Over the last few days I have been reading the analysis of the election results for the European Parliament and believe that most of the reports essentially miss the point.
Rise of the extreme Right ?
There is much consternation of the rise of the extreme right and euroskeptics and the fact Marie Le Pen‘s National Front slammed the more moderate UMP and almost doubled President Hollande’s socialists with 25% of the vote is cited as proof that something is changing.
Other countries also experienced a strong showing by similar groups. In the UK, The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) achieved 26.8 beating both labor and the conservatives, Austria’s FPÖ had 19.7% and Germany’s AfD got 7% of the vote.
Who voted anyway?
What I found missing in the analysis is a closer look at the turn out for this election which, while reported, is rarely connected with the electoral results. Overall, 43.1 % of eligible voters actually turned up for the election which is almost exactly the same as in 2009. This means that abstention actually won the vote with 57%!
In France, turn out was 43.5% which means that the people who voted for Marie Le Pen’s party were actually just over 14% of eligible voters. Using the same math, the UKIP’s share is about 10%.
The key word in this context is mobilization and the key issue in modern electoral politics is who can get their people out to vote! In the last U.S. Election, Barak Obama‘s democrats out organized the Republican party on the streets of Ohio and got them to the polls. Turn out in that vote was 58.2 % meaning again that the largest single voting block was people who stayed home and Obama received 51.1% of the people who voted or just under 30% of eligible voters!
It seems to me that the real message here is Ms. Le Pen and her ideological counterparts in other countries are able to get all or most of their people to the polls while the larger parties simply are not able to do so.
An example on the other end of the political spectrum here in Spain is a party called Podemos or “We Can” which won 8% of the vote. Podemos is the brain child of Pablo Iglesias, a leftist political commentator with no government experience, political organization, or platform. What he does have is a face book page and a simple, hopeful message for Spain’s disaffected youth.
The Problem of Europe
For me, what the 2014 European election results show more than anything is that 21 years after its founding, there is little emotional connection between the European Union and average europeans. This may be because europeans take for granted the benefits of living in a united Europe; do not care; or perhaps do not really understand what role, if any, the european Parliament has.
The one politician who actually seemed to stand for something was Italy’s Matteo Renzi. His party won 40.8 % of an election with a 60% turn out so perhaps Europe just needs more passionate politicians, like Renzi, who actually have a credible geopolitical discourse.
I agree. Nobody knows which is the rol of the European Parliament, the European Commission and the other European institutions that, theoretically, are managing the EU. What does an elected politician during four years? Nobody knows. The only thing that most Europeans citizens can say about the EU is that some countries share the currency, a wider group have common commercial policies and there are not borders into the EU.
Who does lead the EU? The stronger countries, obviously. It is, probably, the only clear point. As a consequence of this confusion, the elections are used by the European citizens as a useful tool to penalize governments, corruption or like a way to show the irritation, above all during this long crisis.
It is clear that people with more radical ideologies tend to mobilize more, but I think that people often do not vote the same in Europe than in their home country.
About Ranzy, I don’t want to detract his value, but voting is compulsory in Italy.
Great comments! I did find and article on cumpulory voting which said that turn out is typically 10-15 % higher in countries which require people to vote but about Italy, it said that while voting used to be compulsory “A new electoral law was introduced in 1993 after being accepted by a national referendum. At present the law says that voting is a right and a duty, without using the word ‘compulsory”. The full article is available at http://www.idea.int/publications/voter_turnout_weurope/upload/chapter%203.pdf.
Does anyone know for sure the situation in Italy?