Does the Public Back a Cordon Sanitaire in the European Parliament? Evidence from the 2024 EU Elections

With the heightened vote share for far-right parties in European elections, cooperation in the European Parliament is increasingly put to a test. As in previous legislative terms, several European party groups, including the Social Democrats and the Greens, announced that they would not collaborate with political parties from the far-right prior to the 2024 European elections. However, centrist parties have been losing seats, making legislative majorities more fragile in the current parliament. At the same time, polarisation over different understandings of democracy is on the rise among both elites and voters across Europe. The purpose of this paper therefore is to understand voter preferences with respect to collaboration between European party groups in the European Parliament. We expect that voter preferences in favour of either collaboration with or upholding a cordon sanitaire against the far-right in the European Parliament will be structured along differences in populist attitudes and satisfaction with European democracy and moderated by varying levels of political sophistication. We test these assumptions with panel survey data collected in connection to the 2024 European Parliament elections in Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands. Our findings suggest that only a minority of voters supports a cordon sanitaire, and that people with strong populist attitudes and people with lower levels of satisfaction with democracy are particularly against treating far-right parties as pariah parties in the European Parliament. These associations are more pronounced for voters with low levels of political knowledge compared to more sophisticated voters, while political interest hardly moderates any of the relationships. Our findings have important implications for democratic resilience in the European Union.