Abstract
European elections have long been considered ‘second-order national elections’. However, the Treaty of Lisbon brings about a window of opportunity, particularly when it comes to reinforcing democratic legitimacy and political participation in the EU. This article tries to shed light on potential ideas to make European Parliament elections more comprehensible and attractive for the citizens of the EU. Two steps in this direction are to establish a clear-cut link between the European Commission (both the president and its members) and the European elections, and a proposal for a new type of European manifesto. Successful implementation of these ideas requires reform in the content of the work of European parties.
Keywords
An enduring truth
One of the longest-standing truths about the European Union is captured by the use of the term ‘second-order national elections’ to describe European polls. Coined by Reif and Schmitt [9], it described the first elections to the European Parliament by universal suffrage in 1979. Thirty years have passed; the number of countries in Europe has doubled while the membership of the European Union has tripled. The iron curtain has collapsed and the EU has been transformed both in content and context. Yet this insight still holds true. It succeeds in explaining what is at stake in the European elections. When every five years people are called to the European ballot box, they exercise their right with the national political context in mind. This was reaffirmed in the seventh elections of 2009 and it has proved correct all along [11, 333]. Two sets of forces have been at work: on the one hand globalisation, particularly Europeanisation, with the shortening of distances and the technological revolution; and on the other, the common currency and real legislative powers for the European Parliament. Neither has made a significant difference to this attitude.
The explanation for this phenomenon cannot be that people are wrong; what is really going on is that European elections, contrary to the national experience, do not produce tangible political outcomes. The day after a European vote, the political context of citizens’ lives is much the same and although they understand that there will be new personnel in the European Parliament, they do not view this as important in producing change.
As of 1 December 2009
The ratification of the latest Treaty of the European Union was a slow and stressful procedure that was further eroded by the global economic recession and the fear of a domino effect brought on by economic interdependence. However, the Lisbon Treaty 1 introduced important changes that are expected to affect this second-order attitude. According to Article 17, Paragraph 7, the appointment of the president of the European Commission, the top job in Brussels, will ‘take into account’ the results of the European elections. This is a key clause when reviewed in the context of the president's authority. The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, exercises and monitors the implementation of EU policies. According to Article 17, Paragraph 6, the president has a number of key competences, including authority over the makeup of the Commission. He or she also distributes portfolios, appoints vice-presidents and can force a member's resignation.
1998 Treaty of the European Union.
The aim of the Treaty is to increase the political significance of European elections for voters, establishing for the first time a semi-direct link between the Commission and its political programme through the election of the president of the European Commission. 2
Europarties and the 2009 European elections
The Lisbon Treaty, signed in December 2007, was not ratified by all Member States before the European elections of 2009 and was, therefore, technically not yet in effect. However, the clause governing the public appointment of a candidate for the Commission presidency could be exercised by European parties even in the pre-Lisbon, but towards-Lisbon, status quo. The European Council would have been uncomfortable if it did not ‘take into account the elections to the European Parliament’. 3
Other changes introduced by the latest Treaty are the further increase of the powers of the European Parliament by extending the co-decision procedure, the further extension of the role of qualified majority voting (QMV) in the Council and the entry onto the scene of national parliaments as safeguards of the subsidiarity principle. For a better understanding of the Lisbon Treaty, see also Bonvicini [1].
In 2009 European parties 4 were ill-equipped, to put it mildly, to exercise their new political role. Their performance speaks volumes, especially in light of their well-established record—at least in the case of all three major European parties—of a commitment to advancing European integration and to evolving into real political parties. The actual clause linking the result of the European elections with the appointment of the presidential candidate was originally proposed by a European party [3]. 5 Most Europarties have talked about this, and the issue has been part of the public dialogue and academic discourse, but when the chance was there in 2009 they did not deliver.
The terms European parties and Europarties refer to the organisations of transnational political parties cooperating at the European level.
The EPP played an important role in the development of this idea, as in 2004 it had already made an explicit declaration that, as the winning party of the 2004 European elections, it would not support a candidate president for the Commission should he or she not be from its ranks.
