In this ECPS interview, Associate Professor Péter Krekó examines Hungary’s uncertain political transition after Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat and the rise of Péter Magyar’s TISZA party. Drawing on his work on “informational autocracy,” disinformation, conspiracy theories, and populism in power, Assoc. Prof. Krekó argues that Orbán’s centralized media and propaganda machinery has suffered a striking collapse, opening possibilities for democratic renewal. Yet he warns against premature optimism. Hungary may move toward a more pluralistic and critical information space, but concentrated power, weak parliamentary alternatives, and one-sided polarization create “dangers of re-autocratization and of abuse of power.” For Assoc. Prof. Krekó, Hungary’s future depends on institutional reform, media pluralism, civic vigilance, and political self-restraint.
The electoral defeat of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government after sixteen years in power has generated intense debate over whether Hungary is witnessing a genuine democratic rupture or merely a reconfiguration of illiberal governance under new political leadership. For more than a decade, Hungary stood at the center of global discussions on democratic backsliding, populist governance, and informational manipulation, becoming what many scholars described as a laboratory of contemporary illiberalism. Among the leading analysts of this transformation is Péter Krekó, an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Psychology; the Research Laboratory for Disinformation & Artificial Intelligence at Eötvös Loránd University and director of the think tank Political Capital Institute, whose work on disinformation, conspiracy theories, and “informational autocracy” has significantly shaped scholarly understanding of the Orbán regime.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Assoc. Prof. Krekó examines the political and psychological foundations of Hungary’s illiberal system, the apparent collapse of Orbán’s informational machinery, and the uncertain prospects for democratic renewal under Péter Magyar and the TISZA party. Drawing on his interdisciplinary expertise as both a political scientist and social psychologist, Assoc. Prof. Krekó situates Hungary’s transition within broader debates on populism, post-truth politics, democratic resilience, and authoritarian adaptation.
At the center of the discussion is Assoc. Prof. Krekó’s application of the concept of “informational autocracy,” originally developed by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, to the Hungarian case. According to Assoc. Prof. Krekó, Orbán’s rule depended less on overt repression than on the construction of “the most centralized and politicized mediaenvironment in the entire European Union,” where nearly 500 media outlets operated within a politically controlled ecosystem reproducing state-sponsored narratives and disinformation. Yet despite these asymmetrical conditions, Orbán’s “highly professional media and disinformation machinery” ultimately “was unable to spread its narratives effectively or shape public opinion in the way it once had.”
At the same time, Assoc. Prof. Krekó warns against premature democratic triumphalism. Although he believes there is “some basis for optimism” that Hungary may move toward “a more diverse, more pluralistic, and, in many respects, more critical information space,” he repeatedly emphasizes the structural dangers accompanying overwhelming electoral victories and concentrated political authority. As reflected in the headline of this interview, Assoc. Prof. Krekó cautions that “there are dangers of re-autocratization and of abuse of power in Hungary,” particularly in a political landscape where “only the right exists in parliament” and where polarization may evolve into what he describes as “one-sided tribalism.”
The interview further explores the enduring effects of disinformation and conspiracy narratives on collective memory, the fragility of democratic norms after prolonged informational manipulation, and the challenge of depolarizing political cultures shaped by Manichean populism. Hungary, Assoc. Prof. Krekó argues, has been “a major experimental laboratory of post-truth politics,” and may now become “a major experimental laboratory of post-post-truth politics as well.”Whether the country ultimately evolves into “a model for re-democratization” or drifts toward new forms of hybrid rule remains uncertain.
Throughout the conversation, Assoc. Prof. Krekó offers a nuanced and cautious analysis that avoids both fatalism and romanticization. Instead, he frames Hungary’s transition as an open-ended political experiment whose outcome will depend not only on institutional reforms, but also on political self-restraint, media pluralism, civic vigilance, and the willingness of both elites and citizens to defend democratic norms consistently, regardless of partisan loyalties.
This commentary examines Hungary’s 2026 political rupture through the paradox of Péter Magyar: a former Fidesz insider now positioned as the possible dismantler of Orbánism. Rather than romanticizing the defeat of Viktor Orbán as automatic democratic restoration, Professor İbrahim Öztürk situates Hungary alongside the US, Brazil, and Poland to show that authoritarian-populist systems often survive electoral defeat through media ecosystems, patronage networks, institutional residues, and polarized identities. Magyar’s supermajority creates a rare “Cincinnatus moment”: he can either rebuild pluralist institutions or reproduce Orbán’s majoritarian methods under a pro-European vocabulary. The commentary argues that Hungary’s democratic opening is real but fragile, and that its future depends on institutional restraint, EU conditionality, civic vigilance, and genuine democratic reconstruction.
Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party ended Orbán’s sixteen-year rule in the April 12, 2026, parliamentary election and, after the final count, secured 141 of the 199 seats in Hungary’s National Assembly—comfortably above the two-thirds threshold required for constitutional change. As a result, Viktor Orbán’s regime, carefully constructed since 2010 and ideologically legitimized under the banner of “illiberal democracy,” has for the first time been seriously shaken by a figure produced within its own political architecture. Such a political rupture cannot be reduced to an ordinary electoral defeat or a conventional alternation of power.
Although Hungary is relatively small in population, economic weight, and geopolitical scale, Orbán’s era in power has become one of the most visible laboratories of authoritarian populism in Europe. Even more damaging than Hungary’s domestic democratic regression was the corrosive perception it created: Hungary is in permanent conflict with Brussels over the rule of law, media freedom, migration, Ukraine, Russia, and EU funds. In 2022, the European Parliament declared that Hungary could no longer be considered a full democracy, describing it instead as an “electoral autocracy” resulting from the government’s deliberate and systematic efforts to undermine European values. As a result, the message was that the European Union could no longer serve as a reliable democratic anchor, even for its own members.
Yet Péter Magyar’s rise should not be romanticized as a straightforward victory of democratic opposition. Tisza’s electoral landslide undoubtedly reflected accumulated fatigue with Orbánism: economic stagnation, perceptions of endemic corruption, deteriorating relations with Europe, and growing frustration with the cartel-like fusion of party, state, media, and oligarchic capital. But the bearer of this anti-Orbán moment is not a pristine liberal democrat emerging from civil society. Magyar is a product of the Fidesz world itself: someone who knows the regime’s language, networks, reflexes, vulnerabilities, and internal codes.
Hungary’s paradox lies precisely here. The first actor capable of breaking the Orbán system did not come from outside it but from within. The possibility of dismantling a hybrid-authoritarian regime has emerged not through a “clean” outsider but through an insider who understands the machinery of power because he was once close to it. This is both promising and dangerous. It is promising because authoritarian systems often fracture when insiders defect. It is dangerous because those who know how such systems work may also be tempted to reproduce their techniques under a new moral vocabulary.
For this reason, Hungary should be read not merely as a national case of regime change but as a broader laboratory for understanding the contemporary democratic crisis. As emphasized at the ECPS Fifth Annual International Symposium on “Reforming and Safeguarding Liberal Democracy: Systemic Crises, Populism, and Democratic Resilience,” (Hereafter, ECPS Symposium), the crisis of democracy today cannot be understood through a single discipline, region, or causal factor. It is political, institutional, ideological, economic, technological, and geopolitical. The ECPS symposium report likewise frames the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy in terms of systemic pressures, populist mobilization, institutional erosion, and democratic resilience. Hungary concentrates all of these dynamics into a single case: electoral competition, media capture, judicial dependence, party-state fusion, EU conditionality, nationalist-populist discourse, and the unresolved problem of post-authoritarian reconstruction.
The Orbán Regime: From State Capture to Party-State Fusion
Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Understanding Magyar’s challenge requires understanding the nature of the regime he inherits. Orbán’s Hungary was not a classical military dictatorship. Elections continued. Opposition parties were not formally banned. Courts existed. Parliament functioned. Civil society survived, though under pressure. Yet the substantive capacity of these institutions to promote fair competition, constrain power, protect the rule of law from political influence, and sustain pluralism was steadily weakened.
Hungary became one of the most instructive examples of contemporary authoritarianization. Elections took place, but the electoral field was tilted. Media existed, but large parts of it were controlled by government-friendly capital and state resources. Courts remained, but key appointments increasingly reflected political loyalty. Universities, foundations, media councils, prosecution offices, regulatory bodies, and constitutional institutions continued to exist formally, but their internal logic was increasingly subordinated to the party-state.
The House of Commons Library notes that Orbán held power from 2010 until 2026 and was widely criticized by domestic opponents and international bodies for moving Hungary in an authoritarian direction. It also recalls Orbán’s own 2014 declaration that his government was building an “illiberal” state and emphasizes that Fidesz’s long-standing two-thirds majority enabled far-reaching constitutional changes that repeatedly brought Hungary into conflict with the EU.
This illustrates one of the broader mechanisms highlighted at the ECPS symposium: democratic erosion does not proceed only through electoral manipulation. It advances through the transformation of political language, the weakening of judicial authority, the loss of neutrality in public institutions, the narrowing of media pluralism, and the reshaping of civic imagination. Orbánism, in this sense, was never merely a governing style. It was an attempt to reorganize the state, society, and public reason around a durable nationalist-populist order.
This architecture was also designed to survive electoral defeat. Long-term appointments in the prosecution service, constitutional court, media authorities, university foundations, public companies, and regulatory bodies created a state structure capable of resisting a new government. In such a system, winning an election does not mean automatically taking control of the state. It opens the first gate; the deeper struggle begins inside the bureaucracy, the judiciary, public finance, and media infrastructure.
Magyar’s victory is therefore not an endpoint but the beginning of a difficult transition. Orbán may have lost office, but the institutional residues of Orbánism—its economic networks, media ecology, bureaucratic habits, legal traps, and cultural reflexes—are likely to persist. The crucial question is whether Magyar will dismantle these structures or make them more usable for himself. Before focusing directly on Magyar, a comparative perspective would provide further insight into the personality, ideology, and experience of the leadership that might lead to the transformation of power.
Comparative Lessons: Trump, Lula, Tusk, and the Difficult Art of Defeating Authoritarian Populists
Hungary can only be properly understood through comparative and historical analysis. As the ECPS Symposium emphasized, populism and democratic backsliding do not take identical forms everywhere. Yet across cases, recurring mechanisms can be identified: humiliation, polarization, institutional weakening, executive aggrandizement, cultural backlash, strategic disinformation, and the political exploitation of uncertainty. Reading Hungary alongside the United States, Brazil, and Poland helps clarify not only how authoritarian-populist incumbents can be defeated, but also why democratic restoration remains fragile after electoral victory.
In the ideal world of democratic theory, one might expect a principled, pluralistic, and untainted civil-society leader to rise against an “authoritarizing” regime. Real politics rarely works that way. Where media space has been captured, opposition actors have been criminalized, electoral rules tilted, and public resources converted into partisan instruments, a “clean” outsider may never effectively reach the electorate. The European Parliament’s 2022 finding that Hungary had become a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy” captures precisely this kind of distorted competitive environment.
Hungary’s 2022 opposition experiment around Péter Márki-Zay is instructive in this respect. The Guardian describedMárki-Zay as a conservative outsider backed by a broad opposition alliance to challenge Orbán. Yet he was rapidly damaged by Orbán’s media and propaganda apparatus. The lesson was blunt: in a captured information environment, a plausible candidate is not enough. The opposition must also find a way to penetrate the regime’s communicative architecture.
Magyar’s rise did precisely that, though not because it was the product of a carefully designed opposition strategy. It resembled an unexpected explosion from within the regime’s own crisis. His “surprise candidate” effect rested on two sources of credibility. First, insider testimony carries a distinctive political force. Corruption allegations repeated for years by Hungary’s opposition had limited impact on Fidesz voters; similar accusations voiced by a former insider produced a different kind of rupture. Second, Magyar escaped the exhaustion associated with the traditional opposition. He appeared outside its record of fragmentation, ideological baggage, and repeated failure.
This suggests a broader pattern: authoritarian-populist regimes are rarely defeated by pristine figures alone. Success often requires three conditions: a broad democratic front, a credible figure capable of puncturing the incumbent’s information monopoly, and a pragmatic promise of transition that reduces voter fear.
The US: The Return of Trump and the Failure of Liberal Restoration
Trump supporters marched toward Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., USA. Photo: Dreamstime / Bgrocker
The United States offers the most important first comparison because it shows that defeating an authoritarian-populist leader at the ballot box does not necessarily defeat the political formation he has created. Donald Trump lost the presidency in 2020, but Trumpism did not disappear. It survived as a mass political identity, a media ecosystem, a party-capturing force, and a movement built around resentment, grievance, distrust of institutions, and the claim that the system had been stolen by hostile elites.
The trauma of January 6, 2021, seemed at the time to mark a possible rupture. The Final Reportof the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack described a sustained effort to overturn the 2020 election result and placed Trump at the center of that campaign. Yet the institutional reckoning remained incomplete. The Republican Party did not decisively break with Trump; conservative media did not abandon the stolen-election narrative; and the broader social grievances that sustained Trumpism were neither politically absorbed nor materially addressed.
This is why Trump’s return in 2024 is so analytically important. The National Archives’ official Electoral Collegeresults recorded Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris by 312 electoral votes to 226, while AP described his victory as a remarkable political comeback rooted in appeals to frustrated voters. His second inauguration as the 47th president on January 20, 2025, confirmed not merely a Republican electoral victory but the return of a populist movement that many had prematurely assumed would be exhausted after 2020.
The American case, therefore, reveals a central post-populist trap. Joe Biden’s presidency defeated Trump electorally in 2020, restored a measure of institutional normality, and defended NATO, administrative professionalism, and democratic procedure. But it did not fundamentally transform the socioeconomic, cultural, and institutional conditions that had produced Trumpism in the first place: regional decline, working-class insecurity, border anxiety, distrust of expertise, racial and cultural backlash, media fragmentation, and the perception that liberal institutions served insulated elites rather than ordinary citizens.
In this sense, Trump’s comeback was not only a personal return. It was the revenge of an unresolved political formation. The Brennan Center’s analysis of Project 2025 warned that the conservative governing blueprint associated with Trump’s return aimed at a major expansion of executive power. The Carnegie Endowment’s comparative analysis of US democratic backsliding similarly situates the second Trump presidency within a wider global pattern of democratic erosion, comparing developments in the United States with cases such as Hungary, India, Poland, and Turkey.
Trump’s comeback shows that authoritarian populism is not merely a government; it is an ecosystem. It can survive defeat through party capture, alternative media, loyal courts, donor networks, grievance politics, and a disciplined narrative of betrayal. Unless the post-populist government delivers visible reform and democratic renewal, the defeated populist can return as the voice of unfinished revenge.
The American case also sharpens the central dilemma of reform. If democratic successors move too cautiously, they appear weak and irrelevant. If they move too aggressively, they may be accused of weaponizing institutions and confirming the populist claim of elite persecution. Biden’s difficulty was precisely this: restoring procedural normality was not enough to rebuild democratic confidence. Voters who experience insecurity, disorder, or decline do not reward the process alone. They demand protection, direction, and visible change.
Brazil: Lula’s Broad Coalition and the Survival of Bolsonarism
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva walks among supporters on Augusta Street at São Paulo on the eve of the brazillian election on October 1, 2022. Photo: Yuri Murakami.
Brazil’s 2022 election offers a second powerful comparison. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was not a new or immaculate candidate. He was a former two-term president, a deeply polarizing figure, and someone who had been imprisoned on corruption charges later annulled on procedural and judicial impartiality grounds. Yet he proved to be the most effective candidate against Jair Bolsonaro, a radical right-wing populist who attacked institutions, questioned the electoral system, and polarized society. AP described Lula’s victory as an extremely tight election that marked an about-face after four years of far-right politics.
Lula’s success rested on strategic coalition-building rather than ideological purity. By choosing Geraldo Alckmin, a former center-right rival, as his running mate, he reassured markets, moderates, conservative voters, and institutional actors. The contest was thereby reframed not as a conventional left-right struggle, but as a choice between Bolsonaro’s destabilizing authoritarian populism and democratic normalization.
Lula also benefited from powerful social memory. For millions of poorer voters, workers, trade unionists, northeastern Brazilians, and beneficiaries of earlier social programs, he was associated not merely with ideology but with concrete improvements in living standards. Just as importantly, Brazil’s electoral institutions held firm against Bolsonaro’s efforts to delegitimize the result. Bolsonaro delayed full acceptance, but the institutional outcome held; The Guardian reportedthat Bolsonaro broke his silence without conceding, while his chief of staff indicated that the transition process would begin.
As I argued in an earlier article,Lula’s return should not be read merely as the return of the left. It represented a broad coalition for democratic normalization: workers, poorer voters, environmental constituencies, institutional actors, moderates, and democracy-minded conservatives converging around a minimum democratic agenda. In a former commentary at the ECPS, I further argued that the decisive question in confronting authoritarian populists is not simply whether the incumbent has produced economic crisis, corruption, or institutional decay. It is whether the opposition can construct a credible, governable, and inclusive alternative in the eyes of voters.
The lesson for Hungary is clear. Authoritarian-populist regimes are not always defeated by flawless candidates. Sometimes they are defeated by figures who can reassure broad social blocs, understand how the state works, and pierce the regime’s information monopoly. Lula did this through historical legitimacy and social memory. Magyar has done it through insider credibility. Yet the difference is equally important: Lula was the carrier of a long political movement, party tradition, and social program; Magyar still leads a movement largely organized around his person, with limited ideological and institutional depth.
Lula’s example, therefore, offers both hope and a warning. It shows that authoritarian populists can be defeated at the ballot box and that broad democratic fronts still matter. But it also shows that defeating authoritarian populism does not automatically eliminate its social base, media networks, economic interests, or institutional residues. Bolsonaro lost, but Bolsonarism survived. AP’s reporton Brazil’s Congress overriding Lula’s veto of a bill reducing Bolsonaro’s coup-related sentence demonstrates the Bolsonaro camp’s continuing institutional and political resilience.
Poland: Democratic Restoration in a Minefield
President-elect Karol Nawrocki campaigning ahead of Poland’s 2025 presidential election in Łódź, Poland, on April 27, 2024. Photo: Tomasz Warszewski.
Poland offers a third instructive case, but it should not be read as a simple story of populist defeat followed by democratic restoration. The last five years reveal a more uneven trajectory: PiS retained the presidency in 2020, lost its ability to govern in 2023, continued to shape the reform environment through institutional legacies, and regained strategic leverage through the 2025 presidential election.
The starting point matters. Poland’s presidential archive records that Andrzej Duda was re-elected in 2020 with 51.03 percent of the vote, keeping the presidency in the hands of a PiS-aligned figure and preserving a powerful veto point inside the Polish political system. This mattered greatly after the 2023 parliamentary election. Although PiS won the largest share of the vote, Freedom House notes that it secured only 194 Sejm seats, while Civic Coalition, Third Way, and The Left won a combined 248 seats and formed a governing majority. Freedom House also emphasizes that turnout reached 74.3 percent, the highest since 1989, signaling not only anti-PiS mobilization but also a powerful democratic re-engagement by Polish society.
Donald Tusk’s return to power in December 2023, therefore, ended eight years of PiS-led nationalist-populist rule, but it did not amount to a clean institutional break. Tusk was not a new civil-society outsider; he was a former prime minister and former president of the European Council. His strength lay not in novelty but in governability, experience, international credibility, and coalition-building.
The Polish case shows that opposition forces do not always need to merge into a single ideological bloc. Tusk’s Civic Coalition, Third Way, and The Left preserved distinct identities while mobilizing different constituencies: urban liberals, moderate conservatives, agrarian centrists, young voters, women, and citizens concerned with the rule of law. This flexible democratic majority proved more effective than forced ideological homogenization. For Hungary, this is a crucial point: defeating authoritarian populism may require not a single purified opposition identity, but a broad, strategically plural coalition capable of reassuring different social blocs.
Yet Poland also reveals the fragility of democratic restoration after victory. Tusk’s government moved quickly to repair relations with the EU. The European Commission’s February 2024 decision paved the way for Poland to access up to €137 billion in EU funding, citing rule-of-law reforms and immediate steps toward strengthening judicial independence. But the domestic process of institutional repair proved far more difficult. President Duda, still aligned with PiS, remained able to block key reforms and frustrate the government’s efforts to reverse the institutional legacy of the previous era.
The public media crisis illustrated the dilemma sharply. Tusk’s government argued that it was restoring impartiality after years of PiS control over state media. Critics, however, claimed that the government was stretching legal procedures. AP reported that Duda vetoed a spending bill that included 3 billion zlotys for public media, turning media reform into an early constitutional and political confrontation. Poland thus became a real-time laboratory of the central post-populist dilemma: how can a new democratic government undo politicized institutions without itself appearing to politicize them further?
The 2025 presidential election then exposed the limits of Tusk’s restoration project. Le Monde reported that Karol Nawrocki, backed by PiS, narrowly defeated Tusk’s ally Rafał Trzaskowski by 50.89 percent to 49.11 percent. This did not remove Tusk from government, but it weakened his coalition politically and gave the populist right a renewed institutional platform. AP’s assessmentof Nawrocki’s victory underlined that Tusk’s multiparty coalition now faced serious questions about its capacity to survive and pursue reform under a president with veto power. In the Financial Times, Jarosław Kuisz similarly argued that Nawrocki’s win reflected not only PiS’s resilience but also Tusk’s own errors, poor management of expectations, and the danger of liberal complacency after electoral victory.
Poland, therefore, offers Hungary both encouragement and warning. It shows that nationalist-populist governments can be removed from office despite media bias, state resources, polarization, and institutional asymmetry. But it also shows that electoral victory does not dissolve the old regime’s social base, cultural influence, presidential veto points, or judicial and media legacies. Democratic restoration survives only if it produces tangible results, preserves public trust, and neutralizes the populist claim that “nothing has changed.”
For Hungary, the comparison is sobering. If Magyar wins the state but fails to deliver visible institutional and social repair, Fidesz may retain or rebuild its political force from outside government, much as PiS did after 2023. Conversely, if Magyar moves too aggressively against captured institutions, he may reproduce the very majoritarian logic he claims to overcome. Poland’s last five years, therefore, sharpen the central lesson of this article: defeating authoritarian populism is only the first stage; the harder task is governing the transition without either paralysis or overreach.
