Changing landscape, or business as usual?: The nature of populism and Euroscepticism in the CEE countries in time of COVID-19 crisis

Our aim is to explore, analyse, and compare possible changes in political parties rhetorics during the Czech and Slovak Parliamentary plenary debates using data collected from July 2018, i.e., one and a half years before the COVID-19 crisis has broken out, to June 2022, when the crisis, hopefully, will go down after more than two years. Countries in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Czechia and Slovakia, might represent interesting cases for analysis in this regard. For both countries, the increase of populism and Euroscepticism has been typical in recent years, but, on the other hand, it seems that these two countries can still be seen as the liberal and democratic part of the Visegrad Group, which is sometimes perceived as the ‘toxic brand’. As scholars argued (e.g., Buštíková and Guasti 2017; Conti 2018; Moffitt 2014; Pirro et al. 2018), populism and Euroscepticism can be triggered and by themselves can also act as triggers for the crisis. At the same time, Special Issue of Politics (Pirro et al. 2018), focusing on several case studies of Western and Southern European countries and their party systems, concluded that populist parties reacted to the multiple crises the EU faced in the last decade differently. The same can be claimed for Eurosceptic parties as well. Various forms of populism and Euroscepticism are also apparent among Central and Eastern European political parties (see, e.g., Bugaric and Kuhelj 2018; Taggart and Pirro 2021) and are, moreover, evident not only geographically but also between several crises. For example, Kneuer points out (2019) that the migration crisis impacted more old populist parties than the debt crisis, while for the new populist parties, the opposite direction of the influence of the particular crisis was true. Such a cleavage might also occur in the case of the COVID-19 crisis. The general assumption was that the health, and related economic, crisis, as previous crises experiences showed, would further strengthen Eurosceptic positions, but some scholars (e.g., Baute and de Ruijter 2021) warn that national context has to be taken (again) into account. Therefore, the national response to the pandemic could have a different impact on the increase of Euroscepticism and populism. Our analytical framework builds on document analysis (Wesley, 2014), and we triangulated the analysis using different methodologies. The authors combined computer-assisted quantitative content analysis with qualitative content analysis and frame analysis – the tools of choice for content exploration and inquiry into sense-making and sense-giving processes (Foldy et al., 2008; Jørgensen et al., 2012).