The Corrective Forces That Overshoot

On Democratic Self-Defence and the Paradox It Has Produced

The Measure That Cannot Be Borrowed

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The Zhōng Yōng (中庸) does not ask for the midpoint between competing positions. That is the most common misreading, and it is worth correcting at the outset, because the article that follows depends on the distinction. What the doctrine of the mean actually describes is the disciplined capacity to respond to each condition with exactly the measure it requires, neither more nor less, sustained over time even when the surrounding environment is pressing hard toward excess. It is a demanding standard. It asks not for moderation as a temperamental preference but for calibration as a continuous practice, which requires both accurate diagnosis of the condition being responded to and the institutional capacity to act on that diagnosis without being captured by the pressures of the moment.

Used here as an interpretive discipline rather than a causal explanation, the framework does not tell us why particular actors made particular choices. It asks what conditions a political system must sustain in order to remain capable of genuine self-correction, and what the observable signs are when those conditions are eroding. That question turns out to be a useful one to bring to the current state of European democracy.

That standard is particularly relevant when a political system is under stress, because stress tends to produce responses that are proportionate to the emotional intensity of the threat rather than to the structural nature of the problem. And the evidence accumulating across several European democracies over the past decade suggests that the responses those systems have deployed against corrective political forces have, in a number of cases, produced the opposite of their intended effect. The excluded force has not diminished. It has, in some of the most instructive cases, intensified and radicalised. The system generating this outcome continues to apply the same response, attributing the failure to the stubbornness of the problem rather than to the inadequacy of the medicine.

That is the paradox this article attempts to examine, through three European cases that sit at different points in the same structural sequence: a corrective impulse excluded from power and in consequence radicalising; a corrective impulse that reached power and diverged, one expression of it moderating toward institutional accommodation, another consolidating a new form of imbalance; and a corrective impulse that succeeded electorally against an entrenched populist government and is now discovering that winning the election and repairing the institution are not, in any straightforward sense, the same thing. The cases are Germany, Hungary and Italy, and Poland. They are not presented as equivalent. They are presented as different phases of the same structural problem, and the differences between them are as analytically important as the common pattern.

The Excluded Force: Germany and the Logic That Has Not Worked

The AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) has been a feature of German political life since 2013. For most of that period the response of established parties has been consistent: the cordon sanitaire, the principled refusal to govern with the AfD or to treat it as a legitimate coalition partner at any level. The constitutional and moral reasoning behind this position is not negligible. Germany carries a history that makes the normalisation of a party its own domestic intelligence agency has labelled a proven right-wing extremist organisation a matter of considerably more than ordinary electoral caution. The firewall has been maintained by parties whose differences on almost everything else have been set aside in order to keep it in place.

The problem is that this strategy, maintained now for over a decade, has achieved its narrow objective of keeping the AfD out of government while producing a situation that its architects did not anticipate and cannot easily explain. The AfD is not smaller than it was. It is larger. It is not more moderate than it was. It is, by the consistent assessment of analysts who study it closely, more radical. In two eastern German states, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, it is currently polling at or above 39 per cent, levels at which it could take part in government or block coalition formation entirely. It is the strongest political force in Germany by national polling. And it is achieving these results while becoming more extreme in its rhetoric and more elaborate in its organisational structures, not less.

There is a structural explanation for this that the Zhōng Yōng framework renders visible. A corrective impulse that is blocked from entering the normal processes of political accountability does not dissolve. The evidence across the German case is at least consistent with intensification in proportion to the blockage: the grievance that produced the movement remains unaddressed, while the exclusion adds a further grievance, that the system is protecting itself against accountability by disqualifying those who would demand it. That structural argument has limits worth stating plainly. Not every political movement that arises from genuine material failure functions as a corrective force in any useful sense. Some are pathological expressions of real grievance that would deepen the imbalance rather than resolve it, and whether any given movement crosses that line cannot be settled by pointing to the conditions it emerged from. The firewall’s architects understood this. What they did not adequately reckon with was that treating exclusion as the primary instrument, without a parallel effort to address the underlying governance failures, was unlikely to reduce the problem over time.

