Europe is no longer big enough to hold the global record for democratic elections. Just last week, after an election marathon, India demonstrated how a voting population of almost a billion people can go to the polls in an orderly manner. In contrast, the elections to the European Parliament, which began in the Netherlands on Thursday and will continue until Sunday, are a little smaller; the EU is sending “only” around 350 million eligible voters to the polls.
But more important than a world record is the question of how democratic the EU actually is. In any case, the complexity of the union of 27 states stands in the way of a system of parliamentary and representative democracy. The national differences are far too great. So great that even members of parliament and officials of the EU are not completely convinced of the transparency of their own government.
Otherwise, there would have been no attempt at electoral reform in recent years. Significantly, the proposal failed due to national contradictions. This is why European citizens will not be able to vote for candidates from other European countries with a second vote in 2024, but will remain bound to national lists. Other serious differences will also remain.
In some countries, there are thresholds for parties that range from 5 percent, such as in the Czech Republic and Poland, to 1.8 percent in Cyprus. In contrast, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has overturned a German 5 percent hurdle, meaning that the cheerful anarchists of “Die Partei” can enter the European Parliament quite comfortably, while in large countries such as Italy and France, millions of votes for small parties are lost.
Not all Europeans are the same when it comes to voting age either. In Germany, 16-year-olds are allowed to vote for the first time – a privilege they only share with their contemporaries in Malta, Belgium and Austria. The situation is even more confusing when it comes to passive voting rights. Italians can only be elected from the age of 25, while German candidates can be elected from the age of 18.
The EU member states could not even agree on an election day – intended as a uniform European day of democracy. Only Luxembourg and Kosovo have declared May 9th as a day off from work, although, funnily enough, Kosovo is not even a member of the club. But the deadlock in the elections shows, and not only in such details, the existence of the “democratic gap” in the European edifice that experts have been complaining about for decades.
Even more crucial is the complicated interaction between nation states and the EU, which reflects the historical and current reality: the European Union is, contrary to what its name suggests, by no means a unified federal state, but rather a kind of confederation of states. The latter is consequently controlled primarily from the capitals of the member states and not primarily from the dual headquarters in Brussels and Strasbourg.
This democratic gap was clearly visible in the last elections five years ago. The European People’s Party – an alliance of Christian-conservative movements within the EU – put forward a leading candidate in the form of the German Manfred Weber. But after his relative success at the ballot box, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel pulled a candidate out of the hat for Commission President who had not been on any ballot paper.
Ursula von der Leyen took over the high office through the national back door; Weber had to dutifully step back into the background. The fact that they discredited the pompously staged European elections with this hasty personnel decision was of less interest to the powerful in Paris and Berlin, together with their colleagues, than to their balanced compromise, in which the personnel details were negotiated behind closed doors in a super-large coalition of liberal-conservatives and social democrats, with the approval of the Greens.
In the end, this time too, the percentages in the huge EU Parliament will be added up, then the positions in the Commission will be distributed, and in the end, the Parliament can only reject this cabinet as a whole, just like the budget. In terms of democratic history, the very limited power of the Strasbourg Parliament is more like that of the German Reichstag under Kaiser Wilhelm.
There is no provision for even an indirect election of the executive, and for reasons of national vanity there are no supranational lists of candidates. It can therefore be said that the EU is a union of democracies that agree on common standards in the areas of foreign trade and justice, transport and agriculture, but have so far blocked any further attempt to transfer power over these compromises from the hands of national actors.
This then results in the so-called “blame game”, in which prime ministers or party leaders boast about European successes in front of the cameras of their national television stations – and can blame unpopular measures or failures on the anonymous EU.
The often idealistic candidates and model Europeans of all stripes can rightly emphasize as often as they like that the most important decisions are no longer made in the Bundestag in Berlin, but in the compromise factory in Brussels – if the actors themselves are so little guided by the power of parliament (and thus of the electorate), then they should not be surprised if voter turnout has settled at 40 to 50 percent.
In some countries, not even one in three people who are entitled to vote goes to the polls. A majority does not seem to care about the outcome, reflecting the cynicism of those pulling the strings in national capitals who are not willing to turn the EU into a parliamentary democracy.
Ursula von der Leyen is a masterfully adaptive – some would say opportunistic – politician. Over the last five years, she has learned how the rhizomes of power run between Brussels and the capitals. She does not need this election for her intended re-election any more than she did five years ago. That is probably why she was hardly seen during the election campaign and did not even appear at the debate between the top candidates on ZDF.
Instead, she had to endear herself to the growing right-wing parties such as the long-ostracized head of government of Italy, Giorgia Meloni. In the face of the farmers’ protests, she had to accept setbacks in the once fateful “Green Deal” project, whose symbolic figure, the socialist Frans Timmermans, has long since turned his back on Brussels in resignation.
After massive protests, the EU Commission has rediscovered its love for farmers. A tough asylum policy is now also possible, thanks to Merkel’s student Ursula von der Leyen – not because the balance of power in parliament has fundamentally changed, but because more and more hardliners like Meloni or the Dutchman Geert Wilders are exerting pressure from national parliaments in the European Council.
The fact that Poland’s on paper liberal government under Donald Tusk has now decided to build a massive border fence with aerial surveillance on the Belarusian border to protect against illegal migrants at a cost of 2.5 billion euros and, like Finland, has long been sending asylum seekers back to the east, has met with no opposition in Brussels.
After the British turned their backs on the EU in 2016 like a sinking ship, many staunch Europeans hoped for reforms and predicted an economic collapse for the British. But the shrunken EU has not saved a cent and has not given up a single position. Without enthusiasm and without vision, but with excellent financial cushioning, they continue to muddle along as before, which is clearly evident in the failure of even the smallest electoral law reform.
The majority of voters are responding to this standstill by not even going to the polls or by happily supporting Eurosceptic parties. The despondent and undemocratic EU can safely share the bill for this trip to the day before yesterday with the national governments.