Democracy in Europe Movement 2025


The Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, or DiEM25, is a left-wing European political alliance. It operates as a pan-European umbrella for subsidiary parties sharing the same name and branding, and runs electoral lists with other affiliated parties. Despite its organisation and sometimes being referred to as a "European party" or "transnational party", DiEM25 does not meet the requirements to register as a European political party.
DiEM25 was founded by a group of Europeans, including Yanis Varoufakis and Srećko Horvat. The movement was officially launched at ceremonial events in 2016 in the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin and on 23 March in Rome.
DiEM25's tendencies are alter-globalisation, social ecology, ecofeminism, post-growth and post-capitalism. Implementation of a universal basic income is widely defended among its members.
The acronym DiEM alludes to the Latin phrase carpe diem. To highlight the urgency of democratising Europe, the movement had set the horizon for the year 2025 to draft a democratic constitution to replace all European treaties. Yet, it failed to elect representatives in the European Parliament up to the 2024 European elections.

Aims

DiEM25 argues that the people of Europe need to seize the opportunity to create political organisations at a pan-European level. Its participants consider that the model of national parties forming fragile alliances in the European Parliament is obsolete and that a pan-European movement is necessary to confront the great economic, political and social crises in Europe today. In its analysis, the movement considers that these crises threaten to disintegrate Europe, and which possess characteristics that are similar to those of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
DiEM25 seeks to create a more democratic Europe. They see the European Union becoming a technocratic superstate ruled by edict. DiEM25 aims instead to make Europe a union of people governed by democratic consent through a policy of decentralisation. DiEM25 cites eight distinct elements of European governance by compulsion, the first of which is "hit-squad inspectorates and the Troika they formed together with unelected 'technocrats' from other international and European institutions". Adding that the establishment is "contemptuous of democracy" and "all political authority from Europe’s sovereign peoples".
DiEM25 would like to act as an umbrella organization, gathering left-wing parties, grassroots protest movements and "rebel regions" to develop a common response to the five crises Europe faces today, namely debt, banking, poverty, low investment and migration. Further, DiEM25 wishes to reform EU institutions, originally designed to serve industry, so that they become fully transparent and responsive to European citizens. Ultimately, DiEM25 envisions European citizens writing a democratic constitution for the European Union.
Adopting a bottom-up approach by mobilising at a grassroots level, the movement aims to reform the European Union's existing institutions to create a "full-fledged democracy with a sovereign Parliament respecting national self-determination and sharing power with national Parliaments, regional assemblies and municipal councils" in order to replace the "Brussels bureaucracy". Among others, the movement is supported by prominent American linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, Italian philosopher Antonio Negri, American anthropologist Charles Nuckolls, American economist James K. Galbraith and former Labour MP Stuart Holland. Diverse figures including Julian Assange, film director Ken Loach, Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, British Labour politician John McDonnell, Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen, Franco Berardi and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek are on its advisory panel.
DiEM25 supports the petition "Transparency in Europe now!", requesting the live broadcasting of the meetings of major European institutions, a comprehensive list of all Brussels lobbyists and the electronic publication of all TTIP negotiating documents. DiEM25 describes itself as internationalist and promotes a foreign policy where non-Europeans are "ends-in-themselves".

Policies

The democratisation of Europe Union is the motivating force behind DiEM25.The overwhelming consensus within the movement is that the EU will either be democratised, or it will disintegrate. Democracy in Europe shows partial democratic backsliding.
Ultimately the goal is to achieve a Europe of reason, liberty, tolerance, and imagination, all of which will be made possible by comprehensive transparency, real solidarity and authentic democracy. DiEM25's priorities are:
  1. Full transparency in decision-making and
  2. The urgent redeployment of existing EU institutions in the pursuit of innovative policies that genuinely address the crises of debt, banking, inadequate investment, rising poverty and migration.

    European New Deal

DiEM25's European New Deal addresses the following issues:
  • Taming finance by regulating banking and establishing a new public digital payments platform that ends the monopoly of banks over Europe's payments.
  • Ending precarity through an Anti-Poverty Program, a Social-Housing Program and a job guarantee Program.
  • Fixing the Euro and saving the Eurozone requires the abolition of self-defeating austerity and minimising the cost of its disintegration where it has occurred.
  • Pan-European coordination between Eurozone and non-Eurozone countries to maximise Europe's recovery, optimise the economic and social outcomes across Europe, and address the major environmental and socioeconomic factors causing involuntary mass migration.
  • Green investment linking central banking operations with public investment programs and the new public digital payments platforms.
  • A Universal Basic Dividend which can democratise the economic sphere and construct a pathway towards a post-capitalist economy.

