In this ECPS Voices of Youth contribution, Kader Gueye examines how European populist movements are transforming genuine agrarian grievances into political capital. From Dutch nitrogen protests to French mobilizations against the EU–Mercosur deal, Gueye shows how populist actors amplify farmers’ discontent by framing it as a moral struggle between “ordinary people” and “distant elites.” While such narratives generate visibility and significant institutional leverage—as illustrated by the rise of the BBB in the Netherlands and the far right’s support for French blockades—they rarely address the structural drivers of rural hardship, such as volatile markets, supply-chain imbalances, and climate pressures. Gueye argues that without constructive long-term solutions, populist exploitation risks deepening divisions and leaving farmers’ core challenges unresolved.
By Kader Gueye*
Across Europe, images of tractors lining highways have become quite familiar. Farmers block roads, dump manure at ministry gates and brandish placards about survival and “fair competition.” Falling incomes, volatile markets, and increasingly demanding environmental and trade rules have defined their grievances. The political environment that has grown around these protests is not solely about farm policy, but how populist actors have turned agrarian discontent into leverage without offering credible plans to solve the underlying crisis.
Political farmer mobilization has become politically decisive not simply because of their scale, but because populist parties and their allies translate and diffuse their genuine grievances into a simplistic narrative of “the people” versus “distant rule-makers,” and convert that narrative into institutional power. Notably, the Dutch Farmer-Citizen Movement (BoerBurgerBeweging — BBB) and the French debate over the EU-Mercosur trade deal illustrate this translation and provide an example onto why farmers’ structural problems are often left unresolved.
Populism and Agrarian Discontent
Political scientists usually describe populism as a “thin” ideology that divides society into two camps: a virtuous people and a corrupt elite, and that insists politics should express the general will of those people (Mudde, 2004). Because it is “thin,” populism needs a host ideology or a concrete issue to attach to. Agrarian discontent has become one of those issues in Europe.
Farmers are often portrayed as the most authentic part of “the people,” especially in countries with a strong rural identity. When farm incomes stagnate, or when new rules arrive from, say, Amsterdam or Paris in the name of environmental protection, it becomes easy to cast farmers as victims of remote decision-makers who may not truly understand life outside the cities.
However, real agrarian grievances are complicated. Farmers face pressure ranging from large supermarket chains, extremely volatile export markets and rising input costs, all while they are being asked to cut emissions, protect biodiversity and adapt to extreme weather linked to climate change (Henley & Jones, 2024). Populist actors rarely talk about all of these drivers at once. They select the parts that fit their story about out-of-touch elites and elevate those parts into a moral conflict. That is the “translation” this article will focus on.
Agrarian Populism in the Netherlands
Dutch farmers protest against measures to reduce nitrogen emissions in the city centre of The Hague, the Netherlands, on June 28, 2022. Photo: Dreamstime.
The BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) was founded in 2019 by journalist Caroline van der Plas and agrarian advocates. The party initially presented itself as a voice for farmers and rural citizens who felt left behind by the urban political elites. Its platform opposed compulsory farm buyouts and demanded a slower transition on nitrogen regulations, with an increased emphasis on technological solutions and voluntary change (Hendrix, 2023).
During the nitrogen protests, BBB politicians regularly appeared at demonstrations, amplified farmers’ slogans and insisted that ministers and unelected EU bureaucrats did not understand rural life. The core message of the BBB was that the government was threatening food producers, while protecting abstract environmental goals. That narrative connected easily with populist language about “ordinary citizens” versus “climate elites.”
The crucial step came during the 2023 provincial elections. BBB transformed the visibility of road blockades into electoral support and won more seats than any other party across all provinces. Because provincial councils elect the Dutch Senate, the party also became the largest group in the upper house (Reuters, 2023).
In that position, BBB gained significant bargaining power. With its newfound power, it could support, amend or stall national laws, including those related to nitrogen emissions. Analysts at the Clingendael Institute describe this as a shift from street protest to “institutionalized leverage” that changed how the entire party system talked about rural concerns (van der Plas & Candel, 2023).
Yet the deeper policy problem remains. Court rulings still require substantial reductions in nitrogen emissions in sensitive nature areas, and new permits for construction are constrained as long as the problem is not resolved (Candel, 2023). BBB has pushed for looser targets and slower timelines but has not presented a comprehensive plan that both satisfies legal obligations and gives farmers a clear long-term horizon.
In practice, this means farmers continue to face uncertainty about land values, future production levels and investment decisions. Populist framing has helped them obtain more political attention, but it has not delivered a stable settlement that combines environmental goals with rural livelihoods.
Tractor Blockades and ‘Fair Competition’ in France
In early 2024, French farmers blocked key highways, encircled Paris with tractor convoys and targeted wholesale markets. where they protested low farm incomes as well as complex regulations. Many of the farmers believed they had to follow much stricter environmental and animal welfare guidelines than did many of their international competitors who exported products into the same markets that the French farmers sold into. (Al Jazeera, 2024)
“Fair competition” was the repeating mantra of these protests. French Farmer’s Associations argued that due to strict environmental and animal welfare laws paired with trade agreements signed by the European Union to allow increased imports from countries with looser regulations, French farmers were at a severe competitive disadvantage.
The main driver of this argument was the European Union-Mercosur Trade Agreement, a proposed deal between the European Union and the Mercosur block composed of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. The agreement would lower tariffs and open markets for crucial goods like beef and various industrial products (European Parliament, 2023). French farmers speculated that the increase in imports of beef, poultry and sugar from South America would put pressure on European farmers to compete with unregulated foreign producers whom they viewed as operating under unfair conditions.
Here, far-right populist parties saw a chance to expand their rural base. Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National (RN) party, openly expressed her support of the farmers’ blockades and argued that the protesters were evidence of how the EU’s “green bureaucrats” and “globalists” were harming the interests of French farmers and ultimately threatening the native French way of life (Harlan, 2024). Le Pen and the RN leadership described themselves as champions of the “Real France,” defending its people against technocratic elites in Brussels and disconnected elite groups in Paris, a theme that is often repeated by populists.
What Are the Consequences?
Across these two examples, the populist translation of farmer grievances into policy leverage had a number of consequences, the first of which was the simplification of the intricate causes of farmers’ issues. Global market dynamics, domestic policy decisions, corporate concentration, and environmental constraints all contribute to agrarian hardship. Populist narratives, however, focus more on the role of Brussels or environmental regulations and less on the domestic supply chain power or the climate crisis itself (Henley & Jones, 2024; van der Ploeg, 2020). This selective focus makes it easier to mobilize anger, but it restricts the range of solutions that are politically thinkable.
This phenomenon also makes long-term transition planning more challenging. For instance, populists in the Netherlands claimed that any attempt to establish legally binding emission reduction pathways was evidence that the elites were attempting to “shut down” family farms and any trade agreements are viewed as betrayals of the rural populace in France. These populist portrayals leave little room for negotiated packages that can combine stricter rules with strong support for innovation and major diversification (Hendrix, 2023; van der Plas & Candel, 2023).
The last, and perhaps most apparent effect of this framing is the deepening of social divisions. Here, farmers are pitted against urban consumers and environmental activists, despite the fact that both groups may be interested in a more resilient and sustainable food system. The differences among farmers themselves get blurred as well. Large and intensive operations and small farms have very different capacities and interests, yet populist discourse typically frames them as a monolith, a single, unified “people of the land.”
Towards More Constructive Leverage
Cows grazing on a green pasture in rural Brittany, France. Photo: Elena Elisseeva.
None of this implies that populist parties never raise legitimate concerns or that farmer protests are illegitimate. The demonstrations show genuine worry about rural futures as well as genuine dissatisfaction with the way trade and environmental policies have been presented and organized. The question is how to turn this mobilization into leverage that produces lasting solutions rather than recurring crises. In the current policy discussions, a few options stand out.
Combining comprehensive rural transition contracts with environmental targets is one strategy. For instance, policy analysts in the Netherlands have proposed packages that combine investments in non-agricultural rural jobs, incentives for nature-inclusive farming, and targeted buyouts. The aim being to give farmers a predictable route as opposed to a string of brief shocks (Candel, 2023).
Another approach is to address power imbalances in the food chain. More transparency in pricing, support for producer organizations, and stricter regulations on supermarket purchasing practices could put some pressure on big retailers and processors, who currently hold a significant portion of value added, rather than individual farms (Henley & Jones, 2024).
Lastly, democratic actors require narratives that link rural justice with biodiversity and climate goals. This entails acknowledging that rural areas have historically been neglected, valuing farmers’ knowledge, and incorporating them early in the policy-making process. It becomes more difficult for populists to claim that the countryside can only be protected through complete resistance when transitions are co-designed rather than imposed (European Center for Populism Studies, n.d.; Van der Ploeg, 2020).
As European societies struggle with issues like food security, climate targets, and shifting trade patterns, farmer protests are likely to continue. The key issue is not whether or not farmers voice their dissatisfaction, but rather who uses it as political leverage and for what purposes. Currently, populist actors are adept at turning rage into visibility and temporary power. When it comes to providing reliable, widely accepted roadmaps for the future of European agriculture, they are far less persuasive.
(*) Kader Gueye is an IBDP student at Upper Canada College in Toronto and an aspiring diplomat. He has contributed to briefing work in a federal office and organized student programming on global child protection and civic engagement. His current work examines how institutions stay resilient when politics are under strain.
Chile’s November 16, 2025 presidential vote has produced an unprecedented runoff between José Antonio Kast and Jeannette Jara, crystallizing what Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure calls a historic ideological rupture. Speaking to ECPS, he warns that Chile’s shift must be understood within a broader continental realignment: “A new right-wing alliance is emerging in Latin America—and democracy will take a toll.” According to Larrabure, this bloc is not restoring old authoritarianism but “reinventing democracy—and it’s working.” Kast’s coalition embodies a regional “Bolsonaro–Milei playbook,” powered by what Larrabure terms “rule by chaos,” amplified by compulsory voting and disinformation ecosystems. Meanwhile, the Chilean left enters the run-off severely weakened—“the final nail in the coffin” of a long cycle of progressive contestation.
Chile’s first-round presidential election on November 16, 2025 has produced one of the most consequential political realignments in the country’s post-authoritarian history. For the first time since return to democracy, voters are confronted with a stark extreme-right–versus–Communist runoff between José Antonio Kast and Jeannette Jara—an outcome that crystallizes the profound fragmentation and ideological polarization reshaping Chilean politics. Against this backdrop, the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) spoke with Associate Professor Manuel Larrabure, a scholar of Latin American Studies at Bucknell University, whose research on Latin American political transformations offers a critical vantage point on Chile’s current trajectory. As he notes, the 2025 election marks not merely a national turning point, but a regional one: “A new right-wing alliance is emerging in Latin America—and democracy will take a toll.”
Dr. Larrabure situates Chile’s sharp bifurcation within a wider continental pattern of right-wing recomposition, one increasingly linked across Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, and beyond. This emergent bloc, he argues, is not driven by nostalgia for past authoritarianism but by a more adaptive and experimental form of illiberal governance. “They are not trying to destroy democracy,” he stresses. “They are trying to reinvent it—and it’s working.” Kast’s coalition, he suggests, fits squarely within this “Bolsonaro–Milei playbook,” but is tempered by Chile’s more conservative political culture. Still, the danger is clear: the right is forging a novel repertoire of power in an era defined by global monopolies, weakened party systems, and disoriented progressive forces.
One of Dr. Larrabure’s most striking insights concerns what he calls the right wing’s mastery of “rule by chaos.” Rather than relying solely on repression, the contemporary right activates social anxieties—around crime, immigration, and insecurity—to mobilize working-class discontent. This dynamic has been amplified, he argues, by Chile’s reintroduced system of compulsory voting, which “absolutely turned out working in favor of the right wing” during the failed constitutional plebiscite of 2022. Social media ecosystems have further strengthened the right’s influence by “creating an atmosphere of general misinformation and chaos, communicational chaos and informational chaos, in which they can operate with ease.”
