Europe’s present political condition is not marked by an absence of democratic forms. What has become apparent is the loss of their operational efficacy. Parliaments exist, elections are held, public debates take place. Yet the actual capacity of citizens to shape social development has been progressively hollowed out. Decisions are displaced into the executive sphere and administratively entrenched. Only afterward are they legitimised retroactively. Democracy remains visible but loses its grip.

Under these conditions, the classical concept of resistance no longer applies. Resistance presumes that something existing can be defended against its abolition or violation. It is conceptually conserving: it holds fast to a norm still in effect, a procedure still functional, an order still intact. But precisely these preconditions no longer obtain. Democratic procedures often exist only formally. Their substance – revisability, genuine accountability, the possibility of organising counter-power – has been largely suspended or neutralised.

Under such conditions, resistance can preserve nothing effective. It orients itself toward an order that no longer factually exists, though it remains symbolically present. Thus resistance either misfires or becomes paradoxically system-stabilising: it confirms the appearance of pluralistic contestation or even societal challenge without generating real decision-making or executive power. Resistance then marks boundaries but does not restore agency.

This does not make resistance wrong. But it renders it obsolete as a political tool. Its core intention – the refusal to sustain illegitimate developments – remains central. Yet this intention points toward a necessary shift in perspective: away from reactive defense, toward the regeneration of democratic agency in the present.

This shift demands a livable restructuring of social organisation. “Livable” here does not mean moral improvement but structural compatibility with actual conditions of life: manageable spheres of decision, traceable responsibilities, concrete consequences. Agency emerges only where responsibility is bearable and efficacy can be experienced. This necessarily directs attention to the immediate realm of political possibility: municipalities, regions, concretely tangible sites where political decisions take effect.

The central task, therefore, is not resistance against the existing system but the (re)construction of parallel, functioning democratic practice. Civic movements must evolve from protest formations into operationally capable organisational forms: sovereign in information, consolidated, able to decide. Their aim is not moral articulation but the preparation of real majorities, real resolutions, real implementation.

Municipal councils play a pivotal role here. They are formally legitimate, genuinely capable of decision, and yet often politically underdetermined. Here democratic constituent power can be practically reclaimed – with institutions and through their operational use. Complementing this, citizen assemblies make sense only if they do not remain consultative but are granted concrete responsibilities, binding procedures, and traceable consequences. Anything less is simulated participation.

The actual conflict unfolds not between citizens and the state but between political direction-setting and administrative self-logic. Administration implements – politics sets direction. Where this directional function is eroded, executive dominance emerges behind a democratic façade. Reclaiming political efficacy therefore also means making decision-making structures themselves objects of political intervention: Who decides what? On what basis? With what possibility of revision? Within what manageable timeframes?

All of this presupposes a capacity currently being systematically obstructed: non-partisan political communicative competence. This does not mean neutrality but the ability to speak politically without being immediately assigned to factional camps. A mode of communication that argues along lines of responsibility, procedure, and consequence – not along identity markers. This form of communication is a precondition for cross-coalitions, for translational work between civic movements, councils, and administrations – and thus for any real democratic efficacy.

That this capacity is scarcely being cultivated today is no accident. The automatic assignment of political statements to camps functions as preemptive discipline. It prevents coalitions before they can become capable of action. Political communication itself thus becomes a risk – not merely its content. This stabilises a system that requires democracy as a source of legitimacy while shying away from its operational unpredictability.