Tag Archives: European Parliament Elections

Duff’s EP reform proposals prioritise institutional change over real leadership – misguided

The Constitutional Affairs Committee of the European Parliament yesterday backed Andrew Duff‘s report (PDF here) that proposes reforms to the way MEPs are elected. Most controversial is the proposal to create a Europe-wide list of 25 MEPs, essentially a transnational list, that would give European Parliament elections a truly transnational flavour. Duff’s argument is this would make European political parties become proper campaigning bodies, and the party that wins the elections would then nominate the President of the European Commission.

It strikes me there are two major problems with this.

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Socialist Group rebrands as ASDE, not to be confused with ASDA or ALDE

ASDE Martin Schulz - J. Worth montage

ASDE Martin Schulz - J. Worth montage

Britain has ASDA, a rather lousy supermarket chain owned by Wal-Mart. Now Brussels has ASDE, the new name for the Socialist Group in the European Parliament. The name stands for the Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. Which means the name is not too far away from ALDE, the acronym for the Liberals in the EP, and even the EPP has its ED (European Democrats) adjunct. So everyone’s a democrat. Isn’t that nice. Everyone has an alphabet soup of names. That’s perhaps less nice.

So what are the reasons? Julien Frisch has a breakdown, and also a video from Europarl TV explaining the rationale. Essentially the Italian Partito Democratico did not know which group to join, wanted the socialists to sound a bit more moderate, and hence the name change. So Martin Schulz can now preside over approximately 170 MEPs rather than 150. Woo hoo. Forget the coherency, forget the brand, forget the fact you sound like a supermarket chain, forget even how things will have to be explained at the 2014 elections. That’s a long way off…

(Photo credit: image adapted from this Flickr / CC image)

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Introducing the Gabon Coalition

Gabon Coalition - montage by J. Worth

Gabon Coalition - montage by J. Worth

One of the great things about the Twitter is that it allows you to be rather silly and flippant about serious topics – just look what we managed with @AtheistBus. But this post is about EU politics. For today, in a discussion with @JulienFrisch, @spiller2 and @kosmopolit, I managed to come up with a new EU political term: the Gabon Coalition.

So what, you ask, is the Gabon Coalition? It is not some sort of EU agreement signed in the central west African country, but instead the term for a proposed coalition in the European Parliament.

A discussion has been brewing about the potential coalitions in the European Parliament after the 4-7th June 2009 elections about how the political groups in the EP are going to cooperate, specifically about the nomination of the Commission President. It looks like a traffic light coalition of PES (Red), ALDE (Yellow) and Greens (Green – evidently) could back Verhofstadt over Barroso.

The traffic light coalition was last mentioned at 2006 German Federal Elections – a possible alliance of SPD (Red), FDP (Yellow) and Grüne (Green). An alternative at that time was the Jamaica Coalition comprising CDU (Black), FDP (Yellow) and Grüne (Green), the party colours making up the colour of the Jamaica flag.

So what’s the EU equivalent of the Jamaica Coalition? The conservatives at EU level – the EPP – are blue rather that black. Which leads us to Gabon – the national flag is blue, yellow and green. Simple, eh?

[UPDATE] @kosmopolit has pointed out the potential joys of Tanzania, Mauritius and Gambia coalitions. I am however yet to find a flag that has red, dark red, green and yellow in it… anyone know one?

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Rebuilding the European left

Red Brick Wall - CC / Flickr

Red Brick Wall - CC / Flickr

The European Parliament Election results on Sunday were not good for social democratic and labour parties across Europe, polling 3% less than at the elections in 2004. PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, posting at Labourlist, states rather blandly that “We need more PES, not less PES” so as to do better next time. I’m afraid it’s not that simple Poul – so here are a few more ideas.

