The “Lazy” Europeans
Seeing a bigger percentage in the vote percentage around Europe, apparently the highest in the past 20 years, I would expect my country would follow the trend of its European Union neighbours.
But no, even though there was an increase on the number of people voting for this election the abstention reached historical highs. People just prefer to go to the beaches to catch some sun instead of wasting five minutes of their time to vote. It wasn’t long ago that we were ruled by a dictator, a country without free speech and police after the opposers to the regime. People fought for it and now it is just depressing.
I’m honestly not caught by surprise by some extremist parties winning like what happened in France due to bad policies. But what caught my eye was only 1200 people voted out of 387 thousand Portuguese living in France for this European Elections.
At least the Romanians know the importance of voting in this day since there are hundreds of Reddit posts talking about. Adding to the European Union election it was the day to vote in a referendum about anti-corruption.
I started to understand a bit more of the importance of the European Union a while ago. You can travel in our countries just with the ID, you can work or study abroad with the Erasmus program, send your kids with 18 years old to have a free adventure with InterRail, not to talk about the huge sums of money that are sent to help countries to be used for development.
Even though the system that rules the European Union is not easy to understand at first glance, the majority has no clue how the system works and has no intention into knowing it. That leads to. situations like when I was searching for a job , I had to show some HR people about the EURES program that could benefit the company where they were working on.
I am starting to strongly believe that voting should be a must instead of being just a right in our lives. Taking stuff for granted is halfway into chaos just like it is happening in Brexit or its standoff, or the climate change problem.
It looks like the frog on a hot pot is this indifferent humanity to serious problems.
I think nonvoters shouldn’t get a fine for not voting but instead be ineligible to be using European funds or programs to understand the real importance of the EU.
It is just depressing to see so much money spent on the marketing #thistimeimvoting by the EU to get this kind of results in the country I love.
