The politics of Covid-19

Organised by

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• EGPP: European Governance and Politics Programme

The Covid-19 pandemic is a critical juncture that has created new oppositions across European societies. The health and economic crises have hit Europe asymmetrically across functional and geographical lines: some socio-economic groups and countries have been affected more than others from the health impact of the pandemic and from the economic consequences of lockdowns, leading to a new ‘health-economy’ (pandemic) cleavage. Similarly, on the implementation of the Recovery Plan different spending contrasts emerge, both functionally and territorially, prioritizing a rather technocratic long-term expenditure on structural investments, or a more politically rewarding short-term spending on economic sectors in difficulty, creating a new ‘reform-relief’ (recovery) cleavage. Theoretically, these new fault lines relate to the European cleavage structure by either overlapping with or cutting across existing dimensions created by previous crises (the economic and cultural left-right dimension but also on the urban-rural cleavage and creditor-debtor territorial cleavage between member-states). The research investigates which actors have politicized the asymmetric impact of the pandemic between countries and groups, as well as the politicization of spending plans for the recovery fund. The guiding hypothesis is that the existential nature of pandemic and recovery lead to a renewed salience of material issues as opposed to post-material once and thus to a shift of the new axis of competition toward the horizontal axis.