Between June 4th and June 7th, Europeans from twenty-seven member states will go to the polls to elect a new European Parliament. One man, however, is more likely to tip the balance of power in Strasbourg than the electorates of most individual countries. That man is David Cameron. In 2005, when campaigning for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Cameron sought to ingratiate himself to the Eurosceptic wing of his party by making a pledge. Choose me, he assured them, and I’ll bring the Conservatives out of the mainstream centre-right political grouping in the European Parliament, the EPP (European People’s Party), after the next elections. The icing on this isolation cake was the surreptitious deselection and suspicious retirements of old-style pro-European Tory MEPs, and the imposition of control from Central Office during the MEP corruption scandals of Summer 2008.
Why exactly did the Cameroonian plan tug on the heartstrings of the John Redwoods and William Hagues of this world? Above all, it’s important to remember that the modern-day British correlation between Left and Right and Europhile and Eurosceptic is an anomaly in international terms as well as historically (Labour’s 1983 manifesto promised, for example, to pull Britain out of the then-EEC). Your most ardent Superstaters are likely to be found, not in the Socialist bloc, but within Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats or Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP. The Tories smell a federalist scent wafting around the hemicycle, and it gives them the jitters. For them, there’s nothing worse than the familiar refrain of common security, immigration and foreign policies. And don’t get the anti-Maastricht veterans started on the Lisbon Treaty (no really, please don’t).
So, you might be asking, Cameron’s had four years: how’s he got on? Not well, is the answer. And with only three months before a new Parliament is elected, Cameron risks, in Prescottian style, getting the political egg on his face. The problem is that most of the centre-right parties who make up the EPP are quite happy where they are, thank you very much. As the largest grouping in the Parliament, they elect its President, who gets to do fun things like fawn over Hillary Clinton, and perhaps more importantly, have an evident leg-up in setting the political agenda and controlling committees. Bubbling below the surface, as I mentioned last week, are also various propositions to expand the role of the parliamentary blocs. If the Tories do break away, then, they could deprive the EPP of its largest-party status, giving European Socialists a boon (although the EPP still fancies its chances). The European Parliament doesn’t like splinter groups, especially national ones. It somewhat defies the point of a multitude of countries coming together to work towards common goals after centuries of division. That’s why it takes 25 MEPs from seven countries to create a recognised grouping, eligible for EU funding. To many, this looks like a bit of a long-shot for Cameron’s comrades, assuming he doesn’t want to end up sharing floor space with Jean-Marie Le Pen, Alessandra Mussolini or not-quite-Fascists-but-really-pushing-it parties (I’m looking at you, Law and Justice).
But internal European Parliament arrangements are probably not what are on Cameron’s mind. For him, the political dilemma is tricky. Either he stays true to his word, and succeeds in attracting Czech, Baltic, Swedish and Italian Conservatives as seems to be his best-case scenario (good luck…), thereby winning plaudits from within his Party, or he fails, embittering the Eurosceptics who are already miffed at the return of Ken Clarke. Either way, in a move which will be one of the first to which foreign leaders pay attention, Cameron risks appearing like an isolationist who has no conception of the necessity of co-operation during this time of recession. Not a great way to dispel doubts about the existence of a foreign policy vision. By all accounts, Barack Obama wasn’t impressed by this kind of attitude when he met Cameron last summer. So does Cameron move out of the EPP, annoying other governments to placate an internal faction of his own party, or does he stay in, and risk re-opening the fissures which destroyed the Conservatives in the Thatcher-Major era? Either way, Dave, the clock’s ticking…
Update: the decision looks pretty final.
March 12th, 2009 at 10:31
While I admit being biased by Conservative at University, I do think that much of Conservative Euroscepticism is actually built on a longing for the Commonwealth, Cameron even indicated this when a while back he ran an article saying forget Europe, we should be thinking of trade with India. I think they resent the ideaof Britain having to be an equal on a continent that it long seemed the above.
March 12th, 2009 at 10:34
Well when I said much, maybe a significant vein.
March 12th, 2009 at 12:50
Yeah it does look like they’re leaving then – which is going to be a bit of a mess for the Tories. What’s the betting there will be some kind of fudge?
Do you reckon they think they’re going to get any political traction from this, that it will boost their chances in June? I can’t see why any non-political wonks would vote for them on the basis of their withdrawal from the EPP.
It would be really brilliant if, as a result, the EPP lost their domination of the Parliament…
March 12th, 2009 at 15:28
I don’t think he’ll get any political traction, but it’s probably useful internally.
On the question of the balance of power in the Parliament, there’s an excellent article here: http://www.euractiv.com/en/eu-elections/uk-tories-return-eu-socialists-power/article-180179
March 15th, 2009 at 12:42
Right so the EPP might just lose their vote and then Parliament swings to PSE and makes legislation the Tories hate even more :-p
March 15th, 2009 at 16:01
This will get the Conservatives a few extra votes in the elections this June that they wouldn’t have otherwise got, but they’ll be from Conservative party members who voted UKIP last time.
As for the sceptic & pro European positions falling on right-left lines in the UK, this is in part because the centre-right in the UK is a different beast from the continent. There are differences between Conservatism and Christian Democracy and it is these very differences that are at the root not only of the strained relations between the Conservatives and the EPP (remember originally it was the EPP who were sceptical of membership) but indeed of the Conservatives’ growing alienation with the European project as a whole. The project is very much a Christian Democrat one, in which free trade was a mere means to an end, whereas for the Conservatives free trade was supposed to be an end in itself. Hence Conservatives are not keen on a project that is not going in a Conservative direction.
The Conservative membership generally know very little about European centre-right parties (if they did they might not have been taken in by the claims that “a new grouping of Eurosceptic Conservative parties” was just waiting to be formed) or instinctively feel they are the most natural cousin parties – run a poll on their favourite elected centre-right leader in the world and you won’t see many votes for Nicolas Sarkozy or Anglea Markel, who do have a profile here, won’t get many votes, let alone Mirek Topolánek (despite actually being a conservative prime minister in a European country). Instead it will be a landslide for Canada’s Stephen Harper.
Chris – you’re right that if the PES is the largest party it might make withdrawal seem a more attractive option. I don’t think this has escaped some anti-EPPers’ notice…
March 15th, 2009 at 22:13
But I don’t think Tories would ever seriously consider withdrawal, making this whole move slightly redundant, but that is the subject of my next post :-p
March 22nd, 2009 at 15:25
[...] Mark announced on the update to his post, Cameron has formally reasserted his desire for the Conservatives to leave the European [...]