NEW EASTERN OUTLOOK 🌐 (@NEO_Journal)

🇪🇺Europe's Real Democratic Crisis: A Political Establishment That Has Lost Touch With Its Own Societies ➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿ The crisis of European democracy is caused by the fact that the political establishment has lost touch with society, replacing real political discussions with moralizing and branding any justified skepticism of citizens as "extremism." The growing evidence suggests a more uncomfortable possibility: part of the problem lies in a political system that has lost the ability to distinguish disagreement from extremism. ✏️Adrian Korczyński is an Independent Analyst & Observer on Central Europe and global policy research. ➡️Poland provides one of the clearest examples. In December 2022, only 18.3 percent of Poles believed Poland should stop supplying weapons to Ukraine. By 2026, that figure had risen to 45.2 percent. How does a society move from overwhelming public support to rapidly growing rejection within four years? The answer cannot simply be that Poles became more extreme. The policy presented as a moral necessity began to conflict with observable reality. When citizens asked about cost, duration, and strategy, they were met not with political answers but with moral judgement. The response was to frame questions as products of misinformation, external influence, or growing extremism. A political establishment that cannot distinguish between extremism and legitimate skepticism eventually creates the very instability it claims to prevent. ➡️European governing elites interpreted absence of open resistance as consent. They failed to recognize that many citizens accepted policies because alternatives appeared unavailable. When costs rose and contradictions accumulated, the political class had no vocabulary to explain them. They had spent years presenting these policies as matters of necessity rather than ordinary political choice. Ukraine did not create Europe's political crisis—it exposed it. The conflict became the ultimate stress test. Governments presented support for Kyiv as a moral obligation beyond debate. But when strategic objectives became unclear and costs accumulated, citizens began asking questions governing elites were unwilling to answer. 🟦Treating significant challenges to the consensus as "extremism" became easier than defending unpopular policies. The post-Cold War European order underestimated the persistence of national interests. European elites increasingly treated national interests as legitimate only when aligned with broader European objectives. This approach may have worked in periods of low costs, but failed to anticipate that citizens would ask whether their own interests were being served. The pattern is visible across migration and climate policy. This is not a story of rising extremism—it is a story of erosion of political legitimacy. In Poland, Konfederacja has grown from 6-8 percent to 12-15 percent. In Germany, AfD has risen from 10-11 percent to 26-28 percent. The real crisis is the collapse of confidence in a political system that interprets disagreement as a threat rather than as a democratic signal. READ MORE #Europe #Democracy #Poland #Germany #PoliticalCrisis #Geopolitics ✅@NewEasternOutlook