As the world marks International Democracy Day, Europe is still reeling from the recent election results in Saxony Anhalt, where a far-right nationalist party just won a landslide and might enter government in Germany for the first time since the Second World War.
It has become hard to mention democracy these days without adding the word “crisis” in the same breath. Yet that concept is misleading, and prevents us from understanding, and therefore addressing, the underlying problems that beset our political systems.
A crisis is sudden. What democracies have been going through is actually a steady erosion of trust and legitimacy since 2008, through financial collapse, a slow-motion cost-of-living squeeze, a migration crisis, a war at Europe’s doorstep, and now a technological upheaval that is outpacing the laws and institutions meant to regulate it.
That distinction is not academic.
A crisis calls for immediate defensive measures. Erosion calls for something harder — an honest look at why the ground has steadily given way in the first place, and the will to rebuild on firmer footing.
Here is the finding that should unsettle defenders of the status quo most: democracy itself remains popular. Eurobarometer polling results show that 89% of Europeans still support self-government. What has collapsed is not the ideal, but the confidence that today’s institutions can deliver it. People are not falling out of love with democracy, human rights or the rule of law; they are out of patience with governments that do not seem to listen to their concerns, do not seek their input or consent between elections, cannot defend their interests on the world stage and, increasingly, look captured by the wealthy and the well-connected. That gap — between the democratic ideal people still hold and the democratic practice they experience — is the terrain on which populist movements are winning ground.
It is tempting, and politically convenient, to blame outside forces: foreign misinformation and disinformation campaigns from which we might shield ourselves. These threats are real and deserve the serious institutional response now underway across Europe. But preliminary research into the drivers of democratic erosion by our team at Democracy27 points somewhere less comfortable: foreign interference is not the leading cause of the democratic crisis. It merely thrives on, and exacerbates, genuine domestic grievances.
The deeper drivers are ones democracies have manufactured for themselves: socio-economic stagnation, declining public services despite rising taxes, a crisis of representation in which citizens feel governed from a distance they cannot reach, their concerns not only left unaddressed but often stigmatized, state capture; and a fraying of everyday civic life — the churches, associations, local newspapers, etc. — and shared customs and identities that used to hold communities together.
According to polls, it is youth that feels most disenfranchised, and are voting for the extremes in droves. Sixty-six percent of the 18-25 voted for either left-wing or right-wing populist parties in Saxony Anhalt, for example. Who can blame them? They cannot find affordable housing, let alone dream of home ownership, their educational qualifications can no longer promise them meaningful jobs, they are coming of age already saddled with enormous debts accumulated by successive governments that failed to reform, and they live in fear of environmental collapse.
Seen this way, the populist movements gaining ground across established democracies are not the disease; they are the fever. They are the symptoms of dysfunction that predates them and will outlast any single election that removes them from office.
Treating the symptom, or worse, breaking the thermometer, while ignoring the underlying condition is guaranteed to make matters worse.
That reframes what defending democracy should mean. It is not enough to preserve institutions built largely in the nineteenth century in the hope they can address twenty-first-century challenges. Democracies that only defend the status quo will keep losing ground, because standing still is not a strategy against a slope.
The generational task is reform, root and branch: rebuilding state capacity to actually deliver, reducing needless bureaucracy, constraining the capture of institutions, opening new channels of representation and participation between elections rather than only at the ballot box, and doing the slow work of rebuilding trust and civic life from the ground up.
This is not work that governments can do alone, and not only because incumbents rarely reform the systems that put them in power. EU institutions, to their credit, cannot easily criticize their own member states’ domestic political systems. That leaves an opening, and an obligation, for civil society — one willing to make recommendations uncomfortable enough to matter, built from conversations with citizens and stakeholders rather than handed down from experts and politicians.
The initiative I am leading, Democracy27, mandated by 27 civil society organisations working across the EU, championed by leaders from politics, business, unions, tech, social movements and academia, is doing just that: we are embarking on a journey, which began in Poland this month, to consult the people and understand the key drivers of democratic erosion. We will come up with bold, innovative and disruptive solutions by next March, in the hope that when we next mark International Democracy Day, we will have more to celebrate.
Věra Jourová — Chair of Democracy 27 and Former Vice-President of the European Commission