Why do some of the world’s wealthiest individuals openly support populist radical right and far-right movements whose central political message revolves around anti-immigrant and anti-minority mobilization? In this commentary, Dr. Bulent Kenes argues that this alliance is best understood not as an ideological convergence but as a pragmatic strategy for deflecting public attention from the structural roots of social injustice, economic inequality and wealth concentration. Drawing on John Rawls’s concept of the veil of ignorance, the article examines how immigrants—among the principal victims of contemporary economic and social inequalities—are transformed into convenient scapegoats. It further explores how the growing concentration of economic and digital power enables technology billionaires to amplify exclusionary narratives while marginalizing pluralistic voices, raising profound questions about democracy, algorithmic governance, and contemporary capitalism.
If we were to apply John Rawls’s famous veil of ignorance thought experiment, developed in A Theory of Justice, to today’s world, there is little doubt that immigrants would emerge as one of the most disadvantaged and the most vulnerable social groups. Immigrants, political refugees, in particular, as well as individuals forced to migrate for economic reasons, are compelled at some stage of their lives to leave behind their accumulated economic, social, and professional capital and begin life anew in a different country. Consequently, they typically enter their host societies from the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. In terms of cultural, economic, and professional resources, their starting point is often below zero.
In this respect, immigrants constitute one of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable segments of society in terms of social justice and income distribution. Yet, while attempting to rebuild their lives, they are forced to contend not only with economic and social hardships but also with the prejudices generated by the rising populist radical right (PRR) and far-right parties and movements. Moreover, by being portrayed as the principal culprits behind economic inequality and social injustice, they are turned into scapegoats, a process that imposes severe socio-psychological costs on an already vulnerable population.
One point can be stated unequivocally: economically (and even culturally) driven anti-immigrant sentiment is not a phenomenon that emerges spontaneously. Social injustice and income inequality are undoubtedly real societal problems, and angry eyes are constantly searching for those responsible for them. Unfortunately, they do not always succeed in identifying the real causes. Meanwhile, for far-right actors who incite, inflame and ride the wave of resentment generated among these groups, targeting immigrants—one of the weakest, least organized, and least capable social groups in socio-political and economic terms—is both the easiest and the least politically costly strategy. Although the attempts of far-right political actors, whose humanitarian sensitivities have been considerably weakened, to exploit and simultaneously provoke this wave for political gain deserve the strongest ethical condemnation, it is nevertheless understandable why they choose this strategy within the context of political competition, which is driven less by values than by the pursuit of power. The fact that populist far right politicians such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, Robert Fico, Jarosław Kaczyński, Jimmie Åkesson, and many others have placed anti-immigrant politics at the center of political mobilization can be understood within this framework.
What is particularly striking, however, is why dollar billionaires—and even the owners of trillion-dollar companies—whose activities are largely confined to technology and the global economy, support far-right actors, PRR parties and movements, and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
In my view, the principal explanation lies in pragmatic interests. The anti-immigration discourse of the populist radical right and the far right systematically recasts those who are most severely affected by income inequality and social injustice from victims into perpetrators of these very problems. In reality, however, immigrants—alongside other disadvantaged groups—are among the greatest losers of the contemporary global economic order and the structural inequalities it generates. This is precisely where the core of the issue lies. By systematically constructing immigrants as scapegoats, far-right actors divert public attention away from the structural sources of economic inequality and social injustice. In doing so, they help obscure the role of the super-rich, who are not only the principal beneficiaries of the existing distribution of wealth but also key beneficiaries of the economic structures that reproduce and deepen these inequalities.
It is precisely at this point that the logic behind the support given by figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—the greatest beneficiaries of the existing global economic order—to populist radical right parties and far-right actors becomes apparent. Historically, just as the East India Company and the West India Company represented the corporate actors that benefited most from the global colonial order of their time, today’s technology giants occupy a comparable position as the greatest beneficiaries of contemporary global hi-tech capitalism. The strengthening of political discourse centered on anti-immigrant sentiment diverts public attention away from these structural causes of economic inequality and wealth concentration.
Regrettably, I must note that approaches which, in recent years, have argued that anti-immigrant sentiment is fundamentally the product not of economic grievances but of a cultural backlash, even if unintentionally, contribute to strengthening this political strategy. The influence of cultural factors and identity politics cannot, of course, be denied. However, explaining anti-immigrant sentiment primarily through cultural dynamics diminishes the visibility of structural causes such as economic inequality and social injustice, while simultaneously providing the far right with an indirect—albeit problematic—source of legitimacy. The issue, therefore, is not merely one of cultural reaction; it should also be understood as a political mechanism of distraction that conceals underlying economic power relations and discourages scrutiny of the existing distribution of wealth.
If the support that the super-rich extend to the far right were merely an expression of their individual political preferences, it might not warrant such sustained attention. The issue, however, extends far beyond that. These billionaires, who have effectively acquired monopolistic positions in the technology sector, not only deploy their immense economic resources in support of far-right political movements but also possess the capacity to shape the boundaries of public discourse through the digital platforms they control, including X, Facebook, YouTube, and others. Through complex algorithmic mechanisms, these platforms are increasingly transformed into the principal channels for the circulation of far-right narratives, while alternative viewpoints, critical voices, and pluralistic perspectives experience a substantial loss of visibility.
In this process, observations suggesting that the digital visibility of actors defending liberal democratic values, pluralism, the rule of law, and humanitarian principles is being systematically weakened, while polarizing, provocative, and extremist content is algorithmically rewarded, are increasingly supported by empirical research. As a consequence, democratic actors using these platforms face not only declining public influence but also invisible, though perceptible, algorithmic barriers that make it increasingly difficult even to reach their own natural audiences.
This picture reveals the combined impact of the economic and digital power of technology barons who stand among both the principal creators and the greatest beneficiaries of the global income divide. Despite being among the primary causes and beneficiaries of wealth concentration, economic inequality, and social injustice, Elon Musk and similar actors openly support extremist, far-right political movements that systematically portray immigrants and other vulnerable socio-cultural minorities as those responsible for these problems and as convenient scapegoats. Elon Musk’s most recent extensive interview with The Economist, in which he reiterated positions supportive of the far right, together with his backing of Marine Le Pen, Alternative for Germany (AfD) and various other far-right parties and actors, is open to interpretation within this framework. The political positions, public rhetoric, and algorithmic maneuvers of Musk and other technology-baron billionaires function as a deliberate mechanism of distraction, obscuring the true sources of wealth concentration and structural economic inequality.
Perhaps the greatest contradiction that deserves attention, and the most fundamental question that requires an answer, is the following: Why do broad segments of society that are themselves victims of structural economic inequality and social injustice follow far-right political actors supported by the greatest beneficiaries of wealth concentration, rather than questioning the structural causes of these inequalities? More importantly, why are they tend to view immigrants and socio-cultural minorities—groups that share similar structural vulnerabilities—as the principal causes of these problems? This paradox points not only to the discursive success of the populist radical right and far right but also to a fundamental research problem requiring us to understand how public perceptions are reshaped through the influence of economic and administrative power over digital communication infrastructures.
Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the contemporary center-left may be entering a decisive post-neoliberal phase by re-centering politics on material security rather than cultural conflict. Using Andy Burnham’s political vision as a point of departure—and drawing comparisons with Zohran Mamdani—he contends that democratic renewal depends on reconnecting progressive politics with the everyday concerns of housing, employment, public services, and economic security. While defending the achievements of cultural inclusion, Dr. Dias suggests that the left must once again become the primary political organizer of material insecurity if it is to counter the appeal of ethnonationalist populism. This timely commentary offers a compelling contribution to current debates on populism, post-neoliberalism, democratic representation, and the future of liberal-social democracy in an era of deep political realignment.
Andy (Andrew Murray) Burnham’s first speech in Downing Street, in reminding me of Zohran Mamdani, left me wondering whether we are witnessing a new tendency to recenter political action and political language on material questions. If this tendency is confirmed, it would mark a programmatic shift within Labour’s centrist and moderate left: one that is less ideological and more programme-driven than the radical left, which has lived off struggles for recognition and cultural emancipation. Put differently, the center-left wants to deprive the culture wars of their monopoly over the political agenda.
After decades in which the left increasingly became an interpreter of cultural transformations, Burnham is seeking to return it to its original function: politically organizing economic and social insecurity at a time when that insecurity has been captured largely by the radical right, through a clear articulation of economic resentment with conservative and nationalist appeals. Not because ethnonationalism follows automatically from economic insecurity, but because such insecurity creates fertile ground for converting material loss into cultural resentment (Gidron & Hall, 2020; Rodrik, 2021).
The causes of the erosion of the left’s social representativeness are by now well known. Both the radical left and the radical right identified a culprit behind growing economic unease and anxiety: the neoliberal policies that culminated in the 2008 crisis. Yet, following the success of the radical left during that period, left and right shifted their arenas of action, in a mirror game centered on the struggle for cultural hegemony between progressivism and cultural backlash (Hopkin, 2020; Mudge, 2018; Norris & Inglehart, 2019).
In the post-austerity turn, the left placed greater emphasis on policies recognizing voices historically rendered subaltern and on the struggle against white privilege. The agenda was commendable, but its timing proved challenging as immigration reshaped the social landscape and became an increasingly sensitive political and social issue, carrying with it both economic and cultural anxieties. The radical right, in turn, transformed these anxieties into an identitarian narrative according to which the loss of security, status, and control resulted not from the economic model, but from immigration, cosmopolitan elites, and the cultural transformation of Western societies (Norris & Inglehart, 2019).
Inflammatory rhetoric, readily identifiable culprits—corrupt politicians, immigrants, and “leftists”—and simplistic solutions to complex problems gave the ethnonationalist right room to grow among segments of the working and middle classes who were materially vulnerable, culturally disregarded, and politically estranged from elites. Many of these voters felt anxious about cultural change while parts of the radical left pointed the finger at them as racists, xenophobes, and beneficiaries of racial privilege (Gidron & Hall, 2020).
Like Mamdani, Burnham seems to understand the elementary formula for combating the radical right. It does not lie in continuing to impose a moral framework centered on patriarchy and white privilege, nor merely in explaining that, for example, Nigel Farage is wrong and is a populist. On the contrary, it requires addressing the needs to which he responds: economic and employment security, social protection, public safety, the creation of a sense of belonging and identity within a multicultural framework, and the promise of a shared horizon.
Burnham and Mamdani do not, of course, occupy the same ideological position. What brings them together is less the programme than the political method: making the left intelligible again through the price and quality of everyday life and returning to the idea of a platform broader than the segmentations on which it has come to depend. Rather than first asking voters to subscribe to a moral or identitarian framework, they show them what public power can do for housing, transport, employment, and essential services.
The ethnonationalist right offers security through the border, belonging through the ethnic nation, and a future through restoration. Burnham seeks to offer security through public services, belonging through community and territory, and a future through investment and reindustrialization. He therefore does more than promise protection against decline: he seeks to recover an idea of progress, mobility, and collective capacity, without which the left risks becoming merely the administrator of decay (Hopkin, 2020).
This does not mean, however, that the culture wars can simply be declared over. The radical right will continue to mobilize immigration, national identity, gender, religion, and historical memory even if the left prefers to concentrate on economic questions. The response cannot be to abandon cultural achievements and minority rights, but to integrate them into a universalist language and an idea of common civic belonging. Material politics is necessary, but insufficient. Yet it is now the best and most urgent weapon available to centrists everywhere.
The rematerialization of the centrist left is an essential step towards rebuilding an electoral base amid the urgent need to safeguard the principles of liberal-social democracy. Burnham does not appear to want to replace culture with economics, but rather to reconstruct materially the conditions of democratic belonging—a belonging that is as much of the left as of the right, as much liberal as conservative—which the radical right has converted into an ethnonationalist promise.
References
Gidron, N. & Hall, P. A. (2020). “Populism as a problem of social integration.” Comparative Political Studies, 53(7), 1027–1059. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019879947
Mudge, S. L. (2018). Leftism reinvented: Western parties from socialism to neoliberalism. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674984837
Norris, P. & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595841
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming far more than information ecosystems—it is reshaping the constitutional foundations of democracy itself. In this interview with the ECPS, Professor Danielle Allen argues that the central challenge of AI is not merely technological but constitutional, requiring democratic societies to rethink representation, political power, and civic agency. Rejecting technological determinism, she contends that democratic institutions can still shape AI’s trajectory, provided they strengthen rather than diminish human judgment. Discussing populism, democratic backsliding, surveillance, intermediary institutions, digital citizenship, and constitutional reform, Professor Allen presents a compelling vision of democratic renewal grounded in one core principle: artificial intelligence should complement human capacities—not replace the judgment upon which liberal democracy ultimately depends.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the institutional architecture of democratic politics. While much public debate has focused on misinformation, deepfakes, automation, and employment, a growing body of scholarship suggests that the more profound implications of generative AI lie elsewhere: in its capacity to reshape political authority, democratic representation, and the constitutional foundations of liberal self-government. As AI systems increasingly mediate public discourse, organize information, influence political preferences, and concentrate unprecedented forms of economic and computational power, the central question is no longer simply how societies should regulate a new technology, but how constitutional democracies themselves must adapt to preserve political equality, civic agency, and democratic accountability.
Few scholars are better positioned to address these challenges than Professor Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and the Democratic Knowledge Project, and one of the world’s leading political philosophers working at the intersection of constitutional democracy, citizenship, technology, and democratic renewal. In her widely discussed Journal of Democracy essay, “The Real Dangers of Generative AI,” Professor Allen argues that contemporary debates have fundamentally misidentified the nature of the challenge. Rather than treating AI as merely a technological disruption, she contends that it represents a constitutional turning point requiring a fundamental rethinking of democratic institutions themselves.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Allen offers a remarkably expansive framework for understanding how AI intersects with democratic governance. Rejecting the conventional separation between technology and constitutional politics, she argues that “political institutions are themselves technologies” and therefore cannot be understood independently of technological transformation. From this perspective, AI is not simply another digital innovation but a force capable of altering the institutional mechanisms through which democratic societies organize representation, distribute political power, and preserve constitutional order.
Throughout the conversation, Professor Allen explores the twin dangers confronting liberal democracies: democratic collapse, produced by the erosion of trustworthy informational infrastructures, and democratic singularity, arising from unprecedented concentrations of computational, informational, and economic power. At the same time, she rejects technological determinism. Instead, she insists that democratic societies retain the capacity to shape AI’s trajectory through institutional reform, constitutional safeguards, and renewed democratic participation.
A recurring theme throughout the interview is the centrality of human agency. Professor Allen argues that democratic renewal ultimately depends not upon resisting technological innovation but upon designing institutions that preserve civic judgment and constitutional self-government. As she puts it, “technology always develops out of a moral vision,” making AI fundamentally a political rather than merely technical question. Consequently, she maintains that the essential democratic task is not simply regulating machines but ensuring that “AI should strengthen human judgment, not replace it.” That principle ultimately serves as the interview’s normative anchor, connecting questions of constitutional design, democratic education, AI governance, intermediary institutions, populism, surveillance, and the future of liberal democracy into a single coherent vision of democratic resilience in the age of artificial intelligence.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Professor Danielle Allen, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Political Institutions Are Themselves Technologies
Facial recognition technology scans individuals and displays digital identity and personal data, illustrating AI-powered biometric surveillance. Photo: Piyamas Dulmunsumphun / Dreamstime.
Professor Allen, welcome!Let me begin with your recent Journal of Democracyarticle, “The Real Dangers of Generative AI.”You argue that public debate has focused too heavily on misinformation, deepfakes, and job displacement while overlooking AI’s deeper capacity to restructure political authority and democratic institutions. Why do you believe the greatest threat posed by generative AI is constitutional rather than merely technological, and how does this fundamentally change the way scholars should understand democratic backsliding?
