30/05/2014 - 09:39
The EU election campaign was politically and ideologically shallow, with most of the parties deploying only general massages, so people did not see any point in going out to vote, writes Radovan Geist.
One in eight Slovak citizens bothered to go to ballot box in the last European elections. A turnout of 13.05 percent looks surprising even in the light of generally low citizen participation in European politics. Do we really care so little about the future of Europe?
After the third European elections in my country, one thing looks pretty certain – Slovakia is a reliable bottom mark of EU citizens’ (dis)interest in the European affairs. This time we have even managed to sneak under own record low from 2004 (17 percent).
Unfortunately, the persuasiveness of the most frequent explanations given for notoriously low interest in the EU politics wears thin. Slovakia is enjoying its tenth year in the EU, but the turnout has decreased (compared both to 2009 and 2004).
At the same time, more than five years of the economic and social crisis have achieved what millions of Euros spent on information campaigns could not: the EU is much more present in media and public debate. Even if it’s far from saying that people better understand how the EU works (that’s often an uneasy task even for experts), they are certainly more exposed to information. So if we have already internalised EU membership, hear our politicians talking about the EU more often and discuss it over a beer, why don’t we go out and vote?
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