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#5 MEPS... Say What!? Tweets of the Week

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PoliticsMEPs... Say What!?

Who says EU politi­cians are a bunch of face­less bu­reau­crats? They're peo­ple just like us, and here's the proof. Each week Cafébabel brings you a se­lec­tion of the weird­est, whack­i­est and most touch­ing Tweets from Eu­ro­pean par­lia­men­tary can­di­dates. We'll bring you bright ideas, bril­liance and loonies, and rea­sons to vote in the May elec­tions.

Trans­la­tion: The launch of "The Eu­ro­peans'" cam­paign. We are the only ones de­mand­ing a con­crete Eu­rope which serves the cit­i­zens.

France has a new party! "The Eu­ro­peans". Sim­ple by name, sim­ple by na­ture, they offer "em­ploy­ment", "pro­tec­tion", and "democ­racy". But the rise of the eu­roscep­tics with their one­line knock­out punches proves sim­plic­ity can work. Can France's newest party of eu­rophiles start land­ing punches in time?

Trans­la­tion: Vis­it­ing Tara­jal beach in Cueta, where 15 peo­ple were killed last Feb­ru­ary. We con­tinue to de­mand ac­count­abil­ity!

Span­ish can­di­date Ernest Ur­ta­sun is pay­ing homage to the 15 mi­grants killed at this beach in Cueta when try­ing to enter Spain. ​Coast guards al­legedly opened fire to keep them out, and protests ex­ploded across Spain. Is this the way Eu­rope should treat peo­ple who want a bet­ter life? 

Trans­la­tion: And here's an in­fo­graphic with num­bers re­gard­ing the theme "smok­ing kills"

So Eu­rope is the heav­i­est smok­ing con­ti­nent, with 32% puff­ing (28% ac­cord­ing to WHO). The EU is aim­ing to cut the num­ber of smok­ers by 2.4m. Ser­bia an­nu­ally smokes 2861 cig­a­rettes per per­son, the high­est in the world. More than 43 tril­lion cig­a­rettes have been smoked gob­ally in the last ten years. Enough stats? How about a joke? Three pi­rates on a ship have four cig­a­rettes, but no lighter or matches. What do they do? They throw one cig­a­rette over board and the whole ship be­comes a cig­a­rette lighter.

This is a busi­ness strat­egy for a post pot-pro­hi­bi­tion UK. Sorry, my mis­take, it's a map of UK frack­ing. Green ac­tivists play on al­leged dan­gers like lit­tle earth­quakes etc. so Eu­rope isn't back­ing frack­ing. France has even banned it. But Eu­rope’s re­liance on Russ­ian gas seems ever more sui­ci­dal.​ The US, lead­ing the frack pack since 1949, will soon be a big­ger oil pro­ducer than Saudi Ara­bia, and this geopo­lit­i­cal in­de­pen­dence may tempt the Eu­ro­peans into un­sheav­ing their drills like Benny Ben­nassi.