Journal Article

THE EMERGENCE OF THE EUROPEANIZED PARTY SYSTEMS IN ECE: THE TURNING POINT AT THE 2019 EP ELECTIONS IN HUNGARY

Ágh, Attila

2021

Overview

The paper puts forward the hypothesis that the ECE parties until the 2019 EP elections were inward-looking or nationally oriented, but the 2019 EP elections indicates an important turning point in East-Central Europe with the emergence of the Europeanized party system. Accordingly, earlier at the EP elections the internal-national issues dominated, and the European dimension of the elections was low, i.e. in the EU context they were \"second order elections\", while for the first time at the 2019 EP elections the EU issues mattered, and in some ways they became central in the electoral fight. In my former papers I have argued that the original ECE party systems collapsed around 2010 under the pressure of the global financial crisis, and the first party system turned to the second one in the early 2010s. Now I would argue that after this turbulent decade the second party system also underwent a serious change in 2019 that resulted in the emergence of the third ECE party system. This change took place under the dual pressure of the extremely polarized political camps in the ECE countries and the new global crisis in the late 2010s that strongly determined the electoral behaviour of their populations. This paper describes this turning point first in general terms in the ECE region, then it illustrates and documents this development at length in the Hungarian case.

• Publisher: University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences
• Subject: Camps / Economic crisis / Elections / EU membership / Europeanization / International finance / International relations / Political parties / Voter behavior