OPINION: The lack of pan-European media explains some of the dubious coverage of the parliamentary elections
WHEN LABOUR’S Alan Kelly, a month short of his 34th birthday, won the European seat in Ireland South, the temptation to draft a headline saying “Centre Left triples seats in European Parliament” was hard to resist.
It was a temptation with the dual merits of being a) locally factual and b) thus as accurate as other zany extrapolations about the European elections.
We actually had a very European election, but you need to dig a bit to see that. There was a touch of the curate’s egg about it – good in parts with something for everyone.
The European Union is unique. Nothing comparable exists, or has ever existed. It is not, nor should it become, something resembling the empires of old. It is much more than a free trade zone, or an international organisation, but something considerably less than a state. We have no everyday word to describe the EU and find ourselves obliged to employ the academic term “polity”.
There are those who argue for the EU to become a United States of Europe, and those at the other end of the spectrum such as Václav Klaus, the Czech president. He views the EU as a reincarnation of the old Soviet Union. Mind you, Václav also sees global climate change as a “false myth”.
Most of us are, however, condemned to inhabit the real world, where the EU hovers as a useful framework somewhere in between those two extremes.
The EU is both very important and rather simple. It can, with just a little obfuscation, be presented as being either irrelevant or menacing (depending on one’s prejudices) and inevitably as being something extremely complex beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals.
The EU is a sovereign body where 27 nation states, with a collective population of 500 million, have voluntarily pooled certain responsibilities. Those 27 states have, over decades, agreed through treaties that certain policy areas such as trade, environment, consumer affairs, and agriculture are best tackled at the European level.
The same governments can unanimously also agree to tackle additional areas should they so wish. This all means that the EU plays little or no role across a huge swathe of important areas such as education, health or social welfare.
So just how much of our legislation is decided within the EU framework? Eurosceptics frequently trot out the figure of two-thirds, with the unctuous British Tory MEP Dan Hannan suggesting 75 per cent. The independent House of Commons library places the formal figure at 9 per cent. If you include laws and regulations reflecting general agreements at the European level, but not flowing from European legislation per se, the total probably comes out at something around 20 per cent.
The national governments appoint the European executive, the Commission, to manage the operation. Those same governments also set the EU budget, the legal ceiling for which is now set at 1.24 per cent of the EU’s Gross National Income (GNI). In practice the EU budget is kept under 1 per cent of European GNI.
The average national public expenditure level across the 27 nation states is around 45 per cent of GNI. So average national public expenditure is 45 times greater than EU spending – which puts the whole thing in a rather clear perspective.
An even more unique body exists inside this EU polity, the European Parliament, elected by almost 400 million voters. While it shares certain characteristics with other continental assemblies such as the US House of Representatives or the Indian Lok Sabha, it remains the world’s only elected transnational parliament.
I watched the election coverage on France’s prime public television channel, France2. It began just before the French polls closed at 8.00pm, but I had to wait almost two hours for any coverage of results from the rest of the EU. If you discount a handful of small specialised operations, there is no European media, which goes some way towards explaining the extraordinary hodgepodge of dubious coverage of the latest European elections.
These include gems such as a magnificent breakthrough by the far right, the collapse of voter turnout across the EU, and a ringing endorsement of Europe’s centre-right governments.
While the far rights did do well, that story got its legs from the early Dutch exit poll reporting that Geert Wilder’s PVV had won four of his country’s 25 seats. The fact that avowedly pro-EU parties like the libertarian D66 had gone from one to three seats, or the Left Greens from two to three, was somehow overlooked.
The BNP won two seats in England despite the decline in its vote – because 10 per cent of Labour voters stayed at home.
The 43 per cent turnout may actually represent a baseline for these awkward elections, down just over 2 per cent on 2004. If you discount this 2 per cent average (Irish turnout was down nearly 1 per cent), turnout changed in 15 countries. Estonia’s early and remote e-voting systems helped boost its turnout by over 16 per cent. Twenty-two per cent fewer neighbouring Lithuanians went to the polls, but then they had already voted on May 17th to elect their former European commissioner Dalia Grybauskaite as president. Eleven per cent more Danes and 10 per cent fewer Greeks voted, making the composite picture something less than crystal clear.
Those who fought campaigns on European issues did rather well – at both ends of the spectrum. Britain’s UKIP won over 16 per cent, but then so did Daniel Cohen-Bendit’s Europe Ecologie list in France.
Most of Europe’s centre-left parties had a rough election. Apart from their various domestic travails, they face the challenge that the continent’s centre-right governments have stolen many of their clothes.
But not in Ireland, and certainly not in Tipperary. I wonder did Alan Kelly dream of this pivotal role when he was a student in Boston 10 years ago?