Abstract
This study examines variation in far-right parties’ positions on the European Union (EU) by analytically distinguishing between radical and extreme-right actors and analysing their EU-related discourse. While existing research often treats the far right as a single party family and explains its variation in Euroscepticism mainly in terms of ideological opposition and strategic positioning, this article argues that differences in EU orientation also reflect different forms of systemic integration. Drawing on a qualitative thematic analysis of electoral manifestos and Telegram messages from three radical and three extreme-right parties in France, Italy, and Spain, the article examines how these actors discursively construct their relationship to the EU as both a political project and a political system. The findings show that both party families share substantial ideological opposition to the EU, centred on sovereignty, migration, and economic control. However, radical-right parties combine criticism with sustained engagement in EU institutions and reform-oriented discourse. By contrast, extreme-right actors predominantly frame the EU as illegitimate and advocate withdrawal or rupture. These findings suggest that similar levels of ideological opposition may coexist with different modes of articulating that opposition. The work contributes to the study of the far right by demonstrating the analytical value of distinguishing between radical and extreme-right actors when examining their relationship to the EU as a political regime. It also contributes to debates on Euroscepticism by clarifying how similar levels of ideological opposition to European integration may correspond to different modes of articulating that opposition related to systemic integration.
1 Introduction
In academic research, ‘far right’ has become a widely used umbrella encompassing the radical and extreme right and including a broad range of actors, from institutionalised parties to marginal and extra-parliamentary movements (cf. Pirro, 2023). While this categorisation has analytical advantages in capturing shared ideological features such as nativism and authoritarianism, it also risks obscuring important internal differences. More specifically, recent scholarship’s tendency to treat radical and extreme-right actors as part of a single party family risks oversimplifying complex political distinctions and assuming that any actor under the far-right umbrella is inherently ‘illiberal’ or ‘anti-system’ (Tetrault, 2025). This simplification can blur meaningful variations in how these actors relate to political institutions and democratic processes.
These differences become particularly visible in European Union (EU) politics. Far-right actors across Europe frequently oppose the EU and European integration, yet the form and intensity of this opposition vary considerably (Roch, 2024; Keil, 2026). Some parties advocate withdrawal or the dismantling of the EU, portraying it as an illegitimate political order. Others, while highly critical, engage with EU institutions, promote reform from within, and participate in European Parliament elections. Existing research has often interpreted this variation as resulting from strategic positioning within a shared ideological family (Vasilopoulou, 2018), suggesting that parties adjust their rhetoric in response to electoral incentives, coalition opportunities, or institutional constraints. However, this interpretation assumes that all far-right actors share a similar relationship to the political system and that the parties being compared are similarly embedded in it and therefore respond to comparable electoral and institutional incentives.
This paper challenges this assumption by arguing that variation in EU-related discourse reflects not only ideological considerations but also different types of systemic integration, intended here as modes in which ideological opposition to the EU is discursively articulated. In particular, it reintroduces the distinction between radical and extreme-right actors (see Zulianello, 2025) as analytically meaningful for understanding their positioning towards the EU. Against this backdrop, the paper asks: How does EU-related discourse reveal differences in ideological opposition and systemic integration among radical and extreme-right parties? By addressing the question, this work aims to investigate whether the distinction between radical and extreme-right actors is reflected in different discursive modes of articulating opposition to the EU as a metapolitical component of the existing political order.
To do so, the study analyses the political communication of six parties—three radical and three extreme-right ones—in France, Italy, and Spain, drawing on electoral manifestos and Telegram messages from January 2024 to December 2025. Throughout the analysis, EU discourse is treated as a diagnostic arena in which ideological opposition and systemic integration become empirically observable. Results show that radical-right parties tend to combine criticism with participation and cooperation, while extreme-right actors more consistently reject the EU as a political system and call for withdrawal.
This work contributes to two strands of literature. First, it refines the study of the far right by showing the analytical value of distinguishing between radical and extreme-right actors when examining their relationship to political regimes, and by situating this distinction within the broader literature on parties’ positions towards the EU. Second, it contributes to debates on Euroscepticism by clarifying how similar levels of ideological opposition to European integration may correspond to fundamentally different modes of articulating that opposition. The rest of the paper is organised as follows: the next section discusses the use of the ‘far right’ as an umbrella term and its consequences in the study of Euroscepticism. The third section presents the analytical framework, while the fourth reports results. The last two sections discuss and conclude.
2 The ‘far right’ and far-right Euroscepticism
2.1 The far right as umbrella term
Miller-Idriss (2022, p. 17) points out that ‘far right’ is “the ‘best bad term’” we have to deal with, as it encompasses a complex, heterogeneous field of actors, labels, and definitions. Moreover, as Carter (2018) suggests, the scholarship appears to address the ‘far right’ without engaging in detailed, comprehensive conceptual and definitional debates (see also Pirro, 2023). Thus, ‘far right’ appears today as a good compromise to group under a single label both the radical and the extreme right—identifying all those actors that are not part of the ‘mainstream right’ (i.e., conservatives and liberals/libertarians) and are largely ‘anti-system’ (Mudde, 2019, p. 7). As a result, recent literature in the field has analysed and compared, under the unifying label of the ‘far right’, actors ranging from white supremacist militias and anti-governmental groups to institutionalised, even governing, parties (see, among others, Mondon and Winter, 2020; Norris, 2023; Feola, 2024; Fernández-García, 2026).
