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On Sunday 7th June, 2009, polls closed across Europe for the seventh EU parliamentary elections since European elections were first held in 1979. Nobody could have predicted what a roller-coaster ride of excitement these elections would turn out to be. Campaigning started months ago, with clear favourites picked out early on. It wasn’t long, however, before the favourites had fallen to the side and nobody had any clear idea who was in the lead. The media covered everything 24-hours a day, 7-days a week, devoting significant time and resources to highlighting the ups and downs of the largest transnational elections in the world. Not only was voter turn-out predicted to reach record highs, but the eyes of the world were fixed on Europe, eager to see what the results would be. At the end of a long and bitterly-fought campaign, it was an unknown senator from Illinois that found himself elected the first African-American President of the European Union.

Or… um… hang on. I think I might have confused things a bit. Let me try again:

On Sunday 7th June, 2009, polls closed across Europe for the seventh EU parliamentary elections since European elections were first held in 1979. To all but the most devoted Europe watchers, it was easy to predict that this was not going to be a particularly exciting election, largely because the EU is not a particularly exciting political system. In fact, the necessities of balancing power between 27 competing member-states (with small countries like Luxembourg not wanting to be out-voted on every issue by larger countries like Germany) has left the EU largely technocratic, void of personality and without a clear (at least to the voting public) demarcation of power and responsibility. The EU is boring by design, because it is based on the separation of power and a system of consensus building. If things ever got too exciting, the EU might break apart.

There’s nothing wrong with boring. Boring can be good. “Bread-and-butter” politics is the sign that things are ticking along nicely. “Excitement” can be short-hand for political extremism, conflict and violence. After two World Wars and one Cold one, Europe has had quite enough of that kind of excitement, thank you. But it makes it very difficult for the public to become engaged in pan-European politics if the separation of powers is so successful that few people actually understand how power has been separated in the first place.

Consequently, across Europe, there was little mainstream media coverage until the actual week of the elections. European media organisations are, just like any other business, not only operating in a severe recession right now, but print and television media are increasingly coming under pressure from internet news. All this extra competition means that the mainstream media are (perhaps understandably) unwilling to devote large resources to stories that might not attract an audience. Compare the coverage of the EU elections to the 2008 US Presidential election campaign, when the smallest piece of gossip was enough to guarantee a large and eager following, not just nationally but globally.

The EU and the US are, of course, two completely different political systems. But EU politicians and pundits nonetheless look back at all the hype generated by the 2008 US Presidential race with a certain jealousy. Everything is always bigger and flashier in the US – why can’t we have some of that?

On the other hand, do Europeans really need that kind of political race? All the smears and scandals, the big business interests and the invasive, 24-hour news coverage? Possibly not. But with voter turn-out at a record low last Sunday, it would have been nice to have at least a little bit more hype. Europeans can sneer at US elections as dumbed-down, populist politics appealing to the lowest common denominator, but there really is no risk at all of “dumbing-down” the EU. It seems completely resistant to explanation, let alone simplification.

So, for one reason or another, the mainstream media failed to cover the elections properly. When coverage did start in earnest (practically on the day of the elections) the public were bombarded with an alphabet soup of acronyms. They were overwhelmed by discussion of political groups they had never heard of before: EPP, PES, ALDE, UEN to give just some of the more important. With no real media coverage before the elections, Europeans have not been properly equipped to decipher the results. Is it a good thing that the EPP has done very well in the elections? Or that PES has done badly? What is UEN, and what does it mean that it has 25 seats in the parliament (the minimum needed for a political group) whereas the eurosceptic Ind/Dem group has only 21?

In the US elections, not only is the political system clearer (despite the confusion of things like electoral college voting and super-delegates) but where the mainstream media does fail to cover something, there is an army of online “citizen journalists” ready and waiting. Much has been said about President Obama’s shrewd use of online social networks like Twitter and Facebook to mobilise grassroots support for his campaign. If the European media has failed to cover the elections properly, why don’t online citizens step in to fill the gaps with blogs and social networking?

The simple truth is that the political blogosphere in the EU is nowhere near as developed as it is in the US. I say this as an EU political blogger myself. There are plenty of blogs that mention EU politics occasionally (usually on the rare occasion when something exciting happens, like a scandal or a gaff) but only a handful that are devoted purely to the subject.