Professor Danielle Allen: Thank you. It’s an important question. I would start by saying that I don’t draw a distinction between the merely technological and the constitutional. Political institutions are themselves technologies. Representation, when it was invented in the eighteenth century, along with electoral districts and voting methods and so forth, was a technology. It was a technology for channeling citizens’ voices into decision-making and producing a counterweight to the other forms of power that existed in monarchical and aristocratic structures. Consequently, any major technological change that affects information, communication, and related domains has the potential to disrupt that foundational technology through which we organize politics.
For the last four decades, policymaking circles have prioritized material well-being while substantially downgrading questions of political organization. As a result, we have underestimated and under-attended to the ways new technologies can disrupt our core political technologies because of this broader blind spot in thinking about politics. In that regard, what I’m trying to do is rectify a broader blind spot in policymaking—to help people remember that our political institutions, whether people have political empowerment, access to voice, and so forth, are essential parts of the story of human flourishing. We have to pay attention to those things as policymakers. And secondly, we have to pay close attention whenever a major disruptive technology directly interacts with those original technologies of representation.
The Concentration of Power Poses Dangers to Core Democratic Rights
You distinguish between what you call “democratic collapse” and “democratic singularity.” Could you explain how these two concepts differ? To what extent does the concentration of computational, informational, and economic power in a handful of corporations create conditions that resemble the concentration of political power traditionally associated with authoritarian regimes?
Professor Danielle Allen: Great question. What my co-author, E. Glen Weyl, and I were trying to do in that article was to describe two dangers that liberal democracies have to navigate. We call these the danger of collapse and the danger of singularity.
The danger of collapse is one in which the informational infrastructures on which you rely for popular sovereignty and institutionally driven decision-making no longer function because of misinformation, deepfakes, the collapse of identity systems, and things like that. That’s one danger the new technologies are provoking as they interact with the traditional technologies of representation.
The second danger is the concentration of power that you’ve been describing. That concentration can emerge in several ways. There’s the issue of capital, the concentration of capital, and the sort of political power that flows from it. There’s also the issue of the concentration of power through control of data and surveillance capacity. Both of those things harbor dangers to core democratic rights, whether those are rights of privacy or rights of equal voice in a political system, and so forth.
So, these are the two dangers: on the one hand, the possibility of chaos and collapse; on the other, the concentration of power. The hard question, then, is how the institutions of liberal democracy can steer through this period of rapid change and transformation, secure control over the new technologies, and truly integrate their capacities into the project of liberal self-government.
What We Really Have Is a Clash of Intermediaries
Truth Social displayed on a smartphone. The social media platform, owned by Donald Trump, was launched as an alternative to mainstream social media. Photo: Rokas Tenys / Dreamstime.
Across Europe and North America, populist leaders increasingly claim to represent “the people” while simultaneously attacking intermediary institutions such as independent media, universities, courts, and civil services. Does generative AI risk accelerating precisely this populist logic by allowing leaders to communicate directly with citizens while bypassing democratic intermediaries altogether?
Professor Danielle Allen: That’s a great question. I would put the situation slightly differently. I would say it’s not so much that they’re bypassing intermediaries as deploying AI as a new kind of intermediary. In that regard, yes, the traditional intermediaries are under pressure from a new set of intermediaries. Those new intermediaries are the tech infrastructures that populists are using to communicate. In other words, when President Trump establishes Truth Social as an alternative to the existing social media platforms, he is not dispensing with intermediaries but creating his own intermediary, namely that platform.
So, what we really have is a clash of intermediaries. The challenge is that the old intermediaries—universities, newspapers, the traditional institutions, and so forth—grew up in a legal environment, and actively defended a legal environment, that placed a set of basic rights at its center: freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of civil society to maintain independence from government, and the like.
The new intermediaries, by contrast, are not necessarily dependent on those basic rights for their growth or committed to protecting them. That’s where the problem arises.
This is captured, for example, in the challenge surrounding Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act. That provision has essentially exempted social media platforms from regulation on the grounds that regulating them would amount to regulating speech. It collapses speech and algorithms. We ought to be able to regulate algorithms, which essentially perform an editorial or publishing function, in the same way that the print media found itself regulated.
Print media was liable for libel, defamation, and similar harms because of its editorial decisions, whereas social media platforms have been exempted from all of that. Mistakenly exempted, that’s the point I’m making. Because they have been able to flourish without the kinds of careful mechanisms for balancing the protection of speech rights with protection against harms such as defamation and libel, we have experienced rampant problems of misinformation. So, the point I’m trying to make is simply that the old intermediaries have baked into them a more stable and useful rights-based structure than the new intermediaries do.
The Personalized Algorithmic Universe Is Becoming Completely Unreliable
Your work suggests that democracy ultimately depends upon citizens sharing a sufficiently common informational environment. Yet generative AI enables highly individualized persuasion at unprecedented scale. Are we moving from an era of mass propaganda toward what might be called algorithmic individualized populism, where every voter effectively receives a personalized political reality?
Professor Danielle Allen: That’s a great question. To some extent, I think the answer has to be ‘yes’. Although I think there’s a situation beyond that. What is really happening is that everybody is going to be thrown back on communication with their own trusted networks, and that’s what they will rely on as their source of information.
The personalized algorithmic universe is also one that people are already coming to recognize as completely unreliable. You can’t distinguish between AI-generated things and real things, and so forth. As we develop digital competence—and by that I mean the ability to use these tools ourselves so that we can understand how easily they can be manipulated and manipulate others—we will inoculate ourselves against some of the dangers of that algorithmic environment.
What that, then, means is that we will basically trust the people we actually know and our communications with those people. So, in a funny way, the very big world that we had made small through communications technology is about to become much bigger again. It is going to be harder for people to share trusted messages at scale, precisely because the level of distrust is going to be so high.
We Need Algorithms That Encourage People to Bridge Viewpoint Differences
Artificial intelligence as a next-generation technology shaping the digital era. Photo: Dreamstime.
One striking feature of contemporary populism is its capacity to transform emotional identity into political loyalty. To what extent do recommended algorithms and generative AI amplify precisely those forms of resentment, grievance, and identity polarization upon which contemporary populist movements increasingly depend?
Professor Danielle Allen: They certainly seem to be very active contributors to that. There’s important work being done now by technologists and political scientists to propose alternative structures for algorithms that are focused on pro-social incentives—algorithmic incentives that encourage people to build more bridges across viewpoint differences—and better contextualization tools so that people can see the full spread of opinion and understand where their own opinion sits within that landscape. That helps avoid some of the effects and emotional impacts that come from the siloization of opinion.
The problems you’re describing are all very real. They are the dominant problems in our social media and algorithmic landscape at the moment. At the same time, there really is innovative new work. I’m thinking of people like Aviv Ovadya and his colleague Luke Thorburn, and others who are generating an alternative set of structures for our algorithmic foundation.
Existing Scholarly Foundations Can Be Extended Into the Age of AI
Much scholarship on democratic erosion focuses on executive aggrandizement, judicial capture, electoral manipulation, and attacks on independent institutions. Does AI require us to rethink democratic backsliding itself by recognizing that democracy may now be weakened through the concentration of technological infrastructure rather than solely through constitutional manipulation?
Professor Danielle Allen: I’m not so sure if it requires fundamentally different analytical categories. When, for example, people were studying the genocides in Rwanda, Serbia, and Croatia, one of the key technologies that facilitated them was radio and its use to spread slurs, dehumanizing rhetoric, and memes that helped frame the ultimate victims of genocide as enemies and non-humans, and things like that. My point is that the study of autocracy has long included the study of technology and mass communication. Those pre-existing scholarly foundations can simply be extended into the contemporary context. I don’t think it’s a change of kind so much as a change of scale.
We Don’t Face an Emerging Problem—We Face an Already Existing One
You argue that democracy requires not merely political equality but also a broad distribution of power. Looking at the rapid consolidation of frontier AI among a handful of technology companies, do you believe liberal democracies face an emerging form of private constitutional power that existing democratic institutions are largely unequipped to regulate?
Professor Danielle Allen: I think we don’t face an emerging problem; we face an actually existent, interior problem. It has already emerged, and it’s a totally real problem. Europe has done a better job regulating this power than the US has. I’m thinking about the GDPR(The General Data Protection Regulation) and other forms of regulation, including the recent EU AI Act. That tells me it’s not that liberal democracies lack the capacity to regulate these technologies; it’s that the US, specifically, doesn’t have the capacity right now to regulate them. So, this is not a permanent problem but a political problem here in the US.
I also think we probably have a lot to learn from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the first Gilded Age, as we call it. We’re living through a second Gilded Age, and just as in the first, industrialization produced corporations with enormous concentrations of power, robber barons, and corporations that sought monopolistic control not only of the economy but also of political structures. We’re watching a repeat of all of that.
Those concentrations of power were broken up in the early twentieth century through a very serious array of anti-trust policies. People often point to the importance of the work of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, for example. Today, there’s a whole slew of what people call neo-Brandeisian anti-monopoly policies that many are advocating. I think we do need another era of trust-busting, breaking up those concentrations of power.
I know the dynamic right now between Europe, the EU, and the US is extremely complicated and painful. I will say that I take it as good news that Europe is starting to build a path toward empowering its own tech companies. I do think that taking on the monopoly of the US firms is an important thing to do.
There’s Going to Be a Battle Between Globe-Spanning Tech Powers and Nation-States
Elon Musk—founder and CEO of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla, owner of X (formerly Twitter), and co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI—speaks at VIVA Technology (VivaTech), June 16, 2023. Photo: Frédéric Legrand / Dreamstime.
Throughout democratic history, monopolies over information have often strengthened authoritarian rule. How different is today’s AI revolution from earlier media revolutions such as radio, television, or social media? Does generative AI represent a quantitative extension of those transformations, or does it constitute a genuinely new constitutional moment?
Professor Danielle Allen: It’s a great question. To be honest, I don’t think I really have an answer. In some ways, it’s an obvious continuation, and I’ve already mentioned that. On the other hand, the speed and scale of change are wholly new for humanity. That’s honestly the part that concerns me the most: the rapidity and the totalizing nature of it.
Take the fact that somebody like Elon Musk can, in five years, manage to have half of the world’s satellites in space. It’s probably more than half of them by now. He has the capacity to intervene directly in geopolitical decision-making among the world’s nation-states. That’s what’s fundamentally different. The earlier technologies came into existence and existed essentially within nation-states. We now have corporations with a degree of political control that puts them in a more powerful position than nation-states.
It’s not that this has never happened before. In the eighteenth century, for example, Britain faced, roughly speaking, a similar kind of problem with the East India Company. Other European powers faced similar challenges with the colonial trading empires that they first allowed to grow and then discovered had gone beyond their control. That, of course, led to the struggles in the nineteenth century between nation-state governments and those colonial companies. We are likely to see another period of that kind of struggle.
I don’t think the nation-state is doomed. I don’t think it’s doomed primarily because people still live in places. Human beings are embodied, and we are instantiated in geographic locales. Our communities matter to us, and that feature of human life, which starts from the ground and extends outward, will continue to be an important part of governance and jurisdictionality. So, in that regard, there’s going to be a battle, for sure, between globe-spanning tech powers and nation-states. I do think nation-states can win in the end. And I would argue they should win. But it’s going to be a very hard period of struggle.
Technology Should Complement Human Intelligence, Not Replace It
In “How AI Fails Us,” you criticize the dominant vision of AI as autonomous intelligence and instead advocate technologies that augment human cooperation rather than replace it. How might this alternative vision reshape democratic governance? Could cooperative AI become a tool for democratic renewal rather than democratic erosion?
Professor Danielle Allen: I appreciate that question. What really matters here is that we sometimes think the way technology is currently unfolding is somehow a matter of the laws of nature or the laws of physics—that it’s simply a natural outgrowth of nature itself. That’s a mistake, and it already gives away too much power. Technology always develops out of some kind of moral vision. By moral vision, I mean a way of understanding human beings, human capacity, and the human relationship to nature and the world.
The argument of that paper is that the moral vision behind the current technological supernova rests on a flawed premise. That premise is that there is one thing called human intelligence, that it is singular, and that machines are trying to replicate and ultimately overcome it. Whereas, in fact, human intelligence is multiple. It comes in a whole range of varieties. Machine intelligence is also multiple. That plurality of our intelligences is valuable to specific societies and to humankind as a whole.
Plurality can be activated for tribalism, conflict, and division, or it can be activated for creativity, innovation, and cultural richness. One of the most important human projects, therefore, is to give ourselves the tools to activate the plurality of our intelligences for those positive outcomes.
If you begin with that basic vision of human beings and human well-being, then you can see a completely different approach to technological development. It is an approach based on activating that plurality in a positive way, one that requires complementing human intelligences rather than trying to overcome or replace them.
Very ordinary technologies, like the Zoom technology we’re using right now, provide a good example. Zoom complements what human beings can do. We can’t see across thousands of miles, so being able to do that through Zoom supplements what we are already able to do. It doesn’t actually replace anything we were previously doing. So, one can begin to envision a host of things that would be wonderful to be able to do that are all supplemental rather than replacing our core capacities.
We Need a Formally Articulated Bill of Rights Against the Powers of AI
Authoritarian governments increasingly combine sophisticated digital surveillance with artificial intelligence, while democratic governments are also rapidly adopting AI for policing, border control, and public administration. How can constitutional democracies harness AI’s administrative potential without gradually normalizing technologies of surveillance and executive concentration that undermine liberal constitutionalism?
Professor Danielle Allen: That’s a great question. I think we’re at a point where we need a formally articulated bill of rights against the powers of AI. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as nation-states were consolidating their power, people articulated bills of rights. In the US case, we have the first ten amendments to the Constitution: rights to association, rights to expression, freedom from search and seizure without warrants, rights to trial by jury, and so forth.
All of those rights apply to the AI universe, but it is worth taking the time to elaborate on what is required to ensure that they are protected under the surveillance conditions made possible by AI. That’s a project for legal scholars—to spell out, at meaningful length, what those requirements are.
I do think the GDPR was a good model for extending those rights protections into the environment of digital data and the like. We need to keep building that edifice of crystal-clear legal protections and limitations. Again, some of the lawsuits right now against Anthropic and others, for example, for stealing authors’ works, are really important. We already have this rights-based framework, and with more investment of time and effort, we could use it much more comprehensively to cover the world of generative AI.
Generative AI Is Going to Accelerate the Capacity of Everything
Photo: Dreamstime.
Recent years have witnessed growing interaction between transnational populist movements, digital platforms, and algorithmically amplified political narratives. Do you believe generative AI is likely to accelerate the emergence of increasingly coordinated transnational populist ecosystems that operate beyond the regulatory capacity of individual democratic states?
Professor Danielle Allen: Generative AI is going to accelerate the capacity of everything. It will also accelerate the capacity of pro-democracy transnational networks to operate across borders. In that regard, it only changes the balance of power if only the populists use it.
The First Thing We Need Is Functional Democratic Governance
Much current AI regulation emphasizes safety, content moderation, transparency, and risk mitigation. Yet your work argues that these approaches address symptoms rather than underlying distributions of power. What institutional reforms would be necessary if democratic governments were to regulate AI according to constitutional principles instead of primarily technological ones?
Professor Danielle Allen: The two major things we need in the US are to get rid of corruption and restore suffrage. We have experienced an incredible erosion of voting rights in the US. Those two things—corruption, by which I mean the impact of money in our politics, and the erosion of voting rights—mean that our institutions have been captured by small oligarchic minorities pursuing their own financial interests through cronyist arrangements with tech companies.
