Short of giving him a pair of horns and a forked tail, it’s hard to see how you could make the people who run institutional Europe dislike Declan Ganley more than they do now. Ganley is the British-born, multimillionaire Irish businessman who spoiled the European Union’s party last June by spearheading a successful campaign to persuade Irish voters to reject the EU’s Lisbon treaty. The Irish vote threw the EU into a state of organisational confusion from which it has not recovered to this day.
Now Libertas, Ganley’s political movement, is putting up local candidates across the EU for next June’s European Parliament elections. Ganley himself will stand for the constituency of Ireland North West. It is clear that Libertas will run a highly populist campaign – in one recent statement, it attacked a European Parliament decision to “go ahead with building a €9m gym and pool in Brussels which only MEPs and parliament staff can access… The move to go ahead with it while families across the EU are facing financial hardship shows a complete lack of respect for the people of Europe.”
It’s this sort of populism that makes Ganley’s opponents stick a great big ”anti-European” label on him. But is he really anti-European? I recommend readers of this blog to look at the transcript of a long interview that Ganley recently gave to the online edition of E!Sharp, a magazine that specialises in EU affairs. In this interview, he comes across as more sympathetic to the idea of European integration than his critics allow. This is no British-style Eurosceptic speaking. He pulls no punches, however, in attacking what he sees as the EU’s shortcomings in democracy and accountability.
So how successful will Libertas be in the European Parliament elections? For sure, there is a protest vote out there in some countries that is waiting to be tapped. But it could go to the far right or the far left rather than to Ganley.
In a recent conversation I had with Ganley, I got the sense that he risked putting too much emphasis in his campaign on his anti-Lisbon treaty views, and too little on the bread-and-butter issues of jobs, financial worries and economic recovery that are surely uppermost right now in voters’ minds.
And then, with turnout at European Parliament elections having fallen on every occasion between 1979 and 2004, there is the minor matter of how to get the voters to vote…
Across the globe: Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs on