Against Helplessness

Two options when the political situation around you becomes unacceptable: complain about it at the bar until someone in your circle starts nodding along to the far-right’s surprisingly shallow solutions, or start a party. These people started a party.

Volt is a pan-European political movement—genuinely transnational, the first of its kind—founded by people who looked at the state of the European Union and decided that frustration wasn’t enough of a response. Brexit, the refugee crisis being mishandled from every direction, creeping legislation threatening to break the open internet: the European idea might be sound at its core, but the execution had become something to be genuinely ashamed of.

Founder Andrea Venzon put it plainly: We want a democratic and united Europe where citizens actually matter. The party’s proposals are evidence-based, fiscally and ecologically sustainable, with particular attention to vulnerable populations. The argument is that climate change, economic inequality, migration, and digital rights are all fundamentally transnational problems that can’t be meaningfully addressed at the national level—especially when politicians are optimizing for their own voters’ short-term preferences. The only way through is a shared European answer, applied at whatever level actually makes sense.

At founding, Volt had around five thousand members across the continent, which is modest for a party with European Parliament ambitions but still represents a specific kind of courage: the willingness to build something real rather than just be correct on the internet. The funding model—crowdfunding and small donations, everything run on volunteer time—gave it the texture of something that wasn’t pretending to be bigger than it was.

Whether Volt could hold its distance from the established parties and deliver on goals that are, by any measure, ambitious—that would prove itself over time. But I’d take this over watching another generation of young people become famous primarily for their proximity to identitarian movements and their talent for packaging resentment as political thought.