The European Political Parties and the Strategic Agenda 2024–2029: A (Party) Political Convergence?

ABSTRACT

The European Union's Strategic Agenda establishes the EU's priorities and its strategic orientations for the next institutional cycle. Before setting the Strategic Agenda for 2024–2029, the European political parties have set their policy positions in the months before the 2024 European Parliament elections. However, European political parties do not determine the Strategic Agenda, but their preferences may be filtered through intergovernmental bargaining. As such, this research seeks to understand if the Strategic Agenda, while under the influence of collective intergovernmental bargaining, reflects the preferences of major political forces within the EU. By analysing the convergence between party manifestos of the EPP, PES, ALDE and ECR with the Strategic Agenda's policy issues, results suggest the existence of selective convergence. Strategic‐partisan alignment is highest in less contested domains, such as external relations and economic competitiveness, while issue salience shows strong convergence with mainstream political families such as EPP and lower for ideologically peripheral actors like the ECR.