The identity and ideological dynamics of the Covid-19 protests in Europe

The globalization of politics has made street protests a form of recurrent public participation, and the democratic states have been taken by surprise by the scale of this phenomenon. The culture of protest against the political power is a part of the Covid-19 pandemic. Regardless of their purpose, protests have at least two common characteristics: they are staged by the use of communication networks and have an identity and ideological substratum. In this context, online political socialization aims to organize offline public events. United by beliefs, ideas and attitudes, social groups challenging government decisions on Covid-19 pandemic have developed effective communication systems that often go beyond the media impact of official information. The identity and ideological diversity of these communities, the continuous new identity affiliations and their radicalization against the existing political order, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, are visible aspects of the accelerated atomization of society at European level. This article aims to demonstrate that democracy is structurally affected by the confrontations between these various identity movements, which aspire to participate in the decision-making processes, but by challenging the constitutional order and democratic principles. Protests against restrictive measures to combat Covid-19, beyond the anti-system line on which they are based, reveal the current challenge for the Europe's most advanced democracies to effectively manage new social identity cleavages.