The 1984 Luxembourg election

Abstract

As was the case in 1979, elections* to the European Parliament were held the same day (17 June 1984) as the national election. Consequently, the European election was not very prominent. Politicians concentrated their efforts on the national campaign, giving attention primarily to national issues. The European campaign was a side-show significant only in so far as it permitted a ranking of candidates according to their national prominence. For European elections the country as a whole forms a single constituency, whereas for national elections it is divided into four electoral constituencies. Unlike 1979, the 1984 results for the two elections were remarkably well in line, owing to the fact that a certain 'normalisation' of the score of the Liberals, the Democratic Party (DP), took place as far as its European results were concerned. In 1979 the DP achieved an astonishing performance in the European election with 28.1 per cent, exceeding its national result by six per cent; this was mainly because of the effective electoral role of the Liberal leader, Gaston Thorn, who did not run in 1984. The campaign was dominated by themes related to the crisis management of the outgoing government, a coalition between the Christian Social Party (CSV) and the DP. In order to raise the considerable public subsidies needed to restructure the debt-ridden steel industry, the government had to resort to exceptional measures in the course of 1983 which resulted in an increase of taxation and a slowing-down of the rise in wages by a temporary freeze in their automatic indexation to the inflation rate. The question of purchasing power thus dominated the election, and a considerable part of the Socialists' success can be attributed to their promise to re-establish the automatic indexation of wages seen as the key to social peace in Luxembourg. It should be noted that the government was unable to obtain the agreement of the tripartite conference, an economic and social concertation body bringing together trade unions, employers and the government. As a matter of fact this body, in existence since 1977, has superseded Parliament in the formulation of key decisions in the economic and social field. Trade unions and especially the biggest organisation, the OGB-L, close to the Socialist Party (LSAP), felt they could not subscribe to these measures because they jeopardised entrenched interests. It should be noted in this respect that the trade unions in April 1982 staged the first general strike in Luxembourg since 1921. This strike was also supported by the LCGB, a trade union close to the CSV. It was widely felt that this action and the failure to reach a consensus in the tripartite conference marked the end of the so-called 'Luxembourg model', a social concertation device. The LSAP