Are citizens’ assemblies on the decline in an era of eroding democracy?

While the Citizens’ Assembly 2025 went ahead at the national level in Switzerland last year, a similar project in Geneva was cancelled at short notice by local authorities in early 2026. Keystone / Alessandro Della Valle

In Switzerland, a long-planned citizens’ assembly was cancelled by Geneva authorities shortly before it was due to begin. With similar developments observed internationally, are these democratic tools in crisis?  

In recent years, around 20 citizens’ assemblies have taken place in Switzerland at local, cantonal and national levels. A key question is whether the experimental gatherings can help develop political solutions.

Canton Geneva had planned a citizens’ assembly for democracy that was scheduled to start in March. Citizens selected by lot were to discuss how democracy could be improved in the canton, which has a population of around 500,000.

“In Switzerland, we are sometimes caught in a perfection trap,” says Victor Sanchez-Mazas, a political researcher at the University of Geneva. Since Swiss democracy performs well in international comparisons, problems such as low voter turnout are overlooked. Sanchez-Mazas spent years preparing the project for a citizens’ assembly along with university colleagues and government officials.

Geneva pulls plug on citizens’ assembly

This preparatory work now appears to have been in vain. At the end of February, the canton cancelled the citizens’ assembly, at least for 2026. The move followed a resolution passed by a majority in the cantonal parliament opposed to the assembly. The project lacked a “specific mandate” and existed in a “vague institutional space”, the parliamentary majority criticisedExternal link. There was also criticism over the transparency of the funding.

Sanchez-Mazas says the decision sends “a bad signal at a time of global democratic backsliding”. Geneva’s politicians, he says, may have overlooked Switzerland’s role as a champion of democracy.

Citizens’ assemblies are no panacea for problems such as populism or polarisation. Yet Sanchez-Mazas is convinced that democracy must engage citizens and keep evolving. “We should not see the democratic institutions from the 19th century as no longer perfectible,” he argues.

The Geneva citizens’ assembly was intended as an open debate on how to strengthen democracy. Instead, it made headlines for its last-minute cancellation rather than any new ideas. A thousand people had registered to participate.

Momentum after Irish citizens’ assembly success

By Swiss standards, the rejection was abrupt. But is the decision part of a broader global trend?

Democracy is losing ground, and populist parties are gaining support in many places. For decades, the world has grown more autocratic. Against this backdrop, many welcomed the news in 2018 that a citizens’ assembly in Ireland had helped to pave the way for broadly supported abortion legislationExternal link. The idea of bringing randomly selected citizens together in the form of assemblies was gaining momentum.

Many saw the solutions-oriented, intensive exchange of arguments – known as deliberation –  as bridging the gap between elected-party politics and citizens. Unlike polarised referendum campaigns, such assemblies were intended to prevent populist decisions and develop workable solutions.

Ireland is “regarded as a pioneer in the use of citizens’ assemblies”, says the country’s official website, while also noting: “There is currently no active citizens’ assembly.”

The situation in Germany and Belgium

In Germany, the new federal government abolished the “citizen participation unit” in 2025.

The association Mehr Demokratie criticised the decision, noting that citizens’ assemblies were “booming everywhere” – at least at the local level. Around 50 local processes take place each year in Germany, and activity at the level of the federal states has reached a “record high”, the association tells Swissinfo.

The most active examples can be found in Belgium. In German-speaking regions, they are an key part of local politics. “Belgium is further ahead than Switzerland: we have been experimenting with citizens’ assemblies for 25 years,” says Julien Vrydagh, an associate professor in social sciences at Hasselt University. “In the German-speaking regions, where politics are less polarised and many politicians work part-time, I haven’t noticed any slowdown.”

The situation is different in Brussels and in French-speaking Wallonia. There, so-called deliberative committeesExternal link have a legal basis within the political system. Yet no new proceedings have been launched since 2024. A citizens’ assembly on climate issues took place in 2025. “Citizens’ assemblies are part of the institutional landscape by law, but there is a lack of political will to activate them,” says Vrydagh.

The political right is critical of citizens’ assemblies

The reason lies in shifting majorities. “Right-wing parties are now the largest political force in both regions,” Vrydagh explains. “They are critical of citizens’ councils. They find the processes too expensive.”

In Geneva, too, a centre-right parliamentary majority opposed the project. Vrydagh sees a fundamental problem in the relationship between citizens’ assemblies and elected officials. “Citizens’ assemblies are always dependent on the goodwill of politicians,” he says.

This could be avoided if their recommendations carried more political weight. “For example, if citizens’ councils had the right to veto legislative proposals from parliament, parliament would have to work with them,” he says. He also points to another approach: letting the public initiate a citizens’ assembly themselves, as is already possible in Belgium’s German-speaking community.

According to Vrydagh, it was primarily the Greens in Belgium who promoted citizens’ assemblies. “The Greens had a huge agenda for democratic reform,” he says, and worked to build broad acceptance.

He also criticises the current government in Wallonia for failing to act on the recommendations of a climate citizens’ assembly. One of the “biggest risks of citizen participation”, he argues, is setting up assemblies without using their results. “Then it will backfire. If you don’t take up the recommendations, people feel instrumentalised. Not even just the participants, but the entire public following the project,” he says, referring to the “French situation”.

The national climate assembly in France

Following the Yellow Vests protests, President Emmanuel Macron convened a national climate council to draft measures that would be widely accepted – unlike the policy proposals that had sparked the protests in the first place.

However, the authorities implemented only a very small number of the 150 proposals put forward by the citizens’ assembly.

Macron’s “highly public U-turn on the promise of an unfiltered adoption” may have “reinforced mistrust of political institutions”, says a scholarly analysisExternal link of climate citizens’ assemblies in several countries.

Part of the politicisation of a democratic instrument: activists from the radical climate action group Extinction Rebellion calling for a citizens’ assembly in autumn 2022, whilst chaining themselves to the fence outside the British Parliament. Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved

Rikki Dean, an associate professor of politics at the University of Southampton, contributed to this analysis. He cites another reason why such assemblies might fail: their politicisation.

This could also be a factor in the Geneva case.

In general, Dean has observed an increase in citizens’ assemblies in recent years, “especially on climate topics”.

The politicisation of citizens’ assemblies

Yet, according to Dean, citizens’ assemblies are “increasingly seen as a left-wing intervention”.

He outlines where support lies across the political spectrum: “The centre-left and, more surprisingly, the environmental left have been very in favour of these processes, but reactions of the centre-right have been quite mixed, varying from country to country.” The far right, he adds, is generally very critical of the format, preferring more direct forms of participation such as referendums.

According to Dean, this politicisation complicates organisation and makes discussions more difficult during sessions. “Deliberative mini-publics’ key claim to legitimacy is to produce public opinion that is representative of society,” he argues.

However, if right-wing voters perceive the process as left-wing and stay away, it becomes hard to “genuinely recruit a representative sample and hear the full range of discourses on a topic”.

Lessons from Geneva?

Dean still sees movement in the field. In Finland and the US, researchers are exploring how artificial intelligence can help moderate deliberative assemblies. The research is “still embryonic”, he argues, but could one day make such processes more cost-effective and accessible.

Perhaps the cancellation of the Geneva citizens’ assembly is, after all, a useful lesson. “One of the problems of this field of research is that it often focuses on the best cases and ignores the failures,” Dean adds. “So we don’t tend to know much about failure, which makes the Geneva case interesting.”

Edited by David Eugster. Adapted from German by Patrick Julian Huwyler/gw