This is therefore the first of a six -part series examining the rise of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and the response of German democracy from several different angles: the shift from protest vote to political belonging; the knot connecting economics, migration and identity; the strategic dilemma facing Germany’s Christian Democrats; the erosion of shared reality and trust in truth; and, finally, what could actually change if the radical right moves from opposition politics to real executive power.

Let me make one thing clear at the outset. This series does not begin from a scenario of democratic catastrophe. Quite the opposite. My aim is to understand the scale of the change without either minimising it or forgetting how resilient Germany’s democratic institutions, civil society and broad political centre remain.

The AfD’s 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt cannot be explained simply as anger at Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government, economic hardship or a specifically East German protest reflex.

The deeper shift is this: for a growing share of its voters, the AfD is ceasing to be a temporary instrument used to punish “the system”. It is becoming a source of political identity, belonging and, increasingly, a vision of the future.

First, get the scale right

To understand what happened on 6 September 2026, we should begin with scale.

Saxony-Anhalt is one of Germany’s 16 federal states, or Länder. It lies in the former East Germany and has a population of roughly 2.12 million. Its economy accounts for only around 1.8 percent of Germany’s total output.

So an AfD result of 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt does not mean that 44 percent of Germans support the party.

But that does not make the result insignificant. Quite the opposite.

Saxony-Anhalt is not Germany. But it is part of Germany.

And sometimes a dramatic political shift in a relatively small state functions less as a national verdict than as a magnifying glass: it tells us where to look, which assumptions have stopped working and which social changes may be further advanced than we realised.

The AfD had received 20.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt in 2021. Five years later, it more than doubled that share to 43.8 percent. The Christian Democratic Union, the CDU — the centre-right party that has governed the state for most of the period since 2002 — fell from 37.1 percent to 17.2 percent.

Turnout, meanwhile, jumped from 60.3 to 77.8 percent.

Of all those figures, one stands out to me. According to the election analysis of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which is affiliated with the CDU, the AfD mobilised roughly 170,000 people who had previously not voted. They accounted for close to a third of the party’s second votes, the ballot that largely determines proportional representation in the state parliament.

That matters because the AfD is no longer growing simply by taking angry voters from other parties. It is also persuading people who had effectively withdrawn from electoral politics that politics is worth participating in again-  because this party speaks to them.

That is a different kind of political mobilisation.

The AfD is no longer simply the party of “no”

For years, one of the most comfortable ways of explaining the AfD’s rise was to call it a Protestpartei: a protest party.

The term was politically and psychologically reassuring. Protest, after all, is presumed to be temporary. Voters get angry, punish the government and, when circumstances improve, eventually return.

Saxony-Anhalt makes that assumption increasingly difficult to sustain.

Fifty-five percent of AfD voters said they had chosen the party out of conviction — Überzeugung in German. Only 35 percent described disappointment as their main motivation.

Even more importantly, the AfD is no longer perceived merely as “the party that talks tough on migration”. Thirty-five percent of voters in the state now say they trust the AfD most to solve the most important political problems. Five years earlier, that figure was just 9 percent.

In 2021, only 8 percent believed the AfD had the best answers on the economy. By 2026, that figure had risen to 30 percent — putting it ahead of the CDU.

That may ultimately tell us more than the 43.8 percent itself.

A protest party becomes something else when voters stop saying, “I am voting for them to punish you,” and begin to say, “I believe these people can govern.”

That is the psychological threshold between protest and power.

The most important number may be 87

The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is not simply another conservative party.

Since 2023, the state branch of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz, has classified the local AfD as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation — in German, a gesichert rechtsextremistische Bestrebung.

Yet here is perhaps the more consequential number:

Eighty-seven percent of AfD voters say that while there may be individual right-wing extremists in the party, they consider the AfD as a whole to be part of the political centre.

To me, this may be the most revealing finding of the Saxony-Anhalt election.

Because what has shifted is not simply how people vote.

It is their understanding of where the centre lies.

Political normalisation rarely arrives as a dramatic moment in which millions of people wake up one morning and declare themselves radicals. The boundary usually moves quietly. An idea that was unsayable yesterday becomes debatable today, one legitimate position among many tomorrow, and, eventually, something that feels perfectly ordinary.

But this is exactly where the analysis also needs restraint.

To conclude from this that “Germany has become far-right” would be every bit as misleading as continuing to dismiss the AfD as a temporary protest phenomenon.

The other Germany is still there

The Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s extensive 2024/25 Mitte-Studie, a long-running study of political attitudes in the German mainstream, found that 76.1 percent of Germans reject right-wing extremist positions. Only 3.3 percent were classified as holding a consistently right-wing extremist worldview.

And it is worth remembering what this same society did only a little over two years ago.

In January 2024, reporting on a meeting in Potsdam attended by several AfD figures revealed discussions around the concept of “remigration” and proposals involving the removal of large numbers of people from Germany.

The reaction was extraordinary.

From Berlin and Hamburg to Munich and smaller towns, people took to the streets. According to organisers, roughly 1.4 million people participated in demonstrations over the weekend of 19–21 January alone. The protests continued for weeks. Then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz soon spoke of “millions” of citizens demonstrating in defence of democracy.

And they did so with remarkable speed, without waiting for a political party to manufacture the mobilisation from above.

So the Germany in which the AfD has now received 43.8 percent in one relatively small state is also the Germany in which millions mobilised against radical-right ideas of “remigration”.

Both realities are true.

Germany did not turn into an authoritarian country overnight because of several election results. Nor did the huge demonstrations stop the radical right from continuing to grow.

That coexistence may be the more important story: a resilient democratic society and a remarkably powerful radical right can exist in the same country at the same time.

Which is why we also need to look at the second side of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s findings.

Only 52 percent now say that German democracy works well overall. Some 34.1 percent agree that, when the national interest requires it, not everyone should necessarily be granted the same rights. Another 25.3 percent believe too much consideration is given to minorities. And the proportion saying they do not trust democratic elections has roughly tripled over four years.

The correct diagnosis, then, should be more nuanced than “Germany is moving to the far right.”

Germany still has a broad democratic majority. At the same time, some illiberal ideas that once sat more clearly at the political margins are moving closer to the mainstream.

These two facts can coexist.

And that is why the struggle taking place is not simply a struggle “against the AfD”. It is increasingly a contest over the boundaries of the democratic centre itself: what it includes, what it excludes and which principles remain non-negotiable.

There is no single “AfD voter”

There is another shortcut we should avoid: treating the entire 43.8 percent as a single ideological bloc.

Research shows substantial differences within the AfD electorate, ranging from comparatively moderate conservatives to voters with much more authoritarian and radical-right attitudes.

So saying that “43.8 percent of Saxony-Anhalt is far-right” is not supported by the evidence.

But the opposite simplification is equally misleading:

“They are ordinary people. They are just angry.”

A voter does not have to hold a fully coherent far-right ideology to become part of a far-right political project.

The strength of political movements rarely comes from gathering people who believe exactly the same thing. It comes from giving people with very different grievances a common answer to the question: Who are “we”?

That is where the AfD has become considerably more sophisticated.

More than a campaign: building a social space

Political scientist and populism expert Marcel Lewandowsky has drawn attention to another dimension of the AfD’s success in Saxony-Anhalt: its strength is not based on rhetoric alone.

Particularly in smaller towns and rural areas, the party is building a physical and social presence.

Family festivals. Town-square events. Local symbols. Social-media images.

Individually, these may seem trivial. Together, they create something larger than a political brand: a sense that “we are here, and we are one of you.”

Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD politician who led the party to first place in Saxony-Anhalt, has been especially effective at this.

Rather than presenting himself as an immaculate professional politician, Siegmund cultivated something much more familiar: the neighbour’s son, the approachable family man, the sort of figure Germans might jokingly describe as the ideal son-in-law.

His appearances with an old Simson motorcycle-  an object with particular cultural resonance in former East Germany-  were therefore more than charming campaign photography.

They carried a political message: “I am one of you.”

His social-media presence shows how consistently that message has been constructed.

Far-right groups organising community festivals in economically and structurally weaker regions is not a new phenomenon. Similar strategies can be traced back to the 1990s.

The more uncomfortable question, then, is perhaps not why the AfD is doing this so successfully. It is why democratic parties have found it so difficult to build equally durable relationships in the same places.

In other words, the challenge is not to reach people every four or five years when an election approaches. It is to be present in their lives.

Politics cannot outsource belonging to campaign season.

The task facing Germany’s democratic parties therefore goes far beyond finding a better slogan. It is about rebuilding local spaces, social structures, representation and, ultimately, belonging.

Perhaps “rebuilding” is not even the right word everywhere. In some places, those relationships have to be built almost from scratch.

And then there are the young

Anyone who still imagines the AfD primarily as the party of older, angry East German men is looking away from the evidence.

In Saxony-Anhalt, 41 percent of voters under 25 backed the AfD. The party came first across every age group; only among voters over 70 was the CDU roughly level with it.

That statistic alone should make us cautious about explaining everything through the trauma of German reunification.

A generation that never experienced the German Democratic Republic, was born years after reunification and was still children when Angela Merkel made her defining refugee-policy decisions in 2015 is voting for the AfD at rates above 40 percent.

The explanation therefore cannot lie only in the GDR past or in the disruptions of reunification after 1990.

For younger voters, the AfD is capable of becoming something other than the political expression of an old grievance. It can become a future option. And that is the deeper break.

The radical right is not only selling nostalgia. It is selling the future.

I think this point is crucial, because the language of Germany’s democratic parties is still overwhelmingly organised around verbs of defence: protect democracy, defend institutions, preserve achievements, prevent regression.

All of that matters.

But politics cannot speak only about what we are afraid to lose. It also has to describe the place we want to reach. And for years, Germany’s democratic parties have struggled to tell that story loudly, simply and convincingly enough.

The AfD, by contrast, promises its supporters that they can “take the country back”, overturn the existing order and recover strength and control.

That is how a reactionary political project can be experienced by its supporters as renewal, change; even as the future.

But the resources available to Germany’s democrats should not be underestimated either.

This remains a country with a civil society capable of bringing millions onto the streets; strong courts; federal checks and balances; independent media; and a large social majority that still explicitly rejects far-right ideology.

Germany’s democratic core has not disappeared.

The problem is different. Democratic Germany is finding it increasingly difficult to explain to a growing number of its own citizens why it should also be their project for the future.

That is the first lesson I would draw from Saxony-Anhalt.

Anyone who continues to understand the AfD only as a protest vote - merely a symptom of dissatisfaction with something else - is misdiagnosing why the party has become so powerful.

Protest passes. Belonging endures.

But belonging is not fixed. It is politically created, cultivated and capable of taking root somewhere else again.

In the remaining five parts of this series, I will look at precisely that question.

What economic and cultural anxieties feed this sense of belonging? Is the CDU inadvertently strengthening the AfD’s political frame while trying to defeat it? What role do truth and trust in institutions play in this transformation? And what happens when a movement once dismissed as merely a “protest party” moves close enough to power that questions of democratic resilience are no longer theoretical?

Because the story emerging from Saxony-Anhalt is not simply the story of the AfD. It is the story of Germany’s democratic centre trying to define itself again.

I have a habit of returning to films I love, rereading books years later, sometimes even watching the same series for a second or third time.

It is not simply nostalgia.

As we change, the story changes with us. The film remains the same film, the book the same book; but the person encountering it is no longer the same person. The intervening years, the things we have lost and gained, disappointments we did not anticipate, children who have grown a little older, and questions we have learned to ask differently all become part of the work.

Perhaps this is one of the strange privileges of returning to art: sometimes we discover that what has changed most profoundly is not our interpretation of the story, but the interpreter.

Recently, during a conversation with a child about what actually matters in life, I found myself thinking again about Pixar’s Soul.

Children have an inconvenient gift for reducing questions we have spent years surrounding with sophisticated language to something embarrassingly simple.

Why does success matter?

What do you want to become when you grow up?

What happens if you never become it?

And what does it actually mean to be a good person?

None of these questions has an easy answer.

That is why I watched Soul again.

This time, what remained with me was not primarily its jazz, its vision of the afterlife or even Pixar’s extraordinary visual imagination.

It was a simpler question:

What must we be pursuing for a life to count as genuinely lived?

Soul gives that question an almost brutally clear metaphor.

Joe Gardner is a gifted jazz pianist who has spent years waiting for the moment when his “real” life will finally begin. Then the opportunity arrives. He gets the chance to perform with the musicians he admires. The door he has been waiting for seems finally to open.

And just as he believes he has reached the threshold of the life he was meant to have, an absurdly ordinary accident kills him.

The metaphor could hardly be more explicit: Joe has spent his life climbing towards a summit, only to fall into an abyss immediately after reaching what he thought was the top.

But the film’s more interesting moment comes later.

Joe returns to life. He plays the concert he has imagined for years.

And nothing happens.

Or rather, the concert happens — but the transformation he expected does not.

He has achieved the thing around which he organised his sense of self, and yet he remains himself.

This is the more unsettling death in the film: not the death of Joe’s body, but the collapse of the story he has told himself about what achievement will finally do for him.

The question is no longer simply what happens if we fail to reach our defining goal.

It is what happens if we reach it.

What remains when the future around which we have organised our identity finally becomes the present?

Success and meaning are not the same thing

I have never believed that human beings should live without aims.

Quite the opposite. I think a life needs direction: things worth pursuing, standards by which we examine ourselves and some conception of a person we would consider it worthwhile to become.

But direction is not the same thing as success.

Modern societies have become exceptionally good at measuring the latter.

Titles. Income. Visibility. Degrees. Followers. Awards. Positions. Publications. Promotions. Projects completed. Recognition received.

Meaning is more troublesome.

It resists dashboards.

And human beings have a persistent tendency to confuse what can be measured with what matters.

So life quietly adopts the grammar of project management.

When I achieve this, I will relax.

When I reach that position, I will consider myself successful.

When I cross this threshold, I will finally allow myself to feel that my life is going well.

Psychology has been warning us for some time that flourishing cannot be reduced to either pleasure or achievement.

Carol Ryff’s influential work on eudaimonic wellbeing, for example, describes a good life in terms that include purpose, personal growth, autonomy, meaningful relationships and the capacity to live in greater coherence with one’s values.

Frank Martela and Michael Steger similarly distinguish between different dimensions of meaning: coherence, the sense that one’s life is intelligible; purpose, the sense that it has direction; and significance, the sense that one’s existence matters.

These distinctions are important because an outwardly successful life can be experienced as profoundly meaningless.

And a life that would appear unremarkable according to most public metrics can possess extraordinary coherence, purpose and depth.

Joe Gardner’s mistake, then, is not that he loves jazz.

Why should loving something deeply be a problem? There is nothing wrong with developing a gift, pursuing excellence or dedicating years to a craft.

His mistake is to require achievement to provide existential confirmation.

The concert is no longer simply something he wants to do.

It becomes evidence that he has finally become the person he was supposed to be.

We make a dangerous bargain when we ask success to answer questions of worth that success is incapable of answering.

Because the person the world calls successful and the person we might consider good, mature or fully alive are not necessarily the same person.

What do we mean by “the best version of yourself”?

I believe deeply in the possibility of becoming better.

Yet I feel uneasy whenever I hear the injunction to become “the best version of yourself”.

Contemporary culture has an extraordinary capacity to translate moral or existential aspirations into optimisation.

Become more productive.

More disciplined.

Fitter.

More focused.

More visible.

More efficient.

More successful.

The self becomes an enterprise undergoing permanent restructuring.

But perhaps our “best self” should mean something else.

To become more patient.

To be capable of recognising another person’s legitimate claim even when we desperately want to win the argument.

To remain just towards someone who has treated us unjustly.

To become quicker at recognising our own failures than cataloguing everyone else’s.

To stop measuring other human beings primarily by their usefulness to us.

To learn that someone else’s success does not diminish our worth.

To know when perseverance is courage and when it has become vanity.

To know when letting go is wisdom and when it is merely fear.

These qualities do not scale particularly well. They rarely produce spectacular narratives. Many cannot even be observed from the outside.

And yet they may tell us more about the person we are becoming than almost anything that appears on a résumé.

Different philosophical and religious traditions have developed their own vocabularies for this process of moral formation.

Aristotle spoke of virtue as something cultivated through practice and habituation. Confucian traditions placed enormous weight on moral cultivation through relationships, ritual and repeated conduct. Stoic philosophy distinguished between what lies within our control and what does not.

Sufi thought developed another vocabulary: the idea of the insan-ı kâmil, often translated as the “complete” or “mature” human being.

Read carefully, the interesting part of the concept is not a fantasy of moral perfection.

It is almost the opposite.

Human maturity is understood less as arriving at a flawless condition than as undergoing a continuing process of formation.

Fethullah Gülen, writing within this tradition, makes a distinction I find particularly useful: the capacities a person happens to possess are not themselves evidence of maturity; what matters is what that person does with them. He describes this as giving one’s will its due — taking responsibility for developing what has been entrusted to us rather than treating talent, circumstance or potential as achievements in themselves.

I find the idea valuable beyond its explicitly religious setting. It shifts attention away from what we have been given — intelligence, talent, opportunity, status — towards what we make of it. Moral worth, on this account, resides less in possession than in response.

The person who announces that they have arrived has misunderstood the journey.

