Is the Brussels Bubble becoming less optimistic?

The erosion of the political centre

The June 2024 European Parliament election marked the continuation of a trend. At every European Parliament election since 1999, centrist parties lose ground to the political extremes – mainly to the right.

NB: I define the ‘centrist’ bloc as the centre-right (European People’s Party (EPP)), the centre-left (Socialists & Democrats (S&D)), the liberals (Renew), and the greens (Greens).

Although the rate of seat loss varies from election to election, the underlying trend is the same. The centre erodes, and the political margins are reinforced.

One theory is that voters punish the incumbent centrist in a calculated way for worsening living conditions. This could explain the steep drop in centrist support between 2019 – 2024, potentially the response to the economic (and social) fallout of COVID-19.

But actually, the steepest decline in centrist votes came between the 2009 and 2014 elections. 2014 was two election cycles after the onset of the 2008 economic crisis. One might have expected the drop between 2004 and 2009 (in the midst of the economic turndown) to be steeper than 2009 and 2014.

So, rational, economic considerations alone probably do not explain the public’s turn to the margins.

Vibes and public optimism

‘Vibes’ play a major role in shaping if, and how, we vote. But because vibes are so difficult to define, so latent, and so stitched into (and dependent upon) other parts of our lives, we tend to underestimate just how significant a role they play.

A key vibe ‘axis’ for deciding how to vote is optimistic/pessimistic. If centrists hold power and things are perceived to be going well, one probably feels quite optimistic and is likely to endorse the centrist status-quo. If things are perceived to be going badly and one feels pessimistic, one is more likely to vote for change, in this case, the margins (who, by the way, are excellent at tapping into pessimism to jack up their share of votes).

The Eurobarometer, an EU-run public opinion survey tracks how optimistic EU citizens feel. Here is graph of the public’s level of optimism across the Union since 1996:

NB: The graph measures the difference between the optimistic (‘better’) and pessimistic (‘worse’) answers.

I took the responses to each survey just prior to European Parliament election and increased the y-axis (the ‘high’ on the Eurobarometer’s graph above of 27% is still relatively pretty low...). The graph below captures a snapshot of public optimism going into each election, and how it changes between parliaments.

The trajectories of public optimism and the share of centrist seats (shown below) is partially, but not wholly, in-sync. Two contradictions stick out:

Between 2009 and 2014, optimism rises relatively steeply, while the centrists see a major drop in seats. From 2014 to 2019, optimism trends upwards, but the centrist seat share lilts downwards.

So, it is not watertight, but over 25 years, the underlying trend seems to hold. A growing sense of public pessimism coincides with more seats for the political extreme.

Political elite optimism

I thought it would be interesting to see if the EU political elite shares the European public’s growing sense of pessimism.

I wrote a code to use vectorisation, a form of Natural Language Processing, to scrape the European Parliament election manifestos of all centrist EU-level political parties from 1999 – 2024. Based on a basket of words I selected around ‘optimism’ and ‘progress’ on one hand, and ‘pessimism’, and ‘decline/stagnation’ on the other, the code identifies and tallies the most semantically-similar terms used in the manifestos. This allows us to track how frequently optimistic and pessimistic words were used by the different political parties at different times, and how the ratio of optimism to pessimism has changed over time. (NB: I did not include national level EU election manifestos).

The results show that, broadly, parties are still more optimistic than pessimistic, but not strikingly so.

NB: PES is the political party of the S&D group, ALDE a political party of the Renew group.

I do not believe these EU-level manifestos are drafted to appeal to the public. That is what national party manifestos are for. I spoke to some people who have drafted such manifestos, and they confirmed as much. These documents are primarily drafted to set internal, EU-level group positions, to attract new members in the next Parliament, and to present a common party agenda to national leaders from the same political family.

But these manifestos do offer insights into the elite’s political worldview. If I were to speculate:

The Greens are – by far – the most pessimistic. This may be because awareness of climate change has risen dramatically, but remedial political action has arguably been slow. Understandably, this would create a sense of pessimism and frustration. It may also be because they are the party in the centrist bloc closest to the political margins, so may be the least optimistic about, or content with, the centrist status-quo.

The liberals have the greatest oscillation between optimism and pessimism over the 25 years. This may be because the group is a broad church, comprising social and economic liberals, so we can expect changes in opinions and views as the different factions gain majorities and agenda-setting powers within the group.

Socialist optimism sees a decline from 2009 – 2014, just as the liberals and EPP become more optimistic. This may be because, as they are more ideologically opposed to economic liberalism, they were still frustrated at the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and the policy response of financial bailouts.

EPP levels seem to fluctuate the least over time. This may be because they have remained the largest group in Parliament and are perhaps are the most small-c ‘conservative’ in many regards, so have most interest in, and instinct to, maintain the status-quo, and the least in complaining or throwing out their playbook.

Conclusion

Politics is messy, societies are complex, and people are irrational. We should not draw too many conclusions. But the above does raise some interesting observations.

If we take a simple average of the optimistic/pessimistic ratio of all parties prior to each election, and plot it against the levels of public optimism at the same moment, two trends emerge.

Firstly, the changes of public and elite optimism follow the same contours (down until 2009, then up until 2019, then down again in 2024), But the rapid uptick in elite optimism between 2014 and 2019 stands at odds with the corresponding, more gentle increase in public optimism.

Secondly, while public optimism between 1999 and 2024 peaks at 27% and bottoms out at 9%, elite optimism reaches a high of 44% and never drops beneath 22%. So, across 25 years, even at their most pessimistic, the political elite is pretty much more optimistic than the voters they represent are at their ‘lowest’.

Some may argue these are signs that the mainstream political elite views the world through rose-tinted goggles. That it is out of touch with the public. That it should drop its panglossian outlook and better reflect public opinion. I believe the opposite. History shows that when the political elite adopts an optimistic, progress-oriented mindset, it can drastically improve the societal and economic lot of those it represents.

In the next posts, I will present an economic case for why the Brussels Bubble should re-discover its sense of optimism, and a public affairs strategy for how it can do so.