Governments want to win elections and remain in office. We investigate whether electoral competitiveness, the chance that governments lose votes or are replaced by competitors at the next elections, influences their behaviour in the Council of the European Union. We hypothesise that, even in negotiations at the European level, electoral competitiveness alters governments' incentives to pursue vote-seeking versus policy-seeking strategies, especially as governments expect termination to be approaching. Using the Decision-Making in the European Union dataset (modules I to III), we investigate position-taking of national governments on a left-right political dimension towards hundreds of EU legislative proposals and issues in the Council of the European Union, covering a time span from 1996 to 2019. Our results show that different measures of electoral competitiveness are related to how strongly governments follow public opinion at home versus the party programmes on which they have been elected. Our study demonstrates the high relevance of domestic electoral politics for EU legislative decision-making.