Charlemagne. Barbarians at the gate

Contrary to expectations, this week's elections could be the making of the European Parliament

NIGEL GARDNER, a British candidate in this week's elections to the European Parliament, was recently confronted with an unusually direct expression of the difficulty facing the institution he aspires to join. Mr Gardner was out campaigning for the Labour Party in Hemel Hempstead, a medium-sized English town, and approached a female shopper with the usual candidates' patter - “Madam, may I take a few moments of your time to talk about the European elections.” The woman looked at him with distaste and incredulity, then moved her face to within a couple of centimetres of Mr Gardner's before yelling at the top of her voice: “Boring”.

That, in a nutshell, is the big problem facing the European Parliament. Voting will take place over four days between June 10th and 13th, in all 25 European Union member countries. In most normal elections attention would focus on winners and losers, but in these ones the figure that matters will be the turnout. In the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979, 63% of the electorate voted. By 1994 this had fallen to 56.8%. At the most recent elections, in 1999, participation was down to 49.4%.

The sense that ordinary Europeans are disengaging from the parliament is debilitating for an institution that already stands accused of corruption and irrelevance. And it is a worry not just for the parliament, but for the EU as a whole. Even Europhiles acknowledge that the Union has an image problem, with most ordinary Europeans seeing it as remote, incomprehensible and run by unaccountable bureaucrats. The parliament is supposed to be the main answer to this so-called “democratic deficit”. Successive treaties have given it ever more power over European legislation, which in turn accounts for about 50% of all new laws in EU member countries. Yet, as a senior official at the parliament puts it, “we face this incredible paradox: the more power the parliament gets, the less people vote.”

Not everybody is convinced that this is a real problem. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the Greens in the parliament, points out that turnout in American presidential elections has usually hovered around the 50% mark, but “nobody says that the United States is not a democracy.” It is a good answer, but not a complete one. The European Parliament, unlike the American presidency, is a young institution struggling to establish its legitimacy. And in European terms, its ability to inspire people to vote is pretty feeble. Professor Richard Rose of International IDEA, a think-tank, has monitored what he calls the “Euro-gap”, which measures the different turnout in national and European elections. This shows, for example, that only 40% of Portuguese voted in the European elections of 1999, whereas 61% voted in elections to the national parliament at around the same time. The biggest Euro-gap was in the Netherlands, where 80% voted in last year's national elections and just 30% in the 1999 European elections. Across the European Union, according to Professor Rose, the Euro-gap was around 22 percentage points.

And now the good news

Another expected outcome of the elections is a surge in votes for populist parties opposed to the European Union. In Poland, Samoobrona (Selfdefence), a party led by Andrzej Lepper, a pugilistic peasant who rants against the EU, is likely to win a big block of seats. In Britain, the UK Independence Party, which advocates withdrawal from the EU, could win as much as 15% of the vote. Other Eurosceptic parties expected to do well include the Civic Democrats in the Czech Republic, Denmark's June Movement and Sweden's JuneList.

The rise of Eurosceptic and populist parties may be bad news for the EU, because of the disillusion with the whole project that it reflects. But for the European Parliament as an institution, it could actually be quite positive. For it would place the parliament in a unique - and so potentially powerful - position within the EU. One of the oddities of the club is the extent to which most of its leading institutions have managed to insulate themselves from public opinion. National ministers and diplomats haggling in the Council of Ministers often seem to regard their job as “delivering” their publics, as much as representing them. The European Commission, which is unelected, unabashedly sees itself as the keeper of the European flame. And the European Parliament has traditionally been the most federalist of all the EU institutions. The three biggest political groupings - the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), the Socialists and the Liberals - have long been dominated by true believers in “ever closer union”.

This situation will not be transformed by this week's elections, but it could change significantly. Already the EPP, which is likely to remain the parliament's biggest political group, has rewritten its statutes so as to accommodate the British Tories, who explicitly reject the group's traditional federalism. The two avowedly Eurosceptic political groups - one broadly on the left, one on the right - are both likely to gain members. There could be a new alliance of far-right parties that might include France's National Front. Nobody knows which group the Polish potato-throwers will join. But parties that are broadly Eurosceptic could see their representation rise from around 10% in today's parliament to as much as 20%.

Many centrists will doubtless react with horror to this. But the arrival of anti-European populists, along with a sprinkling of cranks, celebrities and single-issue fanatics, among the 732 MEPs reporting for duty after the election might at long last excite some public interest in the parliament. Debate may become less genteel and the work of all those worthy committees on fish quotas and chemical regulations could be disrupted. But by making the parliament more reflective of the true breadth of European opinion, in all its diversity, this week's elections could yet raise its standing in Europe.

Commentary feature in which the author discusses the 2004 European Parliament elections and says that the Parliament may be strengthened by having a greater number of Euro-sceptical MEPs.

• Primary Source