Pirro (2023), further systematising and justifying the ‘far right’ as a useful umbrella term, argues that this solution is particularly necessary given “the increasingly porous borders and growing links between (populist) radical-right parties, on the one hand, and extreme-right movements and groups, on the other” (p. 107). Therefore, relying on this all-encompassing umbrella term would allow scholars to “better delimit this phenomenon and enhance conceptual precision” (p. 102). In this vein, various works (see, for instance, Blee, 2020; Brown et al., 2023; Gattinara et al., 2024; Samaras, 2026) group a wide range of (populist) radical-right, extreme-right, neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi parties and movements, as well as paramilitary or terrorist groups and loosely organised communities under the label of the ‘far right’, as this offers a valuable perspective to explore how “these entities tend to shade into and out one another” (Norocel, 2023, p. 290).
However, the far right is far from being a monolith, as these same scholars recognise, since it encompasses both the radical and the extreme right. Radical and extreme-right actors, while sharing a common ground in nativism and authoritarianism, differ significantly in their attitudes towards democracy (Norocel, 2016). The radical right typically accepts democracy in its procedural form while rejecting some liberal-democratic principles such as pluralism, minority rights, and checks and balances (Mudde, 2019). Then, its opposition is directed primarily against liberalism rather than democracy as such. As a result, radical-right actors are generally compatible with democratic competition and institutional participation, even when they pursue substantial changes to liberal-democratic arrangements (Rydgren, 2007). By contrast, the extreme right is characterised by an overt rejection of democracy and constitutionalism and is revolutionary in nature (Mudde, 2019). Extreme-right actors’ opposition is systemic, targeting the whole political order as illegitimate. This orientation often entails refusing institutional compromise and, in some cases, openness to extra-parliamentary or violent action (Golder, 2016).
Therefore, collapsing radical and extreme-right actors into a single category, the umbrella approach of the ‘far right’ risks obscuring fundamental differences in their relationship with democratic institutions and the political regime. In other words, when dealing with the ‘far right’—similarly to Naxera et al.’s (2024) analysis of the inconsistent use of ‘populism’ by scholars—we risk ending up in a situation where “Different authors use the same term in different senses” (p. 1058). Furthermore, assuming that various far-right actors—from parties in government to militant accelerationist militias—are members of the same party family would not explain how and why some become institutionalised while others remain largely marginalised, if not even criminalised (Tetrault, 2025).
These potential problems arise because the common elements of nativism and authoritarianism serve as the predominant criteria for determining belonging to the far right (Pirro, 2023), overlooking the crucial distinction between the radical and the extreme right in terms of democratic attitudes (Zulianello, 2025). Indeed, radical-right actors’ condition has been described as negative integration: albeit ideologically hostile to aspects of the system, these actors are practically embedded within it and contribute to its reproduction through institutional participation (Saldivia Gonzatti and Völker, 2025; Heinze and Off, 2026). Therefore, it would be imprecise to label them as ‘anti-system’, especially given the increasing availability of mainstream-right parties to join electoral coalitions with radical-right ones (Bichay, 2024; Shuttleworth et al., 2025). By contrast, extreme-right actors tend to remain marginalised or systemically excluded from the political system and lack the potential to form coalitions, limiting their capacity to participate in or affect mainstream political dynamics (Ignazi, 2003; Mammone et al., 2012).
Against this background, the distinction between the radical and the extreme right is analytically relevant, as it implies that these actors differ in their ‘nature’—with respect to their acceptance of democratic rules, strategic engagement with institutions, and capacity for political integration. Additionally, this distinction is not merely a conceptual debate, as it has crucial consequences for empirical analyses. Indeed, if radical and extreme-right actors differ in their democratic orientation and systemic integration, collapsing them into a single category risks obscuring important empirical variation. This limitation becomes particularly consequential when analysing attitudes towards the European Union, where opposition can range from reformist critique to outright rejection of the political system itself (Szczerbiak and Taggart, 2018).
2.2 Euroscepticism and the far right
Several works on far-right Euroscepticism assume the far right is inherently Eurosceptic but rarely engage with the distinction between the radical and the extreme right1. Although the scholarship no longer treats the far right as a “homogenous Eurosceptic bloc” (Almeida, 2010, p. 244), the belief that far-right actors are consistently Eurosceptic and that opposition to the European Union is a symptom of their anti-system nature persists (Ivaldi, 2018; Lorimer, 2020). Recently, scholars have begun to stress that the nexus between the far right and Euroscepticism is neither necessary nor unavoidable (Szczerbiak and Taggart, 2024; Van Kessel, 2025). This is especially due to empirical evidence that far-right actors’ position towards Europe are far from being homogenous but often shows ambivalence and blurred positioning (Chopin and Lequesne, 2021; Heinisch et al., 2021; Lorimer, 2021; McMahon, 2022; Roch, 2024); however, in most of these studies, radical and extreme-right actors are assumed to be all members of the broad party family of the ‘far right’ (see, for instance, Caiani and Weisskircher, 2022; Keil, 2026; Mudde, 2024; Nissen, 2022; Szöcsik and Polyakova, 2019; Vasilopoulou and Zur, 2024).
