Between 7 and 10 June 1979, nine European nations went to the polls to elect the members of a single parliament. Previously, members of the European Parliament had been delegates from national parliaments. Out of the 410 members elected, 81 were from the UK. The electoral system was first past the post in England, Scotland and Wales and single transferable vote in Northern Ireland.
The European dream that turned into a yawn
John Palmer on the election campaign for a Euro-parliament about which voters know little – and care less
11 May 1979
With just four weeks before 180 million voters in the European Community will be asked to vote, the campaign for the first ever direct elections to the European Parliament is getting off to a hesitant and lacklustre start. Now that the general election is out of the way, British voters can expect a high-powered campaign.
This week a £600,000 advertising campaign for the European elections begins in British newspapers and the political parties will wearily crank themselves up again to support their European candidates. Britain will go to the polls on June 7 and all nine countries will vote between June 7 and June 10 with the first results probably arriving late on June 30.
Officials from the Common Market Commission and the European Parliament, and most of those taking part directly in the campaign, acknowledge two common problems: the electorate knows little about the European Parliament or what its future role will be and at present seems not to care much. The campaign promises to be livelier in some countries than others. The sparks are already beginning to fly in France where two parties supporting the regime of President Giscard are deeply and bitterly divided about the kind of Europe they want.
In Denmark the campaign has encouraged the significant number of anti-market groups and parties to unite on a platform which would win the support of many anti-marketeers in Britain. In countries where EEC membership has long ceased to be a political issue, it is going to be much more difficult for the parties to inspire supporters to vote. The signs in West Germany, Ireland, Belgium and Holland are that the elections are being used as a convenient national opinion poll to determine the attitudes to current, national political issues.
In Luxembourg they are holding a national election on the same day. But if that will ensure a high turnout the fact that Italians will be asked to vote again exactly one week after their June general election seems certain to guarantee a very low poll.
Much of the propaganda – paid for by the EEC itself – as well as that put out by the parties will be unusual in that it will have to explain in ABC terms just what the European Parliament is. At present the Parliament makes little or no impact on the political life of the community.
Indeed one reason why the Parliament is unlikely to acquire much greater power is that the Commission – the executive over which it is meant to be exercising primary surveillance – is itself hard pressed to keep the limited power it was given in years past. And for as long as the Council – the real decision-making centre of the Community – is going to be primarily answerable to national parliaments, the Euro-parliament’s role is bound to be very limited.
The new 410 man and woman Parliament – 81 elected in Britain – will have to fight hard to win themselves a serious hearing by the powers that be in the Common Market. A first indication of how seriously the Parliament intends taking itself would be a decision to be permanently sited in Brussels.
The absence of significant numbers of seasoned national politicians from the European election lists suggests that most aspiring young ministers continue to believe their prospects are going to be brighter in London, Paris or Bonn. At the start of the campaign it is anyone’s guess how the major party political formations will do.
Editorial: Time to elect a European parliament of free spirits
21 May 1979
It is, and has been for months, the universally designated bore of the year. Many manifestos are launched across a continent with manifest disdain, even the Dutch, who will vote zealously for anything, are meshed in the tedium of this non event. As for dear old democratic Britain, the ancient fount of freedom: well we’ve traipsed to the polls once (or in some cases twice already this year) as how in the name in sanity are we supposed to traipse all over again? The European direct elections? Wake us up directly they’re over.
If the new parliament wants to be effective instead of merely symbolic its members must avert their eyes from the banners and bands of the parties in the nations whence they come. The Euro MPs must respect their constituents first, their parties second, and their nations third. The task is a supra-national one, and it is immense.
Such flights of hopeful logic are, we suspect, some decades from reality – and still further emotionally, from the dank enervation of the present election campaign. But they do, at least, indicate the kind of candidates worth supporting next month. Candidates prepared to be spiky and voluble: candidates who take their prime mandate from their constituencies: candidates prepared to give their whole energies to the new assembly. And if – forgetting party labels – enough of these free spirits from all over Europe are sent to Strasbourg, then five years hence, at the next great vote, the yawning may have to stop.
This is an edited extract. Read the editorial in full.
Editorial: When we’re voting in the dark
4 June 1979
The media, Mr Heath was saying yesterday, are much to blame for putting about the notion that in the matter of next Thursday’s Euro-election, apathy is king … Not all of those who fail to vote will have spent the day in in the pubs and clubs of Fleet Street. Many who will regard it as their civil duty to vote will do so in a state of bafflement. These are elections of a kind we have never had before, and people feel they have been insufficiently explained. When you vote in a Euro-election what are you voting about?
The most fervent Europeans, as ever, have been the Liberals: who are also the one party of the three to have published a common manifesto with partners in the rest of the Nine. Indeed, one of the most striking illustrations of the Britain’s failure to move into the mainstream of European politics has been the isolated position of the Conservative and Labour parties. Labour refused to agree on a common programme with other socialist parties in the Nine … The Conservatives have found allies only in Denmark.
This is an edited extract. Read the editorial in full.
Voters limit the political muscle of Strasbourg
John Palmer
12 June 1979
“It certainly has not been a disaster. I cannot in truth claim it has been a surprise and I am loathe to admit it has been a non-event.” The bleary-eyed Common Market Commission official’s comment on the outcome of the first ever direct elections to the European Parliament in the early hours of yesterday reflected the generally sombre mood in Brussels. The reaction of politicians and Eurocrats alike was singularly low key.
They expressed open concern that not many more than half the 180 million voters in the nine EEC countries even bothered to go to the polls in an election which was billed in campaign propaganda as “an epoch making event in European history.” The political authority of the new parliament has not been irreversibly damaged by the weak popular mandate, but it does lack the moral authority of a big vote which could have substituted in part for its lack of formal legislative powers.
Even with the last of the results still trickling in, there is no denying the triumph of the right. It could be that the Socialists will by the narrowest of majorities, hold on to their position as the largest political group in the new parliament. But the combined forces of the right and the centre right (Christian Democrats, Conservatives, Liberals and neo-Gaullists) will outnumber the left parties by more than two to one.
The overall political balance in the parliament will almost certainly weaken the drive for major reform of such controversial EEC policies as the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy). The great majority of the right of centre parties are dedicated to uphold the existing farm policy, and, at least in general terms, the present community budget system. Although the British Tories are unhappy with both, the larger than expected proportion of farmers in the Tory delegation is bound to blunt the cutting edge of the Conservative attack on the CAP.
Most EEC and European Parliament officials are convinced that Britain will have to fall in line by adopting some system of PF for the next Euro-elections in five years’ time.
The failure of the British Labour MPS to capitalise on the undoubtedly critical attitude of the British electors to the Common Market was being contrasted with the success of the Danish anti-marketeers. It appears that nearly half the Danish delegation will be made up of opponents of anyway strong critics of the Community. Even the Commission President, Mr Roy Jenkins, believes that it would have been better for the democratic health and prospects of the new assembly for it have contained a truer cross-section of British opinion.
The political complexion of the new European Parliament and the class origins of the UK team
Richard Norton-Taylor
12 June 1979
The British presence in the European Parliament, dominated by the Tories, is to a great extent a collection of spokesmen for vested interests – all the more so since it includes few established political names and the Conservative Party, unlike right wing parties on the continent, have no clear policy either in favour or against the long-term aim of a super-national Community.
The Conservative group in Strasbourg will include at least 16 farmers and landowners – more than a quarter of the total it is appropriate, perhaps, given that the EEC budget offers more to agriculture than any other sector of the economy. Landowners include the Marquess of Douro, son and heir of the Duke of Wellington and European MP for Wessex, and Mr James Scott-Hopkins, the leader of the current Tory group who comfortably captured the Hereford and Worcester seat.
The most prominent farmer in the Tory group is Sir Henry Plumb, who resigned the presidency of the National Farmers’ Union earlier this year and will represent the Cotswolds in Europe. He fought the campaign more as a farmer than as a member of the Conservative Party and again on television yesterday he fought shy of discussing the EEC as a “party issue.” The British group includes a handful of lawyers, a handful of journalists and a medical doctor, Alexander Sherlock, who is also a barrister.
The European Conservatives are likely to adopt a “pragmatic” approach towards the inevitable move towards a more integrated Community: that is to say they can be expected to fight the “bureaucracy” of the other EEC institutions including many of the Commission’s proposals for economic intervention, harmonisation and industrial democracy. They can also be expected to promote the Common Market principle of competition and the free movement of capital and goods.
Editorial: Small ‘quake, not many hopes dead
12 June 1979
No election which puts people like Mr Willy Brandt and Mr Berlinguer and Mrs Simone Veil into the European Parliament, or which administers a fierce – perhaps even a fatal – blow to the throbbing ambition of Mr Jacques Chirac, can be dismissed as entirely unimportant or unmemorable. Certainly the turnout in the first round of elections for the Parliament (apart from an exceptional performance by the Italians, attracted by superstar candidates and anxious to avoid the obloquy which that country reserves for abstainers) has been a disappointment: the Europe-wide average of 61 per cent, though almost twice as much as Britain could contrive, is still a long way below what is habitually achieved in national elections and a long way short of what Euro-enthusiasts had hoped for.
The glamour and authority of the new Parliament must be tarnished by that sort of start. But such things are not beyond the power of the new Euro-MPs to correct. If they can make the Parliament look and sound as though it matters, which the former unelected Parliament was never able to do, then their constituents will sit up and take notice.
A set of elections fought ostensibly for places in a European Parliament may have left a lasting mark on the domestic politics of some member countries. France, where President Giscard has strengthened his hand still further at the Gaullists’ expense – and perhaps undermined the whole future of the Gaullist movement – is one; West Germany, where the Right has at last moved clearly ahead of the Chancellor’s Social Democrats and his Liberal allies, could be another. Denmark, where the anti-Market parties put themselves very firmly on the political map, may well be a third; and the Republic of Ireland perhaps another. Britain, emerging from a a general election, is unlikely to be so much stirred by the tepid events of these past few weeks. Yet there is at least one new ground for hope. Casting off their usual reluctance, the parties have this time chosen, and the voters returned, a notable crop of women candidates. If Mrs Castle, Mrs Ewing, Mrs Ann Clwyd (lately our correspondent in South Wales) and the rest can shake some life into the Parliament and give the consumer the same kind of vigorous advocacy which the farmer has so long enjoyed within the Community’s institutions, then Westminster, in time, may learn to follow. That would indeed make June 7, 1979, a date worth remembering.
This is an edited extract. Read the editorial in full.
