Emmanuel Macron was nothing if not ambitious in his response to Brexit and the tide of Euroscepticism. The French president argued that the EU needed to respond to the negativity of the Brexit debate by rearticulating the great purpose of the union in order to reconnect to citizens. Nothing less than a âEuropean renaissanceâ was called for. âWe have to establish a âConference for Europeâ,â he argued in a 2019 opinion article for international newspapers, âin order to set out all the changes required by our political project, and do so without taboos, even on treaty revision.â
The said Conference on the Future of Europe, a gathering of member-state representatives, MEPs, EU institutions, and randomly chosen citizens, opens its deliberations formally in May â its multilingual digital platform launched last week and within days more than 3,000 citizens had contributed their views online. Clearly there is an appetite for its work. Public