European elections have been described as second-order phenomena for voters, the media, but also parties. Yet, since 2009, there exists evidence that not only voters, but also political parties assign increasing significance to European elections. While initially ‘issue entrepreneurs’ were held responsible for this development, the latest campaigns have raised the question of whether mainstream parties are finally also campaigning on European issues. In this article, we examine European Union (EU) salience in the 2019 European Parliament (EP) campaigns of government and opposition parties and the predictors of their strategic behaviours. We test the relevance of factors derived from the selective emphasis and the co-orientation approach within an integrated model of strategic campaign communication based on expert evaluations of 191 parties in 28 EU member states. Results show that the traditional expectation that government parties silence EU issues does not hold anymore; instead, the average EU salience of government and opposition parties is similar on the national level. The strongest predictors for a party’s decision to campaign on EU issues are the co-orientation towards the campaign agendas of competing parties, and party’s EU position.

欧洲大选被描述为选民，媒体和政党的第二种现象。然而，自2009年以来，有证据表明，不仅选民，而且各政党都对欧洲大选赋予越来越重要的意义。尽管最初由“问题企业家”来负责这一发展，但最近的竞选活动提出了一个问题，即主流政党是否最终也正在就欧洲问题进行竞选。在本文中，我们在2019年政府和反对党的欧洲议会（EP）运动及其战略行为的预测指标中研究了欧盟（EU）的显着性。我们基于对28个欧盟成员国191个政党的专家评估，在战略战役沟通整合模型中测试了从选择性强调和共同导向方法得出的因素的相关性。结果表明，传统上对政党沉默欧盟问题的期望不再成立。相反，欧盟政府和反对党的平均显着性在国家层面上是相似的。一党决定在欧盟问题上竞选的最强预测因素是对竞争党竞选议程和党的欧盟立场的共同取向。