Monthly Archives: May 2009

“Don’t vote” video now with subtitles

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Some time ago I’ve put a video on this blog that we (Les Jeunes Européens, JEF) made for the European elections next week. Since then many people fortunately liked the idea and forwarded the video. Thank you for that! But we haven’t been lazy during the last weeks and tried to improve it. After having cut it to a shorter version first, we added subtitles for different languages now. Unfortunately we couldn’t translate it to every European language as the video is just small project we did during a seminar weekend in Paris (with the help of the French Foundation of Political Innovation). Sorry for that.

Nevertheless please find here some subtitled versions:

Dailymotion where we host the videos does unfortunately not allow subtitles for Bulgarian, Estonian, Hungarian and Slovak. (Which is by the way scandalous!) Therefore, these subtitles can only be found on youtube. Click on the arrow on the bottom-right to choose a subtitle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF_lqRyuXkk

What the heck is the European Parliament?

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Since the elections to the European Parliament (4-7 June) are only a few days away it’s just about time to once again have a quick look at what the EU citizens are actually voting for this year. Here is a nice video that a friend of mine just posted on facebook (Thanks Laura, very viral). Also there is a nice Austrian extended version in German language here.

Tracking your MEP’s voting behavior

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Today I stumbled upon a somewhat interesting database tool in twitter that gathers all voting behavior of the Members of the European Parliament since May 8, 2008. It’s called EP Vote and lets you discover all votes according to the country, political groups and MEPs themselves. So far, 944 MEPs, 700 texts voted and 423,059 votes have been inserted into the database. And EP Vote doesn’t leave you along with this huge amount of numbers. One of the most interesting charts is a list of MEPs that haven’t been that diverse in their voting performance. Let’s take for instance  the one they call whistleblower, Mr. Paul van Buitenen (Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance) who, if you believe the data, abstained in 98 % of the votes.  The only times he could decide to vote in favour or against something was in some few matters of budgetary control. ;)

Link: www.epvote.eu

Don’t vote .. unless you care, of course! [update]

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During this year’s annual international Paris seminar of les Jeunes Européens we came up with the idea of copying a quite successful video made by Hollywood’s favorite celebs to mobilize young voters in the 2008 United States presidential election. Thanks to the French Foundation of Political Innovation we could actually adapt the idea to the elections of the European Parliament (June 4 -7). Now I understand that it isn’t exactly as appealing as the originial as we are no actors of any kind, also there are some minor mistakes and it’s a bit too long … but still: I really like the result and I hope you enjoy it as well!

 

Update (13 May 2009): We just created a shorter version, and also subtitled versions for different languages will arrive shortly.

Update (28 May 2009): The subtitles have arrived. Find here the links to the various versions.