The election of the European Parliament took place in metropolitan France on May 26 (oversees departments had already voted the day before). 74 seats were to be filled, with an additional 5 seats on reserve in case of a Brexit. The election is based on a proportional system, with a 5 per cent minimum threshold: Only lists which pass this threshold obtain representatives in the European Parliament. The party lists are closed, meaning that citizens vote for one list, but cannot express any preference for specific candidates within that list. While this electoral rule was similar to the one...

Latvia was one of the few EU countries that went to the polls on Saturday, May 25 although advance voting was also available for three days. According to the Central Elections Commission (CEC), there were 1’411’955 persons eligible to vote – a decrease by 4 percent from 2014. A party list system is used to choose eight MEPs, and a voter can express either a positive or a negative preference for each candidate on a list that s/he is to vote for. An electoral threshold of 5 percent is provided in the law but the effective threshold (due to...

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,...

Why has Spain elections in 2019? This is the third time since 2015 that Spaniards have voted in a general election. In the first one, the levels of electoral volatility where unprecedented (more than 35 per cent of the voters switched parties between 2011 and 2015) and the number of electoral parties increased in a notable way, from 3.3 to 5.0 (Rama Caamaño 2016). The instability of the party system was profound. In 2015, the high degree of parliamentary fragmentation made it impossible to secure support from a majority of Deputies and constitute a Government (Simon 2016), so Spaniards had to...

Few days before the general election in Spain, some surprising evidence emerges from the ICCP (Issue Competition Comparative Project) pre-electoral survey: what we could call a return of ideological polarization; and along classic lines of conflict that have characterized the Spanish party system in past decades. In a nutshell, this is due to the relevance of relatively new parties such as Podemos and Vox, whose constituencies appear ideologically consistent in terms of left-wing or right-wing stances across multiple issues. This sets these Spanish parties apart from other recent challenger parties in other European countries, which mix and match both...