Opposition Parties in the European Parliament: The Cases of Syriza, Podemos and the Five Star Movement

ABSTRACT

The different crises which have affected the European Union (EU) since 2008, have triggered a major politicisation of European integration. This dynamic makes it of utmost importance to understand how parties act within the European Parliament (EP), in order to gauge whether it is possible to identify a parliamentary opposition which is Eurocritical but not Eurosceptic.

For this purpose, three parties are considered: Syriza (Synaspismos Rizospastikis Aristeras, Coalition of the Radical Left), Podemos (We Can) and the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement). These parties’ positions on the EU are either unclear and/or critical, but also hard to classify as hostile to European integration.

The empirical analysis highlights a significant degree of commonality in the voting behaviour of these parties and a high level of disagreement with the Eurosceptic bloc, thus pointing to a more complex political confrontation in the EP structured around: pro-EU/majority parties, Eurocritical/‘loyal’ opposition parties and Eurosceptic/anti-system parties.

KEYWORDS:

• Euroscepticism
• legislative studies
• party politics
• European Parliament
• European integration

Notes

¹ At the time of the 2014 European elections, all six parties were on the opposition, thereby satisfying the main requirement of being considered challenger parties.

² Eurocritical positions define a third way between Euroenthusiasm and Euroscepticism (Statham et al. 2010; della Porta et al. 2017).

³ The GAL/TAN cleavage identifies a cultural dimension which includes issues involving personal lifestyle, law and order, the role of religion, immigration, multiculturalism and environmentalism. It exists alongside an economic dimension that encompasses traditional left-right issues such as the role of the state in the economy, government spending and welfare state. This cleavage proves to have a strong transnational dimension, pitting those in favour of EU integration (GAL pole) against those opposing it (TAN pole) (Hooghe et al. 2004; Hooghe and Marks 2018).

⁴ The First Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) envisaged a series of austerity measures and structural reforms that Greece had to implement in return for a €110 billion ‘bailout’ loan. This Memorandum soon became the main contentious issue in Greek politics.

⁵ The analysed RCVs refer to the period July 2014-December 2018. Both legislative and non-legislative acts were considered, but not all related amendments.

⁶ Actually, there are substantial differences at both the individual and party level between actors on the Eurosceptic side too, with some more policy-oriented and others more interested in maintaining harsh anti-integration stances in order to obtain publicity and visibility about their ideological Euroscepticism (Whitaker and Lynch 2014; Brack 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eugenio Salvati

Eugenio Salvati is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy.