Quite in a favor

Pan-European electoral list on the wishlist again

He is „quite in a favor” of a pan-European list for the European Parliament (EP) elections, said the European Commission’s President in his State of the Union speech. Given that he wanted to attempt the impossible and reconcile the whole continent in an hour, Jean-Claude Juncker really needed to say so. And the relatively safe topic of a transnational list was indeed a good idea for this purpose. However, it’s a bit ironic that just a day before his speech, the proposal was put on the waitlist by the EP itself.

The Parliament has been trying to set up a pan-European constituency for more than twenty years. The dream has always been modest, suggesting only an addition to the existing Member State-based system, with seats ranging from 25 places up to 10 percent of the total number of MEPs. But as it has always been the case with ideas labelled too federalist, the proposals were shortly turned down.

A ray of hope has started to emerge recently with the Brexit, given that 73 seats will soon be free, therefore the pan-European constituency would be created without hurting national interests. On the top of that, there came the self-proclaimed savior of Europe, French President Emmanuel Macron and called for a transnational list.

If we look away from the fact that Macron has a very strong motivation to interfere in the affairs of the EP because he needs legitimize his brand new political party LREM at the European scene as well, the proposal is a good one. A lot of us wish to have as many euros as many times we have heard complaints about the democratic deficit of the EU. Setting up a moderate-sized pan-European electoral list would be a meaningful step for strengthening the democratic legitimacy. Especially now, that Macron and Juncker have ambitious (and let’s admit, sometimes quite contradictory) plans for deepening the European integration.

So, it seemed for a while to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to launch the project. But what happened instead? Basically nothing. Old reflexes hinder the plan over and over again. One doesn’t even need to read the news to guess how the playbook goes. The ALDE and the Greens push hard for the concept, recalling that it has never happened before that Member States (France and to a lesser extent Italy) asked for transnational lists. But when it’s about to take a step further, there comes the good old political compromise. As long as the Brexit is done, there is too much legal and political uncertainty, so we should wait, concludes the recently debated report on the future composition of EP. Therefore, the seats could only be redistributed after the Brits are gone.

There exists an other magic word that we wish to change to euros: incrementalism. We say we are in a favor of the ever-closer union, but when it’s about to decide, we always temper our tone. So, one just shouldn’t really bother about Juncker’s nice ideas about merging presidencies and Eurozone for all. It was a decent speech. Yes, indeed, we are quite in favor of it. Maybe ten years later, we will take some of its elements into consideration. That’s all, folks.