According to Ricard-Nihoul and von Sydow, ‘The idea is not new and has been gaining ground, but during the last elections the European parties failed to act on it’ [10,6]. Priestley [8] contends that ‘[T]he occasion to make the European elections a choice about the future President of the Commission was lost because some national parties refused to participate in the process, and thus indirectly underlined their own reluctance to commit to a politicisation of Europe.’ In the European People's Party (EPP), there was a lack of consensus at the level of party leaders even as to whether there should be an EPP candidate, while the Party of European Socialists agreed not to put up a common candidate. Behind this historical setback lurks the resilience of intergovernmentalism and of the inter-prime-ministerial tradition of the EU.
Our contention is that this clause has enormous potential to further consolidate a European political system, to give it greater public relevance and to increase the politicisation of the Union. Appointing a candidate is only the first step, but it involves the preparation and presentation of the candidate's political backbone: the programme.
What the Europarties could have done
What the parties could and, for some, should have done is exactly what they will be expected to do after Lisbon is fully in force: choose their candidate for the presidency of the European Commission, even behind closed doors, debate a political platform and present it through the national member parties to the national electorates. The manifesto should not be a wish list for the future, but a political programme along the lines of the ones their national counterparts present in national elections. In the build-up to the presidential elections in France, or the elections for the Bundestag in Germany, parties spend several months preparing their platforms, which are expected to be specific. If a platform is too general, the media and the party's opponents will criticise its discrepancies and inefficiencies. The electorate must know what it will get from each political party should it be given the mandate to govern.
While debating a platform for the European Commission, parties would also be looking for a presidential candidate. Because the candidate would need to be involved in developing the platform, his or her appointment must be made several months in advance of the elections. The platform itself should be ready one to two months before the elections and communicated through the national member parties jointly with the European parties. This is exactly what happens at the national level in Europe and in US presidential elections. The winning Europarty would have its candidate proposed by the European Council and elected by the European Parliament. Should the Council, for whatever reason, decide not to support the winning party's candidate, the European Parliament could reject the Council's proposal and demand respect for the Treaty.
The 2009 elections to the European Parliament were a test that the Europarties failed. The next test will be in 2014 and it remains to be seen whether they will have changed their mode of action by then.
Appointment of Commission members
Although the European Commission was once thought to be more or less ‘technocratic’, party affiliation has always been the dominant factor for the appointment of its members. Candidates are usually personalities with political backgrounds in national governments or are put forward as a result of consultations among governing coalition partners. An interesting analysis of all commissioners from 1958 to 2004 [12, 16] shows that more than half of the Commissioners in the sample (53.6%) held a post as a government minister in their respective Member State before they were nominated as Commissioner.’
If the system works in 2014 and Europarties put up candidates for the Commission presidency, the European Council proposes the winner's candidate and (s)he is elected, on the following day, the Member States will propose their commissioners for the new College of the Commission.
Members of the Commission are appointed by the Council under Article 17, Paragraph 7. This means that European elections and the votes cast as part of them have no effect on these appointments. The winner of the elections may be party A but because party B forms the national government it has the right to nominate a member of the Commission. In 2009 in Hungary, under the Socialist government, the opposition centre-right party, Fidesz, won a sky-high 56% of the popular vote with the Socialists receiving only 17%. Still, the government soon exercised its right to appoint a candidate from its ranks for the Commission, and that person was put forward with other candidates for election by the European Parliament. This paradox is explained by the fact that historically the European elections have not been associated with Commission appointments because the appointments were considered part of the intergovernmental competences of the national governments.
European elections are often won by opposition parties, especially when governing parties have been in office a while. The electorate uses the second-order election to send a message to the national incumbents.
Associating the European Commission with the European elections
What we are proposing is that the competence to nominate a member of the Commission be shifted from the government of the day to the European party and its national member, or the coalition, that ranked first in the European elections. Our aim is to strengthen the association of these elections not just with the European Parliament, as was originally the concept, and not just with the appointment of the Commission president, as the Lisbon Treaty introduces, but with the new Commission as a whole.
