Professor Niklas Bolin argues that the Sweden Democrats’ most consequential transformation is institutional normalization rather than ideological moderation. As Sweden approaches the September 13 election, SD has become deeply integrated into the political mainstream while retaining a resilient populist configuration centered on people-centrism, anti-elitism, popular sovereignty, and antagonism. Professor Bolin stresses that “institutional normalization does not necessarily mean ideological moderation,” even as SD has gained substantial influence through the Tidö Agreement. He also notes that the party has won “an important ideological battle” as restrictive migration positions have become mainstream. Yet normalization creates a paradox: the more successful SD becomes, the more it becomes part of the establishment it has long defined itself against.
Five days before Sweden’s September 13 parliamentary election, the country enters the final stretch of the campaign with an unusually fluid electoral landscape. The latest Novus/TV4 poll places the opposition at 50.3 percent and the Tidö parties at 47.9 percent, with the gap still within the statistical margin of error. The Liberals (L) have climbed to 4.3 percent—just above the parliamentary threshold—while other recent polls still place them below it, making their survival one of the most consequential variables in government formation. At the same time, the Social Democrats (S) remain the largest party overall, while the Sweden Democrats (SD) continue to challenge or surpass the Moderates (M) for leadership of the Swedish right.
In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Niklas Bolin, Professor of Political Science at Mid Sweden University, argues that the most significant transformation of the Sweden Democrats is not necessarily ideological moderation but institutional normalization. As he puts it, “Institutional normalization does not necessarily mean ideological moderation.” A party, he stresses, can become “more professional, more accepted by the other parties, and more integrated into the political mainstream without changing its ideological worldview.”
This distinction is crucial for understanding SD’s trajectory. The party has moved from pariah status to substantial policy influence through the Tidö Agreement, while its core populist configuration—people-centrism, anti-elitism, popular sovereignty, and antagonism—has remained resilient. Professor Bolin therefore cautions that the party’s normalization and growing political influence should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that it has “become less populist” or that “its ideology has changed to the same degree.”
The interview also explores how SD’s success has reshaped the wider party system. Professor Bolin notes that Swedish migration policy has “clearly moved in a more restrictive direction” and that positions considered controversial 10 or 15 years ago are “today almost political mainstream.” In that sense, he argues, “the Sweden Democrats won an important ideological battle.” Yet this mainstreaming produces a paradox: when other parties adopt similar positions, they both legitimize SD and reduce the salience of issues the party once dominated electorally.
Bolin further suggests that SD’s growing success creates a tension between outsider identity and establishment power. The party has benefited from substantial influence without formal governmental responsibility, but “the more successful the party becomes, the more it becomes part of the establishment itself.”
Against this backdrop, the 2026 election is about more than which bloc wins. It tests whether Sweden is consolidating a new party system in which the radical right has not merely entered the mainstream, but helped redefine it.
As Sweden approaches a razor-thin 2026 election, Professor Andreas Jahrehorn Önnerfors argues that the Sweden Democrats’ significance lies not only in whether they enter government, but in how far they have already reshaped mainstream politics. He describes the Tidö Agreement as giving SD “a huge magnet” that has pulled governing parties to the right, while the collapse of the cordon sanitaire has blurred distinctions between SD and the Moderates. The interview also explores Folkhemmet nostalgia, “white melancholy,” migration, alternative media, conspiratorial narratives, enemy images, and information disorder. Looking beyond election day, Professor Önnerfors warns that Sweden may face prolonged coalition uncertainty and a deeper political realignment, concluding that “we are going to face a very hot autumn.”
Sweden’s 2026 election on September 13 may mark a decisive stage in the normalization of the radical right. With the Sweden Democrats (SD) polling ahead of the Moderates in several surveys and the survival of the Liberals remaining uncertain, the central question is no longer whether SD has entered the political mainstream, but how far its influence has already transformed the structure, language, and ideological center of Swedish politics. In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS, Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors, Full Professor in Intellectual History at Linnaeus University and researcher and project leader at the Fojo Media Institute in Sweden, argues that a formal entry of SD into government would represent a qualitatively new phase—but also that the party has already achieved substantial success in reshaping mainstream political discourse.
Professor Önnerfors traces this transformation to the collapse of the traditional cordon sanitaire. Once the Moderates chose sustained cooperation with SD, he argues, voters were confronted with a simple logic: “Why choose the copy when I can vote for the original?” The result, in his view, has been an increasing convergence between the Sweden Democrats and parts of the traditional center-right, to the point where “in some cases it is indistinguishable whether a minister acts on behalf of the Moderate Party or on behalf of the Sweden Democrats.”
The Tidö Agreement is central to this process. Professor Önnerfors describes SD’s influence through the metaphor of “a huge magnet” that has pulled the governing parties “clearly to the right” on migration, integration, deportation, and criminal policy. This power has allowed SD to remain formally outside government while retaining its anti-establishment posture, even as it exercises substantial influence over policy. Yet this arrangement may be reaching its limits. Professor Önnerfors notes that SD has already declared its ambition to secure ministerial positions if the Tidö bloc wins, a development that would force the party to confront the contradictions between insurgent populism and the responsibilities of government.
The stakes are equally high for the Moderates and the Social Democrats. Professor Önnerfors argues that the former may face a profound identity crisis after drifting toward positions formulated by SD, while the latter must confront the failure of years of triangulation toward both neoliberal and increasingly punitive right-wing positions. In his formulation, “SD has already been successful in transforming mainstream Swedish politics.”
What follows, then, is not simply an interview about whether SD will enter government. It is a diagnosis of a deeper political realignment in which radical-right frames have moved from the margins into the core of Swedish political competition. With only a few percentage points separating the two blocs, Professor Önnerfors concludes that “we really don’t know in which direction it will go.” Whatever the result, he warns, “we are going to face a very hot autumn.”
Here is our interview with Professor Andreas Jahrehorn Önnerfors, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Why Choose the Copy When You Can Vote for the Original?
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson campaigns with members of the Moderate Party (Moderaterna) during an outdoor political rally in Uppsala, Sweden, on August 12, 2026. Photo: Krister Hägglöf / Dreamstime.
Professor Önnerfors, welcome! Four days before the election, the polls disagree substantially about the survival of the Liberals but agree on something potentially more consequential: the Sweden Democrats are polling ahead of the Moderates. How should we interpret this transformation of the Swedish right? Are we still looking at a mainstream center-right bloc dependent on a radical-right partner, or has the gravitational center of Swedish conservatism itself shifted toward SD?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: The situation in Sweden is, of course, similar to other situations around Europe. And the simplest explanation is that when the center-right party, Moderaterna (M), decided to enter into more or less a coalition with the Sweden Democrats (SD), voters came to an understanding: Why choose the copy when I can vote for the original? So, that is one reaction that we definitely can see. When Sweden decided against the cordon sanitaire, the cordon that supposedly would keep far-right politics out of the mainstream, that was a dangerous development, because then the two parties with most of the electoral support, the Sweden Democrats and the Moderates, were kind of joining positions, so much so that in some cases it is indistinguishable whether a minister acts on behalf of the Moderate Party or on behalf of the Sweden Democrats.
SD Successfully Appropriated the Social Democratic Ideal of Folkhemmet
SD’s support appears remarkably resilient at around 19–20 percent even amid considerable late-campaign volatility and a sharp decline in Social Democratic support. Does this suggest that SD has moved beyond the classic “protest party” phase and consolidated a durable political subculture and social constituency? If so, what are the deepest drivers of that consolidation—immigration, cultural insecurity, distrust of institutions, welfare concerns, status loss, or something more fundamental about Swedish identity?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: I think it is all of that. The Sweden Democrats have also capitalized on a triangulation pursued by the Social Democrats in relation to the previous Moderate-led governments, which focused much more on new public management, neoliberal solutions, and the economy. Meanwhile, classical Social Democratic themes of societal security—in Swedish, the concept of trygghet—disappeared from the political vocabulary, leaving space for the Sweden Democrats to capture them and connect them to the old Social Democratic ideal of Folkhemmet, the people’s home, which for decades represented the vision of creating a stable society.
This concept was then successfully appropriated by the Sweden Democrats, with all that this implies: policy proposals intended to improve people’s daily lives, but also the broader package of Folkhemmet nostalgia—the idea of a people’s home that supposedly reached its peak in the 1950s and 60s, before the arrival of mass migration. This is something the Sweden Democrats have been able to tap into psychologically and culturally, and we continue to see that to this day.
The Far Right Exploits Imagined Grievances
Your writings engage with the idea of “white melancholy” and with nostalgia for the Folkhemmet, suggesting that radical-right success may be rooted as much in culture and collective self-perception as in material economics. You have discussed nostalgia, melancholy, and “retrotopia” as powerful mobilizing forces, particularly when combined with existential fear and perceived loss. How much of SD’s contemporary strength should therefore be understood as a politics of material grievance, and how much as a politics of imagined loss?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: That ties into the same complex of ideas, doesn’t it? On an objective level, Swedish society is not characterized by huge economic gaps. People are generally well off. It is a prosperous society with good infrastructure and so on. So I would say that, in contrast to other countries—or, for instance, if you were to compare it with Eastern Germany—the grievances people talk about are more imagined than material.
These imagined grievances can then be exploited by the rhetoric of the far right. The immigrant population is portrayed as an internal enemy of the people, as draining resources from society, while the white majority population is depicted as being at risk of replacement in the future by immigrants who are presented as parasiting the Swedish economy. That is the image being sold, and it is successful with parts of the electorate.
The Sweden Democrats Have Won the Agenda-Setting Battle on Migration
A Sweden Democrats (SD) campaign poster ahead of Sweden’s September 13, 2026 parliamentary elections, featuring the slogan “This is how we make Sweden Sweden again” and highlighting the party’s policies on immigration, crime, Islamism, citizenship, welfare, and the economy.
Relatedly, you have argued that immigration can become much more than one policy field because the immigrant “other” provides a screen onto which wider anxieties about social transformation can be projected. Sweden has now adopted substantially more restrictive migration policies across much of the political spectrum. Does this weaken SD by depriving it of issue ownership, or does it demonstrate that SD has already won the deeper ideological struggle by successfully redefining how mainstream Swedish politics understands migration, integration and national belonging?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: I would say the latter. It is absolutely clear that the agenda setting has gone into that field and that SD has been incredibly successful in launching the idea that you can boil down basically any societal problem to immigration, migration, or integration.
You can take the recent PISA results as an example. They came in just the other day and also confirmed a trend that you can see across educated nations globally: that pupils’ reading capacities are decreasing and so on. But the Sweden Democrat framing of the problem is that it is down to the fact that we have an immigrated population that drags down the Swedish picture. So, anything from education to fuel prices to climate change, or whatever, can be boiled down to this entire issue of migration, immigration, and integration.
And with that agenda-setting the Sweden Democrats have really succeeded, which also makes it impossible to discuss big problems, both within the country, such as criminality and its deeper roots, or foreign policy issues, for instance, the war in Gaza and so on. Because if you park these issues on the parking lot of “it has all to do with immigration,” you don’t need to go back and ask your own values what is actually happening here, but you always have a scapegoat upon which you can project the perceived downfall of Sweden and the Swedish people.
The Tidö Agreement Has Given the Sweden Democrats Magnetic Power
The Tidö arrangement represents a remarkable transition from cordon sanitaire to institutionalized cooperation with SD. From the perspective of radical-right normalization, is the most important development of the past four years what SD itself has done, or what the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals have become willing to say and do? In other words, does mainstream accommodation moderate radical-right parties—or does it instead normalize radical-right frames throughout the party system?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: One could use an analogy here and say that, since the Sweden Democrats are not officially part of the government, what they are amassing through the Tidö Agreement is some kind of magnetic power. So, imagine that the Sweden Democrats, with this agreement, have created a huge magnet through which the issues of Swedish politics are framed. And this magnet has dragged the other parties that are part of the Tidö Agreement clearly to the right—in the area of, for instance, critique against immigration and integration, deportation, and things like that; a tough stance against criminality, and so on. That is the power that the Tidö Agreement has shaped. It has given this magnet an incredibly large power that has also made some of the government ministers more or less move over to the other side.
The Tidö Agreement Has Allowed SD to Retain Its Anti-Establishment Role
There is also a paradox here. SD can simultaneously present itself as an anti-establishment insurgent and exercise substantial influence over government policy. How sustainable is populist anti-elitism once a party becomes deeply embedded in policymaking? Can SD continue to depict “the establishment,” bureaucracies, journalists and cultural elites as hostile forces while increasingly becoming part of the governing establishment itself?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: That’s a very good question, and there are, of course, different answers to it. The Tidö Agreement has allowed SD to continue playing that role because they remain formally outside the government, in the sense that they do not appoint their own ministers. Now they have raised the stakes and said that they want to have ministers if the Tidö party family wins the elections. And that will ultimately provide an answer to this question.
At the same time, SD itself has become so powerful that it has been able to expel party members who have behaved well beyond the limits of any reasonable democratic discourse—people with Nazi or far-right sympathies who have been prosecuted and sentenced in court, and so on. Yet they have had so much electoral support that these scandals have had little effect.
The Tidö Agreement has allowed them to retain their role as an anti-establishment party. But we see time and again that SD-appointed politicians, at the local, regional, and national levels, collide with the realities of sound governance. So, if the Tidö party family succeeds in the elections, we will see this trend deepen: the incompetence of populist politicians will become even more visible, and this anti-establishment flair will begin to disappear.
This is, by the way, something that parties even further to the right than the Sweden Democrats have also capitalized on. We have a number of small micro-parties that style themselves as being outside the eight parties currently represented in the Swedish parliament. And they are already framing SD as an establishment party, which you can see in the political propaganda leading up to the elections right now.
The Sweden Democrats’ Politics of Gender Is Deeply Ambivalent
Sweden Democrats’ Square Meeting in Umeå. Jimmie Åkesson speaks to the people on the city square where opposition left-wingers have formed a chain and protest in Umeå, Sweden on August 14, 2018. Photo: Shutterstock.
Your work on “white melancholy” also discusses the perceived loss of white masculinity and the capacity of radical-right politics to mobilize across older class divisions. How important is gender to understanding SD’s electorate today? Should the persistent gender gap in radical-right support be interpreted mainly through attitudes toward immigration and crime, or does it reflect a broader politics of masculinity, authority, family, social hierarchy and resistance to changing gender norms?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: It’s an ambivalent thing because, on the one hand, it’s absolutely clear that the Sweden Democrats belong to the party families in Europe that kind of resist the idea that there would be something like toxic masculinity and so on. When we’re talking about the gender gap, we see a clear gender gap in Sweden between the parts of the electorate that are voting for SD or other parties, where we have a clear gender divide. So, male voters in all age groups are flocking to SD, and female voters are more flocking to the green and red parties.
That is a true gender gap, but beyond the true gender gap, SD also frames itself as LGBTQ+ friendly. Not because they really are, because, on the other hand, they hate Pride and drag queens and things like that, but because it’s a way of framing anti-Muslim positions. They’re highlighting their support for LGBTQI or women’s issues because of the fact that they believe that it’s so provocative for the immigrants. Of course, the projection is that the very moment they would get to power, they would get rid of these positions. They’ve just adopted them to make typical racist arguments against the perceived other.
But it’s really a little bit ambivalent because, on the one hand, they are rejecting the entire idea that there would be something that you could call toxic masculinity, and they are adopting, ambivalently, both feminist and LGBTQI positions, but for the purpose of basically using them in Islamophobic rhetoric. That makes it very difficult to untangle things. Then it’s a party where very many people have been sentenced for domestic violence, which also runs completely contrary to this image that we are the supporters of women’s rights.
