Problems and Purpose

European democracy faces a deepening crisis of legitimacy. Citizens across the continent feel increasingly disconnected from the institutions that govern their lives, while the EU's mechanisms for citizen engagement remain largely confined to periodic elections and occasional consultative exercises that rarely translate into meaningful policy influence. At the same time, Europe has endured a succession of overlapping crises — the 2008 financial collapse, the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate-related disasters, and rising inequality — each of which has exposed the fragility of existing democratic arrangements and the limited role afforded to ordinary citizens in navigating them.

The Democratic Odyssey (DO) was conceived in response to this dual challenge. Its core purpose is to demonstrate that a permanent, transnational citizens' assembly is both possible and necessary. The pilot assembly launched in 2024 pursues this goal by engaging randomly selected citizens in multilingual, cross-border deliberation on how Europe can better prepare for future crises, and how citizens themselves can become more effective democratic actors. The project operates simultaneously as a grassroots campaign and as a proof of concept, seeking to build the political and institutional case for a permanent Peoples' Assembly at the European level.

Crucially, the assembly was not designed to produce binding recommendations. As the project manager Irene Alonso Toucido explained in a May 2026 interview, the Democratic Odyssey is best understood as 'more of a campaign than a list of recommendations that would materialise.' The aim is to demonstrate that transnational deliberation at scale is feasible, and that citizens themselves can generate the legitimacy needed to make the case for a permanent institution.

Background History and Context

The Democratic Odyssey was initiated by a consortium of European civil society organisations and academic institutions, led by the European University Institute's School of Transnational Governance (EUI-STG). Its conceptual roots lie in two overlapping traditions: the ancient Athenian practice of citizen assemblies and sortition, and the modern global movement for deliberative democracy that has produced citizens' juries, deliberative polls, and national citizens' assemblies in countries including Ireland, France, and Canada.

The project emerged from deliberations within a Constituent Network — a broad coalition of civil society actors, academics, practitioners, and journalists — who engaged in a lengthy process to identify a topic for the 2024/25 pilot assembly. This process followed clear criteria: the topic should be a pressing social issue with cross-cutting political relevance, forward-looking rather than retrospective, and resonant across national boundaries. The relationship between democratic governance and crisis management emerged as the shared concern that united the network's diverse membership.

The timing of the Athens launch — September 2024 — was deliberately chosen to coincide with the beginning of a new EU institutional cycle, following the European Parliament elections.

Organizing, Supporting, and Funding Entities

The Democratic Odyssey is coordinated by the European University Institute's School of Transnational Governance. The broader consortium comprises more than twenty partner organisations spanning academia, civil society, deliberative democracy practice, and journalism, including European Alternatives, Particip-Action, Missions Publiques, Democracy International, DemocracyNext, the Berggruen Institute, Real Deal, The Good Lobby, Sortition Europe, and GloCAN, among others.

The Athens Assembly meeting was co-funded by the European Union, the Salvia Foundation, the Berggruen Foundation, and the Region of Attica. The event was held under the auspices of the City of Athens, with public endorsement from Mayor Haris Doukas. Three levels of Greek government — local, regional, and national — were represented at the launch, with politicians from each level expressing commitment to follow the assembly's proceedings. The Athens moment also saw the endorsement of Former Prime Minister George Papandreou and MEP Nicolas Farantouris.

The Democratic Odyssey operated without any formal institutional mandate from EU bodies. As Irene Alonso Toucido noted, the absence of institutional backing had direct operational consequences: 'We were pretty short on money to operationalize each of the assemblies, and this also meant that the translation system was very ad hoc, depending on where we were.' Following the completion of the Vienna assembly in May 2025, the project lost its funding. However, the campaign continues through the Citizens' Council — formed by assembly volunteers after Vienna — and through the Citizens Takeover Europe network, of which European Alternatives, a core consortium partner, is a member.

