Debate over the next European elections is becoming increasingly heated in Brussels. The two largest political parties - the centre-right European People's Party (EPP) and the Party of European Socialists (PES) - have both outlined their programmes to the public, hoping to spark a debate and attract voter attention.
But beyond party politics - which is in any case weak in Brussels due to the consensus-based approach to the EU and the dominance of national politics - it is voter apathy which appears of greatest concern at the moment.
Since the first European elections were held in 1979, participation has consistently fallen, reaching a record low of 46% at the last poll in 2004.
"Clearly, we are worried about turnout," says Julian Scola, a communications and campaign advisor at the PES. The issue, he adds, is "also worrying and even worse" in the countries from central and Eastern Europe that joined the EU in 2004. In the last election, participation stood at 47.1% in the EU-15 but fell to 26.4% on average among the ten newcomers.
And according to Scola, voters in his own socialist family have a fair degree of responsibility for this. "Traditionally, we feel it is our own voters who stay away," he told EurActiv, pointing out that socialist voters often consider the EU to be "too technocratic" and therefore not relevant enough as a political decision-making entity. "It is certainly a major problem."
Socialists want a clear choice between left and right
The key, Scola says, is to increase the relevance of EU elections by presenting voters with a clear distinction between parties left and right of the political spectrum.
In an effort to cure voter apathy, socialist campaigners have rallied behind that view, seeking to mobilise voters within their ranks by launching attacks on the centre-right. In a recent statement, they accused EPP-ED leaders of drawing up their electoral programme behind closed doors.
"We in the PES do not want a manifesto that has been drawn up in a closed room by a handful of politicians," said PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen. "That is yesterday's politics. We want a manifesto that offers not only a clear choice between left and right, [but one] that has also been shaped through consultation and debate. We want to show that social democrats have different politics from the conservatives, and that we do politics in a different way too."
The socialists may have a point there. Earlier in March, James Elles, a prominent conservative MEP from the UK, resigned from his position as chairman of the European Ideas Network (EIN), a think tank of the EPP-ED. Explaining his decision, he said the think tank's work was being ignored by the group when it agreed its political strategy for the 2009 European elections.
"The lack of support from the EPP-ED group leadership has made my chairmanship unworkable," Elles said in an e-mail accompanying his resignation letter. More seriously, he wrote, "the recent elaboration of a 'decalogue' of group priorities for the future took no account of EIN work in any way. It was as if the network did not exist".
Making the EU more controversial?
But whether the socialists or other political parties will succeed in attracting voter attention by stirring controversy remains unclear.
According to Sebastian Kurpas of the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels, political parties at European level are too dependent on their national affiliates, resulting in election programmes which invariably end up suiting the lowest common denominator. "If you look at certain manifestos of the past, the real European party manifestos, they have usually been rather general and not very concrete," Kurpas told EurActiv.
And in turn, national political parties can never single-handedly win a sufficiently large number of seats in the European Parliament to indulge themselves in making big promises to the electorate.
"It has happened in the past that certain parties had a national programme which said: 'If you vote for us, we will push for this or that political result at the European level'. The problem is that, often, one single national party is not strong enough to push for something in a given European party grouping and that makes it more difficult for national parties to deliver on their promises to voters."
In the end, the old habit of consensus politics may end up prevailing again, Kurpas says.
"The Parliament is still very consensus-driven as is the whole European integration process. So EU policymaking is always about finding a compromise and building a common solution, it is not about a majority having the power and imposing it on a minority - this is not how Europe can function. And that is not necessarily the mode which will strike public attention."
