The European elections in Central and Eastern EU states illustrate that the rise of Euroscepticism was far from uniform across Europe

The key story to emerge from the European elections in countries like France and the UK was the rise of Euroscepticism, but does this narrative apply to all countries across Europe? Tim Haughton and Tereza Novotna present an analysis of the elections in four Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries: Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia. They write that while there has been a tendency to regard CEE states as distinct from those in Western Europe, this perspective is largely outdated and analyses of EU-wide political trends should pay as much attention to smaller states in the East as they do to larger states in the West. When adopting this perspective it is apparent that the rise in Euroscepticism was not a Europe-wide trend, but rather confined to individual countries.