Illustration by Peter Schrank

ON BILLBOARDS across Europe, blue posters have popped up alerting citizens to the forthcoming elections to the European Parliament. The posters, parliament's own initiative, make a reasonable stab at a hard task: explaining what is at stake when voters go to the polls between June 4th and 7th. Nobody wins or loses a European election. Instead, the outcome fixes the relative weights of the biggest political blocks, which range from a mushy centre-right to a squishy centre-left, with a woolly Liberal coalition in the middle. One poster asks “How much should we tame financial markets?” and pictures a fierce lion next to a winsome cat. Yet the balanced nature of the image is not quite right. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) love regulating things: most would like the markets domesticated, and some want them spayed and declawed as well.

The posters seem sure to fail in their main aim: persuading Europeans to vote. Average turnout has fallen in every election, from 63% in 1979 to 46% in 2004, even though the parliament's importance has grown. It will gain still more powers if the Lisbon treaty comes into force next year. Yet a recent Eurobarometer poll found that just 34% are likely to vote this time (and previous such polls have overestimated turnout).

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, declared last month that turnout would “depend largely on how positively we speak about Europe and the reform process” in the new treaty. Alas, such high-minded talk is undermined by the election posters hung from every second Berlin lamppost by his own Social Democrats. These depict the Free Democrats as grinning “financial sharks”, the Left Party as hairdryers blowing hot air and the Christian Democrats as “wage crushers”, symbolised by a wilting coin. They do not mention the Lisbon treaty.

Other leaders decry the practice of packing the European Parliament with failed politicians and cronies. France must “send its best” to Europe, pledged President Nicolas Sarkozy. Once elected, MEPs should serve out their full terms, he added. Yet Michel Barnier, running the European campaign for Mr Sarkozy's ruling UMP party, is not expected to take up his seat. He is a figurehead who hopes instead to be picked as France's next European commissioner. Another top UMP candidate, Rachida Dati, is being sent to Strasbourg in disgrace after failing as justice minister. The French Socialist Party is as bad, handing safe spots on its list to figures from all its factions, regardless of merit. Both parties have dumped hard-working current MEPs for party barons.

In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi was widely reported to have chosen eight models and soap-opera actresses to run for his People of Freedom party. His wife called the idea “shameless” (he now says it was never his plan). In the end, he chose a single ex-beauty queen to run, while accusing other parties of favouring “smelly” and “badly dressed” candidates. In Britain, the opposition Conservatives base their campaign on a demand that the Labour government hold a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. The campaign is in reality about the next general election: MEPs have no powers over national referendums.

Ask MEPs to explain the voters' indifference and they often mention such national antics. More and more, complains a leading German MEP, national politicians “resolve their domestic disputes by sending people to the European Parliament who know nothing about Europe.” A senior Belgian sighs that the work of MEPs rarely interests the press. National politics are full of “personalities”, he explains. But the real work of the European Parliament is carried out in its committees. Its debates, in which many speeches are limited to 60 seconds, are a “series of monologues”. Lots of MEPs grumble that the press is obsessed with scandals over parliamentary expenses or perks (which, they hasten to add, happen everywhere).

There are structural reasons why European elections do not thrill voters from such countries as Britain, France and Spain, where elections can turn out governments overnight. To draw an economic analogy, the House of Commons is a free-market body, in which winners take all, brilliant speeches can make careers and power can shift with brutal speed. The European Parliament is a corporatist assembly, in which big parties rule by consensus and horse-trading, office is awarded by rotation and grandees have safe berths. Enoch Powell, a British politician, used to say that all political lives end in failure. In the European Parliament political lives end in the constitutional-affairs committee.

Worse than dull

But the parliament is worse than dull: it does not work properly. Like a student union, only with better expenses, it spends an inordinate amount of time on subjects way outside its mandate, such as foreign policy and defence. Its views can betray an undergraduate lack of realism: in the words of one Brussels diplomat, “that place is one big fucking NGO.” And its members can be loopily intolerant of dissent. At one Brussels dinner, Charlemagne heard MEPs howling “make him stop”, when a British Conservative ventured to suggest that the single currency might fall apart.

Funnily enough, Eurosceptics and federalists are often the parliament's clearest-eyed analysts. “Very few members give the impression that this place is their life,” laments Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Franco-German Green. He would like to see a third of the parliament's members elected on pan-European lists, to create a “European public space”. It is hard to see that working: it would mean campaigning in 23 languages and 27 countries, all with different political cultures. To Eurosceptics, the answer is instead to return more powers to national parliaments. Both federalists and sceptics agree on one thing, though: the present set-up lacks legitimacy. They are right.





Economist.com/blogs/charlemagne