Unmet expectations? The impact of the Coronavirus crisis on radical right populism in North-Western and Southern Europe

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, sociologists and political scientists have questioned the implications of the health emergency for populist actors. Above all, the debate on whether the Coronavirus may strengthen or weaken populist radical right (PRR) parties (Mudde, 2007) has swelled, but scholars have been far from reaching a unanimous opinion. Besides reports and volumes collecting studies on different national cases (Bar-On & Molas, 2020; Hubé & Bobba, 2021; Katsambekis & Stavrakakis, 2020) only a few of the more general contributions have maintained a prudent position (Mudde, 2020b; Wondreys & Mudde, 2020), while many have used tones that appear too definitive. Some have foreseen that in the long run PRR parties will be ‘the profiteers’ of the pandemic (Burni, 2020). Others have depicted them as its ‘victims’ (Betz, 2020a; English, 2020) or its ‘significant losers’ (Samaras, 2020). And still, others have predicted that populism will come out of Covid as a ‘peripheral and almost negligible’ ideology (Bufacchi, 2020), or have claimed that ‘the coronavirus crisis has uncovered some key weaknesses of the populist right’, maybe ‘giving way to a post-populist phase’ (Gerbaudo, 2021, p. 16; 25). Therefore, the following questions remain contested: what can be the state of health of the European populist radical right after Covid-19? Have the health crisis and the socioeconomic crisis that ensued contributed to magnify or dampen the populist wave? In short, is the Coronavirus an enemy or an ally of European PRR parties?

The present article fits into this debate and addresses these questions first from a theoretical standpoint, maintaining a cautious stance, and trying to shed light on some aspects that have not yet been sufficiently investigated. Therefore, in the next section (2), I will argue that a priori, based on the copious literature of political sociology and political science on populism, there are four interrelated good reasons to predict that PRR parties can benefit from the pandemic. Later, in the empirical section (3), after discussing the data and the case selection criteria, I will show how the polls and some recent elections suggest the opposite, namely that European PRR forces have overall found in the Coronavirus slightly more an enemy than an ally. Finally, I will suggest four remarks on why we are facing this unexpected outcome (section 4). Although it will not provide conclusive results, this paper will put forward some exploratory reflections (summarized in section 5), which may foster a better understanding of the complex relation between pandemic and the populist radical right, or at least pave the way for further examination.

The first theoretical reason why the populist radical right should take advantage of the Coronavirus outbreak can be traced back to the definition of ‘populism’ that has gathered the greatest consensus in recent years. This is the definition provided by Cas Mudde’s ‘ideational approach’ (Mudde, 2004; 2017), according to which populism is ‘an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people’ (Mudde, 2004, p. 543). As can be seen from this definition, the two key core concepts on which populism is based are those of ‘people’, virtuous and holder of the truth, and ‘elite’, corrupt and bearer of lies and selfish interests. Against this backdrop, the outbreak of the pandemic created the potential for the expansion of the ‘elite’ concept in the populist view. Given the new centrality of science in the public arena and the enormous visibility and prominence of scientists in the media, also virologists, epidemiologists and doctors may have fully ‘entered the élite’. Therefore, in the Manichean vision of PRR actors, enemies of the people may be no longer only traditional parties, the European Union, non-majoritarian institutions and nonnatives, but also the ‘men of science’, to whom European governments have inevitably turned to outline their policy strategies. For instance, in the Netherlands, during the early phase of the pandemic, radical right leaders Geert Wilders (PVV) and Thierry Baudet (FvD) expressed distrust in the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and Environment (RIVM) in a typical populist flavor (Klein, 2020). In Italy, even a few days after joining Mario Draghi’s national unity government, the leader of the Lega, Matteo Salvini, attacked the main advisor of the Ministry of Health, asked for changing the scientists of the Technical Scientific Committee (CTS), and declared: ‘We can no longer stand “experts” who sow fear and uncertainties’ (la Repubblica, 2021). Thus, although populists’ aversion towards experts is not new (Caramani, 2017), the pandemic could represent a window of opportunity for the full inclusion of scientists in the elite targeted by radical right populists. Of course, a thorough content analysis of PRR actors’ communication is needed to prove that this expansion of the ‘elite’ concept is truly happening. Nonetheless, there are signs that the attack on scientists has provided new fuel to the populist rhetoric, so much so that some authors have begun to speak of a new populist variant, labelled as ‘science-related populism’, and conceived as ‘a set of ideas suggesting an antagonism between an (allegedly) virtuous ordinary people and an (allegedly) unvirtuous academic elite’ (Mede & Schäfer, 2020).