The most significant recent data point is not the AfD’s national polling. It is the age distribution of its support. In the 2024 European Parliament elections, the AfD nearly tripled its share among voters aged sixteen to twenty-four, reaching around 16 per cent and in some analyses emerging as the strongest single party in that cohort, a sharp departure from a generation that had previously gravitated toward the Greens. This shift is not primarily explicable by reference to disinformation or social media radicalisation, though both are present. It reflects something more durable: the values and belonging needs of a generation that came of age through the financial crisis, the pandemic, and a cost of living emergency are not being addressed by the abstract commitments to European values and democratic norms that mainstream parties continue to offer. The AfD is providing an identity structure and a sense of cultural agency within a system that has become, for many young people, both materially unreliable and institutionally illegible.

Chancellor Merz’s government, in office since May 2025, has maintained the firewall while pursuing an ambitious programme of fiscal stimulus and defence rearmament that has broken with the CDU’s longstanding fiscal orthodoxy. He has gained international respect for his foreign and security policy positioning. He has lost ground at home. The coalition is fragile, the CDU’s own activists are beginning to question whether the firewall is narrowing their electoral options more than it is containing the AfD, and the super election year of 2026, with five state parliaments going to the polls, is the test that will determine whether the strategy can survive the evidence being accumulated against it.

None of this implies that the appropriate response would have been to invite the AfD into government. A party formally designated by domestic intelligence as a proven right-wing extremist organisation poses real risks to a constitutional order that cannot simply be wished away. The point at issue is narrower and in some ways more uncomfortable for the established parties: treating exclusion as the primary instrument of democratic self-defence, without a parallel effort to address the underlying governance failures, has not achieved its own stated objectives. The firewall has contained AfD participation in formal power, but it has not reduced AfD support, moderated AfD rhetoric, or restored confidence in the institutions whose failures helped generate that support. Zhōng Yōng names this precisely. The firewall is a response proportionate to the emotional intensity of the AfD’s worst positions, not to the structural nature of the problem that produced the AfD. Applied in isolation from any serious attempt to address the material and institutional conditions generating that support, it is symptom management mistaken for treatment. The symptom is becoming harder to manage with each passing cycle.

The Corrective Force in Power: One Divergence, Two Outcomes

The Italian and Hungarian cases offer a natural comparison that is rarely made with sufficient analytical care, because the dominant framing places both countries in the same category of democratic concern. The comparison rewards closer attention precisely because it disrupts that framing.

Giorgia Meloni came to power in October 2022 leading a coalition that included the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia alongside Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Salvini’s Lega. The international response was one of considerable alarm. The first female prime minister of Italy was also the first from a party with direct genealogical connections to Mussolini’s Italian Social Movement. The alarm was not unreasonable. What followed was more complicated.

Meloni has governed in ways that have surprised some observers across the political spectrum, particularly on foreign and fiscal policy, even as critics continue to contest her record on media freedom and civil rights. On Ukraine she has been consistently pro-Western and pro-NATO, in direct contradiction to the positions of her coalition partners and to the expectations of those who saw her election as a harbinger of Italian Euroscepticism. On European Union fiscal arrangements she has operated within institutional constraints rather than seeking to rupture them, despite substantial domestic pressure to do otherwise. The social conservatism of her government on migration and civil rights is genuine and consequential, but it operates through legislative process rather than systematic institutional capture. Italy’s judiciary, media landscape, and constitutional architecture remain contested rather than systematically colonised in the way Hungary’s now are.

The Zhōng Yōng reading of the Italian case is this: a corrective force that reached power found itself constrained by the weight of institutional reality in ways that moderated its more extreme tendencies. The responsibility of governance, the discipline of European institutional membership, the practical requirements of managing a large economy in a complex geopolitical environment, all of these produced a partial accommodation that the corrective impulse, in opposition, had not anticipated needing. This is not a success story without qualification. Meloni’s government has caused real harm in specific policy domains. But it has not dismantled the institutional architecture through which future correction remains possible. The corrective force overshot in its rhetoric, found the limits of what governing permits, and has partially recalibrated.

Hungary presents the other outcome, and it is the more important one analytically. Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010 on a genuine wave of popular disgust with the corruption and economic mismanagement of the Socialist-led governments that preceded him. The corrective impulse was real. The trajectory from there to the system that now exists, in which the electoral architecture has been restructured to resist correction, the media landscape brought under effective state control, constitutional boundaries redrawn using supermajorities obtained under a distorted electoral system, and opposition parties have had to withdraw from an election rather than divide a vote that might otherwise defeat him, that trajectory is not a story about a man of singular malevolence. It is a story about what happens when a corrective force reaches power without adequate institutional constraint, when the corrective becomes the new imbalance and then engineers the conditions for its own perpetuation. Structural conditions enabled this trajectory. They did not determine it. The choices made at each stage were choices, made by agents who understood their consequences, and that distinction matters for how accountability is assigned even when systemic explanation is the more productive analytical frame.

