14 October 2016

#MEPTalks: MEPs paving the way for the Paris agreement immediate ratification

First of all, apologies if this #MEPTalks comes a little later than usual but as the saying goes, better late than never. Let’s check out what MEPs tweet about during last week’s plenary in Strasbourg! Well, if we look at the most used hashtags, the Oscar goes to #Czarnyprotest which sparked a heated debate in the Parliament on Wednesday (05/10).

It was used 488 times by MEPs to express their objection to the attempt to make Poland’s stringent sexual and reproductive health laws even more restrictive.

The most popular tweet about #Czarnyprotest was posted by the leader of the ALDE Group, Guy Verhofstadt, which was retweeted and liked more than 2,300 times.

 

That being said – for the record – I should specify that almost half of the tweets including #Czarnyprotest were posted by one single MEP, Michał Boni, from the European People’s Party, and that none of them created any relevant buzz.

If we look at the second and third most used hashtags – #Parisagreement (315 tweets) and #COP21 (180 tweets) – we can clearly see that the official endorsement by the European Parliament of the United Nations global climate agreement last Tuesday (04/10) was the most debated topic online.

The most popular tweet was posted once again by Mr Verhofstadt with more than 200 likes and retweets:

 

But it was Mr. Farage who won the prize to the most popular tweet last week, with an incredible 2,500+ RTs and 3,500+ likes. He published the extract of his interview with CNN London where he endorsed the American tycoon and presidential candidate Donald Trump.

 

The second most popular tweet, already mentioned above, goes to Guy Verhofstadt for his defence of Polish women, while the third most popular one with 600+ RTs and 650+ likes goes to Marine Le Pen’s Plenary speech.

 

This time we also looked at the performance of political groups. Some takeaways:

  • Discussions changed depending on the EP Group. The EPP Conservative MEPs focused more on the Czarny protest (311 tweets) while S&D and ALDE MEPs were more active tweeting about the Paris agreement (200 tweets). As for the Greens, their dedicated lots of tweets to their internal primary run, as last Thursday (06/10) a public debate took place on French television.
  • EPP MEPs were the most active ones with 3,293 tweets. S&D came second with 3,084 tweets and then the Greens with 1,679.
  • Surprisingly, the GUE/NGL with ‘only’ 1,610 tweets reached the highest number of users on Twitter: 10.731.000 people; a few hundred thousands more than EPP’s MEPs 10.293.000 people. The S&D’s 3084 tweets reached 4 million people.
  • The second most active MEP did not belong to any of the three most active political groups. Julia Reid from the EFDD Group posted almost 300 tweets – about half the amount of the rest of the group put together (650 tweets).

See you at the next EP plenary 😉

@Giammabxl