Europe’s Wider Crisis of Liberal-Democratic Governability
Row of EU Flags in front of the European Union Commission building in Brussels. Photo: VanderWolf Images.
This problem is not confined to countries emerging directly from authoritarian-populist rule. The faltering performance of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance-led centrist presidency in France, Keir Starmer’s Labor government in the United Kingdom, and Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU–SPD grand coalition in Germany suggests that Europe faces a broader crisis of liberal-democratic governability. In Britain, YouGov’s April 2026 voting-intention poll showed Reform UK leading on 26 percent, ahead of both Conservatives and Labor. In Germany, PolitPro’s poll trend showed the AfD ahead of the CDU/CSU in early May 2026. In France, The Guardian’sassessmentof the 2027 race framed the crowded anti–National Rally field as a potential gift to Jordan Bardella and the far right.
The difficulty is no longer simply that authoritarian-populist actors are hard to defeat, or that their institutional legacies are hard to dismantle once defeated. The deeper problem is that liberal-centrist governments, even when they reach office, often fail to address the underlying structures that generate resentment: stagnant living standards, insecure work, housing shortages, deindustrialization, bureaucratic sclerosis, regional abandonment, elite insulation, and the perception that public authority no longer protects ordinary citizens. The Draghi report on European competitiveness makes a related structural point: Europe faces slowing productivity, demographic challenges, rising energy costs, global competition, and the need for unprecedented investment, yet EU decision-making remains slow, fragmented, and difficult to coordinate at scale.
They promise competent management after populist chaos, but competence without transformation quickly becomes another name for managed decline. This is why defeated or marginalized populists often regain momentum: they can present liberal restoration as the return of the same establishment that produced the crisis in the first place. In this sense, the post-populist trap is circular. Populists are difficult to defeat; their legacies are difficult to undo; and when their successors fail to deliver visible reform, they help rebuild the emotional and political conditions for the next populist surge.
These Cases Suggest Three Lessons for Hungary
First, authoritarian-populist regimes are often defeated not by morally pure outsiders but by pragmatic figures capable of building broad alliances. Trump’s return shows what happens when a defeated populist movement is not structurally dislodged; Lula shows how broad democratic normalization can defeat an incumbent populist; Tusk shows the value and limits of experienced coalition-building; and Magyar represents the risky but potentially effective figure of the regime insider turned challenger. Their legitimacy does not derive from purity, but from their ability to connect with constituencies that traditional opposition forces could not reach.
Second, electoral victory requires breaking information blockades. Lula did so through social memory and organized constituencies; Tusk through the mobilization of plural opposition; and Magyar through the credibility of insider defection. Trump’s return, however, shows the reverse side of the same lesson: if the populist media ecosystem and grievance machine remain intact after defeat, they can convert loss into martyrdom and return to power with even greater determination.
Third, the defeat of an authoritarian-populist leader is not the end of authoritarian-populist politics. Trump lost in 2020 but returned in 2024. Bolsonaro lost, but Bolsonarism survived. PiS left the government but remained institutionally and socially powerful. Hungary is likely to face a similar pattern: Orbán’s defeat will not automatically dissolve Orbánism.
The synthesis is therefore sobering. Democratic breakthroughs in hybrid regimes often emerge from morally ambiguous conditions: insider defections, imperfect candidates, broad but uneasy coalitions, and pragmatic compromises. These are not defects of democratic transition; they are often its real-world preconditions. But they also explain why transition moments are so unstable. The very actors capable of defeating an authoritarian-populist regime may lack the ideological clarity, institutional depth, or self-limiting discipline needed to rebuild democracy.
This comparative frame helps assess Magyar more realistically. His lack of purity does not doom him. On the contrary, his insider background may have enabled him to break Fidesz’s information monopoly in a way Hungary’s traditional opposition could not. But the same background makes skepticism legitimate. The democratic meaning of his victory will not be determined by the fact that Orbán lost, nor by Magyar’s current pro-European language. It will be determined by what follows: whether he dismantles authoritarian infrastructures or repurposes them; whether he builds institutions or concentrates authority; whether he transforms anti-Orbán momentum into democratic pluralism or into a new form of leader-centered politics.
In that sense, the comparative lesson is clear: elections can open the door to democratic renewal, but they do not walk through it on their own. The decisive struggle begins after victory, when the new leadership must choose between restoration and replacement, between institutionalization and personalization, between dismantling authoritarianism and inheriting its tools.
Magyar’s ‘Cincinnatus Moment’: Three Possible Paths After Orbán
Tisza Party volunteer collecting signatures in Mosonmagyaróvár, Hungary on June 5, 2024 during a nationwide campaign tour ahead of the European Parliament elections. Photo: Sarkadi Roland / Dreamstime.
Péter Magyar’s premiership begins with a classical democratic dilemma: can a leader who receives extraordinary power to rescue damaged institutions later restrain himself and return authority to those very institutions? This is the Cincinnatus question. In the Roman republican myth, Cincinnatus accepts emergency authority to save the republic but relinquishes it once the crisis is over. The moral force of the story lies not in the acquisition of power, but in the discipline to give it up.
Magyar now faces a comparable test. Tisza’s parliamentary supermajority gives him the capacity to reverse key Orbán-era legal arrangements, pursue anti-corruption measures, and redesign Hungary’s constitutional order. After the final count, Tisza secured 141 of the 199 parliamentary seats, giving Magyar a two-thirds majority capable of effecting constitutional change. Yet the same majority could become a vehicle for new majoritarian dominance if used without restraint. The central question, therefore, is not simply whether Magyar can defeat Orbánism, but whether he can dismantle it without reproducing its political logic.
This question is sharpened by Magyar’s origins. He is not an idealistic liberal democrat who emerged from outside Orbán’s system. He came from the center, not the margins, of the Fidesz universe. His former marriage to Judit Varga, Orbán’s former justice minister, his connections to governing elites, and his proximity to state-linked positions place him in a different category from Hungary’s traditional opposition figures. Magyar has been characterized as a figure once inspired by Orbán who broke with the ruling bloc after the 2024 pardon scandal and rapidly became the leader of the pro-European, center-right Tisza movement.
That scandal was the decisive rupture. The 2024 presidential pardon controversy involving a child-abuse cover-up forced President Katalin Novák’s resignation and ended Varga’s frontline political career. The Guardian describedNovák’s resignation as an unusual and serious setback for Orbán’s ruling party. The episode pierced Fidesz’s moral armor: a political project that had long justified itself through the language of family, Christianity, national protection, and conservative values suddenly appeared hypocritical even to parts of its own milieu. It also gave Magyar the opening to convert insider knowledge into political rupture.
A past inside the ruling bloc does not automatically disqualify a politician from contributing to democratic transformation. Many regime transitions begin when elites within the regime defect, split, or turn against one another. Internal rupture is often the beginning of authoritarian collapse. Yet Magyar’s trajectory still requires caution. His break appears to have been driven less by a long-standing ideological conversion to liberal democracy than by Fidesz’s handling of its own crisis, especially the political sacrifice of Varga. Put differently, Magyar did not leave when the system functioned smoothly for him; he left when its costs reached his own inner circle.
This does not make him illegitimate. It does, however, clarify the risk. Personal grievance, whistleblowing, and revenge can destabilize authoritarian power in the short run. They cannot, by themselves, supply the patience, restraint, institutional imagination, and legal discipline required for democratic reconstruction.
Magyar’s strength and weakness are therefore inseparable: he understands the Orbán system from within. He knows its corruption networks, propaganda techniques, loyalty chains, legal engineering, and bureaucratic traps. This knowledge allowed him to make visible what Hungary’s traditional opposition had long diagnosed but struggled to communicate persuasively. Yet it also raises the transition’s most important second-order question: will Magyar dismantle the machinery of Orbánism, or merely redirect it toward new ends?
The ideological thinness of Tisza makes this question more urgent. Magyar’s current rhetoric centers on European standards, transparency, judicial independence, media freedom, anti-corruption, and the rule of law. A recent Al Jazeera reportshowsthat he vowed to overhaul state media and urged the pro-Orbán president to resign, while Euronews reported that he promised to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the misuse of EU funds. These commitments are essential to Hungary’s democratic renewal. The harder question is whether they are deeply internalized principles or simply the most effective instruments for defeating Orbánism.
Democratic language does not always produce democratic character. As the Turkish case under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan illustrates, movements that rise against old authoritarian or oligarchic orders may deploy democracy as a language of transition, only to build their own centralized power structures once in office. When charismatic leadership, weak party institutionalization, and a “mission to dismantle the system” converge, democratic restoration can slide into a new personalist regime.
Tisza’s rapid ascent deepens this danger. The party gathered anti-Orbán energy with extraordinary speed, but it remains ideologically and institutionally shallow. A block from the LSE’s Zsófia Barta and Jan Rovny argue that Tisza’s victory opens a historic opportunity while leaving major questions about how the party will govern after such a rapid rise. Magyar’s political image can be read as a promise of a “corruption-free Fidesz,” a cleaner center-right alternative, or a pro-European Hungarian nationalism. That may be enough to defeat Orbánism electorally; it is not enough to reconstruct democracy.
Hungary needs more than a change of rulers. It requires the separation of state from ruling party, media from political capital, courts from partisan loyalty, public procurement from oligarchic networks, and national identity from executive domination. The European Parliament’s 2022 assessment that Hungary had become a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy” points to the depth of institutional distortion Magyar must now confront.
The danger is that institutional repair may require pressure on institutions already hollowed out by partisan capture. A post-Orbán government cannot simply leave Fidesz-era appointees untouched if they are positioned to obstruct reform from day one. Yet if it intervenes too aggressively, democratic restoration may begin to resemble a political purge. Le Monde reported that Magyar said his government would legislate to remove President Tamás Sulyok if he did not resign—an episode that captures the tension between institutional repair and institutional pressure. The task is not merely to act decisively, but to transform emergency authority into durable constitutional restraint.
Three broad paths now stand before Magyar.
The first is democratic restoration. On this path, Magyar uses his supermajority to rebuild the rule of law, restore judicial independence, pluralize the media, make public procurement transparent, dismantle oligarchic networks, and redesign the constitutional order along pluralist lines. He investigates the abuses of the old regime without turning accountability into revenge. Most importantly, he transfers political energy away from his own leadership and into institutions capable of constraining future governments, including his own. In this scenario, Magyar becomes a transitional leader rather than a new founding father. The Center for European Reform describes Orbán’s departure as a unique but time-limited opportunity to restore democracy and strengthen Europe, capturing both the promise and urgency of this path.
The second is controlled center-right normalization. Here, the crudest forms of Orbán-era corruption and propaganda are reduced; relations with the EU improve; some frozen funds are released; economic management becomes more predictable; and Hungary moves away from open confrontation with Brussels. Yet the deeper structures of centralized power remain largely intact. The media becomes less brutal but not genuinely pluralistic; public procurement becomes less scandalous but not fully transparent; courts become less openly politicized but not truly independent. Hungary exits hard Orbánism without achieving deep democratization. Magyar’s talkswith Ursula von der Leyen over frozen EU funds illustrate both the opportunity and risk of this scenario: EU relations may normalize quickly while domestic transformation remains shallower than the rhetoric suggests.
The third is a new leader-centered regime. In this scenario, Magyar begins by promising to dismantle Orbánism but gradually recentralizes authority around himself. Fidesz loyalists are replaced by Tisza loyalists. Media pluralism gives way to a new communication apparatus. Judicial independence is invoked rhetorically while new forms of political influence emerge. Anti-corruption becomes selective. The language changes from illiberal nationalism to Europeanized renewal, but the political technology remains familiar: personalization of power, control over institutions, and the fusion of national destiny with the leader’s project. TheGuardian’s reporton Orbán-linked wealth networks shows why dismantling the old order will require confronting entrenched economic power; the danger is that such confrontation becomes selective redistribution rather than genuine institutional cleansing.
It is too early to know which path Magyar will follow. His promises are encouraging, and Hungary now has a rare opportunity to reverse democratic decline. Yet his past, personal style, ideological ambiguity, and Tisza’s institutional thinness demand caution. The real test is not whether Magyar speaks the language of Europe, transparency, and the rule of law. The test is whether he can build institutions strong enough to limit himself.
As the ECPS Symposium states, democratic erosion is not destiny, but democratic resilience is neither automatic nor linear. It survives in institutions that resist capture, civil societies that continue to mobilize, scholarship that clarifies rather than obscures, and public debate that refuses fear, simplification, and authoritarian temptation.
Magyar’s Cincinnatus moment has therefore arrived. The question is not whether he can use power to defeat the remnants of Orbánism. The question is whether; after using that power, he will have the discipline to limit it.
Lessons for Europe: Institutions, Not Personalities
Flags of Hungary and the European Union displayed together in Budapest. Hungary has been an EU member since 2004. Photo: Jerome Cid / Dreamstime
Magyar’s victory creates a major opportunity for the European Union. Orbán’s government had spent years in conflict with Brussels over the rule of law, media freedom, migration, Ukraine, Russia, and EU funds. Magyar’s post-election talks with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen focused on the release of frozen EU funds, including recovery funds blocked over rule-of-law concerns. Magyar described the talks as constructive, while the Commission emphasized anti-corruption and rule-of-law measures.
But the EU must be careful. If Brussels rushes to declare that “Hungary has returned to democracy,” it will repeat an old mistake: personalizing democratization and losing leverage over institutional reform. The EU’s priority should not be Magyar as a personality but Hungary as a constitutional order. Pro-European rhetoric should not be enough. The release of funds should remain tied to concrete, measurable, reversible reforms: judicial independence, public procurement transparency, anti-corruption enforcement, media pluralism, and institutional accountability.
This approach reflects a broader lesson from the ECPS symposium: in difficult times, serious scholarship and public debate are not luxuries; they are components of democratic defense. Europe’s engagement with Hungary should be grounded not in sympathy, geopolitical relief, or the emotional satisfaction of Orbán’s defeat, but in institutional verification. Otherwise, the language of “return to democracy” may become another illusion, substituting rhetoric for reform.
Hungary’s democratization will not be completed by Orbán’s defeat. The real question is how much of Orbán’s system can be dismantled and what kind of constitutional architecture replaces it. Europe’s approach to Magyar should therefore be neither romantic embrace nor cynical distance. The right posture is conditional support and institutional scrutiny.
Conclusion
Hungary’s historical threshold lies between the ideal and the possible. Péter Magyar is not a Scandinavian-style institutional democrat: calm, ideologically coherent, and unburdened by proximity to the old order. He is better understood as a pragmatic, charismatic, partly populist transition figure who knows the authoritarian system from the inside and can use its vulnerabilities against it.
This does not diminish his significance. But it makes his sanctification dangerous. Magyar is an opportunity, not a guarantee. He may accelerate the collapse of the Orbán system; he may not become the architect of liberal-democratic reconstruction. Hungary’s real test did not end on election night. It began there. The ballot box has weakened an authoritarian regime, but power networks, media monopolies, oligarchic interests, and judicial-bureaucratic linkages remain entrenched. Magyar’s historical role will be judged by whether he dismantles these structures and limits his own power.
If he uses his two-thirds majority not for a new majoritarian domination but to distribute power, autonomize institutions, and place law above politics, Hungary may enter a genuinely new democratic phase. If he reproduces Orbán’s methods under a different moral justification, Hungary’s story will become not democratic restoration but elite replacement.
Hungary, therefore, reveals both the fragility and the possibility of democratic politics. As argued in the closing reflections of the ECPS Fifth Annual International Symposium, democratic erosion is not destiny, but democratic resilience becomes durable only when institutions, civil society, critical scholarship, and public debate work together. Magyar’s historical test lies here: will he transform anti-Orbán momentum into a personal power project, or into a pluralist, accountable, institutionalized democratic order?
This is why Hungary’s hope is also its danger. The insider who can break an authoritarian system may also reproduce its reflexes in a new form. The central question for Europe, Hungarian society, and Magyar himself is therefore this: will this victory mark the end of Orbánism, or the birth of a more refined, more acceptable post-Orbán version of it?
In this ECPS interview, Professor Alexandre Lefebvre of The University of Sydney argues that liberalism’s crisis is not merely institutional but also ethical and existential. Against populist and post-liberal portrayals of liberalism as morally hollow, elitist, and radically individualistic, Professor Lefebvre insists that liberalism historically rested on “freedom and generosity, liberty and liberality.” Yet neoliberalism, he argues, “forgot one half of this tradition,” narrowing liberalism into a doctrine of individual freedom, market rationality, and procedural neutrality. For Professor Lefebvre, liberal renewal requires recovering liberalism as a “way of life” grounded in fairness, reciprocity, moral self-reflection, and generosity. His remedy is clear: liberals must become “more generous with their resources and more generous in the attention they give to others.”
At a moment when liberal democracy is confronting intensifying pressures—from populist radical-right mobilization and democratic backsliding to widening distrust in institutions and deepening social fragmentation—the future of liberalism has become one of the defining political and philosophical questions of our time. Across much of the contemporary world, liberalism is increasingly portrayed as morally exhausted, technocratic, elitist, and detached from the existential concerns of ordinary citizens. In political discourse, it is frequently reduced either to market orthodoxy or procedural neutrality, stripped of any deeper ethical or cultural substance. Against this backdrop, the work of Professor Alexandre Lefebvreoffers a strikingly different interpretation of the liberal tradition.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Lefebvre—Professor of Politics and Philosophy and Chair of Discipline, Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The University of Sydney—argues that liberalism cannot survive as a purely procedural doctrine. Rather, it must recover its ethical, existential, and even spiritual dimensions if it is to respond effectively to the global rise of illiberalism and populism. Central to his argument is the claim that liberalism historically contained not only a commitment to freedom, but also to generosity. As he puts it, liberalism originally rested on “two fundamental values at its core,” namely “freedom and generosity, liberty and liberality.” Yet, according to Professor Lefebvre, neoliberalism emerged when liberal societies “forgot one half of this tradition” and elevated freedom while neglecting generosity, solidarity, and fairness.
Throughout the interview, Professor Lefebvre challenges widespread assumptions about liberalism’s moral emptiness. While acknowledging that many populist critiques rely on “an unfair and highly reductive interpretation of what liberalism actually stands for,” he nevertheless argues that liberals themselves have often “invited this criticism by effectively performing the role of the caricature.” Liberalism’s retreat into technocracy, proceduralism, and elite self-management, he contends, has weakened its emotional and moral appeal while intensifying public perceptions of inequality and exclusion. “Liberalism,” he warns, “has to rediscover generosity and solidarity through institutions rooted in justice and fairness.”
Drawing on thinkers ranging from John Rawls and Henri Bergson to Aristotle and John Stuart Mill, Professor Lefebvre develops a conception of liberalism not simply as a political arrangement, but as a “way of life” shaping everyday practices, relationships, and moral sensibilities. He argues that liberal democracies are facing not merely an institutional crisis, but “an existential crisis” rooted in the erosion of meaning, belonging, and ethical orientation.
Perhaps most strikingly, Professor Lefebvre insists that the renewal of liberal democracy depends less on technocratic management than on moral reconstruction. Liberalism, he argues, must once again become capable of inspiring attachment, solidarity, and self-reflection without succumbing to authoritarian perfectionism. In his concluding remarks, he summarizes this challenge with remarkable clarity: “If I had two wishes for liberalism, they would be these: that liberals become more generous with their resources and more generous in the attention they give to others.”
Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Alexandre Lefebvre, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
Liberalism Beyond Markets
Photo: Edgars Sermulis / Dreamstime.
Professor Lefebvre, welcome. You emphasize the plurality of liberal traditions rather than a singular doctrine. How would you analytically distinguish ethical or perfectionist liberalism from neoliberalism, particularly in terms of their respective conceptions of freedom, subjectivity, and the role of the state? What conceptual clarifications are necessary to remedy the persistent conflation between them?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: That is a great—and very large—question. As I understand liberalism, it has two fundamental values at its core, and this goes back to the original meaning of the word “liberal,” which is a very old Latin term. It refers not only to being a free person, but also to being a generous person. Throughout the 19th century, and at various moments in the 20th century, these two dimensions were understood together as part of a shared ethical vision of what it meant to be both free and generous.So, when I speak of a robust ethical conception of liberalism, I am referring not only to freedom and liberty, but also to generosity and liberality.
The way I understand neoliberalism—and many strands of liberalism as they evolved during the 20th century—is that they forgot one half of this tradition and increasingly amplified the importance of freedom or liberty while neglecting the generosity aspect. They created institutions and mindsets designed to ensure that individuals would be free from constraint, reflecting a predominantly negative conception of liberty, especially in relation to market activity and marketplace freedoms. In my view, this development gave rise to neoliberalism. So, I would still place neoliberalism within the broader liberal family, but it seems to me to represent a narrowing of the tradition—a forgetting of half of what liberalism originally was.
Reclaiming Liberalism’s Ethical Mission
To what extent should neoliberalism be understood as a historical mutation internal to liberalism rather than an external distortion, especially given its reconfiguration of liberal values around market rationality and responsibilization—and how might liberal theory critically reclaim or disentangle itself from this legacy?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: That is a very good question. The history of the 20th century can be understood as a fascinating reworking of liberalism, marked by different episodes that all sought to make liberalism somewhat narrower. To answer your question about neoliberalism, however, I first need to make two short stops along the way.
The term “classical liberalism” is familiar to all of us, but when you stop to think about it, it is actually a rather strange expression. The people who invented liberalism in the 19th century did not describe themselves as “classical”; they were simply liberals. It would be like an original gangster referring to themselves as an “original gangster”—they are just gangsters, right? The same logic applies to liberalism.
What happened was that a “classical liberal” tradition was constructed in the early 20th century because certain liberals of that period— Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Gary Becker, the proto-neoliberals—were deeply concerned about the socialistic, redistributive, and justice-oriented dimensions of liberalism. As a result, they narrowed the tradition, transforming liberalism into a doctrine centered primarily on individual freedom. That tradition then underwent multiple mutations throughout the 20th century, eventually yielding the form of neoliberalism that emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
What liberalism needs today—and this connects directly to the way you framed the introduction, namely that liberalism is currently on the defensive in the face of democratic backsliding and a range of political challengers—is to become both more robust and more attractive. Part of that involves reclaiming its ethical mission and once again presenting itself as an aspirational ethical doctrine. Another part involves recovering its more justice-oriented material dimension – “socialist” is probably too strong a word, but something closer to that tradition.
