Strijdvaardige vrouwen vechten voor zetels in EU-verkiezingen (en)

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Four women with strong anti-corruption credentials are battling to make it to Brussels, even as campaigning revolves around farce, scandals and populism in several EU states.

Norwegian-born French judge Eva Joly, on the French Green party's list, is making headlines in the Nordic countries with criticism of EU judicial and democratic standards.

"Silvio Berlusconi is dangerous and Nicolas Sarkozy has authoritarian traits," she said about the Italian and French leaders in Danish daily Berlingske Tidende. "Europe cannot function with two countries, France and Italy, which have dysfunctional judicial administrations."

In her work as a judge, Ms Joly played a key role in exposing high-level corruption in French state-owned oil giant Elf Aquitaine.

Italian centre left candidate Rosaria Capacchione, a journalist who has written extensively about the Camorra, is calling for an EU-wide anti-organised crime initiative on the model of the EU's robust anti-trust investigative resources.

Romanian former state prosecutor and justice minister Monica Macovei is second on the list of the country's ruling centre-right PDL party.

Ms Macovei, who helped overhaul Romania's administration on its way into the EU, has focused campaigning on tackling corruption in her home country but would face expectations to combat abuses in Brussels if she is voted in.

Swedish-born accountant Marta Andreasson has hitched her wagon to the British eurosceptic UKIP party. Ms Andreasson, who blew the whistle on European Commission financial laxities and got the sack in 2004, is running in the south-east constituency but has failed to attract publicity so far.

The European Parliament is mostly a man's world, with just 244 (31%) of the current 785 MEPs being women, Austria's Der Standard notes. The next two EP presidents are also set to be men. But the institution's last woman president, Nicole Fontaine (1999-2002), had an undistinguished tenure.

The credentials of the four reformers stand in stark contrast to the eccentric candidates profiled in French daily Le Monde.

The paper highlights Romanian glamour girl Elena Basescu, Germany's Gabriele Pauli (who thinks marriages should expire after seven years), Dutch vegeterian Natasja Oerlemans (who aims to "give a voice to animals") and Italy's Prince Emmanuel-Philibert of Savoy (who made his name in a TV dancing show), as some of the oddest would-be MEPs around.

The Italian political scene continues to be dominated by lurid allegations of Mr Berlusconi's affair with an 18-year old model, while UK papers keep pouring out revelations on MPs' expenses.

Some of the British exposes neatly reinforce stereotypes about the nouveau-riche Labour Party, over-privileged Tories and effeminate Liberals: Labour MP Bob Laxton tried to claim for a big new TV set, Tory MP Douglas Hogg claimed to have his moat cleaned and former Liberal leader Ming Campbell splashed out on scatter cushions.

Tory leader David Cameron's reform promises have seen him widely credited as emerging on top of Labour from the scandal. But it has made no one look good. "There is more than a whiff of populist gimmickry about the 'I am more a reformer than you' competition'," The Times' columinst Peter Riddell said.

Do mention the war

Polish parties are trying to make political capital from a German CDU-CSU conservative election promise to support the rights of displaced people.

"The message is basically a questioning of the result of World War II, a questioning of borders," opposition Law and Justice party head Jaroslaw Kaczynski said, alluding to a simmering row over the rights of native Germans exiled from Poland after 1945.

The ruling centre-right Civic Platform party criticised Mr Kaczynski for cultivating "hysteria." But its own deputy PM, Grzegorz Schetyna, could not resist saying that "Germans are the last people in Europe who should initiate projects on exiles," on the radio.

Germany's Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger points out that pretty faces count in electioneering. In North Rhine Westphalia, the attractive Silvana Koch-Mehrin is seen on Liberal posters, while Alexander Graf Lambsdorff is on the list but not on billboards.

Amid fears of low turnout, the paper notes that voters have a confusing array of parties (31) to choose from a list that is literally 1 metre long.

Secret handshakes

French centrist MoDem party leader Francois Bayrou has meanwhile complained of lack of pluralism in the EU.

"The UMP [French centre-right] and the Socialists, as well as their European equivalents, the EPP-ED and PSE, pretend to disagree. In reality, in Brussels, they play together. They divide posts behind the curtain," he told Liberation.

"How can the French Socialists say 'stop Barroso' [the likely-to-be-reapointed EU commission chief] in France and shut up in Brussels when their friends support him?"

On a day (May 27) when Europe's attention is turned to the European football cup final in Rome, politics professor John Peterson at the University of Edinburgh commented:

"I have heard it said that an American presidential election is like a world cup final. A British general election is like an FA cup final, and a European election is like a Tuesday night kick around in the park."