EU voters cast protest ballot

Election officials from Poland to Portugal found one thing in common as they counted votes for the European Parliament on Sunday night: it did not take them long to finish their job.

Record abstention rates marred the 25-nation poll; Those who did turn out used the election mainly to express dissatisfaction with their national governments rather than any opinion about the European Union.

Every ruling party in Europe, save the recently elected Spanish Socialists and Greek Conservatives, suffered setbacks, some of them dramatic. "Voters suffering from mid-term blues wanted to give their governments a bloody nose without having to face the consequences," says Steven Everts, an analyst with the Center for European Reform, a think tank in London.

At the same time, he adds, the 55 percent abstention rate revealed "a growing indifference and apathy - and in some countries outright hostility - to greater European integration. Supporters of the project have some explaining and reconnecting to do."

"This is a wake-up call," outgoing European Parliament President Pat Cox told reporters. "Europe has been too absent in too many campaigns."

Ironically, enthusiasm was at its lowest ebb in the Eastern European nations that joined the EU only six weeks ago. In Poland, for example, the turnout was just 20 percent. "There is a kind of huge disinterest in any political issues" because of widespread corruption, says Anna Rozick, director of the Batory Foundation, a Warsaw think tank. "When people don't want to participate in public life because of political parties' bad image ... it is very difficult to persuade them that by voting they can change anything."

Poland, where the ruling Socialist Party was beaten into fifth place, was also emblematic of another widespread trend, the antigovernment protest vote. In Western Europe, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was hardest hit: his Social Democratic Party took just 21 percent of the vote in its worst result since 1949. The conservative German opposition's success helped boost the center-right grouping in the 732- member European Parliament to top place, with 269 seats.

The British, Danish, Dutch, and - to a lesser extent - Italian governments suffered at the hands of voters angry about their support for US policy in Iraq. And French President Jacques Chirac's ruling party, like Mr. Schröder's party, took a drubbing because of unpopular economic and social reforms and economic stagnation.

Most political parties stood on platforms built mainly from domestic issues. Some observers suggest that this explained some of the lack of interest in the elections. "Your capacity to attract voters diminishes if you operate on left-overs from national domestic campaigns," argues John Palmer, political director of the independent European Policy Centre in Brussels.

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