Marketing-research company Synovate has published a report on the involvement of Dutch citizens in the EP elections. And guess what, do Dutch people Think About It? Well… no. Nothing new, but sad nonetheless.
23% are aware of the fact that there are actually elections coming up, 20% knows this will be European elections, 10% knows they will be held somewhere in June and only 4% knows the exact date: the 4th of June.
The fact that people haven’t marked the date in their agenda yet is probably forgivable, however, if only one out of five Dutchmen is slightly aware of some kind of elections being held at some point in time, it’s going to be tough to top last time’s 39,3% voter turn-out.
Furthermore, the European partyleaders I have been so busy with lately (here, here and here) were rather unknown among the respondents. The answers to the question which probably sounded something like this: “Which EP election front-runner for one of the Dutch parties do you know by heart?” clearly show some more effort has to be put in campaigning in order to gain access to the hearts and minds of the Dutch population.
The two candidates best known among the respondents turned out to be Hans van Baalen (3,4%) and Wim van de Camp (2,8%). Still strikingly low numbers, and probably not even related to their European endeavours, but because of the fact that they are currently both members of our national parliament.
On the bright side of it: there is still a lot of room for improvement. However, it is a discouraging sight to see that the formerly-known-as-Europhile Dutchmen seem to have completely lost their gusto for the European Ideal. The concept ‘democratic deficit’ is often used to describe the governmental situation in Brussels. Not only because of a pretty imbalanced balance of powers, but also because of the indifference of its citizens. Since, what is a democracy worth if its ‘demos’ does not care?
(12 votes, average: 3.58 out of 5)
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[...] 2005. Ooit waren ze eurofielen, maar nu zijn Nederlanders nog slechts euro-ignoranten, schrijft deze blogger. Dit lijkt overdreven, maar de teneur van de publieke opinie is negatief. Aanhangers van de [...]
I think this has defenitely to do with the good economie of the Netherlands. They are neither untouchables. Hopefully the economic crisis will help support this issue. The EU was once started as a an initiative by YES Netherlands and is an actually an extended version of BENELUX! (probably why EU is situated in Brussels. Also visit http://www.trotsopeuropa.eu