The Sweden Democrats Have Captured the Frame of ‘Telling the Truth’
In your work with Emma Ricknell, you examine how Swedish right-wing alternative media contest the authority of legacy journalism by presenting mainstream media as disconnected from ordinary people while constructing their own claims to authenticity and truth. Has this alternative-media ecosystem become an independent driver of radical-right support, rather than merely an amplifier of pre-existing preferences? And does it increasingly allow SD-adjacent voters to inhabit an alternative epistemic environment in which distrust of mainstream institutions continually reproduces itself?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: Yes, an absolutely crucial element of the right-wing surge in Sweden has been the conquest of alternative and social media spaces. This is one area where the established parties have largely failed. The anti-establishment component has been strengthened by the fact that the Sweden Democrats have been very effective at using the affordances and logics of the alternative media sphere. They operate across the full spectrum—from social media, influencers, and YouTube videos to formats that imitate mainstream media, such as morning shows, as well as their own news channel, and the encouragement of so-called citizen journalism. Across this entire spectrum, the media ecosystem has been part and parcel of the right-wing surge in Sweden over the last 10 years.
Moreover, quality journalism has not been able to withstand this development. Even when scandals have been exposed—for instance, a troll factory run more or less by the party headquarters, or behavior that would never be accepted from an independent journalist—such revelations have still largely been accepted by the electorate, because the Sweden Democrats have managed to capture the frame of “telling the truth.” In that sense, the broader media environment has enabled frame capture in Swedish politics and has become an integrated part of the far-right surge.
It is very smart because it works across platforms and media forms. We can even see the Sweden Democrats engaging in popular culture, such as Schlager music in Sweden, with songs that are popular among the population and produced by or involving SD politicians. This has been an important force behind the right-wing surge.
Dog Whistle Allows Conspiratorial Ideas to Enter Mainstream Politics
Your research treats conspiracy theories not simply as bizarre false beliefs but as powerful “meaning-making narratives.” You emphasize their recurring architecture: events are not accidental, everything is connected, hidden actors are malevolent, evidence is supposedly concealed, and society faces existential danger. To what extent has this conspiratorial grammar migrated from Sweden’s political margins into more conventional discussions of immigration, crime, elites, media, EU power and national decline? Where should scholars draw the boundary between radical-right populist rhetoric and explicitly conspiratorial politics?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: The salience of conspiratorial meaning-making in Sweden accelerated during the pandemic, which allowed people to use conspiratorial meaning-making as a frame to conceptualize politics. And this has been used in different ways. The Sweden Democrats have not allowed outright conspiracy theories in the sense of allowing politicians who say that climate change is a hoax, or who promote anti-Semitic or Islamophobic conspiracy theories in an outright manner. They try to separate these things and adopt a language that is much more of a dog whistle language, which implicitly rests on conspiratorial ideas. On the other hand, they have also played with certain terms that are around. For instance, instead of demographic change, they talk about an exchange of the population, which we internationally would call the Great Replacement Theory, this conspiracy theory purporting that some elites are trying to replace the natural national populations of European countries with mainly Muslim immigrants.
The establishment of far-right populism has tried to tone down the outright use of conspiracy theories, but has still been using those frames. They don’t believe in climate science. They don’t believe that immigration is caused by international conflicts, and so on. But they don’t say it openly, and the people within their party who say these things openly are also excluded from the party. But, in the wider far-right ecosystem and among party members, and particularly in social media posts, you can see these conspiracy theories expressed outright time after time, and even more so among the more radical offshoots of the far-right parties. You can see that you have explicit conspiracy theories.
Now, I’m leading a project ahead of the Swedish elections, and what we can see, for instance, on social media is the idea that the Social Democrats are associated with gang criminals, that gang criminals have been admitted to Sweden through Social Democratic policies, and that the Social Democrats have allowed mass migration as a way to create voting cattle and preserve their own power. That is a very strong conspiratorial narrative that is circulating.
Within that same sphere, a much more outlandish conspiracy theory holds that Sweden’s economic powerhouse family, the Wallenbergs, are the wire-pullers behind politics. This is far more conspiratorial and ties into QAnon and deep-state conspiracy theories that remain more on the fringes. I hope that gives you an answer to that question.
A Polarized Information Environment Is a Perfect Target for Manipulation
Illustration by Ulker Design.
You have also shown how conspiratorial narratives can function as vectors of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, precisely because they exploit pre-existing grievances and provide emotionally compelling causal explanations. As Sweden approaches an exceptionally close election, how should we distinguish between authentic domestic radical-right mobilization and the external amplification of the same divisions by foreign actors? Is the principal vulnerability disinformation itself, or the pre-existing distrust and polarization that make particular narratives persuasive?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: It goes both ways. In order for conspiratorial narratives to function as vectors of foreign information manipulation, you have to have either existing or imagined grievances that you can exploit among your target audiences. That can be used by a foreign actor in many different ways.
Now, ahead of the elections, we haven’t seen that actually happening straight away, for many different reasons, but we have had a campaign before that targeted Sweden while we were in our NATO accession talks: a legend that Swedish social services are stealing Muslim children and giving them to sexually deviant foster parents. That was a campaign that grew very big in different parts of the world and was amplified through foreign information manipulation and interference, as well as domestic amplification.
Then you can argue that, in certain policy fields, the potential objectives of foreign actors—foreign threat actors—might already be fulfilled, in the sense that there is considerable doubt about the consensus around climate science in Sweden. We recently had a report about wind energy in Europe that shows that Sweden is a hotbed of anti-wind-power disinformation. So, if you were a foreign threat actor that you don’t need to construct a campaign against Sweden, because opinion is so divided on this issue that it already reaches government levels.
So, it’s a tricky one. Then, of course, as you say, we are moving into the absolutely hottest phase of the election now. We are looking at things right now in the information environment where we don’t exactly know who the sender is. Like I was talking previously about this conspiracy theory that the Social Democrats are supported by gang criminals who have been imported to Sweden. They are siding up with the Muslim Brotherhood. They have imported voting cattle from the MENA region to Sweden to stay in power and stuff like that. Who is planting these narratives? Is this really some kind of independent distribution of political opinions ahead of the elections, or is this coordinated? It’s premature; we can’t tell that right now. But of course, if you imagined yourself as a threat actor sitting on this kind of red toolbox of campaigning, then this would be a perfect thing to throw into this very polarized information environment ahead of an election, trying to manipulate the results.
We should also talk about the fact that Sweden, over the last two elections, has had very narrow results that have resulted in very prolonged periods in which we had to find a viable government, and most projections right now point in the same direction for this year. It would be extremely narrow. We are living in a kind of 50% democracy right now, where we don’t know exactly which side will win, and in any case, the formation of a government will be very tricky.
Very Different Political Positions Can Unite in a General Attack on the System
The Swedish LVU (Swedish Care of Young Persons Act) controversy demonstrated that distrust of institutions can also emerge within migrant communities, while your collaborative work has examined emotional mobilization around Swedish social services and the construction of “us” and “them.” Does this complicate the common assumption that conspiratorial distrust belongs primarily to the radical right? Can very different constituencies—anti-immigration movements, marginalized migrant communities and foreign influence actors—converge around a shared narrative of an untrustworthy Swedish state, even when their ideological starting points are completely different?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: Exactly. That gets to the heart of the issue. The LVU campaign, which concerns decisions by Swedish social services to place children in foster care, was framed as something that unfairly targeted migrant communities. The campaign lasted for more than two years. But from our research, we know that an almost identical narrative had already been directed against the Norwegian social services, Barnevernet, this time by Russian actors and amplified in the Russian information space. So the basic storyline remains the same, while the groups portrayed as victims of this supposedly dictatorial welfare state—or, more broadly, the system—can be exchanged.
In the aftermath of the LVU campaign, which primarily targeted Muslim minorities in Sweden, we have also seen the same narrative of a dictatorial welfare state taken up by Catholic extremist groups and, more recently, by American Christian nationalists supporting a Romanian family that wanted to raise its children according to Christian values. So the point of convergence is that very different political positions can be united through a general attack on the system. We are increasingly talking about a form of anti-system, anti-government extremism that questions the very existence of institutions and the expertise of the state.
That said, of course, no system is without failures. Many decisions leading to the foster care of children in Sweden can be questioned on very good grounds. That is not what I am saying. But we have procedures in place for doing so. Many journalists are also working on these cases, and some of them are absolutely preposterous. The distinction, however, is between legitimate criticism of the exercise of governmental authority and the conspiratorial accusation that the system itself is corrupt and that a deep state exists with the sole purpose of manipulating the entire population. In the end, that kind of belief may discourage people from exercising their voting rights or from identifying with society at large.
Enemy Images Have the Potential to Radicalize into Lethal Violence
Black Lives Matters Protest in Stockholm, Sweden on June 3, 2020.
In your work on “enemy images,” the out-group becomes an existential threat and politics is organized around an increasingly unbridgeable distinction between “us” and “them.” How useful is this framework for understanding contemporary Swedish debates about migrants, Muslims, criminal gangs and allegedly disloyal elites? At what point does legitimate political debate about migration, integration or crime cross into the construction of an enemy image that begins to undermine equal citizenship and democratic pluralism?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: We are already seeing this, and, as with most enemy images, they are fueled in particular by conspiratorial imagination. Internal and external enemies are identified, and the figure of the immigrant captures both, because it is a figure that comes from the outside in and asserts itself. Mostly, it is the idea of male immigrants that is perceived as threatening—entering the body politic of Sweden and being seen as a danger. This fantasy can grow so deep and so wide that it leads to lethal violence.
We had two school attacks in Sweden recently. They have not officially been called acts of right-wing terrorism, but if you dig deeper, you see clear connections to the people who were targeted, particularly in the attack in Örebro, where those targeted were almost exclusively of immigrant origin. So, to my mind, that is an absolutely clear example of how these enemy images have the potential to radicalize into lethal violence.
When it comes to internal enemies, it is the same thing. We were talking before about anti-system, anti-government extremism. A couple of years ago, during a Swedish political getaway week, one of the most hated party leaders of the Center Party—which is basically the only Liberal Party left in Sweden—was the target of a planned attack. The attacker could not carry out the attack and instead killed a government health official. Behind that person’s radicalization process was an entire ecosystem of people spreading hatred against “these internal enemies who were destroying Swedish society from inside.” Because the target was an ethnic Swedish government official, that person was accused of colluding with these external enemies and was therefore, in the language of extremist radicalization, cleared to be killed. There you can see that this has real potential, because if you frame people living in your society as enemies, this can have real-life consequences. The construction of the enemy can go so deep that people are also accused of collusion.
Of course, extremist violence is the most radical expression of this, but we also have many everyday expressions of these kinds of enemy images. They frame and reduce the entire problem to one of immigration, which then leads to calls for tougher measures on criminality and deportations, and even to very absurd deportations in Sweden right now, where people who pay their taxes and work are being deported, and post-Brexit British citizens are being expelled from the country because we have to be tough on migration. This means that the enemy image has been adopted to such a degree that it leads to a bureaucratic logic that, at least in my mind, evokes the 1930s in Germany.
High Trust and Deep Suspicion Can Coexist at the Same Time
An intriguing feature of the Swedish case is that high institutional and media trust has historically coexisted with increasingly powerful counter-publics characterized by skepticism toward journalists, experts and political institutions. Your pedagogical work identifies “hot-button issues,” science denial, distrust in democracy and social identity as four domains of conspiratorial imagination. Which of these is most politically consequential in Sweden today, and has the country’s celebrated high-trust model obscured the depth of alienation among certain sections of the electorate?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: That’s a very good question, because it points to one of the inconsistencies. Sweden is frequently placed in the upper-right corner of the World Values Survey, where high levels of self-realization and trust are among the factors that push a country into that very extreme position, even compared with many other countries. Sweden scores very highly on trust, happiness, wealth, and so on. But at the same time, there is also a strand of deep skepticism and a counter-public in the country. That is a strange equation, isn’t it? Sweden had some of the least restrictive anti-COVID public health policies, yet tens of thousands of people still marched through the streets of Stockholm against vaccine mandates that the government was about to introduce.
This is very difficult to explain, but in my book on conspiracy theories, I explore a thesis borrowed from a political psychologist that can be formulated like this: “Don’t control me, but protect me.” That captures the crisis of the modern self in relation to governmental power. It helps explain why people can react with both an authoritarian impulse and a libertarian one. In other words: “I don’t want to be controlled, but if something goes wrong, I want to be protected.” And who is the power that protects me? Somehow, it has to be a strong state.
At the same time, however, you want to be as free as possible in your own choices—driving your car without thinking about the climate, going on holiday without thinking about the climate, or building houses without thinking about the environment. You want to be free to realize yourself. But on the other hand, you also have the authoritarian impulse: you want to be rescued if something goes wrong.
From a psychological point of view, that is a very complicated position for a modern liberal state to accommodate. But it may help explain the popularity of more authoritarian-style politics, because they present themselves as protecting the liberty of the people, which seems like a contradictory element in political psychology. As I said, it is very difficult to pinpoint, but I think this tension in political psychology helps explain how high trust and suspicion can coexist at the same time.
I wish I could have an entire interview about that topic on another occasion, because I think it explains quite a lot. And this applies more broadly to Nordic-style countries. You could go to the Netherlands and ask yourself: why is the right-wing population so large there? You could go to Denmark, Norway, or even Finland and ask: how is it possible that countries with high levels of trust, wealth, happiness, GDP, and infrastructure also contain such extreme political positions? Why do these positions coexist in societies that we perceive as so stable?
Not All Expressions in Democratic Discourse Are Equally Valid
You have been deeply involved in factchecking, verification and efforts to strengthen Sweden’s resilience against information disorder. Yet populists frequently portray fact-checkers, public broadcasters, academics and psychological-defense institutions themselves as components of an elite information-control apparatus. How can liberal democracy defend the integrity of the information environment without inadvertently reinforcing the populist claim that a self-protecting establishment decides what citizens are permitted to regard as true?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: That is yet another of these very deep questions. I frequently make the joke that democracy cannot live with fact-checking, because Socrates was killed by Athenian democracy and forced to drink poison. And if you take Plato’s dialogues at face value, what Socrates did was constantly correct and fact-check people, trying to bring citizens in Greek democracy to a better understanding of concepts by defining things and so on. That made them so upset that, in the end, they said: we cannot tolerate this behavior in a democracy. Because democracy must live on the persuasion of people, not on whether concepts are true or not.
But then, of course, that is also a very uncanny idea of democracy, isn’t it? So, I think the problem here is to strike a balance between allowing democratic discourse that is fair and open and ensuring that it is not poisoned by foreign manipulation, interference, or deceptive actors. What we must allow is a fair and open democratic discourse, while at the same time maintaining this kind of Socratic position: not all expressions in an open and fair democratic discourse are equally valid from the point of view of truthfulness and trustworthiness. And for that, we have methods such as fact-checking and verification.
So, what I want to say is that if a politician honestly, with honest motives, enters a political debate and talks about a vision of society that is not based in reality, he or she might be free to do that, provided it is honest rather than deceptive, disinformation, or conspiracy theory. But, on the other hand, this same open society and its open debate must allow other people to say that what this person claims is actually not true, and that it is also not trustworthy because it has not been tested before. That is a delicate balance that we must uphold. And we have to make clear that many of the people who accuse fact-checking and verification of representing some outgrowth of the censorship-industrial complex are also claiming to represent Western values.
I would say that those of us who argue for fact-checking and verification are actually much more dedicated to Western values, because the ability to separate truth from fiction, and to determine what kind of information is more trustworthy than other information, has always been part of Western thought over the last 2,000 years. That is what many major intellectual movements were about. Not only Socrates; you could go to the Reformation or the Enlightenment and say that these were core issues in the development of Western thought.
Of course, it is also a very naive conception of democracy to think that democracy is a place where everything can be said and is equally valid. That is not true. People who claim that have a mistaken conception of democracy, and we have to make that case. Historically, of course, this has led to different political systems and forms of government. But if you have the super-populist idea that only the will of the people at this very moment is the most valid basis for framing and solving problems, we will end up in very horrible, dire political conditions.
