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...

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...

The context During the last five years, Portugal has been regarded as a successful case in the European context from both an economic and political point of view (see Fernandes et al, 2018). On the one hand, the country has turned the page on its 2011-2014 crisis, when a financial assistance programme was implemented with painful austerity policies. On the other hand, unlike other Southern European countries, Portugal’s party system has proved to be very resilient. Although mainstream parties have struggled to retain their electoral support, the Socialist Party (PS, Partido Socialista) and the Social Democratic Party (PSD, Partido Social...

European parliament (EP) election in Lithuania was overshadowed by the competitive direct presidential election. Three main contenders were close in the polls during the preceding months. The second round between two frontrunners Ingrida Šimonytė and Gitanas Nausėda was held two weeks after the first one, simultaneously with the voting for EP. Overlap of two elections raised the otherwise (potentially) low turnout in EP election (53.1 per cent of Lithuanians voted), but it also meant that less attention was given to EP campaign by the main political parties. Context and campaign European parliament elections in Lithuania quite closely conform to the second-order...

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...