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

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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