European Elections, Euroscepticism, and Support for Anti-European Union Parties

The chapter tests the idea that European elections might fuel Euroscepticism by providing a regular forum for those who oppose European unification to spread their message. This chapter first explores the strength of the relationships between citizens’ attitudes towards Europe, their support for anti‐EU parties (both measured through surveys), and the positions on Europe of the party they support (measured by combining survey material and content analyses of party manifestos). These three turn out to be strongly related. However, there is no evidence that these relationships become stronger over time or stronger as a result of the increased politicization around European elections. So, the analyses in this chapter have not provided support for this idea, but they have not rejected it either.