In this commentary for the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Amir Ali examines the resurgence of India’s student-led protests against the Modi government, linking concerns over electoral integrity, institutional independence, and democratic backsliding to the socioeconomic consequences of neoliberalism. Focusing on the Cockroach Janata Party’s mobilization, he explores growing youth disillusionment with political institutions, educational inequalities, and diminishing employment opportunities. Dr. Ali argues that India’s Generation Z must connect its democratic resistance to a broader critique of neoliberal economic policies that have deepened inequality and undermined public goods. Drawing comparative lessons from recent electoral developments in Brazil, Serbia, and the United States, he advocates reclaiming socialism and secularism as complementary foundations for India’s democratic renewal.
India’s young cockroach protesters were back on the streets of New Delhi in early October. This was just a little over two months after the late July showdown with the government that earned the rare resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, when Delhi was experiencing the late-July humidity, occasionally relieved by monsoon showers. The October reemergence of the cockroaches happened when the Delhi weather was becoming milder as the onset of winter approached.
The Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) had called for a protest on October 10 and the Delhi Police, under the direct control of India’s powerful Home Minister Amit Shah, denied permission for the protests. Shah is a close associate of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and has an image as a tough, uncompromising strongman. Events took a more dramatic turn when Abhijit Dipke, founder of the Cockroach Janata Party, along with two of his associates, was arrested as soon as the flight on which they were traveling landed in Delhi. The videos taken on cell phones from inside the plane and then posted on social media showed Delhi police personnel entering the aircraft. This reinforced the impression, now widespread in India, that the government was panicking. As protests were disallowed at the Jantar Mantar protest site in Central Delhi, a mushrooming of protest sites took place, wherever demonstrators found themselves being prevented from moving further by the police.
The Delhi Police’s crackdown on protesters and journalists covering these events was brutal and again reinforced the impression that the Modi government was nervous, increasingly on the back foot and resorting to desperate, knee-jerk measures.
In the previous round in July, young cockroach protesters expressed their frustration at the decrepit state of Indian entrance examinations that in turn was a larger reflection of the moribund state of public education. They targeted the Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, and, as mentioned, were able to extract his resignation. In the October round of protests, they targeted the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar over discontent with the implementation of an extensive electoral roll revision exercise and an overall feeling that he was kowtowing to the Modi government. The demand for Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation has, however, fallen on deaf ears.
Election Commissions Past and Present
The Election Commission of India, for many years before the advent of the Modi government, was a widely respected and fiercely independent institution whose autonomy was ensured through Article 324 of the Indian Constitution. It is headed by two elections commissioners and one Chief Election Commissioner. Some prominent Chief Election Commissioners became well known for their ability to stand up to the government of the day to ensure that no incumbent government had the temerity to bully the Commission. Back in the 1990s, a redoubtable Chief Election Commissioner like T. N. Seshan made his commitment to his constitutional role clear in no uncertain terms.
Less than a decade later, in 2002, the Chief Election Commissioner J. M. Lyngdoh prevented Narendra Modi, who was then Chief Minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat from holding early elections to the Gujarat provincial assembly. This was soon after the vicious communal violence that the state had experienced in the months of March and April that year. Mr. Modi had been accused of not doing enough to control the violence. Lyngdoh’s opposition to holding early elections was premised on the inability of many displaced victims living in refugee camps to vote, and who were likely to do so against Mr. Modi. This led to Mr. Modi mocking the Chief Election Commissioner for preventing the elections from taking place by emphasizing his full name, which is James Michael Lyngdoh. These insinuations invoked Lyngdoh’s Christian identity and reinforced Mr. Modi’s notorious minority baiting. The elections were held later that year, and Mr. Modi won.
More recent Election Commissioners who have resisted the Modi regime, such as Ashok Lavasa in 2019, have found themselves at the receiving end of the government’s ire. The controversial current Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar whose resignation, as mentioned earlier, became the focal point of this round of the cockroach campaign in October, seems far more malleable—indeed, compliant. Suggestions have been made that the Election Commission under him does the Modi government’s bidding, raising a question mark over the fairness of elections. A recent controversial piece of legislation, The Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act 2023 granted effective lifelong immunity for actions that Election Commissioners took in office. The legislation also altered the appointment process. Earlier a three-member committee consisting of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India selected election commissioners. This changed to replace the Chief Justice of India with a Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister, giving the government of the day the decisive upper hand in selecting election commissioners.
One of the most controversial decisions that the Election Commission under Gyanesh Kumar has taken is to conduct the Special Intensive Revision of Rolls (SIR). The first state to conduct this exercise was Bihar in June 2025, just months before provincial assembly elections in that state were to be held in November 2025. The SIR has since been extended to many other parts of the country. The most disturbing aspect of the exercise is the Kafkaesque requirement of documentation where inclusion on the rolls depends on proving that a voter or the voter’s parents’ names figured in a previous electoral exercise conducted over two decades ago. This has led to people frantically looking for documents to ensure their inclusion on the current list by being ‘mapped’ on a two-decade-old list. The result, as has been widely reported, is the deletion and thereby disenfranchisement of 130 million people from the voter roll. More worryingly, the emphasis the Election Commission of India places on sanitized and ‘pure’ voter rolls is indicative of an almost ominous electoral cleansing.
The Indian Express Reported Dissent within the Election Commission
The Indian Express report tended to reinforce questions that had been raised over the conduct of the Election Commission. The Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, had in several widely reported press conferences claimed that he had documentary evidence to back the damning claims he was making about electoral malpractices. The Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar took great umbrage at these attacks.
The Emergence of Youth and Student Leaders
In both the July and October rounds of protests, some prominent youth leaders have emerged. From the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) have emerged its founder Abhijit Dipke, Sourav Das and Ashutosh Ranka. In the more recent round, the President of the left-wing All India Students Association (AISA) Neha Bora, a PhD candidate at New Delhi’s prominent Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), played a very significant role. While many of these protesters were detained and arrested, there were worrying reports of some violent counter protesters to whom the Delhi Police appeared to be turning a blind eye.
With the threat of violence looming, a successful march call was given by Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition and head of India’s main opposition party, the Indian National Congress. The march saw large numbers of people participating on October 12 with no violence. It culminated in the filing of a petition at the Supreme Court of India.
Visible decline and dysfunction have taken hold in constitutional institutions in India like the Election Commission and even the judiciary, especially as the over 12 years of the Modi regime have progressed. India’s youth protests pointed towards this in a tangential sort of way. What they have achieved more centrally, through their irreverence, is to completely puncture the carefully curated image of Prime Minister Modi as a brand name spelling a strong, decisive leadership. This brand image was built up by preventing people from speaking out against him, enforced by a silencing of dissent, which youngsters have nonchalantly shrugged off.
The Future of Youngsters Shortchanged by Past Decades of Neoliberalism
What the cockroach protests have not been able to do, so far, is connect concretely to how the future of youngsters in India, and for that matter across the world, has been shortchanged by past decades of economic neoliberalism. India began resolutely on the path of economic neoliberalism in July 1991 when the finance minister Manmohan Singh, who subsequently became Prime Minister in 2004, announced these policies. These neoliberal economic policies are often referred to as LPG which is an acronym for Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization. These policies have been underway for the past 35 years and there has been a kind of consensus that has developed on them between the Congress and the currently ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Between them, these two parties have ruled for the lion’s share of the past three and a half decades. The Congress was in power for 15 of these 35 years, from 1991 to 1996 and then from 2004 to 2014. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been in power for 18 of these 35 years and this covers the years 1998-1999, followed by 1999-2004 and 2014 to the present. The remaining two years form an interlude between 1996 and 1998 when a series of fractious coalitions tried unsuccessfully to stake out a politics that differed from the Congress and the BJP.
That two-year interlude ended in 1998 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the BJP came to power. The subsequent six years of BJP-led rule revealed how the party accepted the orthodoxy of economic neoliberalism, despite the commitment to a broad Gandhian socialism that found its way into the party’s constitution when it was founded in 1980. The BJP government under Vajpayee combined this new commitment to economic neoliberalism and its traditional Hindu nationalism. For the purposes of running and maintaining the coalition that he led, Vajpayee, reputed for wearing an emollient ‘liberal’ mask, was willing to put the central elements of the Hindu nationalist agenda on the back burner.
Keeping in mind the BJP’s adoption of economic neoliberalism, combined with a vague background commitment to Gandhian socialism, one notes something similar in the Congress. Fifteen years prior to its announcement of the 1991 neoliberal economic policies, the Congress back in 1976 under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, during the Emergency that clamped down on constitutional fundamental rights, had inserted, through the 42nd Constitutional Amendment, the word socialism into the Preamble of the Constitution alongside secularism. Both the Congress and the BJP have embraced economic neoliberalism while retaining an uneasy historical commitment to socialism—a contradictory and problematic legacy. This contradiction is more troubling in the case of the Congress. At the same time the BJP’s commitment to economic neoliberalism is far more aggressive. This article concludes by suggesting that the Congress under Rahul Gandhi will have to rescue and redeem that troubled legacy of socialism, if it wants to envision the contours of a post-Modi India.
Before arriving at that conclusion, it is important to do a quick assessment of how the past decades of neoliberalism have shortchanged the future of India’s youth who are potentially at the forefront of political change today. These past three decades of economic neoliberalism have yielded, for at least two decades, a considerable degree of economic growth. Throughout the decade of the 2000s with the BJP coalition under Vajpayee, succeeded by the Congress-led coalition, the Indian economy did grow at significant rates. Such growth over the 2000s also led to an uptick in employment and this was a significant reason for the Congress Party coming back to power in 2009 with an even more comfortable majority.
This is where the story of India’s economic growth under neoliberalism becomes complicated. The world economy was being roiled by the headwinds of the 2008 global financial crisis, just as the Congress was returned to power in 2009. From 2010 onwards, a series of exaggerated corruption allegations were made against the Congress government that were understandably amplified by the opposition BJP that was eager to come back to power. The BJP did come to power in 2014 with a hefty majority under Narendra Modi that ended almost two and a half decades of coalition era politics in India.
India’s Jobless Growth and Gen Z’s Revolt Against Neoliberalism
India’s growth story continued in the first years of the Modi government, but sceptics started pointing to the jobless nature of this growth. The most infamous aspect of the ending of India’s growth story was the controversial decision to demonetize high value currency notes that PM Modi surprisingly and shockingly announced on November 8, 2016, almost exactly ten years ago. The compliant electronic media, that has become notorious for never asking questions of the Modi government, sycophantically hailed it as a master stroke. The economist Jean Drèze offered a more sobering assessment that this was like shooting at and deflating the tires of a racing car. The outcome of this would be an economy that would careen out of control and, in doing so, jeopardize the careers of India’s Gen Z who were growing up and about to enter a job market that would prove to be non-existent for them.
India’s Gen Z protesters were born between the years 1997 and 2012. In other words, they were born between those years when India’s liberalization polices were being consolidated and then yielding whatever returns they had to, in terms of growth clocked throughout the decade of the 2000s. As Gen Z has grown up and increasingly entered the job market, the very same economic neoliberalism that was unfolding against the backdrop of their childhoods has condemned them to a bleak future of little or no prospects. India’s economic neoliberalism that was toasted and celebrated in India and across the world during their childhoods has mortgaged, foreclosed and shortchanged their future.
This is where the creative potential of Gen Z protests needs to be harnessed. These protests, if they are to have a meaningful impact, on the future of Indian politics and its redemption from the vagaries of the neoliberal market, must connect the dots of the orthodoxy of economic neoliberalism to the precarity of their future.
There is no reason why these obvious dots cannot be connected. A few weeks after the October cockroach protests, election results in Serbia showed how two years of student protests could topple the twelve-year-old government of Aleksandar Vucic. Very shortly after that, the US midterm elections revealed a rout of Trump’s Republicans. The Democrats’ blue tsunami was facilitated by a clear movement of the democrats to the left and the success of numerous Democratic Socialist and progressive candidates like Abdul el Sayed who ran for the senate seat from Michigan. El-Sayed has called for universal health care and health as a public good rather than the commoditized private good that it has been for so many years with the pervasive private health insurance market in the US.
In India health care and the role of the private sector is a ticking time bomb. It has not impacted the Gen Z youngsters, who may, however, be perceptive enough to see its impact on their parents and certainly grandparents. Indian youngsters between age 15-29 constitute a whopping 371 million and were once lauded by PM Modi as a ‘demographic dividend.’ They now look almost certainly poised to turn against him.
Conclusion: Redeeming Socialism, Secularism and Democracy
In US politics it seems that the word socialism has suddenly stopped being the unspeakable blasphemy it once was. Future politics in India, the US and many countries across the world may have to be built upon a viable socialism that combines itself with a meaningful democracy. The only way democracy can prevent itself from being hollowed out is to move away from the congruence that has been maliciously created between democracy and the free market.
The global backsliding of democracy is connected to the extension of neoliberal markets for goods like healthcare, education and housing. Gen Z protests will have to foster the overlap between democracy and socialist policies that will create public goods in healthcare, housing and education and most importantly, create employment. The redistributive presence of public goods can reduce widening inequality and sustain flourishing democracies in the 21st century, the opposite of democratic backsliding witnessed over the last decade. The election results in Brazil, where Lula defeated Flávio Bolsonaro, as well as those in Serbia and the US midterms are promising as they halt far-right populism. However, democratic waves can be notoriously fickle.
As far as India is concerned, one way of consolidating democracy is to go back to the year 1976, much before the current Gen Z was born and when some of their parents may have been toddlers and indeed may not even have been born. That year the Indira Gandhi regime during the Emergency wrote into the constitution’s Preamble the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular,’ as mentioned earlier, a sordid legacy. India’s socialism has never been secular enough, as its socialist leaders, notably Jay Prakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia and George Fernandes ushered in right-wing Hindutva nationalism in the name of claiming some notion of authentic Indian indigeneity
India’s secularists, many of them urbane liberals enthusiastically welcomed the role of neoliberal ‘free’ markets. The future of India’s young population may depend on whether its political institutions can reclaim and reinvigorate the principles of socialism and secularism. That would have to begin by realizing that India’s socialism was never secular enough and that her secularism was never socialist enough.
In an exclusive interview with the ECPS, Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević of the University of Belgrade examines Serbia’s student-led electoral breakthrough and its implications for populism, competitive authoritarianism, and democratic renewal. Following the October 25, 2026, defeat of Aleksandar Vučić’s ruling coalition, Professor Vladisavljević argues that the Students’ List represents an inclusive democratic movement rather than another manifestation of anti-establishment populism. Highlighting the movement’s commitment to political pluralism, minority inclusion, and the rule of law, he contrasts its grassroots mobilization with Vučić’s personalized authoritarianism, clientelism, and media manipulation. Yet he cautions that electoral victory alone cannot guarantee democratic consolidation. Serbia’s enduring challenge is translating popular resistance into accountable institutions, independent journalism, and sustainable democratic governance.
Serbia stands at a historic crossroads. Nearly two years of student-led protests, sparked by the November 2024 Novi Sad railway-station tragedy, culminated in the October 25, 2026, electoral defeat of Aleksandar Vučić’s ruling coalition. Yet the transition from authoritarian rule to democratic consolidation remains uncertain. Beyond the electoral breakthrough lies a fundamental question: Does Serbia’s student-led movement represent another manifestation of anti-establishment populism, or does it offer a genuinely inclusive alternative to personalized authoritarian rule?
