Eva Biaudet's Weblog

Yee! We kept are seat against all odds.

My candidate from the swedish people´s party (ELDR in EP), Mr Henrik Lax succeeded to take the last Finnish mandate, against all polls and predictions from the bigger groups. With the EU enlargement Finland lost two seats (from 16 to 14) and it was generally speculated that one of those loosers would be ours. But we fought and our electorate voted more avtively than others. The voting rate rose with 10 % generally in Finland too, opposed to most other EU countries. We had no anti -EU fenomena as in Sweden, where the june-list took 14% ! In Finland the conservatives won (4 seats), the center-rural party came second (4 seats) and the social-democrats came third (3 seats). The greens lost their second seat.

The Roma question i.e. the poor situation of the gypsies in Europe, was not an issue in the elections, even if it perhaps should have been. If someone is interested, look for Amnesty Internationals recent human rights report from Slovakia.

Bad that eu countries can´t decide the same election day

The Finns have to wait three hours for EP elections results just because members have not been able to decide a common day and hour of voting. It is no wonder that the capability of th EU is sometimes questioned when easy problems seem to be this difficult. The Dutch might be fined for making their results public before sunday. We politicians will have to do better to get people believe in common decisionmaking.

Sorry, I am not a candidate this time

Thanks for all encouragement. I am sorry to say but I am not running as candidate myself in these EP elections. My party fights for its only seat in the liberal group. Beeing a representative for the swedish speaking minority in Finland, succeeding with this is important. I am myself in the national parliament for my fourth term. We fight for a europe that is diverse both politically and culturally. Politicians talk about multicultural Europe but it is is much more than the different nations together. One issue that is much to little addressed is the Roma question, both in new and old EU countries. But if my candidate will become a MEP I will try to get him blogging too!

Hello!

I am starting a new life going bloging. I hope you will find me here and give me ideas and comments on politics or anything. I am a liberal politician trying to find new ways for communication between politicians and people. At the moment we are running trough the last days of campaigning in the european parliamentary elections, hoping for people to vote. In last elections only 31% of all Finns voted!
Have you got any ideas to make Europe more interesting?