With less than a month to go to the European Parliament (EP) elections, campaigning has barely begun in the Netherlands. Whether the campaign will address concrete EU policies or the future of the European Union remains to be seen, but this author argues that the outcomes will probably have less to with the parties’ stance on Europe than with the unpopularity of the incumbent parties and the ‘second order’ character of EP elections.
Stijn van Kessel is Lecturer in Politics at Loughborough University and currently an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Institut für Deutsches und Internationales Parteienrecht und Parteienforschung (PRuF) at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf.