So, when people ask that question, what they’re often wondering is, “Okay, what’s the specific regulation that you need to rein in a tech company?” What I want to say is that that’s actually operating at the wrong level. The first thing you need is functional democratic governance, where power actually lies with the people. Then the people will be able to apply regulations to tech companies.
We can devise all kinds of regulations—that’s not really the problem. The problem is whether power actually lies with the people or with the people who are in bed with the tech companies. Right now, it lies with people who are in bed with tech companies. That’s why we need fundamental reforms in the basic operations of democracy in the US to change that balance of power.
Digital Competence Matters More Than Digital Literacy
Your broader scholarship consistently emphasizes citizenship, civic identity, democratic participation, and shared constitutional purpose. In an era increasingly mediated by AI-generated information, how should democratic education evolve to prepare citizens not merely to detect misinformation but to sustain democratic judgment itself?
Professor Danielle Allen: That’s a great question. There are a lot of important pieces there. I think highly of the work of Audrey Tong in Taiwan, who argues for an education in digital competence, not just digital literacy but competence. Again, if you know how to use the tools, you’re going to inoculate yourself against being abused by people who are using them.
So that’s one thing. But, to your point about judgment, cultivating the capacity for judgment is key. That means being able to—and here I’m drawing on some work by somebody named Scott Warren—to provide accurate accounts of what people who disagree with you think and why they think it. In other words, you have to train yourself out of your own silo in order to gain access to the full picture of what people are experiencing. One way to do that is by testing whether or not you can render the best version of your opponent’s argument. That’s a very basic skill, but it is no longer very common in our systems of instruction and education.
The work of judgment also requires understanding how to relate values and principles to empirical realities. To develop those skills, you actually have to spend time thinking about values. What are your values? Where do they come from? What are their sources? How do you justify them? What are other people’s values? How do they interact with each other? The work of connecting a values-based diagnosis to a values-based solution is also a learnable skill. So, those would be three things that I would point to as important to have inside our educational offerings.
We Should Deploy Technology to Elevate Human Judgment
Finally, stepping back from current technological developments, do you believe liberal democracy is entering a constitutional transformation comparable to those produced by the printing press, industrialization, or mass broadcasting? Looking ahead, what institutional innovations will be most essential if democratic societies are to ensure that artificial intelligence strengthens rather than weakens constitutional government, political equality, and democratic self-rule?
Professor Danielle Allen: Yes, I do think we are entering another period of major constitutional transformation of that kind. I wish I could give you a list of specific changes that will help us get where we want to go, but fundamentally, we need changes that strengthen human judgment. That runs a bit against the current at a moment when so much is eroding and replacing human judgment. That’s why I advocate various election system reforms in the US, because they would strengthen human judgment.
I also think there are many ways of deploying technology to elevate human judgment rather than denigrate it. AI sensemaking tools such as Polis and vTaiwan, which are deliberative democracy tools, use natural language to allow people to express themselves in their own words, while helping to bring the themes that people have generated to the surface and making us more visible to one another. Things like this can actually help strengthen human judgment.
The hard question, which I appreciate you’re asking, is this: How do we evaluate whether a technology is strengthening human judgment or weakening it? That seems to me to be one of the criteria we need to bake into our assessments of new models, new tools, and the other technologies that emerge into the world.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming far more than information ecosystems—it is reshaping the constitutional foundations of democracy itself. In this interview with the ECPS, Professor Danielle Allen argues that the central challenge of AI is not merely technological but constitutional, requiring democratic societies to rethink representation, political power, and civic agency. Rejecting technological determinism, she contends that democratic institutions can still shape AI’s trajectory, provided they strengthen rather than diminish human judgment. Discussing populism, democratic backsliding, surveillance, intermediary institutions, digital citizenship, and constitutional reform, Professor Allen presents a compelling vision of democratic renewal grounded in one core principle: artificial intelligence should complement human capacities—not replace the judgment upon which liberal democracy ultimately depends.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the institutional architecture of democratic politics. While much public debate has focused on misinformation, deepfakes, automation, and employment, a growing body of scholarship suggests that the more profound implications of generative AI lie elsewhere: in its capacity to reshape political authority, democratic representation, and the constitutional foundations of liberal self-government. As AI systems increasingly mediate public discourse, organize information, influence political preferences, and concentrate unprecedented forms of economic and computational power, the central question is no longer simply how societies should regulate a new technology, but how constitutional democracies themselves must adapt to preserve political equality, civic agency, and democratic accountability.
Few scholars are better positioned to address these challenges than Professor Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and the Democratic Knowledge Project, and one of the world’s leading political philosophers working at the intersection of constitutional democracy, citizenship, technology, and democratic renewal. In her widely discussed Journal of Democracy essay, “The Real Dangers of Generative AI,” Professor Allen argues that contemporary debates have fundamentally misidentified the nature of the challenge. Rather than treating AI as merely a technological disruption, she contends that it represents a constitutional turning point requiring a fundamental rethinking of democratic institutions themselves.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Allen offers a remarkably expansive framework for understanding how AI intersects with democratic governance. Rejecting the conventional separation between technology and constitutional politics, she argues that “political institutions are themselves technologies” and therefore cannot be understood independently of technological transformation. From this perspective, AI is not simply another digital innovation but a force capable of altering the institutional mechanisms through which democratic societies organize representation, distribute political power, and preserve constitutional order.
Throughout the conversation, Professor Allen explores the twin dangers confronting liberal democracies: democratic collapse, produced by the erosion of trustworthy informational infrastructures, and democratic singularity, arising from unprecedented concentrations of computational, informational, and economic power. At the same time, she rejects technological determinism. Instead, she insists that democratic societies retain the capacity to shape AI’s trajectory through institutional reform, constitutional safeguards, and renewed democratic participation.
A recurring theme throughout the interview is the centrality of human agency. Professor Allen argues that democratic renewal ultimately depends not upon resisting technological innovation but upon designing institutions that preserve civic judgment and constitutional self-government. As she puts it, “technology always develops out of a moral vision,” making AI fundamentally a political rather than merely technical question. Consequently, she maintains that the essential democratic task is not simply regulating machines but ensuring that “AI should strengthen human judgment, not replace it.” That principle ultimately serves as the interview’s normative anchor, connecting questions of constitutional design, democratic education, AI governance, intermediary institutions, populism, surveillance, and the future of liberal democracy into a single coherent vision of democratic resilience in the age of artificial intelligence.
Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen’s book offers a compelling reinterpretation of American populism through the lens of political theology. Challenging conventional accounts that reduce populism to anti-elitism or electoral strategy, Rev. Dr. Bossen demonstrates how competing visions of “the people” are constructed through narratives of belonging, redemption, and collective identity. By tracing the historical continuity of white supremacist, Pan-African, and pluralistic populisms from the Progressive Era to Trumpism, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Lives Matter, and progressive labor politics, the book makes a significant contribution to contemporary populism scholarship. While its comparative framework occasionally risks creating an unintended moral symmetry between emancipatory and exclusionary movements, it remains an original, theoretically sophisticated, and highly recommended study for scholars of populism, political theology, religion, and American political development.
Few concepts have generated as much scholarly debate over the past two decades as populism. Whether understood as a thin ideology, a political style, a discursive logic, or a mode of constructing “the people,” populism has become one of the defining frameworks through which scholars interpret democratic transformation in the twenty-first century. Yet despite the flourishing literature on populism, comparatively little attention has been devoted to its religious dimensions or to the theological narratives that shape collective political identities. Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen’s The Political Theologies of Populism: The Garveyites, the Klan, and the Wobblies, 1905–1930. enters this crowded field with an ambitious and refreshingly original intervention. Rather than approaching populism primarily through electoral politics, party systems, or charismatic leadership, Rev. Dr. Bossen investigates the theological imagination underlying populist movements, arguing that populism is fundamentally a process of “people-making” through narratives of salvation, ritual, belonging, and collective identity. The book thus offers an innovative synthesis of political theology, American religious history, social movement studies, and populism scholarship.
The volume examines three influential movements of the Progressive Era: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and the Second Ku Klux Klan. Although these organizations pursued radically different political objectives, Rev. Dr. Bossen argues that each sought to answer the constitutional question embedded in the opening words of the American Constitution—“We the People”—by constructing its own vision of who genuinely belonged within the political community. In doing so, he identifies three enduring forms of American populism: pluralistic populism, Pan-African populism, and white supremacist populism. These competing projects of collective identity, he contends, have not disappeared with the Progressive Era but continue to shape American political life into the twenty-first century.
Rev. Dr. Bossen is unusually well positioned to write such a study. Trained as both a historian and a scholar of religion, he is also an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister whose long involvement in labor activism—particularly within the IWW—deeply informs his analytical perspective. Rather than concealing his normative commitments behind claims of detached neutrality, Rev. Dr. Bossen openly acknowledges that the book emerged during a period marked by the resurgence of white supremacist politics in the United States. Echoing Howard Zinn’s famous observation that one cannot remain neutral on a moving train, he explicitly rejects the possibility of complete scholarly neutrality and instead argues that historical inquiry should contribute to understanding and resisting contemporary threats to democratic life.
This methodological transparency constitutes one of the book’s principal strengths. Rather than pretending to occupy an impossible position of complete objectivity, Rev. Dr. Bossen clearly situates his scholarship within broader democratic and ethical concerns. His extensive archival research, coupled with his experience as both minister and labor organizer, enables him to bridge historical analysis with contemporary political theory in a manner rarely achieved within existing populism scholarship.
Equally impressive is Rev. Dr. Bossen’s conceptual innovation. Instead of defining populism through anti-elitism, charismatic leadership, or ideological “thinness,” he shifts analytical attention toward the construction of collective political identity. Populism, in his account, is less about particular policy agendas than about the creation of a populus—an imagined political community whose boundaries define inclusion and exclusion. This emphasis resonates with Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populist articulation while simultaneously incorporating insights from Charles Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary and Margaret Canovan’s work on “the people.” Yet Rev. Dr. Bossen moves beyond these traditions by arguing that political identities are sustained not merely through discourse but through deeply embedded theological narratives, rituals, myths, and symbols inherited from American Protestant culture.
Perhaps the book’s most significant contribution lies in demonstrating the historical continuity of these three competing populist traditions. Contemporary discussions of populism often begin with Donald Trump, Brexit, or the European radical right, inadvertently suggesting that populism is primarily a recent electoral phenomenon. Rev. Dr. Bossen persuasively demonstrates instead that today’s political conflicts are rooted in much older struggles over belonging, sovereignty, race, labor, and democracy. The three traditions he reconstructs during the Progressive Era continue to reverberate throughout American political development.
White supremacist populism, represented historically by the Second Ku Klux Klan, survives today in modified forms within elements of Trumpism and the broader MAGA movement. Its rhetoric of reclaiming the nation, defending “real Americans,” protecting traditional values, restricting immigration, and portraying demographic change as existential decline echoes many of the exclusionary narratives that Rev. Dr. Bossen identifies in early twentieth-century white populism. While contemporary movements operate within vastly different institutional and constitutional contexts, the underlying logic of constructing “the people” through exclusion exhibits remarkable historical continuity.
Similarly, the tradition Rev. Dr. Bossen describes as Pan-African populism did not disappear with Marcus Garvey and Garveyism. Rather, it evolved through successive generations of African American political mobilization—from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Power and, more recently, Black Lives Matter. Although these movements differ profoundly in strategy, ideology, and organizational form, each represents an effort to redefine democratic membership by confronting the historic exclusion of Black Americans from the full promise of citizenship. Rather than simply demanding policy reform, they have sought recognition, dignity, and inclusion within the American political community itself.
Rev. Dr. Bossen’s third tradition, pluralistic populism, likewise extends beyond the IWW. Its aspiration to construct solidarity across racial, ethnic, and occupational divisions can be traced through segments of the American labor movement, democratic socialism, Occupy Wall Street, and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns. Here, “the people” are constituted not by ethnicity or race but through shared economic interests and democratic participation. This continuity illustrates one of the book’s central insights: populism is not inherently authoritarian or democratic, progressive or reactionary. It is instead a contested political logic capable of generating radically different democratic projects depending upon how “the people” are imagined.
This tripartite framework represents one of the most original contributions of The Political Theologies of Populism. By recovering these competing historical traditions, Rev. Dr. Bossen challenges simplistic understandings that reduce populism either to an authoritarian pathology or to a democratic corrective. Instead, he demonstrates that American political development has long been characterized by competing populisms, each offering rival answers to the enduring constitutional question of who belongs within “We the People.” The chapters of the book develop this argument through a richly detailed historical reconstruction of the Progressive Era and its lasting influence on contemporary American politics.
The Enduring Legacies of White Supremacist, Pan-African, and Pluralistic Populisms
Rev. Dr. Bossen develops his central thesis through an eight-chapter structure that moves systematically from conceptual foundations to historical case studies before returning to the contemporary implications of his argument. Rather than presenting the Ku Klux Klan, the IWW, and UNIA as isolated historical phenomena, he demonstrates how each movement constituted a distinctive political theology—a comprehensive moral vision that sought not merely political power but the construction of a particular understanding of the people. This emphasis on “people-making” distinguishes the book from much of the existing literature on populism, which has frequently privileged electoral mobilization, anti-elitist rhetoric, or leadership styles over the deeper ontological question of collective identity.
The opening chapter situates American populism within the unresolved constitutional ambiguity surrounding the phrase “We the People.” Rev. Dr. Bossen argues that American political history is characterized less by a stable democratic consensus than by recurring struggles over membership, belonging, and sovereignty. Every major populist movement attempts to answer the same foundational question: who legitimately constitutes the American people? This conceptual move immediately elevates the discussion beyond conventional institutional analysis. Instead of treating populism as a temporary electoral pathology, Rev. Dr. Bossen understands it as an enduring contest over political ontology—that is, over the very constitution of the political community itself.
The subsequent chapter introduces what is arguably the book’s most original analytical contribution: the identification of three distinct varieties of American populism. White supremacist populism constructs the people through racial exclusion; pluralistic populism seeks solidarity across class and ethnic divisions; Pan-African populism builds collective identity around the shared historical experience of Black oppression and aspirations for racial self-determination. These three traditions are neither merely ideological positions nor electoral constituencies. They represent competing moral universes, each grounded in narratives of redemption, sacrifice, community, and historical destiny. In Rev. Dr. Bossen’s formulation, theology becomes less a matter of organized religion than of symbolic frameworks through which political communities understand themselves and their collective futures.
The conceptual richness of this framework becomes particularly evident in the chapters devoted to political ritual, mythmaking, and collective memory. Rev. Dr. Bossen convincingly demonstrates that each movement employed remarkably similar organizational mechanisms despite radically different political goals. All developed founding myths, sacred texts, ceremonial performances, songs, symbols, and narratives of salvation that transformed fragmented social groups into imagined political communities. The Klan’s rituals of racial purity, the UNIA’s Pan-African ceremonies, and the Wobblies’ labor songs all functioned as instruments for constructing political solidarity. Here, Rev. Dr. Bossen successfully bridges political theology with social movement theory by showing that identity formation depends not only upon ideological programs but also upon emotionally resonant symbolic practices.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its sustained attention to historical continuity. Rather than treating the Progressive Era as a closed historical episode, Rev. Dr. Bossen demonstrates that the competing populisms of the early twentieth century established durable political traditions whose influence extends well beyond their original organizational lives. This historical perspective offers a valuable corrective to contemporary scholarship, which frequently treats populism as a phenomenon emerging primarily after the global financial crisis of 2008 or the electoral victories of Donald Trump and other contemporary populists.
