euelection

Elections for the European Parliament will be held in the first week of June. In France, they will occur on 7 June.

The problem

The European Parliament has existed since EU precursor the European Coal and Steel Community became active in 1952. But Euro MPs have been directly elected only since 1979. As the EU has grown, so have the numbers of Euro MPs, which today stand at 785. (Under arcane rules, the size of the assembly will be scaled back, apparently to 751 members).

But a problem has emerged: low voter turnout. And a shameful secret: the problem has been growing worse with each election. Here are the numbers, the percentage of eligible voters who cast a ballot (the source is the European Parliament):

1979    63 %
1984    61 %
1989    58.5 %
1994    56.8 %
1999    49.8 %
2004    45.6 %

Of course, there is variation in turnout among EU member states. But over 30 years, the trend has been constant decline, even as successive forms make the European Parliament more prominent within the EU’s institutional set-up. Across the EU today, less than half of voters bother to show up on election day.

The response

Everyone seems to agree that increased voter participation would be a good thing. The European Parliament has launched a campaign to do this. I’ve seen the results, and the strike me as bizarre: top-down thinking, a fuzzy message, and amateurish execution. Here are some illustrations:
euelection2
This makes some sense: product labeling requirements show what the Euro Parliament does, and it’s a subject people care about. But the elections aren’t a referendum on poultry labelling; voters will not be asked to answer the question presented (how much labelling do we need?). The Euro Parliament seems to be arguing more for its own relevance, than for voter turnout to elect MPs.

A television ad strikes me as even more bizarre. It’s made up of a string of fictitious news reports, delivered in a selection of EU languages. Oddly, some of the headlines seem desirable (at least to some), whereas others are not. (And I’m embarrassed to report that I’d thought –naïvely– that products made with child labor really had been banned.) The quality of execution is about what I’d expect from a high school group. I’ve watched the video repeatedly, but still am unclear about why it would encourage me to vote: