Italy

The issue of EU membership and its explicit link to domestic political issues have characterised the attitude of Italian political forces during forty years of European elections. Additionally, due to their second-order status (Reif & Schmitt, 1980), also the Italian elections have been affected by the transformations of the country’s political and economic system. From 1979 to 2019, Italy went through some vastly different political phases. The first period (1979-1989) coincided with the conclusive decade of the political party system of the First Republic which followed the Second World War. The second period (1990-2000) began with the re-organisation of the party system of the Second Republic, after the old political system collapsed following the Tangentopoli investigation and Silvio Berlusconi’s subsequent entry into politics. In the third period (2001-2010), covering the European elections of 2004 and 2009, a phase of stability was followed by one marked by alternating centre-right and centre-left coalitions in government. The fourth period (2011-2020), covering the elections from 2014 to 2019, was characterised by the electoral success recorded by nationalist, populist and Eurosceptic forces reflecting trends seen in other EU member states. The chapter aims to analyse the campaigning strategies of the Italian political parties during the nine EU elections (1979-2019) in order to identify how the domestic context affected the European campaigns through a comparative content analysis of the political posters.