Indeed, one of the most illuminating aspects of the book is the ease with which Rev. Dr. Bossen’s historical framework can be extended into subsequent periods of American political development. The Pan-African populism represented by Garvey’s movement did not disappear with the decline of the UNIA. Instead, it evolved through successive generations of Black political mobilization. While Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights Movement emphasized constitutional equality and nonviolent democratic inclusion, Malcolm X and later Black Power organizations increasingly embraced forms of collective self-determination that echoed certain elements of Garveyite political thought, albeit under profoundly different historical circumstances. Contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter similarly continue the struggle over democratic membership by insisting that Black Americans be recognized as fully equal participants within the American political community rather than perpetual outsiders.
Importantly, however, continuity should not be mistaken for identity. The Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and Black Lives Matter differ significantly in leadership, ideology, organizational structure, and strategic objectives. Yet they share with Garveyism a fundamental concern with redefining political belonging and confronting structures of racial exclusion. Rev. Dr. Bossen’s framework allows readers to perceive these continuities without collapsing important historical distinctions.
A similar continuity characterizes pluralistic populism. The IWW’s aspiration to unite workers across race, nationality, and occupation prefigured later forms of progressive labor politics that sought to construct solidarity through shared socioeconomic interests rather than ethnic or racial identity. Although the organizational influence of the Wobblies declined dramatically after the 1920s, their broader democratic imagination survived within segments of the American labor movement, the New Left, Occupy Wall Street, and, more recently, Bernie Sanders’ campaigns for democratic socialism. These movements likewise understand democracy as requiring broad popular participation against concentrated economic power, illustrating the remarkable persistence of pluralistic populism across more than a century of American political development.
Rev. Dr. Bossen’s discussion of progressivism further enriches this historical narrative. Rather than equating progressivism with contemporary liberal politics, he defines it as a political theology centered upon the administrative state, legal reform, and technocratic expertise rather than the construction of popular identities. Whereas populists seek to constitute a people, progressives seek to reform institutions. This distinction provides a useful analytical vocabulary for understanding why progressive governments often struggle to respond effectively to populist mobilization. Administrative competence alone rarely satisfies citizens searching for belonging, recognition, or collective purpose.
This insight carries considerable contemporary relevance. Much of the political conflict surrounding Trumpism cannot be adequately explained through policy preferences alone. Trump’s political success rested less on detailed programs than on constructing an emotionally resonant narrative of “real Americans” reclaiming their nation from perceived elites and outsiders. Rev. Dr. Bossen’s historical reconstruction demonstrates that this style of political mobilization has deep roots within American history. Trumpism thus appears less as an unprecedented rupture than as the latest manifestation of a much older tradition of exclusionary people-making.
Yet Rev. Dr. Bossen avoids the temptation to reduce populism to authoritarianism. His historical comparison instead reveals that competing populisms have long struggled against one another. White supremacist populism has consistently encountered resistance not only from institutional liberalism but also from alternative populist projects rooted in racial justice, labor solidarity, and democratic inclusion. This recognition substantially enriches contemporary debates by reminding readers that populism has never been politically monolithic. It has always been a contested terrain upon which rival democratic and anti-democratic visions compete to define the boundaries of political community.
By the midpoint of the book, therefore, Rev. Dr. Bossen has accomplished something remarkably difficult. He has transformed three seemingly disparate historical movements into components of a coherent analytical framework that explains not only the Progressive Era but also enduring patterns of American political development. His combination of archival depth, theoretical sophistication, and interdisciplinary ambition makes these chapters among the most intellectually stimulating contributions to recent scholarship on American populism and political theology.
The Political Theology of Populism from the Progressive Era to Trumpism
The latter half of the book represents the culmination of Rev. Dr. Bossen’s broader intellectual project. Having established that populist movements are fundamentally engaged in the construction of collective identities, Chapters Five through Eight examine the symbolic practices through which these identities are sustained. Here, the book moves beyond conventional political history into the domains of ritual, performance, salvation, memory, and political imagination. The result is an unusually sophisticated account of populism that integrates insights from religious studies, historical sociology, and political theory without sacrificing empirical depth.
Particularly illuminating is Rev. Dr. Bossen’s discussion of ritual and performance. Rather than treating ceremonies, uniforms, hymns, catechisms, or mass meetings as peripheral cultural phenomena, he demonstrates that they constituted the very mechanisms through which “the people” came into existence as a political community. The Garveyites’ elaborate parades, the Klan’s carefully choreographed ceremonies, and the Wobblies’ musical traditions each transformed abstract political ideas into lived collective experiences. Politics, in this account, becomes inseparable from emotion, symbolism, and shared moral narratives. Populism succeeds not merely because it articulates grievances but because it offers individuals a compelling sense of belonging during periods of profound social dislocation.
Rev. Dr. Bossen’s treatment of political soteriology (his analysis of competing narratives of salvation) is equally original. Each movement promised redemption, albeit in radically different forms. The Klan envisioned the restoration of a purified White Protestant nation. The UNIA promised racial dignity, Black self-determination, and collective liberation from centuries of oppression. The IWW anticipated emancipation through industrial democracy and working-class solidarity. These contrasting visions demonstrate that populism cannot be reduced to anti-elitist rhetoric alone. Rather, it constitutes a moral project that offers comprehensive explanations of social crisis while simultaneously identifying the agents of redemption and the enemies of collective flourishing.
The chapters examining decline are particularly noteworthy because Rev. Dr. Bossen refuses to interpret organizational decline as ideological disappearance. Although each movement experienced institutional fragmentation, repression, or internal crisis, their underlying political imaginaries survived. This distinction between organizational collapse and ideological continuity represents one of the book’s most valuable contributions. Political movements may disappear, but the symbolic resources they generate often remain available for subsequent generations confronting new historical crises.
The concluding chapter, significantly entitled “Look for Me in the Whirlwind”: Enduring Populisms, demonstrates precisely this point. Rev. Dr. Bossen argues that the three competing populisms identified in the Progressive Era continue to animate American political conflict well into the twenty-first century. This historical continuity is arguably the book’s central achievement and provides an important corrective to interpretations that portray recent populist mobilization as historically unprecedented.
Indeed, contemporary American politics vividly illustrates the durability of Rev. Dr. Bossen’s analytical framework. Trumpism, despite its distinctive twenty-first-century media environment and electoral strategies, can be understood as the latest manifestation of the exclusionary populist tradition that Rev. Dr. Bossen identifies with the Second Ku Klux Klan. Such a comparison does not imply organizational continuity or ideological identity. Rather, it highlights recurring political logics. Both movements define “the people” through exclusionary conceptions of national identity, portray demographic change as existential decline, invoke nostalgia for a lost national greatness, and frame political conflict as an existential struggle between authentic citizens and corrupt elites allied with threatening outsiders.
The slogan “Make America Great Again,” for example, functions as more than an electoral slogan. It evokes a redemptive political narrative that promises national restoration following perceived moral decline. Immigration, globalization, demographic transformation, and multiculturalism become interpreted not merely as policy disagreements but as threats to the moral integrity of the nation itself. Rev. Dr. Bossen’s emphasis on political theology helps explain why such narratives resonate so powerfully. They address questions of identity and belonging rather than simply economic interests or governmental performance.
Conversely, Rev. Dr. Bossen’s category of Pan-African populism illuminates important dimensions of contemporary Black political mobilization. Although the Civil Rights Movement pursued constitutional equality through integrationist strategies largely absent from Garvey’s separatist vision, both sought to redefine democratic membership by challenging the exclusion of Black Americans from full political belonging. Later movements, including Black Power, increasingly emphasized cultural autonomy, community empowerment, and independent political agency—concerns that resonate more directly with aspects of Garveyite political thought.
More recently, Black Lives Matter has continued this broader historical struggle, albeit through decentralized organizational forms and digital activism unimaginable during the Progressive Era. Like earlier Black movements, it insists that democracy cannot be understood solely through formal legal equality but must confront enduring structures of racial domination embedded within public institutions. Rev. Dr. Bossen’s framework thus demonstrates that Pan-African populism has undergone significant transformation while retaining its central concern with reconstructing political community around principles of racial dignity, recognition, and justice.
Likewise, pluralistic populism continues to shape contemporary progressive politics. The IWW’s aspiration to organize workers across divisions of race, nationality, gender, and occupation anticipated later democratic socialist traditions emphasizing broad-based economic solidarity. Occupy Wall Street’s distinction between the “99 percent” and the “1 percent,” the resurgence of labor organizing across multiple sectors, and Bernie Sanders’ repeated appeals to working-class democracy all reflect attempts to construct an inclusive political people grounded primarily in shared economic interests rather than ethnic or racial identity.
Rev. Dr. Bossen’s historical reconstruction therefore challenges one of the dominant assumptions in current populism research: namely, that populism is inherently anti-democratic or necessarily associated with the political right. His comparative analysis instead demonstrates that democratic inclusion and authoritarian exclusion have long competed through rival populist projects. The decisive analytical question is not whether a movement is populist, but rather how it defines the people, who is permitted membership, andwhich forms of solidarity it seeks to institutionalize.
This insight significantly enriches ongoing scholarly debates surrounding populism. It moves beyond the binary opposition that has often characterized the literature, in which populism is either celebrated as democratic renewal or condemned as democratic pathology. Rev. Dr. Bossen instead presents populism as a contested political field within which multiple normative projects coexist. White supremacist populism, Pan-African populism, and pluralistic populism each mobilize “the people,” but they do so toward fundamentally different political horizons.
At the same time, the book’s impressive conceptual synthesis occasionally invites further reflection. By organizing these movements within a single comparative analytical framework, Rev. Dr. Bossen necessarily foregrounds structural similarities in their methods of identity construction. This comparison is intellectually productive and yields important theoretical insights regarding ritual, symbolism, and collective identity. Nevertheless, the comparative architecture also raises difficult normative questions that deserve closer consideration. Similarities in political form should not obscure profound differences in historical purpose, ethical orientation, or democratic aspiration.
This tension does not undermine Rev. Dr. Bossen’s larger argument. On the contrary, it demonstrates the analytical richness of his framework. Yet it also prepares the ground for a broader critical discussion concerning the limits of comparison itself—a discussion that becomes central to assessing both the book’s enduring significance and its principal limitations.
A Critical Assessment of Rev. Dr. Bossen’s Contribution
The greatest strength of the book lies in its intellectual ambition. Rev. Dr. Bossen successfully brings together fields that too often remain isolated from one another—American religious history, political theology, social movement theory, labor history, African American studies, and populism research—and demonstrates that each can enrich the others. His archival work is extensive, his command of the historical literature is impressive, and his conceptual framework offers an original vocabulary for understanding populism as an enduring struggle over collective identity rather than merely an electoral phenomenon. Particularly noteworthy is his insistence that populism should be understood as a process of “people-making,” one that is sustained through narratives, rituals, symbols, and moral imagination as much as through political programmes or charismatic leaders. In this respect, the book deserves to become a significant reference for future scholarship on American populism.
Equally commendable is Rev. Dr. Bossen’s willingness to acknowledge his own intellectual and political commitments. Unlike many scholars who present normative assumptions as methodological neutrality, Rev. Dr. Bossen explicitly situates himself as a Unitarian Universalist minister, labor activist, and advocate of democratic participation. His long engagement with the IWW informs both his historical sensitivity and his appreciation for grassroots democratic organization. This transparency strengthens rather than weakens the credibility of his scholarship because readers are never left wondering about the standpoint from which the analysis proceeds.
Nevertheless, precisely because the book is so theoretically ambitious, it also raises important methodological questions. The most significant concerns the comparative architecture itself. Rev. Dr. Bossen’s decision to analyze the Ku Klux Klan, the UNIA, and the IWW within a single conceptual framework is undoubtedly productive. It reveals common mechanisms through which populist movements construct collective identities and mobilize followers. Yet comparison, while indispensable as a historical method, carries its own risks.
Most notably, placing emancipatory and exclusionary movements within the same analytical structure can occasionally generate an unintended impression of moral symmetry. Rev. Dr. Bossen is careful throughout the volume to distinguish white supremacist populism from Pan-African and pluralistic populisms and repeatedly affirms his opposition to racial domination. His normative position is therefore never in doubt. Yet the comparative framework itself sometimes places disproportionate emphasis on structural similarities—rituals, myths, narratives of salvation, political symbolism, and collective identity formation—while giving comparatively less analytical attention to the fundamentally different ethical purposes toward which these mechanisms are directed.
This distinction matters considerably. White supremacist movements emerged historically to preserve racial hierarchy, political exclusion, and systems of domination. By contrast, Garveyism, despite its own ideological contradictions and internal tensions, developed as a response to centuries of racial oppression, disenfranchisement, colonialism, and segregation. Likewise, later African American political movements—from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Power and contemporary struggles for racial justice—cannot be adequately understood without recognizing that they sought democratic inclusion, equal citizenship, and protection from institutionalized violence rather than the exclusion of others from political membership.
To acknowledge that these movements all engaged in “people-making” is analytically illuminating. However, democratic theory also requires distinguishing between the politics of emancipation and the politics of domination. Similar mechanisms of collective identity formation do not necessarily imply comparable normative projects. A movement struggling to secure equal citizenship for historically excluded communities occupies a fundamentally different moral position from one seeking to preserve racial privilege through exclusion and violence. Future editions might therefore benefit from engaging more explicitly with scholarship on historical injustice, democratic inclusion, and recognition theory in order to sharpen this distinction further.
Relatedly, while Rev. Dr. Bossen convincingly demonstrates the persistence of three populist traditions across American history, greater engagement with contemporary comparative populism scholarship would have strengthened the book’s broader theoretical intervention. The framework developed by Ernesto Laclau regarding populist articulation, Cas Mudde’s influential conception of populism as a thin-centered ideology, Jan-Werner Müller’s emphasis on anti-pluralism, Nadia Urbinati’s work on populism and representation, Benjamin Moffitt’s theory of populism as political style, and Pierre Rosanvallon’s reflections on democratic legitimacy all offer fruitful points of dialogue. Rev. Dr. Bossen’s contribution stands comfortably alongside these major theorists, yet the conversation occasionally remains more implicit than explicit.
The book also invites reflection on developments beyond its historical period. Although Rev. Dr. Bossen concludes by emphasizing the endurance of the three populisms he identifies, readers are naturally drawn toward contemporary politics. Trumpism illustrates the remarkable resilience of white supremacist populist narratives centred upon national restoration, exclusionary conceptions of citizenship, and nostalgia for an idealized past. Conversely, Black Lives Matter, contemporary labor organizing, democratic socialism, and broader progressive coalitions demonstrate that Pan-African and pluralistic populisms likewise continue to evolve in response to changing social and political conditions. One of the book’s lasting achievements is precisely that it provides a conceptual vocabulary through which these contemporary developments can be interpreted within a much longer historical trajectory.
In sum, The Political Theologies of Populism succeeds because it fundamentally reframes the study of populism. Rather than asking whether populism is inherently democratic or authoritarian, Rev. Dr. Bossen encourages readers to ask a more fundamental question: Who constitutes “the people,” by what moral vision are they united, and whom does that definition inevitably exclude? In shifting attention from electoral competition to the moral construction of political communities, he significantly expands the conceptual horizons of populism research.
If one reservation remains, it concerns not the historical scholarship—which is exemplary—but the comparative balance of the analytical framework. While comparison reveals important structural affinities, greater normative differentiation between emancipatory and exclusionary populisms would have further strengthened the book’s democratic argument and prevented any possible reading that places victims of racial oppression and architects of racial domination within an overly symmetrical analytical space. This is, however, a criticism directed at the limits of comparison rather than the quality of the scholarship itself.
