Thursday 19 March 2009

European Parliament elections 2009 (68): EU Profiler wants to help EU citizens to make their choice (updated)

The European University Institute in Florence is developing a tool that is supposed to help EU citizens to position themselves on the European political map.

[Update: This article has been written before EU Profiler was published. Please also read the comments below to see my opinion on this tool.]

EU Profiler, which should be active from 23 April, looks like a very promising tool for all those who would like to know more about the positions of the European parties as well as their own position vis-à-vis the European parties - and do not want to read all the manifestos (like I did with the PES and ELDR manifestos, the EPP manifesto or the UEL manifesto).

Euronews last month published a 8 minutes long reportage on EU Profiler, and its worth watching.

We'll have to see how this tool looks when it is finally functional, but I suppose that it will go beyond anything that has been produced for any previous EP election.

------------------------------
Under the category "European parliament elections 2009" I am following up national and European activities on the path to the European Parliament elections 2009.

For an overview over all articles in this category have a look at the overview article.

For the five newest post see also the sidebar.

4 comments:

Torsten Spies said...

EU-profiler is now available on the Euranet website:

http://www.euranet.eu/eng/content/view/full/15025

Nice feature, a bit like a Online-game.

Cheers,
Torsten

Julien Frisch said...

I am not really convinced of this tool. Too many questions are nationally oriented or putting forward issues that are not on the EP to decide.

This is distorting the EU-nature of the elections, and I am about to recommend to "boycott" (ignore) this tool because of that.

Torsten Spies said...

Interesting argument. But I think, the elections still function like this: Voters choice is highly influenced by national topics. Why not further discuss it in our community

http://www.euranet-community.eu/networks/blog/index

Julien Frisch said...

@ Torsten

That is exactly the point I am making: Despite the fact that they have not much to do with national topics, they are used by the political parties and the media to focus on the simple solution: National topics.

EU Profiler supports this by taking up the national topics (which won't have influence on the work within the Parliament later) instead of concentrating on those issues that are actually relevant for the EP.

With a good EU profiler, people coming there would actually understand that these elections are NOT national but European, because the topics they get as questions would reflect the competencies of the European Parliament and the manifestos of the European Parties.