Volt, Because Someone Had to Try

Everyone you know spends time complaining about Europe falling apart. Brexit. The refugee crisis being handled like a game of hot potato. Lobbying openly corrupting everything. And the Upload Filter coming down the pipe, which would basically kill the internet as anyone under thirty knew it. You could go out with your friends and spend the night taking it apart, or you could do something.

Some people did. They started a political party called Volt.

It was pan-European and fact-based, focused on problems that don’t stop at borders and can’t be fixed by politicians staring at their own voters’ short-term interests. Andrea Venzon started it. He wanted a democratic Europe where citizens mattered. Climate, inequality, migration, digital challenges—the real problems everyone else was too scared or lazy to take seriously. It sounded like the standard speech, except he seemed to mean it.

They started with five thousand members and basically no money. Crowdfunded. Everyone working for free in their spare time. No backing, no machine, no cynicism baked into the operation. Just people who looked at the state of things and decided someone had to try.

I appreciated that. Not because I thought a new political party could fix anything—the momentum was all going the other way, the right-wing was winning, people were getting dumber, the centrist project was imploding. But at least Volt was something other than either giving up or getting pulled into the actual dark movements, the authoritarian stuff with real organization and real anger. At least some young people were still willing to think you could build something different, something democratic, something not powered by resentment.

Whether it would work didn’t really matter. The point was the attempt.