A glance back: Prof. Kaeding and this semester's first Library x IDEAs book presentation

On Wednesday, February 18th, 2026, the library, together with IDEAs (Inter-Departmental European Advanced Studies), organized its first book presentation during lunch break of this second semester!

Professor Michael Kaeding presented his book ‘The 2024 European Parliament Elections, A Turn to the Right in the Shadow of War'.

As Professor Kaeding reviewed the contents of his book, he touched upon the following topics:

• While the euro crisis, the asylum crisis, Brexit, and climate change had already left their mark on the 2014 and 2019 elections, by 2024, crises had become even more immediate: the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the Middle East conflict, the energy cost, and the cost-of-living crisis.
• While turnout remained remarkably stable (50,7 %) in comparison to 2019 (50,66 %), the 2024 elections brought a turn to the right with shifting majorities and new political groups in the European Parliament. In 2024, the party system in the EP is more fragmented than ever before, and the “grand coalition” (EPP & S&D) no longer has its own majority. Despite ideological similarities, national party competition prevents the formation of a joint parliamentary group of right-wing parties.
• The democratic principle of electoral equality applies to European elections at the national level, but not EU-wide, as the number of votes required to win a seat strongly varies across member states. 
• Finally, a possible scenario for the composition of the European Parliament in a fully enlarged European Union (EU-37) shows no dramatic change in the seat distribution. The biggest change would be the massive increase in the number of non-attached members (NI) to 14.8%, as many parties from the 10 new member states (especially Turkey and Ukraine) have not yet been assigned.

During the Q&A session that followed, the focus was on the impact of mandatory voting on the EU-37 scenario, the impact of the US on the results of the EP elections, the voters for the extreme right, the different strategies of (right-wing) parties to mobilize young voters on TikTok, and the effect of the voting age of 16.

Pictures of the Event