“This Time It's Different”? Euroscepticism and the 2014 European Parliament Elections in the Dutch Press

The Maastricht Treaty is often seen as a turning point in European integration, signaling an end to the so-called ‘permissive consensus’. The Netherlands is a good example of a country where European integration seems to have become subject to increasingly critical debate. During the 1991 intergovernmental conference the Dutch government proposed a far-reaching blue print for a federal Europe. Yet, 14 years later, on 1 June 2005, Dutch citizens overwhelmingly voted against the Constitutional Treaty, partly due to increased dissatisfaction with the pace and extent of European integration.

This paper aims at exploring the idea of an increasingly Eurosceptic debate on EU affairs by portraying varieties of Euroscepticism and opposition to the EU as present in the mediated debates in the context of the 2009 and 2014 European Parliament elections. It focuses on the debates as represented in major Dutch newspapers. To date, there has been relatively little attention for mass media in scholarly work on Euroscepticism. Yet, with the latter’s apparent spread, expanding our scope beyond public opinion and political parties is important.

The empirical analysis compares the mediated debate about the European Elections from 28 May to 10 June 2009 with the debate in the period 15 to 28 May 2014, thus looking at the week preceding the respective elections, as well as the actual elections and the immediate aftermath. The newspapers will be studied using a form of claim-making analysis, in which the unit of analysis is an individual claim made by an actor in the debate.