Central Macedonia Governor Elected President of EU Committee of the Regions

Central Macedonia Governor Apostolos Tzitzikostas was recently elected President of the European Committee of the Regions.

In his new role, Tzitzikostas will lead the EU’s assembly of local and regional elected politicians for the next two and a half years.

Speaking in front of the Committee’s 329 members from all EU 27 member states, the new president laid out three main priorities during his term in office:

“First, the European Union must be at the service of its people and their places of living – villages, cities and regions. We must support territorial cohesion, innovation, entrepreneurship, but also find credible solutions to managing migration led by solidarity,” Tzitzikostas said.

Furthermore, he said that regions and cities should focus on understanding and responding to the profound transformations of the current green, digital and demographic revolutions. “We must strengthen European democracy, putting regions and cities at its very heart, in order to bring Europe closer to people.”

In addition, referring to Brexit as “the wake-up call”, Tzitzikostas further called for the EU to be more effective in responding to citizens’ needs.

During the Committee’s first sitting of the new five-year mandate, its members also elected Vasco Ilídio Alves Cordeiro, President of the Regional Government of the Azores, Portugal, as their First-Vice President.

The European Committee of the Regions is the EU’s assembly of regional and local representatives from all 27 member states. Created in 1994 following the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, its mission is to involve regional and local authorities in the EU’s decision-making process and to inform them about EU policies.