It has been proposed that the candidates for the Commission who are nominated by national parties would also head the national party list in the European elections. This idea was not integrated into the Treaty of 2009 for two sound reasons: the size of the Commission will shrink in the years to come, 6 and the president of the Commission is departing from the role of first amongst equals to become more like a prime minister in a system where ministers hold office at his or her discretion. Having national parties link the nomination of Commission candidates with the European elections, thus receiving the legitimacy of the ballot, would not help the president exercise his discretionary powers. If the appointment of Commission candidates is given national public legitimacy, it reinforces intergovernmentalism. This is counter to the further integration and politicisation that the public nomination of the Commission president achieves.
According to Article 17, Paragraph 5 of the Lisbon Treaty: ‘As from 1 November 2014, the Commission shall consist of a number of members, including its President and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, corresponding to two-thirds of the number of Member States, unless the European Council, acting unanimously, decides to alter this number’.
Our proposal is to link the European elections ballot box with the European Parliament and the European Commission, in full compliance with the institutional and political direction of the new Treaty. The party or coalition that wins the elections will appoint the Commission candidates whenever this is needed during the five year mandate. The names can be drawn from the final list of Commission nominees provided by national member parties.
Some of the advantages of this proposal:
It will further strengthen the European dimension of the European elections since voters will know that the winning party will have an additional key competence.
The legitimacy of having governments of the day appoint the Commission members is disputable. The national governments’ competences are reflected in the Council of Ministers and the European Council. The Commission is the supranational institution and it makes sense that it be linked with the European elections.
The proposed Commission is subject to scrutiny and election by the European Parliament, where the winning party of the European elections in each Member State is represented, usually with more seats compared to the party in office on the national level that did not rank first at the European elections.
Since the appointed Commission president has the right to delegate ministerial portfolios, (s)he should be supported by a Commission that is a better reflection of the result of the European elections that gave him or her the job. 7
The proposal further strengthens the independence of the commissioners from national governments, as their appointment would be linked with the European elections 8 and their legitimacy more European than national.
In the example of Hungary and the 2009 European elections mentioned above, Fidesz elected 14 MEPs while the Socialist party elected 4.
The term ‘elections to the European Parliament’, the official name under the Lisbon Treaty, should be changed to ‘European elections’ as their effect now goes well beyond the European Parliament synthesis.
A counter-argument to this proposal would be that a populist or extremist party may win a second-order victory because citizens have voted to send a message of dissatisfaction with the status quo, and such a party would likely appoint Commission members who would not reflect the political mainstream. Still, reversing this argument could make it another reason to favour the proposal: the threat could strengthen the European dimension of the vote exercised at the European elections. 9 Citizens would realise that their vote affects the appointment of the commissioner.
The Treaty revision, necessary to implement this proposal, could find support from political forces often critical of any new Treaty.
A truly European political programme
Our second proposal concerns the Europarties’ manifestos for the European elections. Their platforms for the 2014 elections could be consolidated in a whole new way: each national party's platform should be part of its respective Europarty platform. The Europarty platform for Europe 2014–19 should combine the national party platforms with a ‘European consolidation’. The manifestos of the Europarties are among the most ambiguous elements in their history. They have been credibly criticised as irrelevant for national voters selecting between national politicians who ask for their vote for diverse reasons.
However, the Europarties’ manifestos are in fact a more accurate reflection of the policies that the respective group in the European Parliament will set in motion under the constraints posed by the EU's inter-institutional decision-making. In the European elections the national manifestos are presented to the citizens even though they may be nothing more than what the national party wishes to fight for in Europe. The manifestos of the Europarties are the actual policy documents to be acted on in the European Parliament and within the edifice of the EU.
We argue that rather than hoping for national member parties to integrate the European manifestos into their campaigns, an ambition that has not been fulfilled in seven trials, the opposite take place: that European parties integrate the manifestos from their national members, aiming to have one consolidated document at the European level. 10 The national party can either promote the whole European document or just the chapter devoted to its country.
Sceptics of this proposal might be convinced by an opt-out clause for member parties that consider the final document unsatisfactory.
These are some of the benefits of this course of action:
Until 2009 the electoral platform of a national party in a European election was quasi-sovereign. The day after the election, it would become severely restricted by the EU's complex decision-making structures. The platform represented what the national party hoped to achieve within the EU framework, where wider consensus must be found to make decisions and to initiate legislation or amend existing policy. Ultimately, the national party's manifesto may have been reduced to nothing more than a wish list. By having national platforms consolidated into European platforms they would have greater weight and increase their prospects for implementation.