By contrast, the Chilean left enters the 2025 runoff severely weakened. Dr. Larrabure describes the election as “the final nail in the coffin of a cycle of contestation” that began with the 2006 school protests, peaked in the 2011 student movement, and culminated in the aborted constitutional process of 2019–2022. Progressive forces, he contends, have struggled to translate grassroots innovation into institutional power, hampered in part by diminished capacities for popular education and an unresolved tension between participatory democratic ideals and party-led governance.
Looking ahead, Dr. Larrabure foresees intensified social conflict but also the latent possibility of democratic renewal. Chile’s constitutional debate, he argues, is effectively over; yet social movements will continue to respond. Ultimately, the question is whether they can forge a transformative project capable of “learning from the mistakes of the past” amid an increasingly securitized and polarized political landscape.
Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Associate ProfessorManuel Larrabure, slightly revised for clarity and flow.
Not Pinochet Reborn—but Something New
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet signs the bill creating the Ñuble Region on August 20, 2015. Photo: Marcelo Vildosola Garrigo.
Professor Manuel Larrabure, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: Chile’s first round of presidential elections on November 16, 2025, produced an extreme-right-versus-Communist runoff unprecedented since the transition to democracy. How do you interpret this sharp ideological bifurcation in light of your work on the fragmentation of both left and right coalitions in Latin America?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: This is a very interesting question, and indeed, there is a bifurcation—a gap—between the Communist Party candidate, Jeannette Jara, and the right-wing candidate. But we need to unpack some assumptions here, because we can easily fall into narratives that are not quite accurate. So let me start with the Communist Party first, and then I’ll talk about the right wing.
The Communist Party has a very long tradition in Chile. It is, in fact, the oldest Communist Party in the entire region. It is very well established, very well institutionalized, and it has long-standing practices. However, it has undergone various changes throughout decades.
If we focus on the changes it experienced beginning with the run-up to the transition to democracy in 1989 and afterward, the Communist Party began to take a much more center-left position. It developed either direct or indirect alliances with what became the center-left governing coalition at the time, the Concertación. You might recall it was led by Michelle Bachelet and Eduardo Frei—some of the key leaders of that coalition. The Communist Party largely supported that center-left coalition, which brought us the kind of neoliberalism that has grown in Chile since those decades.
From that perspective, it would be difficult to call the current Communist Party a far-left party. It really is more of a center-left party. Indeed, if you look at some of the social contestation cycles that began in 2006 with the so-called Penguin Revolution—a social movement of high school students who were called penguins because they wore black-and-white, or dark-blue-and-white, uniforms—these young students were demanding better access to the educational system.
That movement started a cycle of contestation that lasted a few years and then transformed into something we will probably talk about a little later. But many of those early youth movements had a strong critique of the Communist Party precisely for being too timid, lacking imagination, and lacking democratic accountability. In many ways, the progressive cycle that began during that period had a strong critique of the Communist Party for not standing up strongly enough for various social rights.
So that’s the Communist Party; we shouldn’t think of it as a far-left party. Far from it. It can be very timid, and in some cases, even quite conservative in certain respects.
On the other hand, we have Kast and this coalition of right-wing groups and parties. And here, we can also fall into a problematic narrative, because when we say ultra-right-wing or hard right-wing, very quickly that evokes things like fascism or neo-fascism. But the right wing in Chile is actually quite forward-thinking, and has been so for a very long time. By this, I don’t mean progressive in any way, but forward-thinking in the sense that it has been able to successfully adapt to changing conditions on the ground, particularly given that Chile is one of the countries that has inserted itself into global cycles of capitalism, perhaps more so than many others in the region. So it is forward-thinking in that sense. It is willing to adapt, and it is quite pragmatic. It is willing to adjust to changing conditions that it cannot itself fully control.
Yes, they have a strong right-wing agenda on a number of topics that I’m sure we’ll talk about, and indeed many of the people who participate in this right-wing coalition probably have some ideas about Pinochet—nostalgia about Pinochet. In some cases, they even make public remarks supportive of people in the Pinochet regime. But in reality, pragmatism is their horizon—obviously with a right-wing tint to it.
You might recall that although Pinochet himself was a brute, a simpleton brute, the reality—and maybe precisely because he was that—is that he looked elsewhere for ideas. And where did he look for ideas? At the vanguard of American economic thinking at the time, which of course became Milton Friedman. And, this became the neoliberal project, which at the time was very marginal. So within the Pinochet story, there is also a story of looking outside and looking for new ideas to support a right-wing project.
I think this is the light in which we should see this right-wing coalition, rather than seeing it as nostalgic for some kind of European fascism or even Pinochet himself. That nostalgia is there, but it is counterposed with a strong sense of pragmatism.
The Rise of ‘Rule by Chaos’ in Chilean Politics
With José Antonio Kast receiving unified backing from libertarian, conservative, and ultra-right actors, do you see a consolidation of a “new right” coalition akin to the regional patterns you and Levy describe in the “Pink Tides, Right Turns” special issue?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: Yes, it is a consolidation of the right wing. The right wing will undoubtedly win the upcoming elections in December. The outcomes of the current elections were disastrous for the left, even though it maintained some control over the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. However, it’s truly a defeat for the left. If you think about the percentage of the vote that Jara received—approximately 24–25%, I think it was—and compare it to the number of people who voted to approve that progressive constitutional reform project, that was 38%. Only about 24% support Jara, and that’s a big decrease in that respect. It’s undoubted that this is a very difficult situation for the left, and that the right wing will be able to consolidate.
What is it consolidating? That’s the interesting question, and there are many concepts one can use to describe this new right wing. In fact, the very existence of so many of these different concepts—neoliberal authoritarianism, for example—shows that something is changing and has been changing for a long time. To throw yet another concept into the mix, one that I discuss in some of my work, there is the notion of an anti-bureaucratic authoritarian state. Many others could also be valid in terms of the discussions and debates.
But the key novelty in this right-wing coalition—and we’ve seen this with the case of Bolsonaro and Milei—is that it introduces, more than in other situations, the concept of rule by chaos. In the past, the right wing has been accustomed to ruling by pacifying subordinate classes and subordinate groups and repressing them. That will still happen under this new right wing, but it will now have a new dose of attempting to introduce chaos into the mix. That means actually activating the popular classes, activating subordinate sectors, manipulating them, and having them engage with politics, which is something different from what we have seen in the past.
Civil protest for a dignified life in Plaza Italia, as the government deploys military force to repress demonstrations in Santiago de Chile, October 23, 2019. Photo: Dreamstime.
How Mandatory Voting Backfired on Chile’s Left
How do compulsory voting rules—reintroduced in Chile—reshape the dynamics of right-wing populist mobilization, particularly among disaffected working-class male voters in the mining regions?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: Compulsory voting was introduced in 2022 for the final constitutional plebiscite. It turned out to be a big mistake. It surprised everybody, and most people attribute many of the reasons why the constitutional process was not successful to this compulsory voting. An interesting backstory here is that it’s hard to know who introduced it exactly. Some people will say it was actually Boric himself who introduced it, thinking they were in a strong position at the time and that introducing it would lead to a resounding success in the 2022 plebiscite. Others, depending on who you talk to, will tell you it was introduced by someone in the right wing as part of a negotiation with Boric, and that Boric went ahead with it naively, thinking it would work.
It absolutely turned out to work in favor of the right wing, because it forced people to vote on a document that had very little connection to the constitution process itself, about which they knew very little, and from which they were already quite alienated. Their instinct was to vote against it rather than in favor. And that dynamic will continue. Compulsory voting in the context of social media, and in the context of manipulation campaigns of all kinds, actually benefits the right wing in this case.
Crime, Migration, and the Limits of Progressive Narratives
Crime and immigration have eclipsed social rights and constitutional reform as the dominant electoral issues. What does this shift tell us about the vulnerabilities of post-neoliberal political projects in the face of moral panics and securitized narratives?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: It tells us about some of the challenges that progressive movements have had with these issues. If there’s a moral panic about immigration, the best the left has been able to do is cry xenophobia—which, of course, is right. But this kind of moralistic approach is not enough. There are other dimensions that need to be discussed and addressed by the left: psychological dimensions, emotional dimensions, and it’s not as easy as simply saying it’s just wrong. There has to be some other kind of response to that.
On the issue of crime, similarly, the typical answer to rising crime from the left has been to provide jobs, provide economic stability, provide support for citizens, and this will reduce crime. But in practice, this hasn’t necessarily panned out as one might expect. I looked at the case of Venezuela for a while—I still do—and at the height of some of the progressive tendencies in the Chavista project, you had the coincidence of lowering unemployment but higher crime. So you can have higher crime and lower unemployment at the same time, suggesting that there are other things going on beyond these simplistic narratives that the left sometimes uses. Not that that’s wrong—I strongly believe that if you provide a strong, supportive system that allows people to engage in work rather than criminal activity, that’s going to help. But, there are other things going on that the left must think about.
Why Kast’s Securitarian Agenda Isn’t a Return to Pinochet
Kast’s proposals—border walls, mass expulsions, militarization of public security—mirror global far-right repertoires. Do you interpret these as a populist securitarianism, or as an authoritarian neoliberalism in line with Pinochet-era legacies?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: Yes, there are legacies to Pinochet—undoubtedly, and we should be aware of them. But I think we would be mistaken to assume that the right wing is fundamentally nostalgic. Much of the new security-securitization proposals and projects they are advancing also contain an element of creating a new social terrain of chaos—injecting agitation into the population. Many of the things they propose will never actually be implemented, but simply articulating them, simply placing them in the public debate, generates an atmosphere of unrest. And that is precisely the atmosphere in which the right wing thrives.
What label to use—you can choose among several. But it is not a return to a classic authoritarian pattern. It is something different, and it’s important to understand the new terrain they are constructing. That terrain centers on how to concentrate power—how to exercise power—in a context of limited market competition at this particular moment in global capitalism, marked by the rise of extremely powerful monopolies at both global and national levels. They are trying to work out how to wield power under these conditions, and that is a novel context they are adapting to. They are shaping the conditions in which they can then operate with ease. That, I think, is their project.
Checks and Balances vs. Getting Mugged
How does Kast’s explicit admiration for Bukele’s carceral model fit into regional trends you have tracked regarding punitive or penal populism and the erosion of democratic checks and balances?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: At the popular level—and this is something I want to emphasize—the right wing is deeply attuned to everyday sentiments in a way the left simply isn’t. The right understands how people in poor and working-class communities are thinking. If you’re a working-class Chilean, or you have a precarious job, or you’re a low-income person, you’re already struggling to make a living, and you’re heavily indebted. That high level of indebtedness was actually introduced by the center-left, not the right; it was a center-left invention that expanded across broad sectors of the population.
So you’re in debt, you’re struggling to find stable work, your job is precarious, and on top of that, you’re getting mugged regularly in your own community. And what you hear from the center-left is: “we need democracy, checks and balances, human rights.” People think: “What good are checks and balances if I’m getting mugged? They feel, “I can do without all that if it means I’ll be safer.” The right wing is tapping directly into those feelings. Many people feel that under the center-left they didn’t gain much—and they’re still getting mugged. At least the right promises them they won’t.
There is a strong push by the right to activate and amplify those emotions. That’s the dynamic at play. Whether they will build prisons of the kind Bukele is constructing, I doubt it—but it’s possible. What matters far more is the growing resonance between right-wing discourse and popular sectors. That connection is very strong right now.
Democratic Backsliding Without Dictatorship: Chile’s New Risk
Poster of Augusto Pinochet on display at the La Moneda Cultural Center beneath Citizenry Square in Santiago, Chile. Photo: Dreamstime.
Given Kast’s Pinochetist lineage and the rehabilitation of authoritarian nostalgia among sections of the electorate, how serious is the risk of democratic backsliding if he wins the presidency?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: The issue of nostalgia—the right wing has elements of it, but it is actually far more forward-looking. It is the left that primarily lives in the space of nostalgia. As for democratic backsliding, I very much doubt that this will produce a classic authoritarian scenario. It is more likely to generate something novel—different—something that carries some of the flavors of past authoritarianism but operates on entirely different registers. And there are reasons for this. Chilean capital is among the most internationally and globally integrated in the region, and as a result, it has had to remain forward-looking. We need to understand the right wing in this light. The left is far more nostalgic—and unfortunately, that is a problem we still have not resolved.
