Thank you Marilena,

Thank you for making us part of this important meeting.

For decades, when we spoke about security, we thought about territory, borders, and military power.

Today, the security map looks different.

Increasingly, the struggle is unfolding in a less visible domain: the space where citizens form opinions, where trust in institutions is built or eroded; where facts compete with manipulation; and where truth is challenged by deliberate disinformation.

For a long time, we believed to be immune to such threats. We are learning that the closer we get to the EU, the more we become a target by those who do not share our goals, our values, or our ambition and strategic choices, be it Russia or others. These days we face one major cyber-attack every second.

The European Democracy Shield rightly promotes a whole of government and whole of society approach. We see also a third dimension: a whole of Europe approach.

Enlargement is first a domestic transformative drive through targeted reforms; it is also an investment for Europe’s future; we see it also as an investment in democratic resilience.

Because without citizens and the society properly equipped and empowered to recognize and resist to manipulation, malicious interference, carefully distilled in the wilderness of the social media risk erode public trust and destroy the social fabric.

Therefore, the decision to open this platform to us, candidate countries, to cooperate through key European initiatives, notably the European Digital Media Observatory, is particularly important and relevant.

The same goes for the European Network of Fact Checkers. In our era, facts remain democracy’s first line of defense.

But it rests on informed citizens; free, independent and ethical media, participatory civil society, and public trust in democratic institutions.

The Democracy Shield offers an opportunity to bring all these elements together and our response must be coordinated to be effective.

We stand ready not only to participate but also to contribute in every possible way, through the association or through specific projects.

Thank you.