Citizen empowerment

Democracy is about the "rule of the people". These days, electorates are being asked, ever more often, to express their judgement through the ballot paper. The outcomes may please us or not, nevertheless each time the people's message will have been sent. It is not a perfect system but then, nothing is. The challenge for the political elite is to interpret the message without prejudice; without being too defensive or subjective. No one should expect politicians to publicly lay bare their full assessment of the message. What people have come to expect is that their intelligence is respected and the message is given due consideration.

The recent elections for the European Parliament are still fresh in our minds. The EP, the only EU institution elected by the citizens, is meant to be its most powerful legislative body. This year, 375 million voters had the right to vote for 10,000 candidates competing for 736 seats (once the Lisbon Treaty is ratified this will increase to 751 seats). However much skewed by national and other considerations, this was a vote for Europe. Any assessment has to start there.

The EU itself emerges as the biggest loser. Despite all the EU's advertising campaigns, for the sixth consecutive time, fewer people bothered to vote. The absolute majority (57 per cent) stayed away. Why? Is it due to nonchalance, a protest vote, an expression of impotence? Is the EU vision still a technocratic one? How come little reference was made to such key EU issues as globalisation, global warming, budgets and security throughout the electoral campaign? It is too easy for the EU to blame national parties and accuse them of hijacking the elections, turning them into a "mid-term" vote for national governments.

Time magazine stated that "It is perhaps an inevitable consequence of European parliamentary elections that voters in country after country across the continent so often choose to thump national politicians over distinctly domestic issues" (June 8).

Why should this be inevitable? European Commission vice president Margot Wallstrom lamented that national governments continue to blame the EU for all their hard decisions and failures. This is nothing new. What has the EU been doing about it? What is being done to connect the EU and its citizens? Simply resuscitating the ill-fated Lisbon Treaty will not address this serious democratic issue.

Equally worrying is the primary message sent by those citizens that did vote. At a time when the world economy is in a muddle (and no one knows how and when we will get out of it), when capitalism is on its knees and the spectre of unemployment haunts millions of Europeans, the key message sent by voters is their big fear of "outsiders"; be they illegal immigrants (Austria), Muslims (the Netherlands), gipsies (Hungary) or southerners (North Italy). Of course, there is a close link between this fear and economic uncertainty. These "outsiders" have a face; unlike the Chinese and Indian workers, their presence is physical. After long years of being told so, European voters are still convinced that their politicians can do nothing about globalisation and the flight of jobs. Social integration is perceived as being unnecessary and that politicians can do a lot about it. As the cake gets smaller, many Europeans are increasingly reluctant to share it with "outsiders".

This is the only plausible explanation for the battering received by most European Socialist parties, whether in government or otherwise, in these elections. While it is the conservative parties, with their neo-liberal policies, that were technically responsible for the global economic mess, it was the left that was made to pay the price of voters' resentment. The key consideration was how strongly these leftist parties were pushing for liberal immigration policies and greater social integration. This is why the far right did so well.

Once seen within this broad European scenario, local results were no different. We too had a low voter turnout (one in five citizens abstained from voting, which, by our standards, is high). The Labour Party's success was also due to the way it handled the illegal immigration issue. Imperium Europa's gains speak for themselves. Even Alternattiva Demokratika's poor performance could be partly due to its being too closely identified with the pro-immigrants cause.

Certainly, other purely local issues, such as the unduly high cost of living, the water and electricity bills saga and the refund of VAT on car registration, determined the quantum of the final result in. People realise that we are living in difficult times. It is not hard decisions they resent most but arrogance, inconsistency and lack of accountability.

It is hard to expect that, in the foreseeable future, the EP elections will be perceived by the European electorate as being as, if not more, important than national general elections.

To give them greater meaning, the EU and national governments need to find ways of making citizens feel that these are not elections about cushy jobs in Brussels (or Strasbourg) but about their empowerment in shaping the future.