Elections for the European Union come and go, and most Europeans don’t even notice.
Results from the latest Eurobarometer, released June 6th, revealed that only 45% of citizens in EU member states are aware that elections for the institution are scheduled for June 6 to 9, 2024. When asked in a survey about the date for the EU election, which was set and announced three weeks ago, 55% got the date wrong.
From this perspective, it’s easy to conclude the EU is replete with disinterested voters, readily characterised as apathetic, ignorant; as complacent in their democratic duties as they are geographically distant from the Brussels hub. But the reality is otherwise.
The percentage of EU voters aware of the EU’s election dates has been slowly but steadily increasing. It’s up eight percentage points from the same poll taken five years ago before the last elections, showing that the general population is overcoming the obstacles to understanding the giant bureaucracy that operates so far from their own circles of influence.
For average Europeans, the most easily perceived impact of the EU on their quality of life is not having to carry a passport to travel across the bloc, and, in most cases, not having to exchange currency. Understandably, less obvious is how EU policy affects their daily lives and, particularly, how they can influence it through the democratic process.
EU officials chosen in EU elections, namely MEPs, get relatively little media attention. National media updates viewers almost every day about what goes on in national parliaments, but the workings and votes of the EU Parliament get little airtime. To prove the point, we can consider the impact of the recent Qatargate bribery scandal in which several MEPs have been accused of accepting bribes from third-party countries. According to Eurobarameter’s survey, the affair had little reverberation in public opinion about the EU Parliament.
Attention instead goes to the Council and Commission. National media channels tend to cover Brussels mostly through the EU Council, formed by heads of state chosen in national elections and their ministers. The EU Commission, too, gets national media attention, but usually only in relation to the EU Council.
This selective coverage gives the impression that EU politics is practised principally, almost exclusively, by politicians in executive branches elected at the national level. The perception is reinforced by the fact that everything Brussels hands down, whether money or regulations, gets repackaged as national policy, handed down either by the member state’s executive branch or its parliament.
Take, for example, the low emission zone in Madrid initially established in 2018. It became a central policy of the leftist city hall at the time and has remained a critical haggling point in the city’s Left-Right political divide ever since. The principal impetus for initially banning most cars from entering the heart of the capital was compliance with nitrogen emission standards set by the EU and then enforced by a ruling from the European Court of Justice. In the Netherlands, something similar is happening. The EU’s environmental standards have played a central role in the country’s ability to address its housing crisis and have created the looming possibility that many farms will be shut down by the government.
The last fifteen years—three EU election cycles—have seen EU institutions figure large both in the news cycle and major moments in recent history. Following the financial crisis of 2008, Europe’s southern half trembled before the imposition of austerity measures set by Brussels. Now, TV viewers and voters have watched, simultaneously, COVID passports and pandemic recovery funds roll down from the EU, alongside a push for an energy transition. It’s an avalanche of rules and programs that bear on the lives of EU citizens while inflating the authority of the halls of the EU. As EU policy has bloated, moving from basic common market regulations, helpful Erasmus student exchange programs, and benign energy efficiency stickers on appliances to regulations that infiltrate daily life, EU voters have taken notice of the intrigue and schemes of their own national capitals.
Elections are about a year away, so there is still plenty of time for EU voters to realise they have a date at the polls to elect members of the EU Parliament and, in turn, influence who takes up the powerful position of EU Commission President.
In fact, the number of those who knew of the election dates, 45%, marks a trend in voter awareness, up nine percentage points from 2018, when the same survey was taken a year ahead of the 2019 election. Also in that same survey, 56% of those questioned said they would vote in EU elections, six percentage points higher than one year before the last European elections.
Voter participation in EU elections, always lower than participation in national elections, has also increased recently. In 2019, it reached 50.66%, an eight percentage point increase from the previous elections in 2014, and one in which voter participation rose above the 50% mark for the first time since 1994.
The Eurobarometer also showed that Europeans are linking EU policies to quality of life issues. Those polled were most concerned about the cost-of-living crisis, with 65% reporting that they were unsatisfied with what their national governments were doing to address it and 57% disgruntled by what the EU was doing. Because of the common market, EU policy is intimately tied to energy and food prices in individual member states across the bloc. The electricity market is regulated at the EU level, and trade agreements that regulate imports and exports of meat and eggs, for example, are also decided in Brussels. The Commission’s decision to open EU borders and markets to Ukrainian imports illustrates this point.
Additional issues on Europeans’ minds that could play into EU elections are the European response to the war in Ukraine, Green Deal regulations, and migration. The slew of Green Deal regulations will hit Europeans in many ways, from the future of cars to the competitiveness of European farms.
But as the EU continues to reach into the lives of ordinary Europeans, voters are catching up and will hopefully force the EU institutions to become truly democratic.
