European Forum

Second Promising Politicians seminar 2009 in Bitola

Between 8 and 11 October the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in cooperation with the Alfred Mozer Stichting and the European Forum for Democracy and Solidarity, organized their second seminar for young and promising politicians and members of social democratic parties from the countries of former Yugoslavia and Albania. The seminar, in which 25 participants participated, took place in Bitola in Macedonia and can be considered a great success.

Since 2003 the seminar has been organized three times annually and the course includes seminars on ideology, media and communications skills and EU integration. The aim of the course is to introduce young politicians to the various aspects of political leadership, governance and the dynamics and structures of party policies. In addition, the organisers aim to create a network among young and politically active persons and to improve their knowledge on the political developments of countries in the region.

The first seminar of this year’s program took place in Bečići, Montenegro and discussed the ideology and policies of social democracy and other mainstream political theories. The second seminar, on media and communication skills, was conducted by two trainers: Žiga Čebulj, public relations consultant, Socialni Demokrati (SD), Slovenia and Dig Itsha, director corporate affairs at RWE Energy in the Netherlands. Also, guest speaker Biljana beijova, executive manager of NGO Info-center, gave a presentation on independence of media in Macedonia, and guest speaker Gordan Georgiev, SDSM's vice president, spoke about elections in Macedonia. Some main issues that were discussed in the seminar where how to deal with media when being a political party or party leader, methods of communication, how to create a PR strategy and how to deal with a crisis. The participants were very motivated during the seminar, and really showed their interest for the subject by asking intelligent questions and taking the assignments very seriously. During the workshops the interaction among the participants was very good and each participant was eager to take the floor.   

A full report on the second seminar will be posted on the European Forum website shortly.