World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, December 7, 2020. Photo: Elena Duvernay.

Turbulence in the World Health Organization: Implications for EU–US Cooperation in a Changing International Order

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Please cite as:
Veggeland, Frode. (2026). “Turbulence in the World Health Organization: Implications for EU-United States Cooperation during a Changing International Order.” In: Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations: Challenges and Policy Options. (eds). Marianne Riddervold, Guri Rosén and Jessica R. Greenberg. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). January 20, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00133

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Abstract
This paper examines the World Health Organization (WHO) within the broader context of the post-1945 liberal international order. It begins with a brief historical account of the establishment and development of WHO, emphasizing its role as a central institution for global health governance. Particular attention is given to the role of the European Union’s (EU) member states and the United States (US) in supporting the WHO through financial contributions, personnel secondments, crisis assistance and capacity-building measures. The paper then explores more recent developments, notably the US withdrawal from the WHO during the first and second Trump administrations and the termination of key US aid programs. Finally, the implications of this withdrawal are analysed, both for WHO’s operational capacity and for transatlantic relations, with consequences for challenges such as the global fight against HIV/AIDS, antimicrobial resistance, drug and vaccine development and emergency preparedness.

Keywords: World Health Organization; United States; European Union; COVID-19; public health emergency; International Health Regulations

 

By Frode Veggeland*

Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) has been the key coordinating authority in global health governance within the post-Second World War liberal international order. Both the United States and Europe have been important supporters and contributors to the WHO. However, the future of both the WHO and the transatlantic partnership is currently uncertain. This paper explores the WHO’s evolution and its recent crises, focusing specifically on the United States’ notification of withdrawal. It further analyses what these events mean for the future of transatlantic cooperation.

The Establishment and Development of the WHO

The WHO was established in 1948 as a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN). The World Health Assembly, comprising all 194 member states (soon reduced to 193), is the supreme decision-making body and determines the organization’s policies and priorities. The assembly also appoints the director-general. The executive board facilitates the work of the assembly, provides advice and gives effect to its decisions and policies. It is composed of 34 members that are technically qualified in the field of health and represent the WHO’s regional offices: the Regional Office for Africa, the Regional Office for the Americas, the Regional Office for South-East Asia, the Regional Office for Europe, the Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Regional Office for the Western Pacific. The WHO’s main objective is ‘the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health‘ (World Health Organization 1946, art. 1), which is to be achieved by, among other things, the core function of acting ‘as the directing and co-ordinating authority on international health work‘ (World Health Organization 1946, art. 2(a)).

The WHO was seen as a major achievement in the evolution of international health institutions, thanks to its expertise and willingness to address intractable health problems (Youde 2012, 29). However, early on, the WHO’s reputation began to decline, reaching a low point in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was heavily criticized by member states and in public discourse for being too bureaucratic, ineffective and corrupt. Nevertheless, at this point the WHO could also point to some very successful initiatives in its effort to improve global health – including the eradication of smallpox (Brown et al. 2006; Yamey and Titanji 2025).

The organization resumed much of its authority as a prominent and leading force in international health work under the leadership of former Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland (1998–2003), resulting in more action, such as finalizing negotiations on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the rebuilding of capacities for addressing HIV/AIDS, and a more prominent and visible presence on the international stage. Thus, even though the WHO’s role was still contested, some of the organization’s reputation was rehabilitated, paving the way for its continued role in global health governance (Brown et al. 2006).

The United States played a central role in the development of the liberal international order after the Second World War, which included the establishment of a multilateral framework comprising numerous international agreements and organizations, including the United Nations (Hopewell 2021; Lake et al. 2021; Hylke et al. 2024). The United States also played a key role in the WHO, not least as the largest financial contributor for much of the organization’s history. The member states of the European Union (EU) have also been active supporters of and contributors to the WHO, through financial support, personnel secondments, crisis assistance and capacity-building measures. In 2020, when the United States withheld some of its funding, the member states were collectively the largest donors to the WHO. The EU itself is not a member of the WHO and did not engage actively with the organization for a long time, even though a framework for cooperation between the two organizations has been in place since 1972 (with subsequent revisions), based on a series of exchanges of letters.

Recently, and particularly after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU has shown much more interest in the WHO (European Commission 2010, 2025; European Union 2022). There are several reasons for the delayed EU interest in the WHO. First, health policy has been (and still is) primarily the competence of the member states, which limits both the scope and form of health cooperation in the EU. Second, cooperation on health issues was not politicized and put high on the EU agenda until the 1990s onwards, when a series of health and security related crisis – such as the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, also known as ‘mad cow disease’), the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and swine flu emergencies, and the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland in 2010 – contributed to raise the attention towards the need for collective preparedness and action (Greer and Jarman 2021; Brooks et al. 2023). Third, it was not until the 1990s and 2000s that the EU treaties provided a legal basis for the EU to more actively supplement and assist member states in health policy. Prime among these are article 152 of the Amsterdam Treaty (the ‘public health’ article), renumbered as article 168 in the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, article 222 of the Lisbon Treaty (the ‘solidarity clause’) – which ‘requires the EU and Member States to collectively assist any Member State affected by a terrorist attack or a natural or man-made disaster’ – and the Charter of Fundamental Rights (including the right to life and the right to healthcare) which gained equal status to treaty law in 2009 (Ekengren et al. 2006; Brooks et al. 2023).

Partly because of this specification of the EU’s role in health, the European Commission issued a document in 2010 signalling a more active role for the EU on the international stage in health cooperation. Regarding the relationship with the WHO, the document stated: At global level, the EU should endeavour to defend a single position within the UN agencies. The EU should work to cut duplication and fragmentation and to increase coordination and effectiveness of the UN system. It should support stronger leadership by the WHO in its normative and guidance functions to improve global health. The EU should seek synergies with WHO to address global health challenges. It should decrease the fragmentation of funding to WHO and gradually shift to fund its general budget (European Commission 2010, 6).

In line with the intentions stated above, the EU delegation in Geneva (where the WHO headquarters are located) began coordinating common positions on WHO matters among the EU member states in 2010 (Bergner et al. 2020, 3).

Thus, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, health policy had already moved higher up the EU’s political agenda, as reflected in earlier initiatives to strengthen transatlantic health cooperation with the United States. The agreement on mutual recognition between the European Community and the United States of America was set up in 1999 (Official Journal of the European Communities 1999). The agreement lays down the conditions under which the EU and the United States will accept conformity assessment results (e.g., testing or certification) from the other party’s designated conformity assessment bodies. In this way they can show compliance with each other’s requirements, essentially by replacing double testing with mutual trust. The 1999 agreement covered (through sectoral annexes) pharmaceutical goods manufacturing practices (GMPs) and medical devices. Other technical health areas were later included, such as inspections of manufacturing sites for human medicines in their respective territories, which were fully implemented in 2019. The Global Health Security Initiative was set up in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Delegations from the United States and the European Commission (as well as from EU member states) were included in this initiative.

The WHO was allowed to meet as an observer in the Global Health Security Initiative. In 2009, the EU and the United States created the Transatlantic Taskforce on Antimicrobial Resistance to address the urgent, growing global threat of antimicrobial resistance. Negotiations between the United States and the EU on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) began in 2013 (Khan et al. 2015). These negotiations included extensive plans for transatlantic cooperation on health issues, including health services, pharmaceuticals, and other health-related regulatory matters (Jarman 2014).

However, these negotiations were abandoned when Trump became president in 2016 and in April 2019 the EU declared that TTIP was ‘obsolete and no longer relevant‘ (Council of the EU 2019). Following the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the EU and the United States issued a joint statement in the fall of 2022 urging the strengthening of transatlantic cooperation on health, particularly in the context of health emergencies. In 2023, the EU–US Health Task Force was set up to prioritise three avenues for cooperation: combating cancer, addressing global health threats, and strengthening the global health architecture. These initiatives were launched during the Biden administration. The election of Trump in 2024 for a second term has raised new questions about the future of global and transatlantic cooperation on health, in general, and the role of the WHO in these efforts, in particular.

Turbulence in the WHO: Funding, Crisis Management and US Withdrawal

Even though the WHO’s authority was partially restored in the early 2000s, the organization continued to experience turbulence. Ansell and Trondal (2017, 4) identify three aspects of turbulence that are relevant here. Turbulent organizations refers to factors embedded within organizations, such as factional conflicts, staff turnover, funding, conflicting rules and internal reforms. Turbulence of scale appears when actions at one level of authority or scale of activities affect actions at another level or scale. Thus, what appears to be a ‘good‘ solution at one level might be considered a ‘bad’ solution at another. Turbulent environments speaks to factors external to organizations, such as crisis, rapid technological change, protests and partisan conflict. Here, attention is directed towards three challenges creating turbulence: the fragmented funding of the WHO, the handling of the Ebola disease outbreak in West Africa in 2014–2016, the WHO’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the subsequent notification of the United States to withdraw from the organization, first in 2020 and then again in 2025.

WHO Funding

The WHO’s funding comes from two primary sources: assessed contributions (i.e., membership dues paid by member states) and voluntary contributions from member states and non-state actors. Assessed contributions enable the WHO to prioritize and allocate resources to measures and activities considered most effective in fulfilling the organization’s mandate. Voluntary contributions are typically earmarked for the donor’s preferred project, which does not guarantee that the resources will be channelled to where they are most needed. The more the WHO depends on voluntary contributions, the less freedom of manoeuvre it has to fulfil its mandate.

Over time the share of assessed contributions to the WHO has been reduced in favour of voluntary contributions. In the mid-1980s, the share of voluntary contributions had almost caught up with the regular budget, which consisted of assessed contributions (Brown et al. 2006, 68). In the 2014–2015 budget 77% came from voluntary donations – these were, moreover, heavily dependent on rich donors such as the Gates Foundation and the United States (Gostin 2015, 6). In the 2022–2023 budget, the share of assessed contributions was only 12.1% of the WHO’s total revenue, whereas the share of voluntary contributions was 87.5% (KFF 2025, 8).

This fragmentation of funding and shift towards earmarked voluntary contributions has created problems for the WHO’s ability to fulfil its mandate, as priorities and policies are set by the World Health Assembly. In contrast, the larger share of the budget has been controlled by the most powerful donors of voluntary contributions (Brown et al. 2006). The assembly – in recent times, numerically dominated by poor and developing countries – is only in a position to control the use of the regular budget, consisting of assessed contributions. This situation has created turbulence within the organization, raising concerns about the WHO’s independence from internal and external actors and its capacity to follow up on prioritized health areas and thus achieve its objectives. Moreover, the possible withdrawal of the United States means that the WHO loses its historically largest financial contributor. Therefore, other states can fill this void.

The Ebola Outbreak 2014–2016 and the Call for Reform of the WHO

The Ebola epidemic outbreak in West Africa in 2014–2016 was ‘one of the largest, most devastating, and most complex outbreaks in the history of infectious disease‘ (Park 2022, 1). The outbreak put the WHO’s designated role in the global health response system to a severe test – according to many observers, a role that the WHO failed to fulfil (Gostin 2014, 2015; Park 2022). The WHO headquarters was criticized for responding too late to the outbreak, for placing too much responsibility on the Regional Office for Africa, and for hesitating to respond amid political and religious pressures in the affected countries. According to the International Health Regulations (IHR) – a binding agreement administered by the WHO – the WHO director-general has the exclusive power to declare a so-called Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), a mechanism that triggers a coordinated international response. During the Ebola outbreak the director-general did not declare a PHEIC until five months after the Ebola virus began to spread internationally and a long time after receiving warnings about the urgency to act, from local experts as well as from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Doctors Without Borders (Park 2022).

The WHO’s handling of the Ebola outbreak drew heavy criticism and calls for reform. The reform proposals included: increasing the WHO budget and shifting the budget towards assessed contributions, empowering the director-general at the expense of the regional offices to ensure that the WHO speaks with one voice, and to exert the WHO’s constitutional authority as a normative organization by setting an ambitious agenda for negotiation of health treaties and voluntary codes (Gostin 2015). Some reforms were implemented, such as the creation of the Health Emergencies program, a Contingency Fund, and a dedicated global emergency workforce to be deployed rapidly to outbreak zones, the improvement of how the WHO assesses and communicates risks, strengthening of the implementation of the IHR and the enabling of rapid activation of research and development activities during epidemics to help fast-track effective tests, vaccines and treatments for subsequent outbreaks. Having established these initiatives, the WHO was assumed to be better prepared for the next international health emergency.

The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Subsequent Withdrawal of the United States from the WHO

The COVID-19 pandemic was a massive health and societal crisis, which showed how an infectious disease can spread around the globe in weeks, killing millions of people, as well as having devastating consequences economically and socially, and seriously setting back sustainable development (Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response 2021). The pandemic also underscored the importance of international cooperation in combating the virus, including the development and availability of vaccines and other essential medical countermeasures. The WHO played an important role in managing the pandemic – by declaring the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus a PHEIC, by assisting affected countries with knowledge, equipment and personnel, providing recommendations and advice on health measures, coordinating surveillance and control, and by its joint leadership of the multilateral efforts in the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative to develop and manufacture vaccines and to guarantee fair and equitable access to these vaccines all around the world.

However, the WHO’s role during the pandemic was met with mixed evaluations. Central to the negative assessments were that the director-general could have declared the PHEIC earlier (a PHEIC was declared 31 January 2020 – one month after the coronavirus was identified), that the WHO was too soft on China, that the COVID-19 outbreak should have been declared a pandemic earlier (it was declared a pandemic by the WHO on 11 March 2020), that the communication of public health measures as well as the risks related to the virus were inconsistent, and that the system for funding was insufficient. The WHO received positive evaluations, particularly for its efforts to develop and make vaccines available – an effort that was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize – as well as for its technical guidance and ability to deliver hands-on support to affected states.

One of the harshest critics of the WHO in recent times has been the United States (Chorev 2020; Yamey and Titanji 2025). On 14 April 2020, President Trump announced the suspension of United States contributions to the WHO pending an investigation into the organization’s alleged mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic (The White House 2020). In a letter to the WHO’s director-general dated 18 May 2020, Trump criticized the organization for sounding the alarm too late when the coronavirus was identified, for having a ‘China-centric’ bias and failing to hold China to account, and for providing inaccurate or misleading information (The White House 2020). He also cited the vast difference between the United States’ contributions to the WHO and China’s. Moreover, the WHO’s general advice against travel restrictions was heavily criticized – advice that basically reflects the IHR’s general discouragement against broad travel bans as well as the scope and purpose of IHR (article 2), which says that a public health response to international spread of disease should avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade. In the letter, Trump delivered an ultimatum: make necessary reforms, or the United States would redraw its funding permanently and reconsider its WHO membership: “It is clear the repeated missteps by you and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world. The only way forward for the World Health Organization is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China. My Administration has already started discussions with you on how to reform the organization. But action is needed quickly. We do not have time to waste. That is why it is my duty, as President of the United States, to inform you that, if the World Health Organization does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization. I cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to continue to finance an organization that, in its present state, is so clearly not serving America’s interests,” (The White House 2020, 4).

On 6 July 2020, President Trump announced that the United States would formally withdraw from the WHO, effective 6 July 2021. The Biden administration suspended notification of a withdrawal in 2021. That same year, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response published its evaluation of pandemic management. The report included praise and criticism of the WHO and called for several reforms, including ’strengthen[ing] the independence, authority and financing of the WHO‘ (Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response 2021, 48). In line with the intentions of strengthening the global health framework, two sets of negotiations were initiated. In December 2021, talks on a new WHO Pandemic Agreement were launched. The goal was to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response globally. In May 2022, negotiations on revising the IHR were initiated. These were based on the same goal. Then, on January 20, 2025 – on the day of his inauguration – President Trump once again notified that the United States would withdraw from the WHO, effective one year later (The White House 2025). In this letter, he repeated the criticism he made in 2020. The withdrawal was met with intense criticism and warnings about the long-term health consequences, both globally and in the United States (Horton 2020; Yamey and Titanji 2025). The negotiations and revisions to the IHR were finalized and adopted on 1 June 2024. After finalizing negotiations in April 2025, the WHO adopted the new Pandemic Agreement on 14 May 2025. The United States will not be part of either.

We can summarize turbulence in the WHO in a few brief words. The WHO has experienced severe turbulence in the last decades. Some of the turbulence has been caused by internal factors, such as funding (turbulent organization) and questions about decisions at different administrative levels, including the director-general, the Head Office, and the regional offices (turbulence of scale). Even more serious turbulence, however, has been caused by external factors, where the political situation in the United States and its withdrawal from the WHO stand out as pivotal (turbulent environments).

Implications for EU–US Cooperation on Health

The United States has been central to the development and operation of the WHO for much of the organization’s history. The EU did not engage actively in the WHO until the early 2000s, and particularly after 2010 – reflecting the parallel strengthening of the EU’s general engagement in health policies. The EU’s increased support for international health cooperation can also be seen in connection with the EU’s role as a ‘soft superpower‘ (Meunier and Milada 2018). This role implies gaining influence internationally through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or military force, by means of ‘soft measures‘ such as humanitarian aid and health assistance in capacity-building and knowledge-building. Health cooperation can thus be used as both ‘soft’ and ‘smart’ power to advance foreign policies (McInnes and Lee 2012, 54–55).

In 2022, the EU published its new Global Health Strategy, signalling its intention to play a more active role on the international stage and to provide strong support for the WHO and other multilateral organizations (European Union 2022). The report states that global health is an ‘essential pillar of EU external policy, a critical sector geopolitically and central to the EU’s open strategic autonomy‘ and that ‘the EU intends to reassert its responsibility and deepen its leadership in the interest of the highest attainable standards of health based on fundamental values, such as solidarity and equity, and the respect of human rights‘ (European Union 2022, 4). The strategy also points to the need for ‘a new focus to maintain a strong and responsive multilateral system, with a World Health Organization (WHO) at its core which is as sustainably financed as it is accountable and effective‘ (European Union 2022, 7). Two of the strategy’s guiding principles emphasize the importance of international institutions. Guiding principle 14 states the support for ‘a stronger, effective and accountable WHO‘ and lists several prioritized actions the EU will take, such as seeking “formal EU observer status with full participation rights as a first step towards full WHO membership, contribut[ing] to making the financing of WHO more sustainable, advanc[ing] WHO reform to strengthen its governance, efficiency, accountability and enforcement of rules, and strengthen[ing] the WHO’s focus on its normative role in areas of global relevance,” (European Union 2022, 21).

Furthermore, guiding principle 16 states the general intention to ‘ensure a stronger EU role in international organisations and bodies’ (European Union 2022, 22). The EU also signals its intention to use a ‘Team Europe’ approach to follow up on the Global Health Strategy. Team Europe brings together a variety of relevant actors, such as EU institutions, member states and their diplomatic networks, financial institutions and other relevant organizations, to strengthen coordination, coherence and complementarity of actions and ensure the EU’s influence and impact.

Thus, in recent decades, there has been a paradoxical development in the positions of the EU and the United States towards global health governance in general and the WHO in particular. Whereas the EU has engaged more actively and stated strong support for the WHO and other multilateral organizations, the United States has retracted from international organizations and agreements, thus prioritizing attempts at using its power to gain influence through unitary action and bilateral agreements (Hopewell 2021; Lake et al. 2021; Hylke et al. 2024; Flint 2025). This retreat from the liberal international order implies abandoning the recognized relevance and authority of common values, ideas and norms, which have been incorporated into and are an essential part of this order since the Second World War.

The question of the consequences of the United States’ retreat for the transatlantic relationship thus arises. Is the relationship breaking down, or is it being renewed? Or is it ‘muddling through’ by adjusting cooperation based on issues seen as mutually advantageous? To make such assessments, it is necessary first to analyse the kinds of changes we are witnessing in the approaches of the EU and the United States to international health cooperation. In this context, two sets of concepts are relevant: bilateralism vs. multilateralism and transactionalism versus reciprocity (Keohane 1986; Bashirov and Yilmaz 2020; Flint 2025).

Table 12.1: Ideal types of approaches to international cooperation

  Bilateralism Multilateralism
Transactionalism Zero-sum games outside of international institutions (Approach 1) Zero-sum games within international institutions (Approach 2)
Reciprocity Plus-sum games outside of international institutions (Approach 3) Plus-sum games within international institutions (Approach 4)

Reciprocity here refers to the principle of mutual exchange and equal treatment, often involving shared values and long-term cooperation. At the same time, transactionalism is a pragmatic, short-term approach focused on immediate, tangible gains in a zero-sum ‘give and take’ scenario. Reciprocity implies a relationship built on mutual respect and consistent, predictable behaviour where cooperation is assumed to serve the interests of all (‘plus-sum game’). In contrast, transactionalism views relations as a series of discrete, one-off ‘deals‘ in which each party seeks to maximize its immediate benefit, often with no expectation of future cooperation beyond the current exchange. It is important to note that the approaches presented in Table 12.1 represent ideal types; in practice, states may use one or more approaches, or a combination of them, in different settings and at different times.

Approach 1 refers to a state`s emphasis on using its power to achieve (asymmetrical) bilateral agreements with short-term gains. The approach implies a lack of support for international institutions and unpredictable cooperative relationships, where common norms and values are downplayed in favour of relative gains. The Trump administration’s approach, particularly in its second term, shares many of these characteristics.

In Approach 2, international institutions are viewed as powerful tools for enforcing a state’s will on others. The approach is based on the precondition that powerful states can dominate and control the international institution at stake. The United States arguably used this approach in the early years of the global trade framework established in 1947 with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor institution, the World Trade Organization, established in 1995. Here, the United States used its powers to dominate the shaping of the rules and operation of the framework in favour of specific national economic interests.

