Professor Richard Youngs is a Senior Fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at Carnegie Europe and Professor of International Relations at the University of Warwick.

Professor Youngs: We Are in an Interregnum Between the Liberal Global Order and Whatever Comes Next

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeInterviews

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.”

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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,” Professor Youngs 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.

Defensive Democracy Risks Becoming Technocratic Securitization

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.

The President of Tunisia, Kais Saied at the press conference with new Libyan Presidential Council head, Mohamed MenfiTripoli, Libya 17 March 2021

Civilizational Populism and Migration Diplomacy: Tunisia, the European Union, and Italy 

by ArticlesEditor’s ChoiceHomeHuman RightsJournal of Populism StudiesMigration

Please cite as:

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

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Photo: Dreamstime.

COP30: The Spaceship Is on Fire

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHome

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.

By Heidi Hart

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. 

Barry Sullivan

Professor Sullivan: The Separation of Powers in the US Does Not Function as the Framers Anticipated

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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. 

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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.

Patricio Navia

Professor Navia: Chileans Vote For Radicals, but Expect Moderate Governance

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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.”

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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.

 

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Patricio Navia, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Axel Klein

Prof. Klein: It Is Difficult to Label Japanese PM Takaichi a Populist, Despite Her Nationalism and Anti-Feminism

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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.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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.

 

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Axel Klein, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Professor Barry Sullivan is the Raymond and Mary Simon Chair in Constitutional Law and the George Anastaplo Professor of Constitutional Law and History at Loyola University.

Professor Sullivan: The Separation of Powers in the US Does Not Function as the Framers Anticipated

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeInterviews

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. 

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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 in Trump 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

Trump supporters marched toward Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., USA. Photo: Dreamstime / © Bgrocker

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.

Jan Kubik

Professor Kubik: Populism in CEE Is Rooted in Deep Feudal Structures Rather Than in the Communist Past

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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.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Jan Kubik, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

DamonLinker

Dr. Linker: Trump Is the Worst Possible Example of a Right-wing Populist

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In this interview for the ECPS, Dr. Damon Linker delivers a stark assessment of Trumpism’s place in the global surge of right-wing populism. Dr. Linker argues that Donald Trump is “the worst possible example of a right-wing populist,” not only for his ideological extremism but for a uniquely volatile mix of narcissism, vindictiveness, and disregard for constitutional limits. Central to his warning is Trump’s assault on what he calls the democratic “middle layer”—the professional civil servants who “act as a layer of defense” against executive tyranny. By “uniting the bottom and the top to crush that middle layer,” Dr. Linker contends, Trumpism pushes the United States toward an authoritarian model unprecedented in its modern political history.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Damon Linker—Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Senior Fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, columnist, and author of The Theocons and The Religious Test—offers one of the clearest and most sobering analyses of Trumpism’s evolving place within the global wave of right-wing populism. Across the conversation, Dr. Linker advances a central contention: Donald Trump is “the worst possible example of a right-wing populist,” not only because of ideological extremism but because of a personally distinctive mix of narcissism, vindictiveness, and strategic opportunism that intensifies the authoritarian tendencies inherent in contemporary populist governance.

A recurring theme in the interview—and the one that speaks most directly to the headline—is Dr. Linker’s argument that Trumpism seeks to eliminate what he calls the “middle layer” of democratic states. In his formulation, liberal democracies depend on “informed, intelligent, educated… people in that middle layer of the state” who carry out laws, uphold norms, and prevent the executive from “acting like a tyrant.” Trump, by contrast, “tries to unite the bottom and the top in an effort to crush that middle layer—leaving only ‘the people’ and the strongman running the country.” This dynamic, Dr. Linker warns, places the United States closer to the logic of authoritarian rule than at any point in the modern era.

The interview situates Trumpism within both historical cycles and global patterns. Dr. Linker argues that the Republican Party is returning to an older “rejectionist” impulse rooted in its reaction to the New Deal. Yet Trump’s version is more expansive and more radical, because what the right now seeks to overturn is far larger: the post-war regulatory, administrative, and cultural state. At the same time, Dr. Linker stresses that while Trumpism shares features with “authoritarian populism” abroad, Trump himself stands out for being “personally irresponsible… rage-fueled… corrupt… [and] willing to use state power… to hurt his enemies and help his friends.”

