Time for the Conference on the Future of Europe to start

In a democracy, trust is never a given, warn MEPs. After a transformative year, Europe needs an open debate on what comes next, or we risk losing the public.

It was the year a pandemic kept us all at home, and the EU set up an unprecedented bond programme to deal with the economic fallout.

When authoritarian tendencies in Europe thundered on, and anti-democratic spoilers both within and outside the EU actively promoted mistrust in public policies. When one of Europe's biggest mem...