Foreign Policies

Duris-Nicholsonova: I See Wider Dialogue as Main Contribution of CoFoE

Bratislava/Brussels, March 2 (TASR) – The Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) is a positive step towards bringing the European Union closer to ordinary people, and the citizens who participate in these discussions are getting more information on the European institutions, MEP Lucia Duris-Nicholsonova from the liberal faction Renew Europe (RE) has told TASR.

“I see the greatest contribution as enabling wider dialogue giving everybody possibilities to express their ideas on the functioning of the EU and the content of its individual policies,” said the Euro MP. She added that it’s also positive that: “We’ve brought the EU closer to ordinary people and that people in the Brussels institutional bubble have understood and worked on ideas from citizens, which is why all this happened.”

According to Duris-Nicholsonova, people have gained more information about the European institutions from the series of discussions organised in the framework of the CoFoE. The Euro MP noted that, for example, “many of them did not distinguish between the European Council, the Council of Europe and the Council of the EU.”

The CoFoE also includes four citizens’ panels composed of 800 representative citizens, who are submitting their recommendations to the European Parliament. These recommendations will be gathered into the final report, which the executive committee of the conference is preparing for spring 2022.

According to Duris-Nicholsonova, evaluation of the citizens’ recommendations and their implementation will be a challenge for the European institutions, because “applying the voice of the citizens in the political decisions of the European institutions will be the key task.”

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