That is the political-philosophical explanation. Of course, if you dig deeper and say that we do not want deceptive behavior in our public discourse, we do not want disinformation, and we do not want conspiracy theories, then verification and fact-checking are absolute virtues for every citizen to have in the digital information environment.
The Narrative Is Transnational, but Its Content Is National
You have described the radical right as increasingly transnational, with political narratives, symbols, conspiracies and strategies circulating across national boundaries. To what extent should SD therefore still be understood as a specifically Swedish phenomenon rooted in the Folkhemmet, the migration crisis and Sweden’s own political history? Or is it now better understood as the Swedish expression of a broader transnational radical-right ecosystem connecting debates over migration, demographic replacement, gender, climate, sovereignty and hostility toward liberal institutions across Europe and beyond?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: I think it is both. We have seen that the broader transnational radical-right ecosystem you are describing, which connects these different debates, always has to be translated into national contexts. What is true in Saxony-Anhalt, the German state where the AfD received 44% of the vote, is not true for Sweden, so the same narrative has to be framed differently depending on the context.
In that sense, the narrative is transnational, but its content is national. The grievances in Sweden are not the same as those in Saxony-Anhalt, France, or Italy. The same elements are present—elite critique, migration, post-industrial society, and nostalgia—but they manifest themselves differently and to different degrees.
For instance, in Saxony-Anhalt, you can connect to grievances rooted in a sense of loss after the German Democratic Republic. That is not something you can exploit in Sweden. In Sweden, however, you can exploit the concept of Folkhemmet, which serves as a parallel form of nostalgic mobilization to that found in other radical-right movements.
So I would say that the frames are shared, but the content of those frames has remained very national.
Whatever Happens, Sweden Is Going to Face a Very Hot Autumn
Sweden’s Social Democrats campaign ahead of the general election in Malmö, Sweden, on September 2, 2022, in support of then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s bid for a second term. Photo: Francis Joseph Dean / Dreamstime.
Finally, the 2026 election may represent a decisive moment in the normalization of Sweden’s radical right. SD is currently polling above the Moderates across several major surveys, while the Liberals’ survival—and therefore the parliamentary arithmetic—remains exceptionally uncertain. If the election confirms SD as the largest force on the right, what would constitute the more historically significant outcome: SD formally entering government, SD remaining outside government but exercising even greater policy leverage, or the broader transformation of mainstream Swedish politics around themes and diagnoses that originated on the radical right? And looking beyond September 13, are we witnessing the culmination of SD’s normalization—or the beginning of a more fundamental realignment of Swedish democracy?
Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: These are three very different scenarios. If SD enters government, it would be a very hard blow, almost on the scale of when SD entered the Swedish Parliament for the first time. If SD remains outside government, they are already talking about an election victory in 2030. They will certainly strengthen their image as an anti-establishment party even further, and they will go all in on winning the elections in 2030.
On the other hand, if the Tidö party family does not survive, the Moderate Party will almost certainly face a wipeout on the scale of the CDU in Germany—or in Eastern Germany, at least—in the sense that they will have to seriously redefine themselves. So many of their ministers and party officials have drifted toward positions formulated by this magnet, the Sweden Democrats, that they have become almost indistinguishable from them. That means they will have to go back and do some soul-searching: “If we, as the Moderate Party, want to come back, how are we going to come back? Or will we always be the fifth wheel on the wagon that SD rolls through Swedish politics?” So, in that sense, SD has already been successful in transforming mainstream Swedish politics.
When it comes to the Social Democrats, who over the last few weeks have experienced quite a radical loss of electoral support—several percentage points—they also need to do similar soul-searching. Over the last 10 years, they have been triangulating their own positions toward the neoliberal politics of the Moderate Party and the increasingly right-wing, punitive, authoritarian positions of the new radical right in Sweden, and that has certainly not paid off. So we have seen some gains in the center of Swedish politics right now, particularly for the Center Party, but also for other parties.
And what that means is that, equally, if SD were to enter government, the Social Democrats themselves would have to go back and do some serious thinking about how to reconnect what they stand for with the electorate. I can only think of an analogy with Great Britain, where you can see that movement happening right now, and the contrast between Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham, where the rhetoric of the new Prime Minister is much more geared toward typical social democratic Labour positions. The Social Democrats in Sweden will have to realize that they do not win by jumping on the bandwagon of the mainstreaming of SD positions.
If SD enters government, we may also see a similar wipeout on the side of the Social Democrats as would be the case with the Moderates. That could lead to a collapse. Perhaps they (The Social Democrats) would have to redefine themselves, and my prognosis would be that what emerges from that would be a party much more aligned with Labour under Andy Burnham.
But we don’t know. It is razor-thin right now. Only a couple of percentage points divide the two power blocs in Sweden, so we really don’t know in which direction it will go. Even if the Social Democrats were to win the election, I think Sweden will, as in 2018 and 2022, be trapped in months of debate and negotiation over how a government will be formed. Maybe there will even be a new election that clears the way. So, we are going to face a very hot autumn.
Professor Ibrahim Ozturk argues that Turkey’s 2027–2029 Medium-Term Program is less a credible development strategy than a politically sequenced exercise in economic populism. While promising lower inflation, faster growth, and technological upgrading, the program simultaneously expands current transfers, procurement, interest payments, and fiscal deficits while squeezing productive capital expenditure. Professor Ozturk contends that this structure reproduces a familiar electoral cycle: benefits are front-loaded, while the costs are deferred through inflation, taxation, debt, currency depreciation, and declining real wages. He further warns that Turkey is shifting from a developmental state toward a transfer state in which politically protected rents crowd out productivity-enhancing investment. The ultimate cost, he argues, is not merely fiscal instability but the erosion of Turkey’s long-term productive capacity and competitive advantage.
The classical paradigm of macroeconomic populism, articulated by Rüdiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards in The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America, describes a self-defeating political-economic cycle in which governments prioritize short-term growth and redistribution while discounting inflation, fiscal sustainability, productive capacity, and external constraints. These programs generally emerge in societies marked by deep socioeconomic inequality, declining trust in established institutions, and accumulated demands for redistribution. Governments respond by combining expansionary fiscal policies, rapid credit growth, substantial nominal wage increases, administered prices, subsidies, and attempts to suppress exchange-rate volatility. During the initial phase, the resulting demand shock can generate a temporary boom: capacity utilization rises, employment expands, real wages may initially improve, and politically visible consumption increases.
The apparent success of this first phase reinforces the government’s claim that conventional fiscal and monetary constraints can safely be disregarded. Yet the expansion does not necessarily increase productive capacity. When aggregate demand exceeds domestic supply, production bottlenecks intensify, imports rise, foreign-exchange requirements increase, and inflationary pressures accumulate. Attempts to suppress inflation through price controls, subsidized credit, fiscal transfers, or an overvalued exchange rate merely postpone—and often magnify—the eventual adjustment.
As foreign-exchange reserves decline and fiscal and external imbalances become increasingly difficult to finance, inflation accelerates, confidence deteriorates, capital moves abroad or into foreign currency, and the domestic currency depreciates. The government is ultimately forced to adopt stabilization measures involving tighter credit, higher interest rates, fiscal retrenchment, tax increases, and real-wage compression. The central paradox identified by Dornbusch and Edwards is therefore distributive: the social groups whom populist policies initially promise to protect frequently bear the heaviest burden of the subsequent crisis and adjustment.
A second strand of the literature explains why such policies remain politically attractive despite their recurrent economic costs. Acemoglu, Egorov, and Sonin argue that politicians may strategically adopt radical or economically costly positions to signal that they are not controlled by established elites. This signaling mechanism can make policy extremism electorally advantageous even when its longer-term economic consequences are damaging.
Dani Rodrik, in turn, emphasizes that globalization, technological disruption, regional inequalities, and distributional shocks generate genuine grievances that populist actors can mobilize. Populism therefore cannot be understood solely as manipulation from above. It also draws strength from real failures of representation, social protection, and economic inclusion. Once political leaders weaken institutional constraints and subordinate economic policy to electoral survival, however, legitimate grievances can become a mechanism for sustaining increasingly discretionary and unsustainable policies.
The conceptual distinction is crucial. Redistribution is not inherently populist, nor is every expansionary fiscal policy economically irresponsible. Redistribution becomes part of populist macroeconomic management when politically visible benefits are concentrated before an electoral deadline, their financing is concealed or deferred, productive and institutional constraints are disregarded, and the eventual adjustment is transferred to society through inflation, taxation, currency depreciation, public debt, unemployment, and declining real wages.
From the Classical Populist Cycle to Turkey’s Growth-Inflation Trap
Turkey’s recent experience does not reproduce every element of the classical Latin American model mechanically. It nevertheless displays several of its central political-economic mechanisms: the subordination of monetary policy to political objectives, credit-led demand expansion, the erosion of central bank credibility, extensive reliance on administrative interventions, the depletion of foreign-exchange buffers, and the postponement of adjustment until after politically critical moments.
Figure 1 places Turkey’s real GDP growth and officially reported year-end consumer-price inflation side by side. Between 2018 and 2025, inflation rose dramatically without a corresponding durable acceleration in real economic growth. The exceptional growth recorded in 2021 largely reflected the post-pandemic recovery, strong credit expansion via artificially subsidized negative real interest rates, and favorable base effects; it should not be interpreted as evidence that higher inflation generated structurally stronger growth.
Note: 2018–2025 growth figures are annual changes in real GDP, and inflation figures are December year-on-year CPI rates. For 2026, the figure uses Q2 year-on-year GDP growth and June year-on-year CPI inflation. The correlation is descriptive and does not imply causality. Source: Author’s compilation based on TurkStat and CBRT data.
The simple contemporaneous correlation between the two variables is positive but only moderate—approximately 0.44—and does not establish causality. More importantly, the temporal pattern reveals a widening divergence between nominal instability and real economic performance. Inflation exceeded 64 percent in 2022 and 2023, while real GDP growth remained close to 5 percent. As officially reported inflation subsequently declined, growth also weakened, reaching 2.3 percent year on year in the second quarter of 2026.
The central issue is therefore not whether inflation and growth occasionally move in the same direction, but whether inflationary expansion produces sustainable improvements in productivity, investment quality, technological capacity, employment, and household welfare. Turkey’s experience provides little evidence that it does. An inflationary growth strategy can temporarily support consumption, construction, government-directed investment, and politically connected sectors without generating comparable improvements in total factor productivity or long-term supply capacity. Measured GDP growth may consequently coexist with deteriorating income distribution, declining purchasing power, inefficient capital allocation, and eroding institutional credibility.
Turkey’s 2027–2029 Medium-Term Program (MTP) should be read through this conceptual and empirical lens. Although presented as a medium-term framework, its macroeconomic targets, expenditure composition, revenue assumptions, and sequencing of policy measures reveal a considerably shorter political horizon. The central question is whether the program constitutes a credible transition towards price stability, productive investment, institutional normalization, and distributive justice—or another attempt to defer structural adjustment while protecting Erdogan’s immediate political survival.
The Three Tests of an Economic Program
Every serious economic program must answer three elementary questions. First, how will the economy produce more and better goods and services? Second, how will scarce capital, labor, public revenue and foreign exchange be allocated to their most productive uses? Third, how will the resulting national income be distributed across households, firms, regions and generations? Growth, allocation and distribution are not separate chapters. They are a single system.
Analytical Frame: What the MTP Must Demonstrate
Judged by this triad, the MTP fails at a deeper level than forecast inconsistency. It subordinates production to demand management, efficiency to politically protected transfers, and distributional justice to a sequence in which organized beneficiaries receive secure returns while the wider public absorbs inflation, taxation and deteriorating public services.
A Program Without an Institutional Kitchen
The MTP reads less like the output of an autonomous professional planning process than a document assembled backward from a political requirement. The targets appear first; the behavioral mechanisms, policy instruments, implementation responsibilities, risk scenarios and trade-offs needed to make them mutually consistent are either missing or underdeveloped. This is what a program produced under political pressure looks like: arithmetic without architecture.
That weakness is inseparable from institutional history. The State Planning Organization (SPO), which accumulated specialized staff, sectoral memory and a culture of medium-term coordination, was abolished as a distinct organization in 2011 and transferred into the Ministry of Development. In 2018, the Presidency reorganized planning and budgeting functions under the Strategy and Budget Presidency. Formal responsibilities remained, but the center of gravity shifted from relatively autonomous technocratic coordination to a vertically controlled executive structure. The 2018 Presidential Decree establishing the Strategy and Budget Presidency documents these institutional changes. The analytical conclusion follows from the MTP itself: when autonomy, professional challenge, and collective deliberation are weakened, implausible assumptions are less likely to be questioned before publication. The issue is not the personal competence of every civil servant involved. It is the institutional environment in which competence can no longer constrain politics. Merit, teamwork and professional dissent cannot correct a program when the desired electoral conclusion is fixed in advance.
A Medium-term Program with a Short-term Political Horizon
The MTP projects faster growth, lower inflation, falling unemployment, a smaller current-account deficit and—after a temporary 2027 deterioration—a lower budget deficit. None of these outcomes is impossible in isolation. Their simultaneous delivery, however, requires a major productivity shock, stronger expectations, sustained capital inflows and unusually high policy credibility. The MTP states the destination more clearly than the transmission mechanism.
The Fiscal Fingerprint of an Early Election
The program’s political character is clearest in the 2027 budget. Expenditure rises faster than revenue; the budget deficit increases by almost 47 percent; and the already modest primary surplus is nearly halved. The MTP therefore does not begin its disinflation story with fiscal restraint. It begins with fiscal expansion.
The deficit-to-GDP ratio rises from 3.1 percent in 2026 to 3.5 percent in 2027, while the primary surplus almost disappears. In other words, the fiscal stance loosens just as the MTP claims inflation expectations will be decisively anchored.
Against the MTP’s roughly 25 percent 2027 deflator, current transfers rise by about 16 percent in real terms and purchases of goods and services by roughly 15.5 percent, while capital spending falls by about 17 percent in real terms. The contradiction is not rhetorical; it is embedded in the allocation.The MTP’s narrative promises technological upgrading; its budget finances current transfers, procurement and interest.
The 2023 Cycle Is Being Reconstructed
Turkey’s 2023 election cycle combined subsidized credit, public wage and pension increases, retirement arrangements, tax restructuring, energy support and extensive foreign-exchange and credit interventions. After the election came sharp depreciation, higher indirect taxes, tighter monetary policy and declining real purchasing power. The sequencing mattered: the benefit was immediate and politically visible; the correction was delayed and socially dispersed.
The MTP’s 2027–2029 path risks reconstructing the same political technology. The 2027 expansion supplies the distributive moment; the lower deficits and inflation promised for 2028–2029 imply the later correction. This is the classic time structure described by the economic-populism literature.
Distribution: Poverty Is Not a Footnote
The MTP discusses per-capita income and social policy, but aggregate averages conceal the depth of the subsistence crisis. Labor union TURK-IS calculated the August 2026 monthly food-only hunger threshold for a four-person household at TRY 37,388 and the broader poverty threshold at TRY 121,786; the estimated living cost of a single employee was TRY 48,305. These benchmarks show how far ordinary labor income has fallen behind the cost of basic reproduction.
The comparison permits a forceful but precise conclusion: the average household income of the poorest 40 percent is below the TURK-IS hunger threshold, while the average income of the bottom 80 percent is below its poverty threshold. This does not mean every household in those quintiles falls below the relevant line; the figures are quintile averages, and the TURK-IS thresholds refer to a four-person household. (See TURK-IS, August 2026 Hunger and Poverty Threshold. TUIK’s official relative-poverty rate—13.0 percent in 2025—uses an equivalized median-income methodology and therefore answers a different question. The two measures should not be conflated).
The methodological caution does not weaken the substantive conclusion. When the minimum wage is below a food-only threshold for a representative family, and the broader basic-needs budget is multiples of ordinary earnings, distributional stress is systemic. The MTP’s reliance on indirect taxation, inflationary erosion, and delayed adjustment means that lower- and middle-income households finance a disproportionate share of the program.
