Introduction

Populism appears to be sweeping across the world. In a wide variety of countries, it is primarily right-wing populist parties that are winning elections. Once in power, they proceed—with greater or lesser success—to erode existing democratic institutions from within, thereby increasing the likelihood of maintaining their hold on power. The political, social, and economic systems and constellations of these countries differ considerably, and the diversity of their populist leaders and movements is no less striking. For this reason alone, the monocausal explanations that are often offered for their rise are hardly convincing. Rather, there is a multitude of explanatory variables which, in varying combinations and with different degrees of importance, exert their influence at different moments in time. Yet because the political trajectory in so many different countries has taken a populist turn, it seems likely that several deeper underlying factors are at work. It is these factors that I seek to explore in the following pages. My reflections focus in particular on the loss of control, the widespread feeling of being at the mercy of forces that people neither understand nor can influence, the spread of both personal and societal malaise, and the erosion of broadly shared narratives that provide direction and meaning to individual lives and collective existence.

I begin by discussing several defining characteristics of populism. I then examine possible explanations for the rise of this movement. Finally, I address the question of what can be done to counter it. The experiences of Germany, as discussed in Democracy Under Pressure: Political Radicalization and Citizen Discontent in East Germany[1], will serve as the principal background for this analysis.

Contents

1 Characteristics of Populism.. 2

A Homogeneous, Secretive Elite. 3

A “true” people represented by genuine democrats. 3

An Unheard Majority. 5

Threat, Resistance, and Violence. 5

Conspiracy Theories. 6

Strong-willed leaders. 7

2 What explains the rise of populism?. 7

Right-wing populists have always been around. 7

Loss of Control 9

Lack of political interest and competencies, and opportunities to develop them.. 13

Room for charlatans and bullshitters. 14

Social media, disinformation, manipulation. 15

Social and Personal Discontent 16

Indifference and Political Apathy. 17

3 How Can We Counter Populism and Further Develop Democracy?. 21

Expanding Democracy: Deliberation. 21

Political Education. 23

Bringing the “End of History” to an End. 25

Promoting Social Equality. 27

Make Social Media a Public Utility and Strengthen Public Broadcasting. 28

Never Cooperate with and Prohibit Parties That Seek to End Democratic Contestability. 29

Literature. 30

1 Characteristics of Populism

In much of the literature, populism is primarily defined as an attitude or way of thinking that divides the population into just two groups: those at the top, and us, who remain unheard, are looked down upon, or are even oppressed by this elite.

Although plausible, this definition illustrates the always-contested nature of the concept of populism. In particular, it makes it difficult to distinguish populism from democracy. After all, democracy and democratization can also be understood as an extremely legitimate, ongoing effort to bring elites or oligarchies under control or to keep them in check. Robert Michels’ iron law teaches us that oligarchies, even within social democratic parties, are virtually inevitable (1911). It would be rather naive and irresponsible to deny the existence of elites, or the never-ending necessity of curbing their power.

A Homogeneous, Secretive Elite

It therefore takes more than that to define populism. Populists not only posit a dichotomy between an elite and the people; they also portray both as homogeneous entities: there are no internal contradictions or conflicts within these groups. Political, social, and cultural pluralism are denied and are often suppressed and opposed.

Who belongs to the elite is rarely defined precisely. The current government, of course, belongs to it, but so do the older, traditional political parties. Together, these parties form a closed cartel whose members share the same interests, values, and goals. Collectively, they have detached themselves from the common people. In addition, groups such as academics, journalists, artists, writers, and “knowledge carriers” are viewed with suspicion. They are part of the political class, or support it, whether openly or covertly. Together, they  undermine the truths, traditions, and certainties of ordinary men and women.

Because the elite is not precisely defined, there is always room for conspiracy theories. The party or leader that seeks to liberate the people from the elite cannot really fail: unfulfilled promises can always be attributed to the covert opposition of a silent, virtually invisible elite. So, for example, there is a “deep state,” formed by anonymous officials who push their own agenda behind the scenes. The elite may also be organized internationally. Thus, the European Union and other supranational institutions are projects of a cosmopolitan upper class against popular sovereignty and against national cultures, traditions, and identities. In any case, the people are the unheard, disrespected victims.

A “true” people represented by genuine democrats

Furthermore, all populists share the belief that they represent a “true” or “genuine” people. They present themselves as the saviors of democracy, which is being undermined by the aforementioned corrupt elite. Populists are thus the true democrats, and this is how their supporters see themselves as well: they are by no means opposed to the idea of democracy, but believe that the existing democracy ignores them and disregards their wishes and interests. Right-wing populists are therefore not “light” fascists who want to abolish democracy, even though they certainly also attract people with fascist-like ideas.

Populists assume that the people are homogeneous and united, and that they have unambiguous interests and goals that rarely, if ever, conflict with one another. Populist leaders and parties believe they know what those are. Democracy means that the people govern themselves and for themselves. Therefore, their interests and goals must be translated into policy unfiltered and without compromise. If this does not happen, democracy is betrayed. This is why populists have little patience for the separation of powers, as well as for the oversight institutions and mechanisms that have been deliberately created in a pluralistic democracy to protect minorities, to ensure necessary trade-offs between meaningful but inevitably conflicting values, and to curb rarely justifiable, sweeping, comprehensive, and irreversible policy changes. According to populists, the political pluralism inherent in liberal democracy is the main obstacle to the will of the people being carried out. If populists seize power, they thus tend to quickly come into conflict with institutions that guarantee the division, distribution, and control of power.[2] Judges become the enemies of the people, as do journalists and politicians from opposition parties. Populists actively combat these groups—which they have first delegitimized—and force them to align as closely as possible with the will of the people, which only they understand and articulate. This is how the “illiberal democracy” of Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński comes into being.

Populists also strongly believe in normality, virtue, and morality, and the source of these values is always the common people. As soon as the virtues of the silent majority—the ordinary folk, the common man, the people on the ground, the average Joe, Joe Sixpack, Henk and Ingrid—take center stage, the nation or the heartland will flourish once again. “It is about what is essential, what has grown organically, what is right,” writes Marcel Lewandowsky (2024: 59). Only those who truly understand ordinary people and share their notions of good and bad, right and wrong, normal and abnormal, can genuinely represent the people. And based on an understanding of what drives normal people, political decisions can be made that are supported by the people.

Populism thus carries an anti-intellectual, nativist, and romantic undertone. Local tradition, distinctiveness, and identity are perceived as being threatened not only by foreign powers, migrants, and refugees, but also by academics, journalists, artists, city dwellers, cosmopolitans, and other proponents of doubt, inquiry, change, pluralism, and universalism. Moreover, these actors champion the development, diversity, and equality of alternative identities. They are accused of elitism and arrogance, as well as a fundamental lack of understanding of and respect for the lives of ordinary people. These lives are rooted in local, often centuries-old traditions and offer truths and wisdom that displaced, unworldly intellectuals lack.

One valuable but endangered cultural tradition, for example, is the “real man.” Real men are self-assured, dominant, aggressive, masculine, and successful. Women are naturally attracted to these winners. After all, they don’t want to pass on their genes to weaklings and losers. Andrew Tate is not the only influencer here: there is an extensive, international network of such internet self-help gurus for guys who can’t get a girlfriend, the so-called manosphere. They have set their sights on everything that undermines supposed masculinity: Woke, cancel culture, gender, emancipation, feminism, LGBTQ+.[3] Masculinity is also emphatically promoted within the Alternative für Deutschland. In 2024, the aforementioned Maximalian Krah stated on TikTok: “Real men are on the right, real men are patriots… Then you’ll have no trouble finding a girlfriend… Don’t watch porn, don’t vote for the Greens, get out into the fresh air, be true to yourself, be self-confident, look straight ahead” (quoted by Lewandowsky 2024: 123).

