A country, in which the European Union to it’s citizens personally mean the Euro, more crime, waste of money, bureaucracy and unemployment, should provide a promising area for all kinds of populists pursuing their agenda. In Austria, pro-European Social Democrats and Greens have somehow modified their stances towards European integration, which were largely seen as populist moves by many commentators. The populist Freedom Party, a usual suspect, drove a harsh anti-EU, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim campaign and Hans Peter Martin, a maverick MEP, claimed, assisted by Austria’s largest tabloid, to fight corruption, waste of money and eurocrats in Brussels. Under these circumstances the conservative Peoples'' Party (VP) was able to launch a successful pro-EU campaign, thus proving that assumed second-order elections not necessarily lead to electoral losses of larger parties in government. In fact, the party''s vote share was higher than for the last national election. The party''s posters and ads in print media did explicitely address both the national and European levels with messages that did allow for ambivalent interpretations and helped blurr the boundaries between the two levels. On the other hand, the party responded to a personal campaign by an incumbent MEP, who was forced to withdraw from acting as leading candidate, with a number of candidate centered campaigns in some regions. This paper explores regional variations in (relatively) low-budget campaigns aiming at a second-order election. Parties'' campaign materials and content analyses of the media coverage by national as well as regional newspapers are the main source for our analyses, which focus on how parties and candidates respond to regionally specific opinion climates.
