You can tell someone by the company they keep. Patterns of affiliation and disaffiliation of national parties to European Union political actors

The aim of this paper deals with the relations between national political parties and their counterparts at the European Union level. Party politics at the European Union (EU) level is characterized by the presence of three main party actors and by the relations and interactions among them. They are the Political Groups in the European Parliament (EPPGs), the European Political Parties (EuPPs) and the national parties of the Member States (MS) of the EU, which represent the “three faces” of the EU party politics (Katz, Mair 1993; Bardi 2005). The first two faces are still weaker than their national counterparts (Calossi, Cicchi 2018). The EPPGs and EUPPs retain organizational characteristics - such as the lack of direct contact with voters, the functional and legal autonomy of the different faces of the party and the dependence on state funds – which are typical to cartel parties. Due to these shortcomings, EPPGs and EuPPs cannot perform some of the typical functions of political parties, such as structuring of the vote, articulation of interests, political communication and socialization, selection of the political personnel: for these aspects, they rely on national parties. Obviously, the UE faces can vice versa furnish to national parties with some assets they would hardly obtain elsewhere. In fact, EPPGs and EUPPs have direct contacts with the EU institutions, are able to coordinate the multinational electoral campaigns and the EP parliamentarians and, in some cases, can also provide top-down political legitimacy to national parties. The latter function is useful for newly born national parties or parties with little legitimacy within their own national political system. Furthermore, the EU party actors help also to legitimize parties coming from new member states or from EU candidate countries (Cianciara 2016). Therefore, the relations between the EU faces of party politics and the national parties are crucial to understand the real functioning of party politics in the EU. The literature has studied many cases of affiliation (and disaffiliation) of national parties to their EU counterparts (von dem Berge, Poguntke 2012; Wientzek 2019; Gherghina, von dem Berge 2018; Chryssogelos 2017; Mikucka-Wójtowicz 2016), but most of this work focuses on specific geographical areas of Europe or on MS from the recent enlargements. A comprehensive approach on why, when and how national parties join or leave the party actors at EU level is still missing. The different ways in which national parties approach their EU counterparts may also be strongly influenced by the context, especially when new crises, such as the financial crisis or the Covid19 pandemic, arise. This paper aims to provide an interpretative framework of the relationships between national and EU parties, starting from the reconstruction of the events that characterized the affiliation of the various national parties to their European referents. Valuable sources of this will be official records of the EU-level and national parties, newspapers and the secondary literature. Consequently, I will investigate the incentives and the deterrents that facilitate or prevent national parties from joining the EPPGs and the EuPPs.