THE Central and Eastern European countries used these elections to give a double rebuff to the European Union, which they had joined only six weeks before.
Those voters who bothered to turn up at the polls backed anti-European parties with a passion. But many of the ten countries which have just joined the Union experienced one of the lowest turnouts since the fall of communism, a show of indifference that left their leaders dismayed.
There is nothing in the results to make these politicians cheerful. Instead, they are left with a difficult political question, with uncomfortable implications, whatever the answer: were voters expressing their disillusionment with their own politicians, or a new hostility to joining Europe?
The new member states can at least claim that their voters’ apathy is shared by the rest of Europe. Across the EU’s 25 members, turnout was a record low, at an average of just 45.5 per cent. But in the ten Central and Eastern European countries that joined on May 1, it was only 28.7 per cent. Politicians yesterday were scrambling to give answers. They could get only so far by blaming good weather and football championships.
Some thought boredom with elections in the former Soviet countries had played a part after last year’s referendums on joining the EU, and then all the razzmatazz of the accession itself.
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Of the new entrants, only Malta and Cyprus had a high turnout, at 82.4 per cent and 71.2 per cent respectively. But given that Malta is tiny and voting compulsory in Cyprus, these are not significant.
In Poland, the giant among the newcomers, turnout was only 20.42 per cent. President Aleksander Kwasniewski said: “It is a disease we will have to look at, and analyse the reasons why we are so far from civic values.”
However, in Poland’s case, the vote was clearly a strike against the ruling minority Social Democrat (SLD) party as much as an expression of doubts about Europe. Poland’s centre-right opposition Civic Platform trounced the SLD, which managed to get only 9 per cent of the vote. The SLD has been clinging to power despite deep public disenchantment with its performance.
The anti-Europe, strongly Catholic League of Families took second place, with nearly 17 per cent of the vote. The Samoobrona (Self-Defence) party, another anti-EU group, took 12.3 per cent.
The results were a blow for the SLD, not just because of its vulnerability in national politics but also because of the difficulty of its position in Brussels. Mr Kwasniewski, who said he feared “we are entering the EU weakened”, argued that the low turnout would be held against Poland in “discussions in the corridor” in Brussels on the new Constitution.
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Poland is fighting to keep the voting rights within the EU that it won in 2000. But it has looked likely to lose ever since the fall of Spain’s Aznar government, its main ally. These results will have weakened its hand further.
Poland’s parliament is likely to hold a confidence vote in the SLD’s acting Prime Minister, Marek Belka, next week.
In the Czech Republic, only 28 per cent voted. Bohumil Dolezai, a political analyst, said: “In the beginning, elections were something exciting and exclusive after decades of communism. But that enthusiasm is wearing off.”
Among those who did vote, nearly a third backed the free-market Civic Democratic party. It promised to stop the country surrendering too much freedom to Brussels, less than two decades after it had shaken off communism.
In Hungary, the turnout was just 38 per cent, the worst figure since the 1989 fall of communism.
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In Slovenia, where it was only 28 per cent, Janez Potocnik, its European comissioner, speculated that “maybe citizens are saturated with politics, maybe even with referendums or with the EU, or maybe they think the European Parliament is not an important institution”.
There is no single, dominant cause of voters’ apathy in the new member states. But two intertwined feelings appear to explain much of the pattern: disillusionment of their own governments, and suspicion of the constraints which EU membership may bring.
Appreciation of the benefits is small — but not surprising, as they have yet to be seen.
A mixed but worrying message for the leaders of Europe’s newest democracies, then: they cannot expect that voters will forgive them their failings out of gratitude at becoming members of the EU.