Recently, far-right parties have grown rapidly in popularity, while traditionally centre-right parties have entered the terrain of the far right, not only in my home country of Bulgaria but in many well-established democracies in Europe, including the country where I live, Austria – where the far-right and populist FPÖ was announced as the clear winner of this September’s national elections while I was attending Springback Assembly in neighbouring Hungary – and our various expressions of disbelief seemed powerless against their rise. More was yet to come: in early November, violent nationalists tried to storm the Bulgarian National Theatre, physically attacked actors and audience members, and succeeded in sabotaging the premiere of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, directed by Hollywood actor John Malkovich, under the pretext that it was unpatriotic. Early November, as we all know, also saw the shellshock of the US elections.

How did it happen? We posed the question at our Assembly in Budapest, of all places, while discussing the crippling cuts in cultural budgets all over Europe. A shared strategy by some politicians on the right, following Viktor Orbán’s playbook for ‘illiberal democracies’ – a paradoxical neologism which, translated into the political jargon of yesterday, stands for ‘autocracy’. And the firm belief on the part of others that providing enough offerings to the god of the free market will solve the crises they have been elected to overcome. Many cultural workers and artists are already feeling these changes. For it is certainly not only in Hungary that magazines are struggling to survive, dance companies are going into ‘hibernation’, and independent art venues are closing down.

But isn’t our feeling of disbelief a sign that it is time to look outside our cultural habitat and its discourses, and start resisting there, where the change is actually happening – in the crumbling foundations of democracy itself, in today’s ‘Realpolitik’? There, we will face opinions and concepts for the future we deeply disagree with, but instead of quickly dismissing them, will have to understand nonetheless. Not because we should lean into populism, but because such futures are possible and grow more popular by the day with large groups within our societies who are pushed out of cultural life by numerous and devastating economic crises, making it seem more and more like an indulgence of ‘the elites’ rather than a necessity to the fabric of society and democracy. And it is those people we have to win around, for us and for any democratic future we envision and live through our work.

There may be no better, or more urgent, time to mobilise and strengthen democratic institutions. It is their legitimacy which the populists want to question by portraying them as corrupt and obsolete while presenting themselves as an alternative. It is time to protest, share knowledge and strategies, and form joint resistance based on solidarity with our colleagues fighting back in our cities, regions, governments, parliaments, and international networks. 

But the difficult question remains: how do we rebuild trust and restart the dialogue with those whom the far right wants to convince that we have left behind?