Too divided to count: Eurosceptics vote against each other half of the time

The ‘populist wave’, the ‘eurosceptics flood’: few hours before the ballots, it is all about them. Everyone is well aware that during the next term the Parliament will have to deal with a strong presence of eurocritics. Yet, which would be their real influence on European policies? Wait and see: first, it will be necessary for the various anti-euro parties to put their differences aside in order to create a parliamentary group (that is, 25 MEPs of at least 7 different countries). Then, it will be necessary to wait for them to vote. That would be the real deal, as suggested by an analysis published by the independent organization VoteWatch. They examined the votes by seven euro-sceptic and far-right parties from the UK, Italy, Slovakia, France, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium during the last term. The parties, as data showed, had about 50 percent voting match: that is, the voted against each other about half of the time.

The highest degree of common views was registered between the Front National and the Austrian FPÖ, both in the NI group (about 86 percent of voting match). Yet among all the other parties, the match is remarkably lower, and things do not improve even narrowing the area on individual interestes: civil rights, internal market, economic policies. In all these policy areas, the seven national parties had an average of 55 percent of voting match, yet with remarkable exceptions. Front National and FPÖ, for instance, had a significant match on civil rights (92 percent), internal market (89 percent) and economic legislation (86 percent). Would it be enough?

The other parties belonging to parliamentary groups, in fact, show higher voting matches. In the EPP, for instance, the French UMP and the German CDU have a 95 percent voting match. For S&D, UK Labour and the French Social Party share the same vote 85 percent of the time, and 89 percent of the time with the German S&D. The same applies for other groups, with remarkable voting matches.