Abstract
The 2014 European elections will be the first to take place under the Lisbon Treaty. The nomination of presidential candidates by European political parties will personalise the campaign and will trigger the interest of the European public.
Introduction
The first direct elections for the European Parliament took place 34 years ago, in 1979. Since then, and despite the fact that the European Parliament has gradually gained influence over that time, voter turnout has gradually decreased. In 2009 the overall turnout was just 43%, down from 45.5% in 2004. The explanation for this problem is actually rather simple: European elections have never really been ‘European’.
In reality, all previous European elections have been fought at the national level on national issues. For example, in 2009 we had 27 parallel national campaigns with almost negligible European horizontal campaign interaction and content. There was almost no campaign activity at the EU level, with the exception of the congresses of the European political parties. And although Europarties existed during this time and produced substantial election manifestos, they were rarely used by their national party affiliates. According to a report published by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE 2009) on the 2009 European elections, ‘national parties often choose to run their own campaign without associating themselves with Europarties, often due to the national political competition being perceived as more important; some national parties may also not wish to fully support all the positions of the Europarty with which they would normally associate themselves’.
Thus, the average voter has never really understood the European importance of these elections and never felt that something tangible was at stake. Of course, in certain cases, voters have used the elections for the European Parliament as an opportunity to express dissatisfaction towards their national governments. All this is about to change for two fundamental reasons: the emergence of a new political landscape and a new institutional landscape in the EU.
The political landscape
Needless to say, the economic and financial crisis that Europe has experienced in the past four years is unprecedented. The countries in the eurozone that have been hit the hardest–-Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus–-have been obliged to sign up to painful bail-out agreements. On the other hand, the countries that have had to formulate the bail-out agreements have become increasingly reluctant to finance them (for instance, in the recent Cyprus bailout). Surely, this pan-European crisis with its recurring cycles–-country after country, EU summit after EU summit, bail-out after bail-out–-has put the EU under the scrutiny of the media and public opinion. Furthermore, dissatisfaction from both sides of the crisis has led to the rise of extreme and/or populist anti-European parties: Golden Dawn in Greece, The Finns 1 in Finland and so on.
Formerly known as True Finns.
Therefore, it is safe to assume that this time around, the European elections will be dominated by the economic and financial crisis in Europe and the future of the common EU currency, the euro. It is also safe to assume that the populist and anti-European parties which are emerging and/or strengthening their position across Europe will use the 2014 elections to viciously attack the EU and also the mainstream political parties and their Europarty affiliates for fostering an EU-centric approach during the crisis.
On the other hand, the EU, its institutions and its leadership, who are now getting to grips with the crisis, have the difficult task of explaining to the public why a more integrated Europe is the best way to combat future crises and to become more competitive in a world of emerging economic powerhouses. In light of the ever-growing detachment between the EU institutions and European societies, Europe's leaders and the EU institutions made the conscious decision to use the 2014 European elections as the forum to engage directly with the citizens on a pan-European scale. This decision set in motion a series of actions to formulate a new institutional landscape that will facilitate the holding of genuinely European campaigns in a genuinely European public space.
The institutional landscape
The process was initiated by European Commission President José Manuel Barroso (2012) during his famous State of the Union speech in September 2012 in the European Parliament. In this speech he stated the following:
An important means to deepen the pan-European political debate would be the presentation by European political parties of their candidate for the post of Commission President at the European Parliament elections already in 2014. This can be done without Treaty change. This would be a decisive step to make the possibility of a European choice offered by these elections even clearer. I call on the political parties to commit to this step and thus to further Europeanise these European elections.
President Barroso's call was particularly significant since it refers to the Treaty of Lisbon. Article 1, Title lll-9d(7) states that in order for the European Council to propose a candidate for president of the European Commission it should take ‘into account the elections to the European Parliament’. It is important to underline that President Barroso's formal call to European political parties to put forward presidential candidates ahead of the 2014 elections echoes the calls of the past from his own political party, the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), which in 2004, after the elections, and again in 2009, ahead of the elections, referred to the identical article from the draft Constitutional Treaty in order to put him forward as the EPP candidate for president of the European Commission.