Participant Recruitment and Selection

Participant selection followed a rigorous sortition methodology designed to produce an assembly reflecting European society in its diversity. The process was supported by specialist foundations including the Sortition Foundation (Budapest) and the QED Foundation (Athens), alongside the DO's own core team. The assembly drew from eight distinct recruitment pools spanning two spheres. In the transnational sphere, members were randomly selected from across the EU through civic lotteries and door-to-door outreach, with a second stratification stage ensuring balance across gender, age, education, socioeconomic background, and country of origin. Additional transnational pools included citizens who had expressed interest in previous EU panels but were not ultimately selected, alumni of previous deliberative processes, and representatives of transnational civil society organisations. In the translocal sphere, Greek residents of Athens and Attica were recruited as host members, alongside non-Greek Europeans living locally, non-European residents including migrant workers, expats, and refugees, and members of local civil society organisations.

The Athens meeting brought together 205 participants from 44 countries, alongside 20 professional facilitators, more than 20 observers from across Europe and beyond, and an operational team of 10 individuals. Travel and accommodation were covered for all participants.

The recruitment experience varied considerably across the three cities, revealing both the strengths and limitations of the sortition model in different cultural contexts. According to Irene Alonso Toucido, the Athens recruitment was the most robust, managed through a specialist marketing company that combined door-knocking, telephone outreach, and broad population coverage. In Florence, EUI students visited homes across the city, with a notably warm reception from residents. Vienna, by contrast, proved considerably harder: residents were more guarded, frequently asking who was sending the recruiters and whether the municipality was formally backing the initiative.

The project made deliberate efforts to reach what Alonso Toucido described as 'easy-to-ignore' groups. In Athens, the team was in direct contact with refugee organisations, LGBTQ+ communities, and migrant networks. Despite these efforts, demographic variation across cities was visible: Athens achieved the most socially diverse assembly; Florence skewed towards university-educated participants partly due to the city's composition and the EUI's local networks; and Vienna, where approximately 40% of the population lacks voting rights, underrepresented migrants and non-citizens despite outreach efforts.

Methods and Tools Used

The Democratic Odyssey employed a rich combination of deliberative methods designed to foster genuine cross-cultural dialogue and collective intelligence. The three-day Athens programme was structured around four thematic moments, each using distinct participatory formats.

The opening session introduced a 'buddy system' pairing transnational members with local Athenian residents — one Greek, one non-Greek — to embody the assembly's translocal ethos from the outset. Members co-designed metaphorical 'tapestry sails' by sharing personal crisis experiences in small groups and agreeing on collective mottos.

Saturday morning divided participants into 14 smaller groups to deliberate on lessons from past crises, using a structured framework of three guiding questions: what democratic practices should be kept, what should change, and what should be invented anew. Facilitation followed the DO's 'compass' principles, which emphasise storytelling, lived experience, and connections between local and transnational perspectives. Facilitator notes from all groups were compiled and synthesised by the operations team; an AI aggregation tool was initially trialled but abandoned as inadequate, with human synthesis replacing it. Draft outputs were subsequently shared with participants in online sessions and refined through further rounds of feedback.

Saturday afternoon introduced a futures-thinking exercise: participants role-played a 2029 polycrisis scenario involving climate catastrophe, mass migration, a waterborne virus, and geopolitical tensions. Four stakeholder roles — citizen, media representative, industry actor, and policymaker — allowed cross-sector negotiation. Playback theatre complemented the role play by transforming personal testimonies into improvised performances, deepening empathy across cultural and linguistic divides.

Reflecting on the distinctive methodological choices, Alonso Toucido highlighted the centrality of culture and emotion in the DO's design: 'There had to be a way in which participants would rapidly connect with the topic at stake — not through knowledge, but rather through emotions or even culture.' She noted that while institutions often resist arts-based deliberation as seeming insufficiently serious, the theatrical and storytelling elements were genuinely effective at enabling dialogue and were, in her view, transferable to other contexts beyond Greece.

