Reactive, heterogeneous, and pragmatic: the development of party-based Euroscepticism in the European Parliament during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war

Periods of EU-level strain, such as the Eurozone and refugee crises, have repeatedly reshaped party-based Euroscepticism. Existing research offers important insights, but has not yet systematically examined why Eurosceptic parties selectively support certain EU crisis responses whilst contesting others, or why these positions diverge across parties and shift over time. This paper addresses these gaps by analysing the development of party-based Euroscepticism in the 2019–2024 European Parliament during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the Ukraine war. It proposes a two-step mechanism: crisis-specificity structures which EU issues become salient in Eurosceptic party discourse, whilst ideology and national interest jointly influence the positions parties adopt. This mechanism is examined using a novel corpus of tweets from Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) representing 16 Eurosceptic parties across 9 member states, analysed through natural language processing at two-month intervals. This level of temporal granularity captures dynamics that remain largely invisible to expert surveys or party manifestos. The analysis identifies five distinct crisis dimensions whose salience shifts dynamically as each crisis unfolds, and reveals systematic divergences in party positions driven by the interplay of crisis type, ideology, and national interest. The findings empirically demonstrate the reactive, heterogeneous, and pragmatic characters of party-based Euroscepticism in times of crisis.