Your vote for the(ir) President of the European Council!

Despite the official black-out concerning candidates and the member states’ preferences, the French think tank Fondation Robert Schuman offers EU citizens a vote on a selection of personalities, officially in the running or presumed to be candidates for the new post of president of the European Council, to be decided by the heads of government or state on 19 November 2009, in a union “in which decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen”.

They are, in alphabetical order: Jan Peter Balkenende, Tony Blair, Jean-Claude Juncker, Herman Van Rompuy and Vaira Vike-Freiberga.

Even if the information has been spread by a few Euroblogs, the number of participants is rising rapidly. A few moments ago, 9,165 had participated in the poll. At the time I wrote my previous post, there were 8,733, so more than 400 new voters had expressed their opinion since early morning.

You don’t need to be much of a demagogue to conclude that our leaders have missed a great opportunity to connect with the citizens of the European Union.



UPDATE 14 November 2009 about 18:00 EET: The vote count is growing rapidly. During the last twelve hours 1,539 persons have voted, bringing the total from 8,733 to 10,272 votes. Have your say!



Ralf Grahn



P.S. Do you find EUSSR myths fascinating? Are we EU citizens worth a better European Union? Read the Euroblogs aggregated on multilingual Bloggingportal.eu, and discuss our common future.