Scandal? The votes of millions of voters will not be used for the candidates they have chosen. And the results will be impacted.
Can we imagine an election in which voters go to the polls without their vote being taken into account? This may seem quite absurd, but that is the case with this European election. This Sunday, while the vote is proportional, the vote of hundreds of thousands of French people, and the vote of hundreds of thousands of voters from other EU countries will be of no use to the candidates they have chosen. Scandal ? Not really: no fraud, no malfunction to be noted. If votes are not taken into account, it is for a reason linked to a rule defined in France for this election. A rule that applies to everyone.
This rule is that of the 5% threshold, implemented in many countries of the European Union, including France. This rule, which does not exist in Spain or Belgium in particular, stipulates that for a political party to be able to obtain seats in the European Parliament, it must collect at least 5% of the votes cast at national level. This measure aims to avoid too much political fragmentation within Parliament, thus guaranteeing a certain stability and more effective governance during the term of office.
In practice, this means that if a party receives less than 5% of the votes, its votes cast are purely and simply excluded from the calculation of seats. These voices, although expressed by millions of citizens, are therefore not represented in the European assembly. Another effect of this rule: candidates who have passed the 5% threshold benefit from it, the few seats which would have been allocated to very small lists (one or two per list) without the threshold are distributed between the lists which have passed the 5 %, proportionally.
This rule thus favors large political parties to the detriment of small parties. Emerging or marginal political groups thus often find themselves without representation in the European Parliament. In France, for example, during the 2019 European elections, several parties were unable to send deputies to Strasbourg despite significant scores: Debout la France had collected 3.5% of the votes, or nearly 800,000 votes; the list of Benoît Hamon 3.27% (740,000 votes); the PCF list 2.5% (more than 560,000 votes). In total, nearly 4 million votes were cast absolutely for nothing for the supported candidates.
This Sunday, June 9, it will be the same for certain parties which will not pass the 5% mark. We must of course wait for the results of these European elections to count, but all the small lists represent at least millions of votes throughout the European Union which applies this rule.