Topic: EPD Community
Author: European Partnership for Democracy
December 2024
As the new College of Commissioners of the European Commission takes office today, EPD and its membership would wish them all the best for the challenging five years ahead.
Democracy faces an array of grave challenges, globally as well as within the EU’s own borders. 2024 has been a mega-election year and while millions of people, in the EU and abroad, freely expressed their choices at the ballot box, several worrying trends have emerged or been highlighted at the same time.
The outgoing Commission took important steps towards tackling democratic backsliding in Europe in recent years, including the European Democracy Action Plan, the European Media Freedom Act, the Regulation on the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), the annual rule of law report, an EU-level human rights sanctions regime and other initiatives. All of these efforts must be built upon and taken further in the coming mandate.
The European Commission President has laid out very ambitious plans for this legislature, including making the EU more competitive, deepening the Capital Markets Union, creating the European Defense Union, a new European Internal Security Strategy, a European Affordable Housing Plan, an EU anti-poverty strategy and staying on course with the Green Deal. For these initiatives to succeed, democracy and the EU’s founding values must be put at their very core. We have seen in recent years how the rise of authoritarian powers has complicated the EU’s policy agenda in myriad ways.
As a community of European democracy support organisations, we call on the new College of Commissioners to place democracy, at home and abroad, at the top of the policy agenda in the Union for the duration of their mandates and beyond. We will be there to support these efforts in the next 5 years.