    Green New Deal for Europe

The Green New Deal for Europe is a policy platform, drawing on the knowledge and experiences of researchers, activists, practitioners, and communities around Europe. The coalition's landmark policy report, the Blueprint for Europe’s Just Transition, maps out the policies and strategies needed to make the just transition a reality across Europe.
The proposals it sets out fall into four themes:
  • Pathways to the Green New Deal for Europe explores the grassroots organizing and mobilizing strategies that can help advance the agenda for a just transition.
  • The Green Public Works is an investment plan to power Europe's green transition and simultaneously build a just, equal and democratic economy.
  • The Environmental Union is a new regulatory framework for the just transition, aligning Europe's laws with the scientific consensus and legislates for sustainability and solidarity.
  • The Environmental Justice Commission is an independent body who will research, monitor, and advise EU policymakers to advance the cause of environmental justice across Europe and around the world.

    Agenda

The movement proposes a Progressive Agenda for Europe for which DiEM25 is developing common whitepapers centred around eight pillars. Each whitepaper is created with input from all of DiEM25's members as well as a range of experts in the respective fields.
  1. Transparency: Introducing transparent government across Europe, to expose and end the opaqueness of European institutions’ meetings and summits, while also ensuring that all relevant documents and protocols of trade negotiations are made public. In March 2016, only a month after the movement's launch, the Transparency in Europe Now! campaign was set up and demanded that all EU decision-making take place under the scrutiny of its citizens’.
  2. Refugees and Migration: DiEM25 calls upon Europeans and their elected representatives to overrule the EU-Turkey Agreement, and thus end the EU's practice of “sacrificing human lives and basic humanist principles on the altar of appeasing xenophobes and ultra-nationalists”. The primary target of this campaign is the controversial EU-Turkey Agreement, which came into effect on 20 March 2016. This agreement was the latest in a long line of developments in EU-Turkey relations. Involuntary migration is a huge crisis facing Europe. With no jobs or prospects at home, Europeans move because they must. DiEM25's view is that walls and fences are not the solution and that only shared investment can end the crisis of precarity.
  3. The European New Deal: Rationalising Europe's economy in line with the initiatives outlined under DiEM25's Policies as outlined above. Europe is plagued by chronic crises: debts, banks, poverty, investment, and involuntary migration. DiEM25 aims to unite progressive forces across Europe to develop solutions to these crises and subsequently mobilise to make them a reality. For years the EU establishment has pretended that the crises was over, congratulating themselves on fixing the problems they created in the first place. But the crises have not only not gone away, but have instead deepened.
  4. Labour: Issues around labour, technology, employment and the distribution of income, moving beyond the capital-labour contract, and basic income.
  5. Ecological Transition: Imagining a post-capitalist economic and social model, as outlined above, in the section on The Green New Deal for Europe.
  6. A European Constitution: Imagining a democratic pan-European constitution and the how that could be achieved.
  7. Technological Sovereignty: DiEM25 believes that technological progress can go hand in hand with political and social progress – by putting human flourishing at the centre of all technological change. For this reason, the main objectives are the establishment of a Digital Commonwealth in Europe to counteract the power of platform monopolies, as well as the Democratisation of Innovation. Technology monopolies have gained a tremendous power to shape perceptions on knowledge and information, while simultaneously avoiding any democratic accountability of that power. Since technology has become a central tenet of power in today's society, any power must ultimately belong to the sovereign citizens of a technologized society. The Tech Pillar promotes an ambitious plan to achieve Technological Sovereignty, which is seen as the right of citizens, while giving agency to democratic institutions to make self-determined choices regarding technology and technological innovation.
  8. Vision for Culture: From its beginning, DiEM25 has placed arts and culture at the heart of its vision of a democratic Europe. The on-going crisis in Europe is not only economic, nor only political. We are also in the throes of a severe crisis of culture: ‘the disintegration, destruction or suspension of some basic elements of sociocultural life.’ The Movement's mission is dedicated to developing a new vision for culture in Europe and providing a platform for its expression; all in a way that connects rather than divides people.