On Billboards across Europe, blue posters have popped up alerting citizens to the forthcoming elections to the European Parliament. The posters, parliament's own initiative, make a reasonable stab at a hard task: explaining what is at stake when voters go to the polls between June 4th and 7th. Nobody wins or loses a European election. Instead, the outcome fixes the relative weights of the biggest political blocks, which range from a mushy centre-right to a squishy centre-left, with a woolly Liberal coalition in the middle. One poster asks "How much should we tame financial markets?" and pictures a fierce lion next to a winsome cat. Yet the balanced nature of the image is not quite right. Members of the European Parliament (MEPS) love regulating things: most would like the markets domesticated, and some want them spayed and declawed as well.
展开▼
