When do parties engage in issue competition and which subjects do they sacrifice when establishing their preferred issues on the political agenda? Parties consistently aim to shape the focus of political debates strategically, and the issues they prioritize have been the subject of significant attention over the past decades. However, we still lack a systematic understanding of both the timing of these efforts as well as the question of which competing issues, by consequence, receive diminished attention. To fill this gap, we apply state-of-the-art fine-tuned transformer models for topic classification on a full sample of parliamentary speeches and legislative bills from the German Bundestag (2009-2021) and the Austrian Nationalrat (1996-2020). We then triangulate and interlink the classified speeches and bills with party manifesto data, providing precise and fine-grained insights into parties’ issue attention patterns. We find that parties are increasingly likely to engage in issue competition when the current political agenda becomes less advantageous — both due to lower public salience or reduced prominence of issues in their manifestos. In these instances, parties pivot toward more advantageous issue domains, guided by the same principles. Hence, parties use the salience of policy realms in public discourse or within their programmatic orientation not only as a guiding principle for selecting the issues to emphasize but also for determining the timing of these efforts and the subjects to neglect. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the temporal dimension of issue competition dynamics in representative democracies.