The distinction between the Italian and Hungarian outcomes is not primarily about the character or intentions of the leaders involved. It is about the institutional environments within which those corrective forces operated. Italy’s constitutional architecture, European institutional membership, and the balance of forces within the governing coalition provided friction that Hungary’s more weakly institutionalised system did not. Institutional design matters more than leadership quality in explaining the divergence. That is an uncomfortable conclusion for those who prefer the personalised account, but it is the one the comparative evidence most consistently supports.

The Pending Test

As this article is written, Hungary is four weeks from an election that may be the most consequential parliamentary contest in Europe this year. Péter Magyar, a former Fidesz insider who broke with the party in 2024, has built the Tisza party from nothing to a position where independent polling shows it ahead of Fidesz for the first time in a decade. The rival mass rallies held in Budapest on 15 March, drawing hundreds of thousands to both sides, represent the most vivid public demonstration of what is at stake.

The analytical complications are worth naming honestly. The polling is contested: government-aligned pollsters and independent ones are producing results that political scientists have described as unexplainable by legitimate research methodology. The electoral system has been restructured to Fidesz’s advantage through boundary changes and laws that make opposition organisation harder. The campaign is being fought on Orbán’s chosen terrain, war and peace, Hungary’s relationship with Russia and Ukraine, the threat of being drawn into a conflict by a European establishment that does not have Hungarian interests at heart. Magyar’s campaign has been fought on economic grounds, specifically the corruption and deteriorating living standards that Orbán’s model has produced for ordinary Hungarians after the relative prosperity of the early years.

The outcome is genuinely uncertain. If Magyar wins, the analytically pressing question will be whether a government elected on a mandate to restore democratic institutions can actually do so, operating within an electoral and judicial architecture specifically designed to prevent it. If Orbán wins, the analytically pressing question will be whether a corrective force can sustain popular energy over another electoral cycle in a system calibrated against it, and what that failure implies for the democratic mechanism as a tool of accountability in highly distorted institutional environments. Either outcome will therefore test, in different ways, the claim that institutional degradation can be reversed through ordinary electoral alternation once it has crossed a certain threshold.

The article will be updated once the result is known. What can be said now is that the Hungarian case is the point at which the Zhōng Yōng framework is most directly tested, and the question it raises is one that extends well beyond Hungary: whether institutional equilibrium, once sufficiently degraded, can be recovered through the very mechanisms that degradation has compromised.

The Restoration Problem: Poland and the Contaminated Tool

Poland is the case that should occupy serious democratic thinkers most persistently, precisely because it has received the least analytical attention relative to its importance. It is the only European country in which the full cycle is now visible: institutional failure under a populist government, the electoral correction of that government, and the subsequent discovery that restoring what was damaged is considerably harder than removing those who damaged it.

Donald Tusk’s coalition came to power in December 2023 following eight years of Law and Justice government that had systematically captured Poland’s constitutional tribunal, its national council of the judiciary, its public broadcasting, and significant portions of its prosecution service. The mandate was explicit and the popular majority was clear, produced by a 74 per cent turnout that constituted one of the most powerful democratic signals in postwar European history. The restoration project began. And then it encountered the problem that no amount of electoral success could resolve: the institutions designed to confer legitimacy on a reforming government were themselves among the institutions that had been captured.

Two elements of the Polish situation deserve particular attention. The first is what legal scholars have begun calling the dilemma of post-illiberal reform: that restoring democratic institutions after their capture requires confronting a series of traps. Acting strictly within the letter of the law may entrench the harm, because the law itself has been restructured by those who captured it. Acting outside the letter of the law risks replicating the very norm-aversion that produced the capture in the first place. Tusk himself acknowledged this in September 2024 when he invoked the concept of militant democracy and conceded that necessary reforms might require actions that were, in his words, inconsistent with the letter of the law. That acknowledgement captured the dilemma clearly, but it also underlined how easily the rhetoric of democratic self-defence can be deployed by both those who degrade institutions and those who seek to repair them.

