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...

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...

The year of challengers? Issues, public opinion, and elections in Western Europe in 2017 edited by Lorenzo De Sio and Aldo Paparo Within the seven-month period going from mid-March to mid-October of 2017, five Western-European democracies held their general elections: the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Austria. This provided an exceptional opportunity to study public opinion structures in these countries in the particularly turbulent context that followed disruptive electoral developments such as the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. To exploit this opportunity, the CISE launched an innovative comparative research project to empirically assess before the elections the preferences of...

  Introduction 2019 European elections in Croatia were held in a very different political environment than previous EP elections. Economic conditions have improved as GDP growth resumed in 2015, unemployment has declined by more than a half and the government fiscal position has also improved. However, the entry into the EU and expiration of the restrictions on the free movement of labour produced a mass emigration of mostly younger population towards countries of Western Europe. Thus, despite the migrant crisis that affected Croatia in 2015 and 2016, and the constant pressure of migration on the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, it...