# Euroscepticism After Britain Left: A Paradoxical Transformation **Date de l'événement :** 22/06/2026 * Publié le 22/06/2026 ### Date 22/06/2026 ## Chapô _Cet article est aussi accessible en [français](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/content/2026-06-22/le-paradoxe-du-brexit-l-euroscepticisme-apres-la-sortie-du-royaume-uni_JqZ9sOwR63hhtS7yljdI)._ **When the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, nationalist and populist parties across the continent saw it as a sign of the European project’s imminent collapse. Ronja Sczepanski, Assistant Professor at Sciences Po, examines a decade of party-level data to assess the real impact of Brexit on Euroscepticism across Europe. Did Brexit ultimately advance the cause it was meant to embody, or did it paradoxically strengthen Europeans’ attachment to a Union they once believed they wanted to leave behind?** ## Corps du texte When British voters chose to leave the European Union in June 2016, political commentators across Europe held their breath. Would the Brexit vote prove contagious? Would it inspire a wave of exit referendums, a Frexit, an Italexit, a Dexit? Populist and nationalist parties from Paris to Warsaw to Rome wasted no time declaring that Britain had shown the way. The EU, they argued, was not the inescapable fact of political life its supporters insisted it was. You could leave. And now everyone had seen it done. Nearly a decade later, none of those exits have materialised. Support for EU membership across the continent has, if anything, strengthened since 2016. The parties that once cheered Britain's departure have quietly shelved their own exit proposals. So what actually happened and what does it tell us about the future of Euroscepticism in Europe? The picture that emerges is more complex than either the optimists or the pessimists of 2016 predicted. Brexit did change European politics. But it did so not by breaking existing patterns of competition, as many feared, nor by permanently curing the EU of its Eurosceptic challenge, as some hoped. Instead, it sharpened and intensified divisions that were already there without fundamentally redrawing the map. ### Not All Euroscepticism Is the Same Before tracing Brexit's effects, it is worth being precise about what Euroscepticism actually means, because the word covers a wide range of political positions. Hard Euroscepticism is the position that EU membership is fundamentally incompatible with national sovereignty, and that the country would be better off outside the Union altogether. Soft Euroscepticism accepts EU membership in principle but is critical of how the institution currently works - too bureaucratic, too undemocratic, too remote – or what policies it is producing. This is a far more widespread position, shared by parties and voters across the political spectrum. Brexit matters to both varieties, but differently. For hard Eurosceptics, the 2016 referendum was electrifying: proof that a majority could be won for exit. For soft Eurosceptics, the chaos that followed made a different and more damning point: that even if you wanted to reform the EU, leaving it entirely was not a realistic route to doing so. Understanding this distinction helps explain one of Brexit's most consequential continental effects, the gradual migration of hard Eurosceptic parties toward softer, more reformist positions, not because they made peace with Brussels, but because Britain's difficulties made exit look far less attractive. ### Brexit as a Reference Point People do not evaluate EU membership in the abstract. They compare, asking whether their country would be better or worse off outside, and looking at available examples to answer that question. Before 2016, such comparisons were hypothetical. After 2016, they were not. Britain had become a real-time experiment in what leaving the EU actually looks like, conducted in full public view over a period of years. That experiment had two distinct phases. The first ran from the referendum result in June 2016 through the Withdrawal Agreement in late 2019. What continental Europe watched during those three years was not an orderly departure but a slow-motion political crisis: three prime ministers, a paralysed parliament, repeated deadline extensions, and the Conservative Party tearing itself apart over the terms of its own deal. The Irish border question became a symbol of the gap between the rhetoric of sovereignty and the reality of four decades of interwoven legal and economic ties. The lesson was hard to miss: exit is not a clean break but an enormously complex and costly undertaking. The second phase begins with formal departure in January 2020 and continues to the present. This phase is harder to read. The British economy has faced real difficulties since leaving, but it has not collapsed. Supporters of Brexit can argue that its long-term effects are yet to be seen, and that the worst disruptions reflected mismanagement rather than departure itself. This ambiguity matters: the Brexit deterrent is real, but it is not permanent. Its force depends on how the British experiment continues to unfold. ### How Europeans Responded