![Power of Narrative with Leonie Haiden [PODCAST]](https://4liberty.eu/phidroav/2026/08/Liberal-Europe-Podcast-Format-1-1024x1024.png "Power of Narrative with Leonie Haiden [PODCAST]")
What structural strategies must the political center implement to effectively reclaim the future for liberal democracy? How can governance bodies connect abstract concepts to the everyday lived experiences of citizens? What distinct emotional promises allow the populist right wing to capture public dissatisfaction so effectively across Europe? And how does the algorithmic, endless design of modern news feeds erode public trust and dismantle our capacity for reasoned political debate?
Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Leonie Haiden, who after three years of serving on the Policy Planning Staff of the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is currently exploring the challenges of political communication in the 21st century as part of the Europe’s Futures fellowship programme run by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. She is also working as an expert in strategic communication for the ERSTE Foundation.
Leszek Jazdzewski (LJ): Given your current work at the Institute for Human Sciences, what structural strategies must the political center implement to effectively reclaim the future for liberal democracy?
Leonie Haiden (LH): To provide some background on where that thinking came from, I have worked in the foreign policy sphere. Before I was a fellow, I was in the foreign ministry in Austria, working extensively on geopolitical discourses and speech writing. Something that was very apparent to me was that the political center was very much stuck in a passive mode. This is true not just on behalf of politics, but also within the commentary. We have these buzzwords of polycrisis and permacrisis, but nothing was really giving direction.
At the same time, the narratives coming from the fringes were supplying that direction. They were using strong verbs, which is clear when you think of campaign slogans like “Make America Great Again” or the Brexit campaign slogan “Take Back Control.” My background is in communications, specifically looking at metaphors and narratives, and it is important how we think about the future.
When we look at the discourse right now, the passive stance of the political center came out clearly in Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union speech last autumn. She stated that Europe is in a fight for its future, but it was presented very much as a reaction to what was happening around us. The narrative was that we are up against the wall, and we do not actually want to do this, but we are forced by circumstance to fight for our future. One necessary element is getting out of this passive stance that makes it appear that institutions and politics are merely doing crisis management rather than acting into the future.
LJ: From a strategic communications standpoint, what core elements are required to construct an effective and politically resonant narrative?
LH: One element is showing activity, but another is relating it to lived experience. There is sometimes a false assumption that you can craft perfect narratives on the level of politics, disseminate them, and people will automatically believe your story.
Narratives have to relate to very basic concerns. This is why I became interested in metaphors, because a metaphor encapsulates a narrative and acts as a shortcut to that narrative. When people say there is a “populist wave”—which is a very common metaphor right now—it assumes that populism is on the rise as a natural phenomenon that is almost unstoppable. It implies there is nothing we can do about it except engage in contingencies and reactions. We need to think about how we can relate narratives to very basic things. We are observing this right now in the discourse in the United States regarding what people truly care about.
LJ: Which historical political narratives have proven most effective, and what underlying mechanisms allowed them to successfully capture the public imagination?
LH: One narrative I studied for a long time in my doctoral research was containment. Containment is known as a foreign policy in the United States during the Cold War, but I looked at it as a bipartisan example of strategic communications. It lasted for several decades, until the 1960s when there was more of a backlash against it. I analyzed containment as a metaphor. It appeals to a very basic human need to say, “Here is inside, here is outside. Here are the good guys, here are the enemies.”
We see this dichotomy recurring in a lot of narratives. I have thought for a long time about whether that inside-outside view is necessary, or if we can talk in much more open terms. The question is where you draw that line. Populist politicians will draw a very specific line around an in-group. However, you could also say we are contained as a planet, meaning we are the in-group of planet Earth, which is relevant when we see what is happening with current environmental shifts.
An effective narrative always implies movement or direction, speaks about the future, and talks about it in a way that makes people feel included. It is not a narrative imposed externally as a perfect vision of the future. Instead, it tells citizens specifically what they can do to be part of that movement into the future. Historical civil defense plans, for example, connected large-scale weapon production to individual actions, outlining what to do in the case of an attack and how to be a good citizen. It linked the geopolitical level to the individual level. Without that link, concepts feel too abstract. This is what has happened with the language of the political center. It uses big terms like democracy, the rule of law, and freedom of expression, but fails to explain what those mean on a specific, everyday level.
LJ: Does framing governance around a “geopolitical” objective provide the type of effective, everyday connection necessary for a political narrative to succeed?
LH: It depends on the audience. Framing an objective as “geopolitical” is fair, but for a lot of people, complex institutional setups are not clear. Introducing bureaucratic terms can put people off if they do not understand those structures.
If you stop someone on the street and they ask why we need certain institutions, why we should strive for digital sovereignty, or why we should take care of our own security, you need a very simple answer. The narrative must explain how these concepts have meaning in everyday life. It should focus on a future we are all shaping, combining collective freedom with individual freedom.
The problem often is that governance bodies develop good initiatives but talk about them in a technocratic way. During certain political campaigns, effective opposition videos would walk through a house and point out every single everyday item regulated by central authorities, such as the size of pillows or the shape of produce. While biased and one-sided, it immediately demonstrated a relation to daily life.
Large institutions still have progress to make regarding self-branding to shape a cohesive identity. Due to ongoing global shifts, we are no longer looking to external global powers as a big brother that will automatically save us. We are trying to shape our own identity. It is happening at a crisis point where we feel pressure from all sides, but it is actually a very exciting process.
LJ: When analyzing the political communication of the current European mainstream, what common threads or structural deficiencies do you identify in their governing narratives?
LH: The current narrative is quite timid. There is a fear of being bold and courageous because that is viewed as over-promising. However, politics is entirely about navigating the tension between over-promising and offering a vision. The liberal mainstream tends to focus too much on the fear of over-promising instead of providing a clear direction.