The interview also maps the institutional consequences of this project. Dr. Linker shows how Trumpism simultaneously directs bottom-up grievance and top-down coercion to pressure universities, law firms, media, bureaucratic agencies, and cultural institutions. Some actors, he notes, resist, while others “capitulate” under threat of political or financial retaliation. The overall pattern reveals an increasingly fragmented institutional landscape marked by selective vulnerability rather than systemic resilience.

Finally, Dr. Linker reflects on the future of American party politics. If Democrats cannot adapt—by embracing a modestly populist reformism and distancing themselves from the “old, discredited establishment”—they risk long-term marginalization. Yet he remains cautiously optimistic: “As long as we have free and fair elections… my very strong suspicion is [the Democrats] will win again. We just have to be a little patient about it.”

This interview thus offers a penetrating, historically informed account of Trumpism as both a symptom and accelerant of democratic decay in the US—and a warning about what may come next.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Dr. Damon Linker, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Polling officials open ballot boxes and begin counting votes during the November 19, 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections in Chillán, Chile. Photo: Marcelo Vildósola Garrigó.

Professor Navia: Chileans Vote For Radicals, but Expect Moderate Governance

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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.”

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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.

Professor Patricio Navia is a Full Professor of Liberal Studies and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Patricio Navia, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Punishment Vote, Not Ideological Shift

Professor Patricio Navia, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: Given that the combined vote for right-wing candidates exceeded 70% in the first round, how do you analyze the process of vote consolidation behind José Antonio Kast in the runoff, and what does this transference suggest about the strategic flexibility and ideological cohesion of the right-wing bloc in Chile’s two-round system?

Professor Patricio Navia: If we look at the presidential election, there is clearly a punishment vote against the left-wing ruling party or ruling coalition government of President Gabriel Boric. And if we look at the legislative election results, we see that candidates from left-wing parties performed better than the presidential candidates of the same coalition. So, while it is true that 70% of voters in the presidential election supported a right-wing candidate, the picture is more nuanced in the legislative vote, where left-wing candidates did better. This suggests that many voters chose a left-wing legislative candidate and a centrist or right-wing presidential candidate. Now, among the right-wing presidential contenders, only three explicitly defined themselves as right-wing. But there was another candidate, Franco Parisi, who ended up in third place. He campaigned as an opposition figure but also actively criticized the right-wing candidates. He attempted to position himself as a centrist opposition alternative. So, in that sense, I would qualify the idea that right-wing candidates collectively received 70% of the vote.

Crime Politics Eclipse Social Rights

Your work has explored the powerful role of the perception of insecurity on vote choice. To what extent has the political salience of crime and immigration, which the far right has successfully framed as a crisis, fundamentally eclipsed the progressive, social-rights agenda that characterized the recent elections and the ‘estallido social’?

Professor Patricio Navia: The right tends to do better whenever the main issue is insecurity and crime, and the right has successfully turned the migration issue into an issue of insecurity and crime. Migration used to be more of a labor issue, and it has now become an issue of crime. So, migration and crime go together. And that favors the right, which usually campaigns on Iron Fist, law-and-order policies, and that tends to attract more voters under those conditions.

But I would underline the fact that right-wing candidates made sure that, in their campaign, they also promised to keep the social rights and the growing welfare system that Chile has created over the past few years. Even on moral issues, right-wing candidates were very careful to commit themselves—and to signal clearly—that they would not change existing legislation on women’s access to abortion, for example. So, we do see a shift to the right, but that shift is moderated by the fact that, on many dimensions, right-wing candidates actually embraced more moderate positions. They remained far right on crime and immigration, but on other issues, they moved significantly toward more moderate stances.

A ‘Trumpian Feel’ with Chilean Characteristics

Is Kast’s “Trumpian feel”—manifested in slogans like “put Chileans first” and the emphasis on a “Border Shield”—primarily a strategic, populist communication style intended to mobilize an “angry electorate,” or does it reflect a deeper, more permanent ideological mutation of the Chilean far right?

