Jonathan Moskovic about the future of deliberative citizen participation
Jonathan Moskovic is expert in democratic innovation and citizen participation. He has over ten years of experience at local, regional, European, and international levels with various actors, including civil society, traditional political institutions, and international organizations.
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Transcript
Welcome on another episode of Democracy Innovator podcast, and our guest of today is Jonathan Moskovic.
Moskovic is fine. You can say whatever.
Thank you for your time. And, and, yeah, as a first question, I'd like to ask you, what are you working on? And you were telling me your experience in the the field. So if you'd like to
Perfect. Maybe I can start them from scratch, like, how I entered this amazing field. I was myself already It's difficult to say because it's so long ago. Like, fifteen years ago or fourteen years ago, as a master student, I was doing an internship at the Belgian Embassy in Ireland because Ireland had a rotating presidency of the EU. And, the ambassador asked me to cover the Irish constitutional convention. And to be very honest, I was studying political science, but, like, you know, a bit of, orthodox curriculum. And so for me, it was completely to be very honest, bullshit. I was there, and I wanted to see how bullshit it was to bring together randomly selected citizens. And, I did not basically, I did not trust the citizens based on, what I had learned so far. And so probably I came, but then that was completely random probably for during one of the most fascinating moments of deliberative democracy history because I attended as only international observer at Irish constitutional convention, same sex, marriage weekend. And so I saw in this room 66 citizens, 33, members of parliament. And for one weekend, basically, they decided if they would go for referendum on same sex marriage. And there like, the the story that astonished me the most was there was this guy the entire weekend. He he was, very homophobic every single time he was taking the floor. And so just before the vote, there was a last moment of where people could comment before they would vote. And I was sure and people in the room were the same. They were sure that they almost had to leave because he would even say something more radical. And then he took the floor and he said that amazing thing and it's still resonating. So far, I've been always against same sex marriage because as a child, I've been abused by men. And for me, child abuse and homosexuality was the same. But now I noticed after having discussed with all those people, heard so many testimonies, that it has nothing to do with each other, and I'll vote in favor of it. And because he was, like, the spokesperson of those anti same sex, marriage, opponents, basically, it shifted the entire room, and there was a large majority if I remember well. Like, 70% of the people, voted in favor of that. And I was like myself as a young student political science. I was also looking like, what's you know, when you are studying political science, usually, if you are a bit progressive, you want to change the world. That's the reason why you study political science. And I was like, this might be a tool to change not the world, but at least the way we deal with politics. So after that, I've been very involved in the g one thousand in Belgium, which was this initiative when we had no government for five hundred forty one days. And I've been working with the Green Party. And from there on, I arrived at the Brussels parliament, something like seven years ago. And with the president of the parliament, we launched the first ever institutionalized mixed committees. So the deliberative committees in Brussels, which basically bring together, 45 randomly selected citizens and, 15 members of parliament. And, since 2024 not 2025, in fact. So recently, I launched my own, enterprise in order to, help people to design their own, citizen assembly. And I'm working currently with, private organizations with the European Parliament, with the political party in Belgium, and with other organizations. So and at the same time, I'm researching those issues for the University in Florence. So very long sorry. Very long introduction. Sorry for that.
No. No. No. It's, so so, your example showed that, citizen assemblies, they work, and, also, they work also in relation to anti polarization. And I was curious. So, like, these, the the city's in assembly, how what will be, like, the a good way to organize them?
Like So and it's a very good question because, basically, very often, people think that they have to reinvent everything when they launch the assembly. We have, an amazing OECD reports catching the deliberative wave that is analyzing, like because they are still entering the data. I would say something like 800 citizen assemblies organized the last since the late eighties or the last thirty five years. And then based on that, they came with, good principles. And so there there are many different things about, like, transparency, information, random selection, defrayal. So they're basic principles, and you really should stick to them because if you miss one of them, you might have, like, a process that is not well designed and so with some negative impact. And I think one of the most important things, and we are really noticing it, and it's one of the reasons why for me it's very important to plug those assemblies in the decision making system, not outside of it, but inside it. It's because what is the most important I'm not doing and there might be other people in the in the field. I'm not doing, like, entertaining sit in assemblies. My thing is not to create trust by, launching a political party with, citizens. What is important is to have impact. So you have to be oriented towards impact. And to have impact, politician should not see this tool as, like, an enemy. They should be part of it. And so I think from the different designs I've been doing, this is probably two things, the follow-up, so involve politicians and also inclusion. Very often, are there's no inclusion strategy or it's like tokenistic. Oh, we need the three youngsters. We need people, living in poverty. Okay? We bring them on the table, but we don't really think about how to involve them properly, how for them to have the same weight as the other people. So that's also a part of, of the design, every single time.
