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The June 7 elections will be held against a grim backdrop: the worst worldwide recession since 1930. The need for fresh blood in the Strasbourg/Brussels arena has drawn a number of dabblers into the running, for whom politics is, at best, a pastime.
Alina Lebedeva (24), a Latvian of Russian ethnicity campaigning on the “For Fatherland and Freedom” ticket, gained fame in 2001 for hurling a bunch of red carnations in Prince Charles’ face during his visit to Riga, an act of protest against the war in Afghanistan.
And while Kinga Göncz, daughter of Hungary’s ex-president Árpád Göncz, tops the ticket for the Hungarian socialists, Elena Băsescu, the youngest daughter of Romania’s current president Traian Băsescu, is running for office as an independent.
A Polish journalist explained to the Romanian newspaper Cotidianul that the Poles “have had enough of public figures like your president’s daughter”. In 2004, the Polish candidates included astronaut Miroslaw Hermaszewski and two former reality-TV stars. Last year, one of the Polish MEP’s was replaced by one-time rally racer Krzystof Holowczyc.
Strasbourg also attracts Eurosceptics and right-wing extremists. Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the head of the Romanian far-right România Mare party, wants a seat in the European parliament, seconded on his list by Gigi Becali, owner of the football club Steaua. Also in France, anti-Zionist standup comic Dieudonné has announced his candidacy for MEP. Born to a French mother and Cameroonian father, Dieudonné claims he’s not an anti-Semite, but simply struggling against the "powerful Zionist lobby". In 2007, he was fined €7,000 for accusing the Jews, at a press conference in Algeria, of “memorial pornography” on account of their excessive commemoration of the Holocaust.
After having inflamed the Muslim world by producing an anti-Islamic short film, Dutch politician Geert Wilders has two items on his political agenda: to throw Romania and Bulgaria out of the EU and stop all EU accession talks with Turkey. The Irish, for their part, have Declan Ganley, the multi-millionaire who spearheaded the campaign to reject the Lisbon Treaty and founded the Eurosceptical party Libertas. “We are paying £40 million a day to be members of the EU. We can no longer afford to spend money”. This pretty much sums up the electoral strategy of the UK Independence Party, too.
A pack of modern-day pirates have also set sail for Strasbourg. The Swedish Pirate Party, founded in 2006, has declared war on laws protecting intellectual property rights. Its popularity soared after four Swedes were arrested for downloading files from the Web. The party’s goal is to change the legislation governing the use of on-line databases.
Silvio Berlusconi, the self-proclaimed “Jesus of Italian politics”, put four girls from show business on the Partito della Liberta’s preliminary ticket for the European elections. Veronica Lario, his wife, promptly spoke out against what the nation’s press calls “Berlusconi’s harem". "Il Cavaliere" denied the allegations and hasn’t said a word about the two-page spread on the “four Graces” in Il Giornale, a publication that is actually part of his media empire. When this EP campaign soap opera finally came to an end, only ex-mannequin Barbara Matera (28) was left on the list.
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