WHEN TONY Blair arrives at yet another European summit
this week he’ll be able to share the burden of electoral defeat with the
other heads of state around the table.
Karl Debbaut, CWI
The 2004 European elections will be remembered for when
Europe’s ruling governments and the idea of the European Union itself,
received a ‘kick in the ballot box’. There is a widening gap between the
European establishment and the population, and it is filled with anger at
declining living standards, unemployment and self-serving deceitful
politicians.
Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD), led by Gerhard Schröder,
suffered their lowest percentage vote since 1932 when their vote fell to
21.5%. The SPD tried to remind the German public about its anti-Iraq war
stance but that did not divert attention away from the party’s
responsibility for the most brutal package of economic and social
counter-reforms since the second world war.
German state and private employers are pushing for lower
wages and a longer working week. Schröder’s SPD have been willing partners
in this concerted attack against living standards of workers and poor but
they have paid with one electoral defeat after another since they scraped
back into office in September 2002.
In France, Chirac’s ruling Union for a Popular Movement
(UMP) suffered its second electoral defeat in under three months, securing
just under 17% of the vote. The protest against welfare and pension reform
has crippled the UMP.
In France, as in Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands,
the Social Democratic parties benefited from the protest vote as the
mainstream opposition parties. In Italy, Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi’s
party, suffered a backlash while votes of the other parties of his ruling
coalition held up.
Missed opportunity
BUT THIS protest vote doesn’t represent any enthusiasm
for these parties or their policies. For example, the French working class
has vigorously opposed, on the streets and in the polling station, the
‘neo-liberal’ (ie capitalist) policies of both centre-right and centre-left
governments over the past decade.
However, the LO/LCR parties, who claim to stand on a
Trotskyist tradition, suffered a serious setback. They polled only 3.3% of
the vote and lost all five MEPs. While a short-term squeezing of the vote of
the smaller left parties can occur when voters flock to the main opposition
party, LO/LCR didn’t even raise the idea of a new workers’ party as a
socialist alternative to the capitalist parties. It was discarded as
something for after the elections but in the meantime another opportunity to
build such a party has been lost.
What is needed is an active campaign and plan of action
for the formation of a new workers’ party. Only two years ago the combined
vote of LO and LCR reached 10.4% in the first round of the presidential
elections. In January 2004 polls indicated that 9% of the French population
would vote for LO/LCR and another 22% who had never voted for the radical
left before was seriously considering it.
Such was the radicalisation under the salvo of
neo-liberal attacks from the newly elected right wing government, helped by
the fresh memory of the ousted centre-left government in 2002, that a
genuine opening existed to form a new workers’ party.
These opportunities, however, are limited in time. It is
a warning to parties like the Left Bloc in Portugal that electoral gains can
be lost when an initiative to seize political opportunities is not taken.
A workers’ Europe
MUCH HAS been made of rising voter apathy and in general
the trend has been to see a fall in voter participation for European and
national elections in Europe. The turn-out in the ten new EU countries of
Central and Eastern Europe averaged a poor 28.7% and in a clear sign of
further disillusion with the EU and its policies, a number of
representatives for eurosceptic and populist parties were rewarded with
seats in Brussels and Strasbourg.
In Poland two anti-EU parties, the Self-Defence party
and League of Polish Families together won 29% of the vote. In the Czech
Republic the unreconstructed Communist Party gained a stunning 20%, pushing
the governing Social Democrats in to third place. In Slovakia the left
populist Smer party polled 16.9%.
On average the turnout rate slumped to a record low
figure of 42.2%, well below the 49.4% recorded in the last European
elections five years ago. However, in a switch from apathy to antipathy,
voter turnout went up by 15% in the UK, 9% in the Netherlands and Ireland,
and 3% in Italy.
Especially in the UK and the Netherlands this vote also
reflected anger against the involvement of these governments in the Iraq war
and anger against their domestic anti-working class policies.
The Dutch right-wing government of PM Balkenende has
attacked almost everything: unemployment and disability benefits, affordable
health care, education, public transport, rent subsidies, refugees and now
pensions. These austerity measures have cut the average disposable income
for workers with 1,25 % in a year and unemployment is rising at a rate of
14,000 people a month.
Here, the Socialist Party (a party to the left of the
PVDA, the Dutch Labour Party, and in which CWI supporters argue for
socialist policies), polled 7%. This together with the 7.4% of the vote for
Green Left, and the 7.3% for the new anti-corruption party ‘Transparent
Europe’ of EU whistle-blower Van Buitenen, represents an important stage in
political development.
It is an example of a process that is repeating itself
in a number of European countries, ie a part of the protest vote is going to
smaller, working-class based forces to the left of the social democratic
parties.
However they are not the only ones to benefit, alongside
them populist and sometimes racist forces have succeeded in capitalising on
the mood against the capitalist establishment and its policies. The
challenge is to build existing and new formations into instruments of
working-class struggle that are able to attract wider layers to socialist
policies.
As the results in France prove, to complete this task
electoral alliances are not enough. We need to promote and fight for the
idea of a workers’ Europe on the basis of workers unity, joint action and
socialism.
Overrated, overpaid and over there
PAT COX, president of the European parliament, thinks
that people have a prejudiced view of their MEPs. "People think we’re
over here and overpaid, and people don’t get beyond that prejudice," he
lamented.
What does he mean? I thought a prejudice meant a
pre-conceived, ill-informed opinion. Let’s look at the facts.
MEPs are paid the same wage as members of the national
parliament of the country they were elected in. British MPs based in
Westminster earn a whopping £55,118 per year.
On top of that the European gravy train entitles them to
allowances that can top up incomes by more than £66,000 a year. The regime
for travel expenses for example pays each journey MEPs make according to the
most expensive airline ticket available on the market. If these people, we
treat so unfairly, then decide to fly Easyjet they pocket the difference.
Then there is the secretary allowance of £99,000 a
year, which some MEP’s choose to pay to family members. The perk most
recently exposed is the £175 daily attendance allowance. Hans Peter Martin,
an Austrian MEP now re-elected as an independent, secretly filmed MEPs
signing for a day’s work, claiming £175 and leaving for home. Nice work if
you can get it!
The Socialist Party stands for a workers’ MP on a
worker’s wage.
