The Emotional Politics of Radical Policy Reform: comparing the ‘Recovery Plan for Europe’ and the ‘ReArm Europe Plan’

The ‘Recovery Plan for Europe’, drawn during the Covid-19 pandemic (2020), and the ‘ReArm Europe Plan’, drafted on the back of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (2025) are two initiatives supporting collective debt-take at the European Union (EU) level. These two initiatives are the only two occasions when the EU’s so-called ‘general escape clause’ has been activated since coming into force in 2011. The clause allows Member States to temporarily deviate from EU fiscal rules, while still being within the provisions of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and such initiatives are the outcome of severe and highly emotional negotiations. The adoption of the Recovery Plan for Europe at the extraordinary European Council summit in July 2020 was largely hailed as historical among EU leaders. The emotionality of the situation was evident. The plan was variously labelled as a ‘moment of truth and ambition’ (President Macron), as determining the ‘future of Europe’ and a manifest of European ‘unity’ and ‘solidarity’. The Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the negotiations in the days leading up to and during the summit as a ‘rollercoaster of feelings’ with hard negotiations between ‘frugal’ states and less frugal enthusiasts arguing on the back of emotional appeals. On a similar vein, the ReArm Europe Plan, launched in March 2025 and aiming to significantly increase defence spending across the EU, responded to the security challenges raised by the war in Ukraine. The Commission President again called for decisive action appealing to emotions around unity, solidarity and determination, followed by statements by the EU Council highlighting this as a ‘defining moment’ for the Union. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of political emotions in pushing and legitimising controversial political initiatives, generally conceived as such due to embedded member state interests and in adding up to radical policy reform. The main research question driving this paper is how do discourses incorporating political emotions help build support for collective debt-taking initiatives? How does the emotional framing of deep-seated issues, such as European security and transnational public health crises, make these initiatives the chosen policy solution? The paper builds a conceptual framework by reviewing the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic leading to the Recovery Plan for Europe and the security events leading to the ReArm Europe initiative. It compares the discursive emotional practice around these two actions, largely conceived as radically departing from the status quo, by drawing empirical evidence from public speeches by the EU’s senior leadership (President, VPs and Commissioners). Using Emotion Discourse Analysis (EDA) the paper highlights seven emotional dimensions of politics—emotional words, connotations, metaphors, analogies, emotional othering, intertextuality and performativity. Elaborating a novel Emotional Political Analysis (EPA) framework, the paper conceptualises the distinct role of each of these dimensions.