Democracy, but only some of the time

The number of foreigners registering for the Belgian local elections is worryingly low.

Addressing an audience of constitutional lawyers at the weekend, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso dared to utter the d-word. He told them that the eurozone’s crisis showed: “We need more integration, and the corollary of more integration has to be more democracy.”

The European Union is frequently accused by its detractors of having a democratic deficit. It is – so the argument variously runs – the work of unelected bureaucrats, of a cabal of national governments taking decisions without heed to the electorates that put them in power, and of a European Parliament that was elected on a turnout of 41%. These are the doubts on which the critics – and they notably include Germany’s constitutional court – feed. These are also the arguments over which political scientists do academic battle – the likes of Giandomenico Majone, Andrew Moravcsik, Larry Siedentop and so on.

But democracy is about more than abstract political theory. The creation of a culture of democracy requires more than an understanding of political science. It is also about practice, expectation and instinct.

So perhaps it is worth pausing momentarily to reflect on figures released by the Belgian authorities about registration for local elections that are to be held on 14 October. The deadline for registering to vote was the end of July, and on 20 August the electoral registration office published data about registrations. One of the striking features of those figures is the very low level of registration by foreigners – both those from other EU countries and those from outside the EU.

The figures published included details on what proportion of non-Belgian EU citizens who are eligible to vote have actually registered to do so. In the commune (the local government area) of central Brussels, the proportion is 11%; in the neighbouring communes of Ixelles, 11.5%; in Etterbeek, 12.2%; in Schaerbeek, 12.7%; in Woluwe St Lambert, 13.3%; in St Josse, 14.8%; in Watermael-Boitsfort, 16%; in St Gilles, 19.3%; and in Woluwe St Pierre, 21.8%.

So more than a month before we get to the elections themselves, we know that most foreigners eligible to vote have not registered to do so.

It would be easy at this point to blame everything on the Belgian electoral system. Belgian politics is not easy to understand and would rarely be accused of drawing the insider in. The linguistic divisions exacerbate the fractures in an already fissiparous party scene, where parties are named and renamed with baffling frequency. Individual politicians shift in and out of local, regional and federal level. In addition, the theoretical obligation that those registered to vote must vote is off-putting to outsiders not used to compulsory voting. For some, it will be easier to stay off the register in order to escape the theoretical fine (in practice, insiders say that the obligation is not enforced and certainly not against foreigners).

But blaming Belgian politics is too easy. The suspicion still lingers that many people who are living in the communes of Brussels because they have come to work in or around the EU institutions have not registered to vote in the local elections. While they do not constitute all the non-Belgian EU citizens in the city (in St Josse and St Gilles, for example, there are large communities of working-class Poles and Portuguese), yet they are a big part of the non-Belgian EU citizens in such communes as Woluwe St Pierre, Woluwe St Lambert, Ixelles and Wezembeek-Oppem.

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It would appear that for some EU officials, attachment to democracy is only theoretical and in practice that attachment does not extend to registering to vote. They seem to have forgotten that the right to vote was something for which people have campaigned and fought (and in the case of the right for non-Belgians to vote in local elections it was only recently won).

These figures on electoral registration are a timely counterweight to the rhetoric that Barroso and others will unleash this autumn. Democracy is much spoken about in EU circles, but sometimes actions (and inaction) speak louder than words.