COVID-19 pandemic crisis and party-based Euroscepticism in the 9th European Parliament

The Covid-19 pandemic has shaken European societies and their health systems to the core, and the EU’s capacity to manage a global health crisis has been questioned as the Union was not prominently present at the early stages of the pandemic. However, the EU once again attempted to collectively handle the ramifications of the crisis by strengthening its economic and fiscal competences. EU member states agreed upon a new instrument (NGEU) which marked a significant step in European integration. Whilst the EU reached an agreement with concessions, the NGEU negotiation process once again revealed the various dividing lines within the Union. In the light of this, this paper attempts to discover how Eurosceptic political parties constructed their Eurosceptic discourses in response to issues and events engendered by the EU’s crisis management throughout the pandemic crisis. I particularly focused on how the pandemic crisis impacted upon principal political issues that Eurosceptic parties in the 9th EP discussed as well as Eurosceptic frames that they employed to justify their positions on those issues. To investigate the impact of the pandemic crisis upon the Eurosceptics’ framing of the EU, this paper used Twitter as a measurement tool. Previously, Euroscepticism studies have paid little attention to the use of social media data to explore party position. This paper thus contributed to filling this gap by applying topic modelling to tweets published by Eurosceptic MEPs. I utilised BERTopic, a topic model designed to analyse short texts, to capture topics and frames in Eurosceptic tweets. To detect the crisis’s varying impacts between parties and countries, this paper primarily focused on sixteen Eurosceptic parties from France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands – the central actors of EU negotiations for NGEU – as well as Greece since SYRIZA was one of the most active parties on Twitter. In addition, to capture the change of topics over the course of the pandemic crisis, I divided the timeframe – between 1 July 2019 and 31 December 2022 – by three months except for pre-COVID times. In terms of the Eurosceptics’ primary political issues, three different aspects of the pandemic crisis – the public health crisis, the EU’s vaccine programme, and the economic crisis – played out differently over the course of the timeframe. Moreover, both public health and economic aspects of the pandemic crisis have impacted the Eurosceptic right’s discourse at a greater extent and for a longer period of time compared to that of the left. In addition, It is noteworthy that party Euroscepticism’s focus shifted amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Regarding the Eurosceptic frames, the Eurosceptic left once again appeared to invoke economic framing while the right was more likely to put emphasis on sovereignty framing. Two different forms of the sovereignty frame in the Eurosceptic right’s discourse around NGEU clearly showed that Eurosceptic frames were conditioned by the overall political context. Lastly, a new frame, the public health frame, emerged during the pandemic which reflects the specific nature of the pandemic crisis.