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...

  Introduction Contrary to the general European trend, the Maltese Labour Party won the European election held on the 25 May by a comfortable majority and took four of the six European parliament seats allotted to Malta. In 2014 it had also won a majority of votes, but only three seats (Carammia and Pace, 2015). The opposition Nationalist Party failed to arrest its electoral decline whose roots go back to 2004, but won the other two seats. As in the previous three European elections the Europhile parties won more than 96% of the valid votes cast. This is consistent with...

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...

(English translation by Elisabetta Mannoni) Matteo Renzi won the primaries of the Democratic Party, with an outstanding result (70%) with respect to his two adversaries, the current Minister of Justice Andrea Orlando (19,5%) and the governor of Apulia Michele Emiliano (10,5%). A wide gap between the first and the second (50,5 percentage points), yet coherent with the gap registered in the previous primaries, between Renzi and Gianni Cuperlo (49,8). We can then confirm on the electorate what had already emerged in the vote by party members, held a few weeks ago: a dominant ex-Prime Minister over the other main competitors and a...

  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...