After the Constitutional Defeat, the Left Has No Path to Hegemony
Jeannette Jara’s campaign reactivates a Communist Party tradition within Chilean democracy. From your research on grassroots movements and the limits of institutional leftism, do you see her as capable of reconstituting progressive hegemony—or is the left structurally weakened after the failed constitutional process?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: Unfortunately, there is no chance of her being able to reconstruct any kind of progressive hegemony. In fact, I see this election as the final nail—there have already been a few “final nails,” but this one truly feels definitive—in the coffin of a cycle of contestation that began in 2006. It continued in 2011 with the university student movements, out of which Gabriel Boric emerged, and eventually transformed into the creation of the Frente Amplio, a new coalition that for a brief period became a kind of hegemonic force. They then led a constitutional reform process that ultimately failed, for a number of interesting reasons we could discuss.
But the point is the opposite of what the question suggests: this moment does not mark the reconstitution of progressive hegemony—it marks the end of a long cycle that started many years ago. And if the best that progressive movements can offer at this point is a very mild center-left alternative to the right wing, then we are in serious trouble.
Why Chile’s Movements Struggle to Become Institutions
How does the collapse of the 2019–2022 constitutional movement resonate with your earlier work on the Chilean student movement (2011), particularly regarding the translation of contentious politics into institutional transformation?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: This is one of the great dilemmas of progressive movements: how to take the combative spirit and the innovations that emerge from social movements on the ground and translate them into effective political institutions capable of contesting government and leading change. This was the case in Chile during the student movement, and later as well. How to make that translation remains an open question. It has been a very difficult challenge in many contexts, and Chile is no exception. It points to the need to reimagine democracy in some way, and I think this is precisely where these movements struggle.
The right wing is very comfortable with the way it operates, with very strict hierarchies. Progressive movements are not. They try to reinvent how to engage with each other in democratic ways, but this is often messy, and many mistakes are made along the way. The Chilean student movements certainly experimented with different kinds of democracy. There were some really interesting experiences with public neighborhood meetings in the run-up to the 2019 movement—people coming together in public parks to discuss politics and engage in new democratic practices.
But moving from those experiments to establishing similar logics within larger parties is very difficult. It has proven extremely challenging. This is where the left needs to focus specifically. And there is some good news in the failure of this long cycle of contestation: it allows us to see more clearly than before that we need to focus on understanding the relationship between leaders and followers. Progressive movements have a strong discomfort with these questions. We like to imagine that everyone can be a leader, and sometimes that is simply not possible. Who should lead? What makes a good leader—and just as importantly, what makes a good follower—are questions we need to discuss more openly in the context of translating social movements into political institutions.
Chile’s Election Marks the End of the Pink Tide Illusion
In your view, does this election signify the exhaustion of the second-generation Pink Tide, or merely a recalibration within a longer regional cycle punctuated by commodity dependence, political volatility, and institutional fragility?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: It is true that there has been a kind of renaissance of different left political projects in the region that have come to power—Colombia for a moment, and also Peru. Many people began to see these developments as a sort of second coming of the Pink Tide. But we need to be careful with this. There have been some interesting experiments within some of these governments, but the context in which they emerged is completely different from that of the original Pink Tide, which began back in the late 1990s.
The circumstances now are entirely different: we are looking at economic volatility, economic crisis, and a highly fragmented left. This is simply not a context that allows any kind of strong, progressive wave—a Pink Tide 2.0—to sustain itself for very long. So that’s the first point. I really don’t see this second Pink Tide as being anywhere near as substantial as the first one. In that sense, what is happening in Chile right now feels like yet another final nail in the coffin of the idea that a second Pink Tide is emerging. We should not think of it as analogous to the first one.
Disinformation as a Tool of Chile’s New Right
Illustration: Shutterstock / Skorzewiak.
How do you assess the role of corporate media and disinformation ecosystems—topics raised in the Pink Tide literature—in shaping anti-progressive sentiment and facilitating the rightward shift in Chilean public opinion?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: Social media has been a very fertile terrain for the right wing, which has moved into that terrain very quickly and very enthusiastically. It has hired an army of trolls to influence public opinion, and they are very effective at it. They have done a really impressive job of targeting some of the weaknesses of left or progressive discourses and planting doubt in large swaths of the population about what it means to support the rights of citizens. Basic things are coming into question for the very first time precisely because of how effective they have been in the realm of social media.
In particular, they have been good at creating a narrative—the narrative of fascist versus communist—which really works in their favor. People on the left are too defensive about this topic, and people can see it. And when people see that kind of defensiveness, they sense that something is wrong. The right wing has been very effective at pushing those triggers within progressive sectors that reveal to the broader population that they are not fully comfortable with some of the things they are saying.
And this has been the job of the right wing: to seed doubt, to plant doubt, to create an atmosphere of general misinformation and chaos—communicational chaos and informational chaos—in which they can then operate with much ease.
Why Chile’s Left Can’t Bridge Streets and Institutions
Considering your argument that participatory and prefigurative movements often produce tensions with state-centric left governments, does the recent election reflect unresolved contradictions between movement-based radicalism and party-led governance?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: No doubt—and it clearly reflects deep contradictions. It’s striking to think about the movements born in 2006 and 2011, out of which emerged the demand for constitutional reform, and how difficult it was to translate that demand into practice—to convince large parts of the Chilean population that changing the Constitution was necessary. This is why it was such a shock that only about 38% of people voted in favor of the new draft.
This outcome reflects many of the tensions between formal politics and street politics, or extra-parliamentary politics. It is very difficult to bridge these spheres, and we haven’t really built the kinds of organizations capable of making that translation possible. This remains an ongoing task for progressive movements.
In particular, the process exposed lost capacities in the realm of popular education. It is one thing to demand or imagine a very different constitution—as was the case in Chile. Social movements carry what they call “horizons of change”: visions of an alternative society they hope to realize. Sometimes these horizons are explicit, sometimes implicit, but they are always there.
The challenge arises when these horizons of change drift too far from the movements’ capacity to engage in popular education and materially advance those visions. That gap inevitably creates problems. And from my perspective, the real motor of this entire process is the question: can progressive movements carry out effective popular education? This is especially difficult today, when people are tied to their phones and immersed in social media debates rather than substantive collective discussions in other forums.
So the major challenge for progressive movements now is how to engage in popular education in a way that narrows thisgap. In Chile, the gap grew so wide by 2022 that people simply stopped believing in the project of constitutional change.
A New Right-Wing Axis—and Its Democratic Costs
Kast’s openly pro-Trump positioning aligns Chile with an emergent right-wing axis in Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, and potentially Colombia and Peru. How does this recomposition of hemispheric alliances affect prospects for democratic deepening and autonomous development in the region?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: This is definitely a new right-wing alliance—a regional alliance—that is emerging. Democracy will take a toll, without a doubt. What they are trying to do is not destroy democracy; they are trying to reinvent it—something the left should be doing but has struggled to do. And they are succeeding. They are actively reinventing democracy, and it’s working.
Of course, there are elements that recall past authoritarianism; those elements are there. But, as I mentioned earlier, there are also strong elements of novelty. This is a Bolsonaro–Milei political playbook, though not as intense in Chile. Chile has a much more conservative, even stoic political culture compared to those countries. So you won’t see the more outlandish shenanigans of figures like Milei or Bolsonaro, but you will see a small taste of that in Chile—perhaps for the first time.
Indeed, they are consolidating into what I think is an experiment in how to exercise power in a context marked by very strong global monopolies, limited market competition, and a totally fragmented left. For that, you don’t need a dictatorship. You need something different—and that is what they are trying to figure out. It’s not good, but it’s also not a return to the Pinochet era.
Democratic Resilience Beneath the Surface
Chilean presidential runoff at Instituto Presidente Errázuriz in Santiago. Voters cast ballots in the December 19, 2021 election between José Antonio Kast and Gabriel Boric. Photo: Dreamstime.
And finally, Professor Larrabure, what scenarios do you foresee for Chile’s medium-term political trajectory—particularly regarding (a) democratic resilience, (b) the future of the constitutional question, and (c) the ability of social movements to intervene in an increasingly securitized, polarized political field?
Assoc. Prof. Manuel Larrabure: The constitutional question is over. I don’t think that’s on the table anymore. The question of social movements intervening in the political terrain—yes, they’ll intervene. There’s no doubt there will be responses from social movements throughout this period of the new right that’s emerging in the country. That’s been the case in Latin America for a very long time; movements do respond to these kinds of attacks. The question is, how are they going to respond exactly? What new repertoires are they going to use? Are they going to learn some of the lessons of the previous cycle of contestation, or are they simply going to repeat what they did? And I think this is a very important question.
Is this going to lead to challenges to democracy as we know it? Yes, it will. But Latin America has a strong record of democratic resilience; democratic movements are always there, just beneath the surface. And I don’t doubt for a second that they will respond. I hope that through that process—and no doubt a new wave of contestation will begin at some point—they can articulate progressive politics, a political transformation, a social transformation that is more effective and able to learn from the mistakes of the past.
In his interview with ECPS, Professor Richard Youngs (Carnegie Europe; University of Warwick) offers a sharp assessment of today’s democratic crisis. Highlighting a “qualitative shift” in autocratization, he points to two transformative forces: digital technologies and a rapidly changing international order. As he observes, “we are in an interregnum between the liberal global order and whatever comes next.” Professor Youngs warns that democratic erosion is driven not only by structural pressures but by the “incremental tactics” of illiberal leaders who steadily undermine checks and balances—often learning directly from one another. Looking ahead, he argues that mere institutional survival is insufficient: democracies must pursue renewal and resilience, noting that “it is much easier to undo democracy than to reassemble good-quality democratic norms.”
In a wide-ranging and analytically rich interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Richard Youngs—Senior Fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at Carnegie Europe and Professor of International Relations at the University of Warwick—offers a compelling diagnosis of the global democratic landscape at a moment of profound uncertainty. Reflecting on accelerating autocratization, shifts in global power, EU democratic dilemmas, and the prospects for democratic renewal, Professor Youngs provides both conceptual clarity and sobering realism. As he puts it, “we are in an interregnum between the liberal global order and whatever comes next”—a liminal period in which the rules, norms, and institutional anchors of the past three decades no longer hold firm, even as no coherent alternative has yet emerged.
Professor Youngs identifies two forces that make the current wave of democratic regression qualitatively distinct from earlier cycles: the disruptive role of digital technologies and far-reaching structural changes in the international order. Both realms, he argues, remain fluid, capable of generating either deeper democratic decay or future sources of resilience. Although digital platforms currently “carry very negative implications for democracy,” ProfessorYoungs reminds us that past expectations of their democratizing potential need not be abandoned entirely if regulation becomes more effective. Similarly, while rising non-democratic powers are reshaping global geopolitics, there remains “many democratic powers that might coordinate more effectively in the future” to safeguard liberal norms within a reconfigured global system.
This transitional moment is further complicated by the rise of radical-right populism, the diffusion of illiberal tactics across borders, and democratic backsliding in core Western states. Professor Youngs emphasizes that the potency of contemporary autocratization stems not from structural shifts alone but from the “very skillful way in which many leaders have deployed incremental tactics to undermine democratic equality.” Autocrats, he notes, actively learn from one another—sometimes “copying and pasting” repressive legal templates—creating a transnational ecosystem of illiberal innovation.
The interview also probes dilemmas within the European Union, from the risks of technocratic overreach in “defensive democracy” measures to the strategic tensions posed by engaging or isolating radical-right parties. Professor Youngs is clear-eyed about the difficulty of balancing pluralism with the defense of liberal norms, describing the EU’s predicament as a “catch-22.”
Looking ahead, Professor Youngs argues that scholarship and policy must shift from diagnosing democratic decline to theorizing and cultivating democratic resilience. Yet this resilience must go beyond “pure survival” and involve deeper processes of reform, renewal, and societal empowerment. As he cautions, “it is much easier to undo democracy than to reassemble good-quality democratic norms,” and the work of rebuilding will require sustained, coordinated effort at both national and international levels.
Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Richard Youngs, slightly revised for clarity and flow.
The Global Order Is in a State of Uncertainty
Photo: Dzmitry Auramchik.
