COUNTRY PROFILE/GERMANY:When Germans refer to 2009 as their Superwahljahr or "Super Election Year", few have the European elections in mind.
With seven local, four state elections and September’s general election, it’s no surprise that political parties here are running their European parliament campaigns in energy-save mode.
The party posters are everywhere but the slogans are tired, and each party is fighting its own private campaign.
A vague “Us in Europe” is the best that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) can come up with.
Polls show the party at 37 per cent, down eight points from their 2004 result, a potentially disastrous blow for party morale and discipline just four months before the general election.
Almost ten points behind them are the Social Democrats (SPD) who, distract from a woolly slogan promising a “more social Europe”, have launched a negative poster campaign slagging off all the other parties.
Considering that the European Parliament has almost no competencies in social areas, the “social” message seems to have missed its target.
When SPD leader Franz Müntefering addressed a “Europe Festival” in Frankfurt, just 150 people showed up.
While the Greens and the Left Party fight over campaign issues such as a European minimum wage, perhaps the most effective poster campaign is the simplest: “For Germany in Europe” from the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) featuring their election “poster girl” and popular MEP Dr Silvana Koch-Mehrin.
The lacklustre campaign matches the lack of public interest: according to a poll for ARD television just 38 per cent of voters say they will show up on June 7th.
It’s not that Germans are less EU-friendly than in the past, but their approval, traditionally a vague and passive kind, is increasingly tinged with disappointment about a perceived lack of meaningful participation at EU level.
“People sense that there is neither a meaningful Europe-wide political contest nor is the parliament a real parliament. Why vote then?” asks Jan Techau, director of the Alfred von Oppenheim Centre for European Policy Studies in Berlin.
“Voters realise that the European Parliament, despite power gains over the years and doing many good things for the people of Europe, is essentially a second-rate legislative body.”
Today three-quarters of Germans agree with the argument that the EU “helps represent our interests in other regions of the world”.
On the other hand, 60 per cent of Germans admit that they have no overview of how the EU machinery in Brussels works.
Libertas is not participating in Germany’s European election campaign even though party founder Declan Ganley set up a local branch here in March, citing “enormous potential”.
The party failed to register candidates in time and has created a last-minute alliance with a new Christian ecological party as its local partner – one of 18 new parties on the oversized ballot paper.
There is a shadow of uncertainty hanging over the campaign thanks to the constitutional court judges in Karlsruhe, who are still deliberating on legal challenges to the Lisbon Treaty.
Some politicians have expressed relief that the verdict is not expected until after the EU election, keeping the complicated treaty text out of the campaign.
But others are less happy: an unnamed senior CDU member complained in Die Welt newspaper that it was “impossible” for politicians to run an effective election campaign with the Karlsruhe “sword of Damocles” hanging over their heads.
“How can we be expected to . . . say to voters: we don’t know whether (the treaty) conforms to the constitution, but trust us anyway?”