Vasilopoulou’s (2018) work on far-right Euroscepticism exemplifies this analytical perspective. According to the author, “far right party Euroscepticism is by no means uniform” (p. 2), as ideologically similar parties can range from full rejection of the European Union to partial support for aspects of European integration. Vasilopoulou’s framework specifically integrates ideological and strategic explanations to understand far-right behaviour, arguing that these two perspectives are mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive, and that both are necessary to explain why “ideologically similar parties oppose the EU to differing extents” (p. 3). However, Vasiloupolou’s approach to far-right Euroscepticism assumes that radical and extreme-right actors belong to the same party family and that variations are due to intra-family strategic positioning. This approach implicitly assumes that differences in EU positioning are matters of degree or strategy, rather than evidence of structurally different relationships between parties and the EU political system.
This article questions this assumption and argues that part of what is currently interpreted as strategic variation within a single party family may instead reflect different configurations of systemic integration. Accordingly, if the broader anti-system orientation associated with extreme-right parties applies to the EU, their discourse should articulate ideological opposition in predominantly rejectionist terms. By contrast, if radical-right parties are system-compatible, their discourse should combine critique with a reformist mode of engagement. This argument is also consistent with recent scholarship that examines party competition over concrete EU policy issues and crisis responses rather than parties’ general attitudes towards European integration. While crises have increased the politicisation of EU issues (Pirro et al., 2018; Hutter and Kriesi, 2019; Kneuer, 2019), subsequent research shows that party-family affiliation often provides greater explanatory leverage than a simple pro-European/Eurosceptic divide in explaining parties’ positions on specific EU policies, including the European Stability Mechanism, Eurobonds, the Recovery Fund, and the EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Braun et al., 2019; Ripoll Servent, 2022; Capati, 2024, 2026; Braun and Carteny, 2025).
These works converge on the view that, rather than expressing a uniform degree of support for, or opposition to, European integration, parties tend to filter EU-related issues through their broader ideological traditions, producing distinct patterns of contestation across policy domains. This article extends this insight by arguing that, within the far right itself, part of this variation may reflect differences between radical and extreme-right actors—understood here as two distinct party families—rather than strategic variation within a single family. Indeed, if part of the variation in EU discourse reflects different modes of discursive expression of systemic integration rather than merely strategic positioning, collapsing radical and extreme-right actors into a single party family may obscure distinct forms of regime opposition.
This approach also aligns with recent calls to treat Euroscepticism as a context-sensitive concept rather than a fixed, a priori category (Bijsmans and Mancin, 2025). From this perspective, variation in far-right EU positioning should be analysed in relation to how different actors construct and perform opposition to European integration in specific contexts by better engaging with the intricate relationship of ideology, rhetoric, and strategic considerations of radical and extreme-right actors regarding the EU and European integration (cf. Van Kessel, 2025). To do so, it is crucial to further clarify the distinction between the radical and the extreme right from an analytical perspective.
3 Analytical framework
3.1 Conceptual model
Zulianello (2025) advocates for a conceptual and empirical distinction between the radical and extreme right as two distinct party families (see also Taddei, 2025). This study treats this distinction as analytically consequential, allowing a comparison of these actors not only in terms of nativism and authoritarianism but also in their attitudes towards democracy and the political regime in which they operate. Zulianello’s (2018) framework is particularly suitable for this analysis because it distinguishes between ideological opposition and systemic integration in assessing parties’ relationship with the political system. These dimensions capture whether actors challenge elements of the system while remaining embedded in it, or reject it more fundamentally. In this sense, ‘anti-system’ parties are here understood as actors that ideologically oppose a political regime, displaying none, minimal, or purely instrumental engagement with it (Zulianello, 2018, 2019).
Zulianello (2018) situates ideological opposition to the EU within the broader concept of ‘metapolicies’—i.e., the political regime, the political community, the socioeconomic system, or international alliances—arguing that, for member states, the European Union represents a central and relevant part of the political regime (pp. 660–661). As such, ideological opposition captures whether actors challenge the EU as a constitutive element of the existing political order, while systemic integration concerns the extent to which they recognise and engage with the EU as a legitimate political arena. This distinction matters because the opposition to the EU does not necessarily imply opposition to democracy as such or to the domestic political regime as a whole. Consequently, a party’s discursive rejection or endorsement of the EU as a legitimate arena does not necessarily imply a broader negative orientation towards domestic democratic institutions, which involves distinct metapolicies and would require different observational strategies. For instance, parties may combine rejection of the EU with support for democratic competition at the national level, or conversely combine extensive engagement with EU institutions with anti-democratic practices domestically. Accordingly, this study examines how radical and extreme-right actors discursively position themselves towards the EU, rather than offering a general assessment of their anti-system orientation across all metapolicies.
Moreover, because this study focuses on discourse rather than observing political behaviour, it cannot measure systemic integration directly. Hence, this study analyses the reformist or rejectionist articulation of ideological opposition as the discursive form that systemic integration can take in party communication. From this perspective, discourse is understood as a space in which actors construct the European Union as either a legitimate political arena to be reformed or an illegitimate political order to be rejected. If differences in the relationship of radical- and extreme-right party families to the political system are reflected in their positioning towards the EU as a metapolicy, they should become observable not only in the intensity of their opposition to European integration but also in how they present the possibility of engaging with the EU as a political arena.
Accordingly, if the distinction between radical and extreme-right party families is reflected in their relationship with the EU as a metapolicy, radical-right actors should be more likely to articulate ideological opposition through reform-oriented discourse that recognises the EU as a legitimate political arena. Extreme-right actors, by contrast, should be more likely to express ideological opposition in predominantly rejectionist terms, denying the legitimacy of the EU as a political arena. Accordingly, EU-related discourse is not treated as a dependent variable to be explained, but as a diagnostic arena in which reformist or rejectionist articulations of ideological opposition become empirically observable.
