The electoral progress of the populist and Eurosceptic right (original) (raw)

The 2014 European elections have now ended with the consequent allocation of the seats among the various parties at the national level. The national parties will then have to gather into political groups2 within the European Parliament (EP). In this article, I will firstly analyse the electoral results of the parties that belonged to the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) group in the previous parliament. This political group gathers the populist and Eurosceptic parties and, in some cases, even some explicitly anti-Euro and antiEU parties in the EP (Taggart, 1998; Taggart and Szczerbiak, 2004; Szczerbiak and Taggart, 2008). As Figure 1 shows, the EFD gained 38 seats3 out of 751— which correspond to 5% of the total EP seats—increasing its presence in the parliament by seven seats compared to 2009 (when it gained 31 seats). As already mentioned in a previous article4, the EFD was born as a political group on 1 July 2009, and in the previous legislatures, it was made of 13 parties f...