(English translation by Elisabetta Mannoni) So Macron and Le Pen get to the second round. An historical result that - as almost all commentators highlighted - excludes both socialists and the neo-Gaullist right, who had dominated the French political life for decades. However, what are the reasons and voting motivations behind this result? Where does Macron’s success come from? What about his cross-cutting appeal? What about Mélenchon’s exploit? Does it come from his controversial positions? Or is it a identification vote by the French left, disappointed with the Hamon candidacy? We can’t answer to these questions only by looking at 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 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,...

Lorenzo De Sio, Mark N. Franklin, Till Weber, The risks and opportunities of Europe: How issue yield explains (non-)reactions to the financial crisis, Electoral Studies, Volume 44, December 2016, Pages 483-491, ISSN 0261-379 Lorenzo De Sio, interviewed by Andrea Maccagno (English translation by Elisabetta Mannoni) This paper analyzes how parties in different European countries employed (or decided not to employ) such a controversial topic as European integration in their electoral strategies. How did this article come about and which was the research question behind it? The paper is the application of a model I have been working at during the last few years. It’s...

  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...