In this timely ECPS interview, Professor Cengiz Aktar examines the political, geopolitical, and democratic implications of Armenia’s 2026 parliamentary elections. While acknowledging Armenia’s democratic resilience in an authoritarian neighborhood, he challenges prevailing narratives about the country’s westward turn, arguing that Armenia’s economic, energy, and security dependence on Russia remains profound. Describing the European Union as “the greatest populist actor in this game,” Professor Aktar contends that Brussels is fostering expectations it cannot realistically fulfill. The interview explores Nikol Pashinyan’s evolving populism, post-Karabakh politics, democratic backsliding, normalization with Turkey and Azerbaijan, Russian influence, and the enduring significance of historical memory. At its core lies a fundamental question: how can a fragile democracy survive amid competing geopolitical pressures?
Armenia’s 2026 parliamentary elections have been widely interpreted as a pivotal moment in the country’s post-Karabakh trajectory. Taking place amid the aftermath of military defeat, the forced displacement of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, ongoing normalization efforts with Turkey and Azerbaijan, and growing tensions between Russia and the West, the elections raised fundamental questions about democratic resilience, populism, sovereignty, and geopolitical realignment in the South Caucasus.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Cengiz Aktar—adjunct professor of political science at the University of Athens, guest lecturer at Yerevan State University, and one of the foremost analysts of Turkey-Armenia relations, memory politics, and regional geopolitics—offers a provocative assessment of Armenia’s democratic future and its increasingly complex international environment.
While acknowledging Armenia’s democratic achievements, Professor Aktar stresses the extraordinary constraints under which the country operates. As he observes, Armenia remains “the only democracy in the Caucasus, indeed in the region,” a small, landlocked state surrounded by authoritarian neighbors and exposed to intense geopolitical pressures. Yet he warns that many assumptions currently shaping discussions of Armenia’s future rest on unrealistic expectations regarding Europe’s role and capacity.
The most striking theme of the interview concerns Armenia’s growing rapprochement with the European Union. Contrary to prevailing narratives that portray Armenia’s recent political direction as a decisive shift toward Europe, Professor Aktar argues that Armenia’s economic, energy, and security dependence on Russia remains overwhelming and cannot be easily replaced. In his view, European policymakers are encouraging expectations that they cannot realistically fulfill. “None of this can be replaced by the European Union,” he argues. “Yet the EU is systematically giving false hopes to Armenia. In that sense, the greatest populist actor in this game is Europe. Because Europe is offering hopes that it simply cannot fulfill.”
Professor Aktar is equally skeptical of assumptions that Armenia faces a straightforward geopolitical choice between Russia and Europe. While recognizing the country’s genuine democratic aspirations and strong cultural connections with Europe, he contends that geography, energy dependence, trade networks, and security realities continue to bind Armenia closely to Moscow. For this reason, he warns that unrealistic promises of European integration may ultimately prove counterproductive, potentially undermining Armenia’s stability while provoking Russian backlash.
The interview also explores Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s evolving populism, the politics of peace and normalization with Turkey and Azerbaijan, democratic backsliding, Russia’s continuing influence, historical memory, and the unresolved legacy of the Armenian Genocide. Throughout, Professor Aktar returns to a central dilemma confronting Armenia today: how a fragile democracy can preserve its autonomy and democratic character while navigating an increasingly hostile regional environment shaped by authoritarian power politics and great-power competition.
Professor Stephan Haggard, one of the world’s leading scholars of democratic backsliding and authoritarianism, argues that the survival of democracy depends not only on constitutional safeguards but also on sustained public commitment to democratic institutions. In this timely ECPS interview, he examines how populism, polarization, judicial erosion, and attacks on electoral integrity are reshaping democratic politics across the globe. Distinguishing between populism as a “thin ideology” and democratic backsliding as an institutional process, Professor Haggard warns that elected leaders increasingly challenge democracy from within. The conversation explores the weakening of horizontal checks, the rise of anti-institutional rhetoric, the diffusion of illiberal strategies across borders, and the growing importance of democratic resilience. As he cautions, democracy faces its greatest danger when populist movements cease to respect rights, the rule of law, and the integrity of elections.
At a time when democratic institutions are under mounting pressure from populist movements, partisan polarization, and growing distrust in public authority, understanding how democracies erode—and how they endure—has become one of the most urgent challenges in political science. Few scholars have contributed more to this debate than Professor Stephan Haggard, Research Professor and Lawrence and Sallye Krause Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California San Diego. Over a distinguished career spanning comparative politics, political economy, authoritarianism, and democratic governance, Professor Haggard has produced some of the most influential scholarship on democratic transitions, institutional change, and regime durability.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Haggard reflects on the relationship between populism, democratic backsliding, judicial erosion, polarization, and the resilience of democratic institutions. Challenging simplistic understandings of democratic decline, he argues that contemporary autocratization increasingly unfolds not through military coups or abrupt regime collapses, but through gradual institutional weakening carried out by elected leaders operating within formally democratic systems.
One of the interview’s central themes is the fragility of democratic institutions when public support begins to erode. As Professor Haggard observes, “courts operate as checks only to the extent that there is support for courts operating as checks,” emphasizing that “democratic institutions survive only when citizens support them.” For him, the durability of democracy ultimately depends not only on constitutional design, but also on the willingness of political actors and citizens alike to defend the norms and institutions that sustain democratic rule.
Throughout the discussion, Professor Haggard distinguishes between populism as a political ideology and democratic backsliding as an institutional process. Drawing on Cas Mudde’s concept of populism as a “thin ideology,” he argues that populism becomes dangerous when commitments to majoritarian rule are accompanied by efforts to weaken rights, judicial independence, oversight of institutions, and other components of liberal democracy. “Populism is a kind of motivating ideology that can drive backsliding,” he explains, while democratic erosion manifests itself through concrete institutional consequences.
The interview also explores the growing challenge posed by anti-institutional rhetoric, attacks on electoral integrity, transnational networks of illiberal cooperation, and the emergence of authoritarian regional organizations that seek to reshape global governance. Particularly striking is Professor Haggard’s candid assessment of the contemporary United States. Reflecting on the resilience of advanced democracies, he acknowledges that he is “beginning to have doubts”about earlier assumptions that consolidated democracies are largely immune from authoritarian drift. Indeed, he remarks that if asked whether the United States remains a democracy, he would “have to scratch [his] head over that question.”
At once sobering and illuminating, this interview offers a powerful examination of the institutional foundations of democracy and the conditions under which they can be preserved—or lost.
In this timely ECPS interview, Professor Cengiz Aktar examines the political, geopolitical, and democratic implications of Armenia’s 2026 parliamentary elections. While acknowledging Armenia’s democratic resilience in an authoritarian neighborhood, he challenges prevailing narratives about the country’s westward turn, arguing that Armenia’s economic, energy, and security dependence on Russia remains profound. Describing the European Union as “the greatest populist actor in this game,” Professor Aktar contends that Brussels is fostering expectations it cannot realistically fulfill. The interview explores Nikol Pashinyan’s evolving populism, post-Karabakh politics, democratic backsliding, normalization with Turkey and Azerbaijan, Russian influence, and the enduring significance of historical memory. At its core lies a fundamental question: how can a fragile democracy survive amid competing geopolitical pressures?
Armenia’s 2026 parliamentary elections have been widely interpreted as a pivotal moment in the country’s post-Karabakh trajectory. Taking place amid the aftermath of military defeat, the forced displacement of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, ongoing normalization efforts with Turkey and Azerbaijan, and growing tensions between Russia and the West, the elections raised fundamental questions about democratic resilience, populism, sovereignty, and geopolitical realignment in the South Caucasus.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Cengiz Aktar—adjunct professor of political science at the University of Athens, guest lecturer at Yerevan State University, and one of the foremost analysts of Turkey-Armenia relations, memory politics, and regional geopolitics—offers a provocative assessment of Armenia’s democratic future and its increasingly complex international environment.
While acknowledging Armenia’s democratic achievements, Professor Aktar stresses the extraordinary constraints under which the country operates. As he observes, Armenia remains “the only democracy in the Caucasus, indeed in the region,” a small, landlocked state surrounded by authoritarian neighbors and exposed to intense geopolitical pressures. Yet he warns that many assumptions currently shaping discussions of Armenia’s future rest on unrealistic expectations regarding Europe’s role and capacity.
The most striking theme of the interview concerns Armenia’s growing rapprochement with the European Union. Contrary to prevailing narratives that portray Armenia’s recent political direction as a decisive shift toward Europe, Professor Aktar argues that Armenia’s economic, energy, and security dependence on Russia remains overwhelming and cannot be easily replaced. In his view, European policymakers are encouraging expectations that they cannot realistically fulfill. “None of this can be replaced by the European Union,” he argues. “Yet the EU is systematically giving false hopes to Armenia. In that sense, the greatest populist actor in this game is Europe. Because Europe is offering hopes that it simply cannot fulfill.”
Professor Aktar is equally skeptical of assumptions that Armenia faces a straightforward geopolitical choice between Russia and Europe. While recognizing the country’s genuine democratic aspirations and strong cultural connections with Europe, he contends that geography, energy dependence, trade networks, and security realities continue to bind Armenia closely to Moscow. For this reason, he warns that unrealistic promises of European integration may ultimately prove counterproductive, potentially undermining Armenia’s stability while provoking Russian backlash.
The interview also explores Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s evolving populism, the politics of peace and normalization with Turkey and Azerbaijan, democratic backsliding, Russia’s continuing influence, historical memory, and the unresolved legacy of the Armenian Genocide. Throughout, Professor Aktar returns to a central dilemma confronting Armenia today: how a fragile democracy can preserve its autonomy and democratic character while navigating an increasingly hostile regional environment shaped by authoritarian power politics and great-power competition.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Professor Cengiz Aktar, lightly edited for clarity, readability, and publication.
Armenians Were Tired of War, and Pashinyan Successfully Capitalized on That Fatigue
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan arrives for a meeting of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council (EAEU) in Yerevan, Armenia, on November 19, 2021. Photo: Dreamstime.
Professor Aktar, welcome! You recently argued that the 2026 elections would reveal the direction of Armenian democracy after the trauma of Karabakh and the pressures of regional geopolitics. How should we interpret Nikol Pashinyan’s re-election? Does it represent a democratic endorsement of his peace agenda, or merely a choice of the “least risky” option in a constrained political environment?
Professor Cengiz Aktar: Before going into the details of the Armenian political microcosm, we should underline that this small country— less than 30,000 square kilometers after all—completely landlocked and surrounded by two enemy nations, Azerbaijan and Turkey, is the only democracy in the Caucasus, indeed in the region. This is something that people tend to forget. They are doing their best to remain a democracy. It is not easy because they have to deal with anti-democracies. But so far, they have been doing all right.
We will see how the final results of these elections play out. They are not final yet, and there are many issues—we will come to them. We will see the outcome and how the authorities address some of the serious questions that have arisen after the elections.
That being said, the people have re-elected the Prime Minister and, at the end of the day, endorsed his views. This is quite a remarkable achievement because, normally, when a leader loses a war and, moreover, loses a territory—which is the case with Nagorno-Karabakh, a historic Armenian land that was given by the Soviets to Azerbaijan and later reclaimed by Azerbaijan through war with Armenia, openly and extensively supported by the Turkish armed forces—the political consequences are severe. The reality was therefore quite harsh for a prime minister seeking a new mandate. Yet he succeeded. Of course, this may seem contradictory or paradoxical, but it is not.
There are two elements at play here. We could talk for hours about this. As you know, I have written extensively on the subject in Turkish for Agos, the Armenian newspaper published in Turkey in both Turkish and Armenian.
The first and foremost reason is that the people of Armenia are tired of fighting. There is a clear war fatigue. Although we cannot compare it to what is happening in our region, in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, this sense of insecurity has been very real. The Prime Minister used—and abused—this feeling extensively, essentially saying: if you do not vote for me, we will go to war. That was, of course, highly manipulative and a very populist way of dealing with such a sensitive issue as peace and security. Nevertheless, it worked.
The second element is that this country is virtually unrecognizable. I have been going there since 1990, and today Armenia is experiencing a boom in personal spending and consumption. It is becoming a mass-consumption society of the kind we saw in Western Europe after 1945. This, of course, is music to the ears of the Armenian public. I visit regularly, but this time I was genuinely amazed by the number of brand-new cars. There are hardly any old cars left in the city. Everybody seems to have a new one. Where does this money come from? Of course, no one asks such questions. But the main source of these finances, as in other countries of the region—including Turkey, Georgia, and others—comes from sanctions-busting.
The West—the United States and the European Union—sanctioned Russia, first after the annexation of Crimea and then following the full-scale war against Ukraine. Yet many countries have been circumventing these sanctions. This is not speculation. There are extensive reports on the matter, including in leading newspapers such as the Financial Times, documenting the flow of goods and cash to and from Russia. Russian gold, for example, moves through the South Caucasus and then to China and India, where it is processed and made marketable before returning to Russia. As one can imagine, this trade is extremely lucrative, and we see its effects in the economy of Yerevan.
So, all in all, the people have voted—although not for a full majority, and we will come to that. They voted for a different type of future. That is understandable. But is it sustainable? I think that is the real question.
Who Is Not Populist When Seeking Re-Election?
Pashinyan originally emerged from the 2018 Velvet Revolution as an anti-establishment figure challenging entrenched oligarchic networks. To what extent can he still be understood as a populist leader, and how has his populism evolved from opposition mobilization to governing power?
Professor Cengiz Aktar: Who is not populist, Selçuk? Especially when one is running for re-election. It is almost compulsory to be a populist, unfortunately. Nikol Pashinyan was in full swing when it came to populist moves, actions, speeches, and narratives. That is all true. But it worked. The question is whether he really represents a future for the country. Some observers say so, but at what price? That is the real issue, the real problem that Armenians will have to confront sooner or later.
What he has managed to achieve with Turkey and Azerbaijan—two longstanding foes of Armenia—is not yet fully accomplished, but it is on track; it is in the pipeline. However, it has been pursued through, once again, a very populist way of handling highly sensitive matters. It has been achieved by making huge concessions to both countries, without really receiving anything in return. This is very dangerous in the sense that one cannot ignore the imbalance involved.
I often think of a famous observation by Henry Kissinger, who was not exactly a commendable figure. He used to say that the best and most sustainable peace deals are those concluded by parties that leave the negotiating table equally dissatisfied with the outcome. That is very true. Yet in the case of Armenia and Azerbaijan—and also Turkey—that did not happen, and it will not happen, because Azerbaijan and Turkey do not have much to offer in return, except perhaps opening the border in Turkey’s case, and maybe Azerbaijan’s as well.