These things about, plugging the citizen assembly, to the decisional system, it's, quite an important topic because a politician can just, use citizen assembly as a sort of feedback about what people are thinking or, like, it can be like actually, the citizen assembly could also lead to a decision. So how to to make it sure that, then what has been said in the citizen assembly is actually
considered? It's a very good question. And, basically, I've been very frustrated myself, and it's probably the reason why I went also for hybrid assemblies with political decision makers and citizens. Because as I told you, for years, I've been coordinating the g one thousand in Belgium, so I've been involved in many different city assemblies. And every single time, it was the same. The design was quite okay, not perfect, but quite okay. And we had a very nice list of recommendations, but with no single follow-up. And then when they are in the literature, there are interesting, studies about that. Basically, you create even more distrust. If you involve people, you tell them that they'll change policy making, and at the end, they don't at all. So it's very important to think from the inception, from the design phase, how to plug this in the system. So for example, what we did in the Brussels deliberative committee case, and I think it's one of the most interesting ones with the Irish, constitutional convention, is that instead of having and here, in fact, I'm advocating against my own, economic interest. But instead of having experts coming in and designing this assembly, what was very strong here is that we've been working during one year with majority and opposition members of parliament, and we've been designing together. So how it was working, practically, we were inviting every two weeks international experts or national experts. For example, we wanted to have a an introduction on random selection. How would that work? We wanted to discuss information. What the what basic information should the citizens have in order to start to discuss a topic or about follow-up? And then so one week, we had international or national expert, and the week after, we had all the members of parliament. So majority in opposition, not all the members, but one representative for every single party coming in and discussing which, because at the end, the choices are political. So which, way should we go for option a, b, c? Should we go for defrayal? Should we go for a specific scheme? Should we go for a for a fair? Things like that. And so we've been discussing all of that. So there was a lot of buy in since the process was not an outside process, but it was really a process from within the parliament. And I think that was important. Also, we launched many different conferences in the parliament for members of parliament. Maybe it's a bit harsh what I'll say now, but most members of parliament and not only members of parliament, but at the end, they are a bit representative of the overall population. They they're illiterate when it comes to deliberative democracy. They have no clue what it is all about. Basically, if you ask a member of parliament before, what it was, they would say, you take someone in the street, you put them in you put him or her in a room, and you asked him or her, what do you think about nuclear waste? Okay. Give me a recommendation about that, and that's it. So it's very important for them to understand to understand also that it's not, an idea of crazy lunatics or crazy hippies, but that it's something like that it's there are a lot of scientific articles that it has been, studied and that the positive aspect have been studied as well. And that's basically, it has very it has many positive impacts. I won't say it's a silver bullet because we we are witnessing democratic backsliding, and I don't think deliberative democracy is that tool that will solve everything, but at least it's a way forward to address all those issues.
I think it may be a sort of, I don't know, school of digital politics, or, like, a sort of workshop for a politician could be helpful so that they understand what are the potentiality of, all the tools that we have now. And, also, I'm thinking, like, do you think that it will be possible to have some sort of auto organized, citizen assembly? Like, because at the moment, there are professionals that organize them, but there are not so many. And so I'm thinking if, like, I don't know, people from several communities, maybe they can attend the workshop and then try to replicate that, in their community. And this, of course, will not be, a way to plug the citizen assembly to the decisional system. But, yeah, I don't know. What do you think?
