European integration seen by Romanian citizens and the European Parliamentary elections

The forthcoming European Parliamentary elections should be an important political event, marking another step in Romanian’s long way to European integration. Besides receiving the more or less important European Commissioner for Multilingualism post for a bureaucrat, Romania would have its legitimated voice heard in European agora. Moreover, EU sounds excellent, the May 2007 Barometer of Public Opinion revealing that EU is the third institution as degree of trust after the Church and the Army. All in all, it should be an important event. Nevertheless, here we are, two months before the elections and any debate on European issues is absent. But this is only an apparent paradox. To become important, elections need to have both a political stake and issues to debate on, aspects that miss at the moment.

The first elections to be organised in order to select the European Parliamentarians puts political parties in an incommode position. The political stake is high, but not because of policies under debate or persons to be selected, but because of the fact that they are the first electoral test before the local, general and presidential elections that will take place in the next two years. Not different than in other countries, high profile politicians are not willing to leave the national arena while less-known politicians may fail to represent an image vector strong enough to mobilize the electorate. The mid-way to be used by many parties would be to use either external personalities or to put on top of the list politicians that would subsequently retreat in order to maintain their position in the national political arena.

Moreover, the forthcoming campaign, that will focus on internal politics, is determined by the lack of internal debate regarding to different policy options configured in the European Parliament. People and politicians are unaware of the main issues under debate at EU level, and this situation has led to the state where all mainstream political parties have a similar discourse toward EU integration.

Presuming that different parties would be willing to formulate specific policies that should be promoted in the European Parliament and willing to use them in the campaign, the subject of this communication is still absent. This, previous opinion polls as well as journalistic polls showed that a vast majority of the population does not have any idea what the EU is about. The European Union is associated more with the values of democracy, economic growth and freedom of circulation than with its institutions and the institutional mechanism that approach problems in a common framework. In other words, its good to be in the EU and this should bring along all these things by the simple integration.

Todor Arpad, Pro Democracy Association

This article was published in Politeia Newsletter 46 - October 2007