Professor Richard Youngs, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: How should we analytically distinguish the present cycle of democratic regression from previous waves of autocratization? Does this moment represent merely a quantitative intensification, or a qualitatively novel form of democratic decay tied to identity conflict, digital transformation, and transnational illiberalism?
Professor Richard Youngs: I think you answered your own question there with the last two factors, which are really the distinguishing features of the current phase of autocratization. Not every factor is new. These things move in political cycles, and many of the strains affecting democracy have been fairly constant across time. We shouldn’t overly idealize previous periods when democracy seemed to be on the rise. Many of these problems are long-standing, but the two factors you identify do seem to herald a qualitative shift: the role of digital technology and the structural changes in the global order, and how these developments impinge upon national-level politics. I would say that both factors—the digital sphere and the international order—remain quite fluid, and their impact may be complex over the medium term.
The digital sphere, as we know, currently carries very negative implications for democracy, and most attention is on those negative aspects. Yet if one looks back a few years, there was hope that digital technology might also have democratizing effects. If governments manage to adequately regulate the online information space, some focus may return to the more positive potential of digital technologies. The same applies to the international order. Most experts agree that we are in an interregnum between the liberal global order and whatever comes next, and it is not at all clear what form that future order will take.
Clearly, the emerging international order will give greater weight to non-democratic powers. But there are still many democratic states that may, in time, coordinate more effectively to ensure that democracy retains a meaningful place in the newly reshaped global order.
Leadership Strategy Matters More Than Structural Cleavages
To what extent is the rise of radical-right populism in Europe driven by structural cleavages—cultural, socio-economic, geopolitical—versus strategic agency on the part of populist entrepreneurs? How should we interpret this ascent within broader theories of party-system realignment?
Professor Richard Youngs: This is a long-standing debate, but again, the answer is implicit in your question. I would say that the strategic agency deployed by illiberal policy entrepreneurs is the most significant factor. The underlying structural issues—the technological shifts, changes in global politics, economic pressures, identity dynamics—are all clearly present. I don’t think there is a single factor that applies uniformly across all cases, and the balance between these drivers varies from state to state.
But if we recognize that no overarching structural explanation captures these developments in a uniform way, then the focus shifts, as you suggest, to strategic agency: the leadership tactics and the very skillful ways in which many leaders have used incremental measures to erode democratic equality. Even without moving politics fully into authoritarianism, they have steadily chipped away at the quality and robustness of democratic checks and balances.
So I would say it is a combination of underlying structural features and political agency—and, as you intimate, it is the interaction between these two levels that has made the current wave of autocratization so potent.
Illiberal Alliances Are Real but Highly Fluid
A banner depicts democracy as a leaf eaten by “caterpillars” named Putin, Kaczynski, Orban, Babis, Trump, and Fico on Labour Day, May 1, 2017 in Old Town Square, Prague. Photo: Jolanta Wojcicka.
You have written about an emerging “Illiberal International.” Are today’s authoritarian and illiberal leaders (Putin, Erdoğan, Orbán, Trump) converging around a coherent ideological project, or are we observing a more fluid assemblage of mutually reinforcing but heterogeneous illiberalisms?
Professor Richard Youngs: The alliances are more fluid, again, as you suggest. Many books and articles have examined this emerging coordination among authoritarian regimes, and there is a general consensus that these regimes are indeed coordinating more effectively. Part of that coordination involves their pushback against liberal or democratic norms in many parts of the world, but they do not share a uniform agenda. Many illiberal projects are quite distinctive—quite different in their ideological precepts and the kinds of policies they prioritize.
These differences do not, at the moment, preclude some degree of coordination, but there clearly isn’t a single, well-coordinated policy of autocracy promotion in the way that democracies have sought to coordinate in previous years. So it is clearly significant and an important emerging aspect of global politics. But I think we need to be careful not to overestimate how coherent a bloc non-democratic regimes have established, at least so far.
Trump Is an Intensification, Not a New Phenomenon
What does the partial autocratization of the United States under Trump imply for global democratic theory? Does it signal the end of the assumption that consolidated democracies are inherently resilient, or does it reflect deeper path dependencies in presidential, majoritarian systems?
Professor Richard Youngs: I don’t think Trump, in himself, shows that consolidated democracies are not inherently resilient. That fact has been emerging and becoming clear for quite some time over the last decade. His impact is another lurch in that direction—perhaps the most dramatic and worrying to date—but still an intensification of a trend we have already been witnessing rather than something qualitatively new.
What could represent a real game changer, however, is the United States’ shift internationally—from serving as an anchor of democratic order to, in some cases, supporting forms of authoritarian government. Not everywhere, of course, but as the US steps back in many places from defending democratic norms, this could change the balance in the global contest between democracy and autocracy and become a significant factor working against democratic reform in many countries.
We should not overestimate the influence of what is happening in the US. In many parts of the world, the fate of democracy will continue to depend on deeply rooted local factors, not on developments in Washington. But this shift is nonetheless significant and will have important implications, especially for the international dimensions of democratic theory.
Institutional and Cultural Illiberalism Reinforce Each Other
How do you assess the relative weight of institutional capture (courts, media regulators, security agencies) versus cultural-political radicalization in driving democratic deconsolidation? Is one a precursor to the other, or do they typically evolve in mutually reinforcing spirals?
Professor Richard Youngs: Again, you answer your own very good question. I think both the formal institutional level and the more social-cultural level are significant, and it is their increasing reinforcement of each other in recent years that has given so much momentum to the current illiberal wave. In some countries, it is the institutional side that comes first and drives changes at the social level. In other countries, it is the other way around, so there is no uniform pattern across cases. But it seems to me that the coexistence of these formal institutional dynamics and the simultaneous evolution of social and cultural dynamics is what is so interesting—and what represents such a powerful trend.
Flag of Finland and the European Union flag displayed in the European Council offices in Brussels, Belgium, on April 10, 2024. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.
Given the EU’s increasing reliance on counter-disinformation, surveillance resilience, and digital shields, do you see a danger that “defensive democracy” morphs into a form of technocratic securitization that paradoxically narrows democratic space?
Professor Richard Youngs: I think the danger is there. Of course, your question is very topical at the moment, because the EU has just agreed on its European Democracy Shield and, only last week, launched a European Center for Democratic Resilience. You are right that, for now, the priority focus appears to be on shielding European democracy in a very defensive way—from Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) operations, from foreign influence, and from manipulation by external actors. At the same time, European policymakers do, at least rhetorically, acknowledge that this is only one part of what is needed to reinforce democratic norms.
The remit of the shield has shifted somewhat, with a slightly stronger emphasis emerging on civic engagement and media pluralism than was initially evident. This shift reflects concerns, as you suggest, that the EU itself might drift toward a somewhat illiberal technocratic securitization in the name of defending liberal democracy. That warning is clearly on the EU’s agenda, and policymakers seem aware of the risk.
Hopefully, the Democracy Shield and the new center will evolve into a broader democracy strategy that balances, on the one hand, the regulations and laws genuinely needed to protect European democracy from harmful online and external influences, and, on the other, a more positive dynamic of civic empowerment, on which democratic quality depends over the medium to longer term.
Illiberal Regimes Learn Faster Than Democracies Respond
What evidence do we have that autocratizing incumbents actively learn from one another’s tactical repertoires—judicial interference, NGO restrictions, electoral manipulation—and how should the EU conceptualize this diffusion of illiberal techniques?
Professor Richard Youngs: There is a lot of evidence, as you know and as you have worked on in the center, that regimes are learning from one another on these tactics. In some cases, they are almost copying and pasting the same kinds of repressive laws taken from other countries into their own legislation. There is ample evidence of this. This is not a new issue; it has been going on for about 15 years. We are now almost in the second or third iteration of these repressive laws, and the international dynamics—the lessons that regimes are learning from each other—are clearly stronger than they were some years ago.
I think the lesson for actors like the EU is that this assault on democratic space around the world is no longer simply a matter of trying to protect individual civil society organizations in a select number of cases. It exists at a more systemic, international level, and it needs to be understood and addressed at that level. The EU has begun to move in that direction, but it still has quite a way to go to grasp the truly order-level significance of this kind of anti-democratic learning across borders.
Europe Faces a Genuine Democracy Catch-22
You have described a tension whereby insulating the EU from radical-right influence risks constraining pluralism, while integrating them risks legitimizing illiberalism. How should scholars and policymakers evaluate this “democracy catch-22” in light of the long-term risks to both the polity and the party system?
Professor Richard Youngs: I don’t have an answer to this. I conceptualized it as a catch-22 situation, as have many other people, because I just don’t think there’s a good, a perfect option for European policymakers. Engagement with far-right parties clearly risks normalizing such parties to an undue extent, but on the other hand, ostracizing them completely risks actually increasing their appeal for a significant part of the population.
We’re in a gray zone at the moment, where the fact that in many countries these parties have gained such a significant part of the vote makes it not so easy to ignore them completely anymore, but most mainstream parties are still reluctant to build them in formally into any working partnerships, and the far-right parties, the radical parties themselves, now have to juggle with a difficult strategic decision themselves, whether to engage in normalized politics or whether to hold themselves outside the system and retain their appeal as extra-institutional challenger parties, and we see some of these difficulties, for example, in the Netherlands over the last four or five months.
So, at the moment, I would conceptualize it as a rather uneasy, gray area of adjustment, somewhere between far-right parties being left out and ostracized completely and other parties wanting to deal with them as completely normal parties. It’s a very uneasy combination. It’s a kind of implicit attempt to get around this catch-22, but I’m not sure we can expect really dramatic results from this, and I think mainstream parties will continue to struggle with how to deal with this phenomenon at the moment.
Democracy Support Persists, Yet in a Weakened Form
Is Europe’s push for “strategic autonomy” compatible with maintaining a robust external democracy-support agenda, or does the logic of autonomy inevitably push the EU toward transactional geopolitics and away from normative liberalism?
Professor Richard Youngs: I don’t think it pushes the EU inevitably toward purely transactional geopolitics, but there are clearly significant signs at the moment that the EU is prioritizing other policy issues over democracy support. European democracy support is still there—it still exists, and it has not collapsed dramatically. Yet there are indications that many member states, or at least some, are cutting their democracy budgets and prioritizing more strategic alliances with non-democratic regimes.
So, once again, we find ourselves in a rather uneasy balance: some aspects of the democracy agenda are being strengthened in the name of the EU’s geopolitical interests, while many others are being weakened because of a shift toward more realpolitik-style geopolitics. It is an uneasy balance, and it is likely to persist. The EU will likely emerge from this period of adjustment with some degree of commitment to democracy support still intact, but the agenda will look quite different from what it was 5 or 10 years ago.
A New Global Coalition of Democracies Is Needed
Students from public universities in São Paulo protested against cuts in education budgets made by the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) in São Paulo, Brasil on November 8, 2022. Photo: Isaac Fontana.
With US democracy assistance dramatically reduced, is the EU institutionally and ideationally equipped to serve as the central node of a reconfigured global democracy-support ecosystem—or does this require a paradigmatic rethinking beyond “funding substitution”?
Professor Richard Youngs: The latter. And we have just written about this with my Carnegie colleagues. The US cuts in democracy support—although some aid has since been partially reconstituted—remain very significant and severe, and they are acting as a catalyst for other democracies around the world to rethink their policies, including many European donors. There is growing recognition that a broader set of alliances needs to be built with democracies outside Europe. The EU is not going to step up on its own to fully compensate for the reductions in US democracy assistance. Many member states are also cutting development assistance for their own reasons, which is prompting them to explore alternative ways of supporting democratic reformers that are not so heavily dependent on standard project aid, as has traditionally been the case.
The democracy agenda will still exist, but it will have to do so in a significantly transformed way. For the EU, this means the debate cannot simply revolve around how far it can compensate for the cuts in US aid. What we are seeing in the United States presents a broader challenge: the democracy community as a whole needs to think afresh and recognize that the democracy agenda will need to become more selective and pursued through different means. It will not have the same kind of primacy in global politics that it once enjoyed, even if it does not disappear entirely.
Three Agendas, One Challenge: Europe Needs Integrated Policy
Your work on the “triple nexus” highlights interlocking vulnerabilities. Should democratic governance now be treated as a central security variable in EU climate and conflict policy, rather than a parallel track? What institutional reforms would this require?
