French Greens Surge Ahead in Elections for European Parliament.

• Author: Wadlow, Rene

Europe-wide, Greens advance despite shift toward center-right.

The conflict in Kosovo overshadowed the campaign for the 626 member European Parliament, elected from the 15 countries of the European Union on the basis of proportional representation. On June 13, 1999, the deputies of the European Parliament were elected on a national basis-the number depending on the population of each country. They will group themselves into political parties or confederations of parties seated in a traditional left-right semi circle. The Greens have 36 seats in the new Parliament, up from 27 in the outgoing Parliament. The biggest Green advance was in France where the group elected nine members to the European Parliament, having had none in the previous session of the Parliament; each Parliament is elected for a five year period.

It was not that the Kosovo war was hotly debated during the campaign but rather that the war and refugee flows drew all the psychic energy available that would otherwise have been given over to the issues to be debated in the upcoming parliament: employment, immigration, agriculture, food security, urban-rural balance and planning, social security, and energy policies. The flow of Kosovo refugees widely reported on television created an outpouring of sympathy and concrete actions of food and clothes collection and other forms of humanitarian aid. From small villages through large cities, there were collections of food; plans were made for refugee families etc. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, Europeans were made conscious of other Europeans leaving houses like their own, needing clothes and goods like their own. There was a form of cultural identification with the situation that did not exist for other massive refugee flows such as those from the Sudan or Rwanda. For older Europeans, the bombing, fleeing persons were a reminder of the Second World War and of events, which they never expected to see in Europe again.

The Kosovo conflict raised passions but mostly a numbing sense of "how could this happen here?" The positive response was to deal massively with the humanitarian response. Questions of security in the Balkans, of the future political status of Kosovo, of the punishment of genocide and other war crimes was left to be decided later or by specialists. When the campaign for the European Parliament was mentioned, usually at the end of the television news, viewers were worn out emotionally. The low...