Inside Europe: Protest Vote Likely to Grow in European Parliament’s Next Elections

BRUSSELS — In the diplomatic parlor games popular in Brussels, few issues are generating more gossip or being talked about more animatedly than next year’s elections to the European Parliament.

They may be 11 months away, but anyone following European affairs closely knows the vote has the potential to shake the ground under the political establishment and bring about a fundamental shift in the balance of power in Europe. Frustration with how leaders have handled the economic crisis over the past three years, coupled with rising populism, has raised expectations that the anti-E.U. vote will surge in the polls.

That would undermine the traditional blocs, which range across the political spectrum but for the most part are in favor of the Union. And because they will be the first European elections since the introduction of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, which gave the Parliament additional powers, it means the outcome will directly influence the appointment of the Union’s most important jobs.

“Most people I’ve talked to are predicting that parties on the extreme wings of the politics of Europe, both the far right and the far left, will pick up seats in this election,” said William Kennard, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union for the past four years.

“There is a not-insignificant prospect that the populists, particularly on the far right, will have more influence in the Parliament than they’ve had in this particular term, and I think that could affect politics in an interesting way,” he added.

If there was any complacency about the potential impact of the vote, which takes place in all 28 E.U. member states from May 22 to 25 next year, it was displaced recently by Britain’s Nigel Farage, the leader of the rightist, anti-E.U. party U.K. Independence Party.

“There is a gathering electoral storm. It’s coming on the left, on the center and on the right,” he warned the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, as he addressed the full European Parliament. “The European elections next year present the opportunity to show you, Mr. Barroso, that the European project is reversible and it needs to be reversed for the betterment of the peoples of Europe.”

A year is an extremely long time in politics, and there is every likelihood that electoral predictions made now will prove to have been dramatically off-base come April or May next year. But polling conducted by Gallup and research by Debating Europe, a youth politics group, point to two trends that could prove important: Turnout may be substantially higher next year than in the past, and the youth vote may be much stronger.

At every poll since the first direct elections to the European Parliament were held in 1979, turnout has fallen, dropping to just 43 percent for the last vote in 2009. But in a survey carried out in May, Gallup found 68 percent of Britons said they would vote if the elections were held next week, double the British turnout for the 2009 ballot. The figures were similar for France, with the survey finding 73 percent of French were ready to vote this time, versus 40 percent in 2009.

Gallup also found increasing disapproval in most large E.U. countries over the direction in which Europe is moving, suggesting that many of those who do turn up to vote could cast anti-Union ballots or go against how they have voted in the past. Add to that the prospect of hundreds of thousands of young people who have never voted before turning up at the polls, especially those who are unemployed and frustrated.

“Young people are angry, and they want to have a voice,” Adam Nyman, the director of Debating Europe, said earlier this year. “I don’t think they will shy away from the next election.”

No one knows how large the anti-Union vote will be, but speculating about it has become a favorite Brussels pastime. Some see a 25 percent to 30 percent “protest vote” as possible, a figure that alarms sitting members of the Parliament, who tend to break the issue down into individual member states, where anti-Union or protest parties have their national quirks.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/business/global/09iht-inside09.html?partner=rss&emc=rss