Same Strategies, Different Fates: Italian Lega as a Role Model for Central European Eurosceptic Parties in the 2019 European Parliament Election

This article investigates the collaboration between Matteo Salvini’s Italian Lega and its central European allies in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, within the broader Eurosceptic movement before the 2019 European Parliament election. Political parties Sme Rodina in Slovakia and Svoboda a příma demokracie (SPD) in Czechia turned to be strong supporters of Salvini’s ideas on the European Union and actively promote the cooperation with him as a key idea of their election campaign. However, while Lega scored a terrific electoral success, both Sme rodina and SPD performed poorly and lost votes in comparison to previous general elections. What are the reasons behind such a two-faced election result? We examine the public discourse of their alliance focusing on manifestos, media appearance and interviews, election campaign materials, and social networks communication, in the period before the 2019 EP election. The academic literature identifies four main reasons for radical right to engage in a pan-European group: strategic reasons- a desire for publicity, interpersonal relations between leaders, ideological closeness and an attempt to increase the legitimacy of their political parties. This paper seeks to clarify parties’ specific ways of collaboration, the program’s agreement, and the forms and messages’ strategies employed during the election campaign, based on a comparative research design of these three political parties. Our findings suggest that each of the examined parties had different reasons to join the group, though personal links played an important role in all cases. We further claim that the alliance with Matteo Salvini had ultimately negative effect on the election performance of SPD and Sme Rodina. While the alliance focused its attention on the fight against what Brussels “dictates”, conservative values and anti-migrants rhetoric, considerably less attention had been paid to domestic topics which were still highly relevant in the campaign. Despite mixed results in the election, radical right parties established a new group in the EP, Identity and Democracy, within which political parties continue to cooperate after the 2019 election.