The Politics of the 1999 European Elections

Extract

‘Je pense donc je vote’: the confident assertion of the european Parliament's promotional campaign in France to encourage voters to participate in the 1999 European elections struck a spectacularly false note. The citizens not only of France, but of Europe as a whole, reacted with striking indifference to the prospect of the fifth direct elections to the world's only transnational parliament. In the elections held on 10-13 June, turnout fell in all but three of the fifteen member states, averaging less than half of the eligible electorate for the first time since 1979. Except in the two countries holding general elections on the same day – Belgium and Luxembourg – media coverage of the contest was distinctly muted. Even in those countries, the European component was secondary. Across the European Union, there was little sense of key choices being defined, let alone settled, by the election, whether on a national or continental scale. If political elites were engaged in trials of strength which they were unable to avoid, there was scant evidence of campaigning on the ground. In David Butler's memorable phrase, the European elections of 1999, as before, resembled ‘tactical exercises without troops’: army generals were active at the centre, conducting a theoretical, phoney war of interest largely to themselves.