From Spectators to Actors: Citizens Take a Seat at the Enlargement Table
Strategy / Advocacy / Design / Conference / Training
Photos from the Montenegro Forum
Enlargement has long been negotiated in rooms citizens rarely enter, between capitals, ministries, and Brussels. This September 2026, Albania and North Macedonia are changing that. In Tirana from 18 to 20 September, then in Skopje from 25 to 27 September, one hundred citizens in total, drawn by lot, will sit down not only to be informed about enlargement, but to shape what their countries bring to the table.
These are the Citizens' Forums of Albania and North Macedonia, organized by the European Parliament through its Democracy Support and Election Coordination Group (DEG), in cooperation with the Kuvendi, the Sobranie, and local partners IDM in Tirana and the ZIP Institute in Skopje. What about Dem designed the deliberative architecture and trained the facilitators for both, as it did for Montenegro twice and Kosovo.
A political choice, not a technical exercise
Enlargement is usually framed as a technical negotiation: chapters, benchmarks, timelines. These Fora make a different, more political statement: that the people who will live with EU membership have a legitimate claim to help define its terms. Citizens selected through stratified sortition to reflect each country's demographic diversity will spend three days doing what elected chambers rarely have time for: learning together, deliberating without a predetermined outcome, and drafting recommendations from a blank page. MEPs and national MPs take part as resource persons, not as influencers of the deliberation, present to answer, not to steer.
A thread across a region
Albania and North Macedonia are the second and third of six national Fora running across the Western Balkans, each confronting the region's real fault lines (rule of law, economic opportunity, youth unemployment, brain drain) before converging in a transnational Regional Forum in Brussels. Citizen rapporteurs carry each country's conclusions to the next, building a single continuous conversation between six nations rather than six separate consultations. And the institutions are not walking away once the room empties: the European Parliament, European Commission, and national parliaments have committed to a formal, public response to every recommendation within six months.
Why this matters to us
At What about Dem, we don't see this as a communications opportunity or an awareness campaign. We see it as evidence that enlargement can be built differently, with citizens as co-authors of the process, not an audience informed of its outcome. Turning citizens into actors of their country's European future, rather than spectators of a negotiation conducted elsewhere, is a genuine political shift, and we're proud to accompany the European Parliament in making it happen.
