May 2013

May 2013
in Ulricehamn

Friday, April 24, 2009

Who will vote in the EP election?

We are only weeks away from the EP election and no one is talking about it? 500 million people belong to the EU and approx. 65 % of all decision making at municipal level is in direct connection to EU rules. Should we vote? Should we care and if we don’t what will happen then. Well, the extreme parties will probably gain on our lack of interest. Only 38 % of the Swedish population voted in the last EP election which is a scary number – talk about democratic deficiency! Well, we are self to blame and I blame the established political parties the most.
As a voter it is not easy to find information about what to vote for or about. Each party state what they think is important but I would like to have a comprehensive guide telling me what the differences are between the parties or groups in the European parliament. During the last national election in the Netherlands they had a web-guide with questions. By using this you found out what party you should probably vote for (I think 3 options were given with a percentage scale indicating the difference between the 3). During the American election a similar web-guide was created (www.votehelp.org/) which helped people know what issues were at stake. Why is this not possible in Sweden? I called the Swedish EU information centre (EU Upplysningen) to find out if there were any creative ways regarding these issues but they did not know of anything like this. If you want to find out what issues are at stake, what parties you can vote for and what the differences are between them you can get thousands of folders and spend weeks reading them but who has time to do that?
I wanted to arrange a debate day in Ulricehamn with all the parties but they were not willing to hold an open debate. Instead they agreed on handing out folders together a week before the election. Handing out folders is so old fashion and such a boring way to inform people. We will not reach above 38 % voters on the 7th of June and that is very unfortunate!

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