Euroscepticism: how the COVID-19 pandemic affected attitudes towards the EU

After a decade where the European Union experienced some of the most severe crises in its history during the 2010s, with growing populist movements opposing further EU integration, the break-out of the COVID-19 pandemic in February of 2020 was not a good omen for how the bloc would fare in the 2020s. Counter-intuitively, however, the pandemic actually resulted in increasing recognition of the need for European cooperation in a whole range of policy areas. On average, almost two thirds of respondents in nine EU countries agreed that the pandemic showed that the member states needed to work together, compared to less than a fifth who thought it had shown the pitfalls of EU integration.

The COVID shock and decreasing euroscepticism

The reversal of the trend towards euroscepticism which had grown during the 2010s is likely due to the nature of the crises which the EU has faced so far this decade. While in the 2010s the crises, which shook the Eurozone, related to the monetary architecture of the Eurozone currency area and the EU's lack of a coherent framework to deal with the increasing flows of refugees fleeing the war in Syria, the crises of the 2020s are more external in nature and perhaps have clearer solutions.

The COVID pandemic shook the union into action, as the states were forced to cooperate on a number of issues such as managing the movement of people within the EU, determining coherent entry requirements from outside of the union, and financing the fiscal and public health response to the crisis. While the EU was initially criticized for moving too slowly in vaccine procurement, the general response to the pandemic was popular among citizens. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is likely to have had a similar effect on citizens' perceptions of the EU, as it has led to much greater EU cooperation on the issue of external security.