U18-Election in Europe

Since 1996, there is the format "U18 Election - The Election for Children and Youth" in Germany (further information, unfortunately currently only available in German, on www.u18.org). For the election to the Bundestag, European elections, state elections, etc., political discussions about the future are at the center of public interest. This also concerns children and adolescents, they ask themselves questions and express political wishes. At this point, U18 starts: Out of curiosity, political education grows.

U18 elections are always held nine days before an official election date, so that the election results of children and adolescents are heard well in advance of the "right" election.

For this year's European elections, we had over 1,100 polling stations across Germany and were able to inspire 120,000 children and adolescents to vote symbolically.

The idea is now to collaborate with partners from the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland and Italy and to do the following together:

Step 1:
We invite you to Germany to jointly consider whether we can implement U18 in your country for your next major election.

2nd step:
We visit each of the four countries and, together with their young people, think about how we can implement U18 organizationally and in terms of content.

The further steps are then: Observations and youth meetings with joint project week and final participation in the U18 election in Germany (2021), in the Netherlands (2021), in Sweden (2022), in Poland (2023) and Italy (2023). Everybody then carries out his own U18 European election in his country in 2024. Together we will then be able to get more attention from the interests and issues of children and adolescents.