You&EU project awarded Europaeum Scholar’s Prize
On Thursday 21 November 2019, the project You&EU, in which Frederik Behre participated, won the Europaeum Scholar’s Prize for their social media campaign during the 2019 EU parliamentary elections.
The award was sponsored by The Financial Times and was presented by Ben Hall, the FT's European affairs editor at a special Europaeum conference which featured presentations by the scholars. You&EU is a product of the Europaeum Scholar’s Programme, that brought together 30 PhD candidates to formulate projects and policy recommendations to make Europe a better place. Three other projects competed with You & EU and featured 1) ideas of trying to curb energy poverty, 2) strengthening the ‘European Citizen’s Initiative' and 3) improving the EU's online public consultation tool.
You&EU consists of six PhD candidates from various Europaeum partner universities, including Frederik Behre from the Europa Institute here at Leiden University. The project's mission was to motivate young EU citizens to participate in the 2019 EU parliamentary elections. The project can still be accessed through youandeu.eu and it can be found on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. In their campaign, You&EU worked on the theme of elucidating the EU’s functioning to voters, describing the rights citizens gained from key EU legislation and simply outlining the impact the EU has on our everyday life. Overall, the 2019 EU parliamentary elections saw a significant increase in voter turnout, particularly amongst young voters. This positive trend was certainly also a result of the various social media campaigns and initiatives that featured during the recent EU elections.
Frederik Behre and the entire You&EU team are very grateful to the Europaeum for this unique programme and to The Financial Times for rewarding the project with the prize. This will enable You&EU to continue its initiative and organise a roundtable for campaigners that ran similar initiatives during the 2019 EU parliamentary elections.