Anticipatory Democracy and Resilience in a Hypermediated Polycrisis: Young Europeans Negotiating EU Futures During Brexit and COVID-19

The juxtaposition of Brexit, an enduring political rupture, and the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented global health crisis, created a polycrisis in which social, political, economic, and symbolic disruptions intersected and unfolded simultaneously. For young Europeans, these overlapping old and new crises occurred within hypermediated environments, where digital platforms amplified uncertainty, circulated competing narratives, and shaped anticipations of the future. This paper examines how young UK and Greek nationals (aged 18–30) navigated these intersecting crises, anticipating and negotiating democratic and political futures, drawing on twenty online focus groups conducted in 2020 (107 participants in total). Using a social-constructionist and anticipatory democracy lens, the study explores how participants re-evaluated EU membership as both an institutional framework and a forward-looking project intertwined with security, solidarity, and collective resilience. Rather than relying on purely instrumental cost–benefit reasoning, participants engaged in future-oriented sense-making, using digital spaces to explore alternative scenarios, anticipate national trajectories, and articulate collective priorities. UK participants frequently framed Brexit as a test of autonomy and future self-reliance, while Greek participants anticipated EU membership as a stabilising and protective framework amid compounded crises, highlighting how historical vulnerabilities and systemic inequalities shape anticipatory practices. The findings show that anticipatory democracy is enacted through everyday communicative strategies, including narrative reframing, transnational comparison, selective engagement with information, and resistance to polarising future scripts. Participants deployed these strategies to cultivate micro-resilience, through personal coping, emotional regulation, and contingency planning, and macro-resilience, through collective assessments of national capacities, limitations, and social hierarchies. Digital environments functioned as arenas for collective sense-making and imaginative rehearsal of futures, enabling youth to negotiate democratic belonging, project potential outcomes, and contest existing power relations within the EU. By centering youth voices across two contrasting national contexts, the paper demonstrates that democratic resilience depends not solely on institutional structures but on citizens’ imaginative, communicative, and affective capacities to anticipate, evaluate, and act in relation to uncertain political futures. The analysis highlights how engagement with overlapping crises provides a critical lens for understanding anticipatory practices, illustrating how young Europeans develop strategies to navigate uncertainty, sustain democratic participation, and negotiate collective futures in a hypermediated world.