European Parliament Elections Consolidate Their “Second Order” Status

Source: Wikimedia Commons

by Kostas Kourtikakis, Associate Teaching Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

There is a lot that is different but even more that remains the same in the EU after the recent European Parliament (EP) elections. Let’s talk about what is different first. The elections brought significant change to the composition of the EU’s legislature. Most notably, far right parties increased their numbers to unprecedented levels, while liberal parties (i.e. parties of the European center) and the greens saw their numbers shrink. This has been, understandably, the focus of news reports, mainly because of what it means for EU policy and leadership positions.

Yet, there are a couple more structural aspects of the elections that remain remarkably stable. The first is that parties on the fringes of the political spectrum came out strong. This is part of a consistent trend in EP elections that the academic literature has long identified and studied. The main explanation is that citizens often vote more honestly (“with their heart”) in EP elections and more strategically (“with their mind”) in national elections. This would explain why far right parties got more votes than more centrist parties, even though it would not explain the level of success they achieved this time.

The second continuity is that EP elections are ways for citizens to signal satisfaction and, most often, dissatisfaction with the ruling political parties in their countries. And so, just like in the past, these elections were mostly about the performance of national governments rather than the performance of EU leaders or EU policy. This fact is also well documented in the academic literature. But this time around we have spectacular confirmations of how true it still is. Most remarkably, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, declared a national parliamentary election after the dismal result of his party, which was interpreted as a loss of power for him at the national level. By contrast, the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, is understood to have been strengthened on the Italian national political scene because her party did well.

 

These two continuities, the good performance of fringe parties and the EP elections as signals to national politicians, are in fact connected: it is because people vote honestly for the parties they like that they are able to signal their true preferences to national governments. It is also the reason national leaders take the results of EP elections seriously. 

 

But, sadly for the EU, this means that EP elections are not really what they were set out to be: mechanisms for citizens to tell EU institutions what they want the EU to do. This type of electoral contest is known in the political science literature as “second order” elections. The best-known example in the U.S. is midterm Congressional elections, which are generally understood as signals to the president. Hence, one can say that after the 2024 EP elections, their status as “second order” has one more time been blatantly confirmed.