In an exclusive interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS),Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević, who teaches comparative and Serbian politics at the University of Belgrade and is a former President of the Serbian Political Science Association, examines the relationship between populism, authoritarianism, popular resistance, and democratic renewal. His research encompasses democratization, social movements, nationalism, ethnic conflict, and political communication.
Challenging interpretations that equate popular mobilization with populism, Professor Vladisavljević argues that Serbia’s student movement is fundamentally different from the exclusionary politics associated with Vučić’s personalized rule. “I wouldn’t describe this as an anti-establishment mobilization. The target was Vučić’s authoritarian, personalist rule,” he explains. Rather than rejecting democratic institutions, the movement seeks their restoration through political pluralism, institutional accountability, and the rule of law.
Professor Vladisavljević emphasizes that the movement’s organizational foundations distinguish it from conventional populist mobilization. Unlike Serbia’s democratic breakthrough in October 2000, when political parties dominated the opposition, the recent transformation placed students, universities, and their broader social allies at the center of political resistance. Its explicit goals, he explains, are “democratic renewal and the protection of political pluralism.”
The interview also examines how Vučić’s populist appeals gradually gave way to entrenched clientelism, media manipulation, and institutional abuse. Reflecting on the regime’s declining capacity to mobilize supporters voluntarily, Professor Vladisavljević concludes: “That tells you a great deal about how thin these populist appeals were throughout.”
Equally significant is the movement’s inclusive approach toward Serbia’s national minorities. Cooperation between Serbian and Bosniak students, particularly across Belgrade and Novi Pazar, has opened possibilities for bottom-up democratic integration, challenging longstanding patterns of ethnonational division.
Nevertheless, Professor Vladisavljević cautions that defeating authoritarianism does not automatically guarantee democratic consolidation. The Students’ List must transform its horizontal, deliberative movement into functioning representative institutions while safeguarding independent journalism, reforming the security sector, and dismantling corruption. As he warns, “short-term efforts obviously won’t be sufficient.”
Ultimately, Serbia’s experience raises broader questions for democratic movements confronting competitive authoritarianism elsewhere: whether inclusive civic mobilization can overcome personalized rule without reproducing its exclusionary logic, and whether electoral victory can become the foundation of lasting democratic transformation.
In an exclusive interview with the ECPS, Professor Mukulika Banerjee of the London School of Economics and Political Science warns that India’s controversial electoral-roll revisions risk transforming political citizenship into an instrument of exclusion. Describing the reported deletion of approximately 130 million voters as part of “the biggest assault on India’s electoral system that independent India has seen,” she highlights the disproportionate vulnerability of Muslims, Dalits, women, and other marginalized communities. Professor Banerjee examines how student-led protests are challenging democratic backsliding, political intimidation, and Hindu majoritarianism while forging broader alliances around electoral integrity. Drawing on her scholarship on everyday democracy, she argues that protecting political equality requires sustained civic participation, institutional accountability, vigilance, and collective democratic action.
India is witnessing a significant wave of youth-led protests challenging unemployment, educational injustice, and the erosion of democratic accountability. The emerging Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has expanded its mobilization from examination irregularities to contested electoral-roll revisions, raising fundamental questions about political representation, citizenship, and the resilience of democracy under Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.
In an interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Mukulika Banerjee, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, offers a critical assessment of India’s democratic trajectory. Drawing on her influential scholarship on electoral participation, everyday citizenship, democratic culture, and the social foundations of political life, she examines how controversies surrounding electoral integrity threaten the principles of political equality and inclusive citizenship.
At the heart of Professor Banerjee’s analysis is the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and reports of approximately 130 million deletions. Describing the controversy as “the biggest assault on India’s electoral system that independent India has seen,” she warns that the country’s historically inclusive electoral framework risks becoming an instrument of political exclusion. According to Professor Banerjee, the reported deletions have disproportionately affected Muslims, Dalits, indigenous communities, women, and other socially disadvantaged groups.
For Professor Banerjee, the consequences extend far beyond electoral competition. India’s democratic achievement has rested on the equalizing power of the ballot, particularly for citizens experiencing profound socioeconomic hierarchies. As she explains, “This equalizing power of the vote, of political equality, which is a very basic democratic right, is highly valued in India.” She cautions that electoral-roll revisions could undermine precisely this foundation of citizenship, transforming the right to vote from a universal democratic entitlement into a mechanism of selective political inclusion.
The interview also explores the emergence of student-led resistance as a potential counterweight to institutional democratic backsliding. Professor Banerjee argues that young protesters have challenged a pervasive climate of intimidation while bringing opposition parties, farmers’ unions, and civil society organizations together around electoral integrity. Their mobilization, she suggests, demonstrates that “in order to live in a democracy, you have to be an active citizen.”
Beyond India, Professor Banerjee situates these developments within broader debates over authoritarian populism, crony capitalism, Hindu majoritarianism, and transnational democratic resistance. Her analysis connects electoral exclusion to economic inequality and the erosion of institutional accountability.
Ultimately, Professor Banerjee’s warning is also a call for sustained democratic engagement. Drawing on her metaphor of democracy as a plant requiring constant care, she concludes: “In order to cultivate democracy, you need vigilance, you need patience, you need hard work, and you need hope.”
In an interview with the ECPS, Dr. Filip Balunović, Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, examines Serbia’s student-led democratic transformation following the October 2026 elections. Arguing that the Students’ List’s parliamentary victory represents more than regime change, he declares that “the idea of a new society has won.” Dr. Balunović explores how a leaderless movement transformed collective grief into political power through nonviolent resistance, grassroots mobilization, and direct democratic practices. He also analyzes how a left-wing populist strategy challenged Vučić’s authoritarian rule while overcoming ideological and ethnic divisions. Yet he cautions that dismantling entrenched oligarchic networks and sustaining participatory democracy remain crucial challenges for Serbia’s democratic future.
Serbia has witnessed an extraordinary political transformation. What began as student-led protests following the deadly Novi Sad railway station collapse in November 2024 evolved into a nationwide movement challenging Aleksandar Vučić’s populist authoritarianism, institutional capture, and entrenched patronage networks. Through decentralized organization, civil disobedience, and unprecedented civic mobilization, students transformed public indignation into electoral power, securing a parliamentary majority in October 2026 and ending fourteen years of SNS dominance. Yet profound questions remain about democratic institutionalization and the durability of this transformation.
In an interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Filip Balunović, Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, and Assistant Professor at Singidunum University’s Faculty of Media and Communications, examines the democratic significance of Serbia’s student-led political transformation. Moving beyond conventional interpretations of electoral alternation, Dr. Balunović argues that the movement represents a more fundamental challenge to personalized authoritarianism and established political representation. As he observes, “This is not merely a regime change,” emphasizing that the movement’s unprecedented success demonstrates that “the idea of a new society has won.”
Central to this transformation, Dr. Balunović explains, was the movement’s capacity to turn collective mourning into political agency. Following the Novi Sad tragedy, students transformed grief into nationwide resistance through nonviolent mobilization, university occupations, grassroots engagement, and direct democratic decision-making. Their leaderless organization challenged conventional assumptions about political leadership, demonstrating what he describes as “an enviable level of democratic maturity.”
The movement also reconfigured the boundaries of political contestation. According to Dr. Balunović, “right-wing populism was challenged through a left-wing populist strategy,” as students mobilized citizens across ideological, ethnic, and religious divisions. Unlike established opposition parties, they reached neglected communities and built political trust through participatory practices rather than charismatic leadership. Their achievement, he suggests, extended beyond electoral victory: “The students transformed grief into joy,” cultivating a collective imagination of a different democratic future.
Nevertheless, the transition from mobilization to governance presents formidable challenges. Entrenched oligarchic networks, institutional capture, and the potential reproduction of personalized leadership threaten the durability of democratic change. Dr. Balunović emphasizes that the movement’s direct democratic practices must continue to shape political accountability beyond the elections.
In sum, Serbia’s experience raises broader questions about democratic renewal and anti-authoritarian resistance. While cautioning that “one size doesn’t fit all contexts,” Dr. Balunović suggests that the Serbian experiment could inspire societies confronting similar challenges. Its significance lies not only in defeating an entrenched ruling party but also in demonstrating that democratic alternatives can emerge through collective political practice, civic solidarity, and the willingness to imagine a different society.
In this commentary for the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Andrew Karch of the University of Minnesota analyzes the sweeping Democratic victories in the November 3, 2026, US midterm elections and their implications for American democracy. Examining the party’s gains in Congress, governorships, and state legislatures, Professor Karch identifies economic dissatisfaction, immigration controversies, and concerns about corruption as central drivers of the electoral shift. He emphasizes the significance of state-level Democratic trifectas as institutional counterweights to the Trump administration and potential laboratories for policy innovation. Yet he cautions that electoral rejection of Republicans does not necessarily constitute endorsement of a coherent Democratic agenda. Governing effectively will require overcoming intraparty divisions, institutional constraints, and presidential opposition ahead of 2028.
By Andrew Karch*
Midterm elections in the United States are often described as referendums on the president and their party, and sometimes American voters deliver messages that the chief executive would rather not entertain. The Republican Party received what President George W. Bush famously called a “thumping” in 2006; four years later, President Barack Obama lamented the “shellacking” his party suffered at the polls. Those midterm setbacks for the incumbent president’s party are only two of the many precedents for the blue tidal wave that swept through American politics in 2026. The midterm results empowered Democratic officeholders at both the national and the state level, placing American democracy on a new and uncertain path for at least the next two years.
The scope of the Democratic victory is most obvious at the national level, where the party won control of both houses of Congress by impressive margins. Results are still being tabulated, but the Democrats will control between 253 and 260 (out of 435) seats in the US House. Overcoming mid-decade redistricting in several states that was intended to act as a drag on their performance, the party notched victories over Republican incumbents in Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere on its way to winning its largest House majority since 2009. Democrats are on track to win a 13-point margin in the total popular vote for the House, a remarkable margin that hasn’t been seen in a midterm election since 1974.
A similar story prevailed in the US Senate, where Democrats overcame what was thought to be an unfavorable map by flipping at least seven seats. Democratic victories in Iowa, Kansas (which elected its first Democratic senator in nearly a century), Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas will give the party at least 54 seats, including the two independents who caucus with the Democrats. Undecided elections in Alaska and Mississippi might give the party 56 seats (out of 100) in the chamber.
The new Democratic caucuses in the House and Senate will be geographically and ideologically diverse, reflecting the national scope of the wave that swept Republicans out of power. Nationally, nearly every demographic group shifted in a Democratic direction from 2024 to 2026, with especially dramatic shifts among Hispanic, non-college-educated, and young voters. In addition, Black voters made up a larger proportion of the electorate in the Deep South as they mobilized in response to the Supreme Court decision in Callais v. Louisiana which struck down what remained of the Voting Rights Act and facilitated state-level efforts to eliminate majority-minority congressional districts.
The results represent a repudiation of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. They signal voter unhappiness about the current direction of the country, driven by at least three issues. The first issue is inflation and the rising cost of living. Affordability was top of mind for many voters. For instance, the cost of gas and diesel fuel affects Americans in rural, suburban, and urban areas alike. Although inflation helped President Trump win election in 2024, his support was undercut by the perception that his policies—including an unpopular war in Iran and tariffs—exacerbated it. Following their resounding defeat, many Republicans pointed to the war and its economic impact as major culprits.
The second issue is immigration. Many voters recoiled at the confrontational tactics that the Trump administration used to pursue its deportation objectives. Its operations in cities, suburban neighborhoods, and rural job sites across the country made immigration a divisive and emotionally charged issue. High-profile violence, including the deaths of two protesting US citizens in Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge, sparked widespread opposition. The politics of immigration took a very sharp U-turn, most notably as heavily Hispanic counties along the southern border and across the country shifted dramatically back toward the Democrats.
The third issue is corruption and a broader sense that the American economy is “rigged” to the benefit of the rich and powerful. As Americans struggled with high prices and worried about their financial futures, the president’s family and many well-connected individuals were doing extraordinarily well. Many Democratic candidates linked corruption to the rising cost of living, making this argument at a time when a sense of financial unease reaches across party lines. Two manifestations of this unease are resentment toward “Big Tech” and strong, bipartisan disapproval of data centers. American voters in ten states considered 41 data-center-related ballot measures in 2026, and they backed restrictions or rejected pro-development proposals in 40 of them.
With strong Democratic majorities in the US House and Senate, Congress will no doubt embrace its constitutional obligation to serve as a check on the executive branch. Oversight hearings and investigations will be a large part of the congressional agenda after Republican majorities neglected these duties for the past two years. Less certain, however, is the mix of policies that the new majorities will pursue. While American voters thoroughly rejected the president and the Republican Party, the midterms should not be interpreted as an endorsement of a specific Democratic platform. While emphasizing affordability during the campaign, Democrats advanced an economically populist vision that includes pushing back on the Iran War, tariffs, and cuts to Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid. Turning this broad vision into concrete policy accomplishments will require intraparty agreement among different factions in the Democratic coalition, and even then, Democrats will need to overcome the Senate filibuster and President Trump’s veto pen.
It is therefore especially important not to overlook the seismic political shifts that occurred at the state level. While most media coverage and public attention focused on the battle for control of Congress, the 2026 midterms also featured over 6,100 state legislative contests, 39 gubernatorial races, and a slew of additional elections to state executive and judicial posts. The blue tidal wave that swept through Congress also led to massive changes in statehouses across the country. After flipping governors’ offices in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas, Democrats will hold more governorships than Republicans for the first time since 2010. If Democratic candidates in Alaska and Kansas maintain their leads in the two gubernatorial races that have not yet been called, there will be 30 Democratic governors in all. State legislative elections also produced dramatic changes. Twelve chambers flipped from Republican to Democratic control. Shifts in party control occurred in Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere.
Thus, the 2026 midterms produced a new political landscape in the states. One way to understand this new landscape is through the lens of “trifectas” in which a single party holds the governorship and both legislative chambers. New Democratic trifectas will be in place in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Arizona trifecta represents a seismic shift because Democrats had not controlled a single legislative chamber in the state since the 1990s. With the next presidential contest less than two years away and given the states’ central constitutional role in administering national elections, it is worth noting that the list of Democratic trifectas includes several states that have been closely contested in recent presidential campaigns. Democrats also broke former Republican trifectas in Georgia, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Texas in the 2026 midterms. The Democratic sweep of statewide races in Texas, where they had not won a statewide election in decades, was a tectonic upset.
Like the congressional results, the blue tidal wave at the state level is significant for multiple reasons. First, like Congress, the states will serve as an institutional counterweight against the Trump administration. In recent years, the states have been a site of resistance against national policies and priorities. Republican state officials have pushed back against Democratic presidents, and Democratic state officials have done the same thing whenever a Republican has been in the White House. For example, the second Trump administration has faced approximately 100 multistate lawsuits thus far, and that number is likely to grow. Second, the states, especially those governed by trifectas, will serve as policy laboratories. Even if divided government leads to gridlock in Washington, DC, many state governments will address emerging issues like affordability, data centers, and the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI). Policy developments at the state level may play an important role in the 2028 campaign as the two parties seek to build a case that they can be trusted to address the issues that have left so many Americans frustrated with the status quo.
