In the Name of the People? Popular Sovereignty and the 2015 Greek Referendum

The purpose of this paper is to explore the issues surrounding popular sovereignty in EU politics. Popular sovereignty has been overall weakened by the overall structure. At the same time, calling to people’s direct expression through referenda are preferred over parliamentary deliberation in many countries when crucial sovereignty issues are at stake. Focusing on the referendum called by the Greek government on the proposed Memorandum of Understanding in 2015, our goal is to identify the institutional as well as political constraints which weigh on the use of national referenda as political tools staging the expression of popular sovereignty. We adopt a Hirschmanian framework to argue that when basic loyalty towards the European project is crucially at stake, referenda can be used effectively only as a tool for enabling exit rather than as a tool for expressing voice. This is so because EU politics are a “simultaneous double game” (Crespy and Schmidt, 2014) where domestic preference formation and deliberations at EU level are embedded into each other. Using elite interviews of key political actors as well as an analysis of the discussion in the media in the period surrounding the referendum, this paper investigates the motivations behind the referendum and whether it was envisaged by the government to only use it as a negotiations’ tool and not to follow the result which would most possibly lead to Grexit. Thus, the referendum was used instrumentally to put pressure on the EU and thus assist the government to solve its supranational political problems by calling upon popular sovereignty. Yet, the conflicts with other forms of sovereignty in the EU, notably in creditor countries, and the resulting outcome of the negotiations brings evidence that this strategy failed thus leading to a weakening rather than a strengthening of popular sovereignty in Greece.