Even then, there are enormous conditions attached before anything concrete can happen. As you may have noticed, there has been much discussion in the Turkish media about the possibility that the two land border crossings could open during the summer. We will see whether Azerbaijan will allow Turkey to move forward with this symbolic—or perhaps concrete—opening of the border, which has been closed since 1993. That is a very long time.
As of today, the 12th of June, only five days after the elections, there remains a great deal of uncertainty. The Prime Minister did not get everything he wanted, and the opposition actually performed quite well. Does that mean that those who voted for the opposition are pro-Russian or anti-Western? I do not think so. That would be far too hasty a conclusion.
Frankly, I remain quite skeptical about the future, and there are some very unpleasant developments unfolding at the moment. But we will come to those in due course.
People Were Willing to Sacrifice Almost Anything for Peace
Anti-government protesters gather in front of the Armenian government building in Yerevan on December 9, 2020, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan following the Nagorno-Karabakh war. Photo: Corneius Brandt / Dreamstime.
Comparative scholarship often suggests that military defeats weaken populist governments. Yet Pashinyan survived both the 2020 war and the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh. What explains his resilience, and what does it tell us about the relationship between populism, accountability, and democratic legitimacy?
Professor Cengiz Aktar: Democratic legitimacy is a big word. But frankly, as I said at the beginning, the appeal of a consumer society and the symbolic peace narrative played a major role. Pashinyan used this message effectively, even adopting the little heart as the symbol of his campaign, which is totally un-Armenian. It is not something that is commonly used in Armenia, nor in the Caucasus. Anyhow, these two elements—peace and consumption apparently worked. That is the reality. But again, are they sustainable? That is the question.
It worked perfectly. Elderly people were appearing on television, in street interviews and similar formats, saying remarkable things about the importance of peace at any cost. They were prepared to give up almost anything in exchange for peace and greater consumption. So, once again, the question remains: is it sustainable? I do not think so.
The Dominant Geopolitical Orientation Remains Russia, Not Europe
Many observers described the election as a referendum on Armenia’s geopolitical orientation. Do you think Armenian voters primarily voted on domestic democratic concerns, or was this fundamentally a choice between Russia and Europe?
Professor Cengiz Aktar: In Armenia, since the Velvet Revolution of 2018, there has been a genuine sense of democratic aspiration within society. Of course, not every individual is pro-democracy or democratic—that exists nowhere in the world—but overall, the aim, the tendency, and the willingness are there. Armenians want to build a democratic society.
But there are major impediments. It is a very small and a very dependent country. Despite the strong Western tropism that developed during the election campaign, particularly through the major event that took place in Yerevan at the beginning of May—the annual meeting of the so-called European Political Community, which was revived by Macron after an earlier French initiative had been abandoned in 1954—the reality remains quite different. The European Political Community is not a binding European institution; it is essentially a talk shop. Yet during this gathering, the whole of Europe was present, along with Canada, and they all delivered very warm messages to the Armenians. The message was essentially: “You are now part of Europe. You are welcome,” and so on.
But the reality is not quite that. The dominant and determining geopolitical orientation of Armenia remains Russia, not the West. Everything that happened during May before the elections—including these Western visits and those from the United States as well; the Vice President was there in March, carried the same message: “Armenia, we love you, and you are one of us.”
What explains this sudden affection? It is rooted in the anti-Russian policies of the West. In a sense, Armenia has been used for that purpose. Now tensions are emerging with Russia, which remains by far Armenia’s most influential neighbor. Armenia depends on Russia on an unbelievable scale. This dependence cannot be replaced or superseded by any European initiative, however well-intentioned. Geographically, historically, politically, and economically, it is impossible.
You have read what I have written about this dependency. More than 82 percent of Armenia’s gas and energy needs are covered by Russia, at an extraordinarily low price—$177.5 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas. There is nothing comparable anywhere else. If Russia were to change that arrangement unilaterally, Armenia would face tremendous difficulties. Not to mention Metsamor, the country’s only nuclear power plant, located near the Turkish border. It was built by the Russians, and Rosatom supplies its fuel. Nor should we forget the petrol and oil products that Armenians use every day in their new cars. There is also the enormous Russian market for Armenian products such as fruits, vegetables, and flowers.
None of this can be replaced by the European Union. Yet the EU is systematically giving false hopes to Armenia. In that sense, the greatest populist actor in this game is Europe. Because Europe is offering hopes that it simply cannot fulfill. People are now even talking about future EU membership for Armenia. But that is out of the question. One of the indispensable conditions for EU membership is territorial continuity. So where is the territorial continuity? It simply does not exist. It will not happen. There is no realistic chance whatsoever. Yet people are buying into this rhetoric without fully understanding the realities involved, and in the process they are jeopardizing the country’s relations with Russia. That is where we find ourselves today.
Russia Remains the Ultimate Game Changer in Armenia
You have repeatedly emphasized Moscow’s declining credibility in Armenia after its failure to prevent the loss of Karabakh. Has Russia now lost its position as Armenia’s primary external reference point, or does it still possess significant instruments of influence inside the country?
Professor Cengiz Aktar: Of course, as I said, yes. Russia remains the game changer in Armenia. Armenians are certainly not in love with Russia, particularly since the Russians did nothing to stop the Azeris and the Turks from taking back Nagorno-Karabakh. So, every Armenian has reason to be unhappy about what Russia did. But, the reality is something else. As I explained, the country remains highly dependent on Russia, and that dependence will not change from one day to the next.
Moscow May Have Felt No Need to Interfere
Souvenir T-shirts displayed at a market in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, on July 5, 2017. Photo: Matyas Rehak / Dreamstime.
Several reports suggested Russian attempts to influence the election through economic pressure, disinformation, and support for pro-Russian actors. How should we understand these efforts within the broader framework of transnational authoritarian influence and democratic resilience?
Professor Cengiz Aktar: The OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) was there. The ODIHR has a specialized body that monitors elections in OSCE member states, and it was present during these elections as well. According to ODIHR, there was no interference whatsoever. There was a great deal of fake news on the subject, but neither the Electoral Commission nor the independent media found any substantial evidence of vote-buying or influence operations orchestrated by Russia.
On the contrary, there were reports concerning officials from Civil Contract, Nikol Pashinyan’s party, exerting pressure on civil servants to vote for Civil Contract. A civil servant is, after all, an obedient servant, so if the boss says, “Go and vote for me,” he or she generally will. These kinds of irregularities were noted.
Overall, however, I do not think that Russia intervened in the Armenian elections. If I put myself in the position of Russian decision-makers, I would say that they are probably so confident in their leverage over the Armenian economy that they felt no need to intervene directly in order to influence the outcome of the elections.
European Tropism Is a Myth and a Pipe Dream
The election result appears to strengthen Armenia’s rapprochement with Europe. In your view, is this shift primarily strategic and security-driven, or does it also reflect a deeper normative commitment to liberal democracy and European political values?
Professor Cengiz Aktar: No, as I said, this European tropism is a myth. It is a myth. Armenians are not discovering Europe. Armenia is, in a way, a very European country. Just look at the diaspora. The European Armenian diaspora is very strong and remains highly present in Armenia itself. If you compare the two countries, for instance Azerbaijan and Armenia, Armenia is by far more European than Azerbaijan, which has virtually no connection to Europe whatsoever. There is no significant Azeri diaspora in Europe. That is not the case with Armenia. Armenia knows what Europe means, in a way.
But, having said that, I repeat: this European tropism is a pipe dream. It is a personal choice, but it will not have any real consequences for the development of Armenian democracy in the foreseeable future. They are not there, and they will not be there.
The Americans are another matter altogether. They are much more focused on transactionalism. They buy and sell, and they do not care at all about the democratic future of any country in the world—including their own.
Autocratic Tendencies Are Clearly Visible
Some critics argue that Pashinyan has displayed increasingly personalized leadership tendencies and a growing concentration of power. Do you see signs of democratic erosion under his government, or are such concerns exaggerated given Armenia’s broader regional context?
Professor Cengiz Aktar: The trend is troubling. There have been some anti-democratic and illegal actions directed against the opposition, but not only against the opposition. Let me give you the example of the director of the Genocide Museum in Yerevan. This lady offered a book to the American Vice President during his visit to Yerevan. The book dealt with the fate of the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians. As you know, 150,000 Armenians were forced to flee Nagorno-Karabakh. She was subsequently sanctioned by the Prime Minister, who forced her resignation. This is far from any democratic way of handling public affairs. The lady was compelled to resign and was replaced by a bureaucrat close to the Prime Minister who has no real understanding of the history of the Armenian genocide.
He is also challenging the role of the Church. Etchmiadzin, the Holy See, is systematically under pressure from the government. That is not the role of a government—to intervene in the affairs of the Church, whatever the circumstances. There may be all sorts of accusations against the head of the Church, Karekin, involving embezzlement and other matters, but that is not the role of a government.
During the campaign as well, there were some quite worrisome developments targeting opposition figures, and these developments are still continuing.
Moreover, the election results are not yet entirely clear, because we still do not know whether a fourth party will make it into Parliament. Unfortunately, since the closure of voting on the night of the 7th June, there has been considerable pressure on election officials to ensure that this fourth party remains below the 4 percent threshold and does not enter Parliament. By cheating, of course.
And now the scandal is completely out in the open. All opposition parties are protesting loudly. They are taking the matter to the Electoral Commission and will probably proceed to the Constitutional Court afterwards in order to seek a proper resolution, because this party’s votes have been cancelled. The objective has been to ensure that it does not enter Parliament and remains below the 4 percent threshold. We cannot call this democratic. It is anti-democratic, it is illegal, and it challenges the principle of free and fair elections. So, are there autocratic tendencies? Yes, definitely. They are very much there. Are they widespread? No. But the danger is there.
Concessions Without Reciprocity Create Fragile Peace
Photo: Dreamstime.
Pashinyan campaigned explicitly on a message of peace with Azerbaijan and normalization with Turkey. Is this the emergence of a new political cleavage in Armenia between peace-oriented pragmatism and nationalist revisionism?
Professor Cengiz Aktar: It is a good question. National revisionism, okay—but revise what? Those who challenge the Prime Minister’s positions, policies, actions, and narratives are saying something that is very meaningful. They say: “We are not against peace.” After all, who can be against peace? Who can be in favor of war? That is a form of universal wisdom. But they are asking a different question: How did you achieve that peace? What do you receive in return when you make concessions to Azerbaijan and Turkey?
That is the real question. It is fascinating to observe that a very similar dynamic is unfolding in Turkey with the Kurds. The Kurds speak about peace, a peace process here and a peace process there. But what do they receive in return from the Turkish state? In line with their longstanding demands—for example, the freedom of the Kurdish language and the recognition of Kurdish as an official language in Turkey—they receive nothing.
It is the same in Armenia. The practice is exactly the same. Everybody talks about peace, but when you ask what they receive in return for their concessions, the answer is: nothing. They say they receive peace. But this peace exists entirely under the shadow and control of the other parties, who can challenge it at any moment. They have not given anything themselves, and therefore they can always come back and say: “No, we want more.”
That is precisely what is happening now. As you may know, before the elections—more specifically on May 15—there was an important development. The Azerbaijani ambassador to Ankara openly and quite happily declared that the opening of the border between Turkey and Armenia was directly linked to the so-called peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and that Baku and Ankara were coordinating their moves and policies.
He was speaking on behalf of Baku, and the condition for this so-called peace process was—and still is—a change to the Armenian Constitution. Specifically, Azerbaijan wants the removal of the provision concerning Nagorno-Karabakh, which is referred to in the Armenian Constitution as an Armenian territory, or as a territory inhabited by Armenians. In other words, Baku wants Yerevan to eliminate this provision, and this remains the principal condition for accepting a lasting peace with its neighbor.
The problem is that, in order to do that, the Prime Minister needs a two-third qualified majority in Parliament, which he did not obtain. Now, with all the controversy surrounding vote-rigging and alleged manipulation concerning the fourth party I mentioned earlier, I do not see how he can satisfy the Azerbaijani demand by amending the Constitution and removing the reference to Nagorno-Karabakh. This means that the prospects for peace with Azerbaijan—and, consequently, with Turkey—are in serious difficulty.
They are compromised, and no one can foresee the outcome at this stage because we still do not have the final count, nor do we know exactly how many parties will ultimately enter Parliament. But in any case, even if the fourth party fails to enter Parliament, the ruling Civil Contract party still lacks the necessary majority to amend the Constitution. So, we are facing a deadlock, and no one really knows how it will evolve.
The Perversion of Justice Starts With the Denial of Memory
Professor Aktar, you have often argued that Turkey cannot become a fully democratic society without confronting its historical crimes, particularly the Armenian Genocide. How does the current normalization process affect questions of historical justice, memory, and democratic reconciliation?
Professor Cengiz Aktar: This is a question that really deserves a separate discussion, but in a nutshell, I can offer an example. Turkey is in dire straits. Turkish democracy does not exist. In fact, I would argue that it never truly existed. But the rule of law, for which Turks have struggled since 1923—and especially since the end of the Second World War—is now gone as well.
These are structural problems, even structural diseases. I do not particularly like using that term, but this is what we are dealing with: a dysfunction that goes back to the founding sin of the state—the Armenian Genocide and the Syriac Genocide, which are inseparable and which occurred more than a century ago.
A country that does not come to terms with such a painful and sinful past can easily digest other sins, as is the case today, including sins that are far less serious and far less painful than what happened 111 years ago.
What I am saying is not abstract. I am not talking about ghosts. I am talking about the perversion of the sense of justice in this country. And I am quite sure that Turkey will not make it through the remaining decades of the twenty-first century without recognizing, reflecting upon, and recalling this tragic past, which ultimately resulted in the disappearance of the entire non-Muslim population of Anatolia. We are talking about three million people.
So, it is really a matter of either-or. What is the significance of an embezzlement scandal involving a Turkish politician—for instance, Erdoğan—when compared with genocide? It is nothing. It is peanuts.
Therefore, a population, a polity, a society, and a state that do not wish to remember what happened a century ago—which was carried out by Turks and Kurds —can easily digest, accept, and live with far less serious wrongdoings, as we see happening today.
This is simply a normal consequence of this absence of memory, or rather this voluntary loss of memory and de-memorization of the past. It is very dangerous, and it is very unhealthy.
