"Time Bomb" in Europe: Everything will explode?

At the same time, the wave of the extreme right, whose peak is expected during the European elections in June, is considered only a passing political phenomenon. It is still believed that European democracy will survive - although it sounds comforting, it is not entirely true, writes Politico.

Namely, numerous studies show that consistent support for democracy across Europe is already quite low, and it seems that it will continue to decline. Europe may thus be reaching a turning point where non-democratic forms of government not only take root, but flourish.

According to the Open Society Foundation's 2023 global survey, only 38 percent of Germans over the age of 18 consistently support democracy. In France, that number is a miserable 27 percent, while Italy and Poland record less than 45 percent.

This lack of support in the mentioned countries is not a statistical anomaly. In 2022, a nine-country survey for European Movement International also found that such support ranged from a low of 22 percent (in Romania) to a high of 48 percent (in Finland). And in seven of these nine countries – Greece, Italy, Germany, Estonia, Poland, Romania and Hungary – consistent support for democracy was 45 percent or less.

Inconsistent supporters of democracy are those respondents who answered one or more of the five items in a way that questions or opposes democratic norms.

They may have agreed that a leader who ignores election results and the legal authority of parliament is acceptable to them, or that an undemocratic government is preferable to a democracy. Or they answered that democracy was a bad way to govern their nation and that military rule would be better for them.

Theoretically, the more questions a person answered inconsistently, the less they supported democracy. But what is most worrying is the fact that most polls (four from 2023 and seven out of nine polls from 2022) have shown that younger Europeans are significantly less supportive of democracy than their parents and grandparents.

In Germany, for example, only 21 percent of Generation Z and millennials said they consistently support democracy, compared to 66 percent of those 70 and older.

In Poland, only about a quarter of respondents aged 18 to 29 showed consistent support for democracy, which is 17 percentage points below the national average. It is similar in France with only 14 percent, in Italy it is 34 percent, with older Italians almost twice as likely to support democracy.

This data is definitely a wake-up call. Because as younger Europeans age—a process called "demographic succession"—baseline support for democracy across Europe will inevitably be even lower. And this, after all, can lead to a complete collapse.

A real time bomb is ticking in the heart of European democracy, warns Politico. Political polarization at its peak and low trust in European institutions seriously threaten the Old Continent. And this decline in the consistent base of support for democracy in Europe is likely to be further strengthened by demagogues and authoritarians, looking for a new source of power unfettered by democratic rules and norms.