EU elections are set to rattle Europe

EU elections to impact EU economy.

Imagine if fringe political parties of the left and right were gaining sufficient support in different Australian states to win enough seats at a federal election to destabilise the House of Representatives. Imagine that these parties disagree on many social and economic issues. But on one issue they are settled: Australia’s federation must be unwound, even disbanded.

Luckily for Australia, this scenario is fanciful right now. The European Union, however, is not so fortunate. European parliamentary elections are scheduled from May 22 to 25 and opinion polls suggest that a sizeable minority of anti-elite populists will be elected. Amid their differences, these Tea Party-like members of the European Parliament or MEPs will have one common purpose: to sabotage Europe’s loose federation.

Havoc would result if the Europe’s parliament were to fall under the control of the anti-EU populist lot. Such a group could block the EU’s budget and legislation. It could refuse to validate international treaties. Crucially, it could “reject” the European Commission, which means that it could strip Europe’s bureaucracy of its political legitimacy.

Polls show that nowhere near enough anti-EU lawmakers will be elected to quickly dismantle Europe’s integration of recent decades. Europe’s political institutions (including the EU) have proved resilient and malleable enough to deal with the challenges thrown at them so far by the euro crisis and that counts for a lot with many voters. That’s largely the extent the good news, however. The same polls show that anti-EU MEPs could gain one-third of the votes and a sizeable minority of EU-sceptic MEPs will be elected to the European Parliament. While the number of seats they win will likely be lower than the percentage of votes they attract, these anti-EU MEPs will number enough to hinder a closer embrace among the EU’s 28 members. The pity is that Europe needs greater jelling if the 18 members of the eurozone are to surmount a crisis bedeviled by the fact that they share a currency without political union. At the very least, the election of a swag of anti-EU MEPs will place nationalists as the centre of European politics and clarify that Europe’s financial crisis has morphed into a political crisis.

The European Parliament is the only directly elected arm of the European political project, that, because it has formed over the past 60 years without proper voter assent, has always lacked political legitimacy (its so-called “democratic deficit”). Since 1979, elections have been held every five years for an assembly that gained more power in 2009 when it was granted shared budgetary powers. As part of Europe’s bicameral (two-step) legislative process, the parliament shares this budget and other legislative powers with the Council of the European Union, which gathers representatives of the EU member states. MEPs, however, generally can’t initiate legislation – they only get to vote on what the executive European Commission proposes.

Seats within the parliament are split between countries roughly on population size – Germany has 99 seats while Cyprus, Estonia, Luxembourg and Malta get six each – but MEPs sit in the parliament according to their political bent, not their nationality. After the 2009 poll, the 736 MEPs formed seven groups including one for the 27 non-attached and one that is eurosceptic. The biggest two were the 265-strong Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats and the 184-strong Group of the Party of European Socialists. The 27-strong Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group is a eurosceptic bloc. It consists of 10 political parties including Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party.

The elites’ nemesis

The murky structure and lack of daily relevance of the European Parliament engenders it vast apathy among the EU’s 500 million citizens, of whom about 375 million are eligible to vote in May’s poll for 766 MEPs. Voters care more about who runs their country rather than who sits in Strasbourg, France, where the European Parliament is centred. Participation rates in EU elections have dropped over the seven EU elections, sliding to a record low 43% in 2009 compared with 62% in 1979 when people from just nine countries voted.[1] Germany’s participation rate has dropped from 68% to 43% over these three decades, so the fading interest is not just because voters in the other 19 countries are apathetic.

Europe’s problem is that the continent’s crisis has motivated a segment of the population to vote in May. They are disgruntled nationalists vulnerable to populism who want to diminish the influence on their lives of “Brussels”. This is the term that captures for them the elitist, undemocratic and borderless project that is the EU, which has failed at one of its core promises – to create prosperity. (Preventing more world wars was another.) For Brussels is where most of Europe’s centralised bodies reside, including some of the parliamentary functions that are split between the Belgian capital, Luxembourg and Strasbourg.

