Narrating EU Policy Shift: MEPs Narratives and Discursive Repertoires in EU Media Policy Debates

EU media policy has become a salient political issue. The deterioration of media freedom and pluralism, coupled with manipulation and disinformation on online platforms and social networks, has led EU institutions to (re)regulate traditional and digital media. Long considered primarily a technical or competition-related domain, EU media policy is now also addressed through its impact on social cohesion and the rule of law. Such a policy shift raises the following questions: how have European policymakers conceptualised and justified this reorientation of EU media policy? Have conflicting narratives emerged that reflect different views and conceptualisations of the policy problem? Building on interpretive policy analysis, this paper examines how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) (re)defined the policy problem to which recent EU media legislation responds and the narratives and discursive repertoires they used to support their understanding of that problem. Empirically, the paper compares MEPs’ justifications with regard to four pieces of EU legislation: the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, the Digital Services Act, the European Media Freedom Act, and the Anti-SLAPP Directive. MEPs’ speeches were collected through OEIL, the online platform of the European Parliament. Using NVivo, the paper conducts a qualitative narrative analysis of these speeches. This analysis identifies how different narrative components deployed by MEPs—causes of the problem, its consequences and proposed solutions—compose different narratives, characterised by specific expressions or metaphors, understood as core elements of their symbolic repertoires. The results show that the debates are largely disconnected from one another and rest on divergent problem definitions and narratives. Narratives vary according to political orientation: political groups on the left anchor their narratives in the defence of society and the rule of law, while conservative and far-right groups claim to defend the plurality of opinions and to resist perceived establishment cohesion. Positioned between these camps, the European People’s Party (EPP) appears to be gradually drifting to the right, with the debates on the EMFA marking the most pronounced point of this shift (to date). These findings contribute to key debates on symbolic politics and meaning-making in the policy process. The fact that narratives travel only weakly across debates and political groups suggests that, in highly formalised and institutionalised settings such as the European Parliament’s plenary sittings, narratives are used primarily as tools of political communication through which MEPs pursue strategic objectives, rather than as straightforward expressions of deeply ingrained preferences. This underlines the relevance of studying narratives and symbolic repertoires in political science, while also calling for caution in the interpretation of actors’ views solely through narrative analysis.