In a little-noticed scene from Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, an Adélie penguin breaks away from its colony and walks toward Antarctica’s interior — away from the ocean, away from food, away from survival, toward the mountains. Herzog watches in disbelief and asks the only rational question: But why?
Nearly two decades later, the clip has gone viral, celebrated online as an emblem of existential rebellion. Yet its deeper meaning is political. Societies do not always collapse through revolution. Sometimes they unravel through something far more dangerous: quiet departure.
That penguin is today’s voter.
For most of modern history, political dissatisfaction produced either reform or revolt. People voted, protested, or overthrew regimes. What political theory failed to anticipate was mass exit, the decision not to fight the system, but to abandon it emotionally and civically. Across Europe, youth participation in elections has dropped to barely one-third among the youngest voters, while fewer than five percent of citizens belong to political parties at all. These are not cyclical fluctuations. They are symptoms of a deeper withdrawal.
The penguin does not lead a rebellion. It does not persuade others. It simply leaves. And that is precisely what terrifies institutions.
Political systems are designed to respond to voice, to pressure, outrage, and demands. They are far less capable of responding to silence. When citizens stop voting, stop trusting, and stop believing that participation yields outcomes, legitimacy erodes without confrontation. Elites may celebrate stability, mistaking the absence of protest for consent, while the foundations quietly weaken.
So, is the penguin insane or heroic? Is the disengaged citizen irresponsible or rational? The uncomfortable answer is that they are both.
History suggests this is how decline actually begins. Late Roman elites did not face barricades; they faced apathy. Soviet citizens did not storm the Kremlin; they stopped believing in it and start believing more in McDonalds. Empires do not always fall because people rise up. They often fall because people stop caring.
Today, this loss of faith is no longer anecdotal. Only a slim majority (57%) of young Europeans believe democracy is the best form of government, and a growing minority openly flirt with authoritarian alternatives. This is not apathy. It is cost–benefit analysis. When institutions appear incapable of renewal, exit becomes logical.
The penguin does not march toward the mountains because it believes in the mountains. It walks because the sea — the place it was meant to go — no longer promises survival. There is something dangerously seductive about exit. Protest is noisy, exhausting, and uncertain. Withdrawal is quiet, elegant, almost aristocratic. It denies the system the one thing it requires above all else: participation.
The tragedy, of course, is that the penguin will not survive its journey. But the real danger is not the fate of the wanderer. It is the fate of the colony that remains behind, still debating policy, still counting votes, still assuming loyalty, unaware that, one by one, its members have already decided to leave.
Democracy rarely dies in revolution. Sometimes it dies in silence, watching its people walk calmly toward the mountains. The question is no longer whether more citizens will follow the penguin but whether the institutions they leave behind will notice before it is too late.
*Grigoris Patsakis is a project manager at ELIAMEP’s Turkey program
This opinion piece has been selected as part of To Vima International Edition’s NextGen Corner, an opinion platform spotlighting original voices from the emerging generation on the issues shaping our time.
