2025: Democracy Under Attack
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