The aim of the Europarties is not to restrict the national members’ proposals but to help bring them in line with the realities of the day. The process will involve representatives of the national members, so any issues and problems can be worked out through the give-and-take between the two levels.
Including the contest for the European Commission presidency in the European elections further strengthens the argument. A party in the European Parliament will support its incumbent president in implementing its platform, not just on principle but because the platform provides aims and policies for the EU, to be implemented through the cooperation of the Commission with the Parliament and the Council, which is how it actually works in the EU.
The process contains potential improvements in the efficiency, in Pareto terms, of the final result.
Today, national parties have more or less a free hand to ‘serve’ their electorate what it wants without much concern about implementation at the wider European level. The Europeanisation procedure would reduce the asymmetries of information amongst voters from different countries.
At first reading, the proposal may sound too federal, but in fact it gives national parties a role in the preparation of the Commission programme for the subsequent five years. This is a role they have not had in the past. The absence of a link between national and European parties and the content of Commission policies is a contemporary democratic deficit. Its origins go back to a time when the Commission was a more technocratic institution and its president was first among equals. Now that (s)he is the master in command and there is a democratic link established with the electorate, under this proposal, national parties are, for the first time, given a say in the content of the next Commission.
The proposal is also in line with the principles of subsidiarity and of proportionality, while policy consolidation can help to avoid contradictions between programmes and to forge exchanges of know-how at an unprecedented level.
The risk of such a process is a possible stalemate in the negotiations or the production of an inconsistent final document if, for instance, member parties exercise a yes-to-all approach. The coordinating role of the Europarty and its experience accumulated over time are the keys to the success of this new role.
Ultimately, even if the Europarty is on the losing side in the election in 2014, the consolidated European platform will provide a basis for its post-election role: the European opposition. Apart from creating a basis for a more democratic functioning of the European Commission backed up by a relative majority in the Parliament, the first implementation in 2014 will demonstrate the need to consolidate the role of a European opposition comprising the Europarties that did not win and which have rival policy agendas [4]. The process of platform integration will be an excellent basis for this new role.
Upgrade and restart process
The major Europarties will have to go through a restart process. Since their beginning in the promising 1970s in expectation of the first European elections, Europarties have not changed much in content. On the one hand they have reached most of the political goals they had set: their reference in successive European Treaties, their development alongside the European Union with plentiful new members, direct public financing, bigger and better offices, massively attended congresses, colourful brochures and Internet websites, multiple staff, assorted think tanks and so on. But all this is the context of their work. When we review the actual content of their output, we see that Europarties today are not delivering much more than they did in the 1980s. They consolidate a manifesto for the European elections, they organise party summits before the European Council and periodic events at which party representatives have a general discussion about contemporary issues. The traditional intergovernmental element holds strong today at the level of political parties and with the cooperation of their elites, who appreciate networking and socialising. This is reflected in the functioning of the Union's institutions where, hitherto, with the exception of the Parliament, Europarties have a poor record of performance.
It is doubtful that even the major Europarties are currently ready to perform the post-Lisbon role described above. Currently there is a lack of interest among national parties in this new political role.
Europarties, therefore, have to reposition themselves; both the institutional and the political status quo are inadequate to capture the transnational potential that exists today and in the period leading up to 2014. They have a chance to become real political parties and not the cartel parties they are now—close to the institutions, increasingly state-funded and with a growing distance from the electorate [6]. 11 The pursuit of inter-institutional coordination within the European Union is the next level of Europarty development and one area where the current record is poor.
See also [7]
The stressful ratification process of the Lisbon Treaty a couple of years ago, as well as the ongoing financial crisis in the Eurozone and the threats it poses to the stability of the edifice side-lined the positive changes inherent in the new Treaty of the European Union: the further integration of the political system and the political parties in the European public sphere. There is a lack of attention among most national political parties, partners in Europarty cooperation, to the potential they now have. A lot needs to change inside major Europarties if they are to adapt to the post-Lisbon reality. Should things continue as they are, then the Europarties will fail to seize the opportunity at a moment in history when more Europe could be the only way to avoid the end of Europe.