European Union

General : On Wednesday and Thursday European Parliament President Martin Schulz will travel to Athens and Lesbos to discuss the migration crisis and will be present for the departure of the first relocated refugees from Greece.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

General : The European citizens’ initiative was an innovation in the Lisbon Treaty that gave people the right to demand EU action on a particular subject provided they collect a million signatures. However, after three years no initiative has yet led to a new legislative proposal. The European Commission is preparing a review but MEPs already adopted on 28 October several ideas on how to improve the process. We spoke with report author György Schöpflin, a Hungarian member of the EPP group.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

General : The European citizens’ initiative was an innovation in the Lisbon Treaty that gave people the right to demand EU action on a particular subject provided they collect a million signatures. However, after three years no initiative has yet led to a new legislative proposal. The European Commission is preparing a review but MEPs already adopted on 28 October several ideas on how to improve the process. We spoke with report author György Schöpflin, a Hungarian member of the EPP group.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

General : King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands met EP President Martin Schulz during a visit to Brussels on Tuesday 3 October. The Monarch was also due to visit the European Commission and the Council on the same day as part of his country taking over the presidency of the European Council on 1 January 2016.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

A guest contribution by Başak Alpan,
from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara.

Here’s one of the few good things about being a political science professor in Turkey: elections are never only boring econometrical calculations that no one is interested in, but each election gives you an ample amount of shock, perplexity, and challenge to cope with.

The parliamentary elections of 1st November are no exception to this rule. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), as a surprise to even its own cadres, increased its vote from 40 % to 49% compared to the previous elections on 7 June, which had been repeated due to the stalemate in coalition negotiations. For the opponents of the government, it was one more occasion of shock, perplexity and challenge.

Some 70 000 of them – mainly middle-class, educated, urban political activists – had decided to be more than just voters and bystanders. They had volunteered for the civic oversight of elections under the umbrella of the civic movement named ‘Vote and Beyond’.

‘Vote and beyond’ – the civic movement’s emblem.

‘Vote and Beyond’, which started as a movement in Istanbul in December 2013 (in the aftermath of Gezi Protests) became an association in April 2014. They have since become organised in half of the 81 provinces and were active in observing ballot boxes in the March 2014 local elections, August 2014 presidential elections and June 2015 parliamentary elections, aiming to make sure that the elections are realised impartially and without any rig.

The variety of volunteers that make up this movement gives evidence to the ‘shock-perplexity-challenge’ theorem mentioned above: there are social democrats, unwavering seculars sick of the conservative regime, anti-capitalist Muslims, liberals who have more recently been disenchanted with the AKP, socialists who struggle for peace and democracy, and more. According to a widely shared, self-ironical tweet, the political context in Turkey has become so surreal that it even turned previously poststructuralist anarchists into staunch guardians of elections.

As a member of this movement, I was an election observer in Ulubey yesterday, one of the relatively poor districts in Ankara. As I was travelling there along the misty hills of Ankara, I was aware of the fact that I would be meeting with a pre-dominantly conservative AKP electorate. The polling commission welcomed me, and during the nine hours I spent in the primary school classroom used as a polling station, we chatted, laughed, argued and exchanged views.

The inhabitants of Ulubey, however, had a different life agenda: they were concerned with the recent urban regeneration projects that would have a direct impact on their dwellings, and very upset about the influx of Syrian refugees to the district due to affordable rents and living conditions. ‘We were not even locking our doors here before the migrants arrived’, one of the voters said. Note that all these highly political issues were however extremely personalised and bore no immediate connection to any political party or governmental policy. It simply was about their lives and their neighbourhood.

Still, at the end of the day, it became apparent that 68 per cent of the electorate of our classroom had voted for the AKP. The Guardian was right when it claimed after the Ankara bombings and their 102 victims on 10 October that even pain cannot bridge the current polarisation in Turkish society between conservatives and progressives. But that does not change the fact that any political dissident living in Turkey today has to pass that bridge every single day. Before wrapping yourself up into your daily self-induced, anti-government, dissident utopia, you buy your bread from a pro-AKP bakery, you take a cab with a pro-Erdoğan radio channel blasting; you live your life surrounded by them. They are normal people with normal lives, dreams, desires, feelings and experiences. It is just that they have different priorities and abstraction levels.