The second reason is that historically there is a strong correlation between (socio-economic) crises and populism. Furthermore, although crises are not a necessary prerequisite of populism, populism has often been interpreted as a derivative of crises. Indeed, authoritative sociopolitical studies on the transformations of political conflict and European political systems, drawing on the ‘cleavage theory’, trace the roots of radical right populism, and its strengthening, to ‘critical junctures’ that often coincide with crises, such as the transition from materialistic and industrial societies to post-materialistic and post-industrial societies, globalization, the Great Recession of 2008 (Bornschier, 2010; De Wilde et al., 2019; Hooghe & Marks, 2018; Hutter & Kriesi, 2019). Now, although the first and graver waves of the pandemic have gone, what we are still partially facing is not only an unprecedented health crisis, but also a devastating socio-economic crisis which, moreover, is grafted onto the long trail of the Great Recession effects, which have not yet been exhausted. Aware of this, many PRR actors in opposition have adopted a strategy that is only at first sight paradoxical. After keeping an initial low-profile, or in some cases (e.g. FPÖ in Austria and SVP in Switzerland), recognizing the seriousness of the situation (Betz, 2020a; Wondreys & Mudde, 2020), many have accused ruling parties and scientists of ‘feeding’ the emergency. This should appear paradoxical because, as mentioned, it is the populists themselves who usually benefit from crises. But, at the same time, they have tried to capitalize on the type of crisis they are most accustomed to: the socio-economic one (Brubaker, 2020). Wondreys and Mudde have well highlighted this only apparently ‘schizophrenic’ strategy:

The third reason why the populist radical right should strengthen with the pandemic concerns the triangular link between crisis, conspiracy, and populism (Eberl et al., 2021). Historically, moments of great crisis have seen the flourishing of conspiracy theories (van Prooijen & Douglas, 2017). The current Coronavirus crisis is no exception; just think of the widespread theories according to which the virus is a Chinese or US military experiment, or a product of 5G signals or an intrigue born of Bill Gates. The circulation of fake news since the very beginning of the pandemic has thus worried the WHO, which coined the neologism ‘infodemic’ to warn that it was also necessary to fight the pathology represented by mass misinformation (Zarocostas, 2020).