False European Hopes May Push Armenia Back Into Moscow’s Orbit
Photo: Dreamstime.
And lastly, Professor Aktar, at a time when much of the post-Soviet space is characterized by authoritarian consolidation, Armenia remains one of the few competitive democracies in the region. What lessons does the Armenian experience offer for understanding democratic resilience, populism, and geopolitical pressure in the twenty-first century?
Professor Cengiz Aktar: Interestingly, we began our discussion with this point, and we will conclude with it as well. Armenia remains the only country in its immediate neighborhood that is genuinely trying to remain a democracy. The next democratic country, after all, is Greece, which is quite far away.
It is doing its best to preserve democratic governance. But it is extremely difficult to survive in a non-democratic, and even anti-democratic, environment when you are surrounded by countries that do not share the values, principles, and norms of democracy.
This is not merely a theoretical issue; it is a practical one. Non-democracies and anti-democracies can conclude agreements with democratic countries, sign them, and then simply ignore their commitments. Because they are not accountable. A non-democratic or anti-democratic regime is not accountable to its population. It simply does not care.
Take Russia, for example. I mentioned earlier the figure of $177 for 1,000 cubic meters of natural gas. That gas is supplied under an agreement between Moscow and Yerevan. But Moscow, as a non-democratic—indeed, a totalitarian—state, can simply say: “We are no longer bound by that agreement. We are raising the price to the international market level of $600. Take it or leave it.” This illustrates the difficulty of operating—and indeed surviving—in such an environment. I sincerely hope that the Armenians will manage and succeed.
The problem is that the false hopes offered by European countries and by the European Union itself are not helpful. In fact, they indirectly push Armenia back into Moscow’s orbit and deeper into Russia’s sphere of influence. The Russians are already deeply upset with the Europeans, not least because of what is happening in Ukraine. And they are unlikely to tolerate what they would perceive as a second strategic setback in their immediate neighborhood. After all, the Caucasus is their backyard.
There is one final point. Anyone interested in the South Caucasus should take a serious and analytical look at what happened in Georgia. Georgia went through a very similar process—loosening its ties with Russia and moving closer to the West. In the end, it failed. The country ended up with two portions of its territory effectively invaded and, while not formally annexed, indirectly administered by Russia. Meanwhile, all the Western hopes and aspirations of eventually joining the European Union have faded away. They are gone. Finished. Today the country is governed by a tycoon who is completely infatuated with Moscow.
This, unfortunately, is the reality of the South Caucasus. We will see how things evolve. I wish the very best to Armenia, but the task before it is not easy at all.
The authors introduce communaucratic populism as a novel conceptual framework for understanding a form of political mobilization in which electoral competition is structured less by ideological programs than by competing claims of communal belonging—ethnic, regional, or identitarian—to a state conceived as a collective patrimony. Drawing on Cameroon’s 2025 presidential election, the commentary argues that the dominant ideational, discursive, and strategic approaches to populism capture only fragments of postcolonial African electoral dynamics. Situated between ethnic populism and clientelism, communaucratic populism describes a moral economy of intercommunal rotation through which both incumbents and challengers seek legitimacy. The article identifies four constitutive dimensions of the concept, illustrates them empirically, and outlines a broader comparative research agenda on postcolonial democratic pluralism.
Across sub-Saharan Africa, three decades of multiparty competition have produced a paradox that mainstream populism theory still struggles to name. Elections are held; oppositions mobilize; voters turn out, and yet executive turnover remains rare, while political contestation increasingly maps onto communal cleavages rather than programmatic ones. Cameroon offers an unusually clear instance of this puzzle. Since the 1990 return to multipartyism, no presidential alternation has occurred. The 2025 presidential election, which renewed the mandate of an incumbent in power since 1982, again unfolded along a familiar grammar: candidates summoned regional, ethnic, and identitarian solidarities; voters interpreted the state apparatus less as an instrument of policy delivery than as a collective resource to be conquered or defended; and post-electoral disputes were framed less as procedural grievances than as zero-sum struggles over communal access to power.
Such dynamics resist the standard analytical vocabulary of populism studies. They cannot be reduced to the binary opposition between “the people” and “the elite” (Mudde, 2004), nor fully captured by discursive theories of antagonism (Laclau, 2005), nor by strategic accounts centred on the unmediated personal leader (Weyland, 2001). Nor are they exhausted by the literature on ethnic politics or neo patrimonial clientelism. This commentary proposes a new analytical category – communaucratic populism – to designate this distinctive mode of political mobilization, and to begin specifying what its study requires.
Why African Electoral Politics Requires a New Conceptual Vocabulary
The three leading approaches to populism—ideational, discursive, and strategic—each illuminate a distinct facet of African electoral politics. Yet none adequately accounts for its defining feature: the routinized framing of elections as contests among communities for control of the state. The ideational approach (Mudde, 2004; Müller, 2016; Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017) defines populism as a thin-centred ideology pitting a “morally pure people” against a “corrupt elite.” But in many postcolonial African contexts, the morally charged unit of political contestation is not “the people” as singular sovereign but a plurality of communities, each laying claim to representation. The Manichean cleavage runs not vertically (people against elite) but horizontally (community against community) with the state positioned as the contested prize.
The discursive approach (Laclau, 2005) is more accommodating: its emphasis on the construction of equivalently chains and antagonistic frontiers allows for the emergence of a “people” out of heterogeneous demands. Yet Laclau’s framework still presupposes that successful populist articulation generates a singular popular subject. Communaucratic mobilizationworks differently. It does not seek to dissolve communal particularities into a higher unity; it preserves them, and indeed instrumentalizes them, as the very currency of electoral legitimacy. Each candidate becomes a community’s standard-bearer; coalitions take the form of inter-communal arithmetic rather than ideological synthesis.
The strategic approach (Weyland, 2001) emphasizes the unmediated personalistic appeal of a leader to an atomized mass. This captures certain aspects of postcolonial leadership cultures, but overlooks what is most salient in cases such as Cameroon: the leader is not unmediated. He is, on the contrary, deeply mediated by community elders, regional notables, diaspora figures, customary chiefs, and digital opinion-makers who function as relays of communal endorsement. The leader is not “of the people” in Weyland’s sense, he is of his people, and recognition by other communities must be politically negotiated. To these blind spots one might add a fourth: existing accounts of ethnic populism (Brubaker, 2017) and African ethnopolitics (Posner, 2005; Lynch, 2011) treat communal mobilization either as a derivative of ethnicity or as an effect of strategic elite manipulation. Communaucratic populism, by contrast, designates a logic of political signification in its own right.
The Four Constitutive Dimensions of Communaucratic Populism
Communaucratic populism is here understood as a mode of political mobilization in which electoral competition is structured around competing claims of communal belonging (ethnic, regional, religious, generational, or identitarian) to a state apparatus conceived as a collective patrimony to be distributed among groups. The concept articulates four constitutive dimensions.
The firstis communitarian: Politics is organized around morally bounded we-groups that pre-date the electoral moment and persist beyond it. Communities are not residual identities awaiting modernization (Chabal & Daloz, 1999); they are political units in their own right, mobilized strategically but anchored in long-running histories of belonging (Nyamnjoh, 2006; Geschiere, 2009).
The second is identitarian: Communal claims do not function as raw expressions of ethnic interest but as moral narratives of dignity, recognition, and historical reparation. The demand is not merely for redistribution but for symbolic acknowledgment, the recognition that one’s community has been excluded long enough and deserves its turn.
The third is governmental: The state is figured not as a programmatic apparatus delivering public goods, but as a res communis, that is a common good to be circulated among communities. Incumbency by a single community is delegitimized over time not because policies fail, but because rotation has not occurred. Conversely, the incumbent’s coalition defends continuity through a symmetrical communal grammar: the defence of “our turn,” the avoidance of “their revenge.”
The fourth is discursive: Communaucratic mobilization deploys a distinctive vocabulary of patrimony, balance, equilibrium, and “the turn of others.” It produces a moral economy of electoral expectation in which losing is not merely defeat but exclusion, and winning is less mandate than custodianship. Communaucratic populism is therefore neither reducible to clientelism – which describes a transactional logic of patron-client exchange (Bach & Gazibo, 2012) – nor to ethnic populism in Brubaker’s (2017) sense, which presupposes a discursive construction of the people as ethnically delimited. It names a populism whose “people” is plural, whose antagonism is horizontal, and whose telos is rotation rather than rupture.
Cameroon’s 2025 Election as a Case of Communaucratic Mobilization
Cameroon’s 2025 presidential election illustrates each of these dimensions. With more than 250 ethnic communities and a long-standing regional cleavage structure – Northern, Centre-South, Western, Anglophone (Konings & Nyamnjoh, 2003) – electoral politics has long operated as a tacit accounting of communal weight. The incumbent’s longevity is itself read communaucratically: a particular regional constituency is perceived to have “had its turn” for too long, while others have not. This perception fuels mobilization not principally against authoritarianism per se, but against the retention of communal access to state power.
Three patterns observed during the 2025 electoral cycle substantiate the concept. First, alliance formation among opposition candidates followed a logic of inter-communal pooling: when a prominent Anglophone figure was excluded from the ballot, segments of his regional base redirected support not on ideological grounds but on the calculus of which alternative candidate could best aggregate non-incumbent communities. Second, digital political discourse – captured through nethnographic observation of social media debate – was saturated with communal markers: regional naming, ancestral references, and historical claims about precedence and exclusion. Third, post-electoral contestation, while invoking procedural irregularities, was decoded by participants and observers alike through a communaucratic frame: which group had been overrepresented in the tally, which underrepresented, and how the result would be received in each region.
Crucially, this is not “mere” ethnic politics. The communal grammar is articulated in the language of democratic legitimacy itself: rotation as fairness, balance as inclusion, alternation as the test of pluralism. Communaucratic populism does not reject democracy, it reinterprets it as a procedure for inter-communal distribution of state office (Bayart, 1989; Mbembe, 2001). This reinterpretation enriches existing analyses in three respects. i) Against the trope of failed transitions (Cheeseman, 2015), it specifies a coherent – if costly – logic of democratic operation under conditions of pluralism without programmatic differentiation. ii) Against the diagnosis of ethnic voting as informational shortcut, it highlights the moral and historical depth of communal claims. iii) And against the assumption that populism is a Northern import to be measured by Northern criteria, it foregrounds an indigenous configuration with its own conceptual demands (Resnick, 2014).
The Scope, Limits, and Future of the Concept
Communaucratic populism is not a universal key. Its analytical purchase depends on three contextual conditions: a politically salient pluri-communal structure; a state apparatus historically central to redistribution; and a democratic procedure understood – across the political spectrum – as a vehicle of inter-communal recognition. Where these conditions hold, the concept should travel productively: across the Gulf of Guinea (Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Gabon), into the Great Lakes region, and into postcolonial democracies beyond Africa where communal pluralism intersects with statist political economies.
Several limits should be acknowledged. The concept does not, on its own, account for coercion, electoral manipulation (Schedler, 2002), or the international determinants of incumbency. It works best in combination with – not as a replacement for – institutional and political economy analyses. Nor does it claim that ideology and policy are absent from African electoral life; it claims only those communal frames are routinely the dominant idiom through which they are translated. The agenda this opens is comparative and methodological: how to measure communaucratic intensity across cases? How to distinguish it operationally from clientelism and ethnic populism? And how to register its mutations under conditions of urbanization, digital mediation, and generational change?
Communaucratic populism is offered here as a working concept, not a finished theory. It seeks to render intelligible a political grammar that resists translation into the dominant categories of populism studies, and to do so without reducing African pluralism to deviation from a Northern norm. If populism describes, in its most general sense, a politics that makes the construction of “the people” its central operation, communaucratic populism names a variant in which that construction is irreducibly plural: where “the people” is always already a “people of peoples,” and where the democratic question is less who governs than whose turn it is to govern. The wager of the concept is that postcolonial pluralism deserves its own categories rather than borrowed ones. The discussion is only beginning.
The case of Cameroon is just a display of this reality since 1990. The initial idea has been that the Northern communities, through president Ahidjo have passed a turn to the Southern population of Cameroon through President Paul Biya. According to them, political power is supposed to go back to the North after Biya. In the year 1992, the ideology behind the Biya must go slogan was that it is the turn of the Anglophones. The Francophones have been managing power since independence. In 2018, the Bamileke populations, with in mind the ideology of Dongmo, the author of the Bamileke dynamism, stating that the Bamileke population must grab the power by demography, actually were convinced that it was their turn. The score of Issa Tchiroma Bakary in 2025, was partially due to a communaucratic coalition between the Bamileke and some Northern population, and some communacratic allies, who thought that communaucratic alliance could be the solution to overthrow the power of the Fang-Beti and Bulu. Politics in Cameroon has almost always been a matter of which is the new community to get into power? Whose turn is it?
(*) Dr. Yves Valéry Obame is affiliated with the University of Bertoua, the Cameroonian Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Societies (CERESC), and the Geneva Africa Lab (GAL).
(**) Dr. Salomon Essaga Etéméis affiliated with the University of Yaoundé I and the Cameroonian Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Societies (CERESC).
(***) Professor Armand Leka Essomba is affiliated with the University of Yaoundé I and the Cameroonian Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Societies (CERESC).
References
Bach, D. C. & Gazibo, M. (Eds.). (2012). Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond. Routledge.
Bayart, J.-F. (1989). L’État en Afrique: La politique du ventre. Fayard.
Chabal, P. & Daloz, J.-P. (1999). Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Indiana University Press
Cheeseman, N. (2015). Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for Political Reform. Cambridge University Press.
Dongmo, J-L. (1981). Le dynamisme Bamiléké. Yaoundé: CEPER.
Geschiere, P. (2009). The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. University of Chicago Press.
Konings, P. & Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2003). Negotiating an Anglophone Identity: A Study of the Politics of Recognition and Representation in Cameroon. Brill.
Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. Verso.
Lynch, G. (2011). I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya. University of Chicago Press.
Mbembe, A. (2001). On the Postcolony. University of California Press.
Weyland, K. (2001). “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics.” Comparative Politics, 34(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/422412
Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the rise of anti-immigrant unrest across Europe reflects not simply tensions over migration, but a deeper crisis of democratic integration. In this timely commentary, he contends that diversity alone cannot sustain social cohesion without strong institutions capable of transforming difference into common citizenship. Drawing on scholarship by Robert Putnam, David Goodhart, Yascha Mounk, and others, Dr. Dias examines how weakening civic institutions, declining social trust, and unresolved integration challenges create fertile ground for nativist mobilization. Rather than framing the debate as a choice between openness and exclusion, he calls for renewed attention to the civic foundations that make pluralism politically sustainable. At stake, he argues, is Europe’s ability to reconcile diversity, solidarity, and democratic stability.