Taken as a whole, Rev. Dr. Bossen’s book is an impressive, original, and intellectually courageous work. It enriches our understanding of American political development by demonstrating that populism has never been a singular phenomenon but rather a contested field of competing democratic and anti-democratic projects. Combining historical depth with theoretical sophistication, it offers an important contribution not only to the study of populism but also to political theology, American intellectual history, religion and politics, and democratic theory. It deserves a wide readership among historians, political scientists, scholars of religion, and anyone seeking to understand why struggles over belonging continue to define American democracy in the twenty-first century.
Colin Bossen. The Political Theologies of Populism: The Garveyites, the Klan, and the Wobblies, 1905–1930. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2026.
For years, Hungary stood as the defining case of democratic backsliding within the European Union. Yet the 2026 election has transformed it into an equally important case of democratic recovery. In this timely interview, Dr. Hanna Folsz discusses why Hungary’s political transformation challenges prevailing assumptions about the durability of competitive authoritarianism. Drawing on her recent Journal of Democracy article, she argues that authoritarian institutional engineering ultimately remains vulnerable when broad civic mobilization, credible political leadership, and innovative opposition strategies converge. The conversation explores the underestimated role of civil society, the limits of media capture and economic coercion, the challenges of rebuilding democratic institutions, and the broader lessons Hungary offers for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand democratic resilience and authoritarian reversal in the twenty-first century.
For more than a decade, Hungary occupied a unique place in the comparative study of democratic backsliding. Under Viktor Orbán and Fidesz, it became widely regarded as the paradigmatic example of competitive authoritarianism within the European Union—a political system in which elections continued to exist but were increasingly distorted by constitutional engineering, media capture, economic coercion, and the systematic weakening of institutional checks and balances. Consequently, Hungary became not merely a national case but an international reference point for understanding how democracies erode from within.
Yet Hungary’s 2026 election has fundamentally altered that conversation. The defeat of Fidesz after sixteen years in power has transformed the country into one of the most consequential contemporary cases of democratic recovery. In her recent Journal of Democracy article, How Civil Society Defeated Orbán, Dr. Hanna Folsz —an Academy Scholar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where she will begin her appointment in August 2026 before joining IE University in Madrid as Assistant Professor of Political Science in 2027— argues that this democratic breakthrough cannot be explained solely by leadership change or electoral dynamics. Instead, she offers a broader theoretical argument about the hidden vulnerabilities of competitive authoritarian regimes and the underestimated capacity of civil society to reverse authoritarian consolidation.
As Dr. Folsz observes, “Even deeply entrenched competitive authoritarian regimes have vulnerabilities.” While Hungary experienced what she describes as “one of the most extensive and severe episodes of de-democratization or authoritarian consolidation in recent decades,” the very institutions and strategies that sustained Fidesz ultimately proved insufficient to guarantee permanent rule. Institutional engineering, media dominance, financial asymmetries, and intimidation undoubtedly raised the costs of political competition, yet they could not indefinitely substitute for declining public legitimacy. As she argues, “these authoritarian strategies do not guarantee lasting—everlasting—popularity or staying in office.”
A central contribution of Dr. Folsz’s research is her reassessment of the role of civil society. Rather than attributing the opposition’s victory primarily to the emergence of the Tisza Party or the leadership of Péter Magyar, she demonstrates how more than 2,500 decentralized “Tisza Islands” transformed latent civic capacity into effective political organization. In her words, “The role of civil society… is absolutely underestimated,” while “broad civic mobilization, new and fresh opposition challengers… and a credible alternative to voters are definitely a path to democratic reversal.”
In this interview, Dr. Folsz examines the mechanisms that enabled Hungary’s democratic breakthrough and explores their broader implications for comparative politics. She discusses the hidden effects of economic coercion, the limits of media capture, the importance of credible political leadership, and the challenges of democratic restoration after authoritarian rule. She also reflects on the responsibilities facing Hungary’s new government, emphasizing that electoral victory is only the beginning: “Changing governments is definitely only a precondition for democratic recovery.” Together, these insights offer an important contribution to ongoing debates on populism, democratic resilience, competitive authoritarianism, and the conditions under which entrenched illiberal regimes can ultimately be defeated.
Drawing on comparative evidence from Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, and beyond, Associate Professor Laura Gamboa offers a compelling rethinking of democratic resilience in an age of gradual authoritarianism. Rather than viewing democratic backsliding solely through the ambitions of would-be autocrats, she demonstrates that democratic survival depends equally on the strategic choices of opposition parties, constitutional courts, and civil society. Reflecting on Colombia’s 2026 presidential election, Assoc. Prof. Gamboa argues that the results present “a mixed story,” simultaneously revealing institutional resilience and new democratic vulnerabilities. She warns that contemporary authoritarianism advances incrementally—often becoming visible only when “it’s usually too late”—while urging democratic actors to address citizens’ grievances, strengthen institutional legitimacy, reduce polarization, and defend constitutional democracy without abandoning democratic principles.
The contemporary crisis of democracy rarely unfolds through dramatic coups or sudden constitutional collapse. Instead, democratic erosion increasingly advances through legal reforms, institutional manipulation, and the gradual concentration of executive power. This slow-moving process has transformed democratic backsliding into one of the defining political challenges of the twenty-first century, raising urgent questions about how constitutional democracies can defend themselves against elected leaders who weaken democratic institutions from within. Few scholars have contributed more to answering these questions than Associate Professor Laura Gamboa of the University of Notre Dame, whose work has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of democratic resilience.
Unlike much of the earlier literature, which focused primarily on aspiring autocrats, Assoc. Prof. Gamboa redirects attention to the democratic opposition itself. In Resisting Backsliding: Opposition Strategies against the Erosion of Democracy and New Forms of Democratic Erosion in Latin America, she argues that democratic survival depends not only on the ambitions of authoritarian leaders but also on the strategic choices of opposition parties, constitutional courts, legislatures, and civil society. By shifting the analytical focus from autocrats to democratic resistance, her scholarship offers one of the most original frameworks for explaining why some democracies withstand authoritarian pressures while others gradually succumb.
The timing of this interview is especially significant. Colombia’s 2026 presidential election has reignited debates about democratic accountability, populism, institutional resilience, and constitutional government across Latin America. While many observers interpreted the election as a straightforward ideological shift to the political right, Assoc. Prof. Gamboa argues that “the 2026 elections give us a mixed story.” She highlights both the resilience of Colombia’s democratic institutions and troubling warning signs, emphasizing that “both the candidate who won the election and the president’s unwillingness to recognize the election results are not good news for democracy.” Her assessment reminds us that electoral alternation alone neither guarantees democratic renewal nor necessarily signals democratic decline.
A recurring theme throughout the interview is the changing nature of authoritarianism. Contemporary autocrats rarely destroy democracy overnight. Instead, they rely on constitutional reforms, elections, plebiscites, and legal mechanisms to weaken liberal democracy incrementally. As Assoc. Prof. Gamboa warns, “by the time the threat becomes evident, it’s usually too late.” Because democratic erosion often proceeds under the appearance of constitutional legality, recognizing the danger of autocratization before institutions are fundamentally weakened has become increasingly difficult.
The interview also challenges conventional assumptions about populism. Rather than treating it as inherently incompatible with democracy, Assoc. Prof. Gamboa describes populism as “a double-sided coin,” capable of expanding political inclusion while simultaneously encouraging personalistic leadership and executive aggrandizement. Equally important, she argues that democratic oppositions must resist dismissing populist voters. “All of these would-be autocrats come to power because they tap into some kind of discontent,” she explains, emphasizing that democratic forces must address underlying grievances rather than simply condemn their political expression. Ultimately, her message is one of strategic democratic resilience: defend institutions, broaden coalitions, reduce polarization, and remember that “doing politics in a society that is not polarized is significantly easier than doing politics in a society that is polarized.” In an era of democratic uncertainty, Assoc. Prof. Gamboa offers a compelling roadmap for understanding—and resisting—the gradual erosion of constitutional democracy.
Hungary’s democratic transition has entered a decisive new phase following Péter Magyar’s electoral victory, but, as Professor Kim Lane Scheppele argues, defeating an autocrat is only the beginning of democratic restoration. In this timely interview, Professor Scheppele examines the constitutional dilemmas confronting Hungary’s new leadership: dismantling autocratic legalism without reproducing it, restoring judicial independence, ensuring accountability without political revenge, and rebuilding institutions capable of sustaining genuine democratic competition. Drawing broader lessons for democracies facing executive aggrandizement, she contends that successful democratic recovery requires more than electoral change. Hungary’s experience, she argues, may become a comparative model for constitutional reconstruction—provided that democratic reformers succeed in limiting their own power while rebuilding the institutional foundations of liberal constitutional democracy.
For more than a decade, Hungary has occupied a central place in comparative debates on democratic backsliding, constitutional capture, and the rise of legalistic authoritarianism. Under Viktor Orbán, the country became the paradigmatic example of how elected leaders could gradually dismantle liberal democracy not by suspending constitutional order but by systematically reshaping it from within. Through constitutional amendments, judicial restructuring, electoral engineering, and the concentration of executive authority, Hungary demonstrated that democratic erosion in the twenty-first century increasingly proceeds through law rather than outside it. Yet the electoral defeat of Orbán has fundamentally transformed the scholarly conversation. The central question is no longer how democracies decay, but whether they can be successfully rebuilt once authoritarian legal structures have become deeply institutionalized.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University, examines one of the most consequential constitutional experiments currently unfolding in Europe: Hungary’s attempt to move from autocratic rule toward democratic restoration. Drawing upon decades of research on constitutionalism, judicial independence, autocratic legalism, and democratic resilience, Professor Scheppele argues that Hungary may now become not only the world’s foremost laboratory of democratic backsliding but also an unprecedented laboratory of democratic recovery.
Throughout the interview, Professor Scheppele repeatedly distinguishes democratic restoration from ordinary democratic transition. Electoral victory, she insists, represents only the first step. As she memorably observes, “The real test of democracy is not the first election—but the next one.” The ultimate challenge is whether a new democratic government can dismantle institutions deliberately designed to prevent future political alternation while simultaneously avoiding the temptation to reproduce concentrated executive power.
One of the interview’s central contributions concerns what Professor Scheppele describes as the paradox of autocratic legality. Because Orbán entrenched political domination through constitutional and legal mechanisms, democratic reformers may confront situations in which “when law entrenches autocracy, following it may preserve the regime.” This raises profound constitutional dilemmas concerning judicial reform, constitutional replacement, accountability, and the relationship between legality and democratic legitimacy.
Professor Scheppele also explores the practical architecture of democratic reconstruction. She argues that “power must be limited even during democratic restoration,” advocates a constitutional process in which “the rules of the game” are democratically rewritten, and proposes a broader understanding of the rule of law rooted in European constitutional standards rather than exclusively in national legal continuity. Her discussion of judicial reconstruction, constitutional redesign, and transnational legal constraints offers an important comparative framework extending well beyond Hungary.
Perhaps most significantly, Professor Scheppele identifies the political conditions that made democratic change possible. Hungary’s experience demonstrates, she argues, that successful democratic opposition must “fight corruption, build a big tent, and take people out of fear.”
Looking ahead, she concludes that the durability of democratic recovery will depend upon three immediate institutional priorities: reforming the Constitutional Court, restoring meaningful judicial checks, and redesigning the electoral system. Whether Hungary succeeds or fails, she suggests, will shape how democracies around the world think about rebuilding constitutional government after authoritarian capture.
As climate change increasingly reshapes patterns of human mobility, it is also transforming the political foundations of democratic citizenship. In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja argues that climate-induced displacement should no longer be understood solely as a humanitarian emergency or a security challenge, but as an emerging battleground over political membership and democratic inclusion. Introducing the innovative concept of Climate Citizenship Populism, Dr. Solaja demonstrates how environmental displacement is becoming a powerful resource for exclusionary populist narratives that redefine who belongs within the democratic community. By bringing together scholarship on populism, climate mobility, and democratic citizenship, the commentary offers an original analytical framework for understanding how environmental change is reshaping contemporary political conflict and why the future of democracy will increasingly depend on how societies respond to the politics of climate-driven belonging.
Climate change has progressed from being an environmental issue into a central political issue in the 21st century. As the entire debate and politics concerning climate change revolved around the issues of temperature increase, carbon emission, and environmental damage, the effects of climate change do not just end there. It is transforming the patterns of human inhabitation, transforming the ways of life of people, and fundamentally changing the geographical bases on which our understanding of citizenship rests. As environmental factors drive humans away, democracies now face a crucial dilemma: Who belongs to a world changed by climate change?
This article situates climate migration at the nexus of debates surrounding democracy, citizenship and populism. While populism has been defined as the political logic that distinguishes between ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’ (Mudde, 2004; Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017), it is also shaped by debates over the ‘people’ and its boundaries. Populist movements often exploit existing anxieties over economics, culture, immigration and national identity. But in a warming, changing world, climate change-induced movement of people creates a new domain for this struggle.
Climate migration has become a key tool for constructing the ‘people,’ defining who is deserving and legitimating claims to belonging. Evidence for this transformation is widespread. The 2022 IPCC Report (2022) points to climate change as a major driver of increased human vulnerability due to weather extremes, ecosystem degradation and impacts on food and water. In recent years, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) has documented that weather-related events cause the majority of new internal displacements worldwide. Nevertheless, climate-induced displacement cannot be understood in purely environmentalist terms but is a product of interactions among environmental changes, poverty, inequality, failures of governance, and armed conflict (Gemenne, 2011; McLeman, 2014). Therefore, climate migration reflects a broader set of unequal social and political relations that influence people’s ability to stay, adapt or leave their places of origin. The political debate on climate mobility, however, tends to remain framed within two dominant and limiting perspectives.
Firstly, it is widely regarded as a problem requiring a humanitarian response to protect vulnerable displaced people. Secondly, climate migrants are perceived as a threat to national security, welfare systems, labor markets, and cultural identity. Yet both approaches obscure a more profound transformation: climate migration is increasingly becoming a question of membership in the polity. The critical issue is not so much why people migrate as how existing political communities draw the boundaries of membership and belonging in the face of collapsing territorial stability. It is precisely within this terrain of uncertainty that populist politics appears particularly well positioned to thrive.
Populism is fundamentally concerned with issues of borders and political membership, often drawing on the divide between insiders and outsiders (Laclau, 2005; Müller, 2016). Climate-induced displacement offers a rich symbolic site for these populist efforts, since it is deeply entangled with concerns over the sovereignty of the nation-state, the administration of borders, the distribution of public goods, and the management of national culture. Climate migrants can thus be politically reframed not simply as dispossessed people, but as symbols of wider fears about social and political disorder.
Introducing Climate Citizenship Populism
To describe this new political tendency, this commentary introduces the term Climate Citizenship Populism. It is a variant of populism that uses environmental displacement to redraw the lines of democratic membership by defining climate migrants as a threat to the rights, resources, identity and sovereignty of a national community.
Climate Citizenship Populism is not like previous forms of political conflict over the climate, where the conflict might have been over whether climate change is occurring or over opposition to regulating it. It is based on the assumption of environmental disruption, but it is the social consequences that are politicized. Thus, the central conflict changes from a question of climate change to one of who pays the repercussions of climate change and who deserves political representation in a climate-changed world.
This analysis makes a helpful contribution to the current debate on populism in three significant ways. First, it sees climate-induced mobility as a new material trigger for populist mobilization, alongside the more commonly suggested economic insecurity, immigration, and cultural backlash. Second, it suggests that the focus of populist opposition has moved from immigration to democracy itself as the political nature of citizenship is transformed by environmental change. Third, it presents a new analytical framework—Climate Citizenship Populism—to make sense of the conversion of environmental displacement into exclusionary narratives of democratic citizenship.
