European Parliament Hemicycle © Europa.eu

Time Magazine called 2024 “the ultimate election year”. Certainly, there are a lot of electorates around that have been trying (or will shortly try) to decide who they want to represent them, if anyone. Only one thing is certain: a very large percentage of them will come to regret whatever choice they make and will end up feeling let down. Democracy may be immeasurably better than the kind of rule imposed by, say, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, for instance, but it’s still far from perfect. Even Putin is up for election, although in Russia the poll is so fixed and carefully arranged that there is no way he can lose. It’s not really an election at all but rather a rubber stamp job. The problem is, of course, that looking at the world as a whole, no two people want exactly the same thing, and nor do they agree on the right course of action to solve any particular problem. By the end of this year, more people will have cast a vote than has ever happened before in just one year. But that doesn’t guarantee they’ll all get a genuinely free choice (they certainly won’t in Russia, Iran, China or several other places I could mention, for instance), or that they will choose wisely, nor, for that matter, that they won’t regret whatever decision they make. If aliens from another planet ever want to invade Earth, this would be a good year in which to do it. After all, they can hardly make a bigger mess of it than our Earthly politicians have done.

For a number of years, I reported on radio, television and in print on the activities of the EU, especially the European Parliament. I worked for various audiovisual and print media in several countries and I enjoyed it. I even came to admire some (but not all!) of those elected representatives striving to make it all work, even though there were some who were trying to prevent it from working. I certainly didn’t admire them. There were a few MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) who fell into that category, but not that many, I’m pleased to say. The elections of 2024 (European and otherwise) threw up a lot of bizarre results, nowhere more so than in France, where the far-right National Rally party of Marine Le Pen attracted more than twice as many votes as the party of the President, Emmanuel Macron, leaving him feeling that he should call a snap election. Even in Hungary there was a surprise, with the notoriously corrupt governing party, Fidesz, losing a lot of ground to a new party, Tisza, led by a former Fidesz official.

Let’s take a look back at where and why the European Union began. The European Parliament started out as the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) before it was turned into the European Parliamentary Assembly (EPA). It was never going to be easy and there could be no happy ending. From the outset, the High Authority (fore-runner of the European Commission) often failed to meet the targets it set itself. Right back at the start, it bottled out of dismantling the cartels that ran the coal industry and it failed to obtain the assent of the Council to declare a manifest crisis in 1959, leaving it without the necessary powers to handle a coal shortage. But that was a long time ago. Back then, a great many people took no interest in electing representatives at a European level, believing that the Parliamentary Assembly was too weak to make much difference. As a result, when people did vote it tended – understandably – to be on the basis of national interests, rather than European. However, when attending a present-day celebration commemorating the creation of the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community way back in 1952, Roberta Metsola, the current President, reminded her audience that the Assembly has evolved into “the only directly elected multilingual, multi-party, transnational parliament in the world.” 72 years later, surely that is something worth celebrating? Not in the UK, perhaps, where a slim majority of voters listened to the right-wing and nationalist newspapers and politicians and chose to leave the organisation instead. Conservative politician Boris Johnson, an eager self-publicist, claimed the “credit” for that, although exactly why he considers it something of which to be proud is unclear, looking at the damage it caused to Britain’s economy and to the free movement of its citizens.

However, the European Parliament does have some achievements to boast about since that day, 19 March 1952, when the European Parliamentary Assembly held its first constituent
session. It has been largely successful, whatever the far right may say. Being nationalists, they seldom award credit to any multinational bodies of which their country may be a member, which is why there are calls to quit the European Convention for Human Rights. The European Parliament may, therefore, be considered an important democratic institution, but many European voters choose to ignore its elections, viewing the Parliament’s powers as inferior to those of the various national parliaments, a view that could be said to have some merit. This has been a problem ever since before I started reporting on it. The parties represented there still find themselves largely unable to sway public opinion much. What I found was that many voters viewed the European Parliament as relatively unimportant and so they could register a protest vote for some party they’d never normally support without it affecting their lives much. In that belief they were, of course, wrong, although that may be why the far right did relatively well in the most recent elections. Interestingly, that’s not the view of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in the United States. In his superb book, “Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy”, he stresses (among many other things), that employment is far more important than the austerity so beloved of European Commission officials. Incidentally, Stiglitz’s excellent analyses of the problems and possible solutions is so masterly that the book should, perhaps, be compulsory reading for anyone seeking high office in the European Union. He describes growth in the EU since the financial crisis of 2008 as “anaemic and fragile”, with joblessness still “unacceptably high across much of the EU”, while the Union’s leaders remain too concerned with the possible future costs of debt and deficits. Stiglitz reminds readers that “long periods of unemployment have destroyed human and social capital”. What he writes makes complete sense, although it will probably be ignored by Europe ‘s leaders. He points out in his book, published in 2020, that at the end of 2017, unemployment in Greece stood at a very worrying 21.5% and in Spain at 16.5% and that a lot of those put out of work (many of them young and therefore fairly new to the jobs market) remained without jobs for a long time.

The European Parliament has endeavoured to make better contact with civil society by engaging in dialogue with various associations and non-governmental organisations, including trades unions and even churches. The aim has been to fashion a Europe that is closer to its people, but the most recent elections have seen support for far-right parties increasing. Even so, it was the centre-right European People’s Party, the EPP, that secured control of the new Chamber with the greatest number of votes. Parliament President Roberta Metsola told EuroNews that “it looks like the constructive, pro-European centre has held.” The far-right has done well, but not well enough to change things materially, nor to tilt things in favour of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s ambitious president, who apparently likes to give support to extremists.

The European Parliament has certainly had of some important achievements. Take freedom of movement, for instance, which is a vital part of the Common Market. It still is, despite fears (which are encouraged by a largely right-wing press) about immigration. That’s 500-million people able to live, study or work anywhere. Some 14-million citizens live in countries other than those in which they originated. It also created the enormous single market, which has resulted in the EU’s GDP for last year reaching $16.5-trillion (€15.3-trillion). It also abolished the death penalty in 1983, following the lead of the less politically powerful Council of Europe, and cleaned up Europe’s beaches, along with a lot of other environmental improvements. Sadly, that clean-up has not included the UK, of course, where raw sewage has now found its way into water and even into a lovely and popular tourist attraction like Lake Windermere, as a result of which the largest body of fresh water (well, theoretically “fresh”, just not very) in the English Lake District is now heavily polluted. As a child, I was often taken there in the summer by my parents for a holiday. I loved it then; it’s a very beautiful place. However, a comedian recently made the joke (not very funny, really) that these days people don’t so much swim in Windermere as just go through the motions. I should point out here that the European Parliament’s record is by no means all positive and progressive. For instance, when the European Commission proposed limited structural reforms to the banking industry in October 2017, the idea came up against very fierce and well-funded lobbying by an industry opposed to change (at least, to any change that might impact on its excessively generous profits) and under pressure from the banks and their senior executives, MEPs rejected the proposed reform, which meant that in future large banks could only be wound down through the work of regulators and supervisors, and probably not without crashing the whole financial system, according to Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz.

But of course it’s not only in Europe that people have been voting. 2024 has been the year of the plebiscite all over the world, not always fairly. For instance, back in January in Bangla Desh Prime minister Sheikh Hasina won a fifth term of office in an election that also witnessed a massive crackdown on the opposition and a voter turn-out of only a little more than 40%. Voting could prove unsafe for voters. In El Salvador back in February, Prime minister President Nayib Bukele won a big majority as voters rewarded him for cracking down on gangs that had made the country a very hazardous place to live.

In Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev won his fifth term with over 90% of votes in an election described as neither free nor fair. In February, Indonesia saw the election of Prabowo Subianto, a 72-year-old former general who was dismissed from the military after being accused of kidnapping and torture in the 1990s.

