For a while, I have been annoyingly vocal about politics among my friends. I am lucky enough to have a very diverse group of friends working in politics, multinational environments, academia and so on. I am even luckier to have friends with the most diverse interests: sports, fashion, philosophy, and even Eurovision! Every year I host two dinners at my house: one for Halloween and one for Christmas. My favourite thing when organizing these events is to mix all people disregarding their profession. After the dinners I usually get the same feedback: it is great to meet people outside my bubble. The best feedback I got was from a friend of mine who happens to be a personal trainer, he told me:
“I never imagined having dinner with an MEP or a professor, I have some opinions, but I often think it would be stupid for me to tell them out loud because who would care? Anyways, I look forward to the next dinner!”
Inspired by my trainer friend, I started to go to the gym wearing sports clothing with political messages. I started doing so trying to start a conversation with those who see politics as an alien world. Once, a random person approached me at the gym to tell me: “You always have a T-shirt with a message, I wish I could be brave enough to display my beliefs anywhere I go. But what’s the point? Who cares?”
The T-shirt that I wore when I got that comment says “EQUALITY” in rainbow-coloured letters. This particular T-Shirt has allowed me to start talking to many straight men in the gym, who after a quick chat, started destroying their preconceptions about gay people and sports. Many of those straight guys who engaged in a conversation with me are now good friends of mine. Those guys had social and political ideas before meeting me and talking about the T-shirt. They left the gym with a different political perspective because they engaged in a conversation and they were heard.
I did the same experiment wearing a T-shirt that said “VOTE” back in 2018 on the eve of the Hungarian parliamentary elections. The T-shirt had no political party logo.
("Szavazz" in Hungarian means "Vote")
Many people approached me to ask: “vote for whom?”
I replied: “vote for whomever your conscience tells you to vote for.”
Some of the responses were: “I don’t know about politics” / “Why for? Same politicians that won’t listen” / “My vote would not really matter.”
One can answer those questions by getting angry and giving a lesson about our democratic duty. We can also answer by asking back questions tackling hot issues like corruption or unemployment. Every person I had a chat with had opinions and concerns, but they also doubted that their opinions or concerns were of value to those with their name on the ballot. Ultimately, most of the people I spoke with voted, I am not sure for whom, but I am happy that at least they did engage and participated in our democracy. I like to think that our chats were the extra push they needed to go out and vote.
If you work in the same field as I do, you understand that our job is all about building relationships, our job is to engage people. The relations we build with people are not supposed to follow the traditional top-down dynamic that old politicians follow. Instead, our work is to approach those who don’t think like us and ask them for their opinions. If not in the form of an academic level political conversation, as an exercise of curiosity, as a conversation of two individuals on the same level.
Many times the one who was not engaged will share his/her opinions and realize that he/she was thinking politically after all.
On the road, many local leaders told me: “We are organizing forums but people don’t come. People don’t like to give their opinion.” This is a big and common mistake. It is a failure to expect people to come to you to tell you their problems. It is our job to be the ones approaching. People do have opinions, but people also have priorities and their priority is not to walk towards someone who might listen or not. That is the reason why movements that invest in one on one meetings, door to door campaigns and street forums have the most chances to engage first-time voters. They go to the people, they listen to their opinion and they provoke them to get engaged!
(Engagement requires small group discussions to make others feel listened)
How have I engaged my friends in politics? By having conversations, listening and leaving aside the term politics! By not looking down at those who are apprehensive to share their opinion. We have the opportunity to teach social leaders not to be behind a desk, not to organize a forum expecting people to show up and come to them. We need to create leadership willing to start conversations with the people who are not engaged. We need to listen to those who are outside our bubble and resist the instinct to undermine them by proving that our point of view is superior.
People want to share their ideas, they just haven’t had the chance to do so because no one has approached them to listen.
Risks? Many! A few will argue that engaging many people might bring some lovers of authoritarianism to the political discussion. Shame on you! If your winning strategy is to keep people silent and suppress voices then you are in the wrong profession. Instead, it is up to us to try building relationships locally to make sure that newly engaged people are well informed and aware of the false promises of those pretending to listen. Our job is to be different, our job is to be champions of engagement and empowerment!
But how to spark conversations and topics that can engage others? COVID is actually the perfect platform for us to engage many in the political process. I got to reach out to many friends in the pandemic who lost their jobs, who are overwhelmed with the disaster that has been vaccine distribution in many countries, and friends who have lost loved ones. During the pandemic, those who were not politically or socially engaged became more open to sharing their strong opinions to criticize or praise the way governments handled things. Many still refrain from using political terms, but by the end of this pandemic, many more people will be more engaged with politics if we do the job and start listening.
Building relationships to make people open and engaged takes time, effort, and requires personal sacrifices.
That is right, to engage people a single speech, a tweet or a Facebook post are not enough. It takes us to walk the extra mile to leave our bubbles and reach out to those who are disengaged. In the future, social movements and political actors focused on speaking, guiding, and educating will be punished. On the other side of the road, those social movements and political actors focused on engagement and empowerment will grow exponentially.
In the end, organisations and movements are made of people. I invite you to also organize a dinner, to gather friends from different backgrounds in the same space, to ask questions to your friends so they can think about politics. I invite you to wear your message with pride and to engage in conversations to listen to the other! We can spark conversations, leave the bubble, build relations. We all can change political culture and we can help people to love politics.
(Few of my political friends: an MEP, a press officer, a beer maker, a painter and a learning and development manager.)
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