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 The 2019 European election in the Republic of Cyprus came three years after the last legislative elections of 2016 and one year after the presidential elections of 2018 which saw the right-wing governing party, DISY and President Nicos Anastasiades, renew their mandate for another five years. In the backlog of the campaign politics and electoral results that lie before us, one can observe a number of realignments in the patterns of political competition. Although each of them carries significance, their overall relevance in the island’s political evolution is certainly not analogous to a major transformation of domestic politics. Rather,...

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...

26 May 2019 saw an election paradox in Hungary: a long-serving government won big on a record-high turnout, yet the winners looked frustrated and the losers positively re-charged. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP electoral alliance took well over 52% of the popular vote and 62% of the country’s 21 seats in the European Parliament. That is one seat and one percent of the vote up compared to the 2014 EP elections, and just one seat and four percent of the vote less than their all-time best in 2009. But Fidesz’ leaders appeared disappointed and the government shortly announced unexpected...

  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...