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Another article complaining about the de-Europeanisation of the European elections. This time it’s Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Green, writing a piece called The Rape of Europa in Libération. Key quotes (my translation)
If it were a bank, it would be a hold-up. If it were a person, it would be a rape. In those cases, at least, that’s what the media would call it. Here the crime is less - only political and institutional. No disturbance or trace of blood. Still, the facts are as they are: one month away from the European elections and no election as important has ever been the object of such an disappearing act.
In Ancient Greece, Europa was a princess, kidnapped by Zeus in the shape of a bull.
This second Rape, on a B-movie budget, stars Nicolas Sarkozy (no Zeus he) and national political leaders (who no longer live on Olympus).
Only the Green party is taking the European issues of climate change and CAP reform and making them election issues. There are so many issues where the European Parliament has an important role.
The next European Parliament will have a crucial role in big strategic decisions, not to mention more than a little influence on the re-selection or otherwise of the useless president of the Commission, José Manuel Barroso.
But instead of this, the national political class and their faithful followers in the media are obstinately focused on the pre-match of a Presidential election that won’t happen for another three years. Some, even more desperate, are losing themselves in surreal suppositions about candidates for 2017.
This is the French political pandemic. Even while effective political and economic control has seeped away from nation-states, the French regime has engaged in a constant presidentialisation of the institutions of state.
An alien landing in France would have little chance of delivering a message to its people, unless of course he was talking about the President, or his possible successors. Sarkozy and the media scrum around him are partially responsible, but so are the other party’s candidates, and the political culture as a whole.
But the most shocking thing of all is that … the rising star of anti-Sarkozyism is someone who was always considered the most pro-European of the French political class, François Bayrou. He now adopts, to secure his personal position, a position [calling for an anti-government vote] that I don’t hesitate to call politically irresponsible, sacrificing the debate at European level and the important role he might hope to play in it.
To make this vote a training-match for the presidential election, and to use this key moment in Europe’s democracy as a protest vote will send MEPs to Strasbourg with no real vision of Europe, and no mandate for change. It is a pitiful strategy, that guarantees our impotence.
Faced with the present crises, and the magnitude of the responses that Europe needs - particularly on issues where national governments seem too ineffectual - we must cast a useful vote, not a protest vote. A vote that establishes a real alternative to the narrow politics of Sarkozy and his loyal opposition - an alternative, too, to the short-term politics of Merkel, Brown and Berlusconi.
In the midst of this national Rape of Europe, I appeal to the intelligence of the citizens and the news media. Let us liberate Europe from its national straitjackets, and give it the effort and determination that it merits. Our future depends on it.