An Unheard Majority

Even though their views rarely find majority support, populists constantly claim to represent (mostly silent) majorities. Everyone tends to overestimate how widely their opinion is shared by others, but populism amplifies the feeling of belonging to a majority that remains silent because it is oppressed. “A great many people agree with me” and “I speak on behalf of many others” then coincide with “in this country, you can’t say anything anymore.” In 2024, for example, 30% of Germans agreed with the statement: “In Germany, you can no longer freely express your opinion without getting into trouble.” Another 14% could partially endorse this statement (Brettschneider 2024). It is evident that social media in particular—where populists are generally extremely successful—fosters this false consensus. The algorithms ensure that people primarily, or even exclusively, come into contact with opinions and people from the same echo chamber. After some time, this inevitably creates the impression of belonging to a silent, overwhelming majority that is, however, deliberately ignored by the mainstream media and political parties.

According to populists, the elite is actually always seeking to tighten its grip on the common people. Not only through laws and regulations—as happened during the COVID-19 pandemic and, for example, through environmental measures—but also by dictating what can and cannot be said. Politicians, academics, and journalists are all intent on silencing the common man and undermining his authentic way of life and wisdom. The majority remains unheard, or remains silent.

Threat, Resistance, and Violence

In general, populists feel threatened. This threat demands an immediate and direct response. The language they use, brimming with emotion, is tailored to this. They speak of a crisis, a tsunami, a collapse, a struggle for survival; resistance must be offered, and a fight must be waged. In line with this, populists generally do not view rival political parties and politicians as opponents in a democratic contest for voter support—one that is sometimes won and sometimes lost. Instead, they are delegitimized as deceivers and enemies of the people, with whom they have nothing in common. Consequently, there is often a significant willingness to use violence. Fake parliaments can be stormed in the event of disappointing election results; opposing politicians can be threatened, physically attacked, or even murdered. The number of verbal and physical attacks on, and acts of violence against, politicians is therefore rising sharply in Germany as well, leading many to decide to leave politics behind. In particular, right-wing populist-motivated violence is on the rise (Bundeskriminalamt 2024; KFN 2025).

Visiting the websites where populists gather, one sees widespread justification for and willingness to use violence (Blokland 2025: 87ff). Those in power have done all sorts of things to us, and now they must pay for it. This can lead individuals to feel justified in lashing out, setting fires, and committing murder. These are not necessarily “lone wolves.” They radicalize within a collectively sustained discourse (Lewandowski 2024: 164ff).

Claudia Neu and others have studied the political consequences of loneliness among young people. Loneliness had increased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. It appears that loneliness reinforces right-wing populism and the willingness to use violence. The researchers concluded: “People who frequently feel lonely, disconnected, and misunderstood are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, condone political violence, and agree with authoritarian attitudes” (2023: 4). Twenty-five percent of those who were not lonely agreed with the statement “Some politicians deserve it when anger toward them sometimes turns into violence” (which is already a remarkably high percentage). As many as 34 per cent of those who were lonely agreed. Loneliness generally has become a massive social problem and appears to be linked to distrust of social and political institutions, authoritarian attitudes, and belief in conspiracy theories (Lane 2000; Entringer 2022; Bücker 2022; Kersten, Neu and Vogel 2025).

Conspiracy Theories

As has already been noted, populists are highly susceptible to conspiracy theories. This susceptibility can be explained by people’s constant exposure to economic, social, cultural, and political changes they never explicitly chose, coupled with the conviction that a single, cohesive elite controls the world: there are forces that rule the world secretly and against the will of the people. This belief in dark forces is widespread, and thus the potential that populist parties can draw upon is vast. 23% of Germans agree with the statement “There are secret organizations that have a major influence on political decisions,” while 17% believe there is some truth to this. 21% agree with the statement “Politicians and other leaders are merely puppets of the powers behind the scenes,” and 22% partially agree with this. Only 51% reject the statement “The government is hiding the truth from the public.” Time and again, however, the percentages in East Germany are nearly twice as high as in the West. For example, 33% of East Germans agree with the statement “The media and politics work hand in hand to manipulate public opinion.” In West Germany, this percentage is “only” 19% (Brettschneider 2024).

Strong-willed leaders

Finally, populism typically involves a cult of a strong leader who truly understands and represents the people. There is rarely a well-organized political party with a detailed, well-thought-out political platform designed to solve clearly defined social problems. Nor, once in power, is there any investment in social institutions and structures to address social and political problems in a sustainable manner. A populist party can therefore rise to prominence just as quickly as it can disappear. The presence and popularity of a charismatic leader are often decisive. Consider such diverse politicians as Fortuyn, Wilders, Berlusconi, Orbán, Milei, Modi, Trump, Johnson, Farage, Le Pen, Bolsonaro, Babiš, or Fico. The German Alternative für Deutschland is an exception to this, however: it has a developed party organization and there is (as yet) no leader who independently enjoys significant electoral appeal. The party can even afford to be led by a lesbian who is married to a migrant of color from Sri Lanka and lives in Switzerland.[4] Nevertheless, the AfD too is characterized by the near-total absence of substantive contributions to the debate on how to concretely solve social problems.

2 What explains the rise of populism?

Right-wing populists have always been around

How can we explain the current appeal of populism? First and foremost, it is simply the case that a significant portion of the population in Western democracies holds right-wing populist or extremist views. For example, in East Germany, 10.5% of the population believes that Germans are inherently superior to other peoples; an additional 21% do not reject this statement (Decker, Kiess, and Brähler 2023).[5] 41% believe that foreigners have come to Germany solely to take advantage of social benefits; and 21% tacitly support this view. 26% believe that Germany needs a one-party state that represents the national community as a whole; this statement receives tacit support from 25% of respondents. 15% believe that Germany needs a Führer (I will leave the term used in the survey untranslated), who rules with a strong hand for the well-being of all; an additional 19% do not reject this statement. And there is explicit support from 12.4% for the statement “Just as in nature, the strongest should always prevail in society”; 22.5% support this statement implicitly. Also revealing: 44% of AfD voters and 24% of all Germans endorse the statement, “Other peoples may have achieved important things, but these do not measure up to German achievements.”

People with these kinds of views have always existed, but until recently they were unable or unwilling to vote for parties that expressed them. This was because such parties did not exist or, as in Germany, failed to clear the electoral threshold. It is also possible that these people previously did not want to waste their vote by voting for a right-wing populist party, because all other parties had unequivocally declared that they would never cooperate with such a party. It may also be that in the past, these individuals voted for parties that represented values or interests that were higher on their hierarchy of values at the time. As these values have, in their view, been more fully realized (economic security or prosperity, for example), other attitudes (authoritarianism, xenophobia, racism, sexism) have become more decisive in their choice of party. Another possibility is that these people felt in the past that they had to conceal their views. Because the entire political spectrum has shifted to the right, this is no longer the case. Right-wing populist views are increasingly accepted and legitimized in society (see for Germany: Zick et al 2019, 2025). In any case, the individuals in question were not led to their views by populist parties and leaders; they have always held the opinion that foreigners, refugees, people of color, homosexuals, emancipated women (and men), Jews, the unemployed, democrats, artists, and the educated are no good.

It’s not as if young people are the future and the haters will simply disappear from the scene due to natural attrition. At the end of 2022, Sturzbecher and Pöge surveyed 3,142 students in Brandenburg aged 12 to 23 about their views. Nearly a quarter believed that National Socialism “also had its good sides” and that Germans “are superior to other peoples.” 44% of the young people “somewhat” or “strongly” agreed with the statement that there are too many “foreigners” in Brandenburg. In response to the statement “Foreigners enrich German culture,” 14% answered “not at all true” and 42% “somewhat untrue.” According to the researchers, about one-third of those surveyed were “xenophobic.” And based on their “index for right-wing extremism,” they concluded that over 14% of young people could be classified as such.

Naturally, this has implications for voting behavior. In the Brandenburg state parliament elections in September 2024, the AfD was by far the largest party among young people aged 16 to 24 (31%). The SPD and the Greens did not exceed 19% and 6%, respectively. The older the voters, the less inclined they are to vote for extremist parties. Among those over 70, for example, the SPD won 49% of the vote, making it three times as large as the AfD. The use of social media is one explanation for this: the more time spent on it, the more extremist the views. As is well known, young people in particular are active on these platforms.

