How European Union Became an Emotional Subject: European Elections in German Media Before and After the Right-Wing-Populist Anger

Thirty years ago, European Union was kept together by permissive consensus and has been an accepted reality by the majority of Europeans, without much of their emotional involvement. In the 90s, however, the EU decided that it might not be enough and tried to get nearer to its citizens with policies more relevant in people’s lives. Europeans and national politics started to engage with the EU more an, yet mainly in a negative rather than positive way, e.g. emotional blame attributions to Europe in the national political communication (e.g. Hameleers et al 2017) and wide-spread public Euroscepticism (Lubbers & Jaspers 2011). Permissive consensus turned not into the active enthusiasm but into constraining dissensus (Hix 1999; Hooghe & Marks 2005). Heightened politicisation and emotionality in regard to EU is also often put in relation to the populist upheaval of the last years (Rico et al 2017; Wirz 2018). The anger of populist parties is indeed very often directed at European politics, decisions as well as the whole existence of the EU (Capelos & Katsanidou 2018, Pirro & Taggart 2018). The question, though, is whether they really put the new layer of emotionality to the public European debate or whether it has already been present before, yet more successfully mobilized and capitalized on by the populist political parties. To tackle this question, I analyse the coverage of four European Parliament elections (2004, 2009, 2014, 2019) in the German online media (in particular, spiegel.de), two before and two after the rise of Alternative for Germany (AfD), German new right-wing populist party. Germany is a very suitable example for this research question because it is one of the founding and for a long time one of the most pro-European countries in the EU, yet still could not prevent the success of the anti-European populist party. I will compare media discourses in regard to expressed emotions, their subjects and objects. I will use a method of Discourse Network Analysis (Leifeld 2017) which combines qualitative Discourse and quantitative Social Network Analysis, in order to better depict the whole media landscape in regard to the European elections.