Political blogs in Europe... why aren't there more ?

Deutsche Welle reports that political blogs are "making baby steps in German politics". With the German elections just 2 weeks away, more and more politicians are turning to blogs to communicate with the German public but at a slow pace. I wonder why... Is it because the adoption, and knowledge of blogs has been slower here in Europe than in the US (point me to a good survey proving this if you find it) or has it to do with "political culture" ? Belgian political blog list below.

I would assume that European politicians would look for every possible way to start conversations with their public but living in Brussels - let's face it, the capital of Europe - I haven't really seen a lot of blogs from EU politicians, let alone my own Belgian government. Loic Le Meur started a wiki page last year to collect all these European blogs but I can't seem to find the listing.

For the Belgian political landscape we have the following results:

• from the 21 Federal Ministers we have here, only 4 have a blog, none have an RSS feed from this blog. 17 of them have a traditional website.
• from the 10 Flemish Ministers in Belgium, only 5 have a blog, and yes one has an RSS feed.

You can find the listing on the blog of Luc Van Braekel (in Dutch, but the list tells it all).

I guess their PR people still do not have a clue with regards to the benefits of blogs. I wonder what the situation is in the European Parliament. Blogging could help there too.

Technorati Tags : politics, EU, Europe, blog, campaign, germany, belgium

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