This is a response to How to make the European elections more European, a paper published last week by Sophia Russack and Nicolai von Ondarza of the Centre for European policy Studies (CEPS). In their paper, the authors bemoan “the elections’ low visibility (mainly due to a largely unharmonised electoral framework) and their perceived low stakes (mainly due to lacking a link between the elections to the legislature and the head of the EU’s executive arm, the Commission)”. They make some recommendations as to how things could be improved:

• the EU should “fully honour” the election result, which seems to mean involving the European Parliament at an earlier stage in planning the 2024-2029 workplan
• political parties should pledge to make the European element of future European Parliament elections more visible
• future elections should have transnational party lists, led by each party’s candidate for President of the European Commission; the winner would get the job.

I know and like CEPS, where I worked from 1999 to 2002, and I know and like Sophia Russack (though I don’t know her co-author). But I disagree with the analysis in the paper, and with the conclusions.

The core issue is not, as Russack and von Ondarza would have it, the weakness of the link between your European Parliament vote and the next President of the European Commission. Much more important is a related but distinct problem: the very weak connection between voting choice and policy outcomes. In most elections in Europe, whether national, regional, provincial or municipal, you are choosing potential players for the executive branch of government. By contrast, European Union policy choices are negotiated between the Commission, the elected Parliament and the elected governments of all 27 members states in a process that is complex but fairly open and well-understood by those inside it (and by close observers like myself). Your vote for an MEP doesn’t very directly impact what the Commission does.

This is not unique to the EU. In the United States, where the divide between the legislative and executive branches is constitutionally entrenched, your vote for Congress is a vote for someone who will scrutinise the executive and hold it to account; meanwhile your vote for President is your vote on government policy. The two are separate things. There are good arguments to be made about the extent to which the USA is really democratic, but the separation of powers is not usually cited as one of them.

I am sure that in any future negotiations over reform of the EU Treaties, the European Parliament will shift the balance of decision-making power further in its own direction, because it has successfully done so in every previous treaty negotiation. But there is only so far that it can go; national governments are not going to be abolished, and the Parliament is in the end a co-legislator and scrutineer, with only a limited ability to propose new policy measures of its own.

EU policy-making is necessarily complex and broad-based, and does not need to be very adversarial. The democratically elected governments of the member states are key elements in the legislative process. The European Parliament elections are far from being the only path through which you as a citizen can influence EU policies. The framing of the problem as one that can be solved by giving the European Parliament more power seems to me to start from the desired conclusion and work backwards.

And this goes even more for the “Spitzenkandidat” concept, the idea that EU democracy will be enhanced if voters know that the largest transnational party’s pre-designated lead candidate will become the new President of the European Commission, as happened in 2019 when Jean-Claude Juncker was chosen, but then did not happen in 2024 when the EPP’s German lead candidate Manfred Weber was dumped by the EPP German Chancellor in favour of her defence minister Ursula von der Leyen. (The right decision, in my own view.)

I always thought that the Spitzenkandidat concept was a bad idea. It is a swizz on voters, because even if it works (as it arguably did in 2019, though in fact the EPP got fewer votes in that election than the Socialists), the policies of the new Commission are not solely determined by the new Commission President; the Berlaymont is not the White House. Instead, as with all EU decisions, the Commission’s work programme is developed by a consensus-building process; the Commission itself is a grand coalition of political ideologies, and so is the Council (the formal gathering of member states).

At a CEPS conference a few years ago, I asked a very senior adviser to the then EPP President of the Commission what difference it would actually have made in terms of policy outcomes if his boss’s Socialist rival had been President instead. The adviser giggled and was unable to answer. Which I think is fair enough. In an alternate universe where the Socialist candidate had won, the ideas going into the Commission’s work programme would have been the same – both EPP and Socialists would have been strongly represented, and anyway did not have very different platforms – the decision-making process would have been the same, and the outcome different only because of the face of the person making the speeches at the end. (The CEPS conference was under the Chatham House rule so I won’t say who my interlocutor was, though you have probably guessed correctly.)

Actually the consensus-building, grindingly deliberative process of EU policy-making is a Good Thing. These are important decisions that affect hundreds of millions of people. It’s absolutely right that, both formally and informally, the system is forced to engaged a broad base of stakeholders to get their buy-in. It’s not clear to me that making this more adversarial will lead to better outcomes, and it seems to me that supporters of the Spitzenkandidat process want to portray it as more adversarial than it actually is. The big gulf in EU policy-making is between those who want to make it work, and those who don’t, and the latter will never nominate a Spitzenkandidat anyway.

There is an additional neglected weakness of the Spitzenkandidat concept. No sensible prime minister or serving government minister will want to put themselves forward. It would mean taking leave of absence (officially or unofficially) from your government duties for weeks or potentially months, in order to front up the EU-wide campaign that would be required, while sending the message to your home country that you consider them to be second best. Prime ministers do not always make the best Commissioners, let alone Commission Presidents, but the Spitzenkandidat system eliminates them from the pool of potential candidates immediately.

And it’s not clear to me (having attended a couple of them) that an assembly of a couple of hundred European party delegates choosing their Spitzenkandidat has greater democratic legitimacy to determine Europe’s future leadership than do the 27 democratically elected governments.

Looking at the United States, would it really be such a good idea to shift the EU political process to be more like that of our American friends? The low turnout at European Parliament elections is disappointing from the democratic purist point of view; but has anyone considered that it may also indicate a level of trust in the system and confidence in the outcome, so that your vote is not really needed to nudge policies in the right direction? Which is why anti-system parties do comparatively well – their voters are less satisfied with the EU, and therefore more inclined to turn out.

So, how could the European Parliament elections be more European? My provocative answer is that they are already a good reflection of what the EU actually is, rather than what some people may want it to be: twenty-seven (or more) different campaigns, adapted to local circumstances but with a European flavour (both pro and anti EU). I don’t think it is fair to criticise political parties for the lack of European-ness in their campaigns. They need votes and they must adapt to local circumstances, and if making their campaigns “more European” was likely to increase their vote, you can bet that they would be doing it already.

Anyway, thanks to Sophia Russack and Nicolai von Ondarza for helping me to crystallize these thoughts, even if I have ended up disagreeing with them.

Normally when I review books on this blog, I quote the second paragraph of the third chapter to give my reader a flavour of the writing. This paper has only a few sections, but the second paragraph of the third one is:

Subsequently, citizens often vote in EP elections less strategically (‘with their head’) or according to their ideological preferences (‘with their heart’), but rather as a form of protest (‘with their boot’). Since voters do not generally perceive their votes as having to decide between rival policy programmes, the EP electoral contest fails to significantly incentivise political parties to develop competing policy ideas that would encourage political debate and lead to genuine attempts to influence public opinion. In short, the less that’s at stake, the less likely that people are motivated to show up and if they do show up, they’re more likely to vote against their current government as a clear sign of unhappiness with its performance.