What matters is not the possession of moral perfection but the repeated education of attention, intention and conduct.

There is something psychologically plausible in this older language.

Character is not established through isolated heroic decisions.

It accumulates.

You do not become patient by behaving patiently once.

Generosity is not a single donation.

Honesty matters most when telling the truth has a cost.

The self is built to a remarkable extent through repetitions that are too small to become stories.

When I tried to explain goodness to the child who had inadvertently started this train of thought, this was what I found myself returning to.

Being good when everybody is watching matters.

But becoming the kind of person who behaves decently when nobody is watching is something else.

Social psychology approaches the issue in different terms, but the underlying intuition is familiar: identity is not merely a proposition we hold about ourselves.

It is reinforced through behaviour, relationships, habits and the categories of action we gradually learn to experience as “like me” or “not like me”.

This is why becoming a good person makes more sense to me as a direction than as a destination.

It is more like travelling north than reaching North.

You never arrive at “northness”.

But you can know whether you are still moving in that direction.

The part of life we do not choose

There is, however, another problem with our contemporary obsession with becoming.

We do not make ourselves entirely by ourselves.

And we certainly do not author the whole of our lives.

We do not choose the families into which we are born, the historical moment we inherit, much of our biology, or the political and economic circumstances through which we will have to make a life.

We cannot know whom we will meet, whom we will lose, which opportunity will disappear, or which seemingly accidental encounter will alter the trajectory of everything that comes afterwards.

Anthropology has long been suspicious of the fantasy of the completely self-created individual.

Clifford Geertz famously described human beings as suspended in “webs of significance” they themselves have spun.

We enter stories that began before us.

Language is waiting.

Family is waiting.

Memory, social class, culture, institutions and inherited ways of understanding the world are already there.

The autonomous individual beloved by certain versions of modern self-help is therefore something of a fiction. We exercise agency, certainly, but never from nowhere.

This does not make human agency irrelevant.

On the contrary.

Perhaps one of the deepest tensions of human life lies precisely here: we must act seriously while knowing that we do not control the whole field on which we act.

Older religious traditions often expressed this tension through concepts such as providence, fate, surrender or trust.

Secular philosophy has its own vocabularies: contingency, finitude, uncertainty, acceptance.

The vocabulary matters.

But the underlying human problem is broader than any single tradition.

What belongs to me?

What does not?

Where does responsibility end and control become illusion?

We cannot determine everything that happens to us, but what happens to us does not wholly determine what we become.

There remains a field, sometimes painfully narrow, within which response is possible.

How will I behave in this situation?

What will I do with whatever capacities I possess?

What will suffering make of me?

What am I prepared to protect when protecting it becomes costly?

Can I lose something without allowing the loss to determine the moral quality of everything that follows?

Agency is not omnipotence. It is the capacity to answer for the part that is actually ours.

This produces a very different understanding of effort.

Do what is yours to do.

Do it seriously.

But do not imagine that the universe has entered into a contractual obligation to reward you for it.

Effort belongs partly to us. Outcome never belongs entirely to us.

Success therefore cannot prove the moral value of our actions.

Nor can failure automatically disprove it.

This is one reason modern achievement culture deserves more scrutiny than it receives.

It repeatedly implies that if we set the right goals, organise ourselves intelligently, cultivate the appropriate habits and work hard enough, we can design the life we want.

Sometimes we can.

Often we cannot.

Bodies become ill.

People die.

Economies collapse.

Governments change.

Families fracture.

Wars begin.

Other people make decisions.

History enters the room.

The fantasy of total self-authorship becomes especially cruel when circumstances cease to cooperate.

A mature philosophy of life therefore needs something between control and passivity.

Not “everything is up to me”.

Not “nothing is up to me”.

But something harder:

There are things I must attempt to change, things I must learn to endure, and wisdom consists partly in discovering which is which.

The Stoics would recognise this.

Religious traditions would recognise it too.

Different languages; an enduring human dilemma.

Do we find meaning or make it?

Soul repeatedly plays with the idea of the “spark”.

At first, the concept resembles one of contemporary culture’s favourite commandments: find your passion.

Somewhere inside each of us, the story goes, is one vocation, one calling, one singular thing we were meant to do.

Find it, and life will finally make sense.

This is an appealing idea.

It is also a heavy burden.

What happens if there is no singular calling?

What happens if your calling changes?

What happens if circumstances make the life you imagined impossible?

And what happens to all the years lived before you discovered this supposedly authentic purpose?

Research on meaning offers a more modest and, to me, more humane picture.

Meaning is not located exclusively in extraordinary missions or exceptional achievements.

Relationships matter.

Belonging matters.

Care matters.

Continuity matters.

Creation matters.

The ability to understand one’s life as possessing some narrative coherence matters.

Meaning may therefore be less like treasure buried somewhere inside us and more like a relationship we construct between ourselves, other people and the world.

This is also where anthropology complicates the radically individualised idea of purpose.

What we experience as meaningful is never simply an idea inside a solitary mind.

We learn value through relationships, cultures, histories and communities.

Even the question “What gives my life meaning?” is asked in a language we did not invent.

Our answer is personal.

But the materials from which we construct it are social.

This is why I find the command to “find your purpose” less helpful than another:

Do not lose your direction.

A goal can be completed.

A direction continues.

At twenty, the work that gives a life shape may look very different from what matters at fifty.

Relationships change.

Responsibilities change.

Abilities change.

The people who depend on us change.

There need not be one immutable mission beneath all of these phases.

What may persist is an orientation:

to use whatever capacities we have well;

to recognise the claims other people make upon us;

to remain capable of revising ourselves;

to value truth above convenience;

and to care at least as much about the kind of person our choices are forming as about the visible trace those choices leave behind.

No one becomes a person alone

One of the loveliest things Soul understands is that 22 does not discover the value of life through a philosophical lecture.

It happens through contact.

Food.

Walking.

Conversation.

Music.

Wind.

A falling leaf.

The film ultimately refuses the idea that existence needs to justify itself through exceptional achievement.

Life begins to matter through participation in life.

This also suggests why moral development cannot be treated as a solitary self-improvement programme.

We do not develop patience in a room where nobody tests it.

Compassion requires vulnerability — ours or someone else’s.

Justice becomes real when competing claims confront us.

Generosity presupposes another person who can receive.

Forgiveness exists only where injury has occurred.

Ethics requires other people.

Self-Determination Theory, developed by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, makes a related argument from psychology. Human wellbeing is closely connected to autonomy and competence, certainly, but also to relatedness — the experience of connection and belonging.

We flourish not merely because we accomplish things.

We flourish because we are connected.

And this may be why some of the most meaningful acts in a human life are also among the least impressive from the outside.

Making a child feel safe.

Remaining with a friend during a period nobody else wants to witness.

Correcting an injustice no one would ever have discovered.

Taking responsibility for an ageing parent.

Keeping a promise.

Doing ordinary work carefully because other people depend on it.

Remaining faithful for years to a principle for which nobody applauds you.

Much of what makes a life morally serious is radically resistant to spectacle.

None of these things needs to become a “success story”.

Yet character is formed precisely here.

What achievement does to us

This is why I do not interpret Soul as saying that we should abandon large ambitions and simply “live in the moment”.

That would be too easy.

I believe human beings need aspiration.

We need moral direction.

We need projects that demand something of us.

Sometimes we even need commitments that exceed our own immediate comfort and interest.

But our goals must not replace the life in whose service they supposedly exist.

And the question we ask of success should perhaps change.

Not merely:

Did I achieve what I wanted?

But:

What did pursuing it make of me?

A person can succeed while becoming crueler.

More narcissistic.

Less capable of friendship.

Less able to tolerate contradiction.

More willing to instrumentalise others.

One can even turn the desire to be “a good person” into an instrument of superiority.

Moral aspiration has its own vanity.

Perhaps genuine development can therefore be measured partly by an inverse criterion.

As I advance, does my world contain more of me — or more room for other people?

Am I becoming more capable of recognising inconvenient truths?

Does success intoxicate me less?

Does failure humiliate me less?

Can I distinguish more clearly between responsibility and control?

Can I pursue something passionately without making its achievement the proof that my life was worthwhile?

Perhaps maturity means becoming less dependent on events to certify who we are.

To become a better version of oneself, then, is not to reach some summit.

It is to keep correcting direction.

Again and again.

To care somewhat more about character than display.

Effort than applause. Integrity than narrative.

And perhaps most difficult of all: to accept that the work will never be completed.

A life cannot be rehearsed

I still cannot give the child who started all of this a one-word answer to the question of what matters most in life.

Happiness is insufficient. Success is clearly insufficient. Love comes closer, but love without responsibility or justice can become sentimental.

Meaning, belonging, courage, care, truth, loyalty, curiosity, mercy, responsibility: all seem to hold part of the answer.

Perhaps the difficulty is not that we have failed to discover the single correct value.

Perhaps no single value was ever capable of carrying an entire life.

So the questions themselves may need to change.

Instead of: What can I get from life? Perhaps: What will I do with the life I have been given?

Instead of: How successful will I become? Perhaps: What will success and failure make of me?

Instead of: How do I control my future? Perhaps: How do I exercise agency responsibly inside a future I can never fully control?

And instead of asking whether we might one day become completed, perfected human beings:

Can I become a little more capable today of living according to what I claim to value?

What moves me most in Soul is that it places tiny fragments of ordinary existence among its enormous metaphysical questions.

A leaf. A walk. A voice. A conversation. A phrase of music.

Perhaps this is not a retreat from meaning but where meaning becomes concrete.

We do not know the whole shape of our lives while we are living them.

We have limited vision. Limited agency. A limited field of action that opens again each day.

Some traditions call the attitude required beyond that field trust. Others call it acceptance. The Stoics spoke in one register; religious traditions in another; contemporary psychology increasingly examines our capacity to tolerate uncertainty without surrendering agency.

The names differ. The human predicament does not.

A good life is not a life in which everything we wanted eventually happened.

Nor is it necessarily the life that would make the most satisfying biography.

Perhaps a good life is one in which, amid what happens to us and what does not happen for us, we continue attempting to become people capable of meeting reality without surrendering either responsibility or humanity.

I have disagreements with some of Soul’s metaphysical assumptions. I am not convinced that any film (or philosophy) resolve the question of what human existence is ultimately for.

But that may be the wrong criterion by which to judge it.

The value of a serious work of art does not lie in supplying answers we can adopt wholesale. Sometimes it lies in disturbing answers we had stopped questioning.

And Soul does that exceptionally well.

Especially in a culture that has become so adept at confusing achievement with meaning, it asks something worth carrying long after the credits:

If the great moment finally arrives ; the promotion, the recognition, the audience, the success, the thing we thought would make everything cohere; and we discover that life is still simply life, will we know how to inhabit it?

References

Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books.

Gülen, F. (1995). “İnsan-ı Kâmil Olmak.”

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Yasemin Aydın

One of the peculiar confusions of contemporary life is that we have begun to mistake a life worth displaying for a life worth living.

We read, travel, work, exercise, parent, cultivate friendships, develop opinions, support causes and attempt to become more thoughtful versions of ourselves. None of this is inherently suspect. The desire for self-development is among the most human of desires: we want to become more capable, more generous, more coherent, perhaps even wiser.

But somewhere along the way, the axis can shift. Without quite noticing it, character becomes image, authenticity becomes performance, and the question “What kind of person am I becoming?” begins to merge with another: “What kind of person does my life appear to reveal?”

The danger is difficult to detect precisely because it rarely feels like failure. It often feels like progress. We may believe that we are accumulating the ingredients of a richer life at the very moment when we are beginning to experience that life from the outside.

Friedrich Schiller gave us an unexpectedly useful way of thinking about this problem more than two centuries ago.

In his 1793 essay On Grace and Dignity, Schiller developed one of his most beautiful ideas: the schöne Seele, the “beautiful soul”. The phrase can sound quaintly Romantic today. The problem behind it is anything but.

Schiller was asking whether moral life must always feel like a struggle against ourselves. Must we continually force inclination to submit to duty, overcoming what we want in order to do what is right? Or can human beings reach a point at which their values have become so deeply incorporated into their character that goodness no longer feels like permanent self-coercion?

Schiller was responding, in part, to Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy. Kant placed enormous weight on our ability to act from duty rather than merely from inclination. Schiller did not reject the seriousness of that demand. But he wondered whether an endless civil war between reason, desire and duty could really represent the highest form of moral maturity.

For Schiller, the beautiful soul represented another possibility: a person whose ethical commitments no longer stand above the self like a supervisor.

To borrow, carefully, from contemporary psychology, the distance between the person one is and the person one believes one ought to be has diminished. Right action has become, to some meaningful degree, natural action.

Goodness is no longer a performance.

Yet Schiller was far too perceptive a writer to leave us with an uncomplicated ideal. In his dramas, he repeatedly explored what happens when the stories we tell about our own goodness become more powerful than our ability to see ourselves clearly.

When ideals make us blind

In Don Carlos, Schiller places his characters in the court of Philip II of Spain, a world structured by monarchy, suspicion, obedience and political calculation. Against this background appears the Marquis of Posa, perhaps the play’s most seductive moral figure: cosmopolitan, eloquent and committed to freedom.

His famous appeal to Philip “Give us freedom of thought” has echoed far beyond the play.

Posa appears to stand above the small compromises and intrigues of the court. He speaks the language of universal principle.

But Schiller does something more interesting than turning him into a flawless spokesman for liberty.

He asks what happens when a person becomes so convinced of the nobility of his ends that other human beings begin to appear as instruments within a larger moral design.

This is one of the more uncomfortable possibilities of ethical life. The ideal self can elevate us. It can call us beyond selfishness, complacency and cowardice. We need ideals precisely because the person we currently are should not always have the final word on the person we might become.

But an ideal can also become a screen behind which we stop examining our own conduct.

Once someone becomes deeply invested in the belief that they are acting for justice, humanity, truth, freedom or some other unquestionably worthy cause, an especially dangerous form of moral reassurance becomes available: because my aim is good, I must therefore be good in the way I pursue it.

Posa’s problem is not that his ideals are too high.

It is that the distance between the magnificence of his ideals and the moral ambiguity of his actual behaviour becomes increasingly difficult for him to perceive.

Schiller thus poses a question that remains disturbingly modern: Do elevated ideals necessarily produce elevated conduct?

They do not.

Sometimes they make our conduct harder to see.

The distance between being a king and being a man

Philip presents the opposite problem.

It would be easy to read him simply as an authoritarian king. Schiller does not allow us that comfort. Behind the institution, he gives us a human being who has almost disappeared into his role.

In one of the play’s most revealing moments, Philip admits that he has longed for “a human being”.

The line matters because his problem is larger than loneliness.

As king, Philip must continually enact a particular version of himself. He must not hesitate. He must not appear weak. He must distrust intimacy, subordinate private feeling to political order and learn to regard individual lives through the abstractions of state necessity.

Yet beneath this armour remains a person who wants what people ordinarily want: to believe someone, to trust someone, to be encountered as a human being rather than merely as an office.

There are, in other words, two Philips: the person demanded by kingship and the person who continues to exist underneath it.

And here Schiller begins to sound remarkably contemporary.

We are divided not only between who we are and who we wish to become. We can also become divided among the different selves demanded by our roles — professional, parent, citizen, leader, partner, intellectual, believer, dissenter, caregiver.

Roles do not merely prescribe what we should do. Given enough time, they begin to tell us who we are permitted to be.

Two centuries later: the psychology of self-discrepancy

In 1987, the social psychologist E. Tory Higgins gave systematic psychological language to something Schiller had explored through literature.

His self-discrepancy theory distinguished among three domains of the self: the actual self, the person we believe ourselves currently to be; the ideal self, the person we would like to become; and the ought self, the person we believe duty, responsibility and social expectation require us to be.

The distinction explains why two apparently similar statements can belong to quite different emotional worlds.

“I have not become the person I wanted to be” is not identical to “I have failed to become the person I was supposed to be.”

One contains the sorrow of unrealised possibility. The other carries the weight of obligation.

Read through Higgins, Schiller’s two figures almost form a psychological symmetry.

Posa is possessed by the grandeur of the ideal self. Philip is crushed beneath the demands of the ought self.

One risks losing sight of his actual behaviour because he believes too completely in the person he aspires to be. The other risks losing the living person altogether beneath the person his position requires him to become.

Against both stands Schiller’s beautiful soul: not a perfect human being, but the possibility of a life in which values, inclinations and behaviour have become less alien to one another.

And this is where the old literary problem begins to illuminate something strikingly contemporary.

The desire to become a better person is not the problem. Nor is self-realisation.

Without ideals there would be far less learning, moral development, artistic ambition or hope. Human beings need images of possibilities not yet realised.

The problem begins when the ideal ceases to function as a horizon and starts functioning as a measuring device.

At that point, the desire to live well can quietly turn into the desire to produce the appearance of a well-lived life.

The life we live and the life that appears worth living

Erving Goffman’s classic work on the presentation of self reminds us that impression management did not begin with Instagram.

Human beings have always cared about how they appear in the eyes of others. Clothing, titles, manners, speech, possessions and social circles have long communicated identity and status. There is nothing uniquely digital about presenting a version of ourselves to the world.

What has changed is the scale, continuity and intimacy of the audience.