Recent episodes of anti-immigrant unrest in cities such as Southampton and Belfast are often interpreted through the lens of public order, criminality, or political extremism. Yet these events may also be symptomatic of a deeper challenge confronting liberal democracies across Europe: the growing tension between openness and social cohesion.
One of the defining assumptions of the late twentieth-century liberal order was that increasingly open societies would naturally generate greater inclusion. Diversity, mobility, and multiculturalism were frequently treated not merely as compatible with democratic stability, but as self-evident expressions of it. What this assumption overlooks, however, is that openness alone does not produce integration.
Democratic societies require more than legal frameworks and economic opportunities. They depend upon a shared civic foundation capable of sustaining trust, cooperation, and political legitimacy. As Robert Putnam (2007) argued in his influential work on diversity and social capital, heterogeneity can enrich societies in the long term, but it may also create short-term challenges for social trust when institutions fail to mediate difference effectively.
The fragility of contemporary liberal democracies lies not in diversity itself, but in the weakening of the mechanisms that transform diversity into common citizenship. Schools, political parties, trade unions, local associations, and public institutions historically played a crucial role in integrating individuals from different backgrounds into a shared civic culture. When these mediating institutions weaken, identities that might otherwise coexist within a broader political community increasingly become sources of social fragmentation (Judt, 2010).
Immigration policy illustrates this dilemma particularly clearly. Contemporary European migration regimes often emerge from the intersection of several legitimate objectives: humanitarian obligations, historical responsibilities, labor market demands, and demographic decline. Yet political debate frequently neglects a more uncomfortable question: the absorptive capacity of receiving societies.
The notion that democratic states must continuously assess their capacity to integrate newcomers is often portrayed as morally suspect, as if limits necessarily imply exclusion. Yet a growing body of scholarship suggests the opposite. Sustainable inclusion requires not merely access, but incorporation into a common civic framework defined by rights and responsibilities, constitutional norms, linguistic participation, gender equality, and democratic values (Mounk, 2022; Miller, 2016).
Without such a framework, diversity risks evolving from pluralism into segmentation. Social groups become increasingly disconnected from one another, trust declines, and political entrepreneurs find fertile ground for mobilizing resentment. It is under these conditions that nativist movements gain traction.
The appeal of contemporary nativism rests on a powerful narrative: that European societies are losing control over their cultural continuity, historical identity, and political sovereignty. Whether empirically accurate or not, this perception acquires political force when citizens conclude that mainstream institutions are either unwilling or unable to address concerns related to integration, social cohesion, and public order.
Importantly, the rise of nativism should not be understood as a simple reaction to immigration itself. Such explanations are analytically insufficient. The same levels of migration can produce dramatically different political outcomes depending on the strength of institutions, the effectiveness of integration policies, and the degree of social trust present within a society (Goodhart, 2017; Krastev & Holmes, 2019).
The danger emerges when individual acts of crime, disorder, or social conflict cease to be interpreted as the actions of particular individuals and instead become symbolic markers of collective identity. In such contexts, immigrants are increasingly viewed as representatives of an undifferentiated out-group, while native populations come to see themselves as members of a threatened in-group. The resulting dynamic resembles what social psychologists have long identified as the transition from individual judgment to group-based political cognition.
History suggests that democracies become particularly vulnerable when they lose the ability to interpret and respond to the anxieties of their own citizens. Polarization thrives when complex social challenges are reduced to simplistic moral binaries, dividing societies into opposing camps of “us” and “them.” In this environment, both exclusionary nativism and uncompromising forms of ideological universalism feed off one another, narrowing the space for pragmatic democratic solutions.
The challenge facing Europe today is therefore not simply whether to accept more or fewer immigrants. It is whether liberal democracies can rebuild the institutional and civic foundations necessary to transform diversity into solidarity. The question is not openness versus closure, but whether openness can remain politically sustainable without a renewed commitment to integration.
The events witnessed in Southampton, Belfast, and elsewhere may not signal the inevitable triumph of nativism. They do, however, suggest that the political center is increasingly squeezed between competing certainties: on one side, an understanding of inclusion that often underestimates the importance of social cohesion; on the other, a nativist reaction that seeks belonging through exclusion.
Europe’s democratic future may well depend on its ability to recover the difficult middle ground between these two positions.
References
Goodhart, D. (2017). The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. London, UK: Hurst.
Judt, T. (2010). Ill Fares the Land. New York, NY: Penguin Press.
Krastev, I., & Holmes, S. (2019). The Light That Failed: A Reckoning. London, UK: Allen Lane.
Miller, D. (2016). Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mounk, Y. (2022). The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. New York, NY: Penguin Press.
Putnam, R. D. (2007). “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century.” Scandinavian Political Studies, 30(2), 137–174.
Professor Stephan Haggard, one of the world’s leading scholars of democratic backsliding and authoritarianism, argues that the survival of democracy depends not only on constitutional safeguards but also on sustained public commitment to democratic institutions. In this timely ECPS interview, he examines how populism, polarization, judicial erosion, and attacks on electoral integrity are reshaping democratic politics across the globe. Distinguishing between populism as a “thin ideology” and democratic backsliding as an institutional process, Professor Haggard warns that elected leaders increasingly challenge democracy from within. The conversation explores the weakening of horizontal checks, the rise of anti-institutional rhetoric, the diffusion of illiberal strategies across borders, and the growing importance of democratic resilience. As he cautions, democracy faces its greatest danger when populist movements cease to respect rights, the rule of law, and the integrity of elections.
At a time when democratic institutions are under mounting pressure from populist movements, partisan polarization, and growing distrust in public authority, understanding how democracies erode—and how they endure—has become one of the most urgent challenges in political science. Few scholars have contributed more to this debate than Professor Stephan Haggard, Research Professor and Lawrence and Sallye Krause Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California San Diego. Over a distinguished career spanning comparative politics, political economy, authoritarianism, and democratic governance, Professor Haggard has produced some of the most influential scholarship on democratic transitions, institutional change, and regime durability.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Haggard reflects on the relationship between populism, democratic backsliding, judicial erosion, polarization, and the resilience of democratic institutions. Challenging simplistic understandings of democratic decline, he argues that contemporary autocratization increasingly unfolds not through military coups or abrupt regime collapses, but through gradual institutional weakening carried out by elected leaders operating within formally democratic systems.
One of the interview’s central themes is the fragility of democratic institutions when public support begins to erode. As Professor Haggard observes, “courts operate as checks only to the extent that there is support for courts operating as checks,” emphasizing that “democratic institutions survive only when citizens support them.” For him, the durability of democracy ultimately depends not only on constitutional design, but also on the willingness of political actors and citizens alike to defend the norms and institutions that sustain democratic rule.
Throughout the discussion, Professor Haggard distinguishes between populism as a political ideology and democratic backsliding as an institutional process. Drawing on Cas Mudde’s concept of populism as a “thin ideology,” he argues that populism becomes dangerous when commitments to majoritarian rule are accompanied by efforts to weaken rights, judicial independence, oversight of institutions, and other components of liberal democracy. “Populism is a kind of motivating ideology that can drive backsliding,” he explains, while democratic erosion manifests itself through concrete institutional consequences.
The interview also explores the growing challenge posed by anti-institutional rhetoric, attacks on electoral integrity, transnational networks of illiberal cooperation, and the emergence of authoritarian regional organizations that seek to reshape global governance. Particularly striking is Professor Haggard’s candid assessment of the contemporary United States. Reflecting on the resilience of advanced democracies, he acknowledges that he is “beginning to have doubts”about earlier assumptions that consolidated democracies are largely immune from authoritarian drift. Indeed, he remarks that if asked whether the United States remains a democracy, he would “have to scratch [his] head over that question.”
At once sobering and illuminating, this interview offers a powerful examination of the institutional foundations of democracy and the conditions under which they can be preserved—or lost.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Professor Stephan Haggard, lightly edited for clarity, readability, and publication.
Populism and Backsliding Should Be Seen as Distinct Phenomena
Photo: Shutterstock.
Professor Haggard, welcome. To begin, in your recent work on democratic backsliding, you argue that democratic erosion unfolds through identifiable institutional pathways rather than abrupt regime breakdowns. To what extent has contemporary populism become the primary vehicle through which democratic backsliding is advancing across diverse contexts such as the United States, Hungary, India, Turkey, and Latin America?
Professor Stephan Haggard: Actually, your question made me think about the relationship between populism and backsliding in a more comprehensive way. Populism, to me, is a form of what Cas Mudde calls a thin ideology. And I am sure your center has done work in that vein. What I mean by that is something quite particular: it includes a belief that democracy should be majoritarian in form. By majoritarian democracy, I mean the simple concept that the people should rule, the public should rule, and that rights and horizontal checks should be minimized in the interest of popular sovereignty.
Now, that is related to the concept of backsliding insofar as believers in this kind of majoritarian conception of democracy see fit to dismantle things that we would consider components of liberal democracy in order to achieve their objectives. To make a long-winded answer short, I would say that populism is a kind of motivating ideology that can drive backsliding, but it should be seen as somewhat distinct from it, with backsliding being the institutional consequences of governments that hold these populist beliefs.
Courts Cannot Function as Checks Without Public Backing
Many contemporary populist leaders portray themselves as the authentic representatives of “the people” against allegedly corrupt elites and institutions. Why have legislatures, courts, and oversight bodies proven particularly vulnerable to populist attacks despite their central role in democratic accountability?
Professor Stephan Haggard: Again, what I find so fascinating about discussions of populism and backsliding is that they get us to the core components of how democracies survive and what we mean by democratic rule. Courts operate as checks only to the extent that there is support for courts operating as checks. If that support dwindles or diminishes, it becomes harder for them to play that function. This is true across the institutions that manage elections, it is true of courts, it is true of ombudsmen, it is true of anti-corruption agencies, and so forth. So, my answer to this question is that if you have populist movements that are robust and willing to achieve their goals by attacking these components of liberal democracy as we understand them, then it becomes difficult for those institutions to act as checks.
Let me say one thing about the incumbents of these offices as well, because this is something that I think deserves more research. In the United States, for example, in the electoral monitoring bodies, we have found that the individuals who staff those bodies are frequently quite committed to their democratic function. That has itself acted as a check, insofar as the personnel in these institutions have remained committed to their fundamental goals and thus supported them and made them viable. So that is another interesting area of research: the level of personnel, and whether they are committed to the democratic project or not.
Backsliding Has Become the Contemporary Route to Authoritarianism
Illustration: Design Rage.
Classical theories of democratic breakdown focused on military coups and overt authoritarian seizures of power. How has the rise of electoral populism transformed our understanding of democratic erosion and regime change in the twenty-first century?
Professor Stephan Haggard: I would see coups and backsliding as two quite different routes to authoritarian rule, and there may be others. For example, Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way have recently published a very important book on authoritarian durability, in which they argue that social revolution is one path to authoritarian durability. But in general, over the course of the post-World War II world the main route to authoritarian governance historically was the coup. It was the military that challenged democratic rule, and it would typically do so quite suddenly. Military leaders would walk in front of a bank of microphones and say, “Congress is closed, the courts are closed, political parties are banned. The press is now going to be censored and controlled.”
What is interesting is that, in general, this form of attack on democracy diminished in incidence over the post-war period.But it has not gone away altogether. We had a coup in Thailand in 2014 and in Myanmar in 2021, and we have seen a spate of recent coups in West Africa. We also have some hybrid forms, which are interesting. For example, the Korean case is quite interesting.That involved a declaration of martial law that was very short-lived. It was made by a civilian but then implicated the military and was ultimately rolled back.
Basically, my answer to your question is that these are two routes by which democracy is challenged. In some cases, the military is not fully under civilian control and ends up acting autonomously. More recently, however, backsliding seems to be the route whereby elected officials—duly elected officials, I should add, that is, officials elected through free and fair electoral processes—nonetheless attack the components of democratic rule.
Polarization Is Both a Cause and a Consequence of Backsliding
Your work emphasizes the importance of polarization in democratic backsliding. To what extent is polarization an unintended byproduct of contemporary politics, and to what extent is it deliberately cultivated by populist leaders seeking to weaken institutional constraints and consolidate executive power?
Professor Stephan Haggard: I took this question as suggesting two somewhat different issues, so let me address each of them. The first, which is explicit in your question, is a cause-and-effect question: Is polarization a cause of backsliding, or do backsliding leaders advance the cause of polarization? I think the answer is clearly both. We do see an intensification of polarization as a prelude to backsliding. But we also see political leaders—from Erdogan to Trump and many others in between—focusing on dividing publics in particular ways, casting society into categories such as the real people and the enemies of the people, and so on. So, we certainly observe that mechanism at work.
However, there is another question that Bob Kaufman and I struggled with while writing Backsliding, namely whether there is some common taproot underlying the kind of polarization we are currently seeing across the world. Our answer to that question was that it was difficult to find one. Susan Stokes has recently argued that inequality is really a kind of taproot of both polarization and backsliding. But we found a variety of different ways in which publics polarize, and not only over economic issues. They polarize over religion, for example, in Turkey. They polarize over cosmopolitan values in Russia and Eastern Europe. And they polarize around left-right issues in countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
So, the whole question of polarization is certainly not something novel in Bob’s and my work on backsliding. But we do not see a single line of polarization that applies across all of these cases. Rather, polarization can arise around a variety of different social cleavages.
Control of Courts and Media Has Powerful Downstream Effects
The US Supreme Court building at dusk, Washington, DC. Photo: Gary Blakeley.
Populist governments frequently justify attacks on courts by claiming that judges obstruct the popular will. In light of your work on judicial backsliding, do you see the judiciary as the central battleground in the contemporary conflict between populism and constitutional liberalism?
Professor Stephan Haggard: I wouldn’t say that it is the central institution where these contests are playing out, but I certainly think that two institutions deserve particular mention because they have what we might call downstream causal effects. By that, I mean that if you can get a hold of the judiciary, and if you can control the press, then you are able to propagate your narratives to the public, and you are able to remove a limitation on executive discretion.
So, I don’t think that the judiciary is the only locus of this backsliding narrative, or of the institutional changes associated with backsliding. But I do think that it is particularly important because, if backsliding leaders can gain control of the courts, it becomes possible for them to undertake other actions that contribute to their backsliding projects. I should say that I am obviously preoccupied with my own country, where it seems that backsliding is well entrenched.