The symmetry here is deliberate and troubling. Orbán used the language of popular legitimacy and national restoration to justify moves that hollowed out institutional checks; Tusk now invokes militant democracy to justify steps that may need to depart from strict legality in order to repair those same institutions. The structural predicament is that both projects rely on claims to represent the real nation against a captured or corrupted order. Naming this symmetry is not false equivalence. It is the honest acknowledgement that the tools of democratic self-defence are structurally available to actors whose purposes are fundamentally different, and that Tusk’s invocation of militant democracy in service of institutional restoration and Orbán’s invocation of popular legitimacy in service of institutional capture are not morally equivalent simply because they share a rhetorical structure. The distinction between them is real and consequential. It cannot, however, be established by the rhetorical form alone.

The second element is the presidential election of May 2025, in which the PiS-backed candidate Karol Nawrocki defeated the government-backed Rafał Trzaskowski in a second-round run-off by 50.89 per cent to 49.11 per cent, a margin narrow enough to be described in Polish and international coverage as razor-thin. This result was not simply an electoral setback. It restructured the terms of the entire restoration project, because Poland’s constitution gives the president significant powers of legislative veto, and Nawrocki has exercised those powers with considerable energy since taking office in August 2025. The judicial reform legislation that the Tusk government prepared over the first phase of its term has been blocked. The government that won a clear mandate in 2023 to restore the rule of law is now operating in cohabitation with a president whose principal constitutional function, as it is being exercised, is to prevent that restoration from occurring.

Scholars who have examined the Polish case in depth have noted something worth stating plainly: the Tusk government has, in certain policy domains, particularly migration and national security, adopted positions that are not obviously distinguishable from those of its predecessor. The argument made in justification is that these are responses to genuine security conditions rather than ideological commitments. That may be so. What the pattern also illustrates is the observation, made with increasing frequency by analysts of post-populist governance, that the mechanisms of executive power left by a populist predecessor are not automatically dismantled by a pro-democratic successor. They remain available. And governments under pressure tend to use the tools available to them.

There is no clean tool in a contaminated environment. There are only more or less damaging ways of using contaminated instruments to begin the repair, and more or less honest ways of acknowledging the risks involved. The practical implication is stark: where institutional legitimacy has been sufficiently degraded, every available instrument of repair carries within it some element of the damage it is intended to correct. Poland still has an active civil society, an engaged electorate demonstrated by that extraordinary October 2023 turnout, and a reforming government that remains, by any comparative measure, substantially more committed to democratic norms than its predecessor. The difficulty is a counsel of realism about the timescales involved in restoring institutional health once it has been seriously degraded, not a counsel of fatalism about the possibility of recovery. It is, however, a counsel that has direct relevance for the question sitting beneath all three European cases examined in this article: at what point in the process of institutional degradation does the restoration cost exceed what the electoral cycle and normal political patience can sustain?

The Common Structure

Across these three cases, the surface variation is considerable. Germany has not experienced populist government. Hungary is in its sixteenth year of it. Poland is attempting recovery from eight years of it. Italy occupies a position that confounds easy categorisation. But the structural pattern running beneath all of them is recognisable, and the Zhōng Yōng framework makes it visible.

In each case, the proximate cause of the corrective impulse is a genuine governance failure, not a manufactured grievance or a disinformation artefact. In Germany: deindustrialisation, wage stagnation, and an immigration policy administered without adequate institutional support over an extended period. In Hungary: the corruption and economic mismanagement of the Socialist governments that preceded Orbán. In Italy: decades of political dysfunction and the particular humiliation of the 2011 sovereign debt crisis and its management by an unelected technocratic government. In Poland: a transformation that produced economic growth at the national level while leaving large sections of the rural and small-town population feeling culturally displaced and politically invisible. These factors are not exhaustive, nor do they carry equal weight across the cases. They are recurring patterns identified across multiple analyses, and they sit alongside competing explanations that emphasise identity, media dynamics, and the particular signals that governing elites send about whose concerns they regard as legitimate.

Across all four cases, the established political response treated the corrective impulse as primarily a communication or management problem rather than as a signal of genuine institutional failure requiring structural response. The symptoms were managed. The underlying pathology was not addressed. And the pathology, left unaddressed for long enough, produced corrective forces that the existing institutional architecture was not designed to absorb, or, in two of the cases, was subsequently redesigned to resist.

What varies is the institutional resilience of the environment within which those corrective forces operated. Where institutional friction was sufficient, the corrective force was constrained by the weight of governing reality. Where it was insufficient, the corrective force consolidated in ways that produced a new form of imbalance. Where the institutions themselves had been captured before a counter-correction could succeed, the restoration proved harder than anticipated and remains incomplete.

