Elected, yet strangely unaccountable

IT IS hard not to like Strasbourg. The capital of Alsace, 
nestled on the French bank of the Rhine, boasts a delightful 
old town and a fine (and engagingly lopsided) cathedral......

The symbolism for Europe of a city that has repeatedly changed hands between France and Germany is powerful. And the food is outstanding.

It is also hard not to be impressed by the European Parliament, whose sprawling buildings lie close to the river. Ahead of the European elections, to be held between May 22nd and 25th, its vast roofless atrium is adorned with a slogan in several languages—“Use your power: choose who will govern Europe” (subtly altered in the English version to read “choose who is in charge of Europe”).

With over 380m voters eligible to “use their power”, the European election is the biggest in the world after India’s. And because it is, in essence, 28 national elections, it has more individual parties than any other, though the 751 MEPs sit in multinational groups. This time around, voters are likely to discombobulate the pro-EU mainstream in Strasbourg and Brussels, the union’s legislative capital. That is because voters look set to choose more assorted extremists, anti-Europeans and oddballs than ever: they will take well over a quarter of the seats.

The voters are disillusioned partly because of the bill. At some €1.75 billion ($2.5 billion) a year, the European Parliament costs more than the British, French and German national parliaments put together. To be fair, a quarter of that spending is down to working in 24 languages. And as much as €180m a year is the extra cost of being forced by the EU treaties to work in three places: Brussels, where most committee meetings are held; Strasbourg, the official seat, which stages a four-day plenary session once a month; and Luxembourg, where most support staff are based. Three-quarters of MEPs want Brussels as a permanent home, but that would need a treaty change agreed on by all national governments, and France will say no.

The parliament’s cost and travelling circus provoke much ribald comment, some justified. The system of MEPs’ expenses, for example, is scandalous: no receipts need be produced, there is little auditing and employment of family members is common. The parliament ostentatiously refused to co-operate with a recent inquiry by Transparency International, a non-governmental body, into corruption in EU institutions. And moving around does not only cost money: Edward McMillan-Scott, an MEP leading the fight for a single seat, says it puts an extra 19,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. He notes that the buildings in Strasbourg are empty for 317 days of the year.

Yet the greater objections to the parliament are over its failure to meet its real purpose, which is to give the EU democratic legitimacy. Debate over the “democratic deficit” is as old as the European project. A first answer was to set up a European assembly, consisting of nominated national MPs. But in 1979 this was replaced by a directly elected parliament.

Since then, the desire for more democratic accountability has meant that every successive treaty has increased the European Parliament’s powers. Today it is in almost all respects a co-equal legislator with the national governments that meet in the Council of Ministers. As much as 90% of what the EU does requires the parliament’s assent. And since the EU is involved in as much as half of all legislation in Europe, that makes the European Parliament more powerful than most national legislatures.

In need of assembly

Many of its committees do admirable work, often better than their national equivalents. In the past few years they have honed lots of financial, economic and environmental regulations, helped to resuscitate troubled directives on services and chemicals, and (more annoyingly) obstructed data-protection and anti-counterfeiting directives. Martin Schulz, the parliament’s president, takes great pride in this. It is the job of a parliament, he says, to be annoying. But he also acknowledges a huge problem: that voters do not know what the parliament does, assuming that it is an expensive and powerless talking-shop.

It is certainly true that the parliament has more powers than most voters realise. The thousands of lobbyists crawling the corridors in Strasbourg are clear evidence of this. But that does not satisfy the parliament’s critics, who range far beyond atavistic anti-Europeans.

Heather Grabbe of the Brussels-based Open Society Foundations criticises Strasbourg for acting less like a proper parliament than like a group of lobbyists who spend money and pass laws but do not connect with voters. Charles Grant, of the London-based Centre for European Reform, notes that “the parliament has serious shortcomings as an institution…much of the time its priority appears to be more power for itself.” And Alex Stubb, Finland’s trade minister and a former MEP, says “national MPs tend to have responsibility without power. MEPs tend to have power without responsibility.”

Turn off not turnout

Why all this dissatisfaction, given the parliament’s growing powers and the increasing professionalism and quality of MEPs? The first answer is that voters are not impressed. Turnout at European elections has fallen steadily and consistently since 1979 as mistrust of the parliament has risen (see chart 1). In every country more voters turn out in national elections. Admittedly, turnout has fallen nationally over time, and the decline in mid-term congressional elections in America parallels the decline for the European Parliament. But the difference is that nobody challenges the legitimacy of national legislatures. If, as many expect, turnout falls below the 43% level of 2009, that will further erode the parliament’s credibility.