Economic populism does not correct this injustice. It temporarily compensates selected groups, then recreates poverty through inflation, currency depreciation, taxation, and compressed real wages. It distributes relief politically and distributes the bill socially.
Tax More, Privatize More, Borrow More
The revenue side does not solve the contradiction; it exposes it. In 2027, tax revenue is programmed to grow by 36.5 percent, faster than nominal GDP growth of about 30.3 percent. Tax revenue rises from 17.1 to 17.9 percent of GDP, while the total tax burden, including social-security contributions, moves from 24.3 percent in 2026 to 24.8 percent in 2027 and 25.1 percent by 2029. The MTP therefore couples visible expenditure with a rising social tax burden.
Privatization revenue jumps by roughly 70 percent in 2027, yet the MTP does not identify the assets, valuation logic or economic rationale behind that acceleration. Even if fully realized, the proceeds would finance less than 5 percent of the projected budget deficit. This is not a structural revenue strategy; it is a temporary financing device.Tax more, sell more and borrow more—then channel the proceeds into current expenditure, interest and guaranteed returns.
From a Developmental State to a Transfer State: Interest as Upward Redistribution
The MTP projects approximately TRY 13.9 trillion in cumulative interest payments during 2027–2029, against only about TRY 7.1 trillion in capital expenditure. In 2027 alone, interest is 2.15 times capital spending and close to 20 percent of tax revenue. At TRY 3.98 trillion, interest expenditure even exceeds the projected TRY 3.87 trillion budget deficit.
Interest is not merely a technical cost of debt. Under these conditions, it becomes a distributional mechanism: broad-based taxation and inflation-generated fiscal revenue are transformed into secured financial returns. Resources that could support education, research, technological upgrading, industrial capability and social resilience are transferred to holders of public debt.
Guaranteed Rent Capitalism
A second transfer channel lies outside the interest line: public–private partnership guarantees. For 2026, approximately TRY 136.1 billion was discussed for rent and service payments to 18 city hospitals, while about TRY 101.3 billion was allocated for bridge, motorway and tunnel guarantees. Together, these visible channels approach TRY 237.5 billion. Parliamentary budget proceedings on city hospitals and reporting on transport guarantees illustrate how these obligations are dispersed across rents, availability payments, services, traffic or revenue guarantees and exchange-rate adjustments. The problem is not the Public–Private Partnership (PPP) instrument in principle. It is the allocation of demand and currency risk to the state, the protection of corporate revenue over long horizons, and the limited transparency of effective returns and renegotiation terms. Profit is privatized while risk is socialized.
The MTP repeatedly invokes artificial intelligence, semiconductors, digitalization, green transformation and high-value-added exports. Yet its budget composition crowds out the very capital formation needed to make those ambitions credible. The state’s function shifts: its developmental and social capacities weaken, while its tax-collecting, interest-paying and guarantee-providing roles expand.
This changes incentives throughout the economy. Firms gain more by securing public contracts, guarantees and regulatory privilege than by building capabilities, raising productivity or competing internationally. Connections and rents displace innovation and competitive advantage.
Production: Growth Without Upgrading
The MTP treats a rising GDP growth path as evidence of development. But growth generated by public consumption, protected construction, credit expansion and imported inputs is not equivalent to a durable increase in productive capacity. The relevant question is not only how fast output grows, but what is produced, with which technology, at what import content, and with what learning effect.
The OECD Economic Survey of Türkiye 2025 concludes that future convergence must increasingly come from productivity because the demographic dividend is fading and investment is already high. Yet productivity has slowed, investment has flowed disproportionately into lower-productivity areas such as housing, and intellectual-property investment has been roughly half the European share. High-technology exports have remained around 3.5 percent of manufactured exports, far below comparable upper-middle-income economies.
This is precisely why the MTP’s expenditure composition is so damaging. A country that needs skills, research, digital diffusion and export sophistication cannot treat capital spending as the residual item after interest, transfers and procurement. The program may raise measured demand in 2027 while lowering the economy’s ability to generate non-inflationary supply thereafter.
Allocation: The Destruction of Efficiency
Resource allocation is the bridge between today’s spending and tomorrow’s productive frontier. An efficient system directs finance, land, public procurement, skills and foreign exchange toward firms and sectors capable of learning, innovating and competing. A rent-based system directs them toward political access, guarantees, sheltered markets and balance-sheet protection.
The MTP deepens the second pattern. Interest payments reward the holders of financial claims; public–private partnership guarantees protect selected corporate cash flows; current transfers and procurement grow rapidly; and capital expenditure is squeezed in real terms. The result is not merely waste in a static accounting sense. It is dynamic misallocation: productive firms face high financing costs and uncertainty while politically connected activities enjoy protected returns.
The OECD’s assessment reinforces this diagnosis: productivity is impaired by skill mismatch, barriers to business dynamism, state intervention and weak competition in network sectors. It estimates that pro-competition reforms in infrastructure-dependent sectors could materially raise firm-level productivity (See the OECD’s competitiveness and innovation chapter.) The deepest cost is not this year’s deficit. It is the competitive capability that Turkey fails to build.
Economic Populism as a Strategy of Regime Reproduction
The political logic extends beyond ordinary electoral opportunism. Erdogan needs a renewed coalition, a favorable parliamentary balance and a constitutional or electoral route to reproduce the regime. Article 116 of the Constitution provides that if parliament renews elections during the president’s second term, the incumbent may stand once more. This provision does not prove a 2027 election, but it makes the concentration of fiscal expansion in 2027 politically significant. See the official English text of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey. The MTP’s timing fits a strategy in which benefits are immediate and attributable, while costs are postponed, fragmented, and depoliticized.
Gambling with Turkey’s Future
The central problem is not that Turkey lacks resources. The program simultaneously damages all three foundations of the economy. It produces growth without sufficient productive upgrading; it allocates capital away from its highest social return; and it distributes income and adjustment costs in favor of organized financial and politically protected interests.
The immediate casualty is distributive justice. The medium-term casualty is fiscal and macroeconomic sustainability. The longest-lasting casualty, however, is competitive advantage. Inflation can eventually be reduced, and a budget can eventually be tightened. Capabilities not built, skilled people lost, firms excluded from finance, technologies not absorbed and export markets surrendered are far harder to recover.
In that sense, the MTP is less a medium-term development program than an intertemporal political bargain drafted inside a weakened institutional order. The Erdogan regime borrows from Turkey’s future to purchase support in its present. It sacrifices not only fairness in distribution, but efficiency in resource allocation and sustainability in production. The recovery can be staged; the underlying model cannot be sustained.The election comes in 2027. The taxes, inflation, debt and lost development arrive in 2028.
Professor Niklas Bolin argues that the Sweden Democrats’ most consequential transformation is institutional normalization rather than ideological moderation. As Sweden approaches the September 13 election, SD has become deeply integrated into the political mainstream while retaining a resilient populist configuration centered on people-centrism, anti-elitism, popular sovereignty, and antagonism. Professor Bolin stresses that “institutional normalization does not necessarily mean ideological moderation,” even as SD has gained substantial influence through the Tidö Agreement. He also notes that the party has won “an important ideological battle” as restrictive migration positions have become mainstream. Yet normalization creates a paradox: the more successful SD becomes, the more it becomes part of the establishment it has long defined itself against.
Five days before Sweden’s September 13 parliamentary election, the country enters the final stretch of the campaign with an unusually fluid electoral landscape. The latest Novus/TV4 poll places the opposition at 50.3 percent and the Tidö parties at 47.9 percent, with the gap still within the statistical margin of error. The Liberals (L) have climbed to 4.3 percent—just above the parliamentary threshold—while other recent polls still place them below it, making their survival one of the most consequential variables in government formation. At the same time, the Social Democrats (S) remain the largest party overall, while the Sweden Democrats (SD) continue to challenge or surpass the Moderates (M) for leadership of the Swedish right.
In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Niklas Bolin, Professor of Political Science at Mid Sweden University, argues that the most significant transformation of the Sweden Democrats is not necessarily ideological moderation but institutional normalization. As he puts it, “Institutional normalization does not necessarily mean ideological moderation.” A party, he stresses, can become “more professional, more accepted by the other parties, and more integrated into the political mainstream without changing its ideological worldview.”
This distinction is crucial for understanding SD’s trajectory. The party has moved from pariah status to substantial policy influence through the Tidö Agreement, while its core populist configuration—people-centrism, anti-elitism, popular sovereignty, and antagonism—has remained resilient. Professor Bolin therefore cautions that the party’s normalization and growing political influence should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that it has “become less populist” or that “its ideology has changed to the same degree.”
The interview also explores how SD’s success has reshaped the wider party system. Professor Bolin notes that Swedish migration policy has “clearly moved in a more restrictive direction” and that positions considered controversial 10 or 15 years ago are “today almost political mainstream.” In that sense, he argues, “the Sweden Democrats won an important ideological battle.” Yet this mainstreaming produces a paradox: when other parties adopt similar positions, they both legitimize SD and reduce the salience of issues the party once dominated electorally.
Bolin further suggests that SD’s growing success creates a tension between outsider identity and establishment power. The party has benefited from substantial influence without formal governmental responsibility, but “the more successful the party becomes, the more it becomes part of the establishment itself.”
Against this backdrop, the 2026 election is about more than which bloc wins. It tests whether Sweden is consolidating a new party system in which the radical right has not merely entered the mainstream, but helped redefine it.
Here is our interview with Professor Niklas Bolin, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
SD’s Almost Automatic Growth Is Probably Over
Swedish political parties intensified their campaigning ahead of the critical September 13, 2026 parliamentary election, setting up campaign stands in prominent public squares to promote their platforms and election promises. The image shows party campaign stands in the square connecting the two sections of Åkersberga Centrum in Österåker, Sweden. Photo: Bulent Kenes.
Professor Bolin, welcome! In your analysis of the Sweden Democrats’ setback in the 2024 European Parliament election, you asked whether it was merely a “speed bump” or the beginning of an “uphill journey.” Two years later, with SD polling around 19–20 percent but no longer showing the almost exponential growth that characterized its rise since 2010, how would you answer that question today? Has SD reached a structural ceiling, or is it simply becoming a normalized large party subject to ordinary electoral fluctuations?
Professor Niklas Bolin: I’m not sure that we can talk about a structural ceiling, but the Sweden Democrats have clearly entered a different phase. When you have reached around 20%, it’s obviously much more difficult to continue growing at the same pace. So, we should expect more normal electoral fluctuations. This doesn’t mean that the Sweden Democrats cannot grow further, but this almost automatic growth that we have seen for many years is probably over.
The Sweden Democrats Won an Important Ideological Battle
You explained SD’s poor 2024 European election partly through an “agenda effect”: immigration had declined in salience compared with peace, democracy, and climate. Looking toward September 13, are we reaching the limits of the electoral advantage that anti-immigration politics has given SD? Or has SD already won the ideological battle by pushing restrictive migration policies into the mainstream, even if it no longer monopolizes their electoral benefits?
Professor Niklas Bolin: We need to separate the importance of immigration as an electoral issue from the development of migration policy. When migration is high on the political agenda, this benefits the Sweden Democrats because voters associate the party with this issue. But when other issues dominate, as, for instance, in the European election of 2024, this advantage becomes smaller.
If we, on the other hand, look at policy, the Sweden Democrats have been extremely successful. Swedish migration policy has clearly moved in a more restrictive direction, and positions that were controversial 10 or 15 years ago are today almost political mainstream. In that sense, the Sweden Democrats won an important ideological battle. But at the same time, the political conflict has become less salient, and therefore it becomes less important when voters decide who to vote for.
Other Parties’ Shifts Give Legitimacy to SD
The Sweden Democrats entered parliament as an isolated radical-right challenger, whereas today much of the Swedish center-right accepts positions on migration, crime, and integration once associated primarily with SD. Does this “mainstreaming paradox” strengthen SD by legitimizing its diagnosis of Swedish society, or weaken it by allowing mainstream parties to compete on issues SD once owned?
Professor Niklas Bolin: It does a little bit of both, actually. On the one hand, it has clearly strengthened the Sweden Democrats. When other parties adopt similar positions that the Sweden Democrats have argued for over a long period of time, it gives legitimacy to the party, of course. But this success might also be a problem for the Sweden Democrats. When parties move closer to the party on migration, for instance, and crime, there is less political conflict over these issues. So, this can make voters focus on other issues instead.
Political Mainstreaming Does Not Require Ideological Change
Your recent research shows that although the frequency of SD’s populist statements declined between 2010 and 2024, its underlying populist configuration—people-centrism, anti-elitism, popular sovereignty, and antagonism—remained resilient. Should we therefore distinguish between SD’s institutional normalization and ideological moderation? Has governmental influence made the party more respectable without necessarily making it less populist?
Professor Niklas Bolin: I think this distinction is important. Institutional normalization does not necessarily mean ideological moderation. A party can become more professional, more accepted by the other parties, and more integrated into the political mainstream without changing its ideological worldview. So, although the Sweden Democrats have become, at least to some extent, normalized and have significant political influence, we should not automatically conclude from this that the party has become less populist or that its ideology has changed to the same degree.
Governing Together Is Different from Staying Together in Opposition
The parliament (Riksdag) building in Stockholm, Sweden. Photo: Dreamstime.
The 2022 election fundamentally reconfigured Swedish politics through the mainstream right’s abandonment of the cordon sanitaire and the creation of a government dependent on SD through the Tidö Agreement. Four years later, how should we assess the Tidö experiment? Has it created a durable two-bloc structure, or has governing together exposed deeper contradictions within the center-right?
Professor Niklas Bolin: Many people, including myself, are probably surprised by how well the cooperation between the government and the Sweden Democrats has worked. Before 2022, it was sort of an open question whether the center-right parties and the Sweden Democrats could cooperate closely over a full electoral period, and they have now shown that they can.
But I would still, to some extent, hesitate to describe Sweden as having a stable two-bloc system.
There are also clear tensions on the left side of politics. In particular, the Center Party (C) and the Left Party (V) have very different positions, primarily on economic policy, and may find it very difficult to cooperate after the election.
And I’m not sure that the parties to the right will necessarily stay together if they lose the election. It’s one thing to cooperate in government and another thing to stay together in opposition.
It Is Becoming Harder for SD to Present Itself as an Opposition Party
SD gained unprecedented policy influence through the Tidö Agreement without formally entering government. Has this allowed the party to enjoy the benefits of incumbency without fully bearing its costs? After four years of visible influence, can SD still credibly present itself as an anti-establishment force confronting political elites?
Professor Niklas Bolin: To some extent, yes. This was one of the advantages of this arrangement for the Sweden Democrats. The party has received great influence without taking formal responsibility for government, so if voters are dissatisfied, the party can distance itself from the government while, at the same time, taking credit for policies that it has supported. But I also think that this becomes increasingly difficult over time. Voters know that the Sweden Democrats have been deeply involved in government policy. And it becomes more difficult to say that you are an opposition party when you have this level of influence. So, the party has built much of its political identity on being an outsider and criticizing the political establishment. But the more successful the party becomes, the more it becomes part of the establishment itself.
The Liberals Have Long Struggled to Define Their Political Role
The Liberals may now be the most consequential variable in government formation, with recent polls placing them below the 4-percent threshold. You have written about the party’s conflictual leadership transition and changing political orientation. To what extent is its present crisis rooted in an unresolved identity conflict between its socially liberal, pro-European tradition and participation in a bloc dependent on SD?
Professor Niklas Bolin: The Liberals have, for a long time, had difficulty defining their role in Swedish politics, and the cooperation with the Sweden Democrats has made this problem perhaps even more visible. The party traditionally combined center-right economic policy with social liberalism and strong support for European integration, and, of course, a very critical stance towards the Sweden Democrats. Moving from that position to close cooperation with the Sweden Democrats is obviously a major change. So, voters need to understand why they should vote for a small party rather than one of the larger ones. And that has been a difficult question for the Liberals to answer.
