The European Citizens' Initiative: how it actually works

On 7 July 2026 the European Commission registered the citizens' initiative «Introduction of Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) throughout the EU». It is the 132nd initiative registered since the instrument came into existence.

That number, 132, is itself informative: it tells you the instrument is used. The history of the previous 131 tells you how hard it is to carry through.

What it is, concretely

The European Citizens' Initiative is the only instrument of direct democracy in the treaties. It allows a group of citizens to formally ask the Commission to propose a legal act in an area of Union competence.

The route has four stages, and each of them eliminates most attempts.

The organising committee. At least seven citizens resident in seven different member states are required. For the basic income initiative the representative is the Austrian Klaus Sambor, and the supporters include Unconditional Basic Income Europe, a network of activists across twenty-five countries.

Registration. The Commission checks that the request falls within its competences and is not manifestly contrary to the Union's values. It is an admissibility check, not an assessment of merits.

This point is routinely misunderstood and needs stating plainly: registration is not approval. The Commission has not endorsed basic income and has undertaken nothing. It has said the request is formally in order.

Collection. The organisers have six months from registration to open the collection, which then runs for twelve months. One million signatures are required, and that is not sufficient on its own: they must exceed a minimum threshold in at least seven member states, calculated in proportion to each country's number of MEPs.

It is a requirement designed to stop an initiative passing on the mobilisation of a single large country. It has a harsh practical effect: a million signatures concentrated in three countries is worth nothing.

The response. If the threshold is reached, the Commission meets the organisers, the initiative is discussed at a public hearing in the European Parliament, and the Commission must respond formally within six months, explaining what it intends to do and why.

The limit to state immediately

The Commission is not obliged to propose anything. It is obliged to respond and to give reasons.

That is less than many people imagine, and anyone presenting a signature as a vote that «introduces basic income» is misleading them. Several initiatives that reached the threshold received courteous answers and no legislation.

But it is also more than it sounds. A reasoned public response forces a position to be taken: the subject can no longer be dismissed as marginal, because a document exists that explains why nothing is being done. And that document becomes the starting point for the next round of argument.

The 2020-2022 precedent

An attempt on basic income had already been made. The initiative launched in September 2020 asked for unconditional basic incomes across the Union, at an amount above the at-risk-of-poverty threshold, which European statistics set at 60% of national median equivalised disposable income.

That collection closed on 25 June 2022 and failed. In June 2022, two weeks from the deadline, roughly 243,000 signatures had been gathered: less than a quarter of the threshold.

It is a figure supporters of the new initiative would do well to look at squarely. It is not enough for an idea to poll well: signature collection requires organisation on the ground in at least seven countries, and in 2022 that organisation did not exist.

Why they usually fail

Looking at the instrument's history, some recurring reasons emerge.

Signing is more complicated than a click. An identity document or a national identification number is required, depending on the country. It is a necessary safeguard against fraudulent signatures, and it is also a filter that removes most people with good intentions and little patience.

Almost nobody knows the instrument exists. An initiative without media coverage or an organised network behind it never comes close to a million.

The seven-country threshold requires real coordination. You need active structures in countries with different languages, media and political sensibilities. That is exactly what most campaigns lack.

Why the national threshold is the real bottleneck

This requirement deserves attention, because it decides the outcome and almost nobody knows about it.

The national threshold is calculated in proportion to a country's number of MEPs. So large countries need tens of thousands of signatures and small ones a few thousand. But the overall count and the per-country count are independent: you can exceed a million and still fail because only six countries reached their local threshold.

It is a deliberate requirement with a logic: it prevents an initiative backed by a single member state from obliging the whole Union to discuss it. But it turns the campaign into a logistical problem before a communicative one.

The practical consequence is counter-intuitive. Persuading ten more people to sign in a country where the threshold will probably be met is worth less than persuading one acquaintance in a country where the campaign is weak. In European initiatives, the value of a signature depends on where it is deposited.

What changed since 2020

There is a difference, and it lies in how the 2026 initiative is argued.

The organisers do not start from poverty: they start from artificial intelligence and robotics, arguing the urgent need to decouple livelihoods from the ability to sell one's labour, because soon there will not be enough jobs to go round.

It is a precise communicative choice. The poverty argument speaks to people already persuaded that the state should intervene; the automation argument speaks to people who have a job and fear for it. The second pool is enormously larger and crosses political lines.

Whether that will be enough to multiply the previous attempt's signatures fourfold remains to be seen. But it is a reasonable hypothesis about why this time might go differently.

The initiatives that worked

So as not to leave the impression that the instrument is useless, it is worth recalling that some initiatives reached the threshold and produced concrete effects.

The most cited concerned water as a human right and its exclusion from internal market rules: it gathered over 1.8 million signatures and led the Commission to specific commitments on transparency and drinking water quality, later folded into a revision of European legislation.

Another concerned animal testing, another glyphosate: both produced formal responses and, to differing degrees, changes in policy.

The pattern that emerges is recurrent: the initiative rarely obtains what it asks for literally, and almost always shifts the terrain of the discussion. That is a modest result for anyone expecting a law, and a considerable one for anyone who knows the timescales of European policy.

What a person can actually do

Three things, in order of usefulness.

The first is to sign when the collection opens, and to check on the official portal that it really is open before signing anything anywhere else.

The second, more effective than the first, is to get others to sign. The arithmetic of these campaigns is unforgiving: a million signatures in twelve months means roughly three thousand a day, every day, for a year, spread across seven countries. No campaign reaches that rate on spontaneous sharing.

The third is to watch the national thresholds. Each country has a minimum proportional to its MEPs. In small countries that threshold is reachable with a few thousand signatures, and it is there that one person's effort weighs most. An initiative that misses the threshold in a single country fails even with two million signatures overall.

What happens to the signatures

A practical note for anyone hesitating on privacy grounds.

Statements of support collected through the official system are handled under European data protection rules and used exclusively for verification.

If the initiative does not reach the threshold, the signatures are destroyed within the prescribed period. If it does, they are transmitted to national authorities for verification and subsequently destroyed.

Organisers do not receive signatories' personal data in a form usable for other purposes. That is a substantive difference from petitions on private platforms, where collecting addresses is often part of the point.

On realistic timescales

Anyone expecting a European framework within one parliamentary term does not know the precedents. Areas where the Union has built substantial coordination have generally taken between ten and twenty years from the first credible proposal — and the results have usually been partial.

That is a reason to start now rather than a reason to give up. It is also a reason to be careful about what is promised: campaigns that suggest a signature produces a policy generate, at the first non-committal institutional response, a sense of futility that discourages future participation more than any defeat.

What a citizens' initiative can realistically obtain is a reasoned public position from the Commission on a question that is currently not on the agenda. For a proposal that has stayed off that agenda for half a century, that is where the discussion starts.

In brief

This article addresses one part of the problem, not the problem. A basic income creates no jobs, teaches no trades, does not fix pensions and does not replace the services that answer unequal needs. The claim argued on this site is narrower: that it is, among the available instruments, the one that makes the others workable. Training requires being able to live while training; changing occupation requires being able to be wrong; refusing indecent conditions requires being able to afford refusal.

Three objections remain standing, and this site gives each of them a page: the cost, which is real and requires serious fiscal choices; the effect on rents in markets with inelastic housing supply; and the absence of a credible transition plan. None of them shows the proposal is wrong. All three show it is not ready, which is why the demand made here is not immediate introduction but a serious European trial and a public study putting costs, routes and losers on the table.

If anything on this page is wrong or badly argued, telling us is the most useful contribution available: the address is on the Contact page, and reasoned corrections are published.