The most profound indicator of voter preferences in the 2024 super election year—when Europe will see nine parliamentary elections along with June’s EU election—is citizens’ personal perception of crisis. Researchers anticipate that five key social, economic, and political crises are set to shape electoral outcomes more than any traditional political camps or narratives,
A recent report, published by the European Council of Foreign Relations (ECFR), an European foreign and security policy think tank, identified the ‘crisis tribes’—five major constituencies across the European Union—according to which of the EU’s biggest challenges has most impacted to how they look at the future.
The researchers claim that dividing the EU electorate into these crisis tribes grants a much better insight into voter preferences and possible election outcomes than the traditional Left and Right, liberal and conservative, globalist and nationalist, or Eurofederalist and Eurosceptic dichotomies.
The initial survey was carried out with over 15,000 respondents in nine EU member states (Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Spain), representing more than 75% of the bloc’s population, as well as the UK and Switzerland. Taking into account the primary trends in countries not polled, the researchers then extrapolated the results to cover the EU’s entire voting age population of 372 million people.
The five ‘crisis tribes’
While noting that most people are focusing on more than one crisis going on in Europe, if grouped solely by the issue concerning them the most—more specifically, which issue “has most changed the way you look at your future?”—five major groups emerge, each of them heavily influencing foreseeable voting patterns in 2024.
Perhaps surprisingly, the largest tribe—of up to 73.7 million voters— is centered around the COVID-19 pandemic. This constituency focuses on how the pandemic exposed the vulnerability of national health systems and of the globalized world, as well as how it changed the way they see—and even trust—figures of authority and mainstream politics.
The second largest tribe is made of those most concerned about climate change (73.6 million), followed by the global economic turmoil (70.9 million), immigration (58 million), and the war in Ukraine (49.6 million). This leaves only about 46 million EU voters who picked another issue or remained undecided and therefore outside of what the researchers call a ‘tribe.’
Naming these constituencies ‘crisis tribes’ is not accidental, the report notes. Individuals belonging to each are likely to exhibit a “tribe-like mentality” when encountering arguments or people from their own or a rival tribe, the report claims. These shared characteristics might not be immediately obvious on the surface due to the numerous overlaps.
Like all tribes, they share a common origin story. They share forms of language and sensibilities. They have totems and leaders, and they have internal fractures.
The distribution of these tribes is uneven across Europe, with each having one or two centers or ‘capitals’ of its own.
Germany, for instance, is by far the heart of the migration tribe and the only surveyed country where the issue came out on top of the list—unsurprising after nearly a decade of failed “Wir schaffen das!” Despite its high numbers of illegal migrants, Italy (along with Portugal) is most concerned with the economic crises, while Denmark is the capital of the climate tribe. The war in Ukraine dominates the Baltics, especially Estonia, while the COVID crisis was deemed as the most transformative challenge in the UK, Romania, and, above all, Spain.
Demographic trends also change with geography, but across Europe, young people (18-29-year-olds) are generally more preoccupied with the climate crisis and the economic crisis, while the over-70s are most mobilized by immigration and the war in Ukraine. While the younger generations worry mostly about their future and do not seem to care about Ukraine, the researchers note that the older generations’ opposite stance is probably shaped by their Cold War experiences.
The pandemic is the only issue that appears to be evenly distributed across all generations, and it is the number one crisis of concern to the youth in Spain and Romania. Women are also much more likely to pick COVID as the most profound European crisis, while men are overrepresented among the members of the migration tribe.
Ideological poles: climate and migration
If translated into party politics, a few interesting trends emerge. The two most politically mobilized tribes are undoubtedly the climate and migration groups (as shown by the recent Dutch elections), both of which are “particularly sensitive to the temporal dimension of politics,” meaning both groups believe that their priority crises will have irreversible effects if specific policies are not enacted today. These groups also have the least amount of overlap and are most engaged in ideological battles with each other, described by the authors as the clash of two ‘extinction rebellions.’
