The next European elections are just around the corner. They have been moved forward from June to May 2014 to avoid coinciding with the celebration of Whit Sunday–which is a holiday in some of the EU’s Member States–and with the exodus of early Summer vacationists. Anything is possible if it is to increase electoral participation that has been decreasing even as increasing powers have been granted to the European Parliament.
Although the European project seems to fare better when it ‘flies under the radar’, shunning popular engagement, the next European elections will be the testing ground for an experiment in institutional design that hopes to make a ‘dry and boring’ Europe more interesting and appealing to the masses while catalysing a European demos. With the goal of having a European election worthy of its name, national political parties will clearly indicate their affiliation to a European political family (social-democrats, Christian-democrats, liberals, greens, etc.), and so explicitly support a pan-European candidate for the presidency of the European Commission. At last there will be a link between a vote in the European elections and a European leader. For example, it has been known that the current president of the European Parliament, Martin Schultz, wants to run as the Socialist candidate for that office. Therefore, if his candidacy is confirmed, those voting for the PSOE in Spain or for Labour in the UK would know in advance that they are lending support to this German politician as the Socialist candidate for the European Commission.
Somewhere in Europe there must be political consulting firms working on the project of a ‘President for Europe’, a dream of many federalists. Last April I conducted a similar exercise with students attending an MA in Civic Education at Danube University in Krems, near Vienna. I asked them to engage in two practical exercises: 1) to draw the election poster of a pan-European candidate, and 2) to draft the first issue of a pan-European magazine that we tentatively named as ‘Der Spiegel Europe’. The results were telling.