I don’t want to be a bore about voter turnout (it did, at least, generate a bit of a debate here), but it’s important that the numbers are not misrepresented on Monday. A low turnout will provide the Eurosceptics with lots of ammunition, but what will a high turnout, specifically in Britain and Ireland, tell us? That these peculiar island peoples have changed tack and no longer wish to bite the hands that wish to feed them? Not quite.
Everything suggests that there’s been a significant uptick in Britain and Ireland in the level of voter interest in this year’s elections, but it must be stressed that this has nothing to do with the European Parliament. What’s happening is that voters on one side of the Irish Sea want to tell governing MPs what they think about their abuse of expenses and, on the other, to rebuke governing TDs for their negligence of the economy.
It would be exaggerating things to say that voters are straining at the leash to get at those ballot boxes, but they are very, very angry and as a result we could be looking at turnouts in the heady region of 45 percent in the UK and 65 percent in Ireland. The numbers for 2004 were 38.9 percent and 59.7 percent respectively.
“Voter rage“, to coin a term, will cause a lot of people punish the main parties in Britain and Ireland this time round. Something’s seriously wrong with British and Irish politics and the European Parliament elections have come just at the right time to send a message to our masters, as it were.
The paradox of all this, though, is that Brussels-based MEPs will end up being held to account for the wrongdoings of members of the Dáil and the House of Commons. This is hardly what the purpose of the exercise is supposed to be, right? And another thing: the results of these elections will lead to far greater fallout in London and Dublin than in Brussels. Again, unintended consequences.
So, keep all that in mind when the big numbers are flashed up on the screens on Sunday evening. And remember, too, that it is the outrage at misdeeds in two national parliaments that will lead to dramatic changes in the make up of a European parliament. Democracy is truly a marvellous and a perplexing creature.
(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
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Hi Eamonn,
So are you sticking with your 32% turnout forecast? Or is this post just taking out some insurance in case turnout is higher?
People vote (or don’t vote) in all elections for all sorts of weird reasons which have little to do with the formal jobs the candidates are seeking to be elected to or the policies their parties purport to support.
People vote for candidates they can identify with, because a they think a candidate is cool, handsome, sexy, because they are angry about losing their job or something the candidates can do nothing about.
Politics isn’t an entirely rational process, and you can point to all sorts of factors (e.g. the weather) which influence elections which have nothing to do with the formal purpose of the election itself.
Does that invalidate the electoral process or the results? The same factors could have influenced previous elections as well. So the more valid metric is the trend.
If the overall turnout is up - that’s good news if you support the democratic process. If it’s down from the previous comparable election - then we have to look for underlying systemic reasons.
There is no doubt in my mind that the EU is losing traction in the popular imagination. The debacle over the Constitution and Lisbon is a large part of that. But the bigger problem is that there isn’t a shared vision for the EU should be going any more.
Do we want to see an emergent United States of Europe, or a return to Nation states with greater autonomy. And regardless of what vision we have, how can we make it happen given the constitutional constraints the EU is currently labouring under?
Frank, I’ll stick with 32 percent for the simple reason that the high turnouts in Ireland and Britain will be offset by low turnouts elsewhere. But I agree with your sentiment and I hope that the results will lead to an honest assessment of how national and pan-national parliaments can co-exist in Europe.
Eamonn,
I agree with you. If voter turn-out is higher than predicted in these elections, my feeling is that it will be because of “voter rage.”
Frank, you’re right that in general it’s difficult to predict exactly why people vote, but I think in this case we have a pretty clear reason. People will be voting to punish their governments. They will be voting on national issues, not European issues.
The vote is divided (the issues are national) but the politics are united (the EU takes European decisions). Exactly right, Frank - we need to decide what Europe is going to become.
What really surprises me is the very low turnouts in the more recent member states in Eastern Europe. You would have expected them to appreciate democracy more. The EU went out on a limb to admit - e.g. Romania - before, arguably, it really met all the criteria. And what does it get by way of thanks? A 25% turnout?
Ok - voting isn’t about saying thanks, but it is about engaging and participating. Why should the EU pgo to the trouble of devising structural funds to assist Romanian development if Romanian’s themselves don’t really seem to care?
I would really like to engage with Romanian bloggers on this here, because if Romania is sending the EU a message, I’m not really sure what it is or how we should interpret it.
How much of the decline in % turnout in the EU is down to this low participation rate amongst recent entrants? How much is it down to global trends? It seems that the freedoms of democracy our forebears fought so hard to achieve are now being taken for granted, and people can’t be bothered any more.
It’s easy to blame leaders for this and that. But ultimately a democracy is about taking personal responsibility for doing something about it. Maybe that moral message has become diluted over time. But I have little time for people who whinge about the EU when they can’t even be bothered to vote.
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