It strikes me there are two major problems with this.

First of all, it takes the traditional EU approach to solving problems, namely that you make a legalistic change, and political consequences flow from that. The real issue here is a lack of leadership – the European political parties could have linked the EP results to the Commission Presidency before, but dithered. The problem with legal first, leadership second, is it generates a counter-reaction – that change is being ‘foisted upon’ people (see Ashley Fox’s comments at the bottom of this Euractiv story).

Secondly, to make this change happen requires a change to the Treaty on European Union (Treaty of Lisbon). Not only does that need the unanimous approval of all EU Member States, but it would also surely trigger the UK’s referendum lock. That means the chances these proposals see the light of day are slim to none.

Don’t get me wrong – there is plenty of room for improvement in the way the EP functions – but Treaty-driven change is not the way forward just now. Duff and other advocates of genuine transnational democracy would do better to focus lobby efforts on the European political parties (backing initiatives like the PES Primary), and to push for Member States to use open lists to choose their MEPs, hence improving the quality of representation.

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)

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?

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.

Secondly, the left does not have an adequate discourse to appeal to voters. Stuck between the unionised labour wing of the past and potential socially responsible yet more individualised approach of today, the left is in danger of losing votes to the old left (to Die Linke in Germany for example) and to the Greens that polled well across the old Member States in the EP elections. Here the left must be continually and resolutely determined in developing EU-wide principles for flexicurity – not propping up outdated and polluting industries just because they employ lots of people. It is also important that the EU can develop cooperative means to approach labour market relations – Nordic-style collective agreements with collaborative rather than destructive trade unions are a much better model than central European rules-based systems. Just because the EU is a community of law does not mean EU-wide rules are necessarily the right answer.

Thirdly, the left needs to work out in what areas it wants the European Union to act. Regulation of the banking sector is all very well, but what are centre-left principles for CAP, consumer protection, trans-European networks, structural funds? Surely during an economic downturn a resolute effort to ensure Europe does the best it can for its poorest people and poorest regions should be a policy priority for the PES – a more redistributive EU budget. Poorer voters voted against the European Constitution and Treaty of Lisbon as eloquently argued by Kevin H. O’Rourke – the results of the EP elections seem to show these voters tended to stay at home rather than vote for the left. Focus of the budget should also be more on foreign aid and investments in green industries. Beyond that Europe’s education systems are clearly not adequate in the era of globalisation – the left should more strongly advocate giving the Bologna Process some teeth.

If you’ve reached the end of this post and are thinking: what planet is Jon living on to think that all of this is possible, then just think back a little to 1999 and The Third Way / die neue Mitte – an era of Blair, Schröder, even Jospin, when the left managed to have a positive and forward looking message in so many European countries. That’s the standard to which we should aspire by 2014.

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.

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…

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%.

To make matters worse Koch-Mehrin issued a legal threat against Parlorama (and the statistics that were also presented in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest dailies) and this has led to a major dispute over her attendance record, with the Ruhrbarone blog calculating a figure of 62% attendance when adjusted for maternity leave, with Koch-Mehrin herself sticking to 75% attendance. More in German here.

This has got a bunch of bloggers – among them Jan Seifert, Hajo Friedrich and Netzpolitik – adequately annoyed to start to look at other aspects of Koch-Mehrin’s behaviour – the fact that she earnt more than €80000 in work parallel to her work as a member of the European Parliament and has removed financial declarations from her website (Jan’s blog), what money she claims for travel (she lives in Brussels but her election posters claim she’s a Kölnerin), and the fact she has not been a rapporteur in five years in the Parliament (Hajo’s report), and even allegations of dirty tricks in blog comments posted from the FDP party headquarters (Ruhrbarone). All of this has culminated in a FAZ article entitled ‘Wie fleißig ist Silvana Koch-Mehrin?‘ – how hard working is Silvana Koch-Mehrin?

In short Koch-Mehrin has behaved completely the wrong way here. There is much more to the job of a MEP than attendance at plenary sessions of the EP – she could well have just said that. A post on her website to that effect would probably have done the job. Complaining about the statistics provoked a strong counter-reaction, made it look like she was covering things up, and this has dented her reputation still further. So as well as being the place for her 800 closest friends the internet is proving the tools for a tough examination of her behaviour.

[UPDATE 4.6.09]
I’ve just come across this excellent report from NDR German TV’s Zapp programme about the Koch-Mehrin case, that includes some excellent comments from Hajo Friedrich of Europa-Transparent, details of more legal threats against SWR, and a cringe-worthy line about Koch-Mehrin’s performance from Guido Westerwelle, FDP party leader, right at the end of the 9 minute piece. If you speak German then watch it – excellent in that calm, forensic German TV way.

• Fix My Street and They Work for You from MySociety (that also has an excellent blog)
• Info on the Vattenfall lobby action outside the European Parliament
• The US Air Force’s social media strategy
• Bård Vegar Solhjell’s blog

Comments and questions are most welcome!

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.