What do European citizens actually think about EU reform, not as poll respondents, but as deliberating participants, reasoning together across borders and political traditions? The Renew Europe citizens’ panel discussions were designed to answer that question. Structured around three themes central to the EU’s current reform agenda, these deliberation tables brought together everyday Europeans to engage directly with proposals that often remain confined to Brussels institutions and expert circles. As co-facilitator of Table 7, this was an exercise in listening as much as moderating, and what emerged was more nuanced and more reform-minded than most political commentary gives citizens credit for.
Key Questions:
- How should the EU strengthen its position on the world stage, through political integration, greater institutional coherence, or a rebuilt industrial and technological base?
- What does an effective and equitable EU climate policy look like, and how should the burden of green transition be shared across member states and income levels?
- Does the EU’s current institutional design, including unanimity voting, still serve democratic legitimacy, or has it become the primary obstacle to it?
- What would it take to make EU citizenship feel meaningful to people who have never felt the EU as a presence in their daily lives?
Session details:
- Format: Structured deliberation table
- Working language: English
- Participants: 14 citizens representing 10 nationalities
Executive Summary:
The session covered three thematic blocks: a stronger EU, climate change, and democracy and the rule of law, and produced a striking mix of cross-national consensus and principled disagreement that reflected both the ambition and the limits of European integration as citizens experience it.
On EU foreign policy and institutional strength, participants from widely different national backgrounds quickly converged on one conclusion: the EU needs a unified, representative voice in international affairs, not as an idealistic project but as a practical response to an increasingly hostile geopolitical environment. Several pointed to the Conference on the Future of Europe as a model worth extending, including to foreign policy. One participant’s formulation captured the table’s mood well: “The EU has to learn to be less dependent in order to be strong.” There was also a strand of thinking that pushed back against political integration as the primary lever, with one participant arguing that developing EU technological and industrial capacity, pointing to the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act as positive examples, mattered more than further political centralisation.
The climate discussion generated the strongest energy in the room, driven largely by younger participants who brought both urgency and precision to the debate. They were not primarily asking for more ambition; they were asking for more concreteness. Their frustration was with abstraction: the tendency of EU climate policy to speak in terms of targets and timelines rather than choices that people can actually make in their daily lives. Several themes recurred across the table: the need for sustainable choices to be made financially accessible rather than penalising lower-income households; the patchwork of green incentives across member states that creates a two-speed transition; the risk of greenwashing diluting the credibility of the Green Deal; and the question of whether responsibility should sit with individuals or with the structural frameworks, regulation, infrastructure, incentives, that shape the choices available to them. There was no consensus on the appropriate role of sanctions at the EU level versus incentives, with cultural and national differences shaping instincts on both sides.
The most revealing and most divisive discussion was about democracy and the rule of law. On one point, near-unanimity emerged: the current unanimity requirement in EU decision-making was seen as a structural obstacle to effective governance. One participant drew a striking historical parallel, arguing that unanimity requirements had contributed to the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and that the EU was not immune to the same dynamic. Yet one dissenting voice noted the risk of a populist backlash if smaller states felt their veto power stripped away, a reminder that institutional reform is never purely technical. On the question of federalism, participants were broadly supportive of deeper integration in principle, while recognising that the political and psychological preconditions, particularly managing the sense that citizens are losing democratic control as decisions move upward, were not yet in place. The discussion on human rights enforcement revealed sharp differences among nationalities over how far EU-level mechanisms should extend into domestic judicial systems. Perhaps the most telling moment came when participants raised the need to include Eurosceptics in deliberative processes of this kind, to avoid the echo chamber problem that undermines the democratic credibility of citizen engagement exercises.
Throughout all three sessions, the quality of conversation was high. Participants had a solid working knowledge of EU institutions and international affairs. The facilitation challenge was not a lack of engagement but rather managing dominant voices to ensure that the full range of nationalities and perspectives was drawn into the discussion. This task required active steering but ultimately produced a genuinely balanced exchange.