Professor Gail McElroy:

Not so much, one might get better offices, with the funds one gets, one can justify a larger administrative staff and those sorts of thing. What MEPs want is the chairmanships, reports and plenary time because that is where one will, to some extent, get media coverage. Plenary session is not where the action happens, if one wants to influence the legislation, one does not go to Strasbourg when they are voting on it. That is way too late, all the action has happened prior to that.
How can we boost turn-out for the European Parliament elections? We are doing a good job by holding the elections on the same day as the local elections. Holding the elections at weekends definitely increases turnout by a couple of percentage points. Sunday elections in particular seem to be beneficial but we should not berate ourselves too much, as we achieved a 52% turnout. If one takes out the countries with compulsory voting, although compulsory voting is not really that punitive in some of the countries, we are doing reasonably well, although it dropped from the previous time.
The Spitzenkandidaten didnot capture the public imagination but oddly, with the negative coverage now, it is getting some play in the media. Is there any such thing as bad publicity? It will be interesting to watch what happens in the next couple of days. It seems that the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, S&D, will back Jean-Claude Juncker and in exchange Martin Schulz gets to continue to be the European Parliament President for the first two and a half years of the legislative session. He will probably be an EP candidate down the line. The big story is the consensus and agreement going forward between these two parties. There are issues on which they are divided, being a centre left party and a centre right party. One issue to watch will be the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The S&D are more sceptical about it. That will also be a big divisive issue for the European Conservative and Reformist, ECR, Party.