Populism and normative resistance under EU conditionality: ethnic cleavages and party strategies in the Western Balkans

This paper examines how political parties in EU-aspiring countries navigate the tension between domestic cleavages and external pressures discursively. Drawing on party programs and key political speeches (2013–2021) in Albania, Kosovo, and Serbia, it traces how domestic cleavages and EU conditionality shape the discursive strategies of governing and opposition actors across divergent contexts, ranging from unresolved statehood and ethnic conflict to more depoliticized settings. The findings show that in Serbia and Kosovo, parties across the political spectrum sustain exclusionary narratives rooted in ethnic grievance, even while formally endorsing EU integration, revealing patterns of strategic Euroskepticism that this paper conceptualizes as coded Euroskepticism in its discursive form. Yet partial moderation is possible. In Kosovo, the shift from opposition to government suggests a discursive softening, at least in formal programmatic discourse. By contrast, Albania’s depoliticized ethnic context constrains the appeal of ethnopopulism, but parties still employ non-ethnic populist frames, such as moral renewal, anti-elite criticism, and savior narratives across both government and opposition. The study shows how populism operates as a flexible discursive repertoire that enables political actors to maintain formal support for EU accession while mobilizing domestically resonant narratives emphasizing sovereignty, legitimacy, and political renewal under EU conditionality.