 Ladies and gentlemen, readers of our newsletter, December is of course the month where we look back at what happened over the past year. In terms of the work we do, we have to see that on the international scene, there are some challenges. Multilateralism is under pressure, democracy is even under pressure, we have populism, we have illiberal movements, and we have more over a very important decrease of the trust of the average citizens in the institutions, not only in the institutions, traditional institutions like parliaments, governments and judiciary, but moreover in the bigger civil society organizations like trade unions and those who are in political parties. And of course there is distrust in the capacity of the institutions to deliver on their democratic task is endangering the sustainability of democracy. So this is a very negative development in 2018. In this newsletter we will focus on a particular specific aspect that this may be also a source of distrust of average citizens in electoral processes and multi-party democracy, it is in need about the role of money in politics. And of course you need money, you need some resources to bring out your message, to compete in elections, to organize an electoral campaign, that's the positive side of the role money can play to facilitate political activism, political action, participate in elections. But the access to money is unequally distributed. And so this unequal access to money, to fund political activities is putting under pressure the concept itself of democracy, democracy is the system of governments where the exercise of public authority is monitored by the average citizens and where the citizens in that control, in that monitoring have equal opportunities. So of course money biases this equality, fundamental equality of citizens in the exercise of their political rights, be it as a candidate where access to money is crucial to have a successful campaign, so be it as a candidate but also be it as a citizen. Because vested interests, interests that have easily access to important funds can bring their topics, their concerns, their sorrows at the top of the agenda, whereas other people have difficulties to raise the attention of politicians, of institutions and to ask for solutions for their problems. So the role of money in politics and more precisely the negative role of corruption and all activities that bring unequality in the access to resources to fund the campaign, to participate in elections, this is a very important crucial topic, a topic where challenges have to be addressed to give back to people the trust in their institutions, the trust that the rules of the game are applied and that democracy, representative democracy through electoral processes that this goes the right way. I wish you good reading, I wish you also a good end of the year and I hope for democracy a better 2019 than 2018.