3.2 Operationalisation
At the operational level, ideological opposition to the EU is captured through delegitimising EU institutions, calling for withdrawal, framing the EU as an illegitimate supranational authority, or claiming that national sovereignty is incompatible with EU membership. In this sense, ideological opposition captures how the EU is normatively evaluated and contested. Still, ideological opposition can also be articulated beyond its mere content of targets and criticisms. Drawing on Zulianello’s (2018) notion of systemic integration—defined by the author as the degree to which parties are embedded in the metapolitical system through visible and reciprocal interactions with mainstream actors or governmental relevance (pp. 662–663)—this study treats engagement with, or rejection of, the EU as a political arena not as an independently observed dimension, but as a discursive mode through which ideological opposition is articulated.
A reformist mode entails recognising the EU as a legitimate arena, using reform-from-within language, underscoring participation (e.g., elections, votes in the European Parliament, or participation in committees), and employing cooperative rhetoric. A rejectionist mode, in turn, refuses to recognise the EU as a legitimate arena, framing it as an enemy or external imposition, rejecting engagement, and portraying exit as necessary. Table 1 summarises the operationalisation of ideological opposition and its reformist/rejectionist modes of articulation. Indicators have been outlined through an inductive-deductive procedure, combining theoretically derived indicators from Vasilopoulou (2018) and Zulianello’s (2018) conceptualisations with additional categories that emerged during the empirical analysis.
Table 1
| Dimension | Sub-dimension | Textual Indicators |
|---|---|---|
| Ideological opposition | Political regime/EU polity |
|
| International alliances |
| |
| Defence of national political community/national sovereignty |
| |
| Discursive expression of systemic integration (mode of articulation of ideological opposition) | Reformist |
|
| Rejectionist |
|
Operationalisation of ideological opposition and discursive expressions of systemic integration.
3.3 Data and methods
To empirically assess how ideological opposition and systemic integration are discursively articulated in far-right Euroscepticism, the study examines the political communication of six parties in three countries—France, Italy, and Spain—to compare party types across different national contexts. The analysed parties are Fratelli d’Italia, Rassemblement National, and Vox for the radical right and CasaPound, Democracia Nacional, and Les Nationalistes for the extreme right. Party-family classification is established ex ante and is not derived from the dimensions analysed in this study. Specifically, the classification follows existing party-family scholarship and established comparative datasets, which independently identify the selected actors as radical or extreme-right parties, relying on criteria such as ideological self-positioning and affiliation with international party networks (Supplementary material 1). The objective is to compare radical and extreme-right actors within the same national contexts, and the selected cases allow a controlled comparison across party families while limiting the influence of country-specific factors.
Indeed, the three chosen countries provide a suitable comparative setting as they are large multiparty Western democracies in which both radical and extreme-right actors have been politically active (Camus and Lebourg, 2017; Kondor and Littler, 2024). This allows comparison across relatively similar political contexts while preserving variation in party positioning towards the EU. To capture both programmatic positioning and everyday political communication, the analysis combines two sources of party discourse: electoral manifestos for the 2024 European elections and messages published on the official Telegram channels of the six parties between 1st January 2024 and 31st December 2025 (Table 2). While manifestos provide insight into parties’ formal ideological positions (Heinisch et al., 2021), Telegram is particularly useful for studying political communication, as it enables parties to communicate directly with supporters (Peeters and Willaert, 2026).
Table 2
| Country | Party | Total number of telegram messages | Source of electoral programme |
|---|---|---|---|
| France | Rassemblement National | 5,625 | https://rassemblementnational.fr/documents/202411-programme-europeennes.pdf |
| Les Nationalistes | 5601 | https://www.zoomdici.fr/sites/default/files/upload/documents/programme-nationalistes-1.pdf | |
| Italy | Fratelli d’Italia | 2,714 | https://www.fratelli-italia.it/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Programma_Europee2024_FdI.pdf |
| CasaPound | 2,591 | https://casapounditalia.org/il-programma/2 | |
| Spain | Vox | 1,919 | https://www.voxespana.es/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Programa_EUROPEAS-3.pdf |
| Democracia Nacional | 2,054 | https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:9d253123-136e-4f47-9ecb-d31c48a6f4b2?viewer%21megaVerb=group-discover |
Overview of data used in the analysis.
Messages from Les Nationalistes and its leader, Yves Benedetti, were merged into a single dataset to increase the number of analysable posts. Duplicate messages with identical text were removed to avoid counting cross‑posted content multiple times.
CasaPound did not have a proper electoral programme for the 2024 European Elections, as its only aim was leaving the EU; therefore, for the analysis, the political programme available on its website was used.
Telegram messages were downloaded through Communalytic (Gruzd and Mai, 2026), while electoral programmes were collected manually. All data were publicly available and contained no personal or sensitive information.
The dataset consists of EU-related electoral programmes and a random sample of EU-related Telegram messages, stratified by party. Telegram messages were first identified through a keyword-based filtering procedure including references to the European Union, its institutions, and related terms (e.g., ‘EU’, ‘European Union’, ‘Brussels’, ‘European Commission’; see the full list of keywords used for this filtering process in Supplementary materials 2). From the resulting population of EU-related posts, 60 messages per party were randomly selected. This sampling strategy ensures comparability across parties while keeping the corpus manageable for exploratory qualitative analysis. By contrast, electoral manifestos were manually screened to identify passages addressing the European Union or European integration.
