If it has escaped your attention, we tell you now again. The European Parliament elections have taken place and spread over the entire continent the 500 million Europeans represented by this huge parliament had the opportunity to go out and vote from the fourth to the seventh of June. Here in Belgium the seventh was the day to go out and cast votes, but does this really makes sense?

Existing since the early 1950s, the European Parliament is as old as the Union itself. Democratic and open parliamentary elections are however organised only since 1979 on a five-year basis, but whereas critics use to refer to the Parliament as having a mere elite function and being a big bureaucratic powerless machine, nowadays it has strengthened its position significantly.

It has developed itself from a merely consultative assembly to a fully grown-up parliament, to which the executives must legitimate themselves. Since the ratification of the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 the EP has equal weight with the Council that represent the European member states governments and it is active in more than 40 areas of legislation. Special powers concern the draft of the EU budget, the so-called ‘power of the purse’, the power to approve or dismiss the European Commission and the fact that the EP can now effectively block legislation. It is moreover involved in the enlargement of the Union and it sends observers around the world when human rights issues are at stake. These are only some of the powers of the EP, which extend when the Lisbon Treaty will finally be ratified. Nowadays roughly about 75% of the member states’ new legislation comes through the EP first, but in spite of this, the highest voter turnout for the EP ever was 63% in 1979, the year the EP first opened for direct elections. This year approximatively 44% of the European voters showed up. It is a huge understatement therefore to say that people don’t care about ‘Europe’ anymore. But why is it that the Europeans no longer feel they should go out and vote? What has caused this so-called ‘democratic deficit’?

EUROSCEPTICISM
It is not entirely true that a wave of Euro-scepticism has flooded the European continent and that therefore the European voters let the EP elections pass without paying it attention. The European project started after the Second World War as a huge peace project that by joining forces had the noble goal to prevent that these horrors would ever happen again. In order to realize this, participating countries gave part of their sovereignty to the new (economic) transnational organization, the EEC, the European Economic Community, that only in 1992 converted itself to the European Union. Especially since the introduction of the euro however, the EU seems to have lost its grassroots, the ordinary European citizens that should all go out and vote in June. Many people felt betrayed, because they felt the decision was – as many others - forced upon them and therefore the EU lost all its credit and credibility. In 2005 France and the Netherlands voted negative on the European Constitution and the Irish blocked in their 2008 referendum the adapted and improved version in form of the Lisbon Treaty, leaving the EU in an impasse. Euroscepticism no longer seems to be a typical British product.

A DIFFERENT EUROPE
Criticism on the EU however not only comes from the public, but many politicians working for the Union themselves also are in favour of a different Europe. Ideas vary according to political colours, but the general tendency is that Europe needs to become more open, democratic, social and flexible. Popular thoughts in fashion now are ‘the Empire of Europe’ that has replaced the mission impossible ‘United States of Europe’, both promoted by mister Verhofstadt, ex Belgian prime minister and next to Jean-Luc Dehaene Belgium’s ‘mister Europe’. Once the question of the European identity is cleared out, things will become easier, since all Europeans will have something to identify themselves with, and that is important, as former Commission President Jacques Delors sighed that “you cannot fall in love with a common market…” Yet, the importance of the EU today is not overestimated easily. We live in a globalizing world that is becoming more and more interdependent every day and if we count that Europe is only a small player on the political playground, then it is not difficult to realize that the individual member states alone are only insignificant peons on the global chess board. The much disputed euro for example has despite everything kept quite some national economic systems on track during the financial and economic crisis. Europe is no longer to be taken for granted, it has become a must. So, take that one chance you have this year and vote, it does make sense!