Building a freer future is a task that requires large-scale collaboration, but also the great movers and shakers who get a real change going. With our Leader of the Year award, we celebrate such individuals who are on the forefront of the struggle for liberty in Europe. And our 2026’s Leader of the Year is David Briguglio Brown, our National Coordinator for Malta.

David only joined our programs last April as our first volunteer in Malta, and he quickly got to work at building up a community. He founded a team that has quickly grown, and built up a social media presence as well as presence in the network, despite only being 17 years old high school student at the time.

Yet his age has not stopped David from making a real impact. When the European Commission first came with the Chat Control proposal, David was among the leaders of the international student campaign pushing against it. He launched a national petition that quickly got over 1500 signatures with online content reaching over 3 million views, and which got endorsed by one of the Maltese political parties, and even reached the Maltese Prime Minister. Following the campaign, the first version of Chat Control, which sought to end encrypted conversations in Europe, failed to pass the vote.

Following the success of the Chat Control campaign, David and his team did not slow down. They launched the Politics Made Simple project, which makes politics and classical liberal ideas more accessible to young students and the team’s peers, through simple explainer videos, infoposts, as well as on campus interviews.

The project transformed again prior to the Maltese general election earlier this year, when David and team Malta reviewed the respective party platforms, culminating in a literal town square event in the capital city of Valetta, hosting representatives from all major political parties, whom David interviewed on topics pertinent to the Maltese youth.

Additionally, when the Maltese Government floated a blanket social media ban for minors, team Malta acted fast again, submitting a formal, evidence-based consultation to the National Youth Council and the government, offering policymakers an alternative rooted in the EU’s existing DSA framework. When the government began weighing whether to join the so-called “Board of Peace”, the team’s principled opposition was picked up by Times of Malta, ensuring the skeptical student perspective made it into a national outlet’s coverage of the debate. 

Despite only launching last year, the team has gained such attention on the national level that they got nominated to a Maltese national competition as one of the finalists of student group of the year, and David himself got nominated as one of the finalists in the category of Malta’s political activist of the year.

David and his team are far from done though – while they are preparing further events and hosting a John Galt School (an eight-week long course on Objectivism), David also became the Director for Deregulate.EU, our upcoming platform hosting policy-oriented campaigns all around the EU and beyond.

For the great impact he accomplished before even entering university, David Briguglio Brown is our undisputed Leader of the Year for 2026.

European Students For Liberty operated in 42 different countries last year. Our volunteers around the continent hosted events and conferences, wrote articles, and ran campaigns with real-world impact.

Our Georgian chapter did all of that and more, all the while defying an increasingly authoritarian regime. For this exceptional work, Students For Liberty Georgia more than earned the title of our 2026’s Group of the Year!

As much as no classical liberal is a great friend of the government, in the case of our team in Georgia it is unfortunately no hyperbole. The Georgian government has over the last year gradually restricted freedom of speech and association, imprisoning protesters for even standing in front of the parliament, shutting down think tanks and other organisations, and generally freezing the opposition activities and the entire NGO sector.

It is in this environment that our team has persisted in spreading the ideas of liberty as one of the last remaining liberal organisations still in operation, speaking out about human rights, liberal democracy, geopolitics and the country’s future within the European structures and away from Russia, free media and independent judiciary.

And they did not hold back doing so; the team has experienced a major expansion, and throughout the year, they hosted 35 events and 10 full-day conferences, in total welcoming almost 2000 in-person attendees, and reaching another 400 000 online.

The team’s events included major conferences in the capital city of Tbilisi, home to one third of the Georgian population, including a conference on the hybrid threats to the region, as well as events on censorship, rights of women in a repressive society, practical trainings on how to speak up for individual rights, and of course, the traditional Technology and Freedom conference, featuring digital liberty-themed art work, all the way to flat seminars resembling the 1980s dissident period before the fall of communism.

Still, our Georgian team wanted to make an impact beyond the capital city. As the first of our chapters, they piloted a roadshow-style campaign that had since been implemented in Italy, Switzerland, and Romania, to bring the ideas of sound economics and financial literacy to smaller towns in the country.

They travelled around Georgia and hosted small events and medium sized conferences, thus far reaching directly around 200 students who would have otherwise never had access to such courses, and further events are currently in development.

With the relaunch of the Merani platform, the team also became an important media presence, as one of the last remaining classical liberal voices in Georgia. Through Merani, the team hosted writing competitions and writing trainings, giving voice to a generation of young students, who can easily feel silenced as the country’s government continues its onslaught on universities and independent media.

As objective information sources are becoming scarce, the Georgian team’s channels have also become a news source for many young Georgians without access to other trusted outlets, and their pages have gained followers who place the trust in the Students For Liberty chapter to deliver news untainted by the pro-Russian government’s narratives.

Finally, despite all these challenges, the team still found the time to care about infringement of the rights of others: they were strongly represented at the Ukrainian Renaissance in Lviv, where Kesaria, the team’s National Coordinator, spoke about how students can make a meaningful impact in improving the situation in their countries, in front of an audience of over 250 students from 27 countries.

They also launched and coordinated our All Eyes on Iran campaign last winter, monitoring the developments and raising awareness of the human rights abuses by the regime, and last but very much not least, they helped our new chapter in Armenia get off the ground by hosting trainings and providing assistance to the new volunteers from Yerevan.

Through all of these efforts, Georgian Students For Liberty truly stand at the frontlines of the struggle for a freer future, and given all their courage and entrepreneurial efforts to continue reaching audiences seeking liberal ideas in a more and more restricted environment, there can be no other Group of the Year in 2026.