Authors

Sergiu Gherghina¹; Sergiu Miscoiu²;  ¹ University of Glasgow, UK;  ² Babes-Bolyai University, Romania

Discussion

The politicians’ anti-EU rhetoric has gradually increased in Eastern Europe. In addition to the main critiques in Czechia, Hungary or Poland, the political parties and politicians in other countries have also promoted anti-EU discourses. While we know much about the content of these discourses and the context in which they emerge, there is very little information about how people react to this rhetoric. More precisely, it remains unclear whether they share the disaffection with the EU and they trust their representatives to express it, they see it more nuanced, or they disagree. This paper addresses this gap in the literature and analyses the attitudes of ordinary citizens towards the anti-EU rhetoric in their country in general and used by specific parties or politicians in particular. We use 25 semi-structured interviews with voters and non-voters in Romania, a country in which a political party with strong anti-EU rhetoric is on the rise since 2020 and where similar discourses were used by the main government party in 2012-2013 and 2017-2018.