There is now a quite significant debate emerging about the courts because, initially, it was believed that the courts were a block to Trump’s ambitions, for example with respect to the elections in 2020. But now, there are growing doubts about whether the Supreme Court is an adequate backstop against those ambitions. The ruling, which effectively grants him quite substantial immunity with respect to some actions he undertakes in the Oval Office, has cast doubt on whether the High Court can be fully trusted, even though lower courts seem to be standing up to the administration.
Oversight Failures Enable Executive Encroachment on Courts
Your research suggests that declining horizontal constraints are more important than simple legislative majorities in explaining judicial backsliding. Does populism become particularly dangerous when electoral victories are combined with the systematic dismantling of institutional veto points?
Professor Stephan Haggard: I’m really glad that you were willing to give some attention to this work I’ve done with Lydia Tiede on the subject of judicial backsliding, because we were quite excited about that project and about focusing on it in a relatively narrow way.
That paper was trying to make a relatively narrow analytic point, which is the following: there are two ways in which legislatures might play a role in undermining the independence of the courts. One is through their control over statutes. They can rewrite laws governing the judiciary in ways that reduce its independence. They can also allow for the firing of judges. They can give the executive more power in the appointment of judges and in the firing of judges.
So, legislatures can act in that way. But we also found that the dismantling of horizontal checks on the executive, in the form of legislative oversight, played a distinctive role in the process of judicial backsliding. And by the way, when I use the term judicial backsliding, I am referring simply to a reduction in the independence of the courts.
We have a great deal of literature that talks about the sources of judicial independence, but much less that addresses the conditions under which judicial independence might be undermined. And we were simply making the point that legislatures play a role in that regard, either because they have anti-judicial majorities or because their oversight of the executive allows it to meddle in the courts in ways that are adverse to democracy.
Policy Change Is Democratic; Institutional Dismantling Is Not
Populists often frame democratic politics as a struggle between a virtuous people and corrupt elites. How can ordinary people distinguish between legitimate democratic majoritarianism and populist projects that gradually undermine liberal-democratic institutions in the name of popular sovereignty?
Professor Stephan Haggard: The answer to this question is both simple and complicated. It is simple in the following sense: populist projects have adverse effects on democracy when the argument is made that democratic institutions have to be partly dismantled in order to achieve the populist objective. That is really the key point. Let’s take a left-wing example. I could say that I’m Chávez. I could say that I think the Venezuelan government should be engaged in a more radical program of redistribution. Well, that’s fine. That is what democracy is. Democracy is a contest between different political ideas.
But it is quite different to say that we should have a radical redistributive program and to say that, in order to achieve it, I am going to eliminate Congress. Or that, in order to achieve it, I am going to resort to presidential executive orders or executive discretion. That is really where the paths diverge. Does the achievement of the populist objective require that democracy be modified or not? Because it is at that point that the arguments of the populists become worrying.
Anti-Bureaucratic Populism Risks Weakening State Capacity
Populist leaders frequently claim that independent institutions—from courts and central banks to universities and the media—constitute an unelected “deep state” obstructing the will of the people. How important is this anti-institutional discourse in facilitating democratic backsliding, and does it represent a common pattern across contemporary cases of autocratization?
Professor Stephan Haggard: Of all the questions you ask me, Selcuk, this is the one that probably deserves more attention among students of contemporary democracy. Let me try to frame it in a way that might be of interest to your readers. Contemporary advanced industrial states, of necessity, are engaged in complex efforts to regulate public policy in areas that rely heavily on scientific evidence. And the question here—and we are seeing this attack in the United States—goes something like this: Can the legislature delegate to the bureaucracy the process of writing rules that are often extremely technical in their design?
For example, a legislature might want to clean up water pollution. But doing so requires a whole series of technical actions and regulations that would restrict what polluters can do. The radical attack on the modern state is taking the form of arguing that those powers have to be very specifically delegated from Congress to the bureaucracy. My own thinking is that if we really go far down that route, we are going to be in significant trouble, because we will have court’s ruling on highly technical matters on which they really do not have the understanding or the capacity to make judgments.
So, the “deep state” argument, to me, is quite troubling because it basically argues that legislatures cannot delegate to bureaucracies or can only delegate in a very limited way. This is a particular ideological program aimed at dismantling not just the deep state, but what we think of as the contemporary state apparatus in advanced industrial democracies.
The United States Is Testing the Limits of Democratic Resilience
Demonstrators at The People’s March, an evolution of the Women’s March, NYC, January 18, 2025. A protester holds a sign reading “Presidents Are Not Kings.” Photo: Erin Alexis Randolph.
Recent years have seen increasing interaction between populism and what some scholars call “competitive authoritarianism.” Do you view populism primarily as a pathway into competitive authoritarian rule, or can populist movements remain compatible with democratic contestation under certain institutional conditions?
Professor Stephan Haggard: Let me start with the second part of the question, because I want to make sure that my position on this is clear. In a democracy, you are going to have competing ideas, and populist movements are going to emerge. They have every right to contest in the public sphere, just like anyone else. We have right-wing populists, and we have left-wing populists in the United States, such as Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump also has a right to run for political office and contest elections on a right-populist platform. We cannot restrict competition. Democracy is about that kind of political contestation.
But the question is whether those populist programs become attached to political demands for revisions in the nature of democratic rule. Under those circumstances, it is quite possible for populist movements to become anti-democratic in character.
Now, in the book I wrote with Bob, we made the prediction that advanced industrial democracies—or those that had become more extensively consolidated—would be less likely to descend into competitive authoritarian rule. We might think of consolidation as a temporal process involving many years, or as a reflection of the strength of institutions such as the courts. But I am beginning to have my doubts. If I were asked right now whether the United States is a democracy, I would have to scratch my head over that question.
I am not completely convinced that we are at the moment, because so much interference has occurred with respect to key institutions—or at least so many attempts have been made to subvert key institutions, such as the integrity of the electoral system—that there are now sincere doubts about whether the Republican Party in the United States can truly be considered a democratic party.
There Is Clearly a Right-Populist International
Many observers speak of an emerging international ecosystem of populist and illiberal actors. To what extent are contemporary populist leaders learning from one another’s strategies of institutional capture, constitutional revision, and democratic erosion?
Professor Stephan Haggard: You’re a very generous interviewer because you’ve opened up a topic that I’ve been working on recently. If anyone is interested in my work on this, we’re running a project called Illiberal Regimes in Global Governance, which addresses exactly these questions.
Now, the way you’ve framed this question relates directly to transnational movements of right-wing populism and to whether they can learn from one another, or whether there is a process that we might think of as the diffusion of right-populist norms and strategies. The answer to that question is quite clearly “yes.” There is a kind of right-populist international that stretches from Eastern Europe—which some populists in the United States clearly admire—to the Reform movement in the United Kingdom, and even farther afield into Russia and elsewhere. So, if the question is simply whether populists can learn from one another and even collaborate around some of their objectives, the answer is clearly yes.
Autocracies Draw Strength from International Resources
Your work on authoritarian international organizations highlights the external dimensions of autocratization. Are we also witnessing the emergence of transnational networks that facilitate the diffusion of populist narratives, governance strategies, and anti-liberal political practices?
Professor Stephan Haggard: Yes, my answer to the previous question touched on that issue of transnational movements. But let me say, at a more general level, before we continue in this vein, that autocratic governments, while jealously guarding their sovereignty, have always drawn on international resources to sustain their rule.
You can think about this at the highest geostrategic level in terms of alliances. In the early post-war Cold War period, for example, the United States maintained alliances with autocratic regimes that it believed advanced US strategic interests. We saw this in Latin America and in East Asia, with Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and others.
So, as a general matter, it has always been the case that authoritarian regimes have relied on different forms of international support. What this project seeks to address, however, is the question of how authoritarian governments can use international organizations in particular to accomplish those objectives, a topic that I will describe in more detail.
Authoritarian Regional Organizations Deserve Far More Attention
Logo of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), surrounded by the flags of its member and affiliated states. Founded in 2001, the SCO is an Eurasian intergovernmental organization focused on regional security, political cooperation, economic collaboration, and strategic coordination among its members. Photo: Dreamstime. Photo: Vladimir Gnedin / Dreamstime.
The post–Cold War expectation was that international institutions would reinforce democratic norms. Yet many contemporary populist movements portray these institutions as threats to national sovereignty. How has populist nationalism altered the relationship between international organizations and democratic governance?
Professor Stephan Haggard: Again, thanks for your generosity in focusing on some of the research I’ve done recently. We recently published a piece in the Review of International Organizations that explored the agenda of thinking about illiberal regimes in global governance. Let me mention three clusters of questions that are particularly important.
The first is that the major powers, particularly Russia and China, have clearly recognized that multilateral institutions are forums in which existing liberal norms can be contested. Moving forward, we are going to have to pay much more attention to the ways in which China, Russia, and their allies in the Global South are trying to reshape political norms within multilateral institutions. For example, China and a like-minded group of states at the Human Rights Council have been very adept at blocking efforts to use the Council to focus attention on human rights abuses committed by member states. There is something inherently contradictory about a Human Rights Council that is populated, in part, by authoritarian regimes that have no interest in external scrutiny of their actions.
But there are two other levels that are also interesting. Because you are located in Europe, you are obviously familiar with the first of these, which I call the Orban Problem. You have a democratic international institution with strong and specific democratic norms—the European Union. But it also has members that are engaged in backsliding and are actively challenging those norms. I think you and your readers know that it has been a very complicated fifteen-year process for the Union, both at the political level and through the Commission, to determine exactly how to manage the challenges posed by backsliding states within its own ranks.
The other phenomenon I have been working on recently—and I am actually sending off a book manuscript on this over the weekend—is that authoritarian regimes, as we are learning, are quite capable of forming their own regional organizations. And not only of forming them, but of using them for explicitly political purposes. I am thinking here of institutions such as the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Gulf Cooperation Council, ALBA in South America, and ASEAN in Southeast Asia as some of the major examples. I know you have an interest in Turkey, and Erdogan has led similar efforts around this sort of Turkic organization in that space.
What we are seeing is that these organizations are not formed solely for traditional functional purposes such as economic integration. They are also cooperating quite explicitly around political objectives. These include election monitoring, supporting members facing financial distress through lending, and judicial cooperation that eases extradition processes and contributes to transnational repression. So, these authoritarian regional organizations constitute a relatively small part of the global governance architecture, but they are nevertheless a significant one, and we need to pay close attention to what they are doing.
Distrust Can Be as Damaging as Electoral Manipulation
Across many democracies, populist actors increasingly challenge electoral authorities, voter registration systems, and election-monitoring institutions. Are elections themselves becoming a central arena through which populists seek to reshape democratic competition while preserving a veneer of electoral legitimacy?
Professor Stephan Haggard: Of course, the integrity of the electoral system is the bottom line at which backsliding intersects with a turn toward outright authoritarianism. Because I think of an authoritarian system as one in which the possibility of challenging an incumbent electorally falls toward zero. In other words, if my chances of winning an election fall to zero, then you are really dealing with an authoritarian regime.
But I want to emphasize something else about elections and electoral integrity that is equally troubling. It is not only a direct assault on electoral institutions that matters. That effort may fail. For example, it is likely to fail in the United States elections in the fall, and it will probably be well managed. But by repeatedly claiming that the electoral system lacks integrity and by challenging its legitimacy, populists also sow distrust among the public toward electoral institutions.
So, the objective is not only to undermine those institutions directly. It is also to sow doubt about electoral outcomes that populists believe may go against them. This issue poses as much of a challenge in many advanced industrial democracies as an outright attack on those institutions, because it creates a public that increasingly no longer believes that electoral results are free and fair.
Economic Inequality Can Fuel Both Left- and Right-Wing Populism
Two elderly men sit on the street in front of a café in Oslo, Norway, asking for alms on August 1, 2013. This image symbolizes the indifference of society and the state toward poverty. Photo: Medvedeva Oxana.
Your work has explored the relationship between inequality, distributive conflict, and regime change. How do economic grievances, perceptions of unfairness, and social insecurity interact with populist appeals to create conditions conducive to democratic backsliding?
Professor Stephan Haggard: If we have another conversation, we could probably spend the entire time discussing this question. But let me just offer a few thoughts.
First, levels of inequality differ quite substantially across the advanced industrial states, but the overall trend is fairly clear: inequality has been increasing. One might expect that rising inequality would give rise to what we would call left-wing populism. Indeed, we do see this across the advanced industrial world. There is a left-populist current out there. Again, speaking about my own country, you can see it in figures such as Mamdani, the mayor of New York, Bernie Sanders, and a number of politicians on the left of the political spectrum in the United States.
But the important point is that inequality does not necessarily manifest itself through left-populist rhetoric. It can also manifest itself through right-populist rhetoric. For example, it is quite common to see concerns about inequality coupled with anti-immigrant sentiment. Or with protectionist policies on trade. Or with opposition to what are perceived as liberal or cosmopolitan values, as opposed to more traditional ones.
So, we need to be careful about two things. The first is the question of whether inequality is a causal factor in populism and democratic backsliding. The second is how that disaffection with democracy is expressed through different political programs. Those are two distinct questions, because a critique of inequality can just as easily be attached to a right-wing populist narrative.
Working Within Democratic Rules May Be the Strongest Response
Several countries have succeeded in slowing or reversing democratic backsliding despite strong populist movements. What institutional safeguards, opposition strategies, or forms of civic mobilization have proven most effective in countering populist assaults on democratic institutions?
Professor Stephan Haggard: In some ways, this is the most important question you have asked in this interview, and I wish I had more answers to it. I would simply note that there is currently a strong intellectual current within the academic literature that seeks to focus less on backsliding and more on the concept of resilience. Let me make a couple of observations in that regard. There are scholars whose work deserves much more attention, including Laura Gamboa, who has produced some very interesting research on South America.
One of the key questions concerns how confrontational opposition tactics should be. If I understand her work correctly, she emphasizes the use of legal challenges—working within existing rules rather than moving toward mass mobilization and street confrontation. Such strategies may be more effective because they are seen as upholding shared democratic norms.
Of course, there is always a dilemma when it comes to opposition movements confronting authoritarian regimes: whether mass mobilization, and especially the use of violence, can have counterproductive effects by allowing incumbent governments to blame the opposition for civic unrest.
So, there are many intricate questions surrounding this issue. But I would certainly place the study of democratic resilience high on the research agenda as something all of us should be paying closer attention to.
