(Photo: Swiatoslaw Wojtkowiak/Flickr)

The ‘democratic deficit’ in the European Union is perhaps one of the few things that almost everyone knows about it. Throughout at least all the ‘old’ democracies of Europe, there is a widespread feeling that the European institutions ‘steal’ away powers that were previously in the hands of the people when they were at a national level. In the newer member states, faith in the European institutions may be higher, but citizens do not feel the ability to influence their direction.

These impressions (however false may be the picture of the nation state implicit in the first of them) will only be dealt with directly by a strong agenda of putting the citizen at the centre of European decision-making. There is only one European institution that can do that: the European Parliament, and it has to start making itself heard louder. This is why European Alternatives has started a campaign for the Parliament to insist that it has the dominant role in deciding the policies of the Union.

The European parliament already has many of the formal powers of national parliaments. It must approve the nomination of the European Council for the President of the Commission, and it must approve the appointments made by the President to the different Commission posts after grilling them over lengthy parliamentary hearings.  The Lisbon Treaty, which entered into force on the 1^st of December 2009, does improve the importance of the European Parliament by making co-decision the ‘normal’ legislative procedure of the European Union. The European Commission keeps its monopoly on the power to propose legislation, but the European Parliament now has to agree, along with the European Council of member states, in most areas of European legislation before it can become law.

But this is not the sort of thing that will tackle the citizens’ view of Brussels as an undemocratic bureaucracy. For that problem to be tackled, European politics has finally to become fully political – which is to say, fully democratic.

This means a substantial change in the way the European institutions think of themselves: up until this point, the European Commission has been conceived as the ‘party for Europe’, which must drive forwards the European project on the basis of consensus between member states. But this hegemony of the Commission no longer has a sense, and particularly so when an increasing number of the issues it is called to deal with – from climate change to migration – are of a clearly political nature with differing opinions existing across the political spectrum and transversally across member states. These political choices by their nature go beyond national political spheres, and so have to be articulated at a European level. Relying on national parliaments or politicians to formulate or explain these choices is self-defeating : the choices have to be made at a European level, and citizens have to be given a chance to directly influence this level of decision making.

It is for this reason that the European parliament must become the debating chamber of competing views of the future direction of Europe, articulated by meaningful European political parties. These competing visions must be identified with personalities from the parties, and the winning proposals must have a real impact on European legislation.

The key to all this is the last point: the moment the European parliament has the possibility to propose European legislation, the political discussions will assume a new importance. At the moment, the European Parliament can only approve or reject laws promoted by the European Commission, but it cannot of its own accord push through any legislation. This hinders the possibility of European parties becoming identified with clear policy choices for Europe.

But if the parliament were granted a direct influence in European law-making, this would allow the European political parties to take a public stance on key policy areas, and campaign in European elections on the basis of a meaningful manifesto that is common across member states. What legislative steps is the socialist party going to take to safeguard social services in Europe? Are the Greens going to propose a Carbon Tax on polluting industries? What common European asylum policy is the conservative party going to promote?

The common objection is that this would require a change in the European treaties, and after the bumpy process of Lisbon no-one is in any mood for another ride. But as we state in our campaign manifesto, no immediate change in the treaties is required for this to happen: the formal power to initiate legislation can stay with the Commission, all that is needed is an agreement that if the Parliament decides that certain legislation is necessary, the Commission should come up with a proposal within a reasonable timeframe.

The European elections in 2009 were the first in which some of the European Parties made a serious effort to have a common manifesto throughout the Union, but these manifestos were often ignored by the national member parties of the European parties, who campaigned on national issues. Even when genuinely European promises were made, citizens generally felt these amounted to little more than rhetoric, for lack of a clear connection between the European electoral contest and European law-making.

Now in the first months of the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, the parliament must take the opportunity to insist on its importance, in order to give to the representatives of the citizens the power to decide on the direction of the Union. Up until now the Union has relied on the nation states to provide its impulse. The passing of the Lisbon Treaty must be made into the occasion where the citizens are finally given the right to be in the driving seat.