The analysis used a qualitative thematic approach (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006), treating Telegram messages and programme text segments as units of analysis. An initial coding scheme was developed deductively from ideological opposition and its reformist or rejectionist modes of articulation (see Table 1) and subsequently refined inductively during analysis to incorporate additional sub-categories emerging from the data. Each unit of analysis was coded for the presence and combination of indicators. While the analysis relies on qualitative interpretation, particular care was taken to ensure consistency in coding across parties and sources. This included repeated cross-checking of coded material and applying the same coding criteria to both the manifestos and Telegram data.
4 Results
4.1 A shared ideological opposition among radical and extreme-right actors
The analysis shows that radical and extreme-right actors share a broad ideological opposition to the European Union (Table 3). However, the two party families articulate this opposition in distinct ways. The three radical-right parties widely criticise the European Union in both their electoral programmes and on Telegram, channelling this opposition almost exclusively through the sub-dimension of national sovereignty. Only Vox draws marginally on the international-alliances sub-dimension, while none of the three radical-right parties invokes the illegitimacy of EU institutions as such (the Polity/EU-institutions sub-dimension).
Table 3
| Ideological opposition sub-dimensions | Fratelli d’Italia | Rassemblement National | Vox | Radical right | CasaPound | Democracia Nacional | Les Nationalistes | Extreme right |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Political regime/EU polity | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 9.1% | 5.6% | 5.5% |
| International alliances | 0% | 0% | 6.7% | 1.9% | 33.3% | 31.8% | 33.3% | 32.7% |
| Defence of national political community/national sovereignty | 100% | 100% | 93.3% | 98.1% | 66.7% | 59.1% | 61.1% | 61.8% |
Distribution of ideological opposition sub-dimensions in the data sample.
Percentages indicate the distribution of coded segments of ideological opposition across categories.
Overall, the radical right portrays the EU as violating national sovereignty, undermining national borders, autonomy, and domestic decision-making, and damaging national economic interests. This latter point is the most recurrent across all three parties, which depict the Common Agricultural Policy, free trade agreements, and the Green Deal as damaging to national economies and as imposing high taxes to finance these projects. In this regard, for instance, Fratelli d’Italia denounces the EU’s economic lobbying to push public opinion to “embrace left eco-nonsense.” Another common thread among the radical right is the criticism of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, signed in 2024, through which the EU allegedly allows massive immigration, contributing to the “suicide of Europe” and “forcing a flood of migrants” (Rassemblement National).
These criticisms go hand in hand with attacks on Emmanuel Macron in France, the Democratic Party in Italy, and Pedro Sánchez in Spain, all considered key allies of Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and the European People’s Party group, for implementing policies that are damaging national interests. In this vein, Vox specifically laments the “grand coalition” between the Spanish left and the mainstream right on issues detrimental to Spanish interests, such as “migration policies, the Green Deal, the whole ‘woke’ ideology, and even the fiscal policy.”
More heterogeneous is the situation regarding extreme-right ideological opposition within EU discourse (Table 3). Again, across all three countries, the extreme right is concerned about the damage caused by EU policies to national economies and interests. For instance, CasaPound denounces EU agricultural and food-safety regulation as an assault on Italian producers, depicting the EU’s approval of insect-based ‘novel foods’ as a threat to national culinary identity. Migration is the major source of opposition for these actors—as it is for the radical right—but is here mostly framed in demographic terms. The EU and its bureaucrats are depicted as the engine implementing the so-called Agenda 2030, a dog whistle indicating the conspiracy theory according to which there is a “population replacement” (Democracia Nacional) aimed to “eradicate, replace and erase history, culture, and identity” (CasaPound). Therefore, the extreme right, more generally, opposes the EU because it threatens national sovereignty and risks homogenising the various cultures of European nations. This concern is again mostly coded under the national-sovereignty sub-dimension, which remains the dominant category for all three extreme-right parties too.
Unlike the radical right, extreme-right actors also display ideological opposition towards the EU as a key player in contemporary international politics. Except for a limited number of texts from Vox, the radical right does not really engage with the international alliances sub-dimension, which represents the sharpest point of divergence between the two party families. Instead, within the extreme right, projects of European federalism are compared to NATO and any other globalising forms of imperialism (i.e., Israel and the United States) that allegedly undermine national sovereignty and well-being. Accordingly, Democracia Nacional criticises the EU as “an instrument of US political domination,” relegating “Europe to a secondary role.” Similarly, CasaPound calls for “a Europe free from the yoke of Washington and Moscow” and describes European identity as threatened “by Russian-American imperialism.” In the same way, the war in Ukraine should not concern European politicians, who should instead care about “security in our towns, prosperity for our people, the defence of our identity, and respect for our children” (Les Nationalistes).
More generally, extreme-right discourse implies that the European Union is beyond reform and should be dismantled or replaced, as suggested by Democracia Nacional’s manifesto, which closes by advocating “for Spain’s phased withdrawal from the current EU and its dissolution.” As an alternative to the current order of things, these actors propose stronger transnational cooperation among nationalist groups, in line with the extreme-right cultural depiction of Europe as a set of independent and sovereign (but still potentially cooperating) nations.
