European elections: lack of interest by the media
The European Parliament plays a major role in enacting 70-80% of the legislation of Member States of the European Union, and its role is about to get even bigger when the Lisbon Treaty finally gets adopted.
Between the 4th and 7th of June, European citizens were invited to elect new MEPs (Members of the European Parliament), but indicators show a disappointing turnout: only 43.09% of electors went to the poll stations.
The media have called it a lack of interest of citizens, but aren’t they themselves, along with politicians, at fault?
Disclaimer: I can only truly speak for Belgium, as I was not present in other Member States at the time of the campaign. What I observed may nevertheless ring true for many other Member States, as the general idea present in both physical and digital media is that “citizens don’t care about Europe”.
How the campaign took place
In Belgium, the European elections were held on 7 July, a Sunday, but Belgian also held its regional elections that same day. These are elections for the “Regions”, a bit like the German “Länder” and the American “States”. There are three regions: Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia.
The media focussed their efforts on the regional elections, to a point where they had an average of five pages discussing the regional campaign, and only the occasional page on the importance of the European Parliament.
Politicians plastered walls with posters, but (surprise, surprise) most of them (probably 90%) concerned the regional elections.
There was only one field in which the European campaign took great proportions: a duel between to heavy weights of Belgian politics, Jean-Luc Dehaene (former prime minister, with a long history of activity in the European institutions) and Guy Verhofstadt (former prime minister, nowadays still the most popular politician in Flanders). This duel, however, was only discussed at length in the Flemish media, not in the French-speaking media, as the two politicians are Flemish.
All in all, the European campaign was completely dwarfed in Belgium by the regional campaign, despite the fact that the same parties were presenting themselves to both elections.
Role of the Regions and of the European Parliament
Given how the campaign took place, it’s important to take a look at the importance of both levels of power. Surely, if the regional campaign takes such proportions, it must mean that the Regions have a greater role to play… right?
The Regions in Belgium have competence for certain rules pertaining to public infrastructure, taxation, tourism, energy, employment, …
The European Parliament has competence is the great majority of fields of competence of the European Community, from rules pertaining to trade to energy, from consumer rights to certain fields of criminal law.
As can be easily seen, there is overlap.
There is a “principle of subsidiarity” in European law, which requires that the European Community act only if action would be better at the European level. This principle is not always fully enforced, and it means that there are both fields in which the European Community acts that would be better regulated at national level, and fields in which the countries refuse action by the European Community, despite the fact that it would be better to act at that level.
As such, there are many fields in which Regions are competent that are regulated at the European level, and the European Parliament plays nowadays a crucial role in adopting this legislation. As I mentioned before, the European Community enacts 70-80% of the legislation of Member States of the European Union. 70-80%!
One can therefore easily expect that Regions have seen their degree of initiative drastically reduced over the years, to the point where most of the major decisions on principles are taken at the European level.
In light of this, the lack of coverage of the European elections in the Belgian media seems to be completely absurd: why waste so much time speaking about the regional elections, when far more important decisions will be made by the European Parliament?
Why this lack of interest?
It seems that the European Community is suffering from its own success: it has had such an impact on our everyday lives that it has become both invisible and a scapegoat.
The abolition of barriers within the Community has perhaps been the greatest achievement of the European Community in the past 50 years, and it has become such that European citizens only realise what they have when they go outside the EU. To illustrate, in the majority of EU countries, we have the Euro, a single currency. We have the Schengen area, which eliminates the need for border passport checks. We can order products from the other side of the EU with virtually no added cost. Within Europe, we have become so used to this that the action of the European Community has become invisible.
When Europe shows its hand, however, people feel frustrated, as if they have lost control of things. This showed during the adoption of the controversial Bolkestein Directive, where (irrational) fear of losing national jobs caused massive protest throughout the EU, and it shows in many discussions relating to immigration: many conservative minds feel that the loss of sovereignty of Member States is a bad thing, and they therefore blame every problem relating to immigration on “Brussels”, a convoluted bureaucracy.
Because of this dual character, Europe is not often seen positively by citizens these days. Furthermore, outside of Belgium, many feel that Europe is foreign, as it is seated in Brussels, a city that does not belong to their own country. The European Community is therefore more distant that one’s own government and parliament.
Why perpetuate this lack of interest?
The big question I have for the European media is this: if the citizens are not interested in Europe, for a number of reasons I find unfortunate, why do the media perpetuate this lack of interest by giving priority to other matters? Is it for fear of losing readership?
This European election has got me convinced that the problem lies not in Europe nor in its citizens, but in its media: the amount of information given to the citizen does not correspond to reality. The reason the citizen is ignorant of European affairs is that he/she does not receive this information from the media, his/her first source for similar information!
The US elections of 2008 taught us one thing: if a politician can speak to citizens, be felt as real and tangible, the citizens will respond. The media, both physical and digital, are the easiest way to attest reality and tangibility of politics.
The greatest way for Europe to be felt as real and tangible is thus for the media to serve this purpose.
If anyone is to blame for the all time low in turnout to these elections, it is therefore the media.
Get off your backside then, European media. Stop shying from the importance of Europe.
Hopefully, the next elections will be better covered, and citizens will realise the importance of Europe in their everyday lives.
/end of rant