Page 24 - AEI Insights 2018 Vol 4 Issue 1

Mascitelli, 2018

largely neglecting national arenas of democratic decision making ) seems to have made
things worse for democracy in Europe”. (Armingeon & Guthmann 2013: 17).

The results of the European Parliamentary elections were themselves telling. Beginning with
the electoral turnout, it continued to remain at its historic low with 43 per cent of the eligible
voters casting their votes. This turnout was at the same level as the previous election in 2009.
Turnout in the elections had declined in every EP election since the first election in 1979. It
became more telling when in the last four elections - 49.8 per cent in 1999: 45.5 per cent in
2004; 43.2 per cent in 2009 and 43 per cent in 2014. What made these figures look even worse
was that some individual member states showed little or no interest in the elections at all? In
some countries such as Poland and Croatia the turnout was at low levels of 23 and 25 per cent
respectively (Europarl 2014). While the turnout was disconcerting, the actual vote, as the
Financial Times noted was even more troubling when it wrote that the “European parliament
is about to become noisier, more unruly, more confusing and more difficult to deal with”
(Spiegel & Carnegy 2014). What this meant was that many 5representatives from fringe
organisations, right-wing-nationalist parties were gaining access to the EP. The results in the
UK were a clear testimony to these developments. The United Kingdom Independent Party
(UKIP) received 27 per cent of the EP vote and collected 24 seats. Labour and the
Conservatives trailed with 25 per cent of the vote picking up 20 seats while the Conservatives
collected 23 per cent of the votes with 19 seats. The UKIP party had managed to become the
largest party represented in the EP from the UK! Across other member states, the result
produced a large array of Eurosceptics in the European Parliament who were not there before.
It turned out that in 23 out of the 28 member states Eurosceptics won seats in the elections in
2014 (Reib 2014). The only member states which did not produce Eurosceptic parties included
Estonia, Luxembourg, Malta, Romania and Slovenia. The total number of Eurosceptic
parliamentarians sitting in the parliament after this election was 28 per cent an increase from
20 per cent in the previous elections in 2009 (Treib 2014).

While this figure sounds alarming not all Eurosceptics are the same. The ideological divide has
not always clear and the use of the term Eurosceptic has some limitations encompassed within
and the fact that in the European case they are divided between left and right. What may help
an understanding of the force of Europscepticism is in the view towards the European Union
and its permanence. Not all the Eurosceptics were for its abolishment. Where alarm bells
sounded was that this category of political formation has significantly grown since the 2009
elections. The biggest winners in the Eurosceptic camp were on the political right including
the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), The French Marine Le Pen National Front
with 24.9 per cent and the Danish People’s Party, which topped the polls in their respective
country (Trieb 2014). Much of the discussion on the cause for this result is the terrain of much
debate. One stream of argumentation is that the EU elections are not about the EU but about
the member states and therefore about national issues. This argument is also used as a
justification for the lower turn out in voters and the elections whereby they use these elections
to send a protest vote and message to respective leaderships of their member states (Marsh &
Mikhaylov 2010).

The results in European Parliament would equally send out messages on the question of
austerity. Eventually most EU leaders began to see the limits and dangers of an ongoing
austerity philosophy such that even:
“Angela Merkel now seems to agree that austerity has run its course. When Italy’s prime
minister, Matteo Renzi, together with other European leaders, led a fresh charge against the

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