Approach 3 refers to the idea of mutual gains through broad long-term cooperation outside of multilateral institutions. The close relationship between the EU and Norway and (until recently) between the United States and Canada can illustrate this approach. 

Approach 4 refers to the core idea of a liberal international order: that states should be governed by agreed-upon legal and political international institutions and norms, rather than solely by power or force, and that such international cooperation may serve the interests of all. Here, possible short-term losses from international commitments are assumed to be offset by long-term gains. This approach has received sufficient support in the post-Second World War period, including from the United States, so that a predominantly liberal international order has been maintained to date. This order has been characterized by a multitude of international organizations and agreements, as well as successive multilateral negotiations, which have provided binding national commitments across a wide range of issues – from trade and health to human rights and climate and environmental protection. However, as stated earlier, this order is now under severe pressure.

Based on the developments in global health cooperation described above, the EU and the United States have arguably moved in opposite directions regarding their approaches to international cooperation. Whereas the EU has become a more vigorous defender of multilateralism, seeking to play a more active role in international organizations, the United States has abandoned multilateralism in favour of bilateralism. The US withdrawal from the WHO, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and the Paris Agreement on climate change, as well as the Trump administration’s circumvention of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules through its trade policies, are just a few examples of this. Moreover, whereas the EU emphasizes reciprocity and shared norms and values, Trump has clearly moved the United States further towards transactionalism.

Returning to the consequences for the transatlantic relationship of the United States’ retreat from multilateralism, the question arises: How are transatlantic relations changing under the Trump administration? Three scenarios are possible, and I will describe each in turn below.

Scenario 1: A possible strengthening of the transatlantic relationship. One scenario suggests that the transatlantic relationship may move forward and be strengthened in the face of global uncertainty and common challenges, threats and needs. Clearly, there is currently little to support this scenario. When it comes to transatlantic cooperation within the framework of global health governance, we first and foremost see a decline. There were attempts to strengthen health cooperation from the late 1990s onwards. Some of these – such as the TTIP negotiations – while others succeeded, such as the global health security initiative and the EU–US task forces for health and for antimicrobial resistance (AMR). However, the US withdrawal from the WHO means that the United States has put itself outside the EU’s view of the core pillar of global health cooperation. This approach affects the WHO’s operations and also spills over into transatlantic cooperation, for example, by putting many projects relevant to this cooperation at risk, including humanitarian aid, the fight against HIV/AIDS, and the fight against AMR. The potential to strengthen transatlantic cooperation on health is also undermined by the Trump administration’s general bilateral and transactional approach to international cooperation, its withdrawal from multilateral agreements and organizations that the EU strongly supports, and its frequent shifts in positions and policies toward other countries. In addition, the harsh and distrustful rhetoric of President Trump against the EU does not help, as with his claims, for example, that the EU is a ‘foe on trade‘ (BBC 2018), that it ‘was set up to take advantage of the United States‘ (Politico 2018), that it ‘was formed to screw the United States‘ (France 24 2025), and that it ‘is, in many ways, nastier than China‘ (Axios 2025). Such rhetoric does not serve as a sound basis for a trustworthy, strengthened cooperative partnership.

Scenario 2: Maintain the transatlantic relationship by ‘muddling through’. This scenario suggests that the transatlantic partnership will ‘muddle through’ geopolitical and domestic challenges through functional adjustments, while maintaining cooperation in areas seen as mutually advantageous. Some minor developments could support such a scenario – for example, that cooperation has continued to progress in technical and less political areas of health, such as mutual recognition of conformity assessment. However, the overall transatlantic relationship has been seriously damaged by the Trump administration’s approach, which clearly limits the adjustments that can be made. First, the United States’ withdrawal from the WHO puts many WHO-initiated cooperative projects involving both the United States and the EU at risk. One example is the combat against AMR. Second, many cooperative health projects depend on long-term commitments from involved parties to have any effect. The short-term, unpredictable approach of the Trump administration thus creates significant risks for engaging bilaterally with the United States on such projects. Third, much of the transatlantic cooperation on health is based on mutual trust, including technical cooperation such as mutual recognition of conformity assessment. Such trust has clearly been reduced in recent times.

Scenario 3: The disintegration of the transatlantic relationship. Following the assessments of the two other scenarios, recent developments clearly show a decline and disintegration in the transatlantic relationship. Two developments are particularly important in this context. First, the United States’ withdrawal from the WHO – and from other multilateral arrangements – makes it a less relevant partner for the EU, which prioritizes cooperation through the WHO (and other multilateral institutions). Second, the Trump administration’s seemingly abandonment, or at least serious downplaying, of international law and common norms and values, such as human and democratic rights, clashes with the norms, values and principles emphasized by the EU. Third, the Trump administration’s performance on the international stage, including its stance against the EU, makes it a less reliable partner – thereby creating high political risk for entering long-term commitments with the United States.

Responding to the Turbulence: Four Recommendations for the EU

The United States’ withdrawal from the WHO creates a void in influence and authority that others can fill. The EU can contribute to filling this void by:

1. Continuing to support and prioritize the WHO and speed up contributions to strengthen the WHO’s independence and financial situation. This can be achieved by contributing to maintaining and strengthening the EU’s role as a ‘soft superpower’ using health to advance foreign policy aims.

2. Building ‘coalitions of the willing’ within the WHO to strengthen the organization, influence and develop the global health agenda. Experiences from major transboundary crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, as well as the wear and tear on transatlantic cooperation under the Trump administration, have revealed vulnerabilities in Europe and the need to reduce the EU’s dependence on other countries.

To address these challenges, the EU needs to:

3. Strengthen its ability to ensure health security and continue to prioritize strategic autonomy in the health area.

4. Downplay transatlantic cooperation on short- and medium-term commitments and avoid long-term commitments.

This way, political risks related to (health) cooperation can be reduced. The strain on the transatlantic partnership and the question of whether the United States can be considered a reliable partner reflect an uncertain, high-risk situation for the EU. A pragmatic approach is thus needed, where the EU leverages mutually beneficial transatlantic ties while simultaneously developing supplementary and compensatory strategies.

The EU should therefore:

5. Strengthen bilateral health cooperation with like-minded partners, including Canada, non-EU countries in Europe and other trustworthy countries.

Implementing these recommendations would go a long way toward ensuring that the EU retains the ability to exercise independence in health policy and responses to global health emergencies in the long term.

 

(*) Frode Veggeland has a PhD in political science from the University of Oslo and has published extensively on the EU, international organizations, regulatory governance, public administration and food and health policies, including crisis preparedness and crisis management. In 2006, he was Head of the Secretariat of the Governmental Commission that investigated the E. coli O103 outbreak in Norway. In 2021–2022, he was part of the Secretariat of the Norwegian Corona Commission, which investigated the government’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022–2024 he was part of the Secretariat of the government-appointed committee that reviewed Norway’s experience of cooperation under the EEA Agreement and other agreements Norway has had with the EU over the past ten years, including cooperation on civil protection and health preparedness. Email: frode.veggeland@inn.no

 

 

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Democracy and Populism: The European Case

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Please cite as:
Holmes, Douglas R. (2026). “Overview and background: Democracy and Populism — The European Case.” In: Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations: Challenges and Policy Options. (eds). Marianne Riddervold, Guri Rosén andJessica R. Greenberg. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). January 20, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00134

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Abstract
This chapter examines the evolution of contemporary European populism from a collection of fringe insurgencies into a deeply embedded, institution-shaping force within the European Parliament and the broader European project. Drawing on three decades of ethnographic and institutional observation, it demonstrates how populist actors have mastered the procedural, rhetorical, and technocratic mechanisms of the European Union (EU), transforming them into instruments for advancing illiberal civilizational agendas centred on identity, personhood and sovereignty. Far from operating at the margins, these movements now occupy the political centre, generating viral configurations of thought and affect that shape public discourse and institutional practice across Europe. Their ‘gain of function’ has been amplified by transnational linkages – including increasing convergence with US populist strategies – and by exogenous cultural forces that escape standard policy analysis. The chapter argues that these dynamics pose a profound challenge to liberal democracy, requiring new analytical tools commensurate with the scale and complexity of the phenomenon.

Keywords: European populism; illiberalism; European Parliament; identity and sovereignty; populist insurgency; transatlantic politics

 

By Douglas R. Holmes*

Introduction

Policymakers, scholars, and analysts have long presented populism as anti-institutional, or outside mainstream sites of governance and policymaking. But what the new research shows is that this is a new (and thus more dangerous) moment in populist political evolution: Rather than working from the outside in, populist leaders have effectively organized and governed from the very centre of our rule of law and democratic institutions. Whatever the outcome of any future election, the structures of feeling, the configuration of ideas which animate populism are now commonplace. Their anticipatory nature and expectational dynamics confront us daily. Populism is no longer the agenda of unruly individuals and loathsome factions; we all occupy a political field increasingly defined by the exigencies of contemporary populism (Miller-Idriss 2018; Zerofsky 2024). And this fact, even from the perspective of a few years ago, would have been unthinkable.            

Populist movements – bracketed typically as extreme- or far right with national, subnational and regional variants – have defined an increasingly expansive, illiberal politics of Europe and as such challenge the sanctity of democratic norms and values as well as the primacy of the rule of law. For more than three decades a decisive confrontation has unfolded within an institution of the European Union, the European Parliament, revealing the dynamic interplay between populist insurgences and democratic institutional norms and conventions (see Tonne forthcoming). European integration provided a template for a populist insurgency within which the continuous generation of tactical positions was accomplished. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) representing these groups mastered the institutional procedures of the EU, allowing them to insinuate their disruptive, occasionally ludicrous, positions into parliamentary discourse and debate. They were alert to every policy indiscretion and every organizational failure – notably regarding the Euro and immigration crises – which they exploited with devastating effect. On a more fundamental level, the MEPs orchestrating this insurgency developed a series of pivotal civilizational priorities – spanning language, religion, race and gender – which they sought to endow with political legitimacy and currency. Rather than abstract economic or technocratic interests, these MEPs have sought to shape a discourse on Europe in which the nature and dynamics of sovereignty are aligned with the sublime aspiration of identity and personhood.

This brief text thus seeks to provide a primer of sorts for understanding the formidable historical and philosophical exigencies by which illiberal agendas are assuming a fully democratic guise, creating a vast field of political thought and action increasingly populated by young activists and their supporters. The European elections of 2024 and the subsequent election of Donald Trump as US president marked a decisive moment in this political history. A series of micro-insurgencies, which I have studied for more than three decades, underwent a ‘gain of function’, a term I have adapted and modified from virology. By that I mean, certain struggles – in many respects benign and prosaic struggles – can yield new and highly virulent and transmissible configurations of thought and action. Newly elected MEPs representing Patriots for Europe (PfE) and European Conservative and Reformist (ECR) are orchestrating this transformation, this gain of function. They no longer seek to disrupt, curtail or reverse the European project; they aspire to fully conquer it from within, achieving a new, totalizing politics.

How the European case discussed herein can inform a comparative analysis of US politics is very much an open question. There is, no doubt, a systematic and intensifying transatlantic sharing of tactics and strategies underway at many levels of politics and policy. Most obviously, tariffs proposed by the Trump administration are calibrated simultaneously as instruments of domestic US policy and as vehicles for transforming the entire global economic and political order. They ramify through populist politics on both sides of the Atlantic, hinting at a new global framework provisionally articulated in the Mar-a-Lago accord (Mar-a-Lago Accord, n.d.). Relatedly, institutional and regulatory capture in the United States and the EU are also striking tactical aspects of the populist insurgency, anchoring these insurgencies in the rent-seeking schemes of firms and corporations, as well as in the policy orientations of diverse (typically illiberal) special interest groups.

Far less accessible to standard policy analyses are exogenous forces animating contemporary populism: creative outlooks, sensibilities and practices that continually disrupt and recast conventional democratic norms and conventions. What follows is an investigation of these exigencies from the European side of the Atlantic. The degree to which they align with the other side constitutes the decisive question of our time. Indeed, the European case poses decisive questions regarding the nature and function of policy itself and its relations to the interests and outlooks of the public at large.

When I began in the late 1980s observing and analysing the form and content of emerging populist political formations, I was struck by their emphatically future-oriented agendas, predicated on ‘Europe’ as the political field, and European integration as the domain of dissonant thought and action. At the time, European integration was barely imaginable, and yet, I encountered activists plotting a low-key insurgency within this supranational project, a project which, for many Europeans, was at the time little more than an ill-defined dream or fantasy. During that period, I had conversations with eight founders and or leaders of these diverse populist groups (Holmes 2000). Over the ensuing three decades, these MEPs and their successors defined an increasingly expansive illiberal politics of Europe. European integration provided the template against which the continuous generation of positions was accomplished. The European Parliament’s institutional practices and democratic norms were mastered, allowing these MEPs to insinuate their disruptive positions into parliamentary discourse and debate. They learned the intricacies of the EU institutionally and sought to employ this knowledge opportunistically, as an increasingly defiant oppositional stance, which they were prepared to exploit and pillage.

Rather than treating populism merely as a species of politics, I have sought to investigate it as a much broader systemic phenomenon: a configuration of ideas that are continually generated, circulated, and contested, capable of colonising feelings, thoughts, intimacies, devotions, moods, and actions. Populist ideas shape perceptions of what is just or unjust, what is real or unreal, and, ultimately, what it means to be human. Populism thus emerges as an intricate communicative field spanning Europe, an entangled web of meaning that constitutes a dissonant realm we all inhabit. The challenge we face is how to engage the forces animating populist politics, particularly those rooted in powerful attachments to identity, belonging and personhood, forces which resist simple analytical abstraction and quantitative analysis (Shoshan 2022; Szombat 2021).

Populism Observed

Populist activists have cultivated a public, spanning left and right across Europe, eager for a message of withering discontent with the technocratic regime in Brussels. They proposed alternative science, political economy, and metaphysics of solidarity in which the dynamics of sovereignty are anchored to the sublime aspiration of identity and personhood. The policies governing immigration, the fate of refugees, various domains of cultural identity, as well as law and order, have become prominent as the issues the extreme right owns, no longer as a disruptive or marginal preoccupation, but as defining issues of and for Europe, issues which moved to the centre of fraught political contestation in the twenty-first century.

So, what is the nature or substance of this politics? How has a compendium of discontents, which have animated these insurgent groups for decades, been recast as a self-confident program aimed at recrafting virtually every institutional agenda of the EU from within? What follows are thirteen insights – affordances – designed to orient meaningful and sustained political engagement with a European-wide populist insurgency.

  1. Populism is alive, relentlessly and emphatically defining and redefining itself. And this fluidity, this fugitive character, this profoundly systemic and ambient nature creates confounding problems for those who seek to resist or oppose it, for those who seek to grapple with its all-too-human fears and desires. At the core of contemporary populism lies illiberal aspirations that seek to colonize every expression of identity and attachment, encompassing all aspects of truth, beauty, piety, resentment, and depravity (Eco 1995). At the dissonant cultural frontiers of populist insurgencies, protagonists continually seek to establish boundaries of affinity and difference, particularly along lines of race, gender, ethnicity and religion.
  2. Populism is manifested through a far-reaching division of labour and a thoroughly distributed organizational structure, in which numerous micro-insurgencies continuously intersect. European populism exhibits countless permutations; each aligned with and contingent upon the diverse expressions of cultural identity and social distinction articulated in various dialects and vernaculars. What may seem like isolated beliefs and practices carried out by small groups of local activists are, in fact, interconnected through social media and face-to-face interactions with other groups that are formulating parallel or complementary agendas (Pasieka 2024). These agendas can be swiftly appropriated and refined. What may seem like a tight-knit group of activists engaged in a local insurgency on the outskirts of Gothenburg, Porto, Kraków or Belgrade can be interconnected via social media platforms to countless enthusiasts across the continent and beyond. This connectivity creates a widely distributed political configuration characterized by a diverse array of outlooks that reflect agile articulations of the contentious social, cultural and personal struggles of our time.
  3.  What is perhaps most appalling and perplexing about populism is not its alien nature, but rather its proximity to our values, values that can be aligned with fundamental elements of familiar philosophical and cultural tradition. Populism must be understood as integral to the intellectual, sociological, aesthetic and religious traditions of Europe, specifically the enormously complex lineages of the European Romantic traditions, an alternative modernity, informed by virtually every aspect of what we term, all too simplistically, ‘humanism’ (Berlin 1976, 1979).
  4. From the motifs and metaphors found in diverse folkloric traditions to the myriad genres of popular culture, populism operates as ‘a style of life’, assimilating new meanings and affective predispositions. This functioning highlights populism’s capacity to merge, fuse, and synthesize elements that would typically be considered incompatible (Holmes 2019; Shoshan 2016; Teitelbaum 2019). The unsettling premise is that populism functions as a creative force – one that can shape not only our politics but also our feelings, thoughts, intimacies, moods and actions; our perceptions of justice and injustice; our understanding of reality; and ultimately, what we take to be human (Pasieka 2024).
  5. Populism is compelling because it resonates with deeply held convictions about the nature of human collectivities, intertwined with specific understandings of individuals’ capacities to think, feel, experience and act. While brutality and cruelty are undeniable aspects of our humanity, so too are compassion, sympathy, devotion, rage and indifference. These elements comingle with coercion, repression, opportunism and even humour. Discourses surrounding ‘solidarity’ and ‘care’ have become fully integrated into the populist social imaginary. These civic activists insist on the future-oriented trajectory of their politics, foregrounding the moral and ethical nature of their aspirations. They have shrewdly linked their populism with something that can be termed ‘progress’, revolutionary progress, despite its cloying invocations of the past (Berezin 1997; Buzalka 2020, 2021). Feelings, styles, moods, devotions and desires abound, but they typically do not align with something that can be called populist ‘doctrine’ or ‘ideology’ (see Bickerton and Accetti 2021). Populism is not a static ideology; it is in motion and improvised (Gusterson 2021; Loperfido 2018a).
  6. Populists seek to define what it means to be human in opposition to that which can annul our humanity. The disenchantments, alienations, estrangements enlivened by liberal democracy, cosmopolitan society, pervasive materialism, unrelenting consumerism and bourgeois individualism are the foils – the enemies – the counter-models of and for contemporary populism (Herzfeld 1987; Kallius and Adriaans 2022; Mazzarella 2019). Young activists decry the bloodless cliches underwriting the secular world and the necrotizing logics impelling global capitalism. They harbour virulent appraisals of capitalist modernity; they embrace wide-ranging and devastating insights – ‘critiques’ – on the dynamics of unrelenting ‘cultural disenchantments’, specifically, ‘its steel-iron casting’, its ’iron cage’ (Herzfeld 1993; Holmes 1989; Weber 1946).
  7. Populist insurgents have brutally exploited the predicaments of immigrants, refugees, and displaced persons to fuel their militancy (Kallius and Adriaans 2020). Issues of gender, transgender identities and reproductive rights and obligations have increasingly taken centre stage in nearly all expressions of populist activism, activism prone to aggressive outbursts and violent confrontations. Equally significant is the intense scrutiny faced by the legal and regulatory frameworks designed to address past injustices, alongside the erosion of basic codes of civility and norms of sympathy and compassion. Human dignity and decency that language affords are under threat, exposing every cosmopolitan role and lifestyle to scrutiny. Professional statuses are challenged, and bastions of elite privilege associated with them are being devalued. In this context, ‘traditional hierarchies’ are being embraced as all-encompassing alternatives, serving as bases for prestige, power, exploitation and treachery. Oppression and repression increasingly encroach as pronatalist agendas predicated on the sanctity of ‘traditional family values’ gain currency.
  8. Adherents themselves engage in refining and repurposing every aspect of collective experience, every marker of social distinction, as well as every practice of belonging (Fassin 2013; Holmes 2009). They ask astute and canny questions about the social and economic order. Various strata and segments of the public – an ‘agentive public’ – are thus designing populism on their own terms out of the diverse materials, old and new, circulating in their midst (Buzalka 2015, 2020; Eriksen 2016; Holmes 2023; Loperfido 2018a, 2018b; Shoshan 2022; Stacul 2011, 2014).
  9. From the last quarter of the twentieth century, the architects of contemporary populism took the European project seriously, and, again, they have systematically mastered its institutional and, more specifically, its technocratic contradictions and its blatant (and not-so-blatant) hypocrisies (McDonald 1996; Shore 2000; Tonne forthcoming). For them a looming multiracial and multicultural Europe – which they believe is the ultimate purpose of cosmopolitan agendas of integration – is an anathema, foundational to their racialized politics, their circumscription of solidarity and their fraught appraisals of social justice and injustice.
  10. The European Parliament, as suggested above, served as a decisive institutional setting in which political movements and parties could, because of different electoral thresholds, attain representation which had typically been denied them on the national level (Holmes 2000; Tonne forthcoming). They coordinated their participation in parliamentary affairs, they formed political groups, they refined a variety of programs, they crafted a rhetorical style, they often disagreed with each other, and yet they found something like a common ground, albeit a shifting one, from which to formulate their scathing attacks on just about every aspect of the EU itself. Under the guise of ‘Euroscepticism’, they formulated rhetorical positions opposed to every aspect of a cosmopolitan Europe. ‘Scepticism’ served as a thin cover for their fulminating hatred of virtually the entire supranational agendas of the EU.
  11. Rather than abstract economic or technocratic interests, contemporary populists have sought to shape a discourse on Europe in which the nature and dynamics of sovereignty are aligned with the sublime aspiration of identity and personhood (Balibar 1991; Le Pen 1989). And yet, at the same time, they have sought to recast every initiative of the EU for their own material advantage. By so doing they have become skilled at reconfiguring liberal EU projects and programs for the furtherance of illiberal ends. What began in the last two decades as a systematic challenge to the EU’s commitment to the ‘rule of law’ by Polish and Hungarian leaders has given way to an alternative design of Europe, under- and over-written with repressive values (Geva 2021; Orbán 2024; Schmitt 2005; Tonne forthcoming). Leaders have sought to design an illiberal political order by means of the institutional and judicial apparatus of member states – in overt defiance of the EU treaties – to address what they contend are profound civilizational struggles (Orbán 2024). And they have done this largely through democratic means. Populism has been incubated within the institutional project of European integration; its dynamics mirror perversely the historical exigencies of the European project cast against the entrenched powers of its member states (Adenauer 1966; Duchêne 1991; Holmes 2000; McDonald 1996; Shore 1993a; Shore 1993b; Shore 2000). Illiberal, antidemocratic values have licensed, as it were, wide-ranging corruption and incompetence in the service of stark kleptocracy.
  12. Members of the populist public are all activists; their agency is decisive in impelling a self-radicalizing mindset (Eriksen 2016). For them, rather than a towering historical formation, populism is manifest in the predicaments of everyday life, in the intimacies and antagonisms of interpersonal relations, in the crosscurrents of community and livelihood. And they, these activists, have demonstrated how populism can be relentlessly insinuated into virtually every register of taste, perception, faith and ardour. They have designed a vitalist (and virulent) politics for their own grounded purposes and pragmatic ends (Buzalka 2020, 2021; Kotwas and Kubik 2019; Loperfido 2018a, 2018b).
  13. Virtually all the characteristics of populism described herein are manifest as a function of social media – the ‘digital real’ – most importantly, its self-radicalizing propensities (Boellstorff 2016). Gaming, and the vast, overwhelmingly male culture of gaming, is perhaps paradigmatic of this self-radicalizing potential. Navigating between virtual and face-to-face encounters is now a pivotal, and perhaps overriding, challenge for contemporary analysis on these and related matters (Kallius and Adriaans 2022).

