Out of five Croatians in Brussels, roughly one in five Croatians decided who would speak for the other four in five in Brussels, for the next five years. Whatever those twelve people say, vote for, or champion in committee, they carry a mandate stamped with a number most national governments would treat as a crisis of legitimacy, not a functioning election.
Croatia is the extreme case, but it isn’t an isolated one. It’s the sharpest data point in a pattern the EU has learned to live with rather than confront: European Parliament elections increasingly run on the enthusiasm of a shrinking, self-selecting minority, and nobody in Brussels seems especially alarmed about what that minority produces.
Here’s where turnout actually bottomed out in 2024:
Croatia — 21.34%
Lithuania — 28.94%
Bulgaria — 33.79%
Latvia — 33.82%
Slovakia — 34.39%
The EU average was just over 50%. Croatia isn’t slightly below the line, it’s nearly ten points below the next-worst country.
When turnout collapses this far, a comparatively small, committed bloc needs very few actual votes to buy an outsized share of seats, visibility, and legitimacy-by-default. Slovakia is the clean illustration — a far-right party took third place nationally and picked up two seats on turnout barely above a third of the electorate.
Low turnout lowers the bar of admission for whoever shows up organized. The European Parliament should be the EU’s democratic institution in which member states negotiate among themselves. But, when turnout falls this far, an EU election with 21% participation, this isn’t functioning as a democratic reflection on the Union, it is functioning as a no-effort seat-allocation activity that a motivated minority can dominate.
A 21% turnout is a signal that most of the voter don’t see the European Parliament as an institution that represents them, doing something to them or around them. They see the EU as an alliance rather than a union, homogeneity and self-interest push out pluralism, to them, the Parliament is just nominally there to give salaries to PMs.
Another opposite example of this story is Hungary. Turnout there was nearly 60% in 2024, well above the EU average, and a double-digit jump from the previous election. Still, Hungary sent a delegation to a European Parliament, a delegation aligned against the liberal consensus Brussels claims to represent.
There’s no turnaround number for a national delegation’s legitimacy, so a 21% mandate is not different from a 65% one. But, maybe there should be at least a formal acknowledgment that not all EU mandates are created equal.
A Parliament built to speak for 450 million people is only as legitimate as the elections that fill it. Currently, in at least five member states, a little over a fifth of the electorate is doing all the deciding for everyone else.