Euro Skepticism

Southern European States and the European elections: euro skepticism

As we all know, the Southern European States have lot of things in common. Besides the parallel development of their democratic systems, they are also the countries from the Eurozone who are suffering most the devastating financial crisis. All these features could lead to a similar way of facing the last European Elections, marked by the strong economical measures imposed by Europe and in the same way, the anger of the citizens and the growing euro skepticism.

Different theories exist as for the waves democratizadoras of these countries. One of the ideas most defended by the authors includes Spain, Greece and Portugal inside the same wave democratizing. Since 1974 and within only nineteen months, dictatorial regimes were replaced by democratic ones in these 3 countries.

It is important to add here that, apart from Spain, Portugal, and Greece, also Italy is considered to be an integral part of Southern Europe eventhough it took a different path towards democratization. Interestingly enough, Italy consolidated its democratic political system at about the same time as GSP countries. Nonetheless, its transition process, took place much earlier and under different global circumstances.

The European Membership of these countries took very different pathways: On the one hand, we have Italy, one of the founders (1952), while on the other hand, Greece, Spain and Portugal joined the Union several years later, in 1981 the first one and in 1986 the following ones.

Italy’s membership is justified as a way, for not to make war between the neighbours countries while the GSP’s reasons were mostly economic.

Nowadays, these 4 countries share a very common feature: All of them, as well as Ireland, are part of the called “PIIGS”, countries from the Eurozone whose economic development has stopped or even decreased, and who are suffering from an increasing unemployment and disappearance of the welfare state.

All these points should be taken into account so as to make a parallel study about the consolidation of the European elections in each of them.

In the first approximation, the information teaches a clear trend to us: the participation during the national choices is much more significant to the obtained one in the European choices in all the countries. An information that nevertheless must be fenced closely since also the participation changes substantially of a country other one. To others, in outline also we can verify how the governing parties lose votes in the majority of they during the European choices. In Portugal, the low participation is significant, both in the national choices and in the Europeans

. Elections for the four-year legislative terms of the Assembly of the Republic are by proportional representation in each constituency. Portugal uses the d'Hondt method of proportional representation,

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