Political institutions and parties are like diapers—they need to be changed regularly, as they inevitably fill up with shit over time. As crude as the analogy may be: It captures a fundamental and enduring challenge of organising society. Given enough time, power corrupts almost any individual who wields it, and the structures that grant that power are doomed to decay if not cleansed and repaired by regular renewal. This institutional rot is as close as one can get to an universal natural law in political science. The older any organisation gets—whether it is a political party, a government, a sports association, an NGO, or a corporation—the more dysfunction, error and corruption accumulate across all layers of its hierarchy. In their nascent stages, institutions are often driven by great statesmen and stateswomen, visionaries, and creators. However, over time, leadership is either corrupted by its own success or replaced by a growing caste of administrators, powerbrokers, and bureaucrats. This new class is often more preoccupied with consolidating its own power and siphoning off budgets than with enacting necessary change. The result is the entrenchment of the same used-up, worn-out faces at the top, propped up by networks of compliant functionaries and administrators. This phenomenon is famously described in sociology and political theory as the iron law of oligarchy, which posits that every power structure, regardless of its initial democratic intentions or rules, will eventually fall under the control of a self-serving elite. This process can unfold over years or decades. Rarely even centuries as in the cases of the Roman Republic or American Democracy. But the outcome is depressingly consistent: Sclerosis sets in, paralyzing the institution. Leaders become dangerously out of touch with the populace they are meant to lead and serve, clinging to power long beyond their cognitive prime and refusing to make way for more capable heirs. As vested interests and infighting dictate policy, critical problems remain unsolved, incompetence runs rampant, and the suffering of the ruled grows. You can see the symptoms of this decay everywhere if you look closely. In the corporate world, once-great companies stagnate as talented people quit in frustration. Innovative ideas get lost in a swamp of unnecessary actionism and virtue-signaling in boardrooms. The decline of former innovation leaders like Xerox, IBM, Intel, and Volkswagen, serve as stark warnings. And are the reason, economies allow for and need constant creative destruction through new start-ups to prevent suffocation under the weight of complacent corporate titans. In government, this sclerosis leads to a brain drain of the best and brightest through emigration, increased gate keeping of politicial parties and a political class that loses the respect and trust of its people. Incompetent candidates, well past their prime but deeply entrenched in party machinery, rule and run for the highest offices. One needs only look at figures like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, or the late-career tenures of leaders like Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz in Germany or Joe Bidn in the United States to see this entrenchment in action. Ultimately, the price of this decay is paid by the people, the demos. Infrastructure, real income, public safety, and social cohesion erode. Debt rises, as the demos is bribed to look the other way and technocrats need ever more power to expand their influence. Meanwhile, the entrenched elites, insulated within their increasingly gated and guarded communities, remain personally unaffected by the societal problems they have caused or failed to solve. Taxpayer money is funneled to foundations and NGOs run by partisan allies. Public broadcasters become mouthpieces for the establishment as members of ruling party move into executive positions, and the press losses slowly its critical function. The people suffer, and as their suffering grows, so do their anger, their resentment, and their creative hate. This is where the profound genius of democracy reveals itself; at least most of the time. The great virtue of a democratic system is its ability to facilitate a peaceful transition of power— elections are a revolving door designed to kick out the old shit and bring in the new and undigested. It provides a non-violent mechanism for the people to change the diapers at the top, to remove the parts of the elite that have become corrupt, sclerotic and self-serving. This cyclical process of renewal is the essential maintenance that prevents the state from succumbing to terminal decay. In this sense, democracy is society's immune system against the inevitable diseases of corruption and oligarchy. And it works: While authoritarian states like Russia and China have seen multiple catastrophic collapses during the last century, the world’s oldest democracies have endured precisely because of their ability for peaceful revolution at the ballots. When shit and anger accumulated, American voters elected radical reformers like Theodore Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan to force effective change, to change the diapers. In autocratic Russia, by contrast, the Tsar was removed violently, and later the Soviet Union burst. Democracy is an anti-fragile, adaptive organism. It may look superficially like chaos and involves constant infighting that authoritarians see as a weakness, but this is actually a core strength. While it may lead to slower decision-making, history has yet to produce a parliament capable of the same megalomania and delusion as dictators like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or Putin, who in their ignorance started unwinnable wars, destructive great leaps and murdered millions. Democracies can react to change and, through peaceful revolution, remove the bloated diapers and steer away from catastrophe. Dictatorships, dependent on the whims of a inevitably shittier and shittier elite, inevitably burst violently. Unfortunately, even democratic systems are not immune from decay and corruption. The mechanisms of renewal themselves can be corrupted. Oligarchic networks can metastasize within the very fabric of democracy—across parties, NGOs, corporations, academia and the media —creating a web of dependency and concentrated capital that chokes out genuine, bottom-up change. This is why especially Western Europe sees so much suffocating stagnation and decline. This is why today's political parties in the Western world are increasingly gerontocratic and out of touch with the electorate; and often seem (rightfully) incapable of solving the urgent problems of our time; and draw so much popular anger. It is why populist and extremist movements are flourishing—they feed on the deep public resentment, on the feeling that the diapers are full, that one can’t climb party ranks without being born into the right Family of ex-Ministers and that elections only serve to shuffle the same shit around, without allowing the stench to be replaced by fresh air. The German Social Democrats are a prime example: a party that defined German politics since the 19th century, it now has barely any program left except petty infighting, maintaining power and salaries for its entrenched political class; not to speak that it even lacks a vision how to fix Germanys and Europes problems, while producing half of them with halfbacked policies, that mostly consist of stalling change that could risk their hold to power; and bribing their grey haired voters with pension increases and other handouts to look the other way; doing so at the expense of Germanys future and its youth. The people of many European countries increasingly face a debilitating choice: On one side stands an old, corrupt establishment of uninspiring administrators, too embedded in outdated transatlantic or soviet networks and too out of touch with the 21st centuries realities and technologies to govern effectively. On the other side rise reactionary nationalist populists who exploit legitimate anger but serve the interests of foreign adversaries, like the AfD. These extremists of the hard right and hard left offer no real democratic renewal; they are an authoritarian scam directed by our enemies, they are more often than not traitorous proxies trying to dismember Europe and sell its parts to the Putinists and Trumpists. They are foreign corrupt shit flooding our system to bring it to collapse. They are not a genuine solution to the sickness of our Institutions, but another diseases infecting an already struggling political body. The time has come to forge a third option. It is time to heal and renew our democracy. The republican-democratic order is the only time-tested and anti-fragile solution for a free society and civilisation, but for it to survive, it requires a true cleansing and some radical reforms, not just a shuffling of shit around. New democratic movements are desperately needed to allow fresh, competent individuals who have not yet been corrupted by power to rise from the midst of the people. Political parties born in the 19th or 20th centuries are ill-equipped for the 21st. To preserve our freedom and secure a prosperous future, we must stand up, unite democratically, and allow the diapers to be changed. We need to change for more European unity, for more innovation, for positive visions for the future. It is time for a genuine, peaceful, democratic rejuvenation, driven by new political movements built by and for the people of today. It is time for political parties like Ave Europa to rise as true, positive and effective reformers; to rise as the shield and spear of democracy, as the true defenders of the demos against the swamp of corruption of an outdated establishment as well as against the treacherous scam of the national populists.