Research also shows that when people begin to hate, their anger is directed not exclusively at a single group, but at all possible groups (Zick, Küpper, and Berghan 2019: 69). For this reason, it makes little sense to combat, for example, anti-Semitism alone: the hatred is not directed exclusively at Jews, but at all those who deviate from what those involved perceive as “normal” or “decent.” In Germany as a whole, incidentally, there is far more discrimination based on skin color, origin, gender, and religion than in other member states of the European Union (Brandt 2023). The sources of this intolerance lie, among other things, in personality (formed primarily during childhood; for example, those involved have experienced too little affection and emotional security), family background (parents, grandparents, and other relatives pass on values and attitudes), and local culture. It is possible to change these attitudes, but this rarely succeeds within a single term of government.

It is therefore too simplistic to view a party like the AfD solely as a protest party lacking in substance, as Lewandowsky (2024: 217ff) rightly points out. Many (not all) people who vote for the AfD (or Wilders, Baudet, Le Pen, Farage, Trump, Orbán, Meloni, Kickl, and so on) hold beliefs that align with this party’s platform. They oppose migrants and refugees; they believe in the existence of human races; they believe in the existence of authentic peoples rooted in tradition, land, and ancestry; they oppose globalization, Europe, feminism, LGBTQ+, and changes to traditional gender roles; they reject the existing political system; they have authoritarian tendencies; they oppose political pluralism; and they want strong leaders. The number of such people varies from country to country and from region to region. There are also strong indications that this mindset is spreading to the center of society (Mullis 2024; Zick et al. 2019, 2025). In East Germany, in the former Prussia, it enjoys quite a lot of support. Incidentally, these regions have quietly, through the back door of West Germany, become part of the European Union. One might wonder whether a broad public debate should not have been held on this matter first. Does Europe really want these people on board? Shouldn’t we have imposed conditions on Germany, just as we have done and continue to do with regard to other prospective members? In case the reader thinks I am being ironic here: I am dead serious.

Loss of Control

There are also people who vote for right-wing populist parties for reasons other than those mentioned above. What kind of social discontent—often diffuse—do populists successfully tap into? A key factor here appears to be the widespread feeling among citizens that they have lost control over social developments and, by extension, over their own lives. East Germany serves as an instructive case study in this regard.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the absorption of East Germany by West Germany in 1990, economy and society in the former GDR fell apart. Companies suddenly had to compete in a Western market and went bankrupt en masse. Employment fell from approximately 9.6 million people at the end of 1989 to about 6.1 million by mid-1993, a loss of approximately 3.5 million jobs. Industrial production in 1992 was about 73% below the 1989 level (Priewe 1993; Brinkmann and Wiedemann 1995). By 1994, only 25% of East Germans were still working at the same institution as in 1989, and only 18% had been employed without interruption (Mullis 2024: 163). Many became unemployed (around 20% of the labor force in the mid-1990s), had to accept jobs below their skill level, took early retirement, or moved away. Twenty to thirty percent of the residents of states such as Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt left for West Germany. Places like Eisenhüttenstadt, Nauen, or Frankfurt/Oder lost more than half of their residents. For the most part, it was the better-educated, the young, and the most enterprising and socially engaged people who left. As a result, social and civic life also collapsed or failed to develop. Daycare centers and schools closed due to a lack of children, sports clubs closed due to a lack of members, and bakeries and butchers disappeared due to a shortage of customers. People saw the value of their homes decline because their neighbors’ homes stood empty and because no one seemed to be investing in their property anymore. Once the downward spiral has begun, there is often no stopping it. There are fewer and fewer engaged citizens, passionate local politicians, entrepreneurs, firefighters, and consumers, and more and more elderly, sick, isolated, and vulnerable people. A sense of malaise sets in—a feeling of being abandoned, of betrayal.

Starting in 2015, Peter Maxwill traveled throughout Germany in an effort to understand why so many people were drifting toward right-wing populist views. He found a “country in the midst of a collective identity crisis” (2019: 10). As he observes the fanatical demonstrations against a refugee shelter in Freital, Saxony, Maxwill wonders:

“It is quite possible that the protests … are not actually about refugees—but about something for which resentment toward the new neighbors serves as a kind of outlet. Perhaps it is a vague feeling of being forgotten and left behind that has fermented over the years into massive anger. Anger born of loneliness. It is a feeling for which there is a factual basis in some parts of the country: Many thousands of people have left villages and small towns in recent years, and two technical terms have consequently become buzzwords: demography and structural change. Some regions are literally becoming desolate, dying a slow death like aged lions” (2019: 19–20).

According to Maxwill, political polarization thus has its origins in reunification. Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised the citizens of the East flourishing landscapes[6], and little of that has come to pass. One can only understand the anger in the East if one recognizes, he writes,

“that millions of GDR citizens were socialized in a state of injustice and authoritarianism—and found themselves after 1990 in a laboratory of neoliberal social transformation” (2019: 253–4).

Well into the twentieth century, conservatives and socialists shared the sociological insight that most people have a strong need for security, continuity, predictability, clarity, tradition, community, as well as a dominant identity and social narrative that provide meaning and direction. On the one hand, progressives welcomed the Enlightenment because it enabled the emancipation of the individual from old, restrictive forms and ways of thinking. On the other hand, there was always the awareness that rationalization and individualization can undermine the communities in which most people thrive. One of the lessons of the 1930s was that the uncertainties to which people are exposed by the free market must be mitigated by collective insurance schemes. The welfare states that developed after World War II through the 1980s remain a high point in human civilization. They offered the desired security, left no one behind, and had a (consumerist) narrative that many believed in for a long time: things will only get better, and the children will have it even better.

The rise of neoliberalism within traditional conservative parties such as the U.S. Republicans and the British Conservatives, along with the simultaneous collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe, largely freed the market from government intervention. Privatization, deregulation, austerity, marketization, and globalization became the guiding principles, even for social democrats, who allowed themselves to be intimidated by the ideological narrative that the collapse of the planned economy in the East and the fall of the Berlin Wall had proven the validity of market liberalism. This led to economic shock therapies in Eastern Europe, with social and political consequences that we continue to grapple with to this day (Blokland 2006).

Rapid and profound cultural, technological, social, and economic changes—over which politicians seem to have no control or which are even encouraged by them—appear to play a significant role in the rise of populism, particularly in countries that have had to undergo these changes at an even faster pace than average. In recent decades, liberal, cosmopolitan-oriented elites—increasingly driven by identity politics—have undermined the socioeconomic security of people, particularly those in the lower social strata, by allowing market forces into ever more spheres of life and exposing local economies to the forces of globalizing capitalism. Similarly, they undermined the cohesion and stability of local cultural communities. It is no coincidence that, especially in East Germany, it is primarily the Social Democrats who are bearing the brunt of this: instead of protecting people at the bottom of society from unbridled market forces, they embraced these forces in the 1990s; think here of Tony Blair’s “New Labour,” Gerhard Schröder’s “Agenda 2010,” and the purple coalitions into which the Dutch Labor Party allowed itself to be drawn (Blokland 2026).

Over the past two decades, an endless series of crises has compounded these socioeconomic transformations. To name just a few, we can think of the credit crisis, the euro crisis, the refugee crisis, the climate crisis, the energy crisis, the COVID-19 crisis, the housing crisis, the war in Ukraine, the Gaza war, the Iran war, and today we face a new crisis almost every day, caused by a crisis incarnate in the White House: tariffs, trade wars, the dismantling of NATO and other international organizations, (announced) takeovers of, or attacks on, Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba. It takes courage these days to open a newspaper in the morning.

Starting in 2019, political scholar Daniel Mullis conducted a long-term series of interviews with fifty people in four different neighborhoods of Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig where support for the AfD is relatively high. These areas used to be established, homogeneous, stable, and relatively prosperous working-class neighborhoods. Mullis asked how people were faring, what their fears and frustrations were, and what they hoped for the future. Regarding these hopes, he notes: “If anything is mentioned at all, it is normality, predictability, and stability. Things should be as they once were” (2024: 16). “For very many people, uncertainty and unease are on the rise, which is currently evidently fueling a regressive longing for a more homogeneous, secure, and manageable world” (2024: 129). And: “In conversations, happiness, stability, and opportunities for advancement seem to be located in the past, while the future tends to be viewed as uncertain, difficult to plan, and associated with major changes” (2024: 152).