We no longer merely live a life. Increasingly, we watch ourselves living it.

The books we read, the cities we visit, the work we perform, the food we prepare, the causes we support, the people we know, the way we raise our children, the arrangement of a room, even our modes of rest can become fragments in an ongoing narrative of the self.

This is not simply vanity.

Something more psychologically interesting is happening.

We gradually acquire an external gaze upon our own existence.

Alongside “Do I genuinely want this?” appears another question: “What does wanting this say about me?”

Alongside “Was this meaningful?” comes: “Is this the sort of thing a meaningful person does?”

And alongside Higgins’s distance between the actual self and the ideal self, contemporary culture introduces another possible discrepancy:

the distance between the life we actually inhabit and the life we consider worthy of being seen.

When that distance grows, the ideal self begins answering more than the question, “Who could I become?”

It also begins deciding what kinds of lives appear admirable, cultured, successful, ethical, fulfilled or interesting enough to count.

At that point, identity risks becoming curatorial.

We begin to manage not only our choices but their representational value.

The unsettling consequence is that self-realisation and self-display can begin to resemble one another so closely that we lose the ability to distinguish them.

The person becomes both performer and audience, protagonist and curator, constantly looking over the shoulder of experience to assess what the experience signifies.

This is why the distinction matters. It is not an argument against ambition, cultivation or self-transformation. Quite the opposite.

It is an attempt to rescue them from performance.

Where does the ideal self come from?

Psychology alone cannot answer this question.

The phrase ideal self sounds intensely personal. Anthropologically, however, very little about it is purely private.

We do not invent from nothing our ideas of what it means to be successful, cultivated, independent, enlightened, loving, productive, morally serious, politically aware or self-actualised.

We inherit these images.

They come from families and schools, religions and professions, class environments and national cultures, novels and films, institutions and historical moments. Today, of course, they also arrive through an unprecedented flow of other people’s carefully selected lives.

Charles Taylor’s writing on authenticity is particularly helpful here.

Taylor regards the modern desire to live a life faithful to oneself as a genuine moral achievement. But authenticity does not mean excavating some pristine inner self untouched by society.

The very language through which we understand who we are, and who we might become, is socially acquired.

There is no self waiting beneath culture in a vacuum.

This complicates one of contemporary culture’s favourite instructions: ignore everyone else’s expectations and discover what you really want.

But how exactly does the self learn what is worth wanting?

Even our rebellion against convention occurs through concepts, desires and possibilities that a particular world has made available to us.

The anthropological question therefore has to precede the psychological one.

Before asking, “Why am I failing to become my ideal self?” we might ask:

Who taught me to desire this ideal self in the first place? What history does it carry? What form of life does it privilege? What does it quietly exclude?

And whose admiration would confirm that I had finally become it?

The impossible composite self

Perhaps the distinctive burden of contemporary identity is not that we possess more norms than earlier societies, but that we possess more competing ideals.

One of modernity’s great achievements is that people are less completely imprisoned within the identities into which they were born. A person’s profession, relationships, beliefs and mode of life are, at least in principle, more open to choice than they once were.

But expanding possibility has an unexpected psychological consequence.

The number of people we might become has expanded too.

A single person may want to be professionally successful, intellectually serious, emotionally available, physically healthy, politically conscious, widely read, financially independent, devoted to family, attentive to friendships, open to experience, socially useful, creatively productive and entirely unalienated by the effort of achieving any of it.

There is nothing wrong with any one of these aspirations.

The difficulty begins when we unconsciously treat their simultaneous perfection as a reasonable description of one human life.

The ideal self then ceases to resemble a person. It becomes a collage.

We take one person’s discipline, another’s marriage, another’s intellectual life, another’s career, another’s friendships, another’s activism, another’s serenity and another’s creativity. We combine them mentally into a single imaginary human being.

Then we compare our actual life with that composite. There is one small problem. That person does not exist.

Why Schiller still matters

This brings us back to the beautiful soul.

The radical element in Schiller’s idea is not that he imagined a morally perfect person.

It is that he imagined a person who no longer had to spend every waking hour constructing a morally improved version of himself.

Certain values had become character.

Moral life was not an endless personal-development checklist.

This does not make growth unnecessary. Without the ability to question ourselves, transcend habit and imagine better versions of human life, much of moral and intellectual progress would be impossible.

But development is not the same thing as permanent self-surveillance.

Trying to become better is one thing. Feeling obliged at every moment to produce a “better version of yourself” is another.

Once that distinction collapses, the ideal self no longer resembles a horizon. It becomes a destination that recedes as we approach it.

Every achievement generates another standard. Every improvement becomes merely the preliminary version of the next improvement.

Eventually, the present acquires the strange quality of a rehearsal. Life is always preparing to become itself later.

The beautiful soul has its dangers too

Schiller should not be romanticised.

Complete harmony between the actual self and the ought self would not always be desirable. The capacity to say, “This is how I behave, but this is not how I should behave,” is one of the foundations of ethical transformation.

Conscience itself contains discrepancy.

The goal cannot therefore be to abolish every distance among our possible selves.

The harder task is to distinguish between the distances that enlarge us and the distances that turn us into permanent failures in the classroom of our own existence.

An ideal self can be a horizon. It can also become a tribunal. Posa shows us one danger: the ideal becomes so majestic that the person can no longer criticise himself.

Philip shows us another: the person he ought to be becomes so oppressive that the person he actually is almost disappears.

Schiller’s beautiful soul asks us to imagine something more difficult between those extremes: a relationship between values and life that becomes neither moral complacency nor endless self-monitoring.

Perhaps this is why Don Carlos remains alive.

Schiller does not merely place the freedom-loving Posa opposite the authoritarian Philip. He shows two people becoming imprisoned within their own accounts of who they are.

Posa believes too completely in the person he wants to be.

Philip is crushed beneath the person he believes he has to be.

Behind both stands Schiller’s more unsettling question:

Can we live according to our values without turning our own existence into a permanent struggle against ourselves?

Higgins gave us a psychological language for understanding the distances among our selves. Goffman showed how selves are presented before other people. Foucault taught us to examine the ways in which individuals learn to govern themselves through norms they may experience as their own. Taylor reminded us that even our language of authenticity comes from a social world.

But Schiller’s question may be the one we need most now.

A good life surely involves becoming. We should want to develop our capacities, correct our failures, deepen our understanding and move beyond versions of ourselves we have outgrown.

But becoming is not the same as exhibiting becoming.

The danger begins when the centre of gravity shifts from the value of the life being lived to the value of the life being displayed; from character to image, from meaning to performance.

Maturity, then, does not require abandoning the ideal self.

It requires putting the ideal self back in its proper place.

We have to learn which ideals genuinely enlarge the range of our humanity and which merely produce a life that photographs, narrates or performs well.

Perhaps a mature self is not one that has finally become impressive enough to deserve its own admiration. Perhaps it is one that has become sufficiently at home in its values that it no longer needs to watch itself performing them.

That may be the most contemporary promise hidden inside Schiller’s beautiful soul.

Not perfection.

Something quieter, and considerably harder: a life in which our values have become sufficiently our own that, for moments at least, we can stop looking at ourselves from the outside and simply live them.

42 percent.

That is where the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, stands in the final ARD pre-election poll in Saxony-Anhalt, conducted less than two weeks before the state election on September 6.

The Christian Democratic Union, the CDU, is at only 22 percent. The Left stands at 11 percent, the Social Democrats at eight and the Greens at six. The liberal FDP and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, BSW, would currently fail to cross the threshold for entering parliament.

The poll is not a prediction of the final result. But the scale of the shift is remarkable. In the 2021 state election, the AfD received 20.8 percent. It is now polling at roughly twice that level. The CDU, which won 37.1 percent in 2021 and has held the office of minister-president in Saxony-Anhalt since 2002, has fallen to 22 percent.

To understand why this matters, international readers first need to understand what Saxony-Anhalt is and what exactly is being elected.

A small state with potentially large consequences

Saxony-Anhalt is one of Germany’s 16 federal states, located in the eastern part of the country. Its capital is Magdeburg.

At the end of 2025, it had approximately 2.12 million inhabitants. Germany as a whole had roughly 83.47 million. In other words, only around 2.54 percent of Germany’s population lives in Saxony-Anhalt. Around 1.69 million people are eligible to vote in the September election.

Germany, however, is a federal country. State governments are not merely regional administrations. They exercise substantial authority over areas such as education, policing, cultural policy and parts of public administration. They also participate in federal politics through Germany’s second chamber, the Bundesrat.

That is why developments in a relatively small state can have consequences far beyond its borders.

The election system also matters.

Voters in Saxony-Anhalt have two votes. The first is cast for a candidate in one of 41 constituencies. Whoever receives the most votes there wins a direct seat. The second vote is cast for a political party and is decisive for the overall proportional distribution of seats in the state parliament, the Landtag.

The parliament normally has at least 83 members. Parties generally need at least five percent of the second vote to participate in the distribution of seats.

And there is one particularly important point for anyone watching Germany from abroad:

Becoming the largest party does not automatically mean forming the government.

The minister-president—the equivalent of a state premier—is elected by the Landtag. In the first ballot, a candidate requires a majority of all members. If no party controls a majority on its own, coalition-building becomes decisive.

So even an AfD result of 42 percent would not automatically produce an AfD government.

But it would fundamentally transform the political landscape.

The comforting myth of the “protest voter”

For years, Germans have described many AfD supporters as Protestwähler—protest voters.

It is a comforting term. Protest sounds temporary. Someone who protests is supposedly trying to send the political establishment a message. If mainstream parties listen, the assumption goes, that person may eventually return.

That assumption may itself have become part of the problem. Political scientist Marcel Lewandowsky has repeatedly argued that simple explanations of populist success are insufficient. Behind support for parties such as the AfD lie deeper patterns: mistrust of political institutions and traditional media, a feeling of not being heard, and, among some voters, the conviction that democratic institutions no longer work for people like them.

What was once a more volatile electorate has, in part, become a stable political constituency.

The numbers on political competence illustrate the transformation.

Before the 2021 election, 40 percent of voters in Saxony-Anhalt regarded the CDU as the party most capable of solving the state’s most important problems. By July 2026, that figure had collapsed to 16 percent.

For the AfD, the movement went in precisely the opposite direction: from nine percent in 2021 to 36 percent in July 2026.

And confidence in the functioning of the state is strikingly low. In a May 2026 survey, only 16 percent expressed high confidence that the state was successfully fulfilling its responsibilities.

This is more than a shift to the right.

It is a transfer of political trust.

None of this means that 42 percent of voters hold an identical or completely developed far-right worldview.

But the opposite assumption is no longer convincing either: that most of these voters simply do not know what they are voting for.

Since November 2023, the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch has been classified by the state domestic intelligence service as a confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor. The authority says its assessment is based, among other things, on political agitation directed against the principles of human dignity and democracy embedded in Germany’s constitutional order.

That information is publicly available.

The more difficult question is therefore no longer simply:

Why do people vote for the AfD despite its radicalism?

We also have to ask:

What political, psychological and social needs does this identity satisfy?

Migration is an issue—but also a symbol

Migration undoubtedly plays an important role.

It would be a mistake to dismiss it as merely an excuse.

For many AfD supporters, migration, internal security, cultural change and the question of who gets to define social norms are genuine political concerns.

But populist communication turns migration into something larger.

It becomes a symbol of lost control.

If people feel that their surroundings are changing, that important decisions are being made elsewhere and that their own cultural assumptions are losing influence, migration is no longer experienced merely as a policy question.

It becomes a question of identity.

And that distinction matters.

Psychologically, people generally react more strongly to perceived loss than to equivalent gains. Someone who believes they are losing status, cultural familiarity or social recognition will rarely be persuaded by statistics alone.

You can correct a number about immigration without changing the feeling underneath it.

This is one reason populist communication can be so effective. It compresses complicated social transformations into an emotionally intelligible story:

We are losing something. They caused it. We will give it back to you.

Politically, that is extremely powerful.

Saxony-Anhalt is not simply “the East”

There is another comfortable explanation: this is simply what happens in eastern Germany.

That is also too easy.

Saxony-Anhalt has a specific history. The upheavals that followed German reunification, economic and biographical ruptures, population decline, migration toward western Germany, weaker institutional attachments and the perception that important decisions are made “above” or “in the West” have left lasting marks.

These factors do not explain every AfD vote.

And they do not excuse extremist positions.

But Saxony-Anhalt should not be treated as an exotic democratic exception either.

Right-wing populist and anti-establishment parties have grown across many Western democracies.

Eastern Germany may simply be revealing, earlier and more dramatically, developments that are moderated elsewhere by stronger party loyalties, more resilient institutions or different demographic structures.

Saxony-Anhalt may therefore be better understood not as an exception, but as a political seismograph.

Democracy, after all, depends on more than constitutions and elections.

It also depends on a sense of political efficacy:

My vote matters. People like me are visible. I have some influence over what happens to my life.

When that feeling disappears for long enough, populists become exceptionally good at filling the vacuum.

Then comes the algorithm

For younger voters, there is another factor: they increasingly inhabit a political public sphere that operates according to entirely different rules.

Social media platforms have partially taken over functions once performed by television, newspapers and radio.

But recommendation algorithms do not primarily reward political balance.

They reward attention.

And attention is reliably generated by emotion, conflict, outrage, simplification and boundary-breaking.

A study examining young users’ social-media feeds during Germany’s 2025 federal election campaign illustrates the imbalance. The AfD accounted for 21.5 percent of videos uploaded by official party accounts in the study, but 37.4 percent of the political videos recommended to the young user profiles. On TikTok, content tagged with the AfD began appearing within an average of 11 to 12 minutes.

This does not mean that TikTok turns teenagers into extremists.

That would be as simplistic as the protest-voter explanation.

Algorithms do not invent social conflict from nothing.

But they can amplify existing emotions, repeatedly validate particular interpretations of reality and create the impression that a political position is more dominant, widespread or normal than it actually is outside an individual feed.

AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund appears to understand this logic particularly well.

His communication is not a permanent stream of angry ideological speeches.

It also shows a smiling, approachable politician: riding a moped, visiting local festivals, talking to ordinary people.

Political radicalism is combined with everyday life, nostalgia and familiarity.

That matters.

Political normalization does not require radical demands themselves to become moderate.

Radical ideas can also become normalized when they are delivered by a familiar, personable and apparently ordinary messenger.

Germany’s “firewall” cannot solve a cultural problem

This brings German politics to a difficult dilemma.

Germany has developed the concept of the Brandmauer, literally a “firewall”: mainstream democratic parties generally refuse to govern together with the AfD.

Given the official extremist classification of the party’s Saxony-Anhalt branch, institutional distance is understandable.

But the firewall answers only one question:

Who will democratic parties refuse to govern with?

It does not answer the more difficult one:

Why do growing numbers of citizens feel better represented by the AfD than by every other party?

Moral outrage alone cannot answer that question.

But copying the AfD does not necessarily work either.

As Lewandowsky and other researchers of populism have noted, when mainstream parties repeatedly adopt the themes, frames and language on which a populist competitor has built its identity, they may reinforce the competitor rather than weaken it.

The political centre therefore faces a genuine challenge.

It cannot deny real problems.

But neither can it adopt its opponent’s entire worldview in an attempt to win voters back.

Democracy needs a language of its own.

The deeper deficit is narrative

This may be the central problem.

Populists tell powerful stories.

Not necessarily accurate stories.

But emotionally intelligible ones.

There is a “we.”

That “we” has been injured.

There are people responsible.

And there is a future in which the lost order can be restored.

Democratic politics often answers with a very different vocabulary:

Budgetary constraints.

European competencies.

Coalition compromises.

Constitutional limitations.

Administrative procedures.

All of these things are real. They are part of democratic government.

But people do not live by administrative reality alone.

They also need an idea of which society they belong to—and where that society is going.

If democratic parties merely explain why the populist story is false, they still leave their opponents in possession of the most valuable asset:

the story itself.

The democratic answer to populism therefore cannot consist of fact-checking alone.

It must rebuild a sense of democratic belonging.

A society must be able to tell people:

Change is real, but it does not mean that you are disappearing.

Migration changes the country, but belonging does not have to be a zero-sum game.

Democracy is slow and frustrating, but you are not irrelevant within it.

The future does not automatically mean loss.

That may sound abstract.

Politically, it is extremely concrete.

It means functioning schools. Accessible public administration. Reliable infrastructure outside large cities. Economic opportunity. Political representation.

And perhaps most importantly, a public sphere in which people do not first have to become radical before someone listens to them.

Saxony-Anhalt is a test case

Saxony-Anhalt contains only about one German in forty.

But what happens there on September 6 could reverberate far beyond a state of 2.12 million people.

If the AfD becomes the largest party, that alone would mark a historic shift. If it ever became part of a state government, the consequences would no longer be merely symbolic: German states control important areas including education, police, culture and administration.

And at the national level, an AfD-led government in any German state would represent another stage in the party’s political normalization.

Yet perhaps the deeper test comes even before the question of government formation.

Saxony-Anhalt is asking whether a liberal democracy can regain citizens whose political alienation has already become part of their identity.

The necessary answer is also the hardest one:

To take people seriously without affirming every conclusion they draw.

To understand fears without turning those fears into enemies.