(*) Andrew Karch is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, where he has taught since 2010. His research centers on the political determinants of public policy choices in the contemporary United States, with a special focus on federalism and state politics. His most recent book, Responsive States: Federalism and American Public Policy, is co-authored with Shanna Rose of Claremont McKenna College and was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. His previous book, Early Start: Preschool Politics in the United States (University of Michigan Press), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013. He is also the author of Democratic Laboratories: Policy Diffusion among the American States (University of Michigan Press, 2007). He is currently serving on the editorial boards of State Politics & Policy Quarterly, Policy Studies Journal, and Publius: The Journal of Federalism. He is also a fellow of the Center for the Study of Federalism, and he previously served two terms as Chair of the Executive Council of the Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations Section of the APSA.
In an exclusive interview with the ECPS, Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević of the University of Belgrade examines Serbia’s student-led electoral breakthrough and its implications for populism, competitive authoritarianism, and democratic renewal. Following the October 25, 2026, defeat of Aleksandar Vučić’s ruling coalition, Professor Vladisavljević argues that the Students’ List represents an inclusive democratic movement rather than another manifestation of anti-establishment populism. Highlighting the movement’s commitment to political pluralism, minority inclusion, and the rule of law, he contrasts its grassroots mobilization with Vučić’s personalized authoritarianism, clientelism, and media manipulation. Yet he cautions that electoral victory alone cannot guarantee democratic consolidation. Serbia’s enduring challenge is translating popular resistance into accountable institutions, independent journalism, and sustainable democratic governance.
Serbia stands at a historic crossroads. Nearly two years of student-led protests, sparked by the November 2024 Novi Sad railway-station tragedy, culminated in the October 25, 2026, electoral defeat of Aleksandar Vučić’s ruling coalition. Yet the transition from authoritarian rule to democratic consolidation remains uncertain. Beyond the electoral breakthrough lies a fundamental question: Does Serbia’s student-led movement represent another manifestation of anti-establishment populism, or does it offer a genuinely inclusive alternative to personalized authoritarian rule?
In an exclusive interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS),Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević, who teaches comparative and Serbian politics at the University of Belgrade and is a former President of the Serbian Political Science Association, examines the relationship between populism, authoritarianism, popular resistance, and democratic renewal. His research encompasses democratization, social movements, nationalism, ethnic conflict, and political communication.
Challenging interpretations that equate popular mobilization with populism, Professor Vladisavljević argues that Serbia’s student movement is fundamentally different from the exclusionary politics associated with Vučić’s personalized rule. “I wouldn’t describe this as an anti-establishment mobilization. The target was Vučić’s authoritarian, personalist rule,” he explains. Rather than rejecting democratic institutions, the movement seeks their restoration through political pluralism, institutional accountability, and the rule of law.
Professor Vladisavljević emphasizes that the movement’s organizational foundations distinguish it from conventional populist mobilization. Unlike Serbia’s democratic breakthrough in October 2000, when political parties dominated the opposition, the recent transformation placed students, universities, and their broader social allies at the center of political resistance. Its explicit goals, he explains, are “democratic renewal and the protection of political pluralism.”
The interview also examines how Vučić’s populist appeals gradually gave way to entrenched clientelism, media manipulation, and institutional abuse. Reflecting on the regime’s declining capacity to mobilize supporters voluntarily, Professor Vladisavljević concludes: “That tells you a great deal about how thin these populist appeals were throughout.”
Equally significant is the movement’s inclusive approach toward Serbia’s national minorities. Cooperation between Serbian and Bosniak students, particularly across Belgrade and Novi Pazar, has opened possibilities for bottom-up democratic integration, challenging longstanding patterns of ethnonational division.
Nevertheless, Professor Vladisavljević cautions that defeating authoritarianism does not automatically guarantee democratic consolidation. The Students’ List must transform its horizontal, deliberative movement into functioning representative institutions while safeguarding independent journalism, reforming the security sector, and dismantling corruption. As he warns, “short-term efforts obviously won’t be sufficient.”
Ultimately, Serbia’s experience raises broader questions for democratic movements confronting competitive authoritarianism elsewhere: whether inclusive civic mobilization can overcome personalized rule without reproducing its exclusionary logic, and whether electoral victory can become the foundation of lasting democratic transformation.
Here is our interview with Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Serbia’s Student-Led Victory Marks the Beginning of Democratic Renewal
Students and demonstrators gather at Slavija Square in Belgrade, Serbia, on May 23, 2026, for the “You and I, Slavija” protest, calling for early parliamentary elections. Photo: Dejan Krsmanovic / Dreamstime.
Professor Vladisavljević, thank you for joining us. You have compared the Students’ List victory to October 5, 2000, describing it as a turning point in Serbian history. What makes this electoral breakthrough different from the overthrow of Milošević, and what obstacles could prevent it from producing lasting democratic consolidation?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: I think this was more than an electoral breakthrough. It was the culmination of nearly two years of massive protests and popular mobilization against corruption and authoritarian rule. In terms of the outcome, it was not just another change of government, but actually the end of authoritarian rule and the beginning of democratic renewal. So, in a way, the outcome is comparable to what happened in Hungary just a few months ago.
If you compare the two events, in 2000 and more recently, you see that the opposition coalitions were very broad, encompassing not only political but also social actors. However, 26 years ago, political parties formed the core of the opposition, while other actors remained on the margins. This time, political parties were on the margins, while the student movement and its various allies were at the center. So, that’s quite different from what we had before, and in comparative terms, it represents something of a novelty.
The key unknown now is how this leaderless, horizontally organized student movement and its allies, built on deliberation and inclusion, will make the transition to and adapt to political institutions, particularly those of representative democracy. They’re now entering Parliament and will have to form a government and govern. So, it remains to be seen how this will work out.
Students Seek Legal Accountability, Not Revolutionary Justice
In your November 3 RTS interview, you argued that corruption had become a governing practice under Vučić and questioned his controversial last-minute presidential pardons. How can Serbia dismantle entrenched networks of corruption while ensuring that accountability does not turn into politically motivated retaliation?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: That’s a significant challenge because this regime was not simply authoritarian in the sense that it held competitive but not free and fair elections, allowed independent media to exist while systematically undermining media freedoms, and abused public institutions and resources to its own advantage and against the opposition. It was also a deeply corrupt, clientelist regime.
I think there is no danger of revolutionary justice here. If you look at the range of demands put forward by the student movement and its allies, you see that they aim to root out corruption in the short term while building the rule of law in the long term.
The focus is on using legal means to fight corruption, and we’ve seen this in the last few days, as professionals within institutions that previously failed to address corruption have actually begun to do so. The prosecutorial service, the central bank, and other institutions have suddenly started functioning.
This is unfolding through the legal process, so nobody is actually demanding any kind of revolutionary justice. They simply demand that these institutions start operating and do their part to root out clientelism and corruption.
Vučić’s Authoritarianism Rested on Informal Rule
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić participates in an SNS political campaign at Hall Čair in Niš, Serbia, on March 30, 2022. Photo: Radule Perisic.
You have emphasized the need to reform Serbia’s police and security services, which you argue were subordinated to partisan interests. Can these institutions be democratized through leadership changes alone, or does the transition require a more fundamental restructuring of civil-military and security-sector relations?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: Leadership change in the security sector is essential because most top officials were loyal followers of Vučić and his ruling party. Obviously, there were quite a few professionals, and there still are, but they had been marginalized for many years. So, changing leadership is the first step, but reforms need to be pursued more broadly.
In Serbia’s case, the problem lies not so much in the institutional setup of the security sector or political institutions more generally. If you look at the key institutions, they resemble those in the West. The point is that Vučić’s regime, just like Milošević’s in the late 1990s, was based on informal rule, which essentially means the selective application of the law. So, what you need to do is ensure that all institutional actors stay within the law and operate on its basis.
That’s why I think the demands of the student movement and the victory it brought have raised expectations among professionals within these institutions, which have suddenly started functioning. There are quite a few professionals within the civil service, judiciary, local government, and public sector as a whole who were simply sidelined. They routinely dealt with minor cases, while all controversial cases were handled by officials loyal to Vučić. So, this change now opens things up.
Again, the question is whether the Students’ List will have the capacity to pursue those goals in the long term, because short-term efforts obviously won’t be sufficient.
Vučić’s Regime Relied More on Media Manipulation than Political Repression
Your research highlights the relationship between media pluralism, political competition, and democratic quality. Following the reported changes at RTS, what reforms are essential to dismantle partisan media control and restore independent journalism without replacing one form of political influence with another?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: Vučić’s regime relied principally on media manipulation and sophisticated spin rather than repression. There was some repression, but it was more selective, targeting key opponents. The focus was on the media, including major electronic media outlets, the public broadcaster, other national television networks, and a range of cable networks targeting different audiences supportive of the regime. Despite all this, there was still considerable space for independent media, although admittedly limited to low-circulation daily and weekly newspapers, cable television networks with restricted reach—accessible to about 30% of the population—and specialized investigative journalism outlets.
Overall, there was quite a lot of high-quality journalism, even under authoritarian rule. The challenge now is to move this high-quality journalism from the margins to the very center of the media landscape, particularly to the public broadcaster and national commercial television networks.
The experience from the Milošević period suggests that those working at the public broadcaster tend to shift their support quickly from one ruling party to another, so there is some danger of that happening again. However, it seems to me that the two-year struggle against the regime helped most people who supported the Students’ List realize how important independent journalism is, because it was part of that struggle. Such massive popular mobilization over the last two years would have been impossible without independent journalism. In a way, the movement and independent journalists protected each other. That is why many people now recognize the importance of independent journalism and will demand it.
The question, again, is whether the Students’ List will have the capacity to achieve this in the long term, because the transformation will take time. It involves not only the public broadcaster but also other commercial television networks with national coverage and a range of cable channels that the regime developed and funded from the public purse. So, there is quite a lot of work to do.
Student Revolution Was the Culmination of a Decade of Popular Resistance
Serbian students and citizens protest against government corruption following the Novi Sad railway station accident, at Slavija Square in Belgrade, Serbia, on December 22, 2024. Photo: Mirko Kuzmanovic / Dreamstime.
The Novi Sad railway-station tragedy triggered nearly two years of student-led protests that ultimately challenged Vučić’s political dominance. What explains the movement’s success where previous opposition parties and protest campaigns had failed? Was its decisive advantage organizational innovation, moral legitimacy, or the regime’s declining capacity to maintain public consent?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: Obviously, no single factor can explain the movement’s success. I think what really matters is examining the broad mobilization over the last two years. The election campaign and victory were the culmination of this sustained resistance.
You have to understand this popular mobilization as the culmination of previous waves of massive protests over the last decade or so. There were several waves of mobilization in 2018–19, including six months of weekly protests in Belgrade and other cities. Then, in 2023, following the mass murders, there was a similar wave of mobilization. This was followed by a large, more decentralized campaign against lithium extraction across Serbia.
So, in a way, this was just the tip of the iceberg. There were already mobilized constituencies, not only in urban areas but also across the country, as the campaign against lithium extraction had extended into rural areas. The Novi Sad tragedy in November 2024, in which 16 people were killed, was therefore a trigger. It was not simply an accident; it was an accident caused by corruption. The tragedy revived these existing energies.
Now, why was this mobilization broader and more massive than previous protests? One important reason was the involvement of students. Interestingly, Serbia has a tradition of student protests, dating back to 1968 and continuing throughout the 1990s against Milošević. Student mobilization was part of the broader opposition movement during that period, but after 2000, students were no longer involved in politics.
Their renewed involvement was therefore an additional factor. Previously, popular mobilization had been led by opposition parties. This time, several factors came together. As students expanded the mobilization further, their popularity weakened both the regime’s capacity to respond and its public support. So, the movement’s success resulted from a combination of factors coming together at that particular moment.
Students Turned Popular Resistance into Electoral Power
In your research on competitive authoritarianism and popular protest, you emphasize how mobilization can transform political institutions and opposition capacities. How did Serbia’s decentralized student movement convert sustained street protests into an electoral majority, and what does this reveal about the relationship between contentious politics and electoral competition?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: If you look at the mobilization over the last two years, as well as previous waves of mobilization, there has always been an interaction between institutional politics and popular politics outside formal institutions, with spillover from one to the other.
Even during this mobilization, there were such spillovers. People were protesting in the streets, while the opposition was advancing their demands within institutions, including Parliament, local government, and the like. As I mentioned earlier, the election campaign was just the tip of the iceberg of this broad mobilization.
All the key actors—the student movement, organizations, local participant assemblies, and self-organized groups, supported by the logistical resources of opposition parties and civil society organizations—simply shifted their tactics from contentious politics to electoral campaigning.
This transition was not particularly difficult because the students had already shifted their demands. Initially, they demanded accountability from those blamed for the tragedy in Novi Sad. But the government did not respond; it ignored their demands. So, about a year and a half ago, the students began demanding early parliamentary elections.
In a way, everyone expected that elections would eventually take place, and they had been preparing for them through logistical arrangements, training, and other activities. So, the transition was not sudden; everyone had been preparing for it. I think this illustrates a broader point: contentious politics should never be studied separately from institutional politics because the two are closely intertwined.
Opposition Parties Cannot Safeguard Elections Alone
Reports of extensive citizen-led election monitoring suggest that civil society played an important role in protecting the electoral process. Does Serbia demonstrate that defeating competitive authoritarianism requires citizens not merely to mobilize voters but also to compensate for the failures of captured electoral institutions?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: In competitive authoritarian regimes, the political playing field is obviously skewed. This affects not only elections but also involves the ruling party’s abuse of public institutions and resources to its own advantage and against its opponents.
In this context, it is not always easy for opposition parties to mobilize enough well-organized activists to staff polling stations and arrange election monitoring to prevent electoral manipulation, including vote buying. Opposition parties cannot do this on their own; they need others to help. Civil society organizations often provide that support, but these efforts become even more effective when they involve a much broader range of people, including self-organized citizens. In Serbia’s case, this included the student movement and local participant assemblies.
Serbia has never had so many people trained to staff polling stations and monitor elections. There were even mobile groups tasked with protecting polling station personnel and election monitors from regime thugs. Drawing on experiences from local elections, when thugs were used to target these individuals, organizers had to anticipate and address such threats. I think this offers an important lesson for opposition movements in other authoritarian regimes: involve as broad a range of citizens as possible.
Competitive Authoritarian Regimes Unintentionally Create Opportunities for Their Own Defeat
Students and citizens protest against government corruption in Zrenjanin, Serbia, on January 25, 2026, demanding justice and accountability for the 16 victims of the tragic railway station canopy collapse in Novi Sad. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your scholarship argues that competitive authoritarian regimes create institutional opportunities for opposition mobilization even while restricting democratic freedoms. Did Vučić’s electoral defeat expose this inherent vulnerability, or does Serbia represent an exceptional convergence of mass protest, opposition coordination, and declining regime legitimacy?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: This is an interesting issue. I have studied competitive authoritarian regimes in the Balkans during the 1990s, particularly Milošević’s regime, examining how it responded to protests and how protests emerged and developed under competitive authoritarianism.