Mullis observes, too, that the certainties enjoyed by the middle classes have gradually eroded since the 1980s and 1990s. Inequalities in income and wealth have grown significantly, precariousness has increased sharply, the hope and expectation that things will keep getting better have vanished, feelings of loneliness are widespread, as is the fear of social decline. According to Mullis, all interviewees perceive a downturn in Germany’s economy, prosperity, and power, as well as a diminishing sense of German cultural identity. Many also consider Germans to be less diligent, reliable, and virtuous than in the past (2024: 157–160). The interviewees are not future-oriented but idealize the past as a time of fewer conflicts, clear roles, greater clarity, and certainty. The underlying tone in all conversations is: “things used to be better.” Mullis writes:

Essentially, the look back in both West and East expresses a longing for a harmonious place with fewer conflicts, less plurality, clearer orders, and above all, security and normality… In light of the crises experienced in the present, people tend to seek refuge in the supposedly familiar and secure past (2024: 161).

The crises of recent years mentioned above are not the causes of these feelings of uncertainty and fear, but rather catalysts. They amplified the experiences and feelings that have been reshaping the social mainstream since the late 1980s. At its core, writes Mullis, it is about “the neoliberal market-driven individualization, the intensification of competitive pressure, dynamics of de-solidarization, as well as the loss of social utopias alongside the simultaneous pluralization and progressive differentiation of society” (2024: 37).

It also became clear in the interviews that the conviction of not being heard, of having no political clout, was spreading strongly throughout the social center. People observed major social changes, and at the same time felt they could hardly, if at all, influence or steer them: “The feeling of having no power to act oneself is very present in the conversations overall and is repeatedly … expressed” (2024: 167).

The feeling of not being heard and of being unable to exert any influence goes hand in hand with dissatisfaction with existing democratic processes and institutions, and contributes significantly to the strengthening of right-wing populist or extremist attitudes and ideas. Only the right-wing populists promise normality and stability, and claim to represent the people exclusively. What was clearly missing in all the interviewees’ accounts, Mullis concludes, “are (collective) political visions. Many search individually for solutions to the challenges at hand, and frustration grows when these—as is all too often the case—cannot be found. At this point, the right is able to score points with its resentment-laden narratives and the associated promise of restoring normality and order; it gains a lived plausibility for people” (2024: 16).

In this context, migration and the resulting multicultural societies are perceived in the same way as a loss of control. Suddenly, it seemed, in 2015 there were more than a million refugees—mainly from Syria and Afghanistan—at the German border. There was no time to prepare people for this; it just happened. A much-needed broad societal discussion on migration and flight has scarcely taken place in Germany. Instead of framing migration, for example, as a welcome boost for a country where thirty percent of the working population will retire in the coming decade (yet another crisis), the waves of migration were primarily portrayed as crises that had to be endured and overcome solely for humanitarian reasons (and primarily by the people who were to welcome the migrants as new neighbors). Subsequently, there was—and largely still is to this day—a lack of a plan for how these people should be integrated (Blokland 2024). This absence, in turn, leads to all manner of other real or perceived crises.

Lack of political interest and competencies, and opportunities to develop them

Another important cause of the decline in political competence is the disappearance of the institutional settings in which democracy can be learned through direct participation in democratic decision-making. Membership of political parties, trade unions, and other civil society organizations has steadily declined, while an increasing number of organizations—from sports clubs to universities—are now run by professional managers rather than their members. Moreover, the development of democratic structures in other spheres of society has never truly taken off. This is particularly evident in the case of economic democracy.

A related cause of the rise of populism is the decline in political knowledge and civic competence. It is remarkable that many democracies pay little attention to political education, as if democracy were a hobby, comparable to soccer or gardening. This also applies to Germany (Blokland 2025: 111 ff). As social and political complexity increases, Karl Mannheim (1940) observed some time ago, political competencies in a democracy must also grow if it is to survive. However, this is not the case. Despite rising educational levels, the political knowledge and skills of people who read less and less and increasingly amuse themselves with screens seem to be steadily declining.

People are also becoming increasingly less interested in what is happening in the world. Since 2018, the Dutch Media Authority (Commissariaat voor de Media) has monitored media use in the Netherlands. The study is conducted in cooperation with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which carries out the same research in 47 other countries. In its 2026 report, the Authority observes: “Interest in news has declined steadily since measurements began in 2018. In 2018, 61 percent of Dutch adults aged 18 and over reported being (very) interested in news; by now, that figure has fallen to 45 percent. Fourteen percent now say they are (not at all) interested in news, compared with just 4 percent in 2018. The decline has been particularly pronounced among young people, especially young women” (2026: 10–11).

The full Digital News Report 2026 of the Reuters Institute shows that interest in news is declining across all countries surveyed, in some cases very sharply. At the same time, an increasing number of people—especially younger generations—report that social media have become their primary source of news. The authors conclude: “At the global level (averaging across 48 markets), social media and video networks are for the first time the single most widely used way of accessing online news (used by 54% of all respondents), ahead of news organisations’ own websites and apps (51%). This shifting composition of news consumption is happening among all age groups” (2026: 6). The paradox is that people around the world simultaneously report having little confidence in the reliability of social media. In the Netherlands, social media have become the primary source of news for 33 percent of those aged 18 to 34, compared with 20 percent in 2018. The report also shows that people increasingly watch the news rather than read it. More generally, the written word—in books, magazines, and newspapers—has been losing significance throughout the Western world for several decades.

Room for charlatans and bullshitters

When people are increasingly unwilling or unable to understand how the world works, there is more and more room for charlatans. A hallmark of many populists is their aversion to expertise, knowledge, and claims to objectivity, intersubjectivity, or plausibility. This aversion targets scientists, intellectuals, career politicians, journalists, professionals, and other bearers of knowledge. They are all guilty of arrogance and elitism. They express their disdain for the common people through cultural preferences, language use, and manners, among other things. In this sense, populists also stand up for the ordinary, uninformed people.

Donald Trump is a prime example of this. He has absolutely no respect for truth or integrity and is what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt (2005) calls a typical “bullshitter.” A liar still distinguishes between truth and falsehood. Somewhere deep down, he knows what is true or false; he tries to hide the truth; he can feel caught in the act of telling a lie; he can feel exposed. A bullshitter makes no effort to distinguish truth from falsehood. He doesn’t care at all. A bullshitter is neither on the side of truth nor on the side of lies. Whether what he says does justice to reality is irrelevant to him. The only thing that matters is whether what he claims brings him closer to fulfilling his desires, interests, and goals. What matters, then, is the effect of a statement, not whether it can be justified empirically or logically. By the time victims realize that a statement cannot possibly be substantiated, they are already being bombarded with the next set of falsehoods, until they are worn down and give up on rational discussion and the exchange of arguments. It is hopeless. The democrat’s strongest possible weapon—the better argument—is thus neutralized.

When spouting bullshit, one does not merely take advantage of the public’s ignorance. By cornering opponents with false information, one can also rally one’s supporters, even when they too know that the information is false (cf. Kenyon 2025). One shows one’s supporters that, just like them, one has a deep contempt for everything the enemy stands for, including his better arguments.

The belief that everyone is an expert means that any somewhat deeper analysis of the world we live in can be dismissed as snobbery and arrogance. Every populist, on the other hand, is welcomed as “one of us,” as someone who truly understands and respects us, the people. Every populist interpretation of problems is likewise placed on the same footing as interpretations by people who used to be described as “authorities,” “experts,” “scientists,” or “intellectuals.” Thus, it can happen that even on public broadcasters, right-wing populist bullshitters can spread manipulative lies unchallenged, because journalistic impartiality supposedly requires that all viewpoints be heard.

Social media, disinformation, manipulation.

Social media is the perfect platform for bullshitters. It is no coincidence that the global rise of populist leaders and parties has coincided with the rise of these media. To spread their messages, they are no longer dependent on traditional media, which used to be gatekeepers controlled by liberal, educated elites. Social media is also exceptionally well-suited for simplistic messages that target emotions, gut feelings, and prejudices. Because the medium itself—whether it’s TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook—largely dictates the message, political actors relying on rational analysis and argumentation rarely win the battle on these platforms.

