Italy was among the countries going to the polls on Sunday, 26 May. The electoral system provides for five constituencies, which however are not relevant for seat allocation among parties, as this is done merely on the basis of votes received nationwide. Furthermore, there is a 4% legal threshold. In addition to the European Parliament (EP) elections, municipal elections were held just under half of 7,915 Italian municipalities – involving roughly a third of Italian voters. Campaign and competitors In June 2018, after the non-decisive results of the general elections held in March 2018, the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the...

  Introduction The Netherlands and the United Kingdom were the first member states to hold European elections on Thursday 23 May 2019 ahead of other European Union (EU) member states which followed on 24 May or later. One may have expected that the Netherlands and the UK would set a ‘Eurosceptic’ cast over the EP elections to be held in the remaining 26 EU member states but this was not the case for the Netherlands. Actually, quite the opposite happened. The big winner was the pro-EU Labour Party (PvdA) which won the largest vote share of 18.9 per cent, up 9.5...

Over six million voters were eligible to select 17 members of the European Parliament (EP) in Bulgaria under a proportional representation system with preferential voting in a single nation-wide constituency. 318 candidates were nominated by thirteen political parties, eight coalitions and six initiative committees. Voting in the EP elections is mandatory in Bulgaria, but there is no penalty for not turning out to vote. Furthermore, voting can take place only in person in polling districts and there is no postal voting. These voting arrangements, combined with the lack of any new political formations to mobilize habitual non-voters and the...

Introduction Three contextual factors are important for understanding the results of the election in the Czech Republic. Also, the party system has changed dramatically in the recent decade showing the unprecedented decline of the old political parties and the emergence of different anti-establishment challengers after a series of corruption scandals, government instability coupled with the Great Recession (Balík, Hloušek 2016). The EP election took place in times of exceptional economic prosperity. The Czech Republic has experienced a record increase in salaries and has been enjoying the lowest level of unemployment among the EU member states. Last but not least, the...

Introduction The elections for the European Parliament in Finland took place in the aftermath of the national parliamentary elections that took place on 14 April 2019. In this election, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) with 17.7% of the votes narrowly edged out the right-wing populist Finns party (PS) with 17.5% in second and the conservative National Coalition Party (KOK) in third with 17.0% of the votes. Consequently, the election campaign for the EP elections was rather short. The debate centred on the possible success of the Eurosceptic PS, since the party was expected to ride on the wave of Eurosceptic parties...