The EU won’t fix its democratic deficit with another top-down ‘conference’ | Alberto Alemanno | Opinion | The Guardian

Europe needs a new mechanism for involving citizens, not another talking shop chaired by the Guy Verhofstadt... By raising expectations it can’t easily deliver on, it risks eroding citizens’ trust...

won’t directly prepare treaty change... a preparatory process ... could lead the European council ... to initiate them... this time the conference is supposed to be “a bottom-up exercise... the plans ... published by the European parliament ... disappoint everyone ...

council, the commission and the parliament are currently fighting to be in the conference’s driving seat... A Verhofstadt-led conference ... could well alienate anti-Europeans and EU sceptics... represent a quarter of seats ...

Will the agoras be useful sounding boards for the main event, or a cosmetic add-on... not expected to play any agenda-setting role... The EU needs to move away from ad hoc and one-off participatory processes ... often patronising fixes ...

The ultimate success... devise a mechanism capable of capturing the most relevant citizens’ proposals ... a permanent channel to feed into EU decision-making... an accessible, permanent and safe space in which citizens... can regularly engage with EU decision-making.