The European Parliament considerably strengthened its position in the Community from the 1950s onwards. MEPs, however, did not content themselves with anything less than the wholesale democratization of the Community – that is to say, with the direct election of their institution. This had been the aim of most European federalists, the promise of the EPC and, now that a veritable European Parliament existed, an ambition that finally had to be realized. This ambition became fixated on Article 138 of the EEC Treaty, which offered the Parliament the opportunity to draft a proposal for its own election. Hailing this opportunity as the key to strengthening the Parliament and democratizing the Community, MEPs immediately started working out their plans for European elections, which they presented in 1960. The draft convention for direct elections eventually ended up being shelved by the Council. Losing sight of the ambition of European elections contributed in a big way to the sense of inertia that pervaded the European Parliament during the 1960s, as described in the previous chapter.

How did European elections become such a lodestar in the way in which MEPs thought of the future of their institution and the Community? And, crucially, how did they envisage electoral democracy at the European level? In addressing these questions, this chapter will show how the idea of European elections had evolved since the days of the Ad Hoc Assembly. What distinguished the debate from the late 1950s from earlier debates in the decade was the institutional development of the European Parliament. Drafting their plans in a new institutional environment, the members of the Ad Hoc Assembly essentially projected their plans and ideals onto a blank canvas. Some years on, by contrast, MEPs had become attached to and invested in an institution with an established institutional culture. European elections were therefore no longer about creating something new, but about reforming existing structures. The tensions this chapter explores therefore revolve around this dilemma between reform and conservatism, change and continuity.

Despite having been shelved, historians have recently started to delve into the election debates around the turn of the 1960s, driven by a growing academic interest in the legitimating principles underpinning European integration (Piodi 2009; O’Connor 2014; Tulli 2017).