Political parties may win elections, but they remain influenced by institutions that shape the assumptions under which those elections take place. In Germany, that became most visible during the chancellorship of Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician Angela Merkel. Never before had Germany pursued such left-green government policy as under a nominally conservative Christian Democratic chancellor.

Two aspects help explain why.

First Lead, Then Rule

The first is the much-cited and openly advocated “march through the institutions”, which began with the 1968 generation and was completed, at the latest, in the first decade of the new millennium. Within a good 50 years, the once-revolutionary left had found a political and parliamentary home in the Green Party and had brought the social and institutional sphere that shapes politics almost entirely under its control.

The second aspect was described by a brilliant thinker of the left. The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci set out the underlying connection in his Prison Notebooks. In broad terms, his thesis can be paraphrased as follows: whoever controls the pre-political sphere determines the culture.

At its core lies his distinction between rule and leadership. A class is “dirigente” and “dominante”, as Gramsci put it. It can and must already be “dirigente” before it enters government.

In other words, lasting political power does not begin in parliament. It begins where concepts are coined, moral intuitions are shaped and social norms are established. During the supposedly conservative Merkel years, the entire pre-political sphere was, in truth, dominated by the left and the Greens.

That dominance has now fractured because it is becoming ever clearer how poorly left-green narratives survive contact with political reality. Climate policy, including the energy transition, is ruining the economy. Mass migration is ruining society. The deconstruction of family and gender is destabilizing the state. The old Damoclean threat of overpopulation has turned into the guillotine of demographic decline for the West. The list could go on.

The Lack of Counter-Proposals

Yet all this only shows what does not work. There are almost no conservative-liberal counter-proposals to the left-green models that are presented as having no alternative. For precisely that reason, it is plausible to argue that conservative politics can never take root without cultural counter-power.

If conservative and liberal parties merely administer what a left-green hegemony has imposed on them, they will die. The liberals in Germany no longer exist in any meaningful sense because they no longer conveyed a positive message of their own. The CDU Christian Democrats are now on exactly the same path. They are merely starting their descent from a stronger electoral base.

The central question remains: who defines concepts such as family, property, nation, religion, authority, achievement, subsidiarity, homeland or freedom? Who fills them with positive content?

Once these ideas lose their intellectual foundation, they may still appear in election programs. In coalition agreements, they are already empty phrases, in parliament mere slogans, and in the chancellery they become taboo words that even conservatives now nervously label as “right-wing”.

That the Christian Democrats in Germany currently lack firm ground beneath their feet may certainly have something to do with a chancellor stumbling from one political failure to the next. But that is not the only reason.

The party has voluntarily surrendered the power of definition and handed it to its political opponents, whose definitions it then adopts.

When the think tank of the country’s main center-right party, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, treats culture war as something corrupting, something to be guarded against, and frames it in its writings only as a harmful struggle between “wokeness” and “ethnic-nationalist thinking”, that is nothing less than a betrayal of the bourgeois camp.

Pardon Us, We Think Differently

Instead, people discuss funding programs, percentages and coalition arithmetic, while the normative assumptions that define the spirit of a society have long since been set by others. The left-green hegemony of past decades did not mean that the same party governed everywhere. It meant that certain moral reflexes became institutional common sense.

Left-wing dominance did not require parties such as the Greens to be in government. It was enough for them to dominate the pre-parliamentary discourse.

Social progress was equated with concepts such as emancipation, diversity, decarbonization, anti-discrimination and internationalization. Skepticism towards these projects was treated as backwardness.

This was not merely cynical manipulation. Many of the causes had real roots and moral force. But hegemony emerges precisely when particular answers acquire the status of the self-evident. Politics then becomes morality, dispute becomes deviation and opposition becomes suspicion.

The fact that parts of the conservative camp now take Gramsci seriously can be seen, for example, in the French billionaire Vincent Bolloré and the Institut de l’Espérance he founded. The organization has been described as a Christian-conservative think tank seeking to shape policy proposals ahead of the 2027 presidential election.

Whether one finds Bolloré sympathetic is secondary. What matters is the strategic insight behind the foundation. It forms part of a broader concept that also led Bolloré into the media business and, in recent years, saw him buy several newspaper publishers and television channels.

Media, ideas, personnel, foundations and programs are not accessories to politics. They are its precondition.

The Work of Shaping Concepts

In Germany, R21 represents an attempt to close this gap in the bourgeois-conservative camp, not least because the Konrad Adenauer Foundation simply no longer performs its original task of cultivating conservative talent and shaping the terms of debate. R21 describes itself as a “think tank for new bourgeois politics in Germany and Europe” and seeks to develop debates, concepts and networks beyond a left-green interpretive monopoly.

https://twitter.com/Denkfabrik_R21/status/2057029726305214600

Its founding figures include the historian Andreas Rödder and former federal family minister Kristina Schröder. The group understands politics not merely as parliamentary business, but as work on concepts, narratives and intellectual infrastructure. In Germany too, awareness is growing that conservative politics will remain permanently defensive without cultural, media and academic groundwork. Gramsci’s ideas also play a role at R21.

Similar movements can be seen in Europe and the Anglosphere. The National Conservatism Conference presents itself as a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation to strengthen national-conservative principles. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship describes itself as an international forum for a positive narrative of civilization, family, responsibility, energy, technology and “human flourishing”.

The Ground Begins to Shift

Election results also suggest that political assumptions are beginning to shift.

The 2024 European Parliament election brought gains for parties to the right of center and losses for liberals and Greens. At the same time, the so-called center still commanded an overall majority.

That is important: the left-green hegemony has not simply been “broken”, as though it had disappeared. Rather, it is being challenged. Its aura of inevitability is fading. What used to appear to have no alternative is becoming political again. That applies to migration, energy policy, gender policy, public security, education, national sovereignty and freedom of speech.

For conservatives, accepting the culture war is therefore not only useful, but necessary if the discourse is to be reopened. Election results to the right of center are welcome, but the right of center can govern only if it is supported by a coherent and thoroughly debated world of ideas.

A conservative-led culture war must not be mere mirror-image outrage. If conservatives only engage in anti-wokeness without building better concepts, institutions and milieus, they remain trapped in permanent reaction and dependent on their opponent. The left then continues to define the subject, while the right merely supplies the counter-reaction.

Culture war in the productive sense means something else.

The Good Fight

The task now is to create magazines, schools of thought, funding structures, intellectual milieus, art criticism, educational programs, academic networks and a language that does more than say no.

In that sense, culture war is good and valuable. It is good when it does not stop at mere opposition. Anti-gender, anti-climate, anti-migration and similar formulas are not helpful. What matters is the positive case.

What does one stand for, and why? That is why conservative think tanks and gatherings are needed.

A mature and courageous culture war must explain why freedom collapses without responsibility, why ecology without measure tips into planned economy, why migration without borders overwhelms the welfare state, why family is more than a private matter, why nation enables democratic solidarity, why religion is not merely backwardness but a source of meaning and why authority does not automatically mean oppression.

Conservatives do not automatically begin to win as soon as they wage a culture war. They win only when they conduct that culture war at a high level.

Gramsci remains the best teacher here. Intellectual leadership comes before political majorities. Whoever creates concepts, milieus and institutions changes the climate in which politics can take shape. An idea must first become plausible before it can become effective.

That is precisely where the opportunity for a conservative counter-movement lies.