The idea is to connect three lines of research that have been pursued independently so far: populism studies, climate mobility research and democratic citizenship theory. While existing studies have already provided interesting findings on adaptation and displacement, as well as on citizenship and territorial belonging, there is a lack of literature on climate migration and the governance of migration. The current body of research has shed light on migration and the governance of migration, adaptation and displacement, as well as on the relationship between territorial belonging and citizenship and rights, but there is a dearth of research on climate migration and the governance of migration. But there has been little effort to grasp how environmental displacement is influencing the political boundaries of citizenship through populist mobilization.
Climate Citizenship Populism thus draws attention to a more general shift in democratic politics. Climate change is not just an issue to be added to policy agendas but also a structural condition that alters the material and political conditions shaping societies’ notions of belonging. Populist players are now also trying to re-imagine the limits of the democratic community itself as patterns of human settlement are reconfigured amid environmental disruption. In the era of environmental disruption, patterns of human settlement are being redrawn, and populist actors are seeking to redefine the limits of the democratic community itself.
From Border Politics to Democratic Exclusion
Climate Citizenship Populism is not only possible politically; its reasoning can be seen in various regions. Whether it is a matter of humanitarianism or of political membership, sovereignty, and national belonging, a pattern is becoming increasingly recognizable: environmental displacement is increasingly understood as a political issue.
Climate mobility has increasingly been linked to broader European debates on immigration, border management, and national identity. Most contemporary migration movements are not solely a consequence of climate change, but the foreshadowing of future climate displacement has become a political issue. The incorporation of the theme of environmental mobility in more comprehensive narratives of demographic change, overburdened welfare states, housing crises and the failure of political elites to keep the nation together is becoming a hallmark of populist actors. In this sense, migrants are symbolic beings through which anxieties of globalization and social change are conveyed. It is not just the quantity, but the meaning associated with displacement in the stories of populism that has political dimensions.
These trends are also seen in North America, notably in political discussions about migration from climate-vulnerable Central America and the Caribbean. Studies have shown that economic insecurity, governance problems, and social vulnerability are interlinked with environmental pressures to shape migration decisions (McLeman, 2014; IOM, 2024). Political debates, however, tend to reduce such realities to a simple narrative about the border “crisis” and national insecurity. Climate displacement is integrated into a larger anti-immigration discourse, in which migrants serve as a symbol of the waning control of the state. Thus, environmental mobility becomes a political problem, ranging from global inequality to a perceived threat to national sovereignty.
Another facet of Climate Citizenship Populism is illustrated in the African context. In the Sahel and other affected areas of the Horn of Africa, there are growing incidences of internal, rather than trans-border, displacement driven by drought, desertification, flooding and resource pressures. These movements involve complex issues of land, livelihood, access to resources and political recognition. When resources are scarce, displaced people are sometimes portrayed as rivals for economic opportunities or public services, furthering narratives of territorial identity and belonging. In these settings, Climate Citizenship Populism does not appear as much as international border politics, but rather as a contestation over who is entitled to what land, resources, and community.
Perhaps the most profound challenge to conventional understandings of citizenship is provided by Small Island Developing States. Climate mobility raises more than just migration management questions, particularly for communities under existential threat from sea-level rise. Who, then, will be able to live on a land that is becoming uninhabitable, one where citizenship is organized? Climate displacement scholars have suggested that this type of event calls into question the notions of territorialized political membership (McAdam, 2012). They show how climate change is altering mobility patterns and destabilizing the sense of territory that underpins contemporary democratic citizenship.
Contributions to the study of Populism and Democratic Theory
Climate Citizenship Populism enriches the field of populism studies by introducing the idea that environmental disruptions should be considered a novel material condition of political mobilization. Previous scholarship has offered insightful accounts of populist politics as anti-elitism, cultural backlash, nationalism and immigration politics (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017; Moffitt, 2016). Climate Citizenship Populism is not an alternative to these explanations but an expansion of them, showing how political communities draw in their insiders/outsiders in the context of environmental instability.
This way of thinking takes the focus away from migration and towards citizenship. The classic discussions tend to revolve around whether migrants should be let in, kept safe, or kept out. Climate Citizenship Populism uncovers a more fundamental issue: What is the nature of democratic citizenship in an era when climate change is emerging as a primary factor in determining who can and cannot live? In this respect, climate migration is not just an issue for migration governance – it is an issue for the normative basis of democracy.
The idea also emphasizes the issue of climate justice. The concept of climate mobility is defined by deep global inequalities, including unequal historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and unequal ability to adapt to climate change (Caney, 2010; Shue, 2014). Responses to climate migration which exclude are likely to become new forms of democratic exclusion, building on the history of unequal climate impacts. There is a need for effective adaptation and migration policies and political frameworks that acknowledge shared vulnerability and differentiated responsibilities in the context of climate mobility.
Conclusion: Citizenship in a Climate-Changed World
Climate crises have become an essential part of the democratic political landscape. Along with the changing landscape of environmental mobility, environmental disruption is also changing the political questions of belonging, rights and membership. The question for democracies is not only how to deal with climate migration, but also how to maintain democratic inclusion in a world where territorial stability is no longer guaranteed.
Climate Citizenship Populism offers a framework for understanding how environmental displacement is becoming integral to current political identity and conflicts over democratic boundaries. It shows that climate change is not only adding to migration pressures, but also to political opportunities to draw lines about who is in and who is out. What this means is important. What populism is all about is the building of “the people”—and in the future, climate change will be a major factor in the picture of “the people. Debating emissions, adaptation, and environmental governance will thus be a part of the politics of the climate age, but so too will be debates over citizenship itself.
Class, industrialization and social redistribution were significant issues of the twentieth century. The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen globalization, migration and national identity come into conflict. Climate citizenship is likely to become a recurring battle in the next decades. Democracies are now at a pivotal point where they must decide whether climate insecurity strengthens their pursuit of exclusion or provides a moment to reconsider political belonging on the basis of ideas of justice, solidarity and shared fragility.
The future of democracy in a climate-changed world will ultimately depend not only on how societies respond to environmental transformation, but on how they answer the most basic political question of all: who belongs?
References
Benhabib, S. (2004). The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. Cambridge University Press.
Caney, S. (2010). “Climate change and the duties of the advantaged.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 13(1), 203–228.
Gemenne, F. (2011). “Why the numbers don’t add up: A review of estimates and predictions of people displaced by environmental changes.” Global Environmental Change, 21(S1), S41–S49.
Gemenne, F. (2015). “One good reason to speak of ‘climate refugees’.” Forced Migration Review, 49, 70–71.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Cambridge University Press.
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. (2024). Global Report on Internal Displacement 2024. IDMC.
International Organization for Migration. (2024). World Migration Report 2024. IOM.
Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. Verso.
Marshall, T. H. (1950). Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge University Press.
McAdam, J. (2012). Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law. Oxford University Press.
McLeman, R. (2014). Climate and Human Migration: Past Experiences, Future Challenges. Cambridge University Press.
Moffitt, B. (2016). The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford University Press.
Mudde, C. (2004). “The populist zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563.
Mudde, C. & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Müller, J.-W. (2016). What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press.
Shue, H. (2014). Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection. Oxford University Press.
For years, Hungary stood as the defining case of democratic backsliding within the European Union. Yet the 2026 election has transformed it into an equally important case of democratic recovery. In this timely interview, Dr. Hanna Folsz discusses why Hungary’s political transformation challenges prevailing assumptions about the durability of competitive authoritarianism. Drawing on her recent Journal of Democracy article, she argues that authoritarian institutional engineering ultimately remains vulnerable when broad civic mobilization, credible political leadership, and innovative opposition strategies converge. The conversation explores the underestimated role of civil society, the limits of media capture and economic coercion, the challenges of rebuilding democratic institutions, and the broader lessons Hungary offers for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand democratic resilience and authoritarian reversal in the twenty-first century.
For more than a decade, Hungary occupied a unique place in the comparative study of democratic backsliding. Under Viktor Orbán and Fidesz, it became widely regarded as the paradigmatic example of competitive authoritarianism within the European Union—a political system in which elections continued to exist but were increasingly distorted by constitutional engineering, media capture, economic coercion, and the systematic weakening of institutional checks and balances. Consequently, Hungary became not merely a national case but an international reference point for understanding how democracies erode from within.
Yet Hungary’s 2026 election has fundamentally altered that conversation. The defeat of Fidesz after sixteen years in power has transformed the country into one of the most consequential contemporary cases of democratic recovery. In her recent Journal of Democracy article, How Civil Society Defeated Orbán, Dr. Hanna Folsz —an Academy Scholar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where she will begin her appointment in August 2026 before joining IE University in Madrid as Assistant Professor of Political Science in 2027— argues that this democratic breakthrough cannot be explained solely by leadership change or electoral dynamics. Instead, she offers a broader theoretical argument about the hidden vulnerabilities of competitive authoritarian regimes and the underestimated capacity of civil society to reverse authoritarian consolidation.
As Dr. Folsz observes, “Even deeply entrenched competitive authoritarian regimes have vulnerabilities.” While Hungary experienced what she describes as “one of the most extensive and severe episodes of de-democratization or authoritarian consolidation in recent decades,” the very institutions and strategies that sustained Fidesz ultimately proved insufficient to guarantee permanent rule. Institutional engineering, media dominance, financial asymmetries, and intimidation undoubtedly raised the costs of political competition, yet they could not indefinitely substitute for declining public legitimacy. As she argues, “these authoritarian strategies do not guarantee lasting—everlasting—popularity or staying in office.”
A central contribution of Dr. Folsz’s research is her reassessment of the role of civil society. Rather than attributing the opposition’s victory primarily to the emergence of the Tisza Party or the leadership of Péter Magyar, she demonstrates how more than 2,500 decentralized “Tisza Islands” transformed latent civic capacity into effective political organization. In her words, “The role of civil society… is absolutely underestimated,” while “broad civic mobilization, new and fresh opposition challengers… and a credible alternative to voters are definitely a path to democratic reversal.”
In this interview, Dr. Folsz examines the mechanisms that enabled Hungary’s democratic breakthrough and explores their broader implications for comparative politics. She discusses the hidden effects of economic coercion, the limits of media capture, the importance of credible political leadership, and the challenges of democratic restoration after authoritarian rule. She also reflects on the responsibilities facing Hungary’s new government, emphasizing that electoral victory is only the beginning: “Changing governments is definitely only a precondition for democratic recovery.” Together, these insights offer an important contribution to ongoing debates on populism, democratic resilience, competitive authoritarianism, and the conditions under which entrenched illiberal regimes can ultimately be defeated.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Dr. Hanna Folsz, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Authoritarian Strategies Do Not Guarantee Permanent Rule
Hungarian government’s anti-immigration billboard says “STOP the refugees” in Budapest, Hungary on April 4, 2018.
Dr. Folsz, welcome!Let me begin with our first question. For more than a decade, Hungary was widely regarded as the paradigmatic case of democratic backsliding and competitive authoritarianism. Yet your recent Journal of Democracy article argues that the 2026 election also represents one of the most significant democratic reversals of authoritarian consolidation in recent years. How should we interpret the Hungarian election in comparative perspective? Does it represent an exceptional case, or does it reveal broader vulnerabilities inherent in contemporary competitive authoritarian regimes?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: The Hungarian case represents a combination of factors that disadvantage opposition parties or make opposition electoral victory exceedingly difficult. It is definitely an example of—maybe one of the most extensive and severe episodes of de-democratization or authoritarian consolidation in recent decades. Nevertheless, the Hungarian case also represents many of the common factors, or common difficulties, that oppositions experience and the strategies that aspiring authoritarians employ to entrench their rule.
No wonder Hungary serves as a preliminary case, an example for aspiring autocrats worldwide. Fidesz’s dominance in the media, the extensive financial advantage that it enjoyed—or made sure it enjoyed—compared to opposition parties and independent civil society, the severe disadvantages faced by the opposition in the electoral system, as well as the fear of opposition participation due to the repercussions, are all factors that are present in other cases as well.
It was the length of Fidesz rule that made these impediments especially significant, but it also showed that these authoritarian strategies do not guarantee lasting—everlasting—popularity or staying in office. And the lessons it offers are a set of lessons for other cases. Of course, these have to be adapted to context, but the Hungarian case shows that there are vulnerabilities to be exploited, that broad civic mobilization, new and fresh opposition challengers who understand the regime and its vulnerabilities and exploit them, and who present a credible alternative to voters, are definitely a path to democratic reversal. But I’m excited to delve more into the details of this throughout this interview.
The Role of Civil Society in Democratic Change Has Been Profoundly Underestimated
One of your central arguments is that the decisive innovation was not simply the emergence of the Tisza Party, but the rapid development of the decentralized network of Tisza Islands. Why were these semi-autonomous civic organizations able to succeed where traditional opposition parties repeatedly failed? More broadly, does this suggest that democratic resistance in authoritarian settings increasingly depends on civil society rather than party organizations?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: In my article, I make the argument that existing commentary and interpretations of the opposition’s recent electoral victory in Hungary pay a lot of attention to the emergence of the Tisza Party and its novelty, the charisma and skills of its leader, as well as the broader discontent with Fidesz rule after many years of economic stagnation that, in part, could be accounted for by the suspension of EU funds, as well as by extreme corruption and authoritarian overreach by Fidesz.
I argue that this is not the full story. To understand the opposition’s victory, we must take into account the extensive and unprecedented civic mobilization that occurred in Hungary around this election. In my article, I show that Tisza Islands—these semi-autonomous civic groups, small civic groups of at most 50 participants each—emerged across the country. Over 2,500 of these existed by the election. Within a span of a year and a half, they came to dominate civic and public life in Hungary.
They played an essential role in structuring political life, providing political information in their communities, and demonstrating the credibility of the party and the opposition as an alternative through highly visible activities, including extensive volunteering and local charity work that showed the opposition movement cared about the experiences and difficulties of everyday Hungarians. They also provided, basically, the campaign infrastructure for the Tisza Party throughout the election.
The party had very little money, very limited financial resources, in large part due to Fidesz’s actions and changes to party funding, as well as simply being a very new party. This meant that it did not have the resources for the kind of classic electoral campaign that we expect from political parties in democracies most of the time—one funded by donations or state funds, especially in Europe, and relying on an extensive party infrastructure, local offices, and so on. Instead, these Islands stepped up. They basically provided the campaign activists and even the financial resources for the campaign. That played an absolutely crucial role in Tisza’s eventual victory.
What this shows is that there are specific vulnerabilities, difficulties, and challenges for opposition parties in autocratizing and competitive authoritarian contexts. These include financial disadvantage, an absolute information disadvantage under an incumbent-controlled media infrastructure, and the total—or almost total—de-mobilization of the activist base and opposition voters who have become disillusioned with politics and opposition parties. This was definitely the situation Hungary found itself in in 2026, and it showed that the usual avenues for political change were no longer possible.
This is when we saw the very innovative collaboration between the Tisza Party and civil society through the Tisza Islands—these semi-autonomous groups that were only loosely connected to the party. This points to the fact that the role of civil society, the role we expect civil society to play, is absolutely underestimated. Parties will still be crucial, but we need to think about these innovative solutions and about how the strengths of civil society, the often-latent strengths of civil society, can be channeled into electoral competition.
Changing Governments Is Only a Precondition for Democratic Recovery
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.
For sixteen years, Viktor Orbán systematically weakened constitutional constraints, reshaped electoral institutions, captured much of the media, and subordinated state institutions to partisan control. Which of these legacies do you regard as the most difficult to reverse? Is democratic recovery primarily about changing governments, or about rebuilding institutions that have been deliberately hollowed out?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: Changing governments is definitely only a precondition for democratic recovery. Democratic recovery cannot be achieved without rebuilding resilient democratic institutions and norms. And this is where the main challenge in Hungary lies today.
