Who Says It’s Urgent? A Discursive Analysis of “Emergency” Frames in the European Parliament

Alongside its role as co-legislator, the European Parliament (EP) exercises a range of powers including the adoption of resolutions, opinions, and recommendations. As such, it plays a central role in the democratic architecture of the EU polity, acting as a chamber that echoes the voices of citizens, within the Union and, at times, on the global stage. This representative role is particularly salient in times of emergency. Crises have long been viewed as pivotal moments in the EU integration process (Leucht, Seidel, & Warlouzet, 2023; Warlouzet, 2014), often serving as periods of policy innovation and institutional adaptation. For Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), such moments present both opportunities and constraints. On the one hand, emergencies allow MEPs to advance their priorities and shape the EU political agenda. On the other hand, crisis governance often shifts decision-making toward intergovernmental arenas, sidelining the EP in favour of rapid, executive-driven responses by Member States, with the EU serving as a platform for coordination and support (Bartenstein & Wessels, 2023). Against this backdrop, and drawing on a structured database of EP debates (Mochtak, 2025), this paper investigates how MEPs frame emergencies in their discourses. It asks the following questions : RQ1. How is emergency framed within the European Parliament? This research question is deployed in three subquestions analysed through descriptive quantitative methods: RQ1.1. Which public policy domains are associated with emergency frames in the EP ? RQ1.2. Who deploys emergency frames in the EP ? RQ.1.3. When are these frames used? A second research question, focusing on a particular policy domain\event identified as relevant or puzzling through the quantiative analysis (to be selected), asks : RQ2. How do MEPs use emergency frames to justify political action? This second part of the analysis (not developed further in this document) has an exploratory purpose and aims to investigate several related issues, including: whose interests are represented through emergency frames (de Wilde, 2016); what are the object of emergency (an emergency or crisis of what?); the attribution of responsibility (who or what is to blame, and whether causes are exogenous or endogenous); and the range of proposed responses (which solutions are put forward by MEPs to address the emergency). A further option is also to consider the role of emotions and tone in framing processes (Sanchez Salgado & Gürkan, 2025).

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Defacqz, S., Reymond, E., & Laloux, T. (2026, May 26). Who Says It’s Urgent? A Discursive Analysis of “Emergency” Frames in the European Parliament. CEE Research Days, Villers-la-Ville. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-021-00155-9