I concluded that this sort of context, in a way, unintentionally facilitates popular protests. Under competitive authoritarianism, government opponents have legal opportunities to organize and challenge the government, both within and outside institutions. Elections are not free and fair, but they are competitive, and people participate in them. At the same time, opposition actors are systematically suppressed and restricted in their activities. This context creates grievances through the systematic violation of media freedoms and the abuse of public resources against opponents.
So, there is a combustible mix. You have genuine legal opportunities to organize and space for political organization, even though the system is not democratic. At the same time, opposition actors are systematically suppressed in one way or another, creating additional grievances. You also have rapid spillovers between institutional and contentious politics, which often unfold in parallel and create political crises.
What’s particularly interesting is that this permissive context also facilitates nonviolence among protesters, which is useful for democratization. Protests can have immediate consequences, such as regime crises, but they also have long-term effects—what I call constitutive consequences. This means that protests shape the identities, interests, and capacities of both authoritarian elites and opposition forces.
It’s a complex and very interesting process. In Serbia’s case, this permissive context provided space for the opposition to organize and operate, but that’s only part of the story. Another important question is how these opportunities are taken up and by whom, because in some cases, there simply aren’t many actors capable of doing so.
Serbia also has a tradition of popular mobilization. I mentioned the waves of protest over the last decade, but these actually build on the protests against Milošević in the 1990s. So, what we see today is very much what we saw under Milošević in the 1990s. That tradition helps explain the current developments.
Vučić’s Defeat Exposes the Limits of Populism in Sustaining Personalist Authoritarianism
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán meets with Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić during an official visit to Belgrade, Serbia, on September 5, 2016. Photo: Ognjen Stevanovic / Dreamstime.
In your 2023 article with Aleksandra Krstić, you describe populism as the “soft” face of competitive authoritarianism under Vučić. How did populist appeals help normalize authoritarian practices domestically and internationally? Does the regime’s electoral defeat suggest limits to populism’s capacity to sustain personalized rule?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: When Vučić’s party came to power, he was initially second-in-command to Tomislav Nikolić, who had won the presidential election. However, Vučić used his position as Deputy Prime Minister to launch a massive anti-corruption campaign targeting prominent businessmen, which caused his popularity to skyrocket. He then used his personal popularity as an important political resource to confront institutional and other opponents. He promoted the interests of poorer citizens and advocated inclusive economic policies. As I mentioned, there was the anti-corruption drive, along with patriotic appeals and, in parallel, rhetoric supporting EU integration—much like Erdoğan initially.
However, once Vučić consolidated power, he no longer needed to rely so heavily on these populist appeals. Instead, he used and abused public institutions and resources against his opponents, while corruption and clientelism expanded dramatically. What is particularly significant is that, in the early years after 2012, Vučić was able to mobilize supporters to attend rallies voluntarily. Yet, just a few years later, he needed enormous organizational and logistical efforts by public institutions to bring people to similar rallies.
We saw this clearly over the last two years. While the opposition mobilized literally hundreds of thousands of people in this small country, Vučić could not mobilize even a few thousand without coercion or bribing people to attend. That tells you a great deal about how thin these populist appeals were throughout.
The Students’ List Seeks Political Pluralism and Inclusion
The Students’ List defeated not only the ruling establishment but also marginalized much of the traditional opposition. How should we distinguish this anti-establishment mobilization from populism itself? Could the movement’s broad appeal against corrupt elites eventually reproduce the exclusionary political logic it opposed?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: I wouldn’t describe this as an anti-establishment mobilization. The target was Vučić’s authoritarian, personalist rule. The democratic opposition—that is, the opposition parties—was not really a target. Rather, these parties were sidelined or marginalized as less effective partners in the struggle against the regime. At the center of the opposition over the last two years were the universities. The student movement was obviously central, but professors fully supported the students, so it was essentially a movement rooted in higher education, further supported by mobilization in primary and secondary education.
If you look at the Students’ List, which emerged from this mobilization, its representatives are now in Parliament. Most of them have PhDs, so we will have not only a government of experts but also a parliamentary majority of experts. There is therefore no real anti-establishment drive. The explicit goals are democratic renewal and the protection of political pluralism. There is also a strong emphasis on the rule of law as an instrument for fighting corruption and clientelism.
I would also say that there is a broadly inclusive approach toward various previously excluded groups, such as national minorities. They were not politically excluded, but they were co-opted through clientelistic and corrupt practices under Vučić. Now, there is an attempt to include them directly. Several Bosniak and Hungarian candidates will serve as members of Parliament on behalf of the Students’ List. So, there is a very open and inclusive attitude rather than a populist drive. I don’t see that as an issue.
Independent Media and Social Networks Were Essential to Breaking Vučić’s Media Dominance
Your studies of political cartoons, media discourse, and smear campaigns demonstrate how political communication shapes authoritarian power and resistance. How important were alternative media, social networks, and symbolic protest performances in overcoming Vučić’s media dominance and transforming public perceptions of political legitimacy?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: As I mentioned earlier, the regime relied primarily on media manipulation, while repression was highly selective. The regime developed various means to maintain this control. However, opponents of the regime responded, and independent media and high-quality journalism played an essential role in popular resistance. Independent journalists were seen as partners in the struggle, and whenever the government attempted to pressure independent media, the broader movement responded. In this sense, independent media became part of a wider political and social coalition.
Another important factor was the global shift from traditional media to social media. The government also tried to exert influence in this sphere. Vučić had an army of trolls attempting to contain the opposition’s influence on social media. Many of these individuals were employed in the public sector but, instead of performing their official duties, engaged in trolling on Vučić’s behalf.
Nevertheless, he could not counter the popular energies expressed through social media. Opinion polls show that, over the last two years, there has been a major shift toward social media as a primary source of information. The opposition clearly had much greater access to social media than to traditional media. So, once again, it was a combination of several factors.
Vučić Abandoned Ideology in Favor of Power
Serbian politics has long been shaped by Kosovo, Orthodox Christianity, historical grievances, and competing narratives of European identity. To what extent did Vučić incorporate these themes into civilizationalist populism? Can the student-led movement establish a more inclusive democratic identity without reigniting nationalist polarization?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: Vučić began his political career in the early 1990s as a member of Vojislav Šešelj’s extremist and chauvinist Serbian Radical Party. Šešelj was later convicted of war crimes. During the 2000s, after Šešelj went to The Hague, the party gradually moved away from its extremism.
Following successive electoral defeats, Vučić and other leading figures moved toward a more moderate conservative position, eventually forming the Serbian Progressive Party. They realized that they could not come to power on a radical nationalist agenda. They therefore moderated their program and adopted many of their rivals’ positions, emphasizing democracy, EU integration, and even post-conflict reconciliation in the region. By and large, these changes gained acceptance among Western actors and governments.
However, once in power, Vučić gradually abandoned ideology altogether. He delivered different messages to different constituencies and even became quite accommodating toward the government in Pristina over Kosovo. For him, what mattered most was consolidating power and remaining in office.
If you look at the students, they have been very inclusive, particularly toward national minorities. One especially important development during the two years of protests was the connection between students in Belgrade and Novi Pazar—that is, between Serbs and Bosniaks. This opened up new possibilities for bottom-up integration.
At this point, the students remain focused on inclusion, and this resonates with both the Serb majority and national minorities. Many members of national minorities actually voted for the Students’ List rather than for national minority parties, which represents something of a novelty in Serbia.
Vučić Used International Alliances to Project Political Importance Beyond Serbia
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić attend a welcoming ceremony in Belgrade, Serbia, on October 10, 2017. Photo: Dreamstime.
Vučić maintained political relationships with Viktor Orbán and other nationalist and illiberal actors in Europe. How significant were these transnational networks for his political resilience? Could their continued cooperation allow defeated populist leaders to retain influence and obstruct democratic consolidation?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: Obviously, they cooperated for mutual support and protection. Vučić occasionally emphasized his close relationships with Orbán and Fico and claimed to have a similar relationship with Putin.
But I don’t really think these relationships had much influence on his domestic standing. Perhaps his links with Putin mattered to some extent, but those with Orbán mattered less. It was largely an attempt to portray himself as an important figure not only in domestic politics but also on the international stage. However, this was more a matter of appearances than reality.
Student Movement Offers a Bottom-Up Model of Democratic Inclusion
Your research on Yugoslavia and post-conflict societies demonstrates how popular mobilization can produce either democratization or nationalist radicalization. What distinguishes Serbia’s current student movement from earlier nationalist mobilizations, and could democratic renewal create new opportunities for addressing Kosovo and the region’s unresolved ethnic conflicts?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: The international and domestic context today is very different from that of the 1990s and 2000s. In the early 1990s, the disintegration of Yugoslavia reopened all sorts of old issues and animosities. At this point, however, most of these issues have been resolved in one way or another, so many of them will no longer be relevant to the Students’ List.
As I mentioned earlier, the student movement is based on deliberation and inclusion, particularly when it comes to national minorities. This approach will undoubtedly be reflected in broader regional relations. However, whether it will have a lasting effect or become a model for the entire region remains to be seen, because that depends on all sides, not just one.
Again, as I mentioned, the Students’ List advocates a model of integration from below—a bottom-up approach. By contrast, integration efforts proposed in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia, have often followed a top-down approach. So, it remains to be seen how this will work out.
Broad Social Coalitions Are Essential to Challenging Authoritarianism
Your comparative research examines popular protest in Serbia, Ukraine, Poland, and other authoritarian contexts. Which elements of Serbia’s student-led mobilization could inspire democratic resistance in countries such as Turkey, Georgia, or Hungary? What institutional and geopolitical conditions determine whether protest movements can successfully translate mobilization into regime change?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: The breadth of the opposition coalition is essential. Often, a political coalition alone is not sufficient; what is needed is a broader social coalition involving not just political parties but also a wide range of other relevant actors. If you look at Serbia over the last two years, the student movement has obviously been central, but it is not just about the students. The Students’ List brings together a wide range of partners representing a broader social coalition.
You can see similar patterns in other countries. In Georgia, for example, opposition parties have traditionally been weak, while civil society actors play a more significant role, with students also contributing substantially. In Turkey, on the other hand, political parties remain central, so there is a more traditional focus on party politics. Hungary falls somewhere in between, with Tisza, which is formally a political party but essentially functions as a broader social movement.
The general trend is toward broader coalitions than we have seen in the past. New political actors who were previously less important are also emerging. It remains to be seen whether this model will spread to other countries in the coming years. Obviously, such a model cannot easily be transferred from one context to another.
Personalist Authoritarian Regimes Are More Vulnerable Because They Lack Organizational Capacity
Finally, Professor Vladisavljević, your scholarship challenges the assumption that authoritarian regimes are largely immune to pressure from below. Does Serbia’s 2026 experience require us to reconsider prevailing theories of authoritarian resilience and revolutionary change? What broader lessons does it offer for understanding how contemporary autocracies collapse—and why democratization sometimes fails to follow their defeat?
Professor Nebojša Vladisavljević: Some traditional lessons remain highly relevant, although perhaps in a slightly different context. One important factor is the coherence of regime organizations. When you have strong political parties, strong public institutions, and some form of bureaucratic regime supported by ideology, these are difficult for the opposition to confront.
The less coherent these organizations are, the easier they are to challenge. This is particularly true of personalist regimes based on informal rules, such as Milošević’s regime in the 1990s or Vučić’s over the last decade. These regimes are easier for the opposition to confront because they lack organizational capacity.
I also mentioned the breadth and commitment of opposition forces. This has traditionally been an important factor, from classic revolutions to the more urban, nonviolent revolutions of recent decades. However, we now have additional actors who were not previously involved.
The international context also matters, particularly whether autocrats receive substantial external support. At the same time, we are dealing with new types of regimes and political actors.
Many competitive authoritarian regimes differ from the traditional authoritarian regimes that characterized much of the 20th century. They allow considerable space for opposition activities, and this relatively permissive environment facilitates nonviolent action.
So, all these factors come together in different ways, depending on the particular context.
In this commentary, Professor Lane Kenworthy examines the implications of the November 3, 2026, US midterm elections for American democracy. Despite concerns about electoral interference, the elections proceeded relatively smoothly, with high voter turnout and Democrats securing majorities in both chambers of Congress. Professor Kenworthy highlights the resilience of electoral institutions, the judiciary’s role in safeguarding voting procedures, and the significance of strengthened congressional oversight. Yet he cautions that democratic vulnerabilities persist, particularly regarding the influence of wealthy donors, partisan redistricting, and unequal political representation. While economic dissatisfaction, corruption, and foreign policy concerns largely shaped voting behavior, the results could reinforce institutional checks and electoral accountability. The ultimate test, he argues, lies in sustaining democratic safeguards beyond 2026.
By Lane Kenworthy*
American voters delivered a rebuke to the Trump administration and the Republican Party in the 2026 midterm election. The Democratic Party won comfortable majorities in both the House of Representatives (about 57% of the seats) and the Senate (55%). What does the election and its outcome imply for current and future democracy in the United States?
Despite efforts by President Trump and his administration, the election went relatively smoothly. While the Trump administration in the months leading up to the election made a host of attempts to prevent early voting, to block certain people from voting, to criminally prosecute election workers, and to have some election results (such as the Senate election in Alaska) thrown out, courts consistently—in 30 out of 30 cases—ruled against the administration. Many of the justices ruling in these cases, including on the nation’s Supreme Court, had been appointed by Republicans. Nor was there any significant interference with election-day in-person voting. Elections are run by state governments, and a number of those governments signaled they were prepared to counteract any efforts to intimidate voters on election day. Another fear, that the administration would seize ballot boxes or voting machines, also didn’t come to pass.
In the end, voter turnout is estimated to have been 49%. That’s the highest in any midterm election since the 1940s. From 1950 to 1970, turnout in US midterms averaged 45%. From 1974 through 2018, the average fell to just 37%. In 2018 and 2022 it jumped to 47%, and 2026 looks to have furthered this recent upward trend. One reason for the recent rise in voter participation is increased opportunity to vote early. About half of Americans who voted did so before the November 3 election day, either in person or by mail.
In the year leading up to the election, President Trump encouraged state governments in conservative states to redraw the boundaries of House of Representative districts in a way that would maximize the number of Republicans elected. Several, such as Texas, did so. However, some left-leaning states, such as California, responded by redrawing their districts to maximize the number of Democrats elected. The vote margin in favor of Democrats turned out to be so large—nationwide, about 13 percentage points—that red-state redistricting was of little or no help to Republican candidates.
On the night of the election, after it had become clear that the Republican’s had lost their majority in both houses of Congress, President Trump, in an interview with the New York Times, said he would accept the election results. That’s encouraging, though it wouldn’t be surprising if he changes his mind. Following his defeat in the presidential election in 2020, his administration filed 76 lawsuits attempting to have the results overturned in various states. When those suits failed, a violent mob attempted to prevent the sitting Congress and the vice president from certifying the election results on January 6, 2021.
