Protestors in Vilnius (October 5, 2025) | Mykolas Juodelė / Rights reserved
Recent developments in Lithuanian politics have produced a decisive, immediate, and spontaneous resistance from culture workers in various fields. The formation of a new coalition government led to the populist political project Nemuno Aušra (NA)—headed by the antisemitic politician Remigijus Žemaitaitis—being given control of the Ministry of Culture. Žemaitaitis has been found by Lithuania’s Constitutional Court to have violated his oath of office; he employs conspiratorial rhetoric, draws on resentment politics, and perpetuates antisemitic tropes. Yet in the 2024 elections, his party secured nearly 15 percent of the vote and 20 seats in the parliament. Despite earlier promises by both the winning Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP) and the president Gitanas Nausėda to not do so, they welcomed NA into the coalition. Its participation normalized reactionary (or rather plainly destructive) politics. NA was handed the Ministry of Culture to save the newly formed coalition. This was done as a last-minute swap because the LSDP and the president feared that giving a more “strategic” ministry to an anti-state party might be lethal to the state.
However, this might prove no less lethal a move. It is quite astonishing how the LSDP and the president failed to see the danger, which already spreads as if from a playbook of the political takeovers in Georgia and Slovakia, while the tendencies and tactics employed in election interference in Romania, Moldova, and, at the time of writing, the Czech Republic, more and more converge. Knowing this, and learning from what has happened in other countries, Lithuanian artists, cultural workers, and workers in adjacent fields immediately gathered into an assembly when the new culture minister, Ignotas Adomavičius, was announced, and launched a petition against NA taking over the Ministry of Culture. The first protest happened the same morning that the new minister took his oath of office, along with the rest of the cabinet of ministers. In just a matter of hours the petition had gained more than fifty thousand signatures, which amounts to almost 2 percent of the whole population, and several thousand protesters gathered in front of the presidential palace. The petition opposes giving the Ministry of Culture to NA, and is not aimed against any particular candidate, despite the blatant incompetence of Adomavičius, who, as of October 3, has resigned on the advice of prime minister Inga Ruginienė. Here is why.
The uncanniest case from all the scenarios in the region is that of Slovakia. When Robert Fico’s populist party (also declaring itself social democratic) won a majority in 2023, a coalition was formed with the ultranationalist Slovak National Party, who took over the Ministry of Culture, appointing Martina Šimkovičová, a TV presenter and influencer, to lead it. However, dissatisfaction with her as a person effectively obscured the systemic destruction and destabilization of the entire cultural sector and its institutions. Society laughed at her incompetence and did not see the greater peril, which, after a few months, turned into firings, repressions, funding cuts, and censorship. Šimkovičová was not herself the problem; the plan of taking over the ministry would still have been enacted without her.
The parallels are astonishing, and the situation is only becoming more fraught, with news of drones disrupting airports in many European countries, raising tensions in an attempt to push people into not supporting Ukraine. At the same time, the disclosure of a major disinformation campaign in Moldova shows us just how reckless and far-reaching Russian hybrid warfare has become.
When Lithuania declared independence from the USSR in 1990—the first of all Soviet states to do so—its leading movement (Sąjudis) was largely founded and led by artists and intellectuals working in the field of culture. Hence, in the Lithuanian imaginary, culture is both the site of liberation and the terrain of capture. The legacy which resonates today with the artistic and cultural community as they find themselves defending that field against its political dismantling and repression.
Ideological partisanship matters little here. On the left, we have often felt bitter about the rest of the cultural community for being too apolitical, for being complicitly silent on the genocide in Gaza, and for not joining us in other struggles. A lot of this is true, but the struggle today must be seen as transcending any ideological alignment; for these other issues can only be addressed in a relatively stable political environment, which is now under threat. All these issues will be wiped away if we lose our institutions and the possibility of free discourse. After appointing the new minister of culture, Remigijus Žemaitaitis started to talk about dismantling the Constitutional Court; his larger agenda is to undo what has been built with tremendous effort over the years of independence.
Walter Benjamin famously argued that fascism emerges when social crises are aestheticized, mobilizing spectacle to steal rights and dismantle protections. The contemporary “fascist moment” is described by Ilya Budraitskis as ideologically incoherent, lacking historical continuity, and thriving on arbitrary narratives and images. The takeover of the Ministry of Culture is not about solving any social issues; it is a platform for a new form of aestheticization, one that is, in a way, anaesthetic, bombarding and fracturing civil society in order to dramatize chaos and shut down any political normativity. During his first press conference, Adomavičius (the now–former minister of culture) delivered something like a piece of performance art; with tears in his eyes, he used every opportunity to sow divisive narratives.
In the past, the left used disruption as a weapon against fascism and totalitarian tendencies, and against the complacency of postwar social orders in the west. Critical theory largely treated stability with suspicion. But disruption has long been hijacked by reactionary forces, and even more so by Russia’s long-term disinformation strategies. Adorno’s “F-scale” sought the authoritarian personality in those who desired rigid order, whereas today we see a reversal: Many reactionary voters crave chaos itself and are not committed to particular political goals. What was once a strategy of critique has become an authoritarian ploy.
This marks the dialectical paradox of our current moment. The “order” being attacked by populist and fascist forces is not in fact stable: Liberal democracies are in perpetual crisis—economically, ecologically, and geopolitically. Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics have long weaponized postmodernity against itself, so much so that they have turned it into something else, undermining the existing order not by demanding a new order but by escalating chaos and division. If crisis is not simply an exceptional state but the very form of contemporaneity, as Peter Osborne argues in his Crisis as Form, then crisis is not what disrupts the cultural sphere, but is the very medium through which it is registered, experienced, and fought over.
The above-mentioned assembly announced a “warning strike” for October 5 in which all the supporting institutions including museums, concert halls, opera houses, galleries, cinemas, local culture centers, and libraries, as well as NGOs and private initiatives, organized events and discussions and took to the streets. It marked a form of engagement that is important socially, politically, and aesthetically. Indeed, we respond to fascistization by politicizing art—because art is always political. The slogan of the cultural assembly is: “This may be the last time.” The manifesto declares, among other things: “This may be the last time we are united,” “Believe in community,” and “Speak out loudly for freedom and democracy.”
In his Hegelian fashion, Slavoj Žižek once remarked that Trump’s first election might have been a tactical mistake, i.e., a contingency, but his reelection expressed a historical necessity. Yet this historical necessity does not simply mean fate; history is still made by us, if we can take the responsibility to act. The dialectical knot we are facing today is about whether culture will become the instrument of its own dismantling or act as the vehicle of resistance. We call on our allies to watch closely and support us. It may be the last time, but it does not have to be.
This essay was first published in e-flux Notes, on October 6, 2025. Reprinted with permission.
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