Managing the reputational costs of agreeing to joint debt: the framing strategies of government parties on NextGenerationEU

How do government parties sell a delicate policy compromise agreed at the EU level that necessitates making sacrifices to their long-standing preferences? In this article, we explore this more universal predicament through a crucial case study of the parliamentary debate on NextGenerationEU (NGEU) in the German Bundestag. We argue that the government parties faced differential reputational costs by agreeing to a fiscal stimulus package built on joint debt and hence adopted different framing strategies to justify their consent to NGEU. Our empirical analysis, resting on a systematic coding of eight plenary debates, lends support to the expectation that the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), which had traditionally rejected fiscal risk- and burden-sharing, were significantly more insistent than their Social Democratic coalition partner on the exceptional and temporary nature of NGEU. More generally, our findings underscore the strategic agency that government parties have in managing the politicization potential of EU decisions.