Social media is used primarily by young people. It is therefore understandable that populist parties can count on significant support among young people in particular.

Social media has now proven to be a threat to both mental health (Haidt 2024) and to democracies. Its algorithms undermine pluralism in society. Virtually closed groups of citizens are emerging who increasingly live in separate realities and are becoming less and less accustomed to dealing with alternative viewpoints. Social media can also be deliberately and purposefully used for manipulation, disinformation, division, and agitation. Like all media, social media further facilitates certain types of communication more than others, and these forms of communication have proven to be of little benefit to a substantive democratic exchange on social issues and their potential solutions.

Social and Personal Discontent

As extensive data shows, dissatisfaction with one’s personal and social life has increased dramatically in many democracies. Research also indicates that unhappy people tend to be less democratic-minded citizens who frequently seek scapegoats.

People with mental health issues often place a burden on their social environment. People who are unhappy, depressed, or downcast drain energy from others; people who feel good give energy to others. When several unhappy people are together, this can negatively impact the entire living and working environment. Moreover, they become indifferent and pay less attention to themselves and their physical surroundings.

A major source of unease in our Western societies is loneliness. It is already being described as an epidemic and appears to be closely linked to right-wing populist resentments, attitudes, and ideas (Blokland 2021, 2025; Entringer 2022; Brücker 2022; Neu et al. 2023; Kersten, Neu, and Vogel 2025).

In his book The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (2000), political psychologist Robert Lane observed a quarter of a century ago that all Western democracies have seen a sharp rise in depression and other mental health disorders since the 1970s. Moreover, distrust of other people and social institutions has increased everywhere. And everywhere, pessimism about the future has grown, and social and family cohesion has eroded. According to Lane, there was “a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbors, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solidary family life” (2000: 9). This famine has only intensified since then.

As a result of the lack of social support, people increasingly suffer from loneliness and are much more vulnerable to life’s setbacks, such as unemployment, illness, stress, disappointments with their children, and unfulfilled wishes. This leads to a general sense of unease or anxiety. Research findings show, as Lane points out, that people who feel good about themselves exhibit greater creativity, problem-solving ability, willingness to cooperate, generosity, health, and self-actualization. Happy people make friends more easily, and friends make people happier. They also have fewer ethnic prejudices and hold a more positive view of democratic governance. Dissatisfied and depressed people, on the other hand, fall into a downward spiral: they have a negative self-image, a lack of self-confidence and autonomy, perform poorly in school and at work, lose their ability to put things into perspective, come into conflict with family members and colleagues, are poor parents, and so on. The personal, but also the societal, costs of these individuals are enormous: “they drain the resources of the societies in which they live,” writes Lane (2000: 330; cf. Blokland 2021, 2025c).

Lane acknowledges that the market-liberal society once liberated us from poverty and, at least initially, brought with it greater happiness. The point at which we had “enough,” however, has long since passed. For decades now, this order has offered its citizens nothing but more of the same, in a monotonous repetition of what was once a liberating theme. This tendency is deeply embedded in the system, just as it was in earlier great civilizations. Today, we suffer from malaise and loneliness in a social desert amidst an abundance of material wealth. For Lane, the “end of history” therefore does not represent the market liberalism’s glorious final triumph; rather, it marks the slow death of a culture that seems incapable of renewing itself and adapting to changing circumstances (2000: 10).

Indifference and Political Apathy

A final possible cause of the rise of populism deserves more attention than I can give it here. It is also something that is difficult to define or describe with precision. Nevertheless, it seems too important to leave unmentioned. It is closely related to the diffuse sense of unease discussed above and concerns a more general feeling of malaise and indifference that permeates many spheres of life.

Is this the decadence of a culture that is indeed approaching its end? Are people simply exhausted by what seems like an endless succession of crises? Is it a specifically German, or perhaps East German, phenomenon? I do not know. What does seem evident, however, is that for many people everything has become scheißegal—they simply no longer care. This has important political consequences.

Germans have long enjoyed a reputation for being excellent organizers, as well as conscientious, disciplined, and exceptionally hardworking. Perhaps this was true during the first decades after the war—perhaps there was, collectively, something to repress or overcome. Today, however, that reputation seems to rest on increasingly shaky foundations. Very little appears to function as it should in Germany, and only a small minority still seem genuinely concerned about it.

The country’s physical infrastructure is deteriorating or has, in some cases, quite literally collapsed. Trains rarely run on time. The digitalization of society lags roughly two decades behind much of the rest of Europe. The bureaucracy still operates much as it did in the era of Otto von Bismarck, stifling economic and social initiative alike. Germany has allowed a wide range of major policy challenges—its pension system, education, the judiciary, healthcare, housing, the integration of newcomers, defence, and demographic change more generally—to drift unresolved for years.

The automotive industry, long the cornerstone of German prosperity, perfected the diesel engine only to risk becoming a second Kodak in the age of electric mobility. Germans seem to be perpetually on sick leave, on holiday, or otherwise absent. Even when they are present, they often appear to feel little responsibility for the final outcome of their work, let alone derive much professional pride or self-respect from it. One might even say, only half in jest, that the main reason water still comes out of the taps in Berlin is that every day an endless stream of Polish workers travels into the city to carry out the maintenance that keeps essential services running.

This indifference also seems to be spreading to groups in which one might least expect to find it. Through the implementation of our democracy and integration projects, we at Social Science Works communicate extensively with social workers, teachers, employees of civil society organizations, public officials, and others who play an important role in maintaining social cohesion. Here too, one cannot help but notice a growing indifference—not only towards society at large, but also towards their own work. Many appear to have lost faith in the value of what they do.

Elsewhere (2023, 2024, 2025), I have described how difficult it has become even to establish contact with many of these professionals. Letters and emails go unanswered, telephone calls are not picked up or forwarded, and people are frequently absent for reasons that are often entirely unclear. Applications and other matters of considerable importance to citizens, civil society organizations, and businesses disappear into bureaucratic black holes or remain untouched on desks for months or even years, until those concerned eventually give up in frustration. Filing complaints with higher authorities about such administrative inaction (Untätigkeitsbeschwerde) often results only in retaliatory behaviour by officials who perceive their authority to have been challenged.

Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently sparked a wave of outrage when he argued that Germans should finally start working harder.[7] Merz is not always known for measured or well-considered judgments—he drew criticism in 2025, for example, when he complained that the “cityscape” was becoming overly shaped by migrants—but on this occasion he had a point. Too many Germans, one might argue, have become indifferent underperformers.

Merz directed his criticism primarily at proposals for a four-day working week and the growing emphasis on work–life balance. Admittedly, this was an overstatement: life is about more than work alone. But when people do show up for work, they should actually work. If they do not; if trains are perpetually late; if applications are never processed on time; if people are forced to sit in the same traffic jam every day because those responsible have allocated three years rather than a single weekend to repair a small bridge, the consequences extend far beyond economic costs. They also seriously undermine the work–life balance of everyone else.

As noted above, this growing indifference has important political consequences. Paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, one might argue that the greatest threat to democracy comes not from radical minorities who sow hatred and division, but from an indifferent majority—a mass of atomized individuals, detached and passive citizens who no longer experience a shared reality and no longer feel any responsibility to participate in public life.

The problem is not merely that fewer and fewer people actively commit themselves to democracy and the public good, as reflected in the dramatic decline in membership of political parties and other civil society organizations. More fundamentally, large numbers of citizens now look away when democratic institutions are undermined or attacked. Even more troubling is the fact that only a small minority still appear capable of genuine outrage when democratic norms, values, principles, and preconditions are violated.

This is evident, for example, in the declining tolerance for political parties and individuals holding different views; in the weakening acceptance of the legitimacy of political opponents, of the democratic system itself, and, closely related to this, of election results; and in the diminishing respect for a minimum degree of social equality as a necessary condition for political equality—and thus for democracy itself.