Pro-Tidö and Anti-SD Voters Both Have Larger Alternatives
More specifically, has cooperation with SD contributed to the Liberals’ prolonged position below the threshold? Have they entered a strategic trap in which voters comfortable with the Tidö bloc prefer M or SD, while socially liberal anti-SD voters have moved toward C or the center-left? Has the pursuit of governmental relevance endangered the party’s parliamentary survival?
Professor Niklas Bolin: I wouldn’t say that cooperation with the Sweden Democrats is the only explanation. The Liberals were already struggling before the agreement with the Sweden Democrats, but the current strategy creates a different and perhaps even more difficult electoral position. Voters who strongly support the Tidö cooperation can choose the Moderates or the Sweden Democrats, which are much larger parties. At the same time, voters who identify with the socially liberal tradition but strongly oppose the Sweden Democrats can choose the Center Party or the center-left. So, I guess the Liberals are a bit squeezed from both directions.
Swedish Politics Is No Longer Only About Left and Right
Politicians and campaigners engage with voters at the Sweden Democrats’ election hut in a city square in Uppsala, Sweden, on August 17, 2026, ahead of Sweden’s parliamentary elections. Photo: Krister Hägglöf / Dreamstime.
The Center Party has moved away from cooperation with SD, while the Liberals chose the opposite path and now risk disappearing from parliament. Does the 2026 election therefore signal the dissolution of Sweden’s traditional bourgeois orblå-gulapolitical space? If so, what new structure is replacing it?
Professor Niklas Bolin: For many years, the Moderates (M), the Center Party (C), the Liberals (L), and the Christian Democrats (KD) formed one political bloc, even if there were important differences between these parties. The rise of the Sweden Democrats has changed this drastically. All these parties have made different choices in relation to the Sweden Democrats. The Moderates and the Christian Democrats have accepted close cooperation with the Sweden Democrats, and the Liberals eventually chose the same path, while the Center Party has moved in the opposite direction.
So, Swedish politics is no longer only about left and right. Attitudes towards the Sweden Democrats have also been important for determining which parties can cooperate with each other. As long as the Sweden Democrats remain a large party—and I don’t see anything that suggests this will change in the near future—it’s difficult to see a return to the old bloc system, at least as long as the Center Party maintains its current stance towards the Sweden Democrats.
Kristersson Will Remain the Right’s Prime Ministerial Candidate
Ulf Kristersson, Prime Minister of Sweden, arrives for a doorstep statement during the NATO Eastern Flank B9 (Bucharest Nine) Summit in Riga, Latvia, on June 11, 2024. Photo: Gints Ivuskans / Dreamstime.
Current polls show an unusual asymmetry: the Social Democrats (S) remain the largest party overall, while SD often polls ahead of the Moderates on the right. If the Tidö parties retain a majority, would it remain politically sustainable for M to provide the prime minister while being considerably smaller than SD? At what point would an SD claim to cabinet participation—or eventually the premiership—become difficult to resist?
Professor Niklas Bolin: For this election the situation is quite clear. The parties have agreed that Ulf Kristersson is their candidate for Prime Minister, and also that the Sweden Democrats will enter the government if they win. Even if the Sweden Democrats become somewhat larger than the Moderates, Kristersson will remain Prime Minister. So, the more interesting question is what happens in the longer term, so to speak. I mean, if the Sweden Democrats become larger than the Moderates also in the next election, and especially if this continues, it will become increasingly difficult for the Sweden Democrats to accept that the Moderates automatically get the position of Prime Minister.
C–V Differences Make the Post-Election Equation Difficult
Conversely, if the polling advantage of S, V, C and MP survives election day, what government do you regard as most plausible? Could Sweden sustain a Social Democratic-ledröd-gröngovernment relying simultaneously on V and C, despite their major differences on taxation, labour markets, welfare and economic policy?
Professor Niklas Bolin: A Social Democratic-led government would be the most likely outcome, but it’s quite hard to say exactly what such a government would look like. At the moment, it’s difficult to see how the Center Party (C) and the Left Party (V) would agree, especially on economic policy. I also think it would be difficult for the Left Party to immediately give up its demand to be part of the government. So, forming a government after this election could take time, I guess. It’s possible that one or more proposals will be voted down before the parties are ready to compromise. But in the end, they will find a solution. Few parties would want to risk a new election, and that may make possible compromises that might seem difficult today.
A Change of Government Would Not Mean a Return to Pre-Tidö Policies
Critics of the Tidö period argue that tougher migration and citizenship policies, expanded coercive powers, and increasingly majoritarian rhetoric have altered aspects of Sweden’s liberal-democratic political culture; supporters see them as legitimate responses to crime and failed integration. If a Social Democratic-led government supported by V and C emerges, how much of the Tidö-era transformation could realistically be reversed? Or has Swedish politics undergone a deeper rightward recalibration?
Professor Niklas Bolin: I think much of this more restrictive migration and crime policy will remain, even if there is a change of government. The Social Democrats have moved quite close to the government on many of these issues. One of the reasons for this is that they want to reduce the political conflict over migration and crime and move the focus to their issues.
And I don’t think the Social Democrats want to risk being criticized again for having a migration policy that is sort of too generous. So, it will be difficult for the parties to the left of the Social Democrats to push policy very far in another direction. Some policies may change, but I would not expect a major return to the policies that we had before the Tidö government.
There Is No Single Explanation for Sweden’s Growing Gender Gap
Sweden is also witnessing a striking gender divergence among younger voters: young women increasingly lean toward progressive, green, and left parties, while young men disproportionately support conservative and radical-right alternatives. What explains this widening gap? Are young women and men responding differently to the same social changes, or increasingly inhabiting different educational, social, and digital worlds that generate distinct political outlooks?
Professor Niklas Bolin: There’s probably no single explanation for this gender gap. Education is one important factor. Young women are more likely than young men to go to university, and education is related to political attitudes on issues such as immigration, climate, and gender equality. There are also growing differences between young men and women on some of these political issues. But, we should be careful about explaining too much. The gender gap is clear, but we still need more research to understand why it has grown.
Career-Oriented Youth Members Tend to Be Less Radical
Your research shows that youth wings do not simply reproduce the preferences of senior parties: radicals remain prominent, especially in center-left organizations, while politically motivated members seek to influence their parties more than career-oriented members do. What does this tell us about the generation now entering Swedish politics? Could youth wings reinforce rather than moderate ideological and gender polarization?
Professor Niklas Bolin: It’s difficult to say. There’s not much research on what happens when youth members move on to the senior parties. Our research shows that more radical members are often more interested in influencing policy, while those interested in a political career tend to be less radical. But we do not know what happens when they move on, so to speak. Do the more radical members become more moderate, or do they try to change the party? We need more research to see.
More Women in Politics Does Not Necessarily Mean Ideological Change
Your research on young women in party youth wings finds that women report greater increases than men in their desire to influence party policy and stand as candidates, particularly in center-right youth wings. Could this growing political efficacy eventually transform not only voting patterns but also the gender composition and ideological direction of Swedish party elites?
Professor Niklas Bolin: Many Swedish parties are already quite gender-balanced, at least when we look at candidates and elected politicians. But if participation in youth wings increases young women’s willingness to influence policy and become candidates, this could, of course, help maintain or even strengthen that balance in the future. When it comes to ideological effects, I’m not sure. More women in politics does not necessarily mean that parties move in a particular ideological direction.
A Center-Left Victory Is the Most Likely Outcome
Swedish political parties conducted their final day of campaigning in Malmö ahead of the 2022 general elections. Photo: Francis Joseph Dean.
Finally, just days before the election, the Social Democratic (S)-led side remains ahead, SD is larger than M (Moderate Party) in several polls, and the Liberals hover around the threshold. Taking together the electoral arithmetic, the Tidö legacy, Center Party’s changing position, and SD’s transformation from pariah to pivotal party, what is your projection for the next government? And what kind of party system will emerge: renewed left–right competition, a consolidated two-bloc system centered on attitudes toward SD, or a deeper political realignment?
Professor Niklas Bolin: I’m not sure that we social scientists are very good at making predictions, but if I had to make one, I would look at the polls that indicate that the opposition still has a small lead, at least. So, I would say that a victory for the center-left is the most likely outcome, but I’m not certain, of course.
The more difficult question is what happens after the election. At the moment, it’s hard to see what kind of left-leaning government could get enough support in the parliament. On the other hand, if the center-right wins, the situation is much clearer.
In the longer term, I think the Sweden Democrats will continue to become more accepted as a normal political party. Things that seem impossible today can change quite quickly in politics. We’ve seen that with the Sweden Democrats over the last 10 years.
So, it’s possible that the Center Party, or even the Social Democrats, become less negative towards the Sweden Democrats in the future, even if government cooperation seems quite unlikely today. And we know from the past that once the cordon sanitaire has been broken, it’s very difficult to build it up again.
Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the AfD’s strength in Eastern Germany cannot be explained by poverty alone. Instead, its rise reflects the interaction of nativist attitudes, political alienation, territorial decline, demographic shrinkage, and the enduring memory of post-reunification disruption. The AfD’s political success lies in converting disparate grievances—over immigration, economic insecurity, public services, identity, and distant decision-making—into a unified anti-elite narrative. Dr. Dias stresses that the Brandmauer may remain necessary as an institutional safeguard, but it is insufficient as a political strategy. A durable democratic response, he argues, must address material insecurity, regional neglect, state capacity, immigration, and recognition while offering citizens a credible sense of belonging and a recognizable future.
Some election results change governments. Others force a country to reconsider the story it tells about itself. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt belongs to the second category. When a radical-right party comes close to winning half the electorate in a German state, it is no longer enough to speak of a “protest vote.” The question becomes a different one: how did the AfD manage, in parts of Eastern Germany, to become a socially rooted and electorally dominant political force?
The easy answer would be poverty. It is also, to a large extent, the wrong answer. The available research shows that attitudes towards immigration, national identity and political elites explain support for the AfD far better than individual economic deprivation does (Hansen & Olsen, 2024; Kailitz & Rippl, 2026; Schröder et al., 2026). But this does not mean that economics, place and abandonment are irrelevant. It points instead to something more interesting: what matters is less absolute poverty than the experience of loss — or what might be called the “fear of falling”: the loss of status, population, opportunity, recognition and control over the future. Such experiences can produce political alienation. It is the AfD, however, that supplies the nativist and anti-establishment language capable of giving that alienation meaning.
To understand this mechanism, we need to begin before the AfD itself. After 1990, Eastern Germany underwent an economic and social transformation of extraordinary intensity. Reunification was unquestionably an act of political liberation, but it also meant the disappearance of companies, careers, professional hierarchies and institutions that had structured the daily lives of millions of people. Steffen Mau describes this process in terms of status demotion, the transfer of elites, demographic transformation and the loss of biographical security (Mau, 2019). It was not simply that some people lost their jobs. For many, an entire social world suddenly lost its value.
When Economic Loss Becomes Political Memory
There is now evidence that these experiences left lasting political consequences. Kellermann (2024), studying workers affected by the privatizations carried out by the Treuhandanstalt, found lower levels of trust and greater detachment from institutions and established parties decades later. This does not mean that the Treuhand “caused” the AfD. It means that an economic experience can become a political memory when the loss is attributed to decisions made by distant institutions. There is a difference between thinking, “my job disappeared,” and thinking “they decided that the world I belonged to no longer had value.
That experience also acquired a concrete geography. Since reunification, Saxony-Anhalt has lost roughly a quarter of its population. Depopulation on this scale does not simply mean fewer inhabitants. It means young people leaving, schools with fewer pupils, shops closing, services becoming harder to sustain and communities growing progressively older. Höhne, Kölzer and Träger (2025), analyzing more than 1,400 municipalities in Eastern Germany, found a robust relationship between long-term population decline and support for the AfD. The most important finding, however, is that the same pattern does not appear with equal strength in support for the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. Territorial decline, then, does not determine political choice; it creates conditions that a party may or may not be able to mobilize.
It is in this sense that Andrés Rodríguez-Pose (2018) speaks of “the revenge of the places that don’t matter.” The problem is not simply that such places are poor. It is the feeling of living in a territory from which the future has withdrawn. A region may be materially far richer than it was thirty years ago and, at the same time, feel that it has lost relevance. Universities expand elsewhere. The most prestigious jobs appear somewhere else. Young people leave. Decision-makers live far away. The country can prosper in aggregate while particular communities see, above all, what is disappearing. Inequality then ceases to exist only between individuals; it begins to exist between places.
From Collective Disadvantage to Populist Mobilization
This is where the economic explanation meets the cultural one. Recent research is quite clear on two points that have to be held together. First, nativist, anti-immigration and anti-elite attitudes are genuine political drivers of the AfD vote; they should not be reduced to some form of economic false consciousness (Hansen & Olsen, 2024; Schröder et al., 2026). Second, political alienation and feelings of collective disadvantage are particularly strong in the East and help explain why such attitudes find more fertile ground there (Kailitz & Rippl, 2026; Pickel & Pickel, 2026). Kailitz and Rippl put it especially well: the seeds are not necessarily different; the soil is more fertile.
This is how the false choice between “economics” and “culture” can be resolved. A closed factory does not automatically produce xenophobia. A distant hospital does not produce nationalism. But accumulated experiences of loss, distance and inadequate recognition can nourish the sense that institutions no longer represent “people like us.” At that point, a populist narrative becomes more plausible: there is a forgotten people, and there are elites who govern for others. That is precisely the narrative the AfD learned to build.
The party founded in 2013 did not begin with the ideological configuration we know today. It emerged above all from the euro crisis, with a Eurosceptic, conservative and economically liberal profile. Between 2015 and 2017, however, immigration, refugees, Islam and national identity shifted the party’s center of gravity, bringing it closer to what Cas Mudde defines as the populist radical right: a combination of nativism, authoritarianism and populism (Arzheimer & Berning, 2019; Mudde, 2007). The euro crisis created the organization; the refugee crisis turned it into a mass political force.
Since then, the AfD has shown an extraordinary capacity to adapt. Hansen and Olsen (2024) describe it as a populist issue entrepreneur: a party able to retain ownership of the issues on which it already enjoys an advantage — above all immigration — while continually absorbing new conflicts. The euro, refugees, the pandemic, climate, energy, gender, Ukraine and the politics of memory are very different issues. The AfD manages to present them as manifestations of the same problem. That is its central political talent.
The Brandmauer Paradox and the AfD’s Anti-Elite Narrative
A railway station that closes is a transport problem. A factory that shuts down belongs to economics. Immigration is migration policy. The war in Ukraine is foreign policy. Gender belongs to the culture wars. The AfD turns all of them into a single story: the elites in Berlin and Brussels have stopped governing in the name of ordinary people. The issues change. The culprit remains the same.
Immigration occupies a central place in this narrative because it functions both as a real political issue and as a symbolic condensation of several anxieties. It can be connected to security, housing, schools, the welfare state, Islam, borders and identity. In a territory that has already experienced profound transformations decided in distant centers of power, it can also be presented as yet another change carried out “without us.” The interpretation does not need to be empirically accurate in order to be politically effective. Populism often succeeds not because it explains each problem better, but because it connects different problems within a single moral explanation.
This is also why it is no longer sufficient to speak simply of a “protest vote.” Mudde (2019) draws attention to the contemporary normalization of the radical right: ideas that once existed on the political margins gradually enter everyday politics. The Eastern German case adds a troubling generational dimension. Heinze and Scheuer (2026) find among young AfD voters not merely volatility or rebellion, but relatively stable partisan identification, closely associated with nativism. These young people did not experience the GDR, the Treuhand or reunification. Historical experience is no longer only biographical memory. It has become, at least in part, a political inheritance.
This is where the dilemma of the Brandmauer emerges: the firewall through which Germany’s mainstream parties refuse to govern with the AfD. There are powerful democratic reasons for maintaining it. Winning elections does not give any party the right to weaken fundamental rights, pluralism, or institutional independence. But an obvious political problem arises when the excluded force comes close to winning half the vote: the more all the other parties have to cooperate in order to keep it out of power, the easier it becomes for the AfD to say that “they are all the same” and that it alone represents a genuine alternative.
