It's not front-page news and I doubt if anyone within the major political parties in Berlin want to really talk about it much.....but there is a PR campaign going on to some degree with Chancellor Merkel....hyping the positives of the EU existing.
Deutsche Welle chats about the piece to some degree and what is the cause of this PR campaign.
No one says why....but the EU Commission went out in the early part of 2018, and tasked someone to do a poll over how Germans feel about the EU.
The numbers? Forty-five percent of Germans see the EU as positive. Fifty-one percent said that the EU was not headed in the right direction.
The poll, I suspect....went across to other nations as well, and part of the mechanism to gear the 2019 election process and how big a mess it might turn into.
Why the negativity? Well....you can ask the Brits how BREXIT got hyped up and how so many of them got negative about the EU.....and find that Germans have the same complaints.
The worry here by the EU is that some political parties might appear with a anti-EU agenda, and take voting in this summer 2019 election for EU representatives. Just to suggest a ten-percent group making it to Brussels....probably would worry them to some extent. But you have to wonder....what if forty-percent of the votes in the summer of 2019 are going to groups with an agenda to dismantle the EU or radically push it in a different direction. Imagine the group just suggesting that the EU can only meet eighty days out of the year for business.
Last year, I went through Main when a major fest was going to be held, and they had up at least forty major posters around the main event.....discussing the wonderful nature of the EU to fund various Mainz projects, and make the city into an 'epic' cultural center.
The curious way of how the EU got into Germans lives is via the taxation business....where German taxation ended up carving off some money (into the billions) that went to the EU, and then got redistributed back as 'gifts' to the various groups.....suggesting that the EU has a great deal of affect on life in Germany.
If you went to the average working-class German and asked them....how is the EU into your life....most will laugh and say only to create more bureaucratic or regulatory problems.
The problem in this EU election process....they wrote up the rule that the state legislatures of each country was NOT to be involved. It had to be a single election....with the public voting. So if you asked a hundred Germans over eighteen years old about this....I suspect that you'd find that a minimum of fifty percent have little interest in the election, or even showing up. There were 29-million votes in 2014 (the last EU election), out of 82-million residents. In a normal election year (2017 for example), you typically get 47-million.
So, it is conceivable that you might have a limited number of people show up, and the pro-EU crowd fail to show, and then you suddenly have forty-percent of the crowd voting for some anti-EU groups from Germany. Use the same scenario across Europe, and you got a five-star mess on your hands.
But as to how Merkel can change the direction of this? I have my doubts. Last week, the EU finance folks kinda hinted that once the Brits do the BREXIT.....the German contribution to the EU has to increase....another eleven billion EU. How do you carve up the current income off present taxes and meet this? Well....you can't without increasing taxation. Go think and ponder over that.
If I were to take a view of the 2019 election for EU representatives....I'd take a guess that by this fall....some anti-EU political party appears out of thin air in Germany and takes around 15-percent of the public polling by the end of 2018.
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