Unlike the case with national parliaments, voters seldom know who their MEP is. In part this is because in many countries constituencies are vast and parties run a “closed list” system in which their leaders, not voters, choose who gets seats. Elections to the parliament also rarely change anything: whereas a national election can kick out an unpopular government, the European Parliament barely changes course regardless of whether the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) or the centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) is the largest group. The election does not even determine the parliament’s president: by common accord, this job is split, one term apiece, between the leaders of these two blocks, much to the irritation of the liberal ALDE group in the centre.

The parliament has, inevitably, come up with its own proposal for improvement: to hand it even more power by giving it the decisive say in choosing the next president of the European Commission, the EU’s civil service. Under a clause smuggled into the Lisbon treaty of 2009, heads of state and government meeting as the European Council are meant to nominate a candidate “taking account of the elections to the European Parliament”; the parliament then “elects” the president by an absolute majority of its members.

The parliament’s political groups have used this clause to justify their call for the job to go to one of their list of so-called Spitzenkandidaten (literally “top candidates”). The EPP candidate is Jean-Claude Juncker, a former prime minister of Luxembourg; the S&D pick is Mr Schulz; the ALDE group has nominated its leader, Guy Verhofstadt, a former prime minister of Belgium. Along with nominees of other, smaller groups, these candidates have been engaging in televised debates around Europe. Mr Verhofstadt notes that the groups have said the parliament will not approve any other candidate that the European Council may propose; he says that, if their choice fails, and if the parliament is not given greater budgetary powers, “that will be the end of democracy in Europe.”

The idea of Spitzenkandidaten was to galvanise voters to take more notice, on the basis that this time their ballots might lead to the important choice of the next commission president. Yet, predictably, this is not happening. Interest in the debates has been low, even in the main candidates’ home countries. That is partly because the three hardly disagree with each other. It is also because few people believe the job will actually go to one of them.

There are strong institutional reasons to object to Spitzenkandidaten. The idea has stopped stronger candidates, including sitting heads of government, from putting their names forward. To make the commission explicitly political would be a muddle as it has quasi-judicial functions such as policing the single market, applying competition rules and taking erring governments to the European Court of Justice. And letting the parliament pick the president will make the commission, which already leans too far towards Strasbourg, even more of a creature of the parliament. It should stand midway between the parliament and national governments. For all these reasons heads of government seem likely to nominate a different candidate, and then dare the parliament to reject their choice. Months may then pass in a stand-off—further discrediting the EU in general and the parliament in particular.

To add to the drama will be the presence in the parliament of so many populist parties, most of them anti-European. These range from far-left, like Syriza in Greece and the United Left in Spain, to far-right, such as Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and Golden Dawn in Greece. Britain has the UK Independence Party, Italy has Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement and the Northern League. Most central and eastern European countries have populist parties, some nastily racist. The latest polls suggest that the number of MEPs who could be classified as anti-European may rise after the election from about 140 now to more than 200, well over a quarter of the total (see chart 2).

At the extremes

Given that populists and extremists are part of national politics, it is only natural that they should be represented in Strasbourg. Indeed, the EU institutions, which otherwise conform to a bland and mushy pro-Europeanism, may be better for a negative and anti-European strand of opinion. On the other hand, these MEPs will discredit the parliament because they disagree with each other as much as with the mainstream, they fail to turn up to vote and they disproportionately fiddle their expenses. They also tend to be illiberal and anti-free market. Simon Hix, of the London School of Economics, reckons the next parliament will have a majority against a free-trade deal with America.

The presence of so many populists is likely to drive the main centre-left, centre-right and liberal groups into joining forces to pass legislation, in a sort of grand coalition. Already too many laws, even high-profile ones, are stitched up by committee rapporteurs and chairmen in a closed-door “trilogue” with representatives of the commission and the council, to be adopted in up-or-down votes in the plenary. A grand coalition is likely to do more of this. And that could feed voters’ disillusion with Europe even further.

The voters are not alone. Other European institutions and many national governments have also grown increasingly critical of the European Parliament. The French and British governments, habitually the keenest on national sovereignty, have never been enthusiasts. The German government has usually been an eager supporter, not least because Germany has the most MEPs and they generally run the place. Yet even in Berlin the parliament is now widely derided. This habit has grown as Germany’s power in the EU has increased. The German Bundestag has made clear that it sees itself as a more legitimate body than the Strasbourg parliament. And the German constitutional court has ruled that it does not consider the European Parliament to be a credible source of democratic legitimacy for the EU, or even a proper parliament at all.

