IKV hosted a panel entitled “Discussions of Populism, Euroscepticism and Future of Europe” with collaboration of Friedrich Naumann Foundation on 22 December at IKV EU Information Center. Prof. Ayhan Kaya, Jean Monnet Chair of European Politics of Interculturalism, Assoc. Prof. Selcen Öner, lecturer at Bahçeşehir University, Assoc. Prof. Özlem Kaygusuz, lecturer at Ankara University and Assoc. Prof. Çiğdem Nas, IKV Secretary General presented their point of view about the subject during the panel whose moderator was Prof. Gül Günver Turan, President of TURABDER (Turkey-EU Association).

In the panel, Prof. Ayhan Kaya made a presentation entitled “The Use of Populist Rhetoric and the Past in the European Union”. Prof. Kaya shared several results of his field studies in European cities which can be described as “castle of populism”. According to the field research, whose main objective was to describe motivations which feed populist ideas, several common features of populist views have been discovered such as anti-elitist views, politically inappropriate behaviours and  emphasis on mediocrity.

The second speaker Assoc. Prof. Selcen Öner analysed populist and Eurosceptic rhetoric through the examples of political parties, Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and Alternative for Germany (AfD). Expressing that economic crisis and refugee crisis triggered the rise of populist rhetoric; Assoc. Prof. Öner added that the populist leaders imposed the view on Europeans that they are “an alternative to regaining what Europeans have lost”.

On the other hand, the third speaker Assoc. Prof. Özlem Kaygusuz focused on the question whether the European Union is in an existential crisis as European Commission Juncker declared in his “State of the Union” speech on September 13th. Emphasizing that the neoliberalism is in a structural crisis, Assoc. Prof. Kaygusuz stated that the policies implemented and proposed to get out of the crisis are not so different from those that caused the crisis in the first place.

At the end of the panel, İKV Secretary General Assoc. Prof Çiğdem Nas took the floor and shared the statistics of research published by Chatham House on elite and public approaches to EU policies proving the lack of consensus among the Europeans over the future of EU integration. Emphasising that the difficulty to find a common objective has reduced the confidence to the EU, İKV General Secretary said that Russia's influence, political instability after Arab Spring, terrorist attacks has pushed the EU to act with a sense of security. Nevertheless IKV Secretary General ended her speech by sharing her optimist views about the future of Europe and its power in post-national politics.