It's a very interesting question. And in fact, it we already did it with the g one thousands. So the g one thousand had this idea to organize on a yearly basis, like, summer schools. And from summer schools, it went to autumn and spring schools. But the idea was to have once a year invite civil servants because they have a key role in our democracy, and we are very often forgetting about them. So because when politicians, they go and, and come, the civil servants are always there, so it's very important to work with them. So for civil servants, for politicians, for innovators. So I think that we're already five or six, summer let's call them summer school. So summer schools organized by the g one thousand, and there's now this European organization, FIDE, that is doing the same as well. So it's really important also to how to to spread the word and for it not to be something very niche, but to be something that is more and more well known. And so, for sure, I think it's very important and also that there are many, multipliers effects. So if you have, for example, large media coverage, you know, that people will have more interest in it. For example, you, launching your own post podcast, it's also helping and improving the the fact that people know about it. So I have the impression in, in Belgium, especially because, for probably because our governance system is so complex and we have so many government issues. For example, in Brussels now, within today the the the December 2. So within one month, we'll have now, again, a world record. We'll break our own world records of no functioning government in Brussels. We'll have five hundred forty two days, and the former record record was a Belgian one. So we know in Belgium, especially what it is for the political system not to function at all. So it's also the reason why for years already for more than a decade, we're organizing many citizen assemblies and Belgium is probably the country in the world with the most permanent and institutionalized city assemblies. So that makes also that, for example, in Brussels, we send out for every single deliberative committee 10,000 letters to inhabitants in Brussels. So it's helping to create a real culture of participation in that sense.
And, thinking about, I don't know how to extend this, participation, let's say, to to all the citizens of a country or of Europe? What do you think could be, like, the the right steps? And,
It's also, a question that is, in fact, very relevant because there's now a big horizon project, and the name is scaled them, and it's exactly that. It's to look into the different scaling possibilities. And what we when we think about scaling, we think first, for example, at how can we make more citizens to participate to those? But it's not the only scaling possibility. You can, for example, scale it by having more and more institutions doing it. You can scale it by working on the political output so there are different ways to scale them. And what is interesting, and that might be also because I know that's also, made of interest for you. AI can help that, but, I would say AI for me is important and taking not only AI, but technology more more generally, like, in supporting those initiatives. So they should never be the core because, I really believe, especially when we see our polarized world, that the fact of bringing together physically citizens in the same room and having them interact is key because, otherwise, it does not work. But apart from that, you can use AI for different aspects. For example, I'm working now on the city assembly when there are when there are different, what we call in our jargon, maxi public moment. So it's not only, for example, the 75 randomly selected citizens that have their say, but at different moments, it could be before, during, and after you have an interaction with the general public in order to know what the general public is thinking about that. I would like to highlight that by an anecdote. One of the most at least in the French speaking world, one of the most, well known city assembly was the Macron initiated climate assembly. There were different flaws, especially in terms of follow-up, but one of the major lessons learned from that was at the end of the assembly, they asked the 150, randomly selected citizens, what would you like to do with those recommendations? Would you have an interest in organizing a referendum on one of the different recommendations? And they said, no. Don't do that because if you organize a referendum, people, they won't know, why we decided this or this, and so they probably vote against it. So peep they were afraid basically of the rest of the public. From, political science perspective, you can understand it also in the theory because a referendum is binary, is very binary, and there is a lack of information. But from a more conceptual point of view, I think it's very important for the members of the state assembly not to be afraid of the general public. And so you should think about how to create more bridges between the mini and the public, so and the maxi. So, bridges between the randomly selected citizens and the rest of the population.
I I'm thinking about this bridge and about, yeah, how to plug, the citizen assembly to the decisional system. And, like, also interviewing other guests, sometimes it emerged like, inside political world, but I will say everywhere, there are, like, let's call them game of power. So sometime it can be not convenient for a politician to follow what are the the outcome of of a citizen assembly. And, how do you think because because there is this, in some way problem. And so, yeah, how to make it work with the system that we have now that,
