Decadent Brussels or fortress Europe? Punitive Europeanism on the Greek far right

This article theorizes punitive Europeanism through the Greek far-right party Voice of Reason and Afroditi Latinopoulou’s Instagram communication. Drawing on 127 public Instagram posts published between December 2024 and January 2026, and a screened subset of 80 political speech and interview posts, it uses reflexive thematic analysis to examine how moral denunciation of the EU’s normative order is coupled with selective endorsement of EU-level coercive capacity. Punitive Europeanism is defined as a discursive formation comprising these two necessary components. In the case examined, the coupling is made coherent through a selective partition of European authority: the EU’s normative orientation is condemned, while its institutional capacity is revalued as a potential instrument of enforcement. This mechanism is frequently articulated through a contrast between the EU as a corrupted institutional regime and Europe as a threatened civilizational community. It also refines Euroscepticism scholarship by showing how anti-EU moral evaluation can coexist with functional support for supranational enforcement and develops punitive Europeanism as a theory-generating concept for comparative research on far-right EU contestation.