Direct Democracy: Citizen Initiatives Come to Europe

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Leo Cendrowicz, Time Magazine, 07.04.2010

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What do Europeans really want? Lower taxes? Longer holidays? More chocolate? We may soon find out thanks to a new innovation in the European Union: citizens' initiatives.

Meant to bring everyday Europeans closer to the E.U. institutions that govern them in distant Brussels, the direct democracy experiment allows citizens to sling their concerns onto the E.U. agenda. [...]

And Janis Emmanouilidis, an analyst at the European Policy Center, a Brussels-based think tank, believes it could backfire. "One million people is a low threshold and it risks falling prey to a 'tyranny of minorities' backed by resourceful and well-organized interest groups," he says. [...]

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