The EU elections have again failed in their purpose
As ever, domestic-focused EU elections have told us little about where citizens want the union to go. It's a snapshot in time reflecting national political situations in the EU's largest countries.
EU citizens have voted. But what did they tell us? In the end the much-reported “surge” for the far right at EU level didn’t come to pass. There were instead gains in line with their trajectory over the past 20 years. The far right’s startlingly high performance in France and Germany, which prompted President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the French parliament and call a snap election, got most of the attention last night. But Marine Le Pen’s outsized victory in France, where her party got more than twice the votes of Macron’s centrists, was not a phenomenon seen in Europe as a whole. The far right fell well below expectations in Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia and elsewhere. In Italy, the 1st place finish for Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party looks impressive until you notice that this was just existing populist votes moving from Lega and 5 Stars.
The European Parliament’s two far-right groups, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s ECR and Le Pen’s ID, remained at roughy the same seat count at the end of the last term. ID has actually gone down slightly because of Le Pen’s decision to kick Germany’s AfD out of the group just before the election. There’s all to play for with the new crop of unaligned MEPs, which the two women will be competing to woo over the coming month unless Le Pen is able to convince Meloni to merge their groups. But even after the group formation process is over and we get the final numbers, it’s clear that the far right did not do well enough to come even close to the prospect of being able to form a right-wing majority with President Ursula von der Leyen’s EPP, as some had predicted and the president said she was was open to before the election, hedging her bets. The center held, and it looks like von der Leyen can survive a majority confirmation vote for a second term. But yesterday’s other big development, the French snap election, could mean that this confirmation vote never happens at all because her reappointment is blocked in Council.
The European Council summit where the 27 national leaders are supposed to appoint people to the EU’s top jobs, including the holy grail of European Commission President, is supposed to take place on 28 June. That’s two days before the first round of the snap legislative election Macron has called. Given how much she was vilified during the EU election debates in France over the past two months (even her fellow EPP members distanced themselves from her), it seems unlikely he will be willing to sign off on her reappointment just before the French vote. That means one of two things: either Macron can convince Council chair Charles Michel to delay the top jobs summit until after the French election, or Macron chooses to play the spoiler for domestic political consumption. He could come into the informal Council summit next week, a first discussion to digest the election results, openly refusing to back von der Leyen - which might go over well with French voters. He may officially put forward another name like former European Central Bank chief and Italian prime minister Mario Draghi, who he has reportedly been suggesting behind the scenes in recent weeks. The big question is whether, after his massive election defeat and shock announcement for an election in just three weeks, Macron has the political capital or time to be pulling off such shenanigans.
All of this goes to show just how national these EU elections continue to be, which is the exact opposite of their intent. The shape of the European Parliament and the person in power at the EU’s executive all depend on the vagaries of where we’re at with domestic politics in certain countries. I got to thinking about this after seeing Gareth Harding’s observation that ironically, if the UK were still in the EU, the center-left Socialists & Democrats would probably have emerged as the biggest political group in the European Parliament based on the strength of Labour, which would have won 40 to 50 seats. You can imagine another scenario - what if the Northern European countries were actually the biggest in the EU? It would have been an EU left-wing victory. In other words, the reason the European Parliament has shifted further to the right in this election is because of domestic situations in Germany and France, where the governing parties are unpopular.
So how are we then supposed to interpret the election result, in terms of formulating EU policy? The lack of a European demos means that these elections every five years are not providing a clear message from the public. They are providing a fragmented snapshot of domestic political situations, where the situations in the largest countries weighs the most. As EU Law Professor Alberto Alemanno has written, “Unless EU leaders are held accountable to European voters, the European Parliament elections are unlikely to cultivate a transnational space for pan-European policy debates.”
“Voters cast their ballots for candidates selected by national, rather than European, parties. Although most national parties participating in the EU elections are affiliated with European political parties…they rarely highlight their EU affiliation on national ballots. Not many German voters, for example, realize that when they vote for the Christian Democratic Union, they are also indirectly supporting France’s Les Républicains, Italy’s Forza Italia, and Poland’s Civic Platform. Similarly, how many Italians know that by voting for Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, they are also backing Poland’s Law and Justice party and Spain’s Vox at the EU level?”
Something has to change if these elections are to be a proper canvassing of citizens to set a direction for the EU. And given all of the powers that the EU has as a de-facto federation, it isn’t an option to just ignore this democratic deficit. The deficit isn’t a structural one, but rather an attention deficit. We have elections, the problem is that parties and citizens aren’t using them properly. EU citizens are not informed by their governments or their media about how the EU works or what the European issues at stake are in these elections, and so a pan-European demos is given no room to develop. Both Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta have identified this as a problem in their reports on what is holding back Europe’s development and growth. The lack of a European demos makes it harder for the EU to address its defence, immigration, and environmental challenges.
The frustrating part is that any attempt to ‘Europeanize’ these European elections is consistently shot down by national governments. The Spitzenkandidat Process, for instance, was invented in 2014 only to be killed by Macron and other leaders in 2019. That system would have presented presidential candidates to the European public in each EU election, with the expectation that one of them would become president if citizens voted for their group in the majority. But that’s done now, even if was fake-run in a gaslighting exercise by von der Leyen’s EPP this year. Similarly, Macron did not enthusiastically support his EU group’s attempt to establish pan-European party lists.
Clearly, something has to change here. But in order for a change to happen, Europeans need to be honest with themselves about what isn’t working here. That’s Macron has gambled that he can call French voters’ bluff by showing they will not vote for the far-right for a ‘real’ parliament like they would for the European parliament shows how national leaders (and voters) continue to think about EU politics. We need to confront why that is, and change things before 2029, before it’s too late. It’s time for a real European democracy.