First of all, social democratic parties at national and EU level lack coherent and decent quality leadership. Brown is monumentally weak and cares little about the EU, Aubry has not been able to assert herself in France, the Italian Partito Democratico is tearing itself apart, the SPD seems determined to simply turn the clock back, the left has no coherent leadership in Poland… only Zapatero has been able to arrest the decline, and he has seldom been seen on the international stage. Things are not much better at EU level – I have respect for Rasmussen, but he has been unable to assert himself. Leader of the Socialist Group Martin Schulz, famous in large part thanks to his Berlusconi incident, does not have the optimism, nuance or communications skills to lead effectively. In short things at the top must change.

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EP elections – thoughts on the first results

Rose - CC / Flickr

Rose - CC / Flickr

Results – all unofficial at the moment – are staring to drift in, and things are looking quite terrible for the left across Europe. So far the left is only up in Malta, Slovakia and Greece (with a decent result also expected in Ireland), and behind elsewhere – poor results in Germany, France and Austria, and a wipe-out for Labour sure to be around the corner as well once UK results are known later on. Worst of all is surely Hungary, where the right has polled almost two thirds of the votes.

Among the maverick groups running Geert Wilders came in second in The Netherlands, Hans Peter Martin polled 18% (3rd place) in Austria, and the Swedish Pirate Party looks like it might get around 8%. The EP has power, but voters don’t understand that power, so odd groups are understandably doing well.

To keep an eye on all of this Wikipedia has an excellent EP election results table here.

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Stupidity and the EP’s 4-day election

So the European Commission is asking The Netherlands for ‘clarification’ of why results from Thursday’s EP poll there have been released already. Supposedly results are only allowed to be released once the polls have closed all over Europe – Sunday evening. I’ve been debating this on Twitter with @julienfrish, @kierancotty, @davidcochrane and @MickFealty. With Geert Wilders being the big recipient of anti-everything sentiment in the Dutch poll, the last thing anyone needs is the Commission grumbling that the Dutch didn’t respect the rules. What about the Irish too, as results are trickling out today at the Irish Election website? The UK is rather different – polls were on Thursday, but people care so little about the EP elections that little information has trickled out, and Brown has used the lull to try to re-assert a little authority over his cabinet.

So what should happen with all of this? First of all the EP elections over 4 days is silly. OK, national traditions, bla, bla, but could we not have the polls open on Saturday and Sunday in all European countries? The Commission grumbling at The Netherlands looks quite cantankerous when the institutions and the Member States have not managed to make some order out of this mess of election days.

Secondly, why does the Commission send out some anonymous spokesperson to say these sorts of things? Plays right into the hands of people sceptical about the institutions. Someone with a little political nous should do it… which would of course be helped if the Commissioners themselves had more political nous, and some more leadership from the top.

And everyone wonders why the population is frustrated by the EU…

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Silvana’s internet Koch-up

Silvana Koch-Mehrin amended poster - netzpolitik.org

Silvana Koch-Mehrin amended poster - netzpolitik.org

Just a few days before the European Parliament elections in Germany (polling day there is Sunday 7th June) there’s an interesting story brewing about the liberals’ (FDP) lead candidate Silvana Koch-Mehrin – I’ve posted a little about this before. It’s one of those interesting cases where a politician getting things wrong online can provoke a vicious counter-reaction – it’s about time this happened in German politics where the political class is arguably even less web-savvy than elsewhere in Europe.

The story started some six weeks ago when the website Parlorama published attendance records of all MEPs. This showed Koch-Mehrin attending 41% of plenary sessions, one of the lowest attendance records of any MEP. Her reasoning? The birth of two children duing the election period, hence lower attendance in the EP as MEPs have no proper maternity leave arrangements. Problem for Silvana is that a couple of other MEPs have also had babies but still managed much higher attendance than she did – Angelika Niebler at 84% and Lívia Járóka at 78%.

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Tech, the EP elections, and Norway

Bente and I have just given a presentation at the Norwegian Mission to the EU about the use of technology for politics. The slides we used are below, and here are a few links to some other things we mentioned – there are more in the slides:

Comments and questions are most welcome!

Tech in the European and Norwegian elections

There’s also a similar presentation I recently gave in Québec to le Cercle québécois des affaires internationales about the EP elections – on Slideshare here.

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