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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