Manuel Müller Strengthening European Political Parties Financial and Power Resources INTRODUCTION European political parties(or Europarties for short) have a long history. The Liaison Bureau of the Socialist Parties of the Euro­pean Community, the forerunner of today’s Party of European Socialists(PES), was founded as early as 1957. In 1976, the Eu­ropean People’s Party(EPP) was the first major organization to call itself a European»party«. With the 1993 Maastricht re­form,»political parties at European level« found official recog­nition in the Treaty on European Union(Wieser 2018). In 2016, the last major overhaul of the EU party regulation(Regulation 1141/2014) led to the establishment of the Authority for Euro­pean Political Parties and European Political Foundations(APPF), which is responsible for the registration, control and sanction­ing of Europarties. As of 2022, the Authority is officially recog­nizing ten Europarties. This gradual formalization and institutionalization of the Eu­roparties(cf. Switek / Weissenbach 2020) has been accompa­nied by their growing importance for the legitimacy of the EU. With the deepening of European integration and the gradual parliamentarization of the EU’s political system, democratic le­gitimacy increasingly needs to be generated through the rep­resentation of transnational social and ideological cleavages rather than national interests. In this context, Europarties are the most suitable actors for structuring transnational political discourses and offering citizens political identification patterns that transcend national perspectives. Strong Europarties are therefore crucial for the further development of the EU towards a supranational parliamentary democracy. In political practice, however, Europarties are not yet able to fulfil the typical functions of parties in a representative de­mocracy. To this day, they primarily serve as»interlinking or­ganizations«(Hix / Lord 1997:58, see also Bukow / Höhne 2013: 828–829) that promote exchange between their mem­ber parties, but can hardly set the political agenda and are barely visible in public. Strengthening the Europarties and enabling them to perform the functions of»real« parties is therefore of central impor­tance for a more democratic EU. This policy paper outlines the most important institutional levers for this, namely the better endowment of Europarties with financial as well as power-political resources. In both respects, pro­gress has been made in recent years, but it has been slow and incomplete. Currently, two new European legislative process­es – the reform of the European party regulation and of the European electoral law – are underway in the EU institutions and promise further improvements. This policy paper first outlines the gap between the democrat­ic opportunities and the unsatisfactory reality of Europarties. It then briefly presents the status quo regarding Europarties’ financial and power resources, the ongoing legislative pro­cesses aimed at strengthening them, as well as further reform proposals that could provide Europarties with additional re­sources.