Written by Konstantinos Tachtsidis
(republished article from rosa.gr )

The rise of the far right is not just electoral. It is cultural and aesthetic. It is the victory of nostalgia for an era that was never ideal, but is presented as such: clean, homogeneous, demarcated. A world without outsiders, without deviations, without unrest on the quiet surface of the “normal.”

Trump ‘s return is not news. It is a symptom. Like the spread of Meloni, Le Pen, Orban and the dominance of the supposedly liberal Mitsotakis. They are not selling politics; they are selling relief from intolerance towards complexity.

The far right has found the ideal distraction: it directs the conversation from bread to gender and from rent to pronouns. And so social anger is directed where the powerful do not need to be held accountable.

The “woke threat” has become a convenient cover. Not because it threatens, but because it gives a weary world an easy explanation: it’s not the policies’ fault, it’s the activists’ fault. It’s not the poverty’s fault, it’s the visibility’s fault. It’s not the system’s fault, it’s the vocabulary’s fault.

This is not just cynicism. It is a plan. It is the conscious choice to turn anger into fear, and fear into peace, order, security, and patience. It is the withdrawal of the state from its role as protector and its transformation into a moral prosecutor. It does not matter if it cannot regulate the market; as long as it can regulate words.

Diversity is disturbing because it disrupts certainty. Because it introduces the unfamiliar where everything should be orderly. Because it says there is no one identity, one homeland, one gender, one truth, one boundary. That is why it becomes the first target, as a supposedly woke agenda that threatens our way of life. Because it is the presumption that power cannot control everything.

Thus, nostalgia appears not simply as an emotion, but as a solution. Yesterday is no longer a memory, but a promise: a “normal” time, without complex identities, without claims, without voices that disturb the quiet stillness.

And in a society exhausted by economic insecurity and institutional abandonment, this fabricated memory of the past seems comforting — because it doesn’t force you to imagine the future, or even to experience the unbearable present.

Let’s not kid ourselves: the attack on inclusion policies, on queer identities, on immigrant communities, on school curricula, is nothing more than a dress rehearsal for something deeper:

The abolition of the very concept of “common ground.” No longer all of us meeting somewhere, but living side by side, controlled and fearful. Each in his own bubble — with barriers, borders, and walls.

And here lies the responsibility of the “Center-Left” in how it treats the far-right: that is, as something marginal, that “will go away on its own.”

He didn’t understand that fascism today doesn’t wear boots, but rather “likes” memes. It doesn’t rush in with iron fists, but erases memory and rewrites history.

If we do not, now, vigorously defend the right to exist, when the system constantly proposes alternative versions of yourself – more digestible and more “normal”, then our silence will not be neutral. It will be complicity.

It is not enough to say “it will not pass.” We must say what will pass in its place. of.

If the far right proposes nostalgia, we must respond with desire. Not for a return. But for a future that has never been before. A future where society will not be measured by similarity, but by how many different ways of being it can accommodate.

This must be the new internationalism of our days. Not the abstract opposition to Trump, Orbán, or Georgiades. But the head-on confrontation with the lie that “we used to be better.” With the mythology of purity, with the fantasy of social homogeneity and above all: with the idea that change is dangerous.

And if the far right holds nostalgia and fear in its hands, we hold something stronger: the courage to dream of an inclusive future, without “normalities.” A future where no one will need to hide who they are in order to belong.

And if this seems difficult, so much the better. Because the most necessary worlds are always those that don’t yet exist.