In these respects, liberalism could begin to offer something stronger and far more compelling than the version of neoliberalism currently on the table. Because I do not think neoliberalism is particularly well positioned to withstand the kinds of challenges we are seeing today, from populism to resurgent nationalism and related movements.
Why Neoliberalism Failed
Tea Party protest rally in Boston, Massachusetts. The demonstration, attended by roughly 5,000 people, took place near the historic site of the original Boston Tea Party. Photo: Dreamstime.
Illiberal populist actors frequently portray liberalism as morally hollow, elitist, and culturally corrosive. To what extent is this misrecognition rooted in liberalism’s own failure to articulate its ethical and existential dimensions—and how might liberalism reconstruct its normative language to counter such distortions?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: A book that made a major impact about a decade ago—and that, in many ways, helped launch the post-liberal movement—is Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen. But, for me at least, the book might have been more accurately titled “Why Neoliberalism Failed,” because what it primarily attacks is the idea that liberal subjectivity consists solely of an individualistic, atomized self-seeking to detach itself—or “him or herself,” or “itself,” as Deneen would put it—from all forms of particular attachment.
So, I do think that many post-liberal critiques rely on an ungenerous and somewhat strawman version of liberalism that fails to capture the richness and complexity of the tradition. That is one side of the story.
On the other hand, the critique is also partially correct. I wrote a book called Liberalism as a Way of Life, and while half of that book is a celebration of liberalism, the other half is a critique of how liberals themselves are often very poor practitioners of liberalism. Too often, they abandon its more demanding ethical, political, and economic aspirations and settle instead for something closer to neoliberalism.
So, when conservatives criticize liberalism as individualistic and morally thin, that criticism is, on the one hand, an unfair characterization of the broader liberal tradition. But on the other hand, it may also reflect, quite accurately, what liberalism has unfortunately become in many contemporary contexts.
The Betrayal of Fairness
How has the reduction of liberalism to procedural neutrality and technocratic governance contributed to its vulnerability to populist critique, particularly from the radical right—and what institutional or intellectual reforms could overcome this narrowing?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: What I find particularly devastating is that, if liberalism wants to pride itself on expertise, procedure, and economic management, it cannot continue to present itself as the party of fairness and opportunity while managing resources and opportunities in ways that disproportionately benefit elites.That is precisely what has so often happened with liberalism today. In the narrowing you describe; there is also a kind of class politics at work in which elites effectively self-deal.
What has contributed to this narrowing of liberalism is not simply a retreat into technocracy, but also a deeply toxic combination in which liberalism has come to signify many things. One of those meanings—particularly in the United States—is progressivism and a political movement ostensibly committed to fairness. Yet, at the same time, our societies have rarely been as unequal and structurally imbalanced as they are today.
So, on the one hand, you have a liberalism retreating into neutrality and proceduralism that fails to inspire much emotional attachment. On the other hand, you have a systemic betrayal of its promise of fairness, which generates enormous emotional energy—though in negative and rage-filled forms—because people come to feel that liberalism has betrayed the very principles through which it legitimizes itself as a political movement.
In that sense, liberalism—and liberals—need to put their money where their mouth is and genuinely live up to their commitment to fairness. At the same time, liberalism must move beyond mere proceduralism, not in order to impose a singular conception of the good life on citizens, but rather to articulate much more clearly what liberalism, morally speaking, actually stands for. Because, at the end of the day, I believe liberalism remains a powerful moral vision—one that is still capable of inspiring and attracting people.
Living Down to the Caricature
Could we say that contemporary populism thrives not only on opposition to liberal institutions but also on a caricature of liberalism as radically individualistic and morally empty—and how can liberalism rearticulate its moral substance without collapsing into moralism or exclusion?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: This goes back to what I was saying earlier with respect to Patrick Deneen. On the one hand, I do think this is an unfair and highly reductive interpretation of what liberalism actually stands for. But, on the other hand, liberals themselves have, in some ways, invited this criticism by effectively performing the role of the caricature.So, in that respect, the critique is simultaneously unfair and fair. It is therefore up to liberals to reconstruct the doctrine in such a way that these kinds of criticisms appear clearly caricatural rather than persuasive. We cannot continue to live down to them.
Liberal Values in Everyday Life
Photo: Dreamstime.
Your work reinterprets liberalism as an ethical practice oriented toward self-transformation, openness, and moral cultivation. How might this reconceptualization reshape contemporary debates about liberal democracy—and what practical steps are required to embed this vision in political and social life?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: That is a difficult question. The central premise of my work is that liberalism today is no longer merely a political doctrine. Rather, many of its core values and commitments have filtered deeply into the broader culture of liberal democracies. Liberal norms are not simply political principles that govern how citizens interact with one another; they now shape a wide range of institutions, from the media and universities to workplaces and everyday social life. More importantly, liberalism has come to influence how we understand ourselves and how we relate to others at a very ordinary and intimate level.
For example, it shapes how we approach romance, friendship, parenting, collegiality, and countless other dimensions of everyday life. In that sense, liberalism and liberal ideals have thoroughly colonized—if one wants to use a somewhat provocative term—the background culture of liberal democratic societies.
The aim of my book, then, was to encourage readers to recognize just how deeply liberal they already are, and at the same time to underscore the stakes involved in the current global backlash against liberalism. For me, this is not simply a matter of political displacement; it is an existential crisis, particularly for people whose values and ways of life are profoundly shaped by liberal ideals.
So, what liberalism needs to do first is to make both itself and liberals more self-conscious about the depth of their attachment to that tradition. That awareness can provide people with a clearer sense of orientation and something genuinely worth defending.
Beyond Justice as Fairness
How does your existential reading of liberalism challenge dominant Rawlsian interpretations that prioritize justice as fairness over questions of personal moral development—and can this tension be resolved without undermining liberal pluralism?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: That is a great question, though also a very complicated one, because John Rawls himself changed his mind on these issues over time. The framing of your question seems to point especially to the later Rawls, particularly the work from Political Liberalismonward, where he became very clear that liberalism should be understood as a political doctrine and institutional framework rather than a comprehensive moral vision concerned with defining the good life.However, Rawls’s earlier work—especially A Theory of Justice—contains a remarkably rich moral psychology that addresses not only what it means to be a liberal citizen, but also what it means to be a liberal person.For me, then, the central challenge for liberalism is how to recover that richer vision of the liberal person without liberalism itself becoming illiberal. And that is the crucial point.
Liberalism’s rivals—whether traditionalist, religious, conservative, or otherwise—generally have no principled objection to using the state and political power to promote and privilege particular ways of life. There is no deep internal resistance within those traditions to that kind of orientation. Liberals, however, by virtue of our own doctrine, are deeply hesitant about using state power to impose any singular ethical vision of the good life, precisely because we believe individuals must be free to determine such matters for themselves.
So, liberalism finds itself in a very difficult predicament. On the one hand, it must reaffirm and articulate its ethical vision. On the other hand, it must avoid imposing that vision from above, because doing so would ultimately be nothing short of illiberal.
Liberalism’s Personal and Spiritual Renewal
What are the implications of conceiving liberalism as a form of ethical cultivation for addressing contemporary crises of meaning, belonging, and political alienation—and what institutional or cultural mechanisms could sustain such cultivation?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: At its core, liberalism is grounded in a set of values that, in my book, I identify as freedom, fairness, and reciprocity. One could also add values such as tolerance or even, if one wanted to push in that direction, irony and a sense of self-distance. For me, these qualities together constitute something like the liberal personality.
Now, I do not think this vision will appeal to everyone. Conservatives, traditionalists, or people with strong religious commitments may find other values far more meaningful and fulfilling than liberal ones. So, I am certainly not presenting liberalism as a one-size-fits-all solution. Rather, what I am trying to do is encourage readers who are already sympathetic to liberalism to recognize the depth of their own liberal commitments and to recommit themselves to those values more seriously.
This is something I want to make absolutely clear: my book is not an attempt to persuade non-liberals—whether conservatives or others—to become liberals. That may well be a worthwhile project, but it is not my project. My aim is instead to encourage liberals themselves to take their own values more seriously and, through that process, to rejuvenate liberalism not only at the institutional level, but also at the personal and even, in some respects, the spiritual level.
Liberalism’s Double Game
Do you see John Rawls’s project as incomplete in its account of moral psychology and the formation of liberal subjects, and if so, how might it be reconstructed to address democratic fragility and polarization today?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: That is an interesting question, especially because Rawls himself eventually became critical of aspects of his own earlier moral psychology. In many ways, the later Rawls began arguing against the earlier Rawls. To put it in the terms of your question, what concerned the later Rawls was not that the moral psychology and ethical vision developed in his earlier work were incomplete, but rather that they were too complete.
He came to believe that he had articulated a highly specific—and perhaps even somewhat prescriptive—account of what it means to live well as a liberal. As a consequence, he sought to reduce liberalism’s dependence on any singular conception of the good life in order to create more space for pluralism.
So, what can liberalism do in response to this tension? I think it has to play a kind of double game. On the one hand, liberalism must acknowledge that it does possess a rich and relatively comprehensive moral psychology. On the other hand, it must remain sufficiently open and porous to allow for alternative ways of life and different forms of human flourishing, while also resisting the temptation to impose its own moral psychology through liberal institutions.
Comprehensive but Not Coercive
Photo: Michal Suszycki / Dreamstime.
Can liberalism incorporate a more substantive account of the good life without compromising its commitment to neutrality and pluralism—and how might this balance be normatively and institutionally secured?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: What you are pointing to here is the idea that liberalism itself contains a vision of the good life and a conception of ethical fullness. Those who hold this view—and I would count myself among them—are often described as comprehensive liberals. Now, comprehensive liberals can go one step further and become what the literature calls perfectionist liberals, meaning liberals who are willing to use state power to promote their preferred way of life.
Liberalism can incorporate a more substantive vision of the good life, but we have to distinguish carefully the level at which this takes place. If we are speaking about personal life and the broader social and civic sphere, then liberals can certainly promote their values and way of life quite robustly, including through institutions. But liberals must remain very cautious about advancing those values through the direct use of state power. Liberalism has always been deeply uneasy with that possibility, and for two distinct reasons.
Interestingly, those reasons vary depending on which phase of the liberal tradition we are discussing. Early liberals resisted the state promotion of any singular way of life because they elevated freedom above all other values. For example, John Stuart Mill viewed individuality, while Immanuel Kant emphasized autonomy, as central to human flourishing. From that perspective, it would be entirely contrary to the liberal ethical vision for the state to impose or privilege one conception of the good life over others.
Later liberals, however, arrived at a similar conclusion through a somewhat different line of reasoning. They argued that because democratic societies are composed of political equals, all citizens are co-holders of political power. Consequently, for the state to use that shared political power to advance one particular way of life would be unjustifiable to the citizenry as a whole, and therefore illiberal.
So, my broader point is that the liberal tradition has long contained a deep resistance to paternalism and perfectionism when it comes to the state-led promotion of any particular ethical way of life.
Populism and Virtue Politics
To what extent do contemporary patterns of democratic backsliding reflect not merely institutional erosion but a deeper normative exhaustion within liberal societies—and what resources within liberal thought might counter this decline?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: This question is actually at the center of my new research project. I am currently studying illiberal political movements and actors by traveling to countries that are either openly non-liberal or increasingly moving in a post-liberal direction, in order to understand the moral sources that animate these political movements.
I recently spent two months in Hungary working with the government of Viktor Orbán, and in December I will travel to China. Next year, I will continue to India, along with several other countries. What strikes me is that, despite their many differences, these political systems and movements share one important feature: a willingness to use state power to promote a substantive vision of the good life.
Naturally, the content of that vision differs from one context to another. In Hungary, for example, Orbán and the Fidesz government use the state to advance a conception of the good life centered on family, national loyalty, and religious faith. In China, I expect to encounter a very different moral framework, one emphasizing harmony, filial piety, respect for hierarchy, and related values. Yet, despite these differences, all of these regimes are participating in a broader attempt to revive what may be the oldest tendency in political thought and institutional design: the idea that the state should promote a particular conception of the good life.
You can already see this in the opening pages of Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle asks a fundamentally Aristotelian question: why do we have political communities at all? He considers answers that contemporary liberals might regard as self-evident—security, trade, or the protection of individual rights—but ultimately argues that the true purpose of political life is to cultivate and sustain a particular vision of human flourishing grounded in ethical life.
What I am suggesting, then, is that liberals often assume—or perhaps hope—that the neutral, pluralist state represents the natural or default condition of politics. That assumption is mistaken. The liberal, neutral, inclusive, pluralist state is historically very recent, perhaps only about 200 years old. It emerged out of difficult historical experiences, including the Reformation and the wars of religion. But to imagine that this arrangement is somehow the natural resting point of political life is historically inaccurate.
What we are witnessing today, particularly through the rise of populism, may therefore be understood as the return of a much older tradition of political thought—one centered on ideas such as the common good, the good life, teleology, perfectionism, or virtue politics. In many respects, that is the deeper political tradition to which contemporary politics is now returning.
Liberalism’s Difficult Position
How can liberal democracies respond to illiberal and populist challenges without reverting to defensive technocracy or mimicking the affective and identity-based strategies of their opponents—and what alternative modes of democratic engagement might be envisioned?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: Liberalism currently finds itself in a very difficult position. It possesses a moral core, but it cannot promote that moral core in the same way that its teleological rivals do. Liberalism therefore has to find ways of demonstrating its moral attractiveness without succumbing to the temptation to advance itself through the direct use of institutional political power.As for concrete strategies, however, that is probably a question better addressed to constitutional theorists. I will leave it there for now, because I do not yet have a fully developed answer to that question.
Liberalism’s Self-Correcting Resources
A rear view of people with placards and posters on global strike for climate change. Photo: Dreamstime.
At the global level, how should we interpret the crisis of liberalism in light of its entanglements with colonialism, exclusion, and geopolitical hierarchy—and what normative or institutional transformations are needed to restore its legitimacy?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: Liberalism has, of course, a long and deeply troubling entanglement with colonial projects. Indeed, even some of the most celebrated liberal thinkers were implicated in them. In the 19th century, for example, two of the most important and influential liberals were John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. Neither was merely sympathetic to colonialism in an abstract sense; both were directly involved in administering aspects of the European colonial project. Mill served as secretary to the East India Company, while Tocqueville, during his brief tenure as France’s foreign minister, was involved in the administration of colonial rule in North Africa.
So, liberalism undeniably possesses deep colonial roots, and these should not be dismissed as historical anomalies. They were tied to an early liberal belief that people could only enjoy freedom once they had attained certain “civilizational” standards or qualifications.
At the same time, however, I do not think that liberalism’s historical entanglement with colonial violence and exclusion means that it is permanently condemned to reproduce those legacies. In fact, I would argue that liberalism contains within itself the intellectual and moral resources necessary to criticize and reject its own colonial past on explicitly liberal grounds. So, at the level of political and moral theory, my view is that although liberalism may have emerged in close connection with colonialism, it is not irredeemably bound to that history.
Bergson, Rawls, and Liberal Spirituality
Your Bergsonian account suggests that human rights must break with “closed moralities” rather than extend them. Could this insight help explain why liberal democracies struggle to counter exclusionary populism—and how might human rights be re-grounded to overcome this limitation?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: That is a difficult question. One of the central themes connecting my earlier work on human rights with my later work on liberalism is the idea that what we often regard as merely political or legal institutions are, in fact, also moral and even spiritual doctrines. In my earlier work, this concerned human rights; in my later work, it concerns liberalism. In both cases, my argument is that these are not simply systems concerned with rights, judges, constitutions, or institutional arrangements. They also contain implicit visions of what it means to live well, decently, and aspirationally.
Henri Bergson, one of the major French philosophers of the early 20th century, turned in his later work toward questions of politics and morality and developed a fascinating conception of human rights. Bergson himself was closely connected to the intellectual milieu surrounding the creation of the League of Nations, and he understood human rights in a rather unusual way. For him, the true purpose of human rights was not simply to protect vulnerable populations or defend individuals from harm. Rather, he saw them as institutions designed to initiate human beings into a form of universal love—a mode of attachment and affection capable of breaking beyond closed communities. In that sense, our obligations and affections would no longer remain confined to people like ourselves, to family members, friends, or fellow citizens, but would instead become universal in scope.
In my own work on liberalism, I have tried to pursue a similar line of thought. Bergson himself regarded this vision as a secularized form of a Christian doctrine. He understood human rights as a secular recreation of the Christian ideal of universal or agapeic love. Likewise, when I examine liberalism, I see a doctrine whose roots lie partly in Christianity, especially in early Protestant and Reformed traditions. These institutions may appear secular, legal, and political on the surface, but they remain deeply shaped by a Christian moral inheritance and continue to carry many of its ethical orientations.
My own reading of John Rawls is that, at the deepest level, he was someone who had lost his Christianity but nevertheless wanted to preserve an ethical vision that emerged from it. In that sense, Rawls attempted to construct a liberal political philosophy capable of recovering or redeeming aspects of Christianity within a secular framework.
So, when I speak about “closure,” whether in relation to human rights or liberalism, I am implicitly drawing on this hidden or cryptic Christian inheritance. And although I am myself secular and not Christian, I nevertheless believe that this inheritance remains internal to the functioning of these institutions even today, in the 21st century.
Resources, Attention, and Justice
Illustration by Lightspring.
And finally, Prof. Lefebvre, if liberalism is to be revitalized as a transformative ethical practice rather than a purely procedural doctrine, what combination of institutional reform, civic education, and cultural rearticulation is required—and where do you ultimately locate the most promising remedy for liberalism’s current crisis?
Professor Alexandre Lefebvre: If I could wave a magic wand, I would do two things. And that magic wand takes us directly back to the point I made at the beginning: liberalism is grounded in two core ethical ideas—freedom and generosity, liberty and liberality. My sense is that liberalism has largely forgotten the generosity and liberality side of its own tradition, and my imaginary intervention would be aimed at recovering precisely that dimension.
The first thing I would do to restore the liberal ethos of generosity would be to pursue comprehensive tax reform, especially reforms oriented toward fairness. I am pleased to see that my own country is beginning to move in that direction. I am both Canadian and Australian, but in Australia, at least, new measures are currently being introduced to address intergenerational justice more seriously. This is absolutely essential if liberalism is to regain vitality, because people—particularly younger generations—need to see why these institutions are worth believing in and investing in. In other words, liberalism has to rediscover generosity and solidarity through institutions rooted in justice and fairness.
The second thing I would do is encourage liberals to become more generous not only materially, but also in the way they extend attention and judgment toward others. One of the most damaging tendencies within liberalism today is its inclination toward condescension—the habit of scolding others and assuming that liberals possess a monopoly on correct opinion. First of all, we do not. And second, in a democratic culture that values equality and encourages people to speak for themselves, nothing is more corrosive to public support than appearing as a self-righteous know-it-all intent on prescribing the one correct way to live.
So, if I had two wishes for liberalism, they would be these: that liberals become more generous with their resources and more generous in the attention they give to others.
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval examines how democratic erosion is increasingly shaped by forces operating beyond conventional accounts of executive aggrandizement and electoral backsliding. Drawing on his research on global illiberalism, state erosion, populism, political violence, and subnational authoritarianism, Dr. Sandoval argues that the international democratic environment has become less supportive of opposition forces and more permissive of illiberal practices. He warns that while populist leaders may be defeated electorally, the institutional damage they leave behind is far harder to reverse. The interview also explores Mexico’s “ballots, bots, and bullets” dynamic, where digital manipulation and criminal violence reshape democratic competition from below, while declining trust undermines democratic recovery at both domestic and international levels.
The accelerating crisis of liberal democracy is no longer confined to domestic arenas of polarization, institutional decay, or electoral contestation. Increasingly, democratic erosion unfolds within an international environment that has itself become more permissive of authoritarianism, more tolerant of illiberal governance, and less capable of sustaining democratic norms across borders. In this context, the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) spoke with Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Democracy at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, whose research explores the intersections of global illiberalism, populism, state capacity, political violence, democratic resilience, and subnational authoritarianism. Across a wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Pérez Sandoval offers a rich analysis of how contemporary democracies are being reshaped not only from above by executive aggrandizement, but also from below through institutional hollowing, criminal governance, digital manipulation, and declining public trust.
At the center of the interview is Dr. Sandoval’s argument that the international democratic order itself has undergone a profound transformation. Drawing on his recent Journal of Democracy article, he argues that the post-Cold War assumption that “linkages to the West” would provide a reliable democratic impetus has weakened considerably. As democratic turbulence intensifies within the United States and Europe themselves, “it is no longer certain that these linkages to the international arena, and specifically to Western democracies, provide robust support for democratic forces around the globe.” In their place, long-established autocracies have become “increasingly organized and much more sophisticated in how they operate internationally,” contributing to what he repeatedly describes as the “normalization of illiberal practices” both domestically and internationally.
This transformation, Dr. Sandoval argues, has profound consequences for democratic oppositions operating in hybrid regimes and eroding democracies alike. Global illiberalism raises the costs of resistance, fragments opposition coalitions, and produces what he terms a “credibility gap,” in which democratic actors may sacrifice long-term democratic commitments for short-term electoral viability. The result is an increasingly zero-sum international environment in which “policy preferences and regime preferences are becoming increasingly aligned.”
The interview also explores Dr. Sandoval’s influential work on state erosion and populist governance. In his collaborative research with Andrés Mejía Costa, he distinguishes democratic backsliding from the “hollowing out” of state institutions through mechanisms such as the dismantling of bureaucracies, the rearrangement of state agencies, fiscal centralization, and judicial reconfiguration. While populist leaders may be removed electorally, the institutional damage they leave behind is far more enduring. As he warns, “state erosion and state damage are much harder to undo.”
Particularly striking is Dr. Sandoval’s discussion of democratic trust in both domestic and international contexts. Reflecting on transatlantic relations, he observes that “a partner that was once regarded as reliable may suddenly appear far less trustworthy,” adding that “even when a government leaves office or is voted out, the damage to trust may already have been done.” This erosion of institutional confidence, he argues, extends from citizens’ relationships with the state to alliances such as those between the United States, NATO, and Europe. Hence the interview’s central warning: the erosion of trust often outlasts electoral change itself.
