Anti-Europeans, Populists, and EU External Relations

Anti-European and populist political forces are getting stronger across Europe. As the authors of a recently published European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) report also underline: ‘With anti- Europeans on their way to winning more than one-third of seats in the next European Parliament, the stakes in the May 2019 elections are unusually high’ (Dennison and Zerka, 2019: 1). The present paper focusses on the impact of these dynamics on the Union’s external relations. It does not aim to discuss the full spectrum of EU external policies, but only concentrates on a few geographic and policy areas where this impact is particularly pronounced.