Looking forwards to 2024 June’s European election

I look forward to June’s European elections, somewhat with a frightened heart, expecting an outcome we really would not like to see.

As we get closer to the 2024 European elections, people need to be made more aware of their say in this matter.

Behaviour of politicians

The way many politicians behaved the last few years, them also showing they are far away from the real life of the daily man, made that all over Europe there is a sort of non-interest in local as well as European politics. Lots of people also do not see the use or necessity of a united Europe. It are those who love to see their nation in the forefront again, independent of Europe who are gaining foot.

What worries me is the difficulty of even imagining democracy’s seeds taking root in the European Union in my lifetime.

A start with good intentions

Already at the end of World War II, several politicians from the Western European countries knew that they had to unite to be strong enough to counter such an attack they had to endure those last five years of fighting. They sought closer economic, social, and political ties to achieve economic growth, human and military security to protect the citizens, defend themselves and to make sure they could evolve properly in good understanding with each other in a peaceful world.

Signed by “The Six” on 18 April 1951, effective from 23 July 1952: the Treaty of Paris (formally the Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community) was signed on 18 April 1951 between France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which subsequently became part of the European Union.

It has taken already more than 70 years, after, in 1951, the leaders of six countries — Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany — signed the Treaty of Paris, thereby, when it took effect in 1952, founding the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which we can consider as the embryo of the later European Union. From 1957 until Nov. 1, 1993 they worked hard to create the European Economic Community (EEC), (byname) Common Market, former association designed to integrate the economies of Europe.

A build toward a democratic nation

Much too often, people forget that to have a democracy to be successful, one has to have an openness to all sorts of ideas and political groups.

The Europe Declaration or Charter of the Community, was issued by the representatives of the six nations, hoping their different political parties could stand behind the idea of uniting “Europe” and creating a common market among its members through the elimination of most trade barriers and the establishment of a common external trade  and/or monetary policy policy, giving it strength like there was also the United States of America. The Declaration emphasised that the supranational principle was the foundation of the new democratic organisation of Europe. From the start, there were opposers to such a greater transfer of or limitation of state sovereignty.

Luxembourgian-born French statesman Robert Schuman was far ahead of his time when he, as foreign minister, developed the Schuman Plan (1950) to come to a single authority to control the production of steel and coal in France and West Germany (now Germany) (realised in 1952), to be opened for membership to other European countries.

Debate on supranational democracy

Schuman initiated the debate on supranational democracy in his speeches at the United Nations, at the signing of the council’s Statutes and at a series of other speeches across Europe and North America. He served as president of the Common Assembly, the consultative arm of the Common Market, from 1958 to 1960 and was an Assembly member until February 1963, of which was to become the legislative assembly of the European Union (EU).

The Council of Europe created a system based on human rights and the rule of law, giving all adults of the assembled countries the right to vote in a general election. That suffrage will be there again in a few months time. People will then have the choice between groups not organised by nationality, but by political affiliation, having the centre-right Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats), the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (largely comprising members of the Party of European Socialists), the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (dominated by members of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party) or the Renew Europe Group the liberal, pro-European political group of the European Parliament, coming up for the environment and human life we find The Left group in the European Parliament – GUE/NGL and the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance, but also for the eurosceptic, anti-federalist and right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists Group, and the newcomer but already the sixth largest one in the current European Parliament: Identity and Democracy Group. They do find it not clear how the introduction of a European constituency and transnational lists would contribute to bringing the European dimension closer to the citizens, starting from the European elections.

Representative members for the people

23 Members are needed to form a political group, and at least one-quarter of the Member States must be represented within the group. Members may not belong to more than one political group.

Some Members do not belong to any political group and are known as non-attached Members.
The problem at the moment is still that citizens from one country cannot be represented by a candidate from another Member State, who is not familiar with the territory and its needs. We can see that many MEP’s are being distant from the real world and unable to understand the real needs and expectations of citizens, that are certainly not interested in transnational lists or being represented by unknown candidates.

In fairness, everyone in the union should have the opportunity to cast their vote for whomever they believe can represent them, whatever country that electable person may come from.

The citizens should remember they retain the authority to hold their elected bodies accountable for their decisions (within the country’s exogenous constraints). Though this seems quite difficult not to say, impossible at the EU level.

Parliamentarians for the people who dare to take responsibility

It is a shame, but we can only ascertain that when our leaders return home following an EU Council meeting, they immediately shed responsibility for unpopular decisions, blaming their Council colleagues instead. Time and again everyone appears to point the finger at someone else and pass the matter on to another “responsible” Each time they wash their hands of the matter and claim that they did their best but that it was because of the other person.