The conversation further examines Mexico as a paradigmatic case of democratic vulnerability under conditions of criminal governance, digital misinformation, and political violence. Discussing the country’s 2024 elections—described through the now familiar formula of “ballots, bots, and bullets”—Dr. Sandoval analyzes how criminal organizations increasingly shape electoral competition and democratic participation. He warns that when political elites are effectively “vetted by criminal organizations,” the minimal democratic principles of electoral contestation and elite rotation become fundamentally distorted.
Yet despite the gravity of these developments, Dr. Sandoval does not embrace fatalism. Instead, he repeatedly returns to the importance of democratic diagnosis, documentation, institutional rebuilding, and civic cooperation. Democratic resilience, he argues, begins with the ability “to diagnose and call things what they are,” and with the willingness of democratic actors to unite around minimal democratic thresholds rather than maximalist ideological positions. In sum, this interview presents a sobering but deeply illuminating reflection on the contemporary condition of democracy—and on the difficult but necessary work required to defend it.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
The International Arena No Longer Guarantees Democratic Support
US President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán arrive for a working dinner at the NATO Summit in Brussels, Belgium on July 11, 2018. Photo: Gints Ivuskans / Dreamstime.
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval, welcome. In your most recent Journal of Democracy article, you argue that global illiberalism reshapes the strategic environment in which democracies operate. How should we conceptualize the transition from a democracy-promoting international order to one that is increasingly permissive—or even enabling—of authoritarian practices?
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval: That is one of the big questions we have to face and answer, and one that we try to address in the paper. In thinking about this question, my first response is to suggest that we have to acknowledge that it is happening. Sometimes the international environment appears distant or somehow separate from domestic politics. There is already enough happening within domestic politics, and the international environment can seem either too far removed or very static.
The first task in conceptualizing, theorizing, and properly understanding what is happening is to look closely at the changes that have taken place over the last decade or 15 years. In the paper, we suggest that there are at least three key ways in which the international environment has changed. Critically, the point of departure is an idea that was very prominent in the 1990s and early 2000s—namely, the concept developed by Levitsky and Way regarding linkages to the West. The assumption was that the international environment possessed a pro-democratic “flavor,” so to speak, and that one could rely on the international arena to provide a democratic impetus. But given the pressures we now see in the US and Europe, along with their own domestic democratic turmoil, that dynamic has certainly weakened.
So, the argument we present in the paper is that it is no longer certain that these linkages to the international arena, and specifically to Western democracies, provide robust support for democratic forces around the globe.
The second point, very evidently, is that long-established autocracies have become increasingly organized and much more sophisticated in how they operate internationally. They have strengthened their presence within international organizations and become far more adept at navigating the international system.
Ultimately, what this suggests is a certain normalization of illiberal practices. I would not necessarily describe these as openly anti-democratic practices, because I still think the democratic narrative retains the upper hand. You can see this even in the way illiberal and populist leaders continue to adopt the democratic umbrella rhetorically.
So, in narrative terms, democracy still has the upper hand, but there is nonetheless a growing normalization of illiberal practices, both domestically and internationally. That would be my two-part answer to the question.
Global Illiberalism Raises the Costs of Resistance
You highlight that global illiberalism constrains opposition actors by raising the costs of resistance and reducing external support. How do these shifting international conditions alter the prospects for democratic resilience in hybrid regimes?
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval: This is an interesting question, especially the last part. Because, when we were writing this piece, we were thinking primarily about eroding democracies—democracies facing autocratizing pressures. But the setup of hybrid regimes makes me think that we perhaps have to refine our thinking about what the starting position is for forces that are trying to strengthen democracy domestically. Even so, I would say that the three key areas or domains in which we highlight increasing costs are still applicable to hybrid regimes. There is the very obvious issue of material and financial support, which might become harder to secure.
But on top of that, we also add the domain of symbolic support. In the paper, we argue that this creates a sense of the narrowing of the international space, in which politics increasingly becomes a kind of zero-sum game. Opposition forces have to compete for international alignment, or they are immediately sidelined by it. And so there is this zero-sum logic that is becoming increasingly present in the international arena when it comes to democratic support.
The immediate consequence of this is the fragmentation of oppositions. Whether you are in an eroding democracy, in a consolidating democracy that is eroding, or in a hybrid regime, this situation fosters the fragmentation of opposition forces. Rather than cooperating and presenting a united democratic front, what happens instead is that these forces begin to fragment and fall apart.
The third cost—which is perhaps the trickiest one because it requires a great deal of strategic thinking—is what we label the credibility gap. This is the idea that some opposition forces will prioritize short-term electoral viability and, in order to achieve that, may compromise their democratic credentials. But what does that imply for democracy-promoting actors in the future if their democratic credentials can later be questioned? It creates a dilemma and a misalignment of incentives between short-term electoral goals and long-term democratic promotion.
It also highlights that, between this fragmentation, the narrowing and zero-sum nature of the international space, and the credibility gap, we may be observing a situation in which both policy preferences and regime preferences are becoming increasingly aligned. Whereas perhaps in the past you would not have compromised your regime preferences if you wanted to support or campaign on a right-wing ideological platform—or a left-wing ideological platform—today, choosing one or the other may also limit what you are then able to stand for in terms of the regime-level question.
Illiberal Practices Now Outlive Their Leaders
Labour Day celebrations at Old Town Square in Prague on May 1, 2017, featuring a banner depicting democracy as a leaf eaten by caterpillars labeled Putin, Kaczyński, Orbán, Babiš, Trump, and Fico. Photo: Jolanta Wojcicka.
Your work suggests that illiberal regimes increasingly learn from one another. How significant is this transnational diffusion of strategies for the consolidation of populist and authoritarian rule?
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval: That is a big question, and the first thing I would say is to return to this idea of normalization. So, not only is there perhaps a learning of strategies, but there is also a normalization of what, in other contexts and historical periods, would have been considered highly abnormal behavior, non-standard behavior, or sometimes even openly illegal behavior. In that sense, this undermines not only the domestic rule of law, but international law itself.
We are seeing—people often describe it as a return to inward-looking politics, a turn toward domestic issues at the expense of international ones—but I also think we are witnessing a very evident shift toward, for lack of a better word, realpolitik, where law, and especially the normative dimension of law, is increasingly sidelined in the face of economic interests and power politics.
The normalization of those practices and values is perhaps one of the most pressing and long-term dangers that we face. Because insofar as this process is generated and reinforced through diffusion, it creates a mechanism through which these practices survive and outlive current leaders. So, this is not only a conjunctural issue, but also a question of duration: how long are we going to remain in this process? How long will it last? I think that is the key danger and the key issue we should continue to watch closely.
State Erosion Is Harder to Undo Than Electoral Defeat
In “Why Populists Hollow Out Their States,” you argue that populists systematically erode state capacity. How does this process differ from more familiar accounts of democratic backsliding focused on executive aggrandizement and institutional capture?
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval: That is another piece that I had the fortune to write with Andrés Mejía Costa, and you are putting your finger on perhaps the most challenging empirical question we face. Ultimately, this asks us to distinguish between what the political regime is and what the state itself is.And sometimes—indeed, often—these things coexist, and they can be difficult to pull apart. Perhaps the best way to think about it is that you can have measures that erode democracy without necessarily hampering the state, and measures that hamper the state without necessarily damaging democracy. So, I will try to give examples of both in order to answer your question.
One measure that might damage the state without necessarily damaging democracy has to do with one of the examples we discuss in the paper: the centralization of spending. If you centralize public spending, you might not necessarily damage the liberal or electoral aspects of democracy, but you may still facilitate executive aggrandizement in the long term, or hamper accountability and the ability of subnational actors, for example, to exercise budgetary authority. So, there is an aspect in which the state clearly changes, while the regime itself may remain relatively constant and not immediately erode.
Another example is the current debate in the United States over gerrymandering and redistricting. These practices have immediate electoral and democratic consequences, but they do not necessarily have immediate consequences for the state itself. So, there are aspects in which we can analytically tease apart these elements.
In the paper, we present at least four ideas—or four mechanisms—through which we can clearly observe forms of state erosion that differ from democratic backsliding alone. These are the dismantling of bureaucracies, the rearrangement of state agencies, the centralization of spending, and the last one—which is perhaps the closest to democratic backsliding—the dismantling or reconfiguration of the judiciary. Those four mechanisms are the key ideas we present in the piece in order to offer a clearer empirical distinction between democratic backsliding and state erosion.
And I would add that the ultimate concern in the piece is that we see both processes as going hand in hand: the process of state erosion and the process of democratic erosion. Our key concern is that while you can push back against the regime question—you can remove illiberal or populist leaders through elections—state erosion and state damage are much harder to undo.
So, our concern is that by damaging certain state institutions and state capacities, democratic recovery becomes much more difficult in the long term. I think that is perhaps one additional distinction that I would emphasize.
Rebuilding Trust Is Harder Than Removing Populist
Luís Inácio Lula da Silva and former President Bolsonaro participate in the debate over Brazil in Sao Paulo on October 16, 2022. Photo: Isaac Fontana.
You emphasize that state erosion can occur rapidly, whereas state-building is slow and cumulative. What does this asymmetry imply for the long-term prospects of democratic recovery after populist rule?
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval:You are really putting your finger on the issue. As you said, from what we know from the literature on state-building and state capacity, it takes generations to build autonomous and capable institutions that are able to deliver public goods and services.And there seems to be a profound asymmetry between how long it takes to build and accumulate those capabilities and how quickly they can be dismantled.
One key area in which I see this tension emerging very clearly concerns not only public service delivery but also trust—both among citizens and among international allies and partners. Take, for example, the domestic arena. After a populist leaves office, a pro-democratic government may come in and attempt to rebuild institutions. But if citizens have already come to perceive that the state, and the services it provides, can be easily politicized and quickly stripped away, they may become much more wary of relying on or engaging with the state in the future.
In the international arena, you can perhaps see something similar in the relationships between, for example, the United States, NATO, and Europe. A partner that was once regarded as reliable may suddenly appear far less trustworthy. Even when a government leaves office or is voted out, the damage to trust may already have been done, and I do not think it can be rebuilt so easily. So, there is definitely an underlying tension there. Rebuilding that trust will require commitment on both sides: domestically, from incoming governments trying to reconstruct institutions, and from citizens willing to trust again and reengage politically and publicly. And the same can be said at the international level.
When Reform Becomes a Pretext for Capture
Your analysis suggests that populist leaders often justify institutional weakening through anti-corruption and austerity narratives. How do these discursive strategies help legitimize policies that ultimately undermine democratic governance?
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval: The key answer to that is that they do work. In most instances, if you look at the trajectories through which populist leaders not only get elected but also manage to get away with these measures, what you usually find behind them is a narrative—a campaign in which, with some degree of truth, the institutions being attacked or dismantled are already widely perceived as corrupt, deficient, problematic, or incapable of fulfilling the duties for which they were originally created.
You see this, for example, in Mexico, across Latin America, but even in the United States, where there are attacks on key institutions based on their past performance, or their perceived performance. Those institutions are then dismantled or significantly weakened, and only afterward do people suddenly realize that, despite their deficiencies, they were still performing important functions.
Here, I cannot help but refer to the Mexican case and the recent reform of the judiciary. We all know that Mexico has extremely high levels of impunity. Only around 2 percent of criminal cases ever receive a judicial sentence. So, there are very high levels of impunity, and the central banner of the campaign became: “Well, we need to reform the judiciary.”
But under that pretense, what ultimately happened was the takeover of the judiciary. The long-term consequence then becomes: how do you reverse that damage? I try to put myself in the position of an incoming government—a non-Morena government, a pro-democratic government—and the question they will likely face is whether they, too, should reform the judiciary under the pretext of restoring democracy. But by doing so, do they then expose themselves to criticism for also trying to reform the judiciary in order to capture it?
So again, trying to connect the dots between the issues raised in the first paper on opposition forces and the issues raised in the second paper on the state, this creates extremely complex scenarios in which the decisions made by democratic forces will be crucial in determining both how quickly and how successfully we are able to recover from certain conditions and situations.
Social Spending Can Become an Electoral Instrument
Volunteers donate food to help homeless and hungry people. Photo: Todsaporn Bunmuen / Dreamstime.
Drawing on the Mexican case, how should we interpret the reallocation of state resources—such as shifts toward social spending at the expense of institutional capacity—in terms of democratic quality and state effectiveness?
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval: I was once asked whether any and all re-budgeting was necessarily a sign of hollowing out or state erosion. The answer to that is no. In principle, if you were to ask me that question, let’s say in a vacuum—do we think that simply repurposing spending toward welfare and social spending is necessarily a problematic sign for democratic governance? My answer would be no. It is in the context of everything else that is happening, particularly in the Mexican case, where my answer would have to be: Actually, we might need to be worried about it.
Precisely because one of the key things, for example, is that in the Mexican case they are re-shifting the budget and implementing all of these austerity measures, but coincidentally—and I say this ironically—for purposes that are very beneficial to the incumbent government. So, if you redesign social policy in a way that provides beneficiaries with direct, non-conditional cash transfers, the expectation is that you will reap the electoral benefits from those transfers. And not only that, but you are also opposing any sort of strong or robust fiscal reform that would actually expand the size of the pie. By engaging in this kind of budgetary shifting, you are therefore taking resources away from other potentially relevant state activities.
So, again, in and of itself, it is not necessarily the case that any one of these measures would be problematic, but we always have to situate the analysis within its broader context.
When Elections Face Bots, Bullets, and Criminal Power
In the context of Mexico’s 2024 elections, characterized by “ballots, bots, and bullets,” how do digital misinformation and political-criminal violence interact to reshape electoral competition and citizen participation?
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval: This is what keeps me up at night, and one of the reasons is precisely because I have the Mexican case very close to home. I am from Mexico, so it feels very immediate to me. But more broadly, Mexico is perhaps a paradigmatic extreme case of the growing relationship between criminal governance, democracy, and the increasing growth and permeability of digital life.
So, I will say two things. First, they have completely reshaped electoral competition, at least in the Mexican case. I can also think of the Brazilian case, particularly at the local level, where it is now pretty hard to win an election if, A, you are not at least on good terms with criminal organizations, and B, you do not have a strong online presence.
There is also the fact that it is hard to collect evidence to ascertain this with 100 percent certainty, but criminal organizations themselves have become quite embedded not only in local politics, but also in terms of their technological reach. The domain of their activities no longer pertains only to drug trafficking. So, it is hard for me to see exactly where the influence ends, if that makes any sense. It is one thing to think about the traditional vision of drug-trafficking organizations as groups simply in charge of moving drugs from point A to point B, and that is basically all they do. Now, however, we are talking about really complex systems of criminal governance.
I recently read a paper that even referred to criminal hybrid regimes, in which state institutions and criminal organizations are conceptualized as fused. And again, in the Mexican case, the now former governor of Sinaloa—who recently stepped away from office—has been accused of having close ties with a criminal organization.
So, absolutely, there has been a reshaping of what elections might allow you to do in a democracy. The question then becomes: how do we protect the electoral mechanism from such complex and disruptive forces as, online misinformation, and criminal organizations? There are ample opportunity and space to learn in terms of candidate selection and campaign monitoring.
Violence Hollows Out Democracy from Below
Mexican soldiers rehearse ahead of the September 16 Independence Day parade in Mexico City. Photo: Alejandro Muñoz / Dreamstime.
Given the documented 401 attacks on political actors during the recent electoral cycle, to what extent does violence function as an alternative mechanism of political selection, effectively hollowing out democracy from below?
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval: This completely redefines the situation, and you are right to point out that this is not necessarily the kind of executive-led aggrandizement from the top down that we usually conceive of, but rather more of a bottom-up—I do not want to call it grassroots—dynamic. But it completely distorts what the minimal definition of democracy entails, namely the rotation of elites and electoral contestation. So, if the only elites rotating through the system are those effectively vetted by criminal organizations, and if, from their very inception, they already possess what we might call a very lax commitment to the rule of law, then I do not see a very bright future for liberal democracies at the local, subnational, or national level, in Mexico or elsewhere where this might be happening.
Local Politics as a Space of Experimentation and Democratic Defense
To what extent do populist and far-right actors exploit subnational arenas—such as regional governments or municipalities—as laboratories for illiberal experimentation and institutional erosion?
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval: This is an interesting question, and you will get different answers depending on the case and who you ask. Subnational arenas, or subnational units, have been described both as laboratories of authoritarianism—where exactly the kind of dynamics you mention take place, with parties and politicians experimenting, learning, and seeing what they can get away with—and as arenas of resistance, in which politicians and parties resist and withstand autocratizing pressures from above.
In that sense, it ultimately becomes a matter of the preferences of the actors in power and what they are actually able to push for. The subnational arena allows for experimentation in either direction. It can function in an autocratizing way: actors can learn what the legal framework allows them to do, how they might reshuffle certain budgets, which agencies are absolutely necessary, and which messages resonate with the electorate, and which do not. This can actually catapult actors to the national stage. But it can also serve as a space of resistance—a space in which we learn how to contest autocratization from above.
So, I would try to balance the picture and say that there is evidence for both dynamics. My hope is that we are building enough research and collecting enough evidence regarding best practices in both scenarios: on the one hand, to identify these dynamics early and recognize that certain types of practices tend to lead to autocratizing outcomes; and, on the other hand, to replicate successful efforts toward rebuilding and resisting in defense of democracy.
Trust Is the Long-Term Challenge of Democratic Recovery
Your work suggests that declining state capacity undermines citizens’ trust and fuels disengagement. How does this dynamic contribute to a vicious cycle in which democratic dissatisfaction further empowers populist or authoritarian actors?
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval: I’ll connect that question to your previous question by saying that there is research showing that the democratic features of the subnational unit in which you live shape citizens’ perceptions of how democratic their country is, and also shape trust in the state, government, and public institutions. In that sense, this broader process of declining state capacity and democratic erosion at multiple levels also affects how we see and relate to the state, the government, and public institutions across different levels.
Trying to connect the two dots, there may still be opportunities, particularly in the subnational arena, where efforts of resistance can serve as bastions for democratic preferences. We may observe national autocratizing trends and the normalization of certain radical ideologies or political preferences, but perhaps the local sphere can still remain a space in which a minimal threshold of democratic practices, norms, and behaviors endures. And that, in turn, can become a baseline from which we can begin rebuilding again from the bottom up.
So, there is this recognition that, as I mentioned earlier, the key issue in the long term is trust. How do you rebuild trust for the future? My hope—and I say this very openly—is that by identifying these very local good practices and efforts, we can find a baseline from which to begin building back up again.
Democratic Defense Begins with Naming the Problem
Illustration: Design Rage.
And finally, considering the combined pressures of global illiberalism, state hollowing, digital manipulation, and political violence, what would a viable strategy for democratic resilience look like in the contemporary era?
Dr. Javier Pérez Sandoval: If I nail this question, I probably need to ask for a raise, because this is perhaps the question being asked in a lot of quote-unquote war rooms for the opposition. The broader question is: How do we successfully defend democracy? And there are multiple answers to this. Perhaps I am thinking of two things. One is a very personal answer, in terms of the way I try to approach it myself. The other is a more practical way of thinking about it from the perspective of an opposition movement or political actor.
The way that I try to do it personally is through documenting—trying to track what is happening to democracy in Mexico, in Latin America, and more generally; trying to document, gather, and collect evidence of where democracy is declining and where democracy is able to make a stand and resist. So, if I were to answer that question from my own experience—”how do I see myself as defending democracy?”—that would be my answer: documenting where it erodes, and also documenting where it resists, not only in a cross-country comparative way, but also within countries, through a subnational lens and perspective.
But beyond that and perhaps trying to extrapolate from that experience more broadly, the first thing would also be to document and agree on the diagnosis. Sometimes—I was watching some depositions in the US Congress where some members of the current administration could not even identify a very blatant non-constitutional act as such. We have become so politicized, and partisanship has seemingly trumped everything, that we cannot even agree on what a plain and clear reading of the Constitution is.
So, simply agreeing on the diagnosis, documenting it, and being able to call things by their proper names would already be a great first step. And then, moving forward, it would also be a crucial first step toward finding a common dialogue.
This is one of the calls that we make in the paper on illiberalism and democracy with Maryhen Jiménez and Timothy J. Power. One of the things that history teaches is that democratic defense and democratic oppositions are more likely to coalesce—and therefore more likely to succeed—when they agree on a minimal threshold. Agreeing on a maximalist position or a very high ceiling is always a difficult strategy. But agreeing on the minimal conditions that we can all defend and stand for is a much more feasible strategy and a more realistic act across different contexts.
But unfortunately, we are still in a situation where there is a precondition for that, which is simply the capacity to diagnose and call things what they are. And agreeing on that language today seems even harder than it was in the past. So, if anything, I hope that my work, and the work of my colleagues—and of the Center, for example, in this space—helps us create that common language to diagnose problems and then move forward.
Hungary’s democratic transition after Viktor Orbán may begin where his regime was once strongest: the centralized media and propaganda machine that sustained sixteen years of illiberal rule. In this ECPS interview, Assoc. Prof. Péter Krekó argues that Orbán’s highly professional disinformation apparatus has suffered a striking collapse, opening new possibilities for democratic renewal, media pluralism, and a more critical public sphere. At the same time, he warns that concentrated political power, polarization, and the dangers of re-autocratization remain serious challenges. Drawing on his expertise in political psychology, populism, and informational autocracy, Assoc. Prof. Krekó examines Hungary’s transformation within broader debates on post-truth politics, democratic resilience, and authoritarian adaptation—asking whether Hungary can evolve from a model of illiberalism into a model of democratic recovery.
The collapse of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government after sixteen years in power has shaken one of Europe’s most influential illiberal regimes and raised a defining question: can Hungary’s democratic renewal begin where Orbán’s system was strongest—its centralized media and propaganda machine? For more than a decade, Hungary served as a laboratory of democratic backsliding, populist governance, and state-sponsored informational manipulation. Yet, as Assoc. Prof. Péter Krekó argues in this ECPS interview, Orbán’s once highly professional disinformation apparatus has suffered a striking failure, losing its capacity to shape public opinion as effectively as before.
