Building a pan-European movement party: DiEM25 at the 2019 European elections.

In this research note, I analyse the case of DiEM25, a pan-European movement that decided to contest for the 2019 European elections and ran in seven different countries with the same programme. Focussing on Germany, I discuss how the different logics of spontaneity in social movements and party politics both enabled and constrained the electoral campaign. Building on official documentation as well as my own experience as part of the campaign, I suggest that organizational complexity, lack of resources and reluctance to embrace electoral politics on the part of movement-oriented members finally contributed to the failure to secure seats in European parliament. The paper also contextualizes both the political junctures of DiEM25's emergence and the political opportunity structures in Germany at the time of the campaign arguing that the political space was quite narrow in light of political contenders and public opinion in Germany in relation to the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]