We Are Clearly Living Through a Populist Moment
And lastly, Professor Haggard, much of the literature on populism focuses on its causes, while your work highlights its institutional consequences. Looking ahead, do you believe that populism is a temporary challenge within democratic politics, or has it become a durable feature of contemporary democracy that requires a fundamental rethinking of democratic resilience and constitutional design?
Professor Stephan Haggard: I’ll close—unfortunately or fortunately—by reiterating a point I have made before, and it may sound simple and obvious. We are definitely experiencing a populist moment. There is really no question about that. At the same time, we need to be very careful to distinguish between populist movements that are willing to operate within a given democratic framework and those that seek to fundamentally challenge what we would regard as the core elements of a democratic society.
I’ll conclude by noting that this extends to issues of rights. Because extreme populist movements can argue that certain groups in society should not enjoy the rights they have come to possess and that those rights should be taken away. In both Europe and the United States, for example, this debate is playing out with respect to how immigrants should be treated. Whether they should be afforded due process and access to court hearings before they are deported or imprisoned, and so forth. These are very basic issues.
If populist movements are not committed to sustaining those components of democracy that we regard as essential—rights, horizontal checks on executive power, the rule of law, and the integrity of the electoral system—then we are facing a much deeper problem than if populism is simply being contested within the realm of routine policy disagreements among parties in a democracy.
Please cite as: Solaja, Oludele Mayowa. (2026). “Waste Sovereignty and Plastic Colonialism: Environmental Power and Populism in the Global Political Economy of Waste.” Journal of Populism Studies (JPS). June 11, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/JPS000124
Abstract
Plastic pollution is one of the most pressing environmental problems of the twenty-first century, but the governance of global plastic waste is remarkably unequal. Significant volumes of plastic waste from developed countries are exported to developing countries in the Global South, where waste management infrastructure and regulatory capacity are often limited. While this movement of waste across borders is frequently discussed in terms of recycling efficiency or waste management capacity, these transactions are deeply embedded in unequal power relations within the global political economy. This article proposes a theoretical framework called Waste Sovereignty Theory (WST), which explains how international waste trade reproduces environmental power asymmetries between exporting and importing nations. Drawing on political ecology, environmental justice, postcolonial environmental governance, and emerging scholarship on environmental populism, the paper conceptualizes transboundary plastic waste flows as a form of plastic colonialism in which the ecological costs of production and consumption in wealthy countries are displaced onto less powerful states. The article introduces a Waste Sovereignty Theory Framework (WST Framework) that links four key dynamics—plastic production, transnational waste trade, governance inequality, and sovereignty claims—to explain contemporary struggles over environmental authority in the Global South. Using illustrative cases from Southeast Asia and Africa, the article demonstrates how states and communities respond through waste import bans, stricter regulatory regimes, waste repatriation policies, and the promotion of domestic recycling industries. These responses are interpreted not only as efforts to reclaim environmental governance but also as expressions of environmental populism, whereby affected populations challenge environmental burdens perceived as imposed by distant political, economic, and technocratic elites. Waste sovereignty thus emerges as both a claim to environmental justice and a form of political resistance against unequal structures of global environmental governance. The article argues that addressing the global plastic crisis requires more than technological improvements in waste management; it demands institutional reforms capable of confronting the structural inequalities embedded in contemporary systems of production, consumption, and environmental governance.
Keywords: Waste Sovereignty, Plastic Colonialism, Environmental Populism, Global Waste Trade, Environmental Governance, Political Ecology, Environmental Justice, Circular Economy, Global South
Plastic waste constitutes one of the leading contemporary environmental problems in the 21st century. Over the last decades, production of plastics in the global South have rapidly increase from less than 1 million tons per year in the 1950s to more than 400 million tons in a year and rapidly growing international plastic waste trade networks (Geyer et al., 2017; Zhao et al., 2021; Clapp, 2022). Although plastic waste is created around the globe, its environmental burden has been distributed unevenly, that is, wealthy industrialized countries ship vast amounts of their waste to the Global South countries whose institutions and capabilities are often unable to manage this commodity (Brooks et al., 2018; Clapp, 2021). This paper considers that what often appears as technical problems with waste management or efficiency of recycling, are the consequences of underlying structural power relations within political economy that shaped global politics of waste management.
The political ecology literature frames such dynamics within a politics of unequal access to environmental resources. International industrial and consumer economies are producing vast flows of unwanted materials whose disposal is often externalized, whereby they can find an outlet within the weaker regulatory systems found in some Global South countries, leading to environmental contamination and informal dumping and recycling networks (Pellow, 2018; Liboiron, 2021). This is a pattern of waste colonialism where environmental harm produced by global industrial capitalism can be displaced from wealthy consumer economies to the periphery through the waste trade (Pellow, 2018; Liboiron, 2021). This in turn constitutes ecological distribution conflicts, whereby environmental burdens and their subsequent harm fall unevenly between social groups and geographic territories (Martinez-Alier, 2002).
Emergent trends in international waste markets highlight the politicization of these dynamics. The closure of the Chinese market to the majority of foreign waste exports under the National Sword policy in 2018 led to the redirection of massive flows of plastic waste to countries in Southeast Asia and Africa, overwhelming the existing domestic waste management systems of these recipient countries. Consequently, governments from the Global South such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and a host of African states have since imposed new regulations and repatriated illegal shipments of plastic waste, showing the burgeoning politics of the waste system.
Most academic literature on the global plastic crisis frames plastic waste as a technical problem of recycling efficiency or waste management systems, however there is an important politics of why environmental problems and the burden of waste are distributed unevenly. More focus has not been paid to the issue of environmental sovereignty – a State’s/Community’s authority over their environmental resource system, including regulation of trans-boundary flows and their control over development pathways, as a source of environmental power and control within global waste flows governed by the trade regime, global corporate supply chains, and disparities in regulation.
This article theorizes the politics of global waste governance by developing the Waste Sovereignty Theory (WST), which frames global waste systems as arenas of political struggle over authority where States and communities contest the uneven distribution of ecological burden. Waste Sovereignty Theory framework links four key mechanisms-production, trade networks, disparity in regulation, and sovereignty claims-to illuminate the operation of environmental power within current waste regimes. Waste sovereignty, within WST, signifies the authority of States, communities and social movements to assert control over the management of waste systems, including import flows, domestic recycling industry development and environmental common preservation.
In this article, waste sovereignty is defined as the capacity of states, communities, and social institutions to exercise political, ecological, and economic authority over the governance of waste within their territories. This includes the power to regulate transboundary waste flows, control domestic recycling infrastructures, determine environmental standards, and shape the economic systems through which waste materials are managed or transformed into resources. Within the Waste Sovereignty Theory Framework (WST Framework), waste sovereignty therefore represents a form of environmental authority through which political actors contest the unequal distribution of ecological burdens generated by global production and consumption systems.
The theory of Waste Sovereignty extends the field of environmental governance in three main ways; first, situating the plastic crisis within the politics of production, consumption and the externalization of environmental impact. Second, it develops the discourse of environmental justice by placing issues of ecological inequity alongside control over environmental governance systems. Third, it theorizes responses to plastic waste in the Global South as claims to sovereignty from the peripheries in the form of restrictions on imports, new legislation, domestic recycling industries development etc.
Therefore this paper answers the questions: how does global plastic waste trade create a power disparity and how can the Waste Sovereignty Theory frame the emergence of fights for environmental governance in the Global South? Showing the dynamics of the WST through cases from Southeast Asia and Africa, the paper argues that plastic waste has become a politically embedded global issue and its solutions need to transcend purely technical strategies of waste management and recycling, and include the politics of environmental power and sovereignty within the waste system.
India’s 2026 state elections have reopened fundamental debates about democracy, federalism, and political representation in the world’s largest democracy. In this timely ECPS interview, Yamini Aiyar, Visiting Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, examines the tensions between the BJP’s centralizing “One Nation” project and India’s plural federal structure. Discussing the BJP’s breakthrough in West Bengal, the dramatic rise of Vijay’s TVK in Tamil Nadu, and the emergence of youth-led movements such as the “Cockroach Janta Party,” Aiyar argues that democratic resistance is increasingly emerging outside formal institutions and party structures. While warning of growing democratic backsliding, she maintains that India’s enduring “democratic sentiment” remains a powerful resource for challenging authoritarian tendencies and renewing democratic life.
India’s 2026 state elections delivered some of the most consequential political surprises since Narendra Modi first came to power. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) achieved a historic breakthrough in West Bengal, ending fifteen years of Trinamool Congress rule and extending its political reach into one of India’s most symbolically important states. At the same time, Tamil Nadu witnessed the extraordinary rise of actor-turned-politician C. Joseph Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), which shattered the long-standing dominance of the state’s established Dravidian parties. Together, these electoral outcomes have reignited fundamental debates about democracy, federalism, political representation, and the future of opposition politics in India.
To explore these developments, the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) spoke withYamini Aiyar, Visiting Senior Fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and one of India’s leading public intellectuals on democracy, governance, state capacity, and democratic accountability. Drawing on her influential recent essay, “The Cracks in the India Model: Democracy Can Be Both Curse and Cure,” Aiyar offers a nuanced interpretation of India’s current democratic moment.
Rejecting both triumphalist and declinist narratives, Aiyar argues that India is experiencing a profound democratic dialectic. On the one hand, democratic institutions have increasingly been captured and instrumentalized by majoritarian political forces. On the other hand, democratic processes continue to generate unexpected forms of resistance and renewal. As she explains, India today is engaged in “a very important old-but-new conversation about what India is and who we are.”
A central theme of the interview is the growing tension between the BJP’s centralizing “One Nation” project and India’s deeply plural federal structure. Aiyar warns that the ruling party has increasingly used state institutions to consolidate power, while simultaneously noting that regional identities and democratic aspirations remain remarkably resilient. The unexpected success of Vijay’s TVK in Tamil Nadu, she argues, demonstrates that “young India is becoming exhausted with many of the older forms of politics.” Far from representing a rejection of Tamil subnational identity, the TVK’s rise illustrates how younger generations are seeking new political vehicles through which to express long-standing regional aspirations.
Indeed, one of the most original aspects of Aiyar’s analysis concerns the emergence of new forms of political mobilization beyond traditional party structures. She points to the recent appearance of the “Cockroach Janta Party,” a satirical youth-led movement that rapidly gained millions of followers after young Indians appropriated a derogatory label allegedly used by a senior public figure. For Aiyar, this phenomenon is not merely a social-media curiosity but evidence of deeper frustrations among younger generations facing unemployment, precarity, and declining faith in established political actors. As she notes, “there is a bubbling up of anxieties among young Indians for a variety of important reasons,” and these emerging forms of mobilization may become important sources of democratic resistance.
Reflecting on the broader political landscape, Aiyar observes that “the Constitution itself became almost a living political actor in the election,” while even within the BJP’s own support base “some voters started questioning the increasingly authoritarian methods being deployed.” These developments suggest that democratic sentiment remains deeply embedded within Indian society despite growing concerns about institutional erosion.
Yet Aiyar’s optimism does not rest primarily on formal institutions. While she is “deeply pessimistic” about the ability of party politics and institutional mechanisms alone to halt democratic backsliding, she remains “hugely optimistic” about the capacity of civic mobilization to generate democratic renewal. Ultimately, she argues that India’s most important democratic resource remains the enduring democratic instinct of its citizens—a “deep democratic sentiment” that will continue to find new avenues through which to challenge and resist authoritarianism.
India’s 2026 state elections have reopened fundamental debates about democracy, federalism, and political representation in the world’s largest democracy. In this timely ECPS interview, Yamini Aiyar, Visiting Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, examines the tensions between the BJP’s centralizing “One Nation” project and India’s plural federal structure. Discussing the BJP’s breakthrough in West Bengal, the dramatic rise of Vijay’s TVK in Tamil Nadu, and the emergence of youth-led movements such as the “Cockroach Janta Party,” Aiyar argues that democratic resistance is increasingly emerging outside formal institutions and party structures. While warning of growing democratic backsliding, she maintains that India’s enduring “democratic sentiment” remains a powerful resource for challenging authoritarian tendencies and renewing democratic life.
India’s 2026 state elections delivered some of the most consequential political surprises since Narendra Modi first came to power. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) achieved a historic breakthrough in West Bengal, ending fifteen years of Trinamool Congress rule and extending its political reach into one of India’s most symbolically important states. At the same time, Tamil Nadu witnessed the extraordinary rise of actor-turned-politician C. Joseph Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), which shattered the long-standing dominance of the state’s established Dravidian parties. Together, these electoral outcomes have reignited fundamental debates about democracy, federalism, political representation, and the future of opposition politics in India.
To explore these developments, the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) spoke withYamini Aiyar, Visiting Senior Fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and one of India’s leading public intellectuals on democracy, governance, state capacity, and democratic accountability. Drawing on her influential recent essay, “The Cracks in the India Model: Democracy Can Be Both Curse and Cure,” Aiyar offers a nuanced interpretation of India’s current democratic moment.
Rejecting both triumphalist and declinist narratives, Aiyar argues that India is experiencing a profound democratic dialectic. On the one hand, democratic institutions have increasingly been captured and instrumentalized by majoritarian political forces. On the other hand, democratic processes continue to generate unexpected forms of resistance and renewal. As she explains, India today is engaged in “a very important old-but-new conversation about what India is and who we are.”
A central theme of the interview is the growing tension between the BJP’s centralizing “One Nation” project and India’s deeply plural federal structure. Aiyar warns that the ruling party has increasingly used state institutions to consolidate power, while simultaneously noting that regional identities and democratic aspirations remain remarkably resilient. The unexpected success of Vijay’s TVK in Tamil Nadu, she argues, demonstrates that “young India is becoming exhausted with many of the older forms of politics.” Far from representing a rejection of Tamil subnational identity, the TVK’s rise illustrates how younger generations are seeking new political vehicles through which to express long-standing regional aspirations.
Indeed, one of the most original aspects of Aiyar’s analysis concerns the emergence of new forms of political mobilization beyond traditional party structures. She points to the recent appearance of the “Cockroach Janta Party,” a satirical youth-led movement that rapidly gained millions of followers after young Indians appropriated a derogatory label allegedly used by a senior public figure. For Aiyar, this phenomenon is not merely a social-media curiosity but evidence of deeper frustrations among younger generations facing unemployment, precarity, and declining faith in established political actors. As she notes, “there is a bubbling up of anxieties among young Indians for a variety of important reasons,” and these emerging forms of mobilization may become important sources of democratic resistance.
