The 2024 EP Election - A shift to the right – but what will it be enough for?

After 5 years, the EU citizens had the chance again to express their political preferences in the recent European Parliament (EP) election, held across the member states between 6–9 June 2024. Although the voting took the form of 27 different national elections with individual domestic campaign topics and party strategies also this time, the overall results shed some light on the possible policy orientation and role of the EP in the new term. European Parliament elections are traditionally considered so-called second-order elections in the literature, which means that voters are generally less inclined to vote as they attach minor importance to them compared to national general elections, and so do the political parties themselves. Indeed, this year’s EU-level turnout (51.08%, though with a minor increase after 2019 and a high variance across member states) also seems to justify this argument.

In the latest Votes & Seats podcast episode, Szabolcs Janik, senior researcher of the Center for Political Science (MCC) had the chance to discuss the EU-level results and the potential political consequences with professor Emanuele Massetti from the University of Trento. Our discussant argues that the EPP, ECR and ID party families can be deemed the winners of the election, the S&D faces a seat allocation similar to 2019, while the Greens and the liberals (Renew Europe) experienced substantial losses. In Massetti’s opinion, the European Green Deal, the issue of further EU integration, the war in Ukraine and immigration could be the topics on which a significant share of voters disagreed with the underlying national parties belonging to the mentioned center-left and left-wing political powers. At the same time, he expects that the increased vote share and seat number of right-wing powers in the EP are not likely to change the earlier domination of mainstream, centrist party groups, but the EPP will be a ‘kingmaker’ in the European Parliament. Our latest podcast episode also touches upon the post-election political landscape in Italy and the possible future fate of the ECR and ID groups in light of the recent EP election.

With the help of guest experts and politicians, in the podcast series of MCC’s Centre for Political Science we endeavor to analyze which actors are the real winners of the parliamentary and municipal elections taking place this year in different European countries and what exactly can be considered a real victory after the ballot counts.