European parliamentary elections
June 9, 2009 9:11 am GeneralWarning: politics post
Since moving to France, the only elections I get to vote in here are the European and municipal elections – so on Sunday I blew the dust off my voter card & trotted down to my local “bureau de vote” as one of the 40% of the French electorate who voted. I had a chance to think about why the European elections inspire people so little.
In the past couple of weeks, debate about European issues has been mostly absent from newspapers and TV. What little we hear is more like celeb news – “he said, she said” or “the sworn enemies unite and appear on stage together pretending they like each other”. But to me, the fundamental questions about what we expect from Europe, and how a vote for one party or another will move towards that vision, are absent.
There are a few reasons for this – the political groupings in the EU parliament are detached from the local political landscape in France. Even the major groupings like EPP, PES, the Liberals and the Greens don’t have an identity in the election camaign. There is no European platform of note. Very little appears to be spent spent on advertising. In brief, the European election appears to the public to be nothing more than a mid-term popularity contest with little impact on people.
That is not to say that the EU has no impact. But the European parliament is quite hamstrung by the European law-making process, as we saw with the vote for the EUCD: in that case, the EU parliament was unhappy with the law proposed by the commission, and proposed many amendments which improved the law, only to see the majority of these reversed by the council of ministers. When the law came back to the parliament, there were three options available: accept the law, reject it outright (requiring an absolute majority of MEPs, difficult to obtain), or reject it by a majority (by proposing amendments) and send it into a commission, made up 50% of nominees from the council of ministers and 50% from the EU parliament.
The process is weighted toward the commission (which writes the law in the first place) and the council of ministers, who have veto power at every stage, and against the parliament, due to the requirement of an absolute majority for rejection in second reading. The commission and the council of ministers are both nominated by the governments of the member countries. I would argue that because of this, they don’t represent the European population, so much as they represent a cross-section of European political parties.
On other occasions, a stand-off between the governments and the EP is possible – as with the nomination of the Barroso commission in 2004. And when people are asked their opinion on the direction of Europe, as in the first referendum on the Nice treaty in Ireland, the French and Dutch referenda on the European constitution, and now the referendum on the Lisbon treaty in Ireland, if the result doesn’t match with what is supported by the member governments, a way is found to work around the result. In the case of a small country like Ireland, a couple of special case amendments, and you rerun the referendum. For the bigger countries like France, you renegotiate the form of the agreement so that it’s a treaty, not a single document (which, by the way, makes it harder to read and understand), so that you can ratify it with a working majority in parliament.
And so Europeans are slowly but surely distancing themselves from Europe. Fringe parties and independents representing a protest vote get very good scores, like the UKIP in the UK, or NPA and (until recently) the Front National in France. The European parliament is becoming less representative of European opinion, rather than more representative. Only 4 in 10 registered voters go to the polls. I would be willing to bet that Lisbon will not pass the second time around in Ireland, plunging Europe into another institutional crisis.
These are the twin problems facing Europe: the national governments in Europe are not representing the views of their citizens, and the only representative body we have is pretty ineffectual, even when they try to do something.
The solutions in my opinion: Elect commissioners and members of the council of ministers. Create Europe-wide political parties with Europe-wide campaigns, like in the US. Let the voters know what they’re voting for in the parliament, and allow them to vote the executive branch of the European government. The path to greater voter activity in Europe is greater voter inclusion in the electoral process.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Every 2nd lecture amendements must be voted with the absolute majority (at least that was the case with the famous amendment 138, preventing the implementation of the french 3-strikes).
June 9th, 2009 at 10:24 am
“Create Europe-wide political parties with Europe-wide campaigns, like in the US. Let the voters know what they’re voting for in the parliament, and allow them to vote the executive branch of the European government.”
I agree with you on this. However I think our current voting system sucks in some way. We give too much power to people who simply don’t care about politics at all. People who have never read one line of the EU contract proposal vote against it but don’t have a clue what this means to the other 500 million people affected.
So my solution is more radical. Build up a voting system that is somehow related to the value of a person. Im not talking about who has the biggest income. Im talking about social engagement, level of education, career…a mixture of different positive attributes. The voices should have a different count related to those skills. Thats what every company does, thats how every priority scheduler in a software works. Think about it!
June 9th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Thanks for the informative post, Dave. I agree with most of what you’re saying, but a few remarks:
– the Lisbon treaty, if ratified by all member states, will give more power to the European Parliament;
– even though trans-national political parties are still impossible, the Greens have campaigned throughout all EU member states with the slogan ‘Think Big, Vote Green’ and the plan for a Green New Deal. Could they have done more, in your opinion?
June 9th, 2009 at 11:52 am
@ReinoutS: The Greens did have a pan European platform, but not a pan European campaign (well, not counting “Home” 😉 But when on the telly, they didn’t talk about what was in it much.
The Socialists did too, but it got no press & no-one in the socialist parties really talked about it
@Christoph: when you say “We give too much power to people who simply don’t care about politics at all. People who have never read one line of the EU contract proposal vote against it but don’t have a clue what this means to the other 500 million people affected.” I get the impression you’re talking about the Irish electorate.
It is next to impossible to understand the Lisbon treaty as it stands. It is a treaty which modifies all of the existing EU treaties, some of which modified previous EU treaties. So understanding what Lisbon means is like trying to understand how the behaviour of a program will change given the last changeset. You’re missing a bunch of important information (how it worked before).
I’m a firm believer that Europe can be a positive force, as a loose federation. Social harmonisation in Europe is politically impossible – you would be increasing government spending on social welfare in some countries (unacceptable) and decreasing social protection in others (unacceptable) by edict. Tax harmonisation would cause issues for some exchequers because of lost tax revenue, for others because of increased tax rates.
The nation state is a fundamental building block of Europe, and any move to further erode the ability of nation states to govern themselves would surely meet with fierce resistance in countries like Ireland and France (the two that I know best) and traditionally “euroskeptic” countries like Great Britain, Denmark, Finland and Sweden. One man one vote is another fundamental building block of modern democracies. Attempts to have people who are “worth” more have a greater say has resulted in civil unrest in the not so distant past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_Civil_Rights_Association – any attempt to devise a scheme based on increasing the vote of those with more civic tendencies would be a very bad idea indeed.
Dave.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:57 am
It is next to impossible to understand the Lisbon treaty as it stands. It is a treaty which modifies all of the existing EU treaties, some of which modified previous EU treaties. So understanding what Lisbon means is like trying to understand how the behaviour of a program will change given the last changeset. You’re missing a bunch of important information (how it worked before).
Almost every piece of legislative work does that, that’s why there’s a consolidated version:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/JOHtml.do?uri=OJ:C:2008:115:SOM:en:HTML
June 9th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Hi Dave,
Im not talking about the Irish folk in general. Those people can be found in any country including mine (Germany). I doubt that our folks would vote ‘yes’ if they were asked. But I also doubt that asking them is a good thing.
If they would understand what it means (One EU foreign minister, a voting system that unlocks from the current paralyzation etc.) they surely would have voted with ‘yes’.
But why do we ask people about something they don’t have a clue of? It makes no sense, I don’t ask my lawyer about medicine stuff neither…
June 9th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Re. Consolidated versions: Thanks for the link! Very useful. What’s tricky is to know what you’re voting for, though – you’d need the consolidated result of Amsterdam + the diffs to Lisbon. I guess that’s possible. I believe it was Vincent Browne in Ireland who went hunting & could not get a copy of the text he was being asked to vote for during the last campaign. Anyway…
Re. “If they had understood…” – this has got to be the least effective argument you could possibly use to convince someone of something. “Trust me, I know about these things” will never get you a yes vote. You would have more chance of getting Crotty overturned in the Supreme Court. At least that way you will never have to ask.
What would be better as an argument is to talk about the benefits and argue against the “No” campaign. Sinn Fein and Libertas quote lines of the treaty (out of context, perhaps?) in support of their arguments, quote them back. If you can’t argue on the merits of the treaty, then maybe there are side-effects which some people would find undesirable. The Lisbon Treaty does not only concern a foreign minister and changes in the decisioon making structure of Europe, there are a lot of changes sneaking in with the rest which are progressively defining Europe as a liberal free market++ entity.
In Ireland, part of the problem is also the Irish government’s application of EU directives by high-level civil servants. The Irish government is so willing to please that Irish farmers find themselves facing regulations which their French counterparts don’t have – where the French defend their wine industry, their cheese makers and their fresh fruit and vegetable producers, Ireland have put a heavy regulatory burden on farming and food production which has turned the Irish agricultural industry into a small number of dangerous monocultures, and turned the west of Ireland into an underexploited wasteland with welfare and grant dependent populations. Schemes like REPS and National Development Plans for conservation areas have turned formerly pro-European rural areas to fervently anti-European – witness Mayo’s vote in Lisbon 1 as evidence.
June 9th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Create Europe-wide political parties with Europe-wide campaigns, like in the US.
There is only one US-wide campaign: the President. That’s the only nationally elected position we have.
June 9th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Hi Dave,
for my humble opinion, you go too much into detail. My thought is basically that it just can’t be good to let decisions been made by people who doesn’t spend much time thinking about the right solution.
I know that this is a kind of radical opinion and I don’t think that it is something which will change in the near future.
But I strongly feel that we do not good in letting the masses decide where to go. No big company is beeing run that way. It doesn’t work. Don’t get me wrong..I’m not asking for monarchy or dictatorship and I’m not the one who comes with a solution. But I say, we have a bug in our current approach. The successful, intelligent people have too less power. Because the masses decide.
June 10th, 2009 at 1:18 am
I agree that arguing the treaty would have been better, but it’s a difficult to explain what it is if all the media and the general public are interested in is soundbites.
I find it quite obnoxious how people keep on muttering about the terrible Brussels Bureaucracy, and how “unelected” bureaucrats are going to ruin their lives, and then vote agains the very things that try to alleviate the problems – the French and the Dutch first with the constitution, the Irish with the Lisbon treaty.
When people don’t understand things, they tend to fear change – even chang for the better. The least they could do is to try to inform themselves – either that or don’t vote.
The ones I blame most however are the media in general. Important political debate on a European level very rarely gets properly covered. Come election time, there’s hardly any coverage of the accomplishments (or failures) of our euro MPs; hardly any talk about the party’s program; and if there is any, the discussion most often centers around national/local politics, not euro policies.
No wonder people feel disconnected from what’s happening in Brussels.