Assoc. Prof. Krekó—Associate Professor at Eötvös Loránd University, Director of the Political Capital Institute, and Senior Budapest Open Society Fellow at the CEU Institute for Advanced Study—examines how this collapse opens new possibilities for pluralism, democratic reconstruction, and a more critical public sphere. At the same time, he warns that democratic renewal is not guaranteed. Concentrated power, one-sided tribalism, and the risk of re-autocratization remain serious dangers.
Drawing on his interdisciplinary expertise as both a political scientist and social psychologist, Assoc. Prof. Krekó situates Hungary’s transformation within broader debates on populism, post-truth politics, democratic resilience, and authoritarian adaptation. He argues that Orbán’s system relied not primarily on overt repression, but on the creation of what became “the most centralized and politicized media environment in the entire European Union,” where hundreds of media outlets operated within a politically controlled ecosystem reproducing state-sponsored narratives, fear campaigns, and disinformation.
Yet despite these highly asymmetrical conditions, the Orbán regime’s informational dominance appears to have reached its limits. As Assoc. Prof. Krekó explains, the very machinery that once enabled Fidesz to consolidate power ultimately failed to maintain public trust and political legitimacy. The interview therefore examines not only the weakening of Orbán’s media empire, but also the broader unraveling of the patronage networks, ideological loyalties, and communicative structures that sustained Hungary’s illiberal order for more than a decade.
At the same time, Assoc. Prof. Krekó repeatedly cautions against simplistic narratives of democratic restoration. While Orbán’s centralized propaganda system may be collapsing, the institutional and psychological legacies of illiberalism remain deeply embedded within Hungarian political culture. The conversation explores the persistence of conspiracy narratives, anti-immigration attitudes, and pro-Russian disinformation, as well as the dangers that can emerge when overwhelming electoral legitimacy becomes concentrated in the hands of a new political force.
Importantly, the interview also highlights the possibility that Hungary could evolve from a model of informational autocracy into a model of democratic recovery. Assoc. Prof. Krekó reflects on the prospects for rebuilding media pluralism, depolarizing public discourse, strengthening democratic norms, and resisting the temptation to reproduce the very forms of centralized power that characterized Orbánism.
Ultimately, this conversation presents Hungary not merely as a case of authoritarian decline, but as a crucial test case for understanding whether democracies damaged by prolonged informational manipulation can successfully reconstruct pluralistic political life. Whether Hungary becomes a model for democratic renewal—or drifts toward new forms of hybrid governance—remains uncertain. But as Assoc. Prof. Krekó suggests throughout this interview, the striking collapse of Orbán’s centralized media and propaganda machine has opened political possibilities that only a few years ago appeared unimaginable.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Associate Professor Péter Krekó, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
Orbán’s Informational Autocracy Meets Its Limits
Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, arrives for a meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels, Belgium, on June 22, 2017. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.
Professor Krekó, welcome. In your work, you conceptualize Hungary as an informational autocracy, where media control and narrative manipulation underpin regime stability. To what extent does Magyar’s electoral victory represent a structural rupture in this system, rather than merely an elite turnover?
Associate Professor Péter Krekó: Thank you very much. It’s a brilliant question. Just as a disclaimer at the outset, the term “informational autocracy,” or “spin dictatorship,” was coined by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman. I merely applied it to Hungary and wrote an article on the subject. So, unfortunately, the term itself is not my brainchild. Nevertheless, I think it is a very important concept, and when it comes to understanding the nature of the Orbán regime, it is definitely helpful.
What has happened in Hungary challenges some of our traditional concepts for describing certain kinds of non-liberal—and indeed non-democratic—regimes. In many respects, the Hungarian regime under Viktor Orbán was a non-democratic system, but that did not mean it was impossible to defeat through elections.
Regarding your question about informational autocracy and systemic rupture, Viktor Orbán never systematically used violence during his rule. There was no imprisonment of political opponents, no imprisonment of journalists, and no violent crackdown on opposition protests. However, he developed an extremely centralized media system. Hungary had the most centralized and politicized media environment in the entire European Union, with more than 400 media outlets concentrated in a pro-government foundation called KESMA (Central European Press and Media Foundation), all under political control. In a country of only 8 million voters, this represented a massive media conglomerate. Combined with the so-called public media and additional aligned outlets, there were nearly 500 media organizations altogether, practically all parroting the same narratives, spreading politically controlled and state-sponsored disinformation.
The manipulation and spinning of information through television, billboards, and social media became the regime’s most important tool for reproducing its legitimacy. Yet Péter Magyar was still able to challenge this informational autocracy. One key rule of informational autocracies is that the side with greater resources generally enjoys greater support. Viktor Orbán possessed enormous resources in terms of media ownership and money spent on political advertising. Although the most recent elections were somewhat affected by social media self-regulation, in earlier elections the government could deploy far more billboards and advertising resources than its opponents.
In the 2022 elections, for example, the governmental side was able to display eight times as many billboards in public spaces as the opposition. So, while the competition appeared formally fair, in reality it was highly unequal. Despite this highly asymmetric and unfair environment, Péter Magyar was nevertheless able to challenge the government.
What we saw in the latest elections was that the highly professional media and disinformation machinery constructed by Orbán and his cronies was ultimately unable to spread its narratives effectively or shape public opinion in the way it once had.
Dismantling Informational Autocracy Requires More Than Victory
Peter Magyar, a popular opposition politician of celebrity status meeting the press at the site of a soccer arena and miniature train station in Viktor Orban’s village in Felcsut, Hungary. on May 24, 2024. Photo: Blue Corner Studio.
Given the deep institutional embedding of Orbán’s system—including media capture and electoral engineering—how reversible is this model in practice, even with a constitutional supermajority?
Associate Professor Péter Krekó: This is a great question. I would argue that it will be possible to dismantle this informational autocracy through a set of measures. First of all, of course, you have to somehow guarantee the plurality of the media environment. Second, you have to reform the state-sponsored media and its editorial standards, because it has effectively functioned as the cheapest pro-government propaganda imaginable. Third, you have to break up the information monopolies, even in the public domain, because many media mergers on the pro-government side were made legal and possible by the authorities, whereas attempts by independent media outlets to merge often faced institutional obstacles. Fourth, you also have to re-regulate the issue of state advertisements. In Hungary, state advertising became a major tool for financing pro-government media, with 95 percent of state advertisements going to pro-government outlets. In addition, substantial investment in media literacy education is necessary, alongside efforts to address hybrid threats. So, this is a multi-sectoral issue that requires a complex response.
I am hopeful that the new government, understanding that this monopolized and highly over-politicized media system primarily served Viktor Orbán’s interests, will recognize that it is not necessarily in their own interest to maintain it. In that sense, I remain cautiously optimistic. At the same time, however, there are also clear dangers ahead.
When you are in government, you are typically less interested in maintaining a diverse and critical information space than when you are in opposition. I do not need to elaborate on that because it is obvious. But with a constitutional majority, a very large parliamentary group full of political novices appointed by Péter Magyar himself, and no real parliamentary alternative outside the right side of the political spectrum, there are clear risks.
In Hungary today, you have the center-right TISZA party, the far-right Fidesz party, and the extreme-right Mi Hazánk party. So, you have one party from the European People’s Party, one from the Patriots group, and one from the European Sovereignists. In other words, only the right exists in parliament. The alternatives being articulated therefore emerge almost exclusively from one side of the political spectrum, often with authoritarian leanings.
Therefore, I think there are dangers ahead—dangers of re-autocratization and of abuse of power. Again, we have to wait and see. The TISZA movement has a much more diverse, younger, and more pro-democratic voter base than Fidesz had, and that gives some reason for optimism. It suggests that they may genuinely wish to dismantle the information monopoly and move toward a form of informational democracy rather than informational autocracy. But again, we have to wait and see.
We can also note that some competent ministers have been appointed, which is another reason for cautious hope. Moreover, the TISZA government is not entirely homogeneous; it includes many civic actors and some liberal public figures as well. So, we will see, but I think there is at least some basis for optimism that the information monopoly will be broken and that Hungary may move toward a more diverse, more pluralistic, and, in many respects, more critical information space.
Orbán’s Networks Are Collapsing Before Our Eyes
Local office of the Fidesz party in Szeged, southern Hungary. Photo: Jerome Cid / Dreamstime.
How should we theorize the resilience of illiberal governance when formal power changes hands but informal networks of patronage and influence remain intact? Moreover, to what extent might segments of the electorate remain psychologically invested in Orbánism, even after its electoral defeat?
Associate Professor Péter Krekó: Again, a brilliant question, and I think we will see the answer in the next few months. When it comes to patronage systems and the hidden networks that Fidesz has built up, they have been extremely important. But as we can see at the moment, the Orbán regime and the remnants of Orbán’s networks and patronage system are collapsing as we speak. Former government spin doctors, for example, have come out and criticized the Orbán regime, while also acknowledging that they themselves were victims of this system.
We can also see leading politicians beginning to criticize Fidesz’s internal affairs, while intellectuals who had been close to Fidesz—mostly for pragmatic reasons—seem to be abandoning it. Generally speaking, the fabric of the Fidesz network appears to be unraveling. Perhaps the reason is that Fidesz became a highly pragmatic and cynical organization driven primarily by nepotistic corruption, while ideology became secondary. And if you lack a strong ideological foundation and suddenly find yourself in opposition, with no more resources to distribute, many former loyalists will inevitably turn against you. That is exactly what we are witnessing in Hungary at the moment.
So, I would say this is definitely a systemic transformation, and Viktor Orbán’s chances of returning to power have diminished almost to zero in the recent period. It is fascinating because no one really expected such an abrupt collapse of Fidesz’s networks, yet it is happening before our very own eyes. In that sense, dismantling the system may prove easier than many anticipated.
At the same time, this also gives even more power to the TISZA Party and Péter Magyar, because their main opponent—Fidesz, now moving into opposition—is collapsing and weakening dramatically.
Coming back to your second question—how loyal Orbán’s core supporters will remain—this is something we still have to see. I would expect Fidesz to become a party with around 20 percent of the vote, or roughly one million votes in a country of eight million voters. Thus, it would become a party with significantly lower support than before, perhaps a medium-sized party. It may even shrink further.
The major challenge, connecting your previous question to this one, is how much Fidesz will be able to preserve voter loyalty if it no longer controls the public media. Many older Fidesz voters, according to research, remained loyal because they consumed only public media. And the public media essentially functioned as a mouthpiece for the Hungarian government and Fidesz, spreading anti-Ukrainian, anti-Brussels, and anti-Western propaganda, alongside a great deal of disinformation.
If those same voters continue watching public television, but public television becomes more independent—or perhaps even more pro-TISZA—then their attitudes may also begin to change. Hungary has been a major experimental laboratory of post-truth politics, and it is now going to become a major experimental laboratory of post-post-truth politics as well in the coming period. What the outcome will be is very difficult to predict at the moment.
Can Hungary Unlearn Illiberalism?
Tisza Party volunteer collecting signatures in Mosonmagyaróvár, Hungary on June 5, 2024 during a nationwide campaign tour ahead of the European Parliament elections. Photo: Sarkadi Roland / Dreamstime.
Your research shows that authoritarian environments can distort perceptions of democratic quality, making illiberal systems appear more democratic than they are; in this context, how might such cognitive biases shape public reactions to reform efforts under Magyar, and to what extent can a new government effectively recalibrate citizens’ understandings of democracy after prolonged exposure to manipulated informational environments?
Associate Professor Péter Krekó: This is again a very good question, but a difficult one—because, on the one hand, we can say that the voter base of the TISZA Party seems to be somewhat more aware of what democracy really means, and this kind of democratic consciousness appears to be at a higher level in that voter camp than it was among Fidesz voters. Within Fidesz, we could observe a strange combination of authoritarian attitudes among voters and a simultaneous denial of authoritarian malpractices.
On the one hand, the argument was that the Hungarian system was absolutely democratic—nothing to see here. In fact, this is the message they continue to repeat: “We could be defeated in elections, therefore the whole regime was democratic.” Any suggestion of authoritarianism was dismissed as far-fetched.
On the other hand, Fidesz clearly had authoritarian instincts. It wanted, for example, to crack down much more brutally on the independent media, NGOs, and think tanks than it ultimately could, but it was constrained by fears of public backlash before the election. So, there was an interesting duality in that respect. Perhaps this is something we can observe in other hybrid regimes as well. On the one hand, such regimes are willing to use authoritarian tactics; on the other hand, they insist that their systems are fully democratic.
Here again, we face both certain dangers and certain opportunities. One opportunity is that Hungary replaced Viktor Orbán’s party with the highest electoral turnout ever recorded in post-transitional Hungarian political history. Turnout reached almost 80 percent, which is nearly 10 percent higher than ever before. Previously, the highest turnout had been 72 percent. During the transition from socialism to democracy in 1989–1990, turnout was only 64 percent, so the level of political enthusiasm this time was significantly greater.
Of course, polarization was also much higher than before, but political engagement—as well as resistance to and rejection of the authoritarian practices of the Fidesz government among opposition voters—was extremely strong. The opposition gained 53 percent of the vote, which is a very substantial majority in raw electoral terms, and this was then translated into a constitutional majority.
This rejection of authoritarian practices opens up avenues for some form of re-democratization—at the level of institutions, public life, and perhaps, in the medium and long term, toward a more pluralistic party system, which would certainly be welcome in Hungary. The Hungarian political and electoral system is highly majoritarian, and it typically produces constitutional majorities, which I personally think is unhealthy.
So, I do believe there is a path toward re-democratization, but again, we have to see what Péter Magyar’s actual goals are. He is not yet in office, so at this stage we can only speculate. He certainly employs a great deal of democratic rhetoric, and if we take that seriously, then he is probably aware that creating a new authoritarian regime would not only be extremely difficult, but also contrary to his own interests.
At the same time, given that he currently possesses almost absolute political power, along with the capacity to redraw the constitutional system, there is always the danger of abusing such a high level of legitimacy. I would not say that we should automatically assume Hungary will simply return to another hybrid regime similar to Orbán’s. But I do think that if TISZA and Péter Magyar lose popularity over time, there is a possibility that he could misuse his overwhelming parliamentary majority, assuming he is able to keep the party united.
So, we will see. My hope is that Hungary, after serving as a model of illiberalism for sixteen years, might instead become a model for re-democratization. But at the moment, I would say that remains somewhat wishful thinking, because we truly have to wait and see. As political scientists, we understand that whenever someone possesses too much power, there is always the danger that they may use that power not only to democratize the system, but also to entrench themselves within it.
Hungary’s Post-Truth Legacy Will Not Disappear Overnight
Viktor Orbán campaign poster ahead of Hungary’s 2026 elections. Photo: Bettina Wagner / Dreamstime.
You argue that misinformation has a “lingering effect” and that even debunked narratives continue to shape attitudes. In a post-authoritarian transition, how can democratic actors overcome the durability of Orbán-era narratives embedded in collective memory?
Associate Professor Péter Krekó: This is one of the biggest challenges we face at the moment, mostly because, in some areas, we can clearly see the damage done to people’s hearts and minds by the Orbán propaganda machinery. State-sponsored disinformation has shaped public attitudes in many domains. To give just a few examples: Islamophobic and anti-immigration attitudes were already strong before the 2014–2015 migration crisis, but they were amplified even further by the Orbán regime. According to international polls, Hungary is one of the most prejudiced countries even within Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), which is already a relatively contaminated region in that respect.
The question is how much public opinion can be shifted toward a more open and nuanced position on immigration, and why this is necessary. No European countries are able to reproduce themselves demographically. Without immigration, European societies would eventually die out, to put it bluntly. And yet, the narratives coming from Péter Magyar and the TISZA Party still remain close to the idea of zero migration, much like their predecessors. So, in that domain, I definitely hope there will be a shift toward a more nuanced and complex approach—one where you do not simply say that everyone is welcome, but where you acknowledge that our economy and society require a certain level of immigration and that immigrants must be properly integrated. Any modern society has a far more diverse population than what we typically observe in Hungary.
The other major issue is Russian disinformation—anti-Ukrainian narratives and this highly hypocritical “peace narrative,” according to which Brussels and the West supposedly want to wage war against Russia, while Ukraine, together with Brussels, is portrayed as the warmonger rather than the Russian Federation itself. Over the last few years, many conspiracy theories have also been spread about foreign powers allegedly conspiring against Hungary, while the victim mentality that nationalist politics typically exploits has become very strong within Hungarian public discourse.
So, I would point especially to these two examples: anti-immigration attitudes and pro-Russian conspiracy theories, both of which have had a long-lasting impact on Hungarian society. Undoing this damage requires, on the one hand, political will. The new government, for example, should speak in a more nuanced way about immigration. But on the other hand, it also requires institutional responses—particularly regarding public media, media pluralism, public education, and so on.
Education itself has become increasingly politicized and ideological in recent years, somewhat following the Turkish model. There have even been attempts to make elementary and public education more ideologically indoctrinating. So, it also requires a certain degree of courage to remove some of the harmful nationalist narratives that are now deeply ingrained in the Hungarian curriculum.
Pre-bunking as a Democratic Defense
Tisza leader Péter Magyar begins a symbolic “one million steps” march to Nagyvárad, Romania, addressing reporters with supporters in Budapest, Hungary on May 14, 2025. Photo: Istvan Balogh / Dreamstime.
In your work on countering conspiracy theories, you highlight the epistemic, moral, and democratic dilemmas of debunking, including the risk of reactance and backfire effects. How should a Magyar-led government design interventions against disinformation without reinforcing polarization or appearing to curtail pluralism?
Associate Professor Péter Krekó: I would say that the party now coming to government, as well as Péter Magyar, the leading figure of this movement, has already used certain anti-disinformation techniques during the campaign in a very clever way. What do I mean by that? First of all, they relied heavily on pre-bunking and preemptive communication while campaigning against Viktor Orbán before the elections.
For example, they warned in advance that Russian disinformation could spread fake stories about Péter Magyar’s private life, that kompromat (compromising) materials might emerge, and that deepfake videos related to his personal life could appear. They also cautioned voters that the other side might falsely claim that TISZA intended to introduce measures such as pension cuts—things they had never promised and never intended to implement. In other words, they prepared their supporters in advance for the kind of disinformation they expected from their opponents.
One important consequence of this strategy was that governmental disinformation and Russian influence proved highly ineffective during the elections. We could clearly see that the government’s narratives no longer resonated with the public in the way they once had. And I do think—and this is also my hope—that these tools can continue to be used in the future, not only against foreign disinformation but also, to some extent, against domestic disinformation. In the political domain, they handled the disinformation challenge very skillfully.
Of course, once you are in government, you need a much broader toolkit for combating disinformation, including forms of misinformation that affect everyday life—pseudoscience, miracle cures, and COVID- and vaccine-related disinformation, all of which spread extensively during the pandemic in Hungary. There is even an anti-vaccine party, Mi Hazánk, which has been extremely vocal in opposing mandatory vaccinations, including long-established vaccines against diseases such as rubella and polio.
Governments therefore also need to confront geopolitical disinformation originating abroad. For that, institutional responses are necessary. Media literacy education, for example, could incorporate pre-bunking and other new tools designed to teach people about disinformation and strengthen their critical thinking skills when consuming information.
I also believe there is a need for some kind of hybrid threat center capable of addressing the geopolitical disinformation Hungary is facing. During the last elections, for example, Vladimir Putin made serious attempts to influence the outcome through military intelligence services, foreign security networks, and the so-called Social Design Agency—a social media company running dark online PR campaigns using bots, trolls, and disinformation.
Ultimately, these efforts were unsuccessful. But I think they failed partly because European countries helped expose some of Russia’s plans, and also because TISZA used preemptive communication and pre-bunking very effectively during the campaign. Hopefully, these practices can now be incorporated into a broader anti-disinformation strategy.
The Risk of Reproducing Elite Privilege
To what extent does Magyar’s background as a former insider complicate the narrative of democratic rupture and renewal, and in light of recent accusations surrounding his nomination of his brother-in-law as justice minister, how might such decisions affect the legitimacy of a government that claims to restore the rule of law, potentially reproducing patterns of elite privilege associated with the previous regime?
Associate Professor Péter Krekó: Thank you for this question, because I think it is extremely important for two reasons. First of all, yes, there is always a danger of abusing power, and there is also the danger of falling into clientelistic and, in some respects, nepotistic practices that were widespread under the previous government and are becoming increasingly common around the world. We can even look at the United States as an example.
So, that danger certainly exists. At the same time, I do not think that the mere fact that Péter Magyar was once a regime insider automatically makes him a born or socialized autocrat. I am also a social psychologist, so I tend to believe that human beings—not only groups, but individuals as well—can change over time depending on the environment and circumstances surrounding them.
Over the last two years, Péter Magyar has spent a great deal of time among voters, traveling throughout the country, and he has clearly become more socially sensitive. His program has also become much more left-leaning in terms of policy proposals than it was before. At the same time, he has also become somewhat more liberal—even if he remains fundamentally a conservative politician—and somewhat more democratic in the way he talks about institutional reforms and the restoration of autonomy within society.
So, I think he has changed considerably over the last two years, and everyone working closely with him, including his chief campaign manager, has said that he is probably no longer the same person he was two years ago. We have to give people the opportunity to change. So yes, he has changed significantly, and I do not believe that being a former regime insider is necessarily a problem in itself. However, the huge majority he gained in the elections definitely creates certain risks in that respect.
But there is another danger here, and this is the danger of political tribalism—political tribalism that overrides universal norms in politics and turns every principle into something particular and instrumental for gaining and maintaining political power.
What do I mean by that? I genuinely hope that opposition voters, opposition opinion leaders, and the independent media will remain just as strict regarding nepotism, abuses of power, possible corruption, and similar issues under the future government as they were under the previous one. Because there is a danger that, after sixteen years of Orbánism and widespread frustration with it, some voters may begin to believe that any tool is acceptable if it helps dismantle the remnants of the Orbán regime. That is a very dangerous way of thinking.
I sincerely hope that this transition in Hungary will not become a shift from one hybrid regime to another hybrid regime, but rather a transition from a hybrid regime toward a more democratic one. But for that to happen, you need not only self-restraint from politicians in power, but also voters who are willing to punish leaders if they depart from a democratic path.
