European elections should focus on policies, not personalities

WORLDVIEW:'EUROPEAN POLITICIANS and parties are not doing their job – that is engaging average citizens in the European public debate." So says Fernando Navarro, a Spanish journalist who edits an online initiative to encourage more political participation in the European Parliament elections. Some 375 millions citizens are entitled to vote, including residents in Ireland and elsewhere from other EU member states who can vote in these and the local elections under the EU's citizenship laws.

Navarro’s website, www.eudebate09.eu, is a spinoff from the now well-established cafebabel.com website launched in 2002 by Erasmus students, which provides a daily multilingual current affairs magazine on European issues. Both illustrate what can be done with new media to make this transnational politics more accessible, as does another one from Germany, www.eurotopics.net. The technology is rising to meet that demand, even though, as Navarro complains, politicians and parties “remain confined in their tiny national spaces and refuse to get involved in the debate with European citizens”.

That is one of the great paradoxes of these elections. They are fought out nationally, when in fact they are concerned with European policy. This is not necessarily contradictory, however, since the national and the European levels are not mutually exclusive but intertwined. Issues salient at one level are also active at the other.

The same applies horizontally, in that Irish debates about the economic crisis, job creation or bank rescues are mirrored in Denmark, Latvia or Spain and have a similar framework of EU policy. In talking about the same issues at the same time with a similar meaning they are engaging in a common project.

But even if that is so, the vital issue of communication is missing or lagging. Media have an obvious role to play in filling that deficit. Again, that does not necessarily mean transnational media, since national media provide most people with a window on to European and international affairs – or can if they want to. Websites like these are supplementary, even if they are revolutionising access.

Media can certainly be criticised for concentrating on personalities and local beauty contests rather than issues – as they were in a letter to this newspaper on Tuesday from the director of the Tasc think tank on social change.

Their study of Irish print media coverage of the 2004 European elections found only 11 per cent of articles covered directly relevant issues and only 6 per cent dealt with European ones. From that perspective, one can validly say the election’s democratic substance is being devalued. But media are only one part of the problem, since if the issues are not being discussed by politicians and parties they are much less likely to be reported and analysed.

Political scientists studying the EU’s democratic deficit distinguish between its institutional and social-psychological aspects. Prominent among them is Simon Hix, professor of European and comparative politics at the London School of Economics and a specialist on the European Parliament. He argues that the EU needs a limited democratic politics if it is to represent citizens more effectively and to overcome policy gridlock. In his book What’s Wrong with the European Union and How to Fix It (Polity 2008) he proposes such reforms. Hix says they should be limited because the public is not ready for a full-blown European-wide democracy in which we would elect candidates directly in one or several vast constituencies; and the existing legal checks and balances limiting political action would remain. More transparent council decisions, an open contest for commission president and clearer party group leadership in the parliament are needed.

A majoritarian Westminster-style system is inappropriate, but a German or Scandinavian model where a broad coalition is built in support of policy changes via open and vigorous political debate is certainly doable – and desirable. Achieving it would also help create or develop the social-psychological conditions required for more effective transnational political communication. Such a greater politicisation of EU affairs would increase the EU’s democratic legitimacy, especially if it is done along the left-right cleavage typical of national politics.

That would help transform the EU’s politics by relating them to European policies rather than concentrating on whether integration is a good or bad thing. Hix disagrees with those who say this is unnecessary because the existing system works very well and does not need fixing – and with those who say politicisation would be destructive because it would not be possible to prevent a politics of, not in, the system. Thus many politicians and officials resist bringing in more politics, preferring the existing technocratic mode which Hix describes as an enlightened despotism.

In fact Hix’s research makes a convincing case that left-right divisions have deeply penetrated policymaking in the parliament, the council and the commission. Missing is a contest for political power and policymaking between rival groups and policies, with clear winners and losers and a visible link between voting, leadership and outcome.

These elections are unlikely to achieve that, partly because Ireland’s Lisbon vote last year muddied the waters. Another website run by political scientists, www.votewatch.eu, shows how much policy is at stake, giving voters a chance to map their own preferences against those of political groups in the parliament. But a website predicting the election outcome (www.predict09.eu) foresees little change in its composition.