In this context, the bidirectional relationship between radical right populism and conspiracy theories is inserted: on the one hand, it is the populist actors themselves who often create, or at least spread, conspiracy theories; on the other hand, the attitude to believe in conspiracy theories is associated with support for populist parties (Castanho Silva et al., 2017; van Prooijen et al., 2015). Taggart (2018) has indeed depicted conspiracy as a populist ‘trope’, i.e. as a feature that is often (not always) apparent in populism. He claims that ‘populists will often tend towards a diagnosis of the present condition that verges on, or is characterized by, being a conspiracy theory’ (Taggart, 2018, p. 7). It is therefore plausible that the present condition marked by the virus has given populists an opportunity to resort to this ‘trope’ more than they do in normal times. And if it is true that, during the pandemic, conspiracy theories have been mostly produced by extreme-right subjects that cannot be classified as the populist radical right (Bar-On & Molas, 2020, chap. 3), it is also true that these ideas have quickly ‘entered the mainstream’ (Ariza, 2020, p. 3; Samaras, 2020) and ‘have been given prominence by populist politicians and parties’ (Bieber, 2020, p. 9). Thus, statements from radical right populists throughout Europe in support of conspiracy theories related to the Coronavirus have widely circulated. To give some examples, ⁠in France the head of a party list for the National Rally ‘shared a video claiming that Jews were behind the pandemic and that they were trying to “assert their supremacy”’ (Ariza, 2020, p. 8). In addition, Marine Le Pen ‘accorded more than a touch of legitimacy to conspiracy theories that claimed that the virus has “escaped” from some secret laboratory’, aware that 40% of her supporters agreed with this (Betz, 2020c). In Spain, Santiago Abascal (VOX) suggested that the virus was a Chinese creation (Meyer, 2021, p. 13). In a similar vein, in Italy, both Matteo Salvini (Lega) and Giorgia Meloni (FdI) shared videos ‘about Chinese experiments with coronaviruses as a potential source of the outbreak’ (Meyer, 2021, p. 13). The leader of the League also insinuated that ‘there was a hidden agenda at the EU level to start a “trade war against goods made in Italy”’ (Albertazzi et al., 2021, p. 6). In Germany, former AfD politician Wolfgang Gedeon suggested that the novel coronavirus could be a US bioweapon (Eckert, 2020). Wondreys and Mudde (2020, p. 5), despite maintaining that ‘with some notable exceptions, far-right parties were not actively spreading fake news’, also acknowledged that ‘several have expressed particularly open positions to fringe theories’. First among these would be Salvini and Thierry Baudet (FvD). But another telling anecdote comes from Greece: the leader of Greek Solution has been under investigation by the Supreme Court for advertising a balm that was said to protect from Covid-19 (Samaras, 2020).

Ultimately, the outbreak of the pandemic has theoretically offered the opportunity for the emergence of an explosive triangular relationship between crisis, conspiracy, and populism. A relationship in which each of the three elements has the potential to influence and enhance the others.

Finally, we cannot neglect the role of the media. Traditional media, and even more so ‘alternative news media’ and social media (Boberg et al., 2020), may have played a decisive role in reinforcing all three of the previous theoretical reasons why the populist radical right should benefit from the Coronavirus. First, media are the channels through which scientists have over-exposed themselves, often making contradictory statements, thus fueling the risk of being seen by the ‘populist people’ as an additional component of the enemy elite. The media, with an incessant, pounding, and often excessively spectacularized narrative of the crisis, have inevitably contributed to further exaggerating the sense of crisis. On the one hand, PRR actors have used their media channels instrumentally to fuel the uncertainties and anger arising from the crisis, and on the other, (some) media have promoted counter-narratives often coinciding with those advocated by radical right populists. As is well known, claims that emerged from the digital world have often resulted in real ‘anti-hygienic’ anti-lockdown demonstrations in the streets (Ariza, 2020; Vieten, 2020). So, there are good reasons to assume that the consensus apparently accumulated by radical right populism in the media does not remain confined to the screens.

In this section, I will stress that, against the theoretical arguments just expounded on, polls suggest that PRR parties in North-Western and Southern Europe have overall not benefited from the pandemic crisis. Indeed, although it is completely premature to state that ‘the next victim of the Coronavirus will be populism’ (English, 2020), it seems that PRR forces have been slightly weakened rather than strengthened by the crisis.

Before moving on to the examination of voting intentions, I clarify the case selection criteria and the data employed. Regarding the geographical selection, the focus is on North-Western and Southern European party systems with PRR parties. I chose not to extend the framework to Central-Eastern Europe because this region is characterized by different cleavage lines and different structures of political conflict (on this point see Hutter & Kriesi, 2019).

