Simona Kustec Lipicer EU was almost completely absent from the third Slovenian elections to the European Parliament. In times when official campaign for the EP elections took place domestic political crisis finally erupted in its whole complexity, although even before it no really visible signs of European elections atmosphere could be detected either within political parties, publics and nor even media. At the end election results in a way confirmed a typical second-order character of EP elections in a part that is related to the opposition and new alternative parties’ election success (Reif and Schmitt 1980), although 2014 EP election results...

Luana Russo France went to the polls on Sunday 25th May. France elected 74 MEPs (two more than in 2009) using a proportional system with a 5% electoral threshold and closed lists. Political parties establish the order of candidates on the lists; voters can only cast a vote for the list and not for individual candidates. Seats are thus attributed according to the order in which the candidates are presented on the list. The national territory is divided up into eight constituencies (including one for all of the overseas territories). The election campaign In France, as in several other European countries (e.g....

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,...

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...

Marco Lisi Portugal is experiencing a huge economic and social crisis that has not triggered – at least until now – significant changes in the political system, as it happened in Greece or Italy. The financial default of the Portuguese state led the three main parties – the Socialist Party (PS), the Social-Democratic Party (PSD) and the Social-Democratic Centre-Popular Party (CDS-PP) – to sign in April 2011 a three-year bailout with the so-called troika (International Monetary Fund, European Commission and European Central Bank). The memorandum of understanding established the implementation of structural reforms based on a neoliberal agenda in exchange...