Each of the intersecting observations outlined above requires elaboration and refinement: some are over- or understated, others may prove to be patently wrong. Plainly, more refined analyses, notably addressing the likelihood of violence on issues of race and gender, are needed, as are far broader appraisals of the decisive role of social media. The continuing or enhanced relevance of the post-socialist transition and the enduring divisions it has left across Europe require continual appraisal and reappraisal. The war in Ukraine looms as an excruciating reminder that the violent enthusiasms described herein can be aligned with militarism and terror as a potential, if not resolute, adjunctive of and for contemporary populism.

Conclusions

In this short text I have sought to emphasize the stark challenges operating at the cultural frontier of populist insurgencies, insurgencies that are posing manifold challenges to an enduring liberal-democratic order in Europe. I have further emphasized the emphatic cultural fears and aspirations animating contemporary populism, sensibilities which resist those stylized abstractions and modelling techniques which inform conventional political analyses. Thus, to fully engage the world-historical challenges we face requires a new empirical toolkit, new analytical assumptions, new understandings of the nature and purposes of democratic politics and the efficacy of policy intervention.

 

(*) Douglas Holmes is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. His work addresses how and why the most discredited ideas and sensibilities of the modern era—ideas that yielded the indelible horrors of the twentieth century—have become persuasive, compelling even, in the new century. More recently, he has turned his attention to the operations of central banks and the design of a distinctive monetary policy regime. In Stockholm, London, Wellington, and two venues in Frankfurt, he has spoken to bank personnel and to policy makers examining how they model the economy and the financial system with language, establishing a radically communicative and relational dynamic at the center of monetary affairs. Holmes is the author of an ethnographic trilogy: Cultural Disenchantments: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy (Princeton 1989), Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Princeton 2000) and Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks (Chicago 2014). He has also authored with George E. Marcus a series of texts exploring experiments in ethnographic collaboration particularly as they are achieved within cultures of expertise. Email: dholmes@binghamton.edu

 

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“Mar-a-Lago Accord.” n.d. Wikipedia. Accessed 12 November 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar-a-Lago_Accord.

Marcon, Federico. 2025. Fascism: The History of a Word. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mazzarella, William. 2019. “The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement.” Annual Review of Anthropology 48 (1): 45–60.

Miller-Idriss, Cynthia. 2018. The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far-Right Youth Culture in Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Müller, Jan-Werner. 2003. A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Orbán, Viktor. 2024. “Lecture of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the 33rd Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp.” Tusnádfürdő (Băile Tuşnad), 27 July. https://miniszterelnok.hu/en/speech-by-prime-minister-viktor-orban-at-the-33rd-balvanyos-summer-free-university-and-student-camp/. Accessed 30 September 2024.

Pasieka, Agnieszka. 2024. Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Labour Day celebrations at Old Town Square in Prague on May 1, 2017, featuring a banner depicting democracy as a leaf eaten by caterpillars labeled Putin, Kaczyński, Orbán, Babiš, Trump, and Fico. Photo: Jolanta Wojcicka.

Illiberalism and Democracy: The Populist Challenge to Transatlantic Relations

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Please cite as:
Newman, Saul. (2026). “Illiberalism and Democracy: The Populist Challenge to Transatlantic Relations.” In: Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations: Challenges and Policy Options. (eds). Marianne Riddervold, Guri Rosén andJessica R. Greenberg. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). January 20, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00135

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Abstract
The election of the paradigmatic populist Donald Trump to his second term as president of the United States raises serious questions, not only for transatlantic relations but also for the democratic values supposedly shared by the United States and much of Europe. The new Trump administration has not only upended normal diplomatic relations with many European countries and the European Union (EU) – particularly over trade tariffs, its commitment to NATO and its support for Ukraine – but has sought to interfere in internal political debates, and even to call into question democratic procedures, as we saw in the case of Romania. This chapter will seek to understand these developments by exploring the central tension between populism and democracy. While populists claim to speak directly on behalf of the ‘people’ and against the ‘elites’, their understanding of the people is a homogeneous one that excludes not only the elites but also minorities. Moreover, populism proposes an authoritarian model of politics that endangers pluralism, the rule of law, judicial independence and the intermediary procedures and institutions of liberal democracy. Recent and ongoing tensions in transatlantic relations must be seen in the context of a global right-wing populist assault on liberal democratic norms and values.

Keywords: democracy; illiberalism; populism; security; transatlantic relations; Trumpism

 

By Saul Newman*

Introduction

Relations between the United States and much of Europe have soured under the first, and, particularly, the second Trump administration. The ‘golden age’ of transatlantic relations that emerged after the end of the Second World War and with the establishment of a rules-based international legal and trading order now seems a distant memory. The United States’ imposition of trade tariffs on the European Union (EU) and uncertainties about Washington’s commitment to NATO and its support for Ukraine have caused a major rupture in relations with Europe. The Trump administration has shown an open hostility and contempt for Europe, referring to European countries as ‘freeloaders’ and admonishing European leaders for their abandonment of the principles of ‘free speech’. Trump himself has at times seemed more sympathetic to Putin than to Zelenskyy, and his style of governing is more akin to Viktor Orbán (a self-described ‘illiberal democrat’) than to the leader of the ‘free world.’

These developments – previously unthinkable – have upended normal relations between the United States and Europe, leaving many European leaders questioning the reliability of their once close ally and strategic partner. The post-Cold War international order is fragmenting, and a new global (dis)order is emerging, comprised of competing power blocs – the United States, China and Russia – in which the EU is regarded by the US administration as an irrelevance, or even as a potential enemy. However, this state of affairs is more than simply the consequence of a transactional president with an America First agenda. The fraught state of US–European relations represents a new ‘clash of civilizations’ – to invoke Samuel Huntington’s famous term – between competing visions of democracy. In other words, the recent fracturing of transatlantic partnerships must be understood in the broader context of the global rise of right-wing populism and the particular challenge it presents to the once-hegemonic liberal democratic model.

This chapter will explore the contemporary phenomenon of populism, which has become a defining (and perhaps permanent) feature of political life globally, and the extent to which it opposes liberal democratic institutions, norms and values. Populism proposes an alternative and, as I shall argue, an authoritarian model of democracy, one based on the unmediated ‘will of the people’ and largely hostile to political pluralism, the rule of law and the rights of minorities. My focus here will be on right-wing populism – that is, a populist model of politics allied to far-right ideologies. Right-wing populism might be seen as a form of radical conservatism, combining economic libertarianism, political authoritarianism, nativism and xenophobia, strong religious identity and socially and culturally conservative values; essentially an antiliberalism, which accounts for its hostility to supranational projects like the EU, as well as to what is perceived as the secular permissiveness of many European societies and their tolerance of multiculturalism, open borders and mass immigration. 

Of course, populism is a dominant presence on the European political landscape, with right-wing populist and Eurosceptic parties either in government (e.g., in Italy and Hungary) or knocking on its doors (e.g., France, Germany and the United Kingdom). Moreover, there is a growing ideological alignment between these European populist forces and those in other parts of the world, particularly the United States. My chapter seeks to understand the spread of right-wing populist ideology beyond national borders and to see it as part of a global political realignment that has succeeded in disrupting the liberal status quo. This realignment represents a significant shift in transatlantic relations, affecting its basic pillars of security, trade, international institutions, and, especially, democratic values, which will be the focus of my chapter. It is too early to predict whether the ascendancy of nationalist populism – which is opposed to the idea of a liberal global order as the previously shared normative commitment of the United States and Europe – constitutes a permanent break in relations or a temporary moment of instability. But the rise of populist currents on both sides of the Atlantic is already causing major stresses and fractures in the transatlantic framework.

What Is Populism?

Populism is a notoriously slippery concept, and the vast and ever-growing literature on the topic testifies both to its importance and impact on politics, as well as to its conceptual vagueness. Populism has been studied as an ideology (albeit a ‘thin-centred’ one; see Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017); a discourse (see Laclau 2005); a performative style of politics (see Moffit 2017, 2020); an antisystem mobilization (see Canovan 1999); and as a political strategy (Weyland 2017). Some studies have focused on populism as an anti-establishment protest (see Albertazzi, McDonnell and Aslanidis 2024), while others have focused on populism in government (see Albertazzi and McDonnell 2015; Venizelos 2023). Populism can be defined by so many, or so few, characteristics as to render it often either too specific or too general a concept to be useful (see Arato and Cohen 2022, 7). Yet, my aim here is not to present a survey of different theoretical approaches to populism, but to identify some of its core elements.

I take an ‘ideational’ approach to populism, seeing it as a certain way of imaging social relations as being based on a central opposition between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ (see Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). This is a moral opposition, where ‘the people’ are seen as morally pure, authentic, honest, hardworking, etc and as being deceived and exploited by duplicitous elites, who have betrayed their economic interests to a liberal, globalizing agenda. Populists claim to be on the side of the people against these nefarious and corrupt elites and to want to restore sovereignty and self-determination to the people. In this sense, populists claim to affirm a more genuine democracy – based on the unmediated will of the people – in opposition to the elites who provide only the fig leaf of democracy, behind which they pursue their own economic and political interests. The elites, it is claimed, have nothing in common with the people and do not share their values and interests. When Trump complains about the ‘Washington establishment’ whose policies have led to American decline – through ‘unfair’ free trade agreements and mass immigration – and when he promises to restore manufacturing and industry and to bring jobs back to the rustbelt; when he promises to ‘Make America Great Again’ through protectionist policies and trade tariffs, he is essentially playing the populist card. This basic narrative of the people vs the elites is shared by all populisms, from Trump in the United States, Erdoğan in Türkiye, Le Pen in France, to Morales in Bolivia and Lula in Brazil. Indeed, left-wing populism – as typified by the last two examples – also sees the people pitted against financial oligarchies and the political class that serves their interests.

How Does Populism Endanger Democracy?

Why, then, is populism a potential threat to democracy? After all, democracy is all about popular sovereignty and the ‘will of the people’. Populists work within democratic systems, run in elections and even support referendums and popular plebiscites. Populist leaders claim to espouse a more genuine form of democracy by giving the people ‘what they really want’ and expressing their desires in a direct and unmediated fashion, bypassing the usual channels of parliamentary procedure and the mainstream media. However, it is precisely this emphasis on the ‘will of the people’ that makes populism dangerously ambivalent towards democracy. However, the problem with this sort of direct relationship with the people – characteristic of populism – is that it undermines and weakens the mediating functions and procedures central to liberal representative democracy. In a liberal democracy, institutions like parliaments, the independent judiciary, and the media act as intermediary bodies between the people and power; their function is to mediate the popular will into a form of governance that can take into account a diversity of views, opinions, and interests. The will of the people – as articulated by the populist leader – cannot, and should not, be absolute; popular opinion must be limited by the rule of law and filtered through the representative function of political parties. The weakening of these norms – which usually happens under a populist-led government – leads to the ‘disfigurement’ of democracy (see Urbinati 2014).

In populist discourse, ‘the people’ are defined in absolute terms, as a homogeneous identity that necessarily excludes other identities that are seen as not genuinely part of ‘the people’. Such exclusion refers not only to the nefarious elites, who are in any case often vaguely defined – financial and political elites, but also various cultural elites who support a ‘woke agenda’ and who do not share the same values as the ‘real’ people – but also to minorities, with whom the elites are seen to be complicit. These minorities tend to be immigrants, who are seen to weaken national identity, come from different cultures with incompatible values, steal jobs from locals, pose a security threat or become a drain on resources. Indeed, mass immigration and ‘illegal’ border crossing is emerging as the central political issue in the United Kingdom, much of Europe and, under Trump, in the United States. The immigration issue gives rise to populist currents on both sides of the Atlantic. However, in populist discourse, other minorities – such as cultural, sexual and gender minorities – can also be positioned as ‘enemies of the people’. Indeed, there is seen to be a kind of conspiracy between the establishment and the minorities they enable. When right-wing populists condemn the ‘woke agenda’ supposedly pushed by ‘out of touch’ cultural, intellectual and political elites (the mainstream media, academics, Hollywood celebrities, liberal politicians, the judiciary, human rights advocacy groups, ‘leftist’ lawyers, etc) it is in the belief that they unfairly support the interests and rights of minorities over those of the majority. – For populists, the people – usually defined as the natives – necessarilypresupposes homogeneity, as well as supremacy concerning other ‘outsider’ groups. Now, if one’s view of democracy is that the interests and rights of majorities should always be placed above those of minorities, then the populist understanding of the people makes sense and is consistent. However, the liberal democratic tradition – centred around the problematic of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ – believes that democracy involves more than just the popular will, but also a respect for the pluralism of values, interests and identities and that it must defend the rights of minorities as equal to those of majorities.

Not only is populism, in its homogenizing notion of the people, largely hostile to pluralism and minority rights (see Müller 2017), but it is also dominated by the figure of the leader, who is seen to directly embody and channel the will of the people. The populist leader sees him- or herself as the ‘people’s tribune’, who shares their values, understands their suffering and gives them what they really want. Populist parties are not like normal political ‘catch-all’ parties that represent a diversity of interests, views and factions, but rather are entirely leader-centric; the party is the leader and the leader is the party. Think of the one-man political party of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands (the Party for Freedom) and think of the hold that Trump has over the Republican Party, which has essentially become the official arm of his MAGA movement. Indeed, Trump is a perfect example of the populist leader who claims to speak directly for and to the people – which is why he tends to bypass the normal channels of political communication, preferring mass rallies and social media to galvanize his supporters. This close relationship that populism seeks to establish between the people and the leader is what political theorists like Nadia Urbinati have referred to as ‘direct representation’ (see Urbinati 2019). The MAGA–Republican movement is more like a religious cult than a political party, and to his supporters, Trump can do no wrong. Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone in broad daylight and people would still vote for him, and there is no reason to believe he was wrong. The faith invested in the figure of the leader allows him to attack the ‘deep state’ and to promise to cut through the mire of bureaucratic inertia and complexity that obstructs the sovereign will of the people. The populist leader thus presents him- or herself as the ‘strong man’ type who is unafraid to violate the norms and procedures of politics, to say what everyone is really thinking, and to play fast and loose with the democratic rules of the game in order to ‘get the job done.’

There have been many studies over recent years of populism in power. Populism has gone from being an oppositional politics challenging the establishment, to becoming the new establishment. So what do populists do when they get into power? How do they govern? And how do they sustain an anti-establishment position when they effectively become part of the establishment? This tension, between populism as an anti-establishment mobilization and populism as a form of government, partly accounts for the chaos of the first months of the Trump administration, with incoherent announcements over tariffs and foreign policy, the mass sacking (and then rehiring) of federal government employees, and hundreds of executive orders that have been overturned by federal court judges. The tendency of populists in power is to still play the part of the outsider, continue their attacks on the ‘deep state’, the media, the judiciary, and entrenched interests, and to blame their policy failures on ‘the establishment’. Yet, behind the scenes, populist governments meddle with the constitution, undermine the independence of the judiciary, attack journalists and universities, restrict the rights of minorities and seek to establish a form of strong executive rule that is largely unhinged from the rule of law. Populist governments form ‘hybrid regimes’, or ‘democratorships’ (see Rosanvallon 2021; see also Keane 2020): they retain the semblance of democracy in the form of parliaments, elections and an independent media, but behind this veneer, political opponents are harassed, the judiciary and media are intimidated, and power becomes centralized in the executive.

Populism is thus a challenge to the idea of constitutional democracy (see Arato and Cohen 2022). The paradigm cases would be Hungary under Viktor Orbán and Türkiye under Erdoğan. But increasingly the United States is coming to resemble a democratorship, or at least an increasingly contested and ambiguous democracy. Illegal and unconstitutional executive orders, arbitrary arrests and mass deportations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, attacks on universities – all these are signs that the United States is descending into authoritarianism, and there is real concern about whether the institutions of American democracy will survive this onslaught.

The Global Far Right

Looking at Project 2025 – the ideological manifesto of Trumpism – it is clear that strong executive rule, draconian border control, isolationism, and the return to conservative and patriarchal values all form part of the agenda of the new US administration, constituting a right-wing assault on liberal secularism and pluralism. However, my point is that this ideological agenda is not unique to the United States: ‘illiberalism’ – driven by the forces of populism – is part of a political realignment whose effects are being felt around the world, and particularly in Europe. Orbán’s version of democracy is looked upon as a model to emulate by Trump supporters: Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, and other figures of the US far right regularly address rallies in Europe and find favour with populist parties like Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD); populist parties in Europe form right-wing alliances in the European Parliament; populist views on immigration – driven by fears of the ‘great replacement’ – become part of the political mainstream and gain legitimacy in the eyes of many voters; journalists and media organizations are condemned as ‘fake news’; climate science, net zero policies, and, indeed, scientific expertise generally, are attacked; and far-right populist politicians, political entrepreneurs and influencers – with powerful social media platforms at their disposal – continue to foment political polarization and sow distrust in the establishment.

Such factors do not bode well for transatlantic relations; nor do they bode well for the future of liberal democracy. We need to see these developments as part of a far-right ideological project which – while it is opposed to globalization – nevertheless has global dimensions and projects an alternative, socially conservative vision of the world that is very different from the liberal, rules-based order that we once knew and to which the transatlantic relationship, based on shared liberal values, was central. It may be that a new transatlantic relationship will emerge on the ashes of the old, formed of power blocs led by nationalist-populist governments. Whatever the case, the populist groundswell on both sides of the Atlantic is testing the former liberal democratic settlement to breaking point.

Conclusion and Policy Implications

In a recent book, Anne Applebaum (2024) has argued that autocratic regimes around the world have formed an ideological bloc united against a common enemy: the ‘liberal democratic West’ and its institutions, such as NATO and the EU. My claim would be that the United States’ place within this schema is now, under Trump, highly ambiguous; is it still part of the ‘liberal West’ or is it part of the new ‘illiberal’ authoritarian alliance that targets it? Moreover, I do not propose a clear-cut division between autocracy and liberal democracy. It is more useful to see all regimes on a kind of sliding scale in which the difference between liberalism and authoritarianism is now a matter of degree rather than an absolute conceptual distinction. Many well-established liberal democracies have implemented security, law-and-order and border-control measures that would not be out of place in recognizably authoritarian regimes. In a sense, democracy is an increasingly contested space. Populism is largely a symptom of this democratic dysfunction. While it endangers liberal democracy – for the reasons I have outlined above – it also has an important message for us: that democracy is not (and perhaps never can be) perfect, and that while there is mass citizen dissatisfaction with politics as usual, while many continue to feel under-represented by their elected officials, and while huge inequalities in power and wealth continue to exist (and indeed are becoming worse) populism will always be a feature of the political landscape. The populist challenge to liberal democracy is therefore also an invitation to rethink and reform it.