Professor Richard Youngs: Exactly, and again, you have posed the policy imperative very well. We have the democracy agenda, the conflict agenda, and the climate agenda—all three growing in complexity. The challenges emerging from each are becoming more severe, yet they are still pursued largely as parallel tracks in European policy. These are very difficult, thorny issues to integrate, but it is essential to understand how conflict intersects with climate change, how climate intersects with governance challenges, and how governance dynamics intersect with conflict. The EU needs to pursue policies, initiatives, and projects on the ground that encompass all three dimensions together.
The EU rhetorically acknowledges that this integrated approach is necessary. It has introduced several strategy documents emphasizing its importance. But institutionally, the funding structures and foreign-policy and security structures are not yet configured in a way that enables governments and EU institutions to approach these different challenges as a single, coherent policy challenge.
Resilience Requires Renewal, Not Just Defense
In your recent work, you suggest moving from analyzing autocratization to theorizing democratic resilience. How should resilience be conceptualized so that it does not simply mean institutional survival but also normative renewal, adaptability, and democratic deepening?
Professor Richard Youngs: Again, that’s exactly the answer. Lots of people are now writing on democratic resilience. For more than a decade, the focus has mainly been on democratic backsliding and autocratization. More people are now trying to understand why some democracies have managed to survive in reasonably good shape despite all the challenges of the last decade; in a small number of cases, some countries have even made democratic improvements. That is why the concept of resilience has become more prominent. It means different things to different people. Part of it is about pure survival—fending off very overt authoritarian dynamics. But the second layer, as analysts increasingly recognize, is that to survive, democracy cannot simply fend off Chinese, Russian, or other external threats; democracy needs to reform itself. There are ongoing debates about what kinds of democratic reforms can provide the most resilience over the longer term. These debates are still quite embryonic, but they are beginning to filter into policy discussions.
The degree of resilience we see remains quite fragile and tentative, but I think that in future years we will need a much tighter learning process between these emerging analytical debates about democratic resilience, on the one hand, and the design of better resilience strategies by the EU and other actors, on the other. There is some overlap and some progress, but it is still quite limited. Even though much of the policy focus will continue to be on dealing with ongoing trends in authoritarianism, there will also need to be, in parallel, a more systematic focus on democratic resilience.
Rebuilding Democracy Is Far Harder Than Dismantling It
Israelis protest in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu’s Judicial Coup in Israel. Photo: Avivi Aharon.
Your research identifies patterns in democratic recoveries (Brazil, Poland, Zambia, Senegal). What distinguishes successful “recovery trajectories” from cases where post-authoritarian openings stagnate or relapse? Which factors—elite coalitions, civil society autonomy, constitutional design—matter most?
Professor Richard Youngs: So you refer to a big report that we’ve just done, presenting a number of cases that seemed to offer a particular moment—an opportunity for democratic recovery. The sobering reality is that when these moments of democratic opportunity opened up, relatively few countries then experienced a truly far-reaching, definitive process of re-democratization. Most struggled to implement full democratic reforms, and there was often pushback against attempts to re-democratize. The whole challenge of re-democratization is extremely difficult, because it requires newly empowered democratic regimes to regain control of state institutions that have been captured by anti-democratic forces.
I don’t think there’s any single factor—because there have been so few cases of absolutely resounding success, it’s hard to isolate variables and say that democratic recovery really depends on A, B, or C. But we have noticed that, in general, where there is strong societal mobilization and pressure linked with reformers within the political sphere—through competitive political parties—and supportive institutional conditions, momentum toward democratic reform after sustained autocratization does seem to be stronger.
But I would also say that these cases of potential positive turnaround show us something important: it is much easier to undo democracy than to reassemble good-quality democratic norms. Rebuilding democracy is a very hard enterprise, and even governments with the strongest will in the world to redemocratize—institutionally and socially—often find this extraordinarily difficult to do.
Not All Illiberal Agendas Are Inherently Anti-Democratic
And lastly, Professor Youngs, your proposal for a European Democracy Pact aims to separate political-system norms from policy disputes. What would constitute a sufficiently rigorous and enforceable set of democratic red lines to test parties’ commitment to liberal pluralism without collapsing into moralism or partisan exclusion?
Professor Richard Youngs: That’s what needs to be defined. It’s very complicated, but what is needed is to prise apart the rather illiberal policy agendas of far-right parties in Europe—policies one may profoundly disagree with but that might not, in themselves, be inherently anti-democratic—from what are genuine threats to the core institutional norms of democracy. At the moment, those two things tend to get conflated. At one extreme, some argue that these parties are inherently and unavoidably anti-democratic. At the other, some claim they simply hold views liberals may dislike but pose no danger to democracy. The truth is probably somewhere between those extremes.
What is needed is a clear agenda outlining what constitutes anti-democratic behavior at the institutional level, separating the issue of illiberal social values on the one hand from the core practices of democratic politics on the other. There will inevitably be some grey areas in making this distinction. But what I suggested with the proposal for a democracy pact is an attempt to prise away certain conservative areas of rising conservatism—whose policies may be illiberal and objectionable—while still encouraging them to join in a shared commitment to core democratic norms.
Murphey, Helen L. (2025). “Civilizational Populism and Migration Diplomacy: Tunisia, the European Union, and Italy.”Journal of Populism Studies (JPS). November 23, 2025. https://doi.org/10.55271/JPS000121
Abstract
Civilizational populists prioritize territorial sovereignty in their approach to migration. In instances of North-South inequality, however, transit countries may be incentivized to accede to ideologically unpalatable agreements. To understand how these compromises are legitimized, this paper analyses Tunisia’s negotiations with the European Union following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding in July 2023 that laid the foundations for cooperation over irregular migration. The deal faced challenges on both the Tunisian and EU sides. Tunisian president Kais Saied, a civilizational populist, chafed at perceived EU paternalism and threats to Tunisia’s sovereignty. The deal was also controversial within the EU due to the Saied regime’s human rights violations, which led to further scrutiny of the Tunisian government’s migration management practices. This article finds that Italy’s mediation, spearheaded by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, was successful in addressing these tensions. By positioning Italy as separate from EU paternalism through a shared framework informed by civilizational populism, Saied could justify engaging in positive-sum diplomacy with the Meloni government and symbolically dispel perceptions of diplomatic asymmetry.
Keywords:migration, European Union, Tunisia, populist foreign policy, Italy
By Helen L. Murphey*
Introduction
In April 2024, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met with Tunisian President Kais Saied for the fourth time in a year. The visit was presented as a success: the two leaders vowed to deepen cooperation, notably over migration, based on the principle of mutual benefit (Gasteli & Kaval, 2024). This successful outcome followed a tumultuous negotiation period with the European Union over a joint approach to migration governance, as some European Union members drew attention to Tunisia’s human rights record, and Saied reiterated his refusal to act as Europe’s border patrol (Dahmani, 2024).
A closer examination of Italy’s role in facilitating EU-Tunisian cooperation over migration helps unpack how populists use foreign policy to preserve sovereignty and mount a symbolic defense of an embattled national identity. It is a truism that populists tend to pursue foreign policy programs that strengthen national sovereignty at the expense of greater long-term international cooperation. This pattern is particularly pronounced when authoritarian populists are driven by strong ethnonationalist concerns, resulting in a reticence to adopt policy positions that might benefit other nations or minority groups (Wajner et al., 2024: 1825). Many such ethnonationalist populist actors can be identified as civilizational populists (Morieson, 2023), a phenomenon referring to populists around the world who adopt a culturalized understanding of the ‘people’ as belonging to a civilizational heritage (Yilmaz & Morieson, 2022b). Such rhetoric allows for boundaries to be drawn between insiders and outsiders that imply a concern with race and demography while instead using the language of culture and civilizational continuity (Mandelc, 2025). This both draws on nationalist tropes while also transcending them through reference to a more grandiose imaginary (Brubaker, 2017: 1211).
For such actors, migration forms a particularly potent issue. Not only is it is seen to threaten the ‘purity’ of the nation or region’s people, but it also is typically associated with the priorities of elites and their neoliberal economic project (Stewart, 2020: 1210). Indeed, civilizational populists’ construction of the ‘elite’ presents them as “culturally deracinated” and antagonistic to cultural and national specificity, in Brubaker’s framing (Brubaker, 2017: 1192). Migration thus combines populism’s tendency to differentiate itself from both global elites and their ideology of cosmopolitanism, as well as the “dangerous” foreigners who are often linked to crime and disorder (Taguieff, 1997: 20). Meloni herself has referred to migration as part of a “globalist” project to render Italy more economically and culturally vulnerable by depriving its citizenry of their natural identities (Kington, 2022). Yet civilizational populism – and its connections to race, religion, and ethnicity – also helps illuminate the logic of why some migrants may be more accepted than others. For example, while the Meloni regime has been critical of policies allowing for the intake of Middle Eastern and African migrants and refugees, it has been more welcoming towards Ukrainians fleeing the conflict.
In Tunisia, the issue of migration has been particularly salient under the Saied regime. Tunisia has long been a country of departure for migrants seeking to reach Europe, a pattern which accelerated after the economic and political instability following the Arab Spring. Yet while in the past, most migrants transiting from Tunisia to Europe have been of Tunisian origin, since 2023 Tunisia has become the largest point of departure for sub-Saharan African migrants embarking for Europe (Abderrahim, 2024). This has introduced new dynamics, including growing racist and anti-sub-Saharan African sentiments, that have been intensified by European policy favoring the externalization of migration governance.
In referencing migration, Saied has used language typical of civilizational populism: he has presented mass sub-Saharan African migration as a demographic threat to Tunisian identity. Such rhetoric was civilizational rather than solely ethnonationalist: irregular migration, in his words, would transform Tunisia from a member of the Arab-Islamic community to “just another African country” (Al Jazeera, 2023). This statement drew on a long history of contestation within negotiations over Tunisia’s regional identity, as well as long-standing marginalization of the country’s Black population (Mzioudet, 2024). After Saied voiced these sentiments in an infamous and controversial speech, Tunisian police began escalating repression of migrants and punishing organizations that advocate on their behalf.
Yet in addressing this issue, the Saied regime has had to balance competing priorities, indicating the complex and shifting power dynamics constraining populists’ agency in the foreign policy arena. The EU has been willing to offer much-needed financial support in exchange for Tunisian cooperation over migration governance. This dependency makes it difficult for Saied to adopt a classic civilizational populist positioning, in which sovereignty is performed through pure oppositionality (Dudlak, 2025: 629). In effect, however, more interceptions of migrant crossings at sea have led to increasing numbers of sub-Saharan Africans stranded in Tunisia, unable to work or obtain housing due to stricter government policies and further inflaming tensions with Tunisian citizens.
This article analyses the tensions at work in EU-Tunisian migration negotiations and their resolution through Italian mediation. Through analyzing official statements, politicians’ interviews with the press, media coverage, and debates within the European Union from the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding in 2023 to the development of European-Tunisian migration partnership throughout 2024-2025, it traces the narratives advanced by proponents and antagonists of the MoU about migration within Tunisia, Italy, and the European Union. This allows for populism to be analyzed as both a strategy and ideology, builds on studies that similarly approach populism – and its links to securitized imaginaries – using a qualitative narrative analytical method centering intertextuality (Löfflmann, 2024).
This study offers theoretical insights linking populist foreign policy to ontological security. Ontological security suggests that states – as well as international bodies – strive for continuity of identity, even at the cost of instability in their foreign relations (Mitzen, 2006). Through analyzing the EU-Italy-Tunisia relationship, this article argues that Meloni’s intercession, fueled in part by shared civilizational populist values between Meloni and Saied, helped the Saied regime cooperate with Europe whilst avoiding the appearance of subservience to the European Union. In so doing, it preserved both the ontological security of the Saied regime and its prioritization of sovereignty, as well as that of the European Union, who could distance themselves from the human rights abuses attending the deal.
This article suggests that unequal power dynamics between the European Union and Tunisia – and between member states within the European Union – are essential in understanding the Saied regime’s seeming erraticism during migration negotiations. Consequently, it advances that bilateral relations between populists can be improved through symbolically differentiating themselves from multilateral institutions – which, in turn, can further empower populists on the global stage.
(*) Helen L. Murphey is a Post Doctoral Scholar at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University. She earned a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews in 2023, where she was a Carnegie PhD Scholar. She has previously held an appointment as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Whitman College. She is a Research Associate at the Institute of Middle East, Central Asia and Caucasus Studies at the University of St Andrews and an Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Religion at the Ohio State University. Her research interests include populism, conspiracy theories, religious social movements and migration. Email: murphey.27@osu.edu | ORCID: 0000-0002-1504-3818
In her sharp analysis of the COP30 summit, Dr. Heidi Hart,an environmental humanities researcher and guest instructor at Linnaeus University in Sweden, captures the surreal moment when an exhibition pavilion in Belém caught fire—an unsettling metaphor for a world already burning. Despite tense negotiations and an extra day of talks, petrostates secured a final text that completely omitted fossil fuels, leaving UN Secretary-General Guterres to warn of a widening gap between science and policy. Dr. Hart situates this failure within a shifting global landscape marked by illiberal regimes, climate denial, and powerful petro-interests. With geopolitical turmoil and corporate greenwashing shaping outcomes, her commentary underscores a stark truth: on a “spaceship” with finite resources, political paralysis is accelerating us toward irreversible tipping points.
The defining image of the COP30 climate summit flashed around the world: fire in an exhibition pavilion at the meeting site in Belém, Brazil, flames spreading up the tent’s walls and forcing evacuations. No one was injured beyond smoke inhalation, but the “world is on fire” adage took a literal turn as delegates wrestled to find consensus. The summit spilled over into an extra day, with a win for petrostates like Saudi Arabia, as the final agreement ceded more funding to at-risk countries but failed to include any language about fossil fuels.
On Saturday, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced a forthcoming “side-text” about fossil fuels and forest protections, also a hot topic among Indigenous protesters who had pressed into the secure COP “Blue Zone” on Friday evening. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ assessment after the summit was grim, despite acknowledging some progress on “adaptation” funds: “The gap between where we are and what science demands remains dangerously wide … The reality of overshoot is a stark warning: we are approaching dangerous and irreversible tipping points.” The lack of even a mention of fossil fuels in the final agreement, let alone the “deep, rapid emission cuts” Guterres acknowledges are necessary to keep the planet below overshoot carbon levels, is not just the result of Saudi and Russian delegates’ bully tactics (Al Gore has referred to the agreement as an “Opec text”) but also a symptom of profoundly shifting political realities around the world.
The notable absence of US delegates, while the Trump administration slashed environmental protections at home, was the source of relief for some at the summit but also pointed to the normalization of climate denial amid illiberal regimes’ growing influence and far-right pressures in green-aspirational countries like Germany. Even Norway, known for its own sustainable, egalitarian culture, has no plans to sacrifice its oil wealth for the larger planetary good. Meanwhile, costly wars and deep political divisions in countries like the US and Brazil distract from efforts to forge coherent climate policy. Finally, the sheer scale of petrostates’ and billionaire technocrats’ influence cannot be overstated in watering down and even – in this case – completely avoiding action on carbon emissions cuts. Bill Gates’ recent essay diminishing the dangers of climate emergency has not helped; though “civilization” will likely not be wiped out in a sci-fi doomsday scenario, the suffering of millions and the loss of innumerable nonhuman species are hardly points to be glossed over in the name of “innovation.” Neoliberal optimism sounds increasingly tone-deaf in a time when the limits of human progress are becoming palpably clear around the world.
The idea of “Spaceship Earth,” popularized by Buckminster Fuller in the late 1970s, portrays the planet as a closed system with limited resources. Though this idea has informed many efforts toward more sustainable living, greenwashing for the sake of profit has become the norm among large corporations. The comforts of petrocultures, the material, cultural, and economic manifestations of decades of cheap oil, are so embedded in privileged countries, there are limits, too, to how much individuals can do to shrink their carbon footprints.
On the political level, Saudi and Russian influence is only one part of the picture; lack of concern or climate denialism (often cast as denial of the human cause) is growing in countries like Indonesia, Mexico, India, and Australia, places where the risks from global heating are high. In the formerly stable if systemically inequitable US, the lurch toward anti-science authoritarianism has been so swift as to induce a kind of vertigo. In his recent book Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, Roy Scranton writes, “We can recognize the Earth as a closed system in which we all depend on each other, but the political reality within that system resembles gang warfare more than it does a unified crew,” (91). The deep lack of consensus at COP30, when the risks of climate collapse are clearer than ever, shows how much more difficult the problem is to address in today’s chaotic political landscape.
Nearly ten years ago, in her essay “What Is the Anthro-political?”, culture theorist Claire Colebrook engaged with the already contested Anthropocene term to argue that, in light of ecological destruction, “the political” as a norm can no longer be taken for granted. This provocative stance is worth revisiting today. Especially with the rise of populist tendencies that tap into human “affect and corporeality,” the political no longer appears as a regulating modality of human-being but rather as a contingent aspect of human culture that, once that culture destroys its own “milieu” or literal environment, will go down with it. In Colebrook’s more elegant terms, “What if what we know as politics … were possible only in a brief era of the taming of human history?” (115).
This geologic-scale perspective on last week’s pitting of the EU’s and other climate-sympathetic delegates against fossil-friendly regimes (with the absent US in the background noise) does not diminish the stakes at COP30 but shows how vast and planetary those stakes are. With our closed system threatening to burn beyond livable thresholds, the responsibility of one global gathering to stave off one local disaster after another becomes painfully clear.
In a penetrating interview with ECPS, Professor Barry Sullivan warns that “the separation of powers does not function as the Framers anticipated,” offering one of the starkest legal assessments yet of America’s constitutional crisis. Drawing on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, he argues that “the constitutional doctrine and the man have met the moment,” producing a presidency with “virtually total control, without suffering any consequences.” Sullivan traces this shift to a revival of a “Nixonian” view of executive authority—summarized in Nixon’s infamous claim, “If the President does it, it is not illegal.” Such developments, he cautions, create “enclaves of unaccountable power” and dramatically heighten the risk of democratic backsliding, especially amid polarized parties and eroding constitutional conventions.
In a wide-ranging and incisive interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Barry Sullivan—the Raymond and Mary Simon Chair in Constitutional Law and the George Anastaplo Professor of Constitutional Law and History at Loyola University—offers one of the most sobering legal assessments to date of the United States’ ongoing constitutional transformation. As he warns, “the separation of powers does not function as the Framers anticipated,” and the consequences for American democracy are profound.
Speaking against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Trump v. United States, Professor Sullivan argues that “the constitutional doctrine and the man have met the moment.” Over the last fifteen years, the Supreme Court has steadily expanded presidential authority, culminating in an immunity doctrine that grants the President “virtually total control, without suffering any consequences.” This shift, Professor Sullivan notes, aligns disturbingly well with Donald Trump’s populist narrative of a personalized leader whose will supersedes institutional constraint.
Calling this new jurisprudence a revival of a “Nixonian” conception of executive power, Professor Sullivan underscores the danger. If the Court has effectively embraced the claim that “if the President does it, it is not illegal,” then the risk of democratic backsliding—especially when paired with the pardon power—becomes “very great.” This combination, he stresses, allows a President not only to immunize himself but “in effect, to grant immunity to those whose efforts on his behalf he needs,” creating what constitutional theorists call enclaves of unaccountable authority.
Throughout the interview, Professor Sullivan situates these developments within broader populist dynamics: the weaponization of “retribution” narratives, the erosion of constitutional conventions, and the increasing collapse of the administrative state under a muscular unitary executive model. His warning is stark: under the Court’s interpretation, the President possesses “virtually unlimited power,” and recent behavior shows “there is nothing that is too great or too small to capture his imagination,” from foreign policy decisions to symbolic renovations of federal buildings.
Crucially, Professor Sullivan emphasizes that the Framers never anticipated the rise of disciplined, polarized political parties—developments that have hollowed out checks and balances. As he notes, the Founders “would be absolutely aghast” at how party alignment now disables Congress and the courts from restraining executive overreach.
Finally, Professor Sullivan stresses that reversing democratic backsliding will require not only judicial recalibration but also broader political and civic reform. The core problem, he argues, is “not a constitutional problem but a political problem” rooted in polarization, unified government, and the abandonment of institutional good faith.
This interview offers an essential window into how constitutional design, judicial interpretation, and populist leadership together shape the current crisis of American democracy.
In an interview with the ECPS, Professor Patricio Navia underscores a defining paradox of Chile’s 2025 election: “Chileans ended up voting for two radical candidates in the first round, but they want them to govern as moderates.” He stresses that the apparent right-wing surge is less ideological than punitive, describing the first round as “a punishment vote against the left-wing ruling party.” Professor Navia highlights how insecurity reshaped the campaign, noting that the right “successfully turned the migration issue into an issue of insecurity and crime,” yet simultaneously embraced moderate positions on social rights. While Kast’s discourse may appear Trumpian, Professor Navia cautions that “Trump is a protectionist; Kast is a free-market advocate.” Ultimately, he argues, Chileans remain centrist in expectations: “They expect those candidates to govern as moderates.”
In a wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Patricio Navia — Full Professor of Liberal Studies and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University — offers a penetrating analysis of Chile’s 2025 presidential election, an election defined, paradoxically, by radical electoral choices and enduring moderate expectations. As Professor Navia succinctly puts it, “Chileans ended up voting for two radical candidates in the first round, but they want them to govern as moderates.” This apparent contradiction lies at the heart of his interpretation of Chile’s shifting political dynamics, voter psychology, and institutional constraints.
Professor Navia begins by challenging simplified readings of the first-round results. While over 70% of voters opted for right-wing presidential candidates, he warns that this does not signal a deep ideological realignment. Rather, it reflects what he calls “a punishment vote against the left-wing ruling party,” noting that legislative voting patterns remained more balanced. This reflects a chronic feature of Chilean politics: electorates punish incumbents but do not necessarily embrace the ideological alternatives they vote for.
A central axis of Professor Navia’s argument is the politicization of insecurity. The right has, in his words, “successfully turned the migration issue into an issue of insecurity and crime,” capitalizing on fears that have intensified alongside Chile’s unprecedented migration influx. Yet even here, the story is not one of unbounded radicalization. Professor Navia notes that right-wing candidates simultaneously “promised to keep the social rights and the growing welfare system” and signaled restraint on moral issues—evidence of a moderated right adapting to a centrist electorate.
In discussing José Antonio Kast’s rise, Professor Navia cautions against superficial comparisons to Donald Trump. “Trump is a protectionist; Kast is a free-market advocate,” he argues, stressing both the distinct historical context of Chilean immigration and the ways Kast has fused crime-control narratives with nativist appeals. Still, he highlights the limits of this strategy: policy promises such as deporting large numbers of undocumented migrants are unrealistic and risk generating “discontent against this government that promised easy solutions.”
Crucially, Professor Navia emphasizes the resilience of Chile’s institutions. Despite concerns about authoritarian drift, he argues that “Congress will curtail the president significantly,” given its growing assertiveness and Kast’s lack of a congressional majority. For that reason, he sees no scenario in which Kast successfully expands executive power or revives Pinochet-era nostalgia: “If he says Pinochet was good, then he’s going to lose popular support.”
Ultimately, Professor Navia’s analysis underscores the stability of Chile’s political center—less visible electorally, but palpable in voter expectations. Voters may choose radicals, he argues, but “they expect those candidates to govern as moderates.” This tension will shape not only a Kast administration but the trajectory of Chilean politics in the years ahead.
In this incisive interview for the ECPS, Professor Axel Klein offers a nuanced assessment of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s ideological profile. While her blend of nationalism, anti-feminism, and strong-leader rhetoric has led some observers to categorize her as a populist, Professor Klein cautions against this simplification. As he notes, “nationalism and anti-feminism… are trademarks of a conservative or right-wing politician, but they are not necessarily populist phenomena per se.” Instead, he situates PM Takaichi within Japan’s broader political culture—one shaped by nostalgia, stability-seeking voters, and the enduring dominance of the LDP—arguing that her conservatism reflects continuity more than populist rupture.