Isn’t politics fun? In Belarus, opposition leader Maria Kolesnikova remains in jail and at the time of writing, no-one (apart from her captors, one assumes) seems sure if she is still alive. Longtime dictator Alexander Lukashenko remains in charge there, although no-one knows how much power he still wields. He is still on terms of close friendship with Vladimir Putin, however, who may be the one who is actually calling the shots. Iran, not known for its allegiance to democracy, saw elections (well, sort-of…) for the parliament (Majlis) and the Assembly of Experts, the body which chooses the Supreme Leader. There was a turnout of just 41%, the lowest since the 1979 Islamic revolution that put the clerical rulers in power eternally. Here, we reach March, when Putin claimed a landslide victory, leading to his re-election as president with what is claimed to be 87.28% of the vote in the biggest turn-out in Russian history. The figures are ludicrous, of course, and Putin, as usual, is exaggerating quite a lot. One might even say “lying”. Nobody turns out in such impressive numbers when the result is pre-fixed as it generally is in Russia’s case.

| BALLOTS VERSUS BULLETS

There were a great number of elections, all over the world with some still to come, but I don’t intend to list them all. Suffice it to say that Germany’s far right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), did quite well in the European elections but not as well as they had hoped, winning most votes in the former East Germany, while more traditionalist centre parties like the Christian Democrat Union (CDU) did better overall, especially in the West. So, nothing to frighten the horses, then. At least, not yet, although the Green party did particularly badly. Even so, the centre-right CDU and its Bavarian cousin, the Christian Social Union (CSU), were successful.

The one thing that seems to be universally true is that voters are, by and large, fed up with the choices they’re offered. In the UK, for instance, groups of dissatisfied voters have been getting together to bemoan their millionaire prime minister and his even richer wife. They say they feel estranged from it all and probably won’t vote when their turn comes. AP News reports that In a coffee shop in Jakarta, meanwhile, 46-year-old Ni Wayan Suryatini, moaned about the recent election there, in which the son of Indonesia’s former president rose to become his country’s vice president, while the opposition parties seemed to make little attempt to stop him. AP reported Suryatini saying: “It is difficult to trust them since they only want to reach their goals. As long as they achieve those goals, they will forget everything else.” Meanwhile in her Colorado gift shop, Sally Otto told AP that she dreaded the upcoming US presidential election between President Joe Biden and the man he defeated in 2020, former President Donald Trump: “I feel like we’re back where we were, with the same two poor choices,” she complained. Not so much a voting machine, then, as a time machine. Electioneering pamphlets have been coming through my door, but a cursory glance demonstrates amply that the candidates have learned nothing and have no plans for advancing progress. All they want is to keep their jobs.

Certainly, the various elections around the world have brought a few surprises. For instance, Prabowo Subianto will become the president of Indonesia later this year. There are very real fears that this former general, who served under a previous authoritarian government, will reduce democracy in the country even though Prabowo was trained and supported by Washington before he was banned even from entering the US for twenty years.

These are not only the most numerous elections the world has yet seen, they are also turning out to be the strangest and, perhaps, the most surprising. The fact is that the world has changed and too many leaders are acting as if everything is just the way it was. Nowhere is that truer than in Europe, where the super-rich can still revel in their luxury while most of us are struggling. Stiglitz recommends a strongly progressive income tax to eliminate the incentive for high-wealth residents to move to low-tax jurisdictions. Alternatively, he suggests a 15% surtax on everyone with an annual income in excess of, say, €100,000. He makes a comparison with the United States.

The EU budget is very small at just 1% of the EU’s GDP, while the budget of the US Federal government in 2018 came to 21% of GDP. That’s a very wide gap, although Stiglitz is not convinced that the US has everything right either. He praises Europe’s “social model” though, saying that Europe’s generosity didn’t cause the financial crisis. That was the fault of excesses in the financial sector. Indeed, the subtitle of Stiglitz’s book is “as agenda for growth and shared prosperity”. Don’t expect bankers to vote for that, of course.

Eastern Europe has been a border region for centuries, with pagans fighting Christians, Catholics fighting their Orthodox equivalents and subsequently Christians fighting Muslims, with Poland adopting its supposed place defending the so-called Antemurale Christianitatis, the “Bulwark of Christendom”, alongside Albania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary and various others. East and West often see things differently: in East Germany the far right came out of the election in the lead but only came fourth in the West.

| IN, OUT, SHAKE IT ALL ABOUT

India has the world’s largest democratic electorate, of course, and the election there took six weeks to complete. It involved counting 640-million votes. The governing Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi won 240 seats, but that fell short of the 272 seats that would have represented victory in the Lok Sabha, or Lower House, which has a total of 543 seats.