My work is part of the Horizon-funded ‘Reclaiming Liberal Democracy in the Post-Factual Age’ project, which has explored the central role ‘post-truth’ narratives and disinformation campaigns play in populist politics. This dynamic is regarded as a serious challenge to the resilience of European liberal democracies, and the EU has responded with a series of policy and regulatory frameworks designed to bolster democratic institutions. These have included the European Democracy Action Plan or EDAP (2020) which is committed to the protection of open political debate from malign interference; the creation of a transparent and accountable digital ecosystem; the promotion of an enabling civic space that ensures inclusive and effective engagement between public authorities, civil society organizations, and citizens; and the defence of the EU’s democratic sphere from covert external influence (see García-Guitián and Bouza – forthcoming 2026). Whether regulatory frameworks such as these will themselves be enough to head off the threat from authoritarian populism is doubtful – but they are examples of the kinds of policy innovation needed to bolster liberal democracies on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

(*) Saul Newman is Full Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths University of London. His research is in the area of contemporary political and democratic theory, including topics such radical politics and anarchism, human rights, political theology, populism and post-truth politics. He is the author and editor of over a dozen books, including Order, Crisis and Redemption: Political Theology after Schmitt (with Peter Langford) (SUNY Press 2022), The Anarchist Before the Law: Law without Authority (with Massimo La Torre) (Edinburgh University Press 2024) and Post-Truth Populism: a New Political Paradigm (with Maximilian Conrad eds.) (Palgrave Springer 2024).

 

References

Albertazzi, Daniele, and Duncan McDonnell. 2015. Populists in Power. 1st ed. Routledge.

Albertazzi, Daniele, Duncan McDonnell, and Paris Aslanidis. 2024. Populist Mobilization. Oxford University Press.

Applebaum, Anne. 2024. Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Allen Lane.

Arato, Andrew, and Jean L. Cohen. 2022. Populism and Civil Society: The Challenge to Constitutional Democracy. Oxford University Press.

Canovan, Margaret. 1999. “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy.” Political Studies 47(1): 2–16.

García-Guitián, Elena, and Luis Bouza. 2026. “The European Union Strategy to Fight Disinformation: Democratic Justification, Policies and Regulation.” In Reclaiming Liberal Democracy in the Postfactual Age, edited by Maximilian Conrad and Saul Newman. De Gruyter. (Forthcoming).

Keane, John. 2020. The New Despotism. Harvard University Press.

Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. Verso.

Moffitt, Benjamin. 2017. The Global Rise of Populism. Stanford University Press.

Moffitt, Benjamin. 2020. Populism: Key Concepts in Political Theory. John Wiley & Sons.

Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Müller, Jan-Werner. 2017. What Is Populism? Penguin.

Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2021. The Populist Century: History, Theory, Critique. Translated by C. Porter. Polity.

Urbinati, Nadia. 2014. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth and the People. Harvard University Press.

Urbinati, Nadia. 2019. Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy. Harvard University Press.

Venizelos, Georgios. 2023. Populism in Power: Discourse and Performativity in SYRIZA and Donald Trump. Routledge.

Weyland, Kurt. 2017. “Populism: A Political-Strategic Approach.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 48–72. Oxford University Press.

Refugees arriving by inflatable dinghy boats remain in camps on the island of Lesvos, Greece, on October 5, 2015. Photo: Anjo Kan.

The Illiberal Bargain on Migration

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Please cite as:
Andersson, Ruben. (2026). “The Illiberal Bargain on Migration.” In: Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations: Challenges and Policy Options. (eds). Marianne Riddervold, Guri Rosén and Jessica R. Greenberg. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). January 20, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00136

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Abstract
Since the 1990s, Western states have pursued a dual migration strategy: economically liberal policies to secure labour supply and hardline measures against ‘unwanted’ migration. The Trump administration has amplified these long-standing tendencies. Across Europe, governments as different as the UK Labour Party and Italy’s Brothers of Italy are cracking down on asylum and maritime arrivals while muddling through on labour migration. Economic and demographic pressures ensure persistent demand for migrant workers, even as short-term politics reward spectacular enforcement campaigns with damaging consequences. What has shifted is the growing centrality of migration as a security domain. Fears of ‘weaponized’ migration in Europe and Trump’s confrontations with origin states show how trade and aid are being deployed to pressure poorer countries into cooperation on control and deportation. Despite hostile rhetoric, the European Union (EU) and the United States are increasingly converging on coercive, illiberal bargains. Whether labour market needs, practical limits or political resistance can soften this trajectory remains uncertain.

Keywords: migration; borders; liberalism; refugees; security; transatlantic relations

 

By Ruben Andersson*

Introduction

After the Cold War, it seemed briefly as if a new ‘borderless’ world was emerging. Yet as the Iron Curtain came down, new barriers appeared at the United States–Mexico border – continuing the ‘securitisation’ of especially Latin American migration pushed by Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s. In the European Union, securitization accompanied the establishment of a shared external border. In both cases, a security approach to migration emerged as the liberal vision of free trade and openness ran into deep contradictions. Yet this ‘security model’ has failed. This failure, in turn, has contributed to rising political fervour – fuelling, in the process, even more demand for border security.

Notably, the ‘security model’ short-circuited ordinary political procedure. Measures were frequently pushed through from the top with little democratic scrutiny. Externally, it involved strengthening the repressive apparatus of ‘partner states’. Rather than bolstering democratic values, ‘border security first’ increasingly eroded their importance – as seen most starkly in the European Union’s (EU) collaboration with repressive regimes.

Domestically, ‘border security first’ hindered a robust democratic debate over the realities of migration. In the United States, border enforcement was a stopgap measure to address a central contradiction of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): capital and goods moved frictionlessly while workers did not. In the EU, border security similarly rose as a simple ‘fix’ when member states failed to enact a functioning common migration or asylum policy to accompany their new borderless area of free movement and trade.

In the process, a two-faced migration regime was consolidating on both sides of the Atlantic. The promotion of a globalized economy – including for large-scale labour migration – was accompanied by an increased, if selective, securitization of poorer overland migrants and asylum seekers from the south. The two sides of the transatlantic relationship, insofar as migration was concerned, seemed to move as much in lockstep as in other domains such as trade, finance and international security.

These recent historical patterns reveal some remarkable continuities in the politics of migration across the Atlantic. However, in recent years the ‘security model’ against unwanted migration has gained increasing salience despite solid evidence that it has tended to fuel border chaos and stronger smuggling networks while eroding fundamental rights and liberties. The crisis footing over migration has been central to rising ‘populist’ or authoritarian sentiment, to the point where its framing and ‘solutions’ are increasingly mainstream. While this tendency has become especially stark under the second Donald J. Trump presidency, the EU and many of its member states are equally wedded to the security model. Meanwhile, the failure to adequately account for the structural determinants of migration – the supply and demand of labour, deep demographic and economic imbalances, and drivers of forced displacement – will continue to haunt politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The risk is that, on current trends, this ‘unresolved business’ will keep fuelling demand for authoritarian ‘solutions’. Here governments may not simply keep ‘muddling through’ but actively shift towards a renewal of transatlantic relations through hard securitization – including, besides vast investments in rearmament and surveillance, the securitization of mobility on a much wider scale.

The chapter will compare migration politics in the United States and at the EU’s southern external border since the 1990s. We will examine one emblematic case, Spain, which became an important immigration destination around this time. As elsewhere in Europe, both conservative and socialist governments responded to this shift in part by securitizing numerically small movements of African migrants and asylum seekers towards Spanish land and sea borders – a pattern replicated on a much larger scale at the US–Mexico border. The security model has fed further border crises in both cases, while overall migration has continued to fluctuate in response to structural factors, with border security itself providing further impetus for undocumented migration. Next, we shift focus to the present Trump administration and to the increasingly nationalist politics of Europe, showing how the security approach has fed on its own failures while opening a window for radical offerings from the ‘new right’. Throughout, we must understand US and European migration regimes as intertwined: rhetoric, expertise and technology have travelled across the Atlantic while buttressing an increasingly shared political outlook, with one partial exception: Spain itself, which in recent years has opted for a more liberal approach.

Europe’s Two-faced Migration Regime Since the 1990s

A small Spanish enclave at the tip of North Africa is emblematic of the challenges in managing the EU’s external border. At the ‘autonomous city’ of Ceuta, one of the EU’s only two land borders in Africa, Europe erected its first border barriers against migration in the 1990s. Since this time, each new measure at the border has fuelled more dangerous entry methods, as the guards themselves point out. The fences were soon being breached en masse, similarly to the ‘kamikaze runs’ taking place at the San Diego–Tijuana border. When Madrid announced it would reinforce the barrier in 2005, migrants took their chance. The result was one of Europe’s earliest ‘border crises’: an event in which at least fourteen migrants were killed in gunfire, with many more expelled deep into the Sahara desert.

Since that time, crises have periodically recurred. However, this has not stopped Ceuta’s barrier from becoming a prototype for fences that today stretch from Greece to Finland. Spain also provided Europe with a model for ‘externalizing’ controls to African states, first in Morocco and later, when routes shifted due to post-2005 crackdowns, to West Africa.

Meanwhile, Spain pursued diplomatic efforts that fed into the Europeanization of border management. The Frontex agency conducted its first notable operations off the Canary Islands, where the next ‘migration crisis’ occurred in 2006, itself a knock-on effect of the 2005 crackdowns. EU initiatives on border security, development, and even ‘mobility partnerships’ multiplied – a process driven partly by member states such as Spain, keen to offer aid and diplomatic relations in exchange for African states agreeing to patrol migration routes and accept deportees. The carrots-and-sticks approach – articulated by European governments at a 2002 summit in Seville – seemed to offer a ‘solution’ that paired border security with opportunities for cross-regional collaboration.

In the intervening period, the Spanish economy continued to grow at a febrile pace. Amid demographic imbalances and strong labour demand, migrant workers were desperately needed. Madrid ensured a steady supply of workers, especially from Latin America, Eastern Europe and even Morocco. In this context, the spectacle of border enforcement allowed politicians to show a ‘tough’ line on migration while simultaneously encouraging large-scale labour immigration. This disproportionate concern over the external border was a Europe-wide phenomenon: indeed, already in the 1990s, northern European states had been leaning on their southern counterparts to enforce strict measures. Spain also remained emblematic of the wider European ‘muddling through’ on migration as it launched regularization campaigns and released boat arrivals from detention with a deportation order, free to join the informal economy. The two-faced migration regime kept the economy thrumming and the borders ‘secure’ – sending a mixed message picked up in origin states and among European voters.

To critics in politics, advocacy and academia, a small minority of migrants and asylum seekers were seeing their basic rights sacrificed as they faced dangerous expulsions into desert areas by partner forces or extremely risky sea crossings in attempts to evade patrols and radar systems. The heightened salience of a small – and clearly racialized – minority of migrants was, at the same time, channelling right-wing ‘populist’ sentiment towards the borders, fuelling demand for further crackdowns. Meanwhile, deaths owing to ‘Fortress Europe’ policies since 1993 have been estimated at more than 66,000 – a staggering figure (United Against Refugee Deaths 2025).

The United States: A Model of Mismanagement?

A similar trend could be observed in the United States. In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act, similar to Spanish efforts, offered an amnesty to undocumented migrants while paving the way for further crackdowns. President Ronald Reagan hardened rhetoric as he called undocumented migration ‘a threat to national security’ with ‘terrorists and subversives… just two days’ driving time’ from the Texas border – echoing Trump’s later pronouncements (Massey 2015, 288). By the 1990s, army surplus landing mats were stood on their ends outside San Diego to form the first rudimentary border barrier (Harding 2012, 91). Border security operations started multiplying while collaboration deepened with Mexico and Central American states – replicating the ‘externalization’ pattern of Euro–African relations.

Unlike those in Europe, migration flows across the southern US border were of a different magnitude. Very much like in Europe, however, Washington was ‘muddling through’ as it tried at once to satisfy labour needs and project selective toughness. The resulting ‘border game’ (Andreas 2000) offered a stark contrast with the post-Second World War approach. The bracero program – a bilateral agreement between the United States and Mexico that began in 1942 to address wartime US labour shortages and allowed millions of Mexicans to work legally in the United States as seasonal agricultural labourers – had once provided legal pathways for labour migration. Once it ended in the 1960s, irregular migration rose correspondingly as legal routes were replaced by illegal ones (Massey et al. 2015). As border enforcement saw vast sums of investment from the 1980s onwards, migrants still kept arriving – only now, they were easier to exploit.

As in Europe, border security was deployed as a solution to an eminently political problem: it papered over the cracks and contradictions of a ‘free’ transnational market – a market that, through NAFTA, was leading to a ‘migration hump’ as many Mexicans left amid shifting economic opportunities. After 9/11, securitization escalated under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. However, the tremendous efforts did not halt deaths or irregular migration. In 1986, there were some two million undocumented migrants in the United States; after years of heavy border security investment, in 2008, there were twelve million (Massey et al. 2015). Many of these were migrants who no longer felt it safe to return to Mexico after the agricultural season, owing to the fences and patrols. Each new border crisis kept feeding demand for more border security, opening further avenues for authoritarian and right-wing forces to propose ways for breaking the stalemate.

Post-2008: Securitization Gains Momentum

After the financial crisis, the path dependency of the security model was strengthened on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, immigration reform became increasingly contingent on ploughing even more funding into border security. While the political battles played out along broadly familiar lines, the underlying security model remained bipartisan, as revealed by Senate wranglings over draconian immigration bills or indeed the record three million people removed under the Obama administration (Foley 2013).

Yet in the early 2010s, Mexican immigration was in fact falling due primarily to demographic and economic factors. Migrant apprehensions were at their lowest numbers in about forty years (WOLA 2025). The security model was taking on a momentum of its own, irrespective of actual migration figures or its actual results.

In Europe, the security model received great impetus from the 2015 border crisis, when record numbers crossed the Mediterranean via Türkiye and Libya. Frontex began operations with a modest budget of €19 million in 2006: by 2022, it had reached €750 million. The allocation to Frontex was but a small part of the expenditure on the national level, or the cost of externalizing controls. The security model was building further momentum via attempts by both ‘partner states’ and hostile actors to use irregular migration as a bargaining chip with Brussels and EU capitals. Favours included financial disbursements – such as €1 billion in aid for Niger, the exact sum it had asked for in 2016 ‘to fight clandestine migration’, or the much larger aid deal struck with Türkiye (Financial Times 2016). It also included political favours, such as Spain’s acquiescence to Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara as quid pro quo for Rabat playing its on-again-off-again role as Europe’s ‘gendarme.’

In sum, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic converged around a two-faced migration regime: feeding migrants into their labour-hungry economies on the one hand, including illegalized workers who could be readily exploited, and launching tough-seeming crackdowns at physical borders and in third countries, on the other. The result was a growing enforcement industry and a self-sustaining spiral of securitization. In this spiral, there was eventually one clear winner: the challengers on the hard or new right, which actively played the two sides of the border regime against one another – using overall immigration figures as an argument for more crackdowns at external land and sea borders, for instance, or using the frequent crises at those borders as a justification for saying the whole migration system (and by implication, its mainstream political architects) was compromised.

2020s: Total Security

Even as political challengers started becoming more vocal – including in the United Kingdom’s Brexit campaign, in the first Trump presidency, or in the rise of right-wing authoritarian forces across continental Europe – one could still see much transatlantic ‘muddling through’ on migration. However, the two-faced migration regime is tilting further towards securitization. The impetus is not only coming from the Trump administration or from Europe’s authoritarian right. Centrist European governments are also adopting similar rhetoric and objectives, while increasingly following the new right’s lead. Instead of sating popular demand for more border control, however, they contribute to an uncontrollable appetite for more security and for more hard-right solutions.

In the EU, policymakers are increasingly painting migration as a security problem. Measures include crackdowns on ‘instrumentalized’ migration – the tactic of using migrants as a bargaining chip, which developed in direct response to Europe’s migration-induced panic. Even so, governments still adhere to the two-faced migration regime in important respects – including Italy’s ‘populist’ right-wing government, which has opened legal migration pathways into sectors with labour shortages paired with harder crackdowns in the Mediterranean.

In the United States, Trump has shifted focus inland. Raids on homes and workplaces have targeted green card holders and blue-chip technology companies (Financial Times 2025). European visitors have been caught up in crackdowns, adding potential transatlantic friction. Overall, the securitization of US cities and workers shows how the security model increasingly ‘trumps’ the economy. In the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ of 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) alone received an estimated $37.5 billion a year while its watchdog was gutted, citizenship-stripping came up for discussion, and the courts and Congress let checks and balances melt away – creating, as one commentator put it, a ‘security state within a state’ (Luce 2025).

On both sides of the Atlantic, there are again some clear winners. First, the hard or far right, which always offers more convincing ‘security theatre’. Second, the defence, security and detention–deportation industries, which are seeing a staggering surge in demand. And third, the human smugglers, who have found themselves with a captive market – a lesson that has consistently been ignored despite clear evidence that criminal syndicates have grown stronger and more predatory on the back of enforcement efforts (Andersson 2024).

Where Next?

The two-faced migration regime has proven remarkably long-lived, as even the most hardline governments struggle to square the circle of economic realities and security politics. However, we may also discern not just a quantitative but a qualitative shift in the security model. Migration is becoming central to how ‘security’ is envisioned, and this is occurring in transatlantic dialogue. We see this, for instance, in the geopolitics of bargaining with migrants played by the Trump administration with origin and ‘dumping’ countries, or in the very similar deals being crafted by the EU and its member states. We see it, notably, in how the earlier emphasis on development and human security, especially in the EU case, has melted away. Even a classical ‘security crisis’ – Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – has increasingly been framed in terms of ‘instrumentalized’ movements of desperate people.

The Trump administration likes to lecture ‘liberal’ Europe on sleepwalking into an ‘invasion’ – deploying rhetoric not dissimilar to that of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi when he once used racist language to threaten Europe over engineered migration flows. Yet the rhetorical smoke hides the reality of increasing convergence around treating migration as a security domain. The security model is now hitting legal migrants, permanent residents and sometimes even citizens with invasive surveillance and control. Meanwhile, both the United States and European actors engage in lopsided bargaining with poorer states over responsibility for migration and asylum, ‘instrumentalising’ migrants for domestic and geopolitical ends.

Some dampers exist, especially in the EU, where some aspects of the Union and some member states (Spain being one) hold out for a more liberal approach. In fact, one main risk of a breakdown in transatlantic relations comes from the Trump administration’s putting its thumb on the scale in favour of far-right challengers while undermining checks and balances. Yet for now, the transatlantic bargain is developing, much as in the military domain, with Europe enthusiastically following through on further securitization. While we continue to see much ‘muddling through’ domestically, we are also seeing signs of a ‘renewal’ of transatlantic relations around an illiberal bargain that construes migration as a threat and refugees and migrants as bargaining chips in the international arena.

The Path Forward

For those who wish to reverse this trend, a few things should take priority:

1. Establish a civil liberties compact in the interest of citizens and foreigners alike.

As we can start to discern both in the ICE raids in the United States and in various European initiatives of control and surveillance, efforts to securitize migration eventually start hitting the wider social fabric and affecting citizens’ liberties as well, while frequently fuelling an anxiety that benefits the far right. A compact on liberties can ensure that the EU’s ‘area of freedom, security and justice’ becomes concrete and meaningful for all residents. Baking in privacy and civil liberties safeguards into new control proposals is a start, as even some of the architects of the US homeland security state are now acknowledging. Enshrining such safeguards would show that the EU is still keeping some faith in small-l liberal values – a project that may surprisingly appeal to many of the voters flocking to the new right, who, on the whole, are worried about state surveillance and overreach.

2. Rework relationships with ‘partner states.’

The European externalization of controls has led to a ceding of control to neighbouring states, who have consistently used migration fears to extract political or economic concessions (Chebel d’Appollonia 2012). As border guards themselves recognize, it is a game the Europeans are increasingly losing. Here is an opportunity to shift to a more positive, pragmatic footing. It is in the gift of Brussels and member states to shift the equation back towards economic cooperation, humanitarian and peacebuilding support and reaffirmed democratic rights – but this will require some heavy lifting, including a revival of refugee resettlement programmes offering an alternative to displaced people and some goodwill to the world’s largest refugee hosts in Africa and Asia.

3. Foster positive foreign policy coherence.

The EU and its member states can gear foreign policy towards less distress-inducing migration, not more, as is so frequently the case. The 2015 spike in arrivals was in no small part a knock-on effect of NATO’s disastrous Libya intervention. While the chaos spurred large-scale departures from the country, Russia saw the risk of regime change elsewhere and scaled up involvement in Syria’s civil war. Geopolitical bargaining with Syrian refugees followed. Today, EU support for Israeli war crimes in Gaza may not be adding pressure to Europe’s borders – given the particularities of that context, and the lock-in of its bombarded inhabitants – yet the pattern remains: of foreign policy choices fuelling forced displacement rather than addressing it.

4. Strengthen the social model. 

The EU could be bold and see migration as an opportunity and a source of enrichment. Instead, it has frequently been handled terribly poorly through the two-faced migration regime – as a security problem on the one hand, and as a source of use-and-discard labour on the other. The security model, in other words, distracts from the need to strengthen labour protections. A smart policy would be to turn this around. In fact, a de-securitization of migration can occur in tandem with a strengthening of social security. 

This strengthening would entail adequate labour standards and fair pay for citizens and migrants alike; fortifying the welfare state and so creating attractive jobs; cracking down on unscrupulous employers, not employees; and providing genuine rights for people fleeing persecution through safe routes rather than via the heavily policed borderlands that feed the smuggling economy and partner-state brinkmanship. Such controls would provide pathways to genuine ‘integration’ rather than generating just-in-time labour pools. Paired with targeted funds for local areas where migrants concentrate – as well as sensible policies for ensuring everyone does not end up in the same place – this will reduce costs and increase benefits for citizens. It may well put a damper on international movement as people respond to reduced labour demand. Incidentally, however, this may also help origin countries struggling with large outflows of their working population through unsafe routes. It will also offer migrants a genuine and safe alternative.

