Democracy is still one of the best things ever invented by humankind, but it’s taken a battering over the last few years. Illiberal laws, heavy-handed government, the way most legal and civil rights were put in abeyance around the world during Covid; worst of all, the undeniable feeling that the people in power simply aren’t listening. In fact, most of the time nowadays, they don’t even pretend to be listening.
Faith in democracy has been grievously wounded for many of us. Not in that stupid, elitist “democracy doesn’t work, we need an enlightened few to decide everything for us” way. Rather: what’s the point?
We, the eponymous “demos”, vote and have our say; those elected are then tasked with carrying out the wishes of their employers i.e. us. And they just carry on doing what they feel like anyway. So what’s the point?
The European parliament elections take this pointlessness and amplify it, maximise it. This pantomime of democracy goes so deep into futility, it passes some kind of event horizon, where the normal rules of space and time, and politics, no longer apply. Democracy is sundered into nothingness by the crushing, killing gravity of an EU election.
At the highest level, it’s farcical. A recent article on the influential centrist website politico.eu noted that Ursula von der Leyen’s main challenger as next European Commission president, Nicolas Schmit, is her rival and running-mate and colleague, all at the same time. How is this possible? Who knows.
The article also argued that it’s basically impossible for Schmit to win. So what’s the point?
From my perspective, as a reasonably well-educated European of normal intelligence, it gets worse. I couldn’t tell you what the European Commission president does, or what the European Commission is exactly.
Is it a higher authority than the EU parliament? No idea. Is good old Ursula the capo di tutti capi, and thus the boss of the President of the European Parliament and President of the European Council? (These titles really exist.) No idea.
Yes, I can google all that if I want to. But surely any functioning, healthy democracy would be so entwined in its citizens’ lives that they’d know this stuff automatically, by cultural osmosis. I don’t follow Irish national politics as much as I did, but I still know what and who the President and Taoiseach are, where the power lies, who does what, who my local representatives are.
I couldn’t name one of my current MEPs, and don’t know how many there are, either in my constituency or nationally or continent-wide. In fact, I’m not even sure what constituency I live in.
European elections should be a big, or biggish, deal, but they’re not. I was barely aware it was happening until very recently, when I started noticing posters on lampposts. And for a while, I assumed they related to the local council elections, which in Ireland took place the same day. Not one person, literally, mentioned this European election in conversation, almost until polling day itself.
This election and the European parliament are a charade, a puppet-show, a sham of democracy. The Brussels talking-shop couldn’t be further removed from the people it purportedly serves if it tried. In our minds, it doesn’t feel like it matters.
It probably should; after all, EU citizens’ lives are increasingly “ruled from Brussels”, as the old catch-cry has it. These are the parliamentarians who debate and decide on all that legislation which affects 450 million people across the continent. Yet it doesn’t.
Maybe the Brexiteers and other Euro-sceptics are right, and the EU has become a giant, unaccountable bureaucracy, which goes about its business with no regard for the people – not so much, perhaps, with evil designs on its mind, but rather a godlike indifference to the vox populi? Maybe it’s become more empire than genuine democracy.
Empire isn’t always a bad thing. I read recently that Europe basically fell apart, literally and metaphorically, after the Roman imperium collapsed. No central control and organisation meant disintegrating roads, crashing literacy levels, rampant disease and about a millennium of war, poverty, chaos and horror. The people were free of Roman rule…but then died before they had the chance to fully appreciate it.
So maybe the EU “project”, and other gigantic bureaucracies, are making life better for everyone, and it just gets messed up by the plebs and their annoying insistence on having a say in things. Maybe the whole world would be better off ruled by a self-appointed elite, doing what’s best for the proles whether they want it or not.
Maybe. But I doubt it. In any case, that’s not democracy; at least be honest about it. And it’s not what I’d prefer.
The whole sorry situation reminds me of the character in Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s wonderful, dreamlike 2001 film, who, to express his disgust, sets himself on fire, declaring: “The powers that be want us to be passive observers, and haven’t given us any options outside the occasional, purely symbolic, participatory act of voting. ‘You want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?’ …Let my lack of a voice be heard.”
Of course, if you’re reading this in the UK, you don’t have to worry about European elections anymore, after Brexit – the biggest popular vote in British history. For good or bad, wherever you stood on the matter, the people spoke and were listened to.
How about that? Maybe democracy ain’t dead after all.
Darragh McManus, author and journalist 
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