Apathy was said to be the main winner of the last elections to the European Parliament, not only by journalists but by the politicians too. Long criticised for its ‘democratic deficit’, six EU treaty changes mean that formally the deficit has all but disappeared. No major EU decision can be taken without agreement from the majority of member governments and a majority in the European Parliament.
It may sound like democracy, and on paper look like democracy, but to Europe’s citizens it doesn’t feel like democracy. The Parliament whose members they can vote for, and which now has many of the powers of a national Parliament, still doesn’t feel like ‘their’ parliament. Instead, it’s seen as just another Brussels institution that interferes in the nooks and crannies of everyday life. Small wonder that fewer and fewer Europeans bother to vote.
The 2009 European elections were the seventh to be held and voter turnout fell for the seventh consecutive time. It may not have fallen as much as some feared, but at 43% it was, averagely about 20% lower than national turnouts. Apologists point to falling long-term trends in national elections, and argue that in any case truly controversial national issues like health, education and tax are of more immediate interest to voters. But increasingly these are questions that have become European as well as national.
The novelty of citizens from 27 countries coming together to elect a Parliament with real legislative and budgetary powers should be an exciting one, yet in truth it is an event of the greatest possible indifference to most of Europe’s 500m citizens.
This matters to the Parliament, of course, but even more to the EU as a whole. The EP elections were intended to be the moment when the people of Europe could engage with the EU’s institutions and shape its future direction. Instead there is a sullen, fatalistic acceptance by most people of the status quo in Europe, with any attempt to make the Union stronger or develop new policies likely to come up against a brick wall of public dislike for the ‘Brussels bureaucracy’ and most of its works. No treaty change that requires public backing through a referendum in anyone of the member states is even going to be contemplated in the present climate. And if Europe is seen to be imposing ever-greater budgetary disciplines on the member states – like some regional version of the IMF – without pushing for a growth strategy to provide some hope of an antidote to prolonged austerity, then today’s passive hostility could turn into something much more radical, dramatic and destructive.
Much has been written and said since the 2009 elections about ways of overcoming the participation deficit and to re-engage citizens with Europe. Some seem almost to want to by-pass the Parliament by using the new role given by the Lisbon treaty to national parliaments as a means of moving the more established national legislatures centre-stage as a way of ensuring greater accountability in Europe. The trouble is that national parliaments have in the main not wanted more involvement in EU business – very few even try to hold their ministers to account before they go off to ministerial meetings in Brussels. And they have also turned away from the idea of a congress of national parliaments that would have a decision-making role.
There is a school of thought that a little dose of direct democracy is what is required. There is the new provision in the Lisbon treaty for citizens’ Initiatives – a million signatures on any proposal mean it must be considered by the Commission. But decision-making is quite another matter. The EU system is that the Commission proposes and Parliament and the Council dispose. Some people may well be interested in the new procedure as a means of expressing a view or supporting an idea, but they will soon see that this is no substitute for taking part in decisions.
Then there is the idea of Europe-wide referendums on major issues like future EU enlargements, or possibly the next generation’s growth and stability pact. Leaving aside widely-held concerns that referendums are not the European way for taking decisions for the very good reason that political campaigns for them are so often about other issues than the question on the ballot paper, the obstacles to be overcome are so great (including changing the constitutions of several member states just to allow the holding of referendums) that this not very brilliant idea has little or no chance of even being accepted.
Some MEPs in the European Parliament are campaigning for a change to the electoral system, so that up to 25 MEPs would be elected by a transnational European list on top of the 751 members voted directly in member states or regional constituencies. They say this would “Europeanise” the campaign and stimulate greater interest, but not everyone would be happy with two different types of parliamentarians in the same legislature. In any case, it would require a treaty change to be ratified in all member states (including those which would not benefit from this ‘windfall’ of extra MEPs) as well as changes to the electoral law of each country. And whatever its merits, it couldn’t come into force until 2014 at earliest.
Is there a quicker fix to encourage public debate and greater participation by citizens? So far one key ingredient has been largely absent – political parties.
In our democratic tradition, political parties are the key protagonists in elections. Love them or loath them, they shape public debate. They are bound together by ideological ties; they have individual members; they campaign on their policies; they select candidates; they contest elections; and after the elections, they try to hold those who have been elected to their mandates. That is except in the EU, where they do almost none of the above.
There are European political parties, but broadly they are confederations of national parties and act as little more than clearing houses for essential common business. Mostly they don’t have individual members – members of Spain's conservative Partido Popular are as unlikely to see themselves as members of the European People’s Party as are their German social democrat counterparts with regard to the Party of European Socialists. They have common programmes for European elections that are usually the lowest of common denominators, but then have no one to campaign for them. Campaigning is generally done by national parties on national issues, and with national rather than European politicians as the most visible personalities. The impression given is that the only thing at stake in European elections is the national standing of national parties. Little wonder that electors wonder whether anything is really at stake in these elections, and whether they should bother to vote.
Yet beneath the surface things are beginning to change. The main European parties have since 2007 had their policy work underpinned by foundations or research institutes. From 2011 onwards, the funding for their political activities that comes from the EP’s budget will be increased every year until the next elections. This is beginning to give individual MEPs a greater voice in shaping the policies of their own national political parties. They are also moving to greater internal democracy with their members now electing delegates to decision-making congresses that vote on leadership contests and decide election manifestos. These are all steps towards a coming of age for European-level political parties – and they have been in response to the public apathy about European politics that could well be the greatest long-term threat to the EU.
The two main parties – the EPP and the PSE European socialists are each to nominate a candidate for the president of the European Commission to succeed José Manuel Barroso in 2014. The timetable may be for nominees to be in place by the end of 2013, and discussions are taking place about the method; the EPP will probably nominate its candidate at a party congress in the autumn of 2013, while the socialists are discussing a wider franchise with individual party members having a say, possibly through national or regional primaries. Both agree that the 2014 campaign for the European Parliament elections will be dominated by a new focus on the personalities who will be putting themselves forward to head the EU’s executive as this would involve debate on television and in other media between the candidates.
This rather startling development will not in itself guarantee greater turnout in itself, as 30 years of cynicism about European elections will not be effaced so easily. Depending on the quality of the candidates, there will be much jeering in the media about faceless nobodies. But for the first time there may well be a Europe-wide contest between candidates and a public debate about competing visions for Europe’s future.