Everyone’s complaining that the EU has a legitimacy problem. More and more is being regulated from the European commission in Brussels and its huge bureaucratic machine – and national parliaments and administrations seem simply having to follow the EU Directives. It is even a bigger problem though that a lot of people don’t want to use the little influence they could have in the European political system. May it be for the reason to protest against the current situation – or, more likely because of a mixture of indifference, ignorance and dullness. To bring the second group to the ballot boxes, no cost and effort was too great. Here some of the actions which were taken to motivate the European citizens to participate:
The European parliament launched a multilingual online television station, called europarlTV, which covers everything in Europe from agriculture to women’s rights. In the categories Your Parliament, Your Voice, Young Europe and Parliament Live you can find all kinds of information on the political system as well as news about ongoing events and citizens speaking up.
First of all, you can find here the official TV spot for the European elections which exists in 34 languages and is being broadcasted all over Europe on television, in cinemas and on the web.
In the last European elections, only 18 % of the 18-25 years old voted. To bring about a change to low participation, there’s much attention being given to the youth in the EU elections campaign. For example, the Charlemagne Youth Prize has been awarded some days ago. This competition asked for projects which foster a shared sense of European identity among young people. The winner is the Polish project “Yourope needs You” and was designed by the members of the European student’s forum, AEGEE.
MTV’s campaign “Can you hear me Europe?” works in the same way. Set up as a competition, the incentive to take part is also to win a prize. MTV wants to raise the awareness of the European elections rather by a big shout than a complex learning process. In Prague, Berlin, Rome and other European cities people came together to simply shout out their support for Europe – and also to win a ticket for a major MTV event.
