The IYTT at the 2026 Athens Democracy Forum

From 29 September to 1 October, IYTT joined the 14th Athens Democracy Forum (ADF) in Athens, Greece. This year, for the sixth year in a row the IYTT had speakers in the ADF agenda and attended the conference represented by Youth Fellow and Project Coordinator Elena Vocale, Youth Fellows Vinkha Adinda, and Director and Co-Founder Urban Strandberg. Organised by the Democracy & Culture Foundation in association with The New York Times, the Forum brought together political leaders, academics, journalists, civil society representatives and young leaders to examine the challenges facing democracy and how democratic systems must evolve to remain fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.

I had always assumed that if I were given the opportunity to speak about democracy, I would be defending it. Instead, Athens challenged me to look beyond the institutions we seek to preserve and ask more fundamental questions: what do we expect democracy to deliver, whom does it serve and do the systems we have built give people meaningful agency over the decisions that shape their lives?

I had the opportunity to take these questions to the stage at the opening debate of ADF, where I argued against the motion on whether democracy is still fit for purpose, against a team that included Dalia Grybauskaitė, the former President of Lithuania.

Arguing against the motion was not an argument against democracy itself, but an opportunity to examine the gap between its ideals and practice. With thanks to Urban and Elena for helping me prepare, we worked through what it meant to challenge a system we still believe in, grounding our case in three fundamental tests: democracy must deliver, protect and empower.

Making that case also meant looking beyond political theory and drawing on what I had experienced firsthand, as well as what we had seen through our work at IYTT.

Last year, I represented Indonesia at the G20 Youth Summit in South Africa, which concluded without a joint statement for the first time in fifteen years. It left me questioning what representation means when it fails to translate into collective action. At IYTT, the question of protection took on a different meaning. Following our seventh IYC25 in Washington, DC, our report was published without contributors’ names for the first time, amid concerns about the risks of publicly associating their identities with their political views.

If the G20 experience made me question what participation can achieve, this made me consider what it can cost. Together, these experiences shaped our argument around a broader question: what does it mean to participate in a democracy if people cannot influence its outcomes, or do so without fear of the consequences?

This was a question Urban also explored alongside Clare Byarugaba, one of only a few openly LGBTQ+ rights advocates in Uganda and diversity, equity, and inclusion officer at Chapter Four Uganda; and Patrick Gathara, a journalist, editor, political cartoonist, and writer, and senior editor for inclusive storytelling at The New Humanitarian; Tayo Clyburn Chief Strategy Officer and Senior Advisor to the President at CKF, and Paloma Dallas, Senior Program Oficer for Democracy Around the Globe at CKF, in a panel organized by the Kettering Foundation, Inclusive Democracies: What Does It Mean for Those Democracy Has Written Off? 

One difficulty with talking about inclusion is that it can make exclusion sound like a problem of access. If people are missing from political institutions, the apparent solution is to bring them in. But exclusion can persist even when that door is open. Political systems make decisions about which issues reach the agenda, which forms of evidence carry weight and which demands can be accommodated without challenging the status quo. These choices shape whose experiences become matters of public concern and whose are left at the edges of political debate.

This matters because people do not enter democracy on equal terms. Some already have the networks, resources and institutional access to make their concerns difficult to ignore. Others must first persuade the system that their concerns are worth hearing at all. The language of inclusion can obscure this difference if it focuses on who is present without asking who has the power to define the terms of participation.

These questions about inclusion and belonging took on a different dimension during our Open Chair Democracy Talks (OCDTs), a method for emancipation and empowerment, which the IYTT started six years ago in Athens in the very same neighborhood as we ran OCDTs this years. On the second day, we left the conference setting with four Greek university students attending the conference and went into the streets around the Stoa of Attalos, speaking with people in Athens about how they understood the changes taking place around them.

I had the chance to speak with a local shop owner about how Athens had changed and how young people were leaving Greece in search of better opportunities. There is something unsettling about the idea that a city can still be home to so many people, yet feel increasingly difficult for its younger generation to build a future in.

Of course, democracy cannot promise everyone a good life in the place where they were born. People leave for all sorts of reasons and wanting to experience something beyond home is not necessarily a sign that anything has gone wrong. But what happens when leaving begins to feel less like a choice between different possibilities and more like the only way to find them?

For me, this comes back to what we expect democracy to do. We can look at whether institutions survive, whether elections continue and whether power changes hands peacefully. But those measures tell us less about how people feel about the future they are being asked to share. A democracy can remain intact on paper while the sense of possibility that gives it meaning slowly erodes. And I wonder whether we pay enough attention to that distance between a system continuing to function and people still believing in what it might make possible.

Not to disappoint you all, but I left Athens without resolving the question that framed our opening debate: whether democracy, as it exists today, is fit for purpose. I did, however, return with a clearer sense that its future depends on more than persuading people to participate.

Participation cannot substitute for institutional responsiveness, nor should the burden of sustaining democracy fall entirely on those already trying to make their voices heard. Institutions must demonstrate that participation can lead to meaningful influence, that rights are protected in practice and that political systems can adapt when the people they serve challenge their assumptions.

These are questions we continue to grapple with at IYTT. We may not be able to guarantee what happens after a young person raises their voice, but we can help create spaces where they are heard, where their assumptions are challenged and where they can imagine a different relationship with the systems that govern their lives. For me, that is part of what makes this work worth doing!