My article on the effects of the EP elections for the domestic surge of the populist right has just been be awarded the SAGE award for the best article published in 2018 in European Union Politics.

The article departs from an empirical puzzle: challenger parties do not only seem to have better chances in EP elections, but some of them also build on this success in the national arena. In 2014, the populist right “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD) gained more than seven percent of the German votes in the European Parliament (EP) elections. Immediately after this success, nationwide opinion polls reported a surge in public support to eight percentage points, indicating that the party would pass the national threshold if elections were to take place. Meanwhile, the “Sverigedemokraterna” (SD) doubled their result in the Swedish “Riksdag” election four months after their unexpected success in the 2014 EP elections. Born only a couple of months prior to the EP elections 2014, also the Spanish “Podemos” movement drew crucial momentum from the broad media coverage related to their European success, helping the young party to become the third largest party in the Spanish general election a year later. European Parliament (EP) elections create structural advantages for challenger parties.

According to the second-order elections theory (Reif and Schmitt, 1980), challenger parties are likely to be successful in European elections. Existing research shows that challenger parties have higher chances for electoral success in EP elections than in national elections because of: (a) the secondary character of the EP elections; (b) their stances on Europe in their policy proposals; and (c) the permissiveness of the electoral system in the European arena. While the EP election is supra-national in nature, the related campaigns still take place on the national level, and national parties run for office in the European contests. Within each country, the party system, media, and electorate are virtually identical in the domestic and European arena. Offering structural advantages to challenger parties, the institution of EP elections may have unanticipated consequences for national party competition. Although the literature has established that second-order elections facilitate the success of challenger parties, it is not fully understood how their success in the second-order arena relates to their national performance. Despite low levels of voter turnout, the very institutional existence of the EP elections offers challenger actors a forum to promote their policy-demands and to attract national attention.

I contend that the benefits for challenger parties in the European arena also boost their domestic prospects. European electoral successes may heighten a challenger party’s visibility in the domestic arena – in particular, if the temporal proximity between both elections increases the domestic salience of European integration. Building on the second-order elections theory, this article argues that EP elections foster challenger parties’ success on the national level by increasing their visibility and offering an opportunity structure for domestic politicisation of Europe. I test this proposition by exploiting the quasi-exogenous timing of EP elections and the variation in national electoral cycles since 1979. A country-fixed effects model and two placebo-tests show that populist radical right parties gain momentum in the supranational contest, particularly when coinciding campaigns increase the domestic salience of Europe. By changing the focus from the European to the national arena, the paper contributes to an emerging research agenda on the national implications of EP elections.

The study disentangles the spillover effect from alternative explanations and sheds light on the underlying mechanisms of the spillover, establishing that: (a) the impact of EP elections on the national fortune of the radical right does not only stem from congruent voter preferences across governance levels; and that (b) the mere event of the EP contest benefits radical right actors when the national election is close in time. Considering their antagonism to an integrative Europe, it seems ironic that the EP elections foster the ascendency of just these opponents of the European idea.

In times of growing nationalism and the rise of populism across Europe, it is important to understand the implications that EP elections have for challenger parties’ national success. Shedding light on the mechanisms that augment the domestic prospects of challengers, this article contributes to uncover the unintended, disintegrative consequences of the European direct elections. The EP elections offer an opportunity structure for the populist right to make their antagonism towards further integration domestically salient, potentially imperilling the European project.

Replication material is available at the Harvard Dataverse.