Now, he might not become the next Margot Wallström (EC Communication Strategy) or even a new creativity ambassador with his performance, yet he raises a valid point. It’s the elections to the European parliament this week where we can shape our future in and for Europe. Let’s do so!

So, in the spirit of a Union of Peace, Love and Bass and with the words of DJ Trexx: “Take you positions, party brothers and sisters, and let me see you dance like you got ants in your pants. Yes, democracy is cool.”

Update (04 June 2009): Today the faces behind this song released an English version of the Swedish press release explaining the whole project:

Swedish comedian/musician Micke Lindgren let’s his character DJ Trexx rock the vote for the upcoming European Parliament elections with new song A Union of Peace, Love and Bass DJ Trexx (Micke Lindgren) rose to Swedish fame during the national Eurovision finals, where he and his merry band of dancers performed a satirical showstopper called “Tingaliin – russian bass lovers remix”. [...]

Now, DJ Trexx is back with a message to Europe: Democracy is cool. The mohawk-clad russian-german DJ and rapper has made a hard pumping eurotechno-anthem to put some color on the runup to the EP elections. The music-video contains sexy parliamen tarian-dancers, European Union-hotpants and an electric violin. [...]

The project is quite unique in that it is a european citizens attempt to reach out to all young people of the union with the message that voting on the 7th of june is important. According to alarming reports, a big portion of european youth are not even aware that the election is taking place or when. 

Further information, the song as mp3 download and some pictures can be found on his website www.djtrexx.eu.

Nevertheless please find here some subtitled versions:

• Dutch: http://tinyurl.com/5-Friends-Sub-Dutch
• French: http://tinyurl.com/5-Friends-Sub-French
• German: http://tinyurl.com/5-Friends-Sub-German
• Italian: http://tinyurl.com/5-Friends-Sub-Italian
• Spanish: http://tinyurl.com/5-Friends-Sub-Spanish
• Swedish: http://tinyurl.com/5-Friends-Sub-Swedish

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

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.

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

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.

Why is it that people in the U.S. are so much more personally involved in politics? One answer is for sure that persons and faces play a big role in U.S. politics. Of course we react differently to human beings than to policies. But that doesn’t seem to explain the radicalization that I see on the campaign trails and especially between the supporters. What’s the reason for that? One might think that’s a good thing that people are more and more becoming involved in politics. But I believe that they’re are not becoming involved in politics but mainly in the election campaigns. Still a good thing, people should be aware of whom they’re voting for. But these rallies? I mean, we all know that Americans really need this kind of event character and the action in everything. And as long the results make you smile (like the video above) and are that creative and crazy in a positive way I might agree. But there’s another side to it. I fear that people overidentify with their party and I guess we all know what that can lead to (see F. Glasl’s nine-stage model of conflict escalation) keeping in mind this “if you’re not with us – you’re against us”-mentality. So how to prevent from these scenarios?

First I thought that if the voters had more parties to identify with, the vast and moderate majority would get a home without extremists. But then I remembered Germany and what I see happen here at the moment. I quite get the impression that German political parties are diversifying. Now we have a new socialist party in the Bundestag deharmonizing the political landscape, the two big people parties are more and more losing voters. That doesn’t seem to be the solution. So there must be something else .. I’ll get back on that topic.