When the referendum for Lithuania’s joining of EU started, the attendance was abysmal.
It picked up when a supermarket chain offered to exchange the “I voted” sticker for a bottle of beer, a chocolate bar or a small bag of laundry powder.
If there’s one thing I learned from observing Brexit first hand as an EU immigrant in Britain, is that the vast majority of people don’t really care about the EU unless they are or see a way to directly benefit from it (as I benefited from Freedom Of Movement) and even when they do care they don’t understand how most of the mechanisms which are the point of the EU affect their lives (hence Brexiters only saw immigration and not how an island with no natural resources and a Service-centric Economy can’t just default to WTO rules for exporting Services because WTO Treaties don’t cover those, whilst even Remainers couldn’t see the whole “together we’re stronger” side and kept claiming that Britain could “better change the EU from the inside”, which is not a teamplayer position).
So EU membership ends up being sold to the public on pretty generic promises of improvement of their own lives and on single sides the EU’s many-sided nature, a message which is far easier to distort and even use in reverse by anti-EU actors.
That brings some memories.
When the referendum for Lithuania’s joining of EU started, the attendance was abysmal.
It picked up when a supermarket chain offered to exchange the “I voted” sticker for a bottle of beer, a chocolate bar or a small bag of laundry powder.
If there’s one thing I learned from observing Brexit first hand as an EU immigrant in Britain, is that the vast majority of people don’t really care about the EU unless they are or see a way to directly benefit from it (as I benefited from Freedom Of Movement) and even when they do care they don’t understand how most of the mechanisms which are the point of the EU affect their lives (hence Brexiters only saw immigration and not how an island with no natural resources and a Service-centric Economy can’t just default to WTO rules for exporting Services because WTO Treaties don’t cover those, whilst even Remainers couldn’t see the whole “together we’re stronger” side and kept claiming that Britain could “better change the EU from the inside”, which is not a teamplayer position).
So EU membership ends up being sold to the public on pretty generic promises of improvement of their own lives and on single sides the EU’s many-sided nature, a message which is far easier to distort and even use in reverse by anti-EU actors.