All for one, and one for all? Analysing party positions on EU solidarity in Germany in pandemic times

The article analyses party positions on European Union (EU) solidarity in Germany in the run-up to the 2021 German federal election. Besides the increasing relevance of European issues for national elections, the COVID19-pandemic is the latest EU-wide crisis bringing questions of solidarity to the forefront of political competition. While previous studies have heavily investigated whether and under which conditions individuals would support or reject different types of EU solidarity, little is known about how political parties position themselves on the issue. Moreover, even if party stances have been studied in rare cases, earlier work tended to focus on individual aspects of EU solidarity rather than providing a more comprehensive picture. The present study adds to this academic void by drawing on an original expert dataset on German party positions collected before the 2021 federal elections, including various items on EU solidarity. We investigate what types of EU solidarity are more or less supported by German political parties and to what extent we can explain these solidarity positions with the politicised GAL-TAN cleavage . First, we demonstrate that indeed the GAL-TAN dimension strongly shapes the positioning of the political parties on EU solidarity. While the classified GAL parties support EU solidarity, the classified TAN parties rather reject EU solidarity. Second, the support by political parties varies based on the type of EU solidarity (redistributive or risk-sharing solidarity). While green and left parties’ favour both redistributive solidarity and risk-sharing solidarity, conservative and right-wing parties reject risk-sharing solidarity in particular. Moreover, the right-wing populist party AfD rejects every kind of EU solidarity. Our study contributes to the less investigated role of EU solidarity among political parties, conceptually highlights why solidarity is a multifaced phenomena and empirically contributes to the political cleavage debate in Europe in times of COVID-19.