THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION REPORT. Europe in a period of transition

THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION 24 ance and in particular its presidency and its composition. As far as the presidency was concerned, the choice was between appointing an individual or a plural one. Finally, it was decided that the three institutions of the Union (Parliament, Council, and Commission) should hold its Joint Presidency . As for its makeup, a primary issue, under debate for years, was the direct participation of civil society or of European citizens in the Conference. That participation has ultimately been reduced to the free input of ideas and the free creation of discussion events on a Multilingual Digital Platform 4 created by the European Commission and launched on 19 April 2021 (https://futureu.europa.eu) , henceforth the Platform. The governance of the Conference as described in the Rules involves three decision-making bodies: the Citizens’ Panels, the Plenary, and the Executive Board. The Citizens’ Panels are the sphere of greatest exercise of participatory democracy within the Confer- ence. Defined by the Rules as the instrument of citi- zens’ participation in the Conference, they can be on an intrastate or European level and are linked to the Digital Platform. The Rules describe their function as follows: each panel shall consist of a number of citi- zens in order to ensure at least one female and one male citizen per Member State and taking into account the degressive proportionality principle applied to the composition of the European Parliament. The citizens shall be chosen randomly, and be representative of EU sociological diversity, in terms of citizens’ geographic origin, gender, age, socioeconomic background and/or level of education. One third of each Citizens’ panel shall be composed of people younger than 25. In addi- tion to the necessary time for preparation, information sharing and feedback, these panels shall meet during deliberative sessions, in different locations, and shall be dedicated to specific themes based on the scope fundacionalternativas.org/public/storage/publicaciones_archivos/fd0e- 0d5ec07017d5f73a0a8cfd3de173.pdf 4  Participation in the futureu Digital Platform is entirely free, but on subscribing the user accepts the Conference Charter, the text of which can be read here: https://futureu.europa.eu/pages/charter?locale=es described in Article 2 and citizens’ contributions on the digital platform. In view of the possibility, as it stands at present, that the Citizens’ Panels meet just three times during the Conference, one might be somewhat sceptical about the quantity and quality of their deliberations and conclusions. The Conference Plenary is made up of 108 rep- resentatives of the European Parliament, 54 from the Council of Europe, and 3 from the European Commission, as well as 108 representatives from all the national par- liaments, on an equal footing, and of citizens. The Rules of the Conference state the following on the subject of citizens’ participation in the Conference Plenary: 80 rep- resentatives from European Citizens’ Panels, of which at least one third shall be younger than 25, the President of the European Youth Forum and 27 representatives of national events and/or national Citizens’ Panels will participate. This represents a total of 108 participants. 18 representatives from the Committee of the Regions and 18 from the Economic and Social Committee, 8 from the social partners, and 8 from civil society will also par- ticipate. To sum up, the members of the Conference Plenary come to 433. Of them, 317 belong to the public powers (from the four levels of European governance: Union, States, Regions, and Municipalities) and 116 belong to civil society. We can say then that the Conference Ple- nary is 73 % representative democracy and 27 % participatory . This distribution of the Conference’s de- cision-making power illustrates the persistent conception on the part of the public powers of the Union of partic- ipatory democracy as a mere complement to represent- ative democracy. Even so, the direct participation of civil society in the decision-making process of this Confer- ence, at the request the Union’s three main institutions, in collaboration with all the national parliaments and which may lead to action from the Union’s legislative arm in the medium term, is a historic first experience of this type . The Executive Board is made up of an equal rep- resentation from the European Parliament, the Council,