The East and Central European EU Member states have always been one of the most visible sources of various forms of Euroscepticism – be it its party expression, general public positions or behaviour of these states in the EU institutions – since their EU accession in 2004. The polycrisis in the European Union, together with its repercussions in the member states, opened a sort of opportunity window for diverse variants of Euroscepticism. Therefore, the panel and papers it contains seek to answer the question of to what extent this long-term phenomenon of ECE Euroscepticism has been durable or changing and to what extent its expressions are affected by the EU’s multiple crises. More specifically, the papers deal with the following questions. Has the crisis changed the way Euroscepticism performs? Have the actors who promoted Eurosceptic positions changed or remained the same? Have strategies, narratives and tools that Eurosceptics use in political competition adapted to the EU crisis mode? All these questions are studied from the country case perspective or using a comparative approach.

The paper analyzes the discourse surrounding the preparation of the second Czech EU Presidency. It focuses on the narratives that various Czech political parties constructed around the EU Presidency, paying thus specific attention to the neglected domestic dimension of the EU Council Presidency. The Czech case is worth analyzing as the country had a parliamentary election nine months before the Presidency started, and the EU dimension was thus visible in the electoral campaign.

Multiple crises of Europe and European integration, the Eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, Brexit, covid crisis, and the war in Ukraine, augmented the argumentation potential of hard Eurosceptic parties in the region of East Central Europe. Especially the idea of Brexit made a profound impact on the local hard Eurosceptic parties, yet with diverse intensity and diverse narrative connotations. Our research aims to show how the radical right Eurosceptic parties in the East Central European area used the narrative of “exit.” The comparative paper will build on the cases coming from the Visegrad Group countries from 2010 through 2022.