Last year was in many ways challenging, with the world feeling again a bit more closed, a bit less free, and a whole lot less safe.
Nonetheless, our coordinators, alongside our partners and friends of liberty around Europe, are making sure this trend does not last, and we can look ahead towards an indeed freer future. In 2025, our European volunteers invested 130 000 hours into pushing back against authoritarianism, fighting harmful regulation, but also in creating the human connections that are at the heart of a free and open society, and into direct efforts such as collecting and delivering humanitarian aid.
Have a look with us at some highlights of what European Students For Liberty were up to in 2025.
From Tenerife to Tbilisi, from Italy to Iceland
Our network has grown in 2025, and for the first time our presence in Europe exceeded 40 countries, with 12 new chapters started over the past year. In 31 of these countries, you could attend one (or more) of the 387 events our students hosted during the year. In total, these events were attended by 15 203 participants (not counting LibertyCon – but more on that later).
These included traditional lectures, debates and seminars, pub quizzes and meet-ups, as well as protests. The most largescale among them were once again our regional conferences, bringing in as many as 250 people in a single student-run event.
Overall, 19 regional conferences took place in 11 different countries during the year. These included three full-scale conferences each by our well established teams in Italy and Georgia, and two by the up-and-coming Slovak team, as well as conferences by brand new teams, such as our chapter in Romania.
Among the topics we saw returning across countries and regions was prominently featured entrepreneurship and the regulatory obstacles it faces – in Barcelona, the Youth Development Summit focused significantly on the path of young people towards entrepreneurship and start-ups, as did the first of our conferences in Reykjavik, which focused on decentralised technologies. The topic also featured heavily in the November Freedom Works! conference in Bratislava or even more so in the Female Entrepreneurship conference in Belgrade, which also included an exhibition of local entrepreneurs.
Other events covered the rise of illiberalism and authoritarian practices, such as the Leviathan Rising conference in London, our Italian team’s conference in Pescara about state paternalism, the Georgian team’s conference on international trade in Tbilisi, or the Future of Liberty in Slovakia conference in Bratislava.
Finally, a range of conferences covered current topics, from the war in Ukraine that our team in Italy discussed at another one of their events, to the state of the EU our Icelandic team covered in October, and hybrid threats and technological innovation, covered in two different conferences by our Georgian team in the autumn.
The largest event of our autumn conference season was the World Without Borders three-day congress in Krakow, hosted by our Polish team together with a broad range of local partners at the end of November.
More than just conferences
It was not all just lectures and seminars tough – our students took to the streets in protests, organised petitions, and otherwise found creative ways to reach new audiences.
Among them were public speaking trainings our volunteers hosted for students in their cities, demonstrations in front of embassies, exhibitions and fundraisers for worthy causes, campaigns promoting freedom of expression, or a quite unique event hosted by our Portuguese team including a 10K race promoting a campaign against government interventionism.
From the more conventional events, standing out amongst all the rest are the ongoing seminars by our new team in the Canary Islands, meeting biweekly throughout the year for deep conversations on libertarian literature and liberty-related topics, a tour of events through smaller Georgian towns with the aim of promoting sound economics, or a debate series hosted by our team in Prague and Brno, attracting over 100 attendees per session.
Speaking freely, speaking loudly
It hasn’t all been about events either last year. Our coordinators published 287 articles, more than one per work day in an average European country. These included various blogs and magazines, international liberal outlets like FEE, but also a wide range of national media around the continent.
Additionally, the SpeakFreely magazine not only ran another great printed edition with the Debate issue – 1000 copies of which got distributed pretty much within a month – but thanks to its new correspondent program published more texts than ever before.
Our students also published 15 liberty-related research papers and policy whitepapers, some of them related to ongoing geopolitical and security issues, while others focused on Austrian economics, monetary theory, and overall sound economics.
They also appeared on national television, local radio, appeared on, ran and started podcasts, and gave interviews to newspapers on specific policies, their general philosophy, and speaking about Students For Liberty’s general mission.
In an enormous social media expansion, our students reached over 55 million users on social media with their content receiving almost 6 million reactions (January-November data).
Real world impact
While the goal of our events and educational projects is usually to affect the long term trajectory of society towards a freer future, we didn’t shy away from direct and immediate action last year either.