Will the winning candidates in the House and Senate actually be seated in January 2027? The Trump administration and its Justice Department might attempt to collude with state officials to refuse to certify the election results. In this election, the margin of defeat for Republicans in both the House and the Senate was so large that this type of effort would be unlikely to make a difference even if were to succeed. But if it’s tried, it will once again be up to courts to compel the certification.
The Democratic majorities in both congressional bodies will provide a significant check on the Trump administration over the next two years. The House of Representatives can investigate wrongdoing by the administration and its officials, and the Senate can block appointment of judges, including Supreme Court justices, who may share Trump’s limited commitment to democracy.
The midterm election results in the states might turn out to be equally significant for democracy’s future in America. Recent presidential elections have tended to hinge on the results in six states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In 2028, when the Republican Party may nominate another Trump-like candidate for the presidency, each of these five states will have a Democratic governor. And most of them will have a Democratic Party majority in one or both of the state legislative bodies. This should help to safeguard against election interference by the outgoing Trump administration.
Was democracy “on the ballot” in the 2026 midterms? Did Americans reject Republicans because they see the Trump administration, or the Republican Party as a whole, as a threat to democracy? This may have mattered, but probably not very much. Public opinion surveys suggest cost-of-living concerns, the war in Iran, and corruption were the top issues. By “corruption” most Americans likely had in mind Trump’s efforts to use the presidency to enrich himself and his family, his pardoning of assorted criminals, and his appointment of unqualified billionaires to his cabinet, rather than his attempts to interfere in elections or call their fairness into question.
This interpretation is consistent with what we saw in the United States in 2022, when, as Larry Bartels points out, “scores of Republican members of Congress who had supported or condoned Trump’s ‘stop the steal’ effort following the 2020 election stood for reelection. In contested general elections, they did not fare significantly worse or better than their counterparts who had bucked Trump—the electoral cost of ‘disregarding democratic principles’ was essentially zero.”
Another threat to democracy in the United States—at least to democracy understood as equality of opportunity to influence policy—is money in politics. There are few effective limits on the use of private money in American elections (especially since the Supreme Court’s Citizens Unitedruling in 2010), so the country’s massive inequality of income and wealth makes it possible for the rich to have a sizeable advantage in influencing who gets elected.
Because its tax and regulatory policy preferences tend to be closer to those of rich individuals and large companies, the Republican Party is more likely to benefit from this. Prior to 2026, Democrats had been able to offset that disadvantage: total campaign expenditures by and for Democrats and Republicans tended to be roughly equal. In 2026, however, money from rich individuals, especially but not only Elon Musk, tended to heavily favor Republicans.
We don’t yet have the money totals for the 2026 midterms, and early figures indicate that Democratic candidates may have offset the big-donor money by far outraising Republicans in contributions from smaller donors. So, it’s possible that overall campaign expenditures were once again pretty similar between the two parties. Moreover, if Republicans did have a large money advantage in this election, it doesn’t seem to have helped them much, if at all. Still, this development may be a worrisome signal for what the future holds.
Even so, for supporters of democracy there is much to cheer about the 2026 US midterms—the fact that they occurred, the fact that they went smoothly, the fact that voters punished the political party that has failed to stand firmly in favor of liberal democracy, the fact that (so far) the election results haven’t been contested, and the fact that both the national and state-level results are likely to help protect democracy in 2028 and perhaps beyond.
(*) Lane Kenworthy is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Yankelovich Chair in Social Thought at the University of California, San Diego. He studies the causes and consequences of living standards, capabilities, poverty, inequality, mobility, employment, economic growth, social policy, taxation, public opinion, and politics in the United States and other wealthy, long-standing democracies. His books include The Good Society (thegoodsociety.net), Is Inequality the Problem? (2025), Would Democratic Socialism Be Better? (2022), Social Democratic Capitalism(2020), How Big Should Our Government Be? (2016), Social Democratic America (2014), Progress for the Poor (2011), Jobs with Equality(2008), Egalitarian Capitalism (2004), and In Search of National Economic Success (1995). More information on his research and teaching is available at lanekenworthy.net.
In an exclusive interview with the ECPS, Professor Mukulika Banerjee of the London School of Economics and Political Science warns that India’s controversial electoral-roll revisions risk transforming political citizenship into an instrument of exclusion. Describing the reported deletion of approximately 130 million voters as part of “the biggest assault on India’s electoral system that independent India has seen,” she highlights the disproportionate vulnerability of Muslims, Dalits, women, and other marginalized communities. Professor Banerjee examines how student-led protests are challenging democratic backsliding, political intimidation, and Hindu majoritarianism while forging broader alliances around electoral integrity. Drawing on her scholarship on everyday democracy, she argues that protecting political equality requires sustained civic participation, institutional accountability, vigilance, and collective democratic action.
India is witnessing a significant wave of youth-led protests challenging unemployment, educational injustice, and the erosion of democratic accountability. The emerging Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has expanded its mobilization from examination irregularities to contested electoral-roll revisions, raising fundamental questions about political representation, citizenship, and the resilience of democracy under Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.
In an interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Mukulika Banerjee, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, offers a critical assessment of India’s democratic trajectory. Drawing on her influential scholarship on electoral participation, everyday citizenship, democratic culture, and the social foundations of political life, she examines how controversies surrounding electoral integrity threaten the principles of political equality and inclusive citizenship.
At the heart of Professor Banerjee’s analysis is the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and reports of approximately 130 million deletions. Describing the controversy as “the biggest assault on India’s electoral system that independent India has seen,” she warns that the country’s historically inclusive electoral framework risks becoming an instrument of political exclusion. According to Professor Banerjee, the reported deletions have disproportionately affected Muslims, Dalits, indigenous communities, women, and other socially disadvantaged groups.
For Professor Banerjee, the consequences extend far beyond electoral competition. India’s democratic achievement has rested on the equalizing power of the ballot, particularly for citizens experiencing profound socioeconomic hierarchies. As she explains, “This equalizing power of the vote, of political equality, which is a very basic democratic right, is highly valued in India.” She cautions that electoral-roll revisions could undermine precisely this foundation of citizenship, transforming the right to vote from a universal democratic entitlement into a mechanism of selective political inclusion.
The interview also explores the emergence of student-led resistance as a potential counterweight to institutional democratic backsliding. Professor Banerjee argues that young protesters have challenged a pervasive climate of intimidation while bringing opposition parties, farmers’ unions, and civil society organizations together around electoral integrity. Their mobilization, she suggests, demonstrates that “in order to live in a democracy, you have to be an active citizen.”
Beyond India, Professor Banerjee situates these developments within broader debates over authoritarian populism, crony capitalism, Hindu majoritarianism, and transnational democratic resistance. Her analysis connects electoral exclusion to economic inequality and the erosion of institutional accountability.
Ultimately, Professor Banerjee’s warning is also a call for sustained democratic engagement. Drawing on her metaphor of democracy as a plant requiring constant care, she concludes: “In order to cultivate democracy, you need vigilance, you need patience, you need hard work, and you need hope.”
Here is our interview with Professor Mukulika Banerjee, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
India’s Youth-Led Movement Has Shaken the Political Status Quo
Students participate in a peaceful nighttime protest organized by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) in New Delhi, India. Demonstrators sit together on the road, holding placards and posters, chanting slogans, and expressing their demands. Photo: Kamlesh Kumar / Dreamstime.
Professor Banerjee, thank you for joining us. Let me begin with India’s student-led protests. The emerging Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has expanded its mobilization from grievances over examination irregularities and unemployment to challenging the Election Commission and broader questions of democratic accountability. What are the movement’s principal demands, and how have these initial socioeconomic grievances evolved into a wider challenge to Modi’s political legitimacy and institutional authority?
Professor Mukulika Banerjee: There has, quite rightly, been a lot of international attention on the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), which has really shaken the status quo in so many ways. To understand what has happened over the last few months, particularly between July and November, we need to identify two phases.
The first phase was very much led by the Cockroach Janta Party and affiliated student groups, who went on a hunger strike in July, calling for the resignation of the education minister over exam irregularities. Of course, exam irregularities are a very serious issue in a country where the median age is under 30. These are young people with skills looking to enter the job market. For many young people, taking these exams is actually the only way to achieve social mobility. That is why it was such a big deal and why thousands and thousands of students got behind them.
As we saw, two things happened. The first was the government’s response, which involved unprecedented police brutality, including the use of pellet guns and water cannons, as well as arrests and detentions of peaceful protesters. These were young people who were very Gandhian in their spirit of resistance. The second was the outcome: ultimately, after weeks of protests, the education minister had to resign.
So that was phase one. In phase two, these students, quite correctly, took up an associated set of protests and issues that had been raised by the political opposition, primarily the Congress Party and Rahul Gandhi, who had been talking about electoral irregularities for years. But these concerns simply hadn’t gained traction. People said, “Oh, he can’t win elections, so he is blaming the elections.”
Then, in September, there was a very important investigative exposé by The Indian Express, one of India’s biggest newspapers, revealing a series of irregularities within the Election Commission. Two of the three election commissioners came forward to the press and said they had been objecting to illegal, unconstitutional changes to the electoral process that the chief election commissioner had been making without consultation. This led to much wider recognition of an issue that had been simmering.
Those of us who watch elections and electoral processes in India had been raising these concerns for many months. Rahul Gandhi had also been articulating this issue. But it really gained momentum from September onward. By then, having tasted success with the resignation of the education minister, the Cockroach Janta Party put its weight behind the issue of electoral irregularities.
What we saw by November 1, at this absolutely massive rally in the center of India’s capital, was an alignment of interests. Pretty much every single opposition party, including political parties that had supported Narendra Modi’s BJP government in the past, came out to protest against electoral irregularities.
All the student groups and all the farmers’ unions, which are a very important part of India’s political landscape, came together behind this issue. So, what we are seeing in November is this broader alignment of interests around a very fundamental issue that affects every citizen in India.
Electoral Roll Deletions Threaten the Equalizing Power of the Vote
The CJP is demanding Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation amid controversy over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and reports of approximately 130 million deletions from draft lists. What explains these demands, and what risks might such revisions pose to electoral integrity and equal citizenship, particularly for marginalized communities?
Professor Mukulika Banerjee: This is the biggest assault on India’s electoral system that independent India has seen. India has justifiably prided itself on its electoral system, despite the challenges. People need to recognize that when a national election is held in India, it really is the largest human exercise anywhere on the globe. The electorate itself is larger than 900 million people. So, conducting free and fair elections at this scale is, in itself, an achievement. Many of us have written books and given lectures across the world celebrating this incredible feat.
Now, this very electoral system has certain characteristics that made it so admirable and also explain why Indian citizens have embraced it and become such enthusiastic voters. India’s voter turnout is high and rising. More women vote than men. Socially disadvantaged groups vote in larger numbers. There are reasons for this enthusiasm, and they relate to two things.
Structurally, India’s electoral list—who is on the voters’ list—operates on a principle of inclusion. Right from the start, when India first held its elections in 1950–51 and the Election Commission was established, the principle was: if you live in India, you will be on the electoral list. If you were a foreigner or somebody who should not be on the electoral list, evidence had to be produced to strike you off the list. But the default position was to include you.
This is how people who are homeless, who live on sidewalks—and India is an incredibly poor country—were still included. Everybody, whether you sleep rough or live in a mansion, had their name on the voters’ list. Certainly, in my own research, I found, up and down the country, that people really valued this. They said, “Look, I have nothing, but I have a vote. And on the day of the election, I am the same as the guy living in the mansion next to me, while I sleep on the sidewalk.”
This equalizing power of the vote, of political equality, which is a very basic democratic right, is highly valued in India. This is what has been assaulted. So, when we say that there have been 130 million deletions—more than 10% of India’s population and 15% of the electorate—we are talking about a very significant number.
What nobody is quite able to explain, and what the Election Commission hasn’t responded to, is why these deletions have taken place. The Home Minister, Amit Shah, has come out and, on more than one occasion, said, “Well, this is a cleanup of the rolls because there have been too many infiltrators into India who are living in India, who don’t belong to India, who are not citizens, and we need to clean them up, clean the rolls and get rid of them.”
The question people are asking, of course, is: if 130 million people are infiltrators in India, what was the Home Minister doing? It’s his job to keep the country safe. But what we all understand, those of us who study Indian politics, is that this is a euphemism for Muslims, socially disadvantaged groups, Dalits, indigenous communities—tribals, as they’re called in India—and women. These groups have been overwhelmingly affected by the deletions.
There is another theory. When you break down the vote share by social group in the 2024 elections, when Prime Minister Modi’s BJP failed to win a majority, it was these groups that were less likely to vote for him. So, the cleanup is really a cleanup of the electorate, designed to create an electorate that is likely to vote for this government in perpetuity.
India’s Students Have Broken the Climate of Fear Through Humor and Resistance
Protesters gather at August Kranti Maidan in Mumbai, India, to demonstrate against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC), December 2019. Photo: Adnan Mukri / Dreamstime.
Despite police detentions, restrictions, and allegations of intimidation, student mobilization continues. How do you assess the government’s response, and what factors will determine whether these demonstrations can sustain their momentum? Could coercive measures further undermine Modi’s political legitimacy?
Professor Mukulika Banerjee: The main thing that should be noted about these students’ protests is just how humorous and cheeky they were. As we all know from history, the one thing any authoritarian regime or dictator does not like is being laughed at. They do not like humor. The students, as they said themselves, had so little to lose that they had no fear of calling out the utter hypocrisy, the utter silence, and the out-of-touch nature of the political establishment. They made very good use of social media to disseminate these messages.
To understand the significance of this, people need to realize that before these Cockroach Janta Party movements in the middle of 2026, there was a huge climate of fear in India. People did not speak openly or critically of the government. They simply did not. Even in universities, there has been a clampdown on academic freedom. In civil society, people have been jailed for asking questions. India ranks 157th out of 180 countries in the Press Freedom Index. People have been hounded, punished, and jailed without cases across the country. The aim was to create terror and intimidation, to silence people. And it was successful. People mostly kept their mouths shut and carried on with their jobs if they could do so.
The students broke that. By openly saying things that people felt and thought, they shifted something very fundamental in Indian politics. The government’s response was twofold.
The first was violent, as I said before: beating students mercilessly, denying them food and water, and using pellet guns. A student lost his eye during these protests. The second came when the government realized that the students were not backing off. They were not going to be cowed by this kind of violence. In fact, it was fueling their anger and protests. The prime minister made a brief attempt to engage with the students on social media, producing late-night reels addressing young people. But unfortunately, these became the butt of even more jokes, as evidence of just how out of touch he was with the social media game, for instance.
Now, this is significant because, for this prime minister, image and how he looks in public are of huge significance. Prime Minister Modi’s presence is ubiquitous across the Indian landscape. Every streetlamp has his image on it. Every free bag of rice distributed to 800 million citizens of India has his image on it. Even the COVID vaccine certificates used to have his photograph on them. So, for somebody who is so image-conscious, having that image taken down was significant.
The government tried to stall for a very long time but ultimately had to give in to the pressure, and the education minister resigned. But we also need to note that the day after the education minister resigned, when Parliament was in session, he showed up and his fellow parliamentarians welcomed him with applause. No new education minister was appointed. The person who was appointed was already holding another portfolio. So, it’s not as if the government has done anything to really address the demands raised by the students.