The policy prescription implied by this structural analysis is considerably more demanding than any of the symptomatic treatments currently on offer. It requires addressing the material conditions that produced the legitimate grievance at the root of corrective movements: wage stagnation, housing unaffordability, the sense of cultural displacement, and the progressive disconnection of governing institutions from the lived experience of large portions of the electorate. These are long-horizon structural changes. They require decision-making authority placed as close as possible to those affected by its consequences, and institutions designed for human wellbeing and resilience rather than administrative convenience or abstract efficiency. No government currently in power in any of the countries examined here is pursuing those changes at the scale the diagnosis implies.

A Signal in the Southern Hemisphere

Australia is not Germany. It is not Hungary or Poland. Its institutional architecture is more robust than Hungary’s was before 2010, and its political culture retains characteristics that have historically provided a degree of insulation from the dynamics examined above. These are genuine differences, not grounds for complacency.

The recent polling that showed One Nation reaching the low twenties in national primary support, at points overtaking the Liberal Party and drawing level with or surpassing the broader Coalition’s combined vote for the first time in Australian political history, is not primarily a story about Pauline Hanson or about the specific policy positions One Nation represents. It reflects a set of conditions that are structurally recognisable from the European experience examined above: cost of living and wage pressures that have not been adequately addressed by successive governments of either party, a perception that major-party politics is conducted in a different economic and cultural universe from the voters’ own lives, and a growing willingness to treat non-mainstream options as viable first preferences rather than vehicles for registering a protest that will be walked back in the polling booth. On 21 March 2026, that willingness produced a concrete result. In the South Australian state election, One Nation recorded approximately 21 per cent of the primary vote against the Liberal Party’s 19 per cent, the worst result for a Liberal or conservative party in any Australian state or federal election since federation. The ABC’s chief election analyst described the outcome as an earthquake with implications for the entire country. That One Nation’s primary surge did not translate into lower house seats, largely because Labor directed preferences against it in 44 of 47 electorates, is itself analytically significant: the institutional mechanisms absorbed the signal without resolving the conditions that produced it. Pre-election analysis found that over half of One Nation’s voters described themselves as feeling unrepresented by the major parties. That is not a fringe sentiment. It is a structural finding.

These are not signals alone. One of them is now a result. The question of whether to read it as a prediction of the European trajectory remains open, and importing a template wholesale from one political context to another is an analytical error this article has been at pains to avoid. What the South Australian result does establish is that the conditions identified throughout this piece, genuine material grievance, institutional distance, and a corrective impulse that the existing system channelled without addressing, are not hypothetical in the Australian context. They have now produced a measurable electoral expression at the state level. The question is whether the institutional response will be diagnostic or merely mechanical.

The European experience suggests that how established institutions respond to the early indicators of a corrective impulse matters enormously, because that response shapes whether the impulse remains within the normal range of democratic politics or intensifies into something less tractable. Responding with exclusion, diagnosis of disinformation, and reassertion of existing positions has not served European democracies well. Responding with genuine engagement with the legitimate grievances underlying the corrective movement, without endorsing the movement’s less defensible positions, requires both political courage and institutional capacity that is not always available when the pressure is most acute.

The Prior Responsibility

Poland raises the hardest question in this series of articles, and it is one that extends well beyond Poland’s borders. If the restoration of institutional equilibrium is, beyond a certain point of degradation, compromised by the very tools available to pursue it, then the most important question is not how to restore equilibrium once it has been lost. It is how the obligation to maintain it is understood by those in a position to do so before it is lost.

That is a question directed at governing institutions generally, at the parties and leaders who hold power within systems that have not yet reached the advanced stages of dysfunction visible in Hungary, and who face the daily political pressures that make the sustained, unglamorous work of institutional maintenance less immediately rewarding than the management of acute crises. It is a question about the relationship between the short-term incentives of political life and the long-horizon responsibilities of democratic stewardship.

What the European cases suggest, viewed through the Zhōng Yōng, is that equilibrium is not a natural resting state of political systems. It is an achievement, requiring continuous attention and the institutional capacity for honest self-examination. It does not maintain itself. And the cost of losing it, as Poland is discovering, is not measured only in electoral cycles but in the structural damage to the very mechanisms through which future correction becomes possible.

What the cases suggest more persistently is that this question is almost always asked too late, by actors who had the capacity to act on it earlier and found, in the ordinary pressures of political life, sufficient reason not to.

This is the third article in a series applying the Zhōng Yōng framework to contemporary geopolitics.

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