Civic participation in the New Democratic Pact: what we saw at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg

Autocrats are dangerous, but equally dangerous are democrats who refuse to see the need for change.

This was the most memorable statement of the forum. It came from Věra Jourová and set the tone for the World Forum for Democracy, which brought together 1,400 participants from 60 countries in Strasbourg on 2 and 3 November. The forum marked the culmination of the consultations on the New Democratic Pact for Europe, as the 2026 report of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe noted, and invited a broad audience of civic activists, experts, diplomats and young people to join the conversation.

We took part in the 14th edition of the forum, themed "Rupture or renewal? Democratic security for our future", thanks to a travel grant from the Bulgarian Fund for Women. Three representatives of Impact Drive attended: Teodora Ivanova-Valeva (Executive Director), Ivelina Gadzheva (Board member) and Ivet Ivanova-Miteva (Programme Coordinator).

Democracy needs the truth and readiness for change

In our view, the strongest message of the forum came as early as the opening session. Věra Jourová, Chair of the Democracy27 Task Force and former Vice-President of the European Commission, turned attention to the responsibility of democratically minded citizens and leaders to change their thinking and tactics. Democracy, she said, is not a gift from heaven. "We do not need a new narrative, we need the truth." People want a democracy that actually works, and we cannot defend what we cannot clearly define.

Jourová outlined specific tasks:

• Communication. People need to know what the plan is, shared in language everyone understands, online and offline.

• Education. Better civic literacy, starting now, for informed and active citizens. The role of the media is key. We would add the role of formal and non-formal education.

• Participation. Change does not happen only at local level. We need to find ways to connect elections with international policies.

• People say they need a democracy that works in practice.

• Digital platforms and artificial intelligence. She raised the question of European social media as a counterweight to the flow of information coming from the United States.

• Foreign interference. She explicitly named Russian disinformation and proposed that every country should have an agency to detect it.

To these tasks she added the role of experts in the civic sector who defend the truth. Everyone has a task, including speakers from outside politics. Her warning applies to the institutions, parties and organisations that defend democracy, and therefore to us as well. One of the proposals we submitted in Strasbourg points in the same direction: tell the truth and avoid demagogy. We use this same yardstick below to assess the forum itself.

Economic insecurity and loss of trust undermine democracy

In the first panel, Michèle Griffin of the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs outlined nine trends in democracy. Among them are declining trust in institutions and elections, manipulation through technology, disillusionment among young voters, weakening accountability of those in power, and an ageing and urbanising population. A key item on this list is the pushing of women out of politics, including through various forms of online and physical violence.

The topic continued in the second panel of the plenary session, where Prof. Olivier De Schutter of the Catholic University of Leuven, former UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, linked the retreat from democracy to the economy. People turn against democracy when they feel left behind, and the far right gains most in the poorest regions. In his view, social protection must be guaranteed and must not be presented as something that holds people back or restricts them, especially in the most vulnerable regions.

Prof. Aoife Nolan, President of the European Committee of Social Rights, added data on young people: 20-25% support harmful ideologies, and the 20-24 age group faces the highest risk of poverty. Her conclusion, shared by other experts, is that engagement with democracy must start early, well before adulthood.

Maria-Andriani Kostopoulou, President of the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO) of the Council of Europe, described worrying trends: women politicians and journalists are targets of attacks and smear campaigns in a number of EU countries. Democratic security, she said, is closely linked to ending gender-based violence.

Foresight: preparing for change before it arrives

The common thread of the forum was the need for adaptation and democratic foresight [1]: the ability of democracies to anticipate change and build possible future scenarios. At the official opening, Guy Ryder, UN Under-Secretary-General for Policy, presented foresight as a methodology for dealing with a dynamic future. Aikaterini Polyzou, Chair of the Steering Committee on Media and Information Society (CDMSI), clarified that the aim is not to predict the future but to spot change early and prepare for it. The Dutch Ambassador for Human Rights, Wim Geerts, offered a formulation close to our own thinking: hope is a discipline you practise every day.

Later in the afternoon, at the parallel session on future scenarios, the Council of Europe presented findings from its consultations and asked how public institutions should prepare for future democratic challenges. In the session on demographic change, the discussion turned to the specific pressures on different generations. Adam Nyman of HelloFuture noted that young people pay into a pension system they do not believe in, and that housing absorbs 31% of income, with a heavier burden on women. The data come from the Friends of Europe report Voices for Choices 2026: Is Europe ageing fairly?.

Enno Coordes of the European Movement Germany presented a survey on the role of business in democratic resilience, a topic we at Impact Drive are also researching. According to him, companies (in Germany) understand that they need to get involved in defending and improving democracy, but do not know how. They need guidance, standards and confidence that they will not lose customers. For Bulgarian non-governmental organisations, this is a practical question: who will invite business to the table, and with what concrete offer?

How views are included:

• Institutions and sectors. Since 2025, governments, parliaments, local authorities, civil society, academia and business have been consulted. By May 2026, the process had gathered more than 200 contributions from more than 100 contributors.

• Civil society organisations. A written contribution or a five-minute survey, with a deadline of 6 November 2026. When the call was published, 64 organisations had provided 34% of all contributions.

• Young people. On 24-26 June 2026, 120 young people and representatives of youth organisations worked in Strasbourg on a Manifesto for a Democratic Europe in 2049.

• Citizens. The online consultation "Your voice for democracy", launched on 12 October, asks one open question: what needs to change for democracy to work better for you? It is open in 36 languages until 12 November to citizens of all 46 member states. Participants propose their own ideas and see which ones gather agreement and which ones divide opinion.

