Selfies, social media fail to entice EU voters

In an entirely unscientific poll, 10 young Europeans were recently asked if they could identify any of the top three candidates in this week’s European Parliament elections. Only one of them could.

The survey of students at the Marie- Haps Institute, a university in Brussels, was a lighthearted exercise, but it illustrated a serious point: no sector of society is more disconnected from European politics than first- time voters.

Yet it is the young who are arguably most exposed to the consequences of EU decision- making: youth unemployment averages 23 percent across the EU and exceeds 50 per cent in Greece and Italy. Fallout from the debt crisis risks creating a generation of educated and frustrated young people without jobs.

It is an issue at the forefront of the minds of the top candidates — one they have all raised in almost every speech, debate and town hall meeting of the campaign — and yet their message fails to resonate with most young voters.

“A whole generation in the European Union pays with their life chances for a crisis other people, irresponsible people, have caused,” said Martin Schulz, the candidate for the centre- left Socialists & Democrats, during a debate at the University of Maastricht in April.

The response from students and young people in Brussels would not leave him encouraged.

“European politics doesn’t matter much to me,” said Bart Waegeman, an employee of the Belgian government in his early 20s hanging out at MarieHaps. “Europe is a little too big.”

Sarah Boulanger, the only one of the MarieHaps students to correctly identify one of the candidates to be the next European Commission president ( former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt) was equally dismissive.

“It’s not interesting for us. We vote for someone and then in the end it’s not who we voted for that makes it,” she said.