Brussels, 26/05/2014 (Agence Europe) - As in 2009, only 43% of registered voters turned out to vote in the 2014 European elections, the second lowest turnout since 1979, the date when universal suffrage was introduced for selecting MEPs. Countries in central and Eastern Europe have only been members of the EU for a decade, but their citizens stayed away from the polls en masse. The lowest turnout was in Slovakia (87% abstention), the Czech Republic, despite its new pro-Europe government, (80.5% stayed away), Slovenia (79% abstention), Poland (77.3% abstention) and Croatia (75.7% abstention), although more Croatians voted in the European elections than in the vote on joining the EU in 2013 (20.84%). In Western Europe, voter apathy hit record levels in Portugal (65.5% abstention) where voters stayed away as a protest against the Centre-Right government that recently broke the connections with the country's institutional lenders. Some 63% of Dutch voters did not bother voting, although this was lower than the 70% stay-away level of 1999. Apathy was high in the United Kingdom with only 36% of those eligible bothering to vote, but the turnout was one of the highest since 1979. The highest turnout was in 2005 (38.52%). The abstention rate lowest was in countries where other elections were taking place at the same time, such as the Greece (42.6%) and/or voting is compulsory (such as Belgium, 10%). This year, European political parties announced before the polls who was going to be their candidate to become the president of the European Commission in the hope that this would encourage people to turn out to vote. In fact, the main argument for getting member states to agree to this as the new selection process for head of the Commission was that it would make people more enthusiastic about the European elections. On Sunday, German Social Democrat Martin Schulz and Belgian Liberal Guy Verhofstadt pointed out that more people voted in these European elections than in previous years and called for direct universal suffrage to select the next head of the European Commission in the 2019 elections. (MB)