Is the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) bringing the citizens closer to Europe or contrarily building a bureaucratic wall between them? The Parliament’s recent critical notes towards the Commission’s weak response to the first successful ECI ‘Right2Water’ as well as the new research paper ‘Towards a revision of the European citizens' initiative’, drawing attention to the complexity of the system, demonstrate the weaknesses of the democratic mechanism, losing the EU institutions’ credibility in the eyes of the citizens. How could the ECI system be reformed in order to reduce unnecessary bureaucratic obstacles and establish stronger binding responsibilities of the EU institutions responding to successful ECIs?