Every year, European Students For Liberty celebrate the most outstanding student among our hundreds of volunteers with the Leader of the Year award. The recipient of this award in 2024 is Lautaro Soza.
Lautaro Soza-Torrijos, originally from Argentina, joined Students For Liberty at 18 and started a team in Mendosa, Argentina, soon to become the National Coordinator for the country. While there, Lautaro also worked on communications of the Democratic Party of Mendosa and on Javier Milei’s campaign in the region.
When relocating to Europe for his studies, Lautaro was briefly part of our team in Serbia, before moving to Hungary – one of the least friendly countries to liberalism in Europe and a country with no prior Students For Liberty presence.
That didn’t stop Lautaro from starting a brand-new team in the country, which now has almost twenty volunteers in three different cities: Budapest, Pecs and Debrecen. He accomplished that by introducing creative event formats, such as regular informative free-market environmentalism pub quizzes.
To boost the new team’s motivation, Lautaro organised the first-ever training retreat in Hungary, where he also shared his experience with the coordinators. During the year, Lautaro spoke at other Students For Liberty and partner events not just in Hungary, but also Czech Republic and Spain.
But one of the key elements behind the success of the team Lautaro founded is his impressive social media proficiency. The Instagram account he created for the team already reached several million unique profiles, and his SFL Hungary TikToks often reach over 150k people each, all through organic reach. Most importantly, the content Lautaro produces actually reaches young people in Hungary – the engagement data indicates that a quarter of Hungarians in their 20s interacted with his posts.
Because of his impressive social media skills, Lautaro has become the go-to trainer for teaching these skills for coordinators in Europe, having already delivered over 10 training sessions both in-person and online, and being instrumental in devising a social media collaboration initiative that now includes 25 teams from around the region.
For the impressive social media work, Lautaro also claimed our 2024 Impact of the Year award.
Besides all his other activities, Lautaro is also a Prometheus Fellow, and was the correspondent for Hungary at Young Voices, Communications Intern at Alumni For Liberty, and currently is an intern at the Objective Standard Institute.
As a true team leader, Lautaro also keeps his eye out for opportunities for students on the Hungarian team, and secured several internships for them throughout last year.
For all these accomplishments, Lautaro Soza is European Students For Liberty’s Leader of the Year for 2024.