Professor Patricio Navia: That’s a great question. I think this trend of trying to make every right-wing candidate everywhere into a Trumpian candidate can lead to some misconceptions. Trump is a protectionist; Kast is a free-market advocate. Trump has embraced some conservative values; Kast has always lived by those conservative values. So, there are some significant differences.

The issue of migration in the US has been around for a long time, whereas in Chile it is a much more recent phenomenon. About 20 years ago, only 1 or 2% of Chile’s population consisted of migrants; now it is more than 10%. So, migration has become a major social issue in Chile over the past few years, precisely because so many migrants have arrived.

Kast has successfully connected the issue of migration with the issue of insecurity, and thus the border-protection message he promotes is associated with insecurity more than with migration itself. It is not that Chileans don’t want migrants; it is that they don’t want criminals coming through the border. So, I would qualify that statement a bit.

However, it is true that as the two issues become intertwined, an anti-crime platform also becomes an anti-immigration platform, and it becomes more nationalist and more nativist. That merging of crime and migration is what makes Kast’s policies feel Trumpian, because Trump—and the broader far right—advanced the idea that migration and crime are essentially the same thing.

But some of Kast’s border-protection proposals are actually more sensible, given that Chile had never really dealt with such a large migration wave. The country needed a policy update to address massive, and especially undocumented, migration. Some of the measures Kast proposes are similar to those proposed by the left. There are aspects of his agenda that are clearly far right, but others are far more reasonable.

Mandatory Voting Reshapes Chile’s Electorate

Chileans wait in line to vote in the October 25, 2020 national plebiscite in Chillán, deciding whether to replace the Pinochet-era Constitution. Photo: Marcelo Vildósola Garrigó.

Your research has analyzed the explanatory power of ideology and economic perceptions, particularly among moderates and non-aligned voters. How has the reintroduction of compulsory voting impacted the distribution of this “elastically” voting segment, and to what degree is the far right’s current success a function of this institutional change?

Professor Patricio Navia: That’s a great question, because participation rates in Chile were about 45–50% in previous elections, but with mandatory voting in this election, participation increased to about 85%. And most of the new voters are people who do not identify themselves on the right–left scale, or the left–right scale. These are voters who don’t really care that much about politics. They’re discontent, and they can be mobilized on an anti-elite platform. That probably explains why one of the candidates, Franco Parisi, ended up in third place as the anti-elite, anti-establishment candidate.

So, these voters are not well defined by the left–right scale, but they are discontent with the elites. It is important to keep that in mind, because discontent with the elites often manifests itself as discontent with the incumbent government. So, as soon as Kast wins the election, if he does win in the runoff, he will become the personification of the elites. These people who have voted against the elites will end up voting against Kast. So, this is not a case of the Chilean electorate moving to the right; the Chilean electorate is punishing those in power. When Kast becomes the president in power, that electorate will turn against him just as it has turned against the left-wing president, Gabriel Boric. So, those who think that Chileans have now become rightist, and will support a right-wing president, will probably be in for a surprise, because the same voters who threw the left-wing administration out of power—or are about to—are the voters who will later disapprove of President Kast when he personifies the political and business elite.

Why the Crime–Migration Link May Backfire

The dominance of law-and-order issues, security, and immigration has marked the 2025 campaign. How does the far right’s ability to seamlessly link transnational crime with undocumented migration reinforce a nativist, anti-elite populist narrative, and how does this challenge establish theories of issue ownership in comparative politics?

Professor Patricio Navia: That’s also a great question, because the right has campaigned on a strong anti-crime platform. But given the globalization of criminal networks and given the ease with which you can access weapons in Chile and other countries, it is not altogether clear what the right can actually do to reduce levels of crime and the perception of insecurity. Even if the right were to enforce policies that restricted individual liberties, it wouldn’t be easy to control crime, because crime responds to other phenomena, including technological developments, the ease of accessing weapons, and globalization.

So, I think that by promising they will solve the economic issue and the crime and insecurity issue, right-wing candidates are setting themselves up for a task that will not be easily accomplished—and that will eventually lead to a punishment vote against them. That doesn’t mean that the left will necessarily return to power; it might be that a populist left comes to power instead. But we know that governments should not promise things they cannot deliver.

