Social democrats and the People’s Party are gaining some support in Europe
Polls from across the European Union show a slight decline in support for the parties belonging to ALDE, EFDD, and GUE/NGL groups in the European Parliament in the past two months.
Social democrats and the People’s Party are gaining some support in Europe
Polls from across the European Union show a slight decline in support for the parties belonging to ALDE, EFDD, and GUE/NGL groups in the European Parliament in the past two months.
The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) is the group that seems to be taking the biggest hit. It is down by 0.5 points to 13.7 percent. Here are some of the national parties belonging to ALDE that are particularly losing ground:
- Eesti Keskerakond (Estonia): -6.6 points to 20.2 percent
- Ciudadanos (Spain): -2.9 points to 15.5 percent
- Amsterdamska koalicija (Croatia): -1.6 points to 11.0 percent
Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD) and the European United Left-Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) are also down in the latest polls by 0.4 and 0.3 points.
The EP groups with the biggest increase across the continent are the christian democrat EPP and the social democrat S&D, up by 0.8 and 0.8 points respectively. These are the national parties of EPP that have made the largest gains:
- Partidul Național Liberal (Romania): +5.2 points to 27.1 percent
- Nova Slovenija (Slovenia): +3.0 points to 9.4 percent
- Kristdemokraterna (Sweden): +2.7 points to 10.2 percent
Polling support for EU parliament groups at the end of March
| EP group | Support | 2-month change |
|---|---|---|
| ALDE | 13.7% | -0.5 points |
| ECR | 8.4% | +0.2 points |
| EFDD | 4.6% | -0.4 points |
| ENF | 8.0% | -0.2 points |
| EPP | 24.2% | +0.8 points |
| GUE/NGL | 7.4% | -0.3 points |
| Greens/EFA | 7.0% | 0.0 points |
| S&D | 17.8% | +0.8 points |
| non-affiliated | 1.3% | -0.1 points |
| new or uncategorized | 6.9% | +0.1 points |
One of the big trends observers expect to see in the 2019 elections is the rise of populist, nationalist and eurosceptic parties. The three EP groups that can be said to partly or completely fall under this umbrella (ENF, EFDD and ECR) currently poll at 21.0 percent, compared to 9.5 percent in the previous election. Note that Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) was launched in 2015.
Results in 2014 European elections
| EP group | Vote share in 2014 |
|---|---|
| ALDE | 9.3% |
| ECR | 6.4% |
| EFDD | 3.1% |
| EPP | 28.4% |
| GUE/NGL | 7.4% |
| Greens/EFA | 6.4% |
| S&D | 22.5% |
| non-affiliated | 6.4% |
The vote shares for the 2014 European elections have to be taken with a grain of salt however: they are computed as a weighted mean of the vote shares of each EP group in every country. Each country is weighted according to the number of seats in the European Parliament. In some cases the elected members of a coalition of parties are split into multiple EP groups. In Ireland for example the Independents joined three different parliament groups. In those rare cases we assume each EP group to have received a third of the votes, as the official results do not include a detailed breakdown. The numbers don’t add up to 100 percent as the votes of non elected parties are not presented.
National reports
By clicking on the following links you can access individual country reports. Please note that no polls were made in Malta and Luxembourg in the last month.
Austria – Belgium – Croatia – Cyprus – Czechia – Denmark – Estonia – Finland – France – Germany – Greece – Hungary – Ireland – Italy – Latvia – Lithuania – Netherlands – Poland – Portugal – Romania – Slovakia – Slovenia – Spain – Sweden
About this analysis
This report is based on data collected and aggregated by POLITICO through the affiliated site Poll of Polls . POLITICO uses statistical models to compute trend lines for national parties in all EU countries based on local polls. The trend line represent the current likely support of each party.
In countries with frequent polls on the EP election we used these in our aggregation (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany, France, Croatia, Italy, Poland, and Romania). In countries with few or no EP polls we analyzed national parliament surveys (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Spain, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Slovenia, and Slovakia).
We aggregated the level of national support for each party to a weighted European mean of each EP group. Each party is weighted based on the number of seats that the country holds in the European Parliament.
It is worth noting that we do not know for sure what EP groups the national parties will join (if they get any seats). We sticked to the categorization made by POLITICO:
- the parties that are currently represented in the European Parliament are assumed to remain in their current groups
- the parties that are not in the European Parliament, but have been before, are assumed to return to their previous groups
- parties that were founded after the previous elections in 2014 are categorised as “new” until there is news or an official statement regarding their affiliation.
The polling data is made available by POLITICO under the a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license .
