FRONT PAGE
The political parties play an essential role in all the States endowed with a democratic Constitution and play an irreplaceable role in the opinion-forming and decision-making process: they express the hopes, ideas and interests of a part of citizens and organize their participation in democratic life. The ways in which this is realised vary from country to country, since the parties are born and develop as products of national political cultures and Constitutions. The justification of a party’s existence and its power of exerting an influence especially derive from its capacity to develop and represent a project aimed at identifying or solving the problems of the community, with the consent of a large part of the population. The importance of the individual parties also depends on the scale of popular support for their projects, which must be credible, i.e. realizable, if they are to obtain as wide a support as possible. The viability of a project depends not solely on the soundness and exactness of the proposed provisions, but also on the ability of the party to realise it. Much depends, too, on the credibility of those who represent the project and who give a face to the party, because the credibility of a politician is an important requisite for his capacity to convince citizens. Just as national States base their political systems on the Constitution, so the system of the European Union has a need for parties, because the success of the EU depends in a decisive way on citizens accepting and participating in it. The discussions on the form of the European Union and the contest to obtain power within its institutions must be public also at the European level. The protagonists of these public discussions are the parties that – like all the other social forces active in the Union at various levels – must in a phase of growing integration organise themselves to realize the will and the interests of the citizens of the Union whom they represent. The establishment of European parties is now at an advanced stage. First, there are the parties of the classical political families of the Christian Democrats, Socialists and Liberals, which had begun to organize themselves at the European level already in the late 1970s, on the occasion of the first direct elections of the European Parliament, and which have now become important protagonists, under the name of the “European People’s Party”, “European Socialist Party” and “European Party of Liberals, Democrats and Reformers”. Second, alongside these traditional parties, new parties were founded in the 1990s: the “European Greens” and the “European Free Alliance”. And third, after the entry into force of a regulation on the funding of European political parties in early 2004, a number of other parties were founded: the “European Democratic Party”, the “Party of the European Left”, the “Union for the Europe of Nations”, the “Alliance of Independent Democrats in Europe” and the “Europeans Democrats/Group for the Europe of Democracies”. All these parties are federative unions of national and/or regional parties which by reuniting with other similar parties of other countries, recognize their responsibility towards the European Community, which still remains incompletely developed. This demonstrates that not only the process of ‘europeanization’ but also that of ‘democrization’ concur to the advancement of the Union of States, which in this way increasingly becomes a union of citizens.
