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Turnout for European Parliament Election Slumps in Several Countries Fringe Groups Gain in European Voting
(about 5 hours later)
BRUSSELS — After four days of voting in a sprawling election with nearly 400 million eligible voters spread across 28 countries, efforts by the European Union to rally sagging public support and give new momentum to a stalled six-decade push for unity appeared to stumble on Sunday amid signs that voter turnout in parts of Europe had hit record lows. BRUSSELS — After four days of voting in a sprawling election with nearly 400 million eligible voters spread across 28 countries, fringe political groups pugnaciously hostile to the European Union scored dramatic gains in voting for the European Parliament and delivered a blow to the bruised but still dominant mainstream parties.
Official results and turnout figures in the election for the European Parliament will not be available until late Sunday night but preliminary reports from several countries, including the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Malta, suggested that voter interest had slumped. Official results in the election will not be available until late Sunday or early Monday, but in a setback for champions of greater European unity, exit polls and preliminary results indicated that parties strongly opposed to the European Union performed well in several countries, including France, Greece, Britain and Denmark.
In Italy, according to a partial sampling of polling stations by the Interior Ministry, turnout slipped to around 43 percent, nearly 10 percentage points lower than the last European Parliament election in 2009. The Czech Press Agency, citing election officials, said fewer than 20 percent of those eligible to vote had done so, down from 28.2 in 2009. Malta reported a much higher turnout of 74.8 percent but that was slightly less than the total for the 2009 vote. In France, the National Front, the country’s largest far-right party, appeared to have won about a quarter of the vote to defeat both the governing Socialists and the Union for a Popular Movement, a center-right party. Greece’s radical left-wing Syriza coalition looked set to beat the party of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, while Golden Dawn, a neo-Nazi outfit that Greek authorities tried in vain to outlaw, also picked up seats.
For largely local reasons, voters in some countries turned out in large numbers. In Sweden, where the election attracted wide interest as a dry run for national elections in September, turnout soared above the 45 percent who voted in 2009. Turnout in Germany also appeared to be high. France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, a Socialist, likened the results to an earthquake while Jean-Pierre Bel, the president of the French Senate, denounced them as a “real trauma.” Henri Malosse, the president of the European Economic and Social Committee, a Brussels grouping of trade unions and employers, warned that “this may be the last European election if Europe does not change.”
Jakub Janda, deputy director of European Values, a Prague research group, attributed the weak interest to the fact that most voters have no idea what the European Parliament does or who its members are. “It is a sad truth that the Czech political elite has always considered European issues a bothersome and marginal affair,” he said. “Now we are seeing the consequences.” But Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, cheered the outcome and said it would help those in Britain and elsewhere who want to slash the European Union’s powers and return decision-making to individual states.
Politics in Europe, however, remains highly local, making it hard to identify Continentwide trends despite regular pleas from officials in Brussels that voters need to think more as Europeans and widen their horizons beyond national borders. “The real effect of these elections, with big ‘Euroskeptic’ gains in many countries, will be less what happens in Brussels and more what happens within the member states,” he told reporters in Brussels via a video link. “I think the day when we have more referendums on E.U. membership and membership of the euro will have come much, much closer with these results tonight.”
Hailed by Europe’s boosters as a way to hold back a wave of public disenchantment and narrow the chasm between citizens and bureaucrats in Brussels, voting for the 751-seat European legislature began last Thursday under the slogan, “This time it’s different.” After more than three decades of falling turnout, however, this year’s election managed, barely, to halt the downward spiral, with a parliamentary official saying preliminary results showed 43.1 percent of eligible voters had cast their ballots — compared with 43 percent in 2009.
But a series of televised debates between the leaders of rival political blocs and other efforts to engage with voters seem to have had little success breaking through a wall of public indifference to what many Europeans scorn as a remote and overly costly Tower of Babel. The legislature has 24 official languages and shuttles between Brussels, the headquarters of union’s administrative machinery, and the French city of Strasbourg, 270 miles away. Mainstream center-right and center-left blocs will continue to dominate the assembly, with the center-right European People’s Party expected to emerge with 212 seats in the 751-member legislature. But fringe forces will gain a larger platform to promote their hostility to the bureaucracy in Brussels and to immigrants in their home countries.
“The European Parliament is predicated on the idea of a European demos,” Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research group, said, using a term meaning shared political culture. “But if this demos does not exist the parliament has a very hard time connecting with people.” Leaders of some of the mainstream parliamentary parties held out hope that voters’ drift to extremist parties could be reversed.
“This is a bad day for the European Union when the party with such an openly racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic program gets 25 or 24 percent of the vote in France,” Martin Schulz, the current president of the European Parliament and the Socialist contender to run the E.U.’s main policy-making body, the European Commission, told a news conference early Monday morning. “The reasons behind such a vote for a party like this party in France is not that people are hard-core extremists,” he said. “They are disappointed. They have lost trust and hope,” he said.Hailed by Europe’s boosters as a way to hold back a wave of public disenchantment and narrow the chasm between citizens and officials, voting for the legislature began last Thursday under the slogan “This time it’s different.”
