Tag: France

Market Shares and Topic Correlations: European Parliament Party Leadership

The chart above shows how much associated EP Group  leaders have on a variety of EU topics market share of the leaders on different subjects, including their own party. It’s possible that all leaders can be in more than one article so the totals can be over 100%.  The Green line rank the subjects of all the leaders combined. The EU ranks 1st followed by the Parliament – which should be expected, and then the Euro. Joseph Daul (JD) has the most association for the EPP Group at 81%, which is a good indicator for further party branding but not for pan EU leadership , where he lags behind all others.

On the far right, the chart shows the average and over/under performance to the market share compared to Group Parliament seats.

  • Guy Verhoftstadt (GV) (ALDE) is +7,
  • Martin Schulz (MS) (S&D) is + 20
  • Joseph Daul  (EPP) is at -20.

This does not fare well for the EPP Group. When looking at the market shares of EP leaders in context to one another, JD is consistently in last place. Why does the EPP vastly underperform while the S&D and ALDE over perform? This can be due to a number of reasons.

  • JD does not speak English
  • The EPP being the largest group cannot utilize polarizing and thus mobilizing language without alienating many of their MEP’s.
  •  JD has chosen to stay out of the spotlight given that Jose Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy[1] are EPP.
  • MS is from Germany which is heavily discussed at the moment, and will also become the new President of the European Parliament replacing Jerzey Buzek[2].

Robert Fitzhenery (Head of EPP Group Press and who controls the communications and outreach budget) explained to me that the EPP Group cannot be too polarizing on political issues because of it’s size, and cannot risk alienating some MEPs. On the other end some in the Group want to be more polarizing to mobilize debate and heighten the Groups profile.

During my work with the EPP, ALDE and GV typically lead market shares on media despite only having an 11% (88 of 754 MEP seats) market share of the Parliament[3]. I talked with Neil Corlett, Head of Press and Communication for ALDE. Neil explained since ALDE was a smaller group, they decided to follow whatever GV wanted and not deviate from a few main points. In short their message is consistent via both GV and ALDE’s MEPs. It paid off. ALDE is outperforming the EPP and S&D. And both have more money. It’s only in the last two months that MS has been generating so much sentiment. It will be interesting to see if this approach pays off in the 2014 EP elections. It will also be a good indicator of how mature the on-line EU landscape is.

German and French EPP MEPs: Germans Dominate Coverage and the French Talk.

The chart illustrates regional media output and comments online for German (DE) and French (FR) European People’s Party MEP’s during the last 30 days.  The market share of EPP MEP’s is  41%(29) French and 59%(42) German. The market share of coverage is 75% (DE) and 25 % (FR). Essentially the Germans are over performing by 16% (zero sum game). The Illustration get’s more interesting when you see  the comments on  media regionally. 62% of DE EPP MEP related media output is coming from Germany. Despite this,  82% of all DE EPP MEP commented media is from France – Germany only accounts for 10%! On the opposite, Germany is statistically at 0% regarding  FR EPP MEPs comments. The FR EPP MEPs comments are divided between the USA and France ( 48%) and Belgium ( 2%).