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PDFAdditional funds have been pledged to the European Endowment for Democracy and other member states are expected to follow suit.
The fledgling foundation this week secured pledges of €11 million to promote democracy, according to the European Voice: An EU official said that the promises, from the European Commission and Poland, are likely to be followed in the coming weeks by commitments from other countries, including Sweden and the Netherlands. Switzerland, which is not a member of the EU, will also contribute…..The target is to raise €10m to €20m in voluntary contributions from the public and private sector for the EED, which is expected initially to have roughly a dozen staff and to remain small. At one point, Poland pushed for voting rights to be linked to financial contributions, but that proposal was scotched several months ago in favor of equal voting rights for each governor. The board, which is chaired by Elmar Brok, a German conservative who chairs the European Parliament’s foreign-affairs committee, has 42 governors, a number described both by insiders and observers as unwieldy. The executive board has yet to be formed, but will include six people, three of them from civil society. An official said that the relatively large presence of civil society in the executive is to show that the EED, which is legally a private Belgian foundation, has “some distance from the [EU's] institutions”.
In February 2011 Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski put forward a proposal for a democracy fund, an idea that had already been hotly debated in Brussels for some years. The USA’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was repeatedly held up as a model during the debate on the EED.
