Citizens Foresight on 2024 European Parliament elections with voices from CEE

ended

Visegrad Insight—Res Publica Foundation is a European think tank committed to increasing awareness among Polish and the Central European countries’ general public of democratic values and of the importance of ensuring democratic security as a means of countering democratic backsliding. The proposed project aims to enhance the quality of public and expert-level debate on democracy and common EU values and to nurture collaboration amongst civil society, through generating a citizen-led strategic foresight process that would focus on developing potential scenarios related to the electoral process. It fills in the ever-increasing gap for more inclusive participation in relation to people with disabilities, women and Roma communities, which are seen to be most vulnerable in current societies and are unequally represented in democratic participation across CEE. The project will generate a more positive and inclusive voice that connects the needs of citizens and facilitate the constructive input of civil society from the CEE region to overcome an image of recalcitrance, by having constructive public debate through extensive workshops, consultations and scenario-building from the perspective of civil society stakeholders and scenario-based reports. The scenario building exercises and foresight will be paired with extensive dissemination among civil society actors in order to bring together and promote opinion leaders, academia, think-tankers and policy-makers at the EU and CEE state-levels. The core focus is to provide new perspectives and informed findings to draw awareness to and infuse the Democracy Action plan, EU Citizenship Report 2020, EU rule of law, raise the importance of EU gender-related policies and priorities, and advance citizen engagement. This participation component will promote and deepen citizens’ understanding of EU integration at a time when there is a deteriorating state of public debate, that undermines support for EU democratic values in the region