The unloved Euro House

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal">Will it be the Czech porn star or Estonian supermodel who makes it into the European Parliament? It is not only India that uses film stars, TV soap actors and assorted B-list celebrities to inject a sparkle into the dreary rite of democratic renewal. So, on Sunday night, they''ll be announcing the results of the world''s biggest, first, trans-national parliamentary election.And much you''ll care. <br /><br />In fact, even the 350-million registered voters of la grand Europe, the new, enlarged, 25-member European Union, appear to care little or not at all about their future 732 members of the European Parliament (MEPs). <br /><br />Instead, it is another contest, the Euro 2004 football, that gets the headlines and hype. As a project in building a common European political community, the EU''s only directly-elected, fully democratic body is a resounding failure. <br /><br />Little known and even less loved, it is lumped in large parts of the continent as an expensive and unwieldy talking shop, which spends three weeks of every month in Brussels and then transfers itself for a week to Strasbourg at great cost. <br /><br />The typical Euro MP''s life, with a salary and a profligate, non-itemised expense account of 150,000 euros per year, per MEP, is supposed to revolve around fruitless debates about the most asinine subjects. These include bananas that are too bendy for European tastes and the need for pigs to have ''manipulable material'' to stop them attacking each other. <br /><br />And yet, the European Parliament is arguably important. In symbolic terms, it represents some form of accountability in an EU accused of a democratic deficit. It is really and truly the whole continent''s debating chamber, even though few bother much with its elaborately-translated debates in 20 languages and 190 obscure combinations (such as Finnish to Maltese). <br /><br /></div> </div><div class="section2"><div class="Normal"><br />It is because of their Parliament that Europeans have laws to regulate how long they can be made to work every day of the week. It made lead-free petrol an unassailable right and responsibility. It set beauty-without-cruelty, aka cosmetics sans animal testing, as an article of faith within the EU, so much so that the continent will ban all below-standard cosmetics from 2009. It has kept genetically-modified food at bay. <br /><br />But still it persists loveless and lovelorn. Twenty-five national elections are taking place, lamented the Czech Republic''s <span style="" font-style:="" italic="">Pravo</span> newspaper. France’s <span style="" font-style:="" italic="">Le Monde</span> described the mammoth trans-national exercise as an illustration of "Absent Europe", in which domestic politics, not the EU was the issue. <br /><br />It is a good point. The only real EU issue most voters agree on is whether it should exist at all.</div> </div>