Populism in Poland and in Italy and its influence on social perceptions of the European Union – comparative analysis.

Main goal of this thesis is to study the relation between Euroscepticism and populism in the European Union. It is based on the analysis of two countries – Poland and Italy. Additionally, it also contains explanation of different approaches when it comes to concepts of Euroscepticism and populism in researched countries. Answering research question - How has the link between populism and Euroscepticism been shaping? - allowed me to study how these two aspects are connected and how do they influence each other. To examine social perceptions of the EU I explored the phenomenon of Euroscepticism. I focused on populists in power in order to be able to see the process of their born and grow and what were the factors that allowed populist parties to win elections. Those two phenomena are not new but in recent years they have attracted a lot of attention as a result of successes that populist parties achieved in many counties. I took under consideration time frame since 2015 in Poland and 2018 in Italy, because those are the years when populists parties won elections in following countries, in recent history. Firstly, I characterized Polish and Italian cases separately and then I looked on their historical roots, how they are created nowadays, by whom and what is special for them. To do so I studied Law and Justice, the Five Star Movement (M5S), Lega and Brothers of Italy political manifestos. The outcome of this thesis is the comparative analysis of those two cases with a result that there are more differences according to populism and Euroscepticism between Poland and Italy.