Sanae Takaichi’s rise to the premiership marks one of the most significant ideological shifts in Japanese politics in recent decades. Her ascent has sparked debates not only within Japan but also among scholars of comparative populism who are examining whether her blend of nationalism, anti-feminism, and assertive leadership constitutes a new populist moment in East Asia. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Axel Klein— Professor for Social Sciences of East Asia / Japanese Politics at Institute of East Asian Studies and Faculty of Social Science, University of Duisburg-Essen and one of Europe’s leading specialists on Japanese politics and populism—offers a nuanced interpretation of her leadership style and ideological positioning.
Reflecting on the definitional complexities of populism, Professor Klein begins by cautioning against the automatic classification of PM Takaichi as a populist merely because she deploys rhetoric familiar from global right-wing movements. As he notes, “I think you would find it difficult to label her a populist… nationalism and anti-feminism… are trademarks of a conservative or right-wing politician, but they are not necessarily populist phenomena per se.” This observation forms the conceptual backbone of the interview. It foregrounds a tension between PM Takaichi’s affective, backward-looking appeals and the analytical criteria political scientists typically use to identify populist actors.
Several sections of the interview explore the symbolic and strategic dimensions of her conservatism. PM Takaichi’s frequent invocation of Margaret Thatcher, for instance, is not simply an ideological alignment but part of a deliberate performance of decisiveness and moral clarity. Professor Klein situates this “Thatcherian” posture within Japan’s evolving political culture, noting that a significant segment of the electorate has come to desire a strong, assertive leader capable of cutting through bureaucratic inertia. Her rejection of feminist policy is similarly framed as part of a broader moral and nostalgic project rather than a carefully structured ideological program.
The interview further scrutinizes PM Takaichi’s positioning in domestic and international contexts: her recourse to economic protectionism toward China, her appeal to Japan’s aging conservative base, and her relationship to emergent right-wing actors such as Sanseito. Professor Klein’s long-term analysis of Japanese democratic institutions raises critical questions about whether her brand of conservative moralism represents a stabilizing force or a potential risk for democratic quality. While Japan’s electoral patterns and party system differ markedly from Western cases of democratic backsliding, Professor Klein argues that structural conservatism, low youth engagement, and a dominant-party landscape may create conditions in which moralizing politics can flourish without substantial opposition.
Taken together, the interview provides an analytically rich and contextually grounded assessment of PM Takaichi’s leadership, situating her not as a straightforward populist but as a figure whose political significance lies in the interplay between nostalgia, nationalism, and Japan’s institutional continuity.
In a penetrating interview with ECPS, Professor Barry Sullivan warns that “the separation of powers does not function as the Framers anticipated,” offering one of the starkest legal assessments yet of America’s constitutional crisis. Drawing on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, he argues that “the constitutional doctrine and the man have met the moment,” producing a presidency with “virtually total control, without suffering any consequences.” Sullivan traces this shift to a revival of a “Nixonian” view of executive authority—summarized in Nixon’s infamous claim, “If the President does it, it is not illegal.” Such developments, he cautions, create “enclaves of unaccountable power” and dramatically heighten the risk of democratic backsliding, especially amid polarized parties and eroding constitutional conventions.
In a wide-ranging and incisive interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Barry Sullivan—the Raymond and Mary Simon Chair in Constitutional Law and the George Anastaplo Professor of Constitutional Law and History at Loyola University—offers one of the most sobering legal assessments to date of the United States’ ongoing constitutional transformation. As he warns, “the separation of powers does not function as the Framers anticipated,” and the consequences for American democracy are profound.
Speaking against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Trump v. United States, Professor Sullivan argues that “the constitutional doctrine and the man have met the moment.” Over the last fifteen years, the Supreme Court has steadily expanded presidential authority, culminating in an immunity doctrine that grants the President “virtually total control, without suffering any consequences.” This shift, Professor Sullivan notes, aligns disturbingly well with Donald Trump’s populist narrative of a personalized leader whose will supersedes institutional constraint.
Calling this new jurisprudence a revival of a “Nixonian” conception of executive power, Professor Sullivan underscores the danger. If the Court has effectively embraced the claim that “if the President does it, it is not illegal,” then the risk of democratic backsliding—especially when paired with the pardon power—becomes “very great.” This combination, he stresses, allows a President not only to immunize himself but “in effect, to grant immunity to those whose efforts on his behalf he needs,” creating what constitutional theorists call enclaves of unaccountable authority.
Throughout the interview, Professor Sullivan situates these developments within broader populist dynamics: the weaponization of “retribution” narratives, the erosion of constitutional conventions, and the increasing collapse of the administrative state under a muscular unitary executive model. His warning is stark: under the Court’s interpretation, the President possesses “virtually unlimited power,” and recent behavior shows “there is nothing that is too great or too small to capture his imagination,” from foreign policy decisions to symbolic renovations of federal buildings.
Crucially, Professor Sullivan emphasizes that the Framers never anticipated the rise of disciplined, polarized political parties—developments that have hollowed out checks and balances. As he notes, the Founders “would be absolutely aghast” at how party alignment now disables Congress and the courts from restraining executive overreach.
Finally, Professor Sullivan stresses that reversing democratic backsliding will require not only judicial recalibration but also broader political and civic reform. The core problem, he argues, is “not a constitutional problem but a political problem” rooted in polarization, unified government, and the abandonment of institutional good faith.
This interview offers an essential window into how constitutional design, judicial interpretation, and populist leadership together shape the current crisis of American democracy.
Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Barry Sullivan, slightly revised for clarity and flow.
This Is Not How the Framers Envisioned Executive Power
Frontal view of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 2024. Photo: Gualberto Becerra P.
Professor Barry Sullivan, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: In “Trump’s Court, Nixon’s Constitution,” you argue that the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling represents a profound judicial reimagining of the presidency. How does this expanding conception of presidential immunity—articulated inTrump v. United States—intersect with Donald Trump’s populist vision of a personalized, extra-legal leader whose “will” is portrayed as overriding institutional and constitutional constraints?
Professor Barry Sullivan: I think that the constitutional doctrine and the man have met the moment. For the last 15 years, the Supreme Court has been expanding the constitutional power of the presidency vis-à-vis the other branches of government. And with the immunity the President now has, along with the power to pardon those who assist him in the work of government—even if they commit crimes on his behalf—he has virtually total control without suffering any consequences.
The expansion of executive power has been justified, in part, by the idea that the primary check on the President is Congress’s impeachment power. But if we consider the current situation, where both of the politically accountable branches of government are in the hands of the same party—and where that party is tightly structured, not a broad ideological tent but one very much aligned with the President—then the President effectively has near-total control. The separation of powers simply does not function as the Framers anticipated.
So, given the proclivities of the President and the latitude the Court has now provided, the President possesses extraordinarily broad powers at this moment.
Trump Now Holds Power Nixon Could Only Claim
To what extent does the Court’s new approach to presidential immunity signal a structural shift toward what you describe as a “Nixonian” theory of constitutional authority, and how might that shift accelerate democratic backsliding in the US?
Professor Barry Sullivan: The Nixonian theory of the presidency was articulated by President Nixon at the time of Watergate, when he instructed his lawyer, who was arguing in the Supreme Court on his behalf, to tell the Court that the President of the United States had all the power of Louis XIV, except for four years at a time. In other words, there was no check on the President except re-election. He further stated, after he left the presidency, in an interview with David Frost, that if the President does it, it is not illegal—meaning it is legal simply because the President does it.
So, if I’m correct that the decision in Trump v. United States gives the President power similar to the power that Nixon claimed—which I believe it does—then the opportunity for democratic backsliding is very great. And when you combine the President’s very broad powers with the pardon power—which allows him not only to be immune himself but, in effect, to grant immunity to those whose efforts on his behalf he needs in order to do what he wants to do—the risks become even more significant.
Populist leaders often frame legal accountability as partisan persecution. How do judicially expanded immunity doctrines reshape the balance between democratic legitimacy and the rule of law—especially in the face of populist claims to majoritarian or plebiscitary authority?
Professor Barry Sullivan: That’s an interesting question. I think that the President—speaking in terms of populism—repeatedly used the expression in his last campaign for the presidency, “I am your justice, I am your retribution.” And he didn’t say retribution for what or against whom, but I think it was pretty clear that he was suggesting that he had been persecuted during the four years he was out of office, and that he had been persecuted on behalf of his supporters. So, when he returned to power in January of this year, one of the first things he did was to pardon all the people who had been involved in the January 6th invasion of the Capitol.
The Framers Would Be Absolutely Aghast
Mount Rushmore National Memorial featuring Roosevelt, Jefferson, and George Washington — the Founding Fathers carved in granite. Photo: Dreamstime.
Does the Court’s emerging immunity jurisprudence risk creating what constitutional theorists describe as “enclaves of unaccountable power?” In your view, how would the Framers—particularly those most concerned about executive aggrandizement, such as Madison and Wilson—have understood a doctrine that shields a president from criminal liability for “official acts”?
Professor Barry Sullivan: This opinion—unless it is substantially narrowed in the future by the Court, which of course is possible—but as it stands now, does create an enclave of unaccountable power. We’ve seen the use of that power in many ways over the last, well, almost a year now.
What would the Framers have thought of it? I think the Framers would be absolutely aghast that the constitutional structure they created was susceptible to this kind of democratic—or Republican, they would say—erosion. The Framers put a great deal of faith in the structure of government: the separation of powers and the checks and balances they built in. And we’ve seen that those checks and balances don’t work in the way they anticipated.
One thing the Framers did not foresee, of course, was the rise of political parties. They thought that political parties—standing parties, not just temporary coalitions of interests—were a bad thing, and that the United States could function without them. That turned out to be wrong. By the end of President Washington’s time in office, political parties had already begun to form.
Over time, parties became more ideologically coherent—really in the last 40 or 50 years—so that you no longer had a broad range of views within the Democratic or Republican parties. The parties became more unitary, in a sense. I think this is something the Founders didn’t anticipate and—if they were around today—would want to address, because the development of strong, ideologically unified parties means the system of checks and balances and the separation of powers simply doesn’t work the way they intended it to.
Independent Agencies No Longer Independent
Your work on“Expert Knowledge, Democratic Accountability, and the Unitary Executive”highlights tensions between technocratic governance and populist distrust of expertise. How does the Court’s embrace of a muscular unitary executive model empower populist presidents to override scientific, technical, or bureaucratic judgment?
Professor Barry Sullivan: I think it does, in the sense that the unitary executive theory—as the Court has interpreted it—means that the President has absolute control over the executive branch. Moreover, the President must have control over all those who exercise executive power in some sense. So, if we assume, as I think we should, that independent agencies exercise executive power in some sense, then the President has the power to overrule whatever an independent agency decides.
We created independent agencies—and they’ve been around since the beginning of the Republic, although they became more important in the 20th century, especially with the New Deal—because we thought there were some areas of governance that shouldn’t be totally dependent on the political will of the President.
To the extent that the Court has now said the President should have power over these agencies—and we’ll probably see before the end of this term how far the Court will go, because there are a couple of pending cases about the President’s removal power over members of these agencies—the President has the ability to dictate what independent agencies or departments of government do, down to the smallest detail. And that is a problem for scientific and other forms of expertise.
We saw in the first Trump administration—and I detailed this in that article—that the weekly morbidity and mortality report the government publishes, which has long been considered the gold standard for reporting on health in the United States and was largely immune from political oversight, had been the domain of medical scientists. During the pandemic, however, non-scientifically trained people were given the opportunity to edit that report, not to reflect the latest scientific evidence but to mirror the President’s political strategy and political interests. And if the Court is truly going to say that the President has that power, then that’s very dangerous for the credibility of supposedly expert determinations by the government.
Policy Was Sold as Science And That Undermined Trust
Coronavirus pandemic in the United States — New Yorkers on the streets of NYC. Photo: Dreamstime.
During the pandemic, you emphasize failures not only of political leadership but also of scientific bureaucracy. How do these failures complicate the conventional narrative that populist erosion is purely anti-expert, and what constitutional reforms might restore calibrated relationships between science and law?
