With his dark suit and bright blue tie, Baptiste looks a little like Kennedy Junior. Like his colleague Camille, he is a senior at Emile-Jacqmain High School, just a few dozen meters from the European Parliament and the House of European History in Brussels. Both are among the 271,000 young Belgians aged 16 and 17 who, for the first time, will be authorized to vote on June 9 to elect their MEPs. Like Germany, Austria, Malta and Greece (where voting will only be possible from the age of 17), Belgium sought to exert young people to go to the polls for this European election, whose stakes are widely overshadowed by the federal and regional elections held on the same day, but in which minors will not be able to vote.
In front of a room very attentive to the day’s debate, six candidates, including two heads of list and an outgoing MEP, had come to defend their program and, above all, the value of going out to vote. A difficult assignment in a country where voting is compulsory but where 12% of them deserted or cast a blank or invalid ballot during the 2019 legislative elections. Candidates also had to overcome young people’s indifference and even their rejection of politics.
The latest European social survey conducted by the European Science Foundation in 2022 showed that a third of 15-25-year-olds said they were completely disinterested in public affairs. In Flanders, a regional survey of 7,000 young people published in February revealed that 43% of boys and 53 % of girls said they had no political preference. On the French-speaking side of the country, a recent survey by the Youth Council illustrated above all a great ignorance of the institutional system but also, for 53% of those polled, a yearning to understand it better.
‘A return to humanism’
Such was the ambition of the debate’s two moderators and their school, a member of the “Ambassador School” program launched ten years ago by the European Parliament which brings together some 2,000 schools across the EU. Its goal is to raise young people’s awareness of citizenship. “What we’re organizing today is important for young people and democracy, at a time when the world is too often strained by all kinds of extremism,” stressed Agnès Hermans, the school’s director of studies as she welcomed representatives from the Socialist Party, Ecolo (Greens), Les Engagés (centrists), Mouvement Réformateur (liberals), Démocrates Fédéralistes Indépendants (DéFI, centrists) and Parti du Travail (radical left). Deemed undemocratic, the far right was absent from the debate, as it is in all French-speaking Belgian assemblies.
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