This paper studies how ideology and economic conditions shape political preferences over digital money in the European Parliament. During the 9th Legislature, debates on cryptocurrency regulation and the ECB’s central bank digital currency—the digital euro—created a rare opportunity to observe the politicization of money and assess whether it generates political polarization. Drawing on 2,523 tweets from 224 MEPs, we combine sentiment analysis with an unsupervised text-scaling model to identify the ideological and economic determinants of support for private and public digital money, to trace how these preferences are connected, and through which mechanisms. We document a mirror-image pattern: anti-elitism, right-wing economic positioning, and exposure to inflation increase support for cryptocurrencies, while the same drivers underpin opposition to the digital euro. The text-scaling analysis shows that discourse polarizes around privacy and fears of ECB mandate expansion, raising broader concerns about the political acceptability of the digital euro. Taken together, the findings indicate that debates over ECB legitimacy have crystallized into a new cleavage opposing public and private digital money.
Under review – Working paper available below