We are not, therefore, facing a robust and consolidated recovery of social democracy, but rather a certain recovery linked to a greater fragmentation of the electorate and a setback of the conservative parties that managed, in much of Europe, the crisis of 2008. This being the case, although it is true that it is not convenient to champion triumphalist positions, it is not the time to let the opportunity pass by. The changes in the party systems and in the preferences of the electorate clearly show that we are experiencing moments of great transformations that we must know how to identify and interpret and that demand a response. Whoever succeeds in this challenge will design the future, which is to say that he will govern it.
Today's societies, which were already living in a time of uncertainty generated by the technological revolution, demographic changes or climate change –among other factors–, have seen how uncertainty and insecurity have multiplied after the covid-19 pandemic. Many of the coordinates on which life ran are in full transformation or have simply Whatsapp Mobile Number List certainties remain standing in just two generations. According to the spring 2021 Eurobarometer1, among the feelings that Europeans say they have at the present time are uncertainty in the first place, followed by hope, to then describe sensations that point in the same direction: frustration, impotence, anger and fear.
The aversion to this uncertainty is something common to human nature and, in a special way, to the West, whose history can well be understood as a continuous search for certainties. All this makes it largely impossible to understand what is happening. The companion of uncertainty aversion is fear. Fear of the future, fear of the unknown, fear of not understanding and not knowing how to survive in this new space, at a time when politics, and especially democratic institutions, are no longer perceived in Europe as the protective cloak they were at other times.