As for the selection of PRR parties, I subscribe to Mudde’s definition of populism, which I have illustrated in the previous paragraph, and thus to the ‘ideational approach’. The theoretical and empirical strengths of this approach have been highlighted by Mudde himself (Mudde, 2017, p. 35) and are widely shared by scholars. Indeed, ‘the ideational approach is the most readily used approach by studies that empirically measure populism’ (Meijers & Zaslove, 2021, p. 374). I also clarify that, although the interpretation of populism as ‘gradual’ or ‘continuous’ property is appealing (Meijers & Zaslove, 2021), for analytical purposes, the logic adopted here is one of type (‘either-or’) rather than one of degree (‘more-or-less’). In other words, I do not go into an analysis of which of the selected parties are more-or-less populist. European parties that can be classified as ‘populist’ following the ideational approach are listed in the PopuList (Rooduijn et al., 2019). Being the focus of this article on PRR parties, I narrowed the selection to parties that appear both as ‘populist’ and as ‘far-right’ in the PopuList, i.e. parties that in addition to being populists are also nativists and authoritarians (Mudde, 2007). In fact, while some of the theoretical arguments advanced here are valid for populists in general, others more specifically concern PRR parties only.

To track and analyze voting intentions for the selected PRR parties throughout these Covid waves, I rely on the data provided by Poll of Polls, thus the same source for all cases instead of a different source for each country, which would have made comparisons more problematic.

The following analysis continues in the wake of work published by Wondreys and Mudde (2020) in the midst of the second Covid wave. The authors examined the electoral consequences of the pandemic for far-right parties in the broader European Union between March and June 2020. However, this analysis shows something more and different. More because we comment on a wider time span, distinguishing between phases within the pandemic. Different because, by narrowing the focus on a more homogeneous sample in terms of both countries and parties, we can highlight slightly different findings.

For instance, Wondreys and Mudde found that, from March to June 2020, the polling average of far-right parties in opposition in the EU had dropped by 0.8 points. In our narrowed sample, voting intentions for PRR parties from the beginning of the crisis to the end of the first wave fell from 14.1 to 12.8%: 1.3 points less. This is still a moderate decrease, but more than 60% greater than that observed on the less compact sample of Wondreys and Mudde. One might think that the setback of PRR parties in opposition in North-Western and Southern Europe was entirely due to a ‘rally round the flag’ effect that would have benefited ruling parties. However, empirical research has detected little evidence of this effect. In any case, it did not even last until the end of the first wave (Bol et al., 2021).

Of the 20 parties considered, the majority – 13 – experienced losses during the first wave. Among these, AFD (Germany), Lega (Italy), FvD (Netherlands) and SD (Sweden) recorded the greatest collapse (−4 in just three months). Three parties saw their situation unchanged, while four gained. The most remarkable rise was that of FdI (Italy), which grew by 3%.

Thus, in Italy, a trend worthy of further investigation has emerged from the beginning of the pandemic and has continued for two years. The two parties of the populist radical right, Lega and FdI, have met an opposite fate, that is, the losses of the first have largely coincided with the gains of the latter. Throughout two years of pandemic, voting intentions for the League have plummeted by 14 points (from 31 to 17%). The opposite is true for FdI, which has surged by 9 points, from 12 to 21%. The reasons behind this shift in the polls are not yet clear. The fact that the League has joined the new government of national unity chaired by Mario Draghi in February 2021, while FdI has not, cannot be a discriminating factor, since the trend started a year before the change of government (and continued after). The fact that Northern regions governed by the League, especially Lombardy, were the most affected by the first wave could explain the collapse of the party during this phase (Albertazzi et al., 2021). But the League has kept sinking in the polls, almost at the same pace, throughout the rest of the pandemic. Wondreys and Mudde (2020, p. 6) maintained that Meloni’s ‘more moderate opposition has contrasted sharply with Salvini’s radical opposition’ (see also Meyer, 2021, p. 8). Nonetheless, their rhetoric has in many cases overlapped, for example by strongly linking the health crisis to the migration issue. And if it is true that at the outbreak of Coronavirus the League rapidly became the government’s most vocal critic, it is also true that this forced FdI to ‘follow suit’ (Albertazzi et al., 2021, p. 2). Betz (2020b) indicated the ‘unabashed’ nationalism of FdI as the reason for its success during the crisis, whereas the nationalism of the League would still be partially compromised by its regionalist genealogy.² After all, it is likely that the pandemic is not the only element at play in this polling trend, and thus the role of possible endogenous factors needs to be considered by future research.

A similar argument, albeit for the period between the first and the second wave only, applies to the Dutch case. Here, the gains of the PVV (+6 from the first wave to the second, after having lost 2 points during the first wave) can be linked to the FvD’s internal struggles, fostered by party scandals. So, the FvD lost 8 points from the crisis’ beginning to the second wave, but it is likely that the pandemic played a limited role in this dynamic. However, still in shambles just a few months before the March 2021 general election, the FvD turned into a sort of single-issue Covid denialist party in the prelude to the election, which turned out to be an electoral success for the party. The FvD gained 5% of the vote shares, almost quadrupling the result of the previous 2017 election (Figure 3). On one hand, this result demonstrates the potential the pandemic offered to PRR parties in the context of election campaign. On the other, it should be noted that, before the outbreak of Coronavirus, the FvD was at 15% in the polls: three times the vote obtained in 2021. After the national election, the party has remained at 5% in the polls, while the aggregate voting intention for the two Dutch PRR parties has dropped from 33 to 19% (−14) over the two pandemic years.

Returning to the overview, from the first to the second wave, PRR parties have risen by an average of 0.5 points. Some parties have continued to suffer losses but, apart from the League and the FvD, these were now minor losses.

The overall trend continued to be increasing from the second to the third wave (+0.3). One of the most outspoken parties in lamenting a ‘health dictatorship’ and criticizing mass vaccination, the FPÖ (Austria), rose by five points in the polls during this period, and then by other three points from the third to the fourth wave.

The comparison between the situation of March 2022 and that of the beginning of the pandemic crisis captures a rather fragmented picture. As Wondreys and Mudde (2020) suggested, this may be due to an internal heterogeneity of the contemporary far-right. Some parties have lost a lot (the −14 points of the League are the most astonishing), others have gained significantly (+9 for FdI, +7 for FPÖ), and others have seen their consensus almost unchanged. Another remark is that no clear pattern has distinguished the three European sub-regions (i.e. North, Western and Southern Europe) from each other, nor countries that have been more plagued by the pandemic from the others.

In conclusion, arguing that PRR parties are the losers of the pandemic in North-Western and Southern Europe is out of place; yet it is clear that these parties, against the theoretical theses supported in the previous section, have overall not benefitted from Covid-19. The polling average of PRR parties in these European regions has dropped by 1.7 points over the two pandemic years, and the aggregate voting intention for PRR parties has decreased in 9 out of 15 countries (Table 1).

In light of what has been written so far, it must be noted that we are facing an unexpected outcome: the populist radical right has been slightly weakened by the Coronavirus. It would be highly pretentious for anyone to think they know why this has happened. I will therefore limit myself here to providing some exploratory remarks.

First, we should look at PRR parties’ supply in times of pandemic. PRR parties’ supply is usually based on issues such as protection of national borders, aversion to immigration, opposition to the European Union and to the extension of rights to minorities. In times of Coronavirus, health emergency has almost become the only salient issue for public debate. Faced with this sudden distortion of priorities, all parties have had to readjust, and this proved particularly difficult for PRR parties (Meyer, 2021, p. 6). Many of them tackled the new central issue of the pandemic emergency without abandoning their strongpoints, that is, creating a link between the Coronavirus and the issues they usually politicize. For example, the strategy of political leaders such as Le Pen and Salvini was to link immigration and the health crisis, presenting irregular immigrants as ‘plague spreaders’ (Tondo, 2020). In general, PRR parties responded to the pandemic in line with their nativism (Bar-On & Molas, 2020; Wondreys & Mudde, 2020). Therefore, they pointed to immigrants and ethnic minorities as responsible and, to a lesser extent, they stressed the foreign (Chinese) origin of the virus. It is possible that this strategy did not work, that the association between immigrants and Covid-19 seemed forced to voters. After all, ‘practically all governments decided to close the national borders at the beginning of the pandemic, thereby taking away the far right’s main “solution”’ (Mudde, 2020a). Ultimately, the inability to reshape their political supply based on the health emergency and leaving out the old issues may have been detrimental to PRR parties.

