PES Manifesto

Spice up your local party life with a twinning

Published Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 10:47
by Editor (794 views and 2 comments)

Frédéric Engelmann (right) with the PES Parliamentary Group Martin Schulz (left) at the PES Congress in 2006

At the Vienna Forum, several PES Activists expressed their interest in twinnings projects between party federations and branches. We asked Frédéric Engelmann, a PES Activist from Paris, to tell us about the twinning between the PES Activists Groups of the XIIth arrondissement of Paris and of Berlin Mitte.

Frédéric, how did the idea of a twinning come about and how did this whole project start?

To start with, our Paris PS federation had already signed a similar agreement 5 or 6 years ago with the Berlin SPD. Both parties support the fact that the branches of our federations should twin with one another. So far, the branches of XIth and XVIIIth arrondissements (or districts) have twinnings, if my memory serves me right, and more recently the Ist, IInd, IIIrd and IVth together joined a third twinning project between branches. On this occasion, I met the activist in charge of twinnings from Berlin as his branch in Berlin Mitte was looking for a twinning project. I then suggested to organize myself the project from the French side (I am bilingual in French and German) and once we set up a team from both sides, the branches agreed to go along. The first contact took place in April 2006 and the twinning agreement was officially signed during the first visit of a dozen activists in November 2007. We set ourselves as an objective to visit each other once a year in Paris and Berlin.

What are in your opinion the necessary elements for a successful twinning?

I think the following elements are important:

- have a first contact between two people from both branches to see if there is an interest in such a twinning project from both sides;
- gather a small group of half a dozen people so as to show that there is an interest in the project and above all that the resources are there to maintain the project in the medium and long term; try to get local representatives to commit to the project by showing them that there could be opportunities to meet and exchange ideas related to local policy - and also involve some people who are bilingual.
- define realistic and desirable objectives but also allow for the necessary time to reach them.

Can you tell us more about the objectives you set yourselves in the partnership agreement?

The partnership aims at reaching the following objectives:
- Have an exchange on all issues related to local policy, in particular those topical issues that are interesting to both branches
- Inform and discuss the political positions of both our parties
- Support political campaigns in our respective cities
- Inform each other through our respective websites on current affairs and exchange experiences
- Organize and carry out study visits to Paris and Berlin.

Could you describe the different stages of the twinning?

The contact-taking period for the twinning took about a year and a half. That was the first stage. Then, for about a year, we focused on better getting to know each other: organizing the visit to the city, organize meetings between activists and between those in charge of the branches through the first two trips we organized. Now, we have groups of about 15 people in every branch involved in the twinning. Then in a third stage we want to organize more political debates and exchanges, in addition to the exchange visits, by creating for example a blog or something similar.
At present, we only want to focus on two topics that emerged in our discussions:
- Europe (myself and one of the Berlin Mitte activist are the moderators of working groups focused on European policy in our branches)
- local and regional policy-making (our two districts are both governed by our mother parties - the PS and the SPD respectively - and there are a number of local representatives that are interested in our project)

A big thanks to Frédéric Engelmann for having shared his experience with us. By Cécilia Gondard, communication team.

Tags: activists, twinning