Defending the Vote Could Unite India’s Diverse Political and Social Movements
The CJP’s growing cooperation with opposition parties and civil society suggests an expanding political agenda. What does the movement stand for beyond its immediate demands, and can it develop a coherent political platform without losing its decentralized character? What lessons might it draw from the anti-corruption origins of the Aam Aadmi Party?
Professor Mukulika Banerjee: Many people pointed out that the huge public gathering held on November 1 at Ramlila Maidan took place at exactly the same location where the India Against Corruption movement had gathered. That movement ultimately helped oust the previous government in 2014, saw Narendra Modi come to power, and led to the formation of the Aam Aadmi Party. So, there are parallels being drawn. But to my mind, this is a new kind of formation and alignment because the issue here is a little bit like corruption, which affects everybody. In this case, however, the issue is literally fundamental to everybody’s identity and position in society: the vote.
This is something that every single Indian can identify with. So, this alignment is probably unprecedented in the sense that it represents a very broad church, because everybody is affected by it. I also find this alignment extraordinary. As academics, when we study social movements and political establishments, and how social movements work within democratic politics, this is a textbook case of various civil society activists, student groups, and political parties coming together on a united platform. They are all very different in their politics, and some are single-issue groups.
How this is going to proceed is another question. Now, within this united platform, one should note that the students, young people, and farmers’ unions bring, first and foremost, energy. They bring the students’ cheekiness and humor, but also years and years of protest or resistance to a certain kind of politics and a certain kind of economic policy that have disaffected a large number of Indians. So, they bring that energy.
Political parties, on the other hand, have party workers, legal support, and organizational heft. They can also use Parliament, if Parliament is allowed to function. That, sadly, does not happen enough in India. During the July protests, when the students of the Cockroach Janta Party were on the streets, on hunger strike, parliamentarians were trying to raise exactly the same issues within Parliament to support them from inside Parliament. But those efforts were stalled and stalled and stalled by the government, so they never really could have that discussion.
But returning to this broad platform, this broad church of different kinds of political organizations coming together, I think it has now been recognized that there is a single issue that affects everybody. It doesn’t matter what you are fighting for; your vote is fundamental to everybody.
How this pans out will depend on harnessing this energy and spreading it across the country. The message that every single Indian is at risk when an Election Commission can act with such impunity, with the Supreme Court looking the other way and enabling this travesty of electoral dismantling that has happened in India, is something everybody needs to understand. But, as we know, politics requires work. It’s the boring, hard work of mobilizing every single person on the street on a daily basis. Frankly, the next few months and years are going to be about that.
Voters queue at a polling station in Sendra village near Beawar during the Panchayati Raj elections in India on September 28, 2020, held amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with turnout exceeding 83 percent in the first phase across 25 districts. Photo: Dreamstime.
India Is a Textbook Case of Crony Capitalism Enriching a Privileged Few
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio signed a Starlink distribution agreement in March 2025, but their rivalry resurfaced in October 2026 over regulatory approvals. How does this relationship illuminate the intersection of corporate concentration, digital infrastructure, and political power under Modi? Does it raise broader questions about the relationship between economic elites and populist authoritarian governance?
Professor Mukulika Banerjee: India, sadly, is a textbook case of what we call crony capitalism. If we are worried, after the US midterms, about what they have exposed regarding the tech bros and the Republican Party, or at least President Trump, India is a classic case where we really need to dismantle the narrative of India’s high economic growth rates, celebrated around the world and by the Indian government, and examine the basic figures of India’s economy.
Yes, there are robust growth rates, but where are these growth rates coming from? One percent of India’s population owns 40% of its wealth. The people who have benefited from the regime in power are minuscule in number. You can literally count these corporations on the fingers of one hand. So, it’s not even the corporate lobby as a whole that stands to gain. A large part of India Inc. is deeply unhappy about the concentration of access to privileges among a handful of companies close to the prime minister and the BJP, which have done very well and are driving this economic growth story.
So, the Elon Musk–Ambani Jio story that you mentioned has to be seen against this backdrop. When I say that 1% owns 40% of the wealth, that also indicates the extent of social inequality in a country where 90% of India’s population lives on less than $60 a month. So, this is a poor country. Eight hundred million people, or two-thirds of the population, require free rice and wheat to survive. Malnutrition is on the rise. It is not a healthy economy for everyone. Some people have done extremely well, and they drive the headlines and the top-line figures. That economic scenario has to be understood when we talk about Ambani, Elon Musk, Adani, and the government.
The story of Musk, Ambani, the government of India, and India’s economy also has to be seen in tandem with Indo-US relations. Indo-US relations have relied for a long time on the so-called special chemistry—the bromance—between President Trump and Prime Minister Modi. Prime Minister Modi has campaigned for President Trump on US soil, asking the diaspora to vote for him. It has been a long association.
But this actually came to no good with the tariff wars and India being slapped with 50% tariffs. A lot, at one level, depends on Trump’s capriciousness. Nobody can say what he’s going to do, when he’s behind Musk, when he’s not, when he’s going to impose tariffs, or what he’s going to do from one day to the next.
There is also a story about India’s position on the global stage. To follow up on the earlier anecdote, just last month, Marco Rubio was in India to negotiate with the same Reliance, with the same Mr. Ambani, to get his refineries to accept more Venezuelan crude. But when Marco Rubio made that demand, he didn’t bother going to the capital or going through diplomatic protocols and niceties. He flew straight to Bombay, asked the foreign minister to meet him there, and met directly with Mr. Ambani to negotiate this.
Critics of this kind of crony capitalism and economic policy would say that this doesn’t bode very well for India’s standing in the world, vis-à-vis any country, let alone the US, when its leadership can be seen as dispensable and negotiations can take place directly with businessmen. Remember, this is not a business-to-business dealing. This is Marco Rubio coming to make this demand. It’s not even an ask. So, there is a story of complicity and collusion that a lot of critics, especially in the last two or three months, have begun to question very loudly.
The Trump-Modi Bromance Has Failed to Deliver for Hindu Nationalist Politics in America
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former US President Donald Trump met to discuss the betterment of the relations of India and US at Heydrabad House in New Delhi on February 25, 2020. Photo: Madhuram Paliwal.
In your 2025 analysis with Shaurya Dev, you described US–India relations under Trump and Modi as increasingly transactional. With trade negotiations facing renewed difficulties in October 2026, how do the leaders reconcile nationalist rhetoric with economic interdependence? To what extent does their personal political affinity influence bilateral relations?
Professor Mukulika Banerjee: We’ve already been talking about part of this question. What we can add is that recent research from Carnegie shows that the diaspora, on which Prime Minister Modi relies heavily to shape and strengthen Indo-US relations, has overwhelmingly supported the Democrats—about 60% of it. The majority of Indians in America tend to be on the Democratic side.
But what the last few years have shown, especially under President Trump, is that a significant part of the diaspora, among the remaining 40%, thought that by hitching their wagon to the Trump-Modi bromance, they could advance what they saw as a common agenda: a pro-Israel, anti-Muslim, pro-majoritarian agenda that they believed they shared with the Republican Party.
As they’ve found under President Trump 2.0, that is far from the case. When there is an anti-immigration narrative, they don’t say, “Oh, these are the good Hindu Indians who supported the Republicans.” Instead, you’re a brown person living on US soil, and you are just as likely to be targeted as others. This explains some of the swing away from the Republicans in this year’s midterm elections.
So, there are increasingly vocal expressions of opposition from Indian-origin American politicians like Ro Khanna, who even today has tweeted his complete rejection of Hindutva politics, of the Hindu majoritarian politics that the BJP espouses. Of course, there were huge victories in the midterms for precisely the kind of candidates who will call out Islamophobia and the practice of serving corporate cronies at the expense of working-class needs.
The much-celebrated mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, whose mother is of Indian origin, and Nithya Raman in Los Angeles are not only American politicians of Indian origin, but they are also exactly the kind of US politicians that Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t. He lost his election, and he was prominent in espousing precisely the kind of misogynistic diatribe directed against a certain kind of progressive politics. In the American context, the diasporic politics of the RSS, the cultural organization that backs Prime Minister Modi, have involved supporting politicians of Indian origin who share the same values, and Islamophobia is a very important element of that. We don’t know about somebody like Vivek Ramaswamy’s links with the RSS, but what we do know is how much the RSS actually got behind him.
Again, when we talk about US–India relations, there is the government-to-government Trump-Modi relationship and the trade deal, which, as you’ve been saying, has been hanging in the balance for over a year now. Every time we ask for an update, we’re told it’s imminent, but it hasn’t yet come through. Meanwhile, the sort of capricious tariff wars we’ve been discussing have continued.
But there is a second story, which I was also highlighting, involving groups like the RSS abroad, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), as it’s called, which have cultivated a certain kind of Indian-origin American politician in the hope that they will strengthen their larger cultural project. At least the last few elections in the US, and certainly the midterms, have shown that this hasn’t really paid off.
Hindutva Represents a Fundamentally Different Vision of India from Its Constitutional Ideals
Modi’s political project often presents Hindu civilizational identity as foundational to Indian nationhood. How should we distinguish Hinduism’s religious and cultural plurality from Hindutva’s political construction of the nation? Could tensions between these understandings weaken the ideological foundations of Hindu majoritarian populism?
Professor Mukulika Banerjee: We hope it will, for those of us who believe in India’s Constitution, which declares India a secular nation that celebrates its diversity. Every major religion in the world is found in India. Many of those religions were born in India, while Islam came to India very early. Christianity came to India long before it reached various parts of Europe, including Britain, where I live. So, the traditions of these religions are deeply rooted in India’s soil.
As my favorite Bollywood actor, Shah Rukh Khan, said in an interview some years ago, India is like a garden with lots of different flowers and colors, and if you take even one away, it spoils the painting. You can’t imagine India without any one of those elements. It would no longer be India.
I think it’s a beautiful analogy that helps answer your question. First, it is a celebration of the diversity that makes India what it is. Second, it’s also a reaffirmation of democratic politics, because democracy is actually the only way you could possibly manage such diversity. It is by devolving power, having a federal structure, maintaining the separation of powers, and keeping the government equidistant from all religions—which is India’s brand of secularism—that you can manage this diversity.
The Hindutva project, in contrast, which Prime Minister Modi and his party support and which the major cultural organization, the RSS, now over 100 years old, backs, represents a completely different imagination of India: that because India has a Hindu majority, it is a Hindu-majoritarian country, and everybody else can live as second-class citizens. Living as second-class citizens is not a dignified life, first of all. Second, it may not be a life at all, because what we’ve seen in the last decade is pervasive, everyday violence against minorities, including Dalits, who are at the bottom of the caste hierarchy.
Muslims have been targeted as easy prey, with bulldozers being used to remove their shops and homes and Muslims being pushed into ghettos in various places. So, you can’t live anywhere you want in India if you’re a Muslim.
There has been a steady marginalization of minorities and violence inflicted on them, which is part of the Hindutva project. That is not the image of India that the Constitution celebrates. It’s not the image of India that the country’s founders imagined and created at the time of independence from colonialism.
Volunteers of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) on Vijyadashmi festival, a large gathering or annual meeting during Ramanavami a Hindu festival in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh on October 19, 2018. Photo: Pradeep Gaurs.
Democracy Requires Active Citizens, Not Blind Devotees of Political Leaders
In your 2015 essay “Modi Bowled Them Over, but They Are Fans and Not Citizens,” you examined the transformation of political allegiance into personalized devotion. Has Modi’s charismatic leadership cultivated a political culture in which loyalty increasingly displaces democratic scrutiny? Could the student movement signal a reassertion of citizenship over political fandom?
Professor Mukulika Banerjee: Yes, the short answer is absolutely. What students, political parties, and civil society groups have shown is that, in order to live in a democracy, you have to be an active citizen. That is your responsibility. Electing a government is not enough. After the election, you must hold your representatives’ feet to the fire every single day, hold them accountable, demand transparency, and so on.
The unquestioned loyalty that has developed in large sections of the media, the corporate world, and universities has been created and enforced through a process of intimidation. This has meant that asking questions can invite severe punishment. Under this government, you’re no longer allowed to live as a citizen in a democracy and ask questions. Doing so is severely punished. When this is the case, it ceases to be what any of us would recognize as democratic politics.
Instead, what you’re expected to be is what in Hindi is called a bhakt, a devotee. The term andh bhakt, meaning a blind devotee, refers to blind faith in your leader, which is what has been inculcated. We talk about this less, but we should highlight that a huge amount of taxpayers’ money is used to inculcate this devotion and create a cult around the leader and his followers. Grand spectacles and events are constantly staged to encourage submission rather than foster citizens who are actively engaged in politics.
If you ask questions of the government, you’re immediately branded anti-national, a foreign agent, an infiltrator, or an “urban Naxal,” as he calls them. Most people outside India won’t understand this term, but it basically refers to intellectual leftists. These are all slurs. This comes directly from the prime minister. He used the term “urban Naxal” in his Independence Day speech in August this year to brand people who are asking perfectly legitimate questions of the government.
What is required is that you’ve got to be a fan. You don’t question why an elected prime minister of the world’s largest democracy has not faced an unscripted press conference in 12 years. If you ask that question, you’re anti-national. What you’re expected to do is simply toe the line, say he’s fantastic and the government is doing brilliant work, and shut up for the rest of the time. This is obviously not how democracy functions.
India’s Students Are Demanding Free and Fair Elections, Not Anarchy
In “Cultivating Democracy”and your 2024 essay “Democracy Shouldn’t Be Limited to Elections,” you argue that democracy requires sustained civic participation beyond voting. Could India’s student protests represent a revival of precisely this everyday democratic culture, despite the country’s institutional democratic backsliding?
Professor Mukulika Banerjee: Yes, I think democratic backsliding has been noticed by many for years. But the issue of electoral integrity has made it possible to focus everybody’s attention on this particular concern, and people are asking questions. Here, it’s probably worth saying something about these student protests and other protests by young people around the world, especially in the South Asian region, because the government has weaponized these comparisons to discredit the students by saying, “Oh, they’re asking for regime change; they’re calling for anarchy.”
Rather bizarrely, India’s Home Minister, Amit Shah, has been holding rallies across India, trying to save democracy from what he calls anarchy. Now, asking questions is not anarchy. Asking questions or demanding institutional propriety is not anarchy. It is about asking for elections to be made free and fair again. This is also in India’s DNA. It is our legacy from the independence struggle and our legacy of 75 years of practicing democratic politics in a very engaged way.
People want to topple governments through elections. That’s what they want to do. This is not about leaders having to flee the palace or government buildings being raided. This is not the kind of politics that the students, or indeed the opposition political parties or civil society groups, are asking for. They’re asking for free and fair elections. They want the electoral system fixed before the next national election in 2029 so that there can be a fair contest when elections are held. So, that is a classic example of the kind of active citizenship that I write about in Cultivating Democracy.
The Vote Is Sacred Because It Makes Every Indian Equal for One Day
People wait in queues to cast votes at a polling station during the 3rd phase of Lok Sabha polls, in Guwahati, India on May 7, 2024. Photo: Hafiz Ahmed.
