Poverty erodes European rights (and vote)

A poll and a report, both published before the European elections, tell us who we are and where we stand, collectively: the latest Eurobarometer, published in mid-April, and the report of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), released in early June.

The Eurobarometer tells us that in the run-up to the now completed elections, citizens in Europe were (and are) concerned about the increase in poverty and social exclusion, and the reduced accessibility of health care.

“Irregular Immigration is not the top priority for European voters despite the prominence of the issue in the media and political campaigning by rightwing parties over the last year,” explains Lisa O'Carroll, the Guardian's Brussels correspondent.

Citizens of EU member states would have liked combating poverty and social exclusion (33%), and supporting  public health services (32%), to be the main topics of the election campaign. The economy and job creation come next, followed by defence and security, especially in countries neighbouring Russia (Denmark, Finland, and Lithuania).

Regarding public health: four years after a pandemic that reminded us that there are not enough hospital beds (repeatedly slashed over the past 30 years), not enough medicine, not enough staff (and not enough paid staff), the concern is legitimate.

Needless to say,  such concerns have not been heeded.

These figures don’t differ greatly from those of the same survey in December 2023. It’s also worth recalling that according to Eurostat, in 2022, 95.3 million people in the EU were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, or 21.6% of the population.

Poverty hurts us, and our rights

In EuObserver, Nikolaj Nielsen comments on data from the latest report of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). According to the FRA, fundamental rights in Europe are at risk: not just because of governments with increasingly less interest in democracy, but also because poverty and social exclusion are on the rise.  

“Rising energy and living costs have pushed one in five people across the EU into poverty,” states the report, adding that children, women, young people, racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, LGBTQI people, Roma and people with disabilities are those most at risk of poverty, as well as of having their fundamental rights threatened.

According to the FRA, part of the blame lies with geopolitical conflicts and increased racism; but also with the fact that civil society activism is increasingly suppressed: "excessive state interventions, particularly against the rights to freedom of association, peaceful assembly and expression, threatened the space for civil society.”

In an article for the Tageszeitung, Alexandra Kehm tells a very similar story concerning Germany: "Asian, Muslim or black people have a higher risk of poverty than the non-racialised population". Kehm takes data from the report "The Limits of Equality: Racism and the Risk of Poverty" (Grenzen der Gleichheit: Rassismus und Armutsgefährdung) : while 10% of women and 9% of men are at risk of poverty, these percentages rise to 38% for Muslim women and 41% for Muslim men.

How to secure more rights?

There is a push, though lacking some force, towards a social Europe, as Esther Lynch, secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, and Bart Vanhercke, director of research at the European Trade Union Institute, point out. Think, for example, of the Directive for Platform Workers, or the Adequate Minimum Wages Directive.

The commitment to the European Pillar of Social Rights, full of good intentions and potential, was renewed last April with the La Hulpe Declaration: signed by the Commission and the now former Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo on behalf of 25 EU member states (all except Sweden and Austria), the European Economic and Social Committee, and the majority of social partners and civil society, it should lay the foundations of the future of social Europe, that is, prepare the social agenda for the period 2024-2029.

However, in the lives of citizens, noticeable progress is often far away. One only has to look at the press to find examples.

In the Guardian, an op-ed by former British prime minister, Gordon Brown, discusses the "children of austerity," i.e., children born after 2010 who "account for 3.4 million of Britain’s 4.3 million children in poverty," a figure that has increased by about 100 thousand individuals per year over the past 10 years due to welfare cuts (e.g., the repeated cuts in child benefit allocation, which is now worth 20% less, as well as many other measures mentioned by Brown). "The past 14 years have seen even more dramatic events – Brexit, Covid-19 and the energy crisis arising from the Russia-Ukraine war to name only three – but, damaging as these individual events have been to people’s lives, the one constant throughout has been austerity," Brown explains.

France is currently debating a reform of unemployment benefits (which will pass despite the coming elections), which the monthly Alternatives Economiques - among others - calls a "massacre": "Never, in the 66 years of unemployment benefits, has a reform treated unemployed workers so poorly, and never has a government swung its baton so insistently," writes Sandrine Foulon, who also recalls the already significant cuts of 2019-2021 and 2023.

In Finland, another example is analysed by sociologist and Teollisuusliitto union member Michał Kulka-Kowalczyk in Krytyka Polityczna. The Finnish government's new welfare cuts will cause about 68 thousand more people to fall below the poverty line, including 16,700 children. These figures come from Soste, an umbrella organisation of around 200 social and health organisations. According to a report that the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health submitted to the Commission, the number is in fact 94 thousand people.

Abstention and inequality

The results of the recent elections are worrisome, not only because of the space taken by the far right, but because of something we insist on ignoring: across the EU, 50.8% of eligible voters voted, with peaks of participation in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg. So almost half of the eligible voters, almost half of Europe's citizens, decided not to participate - or could not, or did not know how to, or simply did not know about the election. The lowest participation figures were recorded in countries such as Croatia and Bulgaria, among the poorest in the EU.

“Social and territorial inequalities substantially affect political participation. Prior studies have already documented that abstention is more pronounced in countries with lower average salaries and within countries abstention is greater in poorer territories and among individuals coming from a low socio-economic background”, explains Clara Martinez-Toledano, assistant professor of financial economics, and coordinator of Wealth Distribution at the World Inequality Database. “The extreme right is capturing a substantially higher share of the vote in most EU countries. Their emphasis on socio-cultural issues, in particular, immigration issues has become very effective in attracting voters from low socio-economic backgrounds who used to vote for left-wing parties but they feel left behind by them.” 

The reality is (also) that 5% of the population in Europe holds 43.1% of the total wealth, while the poorest 50% own 8%; and in the last 30 years, most EU countries have abolished wealth tax.