We are facing today some of the greatest challenges in history and we can often feel powerless and isolated. But we should remember that we are many and that our ideas are powerful. The challenges we face go beyond national borders and we have to face them together.
Voting in the EU elections means choosing the people who will turn our ideas into laws and promote them across the world. It is one of the many small, yet crucial, steps we must make to give a chance to our ideas.
WHY SHOULD
WE VOTE?
Erasmus+, established in 1987, is the EU flagship programme for education, training, youth and sports. Each year, over 640.000 participants take part in learning activities abroad! The European Parliament has always been a champion to increase the budget of Erasmus+.
EU institutions have adopted the “Reinforced Youth Guarantee”, a commitment by all Member States to ensure that all young people under the age of 30 receive a good quality offer of employment, continued education, apprenticeship or traineeship within a period of 4 months of becoming unemployed or leaving education. Since 2020, the European Parliament has regularly called for the “Youth Guarantee” to become binding and condemned unpaid internships and apprenticeships.
The European Parliament adopted the EU Climate Law on 24 June 2021, which makes legally binding a target of reducing emissions 55% by 2030 and climate neutrality by 2050.
The EU took several concrete actions such as the one related to banning single use plastic from the EU market and to decarbonise the aviation sector as part of the European Green Deal
The European Parliament has consistently promoted the establishment of a coherent public health policy. At the start of the current legislative period, for example, it pushed to make beating cancer a top priority of EU health policy.
In 2023, more than 220,000 migrants arrived in Europe, while more than 2,800 died or went missing. Migration is a European challenge that requires a European response. The European Parliament is involved in the “New Pact on Migration and Asylum” – a set of regulations and policies to create a fairer, efficient, and more sustainable migration and asylum process for the EU.
Thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU has taken the lead in modernising and strengthening users’ rights and freedoms to protect their personal data, and therefore, your privacy!
The European Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights. To ensure that these values are respected, serious and persistent breaches of EU values by a Member State are sanctioned by the EU.
The EU provides common rules to protect your social security rights when moving within Europe. Those include healthcare, work, pension, unemployment, family benefits! Throughout the years, the European Parliament has been calling for adequate social protection, particularly for vulnerable groups.
The ‘Roam-like-at-home’ scheme, which enables EU and EEA travellers to call, text and surf in the EU without extra charges, was extended until 2032! One of the core principles of the EU is the free movement of people, travelling within the EU is unprecedentedly easy.