Strasbourg
Texte original en anglais, non traduit.
Address by Mr Alain Berset, Secretary General of the Council of Europe
Check against delivery
President Helgesen,
Minister Kirbiš Rojs,
Members of the Congress,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Two days ago, young people in Serbia did what many said was impossible. They turned protest into a majority.
The Serbian moment
Next Sunday, it will be two years since a railway canopy collapsed in Novi Sad, killing sixteen people. The students who took to the streets had no leader. Their anger did not end in violence or in silence. It became the Student List. They have shown what democracy can still do.
Serbia has sent a message to the Western Balkans and to all of Europe.
Hungary sent its own this spring. Both remind us that the vote is only the first step.
We stand ready to work with Serbia’s new leadership to strengthen democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
But to take the measure of what happened, you have to look at Europe the way young people see it.
Young in Europe today
Let’s imagine, you are nineteen in Europe today. On your phone, Ukrainian cities are under constant attack. A full-scale war of aggression, just a few hours from home. Those responsible have yet to face justice.
You look up from the screen. A pristine stretch of protected coast is sold for a luxury resort. No one knows who bought it. And no one is held to account for that either.
Your rent goes up. Your university fees rise. Your teacher is absent for weeks and no one replaces them. You apply for job after job and nobody writes back.
The rules of the old world no longer apply, except to you. Then you scroll. Someone your age in another country is standing in the street for the same reasons.
A European movement?
So we can condemn the violence. We can share their anger. We can admire them. We can agree or disagree, in this room, about everything they are asking for.
But what we cannot do is underestimate the young people who have filled the squares of so many European cities these past days and weeks.
Yes, their demands change from one country to the next. They do not always seem organised.
But does that stop them from being a movement? Could it become a European one? Since Sunday, it has a model.
What we have been slow to see
Serbian students have become a political force. Elsewhere in Europe, young people will draw their own conclusions. But their protests are already telling us what we have been slow to see.
We have looked at two ruptures as if they were separate. One in the international legal order, where force is taking the place of law. The other inside our societies, where inequality is becoming the rule. We were wrong. Young people are living them as one rupture.
And they have known nothing else. This generation was born into a financial crisis.
They were barely teenagers when the pandemic kept them at home for months, and back in class when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. Now the people who build the technology they grew up with warn that artificial intelligence could destroy humanity.
Europe has been in crisis for most of their lives. That has left them without perspectives for the future.
Security or democracy?
And it is not just young people. Their parents are asking the same questions. Will the rent go up again? Will I find a doctor when I need one? Will a machine take the job I have held for twenty years?
We do not usually call this security. We keep that word for armies and police. Everything else is dismissed as “soft”. But there is nothing soft about the foundations of a democracy.
When people stop believing that tomorrow can be better than today, then their trust goes with it. And a society that is losing trust is easier to divide and easier to manipulate.
Why democratic security
Dear members of the Congress, ladies and gentlemen,
When young people protest, it is tempting to see only a problem of public order.
To answer with curfews and bans. Or to look for a foreign hand behind every crowd.
Foreign interference is real, and we are working on a legal instrument against it. But young people do not fill the streets of a dozen countries because someone abroad told them to.
The answer cannot be less democracy in the name of security. It must be security that protects people, their rights and the institutions that serve them. At the Council of Europe, we call this democratic security.
Let me be clear. It does not replace military security.
But if we pay for Europe’s rearmament by cutting schools, hospitals and social rights, the very things young people are marching for, we will end up better armed and less secure. And the weapons we buy today will answer to whoever wins tomorrow’s elections.
Local democracy
Democratic security cannot be imposed from the top down. It is built in town halls and regional assemblies, by mayors and councillors. By you.
Many of you know your constituents by name. I did too, back in local politics in Switzerland. You see the strain in your schools, your hospitals, your neighbourhoods, long before it makes the news. And because people still trust you more than any other level of government, it is to you they turn first.
Local democracy is Europe’s early warning system. It is where we feel the rupture first, and where we can begin to repair it. It is our first line of democratic security.
What the Congress brings
And this Congress is giving it the instruments to work.
Your new risk-alert dashboard is built to detect democratic backsliding before it takes hold. It could serve the whole Council of Europe.
Nothing destroys trust in democracy faster than corruption. It is what has brought many young people into the streets. The checklist before you this week turns our standards into practice, where people can really see the difference.
Every election measures that trust. Next year, France, Italy, Poland and Switzerland will vote, among others.
With the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Venice Commission, you issued the Paris Call to protect the integrity of those votes.
What connects all three is foresight: seeing the crisis coming while there is still time to change its course.
That is what the New Democratic Pact for Europe is for.
A Council of Europe fit for our time
As crises accelerate, politics is collapsing into the short term. The Pact forces us to look beyond the next crisis and face what the Council of Europe must become.
That is why we are reforming our Organisation, a process begun in Reykjavík in 2023. It is a reform by our member States, for our member States. It serves peace and stability, while the Pact serves democracy. Both rest on democratic security.
This concept of democratic security was born for moments like this. In 1993, it was the Council of Europe’s commitment to Europe’s new democracies. Today, from Belgrade to Budapest, democracies need it again. It needs the same commitment, in a form fit for our time.
The reform has one aim: to strengthen the Council of Europe’s role and effectiveness in a changed Europe.
In this Europe, we need warning before a crisis arrives, somewhere to meet while it lasts, and legal support once it is over.
No one stands closer to people than you today in this room. In Ukraine. On the environment. On artificial intelligence. Wherever Europe needs local democracy.
You have supported the Pact and the reform from the start.
Next March, you will adopt your own contribution to both. I value this greatly, and I look forward to it.
From Novi Sad, for all of Europe
Dear members of the Congress, ladies and gentlemen,
Two days ago, young people in Serbia did what many said was impossible. Not with violence. Not with silence. With a vote.
They have done their part. Now we must do ours.
Thank you.
© Council of Europe — 51st Session of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities