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Between Thursday and Sunday every country in the European Union will stage elections for the European Parliament in Brussels. But most voters couldn’t tell you much about it. Campaigning across the continent is largely muted, and only a small minority of citizens could name either of the two leading candidates for president of the European Commission, German conservative Manfred Weber and Dutch social democrat Frans Timmermans. After forty years of existence, the EU’s only elected legislative body generates little enthusiasm among its 500 million constituents. Participation has declined steadily since the Parliament’s inception and rarely cracks 50 percent. The lack of interest is understandable. The Commission president isn’t directly elected: in fact, whatever the election results are, the “winner” will be appointed by the European Council, before this choice is ratified by Parliament. It’s quite possible the Council, made up of the leaders of national governments, will pick neither of the main candidates. Formally speaking, the European Parliament is the second-largest legislature in the world. Yet in reality its 751 members have little say in the nitty gritty of EU politics. It cannot initiate or pass EU-wide laws, but only modify or reject proposals coming from the European Commission, which is in turn appointed by the Council. This is really the crux of the matter: despite its pretensions to the contrary, the European Union is not a particularly democratic institution. Most of its powerful posts are filled by appointment from above rather than elected by the population. Especially since the fiscal reforms enacted after the 2008 financial crisis, it often functions as a mere straitjacket, preventing individual member-states from breaking with the austerity imposed by budget control measures like the European Semester program. From the outset, the structures that eventually became the EU were characterized by agreements brokered between elites, beginning with the European Coal and Steel Community drawn up by the political classes of West Germany, France, and a smattering of other states in the wake of World War II. Rather than a coherent federal entity with interlocking levels of authority, the EU has tended to grow and develop as circumstances allow, a product of improvisation and responses to external shocks. For all these reasons, voters rightly see national politics as much more immediately relevant to their lives, and most write off what happens in Brussels as little more than wasteful tinkering by out-of-touch bureaucrats. This attitude is stronger than ever following the fallout of the 2008 crisis and the ongoing economic stagnation across most of the Union. Politicians of the center speak in passionate tones about “our Europe,” but everybody knows that, for better or worse, most voters aren’t particularly interested. The political fallout of this turmoil has been a classic “crisis of representation,” whereby the traditional parties of government grow increasingly unpopular and are no longer able to command stable parliamentary majorities. The crisis has been most pronounced in countries like France, Greece, and the Netherlands where the center-left has collapsed almost entirely, clearing the way for new insurgent leaders on the Left, Right, and center. In recent years, the crisis has largely favored the populist right. Its comparatively simple, often demagogic proposals appear comparatively plausible given the EU’s perceived dysfunctionality and authoritarian tendencies. It poses as offering the most direct solutions. Nationalists have proven particularly successful in the EU’s new eastern outposts. But the revival of the far right is a continent-wide phenomenon that cannot be written off as a by-product of culture or economic frustration. Some countries like Germany, Europe’s de facto leader, remain comparatively stable, but here as well the traditional parties have watched their support plummet and the formation of new parties to their left and right. Democracy in Europe has grown increasingly hollow, its institutional fusion of technocratic austerity-by-decree and largely symbolic social liberalism representing perhaps the best example of what the late Peter Mair described as “ruling the void.” One might have thought this would also have created favorable circumstances for the radical left, represented largely by the Party of the European Left and the GUE/NGL parliamentary group. Given EU’s political atrophy and economic stagnation, it might seem that a message of social solidarity and democratization across European borders should be able find a receptive audience. But with a few exceptions, in the run up to the elections this does not seem to be the case.

What’s Left? The situation in 2019 clashes with what we saw in the first post-crisis years, a time of immense material suffering but also political hope. Popular albeit diffuse mass movements for social change sprang up across the continent, and even as elites pushed through breakneck austerity, it at least felt as if popular anger was mounting. This discontent found electoral expression in the stunning rise of Podemos in Spain (growing from nowhere to 8 percent in 2014) and Syriza in Greece, (soaring from 4.6 percent in 2009 to 36.3 percent in 2015). Indeed, the radical left as a whole improved its results in the 2014 European elections, moving from 4.6 to 6.9 percent. Five years later, that feels like ancient history. The brief, exhilarating hope the Left took in Alexis Tsipras’s election as Greek prime minister in 2015 soon gave way to frustration, disillusionment, and strategic drift following his government’s defeat by the Troika and the social devastation that has continued ever since. Nowhere has the Left really been able to push back against austerity, and in the few countries where it has a role in government it rarely manages to do more than mitigate its effects. Particularly in the EU’s newer eastern members, the parties of the Left are often hopelessly marginalized. They are also divided between different political projects. The GUE/NGL includes all manner of affiliates, from Communist parties to Greens and even animal rights groups, though it lost the backing of Greece’s orthodox Communist Party, KKE, in 2014. It also includes Syriza, whose presence — and failure — has given rise to two other initiatives, namely the “Now the People!” alliance between Podemos, France Insoumise, and Portugal’s Left Bloc, and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s European Spring initiative. They have yet to create formal groups in Brussels apart from GUE/NGL and are unlikely to do so, as they would need MEPs from at least seven countries.