by Erika Matic – 33 years old, deeply tired, and apparently living through the soft launch of authoritarianism
This Saturday, thousands of people will walk through Zagreb to celebrate life.
Which is beautiful, honestly. We should celebrate life. Birthdays. Children. Long lunches. Functional institutions. The feeling of not bleeding out in a hospital parking lot because politicians wanted to role-play morality through legislation.
Unfortunately, this particular “celebration of life” comes with a small administrative detail: They would also like women to have fewer rights.
Again.
And not in the subtle, “we’re just asking questions” way. No. This year, the March for Life has finally stopped dressing the mannequin and said the quiet part out loud: abortion should be illegal.
Refreshing, in a way. There’s something almost admirable about ideological honesty. Like a horror movie villain finally removing the mask after two hours of pretending to be “concerned about family values.”
Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that banning abortion absolutely does not stop abortions. It just changes who survives them.
The Extremely Pro-Life Tradition of Letting Women Die
One of the strangest political rebrands of modern history is calling policies “pro-life” while women literally die under them.
In Poland, women died because doctors were too afraid of prison sentences to intervene during catastrophic pregnancies. Imagine being medically trained for a decade only to stand next to a dying patient thinking: “Legally, I may need to wait until she is septic enough.”
What a beautiful civilisation we’ve built.
And America (always committed to turning dystopia into export culture) has been rapidly proving that if you terrorise doctors hard enough, hospitals start functioning like hostage negotiations.
- Women with non-viable pregnancies.
- Women denied urgent care.
- Women sent home bleeding because medical staff now need legal teams to interpret uteruses.
Land of the free. Home of the extremely conditional emergency treatment.
And while all this unfolds, the same political movements responsible for these laws continue speaking about “protecting women” the way an arsonist speaks about fire safety.
The New Fascism Comes With Branding
People hear the word fascism and imagine dramatic visuals.
- Uniforms.
- Boots.
- Black-and-white documentaries narrated by British men with serious voices.
But modern fascism doesn’t arrive looking like history class. It arrives looking like content.
- TikToks.
- Podcasts.
- Flags sold as lifestyle accessories.
- Politicians smiling beside children while quietly removing rights from their future.
It arrives wrapped in words like tradition, security, nation, values.
And slowly, almost politely, it begins reorganising who deserves autonomy and who exists mainly as a biological support system for ideology.
- Women become incubators.
- Migrants become threats.
- Trans people become moral panic.
- Journalists become enemies.
- Artists become parasites.
- Minorities become “provocations.”
- And suddenly entire societies are spending more energy discussing whose existence is offensive than why nobody under 35 can afford an apartment.
Very efficient, honestly.
Nothing unites economically anxious populations faster than giving them someone weaker to blame. America perfected this business model years ago.
Donald Trump (a man who somehow turned public scandals into collectible merchandise) built an entire political religion out of resentment, spectacle, and convincing ordinary people that billionaires in red hats were personally fighting for them.
Which is impressive branding. Because nothing says “working-class revolution” quite like tax cuts for the ultra-rich and a podcast billionaire explaining masculinity from a private jet.
Meanwhile, Gaza burns, civilians die in horrifying numbers, and global politics increasingly resemble a group chat run by emotionally unstable men with military budgets.
But don’t worry. The real danger is apparently drag queens reading books.
Croatia: Small Country, Big Regression
And Croatia, naturally, watches all of this and thinks: “Yes. Let’s import the worst parts immediately.”
We are currently speedrunning ideological decay while pretending it’s patriotism.
Swastikas on walls?
Normal.
“Kill a Serb” graffiti?
Boys being boys.
Ustasha chants in stadiums?
Football atmosphere.
Military propaganda aimed at children?
Educational content.
The Croatian Army now has TikTok. Which feels less like national defense and more like the beginning of a dystopian Netflix series where a government tries to recruit teenagers using trending audio and drone footage. “POV: you just enlisted for the homeland”
Meanwhile, people making appeals of conscience are treated like disappointing side characters who refused to participate in the reboot of Balkan Hunger Games.
Because apparently, in a country hemorrhaging young people, low wages, and functional healthcare staff, the urgent priority is ensuring everyone becomes emotionally available for war preparation.
Very stable society behavior.
The Performance of Strength
That’s the part that unsettles me most. Not the obvious extremists. Extremists are easy to identify. They usually arrive carrying torches or podcast equipment.
It’s the normalisation.
The casualness.
The way cruelty slowly becomes administrative.
How societies gradually start treating empathy like weakness and aggression like realism. How people begin accepting humiliation, discrimination, surveillance, and dehumanisation as “just the way things are now.”
And if you point this out, someone inevitably says: “Oh come on. This isn’t fascism.”
Of course not.
- And climate collapse is just warm weather.
- And militarisation is just discipline.
- And removing rights is just protecting tradition.
- And censorship is just accountability.
- And fear is just patriotism with branding.
Everything sounds harmless when language launders it first.
The Soft Part Hidden Inside the Rage
This Saturday is my 33rd birthday. Which feels deeply inconsiderate timing from the universe, honestly.
Because there is something emotionally strange about raising a daughter while watching parts of the world become aggressively nostalgic for authoritarianism.
You suddenly notice everything differently.
- The rhetoric.
- The cruelty.
- The dehumanisation disguised as morality.
- The casual way people discuss whose rights should become negotiable.
And underneath all the satire, underneath the sarcasm and exhaustion and jokes, there is just one very ordinary human feeling: I want better than this for her.
- Not perfection.
- Not utopia.
- Just a world where fear is not policy.
- Where healthcare is not ideology.
- Where empathy is not political weakness.
- Where human rights do not depend on election cycles and religious lobbying.
A world where my daughter grows up learning that her body belongs to her before it belongs to the state.
Which suddenly feels like an incredibly ambitious request.
Still.
I’ll make a wish anyway.
Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that authoritarian movements survive on exhaustion. On people becoming too tired, too cynical, too overwhelmed to resist the slow normalisation of cruelty.
And despite everything – the marches, the propaganda, the flags, the fear campaigns, the men aggressively podcasting about civilisation collapsing because women can vote – I still refuse to believe this is the best humanity can do.
Even now.
Especially now.
Erika Matic writes about modern absurdity, political theatre, Balkan contradictions, and the emotional experience of raising a child while democracy quietly develops concerning new hobbies. She believes fascism rarely arrives screaming, usually arrives branded, and almost always insists it’s here to protect you.
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