The Brussels Report podcast.

Welcome to a new episode of the Brussels Report podcast.

My name is Peter Glepper and I'm very happy to have as my guest today,

Dutch MEP Michil Hochveen. Michil, very welcome. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for

inviting me and having me here. Sure. So a small introduction.

Michil is an MEP, I think, for two years now.

Before that, he was working as an assistant to an MEP, from the same party, of course.

And before that, he has history in the financial sector in the Netherlands

worked with a big four company with with a stock storage bank if I can translate that well custodian of course yeah yeah well that actually makes more sense. Well, so very welcome, Michil.

Today, we will discuss, first of all, the conference on the future of Europe.

So our listeners are quite familiar with this exercise, which was started in 2021. I mean, already before the COVID crisis,

there were plans for it. It was delayed. And yeah, you have a very complex structure there

where an executive board controlling much of the action, the action much of the fun and experts giving

their opinions and working groups that are supposed to prepare plenaries coming up with all kinds

of conclusions that are i would say conspicuately similar to what people supporting a more federal Europe wants, right?

Yeah, so the conference on the future of Europe was initially thought of by Emmanuel Macron

when he was having problems in his own country with the yellow vest some time ago.

And he thought of a way to listen to the people.

He wanted to have the opinions of the yellow vests heard in his policy making.

So what he thought of was, well, this, and this is what new political parties see as an alternative to the, and I put it between brackets, populist referendum.

They want to initiate citizen panels.

So in order to have citizens involved in policymaking and politics, they invite them randomly selected citizens.

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