The immediate continental reaction ran sharply against what Eurosceptic leaders had predicted. Rather than inspiring imitation, the referendum result produced a visible wave of pro-European sentiment. Opinion polls showed a measurable rise in support for EU membership across the remaining member states. In France and Italy, where roughly half the population had previously supported EU membership, backing rose noticeably. In Germany, Poland, and Spain, where support was already around 70%, it strengthened further. This was not merely a temporary emotional reaction. Continental EU support stabilised at a somewhat higher level and held there through the years that followed. What it did not produce, however, was a self-reinforcing spiral of ever-deepening Europhilia. Brexit raised the baseline, it did not transform European publics into committed federalists. The effects showed up most clearly in the 2019 European Parliament elections. Turnout reached just under 51%, the highest since 1994, reversing a decades-long decline. More than a fifth of voters cited Brexit as a reason for turning out. For the first time in many years, these elections felt like they genuinely mattered: a real choice about the direction of Europe, not a low-stakes protest vote against national governments. Parties at both poles of the European debate gained ground. the Greens and pro-integration left on one side, the radical right on the other. Brexit had not resolved the European question in EU politics. It had made it more central and more contested than at any point in a generation. ### The Deterrent and Its Limits The deterrence mechanism works through perception. Where people see Britain's departure as chaotic and economically damaging, support for their own country's EU membership rises. The turmoil of the negotiations, the disruption to UK trade, and the instability of successive British governments all fed this perception. Member states - Germany, France, Poland, Spain, Ireland - also presented a united front throughout the negotiations, reinforcing the sense that the EU held the stronger hand. But the deterrent has clear limits. If the UK's trajectory were to shift, if British economic performance were to clearly outpace that of EU member states, or if the political chaos of 2016–2020 came to look like a one-off rather than a structural consequence of departure, the calculation could change. The grievances driving Euroscepticism, over immigration, sovereignty, democratic accountability, and economic governance, have not gone away. They have been temporarily pushed into the background by the spectacle of British difficulties. Whether they stay there depends, in no small part, on developments in Britain that continental politics cannot control. ### How Parties Responded: An Intensified Divide, Not a New One Brexit did not fundamentally change European party competition on EU questions. It did not create new divides, shift the topics parties argue about, or produce a major realignment. What it did was intensify an existing divide, sharpening the contrast between the most pro-European and most Eurosceptic formations while leaving parties in the middle broadly unmoved. To understand why, it helps to know how different party types had related to EU questions before 2016. Mainstream centrist parties, social democrats, conservatives, liberals, had long treated Europe as a source of internal tension rather than electoral opportunity. Unable to agree internally on how fast or how far integration should go, but in general positive views, they preferred to keep the question off the agenda. Radical right parties had no such inhibitions: EU scepticism was their selling point, and Brexit was, in their initial reading, validation of everything they had been promising. Pro-European parties, primarily the Greens and the progressive left,  were broadly supportive of the EU but often quiet about it as it was not a topic to be electorally valuable. ### The Initial Surge In the immediate aftermath of the vote, radical right parties moved fast. Germany's AfD opened its 2017 election manifesto by citing Britain as a model, calling on the German people to follow "the British example" and vote on whether to remain in the eurozone and the EU. France's National Rally placed a demand for a membership referendum as its very first policy commitment in 2017, framing it as a matter of restoring French sovereignty. Reading these passages carefully, however, reveals a notable caution: even at their most emboldened, these parties called for referendums rather than unilateral departure. Exit was conditional on popular approval. ### The Retreat As the chaos of the Brexit negotiations unfolded, radical right parties began quietly adjusting. References to Brexit diminished. Calls for membership referendums were softened or buried. Hard exit gave way, again, to the language of reform. By the time of the 2022 French elections, the RN's referendum demand had been moved to page 25 of its manifesto, no longer a flagship commitment but a distant aspiration. The AfD held on longer: its 2022 manifesto still contained calls for leaving the EU. But by 2025, withdrawal had disappeared from the programme entirely, replaced by a call for transforming the EU into a "Confederation of Sovereign European States." Brexit was not mentioned once. This retreat cannot be attributed to Brexit deterrence alone. The radical right's major gains at the 2024 European Parliament elections gave these parties, for the first time, sufficient weight to form working majorities with the centre right. That parliamentary influence created new incentives: it became more rewarding to shape EU legislation from within than to demand exit from without. Mainstream parties, meanwhile, showed little movement in either direction. They became marginally more pro-European in parliamentary speeches in the immediate post-vote period, but their long-standing ambiguity on EU questions persisted across the period as a whole. Brexit did not move the centre. ### What the Evidence Shows Tracking party manifestos across twenty-five EU member states from 2011 to 2025 produces a consistent picture. Among radical right parties, explicit support for leaving the EU spiked after the Brexit vote before declining steadily as the British experience soured. Among mainstream parties, hard Euroscepticism barely registered to begin with and barely changed. Among Green and ecological parties, a small but non-trivial tail of hard Eurosceptic statements, present before 2016, effectively disappeared afterwards, consistent with the interpretation that Brexit prompted these parties to take a clearer pro-European stance. Parties of the socialist left showed a similar, if weaker, tendency toward reduced hard Euroscepticism after 2016. Soft Euroscepticism, criticism of how the EU works, rather than rejection of membership, tells a different story: it is broadly distributed across the entire party spectrum. Even mainstream centrist parties devote a meaningful share of their EU-related manifesto content to criticising European institutions, questioning the pace of integration, or calling for reforms. Brexit did not significantly disturb this pattern. The only notable shift was in the radical right, which temporarily traded reform proposals for exit demands before retreating from both. Perhaps the most telling finding concerns the topics around which parties express Euroscepticism. Despite everything that happened across this period, a pandemic, a migration crisis, an energy shock, a war in Europe, the distribution of Eurosceptic themes in party manifestos barely shifted. Economic governance remained the dominant frame throughout. Sovereignty and democratic accountability consistently accounted for around 30% of critical content. Immigration, despite its political salience, accounted for only a small minority, because parties tend to frame immigration as a national governance problem rather than a European one. Brexit did not give parties new things to be sceptical about. It reshuffled the intensity with which they voiced existing complaints, it did not change the complaints themselves. ### The Paradox of Brexit's Legacy Brexit was, in one sense, created in one way an opportunity. It arrived at a moment when Euroscepticism was rising and EU legitimacy was under pressure, and it provided, in agonising real-time detail, a concrete demonstration of what departure actually costs. Pro-European forces gained an argument they had never previously had not "European integration is good in theory," but "look what happens when you try to leave." Yet Brexit is also a warning about the limits of deterrence as a political strategy. The EU's current relative popularity is not the product of a genuine resolution of the tensions that make European integration contested. Those tensions, about sovereignty, economic fairness, democratic accountability, immigration, remain active. They are the main issues to be addressed and really are decisive for the public’ support of the European project.  The Eurosceptic right has adapted, learning to pursue its goals from within EU institutions, to frame opposition in terms of reform rather than exit, and to pick battles it can win. Hard Euroscepticism did not disappear. It evolved. Brexit changed European politics in real ways: it produced a measurable rise in continental EU support, transformed European Parliament elections into genuine contests over the direction of integration, and forced parties at the extremes to clarify their positions. But it did not break the mould. The fundamental cleavage between those who see deeper integration as Europe's answer and those who see national sovereignty as the answer was there before 2016, and it is there still. Brexit intensified that divide without resolving it. Britain's departure gave EU institutions a moment. What they do with it remains the open question. ### Thématique `#Europe` **Licence :** `#CC-BY-ND (Attribution, Pas de modification)` **Langue :** `#Anglais` --- ### Navigation pour IA - [Index de tous les contenus](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/llms.txt) - [Plan du site (Sitemap)](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/sitemap.xml) - [Retour à l'accueil](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/)