The EU faced several crises in recent decades, including the Eurozone crisis, the refugee crisis, and Brexit. Given other challenges, such as the rise of Eurosceptic populism, European integration has increasingly been equated with the term 'crisis'. As such, the European question is also framed as a potential threat to the unity of national political parties in Member States.

Yet how did parties treat European integration as a party management issue before? In an attempt to answer this question, this paper focuses on two main cases: the British Labour Party under Tony Blair's leadership (1994-2007) and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) during Gerhard Schröder's chancellery (1998-2005). The main argument of this paper is that even before the 'negativities' affiliated with EU-level crises, Europe marked a thorny intra-party issue despite the progress of integration with 'positive' steps, such as the euro. This was caused by a mix of internal and external factors, including the greater domestic salience of the EU, the "executive bias" encouraged by the integration, and the governmental position of parties.

The management of the EU issue by the Blair and Schröder leaderships is examined based on Katz and Mair's "three faces of party organisation" thesis. To collect data, semi-structured interviews were made with 32 former senior political elites from Labour and the SPD (16 participants each). In addition, several physical and digital archives on Labour and the SPD’s European vocations were covered. To analyse the collected data, the reflexive thematic analysis method was used.

Both sub-state and state nationalists often justify the power of their sub-state or state by emphasising that the voter will be "better off" under their government. Economic success, or lack thereof, thus has a significant effect on both independence-seeking political parties and political parties seeking to keep the state together. Since 2021, many countries in Europe have been in the midst of a cost of living crisis, during which prices of goods and bills have risen and wages have stagnated. As a result, voters have expressed economic pessimism and pessimism about their personal futures in the UK, Spain, and Belgium. These three countries have also faced ongoing constitutional crises with active and popular sub-state nationalist political parties in Scotland, Catalonia, and Flanders. In this paper, we consider how these sub-state nationalists and their state nationalist counterparts articulate their constitutional preferences while responding to the salient and ongoing cost of living crisis. Specifically, we consider the effect of the cost of living crisis on territorial and nationalist contestation during elections in Spain/Catalonia (2023), the UK/Scotland (2024), and Belgium/Flanders (2024).

This paper contributes to scholarly understandings of the perceived political perma-crisis in Europe and how this may affect state-building and state-breaking within three European states. We particularly emphasise the nationalism of the state and the sub-state and the dialogue between them, rather than studying just one side of these dynamic political conflicts. Our use of comparative case studies allows us to examine how different constitutional structures, ideological postions, and relationships with the EU might affect nationalists' response to the cost of living crisis.

This paper serves as a comparison to our previous work on political parties’ state-making and state-breaking narratives and the COVID-19 pandemic. It complements this work by considering a high salience and widely felt economic crisis and analysing electoral communications from parties. To do so, we compile and compare contemporary information on recent and ongoing elections and campaigns including key speeches, manifestos, and political advertising.

Whether having populist actors proclaim it or whether an actual crisis occurs, populism and crisis have often been connected in the literature as having a symbiotic relationship. At present the focus remains on populism and e.g. crisis of ideological discourse (Laclau, 1977), representational notion of crisis (Gramsci, 1971), crisis of previously hegemonic discursive orders (Stavrakakis, 2005), performance of crisis (Moffitt, 2015), contexts of crisis or profound transformations (Roberts, 1995), and crisis and the role of leadership (Taggart, 2000). But little is known about how populist actors construct and mobilise crisis. As populism does not only respond to crisis but it often also creates it, the study of populism enables understanding social, cultural, and political crises in a new light. Due to the symbiotic relation of populism and crisis, and in order to understand holistically the populist phenomenon and its effort to attract or deflect public attention, it is essential to study crisis and populism together and to understand the strategy of populist actors when constructing and instrumentalise crisis for voter mobilisation or pacification.

This project seeks to identify the strategies populist actors use to shape the public’s understanding of a crisis. More specifically, it focuses on defining their framing strategies of crisis, constructing a discourse that explains its causes and who is it to be blamed, or proposing ways to be resolved. To do so, the project analyses 1) societal issues that populist actors politicise in their crisis narrative e.g. migration, European integration, economy, health safety; 2) issues that have been ignored, excluded and left out e.g. climate change; 3) the way crisis is framed and narrated in order to attract the attention of the electorate; 4) polarisation and radicalisation levels in crisis narratives.

This paper uses data from a protest event dataset to uncover tendencies in protest policing in Portugal and Spain between 2000-2020, and locate them in each country’s protest arena. This is complemented with a critical discourse analysis of the utterances made about protest policing by political actors published in two main newspapers in each country, aiming at uncovering the master-discourse on protest policing across the border. I reveal that neither the reported illegality of a protest event or the actions of protesters appear connected to protest policing. I also assert that protest policing is more prevalent and more intense in Spain, and more legitimised in political discourse, although with resistance from civil society. However, in the latest years of the series, Portugal witnesses an increase in both proportion and intensity of protest policing, corresponding to the entrance of the extreme-right in the national parliament and to a change in discourse legitimising high intensity protest policing. I then discuss how these developments relate to historical processes in the adaptation of both countries’ police forces during the transition to democracy, and how these also shaped the discourse on protest policing. The implications of these findings for the quality of democracy in the Iberian Peninsula are discussed to argue that these developments are part of a global trend for the securitisation of protest, increasingly visible in public authorities´ and governance institutions´ responses to popular mobilisation.

Since the Great Recession, the Left group in the European Parliament (GUE/NGL) has undergone a significant change in its composition. The new political landscape in the political group is due to the inclusion of new radical left parties (RLPs) that adopt a social-populist political stance and hold 15 of the GUE/NGL's 38 seats in the EP. This change in composition has brought with it a normative change, with these newcomers holding more favourable positions towards the European Union and European integration. However, this (new) pro-integration stance clashes with the traditional criticism of the EU as an existing institution, leading to an ambivalent position between disruptive and constructive politics. Previous research has shown that mainstream parties see the GUE/NGL as a more responsible opposition in the EP, but little is known about how and when RLPs adopt which forms of Eurosceptic stance in the EP. Therefore, empirical research is needed to understand how this dynamic of new and established RLPs has impacted their work in the European Parliament (EP) and how mainstream parties perceive the work of GUE/NGL Members of Parliament (MEPs) in the EP. This paper examines the behaviour of GUE/NGL MEPs based on elite interviews with members of the GUE/NGL and other political groups working together in committees where constructive work for legislation is needed. The results aim to understand under which conditions GUE/NGL MEPs adopt forms of irresponsible opposition related to their Eurosceptic positions and when it chooses a more constructive approach.