The 2019 European Parliament elections in Ireland

ABSTRACT

When the exit polls for the European elections in Ireland were released, there was much discussion of a green wave, with large successes expected for the Green Party. Indeed, while those polled did list climate change as a major concern, purely domestic issues still played a major role in the election and, despite the on-going process of the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union, European issues were still conspicuously absent from the election. Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil increased their seat total, and Sinn Féin fared particularly badly, losing two of its three seats. This report provides a detailed overview of the election, the main issues and the results. It examines the context within which the election is situated, the candidates, the course of the campaign and opinion polling throughout the campaign, and finally the results. It will argue that, despite increasing attempts to have European elections fought on Europe-wide issues, the 2019 election remained a largely second-order affair, fought on national issues, although climate change did take on a new importance.

KEYWORDS:

• European Parliament
• Ireland
• election

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Samuel A. T. Johnston PhD student in the Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin. My main area of research is radical right and ethnoregional political parties in Europe, and I also research Irish politics. More generally, I work in the fields of comparative politics, European politics, party politics, and electoral studies.

ORCID

Samuel A. T. Johnston http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4413-9683