The European Parliament commits to more responsibility in the follow-up to successful initiatives

The long road towards a European Citizens’ Initiative that works for all

On 5 July 2018, the European Parliament voted in Strasbourg in favour of the decision to start the negotiations with the Council on the revision of the regulation of the European Citizens’ Initiative. The Parliament’s decision was accompanied by an important announcement: György Schöpflin, Member of the European Parliament responsible on behalf of the Parliament, announced that he would initiate a change to the Parliament’s own rules so as to ensure that successful citizens’ initiatives will always be debated by the Parliament in plenary, in addition to the public hearing with organisers that is already provided for in the current regulation. This commitment is an in important breakthrough in the proposed new regulation, as the revision up to this point has failed to tackle the critical problem of perceived lack of political impact of successful initiatives.  

The European Citizens’ Initiative is an instrument with great potential, not only for individual citizens or for civil society organisations – as it allows them to directly participate in setting the European political agenda – but also for the European Union as a whole. The European Citizens’ Initiative has the potential to harness citizens’ intrinsic drive to improve the European Union and society as a whole. This is of crucial importance at a time when great numbers of people are questioning the role of the European Union which they perceive as an elite political project where their voice and concerns are not heard. While the potential is there, the road towards realising this potential is a rocky one, to put it mildly. The first six years of experience with initiatives have shown that the European Citizens’ Initiative, if not properly regulated and implemented, is more likely to lead to further disillusionment and scepticism among citizens than to their empowerment. This is among the reasons why the legislation on the instrument is currently being revised by the EU institutions.

While all institutions and stakeholders agree that the European Citizens’ Initiative needs to be made more accessible, friendly to users and better known to citizens, the most critical question of the revision is how to make sure that successful citizens’ initiatives – those which managed to collect a million signatures – are being treated fairly. Over the last six years, we have had four – soon to be five – successful initiatives, and once they were recognised as such, all eyes turned immediately to the European Commission. How would the Commission respond? This is understandable insofar as only the Commission holds the right to start legislative processes and is thus formally burdened with the responsibility to respond to successful initiatives.

However, this also resulted in a structural mismatch of expectations between organisers and supporters of successful citizens’ initiatives on the one hand, and European policy-makers on the other. It is in this context that we have started the #EPForgetUsNot civil society campaign, joined by more than 80 civil society organisations and all successful citizens’ initiatives, to address the important responsibility the European Parliament has in the follow-up to successful initiatives. We are convinced that only the European Parliament – as the sole EU institution directly elected by and answerable to citizens – can credibly and effectively mediate between the relatively simple demands coming from a successful initiative and the complex reality of European policy-making.

The Parliament’s commitment to holding plenary debates on successful initiatives is an important first step towards increased ownership of the European Citizens’ Initiative. More steps will need to follow and every institution will need to take its own share of responsibility for the European Citizens’ Initiative. This is the only way the participatory instrument can become a success, not only in the eyes of policy-makers, but in the eyes of citizens across the Union.