Overall, however, the BJP, together with its allies, still secured a majority. The main opposition party, India Alliance, led by the India National Congress party secured 232 seats. India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, boasts a total of eighty parliamentary constituencies, having a population of more than 240-million people. Results there tend to dictate who rules in New Delhi. There, the Samajwadi Party (SP) has won 37 seats, compared with just 6 for their allies, Congress party, which totals 43 for the India Alliance.

As Al Jazeera reported: “the partnership between the SP and the Congress worked better this time than in the past, adding that the chemistry between SP leader Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi was stronger ‘and it percolated downwards’.” Indeed, the overall outcome of the various plebiscites across the world has held quite a number of surprises. In the European elections, Germany saw some of the biggest, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats getting just 14% of the votes, while the far right seems to have attracted a lot of young voters (presumably too young to remember the Nazis or to have visited such ghastly places as Auschwitz).

The Greens did especially badly and were the big losers in Europe while the far right can afford to celebrate the most. Even Belgium saw some shocks in its federal elections, too, with Alexander De Croo resigning as Prime Minister after his Open VLD, a Liberal Flemish party, lost half its seats in the federal parliament.

The biggest winner there was Bart De Wever, who leads the New Flemish Alliance, a national-Conservative party. He wants to transfer more power to Belgium’s regions and may get that chance if, as seems likely at the time of writing, he becomes Prime Minister.

The big issue in this EU election has been immigration, which is already dominating the discussions ahead of a general election in the UK. In France, it caused the downfall of Emmanuel Macron, the far right snatching his party’s votes. It’s nothing new. Back in the 15^th century, Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince, advocated lying for politicians as a way to progress, on the basis that the people a political candidate needs to appeal to will appreciate it.

“It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil,” he wrote in his Discorsi Supra la Prima Dec di Tito Livio, between 1513 and 1517, “and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.” He was horribly correct in that, it seems. The general public may like to think of themselves as warm-hearted and welcoming, but this is all too often not the case. Machiavelli believed in strong measures, with death for one’s enemies, so that they couldn’t annoy one again. He also wrote in The Prince that honesty was a dangerous policy for a leader.

Perhaps that’s why Boris Johnson is trying to make a come-back, despite being recently described as a “comical dishonest buffoon”, taking much of the blame for the decline of Britain’s Conservative Party, even if a lot of Conservatives seem to see him as “just a bit of a lad”, which shows how seriously they take it all. Immigration, though, still seems to dominate the thinking of many voters. In a recent British television debate, the first question asked by a member of the public was “what are you going to do about all the immigrants?” Things are very different in Scotland, however, where Scottish government policy says: “Migration is crucial to the development of Scotland as an inclusive, fair, prosperous, innovative country ready and willing to embrace the future.”

In Brussels, which must be one of the most multi-cultural and multi-national cities in Europe, discrimination remains an issue. It’s a point raised in the New European newspaper by journalist Linda A. Thompson, with non-Belgians who live close to the EU institutions being labelled “ex-pats”, while those who come to Brussels to live from places like North Africa get called “migrants”. That’s a considerable distinction.

With Europe’s elections behind us, we must turn to face the plebiscite in the United States. Who will be chosen as the next president? It seems to be a choice between the incumbent, Joe Biden, who is rather elderly, and the former president, Donald Trump, still facing 34 felony charges for paying hush-money to Stormy Daniels (real name Stephanie Clifford), a porn actress with whom he allegedly had sex. It’s not something Trump admits, although the jury was unanimous in convicting him.

He has accused them all of being secret Biden supporters and he has similarly attacked the judge. Even so, he will probably win the election, even without being cleared, and move back to the White House as the only condemned felon ever to have lived there. Politics is a funny business, although you may not feel like laughing. However corrupt it is in certain places, however, it has to be better than a Putin-style pretend-democracy and the dictatorships that mar too much of the world of politics. However disillusioned you may feel, it’s still important to vote. Just don’t expect massive change for the better as a result.