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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Polit. Sci.

Sec. International Studies

Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1623155

This article is part of the Research TopicPopulism and Conflicts Across Institutions and Scales: Unpacking Challenges, Responses, and PotentialsView all articles

Conflict of Interest: Justifying International Cooperation in Populist Discourse

Provisionally accepted
  • 1London Metropolitan University, London, United Kingdom
  • 2Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Contrary to the stereotypical assumption that the foreign policy of populists is geared towards conflict, much of the literature in recent years has converged on the understanding that populism results in a complex and often seemingly incoherent mix of cooperation and confrontation. Populist leaders often adopt a confrontational stance towards other states and international institutions, yet they are also capable of striking deals, defusing tensions and reconciling with multilateral settings. This inconsistency is due to a variety of factors like geopolitical and economic pressures or the thick-ideological proclivities of populists. But in this article, we are interested in how populists reconcile the contradictory trend to antagonize internationally but end up striking deals. Drawing on the literature on populist discourses and a view of foreign policy as political management of state-society relations, we argue that this reconciliation takes place primarily at a discursive level, as populists deploy a discourse of cooperation that remains consistent with the binary and Manichean logic of populism. We identify three populist discursive strategies of justifying cooperation after conflict: elite-splitting; issue-bundling and audience-hopping. We demonstrate our argument by comparing two cases of populist compromising with the EU following a protracted period of confrontation: Greece’s acceptance of a third bailout from the Eurozone under Alexis Tsipras in 2015; and Britain’s signing of a final Brexit deal under Boris Johnson in 2020.

Keywords: populism, foreign policy, Political discourse, Political parties, Brexit, eurozone crisis

Received: 05 May 2025; Accepted: 05 Aug 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Chryssogelos and Meibauer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence:
Angelos Chryssogelos, London Metropolitan University, London, United Kingdom
Gustav Meibauer, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands

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