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Joseph H. H. Weiler
The Spitzenkandidaten Exercise One Year Later - The Unsung Hero A year has gone by since the last elections to the European Parliament. One significant innovation in those elections was the Spitzenkandidaten exercise.
At the recent fifth edition of the "State of the Union" organized by the European University Institute I conducted a public interview with Vice President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans.
Vice President Timmermans and I reached the point where we touched on that perennial topic of the still existing deficiencies of European democracy, resulting, inter alia, in widespread indifference as expressed in the low turnout to the last European elections - 2014 scored the lowest turnout ever.
Here is an edited transcript from the interview.
Weiler: [...] Part of the problem is that when people go and vote for the European Parliament, they are not really being offered a real political choice (the way, for example, yesterday they were offered in the United Kingdom - Labour or Conservative.), neither as regards the policies that will be pursued nor as regards who will govern them. So the delicate question is whether the Union in its processes needs to become overtly more political? Do you think the bold, even though limited, experiment of the last elections to the European Parliament with the "Spitzenkandidaten", who delivered here in this space [the Salone dei cinquecento of the Palazzo Vecchio] one of the televised debates, should be pursued and perhaps deepened as one of the ways of addressing that problem of citizen disengagement? Timmermans: Yes, first of all ... the core of the problem also refers to one of my favourite authors, Hannah Arendt, who ... actually, if you bring back the essence of some of her writings [says] "It is not the anger of the minorities that hates us, it is the indifference of ...
