About me
Who am I?
TL;DR - My name is Sven. I'm 48 years old and from Bavaria. I moved to Lille in 2012 and I manage innovation projects for an open source software publisher, which is trying to prove that everything can be done today with technologies made in Europe. End of last year, I moved to Slovenia, the fourth EU member state after Germany, Austria and France, which I will hopefully soon call home.
I'm a Volt oldie, who joined in 2018 when Volt was still a small and naive bunch and a far cry from the 35 000 members in 31 countries across Europe that we are today. Aside from the local team in Lille, I have spent four years in the board of Volt France, two of them as acting co-president. In 2024, I was elected french lead candidate for the European elections and also tried to become Volt's symbolic Spitzenkandidat. Now in Slovenia, I'm helping to launch our Slovenian chapter while pondering, from the back of the local comic store where I'm renting a desk, how to jumpstart the European project.
What's next?
Volt was created to advance the European project towards a federal Europe. It's the "+1" in our "5+1" key objectives. However, considering the last eight years and how the world has changed, I'm more and more convinced we must make the +1 our main objective and treaty reforms the initial domino that has to fall.
The European Parliament is the wrong place for this. It sits at the end of the legislative food chain and has no leverage to force treaty reforms or put any of our objectives on the legislative agenda. We need to look for more crafty ways to influence national governments and push the needle towards where Europe has to go - becoming a genuine political and geopolitical player on a global scale. If nationalists brazenly call for dismantling the European Union - powered by Trump's and Putin's heralds - federalists must also call for full European integration and find supporters that can help us get the ball rolling.
What do I do in real life?
I moved to France from Austria in 2012 to work for one of the largest open source software publishers in Europe (we are only 40 developers though). I manage our French and European R&D projects covering cloud, defence, telco and industrial automation.
I got into IT well before 2012 with a start-up I created that tried to automate small quantity orders in sporting goods retail (think internet instead of phone and fax). Setting up my own business taught me programming and many other valuable lessons. However, my start-up grew not by leaps and bounds but like a bonsai, so I finally decided to move on and ended up in France.
The idea of setting up my own business came to me after working in my parents' family textile business. I've done my share of sales and marketing, learnt the challenges of financing and managing a company in difficulty, including bankruptcies and hostile takeover attempts. I realised at some point, I need to find my own pair of shoes to be happy in life, and these were neither my shoes nor the path I wanted to follow.
Before walking a few miles in 'the wrong shoes', I studied business administration specialising in marketing, finance and innovation management in Germany and the USA - my second stint in the flyover part of the US after spending a year at high school when I was 17.
What do I do at Volt?
It was after the first round of the 2017 presidential elections and the run-off between Macron and Le Pen that I realised that democracy is fragile. I didn't have the right to vote in presidential or national elections in France, but I still wanted to contribute in some way. I discovered Volt searching for a political movement that did not sound too political and signed up out of curiosity. A first European meeting in Paris confirmed to me that everyone was probably too naive given the scale of the task, but also very motivated to change politics and Europe for the better. So I began my purple adventure.
Unfortunately, Volt in France didn't get very far, failing already to open a bank account - life as a new party in France is difficult. It was a big disappointment for me to not be able to participate in the European elections, but good things take time and the good thing about Volt Europa is that we always have 27 attempts to get it right. Only one attempt needs to work to give life and meaning to all the other chapters. And with our first MEP elected in Germany, we had our raison d'être to continue fighting for our goals across the European Union. Five years later we have 5 MEPs in Parliament.
My first real campaign experience was during the municipal elections in Lille in 2020, where I stood as a candidate and organised our participation in a coalition with EELV. It was a great experience to campaign with established parties, learning things like door-to-door canvassing and the actual effort it takes to get elected. We lost by some 200 votes, I stopped being disappointed realising politics is not so easy and started to share experience with other teams in France.
To have a chance at the European elections in 2024, I volunteered for a first term on the French Board before being elected co-president for a second term in 2021. Our objectives were to run in the legislative elections to receive public funding and professionalise our movement by being able to afford paid staff and to build a coalition with a chance of getting at least one Volt MEP elected in France. I have achieved those objectives and although the European elections didn't go as planned - even a coalition with the necessary 1.5M€ to finance all ballot papers - is no guarantee for success, I learned my lessons and will try something different in 2029. Like running in another member state.
Do I also have a private life?
Currently, life is still in a bit of bureaucratic turmoil since our move to Slovenia. I remain member in the french associations pushing for a federal Europe and will certainly build up my network in Ljubljana and beyond once I'm speaking basic Slovenian - which already proves to be an interesting challenge. Famous last words, I was a Couchsurfing host and Meetup organiser for many years, was good at tango and am always on the lookout for brutalist architecture. Fittingly, I organised a blind date in a nuclear power plant and proposed to my wife in the cooling tower of the former Charleroi power plant.