Carolina Plescia and Sylvia Kritzinger Introduction Austria went to the polls on Sunday, May 25th to elect 18 members of the European Parliament, one less than in 2009 due to the EU membership of Croatia. The electoral system used for the European elections is the same as for the national elections but instead of 39 constituencies there is only a single national constituency. The electoral system is a proportional system with a threshold of 4% and the possibility for the voters to express a preference vote for a single candidate, a possibility that has been rarely used by Austrians (Müller et...

Carolina Plescia and David Johann Introduction Germany went to the polls on Sunday, May 25th, to elect 96 members of the European parliament, by far the country in Europe that elects most delegates. The 96 members were elected by a pure proportional electoral system, a real novelty for nationwide elections in Germany, where the minimum threshold has always been 5% for the national elections and 3% for the European elections. This change is the consequence of the Constitutional Court’s decision last February to eliminate the electoral threshold. The election campaign Despite Germany’s leading role in Europe and the importance of Europe for Germany,...

Nina Liljeqvist and Kristian Voss Finland Populist and EU-critical Finns Party (PS) were expected to pose a serious challenge to the established parties in the Finnish election to the European Parliament last Sunday. Having achieved tremendous success in the national elections in 2011, and continuing to ride high on the Euroskeptic sentiments this spring, the PS aimed to increase their number of seats in the European Parliament from one to three, with polls having predicted that the party would receive as much as 21% of the votes. However, the Euroskeptic sensation never happened in Finland. This may be partly explained...

Tom Verthé In Belgium the elections for the European Parliament have in the past always been held together with the regional elections. Because of this particularity the European elections have long since been considered second-order elections in Belgium (Reif & Schmitt, 1980; Van Aelst & Lefevere, 2012). Because of the split in the party system since the 70s, the regional elections in Belgium are clearly a first-order election since, for the larger part, there is no difference in terms of voting population and party offer between the regional and federal elections (Russo & Deschouwer, 2014). Federal (and even European) elections...

Konstantinos Athanasiadis Abstention ruled supreme in the European elections held on the divided island of Cyprus (divided between the Republic of Cyprus and the so called "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus" recognised only by Turkey). According to the Ministry of the Interior more than the half of the electorate (56%) (Ministry of the Interior 2014) opted for abstention from the electoral process as a token of growing discomfort against the political system and the austerity measures put forward since last year. Paradoxically though, the high abstention rate provided a crucial lifeline to the political system of Cyprus as it enhanced...