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Dreary EU vote should be a wake-up call for region's leaders

The stunning slap delivered to Europe's ruling elite in weekend EU elections is a sobering wake-up call for the newly-enlarged bloc, just as it faces crunch decisions on its future, according to analysts.

Specifically, the results of the European Parliament elections, including a surge in anti-EU forces, will ring alarm bells for countries planning to hold referendums on a first-ever constitution which EU leaders hope to finally agree on later this week.

"This does now place a lot of pressure on a number of leaders," said Alasdair Murray of the Center for European Reform, noting that Britain and Poland in particular faced huge tasks to sell the constitution to their people.

"Certainly if they hadn't woken up [before], then they really need to now," he added.

The polls for the European Parliament, the EU's only directly-elected body, saw defeats for ruling parties across the union, while handing huge gains to euroskeptics.

They were also marked by record low turnout, in particular in the 10 mostly ex-communist EU member states which joined the 25-nation bloc on May 1.

Some commentators said the ballot results underlined a wider crisis in European integration, whose half-century progress towards "ever-greater union" has been seriously challenged of late, including by last year's Iraq crisis.

Skeptics argued that the Iraq war, which opened up a chasm-like fault line down the middle of Europe between pro- and anti-war camps, demonstrated that the EU was nearing the breaking point as it battled to keep its 25 states on the same line.

"The European project is stalling and will require great persuasive efforts in order to take hold," said an editorialist for the right-wing Spanish daily El Mundo.

But a key specific problem is that the vote snub -- described by European Parliament President Pat Cox as the worst in the EU assembly's history -- comes as the EU is struggling to write a new rule book to cope with its ballooning size.

Today EU leaders will gather in Brussels hoping finally to hammer out a constitution for the bloc, which they say is essential to avoid decision-making gridlock within its institutions.

That will be quite a task. They have been talking about it for over two years and a first attempt at striking a deal last December ended in a fiasco.

But even if EU leaders reach an agreement, the new historic text can only come into force once ratified by all 25 member states -- including a handful expected to hold referendums.

Concern among pro-EU forces centers in particular on Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair staged a dramatic U-turn in April and agreed that his countrymen should have "the final say" over the constitution.

Many said at the time that he was taking a huge gamble, given Britain's notoriously euroskeptic population. Commentators said this week that the EU polls, which saw the UK Independence Party surge to almost 17 percent of the vote, had revealed an even deeper anti-EU hostility than had been suspected.

EU Parliament head Cox was blunt about the significance of the weekend poll result.

"This is especially important as a wake-up call for those leaders in those states who propose to hold referendums on the constitutional treaty," said Cox immediately after the scale of the euroskeptic vote became apparent.

"The message is now clear. A minority offer a particular view and challenge the majority to come good on their convictions and to bring their convictions to a wider public," Cox said.

Murray agreed that the polls only underlined the scale of the task facing Blair and other leaders seeking to persuade euroskeptic populations to back them at the ballot box.

"Now they know its going be very tough," he said. "It's a major uphill struggle."
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