{"id":1191,"date":"2014-05-28T10:21:40","date_gmt":"2014-05-28T09:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/?p=1191"},"modified":"2014-05-29T15:36:17","modified_gmt":"2014-05-29T14:36:17","slug":"the-european-parliament-represents-only-those-who-turn-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/2014\/05\/28\/the-european-parliament-represents-only-those-who-turn-up\/","title":{"rendered":"The European Parliament represents only those who turn up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last few days I have been reading the analysis of the election\u00a0results for the European Parliament<\/strong> and believe that most of the reports essentially miss the point<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Rise of the extreme Right ?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\"The<\/a>
Marie LePen (The Guardian)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is much consternation of the rise of the extreme right and euroskeptics and the fact Marie Le Pen<\/strong>‘s National Front slammed the more moderate UMP and almost doubled President Hollande’s<\/strong> socialists with 25% of the vote is cited as proof that\u00a0something is changing.<\/p>\n

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 FP\u00d6 had 19.7% and Germany’s AfD got 7% of the vote.<\/p>\n

Who voted anyway?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

What I found missing in the analysis is a closer look at the turn out for this election which, while reported, is rarely\u00a0connected 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%!<\/strong><\/p>\n

In\u00a0France, 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%.<\/p>\n

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!<\/strong>\u00a0In the last U.S. Election, Barak Obama<\/strong>‘s democrats out organized the Republican party on the streets of Ohio and got\u00a0them 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!<\/p>\n

\"Pablo
Pablo Iglesias (La Republica)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It seems to me that the real message here is Ms. Le Pen and her ideological counterparts in other countries\u00a0are able to get all or most of their people to the polls while the larger parties simply are not able to do so.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>, a leftist political commentator with no government experience, political\u00a0organization, or platform. What he does have is a face book page and a simple, hopeful message for Spain’s disaffected youth.<\/p>\n

The Problem of Europe<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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<\/strong>.\u00a0This 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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The one politician who actually seemed to stand for something was Italy’s Matteo Renzi<\/strong>. His\u00a0party 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Analysis of the European Parliamentary elections miss the point as the real story is the ability of the far right and new left to mobilize their voters …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":788,"featured_media":1195,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25698,26749],"tags":[82364],"class_list":["post-1191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-elections","category-geopolitics","tag-elections-2"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1191"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1204,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions\/1204"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}