This is what we need to theorise and address if we really want to claim that another world is possible for Turkey.

Başak Alpan is Assistant Professor
in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration
at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara.

The French version of this post can be found in the ‘Mails from Europe’ series,
on the homepage of the EU-Asia Institute at ESSCA School of Management.

The post The Vote and Beyond : Lessons from the Turkish Repeat Elections appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

“My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions,” said Peter Drucker, the father of management consulting. Had we met Mr Drucker we’d probably have asked him “what are the right questions to ask in order to become a good consultant to our clients?” Unfortunately for us, Peter Drucker passed away 10 years ago – fortunately, FleishmanHillard organises the “FH Fundamentals” training every six months for young consultants from all over the EMEA region to get to know each other and further familiarise themselves with the values that make FH the best communications agency in the world.

The latest generation of “FH Fundamentalists” from Brussels, London, Paris, & Milan

But let’s cut to the chase – what are the five questions a communications and public affairs consultant should ask himself or herself in order to provide its clients with the best services?

• Do I have enough “face time” with my clients? Even if one works day and night on an account spending time face-to-face with their client will enrich the relationship and will enable to address issues that are to “sensitive” to be discussed over email.
• I am thinking creatively about my account? Beyond the day-to-day tasks it is very important to shake the status quo and present your clients with new ideas. All ideas are good – may they be big or small. At FleishmanHillard, we try to present our clients with one new idea a month – ambitious? Not at all, considering the diversity of expertise we have in our office.
• Is Twitter the be all and end all of communications channels? Not at all! Once our client’s communications objectives and messaging is approved there are a wide range of channels to disseminate messages in order to target the right audience. Think creatively – all your money doesn’t have to go to full page ads in media and all your energy doesn’t need to focus on advertorials!
• Is measuring results necessary? Yes – our clients are constantly connected and want to feel in control of the information they receive. Hence, measuring results is paramount to developing productive relationships with them. However, all measurement is not good measurement. Our objectives need to be clear and mutually agreed from the very beginning and data should be analysed in a relevant way to fit the client’s business and advocacy objectives.
• I’m a young consultant – does this mean I should be terrified of presentations? Quite the opposite! Make sure you know what your role is; don’t read out a script (last time someone read you a story was probably your mother trying to send you to sleep); focus on the audience’s needs; keep eye contact with EVERYONE in the room; interact with your audience by asking questions – and above all REHEARSE. Assuming you know your subject, simple steps are the key to minimizing the pre-presentation stress.

In the FH pyramid of training FH Fundamentals is the basis – as we know the basis is the most important part; it ensures stability. And for communications consultants having good bases is key to understanding our clients’ needs. We may have not drunk from the Holy Grail however we did ask ourselves some questions about our current accounts – now it’s up our managers to embrace our improved selves!

Immavera & Adrien working on their mock pitch with colleagues from London and Munich

Building on Peter Drucker’s inspiring quotes, we too would like to contribute to the Consultant Hall of famous quotes, with a somewhat more impertinent twist to it.

For instance, young FH consultants like to say: “My colleagues are my best friends and my family at the same time.” What we mean: “I spend more time with my colleagues than with my friends and family combined.” Also heard: “I feel privileged to be exposed to such a high degree of expertise on a daily basis.” What that young and dynamic FH consultant actually means: “I can speak in acronyms for hours on end without ever feeling the need to rely on actual words.”

The latest “FH Fundamentalists”, Immavera Sardone, Ilektra Tsakalidou, and Adrien Rorive

Approval of the proposed reform of the judicial framework of the Court of Justice of the European Union

Faced with a once in a generation refugee crisis, and a brewing humanitarian disaster in the western Balkans, Germany has stepped up. . . and pledged 45 extension cords.

Berlin’s donation of a few dozen power cables to Croatia has been revealed as part of an attempt by Brussels to pressure member states by demonstrating the deficit between their pledges of help for Europe’s refugees and their actions – and going into excruciatingly granular detail in the process.

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Delegations

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP