Over the last two decades national political parties and the general public began to play an increasingly important role in the European integration process: events like public referendums or media debates created for them new possibilities to voice and exchange opinions on the European Union. Mainstream political parties, the architects and ‘motors’ of the integration process, together with the EU citizenry, seized this opportunity in order to express their criticism towards the European Union. According to Hooghe and Marks (2008) it was a turning point marking a shift from ‘permissive consensus’ to ‘constraining dissensus’ towards the EU integration process. Interestingly, unlike radical left or right parties, mainstream parties did not challenge the principle of European integration as such but rather the legitimacy of the European Union’s institutional set-up. In other words, mainstream parties criticised selected institutional competences or policies of the European Union without rejecting the idea of European integration. On that background, this paper targets the following questions: what are the contestation patterns among the mainstream and radical political parties? How can we explain the differences? Which contestation patterns are new? Regarding empirical inference, the paper draws on two sources: national plenary parliamentary debates devoted to the ratification of the Reformed Treaty as well as the European election campaigns in the print media. The countries under study were: France, Germany, Great Britain, Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.
