Quotes of the Day

The clock has not yet struck 9 a.m., but the champagne is already flowing at the European Parliament. Here in a wood-paneled room at the Parliament's Strasbourg headquarters, M.E.P.s from Finland's Kokoomus (National Coalition Party) gather with journalists to go over the week's agenda. The tables are laden with fresh fruit salad, yogurt and pastries, and a bow-tied waiter glides around topping up flutes of Moët. This is the sort of scene that comes to mind when you think of the European Parliament: a plush talking shop where politicians spend vast sums in pursuit of some vague European ideal. Is this cliché all there is to the place?

Not if you believe Piia-Noora Kauppi, 29, a fresh-faced dynamo finishing her first term as an M.E.P. and one of the champagne-sipping Finns at the breakfast. "Yes, the European Parliament is a gravy train," she admits, but she insists that it does real, important work that affects people's lives: during the current term, for example, it has passed legislation giving air travelers more compensation if they're bumped from an overbooked flight; ensuring atm-withdrawal charges are the same in all euro-zone countries; and banning cosmetics testing on animals by 2009. And the Moët? That's not standard breakfast fare, but a treat bought for retiring deputy Ilkka Suominen's 65th birthday by his colleagues. "We're a normal political institution," Kauppi says with typical earnestness. "Politicians here aren't more rotten or less capable than in a national parliament. Some of us take our jobs seriously."

But there's no sign that voters will take M.E.P.s' jobs seriously when they go to the polls next week to choose the 732 members of the next Parliament. Interest in — and respect for — the legislature is scraping bottom. Turnout has sunk from 63% in 1979 to 49% in the last election in 1999. This time, only 45% definitely plan to vote, according to a Gallup/Eurobarometer poll. That's a shame, because the Parliament's clout has consistently been expanded with each E.U. treaty, and the new constitution now being hammered out will enhance its power even more.

But since it flexed its muscles by bringing down the European Commission over slipshod accounting in 1999, the Parliament hasn't earned the respect to match that power, partly due to its own accounting problems. One shocking example is British M.E.P. Bashir Khanbhai, who listed a nonexistent address as his residence — the commute was longer than from his real home, so under the Parliament's rules he was able to pocket up to €30,000 in fake travel costs. Dozens of M.E.P.s also "hire" their spouses or other relatives with their €12,576 monthly secretarial allowances.

So it's unsurprising that a 2003 Eurobarometer survey found that only 35% of E.U. citizens felt that M.E.P.s represented their interests well. That's bad news to Kauppi, a working mom who regularly brings her 5-month-old son, Otso-Antero, to the office. (Husband Jussi Järvinen is a tax lawyer in Helsinki.) A passionate believer in the Parliament's power to improve European life at both institutional and individual levels, the self-described workaholic has made a big splash for a first-termer. Leftist M.E.P. Esko Seppanen, whom Kauppi says opposes her "on almost every issue," says she's "a very good representative — unfortunately from a right-wing party."

Kauppi hopes her enthusiasm will be contagious. The E.U.'s work "is too important to be left only to the political élites," she says. To find out what M.E.P.s actually do — and how Kauppi and other reformers are trying to make the Parliament more relevant to the voter — Time tagged along as she shuttled from Strasbourg, where the Parliament meets for a week each month, to its usual home in Brussels, and back to Finland, where she's campaigning not only for re-election but also to help her constituents understand why the Parliament matters.

STRASBOURG: THE STRUGGLE FOR REFORM
The European Parliament complex looms on Strasbourg's north side, a glass-and-steel behemoth ringed by a moatlike road and guarded by unnaturally tidy rows of immature trees, which look vaguely like green and brown barbed wire. Kauppi says the massive exterior has the aura of "a medieval castle," cold, forbidding and inaccessible — an apt description of how most people see the E.U. itself.

But what many in the Parliament think is truly medieval is the setup that requires them to pack up and move from their regular offices in Brussels to Strasbourg once a month. The bizarre commute — which involves each M.E.P.'s office packing all they need for the week into giant metal trunks that are shipped, unpacked for a few days, then repacked and sent back to Brussels — is the product of a typical E.U. backroom deal. When the Belgian capital was chosen as the E.U.'s home in 1958, France blocked an agreement until it got the Parliament's Strasbourg outpost as a consolation prize. The cost to taxpayers: €200 million a year.

This is one E.U. excess Kauppi would like to stamp out. After scarfing down a chicken-curry sandwich, she heads to the members' bar to meet the "young bloods" of the Campaign for Parliament Reform (CPR), a group of M.E.P.s she helped found four years ago. The business at hand is the afternoon press conference at which the CPR will challenge M.E.P.s to sign a pre-election pledge to do away with the monthly trek to Strasbourg, change the expense policy so that deputies are reimbursed for what they actually spend rather than a full-economy fare, and strengthen the M.E.P.s' code of conduct by setting out responsibilities, especially on perks and expenses.

The reformists score a victory the next day when M.E.P.s okay some tough new rules the CPR favors, including reimbursement of travel at cost. But they lose more than they gain. M.E.P.s nix a call for members to submit proof that their office allowances are spent in line with the rules, and decide not to issue a reminder (not a rule) that 50% of members' expenses should be backed by receipts. The move to drop the Strasbourg commute is roundly defeated.

