Find below an article by Angelos Parmatzias, member of the Youth Ambassadors Group, for his experience at the World Forum for Democracy 2014.
I have to admit that every time I am getting involved with the procedure of democratic dialogues, I end up having more questions than answers. The reason is simply because there are so much that can be done for the survival of democracy, but unfortunately almost none of the pre-discussed theories is being implemented; a fact which inevitably raises a variety of queries: Who is actually responsible for the failure of such an implementation; in other words, is the failure interwoven with the capitalistic mode that society tends to espouse,οr is it eventually associated with the mentality of each citizen separately? Because, only when we are capable to identify the reasons which lead us to a weak democracy, the problem will get closer to its solution.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Angelos Parmatzias’s report on World forum For Democracy 2014

Angelos Parmatzias
From participation to influence: can youth revitalise democracy?
Strasbourg, 3-5 November 2014

World Forum For Democracy 2014 was a lifetime opportunity to meet people from 100 different nationalities who were concerned about the democracy in their country. It was impressive to realize how democracy can affect our daily life in a way that we usually do not notice. Indeed, democracy does affect the way we feel about our nation or about the hope we hold for our nation and its people in as much nowadays it remains the only available mechanism which operates on behalf of other peoples’ voice.

As regards our case, the ‘World Forum for Democracy’, the young participants deriving from all over the world, from Peru to Tanzania, managed to bring with them some innovative, brilliant ideas for the revitalization of democracy, which were based on the promotion of new measures such as sophisticated online voting, direct democracy and liquid democracy. In the basis of all these stimuli, I consider that we would have become better democrats than previous generations, if we had truly been interested for the prosperity of our nations and not merely about our families or ourselves.