No prizes for predicting that apathy and ignorance will ensure yet another record low turnout in this week's European elections -- just at the moment when 350 million people across the continent are eligible to vote. And that's not only in the veteran EU member states but, alarmingly, also in several of the eastern newcomers.
Portuguese punters are keener on watching Zidane and Beckham play in the Euro 2004 championship than sending members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to Strasbourg and Brussels. Some eye-catching celebrities are standing, but Slovaks are unlikely to exceed the forecast 26 percent participation because their national hockey champ is a candidate. Ditto for Estonians drawn by the charms of supermodel Carmen Kass.
Robert Kilroy-Silk, star turn of the UK Independence party, will certainly have novelty value if he leads a dozen true Brits into the heart of euro-darkness -- and teams up with a motley crew of Danes, Dutchmen and rabidly anti-EU Poles to form a significant new sceptic block.
That might not be a bad thing. The European parliament is so deeply unloved and so remote that it welcomes almost any publicity, however embarrassing. That much was clear last summer when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi cracked his side-splitting Nazi camp guard gag about an appalled German deputy. The reverberations seemed to flatter an institution that is routinely dismissed as a talking shop on a gravy train, a travelling circus lubricated by dubious expenses claims. Even bad jokes, lost in translation, are better than no jokes.
Parliament, of course, is far more than a talking shop, and its already extensive powers of "co-decision" with the European commission and national governments will expand further under the new EU constitution. The expected center-right majority expects member states to take its views into account when choosing a replacement for Romano Prodi, the commission president, though they missed a trick for giving some democratic substance to the elections by failing to put forward their own candidates.
Lobbyists scrutinizing the small print of waste recycling rules or takeover directives recognize the importance of MEPs even if their constituents have never heard of them. But nothing can compensate for the absence of that elusive creature, a European demos -- with familiar characters, knockabout debate, and a path from the back benches of the legislature up the greasy pole of executive power. Only the Greens operate at European rather than national level. And the only parties fighting on specifically European issues are the the UK Independence party and other populists desperate to leave the union.
Wishful thinkers seeking comfort in the grim times since Sept. 11 argue that mass protests over Iraq suggest the emergence of a genuine pan-European public opinion. Opposition to the war is certainly a significant factor in the elections. The problem is that since parliament does not have -- and is never likely to have -- powers over foreign policy, defense and other core areas of national sovereignty, there is no way of translating it into change at continental level.
Nor does it have any direct control over the most fateful question facing the EU: whether a reforming Turkey has met the democratic and human rights criteria to be given a date to start membership talks. But a confident parliament should be able to influence the outcome as the commission and governments -- some showing signs of back-pedalling -- ponder their decision.
The UK rightly wants to say yes to a model Muslim democracy. That would be a resounding and optimistic European retort to self-fulfilling warnings of an inevitable "clash of civilizations." MEPs should be speaking out, loud and clear, on this. It's not something anyone can afford to be apathetic about.
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