4.2 Radical right: a predominantly reformist mode of opposition
The three radical-right actors, despite their general ideological opposition, display consistent discursive patterns of reformism towards, and engagement with, the European Union (Table 4). They particularly refer to participation in EU governance, parliamentary activity, and European elections, as well as to forms of cooperation framed as serving national interests. All these parties actively engaged in the 2024 European elections by framing the vote to “change Europe” (Fratelli d’Italia) and “take back control of our country’s destiny” (Rassemblement National). More generally, across all three electoral programmes, while criticisms of the EU are present, they mostly aim to show how to reform and improve the Union. However, these three parties diverge in what reform actually means: “an alliance of sovereign Nations” for Fratelli d’Italia or an EU Treaty reform “to return power to national parliaments and restore the rule of unanimity in the European Council” for Vox. Instead, Rassemblement National frames its reformism not around institutional architecture but around a specific set of policies that must be reformed to gain the party’s acceptance. It is the case of a revision of the Schengen Area, an expansion of Frontex’s2 powers, and the improvement of the agreements regarding the single market.
Table 4
| Mode of articulation | Fratelli d’Italia | Rassemblement National | Vox | Radical right |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reformist | 100% | 93.1% | 94.7% | 95.6% |
| Rejectionist | 0% | 6.9% | 5.3% | 4.4% |
Distribution of radical-right reformist/rejectionist modes in the data sample.
Percentages show the distribution of coded segments by mode of articulation.
The 2024 European elections were also framed as a chance to challenge the alliance between the European People’s Party and left-wing and green actors within the European Parliament, which are held responsible for migration policies and economic measures considered detrimental to national interests. Frequent references to participation in EU institutional processes accompany this framing. Radical-right parties emphasise their involvement in parliamentary debates, voting procedures, and negotiations, presenting these activities as attempts to reshape European policies from within. In doing so, they simultaneously target supranational actors (such as von der Leyen, “Brussels elites,” and EU bureaucracies) and domestic political opponents (Macron in France, the Democratic Party in Italy, and Sánchez in Spain). More specifically, Fratelli d’Italia emphasises Meloni’s mediation efforts at the European level on various issues, highlighting her “international prestige.” Vox, in turn, tends to underscore its role within the European party group of the Patriots for Europe, emphasising its complete agreement with the group’s stance on contrasting “the migrant influx and the federalism of the Brussels elite.”
In this regard, the radical right—and especially Rassemblement National—explicitly supports cooperation at the EU level to sustain and implement Frontex, considered as the key player “capable of effectively protecting our national and European borders and ensuring our security in the face of a migrant influx” (Rassemblement National). Vox shows a pattern of selective support for EU-level solidarity, exalting the Patriots for Europe group’s demands to suspend Brussels’ financial help to Cuban and Venezuelan “regimes” and instead support peoples’ protests to gain sovereignty and independence. This aspect indicates that positive engagement with EU-level coordination is not confined to migration policy but extends to a broader ideological foreign-policy agenda shared with allied European parties.
Thus, across these cases, the European Union is consistently framed as a reformable political arena rather than an inherently illegitimate system. For instance, Fratelli d’Italia highlights “the significant drop in arrivals from Africa” thanks to the agreements Italy has signed with Tunisia and Libya, which will now serve as a model for EU migration policies. Similarly, Rassemblement National says it is committed to dismantling trade agreements and regulatory frameworks deemed harmful to domestic industries. Vox, while using more confrontational rhetoric, still contrasts alternative visions of Europe, suggesting reform rather than withdrawal from the EU.
However, while all three radical-right parties display a reformist mode, the intensity and tone vary. Rassemblement National sometimes shows a rejectionist stance towards specific EU policies or initiatives. This is particularly evident in its overt opposition to creating a common European army, seen as a loss of national sovereignty and a further step towards the criticised project of a federalist Europe. However, this pattern is best read as an issue-specific exception rather than evidence of a broader rejectionist orientation. Indeed, outside this single policy area, Rassemblement National’s discourse remains consistently reformist. Vox, on its side, argues that Brussels’ bureaucrats are not Europe: “on the contrary, they are the ones who are destroying our prosperity, our security and our freedom.” Here, the criticism revolves around the EU’s current political infrastructure, which Vox contrasts with an idea of Europe made up of “its people, the new majorities who are calling out for their identity, their roots, their beliefs and their civilisation.” For the Spanish party, it is now the time of a “Reconquista” and to “make Europe great again.”
4.3 Extreme right: a rejectionist mode of opposition
Unlike the radical right, the three extreme-right actors consistently display rejectionist elements (Table 5). However, they diverge from one another more than the radical-right cases do. CasaPound stands out, as its discourse is almost exclusively characterised by ideological opposition to European integration, with no references to participation in EU processes or institutional engagement. Its discourse is better characterised as disengagement from the question of systemic legitimacy altogether. This pattern is consistent with CasaPound’s limited involvement in the 2024 European elections, for which it did not present a proper electoral programme and instead centred its communication on leaving the EU. Still, CasaPound repeatedly distinguishes its rejection of the existing EU from a rejection of European integration as such, calling instead for what it terms “another Europe” or “Europe as a power,” admitting that “in this age of vast spaces, retreating into narrow nationalism is a suicidal choice.”
Table 5
| Mode of articulation | CasaPound | Democracia Nacional | Les Nationalistes | Extreme right |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reformist | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Rejectionist | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
Distribution of extreme-right reformist/rejectionist modes in the data sample.
