Abstract

This chapter surveys the legal candidacy requirements for the selection of presidential candidates in Europe’s semi-presidential democracies before turning to a more detailed analysis of party processes for the selection of presidential candidates in five countries that are broadly representative of the range of European semi-presidential democracies with regard to the power of the presidency: France, Romania, Poland, Portugal, and Ireland. Our contribution is two-fold: we identify the party rules for presidential candidate selection and evaluate whether the 2008 economic crisis triggered more participatory forms of candidate selection. We find that party elites maintain a great degree of control over the selection of their presidential candidates even when more inclusive bodies are in charge of selecting candidates. Moreover, there is little evidence that the European economic crisis has, in any systematic way, triggered more participatory candidate selection procedures.