Chapter 21 - The European Citizens’ Consultations: Will the member states make them count?

Corina Stratulat and Paul Butcher explain that the ECCs might have emerged in response to the EU’s long-standing need to fix its growing problem of democratic legitimacy, but it was the push that the French President Emmanuel Macron gave to the idea of organising citizen consultations across the EU that turned the odds in favour of this new, large-scale experiment in European democratic reform. Whatever helped to make the ECCs a reality in 2018, the burning question as the process draws to an end in May 2019 is whether the member states will now make it count. To do so, they should explicitly link their discussions about the EU’s next policy agenda and priorities with the results of the consultations in the run-up to the European Parliament elections, they argue.