Spanish VersionThe executive branch of the European Union is getting increasingly anxious. Recent elections in Austria, the Netherlands and France have brought with them a remarkable new feature: the blatant public positioning of the European Commission in favour of candidates perceived as pro-European and against candidates labelled as “extremists”.
So far the European Union had been very exquisite in relation to interfering in national electoral processes. However, in May 2016, this tradition began to break apart when the President of the European Commission, the Luxembourgish Jean-Claude Juncker, declared to a German media – between the first and second round of the Austrian presidential elections – that ” I do not want the FPO candidate (the Austrian Freedom Party) to become the new President of Austria. ”
In the case of the Dutch elections held last March, Mr Juncker congratulated Mr Rutte on his victory over Mr Wilders, ‘a vote against the extremists’ in his own words. But the occasion is painted bald and last Sunday he also breathed with relief at the triumph of Mr. Macron in the first round of the French presidential elections and did not hesitate to congratulate the winning candidate over the phone, an moved that was immediately hailed by Mr. Juncker’s cabinet in Twitter.
I would simply remind Mr Juncker that his salary is also paid by millions of citizens who do not like what the European Union has become. It was a pity that his White Paper on the Future of Europe (published only a few weeks ago) did not open the way to a debate on what kind of European cooperation we Europeans want.
Since such debate has already been settled by those leading the EU, the multi-national club with the lowest economic growth in the OECD area, the only thing left for us citizens is to vote for political options that want to open that debate … or even much better, to abstain from voting altogether in order to discredit those undemocratic political systems that have been constructed by elites with no contact at all with civil society.