EU functionaries, advisers, lobbyists, and European Central Bank officials are aware of the opportunities the mandatary uses to shift blame and responsibility away from himself. They have learned to expect member-state representatives to toe the line and tell their national parliaments that, while they disagreed with the Council’s decisions, they were too “responsible” and committed to European “solidarity” to resist.

EU’s democratic deficit

And therein lies the EU’s democratic deficit. Crucial policies that a majority of Council members reject often pass easily, and there is no polity that can pass judgment on the Council itself, hold it accountable, and, ultimately, dismiss it as a body. When the Council reaches some half-decent agreement (like the one between the Spanish and Dutch prime ministers, Pedro Sánchez and Mark Rutte, to reform the EU’s fiscal compact), national elections, which never focus on EU-level decisions, can cause them to vanish into thin air. Still far too often we find that the choice is made to let local national politics take precedence as more important and push aside or look upon the general European necessities as lesser.

Moreover, the formal power of the European Parliament (which still lacks the authority to initiate legislation) to fire the Commission in toto is about as useful as equipping the Greek navy with a nuclear bomb to counter Turkey’s threats to seize an islet close to its coast.

said the Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, who s launched the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) at the Volksbühne in Berlin.

Challenges faced by the members of the EU

Economically, we have seen the biggest challenge yet faced by the members of the EU and, in particular, its administrative structures, with the sovereign debt crisis that rocked the eurozone beginning in 2009. We may have gotten out of that nicely, but 13 years later a bigger bogeyman was at the door. Before 2024 we must be aware that from the war situation in Ukraine there is a very high threat of undermining our values and freedoms. Much will depend on how Nato will be able to keep in the background, while it is actually already fully involved in that war between Russia and the West.

Today we face the greatest foreign policy crisis since the collapse of Yugoslavia. EU sanctions packages against Russian individuals and businesses did not do much and Vladimir Putin was firm in wanting to expand his country, to restore again the previous Soviet Union.

Warfare on both human and natural levels

A lot of citizens see European money flowing away to warfare in the North and are not so keen on their own domestic politics being neglected for the benefit of all that armament. Meanwhile, many European countries have wiped their feet on the Paris Accords of 2015, to combat global warming. This provokes resentment from those who stand up for nature, while others feel that in turn too little is being done to boost the economy and assure people that there will be enough energy available to get through the winter.

Europeans may look indignantly at Trump‘s expressed ideas to build a wall around America but fail to see how Europe is actually also working in a similarly nonsensical way to completely close its borders to the outside world so that uninvited guests will no longer get in. From the right, such a strengthening of Europe’s external borders does receive great applause, but it brings out a very inhumane attitude.

Not negligible accretion in the right-wing camp

After the 2019 European elections, the liberal press expressed relief that Europe’s ultra-right did not do as well as feared. However, we should not let ourselves be captured by these election results, because in the meantime an even greater shift to the right in Europe, as in the United States of America, has taken hold. Unlike the inter-war fascists, the new ultra-rightists do not need to win elections. Their great strength is that they gain power, win or lose, as conventional parties fall over one another to embrace xenophobia-lite, then authoritarianism-lite and eventually totalitarianism-lite. To put it differently, autocratic European leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán don’t need to lift a finger to spread their chauvinist creed throughout the EU and Brussels. He like some other underminers of human rights pose a very great danger to our democratic values.

2024 Elections and a better distribution

More than ever, the next elections will be about getting as many people to the polls as possible, after politicians have done more to defend our European values and make people see the value of joining hands to build a world where there is freedom of speech and freedom of belief, be it relational or religious.

We do have to defend our values and convince people of the importance of securing freedom for everybody, whatever culture or whatever colour of skin they may have. We also need to convince people of the necessity to give enough attention to mother earth and to battle global warming. We also should convince people of the necessity to respond to the climate crisis with sufficient funding for the world’s poorest nations and should make work of unaffordable housing, insecure private tenancies and insufficient social housing.

We also need to clean up the financing of politics by companies. in general all over the EU should come a tax reform that will be more balanced, and provide a better distribution between rich and poor.

Necessary efforts

More than ever we need efforts to bring peace all over the world and a better distribution of food and wealth. People should be made aware that our entire planet is not only threatened by exploitation by large international corporations but also by the threat of nuclear war, which brings our habitat in danger of total destruction.

A destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent!

Every citizen is going to have to be made aware that in their hands lies the future of our earth, which goes beyond the borders of our little Europe.

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Preceding

Education has key role in building the democratic and rule of law culture

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