In Hungarian case, Fidesz was voted out of office. The electoral threat that Fidesz currently represents to the Tisza Party is very low. So, it seems that we do not have to be extensively afraid of Fidesz returning to power in four years. The bigger challenge, rather, is for the Tisza Party to effectively restore democratic institutions and norms while exercising self-restraint in the process.
We have seen them begin to address this challenge very early on with a great deal of energy, which has been very encouraging for many commentators and observers. Their first constitutional amendment was recently passed. They are taking steps to remove the previous president and are also beginning to hold Fidesz-affiliated elites accountable through judicial proceedings and investigations into corruption and other authoritarian transgressions.
We also know that they will begin the constitutional process of writing a new constitution. There is also a new head of the state media who has already been appointed to oversee the transition to a more pluralistic and more independent media environment.
The biggest challenge is to make sure that there are professional and lastingly independent checks and balances across all of these spheres. Tisza has an unprecedented mandate because it achieved a two-thirds parliamentary majority in the election. That means it can amend the constitution. There are basically very few, if any, institutional restraints on how it exercises its power.
So, what we want to see is that, across all these spheres—the judiciary, the media, and state institutions—they install not necessarily party loyalists but rather truly independent actors, and that they respect their independence and decisions, even when those decisions go counter to Tisza’s goals or electoral preferences in terms of ensuring its electoral support.
Hungary Shows That Pro-Democracy Civic Energy Is Easier to Mobilize Than We Assumed
Your research highlights the importance of latent civic capacity that survives even under prolonged authoritarian pressure. What does Hungary teach us about democratic resilience? Can civil society preserve democratic norms even when formal institutions have been substantially weakened?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: The Hungarian case definitely shows me, in a striking way, that civic capacity is latent rather than absent in cases such as Hungary. This is something I highlight in my article as well, because we have a very strong assumption in political science research and in public debates about democratic resilience and resistance to authoritarian pressure.
The assumption is that if we have an institutionally weak civil society, then effective democratic resistance is very difficult. It’s sort of a precondition for democratic resistance that there are existing civil society actors that can serve as a check, hold the government accountable, organize resistance, organize protests, and restructure public opinion around resistance. When this is missing, we assume that democratic reversals are much more difficult.
They are indeed more difficult. But the Hungarian case absolutely shows that it is much easier to bring pro-democracy civic capacity to the surface than we assumed. In Hungary, the Tisza Islands provided a loose organizational frame, and the Tisza Party provided the Tisza Islands with a purpose and a potential for democratic change that mobilized the population across the country, in localities and municipalities both big and small.
This points to a case for some positivity, some optimism, as well as a call for innovative approaches and a better understanding of citizens’ motivations, because political scientists, as well as pundits, assumed that such mobilization would not be possible and were taken by surprise by its scale and effectiveness.
If we take the opportunity and make the effort to talk to citizens more, understand their relationship with this regime, and recognize that there is this latent discontent that may not be expressed for fear of repercussions, but also because of a lack of hope that things could change, and if we can understand how citizens react to the provision of a credible alternative, to hope embodied in an opposition movement, then this might not take us by surprise. We might instead focus a little more on developing these innovative civic approaches in our attempts to achieve democratic reversals.
Economic Coercion Is One of the Most Overlooked Tools of Authoritarian Control
Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
In your broader research, you argue that economic retaliation constitutes one of the most overlooked mechanisms through which aspiring autocrats weaken political competition by deterring talented opposition candidates. How central was economic coercion to Orbán’s durability, and how much did overcoming fear of retaliation contribute to the opposition’s eventual breakthrough?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: One of the focuses of my research is the authoritarian strategy that I term economic coercion. I argue in one of my papers that this is a core strategy of authoritarian consolidation and control that we tend to overlook because we focus on the physical acts of repression that these regimes carry out, be it arresting opposition politicians and activists or banning opposition parties, et cetera.
But economic coercion is another crucial strategy. I define it as a credible threat of economic retaliation for opposition political activity. This means that not just opposition candidates, but activists or those who express public support for the opposition, they themselves or their family members, might face economic difficulties as a result.
Its employment-oriented form—one of its forms—carries the potential for employment loss, dismissals from jobs in the public sector, the state sector, or in regime-adjacent businesses. Its enterprise-oriented form focuses on retaliation against business owners and firms. If you participate in opposition politics, for instance as a candidate, or if you participated in Hungary during the Orbán period, you could very well expect that your firm would be subject to targeted tax audits, targeted tax penalties, or other forms of retaliation—basically, the denial of state contracts and grants that your firm might have previously received, as well as the turning away of suppliers and other businesses that were themselves afraid of retaliation for their association with the opposition.
This was an absolutely pervasive, indeed a defining, characteristic of the Hungarian regime and a major impediment for opposition parties. My interviews with opposition politicians, together with a survey that I conducted among opposition local politicians, pointed to this pervasive fear of retaliation and Fidesz’s media dominance as the two central reasons opposition politicians identified for their parties’—or their political side’s—weakness.
There are many examples of this. I talked to a number of opposition politicians who themselves were fired from their jobs. Or, for instance, if they had a partner who was a teacher, that partner was fired, and their businesses suffered extensive retaliation. But I also heard many stories of opposition activists being too afraid to put their face, appear in photos—for fear that they would face retaliation, to register as an activist for the party, or even to become a party member.
There are countless examples that opposition politicians would tell me. They would set up stalls for campaigns or for collecting signatures for different causes, and even acquaintances whom they knew very well in their private lives would be too afraid to look at them while they were out on the streets, for fear that their employer or their neighbor might see them, and that word would then spread through their social circle that they supported the opposition.
This presented a huge difficulty for parties, both in mobilizing activists for strong campaigns and in finding good candidates for electoral office. The Tisza Party actually faced many of these same challenges.
Conversations with lawyers at the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, one of the main civil liberties protection organizations in Hungary, revealed that the number of cases of retaliatory firings, or proprietary retaliatory actions, that they encountered and were approached with actually increased significantly in the years following the emergence of the Tisza Party. My conversations and interviews with Tisza politicians themselves also revealed a staggering rate of such retaliation among their activist bases.
The way they overcame this is very remarkable and offers many important lessons. One of the most important strategies they employed was the Tisza Islands themselves, which provided a very low-visibility form of activism. Many activists I talked to in these Tisza Islands told me that they and their fellow activists could choose the level and form of activism they were comfortable with, depending on the degree of visibility. The lack of overt—or direct—association with the party also allowed them to evade some of the strongest retaliatory actions that we had previously come across.
Another important way in which the Tisza Islands contributed to mitigating the effects of retaliation was simply by affording the opposition greater visibility. This provided examples of courage and also evidence of the scale of retaliation, because fear of it often outstrips its actual occurrence.
Finally, Tisza started polling above Fidesz roughly a year and a half before the election, which was also very important because fear of economic retaliation operates on an assumption of future enforcement. If the opposition begins polling ahead of the governing party for such an extended period of time, there is at least some expectation that the governing party may lose the election, in which case retaliation will not proceed, or that any retaliation opposition activists or politicians experience will be undone once the new party comes to power.
This was crucial in progressively encouraging participation and lending confidence to the opposition. But it remained a formidable impediment, and it required a great deal of courage from all of the opposition activists I spoke to, as well as from the politicians of the Tisza Party, to stand publicly with the opposition in the way that they did. That is absolutely one of the most commendable actions one could undertake in such a political environment.
When Propaganda Collides with Lived Experience, Its Credibility Begins to Collapse
Poster from political party Fidesz showing the opponents of Hungarian PM Viktor Orban surrounding billionaire philanthropist George Soros, Budapest, April 8, 2017.
Hungary has often been cited as perhaps Europe’s most advanced example of media capture. Yet despite overwhelming informational asymmetries, the opposition ultimately managed to reach voters. Does this suggest that grassroots civic networks can compensate for authoritarian control of traditional media, or were there broader structural changes—including digital communication—that weakened the effectiveness of media capture?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: These grassroots civic networks played a very important role. There was an almost total lack of access to independent news in many parts of the country, predominantly outside of the larger cities. Almost all news sources were controlled by Fidesz by 2024, around the time of the emergence of the Tisza Party. One of the especially important early functions of the Tisza Islands was simply to provide public spaces for these new, alternative information environments where politics could be discussed.
During their first few months, many of these Tisza Islands focused primarily on inviting outside speakers or holding public discussions, talks with experts, and conversations among activists about the political situation. They identified the most important local issues and explored how Fidesz’s wrongdoing, corruption, authoritarian actions, and mismanagement of the economy and public resources contributed crucially to the local problems and difficulties Hungarians were facing. Through these speaker series, the Tisza Islands allowed people to connect the dots between their local experiences and the broader authoritarian encroachment and entrenchment of Fidesz in the country.
Having these communities in which to discuss politics was also something very new. Many of the activists I interviewed noted that this was the first time they could speak openly about politics without fear and simply discuss political developments among themselves. It created a much better shared understanding of the political situation in the country.
Nevertheless, there were three other factors that were also crucial. Beyond the emergence of these Islands and these local information spaces, the growing importance of the digital sphere was absolutely significant, as was the increasing conflict between people’s personal experiences, their economic hardships, and Fidesz’s narrative of its own successes.
In terms of the digital sphere and social media, we could see by the early 2020s, especially after the COVID pandemic, a very important shift in the way online and non-traditional news sources gained ground. YouTube, podcasts, and other social media platforms became very important sources of news in Hungary. Partizán is one of these networks—the largest podcast and YouTube network for independent news in Hungary. Its videos routinely achieved hundreds of thousands of views in a country of fewer than 10 million people. That’s very significant.
Another important way in which the rise of the digital sphere mattered was how Péter Magyar, current prime minister and the leader of the Tisza Party, exploited and leveraged it masterfully to gain popularity. His campaigns and political activities were always online. We heard from many commentators throughout the election how important it was that Péter Magyar travelled across the country, visiting Hungarian towns and villages, both large and small, after entering Hungarian politics. For two years, he was almost constantly on the ground talking to Hungarian voters.
One of the most important aspects of this, however, was that every single one of his appearances was livestreamed on his social media platforms. This created an almost constant connection with Hungarian voters, made possible by the rise of social media in politics. It further enhanced his credibility by demonstrating how hard he was working and strengthened his direct connection with voters.
Finally, another important reason why Fidesz’s media dominance—and its effectiveness—began to weaken was the increasingly apparent conflict between Hungarians’ lived experiences and Fidesz’s official narrative. Beginning in the early 2020s, and especially after 2022, Hungary experienced significant economic stagnation and record inflation. Inflation averaged around 20 percent in 2022 and remained at a similarly high, though somewhat lower, level in 2023. Food price inflation was particularly severe.
When Hungarians experienced firsthand that they could afford much less than in previous years, while Fidesz continued to emphasize its achievements and the support it was providing through its distributive programmes, this sharply contradicted people’s lived experiences. As a result, the credibility of Fidesz’s propagandistic narrative in the media outlets it controlled declined substantially, and Hungarians increasingly began seeking out alternative sources of news.
Opposition Strategy Matters Just as Much as Authoritarian Strategy
Orbán’s governments demonstrated remarkable sophistication in redesigning electoral rules, constitutional institutions, and oversight bodies without formally abandoning electoral competition. Does Hungary demonstrate that authoritarian institutional engineering eventually reaches diminishing returns, particularly when legitimacy begins to erode?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: Definitely. What the Hungarian case points to with respect to this question is simply that competitive authoritarian regimes still rely on popularity to persist. So, however much electoral rules are redesigned, institutions are amended, and oversight bodies are captured, if unpopularity starts to emerge, if the regime loses its credibility and legitimacy—especially its performance legitimacy—then these institutional changes cannot guarantee that it stays in power.
Nevertheless, there are important caveats. First, the Fidesz regime employed limited physical repression and party bans. That is something we are starting to see in cases such as Turkey, which does not have the constraints of the EU and has shown a willingness to use these tools against the opposition. This can represent much more significant constraints and make it much more difficult for the regime’s unpopularity to translate into electoral change and opposition victory.
The other important caveat is that opposition strategy does matter. Having a broad-appeal electoral strategy and offering a credible alternative that promises competent governance in the interests of the Hungarian people—and can credibly deliver on that promise—is crucial if these governing parties are to start losing elections or even come close to losing them.
Looking, for instance, at the 2022 election in Hungary, where Fidesz actually achieved its strongest performance under its rule, even though the election took place amid record inflation, economic stagnation, extreme corruption, and authoritarian overreach, shows that voters rejected the opposition alternative. There were plenty of reasons to dislike the regime, plenty of reasons to want change, but that change simply did not materialize through the opposition.
Performance Legitimacy Mattered Even More Than Ethno-populist Appeals
Orbán has frequently been analyzed as one of the architects of contemporary right-wing populism, combining majoritarian rhetoric with illiberal constitutionalism. Looking back, to what extent was Fidesz’s success primarily rooted in populism, and to what extent did it evolve into a more conventional authoritarian patronage regime whose survival depended increasingly on state control rather than popular mobilization?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: Fidesz’s populism was important to its staying in power and its ability to consolidate its rule, but it was by far not the only factor that mattered. If anything, performance legitimacy in voters’ eyes was even more important than the populist, ethno-populist appeals that we saw, especially in the second half of Fidesz’s rule.
In terms of Fidesz’s populism, we could definitely see that these radical-right nationalist ethno-populist appeals became very prevalent, especially in the second half of the 2010s. We saw this when immigration became the cornerstone issue for Fidesz, and when this sort of anti-immigration rhetoric became a very powerful tool that allowed it to win the 2018 election with resounding popularity.
But even then, Fidesz’s distributive programs were crucial. A very important element was this kind of regime-to-voter patronage—not just giving resources to a small elite but also providing financial benefits directly to voters so that they saw a financial benefit in their own pockets from supporting the regime. This was very important, and Fidesz very consciously leveraged these strategies.
We saw that when these strategies failed, when the economic gains that people felt they had experienced under Fidesz rule disappeared, Fidesz became less popular. Its deployment of nationalism, its use of this outside-threat narrative, this classic populist narrative, was not enough to ensure that it stayed in power and continued to mobilize its base.
In sum, the transformation of the economy to ensure Fidesz’s continuity in power was very important. These distributive programs directed at voters were crucial. Of course, part of that also involved establishing a political elite, an economic elite that gave Fidesz its economic base—this sort of oligarchic network that supported its control over the media and made sure that economically independent opposition actors had a very difficult time gaining ground.
Those factors were important as well. But populism is just not enough of an explanation.
Hope for Change Required a Credible Political Entrepreneur
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.
Your article emphasizes that civic mobilization required not only existing social networks but also what might be called a credible political entrepreneur in Péter Magyar. How important is leadership in activating dormant democratic capacities? Could similar civic energy have emerged without a figure capable of coordinating and legitimizing it?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: Coordination and the hope of change were absolutely essential to the civic energy that we saw in Hungary, and they had to come from a credible source. They had to come from a credible political entrepreneur or group that promised this. It did not necessarily have to be Péter Magyar, but he is a highly politically skilled politician. He was able to recognize these opportunities, as well as the vulnerabilities of the regime. This was very important in activating the civic energy in the country.
One of the preconditions is simply that there has to be a vision for political change. I think what Péter Magyar did right, why he was important, and why he was able to do this was the energy that voters saw in him as he travelled around the country on his nationwide tours, day after day, rally after rally, meeting after meeting, demonstrating that he took this seriously and that he was able to connect with people. Hearing him speak, hearing him identify the problems with the regime, and also hearing him present some possible solutions was also important.
