During the COFOE | UEF actions
How the COFOE works
CoFoE was a unique opportunity for European citizens to meet with European and national institutions and parliamentarians to discuss the challenges and priorities of tomorrow's Europe.
The Conference was the first experiment in democratic proposal and debate open to all citizens. It consisted of the following elements:
- Multilingual digital platform to collect concrete proposals from citizens and their organisations, to comment on them and to disseminate them;
- Decentralised events organised by citizens, organisations and national authorities;
- European Citizens' Panels, drawn by lot and who helped draft the proposals;
- Plenary session of the Conference, which collected the proposals and drafted the Final Report.
CoFoE lasted one year, from March 2021 to May 2022.
The objective of CoFoE was the elaboration of a document with proposals to change the current European Union.
In the silence of the press and media, 500,000 people actively participated (the CoFoE platform was viewed about 5 million times in one year).
Read here the CoFoE digital User Guide
The European federalists actively participated in CoFoE:
- with the publication on the digital platform of the conference, of proposals calling for the revision of the EU Treaties on the points of the EU's power of taxation and the abolition of the power of veto of states simultaneous granting of decision-making powers to the European Parliament.
- UEF organised dozens and dozens of online and in-person events to make their proposals known.
At the European level, the UEF participated in the work of the Conference Plenary, both with its own representative (the Secretary General, Anna Echterhoff) and through the MEPs of the Spinelli Group, in particular the UEF President Sandro Gozi and the UEF VP Domenec Ruiz Devesa, who share federalist positions within the European Parliament.
Here there is an example of the video: UEF representatives in the COFOE - 5th Plenary Session
1) UEF idea in the CoFoE Platform | For a true European democracy: there can be no true European democracy without an autonomous EU fiscal power
Historically, the creation of fiscal power has coincided with the founding act of a political community, and has required strong democratic control over who wields it; hence democratic societies have always required fiscal power to be exercised by parliament. Today, the attribution of fiscal power to the European Parliament (together with the Council of the European Union, under the ordinary legislative procedure) is an indispensable condition for building an effective and fully democratic European Union.
At present, the EU budget depends on the will of the individual member states. On the revenue side, Article 311 TFEU stipulates that the system of own resources shall be decided by the Council unanimously and that the decision shall then be approved by the individual Member States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements. In this procedure, the representative body of the citizens - the European Parliament - is only consulted and each government retains the right of veto on the issue of resources transferred and then used by the EU budget.
This financing mechanism must be reformed so that the European Union has the autonomous capacity to levy European taxes directly on businesses and citizens without going through prior harmonisation of national taxes and therefore without the intervention of national budgets.
2) UEF idea in the CoFoE | For a true Euroepan democracy: abolish the right of veto and assign direct powers to the European Parliament in taxation and foreign policy
Democracy is not compatible with the right of veto. Replacing unanimity with qualified majority decisions is therefore one of the indispensable reforms for the full democratisation of the European Union.
In the current Treaties in particular, unanimity is still required in two crucial areas: taxation (where the size of the Union budget and the nature and extent of the resources that finance it are decided unanimously by the Council and this decision must then be ratified by all the member states; unanimity is also required for approval of the Multiannual Financial Framework) and foreign and defence policy (where every decision is taken by the Council or the European Council with the unanimous consent of all the states).
In these two areas, the time has come to structurally change the EU's decision-making system and abolish the unanimity rule. This means replacing the current forms of coordination between the national governments (which are the real cause of the existence of the veto right) with a fully democratic European government, accountable to and controlled by the European citizens. For this to happen - in addition to reforming the decision-making system in the Council and the European Council - the European Parliament must be given direct power so that it can assume the role of co-legislator and so that the Union can legislate on these matters through acts directly applicable in the member states.
3) UEF idea in the CoFoE | Our Federal Europe: sovreign and democratic
We enthusiastically welcome the start of the Conference on the Future of Europe. We are living in a historical moment of great change. It is at a time like this that communities must be able to adapt their institutions if they are to govern the new processes and avoid falling into irreversible decline. This is what we have to do today in the European Union: making the instrument of the Next Generation EU permanent and creating a federal budget, so that the EU can share fiscal sovereignty with the Member States; and acquiring new competences, extending the ordinary legislative procedure, in the fields of health, economic policy, foreign policy and defence, to make Europe a global leader in the defence of fundamental values and the rule of law, a model of a socially sustainable ecological transition and a global actor for a new multilateralism. For this reason, the Conference must be able to discuss without taboos not only which European policies need to be strengthened, but also which treaty reforms are necessary to equip the EU with the necessary tools to act effectively and incisively.
Events organized by the Movimento Federalista Europeo - UEF Italy
The Movimento Federalista Europeo (MFE) actively participates in the Conference on the Future of Europe by organising events and debates related to the political proposals published on the multilingual platform futurEU.europa.eu. This contributes to the emergence of political will from below and certifies it in the platform.
Events and debates are thus reported in the platform and a final report is also published at the end of each event, which is important to certify the real involvement of citizens in the debate.
Here you can see month by month the events organised at national and local level reported in the futureu.europa.eu platform.
Petition on Change.org for the Conclusions of the Conference
The petition is created the 17 March 2022 (one month later the start of invasion of Ukraine by Russia) and it has been addressed to Executive Board of the Conference on the Future of Europe.
The UEF call on the Executive Board of the Conference, on the Working group Chairs, on the members of the Plenary and the institutions represented in the CoFoE to respect the will of the citizens and to highlight in the Conclusions of the Conference
- the need of concrete institutional reforms to create a federal political union;
- the request of convening a Convention to reform the Treaties.
Petition name: For a federal Europe, sovereign and democratic #moreEUROPEnow #toFedEU
https://www.change.org/p/for-a-federal-europe-sovereign-and-democratic
The petition collected 2.707 signatures