Through its public awareness campaign, the Economic Freedom Foundation hopes to raise awareness of the economic realities of EU functioning that are sometimes disregarded while also encouraging participation in the upcoming European Parliament election. President of the foundation Marek Tatala says to Polish voters: “Vote on June 9 and don’t let yourself be taken out of the Union.”
Despite the efforts of various political parties in the European Parliament, the elections to the EP are first and foremost national elections, and as Enrico Letta remarked, they will be “a sum of national, domestic debates in a frame named European elections.” As such the EU member states also differ in the campaigns and the narratives mostly used before the June votes.
‘Hungary and the European Union after the European parliamentary elections’, a conference organized by Republikon Foundation with the support of Friedrich Naumann Foundation, was held on June 11, 2014 in Budapest. The event was part of the Foundation’s project ‘Lessons learned from EP elections 2014’.
Despite the doubling of the e-votes compared to the EP elections in 2009 the overall turnout decreased more than seven percentage points to 36.5 per cent, therefore falling far lower than was the EU-wide turnout.
The main topic of the campaigns in Estonia was national security witch is obviously the result of the Ukrainian crisis. The results show that this topic is important for the people as the winning party main message was about safe and strong pro-European politics with the best candidates.
Last but not least, the Free Citizens Party has succeeded! Already in the parliamentary elections in 2013, this party showed that all competitors should respect their transition from a community of libertarians discussing mainly on social networks and in pubs into a professional political party.
Bulgaria became a member of the EU, it became a member of NATO, but still, I don’t think that the expectations that everybody had when it joined the EU in 2007 were matched to the full extent.
Last week members of the third strongest and openly neo-Nazi party, the Golden Dawn, destroyed a memorial monument dedicated to a murdered musician, Pavlos Fyssas. They intimidated his family in their house and smashed several bars without any resistance from the security forces.
