Politics & Power Quote by Elfriede Jelinek

A chill runs through Jelinek's line because it treats "socially acceptable" not as a benign label but as the state-approved stamp that makes brutality feel like common sense. The verb choice matters: the government doesn't "support" the right, it makes it acceptable, as if permission itself is a kind of cultural engineering. The target isn't only right-wing policy; it's the slippery collaboration between power and atmosphere, the way institutions don't just pass laws but tune the moral weather.

Jelinek, writing out of Austria's postwar amnesia and the recurring normalization of nationalist rhetoric in European democracies, understands how easily the "right" returns wearing a suit. Her theatre is famously allergic to comforting narratives, and this sentence performs that allergy: it's compact, cynical, and accusatory, with "once again" doing the heavy lifting. Those two words imply a cycle the audience should recognize, a historical rerun where the public pretends it's seeing something new.

The subtext is that ideology doesn't win only at the ballot box; it wins at the dinner table, in media framing, in the casual laugh that turns a slur into a joke. "The right" here is less a party than a permission structure, and the government is cast as the broker of that permission, laundering extremity into respectability.

The sting is that the quote indicts not just leaders but the society eager for the alibi. If the right is "made" acceptable, someone is relieved to accept it.