Reflecting on the broader political landscape, Aiyar observes that “the Constitution itself became almost a living political actor in the election,” while even within the BJP’s own support base “some voters started questioning the increasingly authoritarian methods being deployed.” These developments suggest that democratic sentiment remains deeply embedded within Indian society despite growing concerns about institutional erosion.
Yet Aiyar’s optimism does not rest primarily on formal institutions. While she is “deeply pessimistic” about the ability of party politics and institutional mechanisms alone to halt democratic backsliding, she remains “hugely optimistic” about the capacity of civic mobilization to generate democratic renewal. Ultimately, she argues that India’s most important democratic resource remains the enduring democratic instinct of its citizens—a “deep democratic sentiment” that will continue to find new avenues through which to challenge and resist authoritarianism.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Yamini Aiyar, lightly edited for clarity, readability, and publication.
West Bengal and Tamil Nadu Show Democracy’s Curse and Cure
Political demonstration in Puducherry, India, in December 2018, with protesters gathering in the streets against the policies of the Tamil Nadu government. Photo: Catherine Lprod / Dreamstime.
Yamini Aiyar, welcome! To begin, in “The Cracks in the India Model,” you argue that India’s democratic institutions can simultaneously function as both a constraint on governance and a corrective mechanism against excesses of power. How do the surprising outcomes of the 2026 state elections—particularly in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu—illustrate this dual character of Indian democracy?
Ms. Yamini Aiyar: It has been a dialectic in some ways. One side of the debate looks at the ways in which democratic institutions have been captured through political mobilization, which itself is a very democratic process. If you look at the history of India’s party system, particularly from the 1990s onwards, we witnessed an upsurge in the vernacularization of the political process as newer regional party formations used democratic mechanisms to bring hitherto marginalized voices into the democratic discourse.
What was surprising about this, however, was that these popular mobilizations effectively utilized democratic institutions in ways that pursued particularistic rather than universalist interests. This was perhaps best articulated through the mobilizations we saw in North India around lower-caste politics, which deployed democratic means to come into power. But once in power, or after capturing state power, these movements often deployed the resources of the state to protect the interests of their own caste groups rather than using state power to advance more universalistic public goods and services.
In the present context, these precise techniques have been deployed to facilitate and enable a far deeper and more majoritarian political agenda. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leads the alliance governing India today, has its roots in a strongly Hindu-majoritarian political discourse.
In some senses, India has always had this debate about what she is as a nation. Is India a nation of Hindus first and all others second? Or is India a nation for all, wherein our many diversities can cohere together?
At the time of independence, and during the making and formation of modern India through the Constitution, India made a very active choice. The consequences of Partition gave India a realistic understanding of what majoritarian religious nationalism could do to a nation. India chose to reject the forces that led to Partition and instead recognized itself as a modern nation where equity, fraternity, tolerance, and secularism would serve as the core constitutional values binding the country together.
It was an embrace of the idea that India is, as scholars call it, a state-nation. It is not homogeneous but heterogeneous. That state-nation would cohere within the broader framework of the Indian nation-state. I have a political identity as an Indian, but I also possess many subnational identities—as a Tamilian, as a Hindu, as a Muslim, or as a Christian—and all of these identities can coexist within the construct of the nation-state.
The BJP and its ideological roots represented the other idea of India, one centered much more on the notion of a Hindu nation. Once it captured power in 2014 through entirely democratic electoral means, India effectively reopened this conversation with itself. Over the last decade, as this debate has unfolded, the BJP has not shied away from using the coercive powers of the national government to facilitate and consolidate its hold on power.
The recent state elections in West Bengal offers an important example. The BJP was expanding its presence through what one might call democratic forms of political mobilization. However, in this election it also utilized powers available to it at the national level—military forces, paramilitary forces, and even the Election Commission, which is supposed to function as an impartial arbiter of elections—in ways that tilted the electoral playing field in its favor.
One of the most significant examples was the revision of electoral rolls. Ordinarily, this should be a routine process involving the removal of names of deceased persons or those who have migrated, and the updating of voter records. Instead, it was carried out in a manner that effectively disenfranchised 27 lakh (1 lakh = 100,000) voters, a significant number of whom were Muslim. It also opened up a highly polarizing discourse around who is Indian and who is an outsider.
Remember that West Bengal borders Bangladesh and has experienced considerable population movement as a consequence of the 1947 Partition. In this sense, state institutions were used to shift the electoral balance and alter the playing field of the election.
This is why I describe democracy as both a curse and a cure. In some respects, this institutional capture emerged through the same democratic processes that facilitated the BJP’s rise at the national level. Yet those democratic processes were subsequently used to capture state institutions. The election in West Bengal followed “legitimate procedures,” but the use of institutions such as the Election Commission effectively delegitimized the quality of the election itself.
Tamil Nadu presents a somewhat different case. There, a completely new political party emerged, seemingly from nowhere, and surprised observers by dislodging a long-standing political duopoly. In many ways, this is a positive example of what democracy can achieve. A new political formation captured the public imagination and, through democratic means, came to power while displacing entrenched political structures.
India today is living through this complex dialectic. It differs from the caste mobilizations of earlier decades, yet it employs some of the same tools in new and more complex ways. In doing so, it is prizing open a very important old-but-new conversation about what India is and who we are.
‘Democratic Sentiment’ Still Endures
Women from farming families participate in a peaceful protest against India’s farm laws in New Delhi, January 2021. The farmers’ movement drew millions of participants and became one of the largest protest mobilizations in contemporary India. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your work on democratic erosion emphasizes the persistence of what you call a deeply embedded “democratic sentiment” among Indian voters. To what extent do the 2026 state elections suggest that electoral competition continues to provide meaningful avenues of accountability despite concerns about democratic backsliding at the national level?
Yamini Aiyar: When India chose to adopt universal franchise at its founding moment, there was deep skepticism about how a country as poor, as unequal, and as illiterate as India would survive as a democracy. In this sense, India defied the odds. With the exception of the Emergency from 1975 to 1977, India has broadly remained democratic. On the core principles of what constitutes the minimum standard of democracy—elections and the routine transfer of power—India has maintained that commitment.
India’s electoral process has certainly gone through darker periods. Yet the independence of the electoral process has always recovered itself, largely through mechanisms such as the Election Commission, which oversees the objectivity of elections and has undergone repeated cycles of reform aimed at making the electoral process more transparent, inclusive, and effective.
There is no doubt, however, that even during these phases, India’s substantive democracy—the extent to which liberal norms became embedded in the everyday functioning of institutions and society—was much more of a work in progress than the broader institutional dimensions of democracy.
Nonetheless, it was a work in progress, and over the course of our 77 years of independence, we have experienced important moments of democratic deepening. A particularly significant one came in the 1990s, when vernacular parties used democratic space to mobilize and new marginalized communities found representation within the formal political process. The mid-2000s witnessed a major expansion of the welfare state at the national level, driven by pressures from civil society and social movements that sought to challenge a democratic process that had largely ignored questions of inequality and inequity.
What we are witnessing today is a significant democratic backslide. Liberal norms that had come to be accepted—the idea that basic notions of tolerance and equity should define the framework within which democratic competition operates—have increasingly begun to erode.
The capture of the judiciary, evident even in basic matters such as habeas corpus cases not reaching the Supreme Court; the capture of the media; the use of state power to co-opt and undermine the independence of the Fourth Estate; the targeting of civil society through state institutions such as the income tax authorities, the federal enforcement directorate, and criminal law enforcement agencies; and the systematic targeting of opposition voices and political parties—the scale and extent of all this is much greater than anything India has experienced before.
When India entered the 2024 general election, there was a widespread sense that this institutional capture was nearly complete. On the eve of the election, a senior opposition leader, the Chief Minister of Delhi, was jailed on criminal charges related to a liquor scam, with no clarity as to whether he would receive bail. Remember, one is presumed innocent until proven guilty, yet the case had not even begun.
At the same time, the Congress Party, India’s principal opposition party, announced that income tax authorities had frozen many of its accounts based on allegations of tax fraud that had yet to be proven.
The playing field appeared to have been decisively tilted in favor of the BJP and the Prime Minister, whose dominance seemed likely given the extent to which key institutional pillars of liberal democracy had been captured.
Yet once the election unfolded, the voices of ordinary citizens began to emerge. In surveys we conducted, we repeatedly heard expressions of frustration and exhaustion with this pervasive institutional capture. Recognition that the media had been compromised and that legitimate questions existed about the electoral process had entered everyday political conversation.
In regions where the BJP’s economic coalition was beginning to fray, particularly in Uttar Pradesh—one of India’s poorest and most populous states, where caste politics has long dominated—the narrative shifted dramatically. Constitutional rights and affirmative-action protections for lower-caste communities became central electoral issues. The Constitution itself became almost a living political actor in the election. To me, that was a very important indication that a latent democratic sentiment still exists.
The BJP had effectively built a social coalition centered on religious polarization between Hindus and Muslims. That, fundamentally, runs counter to India’s constitutional and democratic principles. Yet during the 2024 election, we began to see signs of resistance within that coalition itself. Some voters started questioning the increasingly authoritarian methods being deployed.
The 2026 elections are more difficult to compare directly with national elections, since local issues play a much larger role in subnational contests. Nevertheless, what we are witnessing since the 2024 general election is a much more blatant misuse of the electoral process. So far, these concerns have not fully penetrated the everyday dynamics of electoral competition. The BJP continues to win elections. Does that mean the democratic sentiment is dead? I would like to believe otherwise.
Many factors shape electoral outcomes, but the scale of the BJP’s use of mechanisms such as the Special Intensive Review (SIR) raises serious concerns about the integrity of the electoral process. It is also important to recognize the role played by the courts. When the Special Intensive Review and related electoral revisions were introduced, civil society activists challenged them legally. The courts have recently delivered judgments that largely endorse the Election Commission’s actions. Indeed, during one hearing, a senior judge reportedly remarked: So, what if 27 lakh voters in West Bengal have been disenfranchised for this election? There will be other opportunities.
The language being used by institutions that are meant to serve as checks and balances raises important concerns of its own. There is little doubt that we are currently in a dark period of democratic backsliding. One can only hope that opposition parties will be able to mobilize and re-nurture the democratic sentiment that, I believe, still runs deeply within the Indian electorate.
Regional Parties Borrowed the BJP’s Playbook
Congress activists display a portrait of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar during a protest against the central government in Kolkata, India, December 2024. Photo: Saikat Paul / Dreamstime.
The BJP’s landslide victory in West Bengal appears to represent both the success of nationalized politics and the collapse of a long-dominant regional force. Does this outcome confirm your earlier argument that the growing distinction between national and regional political arenas is weakening the bargaining power of regional parties?
Ms. Yamini Aiyar: It has been a dialectical process. The 2024 election was an interesting moment in which regional parties were able to recover some of their bargaining power at the national level. They did so, however, by more or less copying the BJP’s playbook.
I have looked at this very closely in the context of welfare schemes, which matter enormously in Indian elections because of the scale of inequality and the extent to which large numbers of Indians depend on the state for their everyday needs. India runs the world’s largest food program, the Public Distribution System, through which nearly 80 crore (800 million) Indians receive free food. This gives a sense of just how vast the Indian welfare state is and how important it is to the daily lives of Indian citizens.
What Modi did very successfully was to use technology to centralize the political distribution of welfare. In India’s federal system, responsibility for welfare had traditionally been shared between the central and state governments, allowing regional parties governing states to claim some of the political credit for delivering these schemes. Modi effectively transformed this dynamic by tying welfare delivery to his own political persona. Through powerful branding, welfare programs were presented as gifts and guarantees from the Prime Minister himself.
This strategy paid significant dividends in the 2019 election. Between the 2019 and 2024 general elections, regional parties began adopting the BJP’s approach, embracing heavily personalized branding around welfare delivery, expanding welfare programs, and building political narratives around them.
West Bengal provides a particularly good example. The recently ousted Chief Minister was highly effective in using welfare schemes to cultivate her personal brand and establish an emotional connection with women voters in the state. This paid substantial dividends in the 2024 election. Nearly 60 percent of respondents in our survey attributed political credit for these welfare schemes to Mamata Banerjee, and almost 80 percent of those voters supported her electorally. This demonstrates a strong correlation between the centralization of welfare, personalistic politics, and electoral behavior.
Thus, in the 2024 general election, regional parties were able to reclaim some bargaining power. This is one reason why the BJP returned to office without a full majority and had to rely on two regional parties to form a coalition government at the national level.
The story at the state level has evolved somewhat differently. As I mentioned earlier, once the BJP realized after 2024 that it was losing its grip, it became much more aggressive in its use of institutions under its control, including the Election Commission.
At the same time, state elections are deeply shaped by local anti-incumbency dynamics. One of the challenges of concentrating political credit in the hands of a single leader is that it weakens the internal democratic processes of political parties and removes the feedback loops necessary for responding to public dissatisfaction. Anti-incumbency, a term we use frequently in Indian politics, reflects precisely this sense of public frustration and exhaustion with governments in power.
When power becomes centralized, those corrective mechanisms begin to disappear. One aspect of the West Bengal story is exactly this: an overly centralized political structure that lacked effective feedback loops and therefore failed to respond to mistakes, public fatigue, and shortcomings in governance. This created an opening for the BJP to make gains. It then supplemented those gains with its institutional advantages, ensuring that its hold on power would be firm rather than fragile. So, while centralization and the personalization of welfare served regional parties well in 2024, we are now beginning to see the weaknesses of that model emerge.
One final point concerns the national level. In a country composed of multiple states, the role of regional parties in articulating and representing subnational identities has become increasingly important. The BJP’s ideological vision is far more homogenizing, and regional parties have often functioned as a counterweight to that tendency. This, too, helped correct for the highly centralized and homogenized ideological vision promoted by the BJP at the national level. What we are seeing today, however, is that this dynamic does not necessarily translate into success at the local level. In Tamil Nadu, for example, efforts to explain the DMK’s defeat by a new political party have highlighted how the DMK framed the 2024 general election as a contest between Delhi and Tamil identity, or between North Indian and Tamil subnational identity.
That framing was effective in a national election. It proved far less compelling in a state election, where concerns about governance and everyday administration moved to the forefront. I think something very similar happened in West Bengal.
What we are witnessing, therefore, is an interaction between very different political dynamics at the national and state levels. Centralization is creating opportunities for regional parties to regain bargaining power nationally, but it does not appear to have the same political traction, at least for now, at the subnational level. But this remains an evolving space.