Why the Brandmauer Is Necessary but Not Enough
Yascha Mounk (2018) helps illuminate the paradox: populism seeks to present the liberal institutions that constrain majority power as obstacles to democracy itself. The Brandmauer (firewall) may therefore be necessary as an institutional defense and insufficient as a political strategy. It answers the question, “how do we stop the AfD from governing?” It does not answer the prior question: “why do so many people want it to govern?”
Understanding the answer to that second question does not mean excusing it. Anne Applebaum (2020) reminds us that the contemporary illiberal threat rarely begins with the immediate destruction of democracy. It can advance through the gradual occupation of institutions, administrative changes, appointments, education, culture and the media. In Saxony-Anhalt, a move by the AfD from opposition into government would give it access to precisely these areas. Sociologically explaining an electorate does not require us to minimize the consequences of the programme it chooses.
But historical memory is not enough either. Tony Judt (2010) reminded us that post-war European democracies did not survive because of constitutions alone. They built welfare states, public services, security and the expectation that the future could be better. A democratic order becomes fragile when it can tell its citizens only two things: “adapt to change” and “do not vote for them.” The first offers no security. The second offers no project.
Perhaps this is, in the end, the best way to understand the result in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD did not win simply because a population became poorer, or because nearly half the electorate suddenly became radicalized. It won because it managed to transform experiences of territorial decline, downward mobility and inadequate recognition into a political narrative combining nativism, anti-establishment alienation and the promise of national restoration.
It did not merely say: “you lost.” It said: “you lost because they chose others over you.” It is this move — from loss to resentment, from resentment to identity, and from identity to the ballot box — that helps explain its strength.
And that is also why the democratic response will have to be more demanding than copying the AfD, increasing fiscal transfers or reinforcing the firewall. It will have to combine credible control of immigration, state capacity, services and opportunity in peripheral regions, recognition of Eastern Germany’s distinctive historical experience, and an idea of national belonging strong enough to create community without having to turn minorities into enemies.
Because citizens do not abandon a political order only when they become poor. They can also drift away from it when they cease to believe that it contains a recognizable future for people like them, and for places like the ones in which they live.
References
Applebaum, A. (2020). Twilight of democracy: The seductive lure of authoritarianism. Doubleday.
Arzheimer, K., & Berning, C. C. (2019). How the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and their voters veered to the radical right, 2013–2017. Electoral Studies, 60, 102040.
Hansen, M. A., & Olsen, J. (2024). The Alternative for Germany (AfD) as populist issue entrepreneur. German Politics, 33(4), 643–667.
Heinze, A.-S., & Scheuer, T. (2026). Growing up far right? Youth support for the AfD in Eastern Germany. German Politics, 35(3), 485–515.
Höhne, B., Kölzer, J., & Träger, H. (2025). Geography of shrinkage: Local population decline and electoral support for the anti-establishment parties AfD and BSW in East German state elections. German Politics, 34(3), 449–477.
Judt, T. (2010). Ill fares the land. Penguin Press.
Kailitz, S., & Rippl, S. (2026). Same seeds, more fertile ground: Sources of AfD dominance in Eastern Germany. German Politics, 35(3), 437–462.
Kellermann, K. L. (2024). Trust we lost: The impact of the Treuhand experience on political alienation in East Germany. Journal of Comparative Economics, 52(1), 54–75.
Mau, S. (2019). Lütten Klein: Leben in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft. Suhrkamp.
Mounk, Y. (2018). The people vs. democracy. Harvard University Press.
Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.
Mudde, C. (2019). The far right today. Polity.
Pickel, G., & Pickel, S. (2026). The election of the AfD and the collective identity of East Germans. German Politics, 35(3), 412–436.
Rodríguez-Pose, A. (2018). The revenge of the places that don’t matter. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 11(1), 189–209.
Schröder, M., Rehm, M., & Röcke, A. (2026). Supporters of Germany’s far-right AfD party are concerned about immigration rather than feeling deprived. PLOS ONE, 21(7), e0350403.
Professor Howard Lavine argues that the Democratic Party’s path to renewal lies less in ideological repositioning than in economic populism, political energy, and credible material outcomes. While MAGA remains rooted in status threat and a revanchist politics of cultural restoration, Professor Lavine sees greater opportunity for Democrats in focusing on affordability, wages, healthcare, and economic security. He cautions that the “socialist” label may create unnecessary electoral vulnerability, even as the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani current helps reorient the party toward working-class concerns. For Professor Lavine, most voters are not moved primarily by ideological sophistication but by whether political leaders deliver tangible improvements. The strategic imperative is therefore clear: Democrats should “pivot purely to economics” and demonstrate what they can concretely achieve for working-class voters.
In an interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Howard Lavine, Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota and former Director of the Center for the Study of Political Psychology, argues that the Democratic Party’s central challenge is less one of ideological definition than of political branding, economic credibility, and mobilizational energy. His assessment is particularly relevant ahead of the 2026 US midterm elections, as Democrats confront both a weakened but still deeply entrenched Trumpism and the growing influence of figures associated with democratic socialist and economic-populist politics. For Professor Lavine, however, the label itself may be more liability than asset: “The Democrats are making themselves vulnerable to some degree by using the socialist label.”
Professor Lavine draws a sharp distinction between the cultural politics underpinning MAGA and the economic terrain on which Democrats may have greater room to rebuild. MAGA, he argues, remains rooted in status threat and “a revanchist impulse to restore the prior order in which white Christian men feel comfortable in their dominant status.” Yet he does not believe racial and cultural identities necessarily foreclose an economic realignment. Swing voters, he stresses, are generally not those most deeply embedded in MAGA ideology. For Democrats, the crucial question is whether they can translate economic-populist appeals into tangible results: “What matters is the economic outcomes.” Policies themselves are comparatively less important because “most people aren’t going to understand what you say. They’re going to understand what’s happening on the ground.”
This emphasis on economics also shapes Professor Lavine’s interpretation of the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani current. He resists treating it primarily as an ideological socialist project, describing it instead as an effort to rebrand Democrats as more clearly aligned with working-class interests. Indeed, he argues that “the energy is in economic populism. It’s nowhere else.” At the same time, he warns that invoking socialism risks obscuring that advantage: “Too many people don’t like it; it’s not helping Democrats.”
More broadly, Profesor Lavine questions whether ideology itself is what moves most voters. “It’s really not about ideology,” he says of progressive candidates’ recent appeal; what voters are responding to is energy, anger, and a clearer sense of political purpose. In his view, Democrats should therefore move away from cultural issues that animate the academic left and “pivot purely to economics.” The strategic lesson is straightforward: “The more it focuses on economics, the better.” But electoral success ultimately requires more than rhetoric or branding. Once in power, Democrats must demonstrate “what they can do,” and, crucially, “what they can do specifically for the white working class.”
Please cite as: Tauil, Rafael Marchesan. (2026). “Toward a Three-Dimensional Understanding of Populism: Discourse, Ideology, and Democratic Mediation.” Journal of Populism Studies (JPS). September 6, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/JPS000131
Abstract The diversity of conceptual approaches to populism has enriched the study of the phenomenon while leaving unresolved the problem of identifying its common structure across different historical, national, and ideological contexts. This article addresses this problem by proposing a three-dimensional understanding that brings together Ernesto Laclau’s conception of populism as an ontological-discursive process, Cas Mudde’s understanding of populism as a thin-centred ideology, and Pierre Rosanvallon’s account of populism as a form of democratic indetermination. We argue that these perspectives should not be treated as competing or merely complementary definitions, but as analytically distinct and constitutive dimensions of the same political dynamic. Our hypothesis is that populism can be identified through the articulation of three processes: the constitution of an antagonistic fissure between “we” and “they”, the organization of this fissure through moral polarization and its projection onto democracy through the simplification of representation, mediation, and popular sovereignty. To assess the analytical plausibility of this proposition, the article examines four heterogeneous cases—Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Erdogan, Daniel Ortega, and Evo Morales—drawing on peer-reviewed secondary studies and the Global Populism Database’s classification. The analysis provides preliminary evidence that the three dimensions can be identified across substantially different contexts while their substantive contents remain contingent. The article first examines existing multidimensional approaches, then develops the relationship between ontology, ideology, and democracy, and finally applies the proposed approach to the four cases before discussing its implications and limitations.
Keywords:Populism, Discourse, Ideology, Democracy, Ernesto Laclau, Cas Mudde, Pierre Rosanvallon, Political Antagonism, Moral Polarization, Democratic Mediation, Popular Sovereignty, Plebiscitary Democracy
The article takes as its starting point a conceptual problem arising from theoretical debates on populism: the diversity of conceptual formulations of the phenomenon has stimulated the construction or mobilization of highly valuable interpretative frameworks but has not yet satisfactorily resolved the problem of identifying a minimal structure capable of recognizing populism across distinct national, historical, and ideological contexts. This article seeks to address this problem through a three-dimensional theoretical-conceptual framework, bringing together the formulations of Ernesto Laclau, Cas Mudde, and Pierre Rosanvallon on populism.[1] The challenge is to preserve the conceptual variability of populist contents and manifestations without allowing the interpretation to become so broad that it is forced to adapt contextually to the different expressions of the same phenomenon.
This is a predominantly theoretical-conceptual study, complemented by an exploratory empirical exercise involving the analysis of four distinct cases. The hypothesis is that the articulation of these three dimensions makes it possible to apprehend the fundamental properties of populism in a coordinated manner, while simultaneously preserving its conceptual unity and contextual variation.
The framework distinguishes three analytical levels that do not correspond to independent phenomena, but rather to constitutive dimensions of the same political dynamic. At the ontological-discursive level, Laclau makes it possible to apprehend the logic through which frustrated social demands, initially particular and heterogeneous, produce an antagonistic fissure within the social sphere and reorganize political positions and identities around an opposition between “we” and “they.” This division thus constitutes the relational structure through which political identities and hegemonic forms are rearticulated in populism.
At the ideological level, Mudde makes it possible to apprehend the specific way in which this antagonistic relationship is organized by populism through moral polarization. Because of its thin-centered character, populist ideology does not substantively determine the constitutive essence of the two poles but structures their relationship through a moral division between the people and the elite. The concrete contents of these poles remain contingent: different actors and groups may occupy the position of the elite or represent the people according to the context. What constitutes the populist dimension is the persistence of the moral polarized form of the relationship, rather than the stability of its contents.
At the democratic level, Rosanvallon makes it possible to apprehend the unfolding of this antagonistic and polarized configuration within democracy itself. The opening of an antagonistic fissure and its ideological organization as moral polarization tend to reduce the plurality of forms of representation and mediation to a conception of direct, immediate, and polarized popular sovereignty. Democratic indetermination thus appears not as a third property simply added to the previous ones, but as the level at which the political consequences of the articulation between antagonism and polarization become manifest. The plebiscitary simplification of democracy therefore constitutes the unfolding of the specific way in which populist conflict organizes the relationship between the people, power, and representation.
The relationship between these levels is therefore constitutive rather than causally linear. At the ontological-discursive level, antagonism structures the political fissure constituted through frustrated demands; at the ideological level, populist ideology organizes this fissure into a moral polarization whose content remains contingent and currently assumes the form of an opposition between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite”; and, as this configuration is projected onto democracy, it tends to produce its simplification in terms of direct, immediate, and plebiscitary sovereignty.
The framework thus articulates discursive-ontology, ideology, and democratic indetermination as different analytical dimensions of the same process, allowing for the formulation of three distinct but complementary questions through which the cases analyzed here can be empirically examined: 1) does the article identify the presence of an antagonistic fissure that divides the social field between “we” and “they” and produces new political identities through processes of hegemonic rearticulation? 2) does the article identify the organization of this antagonistic division through an ideological form that divides the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” according to a moral yardstick? 3) does the article identify the simplification of forms of democratic representation, mediation, and sovereignty, expressed through the production of a unitary, direct and/or immediate popular will exercised in a polarized and plebiscitary manner?
The empirical exercise consists of assessing the plausibility of this architecture through the analysis of four scientific articles addressing distinct manifestations of populism, selected for the diversity of their national, historical and ideological contexts. The analysis seeks to identify, in each case, the presence and articulation of the three dimensions, assessing whether the framework is capable of producing a common interpretation of empirically heterogeneous manifestations of populism.
The cases selected for the empirical assessment were chosen according to the criteria of the Global Populism Database (GPD) populist classification. The project aims to identify populist features in the speeches of leaders from different countries and periods. The GPD emerged from a project initiated in 2006 to construct a database on the populist discourse of political leaders, initially focused on Latin America and subsequently expanded to different countries and historical periods. The methodology employed is holistic grading, a technique originally developed to assess latent aspects of texts, such as tone, style, and argumentative quality. In the GPD, trained coders assign speeches a score from 0 to 2 according to a rubric that identifies the presence and intensity of populist elements. For a discourse to be considered populist, it must present some conception of popular will; the mere existence of a Manichean worldview is insufficient. For each term in office, the sample normally includes four speeches: a campaign speech, a domestic/commemorative speech, an international speech, and a speech considered representative or famous of the leader.
In addition to this classification, the GPD separates cases and selected speeches according to different ideological, temporal, and geographical dimensions. To maintain case diversity in this analysis, populist leaders were selected with the greatest possible diversity across cases, thereby preventing potential methodological bias. Leaders from the Philippines, Turkey, Nicaragua, and Bolivia were considered, classified across the left, center, and right, with GPD scores of 1.375 (Duterte), 1.466 (Erdogan), 1.25 (Ortega), and 1.462 (Morales), and who were in government between 2002 and 2022. This temporal period was defined in order to test the empirical application of the framework to the political context of the twenty-first century.
Professor Howard Lavine argues that the Democratic Party’s path to renewal lies less in ideological repositioning than in economic populism, political energy, and credible material outcomes. While MAGA remains rooted in status threat and a revanchist politics of cultural restoration, Professor Lavine sees greater opportunity for Democrats in focusing on affordability, wages, healthcare, and economic security. He cautions that the “socialist” label may create unnecessary electoral vulnerability, even as the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani current helps reorient the party toward working-class concerns. For Professor Lavine, most voters are not moved primarily by ideological sophistication but by whether political leaders deliver tangible improvements. The strategic imperative is therefore clear: Democrats should “pivot purely to economics” and demonstrate what they can concretely achieve for working-class voters.
In an interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Howard Lavine, Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota and former Director of the Center for the Study of Political Psychology, argues that the Democratic Party’s central challenge is less one of ideological definition than of political branding, economic credibility, and mobilizational energy. His assessment is particularly relevant ahead of the 2026 US midterm elections, as Democrats confront both a weakened but still deeply entrenched Trumpism and the growing influence of figures associated with democratic socialist and economic-populist politics. For Professor Lavine, however, the label itself may be more liability than asset: “The Democrats are making themselves vulnerable to some degree by using the socialist label.”
Professor Lavine draws a sharp distinction between the cultural politics underpinning MAGA and the economic terrain on which Democrats may have greater room to rebuild. MAGA, he argues, remains rooted in status threat and “a revanchist impulse to restore the prior order in which white Christian men feel comfortable in their dominant status.” Yet he does not believe racial and cultural identities necessarily foreclose an economic realignment. Swing voters, he stresses, are generally not those most deeply embedded in MAGA ideology. For Democrats, the crucial question is whether they can translate economic-populist appeals into tangible results: “What matters is the economic outcomes.” Policies themselves are comparatively less important because “most people aren’t going to understand what you say. They’re going to understand what’s happening on the ground.”
This emphasis on economics also shapes Professor Lavine’s interpretation of the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani current. He resists treating it primarily as an ideological socialist project, describing it instead as an effort to rebrand Democrats as more clearly aligned with working-class interests. Indeed, he argues that “the energy is in economic populism. It’s nowhere else.” At the same time, he warns that invoking socialism risks obscuring that advantage: “Too many people don’t like it; it’s not helping Democrats.”
