The Conference on the Future of Europe held its first plenary session in Strasbourg this Saturday morning, hoping to succeed in encouraging citizens, who are not yet very involved, to participate in this vast consultation on the future of Europe. European Union.
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"
This conference is a unique experience,
" praised the Belgian liberal MEP Guy Verhofstadt in the hemicycle of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, which had already hosted the launching ceremony of this conference on May 9 in the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron.
He then spoke of an "
unprecedented exercise
" to consider the next ten years.
Drawing a comparison with a relay race, Guy Verhofstadt, coordinator for the European Parliament delegation, explained that citizens would first express their wishes before passing the baton to the plenary which will formulate "
concrete proposals for reform
" then finally, hand over to the EU institutions for their implementation.
Multilingual online platform
"
What we are trying to do now is to get European citizens to talk together and bring ideas about the Europe we want to build
", explained Ana Paula Zacarias, Secretary of State for European Affairs of Portugal, a country that currently presides over the EU, facing an assembly composed mainly of 108 MEPs, 54 representatives of the Council, three members of the European Commission, 108 representatives of national parliaments and 16 representatives of social partners and civil society.
On the other hand, the 108 citizens who are also supposed to participate in this plenary are still being selected and should therefore not participate in the work until after the summer, which has not failed to raise criticism.
In addition to the plenary, the Conference on the Future of Europe takes the form of a multilingual online platform allowing European citizens to share their vision of the future of Europe.
In France, “
citizen consultations
” are also planned
in the fall.
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But while the participation of citizens in the debate remains the main unknown, the platform, commissioned in mid-April, attracted more than 17,700 participants on Saturday. The EU has around 450 million inhabitants. The proposals that will be drawn from this work are expected in spring 2022, in the full French presidency of the EU and shortly before the presidential election, while Emmanuel Macron intends to put Europe at the heart of his campaign.
The launch of the Conference on the Future of Europe was more than a year late due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but also to tough negotiations between the European institutions to reach an agreement between them on its functioning, which may have sent the wrong signal on the EU's will to draw real political guidelines from it.