National factors such as domestic opportunity structures and political actors’ positions are most prominent explanatory variables in EU politicization literature. However, since the start of the Euro crisis deep political conflict overshadowed discussions on reform scenarios and revealed cleavages across rather than within countries, suggesting that events on the European level also influence domestic debates. This contribution seeks to answer the question, which impact success and failure of EU governments during EU negotiations have on the level of domestic politicization of European Integration. Based on politicization and Europeanization literature I argue that governments, which are representing domestic interest successfully on the European level face less critique on the domestic level and are more successful in depoliticizing the Euro- pean issue. I use novel data on member states positions in the negotiations of 47 economic and fiscal integration policies discussed from 2010 to 2015 - including, for example, the negotiations on the ESM, the fiscal compact, and the assistance to Greece - to operationalize success during negotiations. In order to measure the level of politicization quality newspapers in France, Ger- many, Ireland and Austria are coded using core sentence analysis. The findings underline the interdependency of domestic and European explanatory factors of politicization and encourage further research considering European explanations for differentiated national public debates.