More broadly, Profesor Lavine questions whether ideology itself is what moves most voters. “It’s really not about ideology,” he says of progressive candidates’ recent appeal; what voters are responding to is energy, anger, and a clearer sense of political purpose. In his view, Democrats should therefore move away from cultural issues that animate the academic left and “pivot purely to economics.” The strategic lesson is straightforward: “The more it focuses on economics, the better.” But electoral success ultimately requires more than rhetoric or branding. Once in power, Democrats must demonstrate “what they can do,” and, crucially, “what they can do specifically for the white working class.”
Here is our interview with Professor Howard Lavine, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
The Trump Administration Is Ginning Up Status Threat
Donald Trump delivers a victory speech after his big win in the Nevada caucus at Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, flanked by his sons Eric (right) and Donald Jr. (left) in Las Vegas, NV. Photo: Joe Sohm.
Professor Lavine, welcome! Your recent work with Christopher Parker describes MAGA as a reactionary movement driven substantially by “status threat”—the perception among historically dominant groups that social change has diminished their standing. Two years ago, Trumpism returned to governing power. Does holding power reduce that sense of threat, or can MAGA continually regenerate feelings of cultural dispossession even while controlling the presidency?
Professor Howard Lavine: It’s a very good question. One could reasonably assume that when the party in power is doing everything it can to restore the dominance of heritage groups—white Christian men—status threat would be assuaged. Howvere, we don’t find any evidence of that. We’ve been tracking status threat since the beginning of the Biden administration through July of this year, and status threat scores have not changed.
It hasn’t changed in part because Trump is ginning it up. And I don’t mean just Trump, but the entire apparatus within the MAGA movement. These are independent actors that are coordinating with one another and reaching millions and millions of people, continuing to present them with evidence that social and demographic change is going to lead to the decline of men, the decline of Christians, and the decline of whites.
Now, part of that is demographic change that no political party can control. Whites will become a minority of the population in about 2045, and Christians sometime between 2040 and 2060. So it’s not entirely related to partisan politics. But, the Trump administration is—whether it is doing this wittingly or not, consciously or not—ginning up status threat.
The Republican Party Has Been Captured by MAGA
You describe MAGA as a movement that ultimately “has taken over a party.” Should we therefore understand today’s Republican Party as a case of movement capture rather than ordinary ideological evolution? And what particular difficulties does that create for Democrats trying to oppose a Republican Party whose identity has become so closely fused with Trumpism?
Professor Howard Lavine: No, it’s the former. The movement has captured the party. Ideological evolution would suggest something different. Think about the change in 2016. I know that most of your readers might not have seen the Republican debates in 2015, but there were 17 people on the stage, and almost all of them were presenting themselves as Reaganite Republicans. Except for Trump.
Now, what Trump might have known—again, consciously or not—was that the Republican Party was no longer a party of Reaganite supporters. It had become a party of ethno-nationalists, concerned with immigration and with the prestige of heritage Americans, who felt besieged not only by the Obama presidency but by the longer sweep of American politics since the 1990s. So, things like political correctness and other sorts of mostly insular academic movements have reverberated somewhat beyond academia, but this is too abrupt a shift to consider it cultural evolutionary change. No, it’s an abrupt capture by a movement.
What this has to say for Democrats is what you began to see under George W. Bush, was an educational realignment, mostly among whites. Whites without a college education moved over to the Republicans. Whites with a college education who were Republican moved over to the Democrats. So, that was an early indication that the Democratic Party was going to be realigned, just as the Republican Party has been captured by MAGA.
But if you’re thinking about this in narrow electoral terms, in American politics, midterm elections are really referendums on the president. What we have in 2026 is just a very clear sense of dissatisfaction with issues related to affordability and the war in Iran.
Under Biden, let’s say in 2022, inflation was 8%, and that crashed his popularity. That was the case all over the West. Inflation was just as high in Belgium, France, and Germany. So, I guess the point I’m making here is that what people are seeing now is not just that gas prices are too high, but that Trump’s actions are clearly responsible. Inflation in Western Europe is half to a third of the size that it is in the United States. And people—not only those who are highly attentive to politics, but those who are around the median, even below the median—are very angry.
So, Trump is underwater everywhere, and I don’t think it much matters. We can get more into the Democratic split, but I don’t think what the Democrats say or do matters very much.
It’s Really Not About Ideology—It’s About Energy
US President Donald Trump greets supporters at MAGA rally for Presidential election 2020 at Harrisburg airport in Middletown, PA on September 26, 2020.
MAGA offers supporters a powerful account of who “the people” are, what they have lost, and who is responsible. Democrats have a much more heterogeneous coalition and often lack an equally clear organizing narrative. Is this one of their principal psychological disadvantages—a coalition broad enough to win elections but too fragmented to generate a comparably strong political identity?
Professor Howard Lavine: The Democrats are, right now, in a very specific place: voters want to see energy. They want to see their representatives and candidates express outrage. But the public is not ideologically informed, apart from a very small stratum at the top. Ten or 15% understand left and right. So, it’s really not about that. It’s more about candidates who, in the past, mostly campaigned in a way that was not as sharply critical of the other party as Democrats are craving now. They want that. To the extent that progressive or Democratic Socialist candidates are winning—for example, in Michigan, House seats in Manhattan, and a couple of other places, including Colorado—it’s mainly about the energy and the sort of tough talk. It’s really not about ideology.
Now, you have other people surrounding the insurgent candidates, and Sean Piker, for example, and these people have millions of followers. They’re much more likely to couch their preferences in ideological terms, but they’re much less salient. They’re only reaching people who are already going to vote for Democrats, especially in a year when Democratic enthusiasm is extremely high. They’re not reaching the voters who swing elections—mostly independents and unhappy members of the incumbent party, of whom there are now more.
So it’s really not about ideology. It’s about, especially among younger voters, wanting to see their candidates become more animated, more angry, and meet Trump’s rhetoric from the opposite perspective. Mamdani is somewhat like AOC, too, but Mamdani is an executive and can do more. He’s a mayor. He has more of a socialist policy agenda, but that doesn’t really translate outside New York. The policy agenda is very concrete and easy to understand. It’s about affordability, subsidized housing, and government-owned grocery stores that will bring prices down and such. That isn’t really what the Democratic Socialists are mostly about. AOC and Mamdani are exceptions.
Democratic Inversion Is a Bad Thing
Your concept of “democratic inversion” suggests that citizens increasingly adjust their policy beliefs to fit their partisan identity rather than choosing parties on the basis of prior beliefs. If so, does ideological uncertainty within the Democratic Party become especially costly because the party itself is less able to provide clear cues about what being a Democrat means?
Professor Howard Lavine: The parties are extremely polarized. When the choice presented to the electorate is simply Republican versus Democrat, it doesn’t really matter what the policy is. Democrats will prefer the Democratic policy. They’re not going to scrutinize it terribly deeply, and most of them won’t understand much about its specifics. Even Democrats running for Congress realize that it’s not really about policy. It’s about showing energy to counter Donald Trump.
The idea of democratic inversion has been around for decades. It’s probably a little bit higher among Democrats, but it’s very high among partisans of both parties, in part because the structure of choice is simply one party or the other. You’re not invited to make up your own policy. Democratic inversion is a bad thing. People should arrive at their political judgments before they pick a party and a candidate. But most of the population—nearly all of it—doesn’t do that. If any sector or stratum of the population does, it’s surprisingly people who are not politically sophisticated. They don’t know what the party’s messages are, so they can’t conform to them, and therefore inversion can’t occur.
Which is ironic. You’d think that the people who are most sophisticated, most knowledgeable, and most aware would start with their own beliefs. It’s just the opposite. I’m only saying this because this is what the research shows over and over again: the most aware partisans are willing simply to adopt the positions of their parties.
Elections Turn Very Much on Recent Economic Change
The November midterms provide an unusually important test. Democrats currently appear more energized than Republicans, and Trump’s approval remains weak. Should the election primarily be understood as a referendum on Trump, or will it also tell us whether Democrats have developed a compelling affirmative identity of their own?
Professor Howard Lavine: Again, largely a referendum on Trump. People are very angry. If you look at it, the issues are inflation and affordability. It’s not about democratic decline. Americans care about democracy, but not that much. Elections turn very much on recent economic change. What we’re seeing here is not only an average 50% increase in gas prices, but also high inflation that can be traced directly to Trump’s policies. And he only seems to be making it worse.
So, a lot of Republican candidates do not want to be seen with him, which is often the case when the president has a low approval rating. Trump’s approval rating is anywhere from the mid- to high 30s, but the most recent polls are in the low 30s, so we might be seeing a decline to a point that we almost never see. Bush left office in 2008 with a 32% approval rating. That’s historic. Nixon did for other reasons, but Bush did because of the economy, and Trump for the same reason.
He’s even underwater on immigration, meaning more people oppose than support his immigration policy, and that is his most important policy. People don’t like the way it’s being implemented. They don’t believe that what was advertised is anything like what Trump is currently doing. They’ve tried to make it more on the quiet. They turned Minneapolis into Fallujah for a couple of months, realized that was unpopular, but the number of arrests and deportations is at an all-time high.
But no, I don’t think the Democrats have much. It may be that in Michigan, some voters might look at Al-Sayed somewhat more negatively than they would his more establishment opponent, but he’s ahead in all the polls. There hasn’t been a single poll where Mike Rogers was ahead, but I think the energy matters. I think Trump has really engulfed the field. There’s really almost nothing outside of Donald Trump.
The Word Socialism Is Just a Very Bad Choice
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the “Bernie Is Back” political rally in Queensbridge Park, Queens, New York, on October 19, 2019. Photo: Aleksandr Dyskin / Dreamstime.
That question becomes especially important as democratic socialist figures seek to shape what that affirmative identity might look like. Before assessing their electoral and organizational potential, however, it may be useful to clarify the concept itself. What distinguishes contemporary democratic socialism in the United States from classical socialism and communism, but also from European-style social democracy? Is the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani current best understood as a genuinely socialist project seeking a deeper transformation of capitalism, or as a more radical version of social democracy operating within a liberal-democratic framework?
Professor Howard Lavine: I don’t even think it’s a radical version of European social democracy. It’s simply projecting a brand—a reputational brand within the Democratic Party—to be more favorable toward the working class, which is probably both morally admirable and strategically correct. The Democrats did a lot better when they were able to win the working class. Since the party inverted, the Republicans have done considerably better. The Democrats simply prefer to be the party of the working class rather than the party of expensively educated elites. Because, there aren’t as many of them. They have cultural and economic power, but they don’t have political power because there aren’t enough of them.
I think the rhetoric—the word socialism—is just a very bad choice. Not that Americans know what it means; they just know they don’t like it. Socialism, Nazism, all the -isms are unpopular. What they want to hear is that the party cares more about them than it does about the more culturally based concerns of highly educated people. The Democrats have gone through a woke period, which AOC recently condemned as crazy, mostly because she realizes that there’s just no political profit in continuing to push wokeism. But because Europe is so substantially to the left in its social democratic ideology and provision, the Democrats simply want to change their brand to attract working-class people who might be disenchanted with Trump.
Meanwhile, there is a crack in the MAGA movement. A lot of MAGA voters—three-time MAGA voters—are beginning to wonder whether the Trump administration cares more about tech oligarchs than the working class. So, it’s a strategically advantageous pivot, both because it does seem to be more squarely focused on the working class economically rather than the upper middle class culturally, and also because, in the late Trump years—he’s about to be a lame duck either way—he’s losing support among Republicans specifically on economic issues.
The Republican Party has mostly been about social or cultural issues, and now the party has captured a group of people who are concerned about economic issues, but the Republicans are not delivering. That’s not just Trump; that’s standard Republican policy from the time of Reagan: cut taxes, reduce them on the wealthy, and reduce the social safety net. So it is not Trump; it’s the Republicans.
Trump probably wouldn’t have wanted to do this, but the Republicans cut Medicaid, which is a social safety net policy that does a lot of things for the elderly and the non-elderly poor, and that will reverberate over the next 12 months. Benefits will be eliminated or substantially lower for MAGA people as much as for non-MAGA people, and so MAGA people are probably looking more than they were in 2016 at specifically economic issues.
Democratic Socialism Is No Longer a Fringe
Zohran Mamdani at the Dominican Heritage Parade on 6th Ave in Manhattan, New York City, August 10, 2025. Photo: Aleksandr Dyskin.
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been joined by the success of Zohran Mamdani and a broader insurgent left, while Abdul El-Sayed’s Michigan Senate primary victory demonstrates the appeal of similar progressive economic politics even beyond explicitly democratic socialist candidates. Are we reaching the point where this tendency can no longer be regarded as the Democratic Party’s fringe?
Professor Howard Lavine: That’s a great question. I would like to think that will be true by the time of the 2028 election. That’s the goal: to rebrand the party. The party is seen by younger voters in particular—and this might include voters under 50—as somewhat ideologically stagnant. They’re not providing as strong a contrast to the Republican Party as younger voters need.
Again, this is both about energy and anger, which is what the Democratic base wants to see. But it’s also, as voters will come to find out, about preserving the safety net and refocusing the party on the working class. So, to answer the question provisionally, yes. I think it is no longer a fringe. It will become stronger.
The Democrats Have Lost Energy in the Trump Years
How seriously should we take the analogy between MAGA’s rise within the Republican Party and democratic socialism’s growing influence among Democrats? Could a movement once considered peripheral eventually reshape the Democratic Party’s agenda, candidate selection, activist base, and political vocabulary as profoundly as MAGA transformed the GOP—or are the two cases fundamentally different?
Professor Howard Lavine: No, I don’t think so. They’re fundamentally different in the sense that they’re somewhat apples and oranges. One is more focused on culture, which the Republicans always were. Now it’s ethno-nationalism. Now it’s pitting white Christians against everyone else.
It is about rebranding, as I said, and it’s about recapturing energy. The Democrats have lost energy in the Trump years. They were excited in 2020 because Trump was weakened, people were generally dissatisfied, and his approval rating was low. But the Democrats now realize they can’t rely on that. They need, as you say, an optimistic vision. They need not just to rely on negative partisanship.
I hate to refer to it as democratic socialism. They’ll drop the socialism part at some point, but that’s the only game in town. By 2028, the goal is to rebrand the party around something much more energetic. I hesitate to say policy, because policy doesn’t really move voters very much, but rather a brand, a reputation, an understanding of what the Democrats are. They need something more active.
The Democrats are also beholden to what we now call the Epstein class: billionaires. The Democrats need to shed that. Once they win the House, most likely—and they could win the Senate—but either way, they could start issuing subpoenas to people who are implicated in the Epstein situation, and that’s what Democrats want to see.
This is why Obama’s popularity, after he got into office, just plummeted, because he refinanced the banks and let ordinary Americans go bankrupt. That was very unpopular and a bad move, and I think you would agree with that now. But it’s what the Democrats need to do to re-energize their brand. Nobody knows what they stand for, at least outside of the people who are already gonna vote, no matter what.
The Energy Is in Economic Populism
From a more positive perspective, could democratic socialism help resolve the Democratic Party’s current deadlock? Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani offer ideological clarity, recognizable adversaries, grassroots enthusiasm, and a straightforward economic agenda centered on affordability, housing, healthcare, wages, and inequality. Could this provide the political identity and mobilizational energy mainstream Democrats have struggled to generate?
Professor Howard Lavine: Yes, absolutely. They need to do that. If they don’t, it will be strongly to their detriment. With a 50-50 electorate, the last three elections have basically been ties. Now, you can’t have an exact tie, so one party wins. But I think that, for the Democrats to break out and attempt to become the majority party, which they once were, that’s exactly what they’ll need to do. The energy is in economic populism. It’s nowhere else. There’s no other alternative being proposed.
