European parliament elections will take place in June 2004. These elections are really important, and also difficult for greens. The reason being that the EU is enlarging, and in new member states greens are not very strong. A lot of work is needed if greens would like to keep their position in European parliament!
For FYEG it is important that there are also young members in the green group. That is why we are organising campaign to support greens, and preferably young candidates during election campaign. FYEG has also issued a statement to the European parliament election campaign meeting for Green parties in Brussels on the 9th of September. Statement headline was “Greens should be party for young people also in future” and the main message in statement is that young candidates should be so high in the lists (where the list based voting system is used) that they have real possibilities to enter to the European parliament.
The first FYEG meeting regarding this campaign took place in the beginning of July in Berlin. The meeting was really successful and after the meeting we had a real plan on how to do the campaign and how to continue. Also we need a lot of coordination with Migration campaign which is FYEG’s main campaign during 2003-2004.
The idea behind the election campaign is that awareness is created so that people will be interested to access the campaign’s internet pages. There they will find interesting slogans and posters, which will encourage people to return to the pages. You will find more information in the next edition of the Ecosprinter after the Prague meeting which will take place at the end of October.
The themes which are included in the campaign were chosen after long discussions. The reason why we chose these themes was that we wanted to include FYEG’s member organisations fully in the campaign. The themes are:
- Enviroment, Euratom, Climate Change and Traffic
- Globalisation, Tobin tax, Fair Trade and Developing aid
During this campaign we will also try to organise a meeting for young candidates in Rome, next February, when the Green congress will take place.
We are hoping that all our member organisations take part in this campaign. Our next meeting will be in Prague 31.10.03 – 2.11.03. All parties are very welcome to this meeting.