To discuss migration, security and economic decline openly without adopting the language of ethnic exclusion.

And to defend democratic boundaries without reducing democracy to the defence of boundaries.

That is why the term “protest voter” has become inadequate. It transforms a structural development into a temporary mood. Forty-two percent is not a passing tantrum.

It is the result of a longer political, social and communicative process.

On September 6, Saxony-Anhalt will therefore be voting on more than who governs a relatively small eastern German state.

It will show how far a political counter-identity has already become normalized and whether Germany’s democratic centre can still offer something more powerful than fear of its opponent.

This is organized doubt. Unlike healthy skepticism, which asks for evidence, organized doubt surrounds evidence with misinformation, competing narratives and suspicion until judgment itself feels impossible.

In this episode of UNFRAMED, I explore how propaganda, disinformation, social media and political communication can turn confusion into power—and why organized doubt is the next step after manufactured fatigue.

Doubt does not have to defeat the truth. It only has to delay it until public attention moves on.

Are we becoming better skeptics? Or are we simply learning to distrust everything?

Watch, save and share your thoughts.

#OrganizedDoubt #UNFRAMED #MediaPsychology #PoliticalCommunication #Disinformation #MediaLiteracy #Propaganda #SocialPsychology

In this episode of UNFRAMED, I examine “manufactured fatigue.” The term does not suggest that crises are fake or directed from a single command centre. It describes how permanent urgency, accelerated news cycles and repeated failures of accountability produce collective exhaustion and how that exhaustion can become politically useful.

When the public stops expecting consequences, wrongdoing no longer has to be defended. It merely has to survive long enough to become familiar.

Classics endure not because they satisfy every expectation of a particular age, but because each age can read them differently. What has kept Homer alive for almost three thousand years is precisely that we have never been able to exhaust him. In Nolan’s film, however, very little of that irresolution survives. Homer’s polyphonic, savage, unsettling world has been made more orderly, more explicable and morally easier to digest.

A director’s stature does not diminish the stature of the work he takes on. Christopher Nolan may be one of the most powerful living storytellers in contemporary cinema. Homer, however, has spent almost three thousand years shaping how human beings think about war, intelligence, pride, desire, loyalty, loss and the longing for home.

When these two forms of cultural weight meet, the result cannot be treated as an ordinary literary adaptation. It becomes something closer to a confrontation: one of contemporary cinema’s most formidable directors meeting one of the most durable narratives in human memory.

To bring the Odyssey to the screen is not simply to retell a magnificent adventure of monsters, ships and storm-torn seas. It means touching a foundational story about what a human being is: how a person returns home; when he hides his name and when he shouts it into the world; how intelligence saves him; how pride destroys what intelligence has won.

Homer’s poem is not merely one of the beginnings of Western literature. It is one of the great cultural mirrors through which human beings have continued to think about themselves, about others and about powers larger than themselves.

Precisely for that reason, Nolan’s reputation should not protect the film from criticism. It should raise the standard by which the film is judged.

And yet The Odyssey was being declared a masterpiece almost before the lights had gone down. Box-office numbers, critics’ scores and the self-reinforcing enthusiasm of social media quickly produced an atmosphere in which admiration began to feel less like a judgment than a consensus. Those who had expressed doubts beforehand were told, implicitly or explicitly, that the verdict had arrived and that they should revise their views accordingly.

To object to the film began to sound less like an aesthetic position than an inability to recognize obvious greatness. As though judgment had already been delivered and the audience’s remaining task was simply to ratify it.

Released widely on July 17, 2026, the film grossed $264.1 million worldwide in its opening weekend. By July 25, it held a 94 percent positive rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes and 97 percent among verified audiences. Words such as “masterpiece,” “cultural event” and “one of Nolan’s greatest films” rapidly moved beyond individual reactions and hardened into a collective narrative of success.[1]

Yet a film being widely watched, widely discussed and signed by a celebrated director does not, by itself, make it a great work of art.

Box-office success is a sociological fact. Artistic value belongs to another realm: interpretation, argument, judgment and dissent. Contemporary culture increasingly collapses the distinction between the two. Success becomes evidence of quality; disagreement becomes evidence of the viewer’s failure.

Once an opinion becomes sufficiently visible and repeatedly affirmed, it does more than influence what people think. It can make individuals distrust what they themselves have seen.

Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments demonstrated how strongly majority judgments can affect individual perception even when the majority is plainly wrong. Add to that the cultural prestige surrounding Christopher Nolan, a director associated with seriousness, intelligence, formal ambition and cinematic grandeur, and another mechanism enters the picture: the work may begin to inherit its creator’s reputation before it has been judged independently.[2]

This does not mean that people who loved the film were simply obeying the crowd. That would be both unfair and analytically crude.

The question is not whether individual enjoyment is legitimate. It is what kind of cultural environment shapes the formation of taste.

Collective enthusiasm may tell us something important about a film’s appeal.

It cannot settle the question of its artistic value.

After watching The Odyssey, I found myself considerably less persuaded than the atmosphere surrounding it seemed to permit.

The film is undeniably large, expensive, technically formidable and visually impressive.

But scale is not depth. And grandeur is not meaning.

My central problem with Nolan’s Odyssey is not that it departs from Homer. Every adaptation departs.

Every adaptation selects, rearranges, omits, invents and interprets. Mechanical fidelity to a source text is neither necessary nor sufficient for artistic achievement. As Linda Hutcheon has argued, adaptation is not simple repetition; it is repetition without replication.[3]

So the fact that Nolan changes Homer is not a criticism. No serious adaptation could avoid doing so. The more difficult question is this:

Does Nolan enter into a genuinely creative dialogue with Homer, allowing both Homer and Nolan to emerge changed from the encounter? Or does he turn Homer’s name, characters and world into monumental scenery for Nolan’s own intellectual universe?

My answer lies much closer to the second: The Odyssey does not simply modernize Homer. It places him inside some of the dominant interpretive languages of the present: trauma, guilt, individual conscience, psychological damage and healing.

The result is that Homer’s strange, morally unstable and many-sided Odysseus increasingly gives way to someone much more familiar to us: a contemporary man attempting to come to terms with his past.

The film does not so much bring Homer into the present as lay the present over Homer.

The Loss of Odysseus

Homer’s Odysseus cannot be contained within a single psychological description. The epic announces this immediately.

In its opening line, Odysseus is described as polytropos, a notoriously rich word translated variously as “many-sided,” “much-travelled,” “of many turns,” “cunning,” “resourceful” or “a man of many ways.”[4] The ambiguity is not a translation problem. It is the point.

Odysseus’s defining quality is neither physical strength nor courage alone. It is his mêtis: strategic intelligence, intuition, cunning, improvisation, sensitivity to timing, the ability to conceal himself, the capacity to alter his behavior as circumstances change. He survives because he reads situations.

Before overpowering an enemy, he tries to understand the structure of power in which he has found himself. Polyphemus is the perfect example.

Odysseus does not defeat the Cyclops through strength alone. He defeats him through language, identity and deception.

He names himself “Nobody.” The name becomes a weapon. Anonymity becomes a survival strategy. Later, when Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca, he does not walk into his palace announcing that the king has returned. He enters disguised as a beggar.

He observes. He tests. He waits. Before revealing himself, he wants to know who has remained loyal to him, who has betrayed him and who was loyal not to Odysseus himself but merely to his power.

This is why Odysseus is more than a warrior. Anthropologically, he is a liminal figure.

He moves between king and beggar, stranger and native, truth and fiction, human and divine, order and chaos. His identity is not a fixed interior essence. It is something continually reconstructed through relationships, performances and circumstances.

That instability is precisely what makes him fascinating. He is intelligent, but manipulative. Courageous, but vain. He longs obsessively for home, yet his journey includes other women. He lies to survive, but through his lies he also creates truths about himself.

He can inspire admiration and distrust almost simultaneously. Odysseus is not morally black or white. He is a character built from contradiction.

And that contradiction is not an imperfection in Homer’s characterization. It is the characterization. In the Homeric world, heroism does not require moral purity. A hero may be magnificent and dangerous at once; constructive and destructive; worthy of admiration and capable of horror.

Odysseus has remained alive for almost three thousand years because these tensions have never been fully resolved. Nolan’s Odysseus loses too much of them.

The figure placed before us in the film is shaped above all by war. He carries the moral burden of what he has done. He is wounded by the past. And he cannot truly return home until he confronts the guilt that past has produced.

The Trojan Horse, traditionally associated with Odysseus’s extraordinary strategic intelligence, becomes something closer to the material embodiment of an original sin.

The destruction of Troy is no longer merely a military victory or an astonishing act of mêtis. It becomes the moral violation that poisons Odysseus’s subsequent life. His voyage therefore begins to resemble a psychological reckoning structured around war, guilt, memory and trauma.

Charlotte Higgins, in one of the more skeptical responses to the film, makes a related point: Nolan moves Odysseus away from Homer’s talkative, charismatic, morally dubious trickster and toward a quiet, grave, remorseful war veteran. That seems exactly right.

There is, of course, nothing illegitimate about reading the Odyssey through trauma. Serious scholarship has done so.

Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay’s Odysseus in America, for example, places Homer’s poem alongside the experiences of modern war veterans and draws powerful parallels between the warrior’s return home and the difficulty of re-entering civilian life after violence.[5] So trauma is not the problem.

The problem begins when trauma ceases to be one dimension of Odysseus and becomes the master key through which almost every other dimension is interpreted.

Odysseus has undoubtedly been transformed by war. How could he not have been? But to define him primarily by his wound is still to reduce him to that wound.

Psychological language can appear to deepen a character while quietly narrowing him. Because a human being is not simply the sum of what has happened to him.

He is also the sum of the responses he makes, the relationships he creates, the strategies he invents, the stories he tells, the mistakes he repeats and the paths he opens through the world.

Homer’s Odysseus suffers. But he is not merely a sufferer.

He weeps, yet is not reducible to brokenness. He deceives, desires, loves, hides, boasts, narrates, manipulates, endures, fails, survives and eventually rebuilds a world.

Nolan’s interpretation pulls him toward one of the most recognizable moral protagonists of our own century: the damaged modern man carrying the burden of his past, learning to acknowledge his trauma and seeking redemption through confrontation with the self.

The result may feel psychologically legible. But anthropologically it is much thinner.

Encountering the Past or Domesticating It

No historical or mythological film can reproduce the past exactly. Nor should we ask it to. Every act of representation passes through the language, moral intuitions and political concerns of the period that creates it.

But there is an important difference between interpreting the past and turning the past into scenery for the present. One of anthropology’s most important intellectual achievements was to challenge the assumption that other societies were merely incomplete versions of ourselves.

The same discipline is useful when we think about history: People who lived in the past were not modern people who had not yet learned how to be modern.

Their understandings of selfhood, family, responsibility, authority, the body, death, fate and the sacred emerged from cultural worlds that were not identical to ours.

To assume that concepts such as individuality, conscience, freedom, personality and responsibility have carried their present meanings throughout human history is not to make the past accessible. It is to silence the past inside our vocabulary.

A convincing historical narrative should therefore preserve something of the past’s resistance to us. It should allow us to recognize human beings while still encountering people who do not entirely think, speak, desire or judge as we do.

Nolan preserves much of antiquity’s visual shell. There are ships, palaces, shores, armor and battlefields. But the moral and cosmological strangeness beneath that shell has been greatly reduced.

The characters look ancient. Their inner lives often do not. Their conflicts, explanations and patterns of speech belong recognizably to contemporary psychological and ethical culture.

At times, the film does not feel as though ancient people are inhabiting an ancient world. It feels as though contemporary people have been placed inside one.

Modernizing dialogue is not automatically a flaw. An adaptation has to communicate. But accessibility and cultural flattening are different things. Language does far more than transmit information. It carries hierarchy. Intimacy. Authority. Shame. Distance. Ideas about time. Ideas about obligation.

How people speak to a king, a spouse, a child, a stranger or a god tells us what kind of social universe they inhabit. This is why the film can occasionally evoke the strange impression of contemporary people in ancient clothes walking through an enormous open-air museum.

The issue is not that a particular word sounds too modern. It is that the dialogue does not always seem to emerge from a coherent ancient social body.

Johannes Fabian famously described one of anthropology’s historical sins as the “denial of coevalness.” Classical anthropology often placed the societies it studied in another time, treating living communities as though they represented earlier stages of human development.[6]

Nolan’s film risks performing the reverse operation. Ancient people are no longer pushed backward in time. Instead they are pulled so completely into our present that they become intelligible mainly insofar as they resemble us.

In one case, the Other is imprisoned in the past. In the other, the past is absorbed into the present. The effect is surprisingly similar. The possibility of a genuine encounter disappears.

When the Gods Withdraw, the Human Being Shrinks

In Homer, the human being does not exist as an autonomous psychological unit.

A person exists inside relationships: with family, lineage, household, guests, political community, gods and fate. Human identity is therefore not merely internal.

It is relational and cosmological. The concepts that structure the Odyssey make this especially clear: nostos, oikos, xenia and mêtis.[7]

Nostos is homecoming. But homecoming does not simply mean reaching the geographical place where one happens to live. Odysseus becomes fully Odysseus again only by returning to Ithaca, Penelope, Telemachus, his household, his ancestors and his political place in the world.

Oikos is usually translated as household, but it contains much more than the physical house. It encompasses family, lineage, property, servants, animals, inheritance and authority.

And xenia, the sacred relation between guest and host, is not simply a matter of politeness. It belongs to the moral and cosmological architecture of the Homeric world. This is why Polyphemus is terrifying for reasons that go far beyond cannibalism.

He violates the sacred relation that should protect the guest. And the suitors’ crime is far greater than irritating Penelope. They are consuming Odysseus’s oikos from within: his food, his wealth, his authority and the order of his house.

Seen from this perspective, the Odyssey is not primarily the story of a lone individual recovering psychologically. It is about the restoration of violated relationships, broken boundaries and disordered worlds.

Which is why the diminished role of the gods in Nolan’s film matters so much. It is not merely a matter of removing fantastical elements.

Once Zeus recedes, Poseidon’s immediate presence weakens and Athena loses much of the continuous, interventionist intimacy she possesses in Homer, something larger disappears: the cosmological architecture in which these people understand themselves.

Richard Brody makes a similar observation in The New Yorker, arguing that Nolan substantially reduces divine intervention and turns the story toward a more terrestrial psychological drama. For a contemporary audience, this may seem to make the narrative more human.

But that depends entirely on what we mean by human. In Homer, the human is not what remains after the divine has been removed. Humanity is partly constituted through the relationship between mortals, gods, fate, ritual and social obligation.

When those structures fade, the journey changes. A voyage shaped by divine anger, sacred order, fate and violated relationships becomes an interior confrontation with memory.

Odysseus ceases to be a person negotiating gods, oceans, households, enemies and obligations. He becomes increasingly a consciousness negotiating itself.

It feels modern because it is modern. But it is not necessarily more human. In one sense, it is less so.

The Cultural Dominance of Trauma

Trauma has become one of the most powerful explanatory languages of contemporary culture. We increasingly tell stories about war, family, childhood, identity, politics and history through the vocabulary of psychological injury.

There are very good reasons for this. The language of trauma has allowed experiences once dismissed or silenced to be recognized. It has made suffering visible. It has insisted that violence does not end when the violent event ends.

That has been an important moral achievement. But every successful explanatory concept contains the temptation to become total. Eventually, trauma can cease to be one way of understanding a human life and become the way.

Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman have shown how trauma has expanded beyond its psychiatric meaning to become part of the moral language through which contemporary societies recognize suffering and legitimate victimhood.[8]

Trauma does not simply describe pain. It increasingly helps determine whose pain is credible, which suffering becomes publicly legible and what kinds of stories acquire moral authority. Art has absorbed this vocabulary too.

Character depth is increasingly demonstrated by the magnitude of the wound a character carries. Desire, anger, intimacy, failure and even moral choice are explained through the injury that came before them.

The human being risks becoming less an agent than the vessel of an earlier event. Nolan’s Odysseus fits remarkably well within this cultural model.

The Trojan Horse ceases to function mainly as evidence of strategic brilliance and becomes a symbol of guilt. The journey home is delayed not only by Poseidon, storms, monsters or divine hostility but because Odysseus himself is not psychologically ready to return.

Calypso’s island, too, becomes more than a seductive, dangerous and divine suspension of ordinary human life. It is transformed into a space of repression, forgetting and healing.

The lotus begins to resemble a psychological anesthetic: something that relieves suffering while dissolving identity. And when Calypso tells Odysseus that he is not ready to go home, the logic of the myth has moved almost completely into the vocabulary of therapy.

Yet this changes the meaning of forgetting. In Homer, forgetting is not primarily liberation from painful memory. It is the loss of nostos. The lotus-eaters do not lose their trauma. They lose the desire to return. And that is far more radical.

To forget is not simply to escape the past. It is to lose the relationships toward which the self is oriented: home, name, community, obligation, place.

One interpretation concerns psychological healing. The other concerns the dissolution of relational identity. They are not the same. And when Nolan draws them together, Homer does not necessarily become deeper. He becomes more familiar.

Trauma is one possible way of understanding Odysseus. It should not become the whole of Odysseus. Because when a character is primarily understood through his wounds, other dimensions begin to disappear: resilience, invention, responsibility, agency, cunning, desire, moral instability.