Young India Is Exhausted with Old Politics
At the same time, Tamil Nadu witnessed the remarkable rise of Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), which disrupted the long-standing dominance of both the DMK and AIADMK. Does this indicate that regional political identities remain resilient even as national political centralization advances?
Ms. Yamini Aiyar: Yes, it absolutely does. It is very important to emphasize that while the TVK arguably came out of nowhere—in the sense that it is a two-year-old party that suddenly captured over 37 percent of the vote share and went on to form a government—Vijay, the leader of the TVK, was very careful to reassert his political philosophy within the framework of Dravidian subnational politics and the ideological underpinnings of the Dravidian parties. So, in a sense, Tamil Nadu was making a choice within the context of its own political and ideological identities.
Within that space, there was growing frustration and exhaustion with the DMK. Tamil Nadu is an interesting case because it is one state that has experienced rapid and robust economic growth over the last five years. In fact, by almost every indicator, the DMK had performed very well, both in terms of governance and economic growth. It also continued, in a robust way, to pursue the social development policies of Dravidian politics that are central to Tamil identity. Moreover, it played a very important role in asserting Tamil identity on the national stage. So, by most conventional measures, it appeared that the DMK should have won this election. But it did not. It lost because of this fledgling party that emerged from seemingly nowhere. Yet that party is not challenging the core subnational foundations of Tamilian politics.
What it is doing, however, is raising important questions about the limits of what the DMK has achieved, while also capturing the imagination of young Indians. This is a very important aspect that is often underappreciated in our political debates. Young India is becoming exhausted with many of the older forms of politics.
Even in Tamil Nadu, in 2016–17, if I am not mistaken, there was a largely unorganized mobilization of young people in response to a Supreme Court order that effectively banned a traditional folk bullfight on animal-rights grounds. No formal political party was involved. The issue itself was not necessarily popular, but it generated a great deal of anger, and people mobilized in large numbers. It was a sign that young Tamilians were looking for something different. Those same young people became the most important mobilizers behind Vijay’s success. One repeatedly hears stories of young voters saying, “I convinced my mother not to vote for the DMK and to vote for TVK instead.” They were at the core of what brought TVK to victory.
Moreover, we are seeing similar developments at the national level. Just a few weeks ago, a satirical political formation called the Cockroach Janta Party emerged among young Indians. They adopted the name “Cockroach” after a comment by the Chief Justice suggesting that unemployed young Indians were cockroaches and parasites. Almost overnight, they attracted 22 million followers on Instagram. Even they seemed surprised by the scale of the response, and they organized a major protest in Delhi two days ago.
There is a bubbling up of anxieties among young Indians for a variety of important reasons. Vijay represents a very good example of how that phenomenon can translate into political power at the state level.
So, to answer your question, this is, in many ways, a continuation of core Tamilian subnational identity, but expressed in a new form that represents the voices of young India. How this ultimately shapes the evolution of Dravidian philosophy is something we will need to watch closely.
India’s Federal Future Is Up for Grabs
In your writings on Indian federalism, you have argued that the BJP’s “One Nation” project seeks to consolidate political authority and strengthen national coordination. How should we interpret the divergent electoral trajectories of West Bengal and Tamil Nadu in light of ongoing tensions between centralization and federal pluralism?
Yamini Aiyar: In the run-up to the 2026 elections in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, the national government, led by the BJP, announced a special session of Parliament to debate amendments to the Women’s Reservation Act, without offering any clear explanation as to why. This was a law passed by Parliament in September 2023 that reserved one-third of the seats in India’s lower house for women. However, its implementation was deferred because the redrawing of territorial constituency boundaries—what we call delimitation in India—and the census were to serve as the basis for allocating these reserved seats. As a result, the reservation provisions would only come into effect after 2030, once the next census had been completed.
There was no obvious reason why the government chose to reopen what appeared to be a settled issue. But another important process was unfolding simultaneously. India has been preparing for a reapportionment of its electoral boundaries, a process that is expected to take place after the census, which is scheduled to be completed in 2027. The historical background is complex, and I will not go into it here. But the central concern is that the more populous parts of India are located in the north, where the BJP enjoys much deeper electoral roots. The less populous regions are largely in the south, where subnational identities have served as an important bulwark against the BJP’s expansion.
Several southern political parties are worried that if constituency boundaries are redrawn strictly on the basis of population, representation will become increasingly imbalanced. The more populous northern states would naturally gain additional parliamentary seats, a development that could strengthen the BJP’s electoral position. The less populous southern states, where regional parties remain dominant, would lose relative representation, thereby diminishing their voice in Parliament and their influence over national policymaking.
This has generated an intense political debate, with strong arguments on all sides. The BJP, however, has never been entirely clear about how it intends to address this fundamental issue. What it attempted to do during that special parliamentary session was to introduce the delimitation process under the guise of women’s reservation in the middle of these elections. As a result, both the DMK, the incumbent party in Tamil Nadu, and the TMC, the incumbent party in West Bengal, found themselves confronting a national political issue in the midst of state-level contests.
The opposition eventually came together and succeeded in blocking the delimitation bill, arguing that the issue required much broader consultation and that any reforms needed to ensure equitable representation. In some ways, this amounted to a national victory for subnationalism against the centralizing juggernaut of the BJP’s “One Nation” project.
The electoral outcomes, however, raise important questions about how these debates will proceed in the future. The DMK, which had served as a major voice for subnationalism and regional interests at the national level, lost the election. It remains unclear how the TVK will position itself on these broader national questions.
The TMC, which retains a substantial parliamentary presence—around 29 members, if I am not mistaken, perhaps even more—continues to be an important actor in these debates. Yet it, too, is undergoing a period of significant internal churn following its electoral defeat.
As a consequence, it remains uncertain how opposition voices will coordinate around these issues going forward. At the moment, much remains up for grabs. We do not yet know how the post-election dynamics within these parties, or their roles within the broader INDIA alliance, will evolve. A great deal will depend on how the immediate political consequences of these elections unfold and how the affected parties respond to them.
One-Nation Politics Creates Space for Regional Assertion
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is showing victory sign with both hand to supporters at Bharatiya Janata Party office amid the results of the Indian General Elections 2024 in New Delhi, India on June 4 2024. Photo: PradeepGaurs.
Do the 2026 elections suggest that Indian federalism remains an effective institutional safeguard against democratic erosion, or are state-level political arenas increasingly being absorbed into a centralized national political narrative?
Yamini Aiyar: The BJP is going to use every tool in its arsenal to pursue its One Nation politics. Of that, there is no doubt. It is evident in the way it has deployed institutions such as the Election Commission and the judiciary, as I mentioned earlier, to tilt the playing field of electoral competition in its favor.
There has also been a push for what it calls “One Nation, One Election,” a system of simultaneous elections that, again, has the potential to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor. The BJP has not been shy about using the fiscal instruments at its disposal to squeeze state finances, and it will continue to do so.
So, there is no question that the BJP will pursue its agenda with full force. It will use both legitimate and illegitimate means to weaken regional parties by coaxing them into its fold. Don’t forget that the current BJP Chief Minister of West Bengal began his political career as a very important player in the TMC, the very party he has now defeated. The BJP is not shy about horse-trading and appropriating powerful political actors, using all kinds of legitimate and illegitimate means to bring them into its fold in order to capture power. It is going to play its tricks.
The extent to which regional parties are able to hold on to federalism as a core element of their political agenda will effectively determine the strength of the bulwark against the BJP. The more the BJP advances its One Nation agenda at the national level, the greater the opportunities for regional parties to carve out political space around subnational identity politics. That space is likely to remain significant because the federal sentiment in the everyday lives of Indians, and the multiplicity of our identities, are fundamental to how India understands the structure of the nation, provided that elections remain fair.
At the state level, however, we are witnessing a shift. There appears to be a certain willingness to experiment with the BJP and explore whether, at the subnational level, its homogenizing force is something that the Indian electorate is willing to accept. That question remains open.
For the moment, I do not envisage a situation in which the BJP will be able, through fair elections, to make deeper inroads beyond what it has already achieved in states such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and, to some degree, Andhra Pradesh. These are very important states that keep the conversation on federalism alive at the national level.
So, I remain hopeful that this will continue to be the case. But the BJP’s capacity to misuse the institutions at its disposal is significant, and we have seen that it does not shy away from trampling over constitutional practices.
Civil Society Holds the Key to Democratic Resistance
Looking beyond electoral outcomes, what do the 2026 state elections tell us about the future of democratic opposition in India? Are opposition forces developing new organizational forms capable of challenging centralized political power, or do structural asymmetries continue to place them at a disadvantage?
Yamini Aiyar: I would argue that, at the subnational level, structural asymmetries continue to place opposition forces at a significant disadvantage. But I also think that something else is happening in India that we need to talk about more.
If you look at the last twelve years, since the BJP acquired dominance and India returned to a single-party dominant model of party politics, the most significant political challenges the BJP has confronted have not come from the formal electoral or party-political arena. They have come from what one could broadly call civil society.
The first major movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which gained momentum in 2019, was a very important moment. It effectively stalled the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act all the way through to 2024, when, on the eve of the elections, the rules were finally enforced.
Even more significant was the farmers’ movement in North India against the three agricultural laws passed in 2020. Over a period of roughly two and a half years, that movement became such a powerful political force that the BJP was ultimately compelled to roll back legislation that it had originally pushed through Parliament.
These are important examples of moments in which social formations outside the formal party-political process acted as pressure points on the government. It is also one of the reasons why the BJP’s authoritarian tentacles have become so sharp and extensive. The party uses every means available to curb dissent.
Some of the key political actors involved in mobilizations against the Citizenship Amendment Act, such as Omar Khalid, have now spent years in jail without even a basic charge sheet clearly laying out the accusations against them. They have been denied bail for more than six years. These protests are therefore dangerous for those who participate in them. The BJP recognizes this vulnerability and, as a result, deploys state power aggressively to suppress dissent wherever possible.
The new ferment we are seeing among young Indians—the Cockroach Janta Party is just one small illustration of it—may represent another potential source of resistance. Mobilizations emerging outside formal political structures could create new sites of political action capable of placing limits on the BJP’s increasingly centralized and authoritarian project.
My sense is that the answers to India’s current political dilemmas are more likely to emerge from outside the formal party system than from within it. The opposition remains weak, partly because of its own failures, but also because the BJP has done everything in its power to tilt the playing field against it. It will take deep and sustained mobilization to counter the challenges that opposition forces face today.
I am not entirely confident that they will be able to do so on their own. The political openings available to them are more likely to come from these new social formations that are mobilizing and challenging the BJP’s dominance, and which the formal opposition can then leverage during elections.
Democracy Is More Than Institutions
And finally, your recent work suggests that democracy itself may provide the resources necessary to resist democratic erosion. In light of the 2026 state elections, are you optimistic that India’s democratic institutions retain sufficient resilience to withstand ongoing pressures toward centralization, majoritarianism, and executive dominance?
Yamini Aiyar: I’m deeply pessimistic about the possibility of resistance emerging through the structures of formal institutions, formal party politics, and formal electoral competition. At the same time, I’m hugely optimistic about the possibility of new sites of mobilization emerging outside these formal spaces and then being able to exert the kinds of pressures necessary to tilt the balance toward a fairer and freer electoral competition—one that can challenge the authoritarian backsliding we are witnessing today.
So, I don’t know if that directly answers your question, but I think democracy is about much more than institutions. It is also about forms of mobilization and the capacity of those forms of mobilization and association to place pressure on institutions, ensuring that formal democratic processes function more effectively.
It’s going to be a long and difficult struggle. The odds are certainly stacked against us. But I believe that the deep democratic sentiment that continues to exist in the everyday lives of Indians will find spaces and avenues through which to challenge and resist the authoritarian juggernaut that confronts us today.
In this timely ECPS interview, Rudy deLeon—former US Deputy Secretary of Defense and Senior Vice President for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress (CAP)—offers a far-reaching assessment of the mounting challenges confronting the liberal international order. Drawing on decades of experience in national security and alliance management, de Leon argues that the world is entering a period of profound uncertainty marked by geopolitical rivalry, democratic strain, technological disruption, and a vacuum of strategic leadership. Criticizing what he describes as an increasingly unpredictable and insular US foreign policy, he warns that “what America says on Monday is not what it says on Thursday.” The interview explores NATO’s future, transatlantic relations, US–China competition, populism, artificial intelligence, migration, and the strategic dilemmas shaping global governance in the twenty-first century.
At a moment when the liberal international order faces mounting pressures from geopolitical rivalry, democratic backsliding, technological disruption, and the resurgence of authoritarian power, questions about the future of American leadership have acquired renewed urgency. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for PopulismStudies (ECPS), Rudy deLeon—former US Deputy Secretary of Defense and Senior Vice President for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress (CAP)—offers a sobering assessment of the strategic challenges confronting the United States and its allies in an increasingly fragmented world.
Drawing on decades of experience in defense policy, alliance management, and international security, de Leon, as one of Washington’s most experienced national security practitioners, argues that the world is entering a period of profound transition marked by uncertainty and the absence of strategic leadership. While emphasizing that the post-1945 order helped prevent great-power war, preserve peace in Europe, and facilitate the rise of global economic integration, he warns that many of the assumptions underpinning that order are now under strain. As he puts it, “all these things are in play,”from climate change and migration to artificial intelligence, shifting demographics, and renewed geopolitical competition. Yet, he contends, the situation has been aggravated by “a president and an administration that are not strategic, that are not diplomatic, and that are very insular.”
Throughout the interview, deLeon repeatedly returns to the importance of long-term strategic thinking. Contrasting the institution-building vision of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower with contemporary policymaking, he argues that today’s American leadership often operates without a coherent strategic framework. “What America says on Monday is not what it says on Thursday,” he remarks, describing a pattern of unpredictability that has generated anxiety among allies and weakened confidence in US commitments.
The discussion examines a wide range of contemporary issues, including NATO’s future, transatlantic relations, the rise of China, the implications of populism for international cooperation, and the evolving relationship between democracy and globalization. De Leon also explores how technological transformations, particularly artificial intelligence, may reshape labor markets, democratic governance, and international competition. In his view, policymakers remain overly distracted by ongoing military conflicts while neglecting the strategic questions that will define the coming decades. “The most pressing issue right now,” he argues, “is to figure out what the rules are for artificial intelligence and what that means for the nature of work.”
Ultimately, this interview is not simply an assessment of American foreign policy under Donald Trump. It is a broader reflection on leadership, institutions, and the future of international order in an era when, as de Leon suggests, the questions confronting policymakers may be more consequential than the answers currently available.