In response to the EU’s proposed Chat Control regulation, we ran a campaign spanning almost all of the EU to stop the implementation of this measure that would effectively impose mass surveillance on chat apps in the EU, through direct contact with MEPs and national legislators, petitions, and public awareness campaigns. As this fight is unfortunately far from over, we hope you will join us in this effort in 2026 as well.
Our students and alumni also collected awards, got listed on Forbes 30 under 30, started their own projects to further spread the ideas of liberty in their countries, published books, assisted victims of political repression, got elected to national parliaments, and extended their impact beyond Europe, with our volunteers supporting the liberal movement in the Middle East.
Štěpán Kovář from the Czech Republic received last year’s Students For Liberty’s global Event of the Year award.
The backbone of success
Our mission is to educate, develop, and empower students to advance the cause of liberty, and that is what our internal trainings are here for – in 2025, we delivered 195 training sessions.
A large portion of these took place at regional training retreats for our volunteers, in which our coordinators learn everything from the classical liberal thought to team management, policy research, event management, and other areas relevant to the specific team – last year, 14 such local trainings took place, with over 200 in-person volunteers trained.
On top of that, we ran our traditional public speaking course in Poland (the graduates of which you could hear speaking at LibertyCon Prague), the Studio Liberty course on content creation and virtual outreach in Ukraine, as well as the annual Top Leadership Retreat in Germany, aimed at bringing our top achieving volunteers from around Europe and further developing their skills as leaders for liberty.
If you are a student passionate about the ideas of liberty and don’t want to miss out on our trainings in 2026, make sure to apply for our programs.
Week of freedom in the city of Mises
In July, we hosted the third edition of the now traditional Ukrainian Renaissance conference, taking place again in Lviv, with the aim to bring together the Ukrainian and international pro-liberty movement to create new connections, but also to discuss strategies for reforms possible still now during the full-scale invasion, but also for reforms needed during the reconstruction when the defensive war is won.
This year’s three-day long conference, which started with the Independence Reception on July 4 and continued for two more packed days on July 5 and 6, was the largest one yet, attracting 251 visitors from 27 countries.
Besides the conference itself, we hosted our annual Studio Liberty training and the new Difficult Dialogue Colloquium in Lviv the same week as the conference – during Studio Liberty, students from Ukraine and around Europe came together to learn how to better spread the message of liberty on social media and in online environments, and in the Difficult Dialogue Colloquium this international cohort of students came together for a respectful conversation over some tough questions.
You can read more about our summer in Ukraine in this article.
Another great LibertyCon Europe
Our largest event is traditionally LibertyCon Europe, the thirteenth edition of which took place in late April in Prague, Czech Republic, and where 780 attendees joined us over the weekend – many of whom attending their first Students For Liberty event.
From the first evening reception and throughout the weekend, we focused on human rights, free markets, and countering the current threat of illiberalism, protectionism, and authoritarianism.
We welcomed to the stage dissidents and freedom fighters from China, Syria, Iraq, Tibet, or North Korea, as well as MPs, MEPs, and the giants of the liberal movements, such as David Friedman, Johan Norberg, Tom Palmer, Lawrence White, and others, but also policy experts from all over Europe, humanitarian workers and classical liberals from Ukraine, and of course our own volunteers. In total, the event hosted over 80 speakers in 44 sessions.
Not missing from the event were evening socials, side activities, film screenings, and workshops on countering misinformation, understanding Bitcoin, or even how to cut bureaucracy and set a country on a straight path to free markets – we hope many of the attendees will put those skills to use!
Last but very much not least, the event raised meager funds for a local humanitarian mission to Ukraine.
What’s coming next
In 2026, you can expect many of our staple programs to make a return – LibertyCon Europe already has a date and a location; we look forward to seeing you in Madrid, Spain on April 24-26 for another unforgettable weekend.
This year’s LibertyCon Europe will also host Students For Liberty’s international award ceremony, so make sure to register soon!
Ukrainian Renaissance and our conference season in countries all over Europe is also coming back, so make sure to follow our channels and newsletter to not miss it when the dates are announced.
You can also expect more policy oriented focus from us in the coming year. The battle over Chat Control is far from over, as is the push against various national level lifestyle regulation proposals and sin taxes we want to take on, not to mention our long-term campaign of defending liberal institutions in the increasing number of countries where they come under threat.
Stay tuned, and stay in touch – you will hear a lot about European Students For Liberty in 2026.
