Tag: european parliament elections 2019

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...

Context 2019 EP elections in Estonia took place amidst a heated political atmosphere that prevailed in the aftermath of the general election held less than three months prior. In a “remarkable failure of mainstream politics” (Walker, 2019), two liberal parties, Reform and Centre (both members of the ALDE group in the EP), failed to cooperate in the process of government formation. Having rejected an invitation by the victorious Reform Party to start coalition talks, the incumbent Centre Party formed a coalition with two right-wing parties, including a moderate Pro Patria and an illiberal, xenophobic, and eurosceptic Estonian Conservative People’s Party...

  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...

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...

Introduction Concurrent to regional-level elections in the state of Bremen and local election in nine out of sixteen states, Germany elected their share of representatives for the ninth legislative term of the European Parliament (EP) on May 26th. With 96 seats, Germany contributes the largest number of politicians to the EP. These parliamentarians are elected based on a proportional electoral system and in a single constituency. Plus, for the second time, there is no legal threshold for parties to win seats which means that due to the large number of seats available already around 0.6 per cent of the votes...