What comes next. The pilot phase continues until the end of 2026, and the final outcomes of the Pact are expected in 2027. According to the Secretary General's 2026 report, the next phase will broaden participation to think tanks, the private sector and groups of citizens who rarely take part in public life, and will test proposals with methods such as collective foresight. The results will be the basis on which political leaders renew their commitment to democracy.

Where is the civic participation beyond the official speeches: our impressions of the forum

Civic participation was more visible in the declarations and speeches of the plenary sessions, but seemed to get lost in the specifics of the discussions, in the answers to questions from the audience and in the debate on practical steps and strategies.

The forum promised a conversation with citizens, yet the sessions focused mainly on young people. Youth participation matters, and the Pact places it at its core. The 2026 report also notes strong convergence around participation as a task for society as a whole. But citizens are not only young people, and dimensions such as gender, cooperation between generations and cooperation between sectors were not integrated into the overall conversation. Even the youth topic cannot be addressed without them: according to a survey in 35 countries, only 23% of young women believe their governments take their opinions into account, compared with 31% of young men.

These topics appeared separately: in the GREVIO intervention, in one of Michèle Griffin's points, and in one parallel session on generations and business. Of the 9 parallel sessions and 7 labs in the programme, not one was dedicated to gender equality. The Secretary General's 2025 report, which proposed the Pact, lists gender equality among the foundations of democratic security. In the 2026 report, consultation participants also emphasise intergenerational dialogue. The forum's concept note does not mention gender equality, even though in May the Gender Equality Commission and the Steering Committee on Anti-Discrimination, Diversity and Inclusion of the Council of Europe published a joint statement on the importance of equality for the Pact.

The content remained general, with little practical focus. Outside the sessions, the programme provided for meetings between participants only through coffee breaks, lunches (which in fact divided participants, as different categories had different arrangements) and a short reception with a cultural programme. The format left too little room for networking, participants could hardly be heard, and their questions were rarely answered in substance. Politicians left after the official speeches without staying to hear from citizens. Several languages were used in the parallel sessions, but there were not enough seats with access to interpretation.

There was a lot of talk about equality and inclusion, but outside the conference room equal treatment was missing. Only about a third of participants had lunch provided, and in practice the lunches divided us. The bureaucratic approach to such important topics left a bitter taste. We write this as an organisation that works with these values every day and wants the Pact process to succeed. The young people consulted on the Pact themselves asked for sustained dialogue instead of one-off consultations, and for transparent feedback on every proposal. The same standard applies to the forum.

Our colleague Ivelina Gadzheva recorded an observation that goes to the heart of the problem. Most of those present could afford to spend two days discussing hardship and then go home. The conversation would have sounded different if the people living through that hardship had the same time to speak and the same power to set the agenda. Teodora adds the conclusion that we cannot speak about participation in principle and then leave it out of our actions if women and girls, experts and citizens of different generations are not sufficiently visible and heard at forums like this one.

When poverty was presented in one of the sessions as a form of expertise, Ivelina asked what we expect of the people we invite into the room: to shape decisions, or first to tell us the worst things that have happened to them in order to be taken seriously. Experience of poverty shows exactly where a public service fails and what that failure costs. This knowledge should carry weight when decisions are made.

She also turned to the question of trust. Critical thinking matters, but no one has time to check every claim and every source. Institutions that ask for trust should allow anyone to see who made a decision, whose interests were heard, who funds a campaign and who pays for political advertising online. This is where her proposal for trusted and transparent accountability mechanisms comes from. If we cannot say what democracy should allow a person with little time, money or influence to do on an ordinary Tuesday, we have hardly defined it clearly enough to defend it.

The four proposals we made

What needs to change for democracy to work better for you? During the forum, we answered this question in the online citizens' consultation app, where each answer was limited to 140 characters, with four proposals:

1. Invest more, and more wisely, directly in women and young people if we want them to participate. Funding for women's rights organisations fell by 28% according to UN Women (UN Gender Snapshot 2026).

2. Avoid demagogy in policy and tell the truth: democracy is not perfect, and values are interpreted flexibly.

3. Leave bureaucracy behind and spend funds effectively to support activists and civil society organisations, which are on the front line of defending democracy and young people.

4. Create trusted and transparent accountability mechanisms.

The Secretary General's 2025 report notes a decline in funding for youth-led associations over the previous three years. The results of the consultation will feed into the final documents of the Pact, expected in 2027. We will then check to what extent the voices of citizens and of front-line organisations have found a place in them.

Civic education and looking to the future: what comes next for our work

Anxiety about the future was among the most present themes at the forum: young people who do not believe in their pension system, regions that feel left behind, people who do not know what the plan is. We encounter this anxiety in our work with NGO practitioners and with young people. That is why we are already developing a future thinking approach (or foresight, as the forum called it). The 2026 report names the same problem at the political level: as crises accelerate, politics shrinks to an ultra-short horizon, while the Pact aims to look beyond the next crisis.

Our Future Thinking model works in three steps:

1. It works through the anxiety and complexity that the future creates.

2. It organises them into a system of trends, risks and possible scenarios.

3. It turns thinking towards planning, organising and engaging for a better scenario. Supports and motivates for awared work towards this change.

The forum and the Pact give us a framework to connect this work to:

Work on EU values, democracy, human rights, solidarity, participation and representation is what gives this approach its direction. Without these values, planning for the future remains a technique that can serve any purpose. With them, it sustains civic space, counters autocratic ideas and builds a politically literate society that stands up for its freedom and democracy.

Our participation in the forum was made possible with the support of the Bulgarian Fund for Women.

[1] Foresight: the ability to anticipate what is likely to happen in the future and to take reasonable action in the present to prepare for it. In this context, it is seen as a methodology that offers a structured, systematic process for exploring alternative future scenarios, anticipating change and making better-informed strategic decisions today, instead of trying to predict a single, fixed future.