Sherutnipe: The First Transnational Gathering of Roma Public Office Holders in Europe

A first gathering of its kind

Roma mayors, councillors, council leaders and members of parliament from across Europe are meeting one another — and the Roma-led institutions that work across Europe — for the first time. Sherutnipe is a Romani word for collective leadership and governance, and we use it to describe this gathering for three reasons. First, Roma have had forms of governance over their own people long before any state recognised it, and regardless of whether any state ever did. Second, what is new today is that Roma public office holders have succeeded in something more challenging: to govern inside institutions built without them. And third, the idea of Sherutnipe is to translate those local and individual successes into collective transnational experience.

This week, in Skopje and in Šuto Orizari, Roma who hold public office across Europe meet one another — many of them for the first time, including some who come from the same country. There have been attempts before: a handful of parliamentarians meeting, appointed officials brought together, national gatherings in one country or another. None has assembled Roma holding public office from across Europe, at every level of public authority, to work as peers. The symbolic power of Šuto Orizari is key: the largest municipality in Europe governed by Roma, since 1996, and the only one where Romani is an official language.

The gathering shapes a conversation towards what comes after an election or an appointment: how a mandate becomes a decision, how budgets and institutions deliver to the people, how political constraints are overcome. The sessions follow the full cycle of entering office, using a mandate to govern and deliver, and building institutions, networks and political pathways that outlast a term — organised around the fields where municipal authority is decisive: housing, land and infrastructure; education and employability; enterprise and procurement; democracy and governance; and narrative, legitimacy and culture.

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

Political representation that delivers

This gathering is all the more important because our data and our work on the ground with locally elected Roma show that political representation delivers. Where Roma hold public office, public money moves. Between 2019 and 2025, in five countries where we work alongside Roma officeholders — Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Italy — more than €42 million in documented public allocations and budget commitments has gone 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 confronts this head on, with the record.

And every one of those results was won alone — in a single municipality, by someone with no counterpart to ask and no way to pass on what they had learned. Roma have built transnational institutions without officeholders, and Roma hold office without transnational Roma-led institutions. This week the two meet.

What this is, and what it is not

This is a first gathering, not a founding. Nothing is constituted here, no membership is created, and nobody speaks on behalf of anyone who is not present. What follows is for those in the room to decide, including the conclusion that nothing should follow. We will publish what the room agrees can be published, and nothing else. Working sessions are closed and held under the Chatham House Rule.

Sherutnipe is convened by the Roma for Democracy Foundation, powered by the Roma Foundation for Europe, the Roma Education Fund, the Roma Entrepreneurship Development Initiative and the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture.