After a whole month dominated by media guiding me “how to survive the global economic crisis”, I wanted to share my thoughts about something less sexy ….
The theme of this competition and the Brussels event a month ago reminded me a story. A while ago I asked my mum to name for me a couple of events that will be politically important to Poland in the next few years (one of the questions on a job application form!). She talked about the eurozone, a bunch of anniversaries and presidential elections. She never mentioned elections to the European Parliament though and she didn’t even know about it. After a couple of days she told me TVN 24 (24-hour! news channel) finally mentioned it. It did not bother me more when I BBC broadcasted “the European Union (as opposed to precisely the European Parliament) voted on a directive restricting the use of pesticides” than when media do not publicize the events regular people can actually participate in. I hope some people agree that not too specific information is less harmful than not hearing about pesticides at all.
Too abstract political parties cause even greater confusion. No wonder the turn out in the elections to the European Parliament is so poor. You can’t blame people who most probably aren’t political scientists for refusing to vote if for instance Christian Democratic party (majority in the European Parliament!) has no representation or even political legitimacy on a national level, which is the case in Poland.
Thirdly, Euro-Skepticism is everybody’s favorite explanation. I happen to be born in one relatively euro-skeptic country -Poland and live in another- the UK. Historically, both countries have been to a degree separated from the rest of Europe due to the location on an island and Iron Curtain. It is forgotten that behind the governments there is people whose mentality has to undergo a much more complex transition than any existing law. So far both Poles and the Brits have taken advantage of the fact they can migrate freely to work in the UK or party in Polish cities (which in fact have become the ultiamte outlet for bachelor parties!) and the only full-time euro-skeptic grief I registered was my old flatmate Vicki complaining that Eurovision song contest is almost annually won by the Eastern European alliance.
It is all nothing less than a chain reaction. Little information leads to confusion that turns people off when it comes to any EU business, not just elections. At the end of the day it is a child’s reasoning; we don’t like something because we either don’t know much about it or we do not understand it.
(11 votes, average: 3.18 out of 5)
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Good point, but it’s really hard to get people interested. Most of the countries have problems with turn up at elections and usually the only thing which helps to solve this is populist parties (or free beer for voters…) Even if it sounds a bit harsh, I think that some people shouldn’t be involved in decisions like that (elections, referendums). Unfortunately, they just don’t know what they need..
sorry, small correction:
“Unfortunately, they just don’t know what they want..”
Yet another story…one time at school, grade 7, girls and boys in my class had a disupte over the way our cloakroom schould look like…the girls wanted a cute diddle theme and the guys a computer game demon one. We then continued to repaint the cloakroom day after day. Finally, our annoyed teacher made us simulate a political debate. At one point the girls said ‘we are in minority so OUR theme would never win’. Now imagine the girls were member states, the boys were EU. The provision of the democracy entitles everybody to vote and be informed about the right to vote. The governments act on behalf of all of the citizens not just people who voted for the majority party. The EU has a similar role. The problem is that there is very little trust in the EU way just because it is other than the national one.