Year XXXVIII, Number 2, July 2025

Michele Fiorillo
Political Philosopher; Spokesperson, Citizens Take Over Europe

If the European Parliament was able in the last parliamentary term, under the impetus of the federalist vanguard, to venture into calling for a Convention to reform the Treaties - activating Article 48 of the Treaty on European Union - it was largely thanks to the leverage offered by the results of the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE).

However, the Parliament’s action, tepidly supported by the Commission, has so far been ignored by the European Council. How to attempt to overcome this impasse? By returning to giving direct prominence to the voice of European citizens and people.

Surely the most innovative element of the CoFoE had indeed been the experimentation with the European Citizens Panels (ECPs): four transnational “assemblies” of 200 citizens drawn by lot (800 in total), from different corners of Europe and from different social backgrounds, with the task of making recommendations to the EU institutions on the continent’s priorities - modeled on the citizens assemblies already tried out particularly in Ireland, Belgium, Germany and France.

Recall that among the recommendations that emerged from the ECPs was the call to “hold citizens’ assemblies through a legally binding and compulsory law or regulation” and the need to reopen the European constitutional debate, with a leading role in the process of revising the Treaties to be assigned to the citizens themselves.

After the end of CoFoE, a new season of ECPs has been launched by the European Commission, making it a new institutional tool for consulting European citizens, from whose recommendations the Commission is committed to drawing lines to be included in the legislative process on a number of issues crucial to daily life: from energy efficiency to food waste, from education to the digital world and the fight against hate in society.

In the intentions of the Von der Leyen II Commission, there emerges a willingness to continue to develop the potential of ECPs, which were given a crucial role in the mission letter sent by the Commission President to each of the chosen commissioners: “We will build on the Conference on the Future of Europe to instill a true and lasting culture of participative democracy. We will choose policy areas and proposals where recommendations from a European Citizens’ Panel would have the greatest value and follow up on their proposals”. This intent reflected what the President herself said on July 18, 2024 in her speech to Parliament on the occasion of the vote to renew her mandate: “European democracy must be more participative, more vibrant. Civil society must be better supported and defended”. The political guidelines she presented at the same time that day read: “The Conference on the Future of Europe – and the success of the European Citizens’ Panels – have been big steps towards a more deliberative democracy and engaging people beyond elections or politics. We now need to embed citizens’ participation across the EU”.

In short, the Commission seems to want to use ECPs more and more systematically in its policymaking. Crucial will be to ensure that they are visible to the general public, even dealing with more controversial issues, including the Common European Defense - with the necessary democratic control over it- and the EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) - perhaps through a full-fledged experiment of European participatory budgeting. This is necessary in order to go beyond the laudable exercise confined to the palaces in Brussels and to ensure a meaningful impact: the opposite of the expected effect must be avoided, due to disappointed expectations and a perceived “citizens-washing” that would be spilled by national-populist forces against the European institutions themselves.

Certain mechanisms will have to be imagined for this purpose to make the Commission accountable in following up on the recommendations that emerged from the ECP, making sure that they are actually incorporated into the European legislative process, toward building a permanent European Citizens’ Assembly.

And likewise: if Parliament’s call for the opening of the Convention on Treaty Reform is ever acted upon, mechanisms for the direct involvement of citizens and civil society on the model of the Future of Europe Conference itself will have to be imagined with it.

But, from the discussion of the particular issues in and around the ECPs organized by the Commission, can thrusts for the revival of the treaty reform theme perhaps re-emerge? Yes, if there is a vibrant and transnationally organized civil society, capable of bringing those discussions to life in a multiplication of deliberative assemblies from below across the continent - and if federalist forces are again able to leverage this renewed participatory fabric by pointing to the need for a European democratic Constitution, helping to build from below a deliberative constituent power that prefigures and poses the very possibility of a real Constituent Assembly (which could also be the institutional outcome of the Convention).

In any case, it is clear that without new, widespread, mass civic and popular pressure, country by country, and at the European level, the convening of the Convention for the Treaty reform will most likely not happen.

And while waiting for the Council perhaps to convene the Convention someday, it will be convenient to leverage the participatory and deliberative spaces offered to European citizens by the Commission (the ECPs) and those organized from below by civil society (such as the European Citizens’ Assembly project carried out by the Citizens Take Over Europe coalition, including through the CitiDem project or the Democratic Odyssey organized in collaboration with the European University Institute).

Finally: an important role could also be given to the ECPs in view of the enlargement of the Union, ensuring the participation in them of citizens of the accession countries.

And again: a New Pact for the Mediterranean is part of the new mandate given to Dubravka Šuica, who moved to Commissioner for the Mediterranean, leaving her role as Vice- President for Democracy and Demography -in whose capacities she had co-chaired the CoFoE Executive Committee, along with Guy Verhofstadt for the Parliament and Clément Baune for the Council.

But how should this pact be arrived at? We propose that it could be done through a Conference on the Future of the Mediterranean-modeled on the same participatory format as CoFoE-promoted jointly by the European Commission and Parliament, in collaboration with the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean (PAM).

In this context, unprecedented Mediterranean Citizens’ Panels - modeled on the European Citizens Panels, with citizens drawn by lot from all the Mediterranean countries - could be initiated, which in time could evolve into a full-fledged Mediterranean Citizens’ Assembly. This assembly would be able to constantly foster a peaceful and continuous dialogue between peoples and persons in this area so crucial for the future of Europe and the world. A way to think the bottom up about solutions to crises, beyond intergovernmental summits where those short-sighted national interests that often lead to wars tend to prevail.