The 7th Elections to the European Parliament (held every five years) are coming up again and will take place between the 4th and the 7th of June 2009.

I don't want to discuss the elections here in detail (check out Wikipedia for information about the 2009 elections and the European Parliament in general), but as the latest polls suggest a low EU voter turnout I wanted to point out three online resources that might help you making your mind up about whom to vote.

• There are several so-called "Voting Advice Applications" (VAA) (aka VoteMatch aka Wahl-O-Mat) available online, that try to inform you about policy differences between the political parties in your country - information that might help you to choose which party to vote.
  
  If your are interested where the present parties in the European Parliament stand on the issues try the Pan European Vote Match.
  
• For an even more ambitious and comprehensive project have a look at the EU Profiler
  
  

I tried both online voting tools, EU Profiler and VoteMatch Europe (and additionally the national VoteMatch for Germany, Wahl-O-Mat).

The EU Profiler is very comprehensive and ambitious (data from almost 300 parties and more than 20 languages) but luckily it has a sleek user interface that makes navigation and comparison easy.
However, I keep wondering if it is maybe already too complex - I found an obvious mistake just by superficially browsing the statements given by the German social democrats.

The VoteMatch Europe website left the worst impression on me (the national one for Germany is far better). It is poorly designed: explanations regarding the parties' positions that are supposed to appear ("By clicking on the viewpoint below, an explanation will pop up in a new window.") do not appear (tested in Opera, IE8 and Firefox 3), and all parties are only presented as acronyms: ALDE EPP ID anyone? Not very helpful.

Although I like the idea of having the possibility to compare the positions of the different parties, the tools can only serve as a very rough guide and many statements are far too general to be useful ("The European Parliament should be given more powers" - well, that depends on the kind of powers; or "The EU should allow member states to export their waste" - All kinds of waste? And export where to? Other EU countries or Africa?).

Less fun but probably more useful might be a look at the parties' manifestos: EurActiv provides a brief overview of the four main European parties' electoral manifestos and compares them with previous efforts.

And if you can not wait: here is a prediction of the outcome of the elections.

Comparision of online voting tools EUprofiler and Vote Match for the upcoming EU Parliament Elections June 2009 ( European, Europe, VoteMatch, EU Profiler ) - Voting Advice Applications (VAA)