The 2019 EP Elections across Europe

The 2019 EP Elections across Europe

The 2019 EP Elections across Europe

The campaign for the 2019 European Parliamentary election in the United Kingdom did not kick off until the last moment as the country’s government had not planned to take part in the election. The UK was originally scheduled to leave the European Union on the 29th of March, but extensions of Article 50 – the legal and political process for leaving the European Union – in late March and mid-April meant that the UK had to participate in the European Parliamentary elections under EU law. Despite this, it was not until the 7th of May that UK Prime Minister...

  The election in Slovenia for eight European Parliament (EP) seats took place on May 26. For the EP elections, Slovenia is considered a single electoral constituency. The election is based on a system of proportional representation – it is obligatory to vote for a party list and optional to also give a preference vote to any of the individual candidates on the selected party list. EP seats are distributed according to the d’Hondt method. There is no formal electoral threshold. All stated, together with the official introduction of a gender quota system, has proven to represent a fairly effective...

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...

The eighth Spanish European Parliament Election (EPE) marked the end of an electoral cycle that began one month before (on April 26th, 2019) with the General Election in which the incumbent Socialist Party (PSOE) won a plurality of seats. However, at the time of the EPE a parliamentary agreement to elect a new national government had not been reached yet, since most parties were eager to postpone this decision until after the election. On top of that, during the EPE campaign Catalan politicians who had organized an independence referendum on October 2017 and ran as candidates in the General...

Introduction Concurrent to regional-level elections in the state of Bremen and local election in nine out of sixteen states, Germany elected their share of representatives for the ninth legislative term of the European Parliament (EP) on May 26th. With 96 seats, Germany contributes the largest number of politicians to the EP. These parliamentarians are elected based on a proportional electoral system and in a single constituency. Plus, for the second time, there is no legal threshold for parties to win seats which means that due to the large number of seats available already around 0.6 per cent of the votes...