By Neil Madden
STRASBOURG, Dec. 21 (Xinhua) -- Once an institution that few of the European Union's (EU) 500 million citizens understood - and even fewer cared about - the European Parliament (EP) was thrust onto the political centre stage in 2014.
Against a background of economic crisis and growing popular discontent, the 2014 elections to the EP were the most important since the first ones were held in 1979.
They not only gave voters a chance to pass judgment on EU leaders' efforts to tackle the eurozone crisis and to express their views on closer economic and political integration; they were also the first elections since the Lisbon Treaty of 2009 gave the parliament important new powers.
The most significant of these was to oblige heads of member states to take account of the election results when nominating the next president of the European Commission (EC), meaning voters would have a clear say in who took over at the helm of EU government.
In the end, the chosen successor to Jose Manuel Barroso was former Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, the candidate of the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), which won the most seats in the elections. But his selection came only after a prolonged and highly public campaign against his candidature by British Prime Minister David Cameron.
Cameron had hoped to get German Chancellor Angela Merkel to back his fight against Juncker, but was in the end left looking an isolated figure as the rest of the EU's centrist power block closed ranks.
The British Prime Minister's campaign was itself a symptom of the biggest political development given voice in the election results; the rise of populist eurosceptic parties in a number of EU countries.
The most stunning result was in France where the outwardly EU-hostile Front National (FN) won 26 percent of the vote, comfortably ahead of the second-placed UMP, and humiliating President Francois Hollande's Socialists who garnered a measly 14 percent, their worst-ever score at a European election.
Almost as amazing was the outright victory of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) which wants a straight in-out referendum on Britain's membership of the EU. UKIP won 28 percent of the vote, giving it 11 more EP seats. The result was the first time since 1910 that a national election in the UK was not won by either the Conservatives or the Labour Party.
Far-right parties also scored big in Denmark, Austria and Hungary, while the far-left Syriza topped the poll in Greece.
The new parliament is now smaller than its predecessor. There had been 766 MEPs since Croatia joined the EU in July 2013, but this number was scaled down at the 2014 elections to 751 and will stay at that level in future.
By the time the votes were counted and the various political groupings had materialised, the EP was left still dominated by the EPP and centre-left Socialists & Democrats (S&D), whose own candidate for the EC presidency, Martin Schulz, was subsequently elected president of the Parliament. The EPP saw a 5 percent drop in popular support while the S&D vote help up. However, the liberal ALDE group lost almost 2 percentage points in the vote, seeing the party overtaken as the third largest by the UK-led European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).
The decline of ALDE mirrors the fate of many traditional liberal parties as European politics seems to be becoming more polarised and divisive, with extremist voices of right and left gaining popular support.
Cognisant of these trends, Jean-Claude Juncker unveiled his new college of EU commissioners in September with a promise to mould an EU that "is bigger and more ambitious on big things, and smaller, even timid, on small things", reflecting voter's concerns that Brussels seems to impinge too much on people's everyday lives.
So far the EP has proved fairly compliant with Juncker's vision. This is principally a function of the dominance of the EPP and S&D when it comes to voting on EU legislation. In the current climate, the last thing the big parties want is to give more ammunition to the eurosceptics by demonstrating that government of the EU is unworkable.
But big challenges still lie ahead. Uncertainties over Greece's presidential election have shown that the eurozone crisis is far from over. The UK also wants to renegotiate its terms of EU membership ahead of its national elections during 2015. These and other issues still have the potential to provoke deep splits among EU lawmakers.
