Riga International Airport, 2016 – "safety valve"? Wikicommons/ Avio2016. Some rights reserved.
Throughout the last decade, Europe has been marred by both economic and ‘migration’ crises. This has triggered the emergence of various Eurosceptic trends across the Continent. In Central and Eastern Europe, Euroscepticism has been mostly propagated by the right. Regardless of whether these are parties of the populist and radical right (Hungary’s Jobbik, Latvia’s National Alliance and Slovakia’s ‘Our Slovakia’) or ‘radicalized’ parties of the centre-right (Hungary’s FIDESZ and Poland’s PiS), these actors have primarily embedded their Euroscepticism into identity-politics: gender-related themes (opposition to LGBT rights); the migration crisis (rejection of EU quotas for refugees); and, at an earlier stage, domestic minority issues (e.g. ‘Gypsy criminality’ in Hungary and/or Slovakia).
Nevertheless, recent years have also witnessed the dynamic emergence of new political actors with a paramount stress on economic Euroscepticism across the region. What has encouraged these parties’ steady growth of popularity? What are their prospects?