These two tribes, however, show very different patterns when it comes to long-term interests relative to who is currently in power. Members of the migration tribe tend to become immediately more relaxed about the issue once their preferred party gets into power and move on to other crises as their primary concern. This is why the migration tribe is relatively small in Italy, for instance, where economic concerns drive most to the ballots. While 66% of AfD and 63% of Reform UK supporters belong to the migration tribe, that number is just 17% in the case of the Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) and only 12% among Law and Justice (PiS) voters.
On the other hand, the behavior of the climate tribe is inverse. Members of that group don’t stop worrying about climate change when green parties are elected into power, in fact, their concerns get reinforced. In other words, anti-migration parties promise policy change and are thus seen as a solution to the migration crisis when elected—whether anything changes or not—while the green parties only highlight the problem and then use their enlarged platform to increase their environmentalist doom-messaging, thereby securing an enduring voter base.
Pro- and anti-government: war and economy
The pro- and anti-government dimension is usually present within the climate and migration tribes, but as we’ve seen, it largely depends on who is in power at any given moment, so the primary identifier in their struggle remains the Left-Right ideological dichotomy. This is not so strong in the case of the economy and war tribes who care much less about the traditional Left-Right divide, and are more likely to consistently back or oppose their governments, whoever is in charge.
The economy tribe is the most anti-government constituency of all and, consequently, the group that’s least likely to even vote, since it dislikes every major party regardless of political orientation. The researchers believe this general apathy comes from the lack of any major difference between the austerity measures implemented by left-wing and right-wing governments after the 2008 financial crisis as well as the recent years’ economic downturns, which made around one-third of this group considering abandoning politics while turning the rest into consistent protest-voters.
On the other hand, the war tribe is not only the oldest group in Europe but also the most pro-government, regardless of who’s at the helm. They believe helping Ukraine is a moral and strategic imperative and back whoever promises—and delivers—on this front, which primarily means large establishment parties.
The great outlier: COVID
Interestingly, the COVID tribe is an outlier in both regards. it’s not Left or Right, and it’s not pro- or anti-government—and not even Europhile like the climate and war or Eurosceptic like the migration and economy tribes—but a mix of all elements.
In fact, the COVID tribe is divided into several factions based on the specific country, the pandemic measures taken, and the governing party that had to deal with it. In the short term—during the height of the pandemic—establishment parties seemed to benefit most from the virus. It seemed to create a bipartisan, pro-government tribe through the call for social unity, which regarded all who questioned public policy—specifically populists—as dangerous.
Gradually, however, more and more members of the COVID tribe morphed into an especially anti-establishment, populist faction whose trust in authority and mainstream politics was decimated by the pandemic measures. The so-called ‘anti-lockdown’ and ‘anti-vax’ (as well as ‘anti-war’) constituencies might be the newest voter groups in Europe, the research notes, but they appear to be particularly strong political identities.
What does this mean for 2024?
First, the increased relevance of these crisis tribes as opposed to more traditional voting patterns (again, only 12% of EU voters don’t fit into any ‘tribal’ category) means there’s a power shift going on, and mainstream politics is on the losing side. Large, establishment parties are usually ‘catch-all crisis parties’ that try to focus on most if not all major crises which then makes their election messaging less effective.
“Lacking a single crisis constituency, they may face difficulty enthusing their supporters to vote in the European election,” says the report, while those who focus only on migration or climate, for instance, have a much better chance of bringing out the voters.
Perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, the researchers also note that the 2024 election is shaping up to be the migration tribe’s biggest moment. Once, immigration used to be a major rallying point in national politics and less so in EU elections. But now Brussels has ‘Europeanized’ the issue by attempting to adopt the infamous Migration Pact, which may mobilize members of this tribe in June.
Incidentally, the migration tribe is the only group in which the majority (51%) believes the EU will likely fall apart in the next 20 years, precisely because they feel that Brussels increasingly disregards the member states’ sovereignty while distancing itself from the people’s point of view. The economy and pandemic tribes were more divided about the EU’s future, and only the war tribe (55%) and the climate tribe (61%) said it was more likely that the Union would hold for at least two more decades.
“Each of Europe’s five crises will have many lives but it is at the ballot box where they will live, die, or be resurrected,” the report concludes. The next six months promise to test the ‘five tribes’ hypothesis to its breaking point.