During the 2009 campaign, the EPP openly challenged the other Europarties to put forward their own presidential candidates against President Barroso, but they failed to do so. As EPP President Wilfried Martens (2012) noted in a recent op-ed article:
[W]e challenged the other European political parties to put forward their own presidential candidates. Sadly, they did not do so–-denying voters across Europe the chance to take part in deciding who should run the commission. Instead, during the election campaign, the Party of European Socialists and the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party 2 launched endless vitriolic attacks against Barroso without offering their own presidential alternatives.
At the congress of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party in Dublin in November 2012, the party changed its name to the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE).
Moreover, in a resolution drawn up after the 2009 elections, the Party of European Socialists (PES) openly admitted their failure: ‘One of the key problems for our political family was the absence of a unifying leadership personality for the position of President of the European Commission, and to embody our common Manifesto. Our political family appeared divided while the EPP unanimously supported José Manuel Barroso’ (PES 2011).
In sum, what President Barroso proposed in his State of the Union speech is for European political parties to become the central stakeholders of the 2014 European elections and to empower their respective campaigns with presidential candidates who will spearhead and personalise each campaign. Moreover, in the same speech, President Barroso (2012), in an effort to back up his campaign call, also put forward on behalf of the Commission a proposal for a reinforced statute for European political parties:
[W]e have very often a real disconnect between political parties in the capitals and the European political parties. This is why we have to recognise the political debate is cast all too often as if it were just between national parties. Even in the European elections we do not see the name of the European political parties on the ballot box, we see a national debate between national political parties. This is why we need a reinforced statute for European political parties. I am proud to announce that the Commission has adopted a proposal for this today.
The Commission proposal based on the Marietta Giannakou report, which was adopted in the form of a resolution by the European Parliament in 2011, is significant because, when approved, it will allow European political parties to function according to EU law and to campaign more effectively across the EU. For example, the draft proposal includes the following provision: ‘a specific European legal status should be established for European political parties …, providing them with full legal capacity and recognition in all the Member States’ (European Commission 2012).
The momentum at the institutional level continued at the European Parliament with the adoption of a resolution in November 2012 on the 2014 European elections, which
[u]rges the European political parties to nominate candidates for the Presidency of the Commission and expects those candidates to play a leading role in the parliamentary electoral campaign, in particular by personally presenting their programme in all Member States of the Union; stresses the importance of reinforcing the political legitimacy of both Parliament and the Commission by connecting their respective elections more directly to the choice of the voters. (European Parliament 2012b)
Then, just three months later, the Commission once again provided impetus to the process by putting forward a set of significant recommendations for enhancing the transparency and legitimacy of the European elections:
Member States should encourage and facilitate the provision of information to the electorate on the affiliation between national parties and European political parties before and during the elections to the European Parliament, inter alia, by allowing and encouraging the indication of such an affiliation on the ballots used in those elections.
National political parties participating in the elections to the European Parliament should make publicly known ahead of those elections their affiliation with European political parties. National political parties should prominently display their affiliation with European political parties in all campaign materials, communications and political broadcasts.
European and national political parties should make known, ahead of the elections to the European Parliament, the candidate for the function of the President of the European Commission they support and the candidate's programme. National political parties should ensure that their political broadcasts in view of the European Parliament elections are also used to inform citizens about the candidate for the function of President of the European Commission they support and about the candidate's programme (European Commission 2013).
In sum, the institutional landscape for the European elections has changed significantly since the last elections. The relevant institutions of the EU have understood that, this time around, the future of the European project is at stake and, therefore, it is necessary to put in place a set of measures that will empower European political parties to run a genuine pan-EU campaign for the 2014 elections.
The players
As mentioned earlier, even though Europarties have been around for more than three decades and have been involved in all previous European elections, their role has been limited to formulating election manifestos and organising some ad hoc events. European political parties have never actually campaigned in the Member States, their election manifestos have seldom been referenced and their party symbols have rarely appeared in the campaign material of their national party affiliates. 2 So in 2009, European political parties simply played a supporting role for the national campaigns, as did their corresponding political groups in the European Parliament.
In fact, the role of the parliamentary groups during the campaign was (and continues to be) even more limited since, according to the rules of the European Parliament (EP) as approved by the 2003 EP Bureau, they are strictly forbidden to campaign because the appropriations from the EP budget to parliamentary groups rule out the use of their budgets for campaigning (OSCE 2009).
