We like the European Union. It's the politicians we can't stand
Version 0 of 1. Tomorrow the first countries in the European Union start to vote for the European parliament. Within three days, all European citizens will have had the chance to vote. In four days, we will know where Europe is heading. That's the idea, but will we really? I have now been working on the Rock the Union tour for a year, talking about the elections and the future of Europe in all 28 member states, and in more than 116 cities. That was the plan, though I never managed to visit all 28 because of the serious financial difficulties facing more or less every European citizen today. But I did make it to six countries and 33 cities and talked to more than 800 people on the streets, and they came from all the 28 member states and beyond. I asked everybody I met if they knew about the election, if they were going to vote and if there was something they wanted to change about Europe. What I learned by talking to all these different people is this. Despite all the rhetoric, my fellow citizens are neither against the European idea nor against the European Union itself. What they are against, however, are their politicians. Listening to all those people, I learned that the political as well as the economic society in our countries is widely believed to be corrupt. They are not seen to care about their citizens. They are believed to be interested solely in counting their power through the amount of money they have in their own pockets. Clearly, this implies that the European Union has not developed enough to actually work, because otherwise we would all not be in the situation we are living in right now. The question is why. My conversations around Europe suggest that this is not because Europe's citizens have failed to support the European project. It is because we have lacked the political will to take a big step towards the kind of European Union that can be what they want it to be. The difficulty is that we see, hear and feel the lack of modesty in the political sphere every day. We experience the way the economic actors – the business leaders and decision-makers – fail to display decent behaviour. We sense a daily betrayal of our right to be represented by responsible, competent and reasonable people who we trust to do their well-paid job by finding the best solutions for all of us. It bothers us that we can't vote for someone who is standing on a platform representing our interests as Europeans, rather than representing a national or regional political party . We don't understand it. We are longing for someone who is competent to represent interests. Those who we can vote for seem more concerned about their wallets, which they call the "national interest". The people I talked to don't care about national interests – we care about us. The people I met don't care if their representative is from another country, speaks another language or is male or female. They want someone to represent them. If this was possible we would participate, support and vote. As it is, most of them will probably not vote. If politicians don't care about us, they say, we don't see a point in caring about them. Those are the conversations I had, and I was more than surprised. I was puzzled. But I learned that what will happen this week will be an outcry of contempt towards our politicians. Nothing more, nothing less. |