Sherutnipe: turning individual mandates into shared governing experience

The word, and why we use it

For three days, Roma mayors, councillors, council leaders, parliamentarians and other public officeholders compared what it actually takes to govern.

Sherutnipe is a Romani word for collective leadership and governance, and we chose it for three reasons. Roma have had forms of governance over our own people long before any state recognised it, and regardless of whether any state ever did. What is new is harder: Roma public office holders have succeeded in governing inside institutions built without them. And the purpose of Sherutnipe is the third — to turn those local and individual successes into collective transnational experience.

Last weekend, that third reason stopped being a proposition and became a description.

Different political realities, shared questions

There have been attempts before: a handful of parliamentarians meeting, appointed officials brought together, national gatherings in one country or another. None had assembled Roma holding public office from across Europe, at every level of public authority, to work as peers.

Sherutnipe brought together people from very different political realities. Countries with decades of Roma representation sat alongside countries where entering public institutions at all remains a breakthrough. Governing parties sat with opposition. Mayors who command budgets sat with councillors whose power may be a vote and a question. Left and right, national and municipal, first-term officeholders and thirty-year veterans.

Their differences remained. But many of the questions proved remarkably similar. How does winning an election become the power to decide? How do you hold a majority long enough to build something? How do you serve a whole constituency and your own people at once? How do you make what you achieve outlast your term?

Those are not questions of representation. They are questions of governing, asked by people who govern.

“None had assembled Roma holding public office from across Europe, at every level of public authority, to work as peers.”

Decades of practice, made visible

Together, the participants brought decades of experience across areas where municipal authority can make a decisive difference: infrastructure, land and housing; education and employability; enterprise and business; democracy and governance; and narrative, legitimacy and culture.

Some approaches have worked. One delegation described a route from an unlawful settlement to a titled house in which every step is a decision a council can take — bringing land into the urban plan, reducing the assessed price, legalising buildings so they cannot be demolished, and issuing a temporary address so residents can obtain identity documents. Another shared what can come next: a transitional housing system in which the quality of the home, length of tenancy and rent evolve as a family progresses, alongside social support and building maintenance.

Some of them half-worked, and participants said so openly: enrolment campaigns that reached some children but not enough; employment training that succeeded while engagement with employers did not; budgets that kept children in school without necessarily improving what they learned.

There were also approaches others in the room had never considered: changing a housing rule rather than increasing a housing budget so that lower-income tenants receive different contract terms; securing the rebuilding of bus stops through direct engagement with a transport operator; using an accession chapter as leverage on a national issue; preparing a council before a vote rather than trying to win the argument during it.

None of these approaches can simply be transplanted. One delegation drew a distinction nobody else had made — in villages a project is rarely blocked once approved; in cities it is blocked during implementation. Every municipality is different, particularly when it comes to issues such as land ownership. What works in one place must be adapted to another.

But political experience can travel. Until now, there have been few places for it to travel to.

Understanding the limits — and possibilities — of political power

Every delegation arrived with an understanding of what limited its ability to deliver: the mandate itself, the national level, opposition status, a party's inherited reputation or a change of government.

Then a councillor described a position that has everything the structure can give — a governing party, a substantial and organised Roma electorate, educated people to draw on. He reported the same ceiling.

That account reframed the weekend. Each delegation had been understanding the part of the wall it could see for the whole of it, and no one of them could have discovered that alone.

Across seven delegations, office holders identified only one obstacle that was genuinely impossible in law. Many of the others came down to a person saying no, a majority that had not yet been built, a timescale longer than a mandate, or a route through the system that nobody had shown them.

When asked what would help unlock the things they could not do alone, not one delegation named money. The answers were relationships: other councillors, a coalition, an institution, a competent team, other Roma organisations. If what were missing were funding, the answer would be a fund. What was missing was access to people who had done the same thing before — knowledge that other officeholders are uniquely placed to provide.

Bringing political and institutional experience together

The Roma Education Fund, the Roma Entrepreneurship Development Initiative, the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture and the Roma Foundation for Europe were present throughout the gathering. Rather than presenting programmes, they responded to questions and challenges raised by the office holders themselves. In some cases, a problem raised in one session could be connected with relevant experience or expertise later the same day.

And few delegations arrived at the same argument independently — writing that a network of elected officials is historic, that the most talented political minds are now assembled alongside the network's expertise, and that the task is to build it into a structure so the Roma voice is heard at European level.

Šuto Orizari: political representation in practice

The gathering concluded in Šuto Orizari: the largest municipality in Europe governed by Roma, since 1996, and the only one where Romani holds official-language status.

For many participants, it was the first time entering a public institution in which the people governing it look like the people who elected them. In Šuto Orizari, that has been a political reality for three decades.

During the visit, Romania's Florin Manole was named an honorary citizen of the municipality by its mayor — Roma political leadership recognising Roma political leadership across a border.

What has never been counted

Between 2019 and 2025, in five countries where we work alongside Roma office holders — Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Italy — more than €42 million in documented public allocations and budget commitments went into water, roads, schools, housing and legalisation. That money was not disbursed to Roma. It was secured by Roma, inside councils, against competing claims, using the ordinary instruments of public institutions.

No state records the ethnicity of the people it elects, so no register of Roma officeholders has ever existed and this contribution has never been counted. What is not counted cannot be pointed to — and representation that appears to deliver nothing produces apathy, doubt and cynicism about elections and about Roma representation itself.

Sherutnipe brought some of the people behind that delivery together and made their collective experience visible.

What comes next

Sherutnipe was a first gathering. Its value now lies in what follows. Three priorities emerged from the discussions.

Strengthening governing capability. Across delegations, officeholders identified exactly one obstacle that is impossible in law. Everything else described as impossible proved to be a majority that had not been built, a route that had never been shown, or a negotiation nobody had been taught. The work that follows is therefore the craft of governing itself: how a budget line is drafted and defended, how a council majority is assembled and held, how a development plan is amended, how an institution is required to answer. It is delivered by office holders who have done it to office holders about to attempt it, because the room was unambiguous that this is knowledge only peers can supply.

Opening access to municipal development. Across infrastructure and housing, education and employment, enterprise, governance and culture, municipalities often have instruments, programmes, legal routes and partnerships available to them. The challenge is connecting those opportunities with the officeholders able to use them.

Building lasting peer relationships. A mayor who has completed a housing legalisation process can help a councillor beginning one. A veteran officeholder can help someone serving a first term. A politician in an EU member state can share experience with a colleague navigating accession or a very different institutional system.

Over three days, those connections began to happen naturally. The next step is to make them easier to sustain across countries and between elections.

Sherutnipe does not replace the democratic mandates these officeholders hold in their own countries and communities. It gives them something that has largely been missing: access to one another's experience.

Roma are not only asking public institutions to deliver. Across Europe, Roma are already inside those institutions — governing, negotiating budgets, shaping policy and making decisions. Sherutnipe makes that political reality harder to overlook — and gives the people behind it a way to learn from one another.