Indifference is closely related to irresponsibility. People no longer feel responsible for public affairs or the common good. They do not involve themselves, they make little effort to stay informed, and they make political choices so frivolous that they would be deeply embarrassed to make similarly careless decisions in their personal lives.

This is reflected in voting behaviour. As in the Netherlands (Blokland 2025b), many people in Germany vote for parties and candidates without making even the slightest effort to inform themselves about their backgrounds, policy positions, or election programs. Many cast their vote for parties whose policies objectively run counter to their own interests (cf. Fratzscher 2023). Others appear to vote out of sheer contrariness, boredom, or a desire to provoke. They observe that those who do inform themselves and take democracy seriously reject—or even abhor—the idea of supporting parties and candidates who oppose the democratic order itself or target entire groups of citizens. And so, all the more reason to do exactly that. It is a juvenile gesture of defiance, a symbolic middle finger directed at everyone. It provides a momentary sense of satisfaction.

The roughly 40 percent of voters in states such as Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg who currently say they intend to vote for the AfD are not all right-wing populists or extremists. Many are simply indifferent and irresponsible provocateurs.

In principle, however, political irresponsibility is not a new phenomenon. Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter, along with many other thinkers writing about democracy in the early twentieth century, harbored few illusions about the average citizen or voter (cf. Blokland 2006, 2014). They supported democracy in principle, but they preferred a form of democracy in which ordinary citizens exercised as little influence as possible. Were they right?

3 How Can We Counter Populism and Further Develop Democracy?

“You read the final line, close the book, put it aside, and stare into space. Just as you have done so many times over the past few years. So many books—some insightful, others less so—have tried to teach us how to talk to the right, explain the logic of democracy, make sense of hatred and incitement, accuse, provoke debate, recount personal experiences, describe public moods, or present scientific and less scientific analyses. And every time you finish one of these books, you are left asking yourself: Now what? What are we supposed to do? In the end, bewilderment always seems to be the prevailing feeling.” [8]

There is no panacea for the problems facing democracy or for the rise of right-wing populism. What is needed instead is a broad range of initiatives, experiments, institutional innovations, additions, and incremental reforms. There is no reason to believe that democracy is a finished project. On the contrary, we have only just begun to develop its full potential.

First and foremost, representative democracy urgently needs to be complemented by deliberative institutions and practices. Beyond that, we should consider expanding civic and political education, both inside and outside schools; abandoning the notion that history—or politics—has somehow come to an end; regulating social media; promoting greater social equality so that political equality, and therefore democracy itself, ceases to be little more than a fiction; and regulating, or where constitutionally justified even prohibiting, political organizations that seek to destroy democracy’s very foundation: its commitment to doubt, openness, and the reversibility of political decisions.

Expanding Democracy: Deliberation

“Wir wollen mehr Demokratie wagen” (“We want to dare more democracy”), declared Willy Brandt in his inaugural policy speech of 1969, responding to the protests of young people and students against the depoliticized political order that had emerged in postwar Germany. Society, he argued, had to become more democratic and more open, and citizens needed to exercise greater influence over politics and public policy. Yet since then, relatively little progress has been made in realizing this ambition. Brandt’s appeal therefore remains as relevant today as it was more than half a century ago.

When democracy comes under pressure, the answer should be to expand it. We need many more platforms in which far more citizens can develop political skills, form and refine their political preferences, learn how democracy actually works, and acquire the capacity to disagree constructively and reach compromises.

In many European Union countries, large segments of the population have little or no personal experience with democratic decision-making beyond casting a vote in national or local elections every few years. In part because of this lack of experience, many people have only a limited understanding of how democracy functions in practice. They have never personally experienced political pluralism, conflicting interests, or the inevitability of disagreement, nor have they learned how to deal with these realities. As a consequence, they often have little appreciation for the compromises produced by the lengthy negotiations characteristic of democratic politics—compromises that are frequently perceived as a sign of weakness, as opaque, or even as acts of betrayal. Nor are they generally inclined to participate politically beyond occasionally voting. In Eastern Germany, for example, many citizens express a preference for a single dominant party, and many have little confidence in the democratic system as it currently operates.

How can this be changed? Civic and political education on the normative and epistemological foundations of democracy and pluralism is, of course, essential. I shall return to this shortly. But an equally effective form of democratic education is active participation in democratic and deliberative decision-making itself. If we wish to strengthen democracy, we must greatly expand opportunities for this kind of participation.

This can be done in many different ways, involving different groups of citizens and serving different purposes. In Resisting democratic decline: deliberation and some lessons from Germany and beyond, I previously outlined a range of such options (see also Blokland 2025: 27ff.). These include, among other things, citizens’ dialogues, juries and assemblies, and deliberative polling.

The essence of deliberation is that it is, above all, an open and respectful exchange of ideas and perspectives that fosters the discovery, understanding, contextualization, and development of political preferences.

In the consumerist or economic conception of democracy that predominates today, the principal purpose of political participation is to translate the pre-existing preferences or interests of individuals into collective decisions and public policy. Questions such as how these preferences came into being, whether they are informed and can be justified, or whether they are genuinely political in the sense that they concern public rather than purely private matters, are seldom raised. In deliberative conceptions of democracy, by contrast, these questions occupy center stage. Deliberation is not primarily about the pursuit of individual interests or about organizations competing on behalf of particular constituencies. Rather, it is about the collective formation of well-reasoned judgments concerning the public good.

Deliberation is not intended to replace existing democratic institutions. Instead, it should be understood as an important extension and complement to them. At a time when political communication increasingly appears to revolve around the manipulation and manufacture of preferences, deliberation can help bridge the gap between politics and society by creating new opportunities for an honest conversation about what holds our societies together and what we collectively seek to achieve.

In doing so, deliberation can also strengthen the sense of political community, civic-mindedness, and citizenship upon which every healthy democracy ultimately depends. These civic dispositions are weakened when democracy is conceived primarily as a decision-making procedure (cf. Schumpeter 1942), in which power is the central objective and political actors are encouraged to secure electoral support by whatever means prove effective, including manipulation and deception. Deliberation offers the possibility of restoring a measure of sincerity, civic spirit, and substantive political discussion to democratic life, thereby contributing to the renewal of democratic culture.

Political Education

A second democratic intervention concerns civic and political education. Most people have little understanding of politics or democracy, and often defend this ignorance by insisting that politics is simply not their interest—that everyone is entitled to their own hobbies. Increasingly, however, this indifference has serious consequences. The rise of right-wing populism and extremism is one of them. As long as every citizen has the right to participate in public debate and to vote, it is only prudent to prepare both children and adults for their role as democratic citizens through civic and political education.

Germany recognizes the importance of political education more explicitly than many other countries. It has, for example, an extensive network of so-called Partnerschaften für Demokratie (“Partnerships for Democracy”), which seek to strengthen democratic knowledge and participation. Yet political education in Germany also falls far short of what is needed.

Partly out of a historical fear of centralized power and state propaganda, educational policy in Germany is highly decentralized. As a consequence, the attention devoted to civic and political education varies considerably from one federal state (Bundesland) to another. Children in eastern Germany generally receive significantly less political education than their counterparts in the west. On average, moreover, civic education accounts for no more than about two percent of total instructional time in German schools (Gökbudak & Hedtke 2019). The trend is downward. As in other western democracies, educational policy has increasingly come to prioritize subjects that enhance employability and labor-market competitiveness—that is, subjects regarded as economically useful.

The amount of political education students receive also varies sharply by educational track. The more academically oriented the school, the more extensive the civic education. Children of highly educated parents in Germany are far more likely to enter higher levels of education themselves. Research consistently shows that the higher an individual’s level of education, the less likely they are to endorse right-wing populist or extremist views. Consequently, the very students who stand to benefit most from civic and political education tend to receive the least of it. Many school principals and teachers appear to believe that their students—particularly those enrolled in vocational education—have little need for political education in the first place (Blokland 2025: 112ff., 142ff.).