Secondly, ‘populists (claim to) speak in the name of the “oppressed people”, and they want to emancipate them by making them aware of their oppression’ (Mudde, 2004, p. 546). Since the outbreak of the pandemic, after an ephemeral moderation of tones (Meyer, 2021), many PRR actors in opposition have tried to convey the message that the causes of this oppression were the decisions taken by governments or the European Union, and supported by the ‘scientific elites’. Therefore, once emancipated from the ruling parties, the EU, and science, ‘the people’ would have also got rid of the health and socioeconomic crisis. Again, it is possible that this rhetoric did not work, and that a large part of the multifaceted, plural, and real people, not the falsely homogeneous people imagined and created by the populists, realized that the cause of oppression was the Coronavirus itself. Indeed, empirical research has shown that, at least during the first wave, in the countries considered here, citizens understood that lockdowns were necessary (Bol et al., 2021).

Thirdly, due to the enormous complexity of this virus and all that derived from it, it is likely that even the ‘simplification process’ operated by populism when it divides society into only two blocs – the élite and the people, evil and good – did not manage to reassure citizens and to make events more intelligible to them. Another typical feature of populism is the trust in the ‘common sense’ of the people, rather than in the ‘specific knowledge’ supported by the elites, which is considered as out of touch with real life. However, in a totally unprecedented situation such as that of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is likely that many have realized that it was not possible to rely on common sense. So, it is plausible that citizens, to understand something more about this paradoxical moment, have turned to what is often considered as the opposite of populism³: competence. This argument is supported by the results of the ‘Wellcome Global Monitor 2020: Covid-19’ report. The Wellcome Global Monitor is the world’s largest survey into people’s attitudes about science and health-related issues. Its most recent wave was conducted in late 2020, whereas the previous one had been conducted in 2018. One of the report’s key findings is that people’s trust in science has increased globally after Coronavirus. People who said they trust science ‘a lot’ rose from 32% in 2018 to 41% by the end of 2020, and those who said they trust science ‘a lot’ or ‘some’ rose from 77 to 80%. Relying on the datasets provided by the same Wellcome Global Monitor, I have verified whether this was true for the 15 countries considered here as well. It turned out that the percentage of people who trust science ‘a lot’ or ‘some’ increased in 10 of the 15 countries (although the average increase was small, + 0.3%), while the percentage of those who do not trust science ‘at all’ decreased in nine countries (with a remarkable average decrease of 13.1%) (Table 2). On the other hand, only 25% of the interviewed globally said that their government valued the opinions and expertise of scientists a lot, and this figure falls to 22% in Western Europe.

Therefore, two not negligible threats to European party-representative democracy derive from this scenario. The first is the temptation to leave the ‘keys of power’ to experts, with the risk that in the decisions taken there is less and less political accountability (Caramani, 2017). The second is the spread of another, less explored, form of populism: ‘technocratic populism’ or ‘technopopulism’ (Buštíková & Guasti, 2019), whose conception of government aims to overcome the distinction between politics and technocracy, by entrusting political direction to ‘a class of experts who translate the “popular will” into bipartisan policies capable of directly incorporating the interest of all’ (Urbinati, 2021).

