Author Description

The 2009 Elections to the European Parliament€looks at the elections€in each of the 27 member states of the newly enlarged European Union, and is an assessment of the European Parliament in 2004-2009. It asks whether the elections were irrelevant and inconsequential. Thirty years after the first Euro elections in 1979, what efforts were made to mobilize the electorate? Was the European Commission's Communicating Europe strategy, which included€blogs, targeting young voters using digital media, and MEPs on Europarl TV, a waste of time? Did the Dutch and French negative referendums on a new EU constitution affect the results? The contributors to this volume examine the Euro elections in each member state, criticising some commonly held assumptions. Common themes and the overall results are analyzed, along with the role of the European Parliament's party groups, and that of the transnational party federations.