What what your question is fascinating in fact because I think it's the core of everything what we are doing, like, how to deal with power dynamics. And there are very, there are people that are very naive about it, I would say, or maybe it's a bit harsh to say naive, but we don't share the same views. Some people say when you put citizens in a room and you let them deliberate, you will eliminate all the power dynamics. And many people were complaining before for example, when we launched this deliberative committees for ex people from the deliberative democracy sector, they would say, yes. But involving politicians, you are, you are opening your design to flaws and to power dynamics. And maybe I've been listening a lot to those because I I was part of the board of another, city assembly in the framework of the Belgian European presidency on AI. It might be interest subject of interest, for you. And then I was there in the room and there were so many power dynamics, but hidden power dynamics, you know. Our society in our society, you have, like, highly educated men take way more the floor than non highly educated women. The question of age, the question of, discrimination linked to, migration backgrounds. And so I think, to say there will be power dynamics because there are politicians in the design, I would say it's a bit neglecting all the power dynamics in our society. And the fact there are members, for example, of parliament in the deliberative committees, it's a way for people to be way more cautious. They know or they have the impressions the the the impression the decision makers, they will do everything to, instrumentalize the process. So they are very careful. And every single time a politician tends to take more place or more power, citizens are stop here. We are the citizens. It's important to listen to us. Well, because in our society, it's way more hidden that we are living in a patriarchy and that men have way more power than women. It's something that is less acknowledged by the participants, and so it's way more easy to to not to acknowledge that. So I would say power dynamics are there, and it's important to acknowledge them. And then if we want, political follow-up, it's important to say the city assembly, and that's something I'm saying for years already. The end of a city assembly is not the day you vote on the report or on the recommendations. In fact, the political part is only starting then, so you have to design also follow-up mechanism. So for example, politicians and ministers, they have, between seven or nine months afterwards to come back to the citizens and explain them recommendation after recommendations what happened with, their work. And I'm not saying here because that's another, let's say, way of thinking about it. I'm not saying here that politicians, they have to follow-up one of the percent of the recommendations. That's not the idea. But at least if they don't follow-up one recommendations, they should motivate and explain why they did not do it. And it's a question also of transparency, of accountability to people, like, that their processes, and I've been witnessing, for example, the end of life convention in France. There were twenty seven days, civil assembly lasted for twenty seven days. So at least what you could do when people are investing twenty seven of their free days, to cocreate the political horizon, the least you could do is at least to explain what happens with the different recommendations. It's a minimum.
Sure. And, I was thinking, how do you imagine, like, the next such a political system? Like, let's say that, citizen assembly now, they become, something usual among citizens. And maybe that also it's possible to plug them to the decisional system. So do you think that, the political system could change radically in some way, or, I don't know, maybe in ten years, twenty years, fifty years?
I think it's it's a very good question, and it's difficult because if we would have done this interview twenty years ago, I'm not sure we would have thought about people like, Bolsonaro or Trump or Duterte. And, like, it's very difficult to do political projections. What I can say, in terms of citizen assemblies, it's very important to make them permanent. And for example and I'm working on that with a a group of people in Belgium. Imagine we have two chamber system on the national level. We have, house of representative and we have a senate, and we are working more and more towards, the fact of transforming our senate into a permanent randomly selected citizen assembly. And why is it important? Because we know, as a matter of fact, that, we live in a kind of oligarchy and that power comes a lot from money. And so we know that, there are some interests that are private interest and not general interest. And so and also because, the electoral system is a bit rigged in the way we only think about our political parties, about the next elections. So you ask your question about twenty five or thirty years. If I would be the president of a party, I would say the longest horizon I would see myself is the next elections. But we know also that today that the big questions when it comes to climate change are, poverty, are all those issues, or migration, although all those issues are not five year term questions, but they are fundamental questions of the future. And so here, it might be very important to have next to and I'm not, the one that is saying, let's change our system. Let's make from elections only randomly selected citizens, assemblies. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying here, it's next to, chambers made out, representative that were elected. Let's launch also, permanent citizens' assemblies to have, like, a way also to have citizens think about more long term, political issues and to be able to offer answers to the most pressing issues we have today that are not three, four, or five years term issues, but they are more fundamental.
I I am thinking about these permanent citizen assemblies and, how maybe they can also would be nice to connect them. I don't know if there is one in Bruxell and one in Bologna, and maybe the topic is the same. They can be connected and there can be, like, a sort of comparison between different ideas. And, also, maybe you mentioned something before, you know, in the previous question. Like, do you think that, there were some, people that I also interviewed that, maybe they try, like to make this AI mayor or, like, other people that candidate, themselves and then try it with some, tool to extend the representative system. And, I'm wondering if, like, there could be, like, I don't know, let's say, an, new political party that really focus on citizen assemblies tries to, as you said, to have, politicians that are elected, but at the same time that they follow what has been decided or discussed in the citizen assembly. So not just, let's say, educating to these digital tools, people that are already elected, but also, like, something new.