But a series of televised debates between the leaders of rival political blocs and other efforts to engage with voters have had scant success breaking through a wall of public indifference to what many Europeans scorn as a remote and overly costly Tower of Babel. The legislature has 24 official languages and shuttles between Brussels, the headquarters of union’s administrative machinery, and the French city of Strasbourg, 270 miles away.
“The European Parliament is predicated on the idea of a European ‘demos,’ ” Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research group, said, using a term meaning shared political culture. “But if this demos does not exist, the Parliament has a very hard time connecting with people.”
Politics in Europe remains highly local, making it hard to identify Continentwide trends despite regular pleas from officials in Brussels that voters need to think more as Europeans and widen their horizons beyond national borders. Voter turnout slumped in 17 countries, including Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic, but rose in 11 others like Sweden and Germany.
Aside from its efforts to restrict snooping by American intelligence agencies in the wake of revelations by Edward J. Snowden, Mr. Grant said, the European legislature “exists inside the Brussels bubble and doesn’t talk about things most people care about.” Its principal concern, he added, “has been to get more power for itself and more money for the European Union.”Aside from its efforts to restrict snooping by American intelligence agencies in the wake of revelations by Edward J. Snowden, Mr. Grant said, the European legislature “exists inside the Brussels bubble and doesn’t talk about things most people care about.” Its principal concern, he added, “has been to get more power for itself and more money for the European Union.”
The entire assembly decamps once a month to Strasbourg, only to return to Brussels a few days later at a significant cost to the taxpayer. Scrapping the trips to Strasbourg would save around 103 million euros, or about $140 million, a year. The entire assembly decamps once a month to Strasbourg, only to return to Brussels a few days later at a significant cost to taxpayers. Scrapping the trips to Strasbourg would save about $140 million a year.
The shuttles have left the parliament open to ridicule as a “traveling circus” by both the public and members of the assembly, most of whom want to scrap the Strasbourg seat. But the waste is required by a treaty that cannot be changed without unanimous approval by member states, something that is impossible so long as France refuses to abandon a role for Strasbourg. The shuttles have left the Parliament open to ridicule as a “traveling circus.” But the arrangement is required by a treaty that cannot be changed without unanimous approval by member states, something that is impossible so long as France refuses to abandon a role for Strasbourg.
A vivid example of the paralysis that grips decision-making in a bloc that began in the 1950s with just six member states but has since expanded to 28, the Strasbourg shuttle has helped fuel mounting public exasperation that is expected to translate into strong gains at the polls for fringe groups on both the far left and far right. A vivid example of the paralysis that grips decision-making in a bloc that began in the 1950s with just six member states but has since expanded to 28, the Strasbourg shuttle has helped fuel the mounting public exasperation that improved the fortunes of the National Front, UKIP and other fringe groups.
Voter projections released on Saturday suggested that mainstream groups would still dominate the assembly by a large margin, with the center-right European People’s Party forecast to get around 217 seats, down on its 275 seats in the departing legislature but still enough to put it ahead of the other main bloc, the Socialists and Democrats. In a sign of how fragmented European politics remain, however, a Dutch party that shares UKIP’s hostility toward immigrants and the European Union did far worse than expected.
But groups hostile to the entire European project, notably the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, and the National Front in France, are expected to do well. UKIP performed even better than expected in local elections on Thursday in Britain and that vote, held at the same time as the European Parliament ballot, appeared to presage a strong finish when the European votes are counted on Sunday. Widely seen as a sideshow to national legislatures, the European Parliament has struggled for years, largely in vain, to galvanize public interest, despite a steady accumulation of power.
In a sign of how fragmented European politics remain, however, a Dutch party that shares UKIP’s hostility to immigrants and the European Union did far worse than expected in the European Parliament election. Exit polls released in the Netherlands indicated that the Party of Freedom, a bombastic insurgent group led by Geert Wilders, had crashed to fourth place behind parties that strongly support Europe.
In Greece, the leftist opposition party Syriza was in contention to place first in the parliament elections ahead of New Democracy, the party of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras.
Widely seen as a sideshow to national legislatures, the European Parliament has struggled for years, largely in vain, to galvanize public interest, despite a steady accumulation of power that have turned what began as an exercise in democratic window dressing into an increasingly important force in shaping policies across Europe.
When the parliament was first directly elected in 1979 to represent the public in a bloc then known as the European Economic Community that consisted of only nine nations, 62 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots. But turnout has fallen in every election since, slipping to 43 percent in 2009.
That is around the same as the turnout in midterm elections in the United States but is far below the level of voter involvement in Europe’s national elections. In the Netherlands, which along with Britain started voting on Thursday, only around 35 percent of voters bothered to cast ballots, half the turnout at the last Dutch national election in 2012.
In another attempt by the parliament to raise its profile, it seized on last week’s elections to put forward leading candidates from the main political blocs to run American-style presidential campaigns for the top job at the European Commission. National leaders like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have traditionally made that choice behind closed doors.
While the campaigns have gained some traction, most of the candidates, including Jean Claude Juncker, the center-right standard-bearer and the socialist camp’s Martin Schulz, are Brussels insiders who regard the calls by populist parties to curtail the European Union’s powers as a form of heresy.
The most recent debate between the candidates was carried live on prime-time television in a number of countries but it was far more difficult to watch in others including Britain, Denmark and France, reflecting a lack of interest from broadcasters.