Claiming ‘MyVoice’ during the global moment of democracy: prefigurative politics and post-recession activism in postsocialist Europe

Following the 2008 financial crisis, grassroots movements across the globe called for systemic change and sought to reimagine democratic participation. While protests in Eastern and Central Europe have rarely been included in debates about post-recession movements, this article offers a new reading of their significance for theorizing contemporary activism in the region. Drawing on radical democratic perspectives, it argues that rather than solely criticising their governments for the unfulfilled promises of liberal transition, grassroots mobilisations – such as the Latvian digital participation platform MyVoice – sought to prefigure alternative political realities. Founded in 2011 amid a continuing economic and political crisis in the country, the platform instituted a new form of citizen participation. The article advances a constitutive and conceptual reading of prefiguration, where it is not (solely) defined by opposition to existing political systems but by the capacity to reshape their meanings. By examining how existing notions of democracy were recast by MyVoice, the article challenges the dominant analytical divide between non-formal activism and institutional politics in the region. Prefiguration allows to capture democratising potential of social movements, particularly when they do not fall within the binaries of success and failure as well as existing frameworks of state and civil society.