Resilience, Recovery… and Fragmentation? The European Parliament and Coalition Dynamics in COVID-19 Pandemic Debates

At first glance, the European Union (EU) has reacted quite differently to the COVID-19 pandemic than to the Eurozone crisis when it comes to EU/Eurozone financial support mechanisms. The Eurozone crisis was an asymmetric crisis with presumably clear fault lines between “creditor” and “debtor” states. The COVID-19 pandemic is more symmetric, and has seen a shift in positions on the mutualisation of debt. While we are beginning to understand the effects of the pandemic on EU economic governance, we know surprisingly little about its implications for actor and policy coalitions in the European Parliament. Therefore, our paper asks: Which actor and policy coalitions emerged in the European Parliament as a response to the COVID-19 recovery efforts? Drawing on previous studies of EP coalition patterns during the Eurozone crisis, we conduct a Discourse Network Analysis (DNA) on debates focusing on the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) in order to determine to what extent the different coalitions were shaped by ideological (left-right; GAL/TAN) or geographical cleavages (North-South; East-West; “frugal four” vs. “friends of cohesion”). In doing so, this paper aims to understand which discourse coalitions were dominant, who formed them and why they were more successful than potential (policy) alternatives.