Moreover, the teaching of politics is still largely focused on the acquisition of factual knowledge. In the hundreds of workshops that Social Science Works has conducted in schools, we observed that most students could still recall the names of the main political parties or knew how often elections were held. However, when they were asked the more fundamental normative question of why democracy is a good idea in the first place—why, for example, it would not be better simply to leave government to experts (after all, when we board a plane to Ibiza, we do not first hold a democratic vote to decide who should fly it)—the room usually fell silent, or the discussion dissolved into confusion.

The education system also falls short in another important respect. Students certainly acquire knowledge, but they are rarely taught what knowledge actually is. How are facts established? How can truth claims be assessed? What distinguishes a scientific statement from one that is not? Who counts as an expert, which questions can legitimately be left to experts, and which cannot—and why? What is the difference between science and philosophy? How can values and ends be justified?

It goes without saying that people who lack even the most basic understanding of these questions are poorly equipped to deal with the bullshitters, liars, fraudsters, manipulators, and other purveyors of alternative facts and fake news who have come to dominate much of the public sphere over the past decades. Consequently, many of the discussions we facilitate in citizens’ dialogues ultimately come down to a simple question: “You are making this claim—but what is it based on? And what, in turn, is your TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram source based on?”

The same issue arises in our workshops with participants from different cultural traditions, religious backgrounds, or social classes when we discuss values such as democracy, pluralism, freedom, equality, or autonomy. The most convincing way to make these values plausible and defensible invariably passes, to a significant extent, through epistemology—the question of how we know what we claim to know.

Bringing the “End of History” to an End

“Es ist alternativlos” (“There is no alternative”), Angela Merkel repeatedly declared during the euro crisis to justify the policies adopted to save the common currency. She invoked the phrase in many other contexts as well, and it ultimately inspired the name of the Alternative für Deutschland. The suggestion that political decisions are inevitable and without alternatives is harmful to the democratic climate, just as is any claim that we have reached the end of politics or the end of history. Politics exists precisely to shape social change in desired directions. That was, at least, the historical raison d’être of social democracy.

Once politicians begin to argue—or simply demonstrate—that politics is powerless; that society must submit to the unchecked play of market forces or to supposedly irresistible processes of rationalization, globalization, or digitalization, they inevitably foster either political apathy or a longing for parties and strong leaders who promise to prove the opposite.

The notion that politics is fundamentally powerless is itself largely ideological. For decades, Western democracies demonstrated precisely the opposite. Those countries whose governments have intervened most actively—through continuous processes of experimentation, learning, and policy adjustment—in both the market and society consistently rank at the top of virtually every index measuring social success. On indicators such as public health, life expectancy, well-being, prosperity, educational achievement, cultural participation, and the quality of the business environment, countries such as Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands consistently outperform others.[9] By contrast, countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, which have embraced neoliberal policies most extensively, tend to rank significantly lower across many of these measures.

The slogan Make America Great Again itself expresses a longing for a period in which both Democrats and, indeed, Republicans pursued policies that today would largely be described as social democratic.

Markets are undoubtedly valuable instruments for coordinating and guiding human behavior. Yet the market is only one of the institutional mechanisms available to societies for realizing their collective values and goals. Markets are not natural forces that simply happen to us, nor are they inevitable features of social life. They are human creations that can—and should—be consciously designed and regulated if their benefits are to be maximized while their shortcomings are contained and compensated for. None of this is a new insight. It has been well understood for decades (see, for example, Dahl and Lindblom 1953). Yet each ideological shift seems to require us to reinvent the wheel.

A small example illustrates the point. There was a reason why housing associations and social housing existed. Before the deregulation and privatization of this sector began in the late 1980s (in countries like the Netherlands and Germany), there was no compelling non-ideological justification for dismantling it. Yet amid the intoxicated euphoria surrounding what was perceived as the West’s final victory—though one may well ask, which West?—this is precisely what happened. The consequences for subsequent generations have been profound: unaffordable housing, growing numbers of young adults forced to remain living with their parents, and record-low birth rates (Wijk & Feijten 2026).

I hope the reader will forgive a personal anecdote. In the 1990s, I submitted a research proposal to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to investigate the social consequences of privatization and possible alternatives. The scholars responsible for evaluating the proposal (names known to the editors) rejected it. Their principal argument was that the subject lacked “societal relevance.”

I mention this not merely to point out once again that older social democrats who know their history and the relevant literature often turn out, in retrospect, to have been remarkably prescient. I mention it also because it illustrates how irrational public debate and collective decision-making can become. Once a crowd begins moving in a particular direction—including university scholars who ought to know better—it often becomes almost impossible to stop the momentum (see also Blokland 2016).

The inability—or unwillingness—of many democracies to address urgent social problems in a satisfactory manner contributes both to political disengagement and to political radicalization. Closely related to this is another issue discussed earlier: the absence of compelling public narratives.

The story of an ever more prosperous consumer society has largely lost its appeal, just as the neoliberal promise that the extraordinary enrichment of those at the top would ultimately benefit everyone has lost much of its credibility. The production- and consumption-oriented “stress society” has increasingly marginalized precisely those social activities that contribute most to human well-being (Lane 2000).

This may also help explain the profound disappointment experienced by many East Germans. They had expected so much from market capitalism, yet what many feel they received instead was social disintegration, emptiness, emotional coldness, and loneliness. In their own accounts of the past, this is precisely what they emphasize. Certainly, the GDR was an Unrechtsstaat—a state in which fundamental legal principles were systematically violated—but it also provided, in their recollection, security, stability, and a sense of community (Mullis 2024).

In short, the time has come for a new public narrative. As for its content, we need not start from scratch. We can draw inspiration from the social democratic tradition—or, where appropriate, even acknowledge some of the concerns articulated by contemporary populism: the desire for community, stability, predictability, and meaningful public guidance of social and economic change.

This requires recognizing that many people attach greater importance to these values than representatives of more cosmopolitan cultures are often willing to admit. Technological and economic transformations, migration and the emergence of multicultural societies, changing views on gender relations, sexual orientation, and ethics more generally can generate uncertainty, weaken traditional communities, and fuel a nostalgic longing for an increasingly idealized past.

The deeply human desire for stability, social cohesion, and predictability must therefore be reconciled with social and cultural transformations that are often both inevitable and desirable. That reconciliation cannot be left to the market alone. It requires deliberate democratic governance and the kind of active social steering that has long been a hallmark of social democracy.

Promoting Social Equality

The dramatic increase in social inequality over recent decades is frequently identified as one of the principal causes of the rise of populism (see, for example, Eatwell & Goodwin 2018). Germany is no exception. The gap between rich and poor has widened steadily over the past several decades. Between 1990 and 2021, the poverty rate—defined as the percentage of people earning less than 60 percent of median income—almost doubled, rising from 10 to 18 percent. While income inequality has increased only moderately during this period, wealth inequality, as in many other countries, has grown dramatically. In 1980, the wealthiest 10 percent of Germans owned 44 percent of total private wealth; by 2023, their share had risen to 65 percent. The bottom 30 percent of the population now possess either no net wealth or are in negative wealth (BpB 2024).

These trends are global. By the end of 2022, just 1.1 percent of the world’s population owned 46 percent of global wealth, while 53 percent of humanity owned only 1.2 percent (Statista 2025).

Remarkably, however, social equality has largely disappeared from the political agenda. Even populist parties rarely make economic equality a central element of their programs. Their supporters—many of whom, though certainly not all, occupy the lower strata of society—generally appear no more concerned about the issue than anyone else. Today, elections are seldom won on promises of redistribution, a striking fact given the scale of existing inequalities. It illustrates the extraordinary success of the neoliberal narrative that has shaped Western political thinking since the 1980s (Blokland 2022b).

Nevertheless, the issue cannot be ignored. A fundamental democratic principle is that citizens affected by political decisions should have a reasonable opportunity to influence those decisions. Yet the increasingly unequal distribution of political resources—including income, wealth, education, access to decision-makers, and control over or access to media—means that this democratic ideal is drifting ever further from reality. The greater the degree of social inequality, the greater the political influence of those who benefit from unregulated market societies, and the less likely it becomes that the grievances driving citizens toward populism—grievances rooted above all in feelings of powerlessness and social malaise—will be addressed effectively.