Sunday's final session took place on the historic Pnyx hillside, where Athenians gathered and took collective decisions for over two centuries. Members refined the collective assembly message through a process inspired by the ancient Athenian practice of placing written amendments under pebbles. Ambassadors to the Florence assembly were then selected by random hat draw conducted by the youngest participant present. An international group of observers from Chile, India, Turkey, South Africa, and the United States provided independent evaluation of the Athens meeting, with ongoing assessment planned for subsequent sessions.

Between in-person sessions, the project used the Decidim open-source platform as a digital hub for document sharing, online discussions, and open data publication. The platform also hosted the Citizens' Charter and assembly composition data, and remains publicly accessible.

What Went On: Process, Interaction, and Participation

The Athens meeting produced substantive deliberative outputs across all three days. Members drew on their diverse experiences of crises — the Greek financial crisis, COVID-19, floods, migration, and the war in Ukraine — to identify patterns in democratic failure and resilience. A consistent thread emerged around the inadequacy of top-down governance, the power of civil society during crises, and the democratic deficit created when emergency measures are used to sideline citizen input.

Language proved to be a significant practical challenge. The multilingual setting was managed through a combination of professional interpreters in plenary sessions and volunteer translators in small groups. Alonso Toucido acknowledged that this arrangement created real informal barriers in practice: those who spoke English were faster and more fluent in discussions, while non-English speakers required additional time and support to contribute on equal terms.

The assembly's collective message, adopted on the Pnyx on Sunday 29 September, articulated the shared aspiration for a permanent assembly capable of 'more participatory democracy via regular and transparent deliberation between people, and involving policy makers, scientists, industry and journalists, that leads to concrete commitments and actions at local, regional, national and transnational levels.' A Youth Council was also initiated at Athens, with thirty younger members aged between 16 and 29 committing to establish a youth assembly in collaboration with the Municipality and Region of Attica.

Not all 205 Athens participants attended every subsequent meeting. Approximately 50 Athens members travelled to Florence, and approximately 50 Florence members travelled to Vienna. A core transnational group attended all three in-person assemblies. All sessions were livestreamed, allowing members who did not travel to participate online and observe proceedings.

Influence, Outcomes, and Effects

The Democratic Odyssey explicitly positioned itself at the agenda-setting rather than decision-making stage of the policy process. Its outputs are non-binding, but the project pursued institutional influence through multiple channels: collaboration with MEPs and Council members on how the assembly's campaign might feed into future EU-organised Citizens' Panels; engagement with the Council of Europe through Papandreou's role as General Rapporteur on Democracy; and a public campaign to build political support for a permanent EU People's Assembly.

The full assembly cycle concluded in Vienna in May 2025, where members produced a Citizens' Charter outlining ten democratic pathways to crisis resilience. A Citizens' Council composed of volunteer assembly members was established to ensure follow-up. As of May 2026, this council continues to meet fortnightly, organises its own events, and actively campaigns for a permanent citizens' assembly at EU level — an outcome that was not formally planned but emerged from participants' own continued commitment.

Alonso Toucido offered a candid assessment of the outcomes: 'When it comes to political impact, we might not have the results we wanted, but there are all these other things' — specifically the transformation of individual citizens' political engagement, the demonstrated capacity of a transnational assembly to function effectively, and the ongoing advocacy work of the Citizens' Council and Citizens Takeover Europe network. She noted that participants arrived for very different reasons, but those focused on EU politics were fully aware of and comfortable with the non-binding nature of the process from the outset.

Following the Vienna assembly, the project lost its primary funding. The Democratic Odyssey as a formally funded initiative has concluded, but the campaign infrastructure it created — the Citizens' Council and the Citizens Takeover Europe network — continues the work of advocating for a permanent People's Assembly for Europe.

Analysis and Lessons Learned

The Democratic Odyssey represents one of the most ambitious attempts yet to operationalise transnational deliberative democracy at scale. Its eight-pool sortition model, multilingual facilitation across 44 countries, and travelling format across three European cities are design features that distinguish it from previous citizens' assembly experiments.