In fact, I will give you, an answer you might not expect, but it existed. In fact, in Brussels, during the last mandate, there was this party, the Agora party, and there it was a single issue party. And the idea, they were elected because they wanted to launch a permanent citizen assembly. So they managed to have one member of parliament that got elected from that party, and, it was tough. Why? Because we we are still coming back to this power dynamics and to the majoritarian opposition power dynamic. And here what happened, it was one member of parliament out of 89 members of parliament. So basically, he had no power at all. And it's also what we discussed before, the idea that for citizens assemblies to be organized, they should be linked to follow-up, political follow-up. And here you were creating systemic, failure of their follow-up because they they had different set of assemblies on topics. The problem was they were always late in the policy cycle, but even if they were not late, imagine they were in advance. You would know that within two years, they would define a new legislation for housing in Brussels and that they would organize a city assembly on housing. The problem is that because it was the recommendations were only, defended and advocated for, on the basis of one member of parliament, nothing would happen. That's what happened. Nothing would happen with the recommendations. So you knew that you would have a city assembly that would not deliver in terms of public policies. And also one of the reasons is that they were running for the elections, but at the same time in Brussels, we decided to launch this permanent city assembly. So the very main reason why they were created, in fact, existed because at the same time, they got a member of parliament in the parliament. The system they were advocating for existed. So there there are different things, and, unfortunately, this party does not exist anymore. So after one mandate, they decided not to run for the elections. But it was interesting because it was also a reminder and a way to bring on the media agenda the fact that people were asking for citizen assembly, and that's not only they were asking for it, but having a party running only for this single issue would bring also one member of parliament. So it was an interesting experience, but I would say on the political level, it failed because it showed that you should go for embedded city assemblies and not, like, one member of parliament defending the recommendations.
Do you know other example of these, I don't know, experiments? Like, because I I think they are very interesting because maybe it they can be like a sort of way I mean, this I I would say that, no one of the experiment that I've seen really succeed. I mean, in terms of, because maybe people, yeah, as you explained it, it's very hard to, like, if there is just one member elected or the party is not, I'm thinking that also in Italy, there was the five star movement, and they also tried with the with a platform, but also, there were some issues. And so I wonder, yeah, if you know some other experiment or if you, let's think about the future. What what could be a nice a good way to replicate? Because I think I'm thinking that maybe in the future, we will see more of this kind of experiments.
Yeah. I think, my answer would be here. Probably what is very weird, but probably key in the next years, is that the traditional parties, they are not so far, they were not experimenting with deliberative democracy. So there are all those theories saying that, the role of a political party was to be to have a mediating role between the government, the parliament, and the civil society, that they were in between and the bridge between both. And that more and more they lost this, this link with the the citizens and that they are more and more, insurance in the government and the parliament. So it is quite weird that so far, except from, for example, Podemos or the chain crust, stellar movement and things like that, that, there are not a lot of parties that were innovating in that. But now in Belgium, and, it's easy for me to say because I'm piloting this this process, the socialist party, and it's not like a small party. It's not like a a 5% party. It's like according to the polls, it's again the biggest party, in Belgium. They decided now to have what they call a refoundation moment. So, basically, it's today because they they lost the last elections. It's to to define today what is it to be left progressive, in Belgium or in Europe? What are the key elements, related to that? And let's build our vision not between among ourselves or or with universities, but with citizens. And so it's like a two year journey when at first, they they launched, almost 60 citizen assemblies to determine, like, the agenda setting. What are the most pressing issues for, progressive left in Belgium. And so they started with those physical civil assemblies. Then there were more than, 10,000, IDs, and they put that on the online platform. And, like, more than 10,000 people, they prioritize the different issues based of what was the most important for them. Then we came to 12 topics, so the most, the topics that were the most highlighted on the platform. And then we organized, referendum. So during a socialist congress, there were thousand people. They were they received five ballots. So they could decide either put the five ballots in one topic because it was the most important or to distribute into five topics. They could do whatever they wanted. And based on that, they defined the five most pressing pressing issues for progressive left, in Belgium for the upcoming years. And those five issues are, labor, purchasing power, education, climate, and public services. And now for the next year, they'll organize five citizen assemblies on those five issues to define the, progressive left vision on those five issues. So here it's interesting because it's not a new party that is willing to get to win the elections through that. It's like a traditional must party, one of the biggest part that have been in power, like, for the last decades in Belgium. So it's a a key player in Belgian politics that is completely innovating, refunding refounding itself through, deliberative democracy. And that's an interesting trend, I I would say. And since we started that, we have many international requests also to understand what we are doing. For example, the chairman of the Democrat party in the state would like to do the same or people in different countries because it might become a new trend. And not I'm not saying a PR trend, but more political trend to involve citizens in political parties' decision making.
