Given the results of the European elections, the EU should urgently improve its defense of democracy. Last week, 16 civil society organisations including elbarlament sent EU Commission President Von der Leyen the following letter:<\/p>\n
Dear President Von der Leyen,<\/p>\n
In your bid for a second mandate as President of the European Commission, you vow to \u2018defend democracy from those who seek to destroy it\u2019. As 16 civil society organisations working on democracy and related matters, this is music to our ears. Assuming you are not making an empty election promise, we have some concrete suggestions for how your next Commission can better defend democracy.<\/p>\n
First of all, the European Commission needs a dedicated Vice-President for Democracy, supported by a Directorate-General (DG) for Democracy<\/strong>. Currently, democracy is all over the place: the Secretariat-General, DG Justice and Consumers, DG CONNECT and the European External Action Service. For more focus, more coordination and to overcome silo-thinking, we need a dedicated Vice-President with a dedicated DG<\/em> to connect the dots between foreign, domestic and technological threats to democracy. In particular, media policy, rules on political party financing, political foundations and elections should be consolidated with the Defence of Democracy package in one DG.<\/p>\n Secondly, we urgently need to create an independent EU Democracy Fund<\/strong>. We acknowledge the significant sums that have been invested in democracy across Europe through several EU programmes, but this support needs to be simplified, broadened, strengthened and unified under the new DG Democracy. If the EU wants to protect its founding values while increasing its strategic autonomy, European civil society cannot depend on a decreasing number of democratic governments and the whims of a few American billionaire donors. Therefore, the EU should substantially increase its funding in a dedicated democracy fund<\/em>. This EU Democracy Fund should have a light-weight, Erasmus-style bureaucracy and give NGOs a margin for investment, reserves and opportunity costs for failed funding bids. Besides budget from the MFF, a modest percentage of the European Investment Bank\u2019s interest revenues could fill the fund.<\/p>\n Third, the time to invest in democracy is now.<\/strong> If there is one lesson that EU leaders should learn from Ukraine, it is that democracy is closely linked to security. Supporting democracy abroad and defending it at home is security policy. Investing in stronger democracy, societal resilience and civil preparedness<\/em> for Russia\u2019s hybrid \u2013 or even conventional \u2013 warfare is not charity; it is investing in our security.<\/p>\n We would welcome a meeting to discuss your plan to defend democracy and our suggestions.<\/p>\n Sincerely, Defend Democracy<\/p>\n * co-signatories<\/strong><\/em> (to be updated here; the sent letter was with 14 signatories)<\/p>\n Albanian Media Council<\/p>\n Democratic Society<\/p>\n digiQ<\/p>\n Elbarlament<\/p>\n European Association for Local Democracy<\/p>\n Fair Vote UK<\/p>\n Faktabaari (Avoin yhteiskunta ry)<\/p>\n Green European Foundation<\/p>\n Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD)<\/p>\n #jesuisl\u00e0<\/p>\n MEMO 98<\/p>\n Netherlands Helsinki Committee<\/p>\n Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy<\/p>\n Open Lithuania foundation<\/p>\n Unhack Democracy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Given the results of the European elections, the EU should urgently improve its defense of democracy. Last week, 16 civil society organisations including elbarlament sent EU Commission President Von der Leyen the following letter: Dear President Von der Leyen, In your bid for a second mandate as President of the European Commission, you vow to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":4060,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbarlament.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbarlament.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbarlament.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbarlament.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbarlament.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/elbarlament.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4040,"href":"https:\/\/elbarlament.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4038\/revisions\/4040"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbarlament.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbarlament.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbarlament.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbarlament.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}