Democracy, Civil Disobedience and Populism

With over 70 countries holding elections and more voters than ever going to the polls, 2024 has widely been regarded as an electoral year. Yet optimism about the future of democracy can be difficult to find.

In Europe and North America, much attention has been paid to potential and actual gains by the far right. The lead-up to the 2024 European Parliamentary elections was filled with unease, and the results were indeed sobering. Across Europe, the far right made significant gains, topping polls in Germany, France, and Austria, and leading French President Emmanuel Macron to call a snap legislative election. While Marine Le Pen’s bid for power was eventually thwarted thanks to a left-wing coalition, the far right’s electoral success nonetheless reflects a broader trend that has echoed throughout 2024. Accordingly, almost every election in Europe and North America is now approached with anxiety, with many fearing that far-right populists could come to dominate the political landscape.

Almost every election in Europe and North America is now approached with anxiety, with many fearing that far-right populists could come to dominate the political landscape This anxiety is not just about ideas and policies. Of course, there are concerns about what far-right policies would mean for gender rights, immigration, public services, and related issues. But there is a broader concern about the repercussions of the electoral success of the right-wing parties on the very nature of democracies and their political institutions. In this regard, the United States in particular stands out, mired in the recent memory of the contested 2020 election, the assault of the Capitol, and blatant anti-democratic claims by the Republican candidates. 2024 also saw a rise in far-right violence in the UK, with far-right riots over the summer, and in Germany, where a report found that extremist crimes across the ideological spectrum increased last year, “with a particularly strong rise of about 25% in far-right offences”. Less blatant, but equally worrisome, are restrictions to press freedom under right-wing populist governments such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.

But these trends should not be understood on their own. 2024 indeed saw another significant trend in the form of a disruptive activism, often conceived as emerging from the other end of the political spectrum. These movements’ tactics differ significantly from the protests that marked the period just before and after the pandemic, which rallied around movements such as Fridays for Future, MeToo, or Black Lives Matter. This year, in contrast, activists – most of them young – have not only taken to the streets: activists have also glued themselves to airport tarmacs, occupied campuses and museums, interrupted public speeches, and performed attacks on well-known art pieces. While largely nonviolent, activists seemed more willing than in past iterations of similar movements to create discomfort, be met with opposition, take risks, and face legal repercussions for their actions.

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While acts of civil disobedience can sometimes look more isolated – mobilising, for example, just a handful of activists rather than the tens or hundreds of thousands that can be rallied to protest in the streets – they should nonetheless be understood as a force in their own right. Activists – primarily either anti-war or pro-climate – have belonged to a range of different movements that could appear disjointed at first glance, but which are in fact networked and coordinated. On the climate front, the A22 Network, for example, gathers 10 movements, including Just Stop Oil in the UK and Letzte Generation in Germany. Campus occupations by the anti-war, pro-Palestine movement, inspired by the first protests at Columbia University, were connected by their methods and demands, by millions of online followers worldwide, and by the involvement of existing groups such as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, Students for Justice in Palestine as well as Jewish pro-peace movements.

For climate activists, climate change is violence towards the non-human world, towards future generations, as well as human contemporaries Climate and pro-Palestine movements emerged throughout 2024, independently of electoral campaigns and in line with their members’ distrust of representative politics which, both movements argued, were responsible for the extended yet invisibilised violence that was unfolding in the very backyards of industrialised nations. For climate activists, climate change is violence towards the non-human world, towards future generations, as well as human contemporaries – particularly those already vulnerable – through extreme weather events. I use the term “backyard” because this violence is not separate from the societies in which activists operate, but rather intimately connected to them, very much the result of a “meta-paradigm with European and North American roots”, reliant on notions of progress and consumerist lifestyles that are still promoted and desired. Yet much climate violence is not recognised as violence because it “occurs at a speed and scale outside of human perception”, or it is dismissed as secondary to concerns deemed more immediately pressing.

These climate movements are further disillusioned with Western governments’ rhetoric of adherence to sustainability objectives, which they perceive as insincere. Climate activists have indeed been met with increasingly heavy-handed treatment in countries such as Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and the US: a much-cited recent report found that these governments are imposing “lengthy prison sentences, engaging in preventive detention, and filing criminal charges for trivial offenses against climate activists”.

Furthermore, activists feel inadequately represented in electoral politics. Activists I spoke to during my research often expressed disappointment, even with green parties, which they argue do not sufficiently confront the scale of this violence head-on. Somewhat similarly, for many campus protesters, the Western political class’s at best feeble response to the scale of destruction taking place in Gaza has exposed the selective application of the human rights regime – something already apparent to many across the world. They struggle, too, with representativity: the Uncommitted National Movement – a US campaign to encourage Democratic primary voters to vote “uncommitted” rather than for the major candidates – stresses on its website that it “has highlighted a clear disconnect between the Democratic party and key constituencies in their base”. And, as with the climate crisis, this violence in Gaza is in great part embedded in structures that can feel beyond the reach of citizens – from tax money and weapons to the persistent silence or omissions of many media outlets.

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With the violence so enmeshed in the fabric of our own societies, instead of targeting electoral politics, activists are calling for institutional and behavioural change: they are asking for institutions such as universities and museums to divest from the worst offenders, for more stringent legislation to be passed, and – at the very least – for politicians to practice transparency.

It would be dangerous to draw direct parallels between these movements and the extreme right. They indeed have close to nothing in common ideologically, demographically, and sociologically. Further, social movements on the left often feel attached to democratic principles. The far-left’s focus is typically on systemic change aimed at equity, social justice, and inclusion, seeking reforms or dismantling structures perceived as perpetuating inequality. In contrast, far-right movements often stem from nationalist or exclusionary ideologies, frequently resisting globalisation and multiculturalism in favour of traditionalism and often ethnocentric unity. Nonetheless, what they do have in common is a lack of trust in democratic politics, in which they do not feel represented – a process sometimes dubbed “affective polarisation”. This creates a feedback loop where emotional divides deepen mistrust, and mistrust further intensifies emotional divisions, weakening the fabric of democratic engagement. On the extreme right, this was well-documented after the double surprise of the Trump and Brexit wins in 2016: some analysts pointed to the role played by economic disaffection, while others emphasised a reaction by once-predominant groups, such as white working-class males, to disruptive, progressive value change. Regardless of the ultimate reason, populist rhetoric argued that they were not represented by a metropolitan, liberal elite that catered mostly to centrist parties.

While, undoubtedly, disobedient protest is polarising and has sometimes slipped into more violent practices, these actions, combined with the increasing appeal of the far right, frame 2024 as not just an electoral year, but also a year that must lead to profound learnings for democratic parties and systems. These must not only address the disaffection felt by those who no longer feel represented on both sides of the political spectrum, but also the causes and reach of the sometimes invisibilised but pervasive violence that goes on within, and much beyond, the boundaries of our local or national jurisdictions. They must learn to see protest movements not as threats, but as the opening of an important dialogue with the law and with democratic spaces as currently formulated, calling for their urgent evolution.