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.”

Poland as the Warning Sign

Poland provides one of the clearest examples of this transformation. In December 2022, only 18.3 percent of Poles believed that Poland should stop supplying weapons to Ukraine. By 2026, that figure had risen to 45.2 percent. A country that became the strongest supporter of Ukraine in Europe is now experiencing a sharp decline in public willingness to maintain an open-ended commitment.

How does a society move from overwhelming public support to a rapidly growing rejection of the same policy within four years? The answer cannot simply be that Poles became more extreme. It is that a policy presented as a moral necessity began to conflict with observable reality. Poland had accepted millions of refugees, transferred substantial quantities of military equipment from its own stocks, and become the principal logistical hub for Western assistance. Over time, however, the relationship became increasingly strained. Disputes over trade, historical memory, and political expectations revealed differences that the early phase of the war had largely concealed. What in 2022 appeared as a clear moral and strategic imperative gradually came to be seen by many as an open-ended commitment without a visible resolution.

When citizens asked about the cost, the duration, and the strategy, they were often met not with political answers, but with moral judgement. The questions were not a sign of radicalization. They were a sign of a democratic public doing what democratic publics do: weighing costs, questioning assumptions, demanding accountability. The response from many mainstream political actors was not to engage with these questions politically, but to frame them primarily as products of misinformation,........

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