Debate: Parliamentarism, European citizenship and democracy
Date: THURSDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER 2023
Speaker: Niklas Nienass
Country: Bulgaria
Language: EN

My grandma was born in a village. She received her education there. She bore her children there. Her whole life was in this village. She almost never left it. She died there in the end. And that’s a few decades ago.  My mom was the first one of the family to fly to Paris on a plane that you could still smoke on. And when she announced that she would go and live in another city almost 100 km away – 88, to be quite frank – the whole town said she’s crazy. I mean this is insane, so far away. And now I have been to four countries in the past week, in a night train – non-smoking, by the way – but this is completely normal now. Nowadays, young people tend to live much faster lives in different ages, different whereabouts in Europe.  The Internet allows us to connect and exchange ideas but also a lot of fake news. And nobody is bound anymore to one location to live in for the rest of the life, especially young people. They grow up in one town, get their education in another, vocational training in the next, Erasmus in between, and then find their love of their life and move, I don’t know, to another country to live there.  Democracy did not adapt to these changes. We still have a democratic system in which if you’re interested in your local politics, you’re required to be there for five years, commit yourself to the service and do that. But that’s really hard to do, especially for young people if they don’t even know what party they are attending tonight. Right? So they don’t know where they will be in the next five years. So we need to find ways to adapt to it.  Also, our European parliaments – I’m not talking about this one, I’m talking about all the national ones – they have sometimes less European exchange than a Call of Duty lobby. And European law has been made commonly, but still people are not talking to each other when they’re legislators.  At the same time, we are having Erasmus European solidarity, all these ways, creative Europe, to bring Europeans together, to create European exchanges, understandings and so on. And at the same time, when citizens move to a different country, their new home treats them as foreigners and makes it really hard to be somewhere: they’re not allowed to vote, they don’t get the easy access to social rights, and it’s really, really hard.  We try to address all of this in this report. First of all, for the democratic question, we had the idea to increase democracy, to extend it, not to exchange representative democracy, because it’s shown its value in the past, but to improve it by bringing it into fast-paced times, by giving citizens the possibility to give their ideas to have this exchange. And we know that it works because we use this very similar motive during the Conference on the Future of Europe.  Money cannot be a reason for less democracy, I have to say. So this is not a good reason. I also have to say, especially to the Commission, the proposal to include citizens in certain ways, in very precise and detailed questions, I think is the wrong extent because it’s endangering democracy. In the end, it will feed into the fact that they can’t really do anything about it. They have to really get into the details of it and, in the end, maybe their results are not being treated respectfully. So we need to change that.  Second point, we have talked about the parliaments and how we can bring them into exchange, how we can make sure that this globalisation, the Europeanisation of our legislation, is getting together.  And third, we have clearly defined what the European citizenship means and that means also an easier life through a common European administration and also more voting rights for citizens throughout Europe.  This is a path forward – an idea to bring our democracy to the 21st century. And I thank very much our shadows that we worked so closely together with.