Percentages show the distribution of coded segments by mode of articulation.
By contrast, Democracia Nacional and Les Nationalistes participated in the 2024 European elections, though they framed them less as meaningful arenas of political representation than as opportunities for mobilisation and contestation. Democracia Nacional presents the elections as a means of “raising awareness of our agenda and challenging the EU from within.” Les Nationalistes, on its side, describes them as “one more step in our long struggle towards the second national revolution, our true objective.” In these cases, participation does not signal a reformist mode but rather a strategic use of institutional arenas for visibility and mobilisation. Electoral engagement is framed not as a means of influencing EU governance, but rather as a platform for contesting its legitimacy. Accordingly, Les Nationalistes describes the vote as “an electoral game whose rules are not only written by others, but are also turned against us,” while Democracia Nacional sees its electoral participation as a means to gauge anti-immigration sentiment rather than to shape EU policy. The manifestos of both parties confirm this position, claiming to suspend the Schengen area to stop migratory flows, leave the EU and NATO, and dismantle the Common Agricultural Policy (Les Nationalistes), and depicting the EU as a political project imposed on Spain by elites (Democracia Nacional).
More broadly, these actors advocate disengagement from the European Union in favour of prioritising national and local political agendas. Their discourse frequently calls for redirecting economic and political resources away from international commitments, including opposition to military cooperation with the United States and support for Ukraine. Still, like CasaPound, they promote alternative visions centred on a “Europe of rebellious nations” (Les Nationalistes) and “sovereign homelands” (Democracia Nacional), free from the influence of both Brussels and Washington. Consistent with this positioning, the European Union is depicted as an external imposition or even as a “dictatorship” (Democracia Nacional), associated with harmful economic and environmental policies, demographic threats, and alleged interference in national political processes. Within this framing, withdrawal from the EU is a primary goal of their electoral programmes and presented as a necessary condition to “effectively defend our identity” (Les Nationalistes).
5 Discussion
Empirical findings show that both radical and extreme-right actors share ideological opposition towards the EU. Therefore, on this dimension, the ‘far right’ umbrella term maintains its descriptive utility. However, the analysis also shows that similar levels of ideological opposition may coexist with markedly different discursive forms of systemic integration. Radical-right actors combine a sustained critique of the EU with a reformist approach and frame participation in its institutional and political arenas, while extreme-right actors discursively articulate a more consistent rejection of the EU as a legitimate political order. When this second layer of the discursive articulation is examined, the analytical limits of treating the ‘far right’ as an analytically homogeneous category emerge. This distinction proved consistent across both electoral manifestos and Telegram communication, with the latter intensifying, amplifying, or articulating positions already present in the parties’ manifestos.
The results support recent calls to reintroduce a clearer distinction between the radical and the extreme right (Zulianello, 2025). Indeed, failing to distinguish between these actors risks conflating anti-EU rhetoric with anti-system behaviour, with important analytical consequences. It obscures why actors classified as ‘anti-system’ are instead able to enter coalitions or cooperate with mainstream-right parties, and it may therefore misrepresent their actual position within the political system. It also encourages misclassification by interpreting reform-oriented contestation of the EU as equivalent to systemic rejection, flattening meaningful variation in regime orientation. Lastly, it weakens explanations of Euroscepticism by attributing variation primarily to strategic adaptation, while the evidence presented here suggests that it may also reflect different discursive forms of systemic integration.
From this perspective, systemic integration adds an important explanatory layer. Radical-right actors can adopt varying positions towards the EU while recognising it as a legitimate political arena, and their criticism coexists with electoral participation, parliamentary engagement, transnational cooperation, and attempts to shape policy outcomes from within. This pattern recalls Zulianello’s (2018) concept of negative integration and aligns with a broader strand of literature that has conceptualised this position as a combination of opposition and engagement, variously named equivocal Euroscepticism (Heinisch et al., 2021), sovereignism (Fabbrini and Zgaga, 2024), or Eurorealism (Steven, 2025).
These approaches capture a shared pattern in which actors criticise the EU while accepting the logic of European interdependence and seeking to reshape it from within. Within the scholarship that conceptualises all far-right actors as members of the same party family, these positions often appear contradictory or strategically ambiguous. However, interpreting them through the lens of systemic integration helps to explain how radical-right actors do not reject the EU as a political arena but instead contest its institutional configuration, policy direction, and governing coalitions. Consequently, calls for ‘more Europe’ in some domains can coexist with broader Eurosceptic narratives without generating ideological inconsistency.
More broadly, these findings are consistent with recent developments in EU politics, where radical-right actors or their leaders—particularly those of the European Conservatives and Reformists group—have become increasingly involved in decision-making processes at both the European Parliament and the European Council (Becker et al., 2025). Concretely, this has translated into the emergence of an alternative majority within the European Parliament—what Broniecki and Høyland (2025) call the ‘Grand Right’ Coalition—between the European People’s Party, European Conservatives and Reformists, Patriots for Europe, and parts of Europe of Sovereign Nations, particularly on issues like environment and climate, security, cultural issues, or economic matters (Jeong, 2024; Alemanno and Giufrè, 2025).