Despite setbacks like these, Parliament President Pat Cox says the CPR "has been a positive force for change," praising it for "maintaining pressure to modernize Parliament." And Kauppi is unfazed. Reform "feels like mission impossible," she says. "I guess it's not — people thought the Berlin Wall would be there forever, too — but it would take a miracle. We're banging our heads against a wall, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't speak out. If you lose that idealism, you should leave politics."

BRUSSELS: GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS
If Strasbourg is the Parliament's showroom, Brussels is its factory floor. At 10:53 on this gray morning, Kauppi takes her seat in one of her two committees, the powerful Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee (ECON), to hear European Central Bank (E.C.B.) president Jean-Claude Trichet present his 2003 annual report. The Parliament's 17 committees, which focus on topics ranging from legal affairs and the internal market (Kauppi's other assignment) to fisheries and women's rights, are where the E.P.'s real power lies. She owes her plum roles to her political group's power: Kokoomus is in the center-right European People's Party, Parliament's largest.

No bill gets to the full Parliament without going through the committees, where M.E.P.s consult other E.U. officials as well as representatives of business, industry and NGOs. ECON, for example, gave Trichet a grilling before his nomination was approved last fall. Today, he reviews the E.C.B.'s year and talks about keeping inflation in check. Committee work "can be a bit boring, but it's very important," says Kauppi as she heads back to her office. "What we do there has a political role as well as an economic role."

The Parliament has long been seen by younger politicians as a stepping stone to bigger roles back home and by older ones as an easy preretirement gig. "They don't do legislation or write reports; they hardly ever speak," Kauppi says. "I think of the Parliament as an ordinary legislative office." And she's convinced its work matters, citing her own 2001 report on the E.C.B., which urged the bank to improve its transparency, as a case in point. The bank has opened up a bit, issuing public monetary-policy analyses and improving access to documents.

As the legislature gains more power, it's increasingly seen as a place where careers are made. A decade ago, it would have been tough to find someone like Kauppi, who says she could envision working as an M.E.P. for her entire political life. While M.E.P.s still tend to vote for their own national interests, Kauppi could turn out to be the prototype for a new generation of truly European politicians with a stronger commitment to represent "Europe." Asked if she'd eventually like to return home and become Finnish Prime Minister, she says instantly: "Of course!" Then she pauses, and adds: "Even better than Prime Minister would be E.U. Commission President."

SATAKUNTA: THE HOME FRONT
"Saakeli!" Kauppi spits out the untranslatable Finnish curse through gritted teeth, her face flushing. The swear word brings a half-smile to the face of aide Henri Hirvenoja, who's driving his boss to meet constituents in Satakunta, a region on Finland's southwest coast, 200 km from Helsinki. Kauppi was supposed to be in the town of Kankaanpää 15 minutes ago. But a missed turn and bad directions mean she's still some 40 km away. "We're going to be so late, some of them probably won't vote for me because of this," Kauppi says.

Finnish M.E.P.s all represent the entire country, so in the average workweek Kauppi spends four days in Brussels, a day in Helsinki, a day at home — Oulu, in northern Finland — and a day visiting constituents elsewhere in the country. As the car finally pulls in to Kankaanpää, she checks her makeup and puts on her game face. Kokoomus supporters have set up a table in the outdoor market with coffee and cakes — no champagne. "I try to explain that the idea of Europe is not just an economic tool," Kauppi says. "I try to talk up the philosophy behind the Union, because I think the idea is much more noble. The higher purpose is peace among the people of this continent."

Peace is nice, but in Satakunta, where unemployment is 13.4%, people want to talk about jobs and E.U. subsidies. "I'm already not happy with the lines the E.U. has drawn," says a worried farmer, regarding levels of agricultural subsidies, as he confronts Kauppi at the market stall. He's concerned that, with E.U. enlargement, the funding he depends on will shrink even further. Kauppi assures him she intends to guard the interests — and subsidies — of small family farms like his.

Kauppi encounters far more indifference than anger among voters. "People just think the E.U. and the European Parliament are not important," says Juha Lehtinen, a Kokoomus leader in Huittinen, 80 km south of Kankaanpää. On a visit to a vocational institute there, Kauppi tries to bring the E.U. closer to home, but her efforts don't always register. As she tells a class of mostly 20- to 22-year-olds what an M.E.P. does, the students whisper and doodle in their notebooks. When Kauppi asks if they know who Finland's E.U. commissioner is, she is met with silence. As she talks about programs to study in other E.U. states, a baseball-capped student gnaws on one of the copies of the Charter of Fundamental Rights that Kauppi has handed out. "You know what?" she says later in her car, undeterred by their apathy. "Being in the Parliament has made me more idealistic. I know things can get done. But idealism without a cause has no meaning. It has to make you do something."

Which is why, even as she's late for her next meeting and her aides are trying to get her out the door of a Huittinen coffee shop, she ignores them and strides, hand outstretched, over to a table of three elderly men. "Piia-Noora Kauppi," she says, as they look up from their coffee cups to her bright, hopeful smile. "Member of the European Parliament." Kauppi may be young, but she's experienced enough to know that every vote counts.

• JEFF CHU
• Less than half of voters plan to take part in next week's European Parliament election. Meet one M.E.P. trying to reform the place