True. But this is a chicken-and-egg problem. Does the public perceive the elections as unimportant because the campaign is conducted on national issues and the parties stack their lists with small fry or old glories? Or do the parties only talk about national issues because that's where the voter interest lies. Do candidates themselves (rightly?) perceive that being in Strasbourg disconnect thems from the home country patronage networks in a way that is damaging to their careers?

It also appears the European Parliament is the original second-order election

The term has appeared for the first time in Karlheinz Reif and Hermann Schmitt's "Nine second-order national elections -A conceptual framework for the analysis of European election results" article for the European Journal of Political Research, in 1980.

(Wiki)

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith