Reaction: The president of the European Commission responded yesterday to the low turnout for elections to the European Parliament by calling for more issues to be decided at a European level.
Mr Romano Prodi said the issues of immediate concern to European citizens should be decided at a European level. If that were not the case, then citizens would not participate in the European elections, he suggested.
Mr Prodi appears to have rejected the idea, much discussed during the convention on a new European constitution, of constraining the subjects that are decided by the EU.
He said: "The main political point is that if Europe does not become the arena where decisions that have a direct impact on the life of Europeans are taken, one can hardly expect to involve people convincingly."
And he implied that the negotiations on the European constitution should cede more power to the centre.
"In the work before us in the European Council at the end of the week, I expect the heads of state and government to take note of this fact and to draw the institutional consequences, which need to be addressed urgently."
Mr Prodi chided the governments of the countries of central and eastern Europe for the low turnout in their elections.
"These elections reveal a serious problem of participation in a large number of member countries that joined the Union last May. With two clear exceptions [Cyprus and Malta\], plus two other cases of countries where the situation can be regarded as acceptable [Latvia and Lithuania\], the rate of participation in the new member-states is highly unsatisfactory," the president said.
He called on the governments of these countries to put resources, energy and enthusiasm into putting Europe back at the centre of political debate. This, he said, should be a top political priority over the next five years.
A mere 45.5 per cent of nearly 350 million eligible voters bothered to cast ballots, the lowest turnout since direct elections for the Strasbourg-based assembly began in 1979. The turnout in the EU-15 was around 49 per cent, slightly down on the 49.8 per cent in 1999.
Putting the best possible gloss on the turnout, Mr Prodi said: "Participation by citizens in the countries that were members of the Union at May 1st is stable, with encouraging signs in some countries [the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Finland and Italy\] where there has been a significant increase in the number of voters."
Mr Prodi said that parties hostile to European integration had won only 10 per cent of seats in the Parliament, meaning that "90 per cent of the political forces represented in Parliament are distinguished by their support for European integration".
He vowed that the Commission would "continue publicly to oppose the distorted views that often lie behind populist, Eurosceptic and anti-European campaigns".