Europe’s Democratic Blind Spot: Who Selects the Candidates?

In this Voice of Youth (VoY) commentary, Filippo Palmieri examines a critical blind spot in the European Union’s democratic resilience agenda: how political parties select their candidates. Drawing on Italy’s new electoral law and comparative research on political recruitment, Palmieri argues that protecting elections from foreign interference, disinformation, and financial manipulation is insufficient if candidate selection remains opaque and concentrated in party leaderships. Comparing recruitment practices among Italy’s major populist parties, he demonstrates that political turnover does not necessarily indicate democratic renewal. Rather than advocating EU intervention in internal party affairs, Palmieri proposes greater transparency, comparative research, and national reporting requirements to strengthen political accountability and democratic resilience.

By Filippo Palmieri*

On October 8, 2026, the Italian Chamber of Deputies gave final approval to a new electoral law, published the next day as Law No. 180 and in force from October 24. Seats will be allocated proportionally, with a bonus for any list or coalition that wins 42 percent of the vote. In each multi-member district, parties will present lists of seven names, and voters may express up to three preferences among the last six. The first name is fixed by the party and has first claim on any seat the list wins. The 70 bonus seats in the Chamber go to candidates on separate lists, all of whom are elected if the bonus is triggered. When Italians next vote, expected in 2027, a significant part of the choice will have been made by whoever compiles the lists.

European resilience policy says little about that stage, and one rule marks the boundary with unusual precision. Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2025/2445 on European political parties and foundations, in force since December 2025, counts among the tasks of European political foundations “capacity building to support the formation of future political leaders in the Union.” Article 27(2), which bars foundations from funding elections, parties or candidates, allows them to train people “up to the date on which they become a candidate in accordance with national rules or up to the date of their nomination in the national party, whichever is earlier.”

The rule concerns funding, and the line it draws is legitimate: candidate selection is a matter for national law and for parties, and the ban keeps European money out of national campaigns. But it shows where European attention stops. The instruments examined below, the core of the Union’s resilience agenda, protect parties from interference and regulate their money; none of them asks how parties decide who will govern, a function whose results vary with how parties are organized.

Protect, Regulate, Train

The European Democracy Shield, presented by the European Commission and the High Representative on November 12, 2025, mentions political parties in a single section, on the fairness and integrity of electoral processes. There they appear in connection with foreign interference, party financing, a level playing field among competitors and voluntary commitments on the responsible use of artificial intelligence; candidates appear chiefly as people whose safety needs protecting. The section on civic participation relies on citizens’ panels, civic technology and civil society organizations, and parties do not feature in it. 

The European Centre for Democratic Resilience, which began its work in February 2026, is designed to detect threats, coordinate early warnings and counter disinformation and foreign information manipulation. The Commission’s 2023 Recommendation on inclusive and resilient electoral processes comes closest to the inner life of parties, asking them to encourage gender balance on their electoral lists. On how candidates are chosen, it says nothing.

An early assessment of the Shield on Verfassungsblog observed that its focus on external threats tends to obscure the domestic sources of democratic weakness. Parties belong to what Jan-Werner Müller has called democracy’s “critical infrastructure,” and selection is the part of that infrastructure that produces the people who will run institutions.

Why Selection Matters

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe parties as gatekeepers whose task is to keep would-be authoritarians away from power. Much of that gatekeeping happens when candidates are chosen. The evidence suggests parties can select well when they have reasons to. Working with Swedish population registers, Ernesto Dal Bó and colleagues found that politicians score above the population they represent on the cognitive and leadership tests taken by men at military conscription, and that selection on ability is stronger where electoral competition is more intense. In Italy, Vincenzo Galasso and Tommaso Nannicini showed that between 1994 and 2001, when most seats were won in single-member districts, parties placed better-educated candidates with local government experience in the districts that either side could win. These studies show that incentives to select carefully matter. They do not show that long careers are better in themselves.