So nice that there are experiments. And, would you like to share something about your background? So professional academic. I mean, you you already said, about your professional background. Yeah, about your academic and also personal background.
With great pleasure. So, I studied political science. European studies. And it's probably during the my master's that I and it's recently that I thought about that That's I understood also for two main reasons, the the why I decided to go all in, not only my professional career, but also my passion. It's it's very nice when you can combine your passion with your professional career. There are two anecdotes. The first one, I was hired by the main, political science professor to do polling. So, basically, I had this ideal idea of people that would vote during elections be for a party because they would embrace the different positions of that party. And so I've been doing, election day polling, you know, in order to have the results at seven instead of 11PM. So when I was I talked to many, many people, and, basically, I was my idea idea of, this taking one party above another was completely destroyed when I was doing those surveys because people had no clue for which party they voted. I had not only to ask them for which party they voted, but also to give their opinion on different political issues. And then I was noticing that they were voting for parties that had nothing to do with their, vision on, for example. I don't know. People would vote for the socialist party, but they would be completely against migration. They would be in favor of private privatizing all the public sector about it, but they would vote for the socialist party or so then it was it crushed completely my idea of, what it was a political party or why people were voting for a party for another. And the second thing I would say was, as a youngster, there's this program Italy. I'm not sure Italy is part of it, but I've been appointed by the when I was a student, European European studies, I've been appointed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be youth representative of Belgium to the United Nations. So for one year, I was the spokesperson of Belgian youth to the United Nations. So I was, having my speech at the UN General Assembly and things like that. And I remember that moment. So, I asked the youth council I was representing, what are the main priorities of youngsters in Belgium? How how I'm the spokesperson, but I'm the spokesperson of what's what should be my priorities? And they were, no worries. You know what? Launch a survey on your Facebook account, and we'll share it, and we'll define the priorities of Belgian news for the United Nations. And so I did it probably my friends and their friends, and they were not a lot. I think if 100 people took part to that survey, that's a lot. And we defined Belgian priorities through a Facebook survey in my echo chamber. So I was probably there are more clever ways to define, common strategies and common views for a citizen. So I I guess in the way I constructed myself politically, those two anecdotes, like, gave me a strong sense of their tools there must be tools in order to use collective intelligence instead of, like, being very trustful to, non, collective intelligent tools.
Yeah. Many times I thought that, you you know, there are several, tools for participation, but then people do not really participate, and this is also in some way a sort of problem. But then, I mean, people actually participate. I mean, people go use Facebook. People use WhatsApp. People use, other kind of tool. And in some way, they are also part of the civic tech world because, I mean, they create a social connection. Then, of course, maybe the main goal of Facebook and, WhatsApp is not anti polarization. It's not, like, collaboration between people. But, yeah, many times I thought that maybe because people are using, like, the main, let's call them mainstream social network, then maybe they can be used. Also, I don't know, if connected with cities and assemblies or, like, other kind of democratic innovations.
But do you know that, for example, Meta, they're organizing, like, those community forum. They're all the same. Like, they're organizing. They're selecting citizens, and they let them speak online, of course, it's meta, to define also some strategies, of meta. So the the they are thinking about that as well. When I said, we started, years ago, and it was something very niche. But today, more and more organizations, public and private sectors are using those tools because they see that's that they all need to be close to the citizens and their priorities as well. So Meta, for example, is using, citizen assemblies as well in another kind of design where they are using it.
