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Big issue in EU voting: Who cares?
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Thomas Fuller/IHT
Tuesday, June 1, 2004
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WARSAW European voters on both sides of the former Iron Curtain will make history next week when they cast ballots in the first transcontinental elections for the European Parliament.
But despite a relatively high-profile roster that includes former prime ministers, a Polish race car driver and a Czech pornography star - and despite the increasing importance of the Parliament in passing laws that affect Europeans in their everyday lives - turnout for the elections June 10-13 may be a flop.
Only slightly more than one-third of Europeans surveyed in a Gallup poll in mid-May said they knew elections were coming and just about 45 percent said they were sure to vote, down from some 50 percent who voted in the last European Parliament elections in 1999.
Most surprising, perhaps, is that participation is expected to be lowest in the countries that joined the European Union just a month ago. In the Czech Republic, Estonia and Slovakia, less than one-third of people surveyed said they would go to the polls, apparently contradicting the notion that the novelty of their first European elections and the joy of being in the Western club at last would lift turnout.
Voters east and west say they do not understand how the Parliament works or what exactly it does, and that is disappointing news for the framers of the Union, because the Parliament is its only directly elected institution.
"I don't really know anything about the European Parliament," said Jan Wilczynski, a former ceramics factory worker living in Wloclawek, west of Warsaw, who attended an election rally over the weekend. "And I'm afraid not a lot of people will vote, because people have stopped believing."
Lobbyists and lawyers long ago understood the power of the European Parliament and have flooded Brussels to try to influence the laws.
But the coming elections in most countries are being described as a sort of midterm popularity contest for the individual national governments, rather than elections where issues like a European constitution and the admission of Turkey are central issues.
The paradox for the European Union, analysts say, is that in recent years the European Parliament has become increasingly powerful, in some cases surpassing the lawmaking powers of national Parliaments.
Experts estimate that the majority of laws passed in Parliaments in Paris, Berlin or other capitals in the EU originate in Brussels, suggesting that Europe is more centralized than most voters think.
"It's one of the few Parliaments that lives up to its role as a legislature," said Ben Crum, an expert on the Union's institutions at the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels.
Heather Grabbe, director of research at the Center for European Reform in London, said that even though actions of the Parliament had a "major impact" on Europeans, it got little attention from them.
"It's actually quite rare to hear about something concrete that the European Parliament has done," Grabbe said.
During the five-year term that is now coming to a close, the Parliament passed more than 400 laws related to consumer protection, the environment, workplace regulation, privacy rights or the financial and accounting industries, among other areas.
When the euro was adopted two years ago, the Parliament passed a law forcing banks to abolish the extra fees they charged customers when they took cash out of automatic teller machines in neighboring countries of the euro zone.
The Parliament also approved a law requiring airlines to offer cash compensation to passengers when their flights are canceled without justification.
On the environmental front, a law was passed requiring shipping companies to use tankers with double hulls in an effort to avoid the oil spills that have tarnished Europe's coastline.
A classification system that rates cleanliness of water at Europe's beaches was set up: beaches that are given "blue flag" status are considered clean enough to swim.
Unlike many national Parliaments in Europe that pass the laws formulated by the governments, Crum said, the European Parliament often significantly rewrites laws before approving them.
In recent years, members of Parliament blocked a law that would have made pan-European corporate takeovers easier; they have consistently been skeptical of genetically modified crops; and they recently vowed to challenge in court a deal with the United States that requires EU airlines to hand over extensive passenger information.
But why has the Parliament failed to connect with so many European citizens?
Analysts and voters say members of the Parliament sometimes come across as second-string politicians who are rewarded with jobs in Brussels at the end of their careers. As a recent investigation by the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times showed, the job comes with perquisites and expense benefits routinely worth tens of thousands of euros a year.
"It doesn't attract the right people," Crum said of the Parliament. "There are a number of people who get a seat in Parliament who simply shouldn't be there. They lack qualifications and only add noise and disruption."
Candidates in the coming elections include a sprinkling of nonpolitical personalities: an Estonian supermodel, Carmen Kass; a Slovak ice hockey star, Peter Stastny; the race car driver, Krzysztof Holowczyc; and the pornography star, Katerina Bochnickova, also known as Dolly Buster.
There are also a significant number of former political heavyweights, including the former Prime Ministers Poul Nyrup Rasmussen of Denmark, Jean-Luc Dehaene of Belgium and Anneli Jaatteenmaki of Finland. And there are scores of hard-working legislators who are clamoring to change the perks that have helped lend a bad name.
Crum says the European Parliament could capture the attention of more voters if it engaged in debates that "articulate the major concerns of Europe."
But one handicap for discussing big-picture European questions is the structure of political parties in the Parliament. Members fall into the main groupings of Christian Democrats, Socialists, Liberal Democrats and Greens.
On a pan-European level, these groupings are awkward. The Christian Democrats, for example, group British conservative Euroskeptics with German center-right European federalists, who have a diametrically opposite vision of Europe.
Karel Lannoo, executive director of Crum's institute, says communication is the main problem for the Parliament specifically and the EU generally. People often do not even get information about what is going on in Brussels because the news media in Europe remain largely confined within national boundaries, he said.
He cites a sweeping law passed in Brussels two years ago that requires publicly listed companies to adopt a new set of accounting standards by January 2005. Forty-two percent of several hundred European companies surveyed in May by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm, had not yet begun serious planning for the changeover.
"This was passed in Brussels in 2002 without notice," Lannoo said. "I find that ridiculous. There's insufficient information about what is going on in Brussels."
But even if news from Brussels were more widely disseminated, it is unclear whether businesses and voters would know what to make of it.
The Union's decision-making process is opaque and complex; there are about 25 different ways to pass a law in Brussels. In most cases, pan-European laws are proposed by the European Commission and then go both to the Council of Ministers and to Parliament for consideration.
But Parliament has voting power only in areas that relate to the EU's single market. In other areas, like foreign policy or agricultural subsidies, the Council of Ministers alone has the power to decide.
How that council decides is another matter: some decisions require unanimity, others a simple majority and still others a weighted majority that takes into account a country's population. For most decisions, however, ministers work by consensus.
EU officials hope to make the Union more accessible to voters through Europe's first constitution. The aim is to simplify the lawmaking process and to gather all the treaties and amendments into a single document. Governments say they hope to reach a deal on a constitution by the EU summit meeting in Brussels on June 17 and 18.
Even if it is ratified, and that is in doubt, citizens will be left with a complex, legalistic document, rather than an American-style citizens' charter.
As for the outcome of the elections, Simon Hix of the London School of Economics and Michael Marsh of Trinity College in Dublin have predicted that the center-right parties, who go under the name European People's Party-European Democrats, would continue to be the single largest contingent in the Parliament, with 285 of the 732 seats. The second-largest group, the professors predict, will be the Socialists.
International Herald Tribune
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