist leaders did not consider leaving the EU a viable option.Sovereignism came in as an attempt to combine the radical critique of the EU with the choice or necessity to remain within the latter" (Fabbrini and Zgaga, 2021: 3).Sovereignism the authors underline has roots in nationalism but reflects the latter's adaptation to European integration.In that sense, the hallmark or defining feature of sovereignism is that it represents "a fundamental critique of the EU but from within".In an interview with Postoj, the interviewer asked Orbán whether he wanted a stronger EU role in defense.Orbán's response is instructive: Yes, because the coordinates in my head are not drawn in such a way that I either support or am against the EU in everything.There are elements of the EU that should be strengthened much more, the opposite is true of the European Parliament, which plays a particularly damaging role when it turns European policy into a partisan policy and the European left uses it to attack sovereign states.So the question is not whether the EU does or not, but which EU. (Hanus and Majchrák, 2021) The quote shows that there is considerable ambiguity in the populists' conception of the EU.They may on balance be said to prefer an intergovernmental EU but are far from clear or consistent on that or what it also may entail.The issue may not be about the EU's existence but that the EU will be transformed beyond recognition.In such a circumstance, especially if right-wing populists seek to strengthen and consolidate the EU in their image, we may see a double-pronged attack on constitutional democracy: from an increasingly undemocratic EU under (partial) populist control and from undemocratic member states.

Conclusion
The purpose of this article was to shed light on the democratic challenge that right-wing populism poses to the EU.I first assessed whether Europe's turn to populism could give a further impetus to EU democratization given that populism's historical credo is to strengthen democracy and popular participation.It was found that the populist stance on EU democracy was not only of the dismissive kind but could also constrain and contain the EU's efforts to further democratize the EU.The EU democracy debate is multidimensional because it is both about the type of polity and form and location of democracy.Where populism (especially of the right-wing kind) stands out from the rest is on its conception of community, nation, and identity, which is incompatible not only with the EU but with constitutional democracy.That was apparent in the right-wing populist attempt to reconfigure the EU's recognition order, from a legally entrenched and rights-based to an esteem-based anchorage.Thus, the answer to the second question as to whether populism represents a democratic challenge for the EU was answered in the affirmative, especially in those member states that are actively involved in undermining key constitutional democratic arrangements in their respective member states, namely Hungary and Poland.In drawing on Urbinati's work, I showed that this form of populism represented a hollowing out of democracy from within, in the sense that populist parties and leaders sought to replace representative with populist democracy as a distinct style of representation.Finally, in examining whether populism represents an existential challenge for the EU, I suggested drawing on the sovereignist account that states that populists appear less concerned with abolishing the EU and more concerned with transforming it to serve their ends.In terms of Europe's democratic development, this is a serious challenge that may place EU proponents in a dilemma.If they do not succeed in reforming the EU in a constructive direction, they risk a double-pronged challenge to democracy in Europe.
This assessment has sought to identify the type of challenge populism represents for Europe.In doing so, it has listed a range of other factors that have given impetus to the populist challenge.These factors such as the transformation of political party systems (the social dislocation of parties combined with the rise of cartel parties), a process and pattern of globalization and Europeanization that alters the relationship between parties' balancing of responsibility and responsiveness, and changes in media systems and the mode of mediatization all play into populists' hands but are not caused by populism.In assessing the gravity of the populist threat, we need to understand the combined impact of these and other changes on the functioning of modern constitutional democracy.