One of the issues here is that the right has promised things that cannot be delivered. I mean, President—soon to be president, I suppose—Kast has suggested that he will ask undocumented immigrants in Chile to pay for their own plane tickets to return to their home countries. We know that’s not going to happen. But he is generating this expectation that you can pretty much kick out of the country 10% of the population, or half of them, or a third of them, who are undocumented immigrants. Many immigrants do have documents and have the right to stay in Chile. But this idea that you can easily solve problems will eventually channel the discontent against this government that promised easy solutions—solutions that are not materializing.

Sociotropic Anxiety and the Right’s Advantage

Protesters chant against President Sebastián Piñera during the October 22, 2019 demonstrations following Chile’s social uprising. Photo: Marcelo Vildósola Garrigó.

Given your findings on the economic vote in the 2021 election, when no incumbent candidate was running, how does the economic performance under the Boric government shape the socio-tropic and ego-tropic perceptions of voters deciding between two ideologically extreme opposition candidates in the 2025 runoff?

Professor Patricio Navia: I’ve been thinking about that point exactly over the past few days. We know that people who have positive ego-tropic perceptions normally think they will do better than the country. So, they are more optimistic about what will happen to them personally, as opposed to what happens to the country. But people with negative economic perceptions, particularly socio-tropic perceptions, tend to vote against the incumbent government. I think that favors all the right-wing candidates, including Franco Parisi, who positioned themselves as opposition candidates. So, when people are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, they vote for the opposition, and that’s exactly what happened this time around.

But people also want hope. So, they ended up voting for an opposition that offered a way out—or a way forward—for Chile in the coming years. That distinction matters, because people care about the economy, they look back and reward or punish the government, but they also look forward and decide which of the available options they find more convincing. Now, right-wing candidates in general have very similar economic policy proposals. So, the main difference between them ended up being their views on crime, not their economic proposals about how to put Chile back on the right track economically.

Kast Navigates Pinochet’s Legacy—Carefully

Poster of Augusto Pinochet on display at the La Moneda Cultural Center beneath Citizenry Square in Santiago, Chile. Photo: Dreamstime.

Your work has mapped the incidence of authoritarian values on vote choice in the constitutional process. Has Kast’s repeated electoral performance effectively mainstreamed the defense of Augusto Pinochet’s economic or public-order legacy, or is this defense still a liability that can be mobilized by the left to curb the far right’s potential?

Professor Patricio Navia: I think time does have an effect. It’s now been almost 40 years since the end of the military dictatorship. Pinochet died in 2006, and even though there is still a Pinochet legacy—and, in general, Chileans don’t want to support somebody who defends Pinochet—Chileans have come to terms with the positive aspects of the economic reforms that Pinochet implemented during military rule. Chileans are strongly against the dictatorship’s human rights violations and authoritarian legacy, but they are supportive of the economic model implemented under military rule. And they are now somewhat more favorable toward law-and-order policies, as Pinochet is perceived to have been tough on crime. So, there is some support for tough-on-crime policies.

But Kast has been very careful not to express support for the Pinochet dictatorship. He will normally say, “I support the economic reforms that Pinochet implemented, but I oppose human rights violations.” In this way, he seeks to differentiate the two things. The fact that he is relatively young—he was just an adolescent during the Pinochet years—makes it easier for him to distance himself from Pinochet, because he entered politics after Pinochet had left office. So, time helps him a bit. Some of the other right-wing candidates, particularly Evelyn Matthei, were much closer to the military dictatorship than Kast was, and that makes it more difficult for her to distance herself from the Pinochet legacy. But the one positive thing about this is that not even the most right-wing candidate today has good things to say about Pinochet, and I think that is good for democracy in Chile. Kast has good things to say about the economic reforms Pinochet implemented, but not about the other aspects of the Pinochet legacy.

How the Far Right Mastered New Media

Social Media

Given your research on political participation and online efficacy, how has the far right, in particular, leveraged digital media to bypass traditional gatekeepers and translate specific patterns of “online efficacy” into real-world political mobilization, particularly among first-time or “angry” voters?

