A light East European vote backs the Union as well.
The media find stories of bloodletting much juicier than boring normality. Where the European elections were concerned, the element of bloodlust was supposed to come from the eurosceptics, expected to vanquish their enemies in the ‘paleo-European’ alliance. By way of an explanation as to why that didn’t happen, I’ll try to paint a picture of a Europe that may be unfamiliar to some.
On 25 May, 400 million European voters were called to polling stations to elect 751 members of the new European Parliament. This is the second most important democratic exercise on the planet, after the Indian elections. Brussels and Strasbourg not only host the second largest of all parliaments, but, even more importantly, the world’s only transnational legislature, with members from 28 nations representing over 500 million citizens.
Beyond the figures, the 2014 European elections will be remembered as the first ever (they began in 1979) to offer voters the opportunity to have a say in the election of the President of the EU Commission, through their representatives in the European Parliament. They were also the first to show an increase – slight, but significant – in voter turnout, from 43% in 2009 to 43.09%.
Surprisingly, while the average voter participation in the EU’s western member states (552 seats) was 53%, voter participation in the Union’s 11 central-eastern countries (199 seats) was only 28%. Even with the benefits of membership, it appears the strong Euro-enthusiasm always present in the East (46% in favour of the EU, according to the latest Eurobarometer survey of March 2014, compared to 34% in the ‘western’ states), goes hand in hand with a curious lack of interest in democratic exercises.
In Croatia, which joined the EU under a year ago, the turnout was 25% (less than half the Western European average!), while participation in Poland and Slovenia was at 22% and 20%, respectively. The Czech Republic and Slovakia took the prize for lowest poll turnout: 19.5% in the former and an incredible 13% in the latter!
Newspapers have gone into great detail about the outcomes in Germany, Spain and Italy, where governing parties have come out on top, and in France and the United Kingdom, where they suffered serious political setbacks.
Please allow me a few words about Italy. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has understood something that his predecessors did not: here our battle will not be won on economic policy (the resources are too limited) but on structural reforms. If Italy shows it is finally managing to drastically simplify its decisionmaking processes, then it can hope to attract the trillions of euros that wander the globe, and that haven’t been stopping off in Italy for decades. That would be, finally, a gamechanger. With their European vote, the Italians have shown that they are prepared to go along with this plan.
We know little however of the other half of Europe, the East, which will have an increasing influence on our future.
Though the turnout in the central-eastern countries was low, it will have important repercussions on national political dynamics, given that governing parties have tended to lose ground in these elections. Only Slovakia (with its left-wing Smer-SD party headed by Prime Minister Robert Fico), Romania (led by Prime Minister Victor Ponta’s center-left coalition) and Hungary (led by the conservative Viktor Orban) saw government parties come out on top.
In Hungary, the elections also heralded the collapse of the country’s Socialist opposition, which stood divided and was thus unable to build a credible identity, to the advantage of the far-right Jobbik party, which came second. In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing center-right Civic Platform Party, and the more eurosceptic and nationalist opposition (the Law and Justice Party) led by one of the Kaczynski twins, Jaroslaw, were neck and neck with hardly anything between them, a preview of what could happen in the political elections next year.
The outlook in the Czech Republic was different. Although Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka’s Social Democratic Party did not secure a majority, the winner was nevertheless its coalition partner, the centrist ANO movement – a victory leading to the success of the pro-Europe parties, who won the majority of seats.
In Slovenia and Croatia opposition parties emerged as the victors. In Bulgaria, the GERB – the center-right party of former Prime Minister Boyko Borisov – triumphed with 30% of the vote, while the socialists in the governing center- right coalition led by Prime Minister Plamen Orešarski came second and third. Despite the fact that the latter parties singly won more votes than the center-right party, the result highlighted the weakness of the governing coalition and the likelihood of early elections.
In the central-eastern countries, eurosceptic parties won a total of 45 seats (22% of the 199 available) while in the ‘western’ countries they took 186 (33% of the 552 available).
The media have emphasized gains of the socalled eurosceptics across Europe, and it is undeniable that they have registered an increase of almost 10 percentage points, moving from 20% of the vote (156 seats) in 2009 to 30% (231 seats) this year.
But I find that the key result in these elections – the first since the Eurozone economic crisis began – is that the four strongly pro-Europe pan-national parties (Christian Democrats, Socialists, Liberals and the Greens) successfully held their own. I’ve yet to read anyone underlining this outcome, but they have in fact secured 70% of the EU popular vote (520 seats).
This is a clear sign that voters are opting for ‘more’, not ‘less’ Europe. So let’s get a move on and build our Union!
A light East European vote backs the Union as well.