It is notable that border guards themselves are alive to the unsustainability of the two-faced border regime and its increasingly illiberal tilt. At Ceuta, the Civil Guard chief presiding over Europe’s first border fences told the author in 2023 that migration had to be returned to the political fold. However, in his view, there was a ‘political cost’ that no government wanted to assume in creating regular labour migration. The EU, he suggested, could recruit workers into seasonal agricultural programmes or develop other pathways that could compete with ‘irregular migration’. At the moment, he noted, there was no competition. Unfortunately, in the political sphere as well, there is increasingly no competing perspective against the disastrous security model, even as it extends its reach ever further into everyday life and into international relations. So far, the only real political winner in the securitization arena is the authoritarian right. For the EU project, and certainly for progressive and liberal actors within it, this should be the time to find a better, more rational, and more humane model that competes with the vision offered by right-wing authoritarian forces and their backers across the Atlantic.

 

(*) Ruben Andersson is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. His research has focused on migration, borders and security, with specific reference to the Sahel and southern Europe. He is the author of Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (California 2014), No Go World: How Fear is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics (California 2019) and, together with David Keen, Wreckonomics: Why it’s Time to End the War on Everything (Oxford 2023). He is currently Principal Investigator on a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, which will result in the book Age of Security, forthcoming in 2026 with HarperCollins.

 

References

Andersson, Ruben. 2014. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Oakland: University of California Press.

Andersson, Ruben. 2024. “Starmer’s Counter-Terror Plan for Migration Woefully Misses the Mark.” OpenDemocracy, November 8. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/starmers-counter-terror-plan-for-migration-woefully-misses-the-mark-labour-small-boats/

Andreas, Peter. 2009. Border Games: Policing the U.S.–Mexico Divide. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Chavez, Leo R. 2025. The Latino Threat: How Alarmist Rhetoric Misrepresents Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Chebel d’Appollonia, Ariane. 2012. Frontiers of Fear: Immigration and Insecurity in the United States and Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Financial Times. 2016. “Niger Asks EU for €1 Billion to Stem Migrant Flow.” May 4.

Financial Times. 2025. “America’s Draconian Immigration Raids.” September 9.

Foley, Elise. 2013. “Deportations Drop to Under 370,000 in 2013.” HuffPost, December 19, 2013. Updated January 23, 2014. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obama-deportations_n_4475496

Government Technology and Services Coalition. 2025. “Strengthening Homeland Security: Evolving the Role of DHS.” Online event, September 11.

Harding, Jeremy. 2012. Border Vigils. London: Verso.

Heyman, Josiah. 1995. “Putting Power in the Anthropology of Bureaucracy: The Immigration and Naturalization Service at the Mexico–United States Border.” Current Anthropology 36 (2): 261–87.

Luce, Edward. 2025. “Trump’s Ominous ICE Security State.” Financial Times, July 7.

Martin, Philip L., and J. Edward Taylor. 1996. “The Anatomy of a Migration Hump.” In Development Strategy, Employment, and Migration: Insights from Models, edited by J. E. Taylor, 43–62. Paris: OECD Development Centre.

Massey, Douglas S. 2015. “A Missing Element in Migration Theories.” Migration Letters 12 (3): 279–99. https://doi.org/10.59670/ml.v12i3.280

Massey, Douglas S., Karen A. Pren, and Jorge Durand. 2016. “Why Border Security Backfired.” American Journal of Sociology 121 (5). https://doi.org/10.1086/684200

Nevins, Joseph. 2010. Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.–Mexico Boundary. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge.

United Against Refugee Deaths. 2025. “The Fatal Policies of Fortress Europe.” United Against Refugee Deaths. https://unitedagainstrefugeedeaths.eu/

Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). 2025. “Some Graphics About the Border and Migration.  https://borderoversight.org/files/wola_migration_charts.pdf

This editorial image, captured in Belgrade, Serbia, showcases an array of novelty socks featuring the likenesses of Vladimir Putin, Aleksandr Lukashenko, Viktor Orban, and Donald Trump in Belgrade, Serbia on December 12, 2024. Photo: Jerome Cid.

Illiberal International: The Transatlantic Right’s Challenge to Democracy

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Please cite as:
Benson, Robert. (2026). “Illiberal international: The Transatlantic Right’s Challenge to Democracy.” In: Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations: Challenges and Policy Options. (eds). Marianne Riddervold, Guri Rosén and Jessica R. Greenberg. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). January 20, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00137

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Abstract

This chapter investigates the transatlantic dimensions of far-right political mobilization, tracing the networks linking populist and authoritarian actors across Europe and the United States. It argues that the far right has become increasingly skilled at building cross-border alliances that exchange strategies, legal models, ideological frames and digital tactics to weaken democratic norms. Moving beyond nation-centred analyses, the chapter highlights growing coordination in anti-immigration rhetoric, attacks on ‘gender ideology’, and efforts to delegitimize multilateral institutions. It examines organizational links among US think tanks, European party foundations and online platforms that amplify common messaging, finance convenings and train activists, with particular attention to the language of ‘sovereignty’, ‘tradition’, and ‘civilizational threat’ as a shared rhetorical toolkit. The chapter also analyses the diffusion of legal hardball tactics – such as assaults on judicial independence, academic freedom, media and civil society – and assesses the implications of these transatlantic linkages for democratic resilience and effective counterstrategies.

Keywords: democracy; transnational; populism; far right

 

By Robert Benson*

Introduction

For decades, the transatlantic relationship rested on a shared moral and institutional foundation. The United States and Europe defined their partnership through liberal-democratic values – human rights, pluralism and the rule of law. Those principles gave coherence to the Western alliance and legitimacy to its global leadership. Yet that consensus now faces a coordinated and ideologically confident challenge. A network of far-right political actors across the Atlantic has learned to cooperate across borders, fusing rhetoric, strategy and institutional power to erode liberal norms from within.

This chapter investigates the connective tissue of those transatlantic illiberal networks. It argues that the far right’s rise no longer unfolds through isolated national movements but through mutually reinforcing exchanges between American and European actors. These networks trade narratives about ‘sovereignty’, ‘tradition’, and ‘civilizational threat’, and share tactical repertoires – legal activism, institutional capture and digital disinformation – that hollow out democratic checks while preserving a facade of procedural legitimacy in the name of a Western vox populi (Mudde 2004).

The chapter situates this development within the broader trajectory of transatlantic relations. It contends that the liberal consensus has weakened since 2016, replaced by a new normative alignment organized around nationalism and identity. Far-right cooperation no longer merely contests the postwar order; it offers a rival model of democracy based on majoritarian rule, cultural homogeneity and suspicion of technocratic authority. The chapter concludes with concrete policy recommendations to counter these dynamics and rebuild a transatlantic foundation grounded in democratic resilience rather than complacent liberalism.

At a scholarly level, this analysis contributes to an emerging field that examines the internationalization of authoritarian populism – a phenomenon analysed by scholars (Mudde 2020; Müller 2016; and Zürn 2019). The diffusion of illiberal tactics across borders suggests that backsliding no longer unfolds as a domestic pathology but as a transnational process. As authoritarian populists coordinate their respective narratives, liberal democracies face a globalized form of contestation that transcends national institutions and elections. This chapter joins that debate by mapping how transatlantic linkages – once engines of the liberal order – now facilitate its undoing.

The Liberal Consensus and Its Erosion

The transatlantic liberal consensus crystallized after World War II and reached its institutional maturity in the 1990s. NATO’s security guarantees, the European Union’s expansion, and the Helsinki process all reinforced a shared commitment to democracy, free markets and multilateral governance. Washington and Brussels viewed their partnership as the normative core of a rules-based international order. Transatlantic summits revolved around values as much as interests: open societies, free elections, and universal rights served as the moral language of Western cooperation (Ikenberry 2011).

During the post–Cold War moment, this consensus evolved into a doctrine of liberal triumphalism (Fukuyama 1992). The fall of the Soviet Union convinced policymakers that democracy and markets would inevitably spread outwards. The United States expanded democracy promotion programs through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, while the EU embedded democratic conditionality in its enlargement policy. ‘Transition assistance’ and civil society funding became instruments of global liberalization. Yet this expansion bred complacency. Liberal universalism hardened into orthodoxy, and many citizens began to see democracy promotion not as solidarity but as ideological export (Chandler 2006). From the Western Balkans to South Asia and beyond, resentment toward externally imposed models began to percolate. In Serbia and Bosnia, local elites portrayed Western conditionality as paternalism, exploiting fatigue with endless reform checklists (Ignatieff 2003). In Türkiye, EU accession delays fed nationalist narratives about cultural intrusion. Across parts of Africa and Latin America, US-backed democracy programs came to symbolize Western hypocrisy (Carothers 2004).

Cracks in that consensus appeared in earnest after 9/11. The United States’ invasion of Iraq divided the alliance and exposed European doubts about American exceptionalism. By the late 2000s, economic crises and migration pressures fuelled domestic disillusionment with globalization. The ‘liberal script’, once a source of pride, became a lightning rod for grievances about lost sovereignty and cultural change (Börzel et al. 2024). Across Europe, populist leaders framed Brussels as an unaccountable bureaucracy and the EU’s rights agenda as an assault on tradition.

Donald Trump’s presidency marked its rupture. His ‘America First’ foreign policy rejected multilateralism and treated alliances as transactional. Trump’s public praise for authoritarian leaders and his attacks on NATO, the EU and the mainstream media emboldened Europe’s far right. Orbán, Le Pen and Salvini hailed him as proof that nationalist populism could capture the world’s most powerful democracy. In turn, American conservatives drew inspiration from European ‘illiberal democrats’, celebrating Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland as models of Christian governance that thoroughly rejected the post-1968 liberal emphasis on secular multiculturalism (Judt 2005; Krastev and Holmes 2019).

The effect was cumulative. By 2020, Trump administration officials such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described Hungary as a model of sovereignty, while European populists echoed Trump’s increasingly conspiratorial rhetoric about the ‘deep state’ (Bowman 2019; Le Monde 2025). When President Biden took office, he sought to restore traditional transatlantic language, organizing a ‘Summit for Democracy’. Yet by then, the intellectual current had shifted. The transatlantic right had institutionalized its own moral vocabulary, positioning nationalism as the authentic heir to Western civilization. By the 2024 election and Trump’s triumph at the ballot box, it became clear that Biden – not Trump – had been the aberration.

The postwar ideal of the transatlantic alliance as a moral community gave way to ideological fragmentation. Shared democratic values no longer defined the relationship; instead, competing visions of sovereignty and identity began to dominate. While the Biden administration restored rhetorical commitment to democracy, the structural erosion of shared norms persisted. The far right now operates as a transnational movement that adapts to electoral setbacks and translates domestic victories into global influence.

Mapping the Networks: Actors, Institutions and Mechanisms

The far right’s transatlantic infrastructure spans think tanks, media platforms, political parties and increasingly influential advocacy networks. These actors collaborate through conferences, digital ecosystems and funding flows that sustain a common ideological front.

In the United States, institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) serve as anchor points. They train conservative activists, produce model legislation, and coordinate messaging on issues from religious liberty to ‘gender ideology’. Their international branches, especially ADF International, operate across Europe, supporting legal interventions and advocacy seeking to restrict abortion rights, challenge LGBTQ+ protections, and expand claims of religious freedom. In Italy, for example, ADF International filed legal briefs opposing same-sex marriage legislation, aligning with Catholic organizations to block broader recognition (Savage 2020; See also Alliance Defending Freedom International 2015).

Across Europe, a parallel network mirrors this architecture. Hungary’s Danube Institute in Budapest functions as a regional hub linking Central European intellectuals, US conservatives and right-wing British Brexiteers. Funded through government-aligned channels, it hosts American speakers and frames national conservatism as the moral defence of Christian Europe. Regular attendees include Nigel Farage, Santiago Abascal, and US commentators from Fox News and Newsmax, who broadcast the message to sympathetic audiences at home (Applebaum 2020; See also Danube Institute 2025). What began as a network of think tanks and training institutes has now evolved into a stage-managed political spectacle designed to project moral legitimacy and global reach. CPAC Hungary operates as the movement’s global showcase. In recent years, it has featured keynote addresses from Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Eduardo Bolsonaro, presenting Budapest as the centre of a global ‘anti-woke’ awakening (CEU CEFAS 2025).

Russian-linked media outlets, although not formally integrated into the network, often amplify the event’s messaging, exploiting its resonance with Kremlin narratives about Western decadence, cultural decay and moral weakness. This convergence is not accidental: both camps share an interest in discrediting liberal democracy and promoting an image of the ‘real West’ as spiritually conservative and geopolitically sovereign. The porous boundary between these movements illustrates how transatlantic illiberalism increasingly overlaps with a broader ecosystem of authoritarian influence that stretches from Moscow to Budapest and beyond (Applebaum 2024).

Digital coordination then extends this ecosystem online, giving it reach and velocity. Platforms such as Rebel News, Epoch Times and Breitbart Europe circulate narratives that fuse European and American grievances – migration, ‘wokeness’, and elite betrayal – into a single story of civilization under siege. Influencers move seamlessly across audiences, translating slogans for local contexts while reinforcing a shared moral panic. This transnational publicity turns regional political experiments into global templates, demonstrating how authoritarian and illiberal actors now learn from, legitimize and amplify one another.

Financial flows and personnel exchanges further institutionalize these ties. US donors such as the Koch network and Christian legal foundations fund European conferences, while European governments sponsor sympathetic American commentators. Researchers tracing nonprofit disclosures have documented patterns of mutual support that blur the line between domestic advocacy and international influence operations (Archer 2020; Datta 2021; Laruelle 2022). Together, these linkages sustain what might be called an illiberal epistemic community – a transatlantic network that produces knowledge, training and legitimacy for antiliberal politics.

Ideological and Rhetorical Alignment

Although Europe’s far right remains nationally diverse, its leaders increasingly speak a common language. That lexicon centres on three core narratives: sovereignty, tradition, and civilizational threat.

The rhetoric of sovereignty casts technocratic governance as a usurpation of the popular will. American conservatives frame Washington bureaucrats, the ‘deep state’, and the federal judiciary as rogue agents. European populists substitute Brussels and Strasbourg for the same role. The parallel is no coincidence; strategists exchange slogans and framing devices through joint forums. The idea of ‘taking back control’, born in Britain’s Brexit campaign, migrated into American Republican discourse, while ‘America First’ became a template for nationalist rebranding in Europe.

The appeal to tradition provides moral ballast. Movements describe themselves as guardians of Christian civilization, opposing secular pluralism and feminism as existential threats. ‘Gender ideology’, once a fringe Vatican term, has become a unifying transatlantic rallying cry (Ayoub and Stoeckl 2024; Cupać and Ebetürk 2020; Korolczuk and Graff 2022). From Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws to Hungary’s ‘child protection’ amendment, conservatives share the same rhetorical script. They depict liberal tolerance not as virtue but as decay – a sign of civilizational weakness that invites chaos and migration. Conservative Catholic institutions in Spain and Poland now distribute translated versions of US legal briefs and training materials from ADF, illustrating how moral discourse travels with ease (Corporate Europe Observatory 2024).

Finally, the notion of a civilizational threat binds the narrative together. Far-right discourse positions the West in a cultural war against both internal subversion and external invasion. Migrants, Muslims, and ‘globalists’ occupy interchangeable roles in this story. Leaders like Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump portray themselves as defenders of an embattled civilization that must reclaim its purity through moral renewal. The effect is to redefine democracy not as pluralism but as cultural self-assertion.

This ideological alignment does not erase local differences; it creates a shared emotional grammar. Phrases such as ‘real people’, ‘common sense’, and ‘nation first’ resonate on both sides of the Atlantic (Moffitt 2016; Wodak 2021). Conferences like National Conservatism (NatCon) codify this worldview, offering a theological and historical narrative that connects Jerusalem, Rome, and Washington in one ‘civilizational’ arc.

These narratives increasingly infiltrate mainstream conservative parties. The United States’ Republican Party has absorbed much of Trump’s illiberal vocabulary, framing political opposition as betrayal and portraying federal institutions as corrupt elites. In Europe, centre-right parties from Spain’s Partido Popular to Germany’s Christian Democrats (CDU) have echoed sovereigntist language to win back voters (Mudde 2019a; Mudde 2019b). This normalization effect blurs distinctions between democratic conservatives and authoritarian populists, allowing illiberal rhetoric to migrate from the margins into governing discourse.

Strategic Diffusion and Legal Hardball

The collaboration between US and European conservatives extends beyond rhetoric to institutional tactics. What unites these actors is their ability to learn from each other’s experiments in bending democratic rules while maintaining formal legality.

American conservatives pioneered the technique of judicial capture through a process of constitutional hardball, using the letter of the law to violate its intent. The Federalist Society’s vetting of Supreme Court nominees provided a model of long-term institutional strategy. European populists adapted that logic to parliamentary systems. In Poland, the Law and Justice Party restructured the judiciary through legislative manoeuvring and disciplinary chambers that undermined judicial independence while preserving constitutional form. Hungarian authorities replicated the approach by packing the Constitutional Court and taking over judicial administration (Benson 2025). Lawyers in Poland connected to the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture – a conservative–religious legal organization – openly cite American legal precedents in their briefs, translating US culture-war litigation into European constitutional idioms (Coakley 2021).

Conversely, European examples now inspire American actors. Hungary’s media consolidation – centralizing ownership under pro-government foundations – has attracted the attention of US right-wing strategists who call for a patriotic media ecosystem. Hungary’s regulation of foreign-funded NGOs and universities informed US debates about restricting ‘foreign influence’ and targeting liberal foundations. The flow of ideas thus moves in both directions: elite learning across borders produces a repertoire of ‘legal hardball’ tactics that exploit institutional loopholes to entrench power (Barry 2025; Benson et al. 2025).

Conferences serve as accelerators for this diffusion. CPAC Hungary and the Danube Institute’s seminars invite US jurists and politicians to exchange strategies with European counterparts. The presence of figures such as Tucker Carlson, Mike Pence and members of the Heritage Foundation lends these events a sense of legitimacy and global reach. Speeches often emphasize that the ‘fight for Western civilization’ requires coordination, not isolation. The audience learns that illiberal reform is not parochial but visionary – a model for reclaiming democracy from cosmopolitan elites.

Digital mobilization reinforces these lessons. Online influencers and media outlets document each success story, turning national policies into templates. When Poland’s constitutional tribunal restricted abortion rights, American platforms celebrated it as proof that cultural pushback was possible. When Florida curtailed diversity programs in universities, Hungarian state media showcased it as evidence of global ideological realignment. Each side validates the other, creating a feedback loop of right-wing legitimacy (Dougherty 2021; Knefel 2023).

Implications for the Transatlantic Democratic Order

The rise of transatlantic illiberal networks reshapes the meaning of the West itself. For most of the postwar period, Western identity signified liberalism – rule of law, minority protection and multilateral cooperation. Today, those concepts coexist with their opposites. Leaders who undermine judicial independence or vilify minorities still claim to defend Western civilization. This rhetorical inversion erodes the clarity of the transatlantic project.

The consequences for policy cooperation are profound. Divergent value systems weaken the alliance’s ability to respond to authoritarian threats (Benson 2023a; Benson 2023b). When Washington or Brussels condemns democratic backsliding, illiberal governments frame the criticism as ideological imperialism. Shared values once enabled coordinated responses to global challenges; now they produce internal dispute. This fracture carries direct geopolitical costs. The Kremlin exploits these divisions to erode Western unity on sanctions, aid and military assistance to Ukraine. Russian propaganda outlets actively echo the rhetoric of Western populists, portraying the war as a clash between traditional sovereignty and decadent liberalism. In turn, segments of the European and American right adopt that framing to justify fatigue with Ukraine’s defence or scepticism toward NATO. The result is a feedback loop in which Moscow’s narratives and transatlantic illiberal discourse reinforce one another, blurring the line between domestic dissent and foreign influence.

The result is a transnational ecosystem of distrust that corrodes confidence in electoral integrity, journalism and scientific expertise. In the United States, European talking points about ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘globalists’ circulate daily on cable news and social media, reframed through American populist idioms. In Europe, US-style conspiracy theories – from QAnon to vaccine disinformation – find new life in far-right Telegram channels and street protests (Schulze 2022). Each side validates the other, portraying democratic institutions as captured by unseen powers. This cross-pollination normalizes cynicism and fuels the perception that politics itself is rigged. The contagion spreads not through formal alliances but through shared emotional affect – anger, humiliation and nostalgia – creating a digital transatlantic common of resentment. As this sentiment seeps into mainstream debate, it weakens the civic trust that underpins democratic governance and ultimately, transatlantic solidarity.

At a structural level, the erosion of shared norms transforms the transatlantic relationship from a moral alliance into a transactional partnership. Security and trade cooperation continue, but the normative glue has dissolved. Instead of universal values, the relationship revolves around selective interests.

The question is no longer whether shared values are weakening – they clearly are – but whether democratic actors can forge a new consensus around defending institutional pluralism itself. The challenge lies not in restoring the Cold War’s moral clarity but in constructing a forward-looking democratic solidarity that acknowledges ideological diversity while safeguarding liberal principles.

Policy Takeaways and Recommendations

Countering transnational illiberalism demands a transnational democratic strategy. Policymakers must recognize that far-right cooperation operates across borders; national responses alone cannot contain it. The following recommendations outline potential interventions. They are necessarily aspirational, given current political realities and would require – at a minimum – a new administration in Washington willing to prioritize democracy promotion and transatlantic coordination.

