Party competition on European issues in the 2024 EP elections

Abstract

Recent developments have turned European integration from a “sleeping giant” into an active political issue. The Maastricht Treaty politicized Europe in national and European Parliament elections. Cross-border crises, like migration and environmental challenges, have further increased the importance of coordinated EU responses. Moreover, an entirely new family of Eurosceptic parties has emerged and consolidated over the past decade. Given that one of their main aims is to challenge and criticise the European Union (EU), Eurosceptic parties have a particular interest in European issues - the European polity as well as major European policies. Against this background, this paper examines whether and how political parties have emphasised these issues during the 2024 EP elections, compared to 2019, and contrasting Eurosceptic and mainstream parties. Drawing on annotated data from the 2019 Euromanifesto project, we fine-tune transformer-based deep learning multilingual models to detect parties' salience and positions on European polity and policy issues in nine countries during the 2024 EP elections. Our analyses show that the salience of European issues has increased on average, in particular for the EU polity. In terms of positions, we detect a pattern of increasing negativity of mainstream parties on European policy issues, such as migration and the environment, whereas Eurosceptic parties (in particular of the far-right) appear to have become less negative on the EU. In sum, our results suggest an increasing relevance of EU-wide issues, with different patterns of polarisation.