The European Parliament

The European Parliament is more powerful — and less popular — than ever. Many of the 500 million citizens represented by the European Union legislature probably don’t know what it does and few pay it much attention. Inside the EU’s home in Brussels, it gets plenty of attention and has steadily expanded its reach to everything from banker bonuses and electricity flows to car emissions and e-cigarettes. It’s also playing a bigger role in who gets selected for top jobs in the EU machinery. At the same time, fringe groups are using the Parliament as a soapbox for populist views, increasingly those attacking the notion of the EU itself.

Protest parties that got a lift from Europe’s debt crisis boosted their share of seats to about 30 percent in a May 2014 election from 20 percent in the previous vote five years earlier. Voters in bailed-out southern countries are angry at German-fashioned budget austerity and wealthier northern states oppose more EU encroachment on national powers. Seats in the Parliament are divided among EU states based on population. Within each country, they are awarded to parties according to the proportion of votes, a system that paves the way for insurgent national groups to harvest protest ballots. These include Nigel Farage’s U.K. Independence Party, which won its first seat in the House of Commons in October 2014, and the anti-euro, anti-immigration National Front of France under Marine Le Pen. Greece’s nationalist Golden Dawn, which entered the Greek legislature in 2012, gained its first EU seats in the 2014 vote. The stronger presence of fringe groups representing both the right and the ex-communist left could further shake up politics in their home countries and lead to less predictable, or gridlocked, EU legislation. Thanks to new rules, the election had a more direct influence on the choice of the president of the European Commission, the executive arm that proposes legislation and polices the EU’s single market.