Recognizing suffering can deepen our understanding of a human being. Reducing a human being to suffering diminishes him in another way.

Historical Credibility: Not Racial Purity, but a Shared World

The debate around the film’s casting has often been framed in the least useful way possible: as a question of skin color and modern racial categories. Historically and anthropologically, that is a poor starting point.

The Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean was not a collection of sealed, biologically homogeneous populations. The Aegean, Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt and the islands were connected through trade, warfare, migration, marriage and cultural exchange.

Ancient DNA research likewise points to population movements and admixture across different periods. But none of this can simply be translated into contemporary racial classifications.

“White,” “Black,” “Asian”: these are not timeless human categories waiting to be discovered in the Bronze Age. They are historically produced systems of classification.

Ancient identities were organized through other configurations: lineage, city, language, political loyalty, geography, culture, religion and shared myth.[9] So the question “Which face looks Greek?” is not a serious measure of historical credibility.

But rejecting racial essentialism does not mean abandoning the question of historical coherence. The more interesting issue is whether the people on screen appear to inhabit the same social world.

A ship’s crew does not become historically convincing because everyone has the same phenotype. It becomes convincing when we believe that these people have sailed together, fought together, feared together and lived under the same authority.

They should share something that cannot be supplied by costume design alone: a bodily culture. A rhythm. A hierarchy. A relation to danger. An understanding of masculinity. A memory of violence. A learned way of obeying and commanding.

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is particularly useful here.[10] Social worlds do not exist only in institutions, objects or verbal rules. They enter the body. They can be seen in how people stand, walk, eat, lower their eyes, interrupt, obey, grieve, threaten, wait.

A group of warriors does not become a community because the wardrobe department gives them matching armor. Shared danger, rituals, violence, mourning, loyalty and hierarchy should have become embodied.

Nolan’s crew sometimes feels less like a group of men formed by the same world than like contemporary Hollywood actors gathered inside ancient costumes.

The rupture is not racial. It is sociocultural. That distinction matters enormously. Because without it, criticism of historical representation can collapse into biological essentialism. But the opposite position is equally intellectually lazy: treating “diversity” as a concept that automatically places every artistic decision beyond criticism.

Neither position helps us think. The real challenge of historical cinema is harder. It is to persuade us that these people belong to the same world.

Not Feminism, but Didactic Anachronism

A similar distinction is needed in discussing gender. There is no reason the Odyssey cannot be reread from a feminist perspective. Of course it can. Classics remain alive precisely because later generations bring new questions to them.

But Homer’s women are not blank figures waiting for a modern screenwriter to arrive and give them agency. Penelope is the clearest example. Her waiting is anything but passive.

She weaves during the day and secretly unweaves at night, manipulating time itself in order to postpone the decision the suitors are trying to impose upon her.[11] She cannot defeat them through physical force. So she changes the structure of the game.

That is agency. Indeed, it is possible to read Penelope’s strategy as an interior, domestic form of the very quality that defines Odysseus: mêtis.

Athena, similarly, is not simply a benevolent goddess standing behind the hero. She recognizes Odysseus because she understands his intelligence. They inhabit the same world of strategic cunning. Circe and Calypso are equally resistant to simple moral classification. They embody power, desire, danger, immortality, seduction, forgetting and the temptation not to return.

Calypso’s offer to Odysseus is especially important. She does not merely offer him romance. She offers immortality. And Odysseus’s refusal is therefore much more than choosing his wife over another woman.

He chooses mortality. He chooses human limitation. He chooses relational identity over timeless suspension. Modernizing these women by reducing their ambiguity does not necessarily strengthen them. Sometimes the opposite happens.

Ancient forms of agency; uncomfortable, morally ambiguous, culturally strange; are replaced by the kinds of empowerment that contemporary audiences already know how to recognize.

One of the more significant losses in Nolan’s adaptation is therefore the contraction of Homer’s female world. Nausicaa, Arete and Odysseus’s mother disappear. Elsewhere, the emotional, bodily, comic and morally unstable qualities surrounding Penelope, Athena, Circe and Calypso are narrowed. The result is paradoxical.

The presence of contemporary gender consciousness does not automatically produce more complex female characters. The issue is not feminism. It is didacticism.

A work of art does not become propaganda simply because it contains political or moral ideas.

But when those ideas stop arising from the character’s world and begin sounding as though they have been inserted to instruct the audience, the dramatic illusion weakens. At that point the character is no longer quite speaking.

The age is speaking through her. The person of the past becomes less a subject inhabiting another world than a vehicle for articulating the correct beliefs of ours.

Both Long and Rushed

For a film of roughly three hours, The Odyssey has a curious relationship with time. Some sequences unfold at considerable length without accumulating equivalent emotional or narrative weight.

At the same time, encounters that carry enormous conceptual density in Homer are treated as relatively efficient narrative stations. This is not the banal complaint that “the book contains more.” Of course it does. No film could reproduce a twenty-four-book epic scene by scene.

The real question is not which events were removed. It is what kind of meaning the surviving events create together. Take Polyphemus. In Homer, this is not merely a monster sequence. It is a drama of language, naming, intelligence, hospitality, power and pride. Odysseus survives first by becoming “Nobody.” To conceal his identity is an act of intelligence. Then, when he has escaped and should remain silent, he does the opposite.

He tells Polyphemus his real name. Why? Because survival is not enough. He wants the victory to belong to him. He wants the story attached to his name. And so the same personality that saves him places him in danger.

His mêtis gets him out of the cave. His hybris brings Poseidon down upon him. This is Homer at his best. The hero’s strength and weakness are not separate moral compartments. They grow from the same root. Nolan retains the event, but the balance shifts. The linguistic and strategic game weakens; physical danger and survival take over. Odysseus’s defining form of intelligence begins to dissolve into the grammar of contemporary action cinema.

The event is still there. But some of the web of meanings that made the event Homeric has disappeared. The same thing happens elsewhere. Episode follows episode, location follows location, spectacle follows spectacle. Yet before the ritual, cultural or cosmological meaning of one encounter has fully accumulated, we are moving toward the next.

The result is one of the film’s strangest contradictions: it feels extremely full and strangely superficial at the same time. There is always something to see. A new place. A new star. A new image. A new threat. But a new image is not necessarily a new meaning.

At moments the film’s length does not create depth so much as expose fragmentation. Some sequences take their time. Some of Homer’s most consequential transformations barely have time to breathe.

The film therefore achieves something unusual: it is simultaneously long and rushed.

The Ethical Responsibility of Adaptation

The ethical responsibility of adapting a classic is not to preserve it under glass.

That would kill it. Classics live because they are retold, argued with, transformed, challenged and reopened by different generations. Every adaptation illuminates certain aspects of its source and pushes others into shadow.

Every director brings his own age into the work. There is no neutral alternative.

But there is still a difference between reinterpreting the past and colonizing it. Reinterpretation creates an encounter. The present asks questions of the past.

But the past is also allowed to ask questions of the present. The violence, hierarchy and patriarchy of an ancient world can become visible to us. But a genuine encounter should also expose the assumptions of our own world: our individualism; our psychologism; our faith in progress; our confidence that we occupy the moral summit of history.

In a genuine dialogue, the past is not a silent defendant standing before the tribunal of the present. The present is also under examination. To colonize the past is different. It is to make the values of the present untouchable and then reconstruct earlier human beings as people who should have thought like us but had not yet learned to do so.

I would call this temporal narcissism.[12] Temporal narcissism is the tendency to experience one’s own historical moment as the natural moral center of human history. It imagines contemporary humanity as the destination toward which earlier forms of human life were imperfectly moving. The past becomes valuable insofar as it resembles us, speaks our language and confirms our values.

And this, more than any individual change to plot or character, is what troubles me about Nolan’s Odyssey. The film does not quite tolerate the ancient world’s otherness. Heroism becomes guilt. Cosmology becomes psychology. Relational identity becomes individual consciousness. Moral ambiguity becomes self-criticism. The film does more than bring Homer closer. It increasingly makes Homer intelligible only through us. A great adaptation should do something more difficult. It should make the old work legible without making it domesticated. It should allow us to recognize the past while preserving enough of its strangeness to unsettle us. It should remind us not only that ancient categories were historically contingent. Ours are too.

Otherwise adaptation ceases to be a dialogue between periods. It becomes the present delivering a monologue over the past.

More Nolan Than Homer

None of this means that The Odyssey is visually unsuccessful. Far from it.

Nolan remains one of the most gifted filmmakers alive when it comes to physical scale, monumental imagery and the transformation of landscape into cinematic experience.

The use of real locations and next-generation IMAX film technology gives the production an undeniable physical magnitude. IMAX describes it as the first feature shot entirely on IMAX film cameras.

And there is one area in which Nolan and Homer genuinely seem made for one another: time. The Odyssey itself is not conventionally linear. It does not simply begin with Odysseus leaving Troy and proceed chronologically toward Ithaca. Large portions of his adventures reach us through memories, retellings and stories that Odysseus himself narrates.

He is not only the protagonist. He is one of the poem’s great storytellers. Reality and fiction, memory and reconstruction, event and narration continually fold into one another.

Here Nolan finds a genuine kinship with Homer. His lifelong fascination with time, memory and narrative structure can enter into a productive relationship with a poem that is already built through retrospection, delay and narrated experience.

And on this point he deserves considerable credit. Nolan is remarkably effective at translating the Odyssey’s winding, non-linear structure into cinematic form. But grand images cannot substitute for a grand conception of a world. And ultimately, while telling Homer’s story, Nolan returns to Nolan’s deepest preoccupations: guilt; memory; time; masculinity; moral responsibility; the past invading the present.

That may make The Odyssey an important Nolan film. For admirers of his work, it may even appear as a culmination of themes he has pursued for decades. But that is not quite the same question.

A great Nolan film and a great Homeric adaptation are not necessarily the same thing. The Odysseus who remains at the end is no longer fully the many-sided, many-minded border figure of the poem.

He has become a modern man suffering a postwar crisis of conscience. And homecoming has shifted accordingly. It is no longer primarily the restoration of a social and cosmological order.

It is the individual’s reckoning with trauma. Perhaps that is also the most revealing thing about the film. Nolan’s Odyssey may ultimately tell us more about 2026 than about ancient Greece.

It tells us what our culture now finds suspicious about heroism. How we understand suffering. How readily we translate moral complexity into psychological injury.

How deeply we have come to believe that victory requires guilt, that depth requires trauma and that the past becomes acceptable when it learns to speak in the moral vocabulary of the present. Nolan’s Odysseus is therefore a mirror.

But when we look into it, what we see is not only Homer’s hero. We see ourselves. The film may win awards. It may remain a major commercial success. It may become one of the defining cinematic events of its moment.

But the noise surrounding a work when it arrives is not the same thing as the mark it leaves after the noise has disappeared. Classics endure for a different reason. They do not survive because they perfectly satisfy the moral and aesthetic expectations of every period.

They survive because no period manages to consume them completely. Almost three thousand years later, Homer’s Odyssey remains strange, funny, brutal, cruel, beautiful, unstable and difficult.

Its power lies not only in our ability to recognize ourselves in it. It lies equally in our encounter with a form of humanity that is not entirely ours. Odysseus’s moral instability. The capricious interventions of the gods. The proximity of heroism to violence. Penelope’s quiet cunning. The sacredness of hospitality. The horror of vengeance. The relational meaning of homecoming. None fits perfectly within the conceptual world of the modern individual.

That is not the problem with Homer. That is why Homer matters. Homer does not merely tell us who we are. He reminds us that human beings have imagined other ways of being human. Nolan’s film weakens that encounter. Instead of allowing Homer’s world to remain sufficiently strange to challenge us, it repeatedly offers us the familiar face of our own age. And perhaps this is the final difference between cultural impact and cultural endurance.

A work may arrive with extraordinary force. It may dominate a season. It may command screens, conversation and awards. But classics do not last because they once overwhelmed an audience. They last because later audiences continue discovering something in them that earlier audiences could not finish. What has kept Homer alive for almost three thousand years is that we still cannot fully resolve him.

In Nolan’s The Odyssey, very little of that irresolution remains. Homer’s polyphonic, savage, playful and deeply unsettling world has been made cleaner. More psychologically explicable. More morally manageable. More recognizably ours. And so my central objection to the film can finally be put very simply:

Its title may be The Odyssey. But the journey does not ultimately lead us toward Homer. It leads us back to Christopher Nolan.

Conceptual Notes and Footnotes

[1] Critical Reception, Box Office and the “Cultural Event”

The film was released on July 17, 2026. During its opening weekend, it grossed approximately $264 million worldwide; as of July 25, 2026, it held a 94 percent positive score among critics and 97 percent among verified audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.

Because these figures are subject to change, the date is specified in the article.

The point is not to minimize the film’s commercial success, but to distinguish commercial reception from aesthetic judgment.

[2] Conformity and the Halo Effect

Conformity refers to the modification of individual judgment under real or perceived group pressure. Solomon Asch’s experiments demonstrated that even demonstrably incorrect majority answers can exert pressure on individual perception.

The halo effect describes the tendency for an overall positive evaluation of a person or object to influence judgments about its individual qualities.

Nolan’s reputation, accumulated through earlier films, may therefore influence the reception of a new work before that work is assessed independently.

The use of these concepts does not imply that everyone who admires the film is simply conforming. The concern here is not the legitimacy of individual taste, but the social environment in which cultural judgments take shape.

[3] Adaptation and the Problem of Fidelity

For Linda Hutcheon, an adaptation is both a reinterpretation of an existing work and an aesthetic work in its own right.

It is therefore insufficient to evaluate an adaptation solely according to its “fidelity” to the source.

But rejecting fidelity as the only criterion does not make the source text’s constitutive meanings irrelevant.

Changing elements of plot and transforming the source’s underlying anthropological, ethical or cosmological world are different kinds of intervention.

This essay is concerned primarily with the latter.

[4] Polytropos and Mêtis

Polytropos carries a range of meanings: “many-sided,” “of many turns,” “much-travelled,” “resourceful” and “knowing many ways.”

Its semantic richness refers both to Odysseus’s physical wandering and to his intellectual flexibility.

Mêtis is broader than abstract intelligence. It includes intuition, cunning, adaptability, deception, concealment, timing and practical improvisation.

Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant describe mêtis as a form of intelligence suited to unstable, uncertain and changing circumstances. It does not simply apply fixed rules. It reads the situation and alters itself accordingly.

Much of Odysseus’s distinctive heroism derives from precisely this form of intelligence.

[5] The Possibility of a Trauma Reading

Interpreting Odysseus through war trauma is not unique to Nolan.

Jonathan Shay’s Odysseus in America places Homer’s poem in conversation with the experiences of Vietnam veterans, emphasizing how difficult it can be for a warrior to re-enter civilian life.

A soldier may physically reach home while still carrying habits of distrust, anger, hypervigilance and grief formed in war.

The objection in this essay is therefore not to trauma as an interpretive possibility.

It is to allowing trauma to subordinate almost every other dimension of the character.

[6] The Denial of Coevalness

Johannes Fabian argued that classical anthropology frequently represented the societies it studied as though they occupied an earlier historical stage than the anthropologist himself.

He called this the “denial of coevalness.”

The anthropologist thus appeared as the fully modern subject, while other societies were positioned as incomplete or earlier versions of humanity.

Nolan’s film risks an inverse but similarly flattening move: rather than pushing the past away from the present, it absorbs the past into contemporary psychological and moral categories.

[7] Nostos, Oikos and Xenia

Nostos denotes homecoming; oikos, the household and lineage order; and xenia, the sacred reciprocal relationship between guest and host.

Together they reveal how far Odysseus’s identity exceeds the boundaries of the isolated individual.

He exists through his household, family, political authority, ancestors, gods and social obligations.

Homecoming therefore does not simply mean arriving where one wishes to be.

It means being restored to a disrupted social and cosmological position.

[8] The Moral Language of Trauma

Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman argue that trauma has come to function in contemporary societies as more than a clinical category.

It has become part of the moral language through which suffering, testimony, victimhood and legitimacy are recognized.

This argument does not deny suffering.

It asks how suffering is made culturally intelligible.

Trauma discourse can make previously invisible experiences visible. But when it becomes totalizing, it can also define individuals primarily through injury, pushing resilience, creativity, responsibility and agency into the background.

[9] Race and Identity in the Ancient World

Modern racial classifications are not neutral labels for timeless biological realities. They emerged through particular historical, colonial and political processes.

Ancient Greek societies certainly perceived bodily and geographical difference, but they did not organize identity according to modern racial systems.

Lineage, city, language, political allegiance, culture and shared gods played more decisive roles.

The diversity of ancient societies therefore cannot simply be mapped onto contemporary categories of racial representation.

[10] Habitus

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus describes the way social structures become embodied as durable dispositions.

People formed within the same cultural world acquire characteristic ways of standing, speaking, obeying, commanding, feeling shame, establishing distance and reading social situations.

Such behaviors are not always consciously taught.

Over time, they come to feel natural.

Historical world-building therefore requires more than accurate architecture, costume and objects.

It requires the sense of an embodied social logic.

[11] Penelope’s Form of Agency

In feminist and narratological scholarship, Penelope’s weaving is frequently read not as passive waiting but as a form of temporal and narrative control.