Increase transparency and accountability.

Governments and the EU should strengthen disclosure requirements for political foundations, advocacy organizations and media outlets that receive cross-border funding. Transparency does not suppress free speech; it clarifies the origins of influence. The United States and the EU could establish a joint registry for political nonprofits engaged in transatlantic advocacy.

Build democratic resilience networks.

Civil society cooperation should mirror that of the far right. Universities, local governments and NGOs need transatlantic partnerships that share best practices in civic education, digital literacy and counter disinformation. Programs like the U.S.–EU Democracy Dialogue, now dormant, could expand into a permanent platform for democratic innovation.

Coordinate digital governance.

The EU’s Digital Services Act offers a model for regulating online platforms that amplify extremist content. US policymakers could align transparency standards and algorithmic accountability with European frameworks. Joint initiatives between the Federal Trade Commission and European regulators would prevent regulatory arbitrage.

Reinvest in public diplomacy and narrative competition.

Illiberal actors win not only through policy but through storytelling. Democratic governments must promote narratives of inclusion and dignity that resonate emotionally. Cultural diplomacy, youth exchanges, and support for independent media should form part of a long-term strategy to restore trust in democratic ideals.

Engage the democratic periphery.

Cities, universities and civil society networks can act as laboratories for democratic renewal. Transatlantic cooperation at the subnational level – mayor-to-mayor partnerships, university consortia – builds social capital that resists illiberal capture. Democracy flourishes through participation; it decays through isolation.

Conclusion

The transatlantic relationship stands at a crossroads. The liberal order that once unified Washington and Brussels no longer commands universal allegiance, even within the West. Illiberal networks have learned to cooperate across borders, translating national grievances into a shared civilizational narrative. Their success lies in coordination: they exchange ideas, tactics and legitimacy faster than liberal institutions adapt.

This chapter has traced how far-right actors transformed the transatlantic space from a community of shared values into a contested ideological arena. It showed how think tanks, conferences, and digital platforms weave an alternative network of power that undermines democratic norms while claiming to defend the West. The result is neither the collapse nor the strengthening of shared democratic values but a strategic weakening – a shift from liberal universalism to national conservative pluralism.

Reversing that trend demands proactive engagement. The defence of democracy cannot rest on nostalgia for a bygone consensus; it must evolve into a deliberate partnership that treats democracy itself as a shared security interest. If liberal actors can match the far right’s strategic clarity and cross-border coordination, the transatlantic relationship may yet renew its moral purpose. 

 

(*) Robert Benson, DPhil., is the associate director for National Security and International Policy at American Progress. Prior to joining American Progress, Benson worked as a global relations consultant at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris and as a research fellow at the Social Science Center Berlin. He holds a Master of Science in global politics from the London School of Economics and a doctorate from the Free University of Berlin. 

 

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Two elderly men sit on the street in front of a café in Oslo, Norway, asking for alms on August 1, 2013. This image symbolizes the indifference of society and the state toward poverty. Photo: Medvedeva Oxana.

Vulnerable Groups, Protections and Precarity

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Please cite as:
Azmanova, Albena. (2026). “Vulnerable Groups, Protections and Precarity.” In: Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations: Challenges and Policy Options. (eds). Marianne Riddervold, Guri Rosén and Jessica R. Greenberg. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). January 20, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00138

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Abstract
This chapter examines how impoverishment, inequality and precarity have become defining features of contemporary societies in Europe and the United States, reshaping domestic politics and altering the foundations of the transatlantic relationship. Poverty persists despite overall affluence, with COVID-19 reversing earlier gains in Europe and entrenched racialized and generational disparities characterizing the United States. Inequality follows divergent patterns: Europe experiences wide variation shaped by austerity and structural barriers facing migrants, while the United States is marked by extreme wealth concentration and systemic racial gaps. Yet inequality alone does not fully explain public discontent. Instead, precarity – politically produced vulnerability across class, gender, age and status – emerges as the central grievance. Expanding temporary and platform work, weakened labour protections and strained welfare systems expose women, youth, migrants and racial minorities to compounding risks. The chapter argues that rising precarity undermines trust in governance and shifts transatlantic cooperation toward transactionalism, requiring renewed social investment and stronger labour and environmental standards.

Keywords: poverty; precarity; inequality; employment; insecurity; populism

 

By Albena Azmanova*

Introduction

Over the past decade, Europe and the United States have faced intensifying social vulnerabilities stemming from economic shocks, political realignments and labour market transformations. Transatlantic EU–US relations are increasingly shaped by internal socioeconomic pressures, especially the precarization of labour and the rise of populist politics responding to widespread physical, economic, social and cultural insecurity. These forces are subtly but significantly reshaping cooperation across trade, security and global governance. The domestic pressures driving change have especially to do with deteriorating employment conditions – marked by low wages, gig work, weakened unions and eroded social protections. This trend is evident in both the United States and the EU, although with different institutional buffers. Economic insecurity – especially post-2008 and post-COVID-19 – has fuelled resentment toward globalization, trade liberalization and perceived elite consensus, which have historically underpinned transatlantic cooperation. To this adds cultural and physical insecurity – including migration anxieties, demographic shifts and perceived threats to national identity – which have intensified populist narratives that challenge liberal internationalism. In what follows, we review three interlinked trajectories in domestic developments – poverty, inequality and precarity – to highlight structural patterns, policy responses and emerging fault lines that are likely to affect domestic political attitudes and, consequently, transatlantic relations.

Poverty: Persistent Risks and Shifting Demographics

Europe: The fragmented landscape of poverty amidst wealth

After the 2008 financial crisis, poverty rates in Europe slowly declined. However, COVID-19 disrupted this trajectory, leading to a renewed increase in poverty risk across many EU countries. The ‘Europe 2020’ strategy aimed to lift 20 million people out of poverty by 2020 – a goal that went unmet, with the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbating vulnerabilities and deepening the scarring effects of poverty across the continent (Mussida and Sciulli 2022). The pandemic increased the risk of poverty, particularly for already vulnerable groups and widened disparities between countries due to differences in policy responses. Southern European countries (e.g., Italy, Spain, Greece) experienced sharper increases in poverty risk due to weaker welfare systems and higher reliance on tourism and service sectors. Northern and Western European countries, with stronger social safety nets, were better able to cushion the impact.

In 2024, 21% of the EU population – approximately 93.3 million people – were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, according to Eurostat’s AROPE indicator, which combines income poverty, severe material deprivation, and low work intensity (Eurostat 2025a). Rates remain highest in Bulgaria (30.3%), Romania (27.9%), and Greece (26.9%). Notably, in-work poverty is rising: 10.9% of employed individuals are still at risk of poverty.

Gender disparities persist: overall, women face a higher risk of poverty (21.9%) than men (20.0%), largely due to wage gaps and disproportionate caregiving responsibilities.

The United States: Structural poverty and policy gaps

According to the OECD, the United States has one of the highest relative poverty rates among member countries, with income inequality and poverty deeply entrenched (OECD 2024). The bottom quintile earns less than 3% of national income, while the top quintile earns over 50%.

Racialized poverty remains a defining feature: Black, Hispanic and Indigenous populations face disproportionately high poverty rates, compounded by housing segregation and educational disparities. Child poverty is particularly acute, with 16.1% of children living below the federal poverty line in 2023 (Guzman and Kollar 2023). Elder poverty is rising due to healthcare costs and insufficient retirement savings (Scott 2024).

Despite solid economic growth, real income gains have been uneven, and intergenerational mobility remains low (Kochhar and Sechopoulos 2023; Kochhar 2024). Impoverishment – both absolute deprivation (inability to meet basic needs) and relative poverty (living below a certain percentage of median income in a given society) – has been on the rise in Europe and the United States. This rising poverty has fuelled grievances about affordability, as households struggle to cover essential costs such as housing, food, utilities and debt repayments. Affordability grievances have been prominent in anti-establishment mobilizations, which have placed cost-of-living issues at the centre of national elections. In Europe, this has led to challenging EU integration, migration policy and austerity legacies – which are perceived as causes of impoverishment. In the United States, public anxiety over purchasing power and declining real incomes have driven support for populist candidates who frame globalization and liberal elites as threats to national sovereignty and working-class dignity.

Inequality: Structural Divides and Policy Responses

Europe: Between convergence and divergence

Income inequality in Europe varies widely. The Gini coefficient ranges from 23.8 in the Slovak Republic to 39.5 in Bulgaria (World Bank Group 2023). Post-2008 austerity widened inequality in Southern and Eastern Europe, with long-term effects on youth and low-income workers (Oxfam 2013).

The protective role of higher education has diminished, while employment stability and childcare provision have become more important in mitigating poverty and inequality (Mussida and Sciulli 2022). Migrant populations often face structural barriers to income parity, with limited access to housing, education, and labour protections (ETUC 2024).

The United States: Polarization and policy stagnation

The United States has seen a dramatic rise in income and wealth inequality. Households in the top 10% of the wealth distribution own 79% in the United States (OECD 2024, 86). Tax expenditures disproportionately benefit high earners, exacerbating inequality and reducing fiscal space for redistribution. Coastal urban centres show high income levels but also high living costs, while rural and post-industrial regions face stagnation. Racial disparities in educational attainment, access to capital, and exposure to environmental hazards deepen inequality (Beard et al. 2024). While impoverishment in absolute terms (i.e., reduced purchasing power) has often been expressed in social discontent, inequality (relative impoverishment) has not been reliably traced to social discontent, even as it has been at the centre of academic research and public debate.

Precarity: Labour Market Insecurity and Social Dislocation

Precarity – politically produced vulnerability caused by social threats to lives, livelihoods, and lifeworlds (Azmanova 2020; 2023) – has recently been identified as a critical condition afflicting contemporary democracies, cutting across class, gender, age, educational attainment, professional attainment and even income levels.

Europe: The rise of precarious work

Precarity has intensified through non-standard employment. Eurostat data show that young workers aged 30 or younger are disproportionately represented in temporary and low-paid jobs (Eurostat 2025b). Women are more likely to be in part-time or informal work, often linked to caregiving responsibilities.

Sectors such as hospitality, retail and care show high levels of precarity, with limited union coverage and weak protections. Platform work has expanded, but regulatory frameworks lag behind. The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) has called for the full implementation of the EU’s directive on platform work and for universal social protections (ETUC 2023).

The pandemic disproportionately affected workers in precarious employment, temporary contracts, and low‑income service sectors. This disproportionate impact has reinforced the link between insecure labour markets and the persistence of poverty (Mussida and Sciulli 2022).

The United States: Fragmentation and Flexibilization

The US labour market is characterized by high flexibility but low security. Gig economy workers often lack health insurance, paid leave, or retirement benefits (Human Rights Watch 2025). Union membership has fallen to historic lows, around 10% (BLS 2023). Frequent job changes, layoffs and contract work contribute to income volatility and psychological stress. Employer-based health insurance ties security to employment, making job loss a significant risk factor for medical debt and coverage gaps. Policy debates over universal basic income, portable benefits and labour classification have gained traction but remain politically contentious.

COVID‑19 intensified poverty in Europe and the United States by exposing the precariousness of households and labour markets, undoing part of the progress made since the Great Recession. It significantly worsened mental health globally, with sharp rises in anxiety, depression, and stress (WHO 2022), while lockdowns and social isolation also triggered a surge in gender‑based violence, often described as a ‘shadow pandemic’ (UN Women 2020).

Overall, even as societies on the two sides of the Atlantic have returned to economic growth, economic and social precarization has persisted. Labour market insecurity and cost-of-living concerns are diminishing public trust in existing systems of governance and driving an upsurge in anti-establishment, populist mobilizations.

Vulnerable Groups: Intersectional Risks and Policy Blind Spots

Across both regions, certain groups face compounded vulnerabilities, resulting from impoverishment and precarization:

  • Women: Gender pay gaps, caregiving burdens, and exposure to part-time work increase risks (UN Women 2023).
  • Migrants and refugees: Legal status, language barriers, and discrimination limit access to services and stable employment (ETUC 2023)
  • Youth: Entry-level job insecurity, student debt and housing unaffordability create long-term precarity.
  • The elderly: Fixed incomes, rising healthcare costs, and social isolation contribute to poverty (Tornton and Bowers 2024).
  • Racial and ethnic minorities: Structural racism, residential segregation, and unequal access to education and healthcare deepen inequality (Bailey et al. 2017; Mirza and Warwick 2024; Clark et al. 2022; Yearby et al. 2022; Kisa and Kisa 2025).

Thus, while precarity is becoming the overarching grievance in Western democracies, it is strongly stratified and is most acutely felt among the poor and socially marginalized. However, as economic and social insecurity are becoming ubiquitous across income levels and educational attainment, precarity is increasingly being identified as the key factor driving social discontent and fuelling anti-establishment, populist mobilizations (Azmanova 2004, 2020, 2023; Apostolidis 2020; Zhirnov et al 2024; Scheiring et al 2024; Rodríguez-Pose 2020).

Protections: Welfare States, Labour Rights and Emerging Models

Europe: Welfare retrenchment and innovation

European welfare states offer a range of protections, but austerity and demographic pressures have strained their capacity. Some of the key developments include:

  • Minimum income schemes: These vary widely across countries, with some offering robust support (e.g., France’s Revenu de solidarité active (RSA)) and others providing minimal assistance.
  • Universal healthcare: This remains a cornerstone of European social protection, although access and quality vary.
  • Labour market policies: Active labour market programs (ALMPs), vocational training and unemployment insurance help mitigate precarity.
  • EU-level initiatives: The European Pillar of Social Rights and the Recovery and Resilience Facility aim to strengthen social cohesion post-COVID-19.

However, gaps remain in coverage, adequacy and enforcement, especially for non-standard workers and migrants.

The United States: Fragmented safety nets and policy innovation

The United States lacks a comprehensive welfare state, relying instead on a patchwork of federal, state and local programs. Key features include:

  • Means-tested programs: SNAP (food stamps), Medicaid, and TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) provide targeted support but face eligibility barriers and stigma.
  • Tax-based transfers: The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit offer income support, although coverage is uneven.
  • Healthcare reforms: The Affordable Care Act expanded coverage but left millions uninsured or underinsured.
  • Local innovations: Cities like New York and San Francisco have piloted guaranteed-income schemes, tenant protections and worker cooperatives.

Despite these efforts, systemic gaps persist and political polarization hampers federal reform.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that poverty is not only cyclical but also deeply tied to structural vulnerabilities in employment and welfare systems. It revealed how poverty dynamics are shaped not only by economic shocks but also by institutional resilience. Emergency measures (short‑time work schemes, income support, moratoria on evictions) mitigated some effects, but structural weaknesses in welfare systems left many households exposed. Recent policy shifts in the EU that have placed a higher priority on competitiveness and defence spending risk weakening social investment and deepening employment insecurity.

Comparative Reflections and Policy Implications

Since the turn of the century, the combined effects of labour market liberalization, automation and the radical opening of national economies have generated widespread employment insecurity and wage depression, fuelling fears of real, perceived and anticipated losses of livelihood. More broadly, political attitudes have been shaped by anxieties linked to physical insecurity, political disorder, cultural estrangement and economic precarity driven by flexible labour markets, outsourcing and competition with immigrant workers. Together, these four sources of anxiety constitute the core of a new antiprecarity public agenda centred on demands for order and security. This agenda of public concerns cuts across the left–right divide and tends to replace the left–right vectors of electoral competition with a new risk–opportunity divide shaped by the social impact of the new economy of open borders and information technologies (Azmanova 2020, 68–69, 140; See also Azmanova 2004, 2011).

Although these developments are tangible in both the United States and Europe, the transatlantic comparison reveals that Europe’s welfare states offer more robust protections but face demographic and fiscal pressures. The United States exhibits higher inequality and precarity, with fragmented safety nets and racialized vulnerabilities. Both regions struggle to adapt protections to non-standard work and intersectional risks. Policy innovation is emerging at subnational levels, but national coherence is lacking.

Social exasperation resulting from ubiquitous precarity is fuelling both economic and cultural xenophobia and undermining solidarities within countries and between the EU and the United States. This is expressed in adversarial foreign economic policy and in the undermining of the traditional EU–US political and economic partnership. Populist movements in Europe (e.g. the AfD in Germany, the Rassemblement national in France) and the United States (especially under Donald Trump) often frame transatlantic institutions as out of touch with ‘ordinary people’. These actors tend to be sceptical of multilateralism, critical of NATO and hostile to EU regulatory frameworks, which complicates traditional alliance structures.

Populist governments or pressures can lead to policy volatility, weakening long-term commitments to shared goals such as climate action, digital regulation and democratic norms. Indeed, trade tensions have resurfaced, especially around subsidies, digital taxation and industrial policy. The EU’s Green Deal and the United States’s Inflation Reduction Act have created friction over protectionism and competitiveness. While security cooperation remains strong on Ukraine and NATO, it diverges on China, Middle East policy and defence spending expectations.

Fundamentally, institutional trust is eroding. The EU increasingly hedges against US unpredictability by deepening internal defence and tech strategies, while the United States questions European burden-sharing. Under populist demands for short-term stabilization measures, a shift is underway from normative alliance-building to interest-based transactionalism. This shift means cooperation is increasingly contingent on short-term domestic political gains rather than shared values. The EU is recalibrating its strategic autonomy, while the United States – especially under populist leadership – prioritizes sovereignty and unilateralism.

Countering precarization as the root driver of reactionary populism would require a systematic effort for building a ‘political economy of trust’ (Azmanova 2020) that provides economic and social stability along two trajectories: domestic and global. In terms of domestic policies, this means replacing the current focus on competitiveness in the global economy (which is prompting governments to cut job security and social investment) with an industrial policy that generates good jobs, as well as increased investment in the commons (public services and social insurance). In terms of global market integration, the logic of pursuing competitiveness, which is prompting governments to weaken labour and environmental standards, should be replaced by a more rigorous implementation of labour and environmental standards of production, trade and consumption.

 

(*) Albena Azmanova is Professor of Political and Social Science at City St George’s, University of London. She has held academic positions at the New School for Social Research, Sciences Po Paris, Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies. Her research spans critical social theory, political economy, democratic transitions, populism, and the rule of law, with a focus on how precarity has become the defining social harm of contemporary capitalism. Her book Capitalism on Edge (2020) is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the American Political Science Association’s Michael Harrington Award for scholarship advancing social justice. Beyond academia, she has served as a policy advisor to institutions including the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the European Parliament.

 

References

Apostolidis, Paul. 2022. “Desperate Responsibility: Precarity and Right-Wing Populism.” Political Theory 50 (6): 889–915.

Azmanova, Albena. 2004. “The Mobilisation of the European Left in the 1990s: From the Politics of Class to the Politics of Precarity.” European Journal of Sociology 45 (2): 273–306.

Azmanova, Albena. 2011. “After the Left–Right (Dis)continuum: Globalisation and the Remaking of Europe’s Ideological Geography.” International Political Sociology 5 (4): 384–407.

Azmanova, Albena. 2020. Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Azmanova, Albena. 2023. “Precarity for All.” In Post Neoliberalism, edited by Albena Azmanova and Pavlina Tcherneva. https://www.postneoliberalism.org/articles/precarity-for-all/

Bailey, Zinzi D., Nancy Krieger, Madina Agénor, Jasmine Graves, Nadine Linos, and Mary T. Bassett. 2017. “Structural Racism and Health Inequities in the USA: Evidence and Interventions.” The Lancet 389 (10077): 1453–1463. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30569-X

Beard, Sandra, Kristen Freeman, Maria L. Velasco, William Boyd, Tara Chamberlain, Ashley Latoni, Daniel Lasko, et al. 2024. “Racism as a Public Health Issue in Environmental Health Disparities and Environmental Justice: Working Toward Solutions.” Environmental Health 23 (1): 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-024-01052-8

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2023. Union Membership. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.toc.htm

Clark, Ember C., et al. 2022. “Structural Interventions That Affect Racial Inequities and Their Impact on Population Health Outcomes: A Systematic Review.” BMC Public Health 22: Article 2162. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-14603-w

European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). 2023. “Platform Directive: No Time to Waste for National Governments.” October 14. https://tinyurl.com/3tfn43nc

European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). 2024. Migrants. Brussels: ETUC. https://www.etuc.org/en/issue/migrants

Eurostat. 2025a. “People at Risk of Poverty or Social Exclusion in 2024.” https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20250430-2

Eurostat. 2025b. EU Labour Force Survey. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=EU_labour_force_survey

Guzman, Gloria, and Melissa Kollar. 2023. Income in the United States: 2022. U.S. Census Bureau, Report, 60–279. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/
p60-279.html

Human Rights Watch. 2025. The Gig Trap: Algorithmic, Wage and Labor Exploitation in Platform Work in the US. ISBN: 979-8-88708-224-0

Kisa, Adnan, and Sevi Kisa. 2025. “Structural Racism as a Fundamental Cause of Health Inequities: A Scoping Review.” International Journal for Equity in Health 24: Article 257. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-025-02644-7

Kochhar, Rakesh, and Stella Sechopoulos. 2022. “How the American Middle Class Has Changed in the Past Five Decades.” Pew Research Center, April 20. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/

Kochhar, Rakesh. 2024. The State of the American Middle Class. Pew Research Center, May 31. https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/the-state-of-the-american-middle-class/

Mirza, Heidi Safia, and Ruth Warwick. 2024. “Race and Ethnic Inequalities.” Oxford Open Economics 3 (Suppl. 1): i365–i452. https://doi.org/10.1093/ooec/odad026

Mussida, Chiara, and Dionisio Sciulli. 2022. “The Dynamics of Poverty in Europe: What Has Changed after the Great Recession?” Journal of Economic Inequality 20: 915–937. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-022-09527-9

OECD. 2024. Society at a Glance 2024: OECD Social Indicators. Paris: OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/918d8db3-en

Ortiz, Isabel, and Matthew Cummins. 2021. “The Austerity Decade 2010–20.” Social Policy and Society 20 (1): 142–157. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746420000433

Oxfam. 2013. A Cautionary Tale: The True Cost of Austerity and Inequality in Europe. Oxfam Briefing Paper 174. https://www-cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/bp174-cautionary-tale-austerity-inequality-europe-120913-en_1_1.pdf

Rodríguez-Pose, Andrés. 2020. “The Rise of Populism and the Revenge of the Places That Don’t Matter.” LSE Public Policy Review 1 (1): 1–12.

