Athens Democracy Forum
The Athens Democracy Forum is the Democracy & Culture Foundation's annual conference on democracy, held in Athens in association with The New York Times. The 2027 edition is expected in late September, the window the forum has held since 2023; the organiser has not yet published the dates.
The Athens Democracy Forum is the Democracy & Culture Foundation’s annual conference on the condition and the future of democracy, held in Athens in association with The New York Times. The 2027 edition is expected in late September, the window the forum has kept for several years: 26 to 29 September in 2023, 1 to 3 October in 2024, 30 September to 3 October in 2025, and 29 September to 1 October in 2026.
The New York Times conceived the forum in 2013 and convened it until 2018, timing the inaugural event around the United Nations International Day of Democracy. The first three-day programme ran in 2015. In 2019 the Democracy & Culture Foundation was established as a nonprofit to take the conference out of the newspaper’s commercial structure and run it independently, with the paper remaining its programming partner and its senior journalists leading sessions and moderating panels.
The forum is held across several Athenian buildings rather than in a single hall. The 2026 venues are the Athens Conservatoire, Greece’s oldest performing-arts institution, founded in 1871 and housed in a Bauhaus-influenced building by Ioannis Despotopoulos; the Stoa of Attalos in the Ancient Agora, rebuilt by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens between 1952 and 1956; and the Academy of Athens, the neoclassical building by Theophil Hansen completed in 1885.
Two awards are presented during the forum. The City of Athens Democracy Award was established by the Mayor of Athens and is given around 15 September, the United Nations International Day of Democracy; it went to Jean-Claude Juncker in 2023, to Katerina Sakellaropoulou, then President of the Hellenic Republic, in 2024, and to the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in 2025. The Kofi Annan NextGen Democracy Prize, launched in 2023 by the Kofi Annan Foundation and the Democracy & Culture Foundation, goes to a democracy advocate aged between 18 and 30, who takes the floor at the following year’s forum.