European Green Academy 2026

Welcome everyone to the European Green Academy. This is a fantastic opportunity for networking, for meeting other green-minded people. So who's in this room matters just as much as who's on this stage. In this edition, the hope lies. The darkness is that that is here right now. Let's develop strategies together to let the light in, to move away from the monstrous times we live in, when the old world is crumbling and the new one is struggling to be born, as Gramsci once stated. The solutions are in the room and that we all have lived experience and you're here because you want to change things. So we have to think that the world has changed and we need to do politics as a rebellion, and politics together, politicians, civil society, young activists. People worry about immigration not at an individual level. So if you ask is immigration a problem for your country, there's a sizable share in most countries that will say yes. If you ask is immigration a problem for you, nearly no one says yes. And if we think about medicines, right, when a medical device or a drug just randomly starts killing children, we don't shrug and say, oh, that's what it does. Someone shouldn't have given it to a kid. And yet we've got AI systems that are driving people in many cases to psychosis and suicide, not just children, but adults. We were getting death threats. They were doing protests about us. They were attacking us. But if you have people united around a positive value, there's no amount of money which can stop us. There are so many people who stood up for what was right, and they had no way of knowing that it would ever have an effect, that it would change society, that it would bring us where we are now. And I think that we all need to imagine as being one of those people. We don't know if what we're doing is going to have any type of effect, but we do it because it's right, because these are our values, and it says something about us. That is what gives me hope. Thank you. It's true they occupied the land, but they can never, ever occupy our inner freedom or our minds. And for this life within us, we will resist. And until the world becomes more free, we will continue to fight by being full of life and full of stories.