ELECTIONS TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT IN SWEDEN, DENMARK AND FINLAND IN 2019: PARTY POSITIONING IN RELATION TO DOMESTIC AND EUROPEAN ELECTION TOPICS

Abstract

This work examines the socio-political divides that exist within Nordic EU member states with the goal of providing a comparative analytical insight into the manners in which Swedish, Danish and Finnish parties positioned themselves on the political spectre during the 2019 elections to the European Parliament (EP), and with the sequential aim of analysing and understanding the results which they achieved. The paper first offers an analysis of the Scandinavian EU election results, and then applies the most similar systems design in identifying the independent variables which contribute to the different election outcomes and to the differences in the ways in which left, right and centre parties positioned themselves during the election within the three mentioned countries, while leaning on Lipset and Rokkan’stheoretical framework about party alignment; cleavage theory (1967). The starting hypothesis is that the campaign of Nordic parties was mostly influenced by their need to position themselves in regard to two key issues, the issue of immigration and Brexit. It is hypothesised that the success/failure of Nordic parties at the 2019 EU elections depended on the success/failure of each party in approaching the two mentioned key issues. Election results show that parties are ever more ready to modify their historically recognizable positions in line with new emerging issues if it means achieving better results. This trend causes a certain dose of instability within the Nordic party systems, but it does not completely break them apart, as the results of the EU elections indicate.