Europe and Democracy: The Dual Crisis of Indifference and Dependency
Victor Ângelo
It could be said that Europe is going through a period of crisis. Across much of the EU, citizens appear to have lost confidence in the political class and institutions. The reason is clear: a lack of satisfactory responses to social issues deemed essential. These include affordable housing, the growing malfunction of public services—especially in the areas of health, education, justice, and security—and political opportunism. More generally, all of this is compounded by the negative impact of the rising cost of life, which is linked to decisions made on the other side of the Atlantic. In the view of many citizens, the leaders of our Europe appear to lack sensitivity and courage.
When hope is lost, democracy does not collapse—it deteriorates silently. Byung-Chul Han, a Korean thinker long based in Germany, states that our societies have reached a phase of "fatigue": citizens are saturated, overwhelmed, and alienated by the digital flow, whether true or false. They feel isolated and incapable of mobilizing the energy required to carry out the changes that politics demands. The incompetence of institutions and the incoherence of politicians push citizens toward egocentrism, toward the solitary management of survival, and toward withdrawal from the public sphere. When the State fails, each individual retreats into their own microcosm. Politics ceases to be a space where hope is built. For many, it is merely a distant noise.
Digital disinformation is one of the instruments of democratic erosion. Algorithms optimized to maximize emotional reactions and content manufactured by artificial intelligence corrode public trust in a structural way. A survey from Special Eurobarometer 568 (2025) leaves no room for doubt: 79% of Europeans fear that voters will cast ballots based on false information, and 70% fear foreign interference. The credibility of national parliaments and governments hovers around 35%. In the case of political parties, the figure is even lower. In Portugal, the European Union maintains some credit, but the Assembly of the Republic and the parties follow the same downward trajectory seen in other European states.
In several societies, immigration, managed for years without a coherent strategy, has become the catalyst for social anxiety. Over time and with mass entries, unease has turned into resentment. It is in this terrain that the Rassemblement National (France), the AfD (Germany), Fratelli d'Italia, Vox (Spain), and Chega (Portugal) thrive. They grow because they exploit the vacuum left by traditional parties—yet they offer no realistic alternatives. Merely demagoguery. Furthermore, they generally ignore the axis that determines the viability and autonomy of the modern State: technological sovereignty. They discuss symbols, borders, and identities while the infrastructure sustaining democracy is in the hands of third parties.
Europe operates today based on digital systems that it does not control. Technological sovereignty means that a State controls the essential elements for its proper functioning: data, networks, software, hardware, AI platforms, and sources of information regarding major events with global impact. Europe is far from mastering these pillars.
The risk is not theoretical. If access to Microsoft and Google services were to fail—due to technical causes or even external retaliatory decisions—or if the supply of microchips from Taiwan's TSMC were interrupted—even if only for a short period—hospitals, businesses, schools, and public administration would grind to a halt. If Chinese electric vehicles were remotely shut down—for a political motive or diplomatic tension—logistics and our daily lives would collapse. A democracy dependent on foreign infrastructure and hardware is not sovereign: it is simply vulnerable. This fragility does not result from geopolitical fatality, but from decades of omission and false priorities in European policy.
Gaia-X, launched in 2019, is the European attempt to recover some control. It is not a "European Google." It is fundamentally a framework of rules, certifications, and standards. In parallel, the Regulation on the Development of Cloud Computing and AI seeks to build physical capacity—data centers, common infrastructures, and requirements for public administration. Gaia-X defines the protocols; the Regulation tries to build the material support.
However, these steps are insufficient. They are slow, timid, and decided by people from the legal field rather than from engineering, mathematics, or economics. They do not reduce, in the short term, the dependency on hardware, submarine cables, semiconductors, and base software originating from abroad. And the political problem is even more serious: these are orphan projects, forgotten, much like the Draghi report (2024). Neither traditional parties nor populists treat technological sovereignty as a priority. They prefer the comfort of easy narratives to the effort of building the strategic capacity that the present and future demand.
Thus, Europe remains a hostage—not by imposition, but due to flawed policies. Technological submission is not a mere backdrop to democratic fatigue: it is one of its most relevant causes. And this situation drags down the discredit of democracy and politics.
Reserves of resilience still exist—visible, for example, in the relative trust that the European Union maintains in countries like Portugal. But the future of our democracies demands clear and urgent decisions on two fronts: in the human dimension—housing, immigration, public services, functional governance, social protection for the most vulnerable, and the promotion of a democratic culture; and in the technological dimension—accelerating Gaia-X, building a sovereign cloud, investing in cutting-edge infrastructure, and mobilizing financial and technical resources at a supranational level.
The fatigue or indifference of citizens and the technological submission of States are the two sides of the same coin of crisis. Political incompetence generates social atomization; social atomization feeds political incompetence and populism. This is the vicious circle that we will have to break.
