Guest article: “Changing the course of Europe – why this election matters”
This May marks the elections for the European Parliament. As a candidate I often get the question why these elections matter and particularly why it would matter to vote for me. In a time when the legitimacy of political institutions on all levels is questioned and Brussels probably feels very far away for a majority of Europeans, the question is without a doubt a valid one. I think voting and engaging in the European elections is important for all the same reasons that engaging in society in general, especially for school student activists,) is: we want to change this society for a better one.
My own engagement in societal issues started in school; we wanted to question who made the decisions and with what legitimacy, why the sex education was so bad and did not address LGBT-issues, why we did not have more human rights education and why school just tried to reproduce the prevailing society with its existing inequalities.
With my engagement in school student politics and later on youth politics in general, a European engagement was born as well. I think European youth organisations, such as OBESSU, largely made me a European, but more than that it gave me loads of valuable contacts and friends that I could work to change society with.
I think in that the European Union will in many ways be in a lot of crossroads in the coming years regarding how the EU of the future will look like. During this election campaign I have debated with people who hold that the EU should only be an internal market – a loose cooperation between Member States, mainly focusing on trade. I disagree, as for me where there is economic activity there is also other forms of human activity. We cannot build an EU where financial transactions and goods can travel freely but we as people are not free to do so. I want to build a Europe for its citizens. But that also requires that the Union needs to strengthen its policies on human and fundamental rights, democratize its institutions and secure the free mobility of people.
For me, this election is important because this is the time when we decide the direction of the European Union. There are alternatives: do we want a technocrat Europe that does just focus on the technical dimension of an internal market, a euroskeptic Europe just trying to selectively cherry-pick the parts of EU that can be directly utilised to enhance the national interest? Or do we want an EU taking into account also the social dimensions in economic cooperation? An EU taking into account that we need more democracy, that we need to protect our climate and that women’s and LGBT rights are also human rights?
This is the main reasons why I feel this election is particularly important, and why I hope that all the people throughout Europe that are trying to change our schools (where society is without a doubt being shaped) also this May try to change Europe.
Written by Alina Boling, who is a Finnish candidate for the European elections. She has a background in school student and student politics. From 2010-2011 Alina was a member of the Monitoring Committee of OBESSU and has FSS as her background organisation. Alina is especially interested in human and fundamental rights, foreign affairs and creating a fairer European economy. When she is not running for the European Parliament she studies law at the University of Helsinki. Follow Alina on Twitter @alinaboling.
