Conferência sobre o Futuro da Europa: uma resposta política à ameaça populista à integração europeia?

The Conference on the Future of Europe was launched in March, 2021 by the European institutions, with the aim of creating a platform for bottom up citizen participation in the definition of policy options for the “future of Europe”. This article analyses the institutional and party discourses on the Conference, in the framework of the reaction of those institutions and of the pro-integration parties to the mounting populist “threat” to European integration, notably as expressed in the outcome of the 2019 European Parliament elections. The author aims to establish whether in doing so the European Union is innovating, by overcoming conventional representative democracy participation and thus entering other complementary models. The article further discusses whether this new method bridges the gap with the citizens, whom populisms have tried to mobilize.