An urgent synthesis” “” “

Of the so-called “institutional triangle” of the European Union (Parliament, Commission and Council), the Parliament is traditionally the weakest. This impression is confirmed by the results of the first election of the new Parliament representative of the enlarged Europe of 25 member states (and comprising a total of 732 MEPs). There are two factors that justify this supposition: the high rate of abstention and the growing political fragmentation. As for the first factor, the elections registered the lowest percentage of voter turnout in the 25-year-old history of the European Parliament: an overall average of 45,5%, and as low as 26.7% in the ten new accession countries, though it is fair to say that these had only recently held referendums to confirm membership. Apart from Belgium and Luxembourg, where the vote is compulsory, the best result achieved among the “old” members was Italy with 73.1% (bucking the trend of recent electoral history) and among the “new” members Malta, with 83,2%. But it would be out of place to indulge in over-moralistic considerations: the electorate must be motivated in its participation; it must feel itself goaded by the defence and pursuit of legitimate interests; it must feel involved in its very identity. It’s here that the second consideration comes into play. If it is true that the balance of power between the major “political families” – people’s party, socialists, liberal-democrats, left – was substantially confirmed, it is also true that all the major groups have lost some of their shine (and some of their numbers, in relative terms). And the reason for this is because, when it boils down to it, no genuine European “political system”, and hence no framework of political dialectic and leadership, was developed. In the absence of political proposals of a continental dimension, made in the measure of the European Union, the elections were therefore reduced, as was largely predictable, to a series of local competitions, whose results, often insignificant due to the low voter turnout, responded especially to “domestic” agendas, often the expression of widespread disillusion. Paradoxically the most significant result, from a politico-institutional point of view, is how far the Parliament will be able to “count” in response to the next deadlines (constitutional treaty and renewal of the Commission). It goes without saying, however, that the problem of the articulation of a European political debate also concerns (at least) the other two components of the Union’s “institutional triangle”, the Commission (i.e. “eurocracy” as institution) and the Council (i.e. the states and their leaders). If it true that the political forces are far from being able to claim a European dimension, it is equally true that no personalities can yet be glimpsed on the horizon that are able fully to express – as they did throughout the fifty-year history of European construction – at once the national and the European interest. Yet it is precisely this synthesis between national and European interests that is the essential motor for the institutional – and ideal – development of Europe also in the 21st century. As routine deprecations continue to be made about the low voter turnout, there is more than ever need for this synthesis today. But it does not arise from nothing. It cannot dispense with a precise reference to values, ideals, and exemplary witnesses. The Union will not be a superstate: it must be an institutional space unprecedented in its articulation, but effective in its results of civil, human and democratic development. In this sense the great values of democracy – and more widely of European civilization in its undeniable Christian origin and inspiration, that still awaits to be endorsed by the constitutional treaty, not least in response to the challenges of the international situation – cannot be presupposed or taken for granted. They cannot simply defer to as lame and watered-down a connotation as possible, a lowest common denominator of how Europe should be governed. Effective and significant measures are needed, starting with the imminent organization of the parliamentary groups and the election of the EP President. sir