Several practical observations emerged from the process. The variation in recruitment outcomes across cities — with Athens performing most strongly and Vienna encountering the most resistance — illustrates how the effectiveness of door-to-door sortition is shaped by local cultural and administrative context. The absence of a pre-existing civic registry or sortition infrastructure added significantly to operational costs, an observation Alonso Toucido linked directly to the question of long-term sustainability: the model is more viable when built on permanent institutional infrastructure than when constructed from scratch for each cycle.

The multilingual format required significant logistical adaptation throughout the process. Professional interpretation was available in plenary sessions, but small group settings relied on volunteer translators, which created uneven conditions for participation across language groups. Participants were fully aware that the assembly's recommendations were non-binding, and many remained engaged well beyond the formal process — a dimension of the project's legacy that was not part of the original design.

The project also demonstrated that arts-based facilitation methods — including storytelling, playback theatre, and scenario role play — can be effective tools for enabling rapid connection among diverse participants at the opening stages of a deliberative process. According to Alonso Toucido, these methods are not specific to the Greek cultural context and can be adapted for use in other settings, including more institutionalised deliberative processes.

See Also

Conference on the Future of Europe (2021-2022)

European Citizens' Panels

Irish Citizens' Assembly

British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform

Participatory Budgeting, Porto Alegre

Citizens Takeover Europe

References

Democratic Odyssey (2024). Europe Comes to Town: The Democratic Odyssey's First Assembly Meeting in Athens. Published December 2024. Available at: https://democratic-odyssey.k8s.osp.cat

Democratic Odyssey (2025). Citizens' Charter: Ten Pathways. Available at: https://democratic-odyssey.k8s.osp.cat/assemblies/travelling-assembly/f/236/

Democratic Odyssey (2024). Assembly Composition and Sortition Methodology. Available at: https://democratic-odyssey.k8s.osp.cat/assemblies/travelling-assembly/f/51/

Smith, G. (2009). Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation. Cambridge University Press.

Alonso Toucido, I. (2026). Interview conducted by Matheus M. dos Santos, 7 May 2026. Democratic Odyssey Project Manager. Transcript on file with the contributor.

External Links

Democratic Odyssey Digital Platform: https://democratic-odyssey.k8s.osp.cat/

Democratic Odyssey Main Website: https://democraticodyssey.eui.eu/home

Citizens' Charter: https://democratic-odyssey.k8s.osp.cat/assemblies/travelling-assembly/f/236/

Athens Assembly Livestream (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/live/taJofDiTjKw

Athens Full Report (PDF): https://democratic-odyssey.k8s.osp.cat/rails/active_storage/blobs/redirect/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBBdXdHIiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--02c359187688e243a58dfb6cbe08750f15a13a4b/Full%20report-DO%20First%20Assembly%20meeting%20in%20Athens_17.12.2024_def.pdf

Notes

This case study focuses primarily on the 2024/25 pilot assembly cycle, with particular attention to the first in-person assembly meeting in Athens (27-29 September 2024), which is the most comprehensively documented moment of the process. The Florence and Vienna sessions are referenced where relevant. All interview material is drawn from a semi-structured interview conducted with Irene Alonso Toucido, project manager of the Democratic Odyssey, on 7 May 2026. The interview transcript has been reviewed and approved by the interviewee for use in this submission.

Contributor Positionality Statement

This case study was produced as part of a third-year undergraduate assignment in the course Reinventing Democracy at the University of Southampton. The contributor has no personal affiliation with the Democratic Odyssey project. Primary sources include the publicly available Athens Assembly report (December 2024), the Democratic Odyssey digital platform, and a semi-structured interview conducted with the project manager in May 2026. The interview provided additional context on recruitment methodology, language dynamics, resource sustainability, and institutional relationships that is not fully captured in the written report. The contributor acknowledges that reliance on both organisational documentation and a single insider perspective as primary sources may mean that the case description reflects the project's self-presentation and the interviewee's personal viewpoint more than an independent external evaluation. This limitation is in part structural, as independent evaluations of the full 2024/25 cycle are not yet publicly available at the time of writing.