European parliament elections underway

teleSUR English

*Germany to vote for European parliament on June 9 *720 MEPS to be elected for European parliament *Energy transition, migration, and war of peace policies among key issues

Transcript

00:00 Now we welcome from our special envoy, Yunus Soner from Berlin, bringing us more information

00:06 on the European Parliament elections. Welcome, Yunus. What's the latest over there?

00:10 Hello, good afternoon from here, from Berlin. I'm standing right here from the front of the

00:17 German Parliament. Behind me, the Reichstag, the old building, but that is obviously not

00:24 to debate right now. What is going to be voted for is the European Parliament and the voting

00:31 has started in some countries, among them Ireland and Netherlands, on the 6th of June and will

00:36 continue until the 9th of June, the day where the majority of the countries, the populations,

00:42 will vote for the Parliament, among them as well Germany, where 96 members of the European Parliament

00:51 will be elected by more than 60 million citizens of the German Republic, Federal Republic,

00:58 in addition to 4 million non-German EU citizens living here in Germany. So 35 political parties

01:06 are presenting themselves here in Germany to these elections and they have 1413 candidates

01:13 running for a seat in the Parliament. The campaign here is not very heated until now,

01:21 but it is becoming more and more. Three different topics are standing out, as far as I can judge,

01:27 here in Germany, between the established fractions in the European Parliament,

01:33 the ones of the conservatives, the leading fraction, the social democrats and the greens,

01:38 as well as the liberals on the one side, and the Eurosceptics or even the Euro enemies on the other

01:45 side, which are comprised by the extreme right-wing parties, but also some new independent or even

01:52 left-wing forces. The topics in debate are, first of all, here in Germany, the climate change and

01:58 the according energy transition, which puts a pressure on the traditional motors, on the

02:05 traditional automobile sector here in Germany, and also on the peasants who have been applying,

02:10 for instance, diesel fuel, and the cuts, the subsidies for this diesel fuel were cut as part

02:18 of this green deal, of the energy transition, which caused the peasants to stage huge protests

02:24 here around Berlin in the recent months. One topic is the climate change. The second topic is

02:30 migration, where the Eurosceptics or the extreme right-wing parties are demanding a complete

02:36 closure of the continent against immigrants and also to expel those who are already within the

02:44 European Union. In that context, it's worth mentioning that the German Parliament, not the

02:48 European one, but the German Parliament is preparing a law by which anyone who rejects

02:55 the right of Israel to exist can be subjected to a trial and expelled from Germany too. This law

03:04 is still in preparation, but it kind of shows the atmosphere in the topic of migration. Third topic,

03:11 as you mentioned, is the war in Ukraine and the positioning of the European Union in the world.

03:16 Here, the traditional factors, the traditional fractions demand a more active, more interventionist

03:23 European Union, which even reforms itself institutionally so that certain bigger countries

03:29 like Germany and France can take the lead easier and push the Union into a more interventionist

03:35 practices in the foreign policy. Others, the opposing fractions, reject that and defend

03:42 the European countries' sovereignty and the law and the regulation that all foreign policy

03:49 decisions have to be taken on an anonymously. So, this is another debate and of course, it has

03:55 become in the recent days a debate on peace and war in Europe because the oppositional fractions

04:02 say that the current governments and the Commission are pushing Europe into a wider

04:08 conflict, into a wider military conflict. In fact, the German foreign defense minister said that

04:13 Germany had to be prepared for a war and the cabinet has prepared an 81-page long paper,

04:20 which has been approved by the cabinet, that studies the case of complete self-defense as

04:28 it's labeled, which means that Germany as an entire country enters the war. So, the climate

04:34 is also a little bit about war and peace and this, so it seems, pushes more people to go to the

04:41 ballots, to go to the ballot boxes and to vote and this debate about war and peace, I'm told here by

04:49 observers, is more serving those oppositional factors who demand a diplomatic solution in the

04:55 Ukraine crisis. I'm being told here in Berlin that the mood is quite changing, that the public opinion

05:02 is becoming afraid of the widening of the war in Ukraine, including European countries as well,

05:09 and that might also affect the numbers coming out on the 9th of June on Sunday evening.

05:14 We'll continue to follow the topic closely. Thank you, Younes, for your input.

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