On Sunday, 10 November, the European Forum of Left, Green and Progressive Forces adopted a declaration in which the participating members want to make the forum more active by developing an action plan for the year 2020 so as to advance the programmatic content in the final declaration.
One source explains, “We are going to ask the different moderators for the different workshops organised during the forum to bring forward the concrete ideas and proposals that were presented” with a view to organising campaigns and political actions in a coordinated way. A working group would be entirely dedicated to this task.
And that is, indeed, the desire of members of the Forum, who want to consolidate the working group that has been operating since the first European Forum in Marseille in 2017 (see EUROPE 12001/21) by establishing “policy coordination with representation of the three pillars making up the Forum”—these three pillars being the radical Left, the social democrats, and the Greens. This policy coordination would be supported by executive coordination to ensure that the tasks for the coming year are followed up and developed.
Thus, the European Forum has reportedly consolidated its foundations a little more following the 2018 edition in Bilbao, where the establishment of permanent coordination had already been discussed (see EUROPE 12135/6). The plan to fight these challenges has been expanded and refined around seven main priorities with the continued aim of reviving the original spirit of the spirit of the 1945 Manifesto of Ventotene (available here: https://bit.ly/2XcspGu ).
The range of participants at the forum has expanded. “Now the People!” co-founder Jean-Luc Mélenchon was notably among the speakers, even though he had distanced himself from the Party of the European Left (see EUROPE 12050/8), which had strongly influenced the first editions of the forum. In particular, the Greens were much more present at this forum than the one held in Bilbao, with the presence of Belgian Greens/EFA Group Co-president Philippe Lamberts.
To consult the final declaration: http://bit.ly/2KcpDM8 (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)