1st EUDEM conference, Salzburg, 3 May 2012 Edmundsburg

Opening speech by Gudrun Mosler Törnström, Congress member

The venue Edmundsburg was build  in 1696 and renovated in 2008 and is one of the best locations, with a beautiful view over Salzburg. It is the home for the Austrian Institute for European Law and policy as well as for the Austrian Institute of Human Rigths and since 2008 the Stefan Zweig Center has been situated here.

It is a honor for me to address some words of welcome to you on behalf of our governor Gabi Burgstaller. Furthermore I am one of the 6 regular Austrian members in the Council of Europe Congress of local and regional Authorities and the head of the Austrian delegation.

It is a social and economical strong and peaceful Europe we work for, but at the moment we witness an earthquake. Strengthening the confidence in Europe and its institutions is more important than ever.

I am convinced that this conference will be a valuable input toward this aim.

“Regional and local Contributions to European Democracy improvement” is the title of my opening words. European democracy improvement can only be successful when it starts at the lowest level, the communities. Therefore, the work of the Congress of local and regional authorities is not to be underestimated. The Congress represents over 200.000 local and regional authorities of the 47 member states. One could say: We are a watchdog for grassroots democracy, bringing democracy to your doorstep at the heart of our cities and our regions.

Since it has been set up in 1957, the Congress hat become one of the main bodies safeguarding local and regional democracy throughout Europe and a key political partner in dialogue with governments.

Assessing the application of the Charter of Local Self-Government in each member country is at the heart of the Congress mission. We undertake regularly monitoring on local and regional democracy and election missions. Numerous legislative reforms have been set in motion by member states on the basis of the findings of these monitoring activities.

The recommendations for improvement are recommendations from partners in order to provide information, problem solving suggestions and best practice know how.

This know how is a powerful regional and local Contribution to European  Democracy improvement, because all the 318 full and 318 substitute members of the Congress are elected and active politicians with various experiences and cultures in their luggage.

One more experience I made on the basis of my work in the Congress, the democratic perspective has been sharpened.

You can see our work also as the framework in order to support the arrangement of local direct democracy elements.

Since April 2012 the new tool for participatory democracy, the European Citizens Initiative, within the European Union has started. This can be seen as a big step forward towards the citizens, by giving them the possibility to participate directly in shaping the development of its legislation.

But to enthusiasm the people for important projects, you have to start at the local level. Therefore the city of Salzburg is working on a “Salzburg Citizens Initiative” that aims towards a stronger involvement of the citizens in projects concerning their surrounding environment.

The initiators developed a three-stage model which includes:

• An initiative plan: this is the first and easiest step of the citizens participation for small-scale matters – support of approximately 1550 people
• Citizens initiative: this is the next step - support of approximately 3100 people
• Referendum: this point is still not clear, because the political parties haven't found a common solution about the number of supporters yet

It is still an ongoing process but the negotiations are in the final phase.

Also at local level there are discussions about instruments of more direct democracy. Therefore within the SPÖ Salzburg a working group about direct democracy has been formed. The aim of this work is divided into 2 directions – on the one hand already existing instruments should be strengthened and

on the other hand new ones and existing ones should be created to make the citizens participation easier for all the people. 

The current situation of democracy in Austria as well as in other European countries is, that people are disenchanted with politics; the turnout is getting lower and lower. To fill the gap between the people and politics, we need to change the political system step by step towards more direct democratic participation.

These new tools will give us the chance to encourage more people to actively participate in the political life at European, National and also Local and Regional level.

It can be successful – this shows a survey, made by the Austrian Society of European Politics which pointed out, that 96 % of young people in Austria are happy about the new citizens' initiative. 90% plan to use this tool if the issue is important to them.

The world, the lifestyle, the self-confidence of the people has changed, therefore it is necessary to adopt the rules of politics to the new circumstances in order to have a chance to get more people political involved again.

Only then we will face the challenge of building up a Europe, where people have the feeling that their opinion counts.

This conference can be seen as an ongoing process for finding an optimized working structure.

At the end I would like to quote a part of the objectives of the Conference which expresses the issue perfectly:

" Finally, in the first conference, it is valuable to discern the dividing line of how far a Think Tank should keep away from 'Brussels' but how near we should affiliate with single representatives of responsible policy-makers within the Union"