How can the EU prevent a domestic backlash when imposing rule-of-law sanctions on a member state? Drawing on a survey experiment in Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland, Soso Makaradze, Michael Blauberger and Gabriele Spilker show that the way sanctions are communicated can play a critical role in how they are perceived by the public.

In 2021, the EU linked respect for the rule of law in member states to sound financial management of the EU budget and made the allocation of cohesion funds to member states conditional on their respect for the rule of law and liberal democratic principles.

On 27 April 2022, the European Commission officially activated this financial conditionality mechanism against Hungary. Since then, Hungarian government officials have frequently condemned the mechanism as an act of “reprisal and punishment” against Hungary for its differing position on migration. Research on international sanctions has long documented these strategies of targeted governments seeking to “rally (support) around the flag”.

We wanted to know whether there is anything the EU can do to counter targeted governments’ attempts to delegitimise the EU’s rule-of-law conditionality measures in this way. We were also interested in the conditions under which citizens in the targeted country would be willing to accept rule of law sanctions and/or to attribute blame to their government rather than to the EU.

To answer these questions, we designed a conjoint survey experiment that was fielded in three EU member states (Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria as a control case) shortly before the 2023 parliamentary elections in Poland.

Defending EU sanctions

To explore whether there is any potential for defending EU sanctions against target government narratives, we asked respondents (2,000 per country) where they would place the blame if the EU imposed rule-of-law sanctions against their country. Table 1 gives an overview of responses in Hungary and Poland by political affiliation.

Table 1: Who is to blame for sanctions?

Note: For more information, see the authors’ accompanying paper in European Union Politics.

As expected, a clear partisan divide emerges: government supporters would blame the EU for sanctions, while opposition supporters would mainly blame the government. Importantly, however, those respondents who did not clearly identify themselves with either the government or the opposition mostly blamed the government for sanctions.

This group of non-aligned respondents was particularly interesting to us because their opinions were not polarised along partisan lines and, thus, most likely to still be open to other influences. Therefore, we next wanted to examine which sanction features may impact the public acceptance of EU sanctions in targeted member states and in which direction.

Communication about sanctions matters

Most existing research on how to mitigate the risk of public backlash against international sanctions centres on the design of sanctions, such as how “targeted” sanctions are and whether the procedure for imposing sanctions is perceived to be fair. However, we focus on a different and less explored approach: public communication defending sanctions.

Starting from the hypothesis that the way sanctions are communicated may influence public perceptions of the EU’s enforcement measures in targeted member states, we included different framings (how EU sanctions are justified) and endorsement cues (by whom they are supported) in our conjoint survey experiment.

We asked respondents to evaluate hypothetical EU sanction packages, which varied in their design (how targeted they were and their procedural fairness) as well as in the way they were communicated. We fielded our experiment in Hungary and Poland, where the sanctions issue was highly salient and polarising in public debates, as well as in Bulgaria to control for the potential impact of this pre-treatment environment on our results.

How EU sanctions can be defended

Our analysis is consistent with other recent studies that find a rally around the flag effect is not an inevitable public response to EU enforcement actions. Instead, we find that both the design of EU sanctions and the way they are communicated can play a role in avoiding a public backlash in targeted member states.

Specifically, EU sanctions justified as measures to protect judicial independence and anti-corruption are perceived more positively by the public across a diverse domestic political landscape. Conversely, more socially and culturally contested values, such as non-discrimination of LGBTQI+ people, are less positively perceived as justifications for sanctions among our respondents. This suggests that focusing enforcement action on the defence of broadly shared norms might help to counter the efforts of targeted governments to portray EU sanctions as illegitimate foreign interference.

Furthermore, we find that public perception is influenced by information about who supports EU sanctions. By and large, scenarios in which the Commission is not alone in defending EU sanctions, but also receives active backing from other actors, such as domestic opposition parties and other EU member states, are viewed more positively by the public.

This suggests that enforcement efforts may be enhanced if both domestic and international actors use their voice to actively condemn violations in member states and support potential sanctions against them, rather than simply hiding behind the Commission.

However, there is an important caveat: while additional backing for sanctions can garner public support, it is effective only up to the point where support for sanctions starts to be perceived as ostracising the targeted member state. Contrary to our expectations, we find that unanimous support for sanctions from other member states led many respondents to feel that their country was being isolated or cornered on the international stage, which led to negative perceptions of these scenarios.

In sum, while a rally around the flag effect is not inevitable, the EU must strike a careful balance in enforcing the rule of law and fundamental values to minimise unintended consequences among the domestic public in targeted member states.

This article is based on the authors’ accompanying paper in European Union Politics and was prepared in the context of EUCHALLENGES, a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of Salzburg, co-funded by the European Commission under grant agreement no. 101127539. It received co-funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG—German Research Foundation) under Germany‘s Excellence Strategy—EXC-2035/1-390681379.

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.

Image credit: European Union.