In the last weeks citizens mobilisations have been seen in many squares across Europe. For over one hundred days people have been protesting outside of the parliament in Tbilisi with European flags. On 15th March the European flag also filled together with the flag of Peace the Piazza del Popolo in Rome, with over 50 thousand people and hundreds of Italian mayors calling to complete the European unification process, with the antifascist Europeanist Manifesto of Ventotene quoted in most of the speeches and in the hands of many persons. Several hundred thousand people were protesting in the streets of Belgrade on the same day, and over that weekend protests took place in Bucharest, Budapest, Athens and Brussels. These protests have different demands, different profiles and carry different flags, but they may mark a new wave of citizens mobilisation at a moment of historic transformation in Europe.
Even where the demands of these protests are localised and focussed on national politicians or policies, they cannot be dissociated from the wider context of threat to democracy across the globe from oligarchic forces, and from the dramatic changes that this is leading to in Europe as the European Union is pushed to reassess budgetary and political priorities in a changed security environment.
How can the diversity of movements, popular demands, perspectives and priorities of people across the continent be made a strength rather than a weakness? The strongest recipe for this is the reinforcement of democratic institutions on the one side and of translocal democratic practices of solidarity on the other. This requires coordination between movements at the same time as a demand for accountable and participative democratic institutions at all levels of governance in Europe, and in particular at the highest levels.
It is alarming in this context that the role of the European Parliament appears to be weaker and weaker in the discussion over Europe’s future direction, and political debate across the continent is taking place in national bubbles, but also without the national parliaments having a very important role in most cases.
By coincidence the European Commission is starting its citizens panels on the EU budget these weeks – a small opportunity for selected citizens to have a say on a major European policy choice. The risk of such an exercise becoming merely technocratic and promoting ‘citizen-washing’ of priorities that are decided by other powers is enormous in the current context – but to avoid this we must treat it is a ‘foot in the door’ for citizens that must be leveraged and turned into a precedent for wider democratic participation in deciding on the EU budget, towards a structured transnational participatory budgeting.
If democracy is going to be not only saved but upgraded in Europe over the coming years it is going to come from coordinated and strategic citizen mobilisation opening up new avenues and spaces of democratic participation and debate. If these spaces are not opened up, then the risk is politics will increasingly happen in more adversarial and less civil forms in other places and spaces, which are more easily manipulated.
In the coming period Citizens Take Over Europe will continue to connect civic initiatives and movements, promote coordination between them and democratic innovation in the public square, in the public sphere and in the public institutions. We call for connected and coordinated public manifestations on Europe Day 9th May across the continent. The time to multiply popular participation to move forward the political unification of Europe by strengthening democracy is now.