This article argues that external factors of EU coverage in the media need to be reassessed against domestic factors, in particular how parties modulate media attention to EU affairs. We explain which parties may set the EU on the media agenda, and how parties interact with events depending on the level of conflict over EU issues. Drawing on the first long-term analysis of partisan agenda-setting of EU affairs in the media – based on ARIMA time-series models of monthly data collected for six newspapers from 1990 to 2015 – we determine the scale of partisan agenda-setting and find partial support for our model. Political parties do not face the intrusion of EU issues, but some of them are actively involved in this process.