Scheiring, Gábor, Marcos Serrano-Alarcón, Anca Moise, Caroline McNamara, and David Stuckler. 2024. “The Populist Backlash Against Globalisation: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence.” British Journal of Political Science 54 (2): 345–367.

Scott, Jennifer. 2024. “America Has a Retirement Crisis. We Need to Make It Easier to Save.” Pew Charitable Trusts. https://www.pew.org/en/about/news-room/opinion/
2024/01/18/america-has-a-retirement-crisis-we-need-to-make-it-easier-to-save

Thornton, Melissa, and Kate Bowers. 2024. “Poverty in Older Adulthood: A Health and Social Crisis.” OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing 29 (1). https://doi.org/
10.3912/OJIN.Vol29No01Man03

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indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=EU&year=2023

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news/item/02-03-2022-covid-19-pandemic-triggers-25-increase-in-prevalence-of-anxiety-and-depression-worldwide

UN Women. 2020. The Shadow Pandemic: Violence Against Women During COVID-19.https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/in-focus-gender-and-covid-19

Yearby, Ruqaiijah, Brietta Clark, and Jose F. Figueroa. 2022. “Structural Racism in Historical and Modern U.S. Health Care Policy.” Health Affairs 41 (2): 187–194. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2021.01466.

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Conclusion: How Should the EU Deal with Changing Transatlantic Relations?

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Please cite as:
Riddervold, Marianne; Rosén, Guri & Greenberg, Jessica R. (2026). “Conclusion: How Should the EU Deal with Changing Transatlantic Relations?” In: Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations: Challenges and Policy Options. (eds). Marianne Riddervold, Guri Rosén and Jessica R. Greenberg. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). January 20, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00139

DOWNLOAD CONCLUSION

This concluding chapter synthesizes the report’s core finding: under “Trump 2.0,” transatlantic relations face a systematic populist challenge across all four pillars—security, trade, international institutions, and democratic values. The authors argue that traditional crisis-management reflexes are no longer sufficient, as “America First” policies combine coercive alliance diplomacy, tariff-driven trade politics, and the instrumentalization of international law with an explicit contestation of liberal-democratic norms. While functional cooperation may persist through selective, issue-based “muddling through,” the EU’s most viable response is strategic adaptation without normative retreat. Key recommendations emphasize EU unity, enhanced European defence and industrial capacity, diversified trade partnerships, robust support for multilateral institutions, and renewed commitments to democracy, pluralism, and social cohesion to address populism’s structural drivers.

By Marianne Riddervold*, Guri Rosén** & Jessica Greenberg***

The transatlantic relationship has always shifted between cooperation and crisis, with tensions rooted in how United States (US) leadership is exercised, the evolution of European integration, and recurring disputes over institutions and burden-sharing. Those strains have usually been contained by shared threat perceptions and a baseline commitment to liberal democracy (Tocci and Alcaro 2012; Smith, this volume).

Under a populist right-wing policy under ‘Trump 2.0’, the authors in this volume depict a sharper, more systematic challenge to transatlantic relations across all four pillars of the transatlantic relationship. In terms of security, strategic interests, and threat perceptions no longer align, and the United States is a less reliable ally. Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda combines a broader rollback of international cooperation (including cuts and withdrawals affecting major bodies and funding streams) with punitive trade tools and more coercive alliance diplomacy, all weakening the relationship. In trade, changing policies under Trump is visible, not least in the use of comprehensive tariffs as well as an increasingly more antagonistic approach to the World Trade Organization (WTO). On the international arena, beyond targeting specific organizations, the shift is one of both practice and principle: international law becomes more openly instrumental, diplomacy more performative and multilateral institutions more readily treated as dispensable. As argued by Smith (this volume), for the European Union (EU), this is not only a difficult partner relationship but an assault on the institutional environment from which the Union derives legitimacy and leverage, while also accelerating a global ‘flux’ in multilateralism as other powers fill spaces left by US retrenchment. And not least, the value basis of the relationship is facing severe challenges, with right-wing populist forces challenging many of the core values on which the EU and the transatlantic relationship have been built.

All chapters in the report conclude that the transatlantic relationship has reached a turning point and is undergoing a significant shift. It is a clear possibility that transatlantic relations might weaken even further now, following a near decade of increased uncertainty. At the same time, several authors also emphasize the many adjustments made to accommodate the challenges to the EU–US relationship. One example is the framework agreement on trade (see Young, this volume). Another is defence and security, where increased European defence spending, the changing role of the EU, and the use of informal networks to bypass collaborative deadlocks indicate functional adaptation to the current impasse (Sus, this volume). ‘Muddling through’ implies that cooperation is issue-contingent. Arrangements are made based on the specific interests of either side rather than a shared ideological platform (Alcaro, this volume). While the relationship clearly is weaker than in previous decades, these various instances of ‘muddling through’ could lead to a redefined and different relationship in areas where interests align. Despite the deterioration of collaboration in international organizations, many of the existing networks of transatlantic relations, both public and private, remain strong and likely to withstand the strain, at least in the short to medium term (Smith, this volume). This form of ‘muddling through’ within a different and less strong relationship is identified as a plausible and likely future path for transatlantic relations, distinguishing it from full renewal or outright rupture.

While this is undoubtedly challenging, the European Union is in a strong position to build on and continue to lead in the areas that made the transatlantic relationship successful for so long, if the political will is there. These include active trade policies and more integrated economic and financial policies, a stronger and more independent European defence, robust commitments to core values, and sustained investment in international cooperation, institutions and coordination mechanisms. Across the chapters, the authors offer recommendations that aim to strengthen the alliance where possible, manage the pressures created by rising isolationism, trade conflict, and the current US political climate, and respond to the causes and effects of populist movements. They also emphasize the need for EU unity, a strengthening of European security and defence through investment in key strategic sectors, reaffirmed commitments to democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law, and a reinforcement of European leadership on global challenges. A further priority is to promote effective multilateralism through new strategic partnerships while also strengthening existing international institutions.

This chapter sums up the report’s main recommendations across the four pillars of the transatlantic relationship – security, trade, international institutions and values. At the end, we also provide a table that summarizes the recommendations of each chapter. Overall, the report argues that a broad coalition of actors is needed to address both the causes and the symptoms of strain in the transatlantic relationship and the impact of populism. Such broad action must include coordination among diplomatic services and international institutions, as well as engagement from citizen groups, civil society and rights advocates, state agencies, legal professionals and judges, teachers, social and health care workers, media literacy experts, academics and EU policymakers and elected officials. Both the EU’s executive institutions and the European Parliament (EP) have important roles to play, not only to create efficient but also legitimate solutions to common challenges. The report also notes that while there are clear areas for action in the state, civil society and the economy, many challenges cut across sectors and require combined approaches. For example, industrial policy can be linked with economic development programmes, environmental regulation and research and development that support new security strategies.

So, What Should the EU Do in Response?

While all the chapters have discussed the changes in transatlantic relations across different policy domains and the direction in which the relationship is moving, they also provide policy advice to the EU on how to respond to these changes. Overall, all the chapters argue for a coordinated and coherent EU response. Several argue that the EU should develop a more unified and firm political line towards Washington, moving away from appeasement and signalling that EU support cannot be taken for granted when US policies damage European security, trade or technology interests. While this is challenging when facing a US administration that links trade and other issues to security guarantees and US support for Ukraine, a coherent and strong EU will put the Union in a better position vis-à-vis its traditional partner and, not least, in a better position to adjust its policies in the face of common challenges. EU strategic autonomy should be strengthened further, and the EU must focus on developing its own security policies, although aligning with the US and cooperating where possible, when interests align.

The EU should also continue to promote international cooperation and trade, in multilateral settings where possible, and with like-minded countries where needed. Several chapters focus on the latter point, highlighting how the EU, in order to reduce its vulnerability, should seek to strengthen its strategic autonomy while deepening bilateral and plurilateral partnerships, both in trade and in other areas of common interests. And not least, the EU should continue to uphold the values that have underpinned the integration project since the beginning. In a changing global and domestic environment, with increased right-wing populism taking place in parallel with war on the European continent, increased geoeconomic and geopolitical conflict and changing transatlantic bond, this will perhaps prove to be the EU’s biggest challenge.

Security: Key Recommendations for the EU

The contributions on security (Alcaro, Pomorska and Morgenstern-Pomorski, Sus, Wong) all point to the same conclusion: the post-war transatlantic relationship is entering a ‘post-American’ phase, in which the EU can no longer rely on stable US leadership and must take much greater responsibility for its own security. Transatlantic ties are weakening, even if they are not collapsing, and US politics has become more volatile and less responsive to European concerns. At best, the relationship is muddling through, but due to developments in the EU, we also see a development towards a different, but redefined relationship where the EU takes a stronger role, and the two traditional partners cooperate in areas where interests overlap.

In this context, Europe has begun to improve coordination of resources and defence capabilities – both inside the EU and through flexible coalitions – but progress is uneven and too slow given the scale of the challenge. The EU needs to reduce its dependence on US military enablers, prepare for a possible weaker US commitment to NATO, and use its potential to strengthen member states’ military, industrial, energy and technological assets. To do so will require a firmer, more unified stance towards Washington, greater solidarity inside the EU, and a coherent long-term strategy: building a stronger European defence industrial base, providing predictable support and security guarantees for Ukraine, and investing in genuine interoperability and European capabilities. At the same time, the EU must manage relations with China and other partners in a way that reinforces – rather than undermines – its strategic autonomy and its ability to act with the United States when interests align.

Trade: Key Recommendations for the EU

The authors in the trade section (E. Jones, K.Jones, Poletti, Young) recommend a strategy where the EU builds its own economic strength and resilience while staying anchored in rules-based trade. The EU should keep prioritizing domestic policy goals, using its market power and regulatory tools to support growth, jobs and security at home. Doing so will form the core of a more competitive strategic autonomy. At the same time, member states need to coordinate enough to avoid pushing the costs of globalization onto one another and to prevent a patchwork of conflicting national measures. The EU should deepen trade and investment ties with partners on all continents, so it is less exposed to pressure from either the United States or China and better positioned as a key player in the multilateral trading system. Strengthening supply chains, technology capacity and the defence-related industrial base are central to this effort. In parallel, the EU should help keep the WTO functioning, work with others to update its rules and use WTO-compatible tools where possible. In the short term, it will often have to muddle through the Trump period with sector-by-sector bargaining, but the long-term goal should be a more autonomous and resilient EU economy that can both defend its interests and uphold an open, rules-based trading order.

International Institutions: Key Recommendations for the EU

The authors in the Institutions section (Drieskens, Fiorino, Smith, Veggeland) are also clear on their advice: under weaker transatlantic relations and more volatile US policies, the EU should approach international institutions as core instruments of European power and legitimacy, not as stable extensions of US–EU partnership. Doing so will require moving beyond a ‘wait and see’ posture and protecting the EU’s agency when US support is uncertain. The EU should be able to sustain institutional functions if the US withdraws, reduce the risks created by retaliation, and work to keep multilateral forums credible as places for rule-setting rather than coercive bargaining. Because internal division is a key constraint, the EU’s influence in the United Nations (UN) system and other bodies depends on stronger member state alignment and more predictable European financial and diplomatic capacity.

More generally, the EU should combine adaptation, selective pushback and long-term institutional strengthening. It should adapt where needed to manage short-term risk, while avoiding dependency or appeasement. It should resist in targeted, coalition-backed ways when core norms and interests are at stake. Over time, it should prioritize ‘reconfiguration’ by strengthening international rules, funding models and coalitions with like-minded states so institutions are more resilient to funding shocks, obstruction and shifting power balances. It should also stay the course on long-horizon agendas, especially climate and health and keep building durable EU leadership that is less exposed to temporary US political swings.

Democratic Values and Climate: Key Recommendations for the EU

Authors in the democratic values section (Andersson, Azmanova, Holmes, Newman) find that there is a clear crisis in the underlying consensus that has structured strong transatlantic relationships for the past 70+ years. The commitment to democracy, the rule of law, pluralism and minority rights is weakening on both sides of the Atlantic. This commitment arguably reached its height in the immediate post-Cold War period. Yet, a series of global shocks, including 9/11 and its aftermath, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2015–2016 migration crisis, anti-internationalist and anti-EU sentiments and finally the COVID-19 pandemic, have shaken those earlier commitments to the core. These factors have shaped the rise of right-wing, populist, xenophobic politics on both sides of the Atlantic. More recently, the second Trump administration has directly undermined the shared values and commitment to the transatlantic alliance. The relationship has gone from one of strong alliance, to growing scepticism, towards what now can be seen as outright antagonism.

At the same time, parts of the population and political elites across the Atlantic converge in the rejection of core liberal principles. This convergence has produced an overall picture in which liberal institutions are muddling through, at best and are being actively dismantled, sometimes from the inside out, by populist forces. Within this context, the EU is called on to be a leader in reestablishing the core values that helped achieve the peace and prosperity of the long twentieth century. Its strength lies in EU institutions as a site for multilateral coordination and a ‘bully pulpit’ for the centrality of democratic and rule of law values. The EU must recommit to robust policy and programmatic ways of modelling inclusive approaches to social solidarity and support for precarious and vulnerable populations; returning to models of social integration and human rights guarantees for people on the move; strengthening institutional responses to populist attempts to destabilize, undermine or co-opt democratic procedures, and rule of law principles. There is also a need to balance the need for investment in European security strategies and economic growth with social cohesion, commitments to environmental stewardship and increased civic and democratic participation.

Policy Recommendations on EU–US Relations

Security

Author Chapter title Key policy recommendations
Riccardo Alcaro Overview and Background: Right-wing Nationalism, Trump and the Future of US–European Relations

 

– Reduce EU dependence on US defence and prepare for a weaker US commitment to NATO.

– Strengthen EU military, energy, technological and industrial capacities.

– Avoid fragmented national approaches and rely on pragmatic, issue-by-issue cooperation.
Monika Sus Functional Adaptation Without Much Love: NATO and the Strains of EU–US Relations – Increase European defence spending and shared capabilities to manage US unpredictability.
– Use strong public support for EU defence to justify deeper cooperation.
– Accept uneven progress while gradually reducing reliance on US military assets.
Reuben Wong EU–US–China Security Relations – Invest in European defence capabilities and the defence industrial base.
– Reinforce coordination through NATO, the Strategic Compass and the Trade and Technology Council.
– Pursue a pragmatic China policy while diversifying partnerships to reduce vulnerability.
Jost-Henrik Morgenstern-Pomorski and Karolina Pomorska The Russia–Ukraine War and Transatlantic Relations – Expand European production and supply chains for weapons, emergency supplies and reconstruction.
– Improve military interoperability and develop genuinely European capabilities.
– Provide Ukraine with credible, long-term security guarantees if US support weakens.

Trade

Author Chapter Key policy recommendations
Erik Jones

 Transatlantic Trade from Embedded Liberalism to Competitive Strategic Autonomy

 – Keep domestic policy goals at the centre of EU economic strategy.
– Coordinate national responses to globalization to avoid burden-shifting.
– Use EU regulatory and economic power to shape global trade norms while protecting domestic interests.
Arlo Poletti  EU–US–China Trade Relations – Prepare to impose credible retaliatory trade measures when EU interests are harmed.
– Strengthen trade ties with partners across regions.
– Make full use of the EU’s geoeconomic policy toolkit.
Alasdair R. Young

From Trade Skirmishes to Trade War? Transatlantic

Trade Relations during the Second Trump Administration

 – Diversify trade and reduce vulnerability to US pressure while supporting the WTO.
– Pursue internal reforms to boost competitiveness and defence-related capabilities.
– Strengthen supply-chain resilience in strategic sectors.
Kent Jones Transatlantic Trade, the Trump Disruption and the World Trade Organization – Expand rules-based trade with non-US partners using the WTO framework.
– Muddle through with sector-by-sector bargaining during the Trump period.
– Strengthen WTO rules, including through plurilateral agreements.

International Institutions

Author Chapter Key policy recommendations
Michael Smith
Overview and Background: International Institutions, Populism and Transatlantic Relations
 – Prepare for further weakening of transatlantic cooperation.
– Use resistance, adaptation and reconfiguration to sustain institutions.
– Focus on institutional resilience rather than restoring past cooperation.
Edith Drieskens The United Nations – Acknowledge that EU–US relations at the UN are unequal.
– Increase European capacity to fill gaps left by US retrenchment where possible.
– Build stronger consensus among EU member states for coherent UN action.
Daniel Fiorino The Trump Administration and Climate Policy – Maintain EU climate leadership despite US obstruction.
– Continue Green Deal policies such as ETS expansion, CBAM and climate finance.
– Frame climate action as supporting jobs, security and democratic resilience.
Frode Veggeland Turbulence in the World Health Organization: Implications for EU-US Cooperation in a Changing International Order – Strengthen EU support for the WHO and global health governance.
– Build coalitions of willing partners within and beyond the WHO.
– Increase EU strategic autonomy in health while deepening cooperation with like-minded states.

Democratic Values

Author Chapter Key policy recommendations
Douglas R. Holmes
Overview and Background: Democracy and Populism: The European Case
 – Treat populism as a structural political challenge.
– Develop anticipatory tools to identify emerging political pressures.
– Reinforce democratic engagement, especially through the European Parliament.
Saul Newman Illiberalism and Democracy: The Populist Challenge to Transatlantic Relations – Strengthen liberal democratic institutions.
– Counter exclusionary populist narratives and protect minority rights.
– Improve regulation of digital platforms to limit misinformation.
Ruben Andersson The Illiberal Bargain on Migration – Protect civil liberties and limit surveillance overreach.
– Rework partnerships with migration host states through broader cooperation.
– Frame migration as a social and economic issue rather than a security threat.
Albena Azmanova Vulnerable Groups, Protections and Precarity – Address economic precarity as a driver of populism.
– Shift industrial policy toward stable jobs and public services.
– Govern global markets through labour and environmental standards.

(*) Marianne Riddervold is a research professor at Arena, Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo and at the Norwegian Institute of international affairs (NUPI). She is also a senior fellow at the UC Berkeley Institute of European studies. 

(**) Guri Rosén is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is also a senior researcher at Arena, Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway.

(***) Jessica Greenberg is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a political and legal anthropologist, with expertise in the anthropology of Europe, postsocialism, human rights, social movements, revolution, democracy and law. Her most recent book is Justice in the Balance: Democracy, Rule of Law and the European Court of Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2025).

References

Tocci, Nathalie, and Riccardo Alcaro. 2012. “Three Scenarios for the Future of the Transatlantic Relationship.” Transworld Working Paper 4. Rome: Istituto Affari Internazionali. https://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/three-scenarios-future-transatlantic-relationship

AI, artificial intelligence, and the concept of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation: A man uses his smartphone displaying the red text “Fake News,” surrounded by related keywords. Photo: Dreamstime.

Post-Truth Populism: A New Political Paradigm

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Please cite as:
Syvak, Nikoletta. (2026). “Post-Truth Populism: A New Political Paradigm.” ECPS Book Reviews. European Center for Populism Studies. January 19, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/br0025

This review assesses Post-Truth Populism: A New Political Paradigm (2024), edited by Saul Newman and Maximilian Conrad, a timely and theoretically ambitious contribution to the study of contemporary populism. The volume advances the argument that post-truth populism is not merely about political lying, but about a deeper transformation in the status of facts, expertise, and epistemic authority in democratic life. Combining political theory, media studies, and comparative analysis, the book conceptualizes post-truth populism as an epistemic struggle in which claims to “truth” are grounded in identity and moral antagonism rather than verification. While the collection’s conceptual breadth sometimes comes at the expense of analytical coherence, it offers valuable insights into how populism reshapes knowledge, trust, and democratic governance in an era of information disorder.

Reviewed by Nikoletta Syvak*

This book review examines the edition 2024 – Post-Truth Populism: A New Political Paradigm, edited by Saul Newman and Maximilian Conrad, which explores the relationship between populism and post-truth in contemporary politics. The book offers an interpretation of post-truth populism (PTP) as a stable political complex in which anti-elitist mobilization logic is combined with a crisis of trust in expert knowledge and institutional sources of information. The review evaluates the central thesis of the collection, its place in political science literature, the quality of its arguments and empirical evidence, as well as its methodological strengths and limitations. It concludes that the book makes a significant contribution to the study of populism and political communication, although a unified conceptual framework is not always maintained at the level of individual chapters.

