DiEM25 members from across Europe and beyond have voted, and our renewed Coordinating Collective (CC) has emerged.
Meet the women and men chosen to guide our movement in the months ahead!
Yanis Varoufakis read mathematics and economics at the Universities of Essex and Birmingham and subsequently taught economics at the Universities of East Anglia, Cambridge, Sydney, Glasgow, Texas and Athens where he still holds a Chair in Political Economy and Economic Theory. He is also Honorary Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Honoris Causa Professor of Law, Economics and Finance at the University of Torino, and Visiting Professor of Political Economy at King’s College, London. In February 2016 Varoufakis co-founded DiEM25.
Background in Law and MA in International Relations. NGO Worker – Amnesty International and Academia do Futuro, Trade Policy Editor at Politheor – European Policy Network and Translator. Professional and Volunteer experience with NGOs in Portugal, Serbia and Kosovo dealing with Human Rights, Truth and Reconciliation, Victim Support and Education and Training.
Paola Pietrandrea is an Italian linguist based in Paris, Paola taught at the universities of Bologna, Roma La Sapienza, Leuven, Nanterre, Roma Tre and Tours, where she currently works as an associate professor of Linguistics. Actively engaged in the social and cultural inclusion of migrants, she has co-founded and she coordinates the local association Nogent d’ailleurs. In the summer of 2015, she wrote Avevamo un’altra meta, a travel journal through a Europe in crisis. she joined DiEM25 in 2016, coordinates the Paris1′ DSC, and is a member of the French PNC.
Marianne Dufour coordinates the DSC Lyon and is a member of the French PNC. After 12 years as a logistician-electrician on oil survey ships, then in the French polar scientific stations in Antarctica, Marianne is not afraid to engage in a movement that aims at democratizing Europe: Technical challenges and hostile environments are common to her. She is an astrophysicist, musician and experienced mountaineer. Settled near the Mont Blanc, she now manages logistics projects for emergency services while organizing treks and mountaineering ascents.
Born in 1983 in Osijek (Croatia), from early age until the early 1990s Srećko lived as a political refugee in Germany. Upon returning to Croatia, he finished primary school and high school, and earned degrees in Linguistics and Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. Instead of pursuing a customary academic carrier, Srećko participated in many “occupy” movements in the Balkans, and founded and directed the Subversive Festival from 2008-2013 in Zagreb. He has published more than 10 books translated into more than 15 languages, most recently “Subversion!”, “What does Europe Want?” (with Slavoj Žižek), “Radicality of Love”, etc. Srećko regularly publishes for the Guardian, Al Jazeera, and many other leading newspapers. He is one of the co-founders of DiEM25.
For the past 7 years she has focused on collective learning dynamics that bring about large-scale systemic innovation, with emphasis on the energy transition. As Researcher at TIDES University Institute in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Visiting Professor at Jaume I University in Castellón, she explores and designs for the individual behaviours and group interactions, physical and virtual, that enable good ideas to flow from far flung sources into the configuration of better systems and services. Her students practice with systems thinking and design to address the bigger picture of violent extremism by walking in the shoes of people at risk of involvement.
Previous experience includes leading projects, at the Club of Madrid, supporting public consultation on political reforms in Ecuador; constitution building in Bolivia; and new ways for grassroots women to leverage their differences to influence national, regional and global policy on peace and security in the Greater Horn of Africa. Past research includes acclaimed simulation-based exploration with bitterly divided stakeholders into the potential strengths and pitfalls of re-writing the Bolivian constitution. “We drew on the South African experience to design the experiment commissioned by the Bolivian National Congress.” She cut her teeth in the world of complex, unscripted, interdependent work with Médecins Sans Frontières in the early 1990s.
Lorenzo has been working for another Europe since 2007, when still a student he founded European Alternatives, a transnational network and NGO (which is still going strong!). Since then, he has spent many years crossing the continent weaving together movements, activists, and citizens, in a constant attempt to create the pan-European political and cultural space we so badly need. In 2016 he was among the initiators and first CC members of DiEM25. Lorenzo holds degrees in Philosophy and Sinology.
The newcomers above will be joining Renata Ávila, Rosemary Bechler, Noam Chomsky, Brian Eno, Elif Shafak and Agnieszka Wiśniewska on our 12-person CC.
While the following candidates did not win election to the CC this time around, we thank them all for participating and hope they’ll continue working with us. DiEM25 needs you and your commitment to make our movement better!
Runner-up candidates: Ivana Nenadovic (35%), Thomas Seibert (23%), Alexander Nitschke (19%), Signe Tørå Karsrud (19%), Aral Balkan (18%), Michael Fromm (16%), Tony Robinson (15%), Kevin Skelton (14%), Tony Pratschke (11%).
The power of grassroots
By making their voices heard in this pivotal internal democratic process, our members have sent a loud message to the status quo: at DiEM25 we really mean it when we say that we believe in grassroots power!
This is exemplified by the 15 DiEMers who ran for a seat in the CC, as they all represent the pan-European, grassroots essence of our movement: women and men from very different backgrounds and countries, and from across the political spectrum. They all stand together ready to fight for the movement we all believe in. No other political organisation can pride itself on this level of openness and inclusivity, at such an international scale.
Background to the vote
Following DiEM25’s Organising Principles (OPs), six of the twelve seats in the movement’s CC were up for renewal this summer. Candidates could send their submissions from June 25 until July 25, and the voting period, which started on August 1, ended at midnight yesterday.
Candidacies to the CC were open to all DiEMers who adhered to basic criteria like how long they have been a member of the movement, and how much time they could give to working on the CC, among others.
Similarly, to ensure transparency and a genuine democratic process, voting was open to members that joined the movement before the elections were announced. Additionally, members’ accounts needed to be verified and active, for them to be able to vote.
As with all DiEM25´s internal democratic procedures, all transnational votes had equal value and were anonymised upon being cast. Furthermore, our members voted as per our OP’s gender-balance principles.
In addition, and though they were not required to do so this time around, our co-founders, Yanis Varoufakis and Srećko Horvat, decided to put their seats up for contest to further underline DiEM25’s democratic spirit.
The next CC elections will take place in the summer of 2018.
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