Introduction On May 17, 2019, the campaign for the European Parliament election 2019 came to an abrupt halt in Austria. That evening, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the German magazine Der Spiegel released a video that resulted in one of the biggest national political scandals in Austrian history, now known as “Ibiza-gate”. In the video – secretly recorded shortly before the national election in 2017 – the FPÖ-party leader Heinz-Christian Strache and deputy leader Johann Gudenus revealed modes of illegally funding the FPÖ, promising government orders at inflated prices to a purported niece of a Russian oligarch in a...

A triple victory for Salvini: numerical (he becomes the center of gravity of the government); geographical (its party is now truly national, with a homogenous electoral support), strategic (he now has several options). Tab. 1 – Electoral results in Italy, 2014 and 2019 EP elections, 2018 legislative elections The geography of Salvini's success is in three numbers: compared to its 2018 results, the League multiplies its votes by 1.5 in the North, by 2 in the Center, and by more than 3 in the South and on the Islands. Thus, the current geographical profile of the League appears to be more nationalized,...

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...

The context The 2019 European elections were held only a few months after the October 2018 parliamentary elections. Surveys for the latter elections had predicted that the Christian Social People’s Party (CSV) would win votes and return into government after being an opposition party for the second time since World War II during the 2013-2018 parliament. In the end, the CSV lost 5.2 percentage points of the national vote and two of its parliamentary seats, while the government coalition of the liberal DP, the social democratic LSAP and the Greens kept a majority of seats (31 out of 60) and...

Introduction Romania organized elections for the European Parliament (EP) for the third time since joining the European Union (EU) in 2007. This time the elections overlapped with Romania holding the six-month rotating Presidency of the EU. During this Presidency, Romania organized different meetings with representatives of the member states, intensively covered by national media. As a result, the European agenda became more visible in the public debate, the peak being reached during the informal summit of heads of state or government of the EU organized in Sibiu to discuss the EU strategic agenda for the post-election period. Political context Romania is regularly...