ELECTIONS FOR THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT 2019 IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL

Abstract

Recently held elections for the European Parliament are extremely important for the future of the European Union. In this paper, we will analyze these elections in two EU member states - Spain and Portugal. Both countries jointly became members of the European Union in 1986 after a democratic transition that followed the fall of two right-wing dictatorships - Francoist in Spain and Salazar’s in Portugal. In recent years, elections for the European Parliament have become a "stepping stone" for far-right political parties, and it is precisely Spain and Portugal that were the only member states of the Union in which such parties failed to achieve a more significant political result.Unlike Portugal, where left and right center parties occupy a dominant political position and where extremeright-wing political parties do not expect significant results in the European Parliament elections, the opposite is taking place in Spain. Not only the far left-wing Podemos re-entered the European Parliament, but also the far right-wing Voxcrossed the election census for the first time. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to analyze the most important election topics in the two countries, detect the most important political actors, and to present electoral results and their political consequences. In the research we will use the historical method, the case study method and the comparative method.