We’ve heard a reasonable amount now about the famed ‘corona bump’ — that is, when the party in power receives a boost in support at the time of the coronavirus outbreak in their country. This has been put down to a ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect of the populace coming to the support of their leaders in a time of national crisis. But how has this effected EU countries if at all? And if it has, will it leave any lasting impact?
Well, as you can see from the following table, it certainly seems real at first blush, but is also very localised, similar to the major outbreaks so far of the virus itself. I have looked at countries which had a major outbreak, measured by whether or not cases of coronavirus reached 20 per million people (source: Our World In Data). Of those countries which did reach this number, only 2 are east of the former Iron Curtain, Poland and Romania. So this is very much a western European issue, indeed almost every country in the former Cold War ‘western bloc’ did reach this threshold.
As a counter-example, Hungary, whose maximum caseload was about 13 per million, one of the worst affected countries not on the below list, never had a corona bump.
‘Start of Outbreak’ is when the country first saw a case rate of 20 per million people. ‘Start of Bump’ is the rough beginning of the increase in support for the ruling party(ies). ‘Size of Bump’ measures from the trough to the peak of support and doesn’t include any later decline.
So, of the listed countries, a clear bump in support around the time of the virus happened in 7 out of the 12. However, the bump actually happened before these countries hit this threshold, so it seems like people were aware of the seriousness of the pandemic before it actually reached this level, or perhaps they were already expecting the pandemic to worsen due to widespread media attention.
However, we should not overstate the impact of this bump, as there are a number of caveats to remember with the above numbers. To start with, the only countries where there is a clear, persistent increase in support for the prime ministers’ parties are Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands and Sweden. In Germany and the Netherlands there was a huge jump, +12 and +15 respectively. This seems to indicate the people were rallying to the support of their leaders and were happy with how they responded to the pandemic. However as well as the pandemic, at this time there was also a lot of media attention surrounding the EU response to the crisis, with the Netherlands in particular getting a lot of attention for its hard line stance during negotiations.
In Germany the case for a corona bump is clearer as it was uncertain what stance they would take in the EU negotiations until the joint Franco-German proposal on May 18th, with the corona bump coming much earlier in March. Sweden too had a large jump at +8 despite its controversial approach to the virus. Meanwhile, Portugal’s senior ruling coalition member gained 4 percentage points, a far smaller increase, and one that is quite close to the margin of error of most polls.
Apart from these four, three other countries saw a corona bump, Austria, Poland and France. However, this bump has already disappeared in Austria and Poland and in France, the bump only affected the president’s approval ratings with no difference being seen between presidential polls taken before and after the outbreak.
In Italy, the junior coalition party, Partito Democratico, has also seen an improvement in its polling numbers, however this improvement has been a gradual increase since January, rather than a clear bump around the time of the outbreak. And the major coalition party, which is also the one associated with the Prime Minister, saw no such jump, while the opposition party Fraterni di Italia has also been increasing since the previous general election, implying that these movements cannot be put down to the coronavirus.
While three of the reamining four countries which have seen a serious outbreak, Spain, Romania, and Belgium, have seen no bump in support, despite Spain and Belgium having very serious outbreaks. In the remaining case of Ireland, their outbreak has been much later than the others so there have not been any polls produced since reaching the 20 cases per million threshold, making it impossible to determine any changes.
So overall, across the EU, the impact on party support from the coronavirus seems to be minimal. There is a clear case for Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden having a significant, persistent corona bump. In Portugal, there has likely been a minor bump but elsewhere, the countries who did see a bump have already seen it disappear and most countries, including those who saw a less severe outbreak of the virus, have seen no polling changes that correlate with the corona outbreak. And while any impact on elections in the Netherlands and Germany are of course significant, the Europe-wide impact has been very localised.