The last remark on why the populist radical right has not strengthened with Coronavirus summarizes many of the previous considerations. It pertains to the type of crisis represented by the health emergency. How can we interpret the unprecedented Covid-19 crisis, compared to the other crises – financial, eurozone and migrant ones – that have affected Europe over the past decade? Pirro and Taggart (2018, p. 258) suggested that we can read crises as ‘critical junctures’, ‘transformative events’, or ‘focusing events’. The first two analytical categories are distinguishable from the third, as they are hypothesized to lead to ‘distinct legacies’ or ‘to the emergence of new power configurations’ or, in any case, to enduring transformations. In my interpretation, although the pandemic crisis has the potential to be judged as a ‘critical juncture’ or a ‘transformative event’, we cannot yet assume that this is the case. Instead, there is no doubt that the Covid-19 crisis has been a ‘focusing event’, i.e. an event that has changed ‘the dominant issue on the agenda’, leading to the identification of new core issues (Pirro & Taggart, 2018, p. 258). The previous crises can also be seen as ‘focusing events’, having projected public attention on the euro and then on migrants. However, two fundamental differences between those crises and the ongoing pandemic can be pointed out. The first concerns the extent of these events. We can agree that the extent of the Coronavirus crisis is enormously greater (we could venture that it is the most global event in contemporary history) than that of the financial, euro and migrant crises. Especially during the first pandemic year, the virus became the only issue to focus on, more than the euro and migratory flows had been during previous crises. The second, and more relevant difference, concerns the potential for politicization of these crises. The previous crises forced attention ‘onto issues usually downplayed or rejected by the political mainstream’ (Pirro & Taggart, 2018, p. 258), fostering the growth of PRR parties. On the other hand, the pandemic crisis has forced attention onto issues usually downplayed, or at least not considered, by the populist radical right (but also by other political actors), such as healthcare systems and the public role of science. In addition, ‘the nature of the crisis does not fit in with the common problem-solving schemes of an economic or migration crisis’ (Hubé & Bobba, 2021, p. 4). In short, the Coronavirus crisis is ‘a sui generis crisis’, as Hubé and Bobba defined it. A crisis that has been politicized very intensely, yet not in the same way as the previous European crises, during which PRR parties had been more skilled ‘crisis’ entrepreneurs’. Attributing accountability of the previous crises to endogenous contradictions, that is, internal to one’s own country or to the EU - such as the interests of allegedly corrupt elites or the increase of nonnatives - not only had been possible for the populist radical right: it had been its trump card. Conversely, there is no doubt that the origins and responsibilities for the outbreak of the health crisis were ‘exogenous’, and therefore blaming the elites or the immigrants has arguably been less effective.

Hubé and Bobba (2021) also argued that, usually, more than from a crisis per se, populist actors benefit from fueling a ‘permanent crisis cycle’, in which they have an active role. In the initial phase, they identify a certain issue as a problem to be politicized. Subsequently, they try to precipitate this problem into a real crisis, from which they can take advantage. At this stage, they highlight the contradictions endogenous to the political system and blame the ruling actors as responsible for the (actually manipulated) crisis. Once the crisis has effectively entered the public arena, populists typically claim alternative – and simplistic – solutions in place of those advanced by governments. Now, in the case of Covid-19, PRR parties have not been able to implement this cycle. The outbreak of the crisis was totally sudden, and the crisis entered the political sphere without any actor intentionally triggering public attention towards it. PRR parties were then left with the play of blaming governments and scientific elites for the managing of the crisis, or immigrants for spreading the virus. But this attempt has been undermined by the many factors we have mentioned. What is more, governments across Europe took similar measures to tackle the virus, and this has reinforced the perception that there was no other way. Thus, even claiming simplistic alternative solutions was not an effective strategy during this peculiar crisis.

Nevertheless, coming back to the interpretation of the Coronavirus crisis as a ‘focusing event’, it is likely that, with the temporal expansion of the pandemic, the virus will cease to be the dominant issue. This will arguably leave PRR parties with wider room for manoeuvre. Thus, we can wager that the ‘populist zeitgeist’ has not left Europe yet.

I am aware that in this article I ran the risk of chasing events, of being guided by ‘the dictatorship of the present in which opinion pretends to be scientific analysis’ (Viviani, 2020, p. 281). However, I am also aware that a reflection with a true heuristic value on the relationship between radical right populism and the Coronavirus crisis must be postponed to the actual conclusion of this crisis. Indeed, although the first and more severe Covid waves are over, the longer-term social, economic, and political implications of the pandemic are not, and still need public and scholarly attention. In this sense, the words of Cas Mudde must sound like a warning, since the author considered unreliable any early predictions on how the Coronavirus would have changed the weight of populisms – although he then foretold that the impact would have been moderate overall. (Mudde, 2020b).

