Eurosceptic Voting after COVID-19: Estimating the Effect of the Pandemic on Euroscepticism in the 2024 EU Election

The COVID-19 pandemic had a distinct impact on the voting behavior of individuals in several countries with radical anti-establishment parties sometimes losing but also occasionally gaining votes in elections throughout the pandemic (Bayerlein and Metten, 2022; Bobba and Hubé, 2021; Wondreys and Mudde, 2020). While a plethora of studies already addresses the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on national- and regional-level voting behavior, studies analyzing the EU-level are surprisingly scarce. This is especially noteworthy, since past crises have often led to surges in Euroscepticism (Stockemer et al., 2020; Pirro, Taggart, and Van Kessel, 2018). Due to the prominence of the EU in the coordination of the pandemic response, the COVID-19 pandemic could have a profound impact on individual levels of Euroscepticism. Focusing on the changes in the vote share of Eurosceptic parties between the EU elections of 2019 and 2024 I answer the following question: How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect Eurosceptic voting in the 2024 election to the European Parliament? Previous research already showed that vote choices and public opinion towards governments during COVID-19 was often determined by the evaluation of the pandemic response (Lazarus et al., 2020) and individual affectedness (Clarke, Stewart, and Ho, 2021) as well as conspiracy believes (Romer and Jamieson, 2021) often fueled by political actors in government and opposition (McKee et al., 2020; Williams, Kestenbaum, and Meier, 2020). Irrespective of this, the effects of individual affectedness have yet to be worked out in detail with pandemic severity drawing some voters to established parties in government but also pushing parts of the electorate to the political fringes (Bayerlein and Metten, 2022). The view existing analysis on the Euroscepticism during the COVID-19 pandemic already show that the perceived inadequacy of the EU’s pandemic response has the potential to increase individual Euroscepticism (Fontana, 2020) with populist leaders like Victor Orbán also being able to utilize the pandemic for their Eurosceptic narratives (Hlousek and Havlík, 2023). At the same time, a positive perception of the EU’s response in general as well as the recovery fund NextGenerationEU are likely to increase support for the EU (Borin, Macchi, and Mancini, 2021; Heermann, Leuffen, and Tigges, 2023). Based on these considerations, EU election 2024 provides a unique opportunity to use the COVID-19 pandemic and work out whether the COVID-19 pandemic still affects voting decisions of individuals and if so, what factors determine whether individuals voice opposition to the EU due their COVID-19 experience. The empirical analysis utilizes a Difference-in-Differences design with the regional average excess mortality during the pandemic as a continuous treatment. This treatment variable is interacted with the moderating factors regional EU support during the pandemic, economic recovery after the pandemic, and national government ideology.