Who knows, the EU might also one day find "their own Obama" ?
A team of prominent EU scholars from the European University Institute(Florence), Kieskompas, a Dutch company that has made similar tools in the past, and the Zurich-based NCCR Democracy/Politools network, last week unveiled the 'EU Profiler', an innovative 'voting advice' website that allows EU citizens across Europe to figure out their their political identity based on a variety of simple questions ahead of the upcoming European Parliament elections in June. Most of the 300 million European voters have no idea for which party they should vote based on their preferences and consequently had not been very interested to vote in the past. But an antidote was developed for this apathy: a "Voting Profiler" to guide the voter through the maze of European ideas, preferences and political parties.
It probably all started with the recent elections in the US, when Europeans proved quite willing to take a position about issues which were not exactly relevant to them or Europe, such as the pros and cons of electing a black president. As a result it turned out that a record number of curious Europeans also consulted the many electronic US voter profilers. Seen in this light, European polling and survey experts figured that the elections for the European Parliament - on 4 June - probably in one way or the other also closely resemble the elections in the United States and that a European Voter Profiler would also do well in getting European voters more interested in the EU parliamentary elections.
The EU Profiler has hit the road running and is becoming very popular. The creators regard it as the Holy Grail of profilers "since it enables you to line up the views of all the European parties alongside each other, without any need for background knowledge", says Amsterdam political scientist André Krouwel, one of the minds behind the EU Profiler.
The EU Profiler is certainly worth a shot, but you have got to be open-minded and prepared for surprises. Remember that we're talking about more than 700 seats in the European Parliament, divided among 27 different countries. When we spoke to a voter who did the EU Profiler test in Holland, he told us that the test had showed him that some political parties in other EU member states came closer to his own political viewpoints than his home grown parties. He said that to him that meant that many local political parties in Holland did not take the time to listen to their voters anymore. When we asked him for which party he would vote for this time around, he said that a party in Italy and one in the Czech Republic matched his profile the best, but that he wasn't sure yet.
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