Crisis management

Perhaps surprisingly, the euro crisis has only made the parliament’s position more precarious, despite the deeper integration it has brought about. The powers of the centre have grown through the creation of a bail-out fund and a banking union in which big banks are supervised by the European Central Bank, and by the ECB taking on the role of lender of last resort to governments.

The provisions of the “economic semester”, an attempt to strengthen and co-ordinate economic policy at the EU level, as well as the fiscal compact and their associated regulations have also given Brussels a more intrusive role. National governments can now be censured and fined by the commission for missing fiscal targets; they have to submit draft budgets to Brussels even before laying them before their own legislatures. There is also talk in Berlin and Brussels of binding contracts forcing governments to make reforms at home.

Europhiles have latched onto these changes to seek an even greater role for the parliament. After all, its economic committee did much to shape the regulations for the economic semester, as well as for banking union. So why not look to the parliament for greater democratic oversight of the new more intrusive monitoring and enforcement system?

The simple answer is that in the eyes of most voters the parliament lacks legitimacy. But institutional objections matter, too. The parliament is an EU-wide body, and the euro embraces only 18 of the 28 member states. Suggestions of creating an inner parliament of just the 18 would deepen an already worrying divide of the EU into “ins” and “outs”. More important, the parliament has no say in the money to be used in euro-zone bail-outs. Because the EU budget is too small, national taxpayers are on the hook either through direct contributions to the bail-out fund or via their share of the ECB.

Democratic input to euro bail-out decisions, and to banking union, thus has to be national, not European. National parliaments certainly understand this: the Bundestag, supported by the constitutional court, has assumed the right to vote on every use of the bail-out fund, and the Finnish Eduskunta has even demanded collateral for Finland from any borrowers. Not everyone is happy with this: Hannes Swoboda, an Austrian Social Democrat who leads the S&D group in Strasbourg, says that, if all countries behaved like the Bundestag and the constitutional court, it “would be the end of Europe”.

The experience of the euro crisis has thrown fresh light on one root cause of the European project’s democratic failings: that it gives too small a role to national parliaments, still the bedrock of Europe’s democracy. Parliaments exert influence through the Council of Ministers, because they determine the make-up of national governments. They also scrutinise how ministers in those governments vote in Brussels, a thing that some parliaments do more effectively than others. Many parliaments could learn from Denmark’s Folketing and other Scandinavians how best to examine EU legislation.

Before 1979 national parliaments also had direct involvement through the nomination of MPs to serve in the parliamentary assembly in Strasbourg. But they lost this with direct elections. It was only in the Lisbon treaty that national parliaments were again given a specific role. A co-ordinating body of European scrutiny committees called COSAC was recognised and given an office in Brussels. The treaty also introduced a system of yellow and orange cards, under which national parliaments can object to EU legislative proposals on the ground that they infringe the principle of “subsidiarity”, which holds that action should be taken at European level only if it cannot be better done at national level.

Playing card games

It is too early to judge the success of this system, which is likely to develop more as national MPs become better informed and learn to collaborate with their colleagues abroad. For most proposals a yellow card, which forces the commission to reconsider its plan, requires objections from a third of national parliaments. So far two such cards have been played: one against common EU rules on the right to strike, which was withdrawn; and one against the establishment of a European public prosecutor, where the commission chose to press ahead.

This system, could be beefed up. A yellow card can be turned orange (meaning a proposal is defeated) if two-thirds of national parliaments object. But some countries, including Britain, want a yellow card to be enough to get the commission to drop a proposal. The Dutch Tweede Kamer and the British House of Lords have also called for a green card that would let national parliaments propose laws or review existing ones. David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, has made giving a bigger say to national parliaments a part of his planned renegotiation of British membership.

Some in Strasbourg welcome the idea of national parliaments having a larger role. But most agree with Danuta Hubner, a Polish former commissioner who is now an MEP, that “the major enemy of the European Parliament is national parliaments.” They know that several governments regret ever having set up an elected parliament and would like to revert to a nominated assembly. As public opinion across Europe turns against a federal union, explicitly supranational institutions might seem vulnerable. Timothy Garton Ash at St Antony’s College, Oxford, suggests that “if we were starting from scratch, we would not invent a directly elected parliament.” Some commentators note that until 1913 the American Senate, which saw itself as the world’s greatest deliberative body, consisted of state nominees.
Indeed, the appeal of the idea of scrapping the directly elected parliament to go back to a nominated body is surprisingly strong in national capitals. It is unlikely to happen, if only because it would require a treaty change that would have to be ratified by the European Parliament itself. But that it is talked of at all is one more sign that EU’s efforts to acquire greater democratic legitimacy are in trouble.

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