THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: If Bulgarian Bilyana Raeva is re-elected to the European Parliament next weekend, she will get a more than eightfold raise. She could also find herself sitting beside a bumper crop of lawmakers from Europe's extreme right.
The European Union's Brussels-based legislature is little loved and less understood, but after polls on June 4-7, it is likely to look significantly different, with new members, new rules and potentially new powers.
The parliament is the Cinderella of EU institutions. With no right to initiate legislation, it is limited to negotiating amendments or blocking laws crafted by the more powerful EU council -- made up of the national governments -- and European Commission, the EU bureaucracy.
But the next legislature could get expanded powers -- and perhaps more public attention and gravitas -- if Ireland later this year ratifies an important treaty amending the way the EU works.
It could also get a laundered reputation. The parliament will have new rules governing legislators' salaries and expenses after an expense-abuse scandal that began three years ago, involving sums far greater than those in the current uproar over Britain's House of Commons.
But the coming election to the Brussels-based parliament is seizing attention in capitals across the 27-nation bloc for a different reason. In the midst of the worst recession since World War II, the vote could offer a guide to political fallout for national governments to come.
"People think that the local and European elections don't matter as much, so they can use those votes to punish politicians they are unhappy with," says Julia Clark, head of political research at pollster Ipsos MORI in the U.K. Germany holds national elections in the fall, while the U.K. must hold them by June 2010.
From a Romanian property tycoon on bail on kidnapping charges, to a Cambridge-educated ultranationalist in Britain, nationalist, anti-immigrant and xenophobic politicians are campaigning to tap into popular anger. Some are likely to make it to Brussels. >>> By Gaston Ceron in Brussels and Alistair MacDonald in London | Friday, May 29, 2009
