Europe and Euroscepticism on Twitter During the 2019 European Parliament Elections: An Analysis of the Spanish Candidates

Introduction

The May 2019 European Election took place in Spain in a unique context. There is normally very little turnout in these elections compared to other elections. There is usually an approximately 70% turnout a general election, and European Elections have traditionally been many percentage points lower, even reaching below 50% (44.9% in 2009 and 43.8% in 2014, the record low). However, on this occasion the European Election coincided with local elections throughout Spain and with regional elections in most of the country. This factor undoubtedly contributed to the increase in turnout (60%), as had also occurred the previous time this happened (in 1999, at 63% turnout).

These figures show the disinterest in the European Union compared to domestic affairs (disinterest that is not incompatible with widespread support for EU membership, as is the case in Spain so far), perhaps associated with the difficulty the population citizens have with following European Union issues, which they perceive as distant, and which cannot always be clearly associated with a recognisable ideology (Seoane, 2013).

It seemed especially difficult to dissociate the 2019 election from local politics, given that it was held only a month after the Spanish legislative election took place, in April 2019. These elections showed the high level of electoral polarisation and fragmentation in the country. The most voted party, PSOE, obtained only 27% of the votes, and the second, PP, 16%. This situation responded to a fundamental trend that had started in Spanish democracy in 2014, when the previous European Election was held: the erosion of political dominance by only two parties, and the dispersion of the vote among more electoral options. This is why the European Election is the ideal scenario, they do not penalise small parties: all the votes are distributed equally among a single constituency, and it is not necessary to obtain a minimum threshold of votes to obtain representation (as opposed to Spanish legislative elections, where a minimum of 3% is needed, or in the regional elections, where a minimum of between 3% and 5% is needed, depending on the region).

In addition, there were two significant differences in the 2019 election. The first was that an openly Eurosceptic political party, Vox, was participating in the election again but this time on the back of recently obtaining excellent results in the April legislative election, ranked as the fifth political party with 10% of the votes. The second was that there were two candidacies headed by the leaders of the two main Catalan independence parties: Oriol Junqueras, from Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, and Carles Puigdemont, from Junts per Cat. These leaders would participate in the election under strained circumstances after the failure of the attempted call for independence from Spain in October 2017. Junqueras had been on remand since November 2017 waiting for the trial to take place, Puigdemont was a fugitive from Spanish justice and resided in Belgium. These exceptional situations gave a very specific flavour to both candidates’ campaigns.

The results of the European Election showed a general reinforcement of bipartisanship, since both the PSOE and the PP significantly improved their results compared to the legislative election held the previous month. Conversely, the smaller parties that had recently appeared as alternative options, Podemos, Ciudadanos and Vox, lost ground although, these three parties stood in the national election for the first time in the previous European Election in 2014. The candidacies and results—which correspond exactly to the eight candidates that make up the sample that we will analyse below—can be seen in Table 1.

Source: Own elaboration