Abstract
The establishment of funding for European political parties has been the result of a long and arduous process. This chapter goes into the origins of the Europarty finance regime. The first part sets out the subsequent steps that had to be taken to introduce Europarty subsidies in 2004 and identifies the key actors in the European Parliament and the European political parties that have driven the process. The second part of the chapter goes into the dominant narrative behind the finance regime. It shows how the funding for European political parties was presented as an instrument to tackle the EU’s democratic deficit: in order to become more democratic, the European level required genuine party politics, encouraged by the EU institutions themselves through public subsidies. This corresponds to the view of political parties as ‘public utilities’. Such a discourse has also often been used at the national level, but the discussions on European political parties take the argument to its extremes.
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Wolfs, W. (2022). An Origin Story: Establishing Public Funding for European Political Parties. In: European Political Parties and Party Finance Reform. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95175-7_2
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