The Twilight of the Cafe Society: Notes from the Fortress

If you want to feel the pulse of the new Europe, don’t go to the parliaments. Don’t listen to the speeches in Strasbourg or the shouting matches in the Bundestag. Go to the border.

Specifically, go to the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras or a quiet crossing into Austria. It used to be that a border was a sleepy affair—a bored guard, a cursory glance, the dull thud-thud of a stamp. But since October 2025, the rhythm has changed. Now, it is the hum of the Entry/Exit System. It is the cold, blue light of a biometric scanner mapping the geography of your face. It is a fingerprint pressed against glass.

There is a clinical efficiency to it that chills the blood. We are no longer just travelers; we are data points to be processed, tracked, and sorted. It is the first, tactile hint that the continent of open doors is quietly bolting the latch.

The Chill in Berlin

I recently spent a week in Berlin, a city that has long been the spiritual home of the European liberal imagination. For decades, Berlin was the "poor but sexy" refuge for the misfits of the world. It was a city that wore its scars proudly and turned its history into a warning.

But the air has changed. You feel it in the small, experimental theaters in Neukölln and the art studios in Wedding. They are quieter now. The funding cuts—brutal and precise—have begun to bite. It isn't just about money; it’s about the message. When the "Red-Black" coalition slashed the cultural budget, it felt like a punitive strike against the city’s chaotic, diverse soul.

I spoke to a young playwright near the canal. She looked tired. "It feels like the lights are being dimmed," she told me. "Not all at once. Just slowly enough that you wonder if your eyes are playing tricks on you."

This is the reality of the shift to the right. It doesn't always arrive with jackboots and marching bands. Sometimes, it arrives in a budget committee meeting. It arrives when a diversity grant is quietly scrapped. It arrives when a gallery director is replaced by someone with "traditional values." The rise of the AfD—now the second-largest party in the Bundestag as of the 2025 elections—has emboldened a certain kind of silence. People are more careful with their words. The café society, that messy, loud, argumentative bedrock of democracy, is looking over its shoulder.

The Hollowing Out

We often talk about "Liberal Democracy" as if it were a building—a solid structure of granite and marble that will stand forever. But what we are learning, painfully, is that democracy is not a building. It is a shared hallucination. It only works because we all agree it works.

The new right-wing alliances—groups like the "Patriots for Europe," who have surged to become the third-largest force in Brussels—understand this perfectly. They have realized that you don't need to burn the building down. You just need to hollow it out from the inside.

They are experts in the architecture of bureaucracy. They use the language of democracy to dismantle it. They talk of "sovereignty" while stripping away the judiciary’s power. They talk of "protecting the people" while demonizing the press. In Italy, Prime Minister Meloni has proven that you can be a radical right-winger and still be shaken by the hand in international summits, provided you wear a sharp suit and keep the markets calm. It is a "normalization" of the extreme that makes the unthinkable feel mundane.

The danger isn't that the EU will collapse overnight. The danger is that it will survive, but as a zombie. A shell of institutions that look democratic on the outside but are powered by illiberal machinery on the inside. A Europe where we still vote, but where the outcome seems increasingly decoupled from the values of human rights and equality that were supposed to be our compass.

The Friction on the Streets

And yet, the story is not over. Europe is not just its governments; it is its streets.

On a freezing morning in late November, I found myself in Giessen, a university town in Hesse. The AfD was attempting to hold a congress to launch a new youth wing—a rebranding exercise for their extreme ideology.

But they couldn't start. They were blocked by 15,000 people.

It was a chaotic, beautiful mess. There were grandmothers in thick coats linking arms with students in hoodies. There were trade unionists and techno DJs. They stood in the biting cold for hours, blocking the roads, making noise, refusing to let the silence settle.

In that shivering crowd, I found the counter-weight to the cold logic of the biometric scanners. This was the friction of democracy. It was messy, it was inconvenient, and it was alive.

The Fragile Garden

We are entering a winter for liberal democracy in Europe. The winds are colder, and the nights are longer. The "End of History" has been cancelled, and history has returned with a vengeance, bringing all its old ghosts along for the ride.

But winters do not last forever. The shift to the right is real, and it is formidable, but it is not total. Every time a border hardens, a network of solidarity tightens in response. Every time a fund is cut, a community rallies to fill the gap.

To be a liberal democrat in Europe today is to lose the luxury of complacency. We can no longer assume that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice on its own. It only bends if we put our backs into it.

The Europe of the future is not guaranteed. It is being fought for, inch by inch, in the voting booths, in the art studios, and on the frozen streets of provincial towns. The walls may be closing in, but the people inside are waking up. And as long as we are awake, the fortress is not yet sealed.