High unemployment is notorious for creating a political environment ripe for populists and extremists who are talented at presenting themselves as reasonable. Europe’s record joblessness of 12% is giving rise to nationalism among the bailed-out and their donors – the former resent the austerity conditions imposed by rescue packages, the latter that they need to help those who lived beyond their means. The high unemployment is boosting the appeal of anti-elite, nationalistic candidates railing against austerity-inspired economic stagnation, the euro, crime, immigration (often shaped as a threat to the welfare state), Muslims, the Roma (gypsies), corruption among the elite, free trade, corruption within mainstream parties and the EU’s ability to trump national sovereignty and squash national identity.

It’s little wonder that heading into elections that are conducted under different proportional representative systems in each country, anti-EU fringe parties are leading, or are among the leaders, in the opinion polls in major countries. Marine Le Pen’s National Front, with its policy to return to the franc, is topping French polls, having recently done well in nationwide municipal elections. The UK Independence Party, whose popularity has forced a referendum scheduled for 2017 on whether the UK will stay in the EU, is leading there. Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom is doing well in the Netherlands. Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement is prospering in Italy. Even in full-employment Austria, the anti-immigrant Freedom Party is gaining support, as are Belgium’s Flemish Interest, Denmark’s Progress Party, Greece’s Golden Dawn, the Sweden Democrats and nationalist parties in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere in eastern Europe. On the other hand, in Germany, while the anti-euro Alternative for Germany is polling in the double digits, fringe parties have little support. Strife-ridden Spain and Portugal appear free from the anti-EU curse, mainly because people trust their own governments less than Brussels.

Proven power

The capacity of anti-elitist parties to rattle Europe’s political establishment was repeatedly shown in 2013. Grillo’s Five Star Movement won the most votes of any party in Italy’s election and left the country in political limbo for two months until a fragile coalition of other parties was formed. Austria’s Freedom Party won 21% of the vote in general elections in September while the ruling two-party coalition recorded its worst-ever result.

The biggest shock of last year occurred in France in October when Le Pen’s National Front triumphed over the mainstream parties at a local council by-election in Brignoles, a small town in Provence in the south. The National Front won 54% of the vote in a second-round poll against the candidate from the mainstream centre-right (Gaulliste) Union For a Popular Movement. The candidate from President François Hollande’s Socialist party was knocked out in the first round. The National Front victory was significant because the purpose of a run-off electoral system (and impediments like thresholds) is to handicap fringe parties, yet the National Front succeeded.

That shock was magnified in February this year in Switzerland, which is not part of the EU but none the less integrated by various treaties into the 28-member union. The Swiss showed the power of populism when they approved by a margin of 0.6% a referendum to install immigration quotas against fellow Europeans even though the country’s political and business leaders opposed the measure. The ramifications for the country’s relationship with the EU are still to play out, but the result energised anti-elite groupings.

Ironically, the anti-establishment parties are forming regional alliances to help their quest against the EU, following on from the creation of the pan-continental European Alliance for Freedom party in 2010. In November, Le Pen’s National Front and Wilders’ Party for Freedom announced they would co-operate to build a continental-wide alliance to “fight this monster called Europe”, as Wilders’ put it, that “has enslaved our various peoples”, according to Le Pen.[2]

Who knows how well the anti-EU parties will do in May. The economy is not a 1930s-like disaster and so it is not stirring up the political radicalism of that era. If the fringe parties do thrive at the polls, they might fight among themselves rather than turn Europe’s parliament into a battle over the EU. But even if the anti-elite parties fail to gain enough seats to exert too much influence in Strasbourg, they are sure to do well enough at the polls to damn the prospect of further European integration by forcing mainstream parties at home to adopt more nationalistic agendas. Traditional parties are already moving closer to their populist anti-EU stances to thwart the long-term threat they pose. Governments in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, for instance, are cracking down or are thinking about restricting the free movement of people within the EU, to win back the anti-immigration protest vote.

If leaders in the advanced EU countries are pushing to repatriate power from Brussels to appease the nationalistic insurrection against the EU, it’s hard to see how the continental-wide co-operation that Europe and the euro need to thrive will emerge any time soon. After all, imagine how fraught politics would be in Australia if the Liberal and Labor parties were in favour of diffusing the power of the federal government to stymie the rise of state-based secessionist movements that are only becoming more mainstream.