Again, after sixteen years of increasingly authoritarian rule, this is going to be a huge experiment. I would not be able to predict exactly what will happen. We have to wait and see, but we must maintain the same critical attitude toward the new government that we had toward the previous one, in the sense that the same rules and the same norms must continue to apply.
The Loss of a Role Model for the International Far Right
From Left: Hungary PM Viktor Orban, Poland PM Beata Szydlo, Czech PM Bohuslav Sobotka and Slovakia PM Robert Fico pose prior their meeting in Prague on February 15, 2016.
Given your argument that Orbán’s model has served as a “teacher” for other illiberal regimes, what are the implications of its apparent collapse for transnational populist networks, and does his electoral defeat signal a broader vulnerability in populist radical-right regimes or rather an exceptional case that such movements may reinterpret as a temporary setback and adapt to—particularly in the realm of narrative and identity politics?
Associate Professor Péter Krekó: The main challenge here is that we are witnessing two contrasting tendencies simultaneously. On the one hand, especially within the European Union, we can clearly observe the rise of illiberal, highly nativist populist parties on the right. Across the last three European Parliamentary elections, populist radical-right parties have steadily expanded their representation in the European Parliament.
We also see upcoming national elections in several countries where these forces are currently leading the polls. In France, for example, Rassemblement National (RN) is ahead. In Germany, the AfD is leading. In Austria, the FPÖ is also leading. So, in many important Western European countries, populist right-wing forces with illiberal tendencies are clearly gaining support. The United Kingdom is not an exception either, where the Reform Party is also leading in the polls.
So, this is one very visible broader trend within Europe. What are the main drivers behind it? There is a growing anti-establishment mood, declining public morale linked to economic stagnation, and immigration continuing to remain a major political issue throughout the European Union. At the same time, there are exporters of illiberalism—such as the United States, Russia, to some extent China, and several other countries as well.
And yet, despite this broader zeitgeist, Viktor Orbán was defeated in the Hungarian election. My most important point here is that perhaps we sometimes overestimate the importance of global political trends and zeitgeists. Domestic issues may ultimately be much more decisive in determining the outcome of national elections.
Viktor Orbán was defeated despite being openly supported by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Benjamin Netanyahu. In the end, it was a sovereign decision made by Hungarian voters. And, in many European elections—and elections elsewhere in the world as well—we may increasingly discover that excessive support from foreign ideological allies can backfire just as much as it can help.
For example, when Donald Trump attempted to intervene politically in Canada, the liberal candidate won. Something similar happened in Australia. In Hungary, J.D. Vance visited the country shortly before the election, but this did not help Viktor Orbán at all.
So, the soft power and sharp power of authoritarian actors—including Trump, but also Orbán himself—may now be diminishing. Viktor Orbán will most likely lose his position as an international role model, and he will no longer be able to use Hungarian state resources to spread his ideology and political influence abroad.
In that sense, this represents both the loss of a symbolic role model and the loss of a financial and ideological resource for the international far right. However, I do not think we can automatically conclude from this that, for example, Marine Le Pen’s party in France is now less likely to win elections. Ultimately, elections are still decided largely by domestic concerns and the priorities of national electorates.
And I think we, as political scientists—myself included, since I am very much part of this field—sometimes place too much emphasis on global tendencies. Of course, such tendencies do exist, but there are also many important exceptions. Hungary was definitely one such exception. But perhaps it is an exception that could itself become a broader rule in the future.
The Danger of One-Sided Tribalism
Peter Magyar, a popular opposition politician of celebrity status meeting the press at the site of a soccer arena and miniature train station in Viktor Orban’s village in Felcsut, Hungary. on May 24, 2024. Photo: Blue Corner Studio.
And finally, Prof. Krekó, in your work on populism in power, you show how populist governance fosters Manichean, tribal political identities that resist compromise. What are the prospects for depolarizing such “tribalized” political cultures after a regime change, and what institutional or discursive tools might facilitate this transition?
Associate Professor Péter Krekó: Thank you again for this question. Many important and fascinating research topics are emerging through this discussion, so it is truly inspirational.
When it comes to polarization and tribalism, you generally need two sides to sustain it. In Hungary, however, I believe the biggest danger in the future may not be symmetrical polarization—where you have a very strong governmental camp and a very strong opposition camp constructing competing realities—but rather one-sided polarization, in which TISZA becomes so dominant in shaping the public narrative that, as we discussed earlier, its supporters may gradually become willing to tolerate democratic transgressions if they are not vigilant enough, simply because they remain focused on fighting the legacy of Fidesz, even if Fidesz itself becomes significantly weaker than before.
So, there is clearly a danger of one-sided tribalism and polarization. At the same time, we cannot exclude the possibility that a new political force may emerge, or that the Mi Hazánk Party—the extreme-right party I mentioned earlier—could become stronger. Polarization therefore depends partly on the direction in which both the political system and the party system evolve. And since these dynamics are changing as we speak, they remain very difficult to predict.
What I would particularly emphasize, however, is the importance of political voluntarism. If you want to weaken polarization and tribalism, you need political will. You have to stop relying on hate rhetoric against your opponents. You have to invest in messages that are more unifying than divisive. And you also have to strengthen the political center.
I actually think that all the preconditions for such a process are currently present. This is a historic opportunity for depolarization—for rebuilding not only the political center, but also the social center, because the center has almost disappeared in vertical economic terms as well. The middle class has weakened considerably in recent years. So, since the democratic transition, there has never been a better opportunity to reconstruct this center.
I can only hope that the new government and Péter Magyar will take advantage of this historic opportunity. But doing so requires self-restraint in the exercise of executive power, and it also requires restraint in the use of campaign strategies and political rhetoric toward opponents. Whether Péter Magyar and the TISZA Party will actually be capable of exercising such restraint remains an open question. Let us hope so.
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Justin Patch argues that, in the age of populism, politics increasingly unfolds as a struggle over aesthetics. Rather than being peripheral, cultural forms—music, memes, and DIY practices—are central to how “the people” are experienced and constructed. As he notes, “the primary terrain of public contestation becomes aesthetic,” as citizens navigate complex political realities through affect, symbolism, and participation. While democracy depends on the capacity to feel “part of something larger than yourself,” this same impulse creates openings for populist capture. By showing how art can function as both democratic expression and ideological instrument, Patch highlights a central tension: aesthetic experience sustains collective belonging yet also enables its manipulation by populist and authoritarian actors.
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Justin Patch, Assistant Professor of Music at Vassar College, offers a powerful account of how politics in the age of populism increasingly unfolds through aesthetics—through sound, image, gesture, affect, and participatory cultural forms. Rather than treating music, memes, art, or DIY production as peripheral to political life, Dr. Patch argues that they are central to how citizens experience belonging, identity, and representation. As he puts it, “the primary terrain of public contestation becomes aesthetic.”
The interview begins by situating democratic culture in practices that emerge from below. Historically, Dr. Patch notes, “the part we celebrate is the work done underneath the state.” From farmers’ organizations to populist gatherings, music, dancing, hymn singing, sewing circles, and potluck dinners created forms of sociability through which “the people” could recognize themselves as political actors. The crucial distinction, he argues, is between culture produced by communities themselves and culture appropriated by state actors or those seeking “state capture.”
This distinction becomes more urgent when Dr. Patch turns to the affective power of political mobilization. Democracy, he argues, depends on people feeling that they are “part of something larger than yourself.” Yet this same need is also democracy’s vulnerability. Populism, authoritarianism, and radical-right movements can offer the same emotional intensity and collective belonging while redirecting it toward exclusionary or leader-centered projects. “Unfortunately,”he warns, “that same need to feel part of something larger can be hijacked.”
A major theme of the conversation is how music and popular culture translate resentment into political identity. Dr. Patch explains that art can become “a proxy for political thought” because of its emotional accessibility. Whether in CasaPound’s punk and hardcore scenes, white-power music networks, or strands of country music, cultural forms can provide “social and emotional cues,”“cognitive shortcuts,” and a language through which grievance becomes durable belonging.
The interview also explores digital populism and the politics of re-signification. In Trump-era memes, parody videos, and online bricolage, Dr. Patch identifies an “aesthetic of domination” in which cultural materials are appropriated, inverted, and weaponized. The ability “to take something associated with one set of values and reframe it entirely,” he argues, becomes a symbolic victory.
Yet Dr. Patch does not reduce popular culture to manipulation. He insists on the democratic importance of self-expression, arguing that “democracy is about a kind of self-expression that communicates with others.” The challenge, then, is to cultivate aesthetic literacy without suppressing popular creativity. Art, he concludes, can be “a pedagogical tool” for learning how to live with difference—and for recognizing humanity “even in the face of profound disagreement.”
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Filip Milacic argues that democrats should not abandon patriotic language to autocrats. Instead, they must develop inclusive and emotionally resonant national counternarratives. Warning that “outbidding autocrats on nationalism only strengthens their legitimacy,” Dr. Milacic explains how authoritarian incumbents justify democratic erosion through “threat narratives” portraying the nation, sovereignty, or identity as endangered. He emphasizes that dignity, recognition, and belonging are crucial drivers of political behavior often neglected by liberal democratic theory. Drawing on cases from Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Turkey, Israel, Brazil, and the United States, he argues that democratic resilience requires institutions, strategy, and narratives—because politics is “fundamentally a battle of narratives.”
At a moment when democratic systems across Europe and beyond are increasingly challenged by populist mobilization, identity conflicts, and institutional erosion, the politics of nationalism has re-emerged as a central battleground. Authoritarian and illiberal actors have proven particularly adept at embedding their political projects within emotionally resonant narratives of national protection, sovereignty, and belonging. It is within this contested terrain that Dr. Filip Milacic’s intervention—captured in the striking claim that “outbidding autocrats on nationalism only strengthens their legitimacy”—acquires both analytical urgency and normative significance. His work invites a reconsideration of how democratic actors engage with the nation not as a fixed identity, but as a politically constructed and contested narrative space.
In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Milacic—senior researcher at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s “Democracy of the Future” office—offers an empirically rich account of democratic backsliding, authoritarian legitimation, and the role of narrative politics. Central to his argument is the contention that opposition forces face a strategic dilemma when confronting nationalist authoritarianism: to ignore the nation, to mimic exclusionary nationalism, or to construct an alternative vision. While the first two options remain common, Dr. Milacic insists that “the third option is the most promising”—namely, the development of a democratic counter-narrative that is both emotionally compelling and normatively inclusive.
This emphasis on narrative is not merely rhetorical but deeply structural. As Dr. Milacic underscores, authoritarian actors do not simply dismantle democratic institutions; they justify such actions through what he terms “threat narratives.” In these narratives, “the state is under attack” and “the nation, national identity, or national sovereignty [is] threatened,”thereby creating a moral and emotional framework within which democratic erosion becomes acceptable, even necessary. Crucially, these narratives resonate not because citizens misunderstand democracy, but because, as he notes, voters often support such leaders “not because of their authoritarian policies, but in spite of them.” This insight shifts the analytical focus from institutional breakdown alone to the discursive processes that legitimize it.
Equally important is Dr. Milacic’s critique of prevailing assumptions within liberal democratic theory. By foregrounding dignity, recognition, and belonging, he challenges the reduction of political behavior to economic rationality. Instead, he argues that “interests related to self-esteem, dignity, and recognition are significant,” and that the nation remains a powerful source of both identity and security. This helps explain why authoritarian narratives, particularly in contexts marked by “formative rifts” such as territorial disputes or contested identities, gain traction so effectively.
Yet Dr. Milacic resists deterministic conclusions. While some societies may be more structurally susceptible to such narratives, they are not condemned to authoritarian outcomes. Democratic resilience, he argues, depends on political agency and the capacity to craft inclusive, emotionally resonant counter-narratives. Ultimately, the interview advances a compelling thesis: that the defense of democracy today requires not only institutional safeguards but also a re-engagement with the symbolic and affective dimensions of political life—because, as Dr. Milacic concludes, politics is “fundamentally a battle of narratives.”
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Justin Patch argues that, in the age of populism, politics increasingly unfolds as a struggle over aesthetics. Rather than being peripheral, cultural forms—music, memes, and DIY practices—are central to how “the people” are experienced and constructed. As he notes, “the primary terrain of public contestation becomes aesthetic,” as citizens navigate complex political realities through affect, symbolism, and participation. While democracy depends on the capacity to feel “part of something larger than yourself,” this same impulse creates openings for populist capture. By showing how art can function as both democratic expression and ideological instrument, Patch highlights a central tension: aesthetic experience sustains collective belonging yet also enables its manipulation by populist and authoritarian actors.
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Justin Patch, Assistant Professor of Music at Vassar College, offers a powerful account of how politics in the age of populism increasingly unfolds through aesthetics—through sound, image, gesture, affect, and participatory cultural forms. Rather than treating music, memes, art, or DIY production as peripheral to political life, Dr. Patch argues that they are central to how citizens experience belonging, identity, and representation. As he puts it, “the primary terrain of public contestation becomes aesthetic.”
The interview begins by situating democratic culture in practices that emerge from below. Historically, Dr. Patch notes, “the part we celebrate is the work done underneath the state.” From farmers’ organizations to populist gatherings, music, dancing, hymn singing, sewing circles, and potluck dinners created forms of sociability through which “the people” could recognize themselves as political actors. The crucial distinction, he argues, is between culture produced by communities themselves and culture appropriated by state actors or those seeking “state capture.”
This distinction becomes more urgent when Dr. Patch turns to the affective power of political mobilization. Democracy, he argues, depends on people feeling that they are “part of something larger than yourself.” Yet this same need is also democracy’s vulnerability. Populism, authoritarianism, and radical-right movements can offer the same emotional intensity and collective belonging while redirecting it toward exclusionary or leader-centered projects. “Unfortunately,”he warns, “that same need to feel part of something larger can be hijacked.”
A major theme of the conversation is how music and popular culture translate resentment into political identity. Dr. Patch explains that art can become “a proxy for political thought” because of its emotional accessibility. Whether in CasaPound’s punk and hardcore scenes, white-power music networks, or strands of country music, cultural forms can provide “social and emotional cues,”“cognitive shortcuts,” and a language through which grievance becomes durable belonging.
The interview also explores digital populism and the politics of re-signification. In Trump-era memes, parody videos, and online bricolage, Dr. Patch identifies an “aesthetic of domination” in which cultural materials are appropriated, inverted, and weaponized. The ability “to take something associated with one set of values and reframe it entirely,” he argues, becomes a symbolic victory.
Yet Dr. Patch does not reduce popular culture to manipulation. He insists on the democratic importance of self-expression, arguing that “democracy is about a kind of self-expression that communicates with others.” The challenge, then, is to cultivate aesthetic literacy without suppressing popular creativity. Art, he concludes, can be “a pedagogical tool” for learning how to live with difference—and for recognizing humanity “even in the face of profound disagreement.”
Here is the edited version of our interview with Dr. Justin Patch, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
Political Culture Begins with Who Creates It: State or Society
Photo: casapounditalia.org
Dr. Patch, welcome. In your work on the “sound of democracy,” you treat music, noise, affect, and collective embodiment not as ornamental features of politics but as constitutive of democratic experience. How should we understand the role of music and art in forming democratic subjectivities at a time when polarization, distrust, and affective partisanship increasingly structure political life?
Dr. Justin Patch: When we look historically at the democratic aspects of music performance and art-making, the part we celebrate is the work done underneath the state. Even when we are talking about the 19th century—and I am being very specific about the American case here—farm labor organizing, farmers’ organizations, and populist movements, the music, art, and dancing associated with these movements came from the people themselves. It was, and I hesitate to say this, almost like a Johann Gottfried Herder-type phenomenon, where the folk arts of farmers in places like Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and Minnesota became part of a political movement.
Here, I find the work of a historian named James Turner quite formative for my thinking. He talks about populist gatherings as places of much-needed sociability. In his article Understanding the Populus, which focuses on Texas, instead of looking purely at the economic output of populous counties versus democratic counties, he examines other factors, such as the number of churches and the average number of miles traveled to market. What he finds is that populous counties were actually more spread out, had less commerce from the outside, and had fewer traveling preachers. There were fewer churches coming from outside. Because they lacked established ways of gathering, populist gatherings became extremely important.
People would hold meetings lasting several days, where there were sewing circles, knitting circles, prayer circles, square dancing, hymn singing, and potluck dinners. In other words, there was a great deal of collective activity. But what is important is that these were things people already enjoyed doing, which they then did together in a collective setting.
So what you see is a distinction between music that people are already making within their communities, which is then directed toward a political purpose, and music that state actors—or those seeking some form of state capture—appropriate, repackage, and project onto society. It is a kind of push and pull, and sometimes it involves the same culture. The key difference lies in who initiates it. Is it culture initiated by the state, where the state defines what it means to be a citizen, to belong to “the people”? Or is it culture that people themselves create and practice, which they then bring into the public sphere as part of their political activity? This is a distinction we need to parse carefully.
Of course, things become more complicated when we consider musicians. In Melanie Schiller’s work with Mario Dunkel, for instance, there are cases of artists in Austria who have aligned themselves with the political right. Certainly CasaPound is an organization that uses music very effectively and has what the British once called “movement artists.” In the 1960s United States, for example, Phil Ochs was considered such a movement artist.
So, where I would begin is by distinguishing between music and art that are appropriated by state actors and those that people are already producing for themselves and then bring into the public sphere. If that makes sense.
Democracy’s Emotional Power Can Be Exploited by Populism
You argue that campaign soundscapes generate emotional intensity, collective participation, and a sense of shared political presence. To what extent are these affective atmospheres indispensable to democratic mobilization, and when do they become vulnerable to capture by authoritarian, radical-right, or supremacist political projects?
Dr. Justin Patch: This is where it becomes two sides of the same coin. Michael Kazin, in his book on American populism, writes that populist waves occur in America so often that he is tempted to say populism is built into American democracy.
Part of democracy—essentially being ruled by your peers—is something we tend to romanticize, but in reality it is a difficult position to be in. The system of popular democracy depends on people feeling that they are part of something. You feel part of something larger than yourself, and this is why democracy is often likened to religion. You secularize authority by saying you are not ruled by God but by a political system, yet you still seek what Freud calls an “oceanic feeling.”
You need that feeling for democracy to function effectively. People must feel that they belong to something larger, but this is also the weak link through which populism, authoritarianism, and similar forces can enter. They can provide that same sense of belonging while, at the same time, redistributing wealth upward to the top one percent. It is, in many ways, the same process.
I remember watching a campaign event in New Hampshire in 2024. My brother and I saw the same event and later discussed it on the phone. He was struck by a man they interviewed, who, when asked about January 6, 2020, and what the truth of it was, replied, “Whatever Donald Trump says is the truth.” I felt an immense sense of sadness at that moment. When we look at the Gini coefficient in the United States and the number of people who are struggling, we see individuals who are searching for something to believe in—who want to be part of something larger than themselves.
What troubles me is that what presented itself to them was Donald Trump and the MAGA movement—something that, beneath its rhetoric, is deeply pernicious—instead of something more constructive. As we mark May Day, we are reminded of the history of labor and labor movements in the United States and Europe. There were periods when people rallied around the idea of supporting working people. Even in the 19th century, many middle-class individuals expressed empathy for the plight of workers. There have been powerful movements in which people looked at the underclasses and said, “You deserve something better.”
As the Supreme Court rolls back the last elements of the Voting Rights Act this week in the United States, we are reminded that, in the 1960s, a majority believed that Black Americans deserved better. These are moments we look back on and recognize that there was a form of empathy—perhaps not radical empathy, but empathy nonetheless—which was tied to the need to feel part of something larger than oneself.
Unfortunately, that same need to feel part of something larger can be hijacked. This is part of the democratic process, at least in the United States. I am not sure there is any guarantee—there is no perfect democracy in which the threat of populism does not exist in some form.
Music Transforms Resentment into Political Belonging
Photo: Dreamstime.
In your analysis of music’s political economy, you emphasize how music provides “social and emotional cues,” creates “cognitive shortcuts,” and affirms identities. How does this help explain the power of far-right cultural ecosystems—from CasaPound’s aesthetic politics in Italy to white-power music networks, identitarian media, and nationalist festivals—to transform diffuse resentment into durable political belonging?
Dr. Justin Patch: When people spend time together, it has an effect on them. When I was younger, I played in rock bands, and when you are playing music, other issues inevitably come up in conversation. There is a process through which cultural leaders can become thought leaders. It is not necessarily a one-to-one relationship, but it often happens.
The beauty—and the danger—of this dynamic is that art becomes a proxy for political thought, partly because of its emotional accessibility. Terry Eagleton, in his early 1990s book The Ideology of the Aesthetic, examines how ideologies are embedded in aesthetics and in the social relations that produce them. Although he focuses mainly on visual art and literature, the insight applies here as well.
If we look at white-power music and CasaPound, for example, much of CasaPound’s music is punk rock and hardcore. This appeals to a very specific audience, often predominantly male. The resentment felt by men in the post-industrial West—if we look at the statistics, in Italy, much like in the United States, non-college-educated white men are falling behind—is captured and expressed through this music. Hardcore, in particular, channels that sense of grievance.
To borrow Althusserian language, it “hails” people together, aggregating them and creating a space in which they can think collectively. CasaPound is able to do this effectively. In smaller pockets, white-power music in the United States performs a similar function. However, there are other forms of music with much broader audiences that do something comparable.
In the United States, certain strands of country music, with far larger fan bases, operate in a similar way. Songs like “Try That in a Small Town” or “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which have charted, translate resentment into a popular idiom. They move it out of the language of newspapers and political speeches and embed it in everyday life.
Former Foreign Service officer, David J. Firestein, wrote an article called “The Honky Tonk Gap,” in which he examined George W. Bush and his relationship with Nashville country music. He argued that Bush was able to adopt the vocabulary of country songwriters in his political rhetoric, creating a link between how he spoke, how musicians sang, and how his audience spoke among themselves. This helped build a kind of intellectual ecosystem across those domains. In that sense, he was able to draw on a shared cultural repertoire with his intended voters and use it very effectively. Country music in the United States has done something similar—on a much larger scale—than white-power music does in more limited contexts, particularly in the mid-2000s.