This is hardly surprising. Blogging is often done by amateurs, and the EU can be a difficult subject to write about as a professional, let alone for anybody also juggling a full-time job and other responsibilities offline. The EU is one of the most complicated systems of government on Earth, and this means less people interested in blogging about it and less people interested in reading blogs about it.

EU blogging also throws up other unique challenges that simply aren’t there for US bloggers. The most obvious barrier is language. No matter what language you write in as an EU blogger, you will always be excluding readers from other member-states. Even English (the most spoken EU language) is by no means universally understood. There are blogging platforms that have tried to develop multi-language blogs (such as blogactiv.eu) but very few people will ever be able to read enough European languages to follow blogs in all 27 member-states (this is the perfect reason for bloggers to promote sites like dailybabel.com, of course!)

The very way the EU parliament is elected is also a barrier to effective blogging. People vote for national representatives to the EU parliament either in their own country or in the country they are a resident. MEPs are therefore encouraged to campaign for national votes, meaning that European issues are rarely touched upon. There is no single “election campaign” to blog about as there was in the US, nor are there candidates that all of Europe can get behind. There is no “X-factor” in European politics.

Having said all that, many parties have made use of the internet to get better coverage – especially smaller, single-issue parties. In the UK, the far-right British National Party has for a long time been denied the oxygen of media publicity because of its extreme views. During the EU elections, it has been making use of the internet to appeal directly to British voters, bypassing the mainstream blockade to successfully elect an MEP to the European parliament.

In Sweden, the controversial Pirate Party got 7.1% of the vote after an online campaign for greater internet freedom in the face of increasing pressure from the music and film industries. Green parties also did well, with (perhaps coincidentally) a disproportionate amount of Twitter “tweets” coming from Green MEP candidates according to europatweets.eu.

It hasn’t been all doom and gloom from the EU blogosphere, either. There has been some truly great blogging going on, picking up on stories that the mainstream might have missed (for example, a claim often made that 80% of all national laws come from the EU was examined and debunked by bloggers in great detail here). EU bloggers recognise how difficult it can be to get into EU politics, and some of them have set up an EU blog aggregator called bloggingportal.eu (I am an editor there) to get more people involved. The European Journalism Centre (with funding from the EU) has also run a blogging competition called thinkaboutit.eu to try to stimulate more online debate in the run-up to the elections.

Despite all this, and depite the US elections demonstrating the potential of social networks, new media and political blogging to reach voters, EU bloggers are still playing catch-up. There are some dedicated EU bloggers, but too few, and with not enough of an audience to really have an impact.

In the end, both mainstream media and independent bloggers have failed to cover the elections with anything like the hype surrounding the 2008 US elections, and ultimately this is because the US and the EU are very, very different political beasts. The problems facing European media and EU bloggers are unique to Europe, and are not problems that commentators in the US have to deal with.

So what happens next? Well, during a recession being blamed on free-market excess, Europe has perhaps unusually shifted to the right and the socialists have been the big losers. The power dynamic in the parliament has changed, and compromises and alliances will now be worked out (largely behind closed doors). This will most likely be the EU at its worst – technocratic and opaque.

The next big challenge for EU bloggers will be how to cover the appointment of the new Commission President (almost certain to be José Manuel Barroso, possibly unchallenged) and how to drum up interest in a second referendum on the Lisbon treaty in Ireland. In many respects, the referendum in Ireland will be an easier thing to blog than the EU elections. Attention will be concentrated on one country, and the issues under discussion will be more focused.

Bloggers are facing an uphill struggle when they write about the EU. Not only do they have to translate news and opinions into 23 different official languages, they also have to clearly explain and make interesting one of the most complicated political systems on Earth. But it is important to stress that in contemporary politics, a healthy blogosphere is a vital part of a healthy democracy – not because it necessarily has any great impact on the “real world” (although at its best it does), but because it demonstrates that citizens are engaged and interested enough in politics to spend time talking and writing about it publicly.

The EU and the US are not the same thing. They have completely different political systems and they face different issues. But if the EU has not caught up with the US in terms of engaging its citizens by the next set of EU parliamentary elections in 2014, then something is surely going wrong with European democracy  

Josef Litobarski is the author of the European blog Citizen Europe. 

Illustration by AJA