From Opposition to a New Position? Exploring the Transformation of 'Sovereigntist Parliamentary Groups' in Europe

The claim of national sovereignty, framed as an essential prerequisite for the re-affirmation of the people’s right to decide, has acquired a key role in the message of a heterogeneous group of populist radical right parties. The underlying reasoning is that globalized elites are taking decisions behind the scenes, ignoring the needs of the people they are supposed to represent. And, it is exactly in the name of the people, these political actors reclaim control back, as also the Brexit slogan prayed. In so doing, they portray themselves as the only morally entitled to represent this sovereignty claim. Such moral self-representation and anti-elite rhetoric is perfectly compatible with an extra-institutional role. However, how do these actors behave when they have a role in the institutions they blame? And what changes in the shift from a governmental to an opposition role? With both an exploratory and an explanatory goal, focussing on a handful of far-right/sovereigntist parties in six European countries (The Netherlands, Slovakia, Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Switzerland) in this paper we aim to explore the extent of change in the legislative attitudes of the parliamentary delegations from these parties, during a time span comprised between the beginning of the XXI century and 2018. Our descriptive goal will therefore imply an assessment of the evolution of the behaviour of a number of parliamentary actors whose success has been somehow connected to the emergence of the sovereigntist appeals. Such a diachronic variation will be then interpreted, looking to a number of country-specific and structural explanatory factors. Among the latter, we will detect in particular on two types of determinants: (1) The Impact of nationalist path-dependent ideology and (2) the effect of different types of sovereigntist leaders. In so doing we count to shed some more light on a still unexplored controversial phenomenon.