EU Elections 2019: What do the Central European Political Parties stand for?
Before the 2019 European Parliament elections, AMO publishes a briefing paper summarizing the positions of political parties in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Austria towards key current topics of the European Union. The findings confirm that there is a general agreement among the parties who currently are members of the three biggest political groups in the European Parliament – EPP, S&D and ALDE – about the need to strengthen the defense cooperation at the EU level as well as investing in security and EU external border protection.
The publication looks at how political parties in the countries of the Visegrad Group and Austria position themselves on five issues that are currently salient regarding the future of European integration. These issues are: the eurozone and its possible future developments; European foreign policy, security and defense; migration; the EU future budget. Structured according to the political groups in the European Parliament that the parties are currently members of, the paper provides an opportunity to compare among parties which (at least supposedly) belong to the same party families, the assumption being that the priorities of the parties in these groups should be similar which, however, is not always the case.
The paper was published in cooperation with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom.