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International audience; This article analyses the political significance of the protests that have arisen in Tunisia since the ʻrevolution’ and the establishment of a parliamentary regime. This is what the protests studied have in common: they belong to neglected regions in the country’s hinterland; that they mobilise young local populations; they claim rights over their territories’ soil and subsoil resources exploitation; they occupy a strategic location for a relatively long period of time; and they set up democratic mechanisms for these locations’ self-management, in the form of ‘coordinations’. The description of social logics and the way populations resist, as well as the authoritarian rationality of government action and the inability of elected officials to mediate conflicts, reveal differences between protesters who seek autonomy from state control, while others refer to a rent-centred understanding of the claim. It also shows the emergence of a ‘protest democracy’, itself an expression of a crisis of ‘governmentality’. These two phenomena are symptomatic of a demand for integrating populations and new ways of governing that break with the reeks of past authoritarianism and current representative democracy.

Ten years after the introduction of participatory democracy as one of the democratic foundations of the European Union, this introductory chapter to "Citizen Participation in Democratic Europe" provides some theoretical background on the role citizens play, and should play, within the EU democratic system. As such, it offers a contribution about the place of citizen participation in the wider, ongoing debate about how to develop the EU’s democratic system in a post-pandemic Europe. It sets the scene for the subsequent chapters written, again, not only by academic scholars but also civil society advocates and practitioners from across Europe who experience on a daily basis the realities of EU citizen participation. Ultimately, this edited volume argues how Europe’s long-standing democracy challenge can be addressed through the emergence of a new model of EU citizen participation, and a set of democratic innovations emerging bottom-up across the continent. To do so, it offers a re-evaluation and systematisation of EU level citizen participation and its future development, which remains largely underexplored.

This time was supposed 'to be different', at least this was the motto of the 2014 European Parliament elections campaign. With less than a year before the next European elections, the time is ripe to examine how different this EU political cycle has actually been. Emboldened by the Spitzenkandidaten process – which established for the first time a link between the outcome of the EU elections and the presidency of the EU Commission –, the Juncker Commission emerged as the most political yet. To shrug off the label of technocratic institution – historically insulated from citizens’ preferences –, the new Commission asked EU citizens to judge its operation by its ability ‘to deliver solutions to the big issues that cannot be addressed by the Member States alone’. While the Better Regulation Agenda might have improved the Commission’s public accountability – with both citizens and stakeholders being better informed about and engaged with EU policy-making –, without however increasing its responsiveness to public preferences. This is the case at the input, throughput and output stage. Rather, the techno-political approach to policymaking – which characterizes the Juncker’s Better Regulation – might have paradoxically led to a compression of participatory democracy and somehow chilled stakeholder engagement. At a time of unprecedented contestation of the EU project – a trend which is combined by a record-demand for new forms of political representation –, it appears paradoxical that the EU – an early promoter of participation – is missing out the chance to seize the momentum to diversify and redesign its participatory structures being busy delivering on its electoral promises no one will ever judge.At the very same time the Juncker Commission has been striving to develop its own, autonomous democratic credentials, its choice to embrace a set of well-defined institutional mechanisms that reward expert judgment over political adjudication appears at odds with its newly-acquired political nature.