Did you vote last Sunday? If you were eligible and didn’t – why?
I did, together with my girlfriend and we were voters number 20 and 21, at 9 in the morning. At the occasion or to be precise, after leaving the polling station, we finally found the campaign posters. No wonder I hadn’t seen them before, they were facing the parking and not the street, as if somebody was ashamed showing them.
But I wouldn’t say this was the main reason the turnout for this election was the lowest ever, with 43,1% (provisional as of June 9th, 11:04 CEST)
Chart – turnout per country.
No, the results, though different from country to country, show one similarity – only parties who concentrated on European topics were able to mobilize new voters. When you look at the outgoing Parliament, there’s only one party that gained votes in this election, the Greens
(Results are still provisional and will only be confirmed on July 15th)
(Screenshot from data provided on June 9th, 13:31 CEST, original chart can be found here)
Unfortunately they didn’t gain all the votes the other parties lost, as always the non-voting lead to the fact that splintergroups gained largely in this election, most of them attributed to the far right. And these parties based their campaigns on being against Europe, which is a logic I don’t really understand
The big loser is the socialist camp which was disciplined by its voters in more than one country (not only Germany).
This election showed once again, protest voting or refusing to vote out of protest against the current government will make room for extremist parties.
I’d like to give you an in depth view of the results, but so far we only have the bare results compiled by several sites, e.g. BBC, and analyses by countries themselves, i.e. not really accessible to me. If you don’t know which European party represents the one you voted, here’s a good explanation of the coalitions.
The new Parliament will get together for its first session on July 14th in Strasbourg. At the same occasion the fate of the current President will be sealed.
Originally published on and written for eurout.org
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I held off commenting on this post until I read up on the European Parliament. I took a closer look at the first bar chart, the one which shows turnout per country and made some observations (though it was a bit difficult to make out the letters).
So it seems that some of the countries with the smallest representation in the parliament had the largest turnout by percentage, e.g. Luxembourg and Malta, Ireland, Denmark. And Germany and France, which have large representations, only had a mediocre showing. But it's good to see Italy having a good showing.
And I wish I knew the differences in the politics of the various parties and the leanings of the different countries, but it seems that "Others" had the largest gain by percentage. :)
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