We know a great deal about what immigration does to European elections. Two decades of research have established that attitudes towards newcomers predict vote choice, welfare preferences and Euroscepticism, and that radical-right parties have built much of their success on the issue.
We know much less about the other direction. Yet for roughly half the European Union — the eastern and southern periphery — the politically salient migration story is not (only) who is arriving. It is who is leaving, and not coming back.
The question
Free movement is a founding promise of the EU and remains genuinely popular. But it has two faces, and they are politicised in different places. In receiving countries, free movement gets attacked as immigration. In sending countries, politicians increasingly attack it as emigration — as the slow draining of a country’s young, educated and employable, usually bundled with anxieties about low fertility and ageing.
The rhetoric is not subtle. Viktor Orbán has told the Hungarian parliament that hundreds of thousands of adults of childbearing age left because they could not build a future at home. Giorgia Meloni made much the same argument in Italy before becoming prime minister. In Portugal, Spain, Greece and Romania, opposition parties of very different stripes have used departure figures as an indictment of whoever is in office.
What nobody had established was whether any of this reaches voters. Most existing work infers the political effect of emigration from regional data — depopulation rates against election results — which cannot distinguish between two very different mechanisms: the people who leave were different voters, or the people who stay became angrier.
Togther with my friend and colleague Anna Kyriazi from the University of Milan, we used individual-level survey data instead. The source is an original survey fielded by Gallup in the summer of 2021 across fifteen European countries as part of the SOLID project, funded by an ERC Synergy Grant. Around 1,000 respondents per country. We restricted the analysis to the nine countries in the sample where emigration is actually a live concern: Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Spain.
The key question was direct. Thinking about freedom of movement in the EU, how concerned are you about your fellow citizens emigrating to other EU countries? Zero to ten.
Concern moves votes, but not where you would guess
Our first expectation was the intuitive one: worry about emigration should push voters towards the radical flanks, left and right, since mainstream parties generally defend free movement.
That is not what the pooled data show. Across the nine countries, higher concern about emigration is significantly associated with not voting for the conservative party family. It shows no average association with voting radical right. And it is not simply generalised disaffection either — worried voters are no more likely to abstain or spoil their ballot than anyone else.
The conservative result makes sense once you sit with it. Conservative parties in these countries have generally championed market liberalisation, austerity and privatisation, the policies plausibly blamed for the brain drain in the first place. Voters who feel left behind by departure punish the parties they associate with the departure.
Is trust the mechanism?
The finding I find most interesting concerns incumbents, and it only appears when you stop treating political trust as a nuisance variable.
Taken on its own, concern about emigration has no relationship with voting for the parties in government. Add political trust to the model and a significant negative association appears. Add the interaction between the two, and the picture resolves: concern about emigration damages incumbents only among voters who trust institutions.
Trust normally works as a resource for whoever is in power — trusting citizens support the government. What emigration concern does is spend that resource down. Among high-trust voters, rising worry about emigration steadily erodes the probability of supporting the incumbent; among low-trust voters, there was not much support there to lose. The pattern is sharpest in Hungary, Latvia, Romania and Spain.
This is a specific, and rather demanding, kind of accountability. It requires voters who believe governments can act. Cynics do not punish anyone.
The country-by-country picture is a mess, productively
Disaggregating by country, the radical right does benefit — in Greece (Golden Dawn), Poland (Kukiz’15), Ireland (Aontú) and Hungary (Jobbik and Mi Hazánk). So the standard story is not wrong, just partial.
But emigration concern also helps SYRIZA in Greece, Lewica in Poland, the Five Star Movement in Italy, and a socialist-led alliance in Hungary. And in Hungary it significantly hurts Fidesz — a radical-right party that has governed from 2010 to 2026 and presided over a great deal of emigration.
The pattern underneath the noise is not ideological. It is positional. Emigration concern never once helped a large centrist party with mass appeal. It always helped somebody small, niche and out of office.
That suggests emigration behaves less like an ideological issue with a natural owner and more like an available grievance — a stick that any party outside government can pick up, provided the local conditions are right. Which parties pick it up, and whether it sticks, has to be established case by case.
Where the concern comes from in the first place
All of that treats worry about emigration as the thing doing the explaining. It leaves open the prior question: who is worried, and why?
I take that up in a chapter for Emigration and the State, edited by Christof Roos and Anna Kyriazi (Manchester University Press). Same survey, but all fifteen countries rather than the nine — so Austria, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden are back in, and concern about emigration becomes the outcome rather than the predictor.
The expectation there was, again, the intuitive one. Political trust should work as a heuristic for risk: if you think your institutions are competent, you should worry less about what free movement is doing to your country. That is broadly how trust behaves in the immigration literature, where trusting citizens perceive less threat from newcomers.
The data say the opposite. Higher political trust goes with more concern about emigration, not less, and the association holds after controlling for age, gender, education, household finances, ideology and identity. It shows up in thirteen of the fifteen countries — Germany and Greece are the exceptions — across countries with very different migration histories, from long-standing destinations in the northwest to the new sending countries of the east.
One reading is that trusting your national political system is bound up with valuing the national community, and if you value it, people leaving it registers as a loss rather than as a career move. Krastev and Holmes make a version of this argument: where the young leave in large numbers, those who stay end up feeling like losers regardless of how well they are personally doing. Consistent with that, the association is strongest among right-wing respondents. What it is not about is identity in the narrow sense — the pattern is just as clear among people who feel European as among those who feel exclusively national, which I did not expect.
Put the two studies side by side and political trust does double duty. It raises the level of concern about emigration, and it is the condition under which that concern turns into a vote against the government. The trusting citizen both worries more and punishes more.
I want to be careful about how much weight that carries. They are two analyses with different samples and different dependent variables, not a single tested causal chain, and both rest on one cross-section from one summer. But the direction is suggestive, and it points somewhere uncomfortable for the standard account. The political risk of emigration does not sit with the alienated and the cynical. It sits with the citizens who still believe the state can do something.
Two publications lie behind this post.
The article is Emigration as an Electoral Issue: Public Concern and Political Choice in Eastern and Southern Europe, written with Anna Kyriazi and published open access in Government and Opposition (DOI).
The chapter is Political Trust and Attitudes towards Emigration across the EU, forthcoming in Christof Roos and Anna Kyriazi (eds), Emigration and the State (Manchester University Press).
Both draw on the survey fielded by Gallup in 2021 for the SOLID project, supported by the European Research Council under Synergy Grant 810356.