Digital Populism Thrives on Inverting Cultural Symbols
In “Editing for Partisanship,” you describe Trump-era populist art as grounded not in stable formal properties but in a “relational aesthetic” marked by domination, ridicule, violence, and re-signification. How does this concept illuminate the contemporary radical right’s use of memes, parody, music videos, flags, street art, and digital bricolage to produce “the people” against feminists, migrants, racial minorities, liberals, and cosmopolitan elites?
Dr. Justin Patch: When I look at the digital ecosystem, what you have are communities that are, in many ways, pre-made. You have people who follow certain accounts and others who follow each other because they know one another. Within this context, digital culture—music videos, memes, Photoshop, and similar forms—gives people an opportunity to participate.
Part of the language of participation involves familiarity and humor, but there is also something like a culture and aesthetic of domination. This may sound unusual, but we can see a parallel in DJ culture. One of the things DJs do, especially when they know their audiences well, is to play tracks people have not heard for a while, disguise tracks by starting them in unexpected places, or mix together seemingly unrelated pieces. Sometimes they introduce something that feels almost like a non sequitur, but if it works, the audience responds enthusiastically. It demonstrates creativity and a willingness to think outside the box, but it is also a form of control. The DJ exercises aesthetic authority by blending disparate elements—disco and ragamuffin—into something seamless.
I think this aesthetic of domination operates in a similar way. It still relies on humor and ridicule, but the further one can push into unexpected or even transgressive territory—particularly into spaces perceived as belonging to an “enemy.” The more recognition one gains for creativity, the more one can appropriate elements associated with, for instance, left-leaning culture and invert their meaning, the more powerful the result becomes.
In Editing for Partisanship, I use the example of Footloose. For those unfamiliar with it, it is a 1980s feel-good film about tensions between urban and rural life in a conservative Christian town that bans dancing. A young man from the city arrives and mobilizes the youth against the older generation. In the end, as in many films of that era, there is a resolution: the youth are allowed to dance, authority is partially preserved, and the narrative concludes on an optimistic note.
Dan Scavino takes the chorus of Footloose and sets it to footage from Portland showing anti-government, anti-Trump protesters, including an incident in which one protester accidentally sets his feet on fire with a Molotov cocktail. What made that clip go viral, and what made it so striking to me, was the radical re-signification of a song associated with a more conciliatory cultural moment into something distinctly aligned with the MAGA movement.
It is precisely this capacity to invert meaning—to take something associated with one set of values and reframe it entirely—that is highly valued within this particular populist movement. The ability to appropriate and transform cultural material in this way is seen as a significant victory.
Imperfection Becomes the Currency of Political Credibility
Your work suggests that popular culture functions as a medium through which populist communities imagine themselves as authentic, embattled, and morally superior. How do movements such as MAGA, CasaPound, Generation Identity, Hindutva cultural networks, and European radical-right youth scenes use DIY (do it yourself) aesthetics to blur the line between grassroots participation and ideological discipline?
Dr. Justin Patch: DIY is such an interesting concept. George McKay, in his edited volume on DIY, cautions that DIY is not a utopia and is not always a left-leaning phenomenon. There is plenty of conservative DIY as well. The key point about DIY is that it carries a veneer of authenticity. DIY culture is always emblematic of the people who create it, but it also has an aesthetic—and it is this aesthetic that can be co-opted. We see this quite frequently. At the present moment, DIY culture is very important in constructing “the people.”
Let me step back for a moment. Some years ago, probably in the 2010s, I met an EDM (electronic dance music) producer by chance. We were chatting, and he remarked that when everything can be made perfect—when digital tools allow for perfect timing and sound—the real challenge is capturing the imperfection that makes something compelling. When you listen to artists like Aretha Franklin or Marvin Gaye, there is always something slightly off—slightly behind the beat or slightly out of tune—that listeners find appealing.
In a digital environment where perfection is possible, DIY and its associated imperfections become signifiers of authenticity. It is the difference between a perfectly staged shot and a slightly shaky, handheld recording. Even if the latter is less polished, it conveys a stronger sense of authenticity.
What we see now is that political actors are deliberately adopting this veneer of authenticity. Highly polished, “Madison Avenue”-style political advertising increasingly appears inauthentic to younger audiences. During the 2020 US election, for example, Joe Biden’s campaign invited individuals to record themselves explaining why they supported him. These clips were edited into campaign materials and proved more effective than professionally produced advertisements that cost millions of dollars.
The DIY aesthetic, then, becomes a marker of authenticity that political actors seek to harness, because voters respond to what feels genuine. One of the major criticisms of Hillary Clinton in 2016 was that she appeared inauthentic—overly scripted and guarded—which many voters rejected.
What remains, in many ways, is DIY. As Anthony Giddens argued, in the context of postmodernity, trust becomes central. The DIY aesthetic functions as an index of authenticity and humanity. The problem, however, is that it is still an aesthetic—and therefore something that can be appropriated and instrumentalized.
The Key Question Is Not What People Create, but Why
Photo: Dreamstime.
In your account, citizen-made art is central to the construction of populist identity because it is “by, of, and for the people.” How should we distinguish between genuinely democratic cultural participation and participatory authoritarianism, where citizens voluntarily reproduce exclusionary, supremacist, or leader-centered political imaginaries?
Dr. Justin Patch: This is always the big question. What are cultural outpourings that are essentially top-down, and what constitutes cultural production that is bottom-up—production from the peripheries, and so on?
At a certain point, it becomes difficult to draw that distinction, because if someone genuinely supports populist candidates, there is no straightforward way to say that this is not an authentic voice of the people. When I look at Trump-related art—work produced by very young people, very old people, and those at the margins of the movement—I am hesitant to say that it is all co-opted. There are people who genuinely believe that Trump will be good for them.
For me, as an analyst, it becomes more important to ask why. Where have we failed—in terms of the economy, education, or public awareness—that someone would believe that this person’s policies would benefit them, or that this person genuinely cares about their well-being? In that sense, it becomes a second-order analysis. It is one thing to examine the art people create for a populist cause; it is another to ask why this is happening.
How is it that so many young men believe in this so strongly that they create their own podcasts, memes, graffiti, T-shirts, hats, and bumper stickers, or even decorate their vehicles as shrines? Why do they feel so passionately about this? In many cases, some of the DIY art I have examined expresses messages that run counter to official campaign messaging, yet remains unapologetically pro-Trump. What these individuals believe Trumpism to be can differ significantly from actual policies, but they believe in it nonetheless.
That kind of projection offers a window into how people manage their everyday lives. In Jim McGuigan’s sense, this can be understood as a genuine voice of the people. Whether we like it or agree with it is a separate question. From an analytical perspective, the issue is whether this reflects how people actually think.
I am hesitant to dismiss such expressions outright, unless they are clearly repeating talking points from talk radio or television. If they fall outside that realm, they are worth examining, because they reveal how people understand and experience the world. And that is important to understand.
Citizens Engage More with Feeling than Policy
An elderly woman prays amidst a busy crowd in Sydney, Australia. Photo: Martin Graf.
How should we theorize the relationship between aesthetic experience and democratic legitimacy when citizens feel more directly represented by songs, memes, symbols, and performative rituals than by parties, parliaments, or policy platforms?
Dr. Justin Patch: This is very much a Terry Eagleton question. Eagleton writes about the problems of the modern state: economic, educational, infrastructure, human policy, health policy—all of this is so complex that, as an everyday citizen, you are quite literally not equipped with either the knowledge or the totality of information needed to be a full participant in these discussions.
For those of us who enjoy discussing politics, at some point you have to admit that you do not have the full suite of information even to think about crafting policy. I often tell people that when I was working on Obama’s campaign in Texas, you had these incredibly crafted 45-minute speeches. But in the Texas Democratic Party office, we also had Barack Obama’s white papers—ten small volumes covering education policy, domestic policy, health policy, international policy, and economic policy. You could read through them, if you had the time to read ten books. These are two very different things. How we feel publicly about someone’s persona, how they come across, is very different from how we feel about policy.
Unfortunately, the complexities of the modern state are such that we cannot all fully participate in policy debates. But, to Eagleton’s point, what we can participate in is the aesthetic dimension. We respond to how something sounds, looks, and feels. Someone uses campaign music that makes us feel good; someone presents themselves in a particular way or frames an issue in a certain way. All of these are aesthetic elements.
I was once giving a talk at a conference in the Netherlands, and a political scientist said to me, “How can you call Trump populist? His policies are oligarchic, if anything.” I said, “You are not wrong. But I am talking about how he campaigns as populist, not what his policies are.” His campaign is anti-elite, people-centered, and displays many hallmarks of populism, even if his policies are not anti-elite.
So you can have an aesthetic that is populist, or even radically democratic, without having policies that reflect that. I think one of the dangers of modern society is that the knowledge required to govern is so specialized that the primary terrain of public contestation becomes aesthetic. As a result, we end up with these aesthetic shortcuts. For example, Nashville country becomes coded as conservative, while artists like Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, or throwback Motown become associated with more progressive audiences. That becomes the dividing line, rather than the ability to have a substantive debate about policy.
A good example—just from the news this morning—is vaccine policy. Vaccine policy is remarkably complex, yet it is often reduced to a binary: vaccines are bad on one side and vaccines are good on the other. The actual substantive debate is far more complicated. If I did not know people with PhDs in virology, it would be difficult for me to evaluate those arguments. I am fortunate to have access to that expertise, but most people do not. And so, what remains for public contestation is aesthetics.
Art as a Training Ground for Living with Difference
Photo: Dreamstime.
And finally, Dr. Patch, in an era of democratic backsliding, digital populism, supremacist subcultures, and authoritarian cultural politics, what responsibilities do scholars, artists, educators, and democratic institutions have in cultivating forms of aesthetic literacy capable of resisting manipulation while preserving the democratic vitality of popular culture?
Dr. Justin Patch: I think I am one of those people who, even though I teach at a conservatory, is not concerned with what kind of art people make. I am very concerned that people make art—that they are given the freedom to express themselves—because, ultimately, democracy is about a kind of self-expression that communicates with others.
From the ground up, there has to be a way for people to express themselves and share their ideas in a healthy way. When we look at partisanship, especially as it tilts toward the kind of violence we have seen in the United States, as well as in Australia and Europe, one of the issues is that there is no adequate way for people to express themselves and have healthy encounters with those who think differently.
Art is one way this can happen early on, as a kind of pedagogical training ground. One of my colleagues in Boston once described rap battles and DJ battles as a form of peer review. In academia, we write something, present it at conferences, and receive feedback; he argued that this is exactly what rappers and DJs go through. As they perform, they receive immediate feedback from audiences, who let them know in various ways how they are doing. The same applies to art exhibitions, critiques, and even “battle of the bands” events.
This kind of experience is very important for teaching people how to deal with difference. Many of the issues we face—whether in Europe, particularly regarding Muslim immigrants, or in the United States, where tensions often revolve around race, as well as religion, gender, and LGBTQ issues—reflect an inability to engage with difference and to recognize humanity beyond it.
Art, as a pedagogical tool, provides a way to learn how to engage with difference. From a young age, individuals can be placed in environments where their expressions may differ—sometimes radically—from those of others, and they can learn how to navigate those differences.
I often think about this in relation to my experience as a soccer referee. One of the things I appreciate about youth sports is that you can compete intensely with someone, but once the whistle blows, the competition ends. I think of players like Paul Scholes, who was fierce on the field but known as a genuinely kind person off it. That is, in some sense, my political ideal. People should be able to fight passionately for what they believe in and advocate strongly for what they want to create, but that process should not prevent them from recognizing the humanity of others.
Working with art—engaging in self-expression within a community, not just individually—is how we learn to live with difference. That, to me, is essential for building a society prepared for the realities of the twenty-first century, where difference is not an exception but a constant. It is something we must teach—from young people to older generations—how to engage with difference and how to recognize humanity even in the face of profound disagreement.
This commentary by Dr. Oludele Solaja advances a compelling decolonial critique of populism by relocating its analytical center from ideology to material life. It argues that, in the Global South, democratic breakdown is experienced less through electoral conflict than through ecological failure—flooding, waste accumulation, and infrastructural neglect. In this context, environmental crisis becomes a language of political judgment and a site of democratic contestation. The study highlights how citizens respond by improvising governance, producing forms of “everyday sovereignty” that reconfigure legitimacy around performance rather than formal institutions. By foregrounding environmental citizenship and survival politics, the article calls for a fundamental rethinking of populism theory, emphasizing the material genesis of antagonism and the centrality of ecology in shaping contemporary democratic claims.
Democratic anxiety is being defined by populism everywhere today. With elections becoming increasingly polarized, institutions increasingly distrusted, and elites denigrated by citizens hungry for clear moral answers in an age of uncertainty, contemporary populism theory increasingly defines the crisis of democracy in terms of ideological confrontation between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite.” Influential concepts such as those of Cas Mudde and Ernesto Laclau define this process in terms of party politics, electoral struggles, and discursive clashes, strongly grounded in European experience. The rise of democratic contestation globally necessitates a reassessment of these ideas.
Citizens in many parts of the Global South do not often frame political resentment first and foremost in terms of party politics, immigrant threats or nationalist appeals. For them the crisis of democracy often occurs when streets become inundated, waste accumulates, sanitation collapses, water becomes polluted, food prices spike and the everyday fragility of survival in urban space defines the state’s responsiveness. Citizens experience this failure of government less as a constitutional crisis and more as a systematic material breakdown, turning ecology into language for political dissent.
This is a crucial insight because democratic legitimacy is increasingly negotiated in terms of environmental realities. When storm drainage becomes a source of flooding and waste management failures prevent sanitation, ordinary people perceive these as evidence of the abandonment of the populace, or of their lives being deprivileged by governing authorities. Such environmental breakdown becomes a source of moral judgment, casting doubt upon the moral authority of political elites.
The work of a growing body of scholars is showing that climate and ecological crisis is reframing populist narratives not only through established ideological distinctions. Some argue that the ideational framework of climate populism theory has already failed because it cannot accommodate the varied ways in which ecological grievance leads to different kinds of articulation across various institutions.
The implications are vast: the study of populism cannot be separated from the ecological reality with which it is increasingly tied.
Why Existing Theory Is Not Enough
The existing literature assumes that populist actors are largely capable of mobilizing symbolic opposition against rulers within relatively functioning institutions. In weak democracies the institutional framework is precarious, and the state can be rhetorically present, but materially absent. This creates a unique political terrain.
When institutions routinely fail to provide sanitation, safety and infrastructure, anti-elite discourse emerges less as a battle of ideologies and more as a concrete test of the performance of the state and democratic governance. Citizens criticize rulers not just for corruption, but because roads are impassable, waste remains undeposited and water and electricity do not function properly.
This kind of anti-elite sentiment, in this situation, does not always constitute a threat to democracy. Instead, it constitutes claims to practical citizenship. This is the point at which a decolonial critique must be introduced, for in weak democracies in the Global South the language of populism increasingly derives from everyday experience with ecological neglect.
Environmental Degradation as Democratic Testament
In places of rapid urbanization such as Lagos, Nigeria, environmental crisis has become the defining public face of democratic strain. Repeated flooding, collapsing drainage, rising sea levels, escalating waste accumulation and the spread of disease have increasingly defined the political experiences of urban inhabitants. A recent analysis of flood vulnerability in Lagos highlights how poor waste management, inadequate urban planning enforcement and a lack of community participation continue to undermine efforts to respond to climate risks, despite multiple state interventions. This demonstrates not simply administrative shortcomings, but a failure to provide unequal protection.
Environmental risk in Lagos and elsewhere is socially and materially distributed. Informally governed settlements and the poor suffer greater and more repeated ecological risks than more affluent neighborhoods, yet it is precisely these vulnerable communities that receive slower and poorer infrastructural responses from authorities. Ecology thus becomes a language of inequality and injustice.
The impact of class and settlement vulnerability on flood exposure is reflected in recent studies of urban spatial inequality in Lagos, demonstrating that environmental insecurity is inextricably linked to democratic exclusion. Ecological collapse thus acquires symbolic power: floodwaters signify state abandonment, waste streams become markers of inequality, and infrastructural failures translate into tangible accusations of undemocratic neglect. Citizens may not explicitly define these dynamics as “populist” framework, but the underlying logic is clearly so—a confrontation between the common people and a distant, selectively responsive, and morally indifferent government.
Informal Governance and Everyday Sovereignty
People rarely wait patiently when their formal institutions persistently fail. They improvise governance. Communities organize the cleaning of drainage ditches, youth groups coordinate waste disposal, street vendors pay for sanitation services, religious networks provide disaster relief, and neighborhood committees enforce rules that sustain survival infrastructures. This is not merely emergency survival; it is also a form of practice that demonstrates effective political authority.
This may be understood as everyday sovereignty: the transfer of legitimacy and power from a failing formal state to individuals and organizations that produce concrete solutions to community needs. In weak democracies, citizens increasingly trust those who demonstrate competence in managing crises to produce political order, rather than those who hold office but fail to deliver. This has profound democratic implications. Authority is no longer legitimized primarily by institutions but is increasingly validated by performance. Recent research in Lagos on struggles against displacement-driven urban restructuring shows how communities develop collective strategies to resist state interventions, contest policies, and articulate claims to political belonging as formal governance proves exclusionary.
This demonstrates a radical redistribution of democratic legitimacy from the state to citizens and communities. Waste itself, more than anything else, has become one of the most significant symbolic sites of democratic breakdown. It is immediate, material, accumulating, and unevenly distributed—settling where and when political neglect occurs and public disorder emerges. The prolonged presence of waste in public space signifies delayed state intervention, while its concentrated accumulation in poorer neighborhoods clearly articulates unequal treatment of citizens.
Waste thus emerges as a public inscription of political relations, where the accumulation and persistence of material residue represent not merely sanitation problems but a testament to the priorities governments set in service provision. This sense of abandonment and differentiated citizenship—captured in narratives such as “we contribute but are not protected” or “they rule but do not care”—mirrors populist discourse: the citizenry versus a distant state and ruling elites. Waste has therefore become not only a material problem but also a democratic issue, constituting a core site of political struggle over resource access and state responsibility. It demonstrates that environmental sociology and populist studies must engage more closely to account for the material genesis of antagonism—the very foundation of populism.
A Decolonial Perspective: Three Shifts Required in Populism Studies
For a theory of populism to be decolonized, it needs to abandon some established ideas:
i) Instead of viewing populism as an ideology of the people versus corrupt elites, a material approach to governance can frame political resentment. This recognizes that in fragile democracies, such feelings emerge not from abstract ideas of morality but from tangible experiences of infrastructural failure.
ii) The electoral arena needs to be widened to include the daily life of neighborhood politics, where claims to citizenship are made on the basis of practical survival mechanisms, not solely through party-led contests.
iii) Instead of a detached analysis of the “people,” the concept of environmental citizenship becomes crucial to understanding populism, as citizens engage in political struggle as part of a struggle over their own survival in an ecological context that increasingly determines who has rights and who has a claim to care.
These adjustments do not necessarily invalidate previous research in the field. Rather, they enable populism studies to engage with phenomena that extend far beyond what has until recently been considered “the political.” Increasingly, the theory of populism itself is being reshaped by the recognition of ecological dynamics; this process has arguably already begun in Europe, where ecological movements are contributing to new populist formations. The Global South, however, reveals an even more radical potential, because for its citizens, ecology is often not merely about ideology but about survival itself.
Why Now Is the Critical Moment
Democratic theory needs to acknowledge that political legitimacy is increasingly tied to how effectively the state responds to ecological challenges. In Europe, political disillusionment is fueled by the climate crisis, and the perceived indifference of governments only intensifies citizens’ perceptions of exclusion and corruption. The implications of populist struggles for the state’s capacity and functioning—at both local and international levels—are becoming evident worldwide. The effects are even more pronounced in weaker states, where democratic buffers are less robust and citizens may prioritize life-sustaining functions over procedural norms in demanding effective governance. This underscores that managing drainage systems, coastal defenses, and waste management can no longer be treated as peripheral issues.
Conclusion: Democracy Is Now Being Judged by Its Performance on Ecology
A decolonized approach to the theory of populism must address how it plays out on the ground in contexts where people navigate the daily crises of floods, waste, and uncertain service provision, and where ordinary survival politics are becoming increasingly central struggles that often define the state’s legitimacy in their eyes. It is no longer sufficient for democratic theorists to focus solely on elections and parliamentary institutions when seeking to understand the challenges confronting the globe. The crisis of democracy and the rise of populism in the Global South are, in many respects, a testament to the critical role of ecological and environmental realities in mediating and generating political conflict and claims in everyday life.
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Filip Milacic argues that democrats should not abandon patriotic language to autocrats. Instead, they must develop inclusive and emotionally resonant national counternarratives. Warning that “outbidding autocrats on nationalism only strengthens their legitimacy,” Dr. Milacic explains how authoritarian incumbents justify democratic erosion through “threat narratives” portraying the nation, sovereignty, or identity as endangered. He emphasizes that dignity, recognition, and belonging are crucial drivers of political behavior often neglected by liberal democratic theory. Drawing on cases from Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Turkey, Israel, Brazil, and the United States, he argues that democratic resilience requires institutions, strategy, and narratives—because politics is “fundamentally a battle of narratives.”
At a moment when democratic systems across Europe and beyond are increasingly challenged by populist mobilization, identity conflicts, and institutional erosion, the politics of nationalism has re-emerged as a central battleground. Authoritarian and illiberal actors have proven particularly adept at embedding their political projects within emotionally resonant narratives of national protection, sovereignty, and belonging. It is within this contested terrain that Dr. Filip Milacic’s intervention—captured in the striking claim that “outbidding autocrats on nationalism only strengthens their legitimacy”—acquires both analytical urgency and normative significance. His work invites a reconsideration of how democratic actors engage with the nation not as a fixed identity, but as a politically constructed and contested narrative space.
In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Milacic—senior researcher at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s “Democracy of the Future” office—offers an empirically rich account of democratic backsliding, authoritarian legitimation, and the role of narrative politics. Central to his argument is the contention that opposition forces face a strategic dilemma when confronting nationalist authoritarianism: to ignore the nation, to mimic exclusionary nationalism, or to construct an alternative vision. While the first two options remain common, Dr. Milacic insists that “the third option is the most promising”—namely, the development of a democratic counter-narrative that is both emotionally compelling and normatively inclusive.