Revanchist Impulse Getting Worse and Worse
Your work emphasizes that status threat is revanchist: it seeks to recover a social hierarchy perceived as lost. Democratic socialist rhetoric generally points in the opposite direction, promising future material gains and greater equality. Could this allow the left to channel dissatisfaction through an aspirational politics rather than the nostalgic politics of restoration that characterizes MAGA?
Professor Howard Lavine: It’s quite likely that what you’ll see as the result of a re-energized Democratic Party around social change is increased polarization. No, I don’t think that revanchist impulse is going to go away, because demographic change doesn’t require social change, which is what you’re talking about.
But as we get closer to becoming a majority-minority country, it will become inevitable that whites and Christians, both declining in numbers and as percentages of the population, are headed toward minority status. So, I don’t think the revanchist impulse is likely to disappear anytime soon. The question is how it’s packaged.
Trump is a rather crude communicator. I don’t mean crude simply in the sense that he says crude things, although of course he does, and that’s his calling card. But he’s not doing it in a way that, say, J.D. Vance or somebody else could, which runs counter to the conventional wisdom that Vance can’t hold together the MAGA movement.
But the MAGA movement is underpinned by what we would call status threat, as well as by a revanchist impulse to restore the prior order in which white Christian men feel comfortable in their dominant status. Right now, they’re not feeling that. So, I don’t see that revanchist impulse disappearing. I see it getting worse and worse as we move toward a more multiracial America.
What Matters Is the Economic Outcomes
Could a stronger economic-populist message help Democrats shift political conflict away from terrain favorable to Trump—race, immigration, cultural hierarchy, and status loss—and toward wages, housing, healthcare, corporate power, and economic insecurity? Or are racial and cultural identities now too deeply embedded in partisan politics for such a strategic shift to succeed?
Professor Howard Lavine: No, I don’t think they are, because the voters who swing elections are not those who are deeply embedded in MAGA’s ideology. But it’s not really about the policies. They can say anything they want; the policies will be understood only in some fractional sense. What matters is the economic outcomes. If they deliver on what they promise, they will do well. If they promise the moon and deliver none of it, they won’t. And the same is true with Mamdani. So, it’s really about economic outcomes.
But you have to start with policies, and policies have to start with branding. Of those three—branding, policies, and outcomes—policies are the least important. Most people aren’t going to understand what you say. They’re going to understand what’s happening on the ground. Are prices getting higher? Are they steadying out? Is the social safety net becoming stronger? Or is it always on the brink of leaving millions and millions of people in poverty?
If the outcomes are achieved, the brand will become more legitimate and longer-lasting, and will become more deeply embedded in the consciousness of the top 40–50% of aware voters.
Cultural Identities Versus Economics
Photo: Mar Tas / Dreamstime.
Your experimental research found that racial cues pushed Trump supporters and opponents in sharply different directions. Does this suggest a limit to the democratic-socialist assumption that material politics can reunify working-class voters? Can class-based appeals actually weaken status threat, or will economic questions themselves continue to be interpreted through racial and partisan identities?
Professor Howard Lavine: That’s another great question. I think the answer depends first on the economic context. Right now, the answer is yes. Under more prosperous conditions, I think it won’t. Then you tend to get cultural politics.
Right now, there’s a clamoring that is all about economics. I mean, not among the MAGA group. They’re concerned with restoring what they perceived—and what was, in reality—a country that privileged whites and Christians and where men ruled the roost. So, if economic times continue to be difficult, an economic-populist message will take root and be competitive.
At some point—and this is perhaps one of the largest debates in political science and political psychology—it comes down to identities, cultural identities versus economics. It really depends. At the end of the Clinton years, everything was looking great. People had every opportunity to say, “We can ignore economics because we’re all fine, and now we can become a party of identitarians,” which the Democrats began to do.
But I don’t see economics falling away from the top of the agenda anytime soon. I think it’ll dominate the 2028 elections, which will be to the great detriment of the Republican Party. I don’t think those cultural messages will be as important when people can’t afford gas, groceries, or their medical bills. People living on the edge are living much further on the edge, and I think that will matter, at least for 2028.
American politics doesn’t stay the same. It could be different in 2030, just as it was in 2010 and 2018, for that matter. Those were the first midterms of Obama and Trump. They got wiped out.
So, when we come back to outcomes, parties realize that the first Congress they have—which is when they most often have unified control of government—is the only time they’ll be able to do anything. By the end of a president’s first term, those effects are generally exhausted. And there’s usually no opportunity to do anything big again because you have lost the House of Representatives in your first midterm. That’s what happened to Clinton, that’s what happened to Obama, that’s what happened to Trump, and Biden didn’t even control the House.
Democratic Voters Will Continue to Push an Economically Populist Message
The 2026 midterms offer a particularly important test because insurgent-progressive candidates must now move from Democratic primaries into general elections. Michigan’s Senate race is especially significant. Will November help determine whether this politics can expand beyond safe urban constituencies into the competitive states and districts Democrats need to control Congress?
Professor Howard Lavine: Michigan’s gonna be looked at very carefully. But it’s one election, and it’s one state, and its dynamics are bounded by time and context. If Al-Sayed loses, I don’t think the entire apparatus of the Democratic left is going to collapse. There will be other interpretations.
So, no, I don’t think one example will be decisive. I think voters will become disenchanted if they see that the slate of candidates they regard as qualitatively different, or different in kind, from Democratic establishment candidates loses across the board. If they lose across the board, maybe they’ll come back to the drawing board.
But one election—the Michigan election—no, I don’t think that’s enough, because I think Democratic voters who control the brand of the party, to the extent that voters control the party’s brand, which I think they increasingly do, will continue to push an economically populist message.
I’d rather label it that way than democratic socialism. The word socialist is going to have to be excised. Too many people don’t like it; it’s not helping Democrats. It’s the influencers outside of party strategists who love the socialist label. Aside from that, it’s supporters of Bernie. Sadly. Trust me
A Vague Term Like Socialism Just Can’t Compete
Republicans are already trying to make socialism itself an issue in the midterms, including through congressional resolutions explicitly linking Democrats to democratic socialist politics. Does that indicate genuine electoral vulnerability for Democrats, or does it show that Republicans recognize the left’s potential to construct a competing populist narrative around economic inequality and concentrated wealth?
Professor Howard Lavine: I think both are true, but more importantly than either of those things, the Republicans don’t have much to campaign on. The running joke is that the only thing they can do is talk about trans athletes, of which there are about five in the country. They don’t really have much to say, but the Democrats are making themselves vulnerable to some degree by using the socialist label.
There will be some people who hesitate to vote for Democrats and may refuse to do so on that basis. It remains to be seen whether this is almost entirely a referendum on Trump or whether the Republicans gain any traction simply by using the word socialism. They’ve used that since Obama, and I don’t think it’s really done much, because most voters don’t understand it, and those who do are already committed to voting for one party or the other.
But this year, voters are so singularly concerned with their economic pocketbooks that a vague term like socialism just can’t compete.
Your work on resistance to persuasion shows that politically engaged voters are particularly capable of rejecting counter-attitudinal messages, sometimes becoming even more certain of their existing views. Does that mean Democrats waste too much effort trying to win committed MAGA voters? Should their priority instead be less-engaged citizens, irregular voters, younger voters, and those whose partisan identities remain relatively weak?
Professor Howard Lavine: Young MAGA voters are unstable. They haven’t formed strong partisan identities. Once they do, it’ll become a lot harder. But there is always competition for swing voters, meaning voters who don’t have a strong party identification. Then there are young voters who are not socialized into the party system. They might vote Republican, and they might even identify as MAGA, but they’re not so deeply embedded in both a belief system and a social world that they can’t be persuaded. So there is such a thing as the persuadable voter, and it’s not a trivial portion of the electorate. I think resistance to persuasion and backfire are generally seen when you’re talking about people who have strong priors.
The Persuadable Voter Is Less Burdened by Strong Party Ties
There is also a normative danger in the MAGA analogy. If democratic socialists became dominant within the Democratic Party, could they eventually reproduce the “democratic inversion” you identify on the right—where movement loyalty determines policy beliefs and internal dissent becomes suspect? What separates healthy ideological renewal from another form of partisan capture?
Professor Howard Lavine: Democratic inversion has been so robust and stable for so long that it’s a permanent feature of the dynamics of democratic citizenship, so it’s a failure of democratic citizenship. But that’s not something that’s going to go anywhere. Again, what I said earlier is that those people who tend to follow the leader, who are inverted, tend to be voters who are, first, certain to vote, second, certain to vote for their party’s candidate. So those people are lost to democratic inversion. And again, those are the people who are most aware and most interested in politics.
The persuadable voter is one who is less burdened by strong party ties and is willing to weigh the evidence, come to a conclusion, and then, potentially, move into a party based on a non-inverted process, meaning that they have come to believe certain values, hold certain policy preferences or goals for the country, and see one party or the other as the basis of that.
We see that already with respect to the growing influence of a fairly heritable personality trait called authoritarianism. That is more strongly structuring American politics, and that’s not inversion. That’s a personality—a deep, heritable personality characteristic—that is sorting the public, mostly the white public, into the Democratic and Republican Party, so inversion isn’t everything. But it’s a dominant dynamic, and there are non-inversion dynamics that are occurring as well. The authoritarianism-to-partisan-identity process is one of them.
The More It Focuses on Economics, the Better
Finally, the November midterms may offer an early answer to the Democratic Party’s larger dilemma. Could the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani phenomenon provide the economic narrative, organizational energy, and political purpose needed to rebuild the party against Trumpism? Or could moving too far toward democratic socialism sacrifice precisely the moderate and cross-pressured voters Democrats need to regain Congress and eventually the presidency?
Professor Howard Lavine: Another great question. I would say the answer is the first one. What they realized—and AOC has, by stating that woke was crazy, or woke one was crazy—is that focusing on cultural issues, especially cultural issues that animate the academic left, is extremely damaging to the party’s brand. So, what AOC and others recognize is that you have to pivot purely to economics. Again, it’s less about how extreme the policies are and more about what they do with power if they take it, and how successful they are with it.
Biden was pretty successful. But inflation and the perception of him as elderly and not fit to run again—which he had promised he wouldn’t do before changing his mind—will probably determine whether the next democratic-left projects succeed. So, the bottom line is: the more it focuses on economics, the better. Beyond that, once they take power, they have to show what they can do, and specifically what they can do for the white working class.
In this interview, Imran Bayoumi examines how the weakening of multilateral institutions and the rise of transactional diplomacy are reshaping global power in ways that often favor authoritarian and populist governments. He argues that authoritarian middle powers benefit from greater flexibility to hedge between competing blocs, while democracies remain constrained by alliances, institutions, and domestic accountability. Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan emerges as a key example: Ankara has “managed to play and interact with both realms at the same time,” using populist nationalism to present strategic balancing as the defense of national interests. Bayoumi also warns that weakening Western cohesion benefits revisionist powers, while calling for a “retooled American leadership” capable of rebuilding democratic cooperation in a more fragmented international order.
In an era of intensifying geopolitical fragmentation, weakening multilateral institutions, and increasingly transactional diplomacy, authoritarian and populist governments may find themselves unusually well positioned to exploit the emerging international disorder. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Imran Bayoumi, Deputy Director and Resident Fellow with the GeoStrategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, examines how the erosion of the rules-based international order is altering the balance between democratic constraints and authoritarian flexibility. His central argument is not that autocracies are inherently stronger, but that a fragmented system can reward governments able to hedge between competing powers, bypass institutional constraints, and personalize foreign policy. As Bayoumi puts it, authoritarian middle powers “have experience with hedging” and are less constrained by the institutions and alliances that shape the choices of democratic states.
The decline of multilateralism is particularly consequential because it lowers the costs of defying established rules. According to Bayoumi, states increasingly feel comfortable “bypassing multilateral bodies,” ignoring treaties and challenging norms because the prospect of meaningful punishment has diminished. Yet he cautions against reducing this transformation simply to populism: “It’s a mix of both things: populism and power.” At the same time, the personalization of diplomacy associated with contemporary populist politics is becoming increasingly significant, as foreign policy becomes more closely tied to leaders themselves rather than institutions and professional bureaucracies.
Turkey provides one of the interview’s clearest illustrations of this emerging geopolitical flexibility. Still embedded in NATO and Western institutions, Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has simultaneously cultivated relations across competing geopolitical blocs. Bayoumi describes Turkey as a country that has “managed to play and interact with both realms at the same time.”Populist nationalism, he argues, has been crucial to legitimizing this strategy domestically: “Erdogan has been able to sell this balancing strategy as a way of being able to secure Turkey’s interests first.” The willingness to purchase Russian air-defense systems while remaining within NATO exemplifies how Ankara combines alliance membership with strategic hedging.
More broadly, Bayoumi warns that weakening Western alliances and institutional cohesion ultimately benefits revisionist authoritarian powers. “Every action that undermines the strong ties between the United States and its allies is a benefit for them,” he argues, pointing to the growing cooperation among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Yet he rejects the idea that authoritarian ascendancy is inevitable. Instead, he calls for “some sort of retooled American leadership” capable of accommodating the growing autonomy of middle powers while rebuilding institutions and democratic cooperation. The challenge, therefore, is not simply to restore the old international order, but to construct a more resilient one capable of reconciling democratic values, strategic power, and an increasingly multipolar world.
In this interview with ECPS, Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde examines how authoritarianism, populism, and democratic backsliding increasingly intersect with struggles over civil society and international norms. She argues that autocracies view independent civic mobilization as a strategic threat because rights-based movements can generate broader networks of resistance. The conversation also explores how conservative and populist actors use transnational networks to contest LGBTQ+ rights, human rights norms, and the role of international organizations. Dr. Valverde highlights the growing polarization of international civil society, the strategic use of migration as interstate leverage, and the resurgence of sovereignty-based challenges to the liberal international order. Together, these developments reveal how democratic erosion increasingly unfolds across both domestic and international arenas.
In an era marked by democratic backsliding, transnational populism, and growing contestation over international norms, the struggle over civic space has become increasingly central to the future of liberal democracy. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde, Assistant Professor in the Department of International Studies at ITAM in Mexico, argues that authoritarian governments do not merely resist particular rights claims; they are deeply concerned with the broader political capacity that autonomous civil society can generate. As she puts it, “Any rights-based mobilization becomes a focal point around which other regime opponents can build networks to resist the regime’s power.”
This insight lies at the heart of Dr. Valverde’s analysis of authoritarian opposition to LGBTQ+ rights. Drawing on her Journal of Democracy research with Gino Pauselli, she emphasizes that conservative ideology alone cannot explain authoritarian behavior. Their argument instead identifies a threefold logic: “repression of civil society, opposition to the liberal international order, and the instrumental use of conservative ideology.” For Dr. Valverde, the civil-society mechanism is especially revealing because rights-based mobilization can create organizational capacities that extend well beyond a single policy issue. Hence her conclusion that “both liberal and illiberal networks and governments understand civic space access itself as a strategic asset.”
The interview also broadens this argument beyond domestic authoritarianism. International organizations themselves, Dr. Valverde argues, have become arenas of normative competition. Conservative NGOs and governments increasingly use the same institutional channels once associated primarily with progressive advocacy, while seeking to influence judges, commissioners, and policy agendas. What is at stake, she stresses, is “not only outcomes, but also the IO’s function itself.” This process can produce what she calls “neutralization”: weakening an international organization’s capacity to advance norms without formally reversing its previous commitments.
These dynamics are closely connected to populism. Dr. Valverde rejects the idea that populists simply learn from autocracies; she instead points to “shared transnational infrastructure” linking conservative and populist actors across borders. She also warns against reducing democracy to electoral legitimacy. Populist leaders, she notes, often reason that “If I won the election, then I represent the people, and if I represent the people, I can do no wrong.” Such logic, she argues, can rapidly undermine checks and balances and weaken non-elected institutions essential to democracy.
Taken together, the conversation presents civic space not as a secondary democratic concern, but as a core arena in which authoritarianism, populism, human rights, and international order increasingly intersect.
