Which party should I vote for in the European Elections?
With the upcoming EP elections, I felt obliged to check out the profiler sites my colleagues have put on the internet. I started with Germany’s wahl-o-mat that has been around for a number of years. After evaluating 30 statements, the program decided that I should vote for the German Liberals, which was not such a big surprise. The Bavarian Christian Democrats and the New Left Party were the biggest distance away from my ideal point, not least because my preferences seem to be more pro-European than these parties.
Why I should vote for the LibDems (maybe)
Given that I’m going to vote in the UK, I next tried the EU Profiler, which is an international project that aims at providing the relevant information on party positions for all 27 member states. After evaluating a new set of another 30 items, I was presented with a fancy two-dimensional graph that shows that I should vote for the UK LibDems, although they look more like my least-bad option since the policy space around my ideal point is not exactly crowded. This is because I am luke-warm (but warm) when it comes to European Integration plus a bit of a lefty when it comes to the “socioeconomic” dimension. This dimension, however, looks a bit dodgy, because according to the map, the Tories would be ever so slightly to the left of Labour. Well, maybe they are. At least no one suggest that I should vote UKIP or BNP (who sent me a flyer the other week, suggesting that all those immigrants should leave the UK).
In a bold move I switched from British to German parties and was a little surprised to learn that I should vote New Left, which is reasonably close to my ideal point while the Liberals are rather far away. So it would seem that I suffer from a national-political personality split.
Should I vote for the Left party?!?
Still not content with the results, I returned to the wahl-o-mat and discovered that they too have teamed-up with researchers from other countries, meaning that we have apparently two competing pan-European profiler projects. So I answered a final UK-specific questionnaire and was reassured that I should indeed vote for the LibDems, though apparently for different reasons.
While their accuracy of the results might be debatable, these tools provide a lot of information and are great fun.
As far as the BNP is concerned - whilst collecting UK manifestos for Mannheim, I took it upon myself to flick through the BNP manifesto (don't worry, I used the Adobe Reader equivalent of tongs) and was amused - and slightly concerned - to see that it is apparently party policy to bring Eire within a wider United Kingdom. Quite apart from the - ahem - logistical difficulties this entails, I can only assume it means one of two things:
1) They have a deportation plan for the natives, and are going to settle ethnic traitors like me (along with our half-breed babies) out in the misty peat bogs and let us all die of alcohol abuse and potato famine;
2) They haven't realised that bringing 4 million Celts into the UK is going to mess about with Anglo-Saxon ethnic purity even more than 1 million Poles has.
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