Every five years, the same concern: will European citizens punish national governments instead of voting for the European Parliament? From the Brussels officials the speech is more than the same: we have to reduce the gap between European Union institutions and its citizens; we have to find a way to communicate the benefits of this Union; we have to intensify initiatives such as citizens forums, citizens weeks etc. In fact, Mr. Schulz tackle the question two and half years ago by replying to Nigel Farage, UKIP’s leader: we need to communicate about and for Europe, we need to fight the creeping growing of the Eurosceptic movement.
Opinion polls show that a vast majority of European citizens don’t understand how Europe’s structure works, neither the work done by the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Aren’t they right somehow? Let’s try to answer the Kissinger question: “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” Today, more than ever, it seems to be impossible to answer this question. We have the President of the European Commission, the permanent President of the European Council, the President of the European Council for 6 months (today we have the ironic Greek presidency), the President of the European Parliament (EP) and in the end a bunch of Vice-Presidents of the EP according to the political groups represented in the house!
Citizens don’t and can’t understand this complex structure.
Although, something has changed in the last three years. The countries that are under the supervision of the famous troika (European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fond) are daily swamped by direct information from Brussels that truly affects their daily lives. In Portugal, for instance, the national policy is today totally mixed with the European policy. Portuguese citizens got to know, for the worst reasons, politicians such as Herman Van Rompuy, Martin Schulz, Guy Verhofstadt, Nigel Farage, and so on. More and more, the decisions taken by the major EU countries are taken into account in the Portuguese media. Ms. Merkel seems to be Portugal’s prime minister supervisor. Moreover, for the first time we know in advance the name of each candidate for the Presidency of the European Commission. Mr. Schulz for the PSE, Mr. Juncker for the EPP and Mr. Verhofstadt for the ALDE. They will appear in each “national” campaign for the EP.
In this framework, this year’s EP elections should be a major concern for the Portuguese political parties. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. António José Seguro, leader of the socialist party - the party that run Portugal from 2005 until 2011 - chose to deport the major opposition voices within the party: Pedro Silva Pereira (former minister), Francisco Assis (he run the election against Seguro) and the other friends of José Socrates (former prime-minister) are the main candidates. They even dare to use the slogan “Change” for their campaign. Should the Portuguese citizens think that Seguro sent on holydays his annoying comrades? Even with the very unpopular and sometimes brutal measures taken by Mr. Passos Coelho (Portuguese prime-minister and member of the EPP), it seems that the socialists could lose this election!
With the Lisbon treaty the EP got much more competences. Nevertheless the MEP job is still seen as an award or a political compromise within a political party in order to shut some voices. The political parties have to wake up and understand that the only way to fight the eurosceptic movement is by bringing to the EP meritocracy. We can’t be surprise with the opinion polls. According to The Economist, “anti-populists of the left and right could take between 16% and 25% of the parliament’s seats, up from 12% today”. This time if the pro-Europeans get a bad score we can’t use the usual argument: it’s not our fault if citizens don’t really understand the Brussels bubble.
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