This article investigates the 'conflict parabola' of the negotiations between EU member states during the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis reopened the foundational controversy over cross-national solidarity under economic adversities. After a peak of conflict in March-April 2020, the political climate gradually shifted from antagonism to appeasement, creating the conditions necessary for the adoption of the Next Generation EU plan. Building on the negative experiences of past crises, some EU leaders engaged in a strategy of 'polity maintenance', i.e. keeping the EU polity together, regardless of interest-based divisions. This strategy mainly rested on public communication. The article documents both conflict and appeasement by analysing a corpus of leaders' quotes drawn from the press (covering eight countries) and a corpus of speeches by Angela Merkel. The Chancellor made a high political investment in EU polity maintenance, presenting European cohesion as part and parcel of Germany's national interest.

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This article looks at how different electoral competition dynamics can result in differentiated party positioning on childcare and family policy. Italy and Spain are compared using a most similar case design. The presence of women in politics, the socioeconomic profiles of the voters of the two main left-wing and right-wing Italian and Spanish parties, and opinions on traditional norms of motherhood explain different policy trajectories and higher incentives for the conservative party in Spain to converge toward the social democratic party in more progressive views of family policy.

The Just Transition Fund was introduced in 2021 as part of the European Union’s Green New Deal and aims to assuage some of the painful social consequences of the green transition. Relying on the Multiple Streams Framework, this article reconstructs the JTF’s institution. It identifies 2018–2019 as a key conjuncture in the European Union when various social, ideational and political preconditions enabling policy innovation converged. Subsequently, the need to publicly finance a just transition emerged in relation to some Eastern European states’ reluctance to work towards the 2050 climate neutrality target. After a Polish-led configuration of actors propelled the JTF onto the agenda, the von der Leyen Commission assumed the task of designing a less transparently self-serving policy instrument necessary to garner wider political support. The final JTF emerged from the interplay between two policy entrepreneurs in the context of the negotiations on the 2021–2027 European Union budget and the dislocations provoked by the COVID-19 crisis.