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  • The 2019 EP election in the UK was called in the middle of an ongoing Brexit crisis and at a considerably short notice. Against all odds, Britons went to the polls to elect their country's Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) despite the fact that they had also voted by a majority to leave the European Union (EU) a few years earlier in the June 2016 EU referendum (Hobolt, 2016; Vasilopoulou, 2016). The UK parliament's rejection of the Brexit Withdrawal Bill essentially meant that the country would continue to be an EU member state and was, as such, legally obliged to hold the election. Against a background of intense political division on how to deliver Brexit, this unexpected vote became a proxy for a second referendum. In contrast to the 2017 general election which had strengthened the UK two-party system, in May 2019 voters rewarded small non-governing parties. On the one hand, two new parties, namely the Brexit Party and Change UK that campaigned on the single question of Brexit, ran for the first time in this electoral contest with the Brexit Party topping the polls. The Liberal Democrats whose campaign promised a second referendum came second, scoring their highest electoral result at any EP election. On the other hand, the mainstream Labour and Conservative parties recorded their lowest ever combined share of the vote since the first EP election in 1979. Support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) also shrank and the party lost all its seats in the European Parliament (EP). What set of events compelled the government to hold such an unexpected election? In what ways did Brexit feature in the political campaign? And how did the Brexit Party manage to achieve such an unprecedented electoral success? This contribution examines the debate in the run-up to the 2019 EP election arguing that – despite the fact that only two years earlier voters had opted for the two main parties that had pledged to honour the result of the EU Referendum – both the executive and the Parliament remained divided and unable to deliver on this promise. This led to Brexit becoming a key issue in both citizens' preferences and party campaigns. Voters rewarded smaller parties, sending a strong signal both against the government and the Labour Party. However, whereas the pro-EU vote was divided across many different political parties, the Leave vote was mostly united behind the Brexit Party, which had implications for parties' short- and medium-term strategies and British politics more broadly. (xsd:string)
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  • 2020 (xsd:gyear)
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  • 2020 (xsd:gyear)
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  • 10.1111/jcms.13078 ()
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  • Brexit and the 2019 EP Election in the UK (xsd:string)
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  • In JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 58(S1), 80-90, 2020 (xsd:string)
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  • 58 (xsd:string)