Professor Patricio Navia: This is very important, because a lot of people continue to fight over legacy media—traditional media and access to traditional media. But I think one of the strategies that Kast tried very successfully, and that other people like Parisi or Johannes Kaiser, the other far-right candidate, also used, was to bypass legacy media and go straight to new media, online media, to reach voters, particularly discontented voters. One of the problems of the traditional right-wing candidates, like Evelyn Matthei, is that she relied way too much on traditional media and didn’t do nearly as well on online media.

Now, most people who don’t care about politics don’t pay attention to traditional media, particularly political programs. So if you want to reach those voters—especially the discontented, and even those who might be economically successful but still indifferent to politics—you have to use online media and work around issues of internal efficacy (how people feel about the political system) and external efficacy (how people perceive the political system responding to them).

And there’s an important side note: Chile grants permanent residents the right to vote if they have lived in the country for at least five years. So, what’s fascinating is that many of the immigrants at the center of the campaign also had the right to vote. José Antonio Kast therefore had to criticize undocumented immigrants or criminal migrants on the one hand, while on the other hand catering to new immigrants who do have the right to vote—offering them economic policies and proposals promising employment opportunities and social inclusion.

The advantage of online media is that you can tailor different messages to different audiences if you understand how the algorithms work. One big lesson is that if you want to win elections, you have to understand new media. The left understood new media well in the 2021 election; this time around, they also performed well online, but it was difficult because discontent with the outgoing government was very high. So, even if they reached those voters, convincing them that the country was on the right track was very difficult, because people perceive every day that the country is not on the right track.

Kast, Bolsonaro, Milei: Similar Style, Different Substance

The news links Chile’s shift to the right with regional trends. How does the specific architecture of the populist discourse employed by Kast (combining social conservatism, nativism, and Pinochet nostalgia) structurally compare to the neo-populism of figures like Bolsonaro or Milei, particularly regarding the role of economic vs. cultural grievances?

Professor Patricio Navia: Bolsonaro was not a free-market advocate in the way that Milei or Kast are. In style, Kast is far more conservative and traditional than Milei. You don’t see Kast with a chainsaw. Kast is not a former member of the military, as Bolsonaro is, but they do share this anti-woke discourse—this idea that the far left has captured the cultural debate in the country and that the country has to go back to traditions and to a kind of simpler moral order where there is good and there is bad. So, in that dimension, the cultural anti-woke discourse is where Kast and the other right-wing candidates in Chile connect with this nativist international right in ways that are truly concerning for the rights of different minorities. In that sense, I think there is a lot of similarity, but they are all anti-woke. Yet Kast is pro-market, Kast is pro–law and order, and Kast is certainly not against globalization in many other dimensions. He is probably against the idea of globalization in that cultural dimension—what they define as wokeism.

Moderate Congress to Block Kast’s Social Conservatism

Given your findings on gender-affinity voting in legislative elections, how might the gender cleavage (and the mobilization of women voters) impact the legislative support for Kast’s socially conservative agenda, particularly in a potentially polarized Congress?

Professor Patricio Navia: In the short run, I don’t think Kast can advance his conservative social agenda simply because he’s just not going to have the votes in Congress. There is significant representation for moderate right-wing parties, and those parties are not going to embrace that socially conservative agenda. So, I don’t see that as a big threat. I do see the government, in the public discourse, going against wokeism and against what they define as gender ideology that grants rights to gender or sexual minorities. I do see them going in that direction from the executive branch, but not legislatively.

Now, part of the problem—or the advantage—for the right-wing parties in Chile today is that during the constitution-writing process, the push to go to the other extreme in terms of gender identity was perhaps a bit too much. So, Chileans are now more supportive of gradual changes rather than radical ones. In Chile, historically, the notion of gender issues or a gender perspective is associated with the left. And now the right is offering a different take on gender views. Traditional gender roles are also gender views, and they are saying that when you talk about gender, you are not necessarily talking exclusively about feminism—you can also talk about traditional gender roles for women. So, I think we’re going to see a significant intellectual and cultural debate about what gender roles actually mean in today’s society.

Kast’s Victory Depends on Moderation, Not Radicalism

If Kast wins, what are the irreversible consequences for the moderate/traditional Chilean center-right? Will the far right become the new, dominant ideological center of the right-wing bloc, or are there historical and institutional mechanisms that could force a moderation of the far right’s most extreme stances?

Professor Patricio Navia: I think that for Kast to win in the runoff, he’s going to have to embrace more moderate views in many areas. He has already done so. I mean, we just had the first-round vote, and he has adopted the more moderate economic policies of the traditional right-wing candidate. So, I think Kast understands—particularly after the Boric administration—that if he wants to maintain a majority, he has to become somewhat more moderate.

The lesson from the Boric administration is that every time the outgoing president took far-left positions, he lost support. And when he adopted more moderate left-wing positions, he regained support. So, I think Kast is going to have to learn from that as well, because Chileans ended up voting for two radical candidates in the first round, but they want them to govern as moderates. That is one of the ironies of Chilean politics: voters choose a radical left-wing candidate, and when he starts governing as a radical leftist, they abandon him and push him toward more moderate positions.

I think the same will happen with Kast. If Kast tries to govern as a radical right-wing leader, people will abandon him, and they will push him into more moderate positions. That means that, in the end, the right-wing parties that Kast represents will probably end up competing with the traditional right-wing parties for moderate right-wing support, because there are far more voters in centrist positions in Chile than in radical positions.

Kast Faces Constitutional Walls, Not Blank Checks

National Congress of Chile Building, Valparaiso. Photo: Luis Sandoval Mandujano.

If a Kast administration were to implement authoritarian-leaning security measures, what is the most critical risk to Chile’s democratic stability: the specific policies themselves (e.g., military deployment, mass incarceration), or the normalization of executive power expansion justified by the populist mandate of public security?

Professor Patricio Navia: I think that in Chile, institutions are strong enough. I don’t see the president taking power over Congress. In fact, over the past years, we have seen Congress becoming more powerful than the president, relative to what the Constitution prescribes. The Constitution is very presidentialist, but over the past decade Congress has exerted a great deal of control—even beyond what the Constitution formally grants—over the president.

So, I don’t see how Kast could move outside of that framework, because he is not going to have a majority in Congress. In the US, President Trump was able to push boundaries because he had a majority in both chambers of Congress. But in Chile, Congress will significantly curtail the president, and he is not going to be able to accumulate more power.

The president will certainly take on some of the anti-crime agenda in order to deliver on the promises he has made. But I don’t think he will be able to go beyond what the Constitution allows, simply because he won’t have the necessary support. He will win the runoff—but he received only 24% in the first round, so he will win the runoff because the alternative is worse for many voters. Chileans are going to vote more against the Communist Party candidate than for Kast. So, I don’t see a power grab as a plausible scenario for José Antonio Kast.

I also don’t see him bringing back Pinochet nostalgia, because Chileans are simply not supportive of Pinochet. If he were to say that Pinochet was good, he would lose popular support. He will try to implement a strict law-and-order agenda, but Chileans are also very much in favor of private property and individual freedom. So, I think there will be a tension there. Everybody wants to be safe, but nobody wants to have police officers searching them. There will have to be a balance between this promise of law and order and the well-established demands of Chileans for individual freedom and liberty.

Rebuilding the Center: A Supply Problem, Not Demand

If the election results demonstrate the weakness of the political center (with the runoff between the two extremes), what long-term mechanisms—perhaps drawing on the history of political stability you studied—must Chileans rely upon to rebuild a viable and moderate political center?

Professor Patricio Navia: I don’t know how you can rebuild a political center. The problem is more a problem of supply than of demand. We just don’t have strong enough centrist political parties that attract voters. But polls do tell us, time and again, that voters are far more moderate than the choices they make in presidential elections. So, even though it looks as if Chile is deeply polarized between a far-left and a far-right presidential candidate, most voters remain significantly moderate. They defend market-friendly values; they also defend individual rights and a strong system of social protection. So, voters, in their preferences, are far more moderate; they may vote for radical left- or right-wing candidates, but they expect those candidates to govern as moderates.

As to whether political parties will emerge that represent moderate voters, I don’t know, and I think the electoral rules are not really conducive to moderates winning elections. But I do know that once a president comes into office, the electorate exerts centripetal pressure that pushes the president toward more moderate positions. Four years ago, Chile elected a far-left president who had promised he would destroy the neoliberal economic model, and here we are, four years later, with everyone saying the president was mostly a moderate center-left—though he didn’t start out that way. Voters ended up pushing him in that direction. I think the same will happen with José Antonio Kast.