By contrast, the extreme right largely rejects the EU as an illegitimate system to be dismantled. Their positions align with Zulianello’s (2018) anti-system classification and resonate with Nissen’s (2022) description of Identitarians’ idea of Europe. According to Nissen, these groups call for cooperation among sovereign states and oppose the EU’s technocratic design. This perspective highlights that extreme-right parties are not simply ‘anti-European’ nationalists but are proposing a different vision of Europe, rooted in a cultural and civilisational conception of it based on shared history, traditions, and a Christian heritage. Accordingly, this study shows that while extreme-right actors may occasionally participate in EU electoral processes, this engagement is presented merely as the quickest way to leave the EU and the most straightforward means to dismantle it. This aspect suggests that, for extreme-right actors, participation and integration are decoupled, and involvement in elections does not translate into recognition of the EU as a legitimate political arena. In line with this, they tend to advocate cooperation among sovereign nations while rejecting supranational authority, and frame Europe in cultural-civilisational terms—often tied to identity, tradition, and perceived external threats.
These findings also speak to recent debates on the conceptual stretching of Euroscepticism. As the scholarship has noted, the term increasingly encompasses positions ranging from routine criticism of EU policies to outright rejection of European integration (Szczerbiak and Taggart, 2018; Bijsmans and Mancin, 2025). In this context, distinguishing between ideological opposition and systemic integration helps capture forms of EU contestation that traditional categories such as hard and soft Euroscepticism alone struggle to classify (Roch, 2024; Pareschi, 2026). The distinction between radical and extreme-right actors demonstrates that similar levels of ideological opposition to the EU may conceal different discursive forms of engagement with the political system. Consequently, some forms of variation that are commonly interpreted as strategic positioning within a single far-right party family may instead reflect distinct modes of systemic integration. Distinguishing between the radical and the extreme right is therefore not merely a classificatory refinement but an analytically consequential step that allows for a more precise understanding of radical and extreme-right actors’ Euroscepticism.
6 Conclusions, limitations, and future research
This exploratory qualitative study examined whether the distinction between radical and extreme-right actors is reflected in different discursive modes of articulating opposition to the EU as a metapolitical component of the existing political order. Radical-right parties combine criticism with participation, portraying the EU as a legitimate arena that should be reformed. In contrast, extreme-right actors reject the legitimacy of the EU itself and frame participation as merely instrumental to broader projects of contestation or withdrawal. The article therefore shows that collapsing radical and extreme-right actors into the ‘far right’ risks overlooking the different ways actors relate to the political system they contest, which is an important source of variation in Euroscepticism.
Nonetheless, the study has some limitations. The analysis is based on a small number of parties and countries, which constrains the generalisability of the findings. The reliance on Telegram content may also introduce biases related to audience targeting and rhetorical style. In addition, keyword-based filtering may have excluded relevant material that did not explicitly mention the EU. A more fundamental limitation concerns the measurement of systemic integration. This dimension is inferred from discursive material, which captures how actors construct their relationship to the EU but does not fully reflect their actual institutional embeddedness or behavioural engagement. As such, the analysis identifies discursively expressed forms of systemic integration (internal to ideological opposition) rather than systemic integration as an observable institutional condition. Consequently, the findings should be interpreted as evidence of how parties represent and perform their relationship to the EU rather than as a direct measure of their objective position within the political system. Relatedly, because this study analyses discursive orientation towards the EU specifically as one metapolicy among several others, its findings speak to parties’ positioning towards this metapolicy alone and should not be seen as an assessment of their anti-system orientation across all metapolicies.
Future research should address these limitations by expanding the range of cases and data sources, including larger-scale quantitative and cross-national comparative designs, incorporating longitudinal analyses to capture change over time, and linking discursive positioning to observable political behaviour such as roll-call voting patterns, coalition and cross-group cooperation in the European Parliament, or committee participation. It should also compare cases in which opposition to the EU coexists with a commitment to democratic competition at the national level, as well as cases in which institutional engagement at the EU level coexists with anti-democratic orientations domestically. These strands of research would allow an assessment of how ideological opposition and systemic integration interact across political and institutional contexts, as well as clarify the boundaries and overlaps between mainstream and radical-right forms of EU contestation.
Statements
Data availability statement
The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.
Author contributions
LM: Formal analysis, Data curation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Conceptualization.
Funding
The author(s) declared that financial support was not received for this work and/or its publication.
Conflict of interest
The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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The author(s) declared that Generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.
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Supplementary material
The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2026.1907339/full#supplementary-material
Footnotes
1.^Existing studies comparing different party families’ Euroscepticism tend to focus on the distinction between radical-right and radical-left actors (Halikiopoulou et al., 2012; Carrieri and Vittori, 2021) or between the mainstream and the radical right (Treib, 2020).
2.^Frontex is the European Border and Coast Guard Agency.
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Summary
Keywords
European Union, Euroscepticism, extreme right, far right, political discourse, radical right
Citation
Mancin L (2026) Not all far-right Euroscepticism is the same: ideological opposition and modes of systemic integration in EU discourse. Front. Polit. Sci. 8:1907339. doi: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1907339
Received
15 June 2026
Revised
25 August 2026
Accepted
03 September 2026
Published
18 September 2026
Volume
8 - 2026
Edited by
Gianluca Piccolino, University of Florence, Italy
Reviewed by
Henk Roose, Ghent University, Belgium
Andrea Capati, Guido Carli Free International University for Social Studies, Italy
Updates
Copyright
© 2026 Mancin.
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) and the copyright owner(s) 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: Luca Mancin, luca.mancin@unimi.it
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