Contesting European Union legitimacy within the European Parliament? Patterns of opposition against intra EU solidarity and the transfer Union in pandemic times

The Covid-19 crisis put under stress the EU member states capacity to tackle the shortcomings created by the pandemic and called also into question the EU capacity to act autonomously and timely in order to deploy a coordinated and effective response. Differently from the past crises, the EU has launched a new instrument of cross-national solidarity, the Next Generation EU, to cope with the severe socio-economic consequences of the pandemic. Previous studies have framed the EU leaders’ strategy that has led to the approbation of the Next Generation EU as a choice of polity maintenance, that is the attempt to safeguards the integrity and the effectiveness of the supranational political system. But what have been the reaction of antisystem and Eurosceptic actors about this effort for strengthening fiscal solidarity? Did they had represented an opposition against a political process that can define an embryonic form of transfer union? In case this opposition rhetoric effectively took place it is relevant to determine if it represented the opposition against a) new powers and competencies for the EU, and/or b) form of Intra EU solidarity, following the cleavage that oppose North vs South. The paper, studying a sample of parliamentary speeches by the means of a discourse analysis methodology, aims to determine if and how Eurosceptic parties within the European Parliament have implied an “anti- polity maintenance” rhetoric in order to weaken and undermine this anti-Covid-19 supranational strategy. Such a discursive approach would represent an ideational opposition against a policy-making decision that could boost EU legitimacy and authority, and at the same time, could strengthen an additional form of conditionality for member states that are going to receive financial aid.