In this article we examine the phenomenon of the use of sovereignist claims, not only by nationalist or populist leaders but also by actors who would not normally fall into these categories. We zoom in on two different cases: France and Italy. Through an analysis of Twitter we examine the discourse of the political leadership in election campaigns. We document some interesting commonalities, as well as some differences, concerning the emphasis on sovereignist claims. We produce an account of the patterns of use of sovereignist issues, we identify which parties/leaders have been the main promoters of sovereignist claims and how their competitors have responded to this challenge. Finally, we analyse the main drivers of sovereignist party discourses. Through regression analysis we show how, both in France and in Italy, the sovereignist supply has been influenced by ideology and citizens' demands.

The emphasis national parties put on European Union (EU) issues in their manifestos varies to a great extent between countries. A systematic explanation of this variation is, however, still lacking. We address this gap by exploring the effect of the temporal proximity between national and European Parliament (EP) elections within the national electoral cycle on national parties’ EU issue emphasis. Multilevel mixed-effects Tobit regressions on a sample of 956 manifestos, produced by 340 parties running for national elections in 27 EU member states between 1979 and 2019, indicate that temporal proximity displays a positive effect on national parties’ EU issue salience: the closer in time EP elections are to national elections within the national electoral cycle, the more parties emphasize EU issues in their national election manifestos. This is particularly the case for non-Eurosceptic parties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of party competition in EU member states.