Lobbying in the European Parliament - life-long experience

Being in the Board and living in Brussels can sometimes bring unexpected opportunities – you just happen to be on the right place at the right time.

And apparently I was

Matthias and me wanted to learn more about the European Parliament so we got to meet Diogo, Secretary General of Youth Forum Jeunesse (aka European Youth Forum) – he explained us a lot, also about the YFJ campaign “Make it Youthful” to support and push through a written declaration on youth empowerment. And from there, it was just one more step to be invited to join their lobbying team for the July EP session in Strasbourg and one other to be sitting in a car heading for Strasbourg...

The aim of this written declaration is to make the European Commission and EU Member States take young people more into account when preparing policies with a direct impact on youth – such as education, employment, social inclusion, mobility etc. In order for any declaration to be passed, a majority of all members of the EP needs to sign it – which means 393 signatures.

When we arrived in Strasbourg on Monday evening, we had about 272 of them – and a looong way to go till Thursday noon which was one of the last opportunities when an MEP could sign.

Our “lobbying team” consisted of 6 people – 5 from YFJ Secretariat or Bureau and me, as the only “outsider”, a representative of a candidate member organisation…

We divided the EU countries among ourselves so that each of us had approximately 70 MEPs to talk to – and preferably MEPs whose language we could speak. So you can imagine “my targets” – Czechs, Slovaks, Polish (even though I cannot say much more than Dzien dobry)  and… Swedes (I admit that my knowledge of Swedish is almost as good as my Chinese skills

And then we dived into the hallways and office of the impressive EP building in Strasbourg to hunt down all the missing signatures… How?

That is quite simple – and much less exciting that you might think... You walk in a hallway, find the right door, knock and enter, introduce yourself and the declaration, explain, persuade, ask for support and signature, reply all the questions, hope they will not forget, come again (if they forgot), knock on the door, remind, hope, come again and so on and so forth.

We all had our ups and downs – depending on with whom we got to talk that part of the day. Sometimes, we met for a lunch with a bad mood as the MEPs from the morning were either not there, not interested, or even rude… only to find out after the lunch that we got other 40 signatures, which boosted us with new energy and enthusiasm.

In the end, we DID it We managed to get over the magical limit of 393 MEPs even on Wednesday evening so we could celebrate our success and come back to Parliament on Thursday morning as the winner, enjoy the speech of Sarkozy who came to explain French EU Presidency priorities and then leave for Brussels.

Yes, life is exciting and great!

P.S. And the best news in the end – the final number of MEPs who signed the declaration and thus acknowledged the importance of youth for the future of Europe was 433!!

P.P.S. If you want to learn more about the declaration, please visit www.youthforum.org/declaration