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The results of Europe’s biggest ever election brought few surprises. The balance of power in the European Parliament will tip slightly to the right, with the socialists as the biggest losers and various “euro-sceptics”, “euro-realists” and other fringe parties as the biggest winners. With no significant change in the composition of the assembly, attention has focused instead on the other historic feature of this exercise in democracy: the record number of voters who chose not to vote. At the press conference to launch the Comece statement on the elections in early May, a Polish journalist asked me why the Bishops had not declared more explicitly their opposition to demagoguery and populism? The vision reflected in the document, he reasoned, could be fulfilled only in an open, democratic system. His question took me aback, not because he was wrong, but because I like so many western Europeans have come to take for granted that I live in an open, democratic society. In some parts of Europe, people still remember that freedom is a fragile and precious gift. It was all the more perturbing and perplexing, then, that the lowest levels of participation in these elections were to be found in the new member states of Central and Eastern Europe. In the old members, there were even some pleasant surprises: the number of people who voted in the UK and the Netherlands jumped from 24% and 30% respectively at the last elections in 1999 to both 39% this year. Overall, though, the participation rate dropped four points to 45%. It may still be higher than the average in American congressional elections, but it is hardly a ringing mandate for the new Parliament that will start work in Brussels and Strasbourg in a few weeks’ time. Who is to blame for this? Voters themselves clearly bear some of the responsibility. Yet if they find none of the candidates inspiring, they can hardly be castigated for not electing them. Indeed, given the derogatory way in which the European Parliament is portrayed in the media, not to mention by other politicians, and the lack of information available to citizens about how the EU works, it seems remarkable that 155 million Europeans actually made the effort to go out and vote. Those who abstained may have done so out of lack of interest, but perhaps also as a protest against a political establishment that provided them with little sense of why they should do so. It is worth noting that a rising number of those who do bother to vote, do so for parties with a clear European agenda, albeit an anti-integrationist one. Unfortunately, the consequence of low turnout is that small and extremist groups are able to wield a disproportionately large influence over the political system. This is where the spectre of populism and demagoguery rises. If voters fail to take the election and the institution seriously by voting for candidates who represent their values and interests, those seats will not be left empty but be filled by people who do not take their electoral responsibility seriously. Let us hope that this does not happen in the new European Parliament. But on the same day as most Europeans were voting, Serbians were trying to vote after successive failures to achieve sufficient turnout for a new president. One of the candidates who made it to the run-off belongs to a party whose leader is awaiting trial for war crimes with Slobodan Milosevic. This should be a salutary reminder to Europe’s voters and politicians alike, some of whom seem already to have forgotten how fragile and precious our democratic freedom is.
