Libertas needs more ideas and less negativity

Libertas needs more ideas and less negativity
By Simon Taylor
09.04.2009 / 05:10 CET
Declan Ganley fails to convince in debate as opposition to Lisbon still overshadows party.

Declan Ganley wants his Libertas party to be known for more than just opposing the Lisbon treaty.

After enjoying success in the Irish referendum on the treaty, which was rejected last June, Ganley has been trying to position Libertas as a party offering a wider political programme. As part of his efforts, Ganley took part in a debate last week (1 April) in Brussels with Daniel Cohn-Bendit MEP, co-president of the Greens – but his performance was far from convincing.

After the success in Ireland, Ganley had promised to field candidates in all 27 member states for the European Parliament elections in June under the Libertas banner. So far, he has established parties in only seven member states (Ireland, the UK, Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, France and Malta) and has already failed to meet the deadline for registering a party in Germany.
Lack of consistency

The limited success in establishing Libertas as a pan-European political force and Ganley's unconvincing performance in the debate last week show that he has failed to move the party beyond being a single-issue campaign platform. One of the reasons for this is a lack of consistency. Ganley said last week that he was “genuinely pro-European”, that the EU was “the most successful peace project ever” and that he believed people would support the EU if there was more democracy, accountability and transparency – Libertas's campaign themes. He also revealed that he had voted ‘Yes' twice in the referenda on the Nice treaty in Ireland.

But he offered no concrete arguments as to why the Lisbon treaty made him “worried about the future of democracy” in a way that the Nice treaty had not. He said he had read the treaty and not found “one good thing” in it. Yet when Cohn-Bendit pointed out that Lisbon provides a mechanism allowing national parliaments to ask the European Commission to reconsider the need for putting forward legislative proposals, he did not engage with him, not even to claim that this mechanism would probably be relatively weak.

In an attempt to offset his party's negative stance on Lisbon, Ganley said that Libertas would soon be proposing a policy that would make the EU a world leader in renewable energy. He then spoke about the GSM standard for mobile phones which, he said, had given the EU leadership in the technology for a generation. But he undermined his arguments by confusing the success of the GSM standard with the fiasco of the 3G licence auctions in the early 2000s.

Ganley clearly has the ability to tap into public resentment of an EU which is seen as undemocratic, remote and secretive. His criticism of the lack of transparency on MEPs' expenses, for example, is justified. But he is increasingly showing that he is not able to expand on his opposition to the Lisbon treaty and turn it into a coherent set of policies. He claims that he wants the EU to work better so that it would garner more public support. But he seems to have a poor grasp of the issues he claims are so important to him: how to address subsidiarity and how technological leadership comes from a harmonised single market rather than disparate national rules.

Ganley may claim that he is not simply out to obstruct the development of the EU. But the lack of credible policies means that he will attract the support only of those who want the EU to fail.