Voting for the future?

Electing European commissioners will not necessarily improve Europe’s long-term prospects.

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Take Angela Merkel and Jerzy Buzek, respectively the chancellor of Germany and the president of the European Parliament. Juxtapose two studies on transport and climate change published in the last two weeks. Then draw a few depressing conclusions about the prospects for European democracy, or the environment, or both.

To start with Buzek: in a speech at Berlin’s Humboldt University, he waxed lyrical about “the Community method” – the interdependence of the EU’s three main institutions, the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. He argued that the method relied on the co-operation of the Parliament and the Commission and, therefore, that candidates to become European commissioners should head the lists for the Parliament elections. This, he argued, would mean that future commissioners would be visible to citizens and would receive a democratic mandate, while the Commission would gain greater democratic legitimacy. In addition, the balance between the three institutions would be redressed. “The two community institutions – the Commission and the Parliament – would win an especial importance.”

“This brings our goal, the European demos, closer,” he said.

Merkel’s position does not need much rehearsing, especially not on the eve of a European Council. She is holding out against a loan guarantee by the eurozone for Greece. Public opinion polls in Germany show that her tough stance, her unwillingness to come to the aid of Greece, finds strong support among German voters.

On Tuesday, I chaired a discussion that was put on as part of the Commission’s Sustainable Energy Week, about whether the EU can de-carbonise transport and if so how. José Manuel Barroso, the president of the Commission, declared in his “political guidelines for the next Commission”, which were presented to the Parliament last September, that: “The next Commission needs to maintain the momentum towards a low-carbon economy, and, in particular, towards decarbonising our electricity supply and the transport sector.”

Our discussion was shaped by a presentation from David King, sometime scientific adviser to the then British prime minister Tony Blair, now heading up the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University, as to “ways to reduce emissions while keeping mobile”.

King’s assessment, at what is only the start of a two-year research project, offered some early prescriptions for policy changes, including tighter emissions and fuel-economy standards, better traffic management, incentives for research and development of low-carbon technologies, and “triggering behavioural change using bottom-up and top-down policies”.

The study made few specific proposals for legislative change, though it promises further work on “how certain policy measures will influence our transport system and travel behaviour”. The interim conclusion is that “no true low-carbon technology will penetrate the mass market in the short term and transport will continue to rely on fossil fuels”.

The Commission’s transport department, which will present its proposals for transport policy by the end of this year, gave a cautious welcome to the study’s findings.

A week earlier, the Commission’s environment department presented the results of a research project into medium- and long-term policy measures that might be needed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions between now and 2050. Among the striking features of that study’s conclusions were that market mechanisms – such as the price of carbon and carbon taxes – are not powerful enough to engineer the changes required; that technological improvements will not be enough, since it takes a long time for technology changes to penetrate through a transport sector (particularly maritime transport and aviation); and that, given the state of the climate, changes must be made very soon.

So how likely is it that our politicians will rush to embrace these unpalatable conclusions? Many of them bear all the appearance of electoral suicide. More public money for railways might be popular, but higher taxes to fund them are not. Stricter controls and higher costs for Europe’s road-users are not vote-winning ideas. Just as Merkel is now reluctant to defy her voters and come to the aid of Greece, so she was reluctant two years ago to support more demanding standards for European cars that would have weighed heavily on German carmakers. Democracy is like that: national considerations take priority over more nebulous and dubious notions such as ‘European solidarity’.

So who will look to the long term and eschew short-term electoral considerations? Traditionally, that has been the role of the Commission, the unelected institution freed from the tiresome obligation to win votes. But Buzek wants the commissioners to seek election, to head the lists for the Parliament. It is an idea, though personally I doubt that it will do much to raise participation levels in the Parliament elections from their current abysmally low level (43% last June). But if commissioners need to court voters (or even a European demos, whatever that is), then they are hardly likely to favour long-term policy needs over short-term electoral considerations. If there is an equation between democracy and looking after the environment, then it is not a simple one. The EU has some work still to do to identify all the variables.