Growing concerns about affective polarization have led scholars to develop depolarizing interventions (i.e., experimental manipulations designed to reduce partisan animosity) with promising results in the United States. However, these interventions remain untested in Europe’s multi-party systems. This study adapts depolarization interventions highlighting commonalities among political parties and voters to the European context. We test these interventions in a 16-country experiment, featuring approximately 27,000 participants, conducted right before the 2024 European Parliament elections. Our results present three key findings. First, our interventions effectively increased perceptions of parties’ shared European and democratic ground. Second, their effects are conditional, influencing only non-far-right party supporters with pro-European and pro-democratic views. Third, despite successfully shifting perceptions, the interventions fail to reduce affective polarization. These findings contribute to the growing consensus that depolarization is difficult to achieve and extend it to the European context. In particular, they highlight the limitations of commonality-based interventions in multi-party systems, where heterogeneous partisan alignments make it harder to identify shared ground that resonates across political groups. More broadly, this paper challenges the generalizability of depolarization strategies tested in the United States and urges us to define the scope and conditions for interventions to depolarize effectively across diverse political contexts.