Silvana Koch-Mehrin amended poster - netzpolitik.org
Just a few days before the European Parliament elections in Germany (polling day there is Sunday 7th June) there’s an interesting story brewing about the liberals’ (FDP) lead candidate Silvana Koch-Mehrin – I’ve posted a little about this before. It’s one of those interesting cases where a politician getting things wrong online can provoke a vicious counter-reaction – it’s about time this happened in German politics where the political class is arguably even less web-savvy than elsewhere in Europe.
The story started some six weeks ago when the website Parlorama published attendance records of all MEPs. This showed Koch-Mehrin attending 41% of plenary sessions, one of the lowest attendance records of any MEP. Her reasoning? The birth of two children duing the election period, hence lower attendance in the EP as MEPs have no proper maternity leave arrangements. Problem for Silvana is that a couple of other MEPs have also had babies but still managed much higher attendance than she did – Angelika Niebler at 84% and Lívia Járóka at 78%.