Your article “Money and Meaning in Elections” demonstrates that voting carries moral and symbolic significance beyond transactional calculations. How might the controversy surrounding the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in India (SIR) affect citizens’ sense of dignity, political belonging, and institutional trust? To what extent does it reflect broader concerns about the erosion of democratic institutions?
Professor Mukulika Banerjee: As I was saying, the vote is not just an instrumental way to elect a politician or bring a political party to power in India. It is, of course, that. That is the main purpose of the vote. But what has also emerged in India is that, because of social inequality, which I’ve talked about, and the extreme hierarchy of social status, which is ubiquitous in India, voting carries another significance. In every single setting—whether you go to watch a film, travel on a train, enter a mall, or consider who gets off an aircraft first—some groups assert their status over others. Even people at the bottom of the status hierarchy feel the need to assert their status over somebody else.
In that kind of society, having one day when you can go to a polling station with your electoral photo identity card, stand in a single line where you can’t be asked to give way to someone more important, and be treated exactly the same as everybody else means a lot. People realize that this is their only chance to experience what political equality actually feels like.
That is why, when I wrote the piece you referred to, “Money and Meaning in Elections,” the word money really referred to—and I say this in the piece—all the instrumental aspects of voting. There is a lot of money, a lot of violence, a lot of patronage, and a lot of things that should not be taking place in elections. But what we forget is that, in the Indian case, there is also a lot of meaning.
People say, “When I come out of the polling station, I feel like I’m walking taller.” Or they hold up their fingers, marked with indelible ink, and say, “Look, this mark on everybody’s fingers makes us all equal today.” People say, “The vote is our weapon. The rest of the time, we don’t have the time, we don’t have the capacity, and we don’t have the knowledge to ask questions. But if we think things are not right, the vote is something we always have to topple governments.”
Actually, the anti-incumbency rate in India has been pretty high over the years. People wield that vote very robustly in the Indian context, and we need to understand that. Without understanding it, we won’t understand why electoral malpractice has brought millions of people out onto the streets. And I dare say we will see more, because this is something Indians really care about.
From India to Serbia, Young People Are Reinventing Democratic Participation
Students and citizens protest against corruption and the Serbian government in Novi Sad, Serbia, on February 1, 2025. Photo: Srdjan Randjelovic / Dreamstime.
You have argued that democracies such as Britain and the United States can learn from India’s traditions of active citizenship. Could India’s contemporary youth mobilization offer lessons to democratic movements confronting populism in Europe and America? Conversely, how might transnational far-right networks and political strategies shape the BJP’s responses to domestic dissent?
Professor Mukulika Banerjee: The far right has been very well organized. Tommy Robinson, who founded one of the most racist far-right parties in Britain, has been invited to India by the RSS. Right-wing movements around the world are very united. They hold annual global conventions at which India is always represented. These conventions are held in London, Washington, and other parts of the world. So, there is a network for sharing information among these groups.
Progressive movements also have their networks. They have less money and less power at this particular point in time, but I dare say the last month has really changed that scenario. With the results from Serbia, the US midterms, what we saw with students on the streets of Paris, and what we saw this morning with the formation of the new Israeli government, there is a reckoning with what we call right-wing populism.
Populism has also been used in the past to describe leaders who have bypassed institutions to serve the poor directly. But what people are up in arms about with this version of populism is a certain kind of economic arrangement that seems to enrich a few people at the expense of many. It doesn’t create jobs. You cut corporate taxes, but corporations aren’t creating jobs.
People get contracts on the basis of shady deals. At the end of the day, the money that is made is not being channeled back into the economy to create opportunities and dignity for everybody. And the word dignity is critical here. It ties together what we’ve been saying about the vote with what you just asked about these different movements. One reason Indian voters consider their vote and elections sacred is that voting provides a moment of dignity in an otherwise very undignified life.
If you listen to what people were saying during the US midterms, the message that the politicians who won are putting out is not so much about a command economy or socialism. It is about pointing out that everybody has a right to a dignified life. That dignified life is what young people all over the world are demanding, quite rightly. They are pointing to our generation, my generation, and saying that they don’t have the life chances that all of us had: finding jobs, buying new homes, having children, and planning for the future. The state of the climate, the state of the Earth, the planet, is a mess.
So, they’re making very legitimate demands for redistribution so that everybody can have a dignified life. It is really a demand against the acute social inequality that creates this kind of indignity. Because these are young people, because this is a world dominated by social media, and because information flows across the globe, groups all over the world are watching and learning from each other, realizing what to do and what not to do.
Serbia is such an interesting case of students deliberately channeling their energy into an electoral process. It took two years of work to create the student list, identify people who could stand for elections, and work out systems through which consensual decisions could be made. This was reinventing the processes of democratic selection. They did that hard work so that they could then put up candidates who would likely do well. That’s the end product we saw last month in the electoral results.
But it’s true that with Orbán’s defeat and the victory of the student groups in Serbia, there is a new energy that makes it possible not simply to topple governments but also to think about how to do democracy differently.
Again, I’ve mentioned the midterms many times, but because they’ve been on our minds over the last few days, I’ve been listening closely to campaigners, people in the back rooms—not the stars in front of the rallies, but the people standing behind them, standing in the wings—who have been doing years of work on voter registration, turning out the vote, canvassing, getting people out, identifying the new boundary limitations in gerrymandered districts, and making sure people understand how important it is to turn out and vote. This is the kind of hard work of active citizenship between elections that young people are willing to do and are doing. The evidence is there for us to see.
Democracy Needs Vigilance, Patience, Hard Work, and Hope to Flourish
Illustration: Design Rage.
Finally, Professor Banerjee, your scholarship emphasizes that democracy must be continuously cultivated through collective action, solidarity, and everyday citizenship. Can India’s emerging student movement transform opposition to Modi’s governance into an inclusive democratic alternative? What conditions would allow it to challenge authoritarian-populist structures rather than merely secure temporary political concessions?
Professor Mukulika Banerjee: What we’ve been talking about so far is precisely evidence of this kind of active citizenship. I’ll leave you with a small metaphor that might illustrate what we’ve been saying. So far, there has been a complacency that has led to democratic backsliding. We treated democracy like a plant that we bought in a store and put on our windowsill. We said, “Oh, look, now we have democracy. I have a beautiful plant in my room, and of course, it will flourish and flower. I’m going to have this beauty, and I can say I have a beautiful room.”
But if you don’t watch the leaves every day, check how much water there is, or see whether nutrients are required—is it getting too much light? Is it too cold? Is it in a draft?—you neglect the constant vigilance required to nurture and cultivate democracy. That’s the first thing.
We treated democracy like something that would just stay green and flourish without being looked after, as if institutions would simply function on their own. There are leaves, there are roots, and of course, it’ll be okay. But what’s eating at the roots? Is there an infection? Is the leaf turning brown? We didn’t pay attention.
The second thing is that you need patience. If you buy a little rose bush for your windowsill, it’s not going to produce roses immediately. You’ve got to find out when the flowering season is, wait, and look for emerging buds. Then the flowers will emerge when they’re ready. So, there is a huge amount of patience required.
You might be all raring to go and protest, turn out the vote, and get people agitated, but they can only vote when there is an election. So, it requires a huge amount of patience. All of this takes hard work. You can’t say, “Oh, I’m going on vacation for a month. I hope the plant will be here when I come back.” No, it takes that kind of commitment and hard work every single day.
And finally, you don’t buy a plant, put it on your windowsill, and say, “I don’t think it’s ever going to put out any flowers.” You never say that. You say, “No, of course, I’m waiting to see the flowers. Actually, I don’t even know what color the flowers will be, but I’m really looking forward to seeing them.”
So, that element of hope is also a very important part of democratic politics. That’s why I say that, in order to cultivate democracy, you need vigilance, you need patience, you need hard work, and you need hope.
In this commentary, Professor Ibrahim Ozturk examines whether recent electoral defeats of authoritarian populists in the United States, Hungary, Brazil, and Serbia signal an emerging democratic counterwave or merely temporary setbacks for populism. Arguing that Trumpism’s electoral defeat does not eliminate the structural conditions that produced it, Professor Ozturk explores how economic inequality, institutional capture, globalization, and technological concentration continue to undermine democratic legitimacy. Drawing on comparative political economy and Daron Acemoglu’s scholarship, he emphasizes the urgency of rebuilding political representation, shared prosperity, and democratic control over technological change. Moreover, he warns that electoral victories alone cannot secure democratic renewal: without credible economic alternatives, institutional reconstruction, and effective governance, authoritarian populism may return in more resilient forms.
By Ibrahim Ozturk
Can electoral defeats in the United States, Hungary, Brazil and Serbia become a genuine democratic counterwave—or will populism return unless its structural causes are addressed? Donald Trump’s resounding defeat in the November 2026 midterm elections, following electoral breakthroughs against authoritarian populists in Hungary, Brazil and Serbia, and partly in Israel, though with significant uncertainties, may mark the beginning of a democratic counterwave. Yet elections can remove or constrain leaders without eliminating the structural conditions that produced them. Unless democratic governments rebuild political representation, state capacity and shared prosperity, today’s victories may pave the way for tomorrow’s populist return.
The Democratic victory was much more than an ordinary shift in the congressional balance of power. By taking control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate—including victories in states and constituencies Trump had carried comfortably only two years earlier—Democrats delivered the most consequential institutional rebuke to Trump since his return to the White House.
According to Reuters’ detailed account of the results, Democrats secured at least 54 Senate seats and gained at least 30 seats in the House. The electoral shift extended well beyond established Democratic territory, reaching deeply Republican states such as Texas, Kansas and South Carolina.
The table reveals the election’s two-sided character. On the one hand, the scale and geographical spread of the Democratic victory make it impossible to dismiss the result as a routine midterm correction. Trump-backed Republicans lost support almost everywhere, including in regions that had recently seemed beyond the Democrats’ reach. The outcome has restored Congress’s capacity to investigate abuses, resist presidential appointments and prevent the legislature from functioning as an extension of the executive branch.
This institutional dimension is especially important given the severity of America’s democratic deterioration. The V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 recorded a 24 percent decline in the United States’ Liberal Democracy Index during the first year of Trump’s second term, with the country falling from twentieth to fifty-first place globally. V-Dem identified legislative constraints as the most severely damaged component of American democracy and described the speed of executive aggrandizement as unprecedented in modern American history.
Against this background, restoring an independently controlled Congress is not merely a partisan change. It reactivates one of the principal constitutional mechanisms capable of constraining executive power. It may block further democratic erosion and create institutional space for recovery. But this is still a lifeline, not a democratic restoration—and certainly not the end of Trumpism. Trump remains in the White House. The institutional damage inflicted on the civil service, judiciary, regulatory agencies, universities, media and wider public sphere has not been reversed. Nor have the economic and cultural grievances that returned him to power in 2024 disappeared. Congressional control may constrain Trump’s room to maneuver, but it cannot by itself rebuild public trust, reverse inequality, or restore the social foundations of liberal democracy.
The second half of the table is therefore as important as the first. The Democrats’ victory was broad, but support for the Democratic Party remains relatively shallow. The Associated Press Voter Poll found that many voters who supported Democratic congressional candidates remained dissatisfied with the party itself. Roughly one-fifth of Democratic voters held an unfavorable view of the party they had just voted for. Many were not endorsing a clear Democratic program; they were looking for an instrument to restrain Trump and punish the incumbent government.
The crucial fact, therefore, is that many of the citizens who punished Trump in 2026 were the same economically and culturally frustrated voters who had punished Joe Biden and the Democrats in 2024. Their movement between the parties reflects neither ideological conversion nor a stable embrace of liberal democracy. It reflects a volatile electorate that repeatedly votes against governments perceived to have failed on prices, employment, security, public services, and political integrity.
The election’s economic geography reinforces this interpretation. Voters who reported serious hardship from inflation and everyday costs moved decisively toward Democratic candidates—even in Republican strongholds. They blamed Trump’s tariffs, the Iran war and the failure to fulfill his promise to reduce prices. Corruption also mattered, particularly the perception that the presidency was being used to advance Trump’s personal, family and corporate interests. The outcome was consequently an accountability vote with two connected elements: a demand to restrain presidential power and a demand for economic delivery. Concentrating only on the first would be a serious mistake.
Congressional investigations into corruption, conflicts of interest and executive abuses are indispensable. But if Democrats define their victory primarily as an authorization to investigate Trump, they may constrain one president without weakening Trumpism. Investigations can expose abuses; they cannot make housing affordable, create career-building employment, rebuild declining regions or give working people greater influence over technological and economic change.The midterms should therefore be interpreted neither as a final defeat for American populism nor merely as a temporary anti-incumbent swing. They represent a narrow but historic window in which democratic forces can move from anti-Trump resistance to democratic reconstruction.
Whether this opening becomes a lasting realignment will depend on what Democrats do with their new institutional power. If they combine constitutional accountability with a credible programme addressing affordability, inequality, good jobs, regional decline and technological disruption, the election may become the starting point of a more durable democratic counterwave. If they return to technocratic incrementalism or assume that Trump’s personal unpopularity has solved the problem, the same electorate may swing back in 2028.
The central lesson is therefore not that American populism has been defeated. It is that Trump has become electorally vulnerable because he failed to deliver on the grievances that originally brought him back to power. Those grievances remain politically available. The question is now whether democratic government can finally address them before another authoritarian populist does.
Daron Acemoglu is right to warn that the most difficult work begins after the electoral victory. As he argues in What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, liberal democracy prospered when it was associated with shared prosperity, political voice, social mobility and the broad distribution of opportunity. It entered crisis when liberalism detached from these social foundations and became increasingly associated with technocracy, globalization, and the priorities of highly educated metropolitan elites.
If Democrats cannot respond to extreme inequality, the affordability crisis and the disappearance of secure, career-building employment—especially for workers without university degrees—the political pendulum may swing back in 2028. Neither an exclusive reliance on taxes and transfers, nor centrist attachment to the pre-Trump status quo, nor the fashionable expectation that AI-driven “abundance” will automatically resolve distributive conflict offers an adequate response.
This is precisely why the American midterm result deserves greater attention than a conventional anti-incumbent election. It creates an institutional barrier against Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, but it also places Democrats under an obligation to demonstrate that pluralist democracy can govern and deliver. If they use their congressional majority mainly to investigate Trump while failing to articulate a credible economic and social program, they may constrain him temporarily while inadvertently preparing the next Trump—or a younger, more capable successor.
In my ECPS commentary “Trump and the New Capitalism: Old Wine in New Bottle,” I argued that Trumpism 2.0 represents more than nationalist rhetoric or protectionist trade policy. It combines economic nationalism, corporate oligarchy, technological concentration and elements of digital feudalism. State power is not withdrawn from the economy; it is reorganized to serve politically connected corporations, dominant technology platforms and favored economic interests. The 2026 vote has interrupted this project, but it has not dismantled the political economy that sustains it.
The American result forms part of a wider sequence of authoritarian-populist reversals. In Hungary, the Tisza Party ended Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year rule and secured a constitutional supermajority. According to the detailed 2026 Hungarian election analysis published by the Institut für Europäische Politik, Tisza won 53.29 percent of party-list votes and 138 of the National Assembly’s 199 seats.
