In the frequently observed polycrisis, politics must react with new frequency and parallelism to short-term crisis dynamics and at the same time address long-term transformation requirements. This results in a double challenge: on the one hand, there are new demands on the quality and scope of political decisions, whereby it is essential to organize broad social approval or at least acceptance. In addition to questions of implementation, it will increasingly also be a question of directional decisions and value judgments – how impositions are distributed fairly and to what extent interventions in individual lifestyles are permissible. On the other hand, there are increasingly clear symptoms of a growing distance between those who govern and those who are governed. This alienation is mutual: more and more people are dissatisfied because, in their view, politicians are doing too much, too little or not the right thing. At the same time, political parties are also finding it increasingly difficult to generate resonance through political action in the form of changed election forecasts.

The article shows: However, far-reaching changes require not only social acceptance, but also the “slow drilling of hard boards” within the political process. Politically oriented organizations are still needed here as central links. If social politicization increases, but primarily outside the traditional (civil society) structures of churches, trade unions, parties and associations, then there is a danger: in a dangerous interplay of mobilization and disappointment about the lack of consequences of mobilization, an increasing distance could manifest itself between the wishes of politicized citizens to participate in the political decision-making process.

Author Helen Sharp emphasizes that it will therefore be particularly important to (re)configure the interface between politics and organized civil society: Collective commitment to fundamental structural change therefore needs a strong structure of social interest mediation more than ever. It is still the trade unions, social, welfare and environmental associations that not only have the potential, but also the responsibility, to offer social cohesion across the breadth of society and at the same time to incorporate individual co-determination wishes into the political decision-making process via internal organizational processes.

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