EUROPE AT A GLANCE
RECORD LEVELS OF ABSTENTION
IN ‘NEW MEMBERS’ TO THE EAST
The calls by the ETUC General Secretary John Monks – relayed in France by the General Secretary of the CGT – to turn out ‘for a social Europe’ went unheeded by the great majority of workers, especially younger ones, who knowingly decided to abstain. They stopped believing in ‘social Europe’ long ago when they realised that European integration was planned and implemented purely in the interests of capital at the expense of labour to stifle popular sovereignty. In an interview in the magazine Alternatives économiques on 3 April 2009, Jacques Delors explained that people were failing to take an interest because they were beginning to forget what the ‘fathers of Europe’ had sought to achieve. But it is precisely because people do remember that more and more of them, all over the European Union, are refusing to vote. They remember that François Mitterrand promised in 1983 that we would either have a social Europe or no Europe at all, that it was the same Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission, who initiated and oversaw implementation of the Single European Act that opened the capital, goods, services and labour markets up to competition, and that the European Union took part in the Balkan wars and became a Trojan horse for NATO. They have a particularly clear memory of how their refusal of the treaty on the European Constitution (with a high turnout of 70%) was overridden by using national parliaments to adopt the Lisbon Treaty. The French people drew their own conclusions from this denial of democracy and abstained in large numbers on European election day, with levels of 60% and even 70-80% in working-class areas and 77% in France’s overseas department. This level of abstention, constituting a new record, mainly reflected a rejection of European integration and its anti-labour policies and dismantling of public services. Indeed, the abstainers included a high percentage of people who voted ‘No’ in May 2005 and found abstention the only way of expressing their opinions in this election.
With the same causes leading to the same effects, the abstention rate was high in almost all EU countries, running at an average of 57%. But it was even higher in those Eastern European countries that joined the European Union in 2004 (or 2007 in the case of Bulgaria and Romania). Much wooed after the fall of the USSR, their peoples turned to the European Union as a mecca of consumerism. Since they were obliged to enforce extremely restrictive accession requirements, they did not challenge the destruction of their social services, the rise in imports, and the privatisation of whole areas of their economies. What a rude awakening once they joined! Having no expectations of the European Union and instead having to put up with its orders and directives, they abstained in large numbers, with voter turnout often under 30%: 19% in Slovakia, 22% in Romania, 27% in Poland, 28% in the Czech Republic and Slovenia, 36% in Hungary and 37% in Bulgaria. These results did not prevent the French daily Le Monde from describing the Polish as ‘enthusiastic Europeans’ in its 8 June issue!
This enormous wave of abstentions did not stop most commentators and politicians, whether from right or left, from proclaiming their ‘need for Europe’ the very next day! Others, being a little more clear-sighted, made no secret of their concern. They included Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg president of the Eurogroup, who believed that the ‘explosive effect’ of the situation should not be underestimated: ‘We are in the heart of an economic and financial crisis and we are heading towards a social crisis since there is going to be a job shortage [...] I get the impression that a lot of politicians are underestimating the impact of what is happening.’ He is quite right to anticipate a flare-up of social unrest, since the stepping-up of anti-social policies, by exacerbating injustice and inequality, can only lead to protest. Change can be brought about only by struggle at all levels. It is our role as communists to foster this struggle by making it a cornerstone of a progressive policy freed from the straitjacket of the European Union and open to international cooperation based on mutual advantage and respect for national sovereignty.
EUROPE IN BRIEF
Jean Paul Le Marec