Actually, I didn't know, but I will research because this is very interesting. Maybe it could be a lot a way to to widespread the the use of seats in the assembly. And and, yeah, I have another question, like, that is, more generic maybe. How would you define a democratic system or, like, democracy in general? Like,
It's, it's interesting because when you ask that to people, and I'm getting so mad when I hear that, people would say democracy is elections. Like, when you have elections, that's it's it's a democracy, and I've been hearing that, for example, a lot also. Now with the Israel, Gaza war, you know, people would say Israel are is a democracy because they had elections, which is especially when you see the way they violate international law, it's completely silly, and it's making me crazy. I think that there are many different definitions of democracy, but what is important for me, it's like this deliberative democracy, approach. It's to say, decisions are legitimate if they are based on citizens exchange. Like, it's a way of governing that is involving citizens in the decision making and not citizens with money or with power, but all the citizens. It's a way to think about inclusion as well. Like, for example, now I'm working for the first civil assembly in Luxembourg, and then they there they have the issue that not many people in Luxembourg, they have the citizenship. So, basically, a lot of the inhabitants in Luxembourg, they have nothing to say in the political system because they are no citizens. So deliberative democracy and citizen assemblies is also a way to open itself, to open the black box of the system to people that have no citizenship rights, same in Brussels and that was very strong. We decided to be randomly selected. The only thing you need to do is to be to register yourself in a district from the day you are registered in a district. So you don't have to have the citizenship at all. From the day you are registered in a district, you are in the database to be randomly selected. So it's a way to completely rethink, power and to really rethink, like, who should have a say in decision making. So that is the way I think about democracy. It's a completely, inclusive way of decision making.
And do you have any message for the people that, are trying to innovate in democratic system? Like, yeah, like, other people that are building, I don't know, tools for participation or, like, the people that are organize are organizing citizen assemblies or, like, experiments.
I would say what is very important because we have so far, we are talking for almost, one hour, and we've not discussed, like, the international context. The international context is very polarized, and it's a euphemism. And there is, like, international regressive, movement where we are, not building a new way of doing democracy, but destroying democracy. There's a huge democratic backslide. So we should think also about an international alternative story, and that would be the deliberative democracy story. And once more, I'm not saying it's a silver bullet, but it's a way forward. So I would say it's very important to build networks. Two weeks ago, there was this big international conference of deliberative democracy. Almost 500 people from all around the world came to Brussels in order to exchange, to discuss. And you might argue the situation, I don't know, in The Philippines or the situation in Hungary is very different from the situation in Belgium, but it's not. We are facing the same challenges. So we have to think also about to build coalitions to deal with, all those, obstacles we are facing. And so for example, like, I learned from Bogota where they're organizing meta assemblies where citizens are defining the design of a citizen assembly. I heard about citizen assemblies ongoing citizen assemblies in Ukraine in the middle of the war right now where they have civil assemblies in bunkers to define, public policies. So it's really important to connect and to see in which way we can deliver also a common message and a positive common message, not a a message of, power dynamics of, new, nuclear, essays, but a story of citizenship and of building coalitions and, of, possible alternative.
Thank you, Jonathan. Really. And, I don't know if you have anything else to add or, like, if you want to ask any question or, like
It was a real pleasure to talk to you. And, also, I've heard recently that Bologna, for example, was very active with its student participation as well. I I saw that the mayor of Bologna was coming to a country of Europe conference within ten days, twenty days since Strasbourg. So it's by launching conversation, we also identify, we map the different initiatives. And you mentioned, for example, partnerships, I think. We should have part way more partnership between institutions but also between citizens. What is very sad is that, for every single citizen that is taking part in city assemblies, there is a before and an after story. Like, it's completely changed the way they see politics and they see their role. It's not a surprise that many former participants of civil assemblies, they are themselves running for the elections. They are taking way more time in civil society organizations. We are today in a such a a society that is very, individualistic that people have this feeling that they can't have any agency on the system, and that's also the reason why we have all those conspiracy theories that people they need to feel the sense of belonging in the community and things like that, and there's a lot of literature. So, I think what is important is to create way more interaction between those people to create a community of farmer participants because farmer participants are not only farmer participants, but they are agents of change, champions of change. So I think this is a a message I would like to give as well. If Bologna is organized as because that was a question and I did not answer to it. I'm sure Bologna will organize a citizen assembly on the topic that has been already addressed, for example, in Vilnius or in Copenhagen. So it might be interesting to create way more connections and to see which way, the recommendations from the same topic since the assembly in Copenhagen or Vilnius might feed the reflections and to create a way more rich process by seeing, what people from other places in Europe and the world decided how they decided to address that question and that issue.
Yeah. Absolutely. I also think, like, the question about, ask you at the beginning how to organize a good citizen assembly was also related to the fact that we are also trying to organize something here in Bologna. I mean, not with the mayor, but, like, but maybe also with the mayor. Who knows? At the moment, it was just, we were thinking about some small workshop to show the tools and the the possibility that, can open using this kind of tools. So thank you a lot, Jonathan, really.
You're very welcome, and enjoy your day, and good luck with what you are doing.
Thank you.
