Panel Discussion on European Elections: A Crisis of Power and Democracy
A panel discussion bringing together political scientists from different subfields in order to address the outcome and significance of this year’s European elections took place on 1st July in the FAU Senate Hall as part of the series “The EU before the elections” (organized by Prof. Dr. Sandra Eckert and Prof. Dr. Petra Bendel). The panel included Prof. Dr. Sandra Eckert (FAU) and Prof. Ingeborg Tömmel (University of Osnabrück) providing expertise from European studies, and Prof. Dr. Susanne Pickel (University of Duisburg-Essen) and Prof. Dr. Constantin Wurthmann (FAU) providing expertise from election and attitude research. Dr. Simon Primus (FAU) acted as moderator.
In her opening statement, Ingeborg Tömmel began by explaining the electoral process in the German context and criticized the decision to suspend the five-percent threshold for the European elections, as this makes it more difficult to form strong coalitions in an already very fragmented parliament. She also explained why, in her view, the Spitzenkandidaten procedure does not do justice to the special institutional context of the EU and should be classified as dysfunctional politicization. Susanne Pickel emphasized that the election result was problematic due to the shift to the right “in the second tier” – right-wing parties were on the rise, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, even beyond the highly visible far-right parties. Sandra Eckert took up the concept of European elections as “second-order elections” and argued that the concept is still relevant, illustrated by the example of France where European elections triggered the election of a new national parliament. She saw the European Parliament itself facing less drastic changes, as the difficulty of forming parliamentary groups, and the increasing fragmentation of the political right in particular, meant that the actual shift in power does not reflect the distribution of seats. Constantin Wurthmann assessed the election results as an indication of a crisis of those in power and a crisis of confidence throughout Europe. According to Pickel, the populist parties are deliberately fuelling this crisis of confidence. Prof. Pickel also emphasized that low trust in institutions is often based on the perception of poor government performance. In the course of the discussion Simon Primus presented the results of a survey that the team at the Chair of Comparative Politics had conducted in Austria and Germany before the elections. These results further supported the thesis of a crisis of confidence, particularly with regard to voters of populist parties.