European Parliament Election: May 23-26, 2019

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

The Sweden Democrats have eliminated their current MEP, Kristina Winberg, from their list just a week before the election. The official reason is supposedly that she has behaved in an indiscriminate and disloyal fashion and has refused to act in accordance with party policy and their election communications strategy. Winberg made headlines in Sweden a few weeks ago when she named Victor Orbán as her main political role-model.      

However, it appears that the real reason that the party has kicked her off the list is that she alerted the party leadership to the fact that the party's other MEP and leading candidate Peter Lundgren had sexually assaulted a female party member during an event last year. Lundgren has since the story broke admitted that he put his hand on the woman and that it was an unwelcome advance but blames the fact that he was intoxicated at the moment and says that he and the woman has made up since the incident.

The newspaper Expressen has acquired a recorded conversation between Kristina Winberg and the female party member where they discuss the touching incident, which they apparently managed to get their hands on before Winberg was officially kicked-off the list. Winberg herself says she's not the one who has provided the paper with the material.  

https://www.thelocal.se/20190520/sweden-democrats-oust-mep-candidate-just-days-before-eu-election

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

EU elections 2019: Country-by-country guide on what to look out for



Sweden

Will Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s climate campaigning across Europe help persuade her compatriots to back environmentally-conscious parties? Sweden’s Greens came second five years ago, with 15.41% of the vote, but may feel they can improve on that this time. Experts also say to look out for the performance of the far-right Sweden Democrats, who have softened their stance on Europe in the light of Brexit. They got two MEPs for their 9.67% vote share last time around.

If the Greens improve on their 2014 showing, it would be a huge upset considering they almost fell out of parliament in the General election last year and most polls are predicting they'll lose between 5-6% compared to 2014. The Greens would also be very pleased to not lose more since they were pretty much DOA a few months ago.   

A much better thing to look out for is the performance of the Liberals. They've historically done much better in EP-elections than other elections (2014 they achieved 9,9% and 2 seats)  but polls show they're on a knife's edge of losing all their seats. If they fall below 4% that might be seen as a huge rejection of the deal they struck with the government in January and might mean the party pulls out of supporting the Social Democratic government, leading to the government potentially falling apart before the next general elections in 2022.   

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

We are over one year away from the European Parliament elections throughout the EU, so it’s time for a thread!

I think it's a joke about how people on here will sometimes start a thread on an election 3 years before it's actually going to take place.

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

Strache will not take his EU parliament seat.

Are you sure this huge development don't deserve its own thread?

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

Also very disrespectful to the voters, whom voted for the top-candidates. Weber or Timmermanns should get it.

Don't be ridiculous. The number of European voters who cared or even knew about the spitzenkandidaten are negligible. I'm a political nerd and probably belongs to a group of at most 1% of Swedish voters who even know who Weber or Timmermanns are and even I had to google them to remember what they actually look like. Outside of Germany and the Netherlands I'm pretty sure they're about as well known as they are here and people voted for their national parties because of their policies and their national candidates.

I'm not particularly impressed by Von der Leyen (it feels like its just more of the same terrible Junker-leadership and ideals) but thinking that Weber or Timmermanns has more of a mandate to become Commission President is not grounded in reality.

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

Also very disrespectful to the voters, whom voted for the top-candidates. Weber or Timmermanns should get it.

Don't be ridiculous. The number of European voters who cared or even knew about the spitzenkandidaten are negligible. I'm a political nerd and probably belongs to a group of at most 1% of Swedish voters who even know who Weber or Timmermanns are and even I had to google them to remember what they actually look like. Outside of Germany and the Netherlands I'm pretty sure they're about as well known as they are here and people voted for their national parties because of their policies and their national candidates.

I'm not particularly impressed by Von der Leyen (it feels like its just more of the same terrible Junker-leadership and ideals) but thinking that Weber or Timmermanns has more of a mandate to become Commission President is not grounded in reality.

Then we need transnational lists.

I actually agree. If the EP is really going to establish itself as the major governing body of the union and for voters to be able to hold it properly accountable the parliamentary groups needs to convert from loose coalitions of very different national parties to proper parties with a united agenda.

However that is not the system we have today so pretending the spitzenkandidaten somehow actually matter is just silly. A lot of voters don't even know which group the party they vote for will end up in as several parties switch around after the election.

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

As ignorant American^TM, all of this sounds bit over the top or am I missing something?
It seems to me that these kind of decisions in EU always involves backdoor dealing.

No you are entirely correct. This is not a big deal to anyone who isn't a combination of a European federalist and a political nerd. As a matter of fact, its just business as usual for the EU.

Everyone knew before the election that the member states would ignore the spitzenkandidat system. If anything it should have been obvious from the fact that the largest group in parliament choose a complete nobody as their leading candidate, considering that Weber hasn't held a single ministerial job in national government or another job in the commission. The only reason the council went along with the EPP's spitzenkandidat last time was that Juncker had been the PM for one of the member states for 18 years.

Despite what  some people like to act like, the European Union is not a federal state but a collection of several sovereign countries with their own independent governments and their own national interests and an overwhelming majority of voters in the EU want it to remain that way. They view their national governments as their legitimate democratic representatives (which should be obvious from the fact that voter turn-out for national elections are so much higher than turn-out for EP elections) and as such its also natural that they choose a Commission President that is broadly acceptable to most member states.   

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

There's clearly a deficit of accountability though, regardless if you think the entire policy process here in intergovernmental. Member-states sort of know they can vote cynically at the EU level with their electorates not knowing much about it. There's a dilution of power that makes it impossible for electorates to properly hold their national and European governments to account.

True, the deficit of accountability is a genuine problem for the European Union and one of the reasons for Euro-skepticism but I don't think the problem is in the system itself but rather in a journalistic disinterest for EU-issues in many of the member states. I can obviously only speak for Sweden but the coverage here over EU-politics is laughably small compared to coverage and commentary about national politics. On paper both the council and the EP are accountable to voters since people can always vote out their national governments if they support EU policies that their electorate doesn't support, the trouble is that the electorate lack the essential information to actually hold either part accountable.

That isn't a problem that is solved by undermining national sovereignty though. At least voters sort of know what their own national governments stand for. When I vote for a party in the EP-election that belongs to the EPP will I get Merkel-style liberal pro-immigration euro-federalism or will I get extreamly conservative Orban-style authoritarianism? 

It is easy to say that the Europe is union of independent states, if you have not to bother the reality. It is like saying that Sweden is federation of independent regions or the Reich was federation of independent princes. Obviously there are independence of states, but less than people like to think.

No it's not like saying that at all, because the Swedish government has its own army, a police force, an independent judicial system and its own separate international relations with other states, which the regions of Sweden does not... (although to be fair the Skåne Region had a try at the last one when they supported Copenhagen's bid to be the new location of the EMA against the will of the national government). Sure, as long as Sweden is part of the European union, EU-law is applicable here, but we're technically free to leave whenever we want (although it's hard, as the UK has showed). A region of Sweden can't leave Sweden unless the national government consent to it.

Sure the EU could turn into a United States of Europe, but that is not the way it is today and as I pointed out it's not what the voters of Europe want. As a matter of fact judging from Catalonia and Scotland they actually seem to want more sovereign states and not fewer.