THUMBS DOWN: Piia-Noora Kauppi signals her opposition to an ammendment.
Is Anybody Listening?
Less than half of voters will bother with next week's European Parliament election. Here's how one M.E.P. is trying to convince a wary and apathetic public that the E.U.'s legislature matters
Posted Sunday, May 30, 2004; 14:48 BST
The clock has not yet struck 9 a.m., but the champagne is already flowing at the European Parliament. Here in a wood-paneled room at the Parliament's Strasbourg headquarters, M.E.P.s from Finland's Kokoomus (National Coalition Party) gather with journalists to go over the week's agenda. The tables are laden with fresh fruit salad, yogurt and pastries, and a bow-tied waiter glides around topping up flutes of Moët. This is the sort of scene that comes to mind when you think of the European Parliament: a plush talking shop where politicians spend vast sums in pursuit of some vague European ideal. Is this cliché all there is to the place?
Not if you believe Piia-Noora Kauppi, 29, a fresh-faced dynamo finishing her first term as an M.E.P. and one of the champagne-sipping Finns at the breakfast. "Yes, the European Parliament is a gravy train," she admits, but she insists that it does real, important work that affects people's lives: during the current term, for example, it has passed legislation giving air travelers more compensation if they're bumped from an overbooked flight; ensuring atm-withdrawal charges are the same in all euro-zone countries; and banning cosmetics testing on animals by 2009. And the Moët? That's not standard breakfast fare, but a treat bought for retiring deputy Ilkka Suominen's 65th birthday by his colleagues. "We're a normal political institution," Kauppi says with typical earnestness. "Politicians here aren't more rotten or less capable than in a national parliament. Some of us take our jobs seriously."
But there's no sign that voters will take M.E.P.s' jobs seriously when they go to the polls next week to choose the 732 members of the next Parliament. Interest in — and respect for — the legislature is scraping bottom. Turnout has sunk from 63% in 1979 to 49% in the last election in 1999. This time, only 45% definitely plan to vote, according to a Gallup/Eurobarometer poll. That's a shame, because the Parliament's clout has consistently been expanded with each E.U. treaty, and the new constitution now being hammered out will enhance its power even more.
But since it flexed its muscles by bringing down the European Commission over slipshod accounting in 1999, the Parliament hasn't earned the respect to match that power, partly due to its own accounting problems. One shocking example is British M.E.P. Bashir Khanbhai, who listed a nonexistent address as his residence — the commute was longer than from his real home, so under the Parliament's rules he was able to pocket up to €30,000 in fake travel costs. Dozens of M.E.P.s also "hire" their spouses or other relatives with their €12,576 monthly secretarial allowances.
So it's unsurprising that a 2003 Eurobarometer survey found that only 35% of E.U. citizens felt that M.E.P.s represented their interests well. That's bad news to Kauppi, a working mom who regularly brings her 5-month-old son, Otso-Antero, to the office. (Husband Jussi Järvinen is a tax lawyer in Helsinki.) A passionate believer in the Parliament's power to improve European life at both institutional and individual levels, the self-described workaholic has made a big splash for a first-termer. Leftist M.E.P. Esko Seppanen, whom Kauppi says opposes her "on almost every issue," says she's "a very good representative — unfortunately from a right-wing party."
Kauppi hopes her enthusiasm will be contagious. The E.U.'s work "is too important to be left only to the political élites," she says. To find out what M.E.P.s actually do — and how Kauppi and other reformers are trying to make the Parliament more relevant to the voter — Time tagged along as she shuttled from Strasbourg, where the Parliament meets for a week each month, to its usual home in Brussels, and back to Finland, where she's campaigning not only for re-election but also to help her constituents understand why the Parliament matters.
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