The Conference on the Future of Europe is a unique deliberative continent-wide experiment, bringing together citizens across the European Union (EU) to discuss its future. At the same time, the Conference is chaired by EU institutions, with the European Parliament (EP), in particular, considerably more supportive of it than most national governments. While designed as a bottom-up forum for listening to citizens, the Conference thus offers an opportunity for Europarties and their EP groups to both engage with their activists and to shape the agenda and debates of the Conference.

This report examines how successful the three largest political families or Europarties – the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the centre-left Party of European Socialists (PES), the centrist Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) and their EP party groups – have been in shaping the agenda and debates of the Conference. The report addresses three main research questions. First, it explores the avenues and strategies through which the Europarties and EP groups have sought to influence the Conference: coalition-building in the Parliament, and links with the Commission, national member parties, and European political foundations that are linked to the Europarties. Second, it analyses the division of labour or balance of power between and within Europarties and their EP groups relating to the Conference. Third, it assesses the priorities of these partisan actors in the Conference. And, more normatively, it discusses whether ‘political parties at European level contribute to forming European political awareness and to expressing the will of citizens of the Union’, as outlined in the EU Treaties, through investigating whether the Europarties ‘reached out’ to the citizens or at least to their own individual members before and during the Conference.

The theoretical framework of the report focuses on the importance of agenda-setting in EU politics and on the strategies of Europarties and the EP groups in previous rounds of constitutional reform. The empirical analysis, drawing on interviews and documents, is divided into three parts. The first examines the inter-institutional bargaining in the run-up to the Conference, the second the actions and strategies of the Europarties and the EP groups before and during the Conference, while the third analyses the positions of the supranational partisan actors in the Conference. 

The results show how the Conference, like the EU in general, has an important transnational partisan dimension. Europarties, and particularly the well-resourced EP groups, benefiting from decades of experience of Treaty reforms and inter-institutional bargaining, managed to shape the agenda and also the debates of the Conference. These supranational partisan actors clearly prioritized items related to EU democracy and institutions but displayed less effort in reaching out to the citizens. Inside the Parliament the party groups built large coalitions behind resolutions, with group chairs strongly present in the process. Europarties played a much smaller role, while the political foundations were highly active through organising events and producing background material. Content analysis reveals considerable similarity between the institutional objectives, although differences were also found – for example, regarding transnational lists for EP elections. The concluding section summarises the findings and discusses how our study contributes to an understanding of EU democracy and the role of Europarties and EP groups in shaping the future of Europe.