A strong performance in the 2024 European Parliament election also gave him and his party the ability to have voters’ expectations, or hopes for change, coalesce around them. That was crucial. He emerged at the right time, when there was very strong dissatisfaction with Fidesz but no opposition alternative or opposition option that voters really saw, and he had the skills to fill that role.
But it could have been someone else. It’s obviously very hard to know. What is crucial, however, is the coordinating and legitimizing role that a political entrepreneur provides.
Innovative Civic Mobilization May Be More Transferable Than Hungary’s Institutions
Many scholars have viewed Hungary as the model that inspired democratic erosion elsewhere, from Central Europe to Latin America and even the United States. Do you believe Hungary’s democratic recovery offers transferable lessons for opposition movements confronting competitive authoritarian governments elsewhere, or are Hungary’s political and institutional conditions too distinctive for meaningful comparison?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: I absolutely think that it offers lessons. Of course, if you look at a different case, you will always have to adapt the strategies and adapt the insights to the challenges that the opposition side faces against aspiring autocrats or competitive authoritarian rulers elsewhere. That is natural.
What we need is a very good understanding of the Hungarian case and of what features of the Hungarian case made this possible, and then a good understanding of the other local context to see how this could be adapted. Some notable traits of the Hungarian experience are sometimes potentially underestimated in commentary that uses the Hungarian case as a promise of hope for democratic change elsewhere.
It’s absolutely crucial that Fidesz was in power for 16 years, a very significant amount of time. In a lot of previous cases of reversal, we have seen less consolidated regimes. And there was very strong dissatisfaction with Fidesz by the time the Tisza Party came around, but that could not previously be channeled into electoral politics.
There was also very limited physical repression, so there were no arrests. There were also no party bans, et cetera, as I already mentioned. This is something that means these lessons, especially the lessons around civic mobilization, could be very different and harder to adapt in cases where such repression is very significant.
It is also important to recognize that the level of disadvantage for the opposition was actually more severe in Hungary than in a lot of other cases. This gives us hope for other cases—that if a reversal could happen here, then that can translate elsewhere. But it also might give too much comfort to opposition actors elsewhere, because it might have taken this level of disadvantage for the opposition to use innovations in civic mobilization, and for this new challenger, the Tisza Party, to emerge, and for voters to recognize that the existing opposition parties could not promise the kind of change they hoped for.
The model of this innovative civic mobilization, the model of a new credible challenger emerging that promises meaningful, positive change in Hungarian living conditions, and then promises good governance as well as the rooting out of corruption and democratic restoration, is very important.
We probably cannot get too comfortable. This level of disadvantage that the opposition had in Hungary is actually something that, maybe, shows that we do not need to reach that stage for other countries, for political entrepreneurs and political actors to take on these lessons in other cases. Maybe this avenue, this broad-based appeal that Tisza had, rather than just chipping away at Fidesz supporters or convincing only a few demobilized voters to turn out, is something that can work in other cases. Instead, creating a broad-based movement is something that can work in other cases and can promise much better opportunities for democratic restoration with a strong mandate afterward.
The Greatest Challenge Is Ensuring That the New Government Constrains Itself
A central feature of democratic backsliding in Hungary involved the gradual weakening of judicial independence and constitutional oversight. Following the recent constitutional reforms initiated by the new government, what principles should guide efforts to restore judicial autonomy without creating the perception that one form of politicization is simply replacing another?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: This is a very important challenge in Hungary right now. As I already mentioned, the Tisza Party entered office with an unprecedented mandate. It holds a two-thirds majority in parliament, which in Hungary permits constitutional amendments and essentially allows the party to unilaterally amend the constitution. There is no need for the support of the new opposition parties in parliament, and this gives Tisza extensive control over institutional reform.
They have already used this power, and they have promised to use it further in relation to the judicial system. A constitutional amendment was just approved on July 13 by the Hungarian parliament that restored a mandatory retirement age of 70 for Constitutional Court judges. This involves four of the 15 judges losing their mandates, including the president of the Constitutional Court, who was a very important Orbán appointee.
They have also promised to implement changes to the selection rules for the presidents of various judicial bodies. For instance, these changes would involve judges choosing or proposing candidates instead of the president independently selecting a nominee. But ultimately, all of these changes would still rest on ratification by a two-thirds majority in parliament. So they would still give Tisza the opportunity to make the final choice.
We see many positive changes that could introduce more independent rules and restore a more independent judicial sector in Hungary. But it is very important that the party exercises self-restraint and is potentially even braver and more resolute in making changes that constrain the Tisza Party itself.
Because even some of these proposed rules—for instance, leaving the appointment of the presidents of various judicial bodies to a two-thirds parliamentary majority—would still give the party essentially full discretion, or at least a very high degree of discretion, over who these officeholders are going to be. The biggest challenge is making sure that Tisza actually constrains itself and establishes a genuine separation of the judiciary from the executive branch and, to some degree, from the legislative branch through these reforms, thereby binding both itself and its successors. Whether Tisza ultimately carries out these changes that may also be politically uncomfortable for itself absolutely remains to be seen.
Democratic Restoration Must Never Become Political Retribution
The new government has promised to dismantle what it describes as the “Orbán system” while introducing sweeping constitutional reforms and anti-corruption measures. How can democratic governments dismantle authoritarian legacies without themselves appearing to engage in victor’s justice or constitutional overreach? Where should democratic restoration end and political retribution begin?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: This is a key challenge of democratic restoration and democratic restoration efforts. Ensuring that these efforts proceed in a rule-of-law-abiding manner is often very difficult, as we have seen, for instance, in Poland, and it is something that inevitably draws a great deal of public attention.
In Hungary, this challenge is also present. There is an exceptionally high degree of public legitimacy for dismantling the Fidesz system and holding Fidesz politicians and its oligarchic elite accountable for their wrongdoing and their actions against the national interest. Fidesz currently enjoys at most 20 percent support in the polls in Hungary, which is exceedingly low. We have also seen an absolute exodus of voters from the Fidesz camp, even after the party lost the election.
There is a clear public mandate. But this process of accountability should be pursued in a very careful manner. The most important thing, so far, is that Tisza is at least promising to pursue it through judicial channels. They have also emphasized that this will likely be a lengthy process.
That said, I do see two dangers. The first is that abandoning the judicial route could become a temptation, and that would absolutely undermine the legitimacy of dismantling the Orbán system in the eyes of many. I think it should, because democratic self-restraint is something this party has to practice and demonstrate if it wants to reintroduce it into Hungarian politics.
I also see another danger. To me, it is the possibility that Tisza may not allow Fidesz to be evaluated again by Hungarian voters as a political alternative in the full sense that we should expect in a democratic system.
For instance, Tisza’s recent proposal for a constitutional amendment introduced a 12-year term limit for MPs in Hungary that would apply retroactively. This follows the adoption of an eight-year limit for prime ministers, also applied retroactively, which many interpreted partly as satisfying voters’ demands that Orbán should not be able to return to power, while also serving as an act of self-restraint by Tisza.
That measure has enjoyed broad public support in Hungary, at least for now. But the proposed 12-year limit for MPs has generated much more public debate. Its retroactive application means that most of the high-profile Fidesz leaders we have seen in recent years would likely be unable to run for office again if this rule actually enters the Constitution.
To me, this does not give voters the opportunity to reject Fidesz themselves, which, in all likelihood, we think they would actually do at the polls in the next election. Instead, it appears more like a measure of retribution than one that serves the restoration of healthy democratic competition.
Lasting Democratic Trust Depends on Meaningful Citizen Participation
Supporters of the TISZA Party gather on Andrássy Avenue in Budapest during a national march led by Péter Magyar on Hungary’s March 15 national holiday, March 15, 2026. Photo: Istvan Balogh / Dreamstime.
Years of polarization, clientelism, and institutional capture often leave citizens deeply distrustful of politics itself. Beyond constitutional reforms, what strategies are necessary for rebuilding citizens’ confidence that democratic institutions can once again operate impartially and effectively?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: What is very interesting about the Hungarian case, and what is very closely related to the civic mobilization that we saw ahead of the election, is that there is an unprecedentedly broad interest in, and enthusiasm for, politics and following politics in Hungary, even after the election. That is very promising. The disaffection that we saw over more than a decade of Fidesz rule appears to have been reversed during this election and seems to persist even afterward.
But in many ways, there is still distrust of Tisza among many voters. Of course, the country’s experience over the past decade and a half has been one of politicians abusing public authority and public office for authoritarian entrenchment and private gain through corruption. There is, understandably, concern among Hungarian voters that any party—especially one with such a large mandate—could eventually fall victim to the same dynamics.
The more immediate concern is whether these participatory channels, this broad-based participation represented by the Tisza Islands and these activist groups, will continue to feed into politics itself or instead be discarded. Because maintaining them could build trust and strengthen the connection between citizens and politics.
Tisza has promised to institutionalize such participatory mechanisms. They are currently setting up the Institution for Functioning in Humane Hungary, which they describe as an institution for strengthening popular participation in politics through consultation with professionals, former civil society actors, as well as voters on proposed constitutional amendments, new public policies, and broader forms of public and civic involvement.
This is very promising, but it has not happened yet. We do not yet know exactly what it will look like. The party has asked voters and its activists for patience while it develops ways to channel this civic energy into politics and effective public policymaking in Hungary.
This is one of the most important questions that remains to be answered. The party can reasonably be granted some patience, especially as it is working very hard to meet the conditionalities required for EU funds to be restored to Hungary by the end of the summer. But after that, if this vision of popular participation in governance does not begin to materialize, some degree of public pressure would be very beneficial.
The EU Should Have Acted Earlier and More Decisively
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission arrives for a EU Summit, at the EU headquarters in Brussels, on June 30, 2023. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.
The European Union has frequently been criticized both for responding too slowly to Hungary’s democratic backsliding and for possessing limited enforcement tools. Looking retrospectively, what lessons should European institutions draw from the Hungarian experience regarding the defense of liberal democracy among member and candidate countries?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: There’s been a great deal of excellent research, including by R. Daniel Kelemen, on the role that the EU played through its lack of action against Hungary, and at times even its support for Hungary and Viktor Orbán, in failing to become an effective obstacle to authoritarian entrenchment. Kelemen’s research shows that European party politics in the European Parliament plays a very important role. There were incentives within the European People’s Party (EPP) to support Orbán despite his authoritarian transgressions, in order to advance the EPP’s broader political objectives within the EU. That points to an important lesson: party politics within the European Union cannot be allowed to impede efforts to stop authoritarian entrenchment in an EU member state.
There have to be clear red lines. There have to be cordons sanitaires around far-right parties within the EU. We have already seen some steps in this direction. But the other important lesson—and perhaps the more important one—is that the EU should act more quickly and be more willing to invoke the conditionality of EU funding.
A large share of EU funding to Hungary was suspended in 2022, and that was one of the key reasons for the weakening of Fidesz’s support. It contributed significantly to the lack of infrastructure investment, the slowdown in economic dynamism, and the broader economic stagnation and difficulties that Hungary experienced over the past four years, all of which substantially increased public dissatisfaction.
Conditionality is a very powerful tool, and it is a legitimate one. Invoking conditionality in determining access to EU funding is entirely legitimate, and it should be used in cases such as this.
Where Violent Repression Is Limited, Peaceful Democratic Change Remains Possible
Some scholars have argued that competitive authoritarian regimes are inherently unstable because they continue to rely on elections for legitimacy, while others view them as remarkably durable hybrid systems. Has the Hungarian case altered your own understanding of the long-term resilience—or fragility—of competitive authoritarian regimes?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: For one, 16 years of Fidesz rule in Hungary is a remarkably long time. Even if the regime ultimately proved vulnerable to an electoral challenge, it still represented an unprecedented period of authoritarian rule within the European Union that we must take seriously. The fact that an authoritarian regime could emerge under the conditions that it did in Hungary is, in itself, an absolute testament to the power of these authoritarian movements.
Nevertheless, the main lesson is that these regimes, and their continuity, ultimately rest on popularity. It requires a much greater shift of voters away from the regime than in democracies for that to translate into an opposition electoral victory. But there is hope. There is real potential for that to happen. Civic mobilization and the electoral mobilization of voters behind the opposition are what can ultimately bring these regimes to an end. As long as there is limited capacity and infrastructure for violent repression, there remains the possibility of a peaceful transfer of power.
The Hungarian case shows that this middle ground of competitive authoritarian regimes—those that resort only limitedly to physical repression, banning opposition parties, and the kinds of tools that we see in some other contexts—is ultimately fragile. These regimes are vulnerable to a sustained loss of electoral popularity.
Defeating Authoritarianism Requires Strategies Beyond Those of Ordinary Democracies
Finally, Hungary has demonstrated both how democracies can gradually erode and how authoritarian incumbents can eventually be defeated electorally. Yet democratic recovery is often considerably more difficult than democratic decline. Looking ahead, what will determine whether Hungary becomes a lasting example of democratic renewal rather than merely another episode of political alternation? And what broader lessons should scholars of populism, democratic resilience, and authoritarianism take from Hungary’s extraordinary political trajectory?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: In terms of what Hungary will ultimately become an example of, I certainly hope that it will be a lasting example of democratic renewal. But that depends on several conditions. For one, it is important that we see self-restraint from the Tisza Party. Somewhat unfortunately, this is a situation in which we have to rely on self-restraint by the governing party because of its extraordinary political mandate.
But I also think it is crucial that we see the emergence of political alternatives to the Tisza Party in the coming years in Hungary. Entering the 2030 election with the Tisza Party facing only a very weakened Fidesz as its main opposition would be very disadvantageous for Hungarian politics if Fidesz continues to weaken in the way it has over the past couple of months.
It’s very hard to see that providing an incentive for voters to evaluate the Tisza Party against the strong benchmark that we would like to see in a democracy. There is also, for now, no real political alternative to Tisza on the left or liberal side in Hungary. We effectively have a political system with three right-wing parties. Tisza is currently very much a moderate party, but nevertheless its two challengers are on the right. Mi Hazánk, the third party in parliament, is a far-right party.
If this situation persists, it is difficult to see how voters could exercise meaningful democratic choice in the 2030 election. To me, that is very important for a successful democratic recovery. It would also place healthy pressure on Tisza, so that we do not have to rely solely on self-restraint by the party and on extra-parliamentary, extra-electoral mobilization to encourage Tisza to help Hungary achieve a strong democratic renewal.
In terms of the broader lessons from the Hungarian case and Hungary’s extraordinary political trajectory, I see a couple of important lessons that focus on the opposition and on opposition to authoritarian incumbents.
Very often, when we think about these regimes and the reasons for their popularity, we focus on the authoritarian strategies that governing parties employ. We examine institutional manipulation, authoritarian entrenchment, media capture, the capture of civil society, economic coercion, as well as ethnopopulist and distributive appeals to voters, together with voters’ willingness to tolerate these transgressions. But we also need to think seriously about the role that the availability of opposition and credible alternatives plays in allowing such regimes to survive and preventing a democratic alternative from emerging. Hungary shows that the combination of a new political party and a broad-based civic movement built around semi-autonomous civic organizations and civic groups can become a powerful vehicle for democratic change.
The Hungarian experience also offers two further lessons. First, it demonstrates that broad-based civic mobilization is possible. We should therefore think much more seriously about these possibilities and about what kinds of innovations enable opposition movements to overcome the distinctive challenges they face under authoritarian incumbents. We may simply need to be much more inventive.
Second, we cannot continue to operate under assumptions about democratic competition that are derived from established democracies when we are dealing with authoritarian contexts. The rules of the game are fundamentally different. Accordingly, the strategies that opposition movements must employ in these settings are also likely to be fundamentally different from those that work in democracies.
