If the European Union is to become a true federation, it must begin to adopt a transnational party system.

If we try to define the concept of a political party, we can say that it is made up of people who share the same ideology, ideals and values.
These people organise themselves into a group with a leader, a logo and a shared political programme, which they wish to see adopted. To achieve this aim, they put forward candidates in elections who represent these ideals, seeking to persuade a section of the population to vote for them. In this way, they can implement their programme at an institutional level, in parliament or in government.

A political party is built on its leader, its members and its candidates, but above all on the ideals that unite them. If these ideals are shared by the majority of the population, the latter will feel that the party is listening to them and representing them, and will therefore vote for it. To be successful, a party must have clear ideals that set it apart from others, but not so niche as to represent only a small section of the population.

A party that wishes to succeed at national level and aspire to form a government cannot confine itself to regionalism or the push for independence in small parts of a country. This is what happened, for example, to the Northern League in Italy: before becoming simply the League, by broadening its agenda to a national level in 2017, it did not secure enough votes to aspire to government, as it garnered less than 1 per cent of the vote across the whole of southern Italy.
A similar case is that of the Catalan independence movement: when they field their candidates for the Spanish Parliament, they can at best act as the deciding factor in governments more favourable to their cause, without achieving sufficient results to secure independence, precisely because they lack the necessary numbers.

So if parties that focus on just one region of a country inevitably fail in national elections – or are forced to broaden their manifesto to include the concerns of citizens from all regions – we must ask ourselves: in the European Parliament elections, why do we still elect candidates linked to national parties rather than European parties?

When we Italians vote in the European Parliament elections, we receive a ballot paper with a list of party lists, made up of one or more Italian political parties. We mark an X on the logo of the party that represents us and can select between one and three candidates affiliated with that party. However, we are voting for representatives linked to parties that are almost all purely Italian, which focus on their own national electorate rather than the European one.

Once elected to the European Parliament, however, these representatives will not only vote on issues concerning Italy, but also on matters affecting millions of citizens in other EU countries. These citizens, too, will elect their own representatives, who are affiliated with the political parties in their country of origin. Consequently, they may pursue a political line aligned with their local party, without a genuine European perspective, even when the decisions to be taken would require one.

After all, what do the leaders of the PD, Forza Italia or Azione know about the running of the German car industry? And what do the leaders of the SPD, the CDU or the FDP know about the regulation of public beaches in Italy?

In the European Parliament, when MEPs from different countries but driven by the same ideals have to make decisions affecting the entire Union, they often find themselves caught up in conflicts, despite sharing the same ideology. This happens because they must represent an exclusively national electorate. A German liberal and a Portuguese liberal, therefore, do not always join forces to pursue the same agenda, but may find themselves at odds because the interests of their respective local parties do not coincide, owing to misunderstandings and national rivalries.

This system is absurd if the aim is to create a European federation: it is as if, in the United States of America, there were a Democratic and a Republican party in every state, each carrying out political activities solely within that state.
These parties would be distinct, independent and sometimes at odds with their counterparts in neighbouring states, whilst sharing the same ideologies, and would nevertheless attempt to work together within the same federal government.

This would result in 50 mini-Republican parties and 50 mini-Democratic parties – a total of 100 essentially identical but divided political parties – all seeking to govern the same nation.

Within the European Parliament, attempts are being made to bridge these differences by grouping MEPs affiliated with more than 200 different national political parties into ideological macro-groups: Europe for Sovereign Nations, Patriots for Europe, ECR, EPP, Renew Europe, Greens, S&D and The Left.
These groups can provide MEPs with a more unified ideological direction, but they are not yet full-fledged parties through which MEPs stand for election in their own countries, as it is still the national parties that decide on the candidates; rather, they are coordination groups for joint voting.

A crucial step towards the creation of a European federation is therefore to free ourselves, when voting for the European Parliament, from this nationalistic, party-political mindset. At European level, this approach will never achieve the desired results, just as a regionalist approach fails to do so in national elections.

Instead, we need to adopt a more universalist approach to party politics, one that does not merely cater to the needs of citizens on the left, right or centre of any single nation, but which is able to represent citizens who identify with the left, the centre and the right across all the Member States of the Union.

In this way, Italian, French, German, Polish and so on – as well as socialists and conservatives – will be able to feel represented even by a Member of the European Parliament elected in a country other than their own, but affiliated with a party for which they too will be able to vote in the next elections, because by then it would be a transnational party.

There have already been experiments of this kind, such as the political party Volt, founded in 2017 in Luxembourg.
It is a transnational party affiliated with the European Greens, which has stood – and continues to stand – in various EU countries at all levels.
Volt runs on the same manifesto, with the same leader and the same logo, simply fielding different candidates depending on the election. Thus, a German, a French person and an Italian, when looking at their ballot papers, will see different candidates, but all affiliated to the same party.

Every European political party at national level should follow Volt’s example and merge with its ideological counterpart in another EU Member State, thereby becoming transnational. This process should continue until all parties within the same political spectrum have united to form a single political entity.

This would lead to the formation of transnational parties on the left, centre and right, which would stand for election across the Union with the same manifestos, the same leaders and the same logos in every election, thereby transforming the political groups within the European Parliament into genuine European political parties.

There would no longer be Forza Italia in Italy, the CDU in Germany or Les Républicains in France, but only the EPP, which, through various factions and representatives, could represent the entire centre-right electorate across the European Union; the same would apply to the liberals, the socialists, the Greens and so on.