Home › Archive › In the Media › Seznam Zprávy | The voice of the people is the voice of God. 150 Europeans will help decide on 30 trillion crownsSeznam Zprávy | The voice of the people is the voice of God. 150 Europeans will help decide on 30 trillion crowns
The European Commission invited 150 randomly selected people to Brussels, who advised it over the course of three weekends on what the EU budget for the next seven years should look like. The current budget operates with a sum of €1.2 trillion, or just under 30 trillion Czech crowns. Economic analyst Filip Křenek from the Institute for European Policy EUROPEUM explains this for SZ Byznys.
20. May 2025
The selection of panelists is overseen by a network of agencies specializing in participatory democracy and representation in citizens' panels across Europe. The goal is to achieve a representative sample, similar to how public opinion polls are conducted.
Of course, you can’t take the opinion of an average citizen and directly apply it to the allocation of a multi-billion budget. Despite how the Commission describes the initiative, I see the whole thing more as a public opinion survey, and it's hard to say whether the proposals will actually be reflected in the final figures. In the Czech Republic, we’re not used to this model, but in countries like Switzerland it works – and the very creation of a platform through which the Commission can learn what people want to see in the budget makes sense.
You can read the full article here.
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