Conference Agenda

Existing research has analysed the impact of the moderation of radical and exclusive language, de-demonisation (dédiabolisation), on the French populist radical right party National Rally (Rassemblement National), which began in the 1980s and was intensified following the takeover of Marine Le Pen from her father in 2011. An integral part of this strategy was a stricter approach to antisemitism in the party. As a result, the RN today presents itself as a staunch defender of the French Jewish community, particularly against a perceived shared enemy of Islam. However, the impact of, and reasoning behind, this self-presentation is comparatively under-researched. This paper uses tenets of discourse-historical analysis of Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) posts shared by RN official pages and high-profile RN members between 2017 and early 2023, and demonstrates how Jews are accepted into their body politic in order to justify the party’s anti-government, anti-immigrant, anti-Islam, and anti-left messaging. Jews are included as long as their victimhood serves to bolster a wider national collective victimhood, often at the hands of these actors. This paper also uses inductive coding to analyse the comments left by users engaging with RN posts, the majority of which reiterate, reflect, and occasionally escalate the party’s “anti-“ sentiments, demonstrating the RN’s framing of Jews and antisemitism as a legitimising and mobilising strategy, which further encourages intolerance.

Though intentionally progressive and inclusive, EU-derived rights, particularly those stemming from the principles of free movement, non-discrimination, and social rights, may have provoked rejection reactions or been exploited to fuel anti-European feelings. This paper explores how several populist and Eurosceptic movements instrumentalised EU rights to feed anti-European rhetoric, calling into question the social and legal cohesion of the European project. For several years, far-right and populist parties have been gaining ground in the EU Member States and within the European institutions, threatening the achievements of European integration based on the rule of law. The Brexit referendum campaign led by the UK Independence Party (UKIP) illustrates how EU-derived rights can fuel populist and nationalist narratives. While UKIP influenced the referendum result, its approach to EU citizens' social rights access also spread to other far-right populist parties in EU member states who adopted the strategies used by UKIP in their national contexts, exploiting fears about immigration, national sovereignty and cultural identity to mobilise support against the EU. In Germany, for example, the far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has used the idea that intra-European migrants took advantage of the German welfare system. This argument has often been aimed at Romanian or Bulgarian workers. These criticisms have had several consequences: the increased division between the Member States and delegitimisation of the European institutions, particularly regarding managing migration and sovereignty.

This has highlighted the EU's vulnerabilities in the face of ideological discourse. This paper investigates how UKIP and other EU populist far-right movements have mobilised this rhetoric against EU-derived rights and how the EU responds to these challenges. If the EU wishes to protect its integration project, it must indeed raise awareness of these rights, respond to criticism, and find ways of countering populist rhetoric without compromising its fundamental principles.

In order to address the European Union’s rule of law crisis in some of its Member States, including Hungary, the institutional approach based on values is insufficient. By contrast, economic conditionality has been proving increasingly effective as an EU law tool. However, there are also peripheral situations which, although they directly affect the EU’s political and legal development, are not covered by EU law and the conditionality mechanisms it imposes. This paper deals with one such case: a preferential regime intended to grant Hungarian citizenship, voting rights and other benefits to “Hungarians beyond borders”. According to Hungarian law, “Hungarians beyond the borders” (or “Hungarians living in neighbouring states”) are entitled to preferential naturalisation without any requirement of residency in Hungary or proof of Hungarian descent. This entails the automatic granting of EU citizenship and its associated rights, including free movement within the EU, creating similar circumstances to those in the Maltese golden passport cases. In that regard, statistical analysis based on available data on naturalisations and parliamentary elections demonstrates that granting voting rights to “Hungarians beyond the borders” has influenced election results in a favourable manner to Fidesz in the past decade and a half, leading to an even greater distortion of democratic representativeness in a mixed electoral system pre-configured to serve a larger party’s interests. In addition, all travel, educational and cultural benefits that only “Hungarians beyond the borders” enjoy by law raise explicit discrimination concerns. Despite the obvious deepening of the EU’s rule of law crisis through such cases of arbitrariness in Member States, the only possible application of EU law, including both de jure and de facto harmonisation options based on both treaty provisions and political will, is currently limited to the use of internal market law and its fundamental economic freedoms, the regulation of which remains a shared competence between the EU and the Member States, not in the hands of the latter. This paper charts to what extent those freedoms can play a role in the context of such preferential regimes and calls for new directions to be set in order to bring such peripheral cases more firmly within the scope of both EU harmonisation initiatives and the EU’s rule of law framework.

This paper explores the potential of the prohibition of the ‘abuse of rights’ under European Union (EU) law to protect against the currently maturing anti-gender movement in Europe. Regardless of the recognition of gender equality as an important value (CJEU) and as a goal in a democratic society (ECtHR), the potential of EU law to provide a fence from the largest growing opposition to gender equality in Europe has not been examined yet. This is the work that the present paper undertakes. First, the paper will revisit the meaning, scope, and approach of the concept of abuse of rights by critically analyzing the existing literature, the legal framing, and the case law on Article 54 of the Charter and Article 17 of the ECHR. Second, by relying on literature from various disciplines, and by looking at examples of common actions of the anti-gender movement which have been documented in the growing body of research, the paper will make the case for the anti-democratic character of the anti-gender movement and will recast the limits of what should be considered “necessary in a democratic society”. Third, the paper will apply the conceptual framework developed in the first part to the examples from the anti-gender movement discussed in the second part. In doing so, it will consider the possible ways in which EU law can be used to approach an issue related to potential abuse of rights arising from the activities of the anti-gender movement.