Applying the data

The ‘Listen to People’ project will mobilise European citizens around European democracy and values ahead of the European elections in 2024 and strengthen the strategic communication and outreach capacity of civil society, activists, and change-makers.

The Italian election represents a watershed moment for the country and for the rest of Europe. There is growing concern in Brussels that the victory of the far-right coalition may turn Italy into a disruptive member state of the European Union (EU) with authoritarian trends and a reactionary political agenda antithetical to the Union’s fundamental values and priorities. At the same time, as war keeps ravaging Ukraine, support for democracy and democratic institutions has been shaken in Italy by the ongoing conflict.

Your base is your core audience - they are reliable in their support. They rarely need to be persuaded, but rather need to be mobilised. There are a few common traps that campaigners, activists and communicators can fall into when dealing with their base.

The Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) has been put forward as an opportunity to address some of the main challenges of our time and to take stock of the state of the European Union

It has been a tough decade for liberal democracy in Europe. Democratic principles, the rule of law, equality, transparency and human rights have been questioned, attacked and undermined by leaders who are euphemistically called “populists” but are in fact displaying all the characteristics of authoritarians.

Last week’s court decision that Golden Dawn, the Greek far-right party, is a criminal organisation and its leadership are guilty of running a criminal organisation is a major blow to a fascist outfit that up until recently had 18 MPs in the Greek Parliament and won 7% of the vote in the 2012 elections.

On 8 January, Italian football team Lazio was fined 20,000 euros after their fans racially insulted Brescia’s player Mario Balotelli with racial slurs. This is not an isolated incident. Last November, Liliana Segre, an 89-year-old Italian Holocaust survivor and senator for life, was assigned police escort after receiving thousands of threats on social media.

Sunday’s election in Poland saw a clear win for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS), with results likely to give the rightwing party, led by Jarosław Kaczyński, an overall majority in the parliament for the next four years; thus pushing the country even further into illiberalism and autocracy.