Agora Brussels started less than two years ago as a grassroots citizens’ movement to reboot democracy in the Belgian capital. Earlier this year, after months of relentless campaigning and grassroots organising, Agora ran for the regional elections and managed to get a foothold in local politics by gaining one seat at the Brussels Regional Parliament.
Pepijn Kennis was nominated as one of the candidates on Agora’s electoral list at the local elections in May 2019, and he now sits as an MP for Agora. Agora is a unique political party, in that it doesn’t have any political programme to speak of: its only agenda is to organise a permanent citizens' assembly, promote its institutionalisation for the region of Brussels, and defend its decisions in Parliament.
During our conversation over Skype, Kennis admits that Agora’s strategy of running in elections might seem counterintuitive at first. “As a movement, we’re very much inspired by the book Against Elections by David Van Reybrouck,” he tells me from his office in the Regional Parliament. Agora shares Van Reybrouck’s view that elections nowadays tend to prioritise short-term thinking at the expense of genuine democracy. But for activists in the movement, getting elected was a crucial strategy that would allow them to affect real change in Brussels’ political system:
