If they are sensible, the leaders of the European Union who have been working for ever greater political union will be thinking hard in the wake of Sunday’s EU elections. A series of different alarm bells has been rung which, if they are ignored, could wreck the whole bright European dream.

First of all there was clear voter apathy demonstrated clearly by the lowest ever turnout. Fewer than half the eligible 350 million voters in the 25 EU states bothered to vote. And this poor figure conceals something even more alarming. While Malta, Cyprus, the Netherlands and unusually for it, the UK recorded higher than expected participation, the new east European member states demonstrated outstanding disinterest with an average of 26.4 percent of the electorate voting, and of that number, only 20 percent of eligible Poles and 17 percent of Slovaks bothered to exercise their first ever vote for the EU legislature.

This lack of enthusiasm may indicate a growing skepticism about the EU itself. There were indeed marked successes for parties with strong reservations about where the EU is headed, though the avowedly Euroskeptic parties actually lost one seat in the new Parliament. The question now is whether voter concerns about the constant pressure from Brussels for ever greater unity were also responsible for the rout suffered by virtually every single sitting government, except the newly elected socialist one in Spain. Here politicians will doubtless seek to argue that different electorates in different countries had different local issues for which they chose to punish their governments. This may prove a dangerous delusion. The government of every EU member state is busily trying to agree to the EU’s first constitution. The unease this exercise has raised runs far beyond nationalists and includes many convinced Europeans who are nevertheless very worried that too much is being imposed by politicians and bureaucrats and too little is being allowed to evolve. Britain’s socialist party, after their local election losses last week, took another drubbing in the Euro-poll as did Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi who has loved grandstanding with George Bush. In both instances, Iraq has played a prominent role. Meanwhile, the French and German governments, which led the opposition to the US invasion fared just as badly.

Euro-enthusiasts will of course rally and seek to explain this setback as evidence that the EU is a powerful functioning democracy but they will be deceiving themselves. The current EU is proving a political house of cards built upon the original solid foundations of the European Economic Community. It was the single market that made sense then and makes sense now, especially to the eastern European states who have just joined. That is the overwhelming rationale for 25 countries coming together. They want to pool their economic interests, not their sovereignties. Political union will come out of this relationship when it seems advantageous, not to ambitious politicians but to the ordinary man and woman in the street. The creation of the euro was both a political as well as an economic act. But the currency is still in danger because its fiscal rules are being broken. What hope then for the working out of an EU constitution? Clearly, EU voters think — not a lot.