Procedure matters as well. Reuven Hazan and Gideon Rahat’s comparative study of candidate selection shows that methods trade participation, representation, competition and responsiveness against one another, and that narrow selectorates tend to produce more cohesive and disciplined groups. A more inclusive procedure is not better on every count. Writing about Italy, Piero Ignazi found parties largely closed to the decentralization of selection seen elsewhere in Europe, in some cases more centralized than before 1994, and warned that appeals to the membership over the heads of intermediate cadres introduce a plebiscitary dynamic.

Same Turnover, Different Careers

Italy’s 2018 election is usually told as a story about populism. The data on selection tell a more precise one. In the Chamber of Deputies, 65.9 percent of members had not sat in the previous legislature, almost the same share as in 2013 (65.5 percent), while electoral volatility was lower (26.7 against 36.7 percent). Eugenio Salvati and Michelangelo Vercesiconcluded that much of the renewal was decided before the vote, by party leaderships that controlled the drafting of lists.

The turnover rate hides who came in. The League, led by Matteo Salvini, renewed 87.8 percent of its group in the Chamber. Yet in a study of the new Chamber, Bruno Marino, Nicola Martocchia Diodati and Luca Verzichelli found an “extremely low” share of League deputies without any previous local, party or parliamentary position, against more than half of the Five-Star Movement’s. The Movement let enrolled members put themselves forward online, subject to a binding veto by its political leader, who also picked the candidates for single-member seats. Both parties are classified as populist in the PopuList, an expert-based database of populist, far-left and far-right parties in Europe.

A different indicator, measured after the 2022 election, points the same way. According to Openpolis, 81 percent of the League’s parliamentarians had served in local councils or executives, as had 68 percent of those of Brothers of Italy, the party of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, also classified as populist. For the Five-Star Movement the figure was 22.5 percent. Parties that share the populist label can recruit in very different ways, and the label alone does not describe them.

What to Look For

None of this makes political experience a measure of democratic quality. A seasoned local administrator may depend entirely on a leader; a newcomer may widen representation. Biographies cannot settle the question. What matters for resilience is the process: whether nominations are transparent, whether they can be contested inside the party, how concentrated the power to nominate is, and how open candidacies are. These features decide to whom elected representatives owe their seats, and so whether they can act as a check on their own leadership.

What Could Be Done

This does not call for European rules on how parties pick their candidates. Three proposals follow, at different levels.

At the European level, the Commission has already used soft law on the composition of electoral lists when it encouraged gender balance in 2023. A future recommendation could invite Member States to make parties disclose how each candidate was chosen: by which body, under which rules, with what room for challenge.

Within the Union’s own structures, the Stakeholder Platform of the European Centre for Democratic Resilience is meant to bring researchers, academia and civil society into its work. Comparative research on candidate selection belongs there as much as research on disinformation.

At the national level, some rules already exist. Since 2013, Italian law has required parties seeking the “2 per mille,” a share of income tax that taxpayers can assign to a party, to set out in their statutes how they select candidates. The commission that reviews those statutes looks at their content: in 2021 it turned down the Five Star Movement’s request, and, according to the party, the changes it asked for included its rules on candidacies. Parliament could go further and require parties to report, after each election, how those procedures were applied. Under the new electoral law, such reports would tell voters who chose the names they cannot change.

Europe will pay to train a future Italian deputy until the day her party puts her name at the top of a list. What happens on that day is where its resilience policy goes quiet.

(*) Filippo Palmieri holds a master’s degree in International and Diplomatic Sciences, specializing in Politics and International Security, from the University of Bologna. His research focuses on democratic theory, populism, political representation, the transformation of political parties and the effects of digital communication on contemporary democracy. His master’s thesis examined the changing analytical value of the concept of populism in twenty-first-century democracies. He has presented research on democracy, populism and illiberalism at academic events hosted by the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, the Italian Political Science Association and Venice International University. Email: filippo.palmieri3@studio.unibo.it