This emphasis on narrative is not merely rhetorical but deeply structural. As Dr. Milacic underscores, authoritarian actors do not simply dismantle democratic institutions; they justify such actions through what he terms “threat narratives.” In these narratives, “the state is under attack” and “the nation, national identity, or national sovereignty [is] threatened,”thereby creating a moral and emotional framework within which democratic erosion becomes acceptable, even necessary. Crucially, these narratives resonate not because citizens misunderstand democracy, but because, as he notes, voters often support such leaders “not because of their authoritarian policies, but in spite of them.” This insight shifts the analytical focus from institutional breakdown alone to the discursive processes that legitimize it.
Equally important is Dr. Milacic’s critique of prevailing assumptions within liberal democratic theory. By foregrounding dignity, recognition, and belonging, he challenges the reduction of political behavior to economic rationality. Instead, he argues that “interests related to self-esteem, dignity, and recognition are significant,” and that the nation remains a powerful source of both identity and security. This helps explain why authoritarian narratives, particularly in contexts marked by “formative rifts” such as territorial disputes or contested identities, gain traction so effectively.
Yet Dr. Milacic resists deterministic conclusions. While some societies may be more structurally susceptible to such narratives, they are not condemned to authoritarian outcomes. Democratic resilience, he argues, depends on political agency and the capacity to craft inclusive, emotionally resonant counter-narratives. Ultimately, the interview advances a compelling thesis: that the defense of democracy today requires not only institutional safeguards but also a re-engagement with the symbolic and affective dimensions of political life—because, as Dr. Milacic concludes, politics is “fundamentally a battle of narratives.”
Here is the edited version of our interview with Dr. Filip Milacic, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
Reclaiming Patriotism Without Exclusion
Photo: Dreamstime.
Dr. Milacic, welcome. In “How to Defeat the Authoritarian Message,” you argue that democrats cannot leave patriotic language to autocrats. How can liberal-democratic actors reclaim national identity without reproducing exclusionary nationalism or validating the authoritarian framing of “the nation under siege”?
Dr. Filip Milacic: What I argue in my book, and also in a recent piece in the Journal of Democracy, is that when the opposition is faced with an authoritarian incumbent who uses national appeals as a justification for the subversion of democracy, it has two or three options. The first is to ignore the issue of the nation. The second is to try to outflank the authoritarian incumbent from the right, meaning to be more nationalist. The third is to create a counter-narrative. I think this third option is the most promising.
However, developing a counter-narrative is not easy. What I have tried to do is offer some guidance to political actors on how to draft such a narrative, based on research I have conducted in several countries. The first criterion is to identify a topic with a strong emotional underpinning. This is crucial. The topic must also be linked to the concept of the nation, because only then can it effectively mobilize voters.
At the same time, this is context-dependent. There is no single topic that fits all cases. It depends on the country. The topic could relate to national history or to contemporary issues. In choosing it, the opposition faces a trade-off. If it wants to defeat the authoritarian incumbent, it needs to win over some of the incumbent’s voters. This requires a narrative that is inclusive not only for its own supporters but also for moderate voters on the other side—those who are willing to switch and are not strongly partisan.
This task is easier in ethnically and religiously homogeneous societies, where it is more feasible to find an inclusive theme. In countries marked by so-called formative rifts—disputes over national identity or territory—it becomes much harder. These rifts are often instrumentalized by authoritarian incumbents as a justification for undermining democracy.
As a result, such issues are very difficult for the opposition to ignore. The Kosovo issue in Serbia or the Kurdish issue in Turkey, for example, is frequently used to legitimize attacks on democracy. The key question is therefore how to approach them. In my research, including cases such as Israel, I find that the opposition faces another trade-off: whether to prioritize inclusion of moderate voters from the majority population or to be more inclusive toward minorities, assuming a deep societal divide between the two.
This depends on the scale and depth of the conflict. In some cases, the divide is so entrenched that the opposition is reluctant to accommodate minority concerns. For instance, the Israeli protest movement in 2023 was more inclusive toward moderate government voters than toward Israeli Arabs. By contrast, in Turkey, the opposition has recently become more inclusive toward the Kurdish minority. Yet this raises another question: will such a strategy also appeal to some government voters? To win elections, the opposition must attract at least a portion of them.
Reconciling these groups is therefore extremely difficult. Finding a topic that addresses a formative rift while remaining sufficiently inclusive is a major challenge. Still, it is not impossible. There are windows of opportunity that allow the opposition to construct an inclusive narrative and even bypass these deeply politicized divides, which authoritarian incumbents rely on to sustain their power.
One example, though not part of my systematic research, is Sri Lanka. Despite strong ethnic cleavages, a presidential candidate recently campaigned on a platform centered on economic progress, good governance, and the provision of public goods for all citizens. However, this approach is often contingent on a severe economic crisis and widespread corruption. In such conditions, these issues acquire strong emotional resonance, extending beyond purely economic concerns.
In this context, it becomes possible to construct a patriotic counter-narrative based on good governance, partially bypassing identity-based conflicts. This is not a universally applicable or particularly reassuring solution, as it implies that such narratives emerge under conditions of crisis. Nonetheless, we observe similar dynamics elsewhere. In Hungary, for example, dissatisfaction with economic performance and corruption has enabled figures like Peter Magyar to develop elements of a counter-narrative centered on good governance.
In some contexts, therefore, widespread corruption and economic failure can open a window of opportunity to bridge divides between electoral groups and construct a patriotic narrative focused on good governance.
Backsliding Is Also a Battle Over the Nation
Photo: Iryna Kushnarova.
Your argument suggests that authoritarian incumbents succeed not simply by attacking institutions, but by embedding those attacks in emotionally resonant narratives of national protection. Should we therefore understand democratic backsliding primarily as an institutional process, or as a discursive struggle over who legitimately embodies the nation?
Dr. Filip Milacic: I do not deny that democratic backsliding is primarily institutional, based on attacks against different elements of democracy, especially so-called executive aggrandizement. However, what I am trying to suggest is that we need to take a step back.
In my work, I have conducted numerous surveys across different countries, and I can say that even voters of parties associated with democratic backsliding—such as Fidesz in Hungary, PiS in Poland, or SNS in Serbia—also endorse and value democracy. This raises an important question: do they perhaps not understand what democracy is? My colleagues and I examined this by asking questions related to so-called democratic competence, and we found that most of them do understand what democracy is and what it is not. Yet they continue to re-elect leaders such as Orbán, Kaczyński previously, and Vučić in Serbia.
So the question becomes: if the majority is pro-democratic and understands democracy, why do they still support these leaders? What I try to do is take a step back and show that they are not voting for these leaders because of their authoritarian policies, but in spite of them. I then investigated this further and found substantial evidence for what I call a “threat narrative.” In the cases I analyzed, before attacks on democracy occurred, there was consistently a narrative suggesting that the state was under attack—that the nation, national identity, or national sovereignty was threatened.
This narrative serves as a crucial justification for attacks on democracy in the name of the nation. In other words, we need to pay attention not only to the institutional dimension of democratic backsliding but also to how such actions are justified. Authoritarian incumbents do not simply undermine democratic institutions and expect voters to accept it; justification is key. My argument is that, before subverting democracy in the name of the nation, these actors construct a narrative in which the nation itself is under threat—and this narrative resonates with voters.
Dignity and Belonging Drive Politics
You emphasize dignity, recognition, and belonging as neglected dimensions of political behavior. To what extent has liberal democratic theory underestimated the affective power of the nation, and how should democratic strategy change once nationalism is understood as a source of personal and collective dignity?
Dr. Filip Milacic: I personally think that we have at least a partially flawed conception of human nature. Much of the literature is based on the assumption that actors are rational individuals whose primary aim is to maximize their economic benefits. While this is partly true, it does not provide a complete picture. There are also interests that are not related to the economy but are nonetheless very important to voters, such as recognition and personal dignity.
These interests may seem abstract. They are not as concrete as wanting more money in one’s pocket or an increase in one’s pension. However, interests related to self-esteem, dignity, and recognition are significant, even if they are less tangible, and this is precisely why they are often overlooked. I believe they are crucial drivers of voting behavior.
If we accept that dignity and recognition matter to voters, we must also acknowledge that people derive a great deal of their self-esteem from group membership. This is why belonging and community are so important. The nation, in particular, is one of the most significant groups. Belonging to a nation contributes not only to individual self-esteem but also to how people perceive their own value.
A simple example illustrates this dynamic. Whether we like it or not, we often feel proud and happy when our country succeeds in international sports competitions. This affects our sense of self-worth, even if we do not fully recognize it. It is a straightforward illustration of how group belonging reinforces self-esteem.
At the same time, groups such as the nation are not only important for self-esteem but also for security. Social psychology shows that belonging to a group provides individuals with a sense of security, which becomes particularly important in times of crisis and uncertainty, such as those we are currently experiencing.
In other words, if we accept that groups like the nation are central to individuals’ self-esteem and sense of security, we can better understand political developments over the past 10 or 15 years. Economic explanations alone are not sufficient.
Identity Conflicts Fuel Authoritarianism
Kurdish people walk by the bombed buildings after the curfew in Şırnak province of Turkey on March 3, 2016. Armed conflict between Turkish security forces and PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party) members killed hundreds of people.
In your work on stateness and democratic backsliding, you show that unresolved questions of statehood and national identity create fertile ground for ethno-political entrepreneurship. How should democrats respond when autocrats exploit formative rifts—such as Kosovo in Serbia, the Kurdish question in Turkey, or territorial disputes elsewhere—as justification for concentrating power?
Dr. Filip Milacic: As I mentioned in response to your previous question, context is crucial, particularly in my research. I have found that countries marked by so-called formative rifts—meaning disputed territory or contested national identity—are especially prone to the subversion of democracy in the name of the nation. These disputes generate nationalism and provide a powerful resource for authoritarian incumbents, as it is much easier to develop a so-called threat narrative when such issues remain unresolved. By contrast, where no such issues exist, threats to the nation often have to be constructed.
Let me compare Turkey and Hungary. In Hungary, Orbán had to invent threats to the nation, portraying immigrants or sexual minorities as dangers. For Erdoğan, this was easier because of the ongoing conflict between the Turks and Kurds. The presence of a real, unresolved dispute makes it easier to construct a convincing threat narrative.
How, then, should the opposition respond? As I suggested earlier, it should not attempt to outbid the authoritarian incumbent on nationalist grounds. In Turkey, the opposition initially pursued this strategy but eventually realized that it only reinforced the incumbent’s narrative. Instead, the opposition needs to develop a counter-narrative. A similar dynamic can be observed in Serbia, where Vučić has consistently used the Kosovo issue to justify attacks on democracy. Whenever the opposition tried to outflank him from the right, it failed.
However, developing such a counter-narrative is extremely difficult. When there is a deep conflict between majority and minority groups, the opposition faces a dilemma. To defeat the incumbent, it must win over some of their voters. This requires a narrative that does not ignore the formative rift but is still acceptable to both minority groups and segments of the government’s electorate. This is very challenging, and I do not have a definitive answer on how to resolve it.
What I can suggest is that there are moments when these conflicts become less salient, creating a window of opportunity. The opposition should use such moments to develop a narrative based on good governance, if the context allows. When the economy is underperforming, corruption is widespread, and citizens are dissatisfied with economic outcomes, these issues can become central. In such cases, it is possible to construct a patriotic narrative centered on good governance and strong institutions that deliver for all parts of society. This kind of narrative can be inclusive enough to appeal across different electoral groups.
Legislative Capture Enables Power Consolidation
Your Serbia research identifies “legislative capture” as a pathway through which Aleksandar Vučić transformed nationalist legitimacy into institutional domination. How does this pathway differ from more familiar forms of executive aggrandizement, and what early warning signs should democratic actors watch for?
Dr. Filip Milacic: I do not disagree that in Serbia the key issue is executive aggrandizement, meaning the accumulation of power in the hands of Aleksandar Vučić. However, what I sought to highlight is the role of parliament. Even though we now have a very strong executive at the expense of other branches of government, this process largely unfolded through parliament. Some scholars refer to this as so-called autocratic legalism. In this contemporary process of democratic backsliding, many measures are formally adopted through parliamentary procedures.
This is why it is called legislative capture. Full control of parliament becomes crucial for initiating democratic backsliding, and to achieve that, one must fully control the parliamentary majority. I believe this was the mechanism in Serbia, and in many other countries: a leader who fully controls the party. This is important to emphasize, as the role of political parties in democratic backsliding is often overlooked.
Once Vučić established control over the party and, consequently, over the parliamentary majority, it became much easier for him to implement anti-democratic policies and engage in attacks on various elements of democracy. In my view, the first step was his portrayal of himself as the savior of the nation and of the West as a threat to Serbia, particularly in relation to the Kosovo issue. This strengthened his legitimacy as a so-called savior of the nation, which in turn enabled him to consolidate control over his party, followed by full control of parliament. The final step is that full control of parliament allows the leader to extend control over many nominally independent institutions and to engage in broader power consolidation.
As for early warning signs, I would focus on these threat narratives. If we see an incumbent portraying himself as the savior of the nation while presenting the nation as being under threat, this should be understood as a clear warning sign of potential attacks on democracy carried out in the name of protecting the nation.
Nationalism Outbidding Strengthens Autocrats
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić participates in an SNS political campaign at Hall Čair in Niš, Serbia, on March 30, 2022. Photo: Radule Perisic.
In the Serbian case, Vučić’s self-presentation as defender of Kosovo and of the Serbian nation gave him a special legitimacy that facilitated party control, parliamentary capture, and the weakening of oversight institutions. How can opposition forces challenge such “national protector” narratives without appearing indifferent to national concerns?
Dr. Filip Milacic: For me, Serbia is a very interesting case, because Kosovo has played a central role in justifying attacks on democracy. The key question, as I also mentioned in relation to the Kurdish issue or the Israeli–Arab divide in Israel, is how to overcome these divisions and build an electoral majority.
In Serbia, opposition actors at times tried to be more nationalist on the Kosovo issue than Vučić, but this strategy failed. The question, then, is how to address voters’ concerns on these issues—on these formative rifts—without strengthening the authoritarian incumbent. I think the opposition in Serbia may now have an opportunity due to a major tragedy, when part of a railway station collapsed, killing 16 citizens. This event demonstrated that, in the absence of the rule of law and strong institutions, and in the presence of widespread corruption, it can cost lives. It is not only that the system fails to perform; people’s lives are put at risk.
This creates the kind of window of opportunity, allowing the opposition to move beyond the Kosovo issue, which strongly divides the electorate. It can instead construct a counter-narrative based on good governance, the rule of law, and democracy, but framed in patriotic terms. In other words, this tragedy illustrates what happens when a country lacks strong institutions and democratic governance.
These are the kinds of windows of opportunity—often arising from tragic circumstances—that the opposition can use to build a narrative that is inclusive enough to appeal to different segments of the electorate.
No Society Is Doomed to Authoritarianism
Your comparative work suggests that authoritarian threat narratives are most effective when they resonate with preexisting historical memories, territorial losses, demographic anxieties, or narratives of victimhood. Are some societies structurally more vulnerable to authoritarian nationalism, or can democratic counternarratives neutralize these vulnerabilities?
Dr. Filip Milacic: As I noted in response to your earlier question, justification is central to attacks on democracy, and threat narratives play a key role in that process. Research by other scholars also shows that narratives about endangered identity or sovereignty tend to resonate more strongly in societies marked by historical losses of territory or sovereignty, as well as in those shaped by formative rifts and demographic anxieties.
All the cases I analyze in my book exhibit these characteristics, which made it easier for authoritarian incumbents to develop narratives that resonated with the population. This resonance is essential, as it makes voters more willing to accept attacks on democracy in the name of protecting an allegedly endangered nation.
However, this does not imply a deterministic path dependency. Societies marked by these factors are not doomed. Poland is a good example. Despite being characterized by many of these conditions, the opposition managed to develop a counter-narrative in 2023 based on EU membership and its role in shaping Polish identity as part of the West. They also emphasized that PiS was jeopardizing this position through its authoritarian policies. This demonstrates that an inclusive counter-narrative is possible even in societies that are historically and structurally more prone to threat-driven narratives.
Another example, not covered in my book, is the United States. It is not marked by the same historical experiences of territorial or sovereignty loss, yet Donald Trump was able to construct a threat-driven narrative that resonated widely. This suggests that contemporary issues, such as immigration, can also serve as the basis for such narratives.
Ultimately, political agency plays a crucial role. It matters greatly whether the opposition is able to develop a counter-narrative that resonates with the public.
Inclusive Narratives Strengthen Democracy
Photo: Dreamstime.
You argue that democratic resistance must develop a nation-related counternarrative rather than ignore nationalism or try to outbid autocrats ethno-nationally. What distinguishes a democratic patriotic counternarrative from a merely softer version of authoritarian nationalism?
Dr. Filip Milacic: I would return to what I said at the beginning about “the three options.” Sometimes the opposition ignores this issue, but when it does not, it often tries to outbid the authoritarian incumbent or, as you mentioned, develops a softer ethno-nationalist alternative. I believe that is the wrong approach.
So how can we differentiate between trying to outflank the authoritarian incumbent and developing a genuine counter-narrative? It comes down to content. A counter-narrative must be inclusive. I am not suggesting that it needs to include 100 percent of the population, but it should be inclusive of a large majority. This is important not only for practical reasons, such as winning elections, but also because it is morally justified and helps define what an inclusive national narrative should be.
First, the choice of topic and its framing are crucial—they must be inclusive. Second, the purpose of the narrative differs. Threat-driven narratives are used to justify attacks on democracy. A counter-narrative should do the opposite: it should be designed to strengthen and safeguard democracy, rather than to serve as a justification for undermining it.
Political Agency Shapes Counter-Narratives
In Poland, Brazil, Israel, and Hungary, you identify cases where opposition actors used patriotic or nationally rooted language to mobilize resistance. What made these counternarratives persuasive, and why have similar efforts been weaker in cases such as Serbia, Turkey, India, or the United States?
Dr. Filip Milacic: For me, political agency is very important here. I conducted many interviews with political actors while researching my book, particularly from the opposition, and I identified two types of politicians. One group would say that the nation as a topic is not relevant and would therefore avoid addressing it. The second group would acknowledge its relevance but admit that they do not know how to develop a counter-narrative. This is why political agency matters so much.
I understand that developing a counter-narrative is not easy, but if a politician chooses to pursue it, some guidance can be offered. The first criterion is that the topic must be emotional, because this is the only way to mobilize people—not only in the streets but also at the ballot box. The topic may be drawn from national history, but it can also be something contemporary.
For example, in Brazil, President Lula frequently framed the contemporary international context—particularly the role of the United States—as a challenge to Brazilian sovereignty, portraying his opponents as aligned with external interests while presenting himself as a defender of national autonomy. The EU, in the case of Poland—and more recently Hungary—served as another contemporary reference point. Péter Magyar, for instance, framed the election as a choice between Hungary as a European, Western democracy or as what he called an Eastern autocracy. This illustrates how contemporary themes can be effective, although historical references can also play a powerful role.
The Israeli protest movement in 2023 provides another example. Protesters invoked the Israeli Declaration of Independence, emphasizing its vision of Israel as a liberal democracy. They argued that the government, by introducing authoritarian measures, was acting against this founding principle—that Israel is a state of all its citizens, regardless of ethnic or religious background.
These examples show that the choice of topic is highly context-dependent. Each opposition must draw on its own national context. In some cases, the economy can also be important. Where authoritarian incumbents mismanage the economy and corruption is widespread, as in Hungary, good governance can become a powerful basis for a patriotic narrative, as Magyar has demonstrated.
However, I am not suggesting that the economy is always decisive. In some contexts it matters, but not in all. For example, in Poland, GDP grew significantly during the PiS period, yet PiS was still voted out of office. This indicates that economic performance alone is not sufficient. Still, when combined with widespread corruption and public dissatisfaction, economic issues can provide a strong foundation for an inclusive and resonant counter-narrative.
Narratives Must Reinforce Community and Democratic Norms
If both ethno-national and pluralist identity claims can become grounds for democratic trade-offs, how should scholars distinguish between identity politics that strengthens liberal democracy and identity politics that weakens democratic resilience?
Dr. Filip Milacic: For me, the key issue is context. It also depends on whether identity politics is inclusive toward a large majority of citizens or whether it is exclusionary. We can, more or less, clearly distinguish between narratives that are inclusive and those that are exclusionary.
The second criterion is the purpose of these narratives. For authoritarian incumbents, the purpose is to justify attacks on democracy; such narratives serve as a cover for power grabs and as a means of legitimizing violations of democratic norms and principles. For pro-democratic opposition actors, the purpose is the opposite. Their narratives are not only aimed at defeating the authoritarian incumbent but also at strengthening democracy, reinforcing the political community, and protecting the elements of democracy that are under attack.
Politics Is a Battle of Narratives
Collage by Marek Uliasz / Dreamstime.
And finally, Dr. Milacic, looking across Hungary, Poland, Israel, Serbia, Austria, Turkey, and the United States, what does democratic resilience require today: stronger institutions, better opposition strategy, more effective patriotic counternarratives, or a deeper rethinking of liberal democracy’s relationship to nationhood?
Dr. Filip Milacic: I would say all of the above. The struggle for democracy is fought on all of these fronts. However, if I may add, the focus has primarily been on the institutional dimension. This is understandable, as democratic backsliding involves the capture, weakening, or dismantling of institutions.
At the same time, the fight for democracy is also fought through words. We should therefore pay much greater attention to the narrative level. This is precisely what I try to do in my research: to explore how democracy can be defended through narratives. It is not only about electoral mobilization; it is also about strengthening democracy by showing people why it matters and why it is important in an emotionally compelling way. For a narrative to succeed, it must resonate emotionally.
I would also acknowledge that the other side—autocrats—is often more successful in this regard than democratic opposition actors. This is because democratic actors tend to focus primarily on output, on what democracy delivers. I am not suggesting that this is unimportant, but it is not sufficient. We also need to engage with authoritarian-leaning actors at the level of narratives. After all, politics is fundamentally a battle of narratives.
