Democracy

Are political parties still capable of integrating the long term into their strategic reflections?

Before investing excessive hope in radical participatory solutions we need to re-examine established beliefs about democracy and sustainability and their mutual relationship.

Modern representative democracy is not conducive to handling environmental challenges. Ecology requires new political institutions capable of tackling long-term concerns.

The economic crisis and the democracy crisis share some of the same causes: redefining the ideal of democracy, the impotence of current regulatory methods in the face of collective decision-making, and a crisis within political programmes.

Old Europe is disaggregating. The new Europe, which has long been a reality in the mind of many European citizens, is waiting for its constitution, one that will effectively take us into the future.

What do the Greens think about the current fatigue with representative democracy?

The specificity of ‘democratic radicality’ is by no means a bulwark for the Greens against developments or rationales that run counter to this ‘democratic requirement.’

In recent years, the volume of articles and books dedicated to the democratic crisis has been constantly expanding. The same is true of the literature addressing the ecological crisis. Yet a simultaneous reflection both on the ecological and on the democratic crisis has not accompanied this proliferation.

In the European elections, European citizens were for the first time given the opportunity to vote for a common European candidate to take the Presidency of the Commission. Yet now it seems uncertain whether this promise will materialise. The outcome will either reinforce or lessen the deficit of legitimacy in the EU.

The time has come to review the democratic workings of the European Union. Ideally, this should be the subject of a new Convention, but it is also possible to strengthen, here and now, European democracy.