Papers, please : the resistance of populist governments to European Union’s migration policies

Abstract

How do populist governments in the European Union resist to its migration policies? Populist leaders' main characteristic is the understanding that the will of the people is above elites and groups outside the fundamental moral rules that the true people represent; therefore, immigrants could be seen as a risk for social stability. Moreover, populist attitudes and anti-establishment sentiments are some of the reasons for resistance to international institutions. Thus, the focus is to identify how populist governments in the EU are resisting migration policies that the bloc implements in the region. Intense migratory flows all around the world interact with populist leaderships, and this circulation is threatened by their potential impact, including - yet not exclusively - the ones rooted in nationalism, especially in Europe. That’s why researching this as an institutional process engaged by populist over a contextual European issue is very important for International Relations. This exploratory work proposed a mixed-method approach. The quantitative part analyzes the terms of office’s populism level and infringement procedures (IP) initiated by the European Commission about non-compliance to migration laws from 17 members, among 2012-2019. A typology based on the steps of the IPs classified how the countries have resisted compared to their populism score, resulting in the case study of a Hungarian procedure carried out by the analysis of the CJEU judgment, EU reports and press releases, and regional institutions informed by NGOs reports, revealing details of the longest resistance process on the dataset.