No Majority, No Radicals: The Limits of a Kast Presidency

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.

If a Kast presidency faces a hostile or fragmented Congress, how might the use of the partial presidential veto—which you analyzed as an executive-legislative bargaining tool in the post-Pinochet era—be employed to push forward security and immigration legislation, potentially exacerbating confrontations between state powers?

Professor Patricio Navia: I don’t think there will be much confrontation, precisely because the president has the veto. Most of the bills that pass are presidential bills, so the president is going to send bills to Congress. Congress will water those bills down, because they will need to be moderated in order to achieve a majority. But if legislators go too far, the president will threaten to issue a veto on a bill he doesn’t like. And yes, he might be able to veto some bills introduced by legislators.

But for the most part, there will have to be negotiation between Congress and the president, and the median voter in Congress is a centrist senator or a centrist member of the Chamber of Deputies. So, even if the president wanted to pass more radical right-wing proposals, he’s not going to be able to. The same happened with President Boric. He sent bills that were far to the left, and Congress moderated them. We will see pretty much the same dynamic this time around. We do have a fragmented Congress, but the decisive legislator in each chamber is a centrist. So, if you want to pass bills, you’ll have to rally the support of centrist legislators to get them through.

Chile Won’t Choose Between the US and China

Given Chile’s vital economic importance (copper/lithium) and its trade balance with China, how would a Kast presidency—which seeks closer “Trump-style” alliances in the region—navigate the inevitable geopolitical tension between its security and trade partners?

Professor Patricio Navia: I find that to be the most fascinating challenge for President Kast—or for any president in Chile. Because Chile has historically been an ally, at least for the past 35 years, of the United States. But our main trade partner is China. So, every time we see Chile, or the United States and China, sort of going at each other, Chileans are like: please, please stop. Because you are my friend, and you are my main trade partner, so I want you to get along, because I cannot and will not take sides.

And the same thing happened with Argentina with President Milei. President Milei is really pro-Trump, but the main trade partner for Argentina is still China, and it will continue to be. So, Chile’s main trade partner is going to be China, and that will likely remain the case. Chile will tell the US: look, if you want to engage more in trade, we’ll be happy to do it with you, but we live off the trade we have with China, so we cannot abandon China. We want to be friends with you and with China. Don’t force us to take sides, because if you do, we’re going to have to really think about it—because we truly depend economically on the goods that China buys from us.

Chile’s Populism Isn’t Pinochetist—It’s Anti-Elite

And lastly, Professor Navia, should the term “populism” in the Chilean context be redefined to more explicitly account for the unique synthesis of Pinochet-era nostalgic authoritarianism with modern, “Trumpian” nativist and anti-globalist communication, rather than relying solely on traditional models of economic clientelism or personalistic charismatic leadership?

Professor Patricio Navia: Populism is always a disputed concept. I think the most appropriate way to understand populism in Chile today is really the opposition against the elites, the anti-elite sentiment, and the perception that the population is abused by this corrupt elite. So, it’s not really about Pinochet or not Pinochet. The authoritarian component is more about conservative views than about populist views. We see populism on both the left and the right offering people this idea that “we are going to get rid of these corrupt elites so that you can be free.” In that dimension, Kast was probably far less of a populist than Kaiser, the other far-right candidate, or Parisi. So, the one piece of good news about Chile is that even though there is still a lot of support for populism, the non-populist candidates ended up doing a bit better.

I wouldn’t consider Kast a populist. I would probably consider him a religiously conservative, somewhat authoritarian, nostalgic-authoritarian leader, but not a populist. He campaigns on cutting the budget by 6 points of GDP. He campaigned on tightening social spending. He didn’t campaign on increasing services and subsidies for people. So, in that sense, he’s more of an authoritarian and very conservative figure than, in the traditional sense, a populist candidate. He won the vote among foreigners in Chile—foreigners who have the right to vote. So, he uses a nativist discourse, but not against immigrants. He frames the issue as being against criminals—many of whom are immigrants and come from other countries—but he also catered to the immigrant community, winning a majority of the immigrant vote in Chile.