Against this backdrop, this article has followed the more cautious approach of Wondreys and Mudde (2020). However, its added value does not lie only in having analyzed voting intentions for PRR parties selecting a more narrowed and thus homogeneous sample in terms of both countries and parties. Nor only in having available a longer time frame, accounting for the different phases of the pandemic. Rather, the added value of this work lies above all in having raised some theoretical arguments that still need to be investigated. Among these: the possible expansion of the ‘elite’ concept in populist vision; the renewed linkage between populism, crisis, and conspiracy; the apparent inability for the populist radical right to reshape its political supply following the emergency; the renovated contrast between scientific knowledge and common sense; the risks deriving from instances of technocracy or ‘technocratic populism’ and finally the peculiar nature of the Coronavirus crisis.

Beyond being exploratory in scope, this article is not all-encompassing. For instance, unlike other studies, I have not focused on the solutions proposed by PRR parties, nor on the successes or failures of these parties in dealing with the pandemic (after all, in North-Western and Southern Europe, PRR parties where practically all in opposition during the Covid-19 crisis). Nonetheless, I believe I have put in the spotlight a perhaps neglected aspect: from a theoretical standpoint, the slight decline in support for PRR parties is an unexpected outcome. Or at least a result not suggested by the literature on populism. Indeed, there are at least four compelling reasons why the populist radical right should have theoretically drawn strength from the Coronavirus crisis. (I) The first is that the outbreak of the pandemic created the potential for the expansion of the ‘elite’ concept in the populist vision, providing a new enemy – the ‘men of science’ – to the PRR actors’ rhetoric. (II) The second is that historically there is a strong correlation between (socio-economic) crisis and populism, and what we are still partially facing is an unprecedented both health and socio-economic crisis. (III) Third, I have argued that there is a triangular link between crisis, conspiracy, and populism, in which each of the three elements has the potential to influence and enhance the others. (IV) Fourth and last, the role of the media, especially but not only of social media, would seem crucial in strengthening all the three abovementioned dynamics.

Therefore, while waiting for time to run its course, I believe it is important for the public debate to question the sociopolitical scenario that will come once the crisis is really over. For the moment, I have advanced four exploratory remarks to try to explain why, according to the polls (and to the elections held during the first two pandemic years), the populist radical right has overall not taken advantage of Coronavirus. (i) The first concerns the possible inability of PRR parties to reshape their political supply based on the health emergency. (ii) The second exploratory explanation is that the ‘people’ may have realized that the cause of their oppression was the Coronavirus itself and not the decisions taken by parties in office, the EU, or scientists. (iii) Thirdly, experts’ competence may have been able to reassure citizens more than populist ‘common sense’. (iv) Finally, the Covid-19 crisis is a peculiar one due to its exogenous nature. It can be interpreted as a ‘focusing event’ that shifted the focus off the strongpoints of the populist radical right. Thus, PPR parties have arguably been not able to politicize the Coronavirus crisis as effectively as the previous eurozone and migrant crises, nor to implement the ‘permanent crisis cycle’ they usually benefit from (Hubé & Bobba, 2021).

The outlined expectations about radical right populism growth in times of pandemic inspired by political science and political sociology have been unmet. In this contribution, I have endeavored to explore why. However, before concluding, we should also briefly deal with the more recent developments. With mass vaccination and the weakening of the virus, the public scientific-medical debate on Covid has started to fade. At the same time, socio-economic grievances caused by the pandemic are not over. On the contrary, they have been even reinforced by the social and economic implications of the intensified war between Russia and Ukraine, and the correlated energy and inflation issues affecting Europe. All these trends are likely to enhance the possibilities for populist actors to effectively exploit socio-economic grievances once again. Therefore, whether the pandemic represented a ‘critical juncture’ for European politics (and not only a ‘focusing event’) and what the state of health of the European radical right populism will be in the next years remain highly contentious issues.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).