Parlamento dos Jovens

At school, I participated a few times in the Youth Parliament. The Youth Parliament is an initiative of the Portuguese Parliament that gives a chance to young students to somehow get a feel of what politics involve. In the end, the measures that come out of this are actually debated by the real politicians in parliament.

Summarizing: every year there is a defined topic. Each school that is participating has one or more lists of students. These lists must debate between themselves and have an agreement of measures they want the school to represent, as well as which students go to the next phase. The next round is at district level, where the same happens, but with a lot more people from the different schools. This culminates with the nationals, which are held in the parliament.

One year, somehow, I managed to end up at the nationals. Not as a deputy to defend the measures of my district, but as a secretary. This session is also live streamed on TV, so I can say I showed up on TV, with a camera focusing on my face, where I actually spoke to a parliament chamber filled with over 200 people.

Nonetheless, I created this post to share some pictures from this day. I’m not sure if it’s accurate, but I think I was one of the youngest people there, in 2012. They also managed to only take two pictures during lunch, one of them with me, of course. I do think this is quite a nice initiative. I’m not sure if other countries have something similar.