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...

  Introduction Contrary to the general European trend, the Maltese Labour Party won the European election held on the 25 May by a comfortable majority and took four of the six European parliament seats allotted to Malta. In 2014 it had also won a majority of votes, but only three seats (Carammia and Pace, 2015). The opposition Nationalist Party failed to arrest its electoral decline whose roots go back to 2004, but won the other two seats. As in the previous three European elections the Europhile parties won more than 96% of the valid votes cast. This is consistent with...

  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...

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...

According to the spontaneous reactions from the parties’ wakes during the Swedish election night May 26, all parties were winners. The parties that lost support did not lose as much as they had feared, and among the parties that gained, celebration was loud and joyful. The only exception was the small Feminist Initiative that lost the single seat they won in 2014. Background The European Parliament election 2019 took place less than a year after the national election in September 2018, which led to the most prolonged government negotiations in Swedish history. Not until January 2019 did the Social Democrats and...