About us
What is our commitment?
To help build a home for the peoples of the earth more just and fraternal.
The Politics for Unity Movement (MPPU) is an international network of politicians, ordinary citizens, diplomats and officials involved at various levels, administrators, academics, researchers, young people interested in political issues, of different inspiration and parties, who wish to respond, on a personal and collective level, to the great questions that humanity faces today, recognizing in universal fraternity the content and the specific method of their political commitment.
It started in 1996 and developed in response to democratic crises in many countries. Today it is established in Europe, Latin America and Africa, and is being established in Asia, the Middle East and North America.
As a “laboratory” of political thought and practice, it proposes political innovation, advocacy and cooperation with national and international institutions, training courses for young people and political actors and processes of cooperation between peoples, cities, institutions, states, for the promotion and care of common goods and the common good.
It is inspired by the ideals and experience of the Focolare Movement.
Since 2020, the MPPU has been the political department of the International New Humanity Association, an NGO that has general consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and is an official partner of UNESCO. MPPU coordinates its own strategic plan with the aims and activities expressed in Articles 2 and 3 of its Statute.
MISSION E VISION
To offer to those of different political standpoints who are interested and committed at various levels, a space for dialogue and political initiative and a network of international cooperation to respond to the big issues facing our world today, within the horizon of universal fraternity.
The cultural and political transition of our time poses urgent questions of meaning: the positive and irreversible rapprochement between peoples coexists with pandemics and environmental chaos, hunger, scenarios of war and terrorism. Uncertainty and fear are growing and all these processes too often are the subject of weak, sometimes sick, politics.
The challenge and our commitment: by thinking and acting politically, to test new categories that can guide the encounter between political cultures, the search for solutions to the problems of individuals and groups, the action of parties and the life of institutions, the government of cities and states.
The idea of universal fraternity has been proposed at various times throughout history. The MPPU has made a commitment to make it a political aim, as Chiara Lubich prophetically indicated at the end of the 1950s, “to love another’s country as one’s own”.
Authoritatively described by many authors as a “strategic horizon of coexistence”, “foundation of civilization”, “strength to heal social fractures” and “to prevent the law of the strongest from prevailing”, “engine of growth and well-being”, fraternity, in Chiara Lubich’s thought, becomes a global paradigm of political development.
The profound need for peace that humanity expresses today, makes fraternity a global paradigm of political development. That is why an increasingly interdependent world needs politicians, entrepreneurs, intellectuals and artists who place fraternity – an instrument of unity – at the centre of their actions and thinking.
(Chiara Lubich to the participants of the First Interdependence Day
Philadelphia (USA), 12 September 2003
Young people
MPPU entrusts young people with a specific responsibility because of their capacity for innovation and experimentation.
Protagonists in all activities, an international network of schools of social and political participation and training is also dedicated to them, so that they can become leaders for the development of their city and country.
MAIN ACTIONS:
● Support institutional arrangements and public policies aimed at promoting, both locally and globally, the fundamental values of peoples, in order to bring about peace and unity in the world.
● To develop and disseminate a mature culture of participation, through training programs, procedures and co-governance tools that promote the richness of unity and respect for diversity in cities and political communities.
● Promoting study and research initiatives, conferences and awareness campaigns to deepen understanding of the different political cultures and to politically decline universal fraternity in the different contexts of the planet.
● To cooperate with any other cultural and social body that in different forms expresses the same desire for dialogue, solidarity and justice, and the promotion of the rights of the person and peoples.
HISTORY
In 1996 Chiara Lubich had the idea of relaunching, in a worldwide movement, all the experiences made until then in view of a new responsibility towards the construction of local and global history. She spoke the very word of her charism: she called it “Politics for Unity Movement”.
During the conferral of honorary citizenship by the City of Pompeii on April 30th 1996, Chiara met mayors, administrators, parliamentarians and local political representatives. She was particularly struck by the diversity of the political positions represented by the people who agreed to listen to her and she felt that this pluralism was the right context to develop a political thought in. Her practice would flow from the characteristic exercise of the Focolare Movement, listening and dialogue which, from the beginning, had also involved the world of politics.
So, on May the 2nd, she immediately convened in Naples her closest collaborators in this field. Among them, Tommaso Sorgi and Lucia Fronza Crepaz, leaders of the New Humanity Movement; Mariele and Pino Quartana, and all those involved in politics in the Neapolitan community. These all were entrusted with what then became the Political Movement for Unity but that she, Chiara, that day, simply called with the name of her Ideal: Movement for Unity.
Politics at local and international level is today subjected to enormous tensions, caused by global issues, often unprecedented. At the same time, the world is increasingly interdependent and expresses a new awareness of the dignity and rights of individuals and people. And, as often happens in history, it is precisely in these complex scenarios and in the face of great challenges, that new ideas, new visions, new perspectives develop.
This was also the case for those first ideas that blossomed on the rubble of the Second World War, when Chiara Lubich 1) perceived the possibility and began to promote mutual love among people, introducing a light into the darkness of the tragic 20th century. From this ideal of unity 2) – which looks at political action as the love of love” 3) and which, over the years, has collected personal and social dreams in a common project and has urged many to spend themselves for humanity – the Politics for Unity Movement, an international laboratory of political innovation, was born.
TO GO FURTHER
«“The specific aim of the Movement for Unity (now MPPU), in which members from diverse parties participate, is this: to help one another and themselves to be, first of all, people who believe -through Fraternity- in the profound, eternal values of the human being and then move in political action.
It is not, therefore, a new party; nor do it want to confuse religion and politics, as has happened and is happening with the fundamentalism of Christians and also of non-Christians.
It only proposes and bears witness to a lifestyle that allows politics to reach its goal in the best way possible: the common good in the unity of the social body”».
((C. Lubich, Per una politica di comunione, Palazzo San Macuto, Camera dei Deputati, Rome, 15 December 2000, in “Nuova Umanità” 134 (2001), p.215 ).
All those who adhere to the MPPU in an open and free manner, in positions in institutions or parties, in public functions at any level, in study and research, or in the commitment to active citizenship, endeavour to: