Time to make the European elections matter

By Keith Nuthall, International News Services

This week, a small proportion of Europe’s electors (maybe less than 30%) will drift over to their polling station to do their European Union (EU) civic duty and vote for a European Parliament representative. That the proportion of EU citizens undertaking this easy task has dwindled is testimony to the failure of the parliament to do its job: to exercise power on behalf of the majority of the EU population.

Because, at the risk of sounding patronising, isn’t the point of participating in elections to win, and then use the levers of authority offered in a political system to shape society, the economy and culture?

And European Parliament elections just don’t deliver this. Here loose coalitions of national parties compete, campaigning usually on national issues, to gain votes to send deputies to the international assembly’s twin-seats of Strasbourg and Brussels. Very few European issues are actually debated seriously in these campaigns, but actually that’s not even half the problem.

The real issue is what happens when these MEPs get to work. Quite peculiarly to an outsider, noone actually takes power. Instead, the committee chairs, the presidency and other important posts are shared out amongst political groups who back home, in their national parliaments, wouldn’t be seen dead riding in the same taxi.

No wonder, Václav Klaus, the president of the EU’s current rotating presidency the Czech Republic, accused the European Parliament of acting like a one-party-state.

And despite the various misgivings about his views in Brussels, he makes a point. When noone actually openly competes for power within a supposedly democratic institution – in a way that’s what you get – a de facto one-party state, a permanent universal coalition.

When I vote in European Parliament elections, I would preferably want my representative to do his or her damndest to secure policies that I agree with….not to share power with ALL the other parties, some of which I really dislike.

I want my representative’s party to win a majority in parliament and then grab all the levers of power and use the European Parliament’s ability to veto and amend a large proportion of EU legislation to shape European law to fit my prejudices. And if my party does not win enough votes, I want it in coalition with as like a minded partner as possible…and then they share the spoils between them. The parties they don’t like get shut out and become an opposition. This could be a conservative-Christian Democrat-liberal alliance; maybe a socialist-social democrat-green coalition. It really doesn’t matter who – it just has to be someone, rather than everyone.

If this kind of practice bedded in, then the parliament really would develop a democratic mandate – and with that more authority. Eventually, it could actually have real authority over the political hue of a new European Commission president.

And if parliament elections demonstrably changed the policies of the EU in a way that voters could see and understand, more people might in future bother to turn out and vote.