June 2009 elections will be on the European Parliament in each of the 27 member states of the European Union. In 2004 the first European VoteMatch was launched, by answering 30 statements with ‘agree’, ‘don’t agree’ or ‘don’t know’ one could see what European party or fraction most met ones political preference. The European VoteMatch is still online at www.votematch.eu.
The European VoteMatch was modelled after the StemWijzer, the very successful political preference test in the Netherlands, developed over the past fifteen years into the most used internet site in election times, reaching more than 4.7 mln. users at the parliamentary elections in the Netherlands, November 2006.
The ‘StemWijzer-method’ was successfully implemented in Germany 2002, where nowadays there’s a ‘ Wahl-O-Mat’ on every Landestag-election. At the Bundestag-elections of 2006 the test was done more than 5 million times. Since 2003 Switzerland has its three lingual Politarena. On the parliamentary elections in Bulgaria 2005 the Glasovoditel was launched. In both rounds of the presidential elections as well as the elections for the Assemblee National in France each time there was a different version of MonVoteÀMoi, the French VoteMatch online.
Why VoteMatch
The IPP in the Netherlands and the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb) in Germany, leading partners in the VoteMatch-network, have taken up the plan to realise a VoteMatch in every member state of the European Union on behalf of the elections for the European Parliament, June 2009. Additionally a ‘pan-European’ VoteMatch will be launched, like in 2004, where the result of the questioning leads to the European groups in the European Parliament.
VoteMatch Europe 2009 is an educational tool. It has the potential to promote European citizenship, to better inform citizens about elections for the European Parliament (EP), teach voters about the programmatic differences between the contesting parties and to increase the voter turn out. By realizing VoteMatch in all EU-member states not only a network between organizations in all participating EU-countries will be established, but also a platform will appear through which all users can get acquainted to the different opinions on all important European issues in the participating countries.
More information can be obtained on the website www.votematch.eu or by mail to the project manager of VoteMatch, Jochum de Graaf, j.degraaf@stemwijzer.nl.
This article was published in Politeia Newsletter 48 - February 2008