Governance-by-signifier and the far-right politics of “woke” in the European Parliament

Abstract

Far-right actors in the European Parliament increasingly use “woke” as a catch-all term for very different political conflicts. Debates over gender, migration and climate are often folded into a single story about ideological excess and unwanted interference from Brussels. This article develops the concept of governance-by-signifier to explain how that process works. It identifies three mechanisms: condensation, through which distinct issues are presented as part of the same threat; transposition, through which arguments move from one policy area to another; and authorisation, through which restrictive positions are normalised. The analysis draws on 85 parliamentary and para-parliamentary texts linked to the European Conservatives and Reformists and Patriots for Europe. The two groups speak in noticeably different registers. PfE relies more heavily on confrontation, civilisational threat and promises of restoration, while ECR tends to express similar concerns through the language of competence, subsidiarity and proportionality. Yet these differences often lead in the same direction. Both groups use anti-woke discourse to question rights claims, resist supranational authority and portray the above-mentioned policy areas as ideological overreach. The article shows how loose political labels can travel across policy areas and acquire real institutional force.