European Elections, Euroscepticism and the Media

This Section has the support of the ECPR Standing Group on Public Opinion and Voting Behaviour in a Comparative Perspective. Political elites have created the European Union (EU) and its predecessors, they have initiated further economic and political integration, and they have taken decisions to enlarge the Union with new member states. Until the late 1990s this elite-driven project has experienced little opposition from citizens, while at the same time citizens were not very interested in the direction in which ‘Europe’ was heading. As a result, European elections were largely second-order national elections. However, there are reasons to believe that the period of permissive consensus for the European project is over. The European project is increasingly opposed by citizens and it seems to take much of the blame for the way the current financial crisis is handled. In Southern Europe, the EU is blamed by many for imposing financial austerity rules, which bring these countries into economic recession, while in Northern Europe many blame the EU for ‘wasting the tax payers euros on helping incompetent and corrupt regimes in Southern Europe’. These sentiments are expressed most strongly by (left and right wing) populist parties. These parties are clearly trying to make the future of Europe an issue in European as well as national election campaigns. We would therefore expect the future of the EU to increasingly become a core topic of contestation in European and national elections. Moreover, the initial EU-phoria which was wide-spread in new democracies that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 appears to be cooling down.