Second-order elections under strain: the 2024 European Parliament elections in Southern Europe

This Introduction presents the framework and summarises the main empirical results of the special issue about the 2024 European Parliament elections in Southern Europe. It argues that Southern Europe is a crucial setting for assessing whether the European Parliament elections remain second-order in an era of heightened EU politicisation. Drawing on the six country studies in this special issue – Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain – we show that, consistent with recent comparative research on broader EU election results, the 2024 elections preserved core second-order traits, above all lower turnout and recurrent advantages for challengers. However, these mechanisms operated through remarkably fluid party systems, selective incumbent sanctioning and increasingly salient EU-related conflicts.