By weaving during the day and undoing the work at night, she delays the moment of decision the suitors seek to impose.

Unable to defeat them through direct force, she manipulates the temporal structure of the conflict and preserves room for action.

Her strategy can therefore be understood as a domestic counterpart to Odysseus’s mêtis.

[12] Temporal Narcissism

The term temporal narcissism, as used here, is not a clinical diagnosis.

It describes the cultural tendency to treat the values of one’s own historical moment as the natural and ultimate standard against which other periods should be judged.

The concept is related to presentism, Fabian’s critique of temporality and modernity’s recurring assumption of its own moral superiority.

Under temporal narcissism, the past is not first approached through its own historical conditions.

It is measured according to how closely it approaches us.

Bibliography

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Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Brody, Richard. “Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Leaves the Gods in the Outtakes.” The New Yorker, July 15, 2026.

Detienne, Marcel and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Translated by Janet Lloyd, University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Derbew, Sarah. Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Derbew, Sarah, Daniel Orrells and Phiroze Vasunia, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race. Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Doherty, Lillian Eileen. Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey. University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. Columbia University Press, 1983.

Fassin, Didier and Richard Rechtman. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Translated by Rachel Gomme, Princeton University Press, 2009.

Felson-Rubin, Nancy. Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics. Princeton University Press, 1994.

Finley, M. I. The World of Odysseus. New York Review Books, 2002. First published 1954.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson, W. W. Norton, 2017.

Higgins, Charlotte. “Christopher Nolan Has Made an Odyssey for Our Times—by Sacrificing the Delicious Darkness of Homer’s Epic.” The Guardian, July 25, 2026.

Hutcheon, Linda and Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013.

McCoskey, Denise Eileen. Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy. I. B. Tauris, 2021.

Nolan, Christopher, dir. The Odyssey. Universal Pictures and Syncopy, 2026.

Pucci, Pietro. Odysseus Polutropos: Intertextual Readings in the Odyssey and the Iliad. Cornell University Press, 1987.

Shay, Jonathan. Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. Scribner, 2002.

Thorndike, Edward L. “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings.” Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1920, pp. 25–29.

Skourtanioti, Eirini et al. “Ancient DNA Reveals Admixture History and Endogamy in the Prehistoric Aegean.” Nature Ecology & Evolution, Vol. 7, 2023, pp. 290–303.

Rotten Tomatoes. “The Odyssey: Audience Reviews.” Accessed July 25, 2026.

Universal Pictures. “The Odyssey—Official Film Information.” Accessed July 25, 2026.

In the early 1950s, social psychologist Solomon Asch designed one of the most famous experiments on conformity. The task given to participants was simple, almost embarrassingly simple. They were shown a line and asked to identify which of three other lines matched it in length. The correct answer was obvious.

Yet when the other people in the room (all secretly instructed by the researchers) confidently gave the wrong answer, many participants began to doubt what they saw with their own eyes. Some conformed because they feared standing alone. Others wondered whether the group must know something they did not.

The Asch experiment is usually remembered as a study of conformity. But perhaps its deeper lesson is about dissent. In later versions of the experiment, when just one person broke the unanimity of the group, conformity dropped dramatically. It did not take a crowd to restore courage. It took one visible crack in the wall of agreement.

This insight matters far beyond the laboratory. Authoritarian systems rarely survive by force alone. They survive by manufacturing the appearance of unanimity. They make people feel that everyone else has accepted the official version of reality. They do not need every citizen to believe the narrative. It is enough if citizens believe that everyone else believes it; or that everyone else is too afraid to question it.

Turkey’s post-July 15 order must be understood through this psychology of enforced agreement.

This distinction matters.

To call July 15 simply a “failed coup attempt” is already to enter the narrative architecture built by the regime. It accepts the first premise of the official story and then debates only the consequences. The deeper question here is how that night itself was framed, managed, narrated, and transformed into a permanent source of political legitimacy.

A violent and chaotic night was turned into a moral dividing line. Society was forced into a brutal binary: either stand with Erdoğan’s version of reality or be associated with treason, terrorism, and the alleged plotters. This binary did not simply silence political parties. It disciplined society. It taught people which questions could be asked, which doubts had to remain private, and which memories were too dangerous to speak aloud.

This is the architecture of organized doubt.

Organized doubt is not the same as skepticism. Skepticism asks questions in search of truth. Organized doubt weaponizes uncertainty in order to prevent truth from stabilizing. It does not merely impose an official narrative. It makes alternative narratives appear dangerous, immoral, or criminal. It tells society that asking certain questions is not inquiry but betrayal. It turns memory into a security issue. It turns dissent into suspicion. It turns journalism, humor, testimony, association, and even grief into potential evidence.

This is why narrative matters. Reclaiming the narrative is not a literary luxury. It is a democratic necessity. It is the process by which a society recovers the right to describe its own wounds, its own fears, its own contradictions, and its own memory. It is not simply about replacing one story with another. It is about reopening the public space in which competing accounts can exist without being immediately criminalized.

The most important transformation was perhaps epistemic. The regime did not merely concentrate power. It tried to monopolize meaning. It claimed the authority not only to govern the country, but to define what could be remembered, what could be doubted, and what could be said.

This is why the struggle over July 15 is not only a legal or political struggle. It is also a struggle over perception.

Like the participants in Asch’s experiment, many people in Turkey were not blind to what stood before them. They saw the contradictions. They noticed the dizzying speed of the purges. They watched as judges were stripped of their robes in front

of their colleagues, teachers were blocked from opening simple bank accounts, and entire families were systematically evicted from economic life through the faceless stroke of an emergency decree (KHK). They saw how property was seized, institutions were closed, passports were cancelled, and professional lives were shattered well before any individualized evidence could ever be tested in a fair court.

The regime’s narrative power rests precisely on this gap between private knowledge and public expression. Around dinner tables, in encrypted messages, in exile conversations, in whispers after public events, many people say what they cannot yet say aloud. The official narrative remains powerful not because it has persuaded everyone, but because it has disciplined the conditions under which disagreement becomes visible.

Reclaiming the narrative therefore begins with refusing the first imposed sentence.

We do not have to begin from the regime’s vocabulary. We can begin from the contradictions. We can begin from the victims. We can begin from the speed with which institutions were dismantled. We can begin from the fact that an entire society was pressured to call repression justice, obedience patriotism, and silence national unity.

The fifth Strasbourg Justice Meeting, held this week in front of the Council of Europe under the slogan “Justice for All in Turkey,” was one such act of narrative reclamation. More than five thousand people from across Europe gathered despite record heat, demanding the implementation of European Court of Human Rights judgments and a more determined response to Turkey’s continuing human rights violations.

The significance of Strasbourg was not only institutional. It was also psychological.

For years, many victims of Turkey’s post-July 15 order have been made to feel isolated, stigmatized, or morally contaminated by accusation. The regime’s power lay not only in courts and decrees, but in its ability to make people believe that their suffering was unspeakable. Strasbourg disrupted that isolation. It placed individual stories next to one another until they formed a public record.

Former prisoners, journalists, dismissed teachers, mothers, families, and human rights defenders did not gather only to make legal demands. They gathered to say: this happened. It is still happening. And it cannot be buried under the language of national security.

Yet, narrative reclamation does not only occur in the solemn, institutional theaters of international law. It also lives in the low-stakes, intimate spaces of culture, where a society’s collective subconscious quietly processes its trauma.

The same mechanism can emerge in unexpected cultural forms. A young comedian on a stage may appear, at first glance, far removed from legal advocacy in Strasbourg. Yet Deniz Göktaş’s recent stand-up performance on YouTube belongs to the same wider struggle over what can still be said in Turkey.

His performance matters not only because of the jokes themselves, but because of the atmosphere in which they are told. In a country where alternative speech is often equated with support for terrorism, where satire can become a legal matter, and where public figures learn to measure every sentence against possible consequences, the act of speaking freely acquires a meaning beyond entertainment.

On stage, the Turkish idiom ‘’“kellesi koltukta” was made literal: a giant head of him resting on an armchair.” ‘’Kellesi koltukta’’ means that he was doing that show with his life on the line. A young man on stage speaking fully aware of the risks but refuses to let fear write the script for him. He touches Turkey’s social fault lines, its political absurdities, its hypocrisies, its shared nervousness, its collective fatigue. He does not speak from the sterile distance of academic analysis. He speaks from inside the atmosphere.

The line lands because it compresses years of democratic erosion into a single image. It does not cite constitutional amendments, purges, emergency decrees, captured media, judicial dependency, or mass prosecutions. Yet it captures something essential: the psychological transformation of power.

Authoritarianism in Turkey did not arrive fully relaxed. It learned. It tested boundaries. It watched what society would tolerate. It became more confident, more expansive, more comfortable in its own skin. What may once have required denial gradually became performative certainty. What once had to be hidden behind democratic language began to speak in its own voice.

This is why the joke matters.

In Turkey’s current atmosphere, naming authoritarianism directly is no longer merely descriptive. It is an act of narrative resistance. The joke tells the audience not only that Erdoğan has changed, but that the change is visible, speakable, and collectively recognizable.

And that is precisely the Asch moment.

In the experiment, the dissenting person did not teach others how to see. They already saw. What the dissenter did was make it socially possible to trust one’s own perception again.

Good political comedy under authoritarian pressure does the same. It does not simply make people laugh. It restores shared perception. It allows an audience to realize that what they privately observed was not imagination, exaggeration, or madness. Others saw it too.

In that moment, laughter becomes more than laughter. It becomes a rehearsal for freedom.

This is where law, testimony, journalism, art, and humor meet. The legal struggle insists that rights violations be named precisely. Human rights reports document patterns and consequences. Strasbourg gives victims a public and institutional stage. Journalism prevents erasure. Comedy punctures the emotional monopoly of fear.

Together, they do what Asch’s lone dissenter did in the laboratory: they make unanimity less believable.

And once unanimity becomes less believable, society changes.

The task is not to produce a mirror image of propaganda. It is not to demand that everyone agree on one final version of the past. A democratic narrative does not require uniformity. On the contrary, it requires the right to disagreement. It requires a public sphere in which the state’s version of events can be questioned without the questioner being marked as an enemy.

It requires the distinction between violence and thought. Between crime and association. Between security and obedience. Between justice and revenge. Between memory and myth.

In Turkey, these distinctions have been systematically blurred. After July 15, the language of security expanded until it entered nearly every field of public life. Political opposition, civil society, journalism, education, property, family ties, humor, and memory could all be pulled into the orbit of suspicion. The result was not merely repression. It was an epistemic crisis: a crisis over who has the authority to define reality.

That is why reclaiming the narrative is not only about the past. It is about the future possibility of democracy.

The people gathered in Strasbourg, the lawyers and writers documenting the post-July 15 order, the journalists still asking questions, the exiles preserving memory, and the comedian who makes audiences feel that something forbidden can still be said: all participate in the same fragile but vital act.

They break the illusion that everyone has accepted the official line.

And sometimes that is how history begins to move again: not when everyone speaks, but when one person speaks loudly enough for others to realize they were not alone in what they saw.

Reclaiming the narrative begins there. With the restoration of perception. With the end of enforced loneliness. With the refusal to call fear consensus. With the simple, dangerous, and liberating sentence: No. What we see is real. And it can be said.

I found myself returning to a phrase that appeared almost incidentally during one of the opening sessions: an age of organized doubt.

The expression stayed with me because it seemed to describe something far larger than the difficulties facing journalism. It captures a broader transformation that has become visible across politics, science, public institutions and even everyday social relations. Increasingly, we live in societies where uncertainty is no longer simply a byproduct of complexity but has become a political and social force in its own right.

For much of modern history, power was closely linked to the control of information. Governments censored newspapers, restricted access to knowledge and attempted to dominate public narratives. The underlying assumption was straightforward: those who controlled information could influence public opinion. Today, however, the relationship between power and information appears to be changing. In many cases, the objective is no longer to convince citizens that a particular version of reality is true. It is to create so much confusion around competing claims that the very idea of a shared reality begins to weaken.

This shift has profound consequences:

One speaker at the forum captured this relationship between democracy, power and journalism with a striking observation: “Journalists are the fourth pillar of every democracy and the second pillar of every autocracy.”

The statement initially sounds paradoxical, yet it reveals an uncomfortable truth about the role of journalism in political systems. Democracies require an independent press because power needs to be scrutinized. Journalism functions as a mediating institution between citizens and authority, helping societies distinguish between claims and facts, promises and realities. In this sense, the media become part of the democratic architecture itself.

Autocracies, however, also depend on journalism—albeit in a fundamentally different way. Authoritarian systems cannot survive on coercion alone. They require narratives that legitimize power, explain away contradictions and manufacture consent. While democratic journalism seeks accountability, authoritarian journalism often seeks compliance. The same institution that can serve as a check on power in one context can become an instrument of power in another.

What makes the contemporary moment particularly complex is that the boundary between these two functions is becoming increasingly blurred. In an age of organized doubt, journalism is no longer challenged only by censorship or direct political interference. It is also challenged by the erosion of trust itself. When citizens cease to believe that any source of information is credible, the distinction between independent journalism and political messaging begins to lose its significance. The danger is not merely that people will believe propaganda. The greater danger is that they may stop believing that objective reporting is possible at all.

From a social psychological perspective, this development is particularly powerful because human beings have a limited tolerance for uncertainty. Faced with complex and rapidly changing environments, people naturally seek stability, coherence and meaning. They look for narratives that help them make sense of the world and communities that provide a sense of belonging. When traditional institutions lose credibility, individuals do not simply become more independent thinkers. More often, they begin searching for alternative sources of certainty, whether in charismatic leaders, online communities or simplified explanations that reduce complexity to emotionally satisfying stories.

This is one reason why organized doubt can be so effective. It exploits a deeply human need. Most people can live with disagreement, but very few can live comfortably with prolonged uncertainty. When societies lose confidence in established institutions, many citizens become vulnerable to actors who promise certainty, clarity and belonging. The attraction of such figures is not necessarily ideological. It is often psychological. In times of confusion, certainty itself becomes a form of power.

This phenomenon is not entirely new. Human societies have always relied on shared systems of meaning to maintain cohesion. Every culture develops stories, symbols and institutions that help people answer fundamental questions about who they are, whom they can trust and how they should interpret the world around them.

The rise of artificial intelligence adds another layer to this challenge. AI has extraordinary potential to expand access to knowledge, improve communication and support journalism. Yet it also raises important questions about authority and authenticity. If information can be generated instantly, if images, videos and voices can be replicated convincingly, and if algorithms increasingly mediate what people see and know, then trust itself becomes an even more valuable social resource. The central issue is no longer whether information exists. The issue is whether people can determine which information deserves their confidence.

This was one of the underlying themes that surfaced repeatedly throughout the first day of the Global Media Forum.

Conversations about artificial intelligence, disinformation, platform power and the future of journalism all seemed to point toward the same fundamental question: how can trust be sustained in an environment where uncertainty is constantly produced, circulated and monetized?

The answer is unlikely to come from technology alone. Nor is it a challenge that journalism can solve by itself. Trust is ultimately a social achievement.

It emerges from institutions that demonstrate integrity, from public cultures that value accountability and from citizens who remain willing to engage with perspectives different from their own. Trust grows slowly, often over generations, yet it can be weakened surprisingly quickly when doubt becomes the dominant lens through which society interprets itself.

Perhaps this is why the phrase "organized doubt" feels so relevant. It reminds us that the central struggle of our time may not be over information itself, but over the conditions that make information meaningful. If journalism is indeed a pillar of democracy, as several speakers argued throughout the forum, then the erosion of trust is not merely a media problem. It is a democratic problem.

The future of open societies may depend less on producing more information and more on preserving the social and institutional foundations that allow citizens to trust it.

Bonn, June 2026

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Analysis

Viktor Orbán is no longer in power in Hungary.
At the level of institutions, this marks a rupture. At the level of political culture, it is far less clear that anything has ended.

***

On Hungarian public television, Péter Magyar sits across from a visibly unsettled host.
What begins as a routine interview quickly turns into confrontation. He accuses the broadcaster - on its own air- of operating as a propaganda machine, of spreading fabrications, even invoking comparisons to “North Korean-style” media.
Days later, he signals that the state broadcaster itself may be suspended.

The scene is striking not only for its content, but for its form.
A single figure, a direct clash, a claim to speak truth against a corrupted system: broadcast through the very institution being challenged.

What we are witnessing is not simply a transition of power. It is a moment in which a society shaped for over a decade by authoritarian populism confronts a paradox: whether the tools that mobilized it against illiberal rule can be used without reproducing the very logic they seek to overcome.

This is often framed, somewhat optimistically, as the possibility of defeating authoritarian populism with democratic populism. But such a formulation underestimates the depth at which populism operates.

Populism as Political Culture, Not Strategy

In much of the public debate, populism is treated as a political strategy: a repertoire of slogans, narratives, and mobilization techniques. From a social anthropological and social psychological perspective, this is insufficient.

Such schemas are not easily discarded. They become internalized through repetition, media environments, and institutional practices. Over time, they shape what Pierre Bourdieu would call a political habitus: a set of dispositions that guide perception and action without requiring conscious reflection.

Orbán’s political project did not only transform institutions; it recalibrated this habitus.