In Serbia, the student-backed opposition movement that emerged from protests following the Novi Sad railway-station disaster defeated Aleksandar Vučić’s ruling alliance. Reuters reported that the movement received 52.7 percent of the vote and secured 139 of the 250 parliamentary seats.
In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Flávio Bolsonaro, although the narrow margin confirmed that Bolsonarismo remains deeply embedded in Brazilian political and social life. As Professor James N. Green warned in an ECPS interview conducted after the election, the Brazilian far right has lost a battle, not the wider political struggle. It retains conservative congressional support, religious networks, digital mobilization capacity and a substantial electorate.
Israel provides a more qualified case. Benjamin Netanyahu’s nationalist-religious bloc won only 53 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, but the process of forming a government remains unresolved. Netanyahu’s parliamentary position has been severely weakened, but it would be premature to describe this as a completed transfer of power.
Taken together, these developments justify speaking cautiously of a democratic counterwave. They show that elections, civic mobilization, coordinated opposition and institutional resistance can still constrain leaders who appeared politically invincible. But they do not demonstrate that authoritarian populism has been ideologically defeated.
In “Populist Attacks on Institutions as a Reaction to Hyper-globalization,” I argued that populist attacks on independent institutions cannot be understood separately from the economic and social dislocations produced by unmanaged globalization. Financial crises, regional decline, inequality, declining social mobility, and the perception that national governments have lost control over economic outcomes generate both demand for populism and the political opportunities populist entrepreneurs exploit.
This argument is consistent with Dani Rodrik’s research on the relationship between globalization and right-wing populism, and with Sergei Guriev and Elias Papaioannou’s extensive study of the political economy of populism. Economic shocks do not translate mechanically into populist politics. They operate through perceptions of status, cultural displacement, political exclusion, and the failure of representative institutions. In “Capitalist Disruptions and the Democratic Retreat: A US–EU–China Comparison,” I developed this argument further by describing a process of authoritarian convergence. Liberal democracies and explicitly authoritarian systems remain different, but widening inequality, technological surveillance, corporate concentration, regulatory capture, and weakened public institutions are narrowing parts of the practical distance between them.The result is a political paradox. Governments remain formally democratic, but citizens increasingly experience economic decisions as matters over which they exercise little meaningful influence. Elections continue, but changing the government does not necessarily alter the underlying distribution of economic power.
The political damage was compounded by the way globalization was governed. Trade integration generated large aggregate gains, but governments too often treated the workers, firms and regions bearing the adjustment costs as if they would automatically move into new and better employment. Autor, Dorn and Hanson’s research on the China shock found that import-exposed local labor markets experienced persistent falls in employment, wages and labor-force participation, while their later work linked greater trade exposure to political polarization. The OECD Employment Outlook 2026 reaches a similar conclusion across advanced economies: the benefits of openness were real, but the losses were geographically concentrated and often endured for years. The resulting backlash was therefore not simply an irrational rejection of trade. It was also a reaction to governments that liberalized markets without constructing adequate mechanisms for regional renewal, worker adjustment, social insurance and political voice.
China’s current growth model has intensified this distributive problem. China is neither the sole cause of Western deindustrialization nor merely an economic threat; its growth has enlarged world trade and accelerated the diffusion of affordable green technologies. Yet weak domestic consumption, state-directed credit, large industrial subsidies, and manufacturing overinvestment now create asymmetric competitive pressure that open market economies cannot ignore. The IMF’s 2025 Article IV consultation warns that export-led adjustment and unwarranted industrial-policy support are producing excess supply and adverse spillovers for trading partners, while the European Commission has documented extensive state-induced distortions and unfair subsidization in strategic sectors. The democratic answer cannot be indiscriminate protectionism, which would raise prices and deepen fragmentation. But passivity would accelerate industrial erosion and feed populist claims that elected governments have surrendered control. A credible response requires rules-based trade defense, reciprocity in market access, coordinated industrial and competition policy, place-based investment and pressure for China to rebalance towards domestic consumption rather than exporting its internal imbalances.
Yet such pressure will be ineffective if exercised through a fragmented, transactional multipolar order in which major powers rely on unilateral tariffs and competing economic blocs. Bringing China closer to fair play requires rebuilding an open, inclusive and enforceable multilateral order, supported by reformed WTO rules on industrial subsidies, state-owned enterprises, excess capacity and reciprocal market access. Trump’s electoral defeat should therefore be understood not only as a setback for authoritarian populism, but also as a strategic opportunity to move beyond unilateral protectionism and toward renewed multilateral order and cooperation. If democratic governments use this opening to construct a fairer international system that reconciles openness with social protection, industrial resilience and democratic accountability, they may simultaneously address China’s distortive practices and the domestic grievances on which Trumpism and related populist movements thrive.
Under these conditions, authoritarian populism becomes a distorted form of democratic protest. Citizens support leaders who promise to recover sovereignty and political control, even when those leaders subsequently use that mandate to dismantle the institutions that make democratic correction possible.
Why Some Populists Lose—and Others Survive Failure
The emerging counterwave supports a first proposition: where electoral competition remains meaningful, authoritarian populists who govern badly may eventually be punished. Populists promise that concentrating authority will enable them to break institutional deadlock and deliver rapid results. Once in office, however, many generate corruption, patronage, inflation, declining services, administrative incompetence, and international isolation. When the discrepancy between rhetoric and performance becomes sufficiently visible, even formerly loyal voters may abandon them.
But this mechanism operates only where opposition forces can organize, voters can obtain independent information, and electoral authorities, courts, and security institutions have not been completely subordinated.My comparative study “Confronting Populist Authoritarians: The Dynamics of Lula’s Success in Brazil and Erdogan’s Survival in Turkey” demonstrated why similar economic and political failures can produce different outcomes. Lula’s broad democratic coalition defeated Bolsonaro, though it could not eliminate Bolsonarismo. In Turkey, Erdogan’s institutional capture, control over resources and capacity to fragment the opposition insulated him from the consequences of economic failure.
This leads to a second and more troubling proposition: where a populist leader has captured the state, failure may produce intensified authoritarianism rather than electoral defeat. In “A Lesson from Turkey: Economic Crises as Steppingstones, but Not Exit Routes for Authoritarian Populists,” I argued that economic crises may help populists enter power without subsequently providing an exit route from populist rule. Once leaders have captured the judiciary, media, bureaucracy, security apparatus, and mechanisms for distributing state resources, poor economic performance ceases to be sufficient to remove them.
Leaders who fear prosecution, loss of wealth or exposure of wrongdoing acquire powerful personal incentives to prevent alternation in power. The more offenses committed in consolidating the regime, the more dangerous surrendering office becomes. The regime’s failures therefore deepen its dependence on repression.Turkey illustrates this danger. Freedom House’s 2026 assessment documents the consolidation of power through constitutional engineering, institutional capture and the imprisonment of opponents, journalists and civil-society representatives.
My more recent analysis, “Stealing from the Future,” shows how such a regime may use fiscal transfers, public procurement, credit and inflation to purchase present political support by transferring the costs to future taxpayers. Economic policy becomes a technology of political survival rather than an instrument of long-term development. Consequently, no mechanical sequence in which the defeats of Trump, Orbán, Bolsonaro or Vučić necessarily predict the fall of Erdogan or Narendra Modi. Democratic openings can spread confidence, but national outcomes depend on the depth of institutional capture, the credibility of opposition forces and whether electoral punishment remains possible.
The Acemoglu Challenge: Redirecting Technological Change
The struggle over artificial intelligence will be critical to whether the American midterm victory develops into a durable democratic realignment. An ECPS long read, “The Economist versus Acemoglu: Who Will Govern the Next World Order?”, argues that the controversy surrounding Acemoglu is not simply a dispute over AI productivity. It concerns who directs technological change, who captures its gains, and whether democracy can discipline concentrations of corporate power that markets have themselves created. Acemoglu, David Autor and Simon Johnson’s proposal for “Building Pro-Worker AI” distinguishes technologies that complement workers and create new human tasks from technologies principally designed to replace labor. Acemoglu’s related intervention in Nature warns against organizing the entire technological agenda around artificial general intelligence and the automation of human capabilities.
If AI intensifies workplace surveillance, displaces labor and concentrates income among a few technology companies, it will aggravate precisely the inequalities and insecurities that nourish authoritarian populism. A democratic strategy must instead use public procurement, research funding, competition policy, worker participation and taxation to redirect innovation toward augmenting human capabilities and creating socially valuable employment.This is where the political meaning of Trump’s midterm defeat will ultimately be determined.
Congressional investigations and institutional checks are necessary, but they cannot substitute for a new governing philosophy centered on productive employment, affordable housing and healthcare, regional regeneration, technological democracy and the reconstruction of worker power.
After Victory Comes Democratic Delivery
Democratic successors must restore legality without producing institutional paralysis. They must dismantle state capture without replacing it with partisan revenge. They must defend pluralism while demonstrating that pluralist democracy can govern, coordinate and deliver. The current electoral reversals are therefore openings rather than conclusions. The V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 finds that nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives under autocratic rule and that democracy, for the average global citizen, has returned approximately to its 1978 level. Only eighteen countries are currently democratizing, while nearly a quarter of the world’s states are undergoing autocratization.
The American midterm victory is therefore historic, but its meaning remains unsettled. It may mark the beginning of democratic reconstruction. Equally, it may be another swing of the electoral pendulum, driven by an electorate that remains economically insecure, politically unrepresented, and willing to experiment repeatedly with anti-establishment alternatives.
If democratic governments cannot address these structural grievances, authoritarian populism will return—perhaps under younger, more disciplined and more competent leaders who have learned from the failures of Trump, Orbán and Bolsonaro. Winning an election can remove or constrain an authoritarian government. Only democratic delivery can weaken the economic, institutional and cultural conditions that continually reproduce authoritarian populism.
In this analysis, Dr. Prerna Chahar, Research Consultant at the Chintan Research Foundation in New Delhi, examines the political and institutional implications of the November 3, 2026, US midterm elections. With Democrats capturing both chambers of Congress, the results represent a significant setback for President Donald Trump, reshaping legislative priorities, congressional oversight, and executive-legislative relations. Dr. Chahar explores how economic discontent, inflation, tariff policies, and the US-Iran war contributed to Republican losses while raising questions about Trumpism’s future and the Republican Party’s political identity. She argues that the elections constitute a critical test of democratic accountability, institutional checks and balances, and political polarization, with consequences extending beyond Washington to global security, international partnerships, and America’s geopolitical leadership.
By Dr. Prerna Chahar*
The American midterm elections are often seen as a referendum on the incumbent president. But the Nov. 3, 2026, elections have proven that they are far more than just a regular election. It’s not just about who occupies the seats in Congress. It’s about who sets the legislative agenda, who provides oversight of the White House, and how much room President Donald Trump has to pursue his domestic and international ambitions in the last two years of his second term.
The results represent a major political blow to the Republicans. The Democrats took control of both houses of Congress, flipping the Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The question, therefore, is no longer simply who won the elections. It is what this outcome means for American democracy, Trump’s political authority, the Republican Party’s future.
A Referendum on Trump: The Politics of Public Discontent
Midterm elections have historically been tough for the party in the White House, with losses in Congress. With two exceptions, the president’s party has lost ground in every midterm election since World War II. But the size of the 2026 Democratic gains suggests more than the typical electoral penalty applied to an incumbent administration.
The economy became a defining issue. Inflation, rising living costs, fuel prices and fears of economic uncertainty have shaped voters’ opinions. The Republican campaign was also complicated by Trump’s tariff policies and the economic fall-out from the US-Iran war. A central focus of public anger was the administration’s decision to strike Iran in February 2026 and the subsequent rise in fuel prices. Voters also expressed concern about corruption, executive power and the way the administration governed.
The election also exposed the limits of presidential popularity as a substitute for good governance. Trump’s political influence has remained central to the Republican Party, but the results indicate that presidential endorsements and campaign rallies cannot necessarily insulate congressional candidates from dissatisfaction with the administration.
The scale of participation is equally significant. Preliminary estimates suggest that approximately 122.7 million ballots had been counted, representing around 48.8 percent of the eligible population. It was the second-highest midterm turnout in more than a century, behind only the record of 2018. That turnout suggests voters saw the election as meaningful for the country’s political future.
The Congressional Arithmetic: A New Political Reality
The most immediate consequence of the Democratic victory is institutional. Control of Congress determines much more than the passage of legislation. It determines committee leadership, congressional investigations, budgetary negotiations, confirmation processes and the ability to scrutinize executive decisions.
By January 2027, Democrats will have control of Congress, and the legislative landscape will be very different for the administration. The House can investigate, can subpoena officials to testify, and can look over federal spending. The Senate has constitutional authority over presidential nominations and appointments.
The new Democratic majority also keeps House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in the race to become the first Black Speaker of the House. His leadership will be tested by the challenge of balancing progressive demands with the priorities of moderate Democrats, particularly on taxation, immigration, healthcare and economic policy.
However, a Democratic-controlled Congress does not mean that Trump has lost executive authority. The president retains the power to veto legislation, direct executive agencies and exercise considerable discretion in foreign affairs. Democrats would require a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override a presidential veto, which they do not possess.
The result, therefore, is not a transfer of presidential power but a redistribution of institutional leverage. The next two years could bring legislative gridlock, vigorous oversight by Congress and new debates over the constitutional boundaries of executive power.
Beyond the Ballot: What’s at Stake?
The election offers Republicans a chance to answer fundamental questions about political identity and leadership. The party has to ask whether its electoral strategy has become too closely tied to the personality and political agenda of Trump.
The results could feed internal tensions between traditional conservatives, populist supporters and Republican lawmakers worried about the party’s future electoral prospects. Vice President JD Vance and other possible Republican leaders also will be asked about the party’s direction leading into the 2028 presidential election.
But it would be premature to read the results as the death of Trumpism. His political base is still an important constituency, and the Republican Party still has considerable clout in state governments and conservative political networks. The question is whether the midterm loss is because people are unhappy with specific policies, the president’s style of governing, or a general change in what voters want.
A Test of American Democracy
The 2026 midterm elections are ultimately about how American democratic institutions function. The US constitutional system includes important elements of separation of powers, congressional oversight, and electoral accountability. Split politics can result in legislative paralysis, but it can also strengthen institutional checks and balances.
The results created a difficult political landscape for Trump in his remaining two years in office. For Democrats they provide congressional power but also the obligation to show that electoral victories can be translated into effective governance.
For the international community, the result is one more piece in an uncertain geopolitical landscape. India’s strategic partnership with the United States, European security, the Indo-Pacific balance of power and Washington’s approach towards global conflicts will all be influenced, to varying degrees, by the new congressional dynamics.
The larger lesson is that American elections are never exclusively domestic events. Decisions taken in Washington affect global markets, diplomatic relationships, security partnerships and international institutions.
But beyond the ballot, a more consequential question looms: Can America’s political institutions reconcile competing visions of national power, democratic accountability, and global responsibility? The 2026 midterms shifted the balance of power in Congress. What Washington does next will determine if they too change the course of American politics and its relationship to the world.
(*) Dr. Prerna Chahar is a Research Consultant at the Chintan Research Foundation, New Delhi, India. Her research interests focus on US foreign policy, inter-American relations, and regional cooperation in East Asia and the Indo-Pacific.
