Dear friends,
2025 is behind us and it was a very busy year. It was the first year of a new mandate in the European institutions. With ESO, we transformed our 2024 elections memorandum into a genuine work programme for 2024-2029, bringing together our priorities for a European policy on older people, solidarity between generations, and addressing the challenges of an ageing population. We established contacts with the new S&D group in the European Parliament and with our sister organizations in the PES, and also made our first contributions to the European Commission’s public consultations: the Union’s multiannual budget (MFF), the new action programme for the implementation of the European Pillar of Social Rights, and the European Intergenerational Fairness Strategy.
We were active in our European party, the PES, preparing and participating to the Amsterdam congress. We also contribute actively in AGE-platform Europe, the umbrella organization for older people in Europe. We are committed to the interest group for intergenerational solidarity in the European Parliament, where we were able to organize a first meeting with our other European political senior citizens’ organizations: ESU, affiliated with the EPP and the European Green Senior Citizens, affiliated with the European Green Party.
2026 presents big challenges: peace, democracy, solidarity, equality! Four fundamental principles of the socialdemocratic movement are under increasing pressure.
As older generations, we learn that European integration was and is the best guarantee for peace and protection of fundamental rights. European integration, through the European Union and the Council of Europe, offers a framework that should help its member states to better develop their social missions. As we are committed to this, we also need to inform our member-organisations and their members – more than ever – about this European added value. That will be our most important task in 2026, and this concerns all our representatives and activists.
In 2026, we will also continue working on the implementation of our action program and help shape the European political agenda: the multi-annual budget, the European fairness strategy, the European housing plan, the European social agenda, the humanization of the digital agenda, a European action plan against ageism and age discrimination and a European strategy for older people, a balanced intergenerational fairness strategy, a European care guarantee.
We also look forward to the next steps in 2026 toward a UN Convention on the Rights of the older persons. This global approach will also demand our attention.
There’s a lot at stake in 2026! Not only for our older generations, but also, and especially, for our younger ones. The policies we implement today will help shape their future. All the more reason to work together. We are committed to do this, first of all with our PES-family, and with the civil society movements.
On behalf of all the activists in ESO—Frieda, Anthony, Marianne, Gyorgyi, Mariqueta, Steven, Jan, Juan, Philippe, Hilde, Sabine, Carlo, Marie-Jeanne, André, and Maria Luigia —I wish us and all of you a happy, peaceful, healthy, and above all, combative 2026!
Brussels, 22 December 2025
Jos Bertrand – President ESO