Professor Barry Sullivan: During the pandemic, there were policy determinations that were made by medical experts, but the reasons for some of those determinations—or the real reasons—were not made public. For example, there was a determination by the government that people shouldn’t wear masks at the beginning of the pandemic. It turned out that this really wasn’t based on scientific evidence; it was based on the fact that there weren’t enough masks to go around. The medical authorities decided that priority should be given to medical personnel. So, in a sense, maybe that was the right decision from a policy point of view, but we were being told that it was a medical determination, not a policy determination.
I think those kinds of situations reflected badly on the scientists involved. And these questions of what proper policy is and what is good science, to a large extent, overlap. We have to be told to what extent one or the other is being relied on. I think that’s important. I’m not sure that it is, by itself, a constitutional problem, but it is certainly a legal and administrative law problem—making sure that we separate those things to the extent that they can be separated.
Not Just Law but Good Faith: What’s Disappearing in American Governance
In the landscape of democratic backsliding, how does the Supreme Court’s revival of the unitary executive—combined with skepticism toward independent agencies—reshape the administrative state’s ability to resist authoritarian tendencies?
Professor Barry Sullivan: That’s a wonderful question. I would add to that picture, or to the hypothetical, the fact that the separation of powers between the executive and the legislative branches also is not working.
But the unitary executive, combined with skepticism about administrative or independent agencies, certainly has an impact on the government’s overall ability to withstand authoritarian tendencies. Under the unitary executive theory, the President has virtually unlimited power. And this President has demonstrated an incredible amount of energy. There is nothing that is too great or too small to capture his imagination—whether it is deciding that we need to go to war, in effect, against Venezuela; subsidizing the friendly government in Argentina; painting the Executive Office Building white because he doesn’t like the natural gray color of the stone; or tearing down the East Wing of the White House. There’s virtually nothing to stop him.
Moreover, I would add to that the erosion we’ve seen in what I would call constitutional conventions—not necessarily law, at least in the sense of hard law, but soft law. The idea that there are some things the President could legally do but that would not be within the spirit of the law. I liken constitutional conventions to the ligaments and muscles that propel us, in addition to bones. We can’t run with bones alone; we need these other things. And just as the rule of law doesn’t depend exclusively on law, it also depends on a spirit of good faith and fair dealing that characterizes the relationships among the branches of government.
When Transparency Fails, Authoritarianism Flourishes
US President Donald Trump speaks at a White House press briefing after a Black Hawk helicopter collided with American Airlines Flight 5342 near DCA Airport in Washington on January 30, 2025. Photo: Joshua Sukoff.
Drawing on“Executive Secrecy,” how do secrecy practices, especially when coupled with expanded presidential immunity, contribute to the erosion of public accountability and provide fertile ground for authoritarian-style governance?
Professor Barry Sullivan: I’ve written extensively on the need in a democratic society for access to government information. I think that access to government information is absolutely critical to any kind of citizenship, or citizen oversight of government.
I gave a lecture a couple of years ago in Bayreuth, and I put up on the board a drawing of the three branches of government—each in its own little box—and then I drew a big box around those three boxes. The big box was meant to represent the people. It’s ultimately the people who have responsibility for government. Without information, the people cannot monitor the government in the way that Madison, in particular, anticipated they would and should in order to sustain a democratic government.
Populist leaders frequently weaponize secrecy, disinformation, and institutional opacity. How should courts conceptualize transparency obligations in an era where executive power is increasingly asserted as a personal mandate rather than an institutional responsibility?
Professor Barry Sullivan: As a general principle, the courts have to insist that executive power must be exercised as an instrument of institutional responsibility rather than as a personal mandate. I think that is one of the essential duties of a constitutional court in a constitutional system: to maintain—or to ensure—that the government acts truthfully and does not wield executive power for personal purposes or personal benefit, but rather fulfills its institutional responsibilities.
Opaque Courts Feed Populist Distrust
In “The Supreme Court and the People,” you stress the Court’s communication failures. How does the persistence of opaque, fractured, and elite-oriented judicial writing exacerbate the populist narrative that courts are disconnected from “the people,” and what risks does this pose for judicial legitimacy?
Professor Barry Sullivan: In that article, my co-author and I compared the way in which the Supreme Court of the United States communicates its decisions to the public. And the article is a little dated at this point because, in addition to what we perceived as the Court’s problems at the time—namely that it didn’t provide meaningful press access or user-friendly summaries of its opinions—we’ve also seen, in the last year or so, the Court increasingly issue decisions in emergency situations without the normal process of adjudication: without extensive briefing, without time for deliberation, and often without any explanation at all. I think this shift toward deciding many important issues in such a summary way—with the justices given little opportunity to do anything other than rely on their predispositions—is problematic from the standpoint of judicial legitimacy.
Justice Robert Jackson, one of the great justices of the Court and the lead US prosecutor at Nuremberg after the Second World War, once said that the door you enter by often determines the door you leave by. In other words, if judges bring certain predispositions into a case, those predispositions often shape the outcome unless a robust adjudicative process intervenes. The normal process of adjudication does everything possible to counteract that tendency. But when judges must decide cases based on very little briefing, a thin record, minimal deliberation, and limited discussion among the justices about what the outcome should be and why, then the likelihood increases that the door you enter by will indeed be the door you exit by.
Canada and Germany Show How Courts Can Reconnect with the Public
Given comparative examples such as Canada or Germany, how might improved judicial communication practices help inoculate the Court against populist attacks that portray it as unaccountable or politically captured?
Professor Barry Sullivan: I think this goes back to my last answer about the way in which the Court has started to decide really important questions summarily. But in addition to that, these other courts have taken steps with respect to the ordinary docket—the ordinary cases—to make sure that the people are given the means to understand what the Court has decided and why. For example, in Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada has created a position, usually held by a law professor, who is available to speak with the press on the day decisions are issued, to advise them about the meaning of the decisions, and to answer their questions.
Moreover, in Germany, there is a similar procedure—a lockup—where reporters who follow the Court are given the opportunity to review the opinion before it is officially released, so that they can be more mindful in the way they discuss it for the public. I think there is a recognition in both Canada and Germany that the press has an important role to play, because most people learn about Supreme Court decisions not from reading the decisions themselves but from reading what reporters say about them.
So, it isn’t just the length or complexity of the opinion. In Germany, the opinions are perhaps even more complex and lengthy than in the US, but other mechanisms exist to provide information to the public about the significance, importance, and meaning of the opinion.
Reversing Backsliding Requires Fixing Congress, Not Just the Court
And lastly, Professor Sullivan, across your writings, there is a through-line stressing how institutional arrangements can unwittingly facilitate populist or authoritarian trajectories. What combination of judicial, legislative, and civic reforms do you believe is most essential for reversing democratic backsliding in the US, particularly in a context where the Court itself is increasingly central to the transformation?
Professor Barry Sullivan: Obviously, a difficult situation. Given the fact that, as you say, the Court has been central to the creation of the problem through this unitary executive theory, I’m not sure how much hope we should hold out that the Court is going to back off of the unitary executive theory. And it’s really a product of the last 20 years. It’s a product of the Roberts Court.
The unitary executive theory really came into prominence during the Reagan administration. Obviously, the seeds of it were sown in the Nixon years because of Nixon’s views of the power of the President. But as a constitutional theory, it really came into its own during the Reagan administration, and Attorney General Meese, in particular, furthered this theory.
I don’t think it is really based in the founding; I think it is principally based in the reaction that some people in government had to the reform measures introduced to limit executive power after the Nixon–Watergate scandal. And virtually from the time of the Ford administration—Ford was Nixon’s last vice president and succeeded to the presidency when Nixon resigned—President Ford kept on many of Nixon’s advisors during his term in office. Many of those advisors, from the beginning, thought that Congress was taking too much power away from the President.
So, this unitary executive theory saw its genesis then and really came into its own in the Reagan administration. But it did not capture the imagination of the Court as late as 1988, in a case called Morrison v. Olson, where the unitary executive theory was being advanced as a way of concentrating power in the presidency. The Court rejected it. There was only one vote in favor of the unitary executive theory, and that was Justice Scalia, who was one of the people in the Ford administration who thought that Congress had gone too far in reforming the presidency.
But once Justice Roberts became Chief Justice, and a group of people joined the Court—Justice Alito, for example, and Justice Thomas—who were very influenced by that theory as young lawyers, we see by this year a complete turnaround on the Court, so that what was essentially a marginal theory in 1988 has now become the majority theory.
As I say, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for the Court changing its mind about that in the near future. Clearly, if we had a Democratic president, and that president made nominations to the Court, perhaps that theory wouldn’t be quite so popular in the Court.
I think the real problem is not a constitutional problem but a political problem: having a unified government, and the separation of powers not working the way the Framers intended because political parties have become extremely polarized. Members of Congress are putting party affiliation above all other affiliations in terms of their governmental duties. And until we can have a more balanced Congress, I think we’re not going to see a lot of progress.
Now, one thing that we need to talk about before we end is the fact that President Trump has managed to persuade people that he won by a landslide. In fact, he won with less than 50% of the vote. Yet, he has been acting as if he did win in a landslide. And, in a sense, he did—but only because he controls Congress as well as the presidency.
In a compelling interview with ECPS, Professor Jan Kubik challenges one of the most persistent assumptions about Central and Eastern Europe: that right-wing populism is primarily a legacy of communism. Instead, he argues, its roots lie in far older social hierarchies. “Many people say populists are stronger in East-Central Europe because of communism. I think that misses the point. It is much deeper. It is actual feudalism… long before communism,” he explains. Professor Kubik outlines how these deep-seated structures—traditional authority patterns, weak middle classes, and historically delayed modernization—interact with neo-traditionalist narratives deployed by parties like PiS and Fidesz. The result, he warns, is a durable populist ecosystem requiring both organic civic renewal and, potentially, a dramatic institutional reset.
In this wide-ranging and analytically rich conversation, Distinguished Professor Jan Kubik—a leading scholar of political anthropology and Central and Eastern European (CEE) politics—offers a profound rethinking of the foundations of right-wing populism in the region. Drawing on insights from two major European Commission–funded projects, FATIGUE and POPREBEL, Professor Kubik challenges one of the most enduring explanations for the region’s democratic backsliding: the legacy of communism. Instead, he underscores that the roots run far deeper. As he succinctly puts it, “Many people say populists are stronger in East-Central Europe because of communism. I think that misses the point. It is much deeper. It is actual feudalism, in a sense, and the structural composition of these societies… which started forming long before communism.”
The interview traces how this neo-feudal inheritance—characterized by hierarchical authority structures, traditionalist cultural norms, and weakly developed middle classes—interacts with the neo-traditionalist narratives mobilized by contemporary right-wing populists. Professor Kubik describes neo-traditionalism as a deliberate attempt to revive or manufacture tradition, often through cultural engineering, to legitimize a new political–economic order. In this context, parties like Fidesz and PiS sacralize national identity through education, religion, heritage, and memory politics, exploiting societies in which, as he notes, “authority is… male-chauvinistic… and that person simply belongs there… because this is how it is.” These deeply rooted cultural logics, he argues, help explain why symbolic interventions resonate so powerfully in Poland and Hungary, but far less in an urbanized and secularized Czech Republic.
Professor Kubik also provides conceptual clarity on the interdependence of political and economic power in right-wing populist regimes. POPREBEL identifies a “neo-feudal” regime type marked by weak business actors, strong political actors, and legitimation through neo-traditionalist, anti-market narratives. Programs such as Poland’s 500+—which “dramatically reduced childhood poverty”—are not merely economic interventions but cultural–political tools for consolidating authority.
A significant part of the interview concerns the durability of these systems. Professor Kubik warns that entrenched cultural substructures and polarized value systems make right-wing populism unusually resilient. This resilience is reinforced institutionally through the capture of courts, media, and cultural institutions—producing distinct patterns in Poland, Hungary, and Czechia.
Finally, the interview concludes with a discussion of democratic renewal. Professor Kubik’s twin proposal combines “organic, society-wide work”—especially civic education from an early age—with, on the other hand, “a dramatic institutional reset.” While the latter may sound radical, he argues that moments of deep crisis sometimes require systemic reinvention, citing Charles de Gaulle’s 1958 constitutional overhaul as precedent.
Taken together, Professor Kubik’s insights offer a compelling and ambitious reframing of populism in CEE—not as a post-communist aberration, but as a twenty-first-century expression of far older structural legacies.
