Why Italy’s new citizens’ assembly on the future matters for democracy

On May 13th, in the beautiful premises of Teatro Regio in Parma, Italian civil society launched the journey towards Italy’s first National Assembly on the Future: a citizens’ parliament made up predominantly of young people, designed to reflect on what Italy wants to become by 2050 and beyond. The project is part of Ecosistema Futuro, a coalition promoted by the Alleanza Italiana per lo Sviluppo Sostenibile that brings together more than 100 universities, research centres, public institutions, civil society organisations, youth groups and businesses.

The Assembly will convene between 100 and 150 residents, alongside experts and researchers, to confront some of the defining questions of our time.

How should Italy respond to demographic decline? How to respond and adapt to climate change? How will education be in 2050? What is the future of labour and free time? How to cope with and use AI for the common good? How to respond to the housing crisis, especially for young people? What kind of cities and services do we need? How to ensure wellbeing for all within planetary boundaries?

The Assembly aims at mobilising people and promoting a nation-wide conversation in a time when representative institutions suffer from short-termism and lack of youth representation. The electoral cycle is by nature a disincentive to think and invest in long-term policies, exactly those that are needed to address some of the biggest challenges of our time. Young people are also severely underrepresented in decision-making processes and affected by power-dynamics, notwithstanding they will experience most of the impact of current decisions over climate, the environment, debt or tax structures. Lastly, future generations – those not even born yet – have no voice at all, even if we are, in these very days, shaping the future they will live in.

The Assembly will start in 2027 in Parma - then the European Youth Capital - and present the first set of proposals to the Italian Parliament in the second half of 2027. The Assembly will draw lessons from the experience of civic assemblies worldwide and locally in Italy, and follow well-established international standards.

What will happen in 2026?

If 2027 is the year the Assembly will start, 2026 will be devoted to design its rules and refine its thematic agenda. A “Constituent Council” has been set up composed of 40 Italians under the age of 35, representing every region of the country and backgrounds ranging from entrepreneurship and academia to activism and public administration. A group of “mentors” including former prime ministers, constitutional experts and scientists will support them. Names include Giuliano Amato (former PM and Constitutional Court President), Mario Monti (former PM), Paola Severino (former Minister of Justice), Silvana Sciarra (former Constitutional Court President), Gianfranco Fini (former Congress’ President).

In the meantime, across the county, several more informal civic participation moments (i.e. Piazze sul Futuro) will take place to gather inputs about the “future people desire” for 2050, trying to intercept those that are traditionally excluded from the debate.

Institutional space

The Assembly will not happen in an institutional vacuum. Over the last years, we have witnessed in Italy and worldwide a major shift in the promotion of future generations’ rights, long-term thinking and foresight – the methodology the allows to explore futures in front of us combining science and participation. The Assembly will be possible because of a ground-breaking 2022 reform that introduced in the Italian National Constitution the “interests of future generations” (Art. 9), and a law passed in October 2025, that requires an ex-ante and ex-post intergenerational fairness assessment of all the laws. The Assembly draws also inspiration from the UN Pact of the Future (2024) and the recently approved EU Intergenerational Fairness Strategy, itself built also through a citizens’ panel.

Are we still capable of imagining the future?

Beyond the practical, policy-making aspect of the Assembly, this experiment solicits a deeper reflection on our ability as society to imagine the future. Not predicting it but shaping it. Designing it collectively rather than simply waiting for events to overtake us.

In recent years, we have become extraordinarily good at imagining collapse. Climate catastrophe, democratic decline, artificial intelligence escaping public control — dystopia now dominates political. and cultural discourse. Yet ask people to describe a fairer, greener and more democratic society thirty years from now, and uncertainty quickly sets in. Or, because of the challenges of our every day’s life – material challenges or the self-induced hustle culture – we have stopped thinking about possible futures in front of us. It is the crisis of imagination many authors have written about.

This matters because imagination is not an abstract luxury. It is a political necessity. Societies unable to imagine better futures lose the capacity to build them. They stop acting and begin merely reacting. Existing systems are endlessly patched rather than fundamentally rethought. The future still arrives, of course — but increasingly on terms set by a narrow minority with the power and resources to shape it.

Confronting short-termism, distrust, and youth disempowerment

Italy offers a particularly striking example of this crisis. For decades, public debate in the country has been trapped in the short term. Governments are dominated by electoral cycles, businesses by quarterly returns, media by permanent outrage. Every challenge becomes an emergency to manage rather than an opportunity to rethink the future. Strategic vision gives way to tactical survival. The consequences are visible everywhere, especially among the young.

Between 2006 and 2024, more than 1.6 million Italians left the country, while only around 800,000 returned. Among them were tens of thousands of graduates and skilled workers in their twenties and thirties. This is usually described as “brain drain”, but the phrase feels inadequate. What Italy is losing is not only talent, but hearts, energy, relationships, confidence and hope.

And yet the familiar narrative of disengaged youth is deeply misleading. Research from Italy’s Toniolo Institute found that three out of four young people still consider politics essential to democracy and to their own lives. Nearly 80% said they would participate more actively if meaningful spaces for engagement existed. The problem is not apathy. It is exclusion.

Young Italians are repeatedly told that they are “the future”, while being systematically denied influence over it. Alongside political short-termism and generational exclusion sits another corrosive force: distrust. Recent polling by the Italian Alliance for Sustainable Development and the Piepoli Institute paints a bleak picture (Barometro sul Futuro, 2026). Only 22% of Italians feel optimistic about the country’s future. Three quarters believe governments do not act in the interests of future generations.

These numbers matter because imagination depends on trust. To imagine a better future requires more than hope; it requires believing that institutions are still capable of change.

And yet pessimism is not destiny.

As the philosopher Karl Popper argued, the future is always open. There is no single predetermined path, only multiple possibilities competing to become reality. Even in periods of rapid transformation, societies retain the ability to choose direction rather than drift passively toward it. The above mentioned 2022 Constitutional Reform opened up concrete opportunities. But laws alone are not enough. Institutional reform without cultural change rarely survives.

Creating a space to debate the future again

What democracies need are spaces where citizens can collectively debate the future again — not only experts and policymakers, but ordinary people; not only older generations defending existing arrangements, but younger generations imagining alternatives. This is the goal of the National Assembly on the Future: delivering legitimate, solid, effective policy proposals, but also igniting in the country a national conversation about the future.

Democracy itself depends on recovering the ability to imagine common futures, rebuilding trust and reinforcing the social contract between people and institutions. It takes courage and confidence to shape the future collectively before someone else does it for us.