Make Social Media a Public Utility and Strengthen Public Broadcasting

Information is a public good that is indispensable to the survival of democracy. Democratic societies must therefore invest in independent, transparent, pluralistic, and high-quality journalism. Germany, in particular, drew important lessons from the propaganda apparatus of the Third Reich and consequently invested heavily in a strong system of independent regional and national public broadcasters.

The concentration of power that has emerged within social media stands in direct contradiction to the principles underlying this public broadcasting model. Like the rise of social media itself, this concentration has developed so rapidly that democratic politics appears to have been caught unprepared. Democracy, however, is too important to be left in the hands of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, or any other private billionaire. Their digital empires should therefore be broken up or effectively regulated. Publicly funded European alternatives should be developed, and these platforms should be brought under democratic public oversight. Neoliberal claims that such measures violate freedom of expression or are themselves undemocratic are simply unfounded (Blokland 1995).

Public broadcasters are among the first institutions targeted by right-wing populists once they gain political influence. Germany is no exception. In the populist narrative, the public media constitute a Lügenpresse (“lying press”), and public funding should therefore be drastically reduced. There are, to be sure, genuine shortcomings in the current system. To mention just one example: as in the Netherlands, Germany—with a population more than five times larger—continues to rely on remarkably small circles of recurring commentators in its political talk shows. Collectively, these familiar faces can hardly be considered representative of society as a whole. Representatives of civil society organizations, trade unions, protest movements, or eastern Germany are rarely invited to participate, research shows (Fröhlich & Hillje 2020). Particularly in eastern Germany, distrust of the media is partly fueled by this lack of diversity, and not without reason (Mükke 2021).

The solution, however, is not to abolish public broadcasting but to strengthen and reform it. National news programs in Germany are currently produced primarily in cities such as Mainz, Hamburg, and Berlin. Why not establish additional editorial centers in Dresden or Leipzig? Why not require editorial boards of political discussion programs to ensure greater diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints among their guests? Seeing Karl Lauterbach, Richard David Precht, Elmar Theveßen, Karl-Rudolf Korte en Herfried Münkler five times a year is more than sufficient (Blokland 2022, 2026). Likewise, why should the Dutch national public broadcaster remain so overwhelmingly Amsterdam-centered? Why not require a meaningful distribution of editorial activities across cities such as Groningen, Eindhoven, Rotterdam, and Utrecht?

Never Cooperate with and Prohibit Parties That Seek to End Democratic Contestability

Finally, one of the central recommendations made by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die (2018) is that democratic parties should maintain a cordon sanitaire—or, in German terms, a Brandmauer—around extremist parties and politicians. Such a democratic firewall, they argue, is essential if democracies are to defend themselves against authoritarian populism.

According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, Donald Trump could have been prevented from reaching the presidency had leading Republicans fulfilled their democratic responsibility, as both Republican and Democratic elites had often done in earlier periods of American history by refusing to legitimize extremist candidates. Instead, they prioritized short-term electoral advantage, with profound long-term consequences for American democracy. Recent developments in Dutch politics illustrate the plausibility of their advice (Blokland 2025c).

A cordon sanitaire also means that mainstream parties should not attempt to defeat right-wing populists by adopting their rhetoric or incorporating elements of their programme. Under Friedrich Merz, the CDU has repeatedly pursued this strategy. Quite apart from the moral problem that political parties cannot credibly embrace any position simply because it promises electoral success, the strategy is also ineffective. Rather than weakening support for right-wing populists, it tends to reinforce voters’ existing convictions and reduces any remaining hesitation they may have had about voting for the original rather than the imitation. Its principal effect is to legitimize populist positions and to shift the entire political spectrum further to the right (Blokland 2024, 2025c).

Should right-wing populist or extremist parties such as the AfD be banned? Earlier I argued that the most fundamental and convincing way to persuade citizens that authoritarian or totalitarian systems are undesirable is through epistemology (cf. Blokland 2025a: 39ff.). Democracy ultimately rests on institutionalized doubt. Freedom of expression and association, political and social pluralism, and open public debate are protected because no one can claim certainty about the correct answers to society’s political problems. Democratic decisions are therefore, by their very nature, reversible: we may change our minds, acquire new knowledge, or face new circumstances that require different solutions.

Political parties and leaders who reject this principle of fallibility, who deny the legitimacy of pluralism, and who seek to abolish the reversibility of democratic decisions no longer operate within the democratic project itself. Parties that aim to eliminate the institutional conditions under which democratic disagreement remains possible ultimately forfeit their claim to protection within a democratic constitutional order.

Germany is once again debating whether the AfD should be banned. Such a request could be submitted to the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) by the Bundestag, the federal government, or the Bundesrat representing the sixteen federal states. In 2017, the Court rejected a similar request concerning the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). It concluded that although the NPD pursued objectives incompatible with the Basic Law, it was simply too small and politically insignificant to pose a genuine threat to the democratic constitutional order.

Now that the AfD has grown to become roughly ten to fifteen times larger than the NPD ever was, consistency would seem to require that this party be prohibited if it is found to pursue unconstitutional aims. Most likely, though, the judges would now argue precisely the opposite: that the AfD has become too large to ban because such a decision might provoke unrest among its millions of supporters and thereby endanger democracy itself. When democracy most urgently requires defending, lawyers have not always proved to be its most effective guardians.

Fortunately, as argued throughout this article, there are many other ways of countering right-wing populism. None of them offers a quick fix. Strengthening democracy will require time, persistence, and political courage. But with greater confidence in our democratic institutions, a stronger understanding of our own political history, and the willingness to renew democracy rather than merely defend it, there is every reason to believe that this challenge, too, can be overcome.

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[1] https://socialscienceworks.org/2026/02/37318/democracy-under-pressure-political-radicalization-and-citizen-discontent-in-east-germany/

[2] For an example from the Netherlands, see how the Minister of Migration appointed by the Party for Freedom came into conflict with every conceivable stakeholder in the field of migration and integration: The Fragility of Dutch Democracy: Populism, Fragmentation, and Voter Volatility (Blokland: 2025). 

[3] Rich and Bujalka note that the problems discussed in the manosphere are often real, but that the causes and solutions are being sought in the wrong places. For young men in particular, these problems include declining academic performance, rising unemployment, loneliness, increasing suicide rates, uncertain future prospects, and an unclear masculine identity. They write: “The foundations of the manosphere may not strictly centre on misogyny, as is popularly imagined, but in young men’s search for connection, truth, control and community at a time when all are increasingly ill-defined” (2023).

[4] https://www.morgenpost.de/politik/article404625599/alice-weidel-afd-infos-partnerin-privat-lebenslauf-kinder-steckbrief.html.

[5] In the summer of 2022, the authors surveyed 3,546 East German citizens. This study has been conducted in Germany since 2002. Respondents are presented with 18 statements to which they can respond on a scale of 1 to 5. A distinction is made between “manifest” rejection (category 1 “completely reject” and category 2 “largely reject”) and “manifest agreement” (which includes the two explicitly affirmative categories 4 and 5). Those who answered with a 3 “latently” agree with the statement, “because this allows the respondent to avoid having to take an unambiguous stance, while still partially agreeing with the content of the far-right statements” (2023: 6; my translation).

[6] In a televised address on July 1, 1990, in which he announced monetary, social, and economic union, Kohl stated, verbatim: “Through a joint effort, we will succeed in transforming Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia into flourishing landscapes again—places where it is worth living and working.” (my translation; https://web.archive.org/web/20130208033025/http://www.helmut-kohl.de/index.php?msg=555).

[7] “We need to work more again in this country—and, above all, more efficiently. We will not be able to preserve this country’s prosperity with a four-day working week and an emphasis on work–life balance.”
(Tagesspiegel, 14 May 2025)

[8] Gavin Armour. 2019. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49433735-die-reise-zum-riss.

[9] See, for instance: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2024/23/brede-welvaart-nederland-een-na-hoogste-van-de-eu; https://imglobalwealth.com/articles/which-nations-score-highest-for-quality-of-life-in-2025; https://factsinstitute.com/ranking/human-development-index; https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/NLD; https://www.oecd.org/en/data/tools/well-being-data-monitor/better-life-index.html.