Ungrateful, for Good Reason

First of all, thank you so much for being here, sincerely. It is important. I'm going to do my best to meet the high expectations about explaining the new Democratic Pact. I prepared for this, I promise. I really did. I'm saying this just in case it doesn't immediately, or maybe not at all, become evident later on—but I did.

I know many of you, but not all, and vice versa. So, first, let me introduce myself. My name is Matjaž Gruden. I'm Director for Democracy at the Council of Europe, which means I'm responsible for the areas of youth, education, media, civil society, and culture and heritage. But I'm also here as the person the Secretary General asked to coordinate the preparation of the new Democratic Pact for Europe, which I guess is a dubious honor—at least we’ll know who’s going to be blamed internally if things go sideways in the end. But they won’t. And if it goes well, there’ll be somebody who gets to take the credit.

But before I start about the New Democratic Pact, just a few words to explain the context, part of where I see the Democratic Pact coming from—where I think it’s most important, particularly regarding young people and their contribution to it.

Let me start with a story. This happened to me in June. Sorry if anyone’s already heard it—it was one of the more interesting things that’s happened to me in the last couple months, so I might have mentioned it before.

I was invited to a European school in Strasbourg as a parent, not as the Director for Democracy. The history and political science teachers invited several parents from the Council of Europe—there were people from Slovenia, Albania, Ukraine, Romania—to talk to students about our experiences with transitions to democracy. We were there as parents from countries that had undergone that transition, telling our stories. It was a great event. It was Friday afternoon in June—I could tell the students’ attention wasn’t at its peak initially, but honestly, they were brave and stuck with us through the session. There were a lot of moving and very relevant, heartfelt testimonies from my colleagues, recalling times of enormous political and social changes, about 30 years ago or so.

What struck me is that, nearly every time, the conclusion was the same: it was hard, but now democracy is here, freedom is here, and you should be grateful that you live in freedom and democracy.

I felt, well, uncomfortable with that conclusion. All our experiences were different—it wasn’t the same growing up in Slovenia (then Yugoslavia) or Albania—and sure, specifically for that group of young people in Strasbourg, the material standard of life has improved a lot. But the idea that young people should be grateful for what they have bothered me. So I couldn’t help myself—when it was my turn, I said, “Don’t be grateful. Be angry, be demanding, be critical—but don’t be grateful.” And I could see the principal and teachers in the corner starting to sweat profusely.

So I had to qualify a bit. I said, you have to be all three—not just angry, not just demanding, but also critical. And critical doesn’t mean just flipping off everything you don’t like—being critical means thinking critically. Look for facts, listen to other people, be critical of yourself, test your opinions, and then be angry and demanding.

So I think I got away with the principal there. The reason I said this is, for the first 25 years of my life, I didn’t live in a democracy. Yugoslavia may not have been the worst of them, but it certainly wasn’t a liberal democracy. I can tell you that. Materially, we had less and so on. But there was a huge advantage: when I was the age of those students, I had no doubt the future was going to be better, and that I was going to be a part of that change.

That’s the difference: that confidence in the future, that sense of empowerment, that certainty that things would get better, maybe not for everyone and not in every aspect, but collectively. That sense is no longer there. That’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for democracy because if people lose confidence in their future, and that loss is replaced by uncertainty or fear, it creates a space for things like manipulation and what is now called democratic backsliding. It applies to young people, but not only young people.

The Secretary General, Alain Berset, in a recent interview for Newsweek described the last 20 or 25 years as a “perfect storm.” And it’s true. If you were born around 2000, you’ve had it all: the financial crisis, the first Ukrainian war, COVID, the migration crisis, another economic crisis, the second Ukrainian war—you name it. Every time, it seems that whatever bad stuff fate throws at us, young people get the double serving.

This has clearly affected young people’s perceptions, attitudes, and motivation to sustain, engage, and participate in democracy. And that’s really the essence of the new Democratic Pact. It’s about finding ways to restore confidence in democracy today. Not renegotiating what democracy is, not horse-trading over which values matter more, which group perhaps deserves less attention or protection, whose rights we can set aside, but finding new, effective ways to make democracy resilient against all the challenges we’re facing.

The overall concept is “democratic security”—security through democracy, based on the understanding that security isn’t only about hard security, though hard security concerns do exist, but sometimes it’s even more important to achieve security through a properly functioning democratic system. Society must invest in a culture where people support, engage, and participate in democracy, because otherwise, democracy erodes—not from tanks and artillery but from someone pressing on its neuralgic points, exploiting fragility and polarization. It can collapse from within. That’s the idea: we need both forms of security.

The Pact has several phases. We’re in the earliest one now, which started when the Secretary General presented it to ministers in May. There were a couple of events already, but the youth event and ministerial session are really among the first major milestones. The first stage is called consultation—or conversation. It’s about bringing people together, even those not normally heard, listening to them, being critical, identifying problems: why have people lost confidence, why are they disengaging from democracy, and what are we doing, are there things that should be done differently.

The next stages will be shaped by this conversation. Your contributions will be taken into account for the next steps.

At a certain point, all these contributions, ideas, and proposals will be collected, analyzed, and synthesized—the most important or innovative ones will be transformed into concrete policy proposals for Council of Europe member states. That’s when the real work begins. The exercise isn’t just about making fancy declarations, but about changing the situation—democratic backsliding isn’t just a technical issue, it’s political, ideological, economic, so it requires a political response. The Pact is also there to create momentum and coalitions for democracy, and what happens this week is part of building those coalitions.

I’ll wrap up, because I want to hear your questions. But I also want to say how the youth sector in the Council of Europe and advisory council have played a vital role in the Democratic Pact—long before the Pact was formalized. The youth perspective is already emerging as one of its most important outcomes—it started in Reykjavik in 2023, and even before. There’s been 50 years of co-management—hugely important—but the youth perspective takes it even further. For example, the “no hate speech” campaign started by young people, demanding something be done at a time when nobody else was talking about polarization. Now everyone talks about it.

The fact Reykjavik happened in 2023, with two main priorities—to support Ukraine and respond to democratic backsliding—was also thanks to young people's contributions. The 50 recommendations of the Democracy Here – Democracy Now, not only helped to pave the way to the Summit, they also represent a highly relevant contribution to the Pact.

In closing—I can’t give you a complete, clear picture of what the Pact will look like in the end, because that’s the point. If we already knew, we wouldn’t need all these phases. The final shape of the Pact relies also on your inputs. This meeting and this conference are really important milestones.

In conclusion and in short, let me return to the notion of ungratefulness. The idea behind this youth event is to extract from this congregation of ungrateful brats the reason why you are so ungrateful, and then, together, find reasons to make you happier. If we figure that out and make it happen, together, the chances are we’ll get a happier and a more democratic world for everyone.

Thank you.