Europe's socialist parties are warming up for the 2009 election campaign

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Published Friday, April 4, 2008 at 11:58
by Editor (903 views and 1 comments)

This week communication experts from Europe’s socialist and social democratic parties met in Brussels to debate the campaign for the 2009 European elections. 50 dedicated campaigners met to share ideas on how to campaign together as one political family.

The experts looked to already existing socialist campaigns to find inspiration: One is the recent campaign of the Spanish socialist party, PSOE, which featured many impressive videos and graphics. Leading up to the national elections they used the first letter of the party leaders name as a brand – ‘con Z de Zapatero’! Another inspiration was the ‘zero VAT on condoms’ campaign of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament. Here the campaigners made extensive use of Facebook – a social networking site – to spread their message.

Last, but definitely not least, the online campaign strategy of the French PS presidential candidate Ségolène Royal was discussed. The Internet was used very effectively during the campaign: Royal's website was extremely popular and more than 1.000 blogs took part in the campaign, clustered in a network called ‘Segoland’.

Meeting participants agreed that Europe’s socialists and social democrats can certainly learn a lot from each others campaigns. What do you think the PES campaign for the upcoming elections should look like? What can the PES learn from campaigns in your home country?

The illustration is a visual representation of 'Segoland' - the socialist blogosphere during the French presidential elections.

Tags: elections, PES, political parties

Comments

1. Local or global networks? by noelhatch Join PES activists on Saturday, April 5, 2008 at 19:25

Have a look at the map and look at the links between the French territory and the circle on the right, which represents the French Socialist supports abroad. You'll notice the links are thicker (i.e. stronger and deeper) between the circle and certain areas of France. What does this mean? As one of those bloggers living in the UK, my links were thicker to Marseille, Lyon and especially Paris because of the blogger friends I had who lived there. We fed of information and debate off each other, but more importantly shared this across the network, so insights about local campaigning "on the ground" in Paris could be taken in by local activists in London and vice versa.

With PES Activists, we are not just members of one national party but of an umbrella organisation of parties right across Europe, so insights about issues and policies in London is very relevant to Parisians, not only Socialist activists to learn tips, but everyday Parisians to work out what works or not. Maybe we could have the equivalent of a Segoland for the PES Activists? What would be even better is to combine the googlemaps function so that PES map doesn't only focus on online activity/blogs but also face-to-face activity. 

In the meantime, I'm going back into the rain to campaign for Ken Livingstone, the most progressive and pro-European mayoral candidate for London...and then write up the synthesis of all the PES debates we organised. Here's the videos of the debate "Globalisation in the community, how can we build a social Europe" here http://manifesto2009.pes.org/en/new-social-europe/post/340

Vote for Ken, Vote for Peace!

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