Enrique Hernández and Marta Fraile Once more, and as is typical in Spain (see for instance Font and Torcal 2012) the main messages and discourses of the electoral campaign were made in national (and not in European) terms. Elections took place when the incumbent government (Partido Popular, PP: conservative) was in the middle of its mandate and had already implemented a number of controversial political decisions. On the top of that, there was a general climate of distrust and disaffection with political elites and traditional political parties without precedents in Spain. The Electoral Campaign The most relevant topic of the campaign (and...

Sorina Soare Over the past 25 years, Romania has experienced a complex process of democratization with moments of crisis, economic stagnation, radical nationalism and extreme polarization (Bunce and Wolchick 2006, Soare 2011). Despite Romania’s admission into NATO in 2004, and into the European Union in 2007, the political situation remained unstable, with recurrent institutional clashes between the President, Prime Minister and Parliament, such as in 2007 and 2012 (Gherghina and Mişcoiu 2013) and tough austerity measures that fuelled social tensions. Sorina Soare is a lecturer of Comparative Politics. She holds a PhD in political science from the Universitè libre de Bruxelles...

Andrija Henjak European parliament elections in Croatia took place only a year after the special EP elections held in 2013 just before Croatia’s accession to the EU. Croatian entry into the EU, unlike the accession of other countries of central and Eastern Europe in 2004 and 2007, was not an event market by palpable enthusiasm and high expectations, but rather, it was market with subdued optimism or indifference. It was seen by the public both as a chance to change the direction of the stagnant economy and improve the functioning of institutions, as well as an inevitable development with uncertain...

di Federico Vegetti Introduction The result of the European elections of 2014 in Hungary is all but surprising. The government party Fidesz got the absolute majority of the votes, the left-wing opposition appears to be more and more fragmented, while the far-right Jobbik remains fairly stable, far from the peaks of popularity obtained by ideologically similar parties in other European countries. However, this apparent calm conceals a quite discouraging political climate, from both a national and a European perspective. The turnout went down to 28.9%, 7 points lower than the previous EP election in 2009, and about half of the turnout...

Sorina Soare Bulgaria, which formerly belonged to the Communist bloc, entered the EU in 2007. Nevertheless, compared to the other countries of the former Warsaw Pact, the Bulgarian process of European integration was carried out with 3 years of delay; as demonstrated by Noucheva and Bechev (2008), the reasons Bulgaria as well as Romania lagged behind in meeting the EU accession criteria had to do with a set of domestic factors linked to a tortuous democratization process, with relevant veto players and institutional structures that obstructed democratic and market reforms for almost a decade. Despite the acceleration of political and...