Unhealthy populism? Medical populism in the European Parliament

It is widely believed that populist leaders exploit popular misconceptions, biases, and fears for political advantage to the detriment of effective, evidence-based policymaking. Given that the COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously affected societies worldwide, it offers an unparalleled opportunity to examine the characteristics of populist leadership through a transnational lens. This paper argues that by using medical populism as a tool to promote COVID-19 mitigation policies, populist party leaders have capitalized on the crisis-induced context to shape political landscapes. There has been a growing research interest in populism during the pandemic, but it has tended to focus on national case studies. This limits the ability to draw useful conclusions about the development of populism. The importance of transnational political fora is demonstrated by formal and informal alliances of populist leaders. The European Parliament (EP) provides an ideal setting, given its representation of political parties spanning diverse ideological perspectives. Presenting a novel dataset and drawing on an extensive analysis of plenary speeches in the EP between February 2020 and July 2022, this article examines, for the first time on the transnational level, how MEPs from the populist radical right (PRR) and radical left (PRL) parties have employed medical populism in their discourse since the onset of the pandemic. It asks a two-fold research question: a) To what extent have PRL and PRR MEPs promoted medical populist policies as strategies to mitigate COVID-19? and b) to what extent do we see differences between medical populist policies promoted by PRL and PRR MEPs? This project integrates both deductive and inductive approaches, employing a representative claims analysis of plenary speeches. I use a codebook approach and MAXQDA as the primary analysis tool. Preliminary findings reveal considerable variation in terms of medical remedies, spiritualism, and ambivalence within policy proposals, particularly in the case of the PRR.