The electoral campaign for the European elections taking place on June 7th in Romania has officially started today. However, the media paid very little attention to this “event”. Today’s newspapers mention it only in brief, in the best case. Only one newspaper, Cotidianul, has a lengthier article on this, but the title is very good: “Did you know that the electoral campaign for the European Parliament has started?”. On tv, the main events of the day are swine flu (3 suspected cases in Cluj, where I live… brr!), the level of inflation in the last month, a mistake made by the Ministry of Education in the subjects given the 7th and 8th graders at a national exam yesterday and the Romanian “El Classico” Steaua Bucharest vs Dinamo Bucharest, taking place this evening and posing a very high risk for public safety (the football game itself is not that much of a big deal). Only as a secondary subject, some news mention the fact that the Liberals launched their candidates yesterday, the Social-Democrats will do it today and the Democrat-Liberals on Sunday.
The parties themselves don’t seem to pay too much attention. The websites of the competing parties practically ignore the European elections. The Democrat-Liberals don’t mention the elections at all on their website and still have a banner with their slogan for the past parliamentary elections, which took place 6 months ago. The Social-Democrats mention their candidates on a visible place on the website, but no more than that. The Liberals and Hungarian party pay some more attention to the start of the campaign. The Liberals changed the main features of their website for these elections and the Hungarians flooded their website with news about their candidates. The website of the main independent candidate, Elena Basescu (the daughter of president Traian Basescu), is being announced as being ready “next week” for the past 2 months.
However, the media has published the slogans that will be used by the main parties during the campaign. The Social-Democrats will use “Choose well!”, the Democrat-Liberals thought of “For good and for worse”, the Liberals have “We protect your interest in Europe”, but also “Europe is liberal”. The extremist Greater Romania Party only use the image of their first two candidates, C.V. Tudor and Gigi Becali (the owner of Steaua Bucharest), otherwise cursing each other in the media in the past 3 years, who will use “Two christians and patriots will save the country from thieves” (it rhymes in Romanian), whith a clear message for Europe, as you can see.
Besides this rather slow, if not inexistent, start to the European campaign, there are some premises for a good debate in the month ahead. The main parties have strong candidates on top of their lists. Almost all active Romanian MEP’s have been kept as candidates by their parties and we can only hope that their strong showing in the EP in the past years will bring some perfume of normality in Romanian politics, at least in this campaign. However, there are even more premises that the campaign will turn very conflictual, especially in the last 2 weeks. The main competitors, the Social-Democrats and the Democrat-Liberals, form the current governing coalition and often enter in dispute with each other. Even more important, presidential elections will take place in 6 months and the main competitors are already known. Practically, all the presidents of the main parties will be in competition, with the current president most likely running in the name of the Democrat-Liberals, the party he lead before 2004 and which he still controlled after that. Therefore, there is a high chance that the main representatives of parties will use this campaign to build their image for the upcoming elections, thus turning the European elections in another political quarrel about national issues.
(13 votes, average: 4.46 out of 5)
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The campaign in Bulgaria starts next week and everybody expects that as the European elections are seen as a warm-up to parliamentary elections in July. Post some photos - Gigi Becali and Corneliu Vadim Tudor should be at least as attractive as a tandem as Elena Basescu just by herself.
Btw, what’s the electoral slogan of Hungarian-minority party - “All Hungarians in Europe - united”?
I will update meaningful pictures during the campaign, once they start appearing. Becali and Vadim will probably capture more attention than Elena Basescu I would say. It seems Elena will focus on smaller towns, in the attempt to seem like a person closer to the normal people and to keep out of the media attention so that she won’t become vulnerable because of her language mistakes and hard way of expressing herself, while Vadim and Becali will try to capture the spotlight with their well-known style of discourse.
The Hungarians didn’t announce their slogan yet, but indeed it will focus on the idea of solidarity.
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