The Internalization of Leadership

One of the most consequential shifts has been the normalization of leader-centered representation. In this model, legitimacy is not mediated through institutions but embodied in individuals. Trust is personalized. Accountability becomes secondary to perceived authenticity or strength.

The emergence of Péter Magyar must be situated precisely within this transformed field. His political appeal does not arise in a vacuum. It resonates precisely because it aligns, at least partially, with expectations that have been socially produced over time.

From a social psychological standpoint, this reflects what can be described as a transfer of charismatic attachment. Voters disillusioned with one leader do not necessarily abandon the underlying desire for personalized authority. Instead, they redirect it. This is not a failure of rationality. It is a response to prolonged uncertainty.

Uncertainty, Cognitive Closure, and the Demand for Simplicity

Decades of research in social psychology, particularly around need for cognitive closure, suggest that individuals facing sustained ambiguity or threat tend to prefer clear, decisive, and unambiguous frameworks.

Hungary’s recent trajectory - economic volatility, institutional erosion, geopolitical tension-has produced precisely such conditions.

Populist politics, whether authoritarian or democratic in orientation, offers an answer: it simplifies: It tells people who they are. It tells them who is responsible. And it promises that someone can act decisively on their behalf.

The problem is not that this is persuasive. The problem is that it reshapes what citizens come to expect from politics itself.

The Risk of a Populist Continuum

If populism is internalized at the level of political habitus, then transitions of power do not necessarily produce transitions of logic. Instead, we observe what might be called a populist continuum: a situation in which different political actors compete within the same underlying framework of representation: leader-centric, morally polarized, affectively charged.

The language may shift from exclusion to inclusion, from authoritarian to democratic aspirations. But the structure remains. And this is exactly the point, where the idea of “democratic populism” becomes analytically fragile. Because it assumes that populism can be normatively reoriented without being structurally reproduced.

The Dangers of Large Majorities

The current political moment introduces an additional layer of complexity: the possibility of overwhelming electoral success for the new governing force.

From an institutional perspective, such a majority may be necessary to dismantle entrenched illiberal mechanisms. From a sociological perspective, however, it introduces what can be termed a majoritarian temptation.

Large mandates generate a sense of moral legitimacy that can weaken the perceived need for constraint. The distinction between “having the right to govern” and “having the right to reshape the system unilaterally” becomes blurred.

This is precisely the tension that István Bibó identified in his reflections on democratic fragility: the danger that political actors, in the name of national or popular interest, bypass the very limits that make democratic coexistence possible.

Authoritarian Residues: The Afterlife of Power

Anthropologically, power does not simply vanish, it sediments. What remains after long periods of centralized rule is not only an institutional architecture of laws, regulations, and administrative hierarchies. It is also a cultural imprint: a set of embodied practices, expectations, and symbolic codes through which power continues to be recognized and reproduced.

Pierre Bourdieu conceptualized this as habitus: internalized dispositions that persist even when the external structures that produced them begin to shift. In this sense, authoritarianism leaves behind more than institutions; it leaves behind a way of perceiving authority.

These residues operate subtly. They are visible in:

• communication styles that privilege certainty over deliberation

• expectations of leadership centered on decisiveness rather than accountability

• norms of political engagement that frame disagreement as threat rather than plurality

From Political Sociology to transitional justice research, studies of post-authoritarian societies consistently show that such patterns endure well beyond regime change.

Katherine Verdery, for instance, demonstrated how socialist power structures in Eastern Europe persisted as “social facts” even after their formal dismantling. Similarly, Levitsky and Way highlight how informal institutions often outlive formal democratic transitions, shaping behavior in ways that can undermine reform.

Hungary’s post-Orbán moment is therefore not a rupture in the anthropological sense. It is a layered field, saturated with what we might call authoritarian residues.

And these residues matter. Because they structure not only how power is exercised, but how it is expected to be exercised.

Without deliberate efforts to transform these underlying patterns, new political actors risk reproducing them: not out of ideological commitment, but because they have become normalized, even commonsensical.

Beyond the Instrumental Use of Populism

This leads to a more difficult question. The issue is not whether democratic actors can use populism effectively. It is whether they can disentangle themselves from its logic.

Ernesto Laclau famously argued that populism is an inevitable dimension of democratic politics: a way of constructing “the people” as a political subject. Yet even within this framework, the boundary between mobilization and simplification remains fragile.

Once politics is consistently articulated through moral binaries and leader-centered representation, it becomes structurally difficult to return to pluralist forms of mediation.

So moving beyond populism, therefore, is not a matter of abandoning political energy, it is a matter of reconfiguring how that energy is organized.

This requires more than institutional reform. It demands a transformation of political culture:

• from personalization to institutional mediation

• from moral polarization to pluralist recognition

• from immediacy to proceduralism

From a social psychological perspective, this shift is particularly demanding. Research on need for cognitive closure (Kruglanski, 1990s) suggests that individuals exposed to prolonged uncertainty develop a preference for clear, stable, and decisive frameworks. Populist politics satisfies precisely this need.

Reversing this dynamic means reintroducing tolerance for ambiguity: what political theorists from Hannah Arendt to contemporary democratic scholars have seen as essential for pluralistic coexistence. But such tolerance cannot be imposed. It must be gradually relearned.

A Fragile Transition

Hungary stands at a critical juncture. The fall of Viktor Orbán creates an opening, but openings are not outcomes. They are contingent moments, shaped by how actors respond to them.

If the transition relies too heavily on the mobilizing logic of populism, even in its democratic form, it risks stabilizing the very structures it seeks to dismantle. The language may shift, the intentions may differ, but the underlying patterns of political expectation remain intact.

If, however, the transition embraces a more sustainable process: rebuilding trust in institutions, normalizing disagreement, and re-establishing limits on power. Only then a different trajectory becomes possible.

But this isn’t the kind of politics that delivers quick wins.
It’s slower, often frustrating—and far less loud or visible than populist politics. Orbán’s era may be over. But what made it possible is still there. In habits. In expectations. In the way politics is imagined. That is the harder part to change.

Because systems don’t just disappear. They leave traces. And those traces shape what comes next: often quietly, without being noticed.

If those patterns remain untouched, then change stays on the surface. And sooner or later, the same logic finds its way back.

Imagine that someone spends years building a parallel version of your identity online — profiles that bear your name, use your image, and interact with strangers as if they were you.

Berlin / Hamburg / New York.

That is what Collien Fernandes describes in her allegations: over a period of roughly ten years, multiple fake accounts were allegedly created under her name, through which men were contacted and sent explicit images and videos designed to appear authentic and private. According to her account, these interactions developed into what appeared to be real, intimate relationships with around 30 individuals — relationships based entirely on a fabricated identity.

What emerges is not a single act, but a pattern: sustained impersonation, digital manipulation, and the erosion of personal boundaries over time.

The investigation in Germany has been discontinued. In Spain, it is ongoing.

And it is precisely this divergence that turns the case into something larger than a personal dispute.

A Scale That Exceeds the Individual Case

The Fernandes case unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding technological reality, one that is only beginning to be understood in legal and political terms.

With freely available tools, it now takes less than half an hour to generate a convincing deepfake video from a single photograph. At the same time, so-called “nudify” applications are producing vast quantities of artificially generated explicit images. According to investigative reporting, one such tool alone generates approximately 200,000 manipulated images per day — the equivalent of two to three images per second — and it represents only a fraction of a growing ecosystem.

What is technologically possible has outpaced what is legally defined.

In Germany, the creation of deepfake pornography is not yet explicitly criminalized. Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig is expected to introduce draft legislation that would punish the production and distribution of such material with fines or prison sentences of up to two years.

The Fernandes case thus emerges at a moment when technological capability and legal response are profoundly out of sync.

When Legal Systems Diverge

The discontinuation of the investigation in Germany, contrasted with ongoing proceedings in Spain, has triggered widespread unease — not simply because of the outcome, but because of what it suggests about differing thresholds within legal systems.

If identical or similar allegations can be pursued in one European jurisdiction but not in another, the question becomes unavoidable: to what extent does protection depend on geography rather than principle?

At the United Nations, where the UN Commission on the Status of Women is currently in session, this question is being addressed from a different perspective — that of access to justice.

German lawmaker Katrin Gebel offers a stark assessment:

“The current legal system does not function well for women… access to justice is not guaranteed.”

She points to a structural reality that extends far beyond a single case:

“Reporting rates and conviction rates are extremely low — below 3 percent.”

Her conclusion is difficult to dismiss:

“Violence against women is, in practice, almost unpunished in Germany.”

In the context of the Fernandes case, this statement reads less like political exaggeration than like systemic diagnosis.

A Debate That Moves Away From the Problem

In the German parliament, the case could have prompted a discussion about investigative thresholds, evidentiary challenges, and institutional shortcomings.

Instead, Chancellor Friedrich Merz linked the broader issue of violence against women to migration — a shift that has drawn sharp criticism.

What makes this move notable is not the existence of migration debates in Germany, but their application in a context where no such connection is evident. The accused in this case is a German citizen, and the allegations concern a private context.

Yet the framing shifted.

What follows is not necessarily a direct argument, but a reframing: even where violence originates within mainstream society, it is discussed in terms that locate its causes elsewhere. In doing so, attention moves away from systemic conditions — and toward narratives that are more politically familiar, but less analytically precise.

Escalation as a Symptom of a Deeper Divide

The reaction in parliament was correspondingly sharp, with Katrin Gebel accusing the chancellor of spreading “racist rhetoric,” for which she received a formal reprimand.

But this moment is less about language than about a deeper tension: the growing gap between how problems are experienced and how they are politically described.

Reality, Unmediated

Outside parliament, that gap becomes harder to ignore.

In Hamburg, between 17,000 and 22,000 people took to the streets to protest violence against women, reflecting a level of mobilization that suggests the issue resonates far beyond political debate.

At the center stood Fernandes herself, appearing under police protection:

“I am standing here wearing a bulletproof vest, with police protection and security, because I receive death threats.”

The statement shifts the discussion from abstraction to lived experience, underscoring that speaking about violence can itself carry risk.

A Structural Blind Spot

Journalist Ronen Steinke has pointed to a deeper institutional factor: sexual criminal law plays only a marginal role in German legal education.

This detail may seem technical, but it reflects broader priorities.

Legal systems do not merely enforce norms; they signal what matters. And what is not central to training often struggles to become central in practice.

Why the Debate Simplifies

When confronted with complex, systemic issues, public discourse tends to seek clarity — often through simplification.

Framing violence as a question of migration provides such clarity. It identifies a cause, assigns responsibility, and offers a narrative that is easier to communicate.

But it does not address the underlying conditions.

Violence against women, particularly in its digital forms, emerges where power, access, and the absence of consequences intersect. It is embedded within societies, not external to them.

Europe Moves, Germany Hesitates

While these debates continue in Germany, developments at the European level suggest a different trajectory.

Driven in part by public accounts from individuals such as Collien Fernandes and Nadine Breaty, the European Parliament voted on March 26, 2026, to expand the EU AI Act by explicitly banning so-called “nudifier systems” — AI tools designed to generate sexualized deepfake content.

The Council of the European Union has adopted a similar position, and negotiations are underway to finalize the legislation.

The direction is clear: where dignity, consent, and integrity are violated, technological capability must be constrained.

The Question That Remains

What emerges from this moment is not a single failure, but a convergence of pressures: technological change, legal delay, political reframing, and lived experience.

If a case of this visibility cannot proceed in one system while it does in another, if those affected require protection simply to speak, and if the most decisive responses come from outside the national framework,

then the question is no longer abstract.

Can a state credibly claim to protect if its systems fail not by intention, but by design?

Or, more directly:

Is gender-based violence in Germany not only a social issue — but one that, too often, carries no meaningful consequence?

When French President Emmanuel Macron declared that “to be free, one must be feared,” he was not simply outlining a military doctrine. He was announcing the end of an era. A profound shift in Europe’s political psychology. For decades, Europe believed freedom could be protected through law, cooperation, and economic interdependence. Today, faced with war on its borders and uncertainty in its alliances, Europe is rediscovering a harder truth: security still depends on power.

For decades, Europe defined freedom differently. Power was restrained, institutionalized, and embedded in law. The European project itself emerged from the conviction that security could be built through interdependence rather than intimidation. Fear belonged to Europe’s past — to empires, wars, and nuclear brinkmanship.

Now, fear has returned to the vocabulary of freedom.

The End of Post-Historical Europe

Macron’s statement signals the final collapse of what political theorists once called Europe’s “post-historical illusion” — the belief that economic integration and norms could permanently replace power politics.

Russia’s war against Ukraine, instability in the Middle East, rising geopolitical competition, and uncertainty about long-term American guarantees have forced Europe into an uncomfortable realization: values alone do not deter aggression.

Deterrence does.

Macron’s speech therefore represents more than French strategic doctrine. It reflects Europe’s gradual acceptance that security requires credible force - including nuclear credibility - if political autonomy is to survive.

In this sense, the statement is less Machiavellian than existential. Europe is rediscovering power not as ambition, but as necessity.

Fear as Political Language

Yet Macron’s formulation matters because language shapes political reality. From a social-psychological perspective, invoking fear as a foundation of freedom carries risks. Fear stabilizes deterrence externally, but it can destabilize legitimacy internally.

European societies were built on a different promise: that citizens obey institutions not because they fear them, but because they trust them. The European Union’s strength has always been normative authority - the ability to influence through law, markets, and moral credibility rather than coercion.

If Europe begins to define freedom primarily through fear, it risks adopting the very logic it historically sought to overcome.

The challenge, therefore, is not whether Europe should become powerful. It must. The real question is whether Europe can wield power without abandoning its civilizational identity.

Strategic Autonomy - or Strategic Anxiety?

Macron’s remarks also revive the debate over European strategic autonomy. For years, the term sounded abstract, even bureaucratic. Today it feels urgent.

Europe faces a structural dilemma: it depends on the United States for security while increasingly diverging from Washington’s political unpredictability. The return of transactional geopolitics in global affairs has exposed Europe’s vulnerability.

Power, in this context, becomes a language of reassurance; directed as much toward European citizens as toward adversaries.

But strategic autonomy cannot be built overnight, nor can it rely solely on military expansion. True autonomy requires technological capacity, energy independence, economic resilience, and democratic cohesion.

Without these foundations, displays of power risk becoming symbolic rather than credible.

The Anthropological Dimension of Deterrence

There is also a deeper anthropological shift underway.

Societies organize themselves around shared perceptions of threat. During the Cold War, fear created unity within Western alliances. After 1989, prosperity replaced fear as Europe’s organizing principle.

Today, Europe stands between these two paradigms.

Macron’s statement reflects a continent transitioning from a culture of peace dividends to a culture of risk management. Europeans are learning again that security is not a permanent condition but a negotiated equilibrium.

The danger lies in allowing fear to become identity rather than strategy.

Power Without Losing Europe

Macron is correct in one essential sense: freedom without protection is fragile. Deterrence remains a necessary component of international order.

But Europe’s historical contribution to global politics has never been raw power. It has been the domestication of power: the transformation of force into rules, institutions, and shared legitimacy.

Europe’s task now is paradoxical: to become strong enough to be feared externally while remaining trustworthy internally.

If Europe succeeds, it may pioneer a new model of democratic deterrence: power constrained by values.

If it fails, it risks becoming merely another geopolitical actor speaking the language of fear.

The real question raised by Macron’s words is therefore not whether Europe should be powerful: It is whether Europe can remain European while becoming powerful again.

The removal of Venezuela’s president is being celebrated as justice. But what it really signals is the return of an old logic: that force, once morally justified, no longer needs permission. This is not a Venezuelan story; it is a warning.

Regardless of how one judges Nicolás Maduro’s rule, a line was crossed the moment the sitting president of a sovereign country was forcibly taken from his bed in the middle of the night. This was not simply a change of power. It is clearly a symbolic rupture, the kind that alters expectations long before it reshapes institutions.

A moment when one of the last protective assumptions of the international order was openly suspended: that sovereignty, however fragile, still provides a minimum shield against direct force.

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is not the individual removed from power, but the logic now being normalized. From a social anthropological perspective, the decisive question is not what happened, but how it is being framed. Violence does not operate solely through physical coercion. Its deeper impact lies in symbolic normalization: in the stories told to justify it, the moral language used to soften it, and the approval that follows.

This is where Venezuela matters far beyond Venezuela. The dominant narrative is not one of law, restraint, or international process, but of political necessity. The operation is described as “strategically understandable,” even if legally questionable. That framing alone is enough to erode norms. Because once violence is accepted as politically rational, international law is reduced to a secondary concern: optional, conditional, negotiable.

And this has consequences well beyond Latin America.

Anyone who calls a violation of international law “strategically understandable” deprives Europe of its strongest argument in support of Ukraine. Russia can then respond with brutal logical consistency: We are a great power. We act out of security interests. Your closest ally does the same.

At that point, condemnation loses credibility. What remains is power speaking to power.

International law either applies universally, or it loses its meaning altogether. Anything else is double standards; and double standards are not a moral flaw alone, they are a structural weakness. They hollow out precisely the order Europe claims to defend.

This shift is not a rhetorical one, it is structural. The demonstrative use of raw force is not a sign of strength, but of normative weakness. It signals the erosion of shared limits. Consent is replaced by coercion; restraint by post-hoc justification. Violence, once framed as necessary, ceases to be exceptional and becomes a legitimate instrument of political resolution.

Max Weber’s classic definition of the state as the holder of the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force becomes newly relevant here; precisely because it reveals the limits of legitimacy beyond the state. There is no world government. No global monopoly on force. International law serves as the substitute: a fragile system of self-restraint that functions only as long as major actors choose to bind themselves by it. When those self-bindings are selectively abandoned, a gray zone emerges in which violence is no longer legitimized, only enforced.

Anthropologically speaking, this is the moment when rules continue to exist formally, but lose their social authority. They become rituals without binding power: invoked when convenient, ignored when costly.

The international legal scholar Martti Koskenniemi has long warned that international law oscillates between normativity and power- and begins to collapse when it is perceived merely as an instrument of the strong.

When law is confused with moral superiority or strategic convenience, it loses its universality. What remains is hierarchy, not justice.

What follows is not chaos, but something more insidious: a learning process. States observe which violations go unpunished, which are excused, which are even applauded. Non-state actors — militias, mercenary groups, hybrid forces — draw their conclusions. This is not the breakdown of order, but order in decline: a harsher grammar of global action in which taboos erode, boundaries blur, and rules apply primarily to those without power.

This is why the argument that Venezuela merely represents the removal of an authoritarian regime is deeply misleading. It reduces politics to moral psychology and ignores structural consequences. The decisive question is not who was targeted, but how.

Methods create realities. They shape expectations, fears, and future behavior far beyond the immediate case. They teach others what is now possible - and what will be tolerated.

Venezuela is therefore not an exception. It is a signal. A moment revealing how fragile the remaining self-restraints of the international order have become. What we are witnessing is not a sudden collapse, but a quiet shift in collective norms: away from law, toward enforceability.

The real danger lies not in the fall of one ruler, but in the growing familiarity with a world in which power once again openly replaces what was painstakingly established as law. A world in which violence no longer needs justification, only success.

Germany’s current predicament is often described in economic terms: supply chains, export controls, de-risking strategies, industrial competitiveness. All true—but incomplete. What Germany is experiencing is not merely an economic adjustment. It is a psychological reckoning with a way of organizing security, morality, and prosperity that no longer holds.

For decades, Germany ran on three structural dependencies that functioned less like policy choices and more like socially normalized drugs: cheap Russian energy, American security guarantees, and China’s growth engine.

None were secret. All were justified. Together, they formed a system that minimized short-term anxiety while quietly accumulating long-term vulnerability.

From a psychological perspective, this is a textbook case of functional dependency: a system that performs well precisely because its risks are outsourced. Energy insecurity was outsourced to Russia. Military risk to the United States. Market volatility to China’s seemingly infinite demand. The result was not ignorance, but managed denial: a state in which discomfort is continuously deferred.

This arrangement rested on a powerful post–Cold War myth: that economic interdependence civilizes power. Germany did not simply trade with authoritarian systems; it internalized the belief that trade itself was a moral instrument. Markets were expected to do the ethical work that politics avoided.

This belief shaped institutions, not just rhetoric. Ministries, corporations, and regulatory frameworks evolved under the assumption that strategic risk was an anomaly, not a permanent condition. Planning followed best-case scenarios. Crisis preparedness became episodic rather than structural.

The collapse of Russian energy dependence shattered the first illusion. The withdrawal was abrupt, painful, and clarifying. The relationship with the United States is now undergoing a slower recalibration, as Berlin confronts the reality that security guarantees are political commitments, not natural laws.

China, however, is a different kind of dependency altogether. And therefore far harder to unwind.

China is not just a market Germany sells into. It is a system Germany is embedded in: rare earths, magnets, refining technologies, industrial inputs that are not easily substituted. When Beijing introduced export controls on critical minerals, the shock was immediate and revealing. German industry discovered that dependency is not only about access, but about permission.

Even the proposed solution- “general licenses”- does not resolve this asymmetry. Psychologically, it shifts dependence from scarcity to conditionality.

At the same time, the economic logic that once justified the dependency is eroding. German exports to China are declining. Market share is shrinking. Chinese firms are moving rapidly up the value chain, no longer absorbing German products but competing with them - often more cheaply, sometimes more innovatively, and increasingly globally.

The automotive sector illustrates this inversion with brutal clarity. German manufacturers now admit that electric vehicles can be produced far more cheaply in China than at home. Some plan to design, manufacture, and export cars entirely from China to third markets. Strategically, this may make sense.

This is not only an economic issue. It is an identity problem.

Germany’s postwar stability has been deeply tied to being a producing society: industrial labor as social glue, export strength as political moderation, manufacturing as moral legitimacy. When that foundation weakens, anxiety does not remain abstract. It becomes political, regional, and cultural.

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is Germany’s continued reluctance to think in worst-case terms. The Taiwan contingency exposes this gap starkly. A blockade or limited quarantine would disrupt global supply chains on a scale far exceeding the pandemic. Europe would almost certainly align with the United States politically; but the economic costs would be enormous, and unevenly distributed.

Germany, as one of Europe’s most China-exposed economies, would face acute pressure. Sanctions, counter-measures, industrial disruption - these would not be theoretical debates but immediate realities. Yet preparedness remains thin. Scenario planning is limited. Public communication is cautious to the point of avoidance.

This reflects a deeper psychological pattern: risk aversion masquerading as prudence. Germany has long preferred incrementalism to rupture, process to confrontation, hope to contingency planning. In a world of strategic rivalry, that instinct becomes a liability.

The year 2026 looms not because a single deadline exists, but because accumulated postponements are converging.

De-risking cannot remain a semantic compromise. Diversification cannot be symbolic. And values cannot be rhetorically asserted while structurally contradicted.

Breaking dependency is never elegant. It involves loss, friction, and uncertainty. But anthropology teaches us that societies do not collapse from discomfort—they collapse from refusing to integrate reality into their self-understanding.

Withdrawal is painful. But prolonged denial is corrosive. And the choice between the two is no longer theoretical.

Yasemin Aydin

2025 will probably not be remembered as a dramatic breaking point for democracy.
No sudden collapses. No single moment where everything fell apart. And that is exactly what makes it important.

Institutions continued to function. Elections took place. Courts remained open. From the outside, democratic systems appeared intact. Yet something shifted underneath. Not abruptly, but steadily. Democratic erosion did not accelerate through shock, it deepened through repetition.

This was not the year new threats appeared. It was the year familiar ones began to reinforce each other.

Uncertainty as the Starting Point

Europe entered 2025 already uneasy. The war in Ukraine did not only test military capacity; it exposed how dependent European security still is on the United States. Support from Washington continued, but it no longer felt automatic. Domestic polarization in the U.S. and shifting global priorities made commitments appear conditional.

In his government address on 17 December 2025, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stated openly that Europe was losing significance in the eyes of the United States and described the moment as an epochal rupture. The language was striking not because it was alarmist, but because it acknowledged what had long been avoided: the transatlantic relationship could no longer be taken for granted. This shift was reinforced by the new U.S. security strategy.

Washington signaled a clear departure from its traditional commitment to Europe and from a rules-based international order. The symbolic breaking point for many came earlier that year, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was received at the Oval Office and treated in a manner widely perceived as humiliating. When Donald Trump publicly accused him of “playing with World War Three,” the moment left observers across Europe stunned - not because of diplomatic disagreement, but because of the tone. It marked a visible collapse of mutual respect.

As Stephen M. Walt^[1]has long argued, deterrence weakens not only when power declines, but when intentions become uncertain. In 2025, that uncertainty was no longer theoretical. It was visible, audible, and politically consequential. Uncertainty did not stay in foreign policy. It seeped into public perception.

When Truth Stops Convincing

Where uncertainty grows, disinformation finds room to operate. Cyberattacks, and digital interference were no longer abstract scenarios discussed in security briefings. They became tangible disruptions. As security experts noted at the time, these operations no longer took place solely along distant front lines, but across civilian, digital, and psychological spaces. Intelligence agencies across Europe and the transatlantic space confirmed what many had already sensed: contemporary disinformation is not designed to persuade. It is designed to exhaust. The goal is not to replace one narrative with another, but to undermine the idea that a shared reality is even possible.

This development reinforced a broader realization: the boundaries between war and peace, external threat and internal stability, had blurred. What was at stake was no longer only territorial integrity, but societal resilience.

Hannah Arendt warned that politics becomes dangerous when people lose trust not only in facts, but in the possibility of truth itself. In 2025, this warning felt uncomfortably accurate.

Truth did not vanish. It simply lost its authority.

People grew tired of defending it.

Platforms Don’t Just Host Debate, They Shape It

This fatigue cannot be separated from the architecture of the digital public sphere. Platforms are no longer neutral spaces where debate happens. They actively shape what is seen, amplified, or ignored. Not through bans, but through ranking. Through design choices that reward speed, emotional intensity, and constant engagement.

Shoshana Zuboff describes this as a system built to predict and influence behavior, not to foster deliberation.^[2]Engagement becomes the measure of relevance — and relevance quietly replaces judgment. European efforts under the Digital Services Act reflect a growing awareness of this imbalance. The question is no longer whether speech is allowed, but who controls visibility in practice.

Exhaustion as a Political Condition

There is also a psychological layer to this story. An attention economy built on dopamine does not encourage reflection. It keeps users in a state of anticipation — always reacting, rarely settling. Gabor Maté has emphasized that addiction is less about pleasure than about escaping discomfort, a mechanism the attention economy exploits at scale. Young people feel this most directly. Attention shortens. Emotional overload becomes normal. Complexity feels heavy. Byung-Chul Handescribes contemporary societies as exhausted rather than oppressed: overstimulated, yet increasingly passive. Exhausted societies do not disappear. They simplify. They don’t have any patience for complexity. But democracy is complex.

Why Populism Starts to Feel Reasonable

This is the moment where populism becomes dangerous: not because it shouts, but because it fits.

What mattered most in 2025 was not the success of authoritarian actors themselves, but how mainstream politics reacted to them. Under pressure, established parties increasingly adopted populist framing, especially on migration and security, presenting it as pragmatism.

Political theorist Jan-Werner Müller^[3] warns that populism is not neutralized by imitation. It is legitimized by it. Austrian political scientist Natascha Strobl^[4] describes this process as the normalization of authoritarianism: not through open rupture, but through shifting thresholds of what is considered acceptable. Authoritarian politics, she argues, does not need to abolish democracy: it only needs to redefine what democracy is expected to tolerate

This is why 2025 felt different.

Exceptional measures no longer shocked.
Oversight felt inconvenient.
Complexity appeared inefficient.

Authoritarian logic did not announce itself. It blended in.

Not a Moral Failure, a Structural One

What 2025 revealed was not a collapse of democratic values. Most societies still claim them. It revealed a structural problem.

Strategic uncertainty weakened confidence.

Disinformation exploited that weakness.
Platform design amplified distortion.
Attention fatigue reduced resistance.

Simplification filled the gap.

Each element reinforced the next. Democracy today is not lost at once. It erodes across systems: in how information circulates, how attention is managed, and how “normal” quietly shifts.

There was no single moment in 2025 when democracy failed. There were many moments when it was simply adjusted. And that may be the more dangerous story.

^[1]Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy. October 2018

^[2] Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, New York 2019

^[3] Jan-Werner Müller, What is Populism?, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017

^[4] Strobl, Natascha, Radikalisierter Konservatismus. Eine Analyse. Berlin: Suhrkamp. 2021

In December 2025, the European Commission imposed a €120 million fine on the social media platform X, owned by Elon Musk, for violations of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The decision marked the first fully completed enforcement ruling under Europe’s landmark digital law and it immediately triggered a political and rhetorical escalation far beyond the scope of the case itself.

At issue was not political speech, opinions, or content moderation, but transparency: how a major digital platform documents its decisions, explains the functioning of its systems, and enables users and researchers to understand and contest how visibility and reach are governed in the digital public sphere.

What followed, however, transformed a regulatory enforcement into a broader confrontation over legitimacy and power. Elon Musk responded by publicly calling for the abolition of the European Union, reframing a narrowly defined legal decision as an existential attack on free expression and sovereignty.

The episode revealed a deeper struggle: not over whether speech is permitted, but over who controls visibility, reach, and accountability in a digital environment increasingly dominated by private platforms. As social media companies function as gatekeepers of public life, Europe’s effort to enforce transparency obligations has become an early test of democratic oversight in the algorithmic age. The outcome will shape not only digital regulation, but the future balance between markets, citizens, and institutions.

At first glance, the decision appeared administrative: a €120 million fine imposed by the European Commission on the platform X under the Digital Services Act. A ruling grounded in transparency obligations, adopted through due process, and applicable to all platforms operating within the European Union.

What followed, however, revealed far more than a dispute over regulatory compliance. It exposed a collision between private digital power and democratic authority: a confrontation over who sets the terms of accountability in the digital public sphere.

To assess the scope and intent of the decision, I have reached out to the European Commission, including spokesperson Thomas Regnier, as well as to Věra Jourová, former Vice-President of the European Commission and a pioneer for digital rights in Europe.

The escalation was immediate and disproportionate. A regulatory enforcement was reframed as an existential threat, transforming a narrow legal decision into a symbolic struggle over legitimacy, power, and control over speech infrastructure.

Musk’s call to abolish the European Union did not engage with the legal findings of the case or the specific transparency failures identified by the Commission. Instead, it represented a familiar form of anti-institutional escalation: a strategy in which regulatory oversight itself is portrayed as illegitimate in order to evade scrutiny.

Such reactions are characteristic of unregulated power centers when confronted with external constraints. Rather than contesting the substance of the decision, the authority imposing limits is reframed as the problem. In this inversion, accountability becomes oppression, and rule enforcement is cast as ideological repression.

The escalation was not accidental. It functioned as a form of delegitimization through exaggeration — expanding a narrow regulatory dispute into a civilizational conflict, thereby shifting attention away from transparency obligations and toward a broader narrative of institutional overreach.

Rules, Not Speech

From the Commission’s perspective, the case is deliberately narrow. Officials insist that the decision is not about speech, opinions, or political content.

Thomas Regnier, the Commission spokesperson, stated unambiguously:

This distinction lies at the core of the Digital Services Act. The DSA does not instruct platforms what to remove. It regulates how platforms explain their actions, how decisions are documented, and how citizens can contest unjustified restrictions.

The Commission has rejected accusations that the law amounts to censorship.

Who Moderates Content

To counter claims of political interference, the Commission pointed to scale and responsibility.

In 2025 alone, platforms operating in the EU took vast numbers of moderation decisions under their own terms and conditions.

All of these decisions, the Commission emphasized, were taken by the platforms themselves, not by EU institutions.

“These are facts,” the spokesperson underlined, adding that the EU’s aim is not to direct moderation, but to ensure fairness.

“We want platforms to enforce their terms and conditions and to make sure that our citizens can fight back against unjustified content moderation decisions.”

The emphasis is on user rights, not editorial control.

When Power Meets Limits

Nevertheless, the reaction to the ruling revealed how sensitive those limits remain. Musk’s call to abolish the EU did not engage with the technical findings of the case. Instead, it reframed regulatory enforcement as ideological repression.

Věra Jourová, former Vice-President of the European Commission, and a pioneer in Digital Rights, reads this inversion as a familiar historical reflex. The digital rules, she notes, were not imposed lightly.

By the end of that debate, the idea of leaving the digital sphere entirely untouched had largely collapsed under empirical evidence.

For Jourová, the claim that freedom of expression is being curtailed misses the point.

What has changed is not what platforms may say, but whether they must explain themselves.

Due Process, Not Targeting

Against the political rhetoric, the Commission continues to emphasize procedural restraint.

The DSA, officials stress, applies only within the European Union and applies to all platforms operating there. Enforcement follows evidence, not ideology.

The Algorithmic Public Sphere

Beyond the immediate enforcement lies a quieter reality. Power in today’s digital public sphere is rarely exercised through outright bans. It operates through algorithms, ranking systems, and visibility controls. Content is not necessarily removed. It is deprioritized. Accounts are not silenced. They are made marginal.

This form of governance leaves little trace and offers limited recourse. It shapes behavior indirectly, encouraging self-regulation through uncertainty rather than command.

Here, the DSA intervenes not to judge ideas, but to illuminate systems.

Media and Democratic Resilience

For Jourová, the implications reach far beyond platforms themselves.

The European Media Freedom Act, now enforceable, seeks to counter platform interference and discriminatory algorithmic treatment. Yet Jourová cautions that regulation alone will not restore a healthy public sphere. Without investment in journalism and public awareness, even the strongest legal frameworks remain fragile.

Beyond the Fine

Stripped of rhetoric, the X case is not about censoring speech. It is about whether private digital power accepts democratic oversight.

The Commission insists it is enforcing rules, not policing ideas. Jourová frames the backlash as resistance to limits themselves. Musk’s reaction exposes how deeply contested those limits have become.

Between these positions lies a defining question of the digital age.

Not whether speech is allowed,
but who controls visibility,
who evades accountability,
and whether democratic institutions still have the authority to govern the infrastructures that shape public life.

Taken together, the case suggests that Europe is testing new ways of asserting democratic oversight in the digital sphere, not as a final answer, but as a beginning.

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