A few days ahead of the EU elections, Germany's Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens seem to be well positioned to attract the vote of the country's large ethnic Turkish electorate. But the recent resignation of two popular ethnic Turkish politicians may have an impact on how they vote in the German general elections in September, EurActiv Turkey reports.

On 4 May, SPD Berlin Deputy Secretary Canan Bayram  resigned from her post and left the party only to join the Greens a few days later, causing a public stir in the Turkish community.

Explaining her move, Bayram said the SPD was not pushing hard enough for policies which would ensure equal opportunities. "There are not enough women in top management and I was not taken seriously. Besides, the party does not pay enough attention to gender equality legislation," she said.

Before the storm had settled, another Berlin-based politician of Turkish descent quit the Greens to join the SPD. Bilkay Öney resigned from her party on 14 May and switched to SDP the next day.

The high priests of Poland are urging the faithful to vote in the European parliamentary election for persons who "fully represent the point of view of the Catholic Church". No party is cited, but, logically, this tends to favour the conservative right. Total voter turnout is predicted to be as low as 13 percent, which would be a record.

A senior Civic Platform member, Danuta Hübner, whose party is leading in opinion surveys, says the electorate is hard to convince: "The challenge for us, for all the candidates is not only to make people vote for us, but to make people indeed just go to the polls. And here they don't feel that they can have impact on what European Union or European Parliament decides for them."

The ruling pro-EU Civic Platform has a 45 percent rating, the opposition Law and Justice conservatives 25 percent. Hubner notes that a lot of eurosceptics and anti-European MEPs have come from Poland, and hopes the people who chose them will vote differently in these elections.

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM - European leaders on Sunday stepped up a desperate battle to persuade people to vote for the EU parliament this week, but the campaign has opened up new political divisions across the continent.

With polls indicating a record low turnout for the June 4-7 election, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued a joint plea to voters, saying a strong parliament was essential to confront the economic crisis.

The two leaders said they want "a strong Europe that protects" its people and called for "all Europeans to vote" in the statement, published by the Journal du Dimanche newspaper in France and Die Welt am Sonntag in Germany.

A "strong Europe does not necessarily mean more powers for the European Union, even more European legislation or even more financial means," said Merkel and Sarkozy.

National Coalition Party Chairman, Minister of Finance Jyrki Katainen, has told fellow party member and European Parliament candidate Kai Pöntinen to stop running an election advertisement that lends itself to accusations of racism.
      In the ad, which was placed on the front page of Helsingin Sanomat on Friday, Pöntinen calls for a "stop to welfare bum immigrants". Katainen said that the advertisement is to be dropped because it can be misconstrued.
     
"I didn't like the ad, because it gives the wrong impression of Pöntinen's thinking. I have asked Pöntinen to stop using the advertisement", Katainen said on the morning.
      Katainen emphasised that Finland will need more immigrants in the future, as the members of the postwar baby boom generation retire. However, he added that open and critical debate is also needed on the immigration question.

Like so much else in the European Union, going to the polls to choose an EU Parliament is a complicated compromise. Actually, EU law says that voting procedures for the European Parliament must be the same in all member countries. But that is still not the case, 30 years after the first directly elected parliament.

Each EU country continues to exercise its own voting procedures and has its own nominating process for choosing candidates. The only common aspect they share is proportional representation, which is mandatory in all member states.

The British National Party leader, Nick Griffin, was last night accused of "sickening" exploitation of the memory of a murdered black teenager, Anthony Walker, who was killed in a Liverpool park.

Mr Griffin was accused of besmirching Walker's memory to stoke up votes ahead of the European elections this week. In a broadcast posted on YouTube, he stands at the spot where the 18-year-old was murdered in July 2005, and says the killing has been labelled as racially motivated but that "this is not the case".

According to new research, however, daughters have an even more profound effect on their daddies: fathers, say Professor Andrew Oswald, from Warwick University, and Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee, of York University, will shift their political allegiance for their daughters. Using research from the British Household Panel Survey, the two economists found that the more daughters there are in a household, the more likely their father is to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat.

In an unpublished article that has been submitted to an economics journal, the pair state: "This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more leftwing, while having sons, by contrast, makes them more rightwing." The academics go on to speculate that leftwing families become so through a predominance of females down successive generations, as anecdotally evidenced by Tony Booth and his many daughters, or the late John Smith and his three ....

The researchers have been accused of propagating gender stereotypes and of perpetuating the idea that women go in for softer politics than men. But their work mirrors recent findings by American researchers, who looked at the voting records of US congressmen before and after having children. In a joint paper, sociologist Rebecca Warner from Oregon State University and the economist Ebonya Washington from Yale University found that support for policies designed to address gender equity is greater among parents with daughters. The result, they say, is particularly strong for fathers.