Europe is currently facing several major crises underpinned by economic stresses, migration pressure, cultural shifts, climate change, and geopolitical tensions resulting from the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Even if Europe recovers from this multiplicity of crises, it will unlikely re-emerge in the familiar political and socio-cultural form, which imbues the current situation with the characteristics of an interregnum – a transitional period between the old and new orders. Antonio Gramsci described the interregnum of his own time as a period in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. Today, European liberal democracies try to navigate the interregnum by mitigating the effects of both the transitional period and the perceived new order. With the interregnum, liberal democracy faces one internal and two external challenges. First, liberalism seems to lack pathos to lay the ideological groundwork for a new order. Second, the interregnum has a carnivalesque (in Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms) nature, which, however, instead of being a temporary liberation from the established order and thus functioning as a rite of symbolic socio-political renewal, keeps on continuously revolving around subversion and contestation of the old prevailing truths. Third, while the liberal-democratic consensus still holds, it is being defied by right-wing populists (most notably in Hungary and Slovakia) who imagine a return of an old Europe thus ending the interregnum by the restoration of the old order.