Writing to Your Politicians

In July, a segment of the European Parliament used a procedural loophole to quickly push through a piece of legislation before the summer break: “Chat Control 1.0,” as it’s dubbed, basically enables the scanning of the private messages of EU’s nearly 500 million citizens.

The idea behind it is noble: “Let’s fight the sexual abuse of children online.” The execution thus far is amateurish at best and nefarious at worst. Instead of targeting predators with precise rules, a blanket permission to scan everyone’s texts—even without suspicion—has been set up as an intermediate solution. Some would like it to be permanent, despite the poor results: So far, a meager 0.00000077% of the messages being scanned actually refer to illegal matters.

Perhaps that’s why various motions for Chat Control 1.0 have been swatted down by European lawmakers in the past. But this time, for whatever reason, an absolute majority was required to deny it. So despite more members of the European parliament voting against the measure than for, it still passed for approval. What a world we live in.

A day before the vote, the activist group “Fight Chat Control” encouraged people to message their MPs. I’ve signed various petitions over the years, but this time, the cause was so well-prepared, I tried taking my effort one step further. All it took was copying a prepared message and the relevant politicians’ emails, signing my name, and hitting send. The law passed regardless, and I and many others will likely have to repeat that process several times to make any meaningful dent in its alteration.

Since both the politicians and I were on a roll, I also became active in another matter: a change of the taxation of cryptocurrencies in Germany. For once, AI came in handy while writing. It drafted a quick email for me to review and amend, which I then sent to a publicly available list of members of the German parliament. I didn’t find all active members, but I still caught a good number of them, and the responses were revealing, as was their lack.

With over 600 members, our parliament is one of the largest, and each member is naturally flooded with requests. Political strength of the common folk, therefore, lies in numbers more so than the contents of each individual message. The more mail politicians receive on certain topics, the more attention they’ll pay to them. Yet, there is nuance.

In my case, the only real responses I received came from the AfD, a right-wing, nationalist party currently on the rise. Possibly because they happened to take the same stance on the matter. But each email was different, and some clearly typed by the politicians themselves. Germany’s ruling parties, meanwhile, the conservative CDU and social-democratic SPD, seemed to have less need to engage with their citizens. Zero CDU politicians replied, and from the SPD I only received a handful of automated responses. Their consensus? “I only deal with matters sent to me by the people in my constituency”—which, if you’re elected from a 10,000-people town to a government representing some 80 million, seems a strange attitude to take. The Green party, meanwhile, had their own ideas. Wherever they responded, they did so with the same manifesto extolling fairness as the reason for yet higher taxes in yet another area.

I don’t have a real conclusion. I doubt my voting behavior will change due to one interaction. But there’s a lot to learn from the reactions you get when you actually start poking the people steering the politics of your city, state, or country. If only that, probably, you should voice your opinion more often. A single idea may fall on deaf ears, but a strong take repeated a million times can ring far more than a bell.

Try writing to your politicians. If they’re already busy doing what you didn’t elect them to do, then what have you got to lose?