The European elections are just around the corner. At Voxeurop, we have been reporting on the elections and the mood in the different countries with the project „Voices of Europe 2024„, which brings together 27 newspapers from the 27 EU countries.

But one question remains: the European ballot shows a worrying trend of abstention: in the 2019 Eu Parliament elections, an average of 49.3 per cent was recorded in the EU countries, with a peak reached in Slovakia (75.3 per cent) and a low in Belgium (11.5 per cent), where however voting is compulsory.

Use your vote or others will decide for you“ is the slogan used by the European Parliament to encourage citizens to vote, and it is hard to disagree. And those who have decided to use their vote do not always know how, especially the  23 million citizens who will be voting for the first time. To help them sort out the various parties, we have integrated a ‚Voting Advice Application‘ into some articles: EU&I.

It is a tool that helps people to get an idea of what the different political parties think and propose, their programmes and their vision of society, based on their preferences on a number of key issues such as taxation, defence, agriculture, employment, the environment or support for Ukraine. EU&I is available in over 20 languages and was developed by the European University Institute in Florence in collaboration with a scientific committee of academics from the Universities of Lausanne and Lucerne. 

In the previous edition, for the 2019 elections, 1.28 million people took part: this is still a small number in relation to an electorate of almost 400 million voters and electors, but it can certainly help with orientation.