MARGINAL NO MORE Liubomir Topaloff Liubomir Topaloff is associate professor of politics at Meiji Univer- sity, Tokyo. His most recent book is Political Parties and Euroscepticism (2012). I n a healthy and vibrant democracy, political parties lose elections. 1 Keeping that in mind, we may say that the relatively poor performance of “mainstream” parties and the strong showing by their “Euroskeptic” rivals in the 22–25 May 2014 elections for the 751-seat European Parlia- ment (EP) added up to a triumph for democracy. Indeed, the balloting may be the clearest sign yet of the irreversible democratization of Euro- pean politics—a dynamic that is chipping away at the European Union’s “democratic deficit.” First instituted in 1979, the balloting to elect the EP is the world’s second-largest free exercise of the franchise: Voters in each of the EU’s 28 member states vote by proportional representation, and only Indian federal elections involve a bigger electorate. As such, EP elections must count as momentous events, not just for the EU and its members, but for the entire democratic world. In 2014, however, this democratic success came at a high price. Already, politicians and analysts are comparing the Euroskeptics’surge to the rise of Nazism or (if greater rhetorical re- straint is being shown) to a natural disaster. When Marine Le Pen’s National Front (FN) came in first among all French parties with 25 percent of the vote, Socialist premier Manuel Valls called it an “earth- quake.” 2 The leader of Britain’s Euroskeptic UK Independence Party (UKIP), Nigel Farage, himself had used similar terms—albeit in a tone far happier than the one that Manuel Valls would soon employ—to de- scribe his own expectations on election eve. Like the FN in France, the UKIP came in first among all its country’s parties with 26.8 percent of the vote. And just as French voters left President François Hollande’s ruling Socialist Party (PS) battered in third place, their British coun- Journal of Democracy Volume 25, Number 4 October 2014 © 2014 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press Euroskepticism Arrives