EU Parliament Elections 2024

European Parliament elections are a big event because the 27 member nations all vote at the same time.

Politico EU has a capsule summary of the prominent issues by country. (1)

The American journalism scholar Jay Rosen uses the term “church of the savvy” to describe what is often the prevailing attitude of political reporters in the US in which a kind of groupthink takes place about what the important issues are and what are the inside-baseball opinions of political developments, whether particular issues or elections. And we often see something like that with EU politics, including among European journalists.

Rosen gave an update on his general view a couple of years ago, in which he restated his 2011 version:

In the United States, most of the people who report on politics aren’t trying to advance an ideology. But I think they have an ideology, a belief system that holds their world together and tells them what to report about. It’s not left, or right, or center, really. It’s trickier than that. The name I’ve given to the ideology of our political press is savviness.

In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane. Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.)

Savviness is that quality of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political. And what is the truest mark of savviness? Winning, of course! Or knowing who the winners are. [my emphasis] (2)

And the latter aspect also creates the tendency to focus on “horse-race” issues and polling at the expense of coverage of substantive issues at stake.

We see some of this is the coverage of EU issues. And Politico seems to have a particularly strong inclination to the “savvy” approach. Charlie Pierce used to call the American version “Tiger Beat on the Potomac,” after a teen gossip magazine.

Matthew Karnitschnig provides a version of that perspective in a piece titled, “Don’t bother voting in European election.” (3)

Another Politico EU piece in this vein is “Europe's Trump moment has arrived” reflecting a basically lazy assumption by commentators that the rightwing parties are becoming stronger. (4) The more interesting point is how the center-right parties choose to deal with the challenge of the far-right parties, as the potential voter pool for the two closely overlap.

In France and Italy after 1989, we did see some defection of traditional constituencies of the Communist Parties to far-right groupings. And in Germany, the post-communist Left Party also found itself sometimes competing with the far right. It’s trends like that which encourage speculation about realignments based vague on “alienation” or “economic anxiety,” and those have been favorite concepts for the church-of-the-savvy.

That perspective is valuable insofar as it’s a reminder that a linear left-to-right image of voters’ choices can be misleading. A more realistic model would be an irregular blob with various internal blobs that overlap in varying ways. But since the French Revolution, the left-to-right spectrum has become very much imbedded in the political vocabulary. In European Parliaments, it’s common for parties to be seated together left-to-right according to party.

In the current German Bundestag (lower house) the left-to-right perspective goes: Bundnis Sarah Wagenknecht, Left Party, Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, the Free Democrats (FDP [liberals]), Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). (5)

So, while we’re likely to be using a left-right spectrum to talk about politics for a long time yet, it’s also important to know that the left-to-right positioning of the parties is not identical from country to country. The EU Parliament itself uses such a seating arrangement. The various national parties form parliamentary alliances, but the EU positions of the member parties do not determine the national programs of the individual parties.

What is the European Union actually?

The stereotypical “savvy” position is that EU elections are mainly indications of how political trends in individual countries are going. (Duh!) But that is often combined with a “savvy” assumption that EU election turnout tends to be lower than for national elections, supposedly because voters don’t see them the former “real” elections. The turnout part is true. But the not-real part seems to be some kind of decades-old political relic. In the 2008 economic crisis and the related euro and debt crises, there was no doubt the EU stuff mattered. The same is true of immigration and asylum issues. And both economic regulations and trade rules are heavily controlled by EU rules.

The EU is sometimes described as a “superstate,” although “suprastate” might be more appropriate. It’s more than a nation-state and more than an international confederation, but less that a full federal system of states.

But it’s certainly much more than just a convenient border crossing arrangement. Britain’s unhappy experience with Brexit illustrates dramatically that the EU is far more than some prestigious diplomatic arrangement with little practical relevance for everyday life.

The EU also not primarily thought of as a defense alliance, but the EU Treaty does include mutual defense obligations. On the face of it, the EU mutual-defense obligation is worded in a way that sounds more binding than the NATO one. But the European Army is a tiny project. And the by far more important European defense alliance is NATO.

But Europe’s actual “Trump moment” will come if convicted felon Donald Trump actually becomes US President again in 2025 and actually pulls out of NATO. Then we’re having a whole different conversation about what the EU is and needs to become. The Russo-Ukraine war has already made bolstering European military capabilities much more urgent – much to the joy of arms manufacturers, of course. But the Trump threat to end NATO and the Ukraine War are both very much related events when it comes to Europe’s military posture.

If convicted felon Trump does pull the US out of NATO, that will also mean that the US, Russia, and China will all be scrambling to make one-off deals with individual European countries. So the cohesion of the EU would become even more important for Europe’s common position in the world, militarily and economically.

We’ll see over the next few days how the election results shake out. Reinhard Heinisch had the following observations in connection with these EU elections about judging the influence of the far-right parties:

If the conservatives drift to the radical right, there are two consequences in particular: Either the conservatives themselves become an autocratic party (Fidesz/Orbán), in the extreme case, or the system becomes bipolar, in which a "normal" moderate party and a radical party oppose each other (as in Poland, the USA, France, etc.), whereby the moderate group cannot always win. This is happening in the UK, where there is a possibility that the radicals will take over or eliminate the moderate Tories, similar to what happened to the Republicans in the US.

The irony of it is that the media coverage seems to be so fascinated by the strengthening of the right that its actual strength is almost talked around. But what we also see in our surveys in political science and what is not reported is that the radical right has a maximum potential of about 30+% and exploits it sometimes better, sometimes worse from the USA to Austria. [Austria’s Herbert] Kickl [far-right FPÖ party] presents himself as the People's Chancellor (Volkskanzler). But according to the OGM-APA Trust Index (May 2024), he has the third-worst value (trust of -47, compared to J[ohannes] Rauch [Greens] +5) among the population. (6)

Notes:

(1) All politics is local: What the EU election is actually about in each country. Politico EU 06/03/2024. <https://www.politico.eu/article/politics-local-eu-election-about-member-country/> (Accessed: 2024-09-06).

(2) Rosen, Jay (20222): The savvy turn in political journalism: And why I continue to criticize it. PressThink 01/17/2022. <https://pressthink.org/2022/01/the-savvy-turn-in-political-journalism/> (Accessed: 2024-09-06).

(3) Karnitschnig, Matthew (2024): Don’t bother voting in European election. Politico EU 06/07/2024. <https://www.politico.eu/article/european-election-voting-democracy-propaganda-activism-far-right-green-deal/> (Accessed: 2024-09-06).

(4) Faris, Stephan et. al. (2024): Europe's Trump moment has arrived. Politico EU 06/05/2024. <https://www.politico.eu/article/european-election-2024-far-right-donald-trump-moment/> (Accessed: 2024-09-06).

(5) Distribution of seats in the 20th German Bundestag. Deutscher Bundetag. <https://www.bundestag.de/en/parliament/plenary/distributionofseats> (Accessed: 2024-09-06).

(6) Heinisch, Reinhard (2024): Facebook 06/08/2024. <https://www.facebook.com/reinhard.heinisch/posts/pfbid02LU4GUsk8U1tLygwywNvamHgZqHYJqzhxMDonfkEeC5BnvCThGtMBXx1G5ze5tiiJl> (Accessed : 2024-09-06). My translation from German.