The rotating EU presidency's relevance for EU politics has decreased since the
introduction of a permanent council president. However, news salience and
framing of the own government acting as the EU presidency can amplify publicity
for EU affairs. We, therefore, evaluate the visibility and framing of the EU
presidency in 12 Austrian newspapers for 2009–2019. We conduct an automated text
analysis of 22 presidencies over 11 years, testing several hypotheses
statistically, and qualify results via manually coded frames of the Austrian EU
presidency in 2018. The results confirm the crucial importance of the
domestication of EU politics, underscoring the potential of the presidency to
serve as a window of opportunity for public debate. We discuss our findings with
reference to the EU's democratic deficit.