Furthermore, the political foundations affiliated to the Europarties, which are slightly more than five years old, are not allowed to campaign, but are expected to have a role in helping to formulate the election manifestos, analysing data, and providing policy feedback and intellectual input (Centre for European Studies 2009).
For example in the 2009 campaign, the logo of the EPP was used by only three of its member parties: UMP (France), Nea Demokratia (Greece) and Democratic Rally (Cyprus).
Therefore, in light of all these new developments, the European political parties have now emerged as the central players in the upcoming European Parliament elections. EPP Secretary General Antonio López-lstúriz White explained in an interview that, in this new political process, there is a shift of power not to the Parliament but to the European political parties–-‘it is the parties who are now in the centre position to nominate the future president’. (Vogel and Keating 2013)
Needless to say, the central qualitative element for the organisation of the upcoming campaigns of the Europarties is the selection of their respective presidential candidates. The two main political parties, the EPP and the PES, have committed to putting forward presidential candidates. The EPP (2012) has an already established tradition with the selection of José Manuel Barroso in 2004 and 2009 and has repeated its commitment in a Congress resolution of October 2012, while the PES (2011) has for the first time formulated a process to select a ‘common candidate’. Although the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE) and the European Green Party (EGP) have, in principle, accepted the concept of putting forward presidential candidates, they have yet to give information on how they plan to move forward with this process. Moreover, it is unclear whether the smaller Europarties will put forward presidential candidates for the campaign.
Of course, the European Parliament will not per se be involved in the campaign, but it will organise a generic go-to-vote information campaign in an effort to raise awareness of the new realities of the 2014 elections and the role of the main stakeholders in the campaign: the European political parties and their presidential candidates (Lahousse-Juárez 2013).
The campaign
The campaign for the 2014 European elections will be more or less divided into two distinct periods: from October 2013 to February 2014 and from March to May 2014. The elections will take place from the 22 to 25 May and the European Parliament has redistributed the 751 seats of the Member States in order to include Croatia, which will join the EU on 1 July 2013 (European Parliament 2013).
The first period, October to February, is the pre-campaign period in which the main European political parties will be focused on selecting their presidential candidates. This will start in October because the major Europarties will wait for the outcome of the national elections in the EU's largest Member State, Germany. That result will have a significant impact on the development of their campaign strategies.
During the first period, the parties are expected to organise events that will help them build momentum for the second period, the actual campaign. Their efforts will culminate by the second half of February, approximately, during which each party should organise a congress or similar event to formally endorse its presidential candidate, to approve its electoral programme and to officially launch its campaign.
The second period, March to May, will be a period of intense campaign activity featuring the presidential candidates of the European political parties. The candidates will be travelling across the EU to campaign in the Member States, to promote the electoral programmes of the Europarties, and to support the campaigns of the national parties and their national lists.
The impact from the interaction between the EU and the national campaigns will vary according to the strategic decisions taken by the Europarties together with their national affiliates. Needless to say, social media will play a prominent role during the campaign because the main European political parties have, for the past three years, been building up their respective accounts (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and so on) to be used as springboards to launch the social media accounts of the presidential candidates.
Moreover, an important highlight during the campaign will be the holding of televised presidential debates. Although the number, the venue(s), the topics and the participants are still unclear, the main European political parties have, in principle, agreed to presidential debates. The European Parliament has also offered to host one such debate on Europe Day, 9 May, at its Strasbourg premises.
Conclusion
The 2014 European elections will be the first ones to be conducted in a true European setting. The empowerment of the European political parties and the contests between the presidential candidates during the campaign will surely trigger greater interest on the part of the general public in these elections.
In a Eurobarometer survey conducted in June 2012, when asked if Europeans would be more inclined to vote than they are today if Europarties would ‘put forward, on the basis of a common programme, one candidate each for the post of President of the European Commission’, more than one in two respondents felt more inclined to vote in 2014 since it would give them a sense of being involved, even if indirectly, in electing the next president of the European Commission (European Parliament 2012a).
Hence, alea iacta est. It's now up to the European political parties to rise to the occasion and to create a genuine European public space that will meet people's democratic expectations. As President Barroso (2012) has correctly said, ‘Europe cannot be technocratic, bureaucratic or even diplomatic. Europe has to be ever more democratic.’
Footnotes