The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.

(Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1915–1919)

The volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of our time preclude simple answers and linear explanations. Yet more knowledge, more data, and more science do not necessarily bring clarity, more light on a dark future. On the contrary, they often compound uncertainty and complexity.

The polycrisis and deep transformations we inhabit – climate change, social and geopolitical fragmentation, the return of wars and great power politics, democratic backsliding, or rapid digital transformations – require expertise and precision to be grasped at all. But democratic politics cannot be reduced to technocratic problem-solving, pragmatism and precision alone. Democratic politics is also affective.

For a Europe shaped by Enlightenment traditions of reason, this would require moving beyond treating emotions in politics with suspicion. While many policy proposals appeal to rational argument, there is a striking lack of narratives capable of engaging spiritually and emotionally – narratives that can inspire, motivate, and mobilize, and thereby establish a meaningful political horizon. Yet by keeping emotions at bay, democracies risk losing their capacity to sustain an active citizenship.

At the same time, it has become almost commonplace to note that Europe finds itself in a profound democratic crisis: Although the European Union often presents itself as one, it has never fully become a political union. Its own democratic deficit was long assumed to be mitigated – at least to some extent – by Member States firmly committed to liberal democracy. That assumption no longer holds. Far-right national populism, once confined to the margins, has diffused across Europe, ready to destabilize and dismantle liberal democracy from within. Meanwhile, Europe’s democracies have failed to deliver on their long-standing promise of equality and meritocratic upward mobility, while also struggling to respond credibly to the ecological crisis and demographic change.

Although public trust in democratic governance has eroded significantly, there remains a strong desire among citizens to secure a better future for themselves. In the absence of responsive and credible democratic pathways, many people turn to alternative, experimental, or informal avenues.

Electoral behavior, in this context, has become increasingly volatile. Votes are cast less as endorsements of political parties or programs and more as expressions of dissatisfaction, protest, or impatience. Efforts to secure the future are increasingly perceived as individual projects rather than as part of a shared political horizon. The rise of crypto culture, including the now-famous meme HODL (“hold on for dear life”), and crypto’s role in Trump’s election, can be read in this light: as an expression of radical individual future-making under conditions of distrust and shrinking political imagination.  

Yet this crisis cannot be understood solely as a loss of citizens’ trust in democratic institutions. It is equally a crisis of institutions’ trust in the demos, as famously observed by Colin Crouch (Post-Democracy, 2004). Throughout European history, including the post-war period, popular sovereignty has been repeatedly regarded with suspicion. As a result, key political and economic decisions are often made within insulated spheres, despite their immediate and far-reaching effects on everyday life. The EU has been profoundly shaping the lives of its citizens, yet it is too often experienced not as a shared political project but as an abstract, technocratic system lacking transparency and accountability.

Europe is not short of strategies, plans, or policy proposals to ensure the wellbeing of its citizens. On the contrary, there is an abundance of visions for Europe’s future: a Capital Markets Union, a Defense Union, the Green Deal – now partially dismantled – strategic autonomy, digital sovereignty, as well as the recommendations laid out in the Letta and Draghi reports. Yet debates about competition and competitiveness are overwhelmingly framed in economic terms, while the necessity of democratic competition of values, perspectives and visions is largely overlooked or sidelined. And just as in economics, there is still a firm belief in the trickling-down effect of political ideas, while public discontent increasingly trickles up.

Democracy is a founding value of the European Union and a condition for membership. During the last decade, Europe had to learn that liberal democracies do not remain liberal by default.

Defending the rule of law and existing democratic institutions and processes, while essential, may not be sufficient. Europe needs to take its demos seriously. This entails exploring forms of deeper democratic participation, broader inclusion, and fostering a lived sense of political agency and shared fates. This is where far-right populist movements have been comparatively successful. They reassert a sense of shared fate and belonging – however racist, misogynistic, mythologized, or authoritarian that shared destiny and future may be.

Taking the demos seriously also means taking new and speculative forms of sociality and engagement – from social media to gaming cultures, AI-mediated intimacy, and decentralized networks – into account. Dismissing these phenomena as solely apolitical or disruptive would be both too easy and reckless.

All of this does not require grand teleological narratives. They can be grounded in the shared recognition of fragility, volatility, and uncertainty – of living together in an unstable world. From this shared condition, new value-based bonds can emerge: dynamic, inclusive, and adaptive rather than fixed or exclusionary.

And so we are back to Virginia Woolf. The future is dark – and this darkness is not a deficit, but a space of possibilities. Rather than deepening anxiety, Europe could learn to accept uncertainty as the essence of democracy, as space for purpose and meaning, for human creativity and empathy, in stark contrast to artificial intelligence’s reliance on data processing. If it does so with confidence in its foundational values – democracy, human rights, the rule of law – it can transform uncertainty into resilience. Not by eliminating ambiguity and complexity, but by embracing openness and flexibility, and by shaping its own visions of Europe’s future. In this sense, for democracy, an open and unpredictable future – even if it appears dark or unsettling – is the best thing the future can be.

Yet when developing compelling narratives for Europe and its futures, focusing on content alone will not suffice. What is equally at stake are new forms of democratic storytelling: narratives that do not merely address citizens as an audience but invite them into co-authorship. This requires experimenting not only with new stories, but with new modes and methods of collective democratic narration – forms of participation in which imagining the future becomes a shared political practice trickling in all possible directions.

That is how “acting is fun”, as Hannah Arendt reminded us. The freedom one can experience through participation can be a political accelerator. Yet participation, imagination, and agency also have material preconditions. Rising economic inequality and the cost-of-living crises remain among the most pressing concerns for EU citizens. When people no longer perceive their problems as shared, a sense of common fate erodes.

Despite ideological differences, affordability was the “shared language” among the democratic candidates who won the elections in New York, New Jersey and Virginia this November. Europe could take note. The appointment of a new EU Commissioner for Energy and Housing and the development of the Union’s first-ever affordable housing plan mark important steps in acknowledging the socioeconomic foundations of liberal democracies.