Geographic variation in COVID-19 protests in the EU-27: Actors, grievances, and protest frames during a public health crisis

REGROUP Research Paper no. 16 (2025)

The COVID-19 pandemic put public health, economic activity, and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms under severe strain. Existing research has studied the ensuing protests, predominately individuals’ likelihood to have participated and the determinants of such participation. The present paper analyzes COVID-19-related protest events across the EU-27 space and examines the observed grievances, actors, mobilization patterns, and protest frames, with protest events as the unit of analysis. Relying on an analytical distinction between economic and cultural grievances, I find that left-wing protesters contested the economic effects of the crisis, while right-wing protests mobilized around cultural concerns about freedom and the importance of science. Non-partisan actors were behind much of the observed protesting and that a “rallying” effect was small and limited to cultural protests. On the Green-Alternative-Libertarian/Traditional-Authoritarian-Nationalist (GAL-TAN) dimension, GAL actors remained relatively inactive, while TAN actors mobilized around cultural grievances. I also observe regional effects, such as the preponderance of cultural protests in Germany and the Netherlands and of economic protests in Southern Europe, and a positive association between protest incidence and centrist/technocratic governments. The paper further discusses the activation of other pre-pandemic cleavages (for instance, ethnoreligious ones) and the most pertinent repertoires of contention observed across the EU-27; a noteworthy finding concerns the diversity and, quite often, the country-specific characteristics of COVID protests. Lastly, a critical discourse and qualitative-interpretive frame analyses of press releases by protest actors in France, Cyprus, and Greece demonstrates the limits of a simultaneous activation of economic and cultural dimensions during the pandemic.

This paper is part of work package 3.