Global surveys indicate that what individuals want most from leaders—including political, educational, and cultural figures—is an expression of hope. This is something politicians must take to heart. It is difficult for many to grasp because we live in gloomy times where it feels as though we are forced to choose a daily doomsday scenario. True hope is not blind optimism; it is the conviction that our actions right now make sense and can have an actual impact.
That sense of agency is not being communicated by politicians, nor is it being transferred to individuals. Living in 2026, people have access to a massive amount of information and disinformation from all over the world, but their individual radius of action feels very small. This imbalance creates a sense of hopelessness and a lack of agency.
Mainstream politics must also move away from bureaucratic, technocratic speak. In recent European elections, far-right parties succeeded by avoiding terms like “party” or “politics,” framing their message entirely around a direct relationship with the people. The answer is not to emulate populist rhetoric, but to learn the lesson of speaking directly to citizens and taking them seriously, rather than turning political communication into a self-referential exercise about maintaining power or forming coalitions.
LJ: What core narratives does the populist right utilize across Europe, and why are they proving so politically effective?
LH: They are effective because they offer direction. Regarding the future, they do not necessarily promise a literal return to the past, but rather a return to how the future used to feel in the past. This appeals to strong, legitimate emotions. Currently, the future feels as though it is racing toward people through constant digital notifications about war, climate crises, and failing global regulatory regimes. Populist narratives offer an escape from that anxiety by promising a familiar sense of security. [1]
Furthermore, they effectively place all other political parties into a double bind by claiming that they are the only true representatives of the public. They position themselves so that any dissatisfaction with the democratic system is channeled into a vote for them. This raises structural questions for democracy regarding what alternative avenues exist for citizens to express systemic protest within the system when they feel unheard.
Populist parties also benefit from a polarized discourse where any form of disagreement is treated as a war. Mainstream politics often falls into the trap of continuing that conflict-driven metaphor. Instead, the narrative should reinforce that democracy is a form of government built on continuous tension and conflict, but its purpose is to resolve those tensions through a respectful, communicative process rather than avoiding or weaponizing them.
LJ: Beyond the thematic elements of a political narrative, what role does the actual messenger play in establishing its authenticity and reception among different audiences?
LH: The role of the messenger has always been important, but it is growing even more now because one of the central concerns right now is trust. We talk a lot about the problem of disinformation, but it is often actually a problem of trust. Disinformation has been around for a long time. The question of trust is whether I can rely on whoever is speaking and whether I feel that they have my best interest at heart. The other element of trust is whether I actually feel that the world is moving in a positive direction, because we do not actually need trust if we feel like everything is going to go bad anyway.
The role of the messenger is growing also because of the way the information environment works. We cannot know our sources; we do not know where messages come from, who they are funded by, or what the true outlet is. We are seeing more and more of a shift toward people choosing specific outlets or individuals to trust. That can have both a positive and a negative effect.
Major media outlets have observed a phenomenon where individual journalists become like pop stars, because people build up a relationship with these individual authors and value their specific work. On the other hand, online influencer culture means that people trust voices because they feel they know these individuals, even though those figures might not have any of the credentials or backgrounds that would justify them sharing political views alongside makeup tutorials.
Politicians should really think about this in their communications. They must try to convey why they should be trusted, because trust takes a long time to build but can be destroyed within a moment. Part of that is looking at trust as a two-way relationship. Politics has sometimes had a patronizing view of citizens, wondering why they are not trusted or believed. At the same time, there is a question of whether you are trusting your citizens. In the way you are speaking with them, are you treating them as self-determined individuals who will choose to listen or not and who make their own decisions?
LJ: How has the mechanical distribution of narratives shifted through modern media, and what structural impact does current technology have on public discourse?
LH: There are two points to make on that. First, digital and social media technologies have made the scaling of information faster, easier, and cheaper. That is part of the story, but another element which is even more interesting is to look at how we are all using these technologies and how invasive they are in our lives. They are changing the logic of how we look at information and how we look at the world.
There is a difference between opening a book, which is bounded and has a clear beginning, a middle, and an end, and entering a news feed on our phones. A news feed is like an endless stream that we plunge into and out of without an internal logic of a beginning, middle, and end. When we talk about politics, it needs to persuade through emotion but also through making a reasoned argument. Making a reasoned argument requires a beginning, a middle, an end, and a sense of causality. If the technologies we are using are anti-narrative, then that really changes how our politicians act. We see this when some politicians become influencer politicians, creating videos that try to emulate the style of the platform. It leaves you wondering how this actually fulfills their responsibility to lead their country as a minister.
Another aspect is how we consume information. Political scientists or people working in policy tend to think that the only thing people look at online is information about politics, but that is only a fraction of what they look at. This intermixing is part of what creates the problem. Because of the “news finds me” phenomenon, users think they do not have to seek out information to be informed; they believe notifications on their phone will keep them well-informed anyway. But because we process political notifications next to our bank statements, messages from a best friend, and other updates, it is a very different way of processing information compared to sitting down to watch a structured morning broadcast and knowing you are sharing that experience of news consumption with millions of others.
That communal sharing of information is crucial, and there has been a real shift away from it. You are no longer sharing the same information environment with people in your town or your neighbors, and often not even with your partner. You can wake up, open your phones, and be in two completely different information spheres. This is not a new concern; historical analysts at the beginning of the twentieth century were saying the same thing. Democracy needs a basis of shared information and facts. If we do not have that, then we run into a problem because we need a shared basis to argue and talk about these things. We can disagree about what the facts mean, but we need that shared basis.
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with the Movimento Liberal Social and the Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.