Right question, wrong answer

The EU should not be looking to the past for ways to encourage citizens to engage with elections to the European Parliament.

The problem of public participation in decision-making in the EU is now engaging the energies of many pro-Europeans who judge, rightly, that elections to the European Parliament have not so far succeeded in creating a democratic connection between the public and Europe’s institutions. There is a welter of proposals, which is positive; some are muddled and wrong-headed, which is not.

Denis MacShane, a Europe minister in the UK’s former Labour government, criticises two very different proposals made by Andrew Duff and myself (“Parliament’s struggle for acceptance”, 20-27 July). Mr Duff can speak for himself, and usually does.

My proposal was simple: reform the European political parties by making them democratically accountable to individual members, by getting them to campaign actively in European election campaigns on the basis of different visions for the future of Europe, and by providing a personality focus to the election campaign through the parties nominating candidates for the presidency of the European Commission, selected after primaries in the member states.

MacShane judges these proposals to be “top-down”; they would “cut some links with the EU’s member states”. This is his first error: giving party members the right to elect delegates to party congresses, to decide party programmes and to nominate the party candidate for the presidency of the Commission is the opposite of “top-down”. It would, at a stroke, involve the many members of national parties in the member states with European issues.

MacShane makes a second mistake in believing this will not happen. In fact, all the main European parties are now involving members more in European decision-making. And at least the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Party of European Socialists (PES) will field party candidates for the Commission presidency in 2014, will focus campaigns around them, and will involve party members in the selection.

The changes I advocate, unlike the proposals made by MacShane, require no treaty change, nor even any amendment to the regulation on European political parties. They are the straightforward application of the treaties, which envisaged European political parties playing a major role in European integration and which foresee the Commission president being proposed “taking into account the elections to the European Parliament”.

MacShane’s different “approaches”, involving a greater formal role for national parliamentarians in the work of the EU, would each require a treaty amendment. In other words, they will not happen – or, at least, not within any reasonable timeframe.

Involving members of national parliaments in European questions would be a good thing. The Danish, Finnish and Swedish experience, with a specialised parliamentary committee meeting regularly to give a mandate to national ministers attending Council meetings, works well. If after nearly 40 years of UK membership of the EU, Westminster has still not devised an effective system of oversight for the actions of the UK government in the Council, then it is unlikely that further institutional tinkering would create serious engagement in EU affairs.

As to the idea of staged elections to the European Parliament so that some MEPs would be elected at or nearer the date for national elections, this would cut the link between the Parliamentary mandate and the Commission’s term of office, which is essential to ensure democratic accountability in the system. And if it is difficult to get voters to turn out for Parliament elections once every five years, it is not immediately apparent that having partial elections every two or three years would generate widespread enthusiasm.

Finally, MacShane falls back on that old favourite (much beloved by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president): a Congress of national parliamentarians. The last thing Europe needs now is new political institutions. Some of us can remember the pre-1979 Parliament when it was made up of national parliamentarians: a part-time parliament, doing a part-time job – unthreatening doubtless for EU diplomats and civil servants, but an inadequate answer to the overriding need to involve citizens in EU decisions.

The European Parliament already affords an important democratic element in EU decision-making. It shapes EU laws, sets and controls the budget, and holds the Commission to public account. To have another parliamentary chamber with a separate but indirect legitimacy doing some of the same things would not enhance democratic controls; it would simply muddy the waters.

The problem with the current system is not that the role of the Parliament is limited or that it may take the ‘wrong’ decisions (which parliament does not?). The weakness lies in the poor turnout in the elections to the Parliament, and the absence of effective Europe-wide campaigns on Europe-wide issues. In all our democratic systems, parties play a key role; they offer a distinct prospectus to voters, they campaign on issues, they fight elections. To date, this has not happened in the EU. Until the current groupings become real political parties, the lack of competition between parties will continue to stunt democratic vitality in the Union.

MacShane’s main concern is to involve the EU’s 9,000 plus members of national parliaments in Europe’s decision-making. Some of us view the real challenge as stimulating the participation of Europe’s 500 million citizens in the big decisions about Europe’s future. Looking to the 1970s for answers to today’s challenges does not take us any further forward.

Julian Priestley

Waterloo