How to reach young voters? The answer is: Visiting a European University!
Two MEPs Ria Oomen-Ruijten (Netherlands) and Elmar Brok (Germany) of the European People’s Party came to Maastricht University on Thursday to campaign. Their supporter was Jean-Claude Juncker (Christian Social People’s Party), Premierminister of Luxembourg.
Together they touched upon all currently interesting topics of the EU as the Lisbon Treaty, the accession of Turkey, financial crisis, social market economy and the EU relationship to Russia.
The language question?
But already in the beginning, one could doubt their Europeanness. Oomen-Ruijten announced that everybody can chose to speak German, English or Dutch. Quite intolerant, since the event was for Students of a European University, whose common used language is English in order to exclude no one. At least Ria Oomen-Ruijten should have known that it is not naturally for Dutch Students to speak German, since the event took place in the Netherlands. Finally, there were also tutors and students from East Europe who only speak English. So why not speaking English on a European event about Europe?
After the language question was resolved Oomen-Rujten started with a little introduction to the European Elections. She said: “Europe is of major importance and the EU Elections are of major importance as well, because they are the only elected body of EU democracy”.
However, after a few minutes she passed the stage to Juncker who could convince with a cogent speech about important European topics. His main aim in the EU is the Maastricht Treaty, which he signed in 1992. He pointed out: “The Euro and me are the only survivals of the Maastricht Treaty”, since no one of the other signatories is still in service. Furthermore, he stated the not known importance of Europe. “Most people do not know how much influence Europe has. 50 percent of the national laws are “ready-cooked” in Brussels by the Ministers”, said Juncker. Moreover Europe has to uptake that it has to work more closely together, since we live in a multipolar century. Today the Europeans make up 11 percent of the world population, but in 2100 the Europeans will only be 4 percent of the world population. Therefore Europe has to work together. Thus, Juncker joked: “In order to show people the significance of Europe, I sometimes wish to relaunch border controls again.”
Brok emphasized in his speech much more the elections and campaign for himself. What was quite a little bit weird, when he asked for copy rights in the European Union in front of twenty year old students. The reason was comprehensible, since he argued that Europe is good in research, but the results should be saved better by copy rights. So that the Europeans can also gain of their research. However Brok also called for more transparency. He said, the citizens have to know: “Who is for what when responsible?”
In the end, the students were allowed to ask questions. There the issue of finance minister Peer Steinbrück was also referred to. Juncker said that he did not like the statement due to several reasons. But one is that it is in fact a defamation of the African continent, since Africa has not deserved to become compared with Luxembourg. These two countries are totally different according to Juncker.
All in all an interesting event, although if it seemed like a European Election rally at University.
(9 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
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Nice summary! But if I could offer some criticism: at the very end, you refer to the issue of Steinbrück’s comments without explaining what the issue actually was!
Here’s a link to a Spiegel article about the issue: http://is.gd/ArxG
I was interested by your point at the beginning, about the difficulty having English, German and Dutch for the conference. Elmine Wijnia reported similar problems at a conference in her blog: http://is.gd/Artd
Is English the de facto language of Europe? Is the most eurosceptic country in Europe responsible for the language of communication?