The main thesis of the collection is that post-truth is not limited to “lies in politics,” but reflects a change in the status of facts and expertise in the public sphere. The editors emphasize that populism has epistemic potential: the opposition between “the people” and “the elites” turns into a conflict between “the truth of the people” and “the manipulation of the elites,” where plausibility is subordinated to political identity (p. 4). In this sense, post-truth populism can be understood as a form of politics that not only ignores facts but actively redefines the conditions under which facts become legitimate in the first place. Particularly important is the idea that post-truth should be understood not as relativism, but as a kind of “truth fundamentalism”: actors can reject verifiable data while offering their own “only true” reality (p. 8).

The book is organized into four sections: theoretical debates about PTP, followed by chapters on political communication and media, counter knowledge and conspiracy narratives, and finally, the consequences for democracy (pp. 11-16). Thus, the collection combines political theory, media studies, and comparative politics, showing that post-truth politics concerns not only information bubbles but also the transformation of democratic institutions.

First, the book clearly positions itself within the political science literature on populism. The editors use an approach in which populism is understood as a “thin-centered ideology” based on a moral division of society into “pure people” and “corrupt elites” (p. 4). However, the collection also draws on the more recent “epistemic turn” in populism studies, which views populist politics as a struggle over knowledge, trust, and authority (p. 1). This allows the book to go beyond interpretations of populism exclusively as an electoral strategy or a reaction to economic crises.

Second, methodologically, the book is an edited volume, which means it includes different approaches. Qualitative methodology dominates conceptual analysis, a discursive approach, and case-oriented argumentation. However, the collection is not limited to theory. For example, the section on communication and media includes a study that uses experimental design to test how populist messages influence the perception of facts and the tendency toward “factual relativism.” This strengthens the book’s evidence base and shows that the PTP framework can be operationalized and tested, rather than just discussed at the level of metaphor.

Thirdly, the quality of writing and clarity of argumentation are generally high. The introduction provides a good introduction to the problem, quickly identifies its empirical relevance, and explains why post-truth populism cannot be reduced to moral condemnation of politicians. At the same time, it should be noted that some chapters in the collection may be theoretically dense and difficult for readers without prior knowledge: this is a typical feature of edited volumes, where a uniform style is not guaranteed.

Finally, the main question is how convincing the argument is and why it is important for us to pay attention to it. The strength of the book lies in its demonstration that PTP is not only about “fakes” and manipulation, but also about the erosion of trust as a resource of democratic governance. If citizens no longer share basic procedures for determining facts, rational public debate becomes impossible, and politics turns into a competition of moral narratives and identities. In this sense, the book raises a fundamentally important topic for contemporary political science

However, there are limitations. The term “post-truth populism” may be too broad and applicable to too many different phenomena, from anti-elite rhetoric to conspiracy theories and platform disinformation.

Furthermore, the claim of a “new paradigm” requires strict criteria: what exactly distinguishes PTP from mere populism plus media scandals? The collection presents a compelling formulation of the problem but does not always offer a single set of verifiable criteria that would allow PTP to be clearly distinguished from other forms of political communication.

Conclusion

Overall, the book makes a significant contribution to political science: it shows that populism should be analyzed not only as an ideology or mobilization strategy, but also as epistemic politics-the struggle for the legitimacy of knowledge and the right to “truth” in the public sphere (pp. 4-8). Despite its methodological heterogeneity and risk of conceptual vagueness, the collection is useful for researchers of populism, political communication, democratic theory, and the crisis of trust. The main merit of the book is its ability to explain why post-truth populism has become not a temporary anomaly but a symptom of structural changes in modern democracies.

 

(*) Nikoletta Syvak is a Graduate Student, Department of Political Science and International Relations, East China Normal University (ECNU). Email: syvaknikoletta@gmail.com

 

Newman, Saul & Conrad, Maximilian (eds.). Post-Truth Populism: A New Political Paradigm. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. 349 pp. ISBN: ISSN 2946-6016 

Dr. Kamran Matin is a Reader in International Relations at the University of Sussex.

Dr. Kamran Matin: Iran Regime Has Ruled by Coercion, Not Consent

by AuthoritarianismEditor’s ChoiceHomeInterviews

Iran is entering a critical juncture as renewed protests expose both the fragility and the resilience of the Islamic Republic. In this in-depth interview with the ECPS, Dr. Kamran Matin argues that since the 2009 Green Movement, the Iranian regime has ruled “primarily through coercion rather than consent,” relying on repression while retaining the support of only a small social base. Yet violence alone does not explain regime survival. As Matin emphasizes, the Islamic Republic endures “not only through violence, but through a fragmented opposition” that lacks organizational depth, ideological coherence, and a credible alternative vision. Drawing on political economy, Gramscian theory, and regional geopolitics, Dr. Matin analyzes why economic shocks quickly become systemic political crises in Iran—and why, despite widespread de-legitimation, the unresolved question of “what comes next” continues to constrain revolutionary outcomes.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Iran has entered one of the most volatile phases of its post-1979 history. The protest wave that erupted after the sharp currency shock of late December 2025 quickly escalated into explicitly anti-regime mobilization, revealing not only the depth of socio-economic dislocation but also the political vulnerabilities of the Islamic Republic. In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies, Dr. Kamran Matin—Reader in International Relations at the University of Sussex—offers a theoretically informed analysis of the current conjuncture, foregrounding two interlinked claims that capture the central stakes of the moment: “Since 2009, [the] Iran regime has ruled by coercion, not consent,” and “[the] Iran regime survives not only through violence, but through a fragmented opposition.”

For Dr. Matin, the disputed 2009 election and the Green Movement mark a critical turning point in the regime’s mode of rule. As he emphasizes, “almost all of these signals are present in some form, but at least since 2009—going back to that critical moment—the Iranian state, the Islamic Republic, has ruled primarily through coercion rather than consent.” In his account, the erosion of consent is not merely ideological but institutional: the narrowing of factional pluralism and the weakening of reformist mediation diminished the regime’s capacity to manage dissent through electoral incorporation. The result, he argues, is a system that “retains the support of a small segment of Iranian society—perhaps 10 to 15 percent at most, and maybe closer to 10 percent,” while relying on “brute force: repression, torture, imprisonment, surveillance, and so on” to govern the remainder.

Yet Dr. Matin’s analysis also resists purely repression-centered explanations of authoritarian durability. Alongside state violence, he argues, regime survival is sustained by the organizational weakness and strategic incoherence of its opponents. “I would argue that, in addition to massive levels of violence, what sustains the regime is precisely the fractured nature of the opposition, its disorganization, and the absence of a political discourse that appeals equally to the main segments of society.” Even as protests broaden to include bazaar networks, students, workers, women, and peripheral provinces, the opposition—he contends—lacks the institutional capacity to translate mobilization into a viable transition project. “Apart from state violence,” he continues, “this lack of an organized alternative—ideologically, discursively, and organizationally—is a key factor keeping the regime in power.” The enduring strategic dilemma is therefore not simply the de-legitimation of the regime, but the absence of a credible successor: “Many people ask themselves, ‘What comes next?’”

Across the interview, Dr. Matin situates these dynamics within wider debates on revolutionary crises, hegemonic contestation, and regional geopolitics. He examines how economic shocks in a rentier political economy can rapidly become systemic political conflict; how coercion is deployed through targeted and exemplary violence; and how opposition plurality can both energize revolt and inhibit the formation of a unifying, “national-popular” project. Taken together, Dr. Matin’s intervention offers a stark but analytically precise assessment of Iran’s predicament: a regime increasingly dependent on coercion, confronting a society in revolt—yet facing an opposition still struggling to answer the question that shadows every revolutionary moment: what comes next?

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

In Iran, There Is No Sharp Distinction Between the Economic and the Political

Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Ali Hamaney on billboard in Tabriz, Iran on August 11, 2019.

Dr. Kamran Matin, thank you so much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: Protests in Iran reportedly originated in a sharp currency shock on 28 December 2025 and rapidly escalated into explicitly anti-regime mobilization. Through what causal pathways do socio-economic dislocations in Iran—currency collapse, inflationary spirals, and distributive breakdown—translate into systemic political contestation rather than reformist grievance, and how does Iran’s specific configuration of state–market–religious authority condition this radicalization?

Dr. Kamran Matin: First of all, I would like to thank you for giving me this opportunity to discuss the protests in Iran. Your question is obviously very dense and contains multiple sub-questions. I will try to address them one by one, to the extent that I remember them.

In terms of economic grievances translating into political contestation, I think we have to bear in mind that Iran is still largely a rentier state. Therefore, like many rentier states—but also developmental states in general—there is hardly anything that is not political in essence. There is no sharp distinction between the economic and the political, because the economic accumulation of capitalists, or the work that the working class does for capitalists, in a country like Iran is ultimately not based—if I use the language of Marxist political economy—on surplus value in the sense we understand it in theory. Rather, profit is ultimately a redistribution of external rent by the state to various sections of society. As a result, the distribution of profit and wealth is politically determined, although not directly; it is mediated through multiple institutions and mechanisms.

In that sense, it is very easy in Iran for economic problems to become political issues. This has always been the case, even before the revolution, during the Shah period. Currently, however, this dynamic has intensified, because the combination of sanctions, the illicit economy, and the informal economy means that control over currency, in particular, is very tightly exercised. The government allocates foreign currency at different rates to different actors. There are cheaper rates from which large industrialists or merchants can benefit, but access to these requires proximity to the state or the government. So even economic competitiveness becomes a fundamentally political process. It is not economic in the straightforward sense that greater efficiency or lower production costs automatically generate higher profits. That logic has very limited purchase in a place like Iran.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the protests began in the so-called bazaar and then very quickly turned into a popular, widespread political movement. However, we should also bear in mind that the bazaar, in the context of Iran—and to some extent perhaps even in Turkey—has somewhat different meanings and characteristics. Historically, the term bazaar referred to the large mercantile bourgeoisie involved in trade. But in recent decades, and probably even earlier, the bazaar has come to include different layers. For example, the current protests were not initiated by traditional, ideologically religious merchants as such, but by shopkeepers selling electronic goods. These goods are imported, especially from Asia—South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere—and these traders were unable either to buy or to sell because the currency was in free fall. As a result, they initiated the protests. Because society as a whole was already suffering from high inflation, unemployment, and general economic insecurity, the wider population could easily identify with their grievances.

As for the second part of your question—about Iran’s specific configuration of state–market–religious authority and how it conditions this situation. The bazaar, particularly its traditional merchant class, has historically been very close to the ulama, or clerical class, through intermarriage and shared religious conservatism. At the same time, the security forces—the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and the Basij militia—have largely been recruited from the petty bourgeoisie, as well as from these social strata in different parts of Iran. There is therefore a close linkage among these elements. The government itself may be internally diverse, with competing factions, but in moments of crisis such as the current one, these factions tend to close ranks in order to weather the storm. The Supreme Leader plays a key role in maintaining a certain level of coherence within this system, though that is something we might discuss later.

Finally, there is, of course, the question of minorities, nationalities, and women—the gender dimension. In the last major wave of protests, the “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi,” or “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, women and subaltern nations were at the forefront, while large cities—especially in majority Persian-speaking regions—were comparatively quiet. This time, however, the pattern has been somewhat different. The protests began in Tehran and other major cities, while significant sections of Kurdistan remained relatively quiet, although some areas were highly active and bore the brunt of repression in the early days—places such as Ilam or Kermanshah. This difference also calls for explanation and is related to the way the previous protest wave was suppressed, as well as to the fragility and temporary nature of solidarity between the center—Persian speakers or Iranian nationalists more generally—and groups such as the Kurds, the Baluch, and the Arabs. 

I hope I have addressed your question, but I am sure that we will return to many of these issues again in subsequent questions.

Wider, More Popular, Yet Unorganized: The Limits of Expanding Protest Coalition

“Woman, life, freedom”: London protest draws thousands following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody on January 10, 2022. Photo: Vehbi Koca.

If the current protest wave incorporates bazaar and merchant networks alongside students, workers, women, and peripheral provinces, how does this re-composition of class alliances alter the movement’s structural power, organizational density, and leverage vis-à-vis the state when compared to 2009, 2017–19, and 2022? In particular, does bazaar participation reintroduce a historically decisive—but long dormant—node of revolutionary capacity?

Dr. Kamran Matin: The fact that the bazaar was involved is significant, because in the previous protests you mentioned there was always this notion that the so-called gray area of the Iranian population was not participating. By this gray area, people meant those who were unhappy or dissatisfied but not willing to go to the streets, protest, and risk their lives. This time around, that changed, because we saw participation not only in big cities but also in small ones. There were a large number of casualties in places whose names I had never even heard before—very small towns in distant provinces like Khorasan in the northeast, near Afghanistan—where historically we have seen very little in the way of radical protest against the regime. 

So, I think this time the protests were wider and more popular, with the partial exception of Kurdistan, which again has to do with the way Iranian nationalism operates. Opposition forces often fail to acknowledge Kurdish grievances as such, and not only that: by accusing Kurds of separatism and of being foreign agents, they actually—albeit indirectly—help the Iranian state repress them even more brutally. As a result, people were very afraid of much harsher repression in Kurdish areas, and some parts remained quiet, although, there were many protests in other regions.

Another important point is the significance of the Green Movement in 2009. Just to clarify, in case readers do not remember, it was triggered by a disputed election in which Ahmadinejad was declared the winner, even though Mousavi, the other candidate, contested the result, leading to large protests. That episode effectively resulted in the strategic marginalization of the so-called reformist faction within the Islamic Republic from the state apparatus and state power. This had incredibly important consequences for subsequent protests, because before 2009 the Islamic Republic was often able to remain flexible vis-à-vis popular mobilization. The reformist faction could articulate some of the grievances, allowing people to continue expressing their dissatisfaction through the electoral system by voting for reformist candidates. In this way, the Islamic Republic was able to absorb a great deal of social and political energy and was therefore not as fragile or brittle politically as it later became.

With the sidelining of the reformists, the state became more or less monolithic, dominated by what Western commentators often describe as hardliners or conservatives. Reformists did not disappear entirely, but they no longer wielded any significant power. At the same time, people lost faith in the reformist route to change. From that point onward, every new protest became more radical. Electoral participation dropped dramatically, even according to the state’s own statistics, which are themselves highly engineered and manipulated. Around 2017 or 2018, a famous slogan emerged: “Neither reformists nor conservatives—this is the end of the story.” In effect, people were saying that they no longer trusted either faction, which meant that they were now seeking radical change in the state itself. In their view, the Islamic Republic had to go.

In the most recent protests, we can also see that there was no reference to any possible alternatives within the establishment or the regime, and the slogans were overtly radical. Many of these slogans had appeared in previous protest waves as well, but from the limited footage I have seen, the key difference was the level of determination shown by protesters in confronting the security forces. They fought them in the streets and, in some cases, even chased them away. This is why, on the 8th or 9th of January, the regime deployed the IRGC. There are also many reports suggesting that the regime brought in militias from Iraq—the Shi‘a militias of the PMU, or Hashd al-Shaabi—as well as other foreign elements of the so-called axis of resistance that it could mobilize. The idea was that, because they were foreigners, they would have no relatives or social ties that might restrain their actions.

So, the density was there, and the scale was there, but organization was not necessarily present—and that is something we may want to discuss further.

Why Repression, Not Legitimacy, Remains the Regime’s Decisive Pillar

Free Iran Protest in Toronto, Ontario: A large group of demonstrators marches south along Bay Street. Photo: Cameron Ballantyne Smith.

In assessing whether the Mullah regime is approaching a decisive rupture, which indicators matter most analytically: elite fissures within the clerical–security nexus, defections or hesitation within coercive institutions, breakdowns in fiscal extraction and strike coordination, or erosion of regime legitimacy within religious networks? How should these signals be weighted relative to one another?

Dr. Kamran Matin: Almost all of these signals are present in some form, but at least since 2009—going back to that critical moment—the Iranian state, the Islamic Republic, has ruled primarily through coercion rather than consent. It still retains the support of a small segment of Iranian society—perhaps 10 to 15 percent at most, and maybe closer to 10 percent. For the rest, it relies on brute force: repression, torture, imprisonment, surveillance, and so on.

If I use Gramscian language, there were periods when a form of hegemonic governance existed, combining coercion with consent. Consent was generated through elections—however engineered they may have been—but also through internal plurality and factional diversity. Reformists and hardliners coexisted, and people could choose one over the other. At the time, many Iranians used to say that they were choosing the “bad” over the “worse.” That option, however, was removed after 2009. From then on, there was effectively only the “very bad” to vote for.

All the other indicators you mention are also present: dire economic conditions, a deep crisis of regime legitimacy, a lack of future prospects, international isolation, and geopolitical weakening—especially since October 7 and developments affecting the so-called proxy forces in the region, the fall of Assad, and related events. Without sheer violence, the Islamic Republic would not be standing. We can see this clearly in the current round of protests as well. Millions of people took to the streets across Iran, in both small towns and large cities, and yet within two nights the regime killed so many people that it managed to force the population back into their homes.

I would say—and this is not just my view, but one shared by scholars of revolution—that it is not enough for a population simply to reject the way it is ruled for a revolution to succeed. For a revolution to succeed, the state must also be unable to repress in the way it has. As long as the repressive and security organs of the state are both willing and capable of suppressing protests, the regime is likely to survive. This is precisely what we have seen over at least the past ten years. So, I think this is the most important indicator.

An indirect confirmation of this can be seen in the way the 12-day war last summer paved the way for the current protests. Militarily, people saw that the Islamic Republic was unable to defend itself. A large number of the most senior commanders of the IRGC were killed on the first day, and the so-called axis of resistance forces disappeared from the political scene, at least temporarily. This created the impression that the state was far more fragile than before, which encouraged people—or gave them the courage—to act as they did this time.

On top of that, there was a statement by Trump, which initially emboldened the protesters. But we know what happened afterward: he changed his position, and the threat of intervention, at least for now, disappeared. This again demonstrates how vital the physical, coercive power of the state remains for keeping it intact and for sustaining the current elite in power. The moment it changes, the Islamic Republic will fall.

So, everything now really depends on whether the coherence of the security apparatus and the repressive organs of the state can be maintained in the period ahead.

Many Symbols, No Common Project

Building on your work on societal multiplicity and the nation’s Janus-like form, how should we interpret the coexistence of competing symbolic projects in the streets—monarchist iconography, republican imaginaries, feminist slogans, and multi-ethnic frames? Under conditions of uneven and combined development, does this plurality enable a Gramscian “national-popular” articulation, or does it risk fragmenting sovereignty claims in ways that invite external instrumentalization?

Dr. Kamran Matin: I cannot remember the exact words, but Lenin has this famous line that says revolution brings together the most extreme, diverse, and different forces into some sort of unplanned alliance against the status quo. So, it is not surprising that we see very different forces—ideologically, politically, and socially—on the streets. Like most revolutions, these protests in Iran are defined more by opposition to what exists than by a shared vision of the alternative that each actor seeks to establish.

Historically, it is in such contexts that an organized political party or movement can harness this massive social energy toward a particular political objective. This role was played in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini, a charismatic leader who was able, in some ways, to direct the revolutionary movement. He was vague enough to appeal to all sections of society, while at the same time being very clear in his opposition to the monarchy. This was central to how he built a hegemonic force, as he managed to present the particular interests of Islamists as the general interest of society as a whole. This, of course, ended once the revolution succeeded, when we saw how even Khomeini had to rely on massive violence to consolidate the post-revolutionary state.

At present, we have a great diversity of social and political forces and classes, but the opposition lacks two crucial things. First, it lacks organization on the ground—again, with the partial exception of Kurdistan, where Kurdish parties have a long history of organized politics. I am sure there are clandestine networks in Kurdish cities and elsewhere, but nothing comparable exists in the rest of Iran, for a variety of reasons. One key reason is that since the 1980s the Islamic Republic has invested almost everything in the physical destruction of the left: mass executions, imprisonment, forced exile, and, even in exile, hundreds of assassinations of dissidents and political leaders. Anyone who could potentially have played a leading role was eliminated.

As a result, we lack organization, we lack charismatic figures, and neither the left nor the liberals possess organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense. A national-popular front or bloc, in Gramsci’s formulation, also requires organic intellectuals who can articulate a hegemonic project capable of uniting otherwise disparate sectors of the opposition. We do not have this, and in some respects we see the opposite dynamic at work.

Among monarchist forces gathered around the son of the former king, Reza Pahlavi, there is a strong unwillingness to engage in collaboration on an equal footing with other opposition forces. They seek dominance rather than partnership and claim a form of quasi-divine legitimacy. It is almost treated as the birthright of Reza Pahlavi to become the next monarch of Iran, or at least to lead a transitional period. As a result, meaningful cooperation with other parties or opposition groups becomes impossible. The so-called Georgetown alliance during the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement collapsed very quickly precisely for this reason, as he withdrew rather than accept equality with others.

Another major source of fragmentation within the opposition is the deployment of an exclusionary Iranian nationalism—by monarchists, by liberals in the opposition, and by the Islamic Republic itself. After the 12-day war, there was a sudden surge in nationalist symbolism: the promotion of Cyrus the Great, the erection of his statue in Tehran, and the revival of symbols of ancient Iran by the regime. The Islamic Republic understood that Islamist discourse could no longer mobilize society, but that nationalist appeals still might. At the same time, this further alienated the non-Persian peripheries of Iran, which in fact constitute more than half of the population: Azeri Turks, who make up roughly 20 to 25 percent; Kurds, around 10 to 15 percent; as well as Arabs, Baluch, Turkmens, Gilaks, and others.

Most of these groups are unwilling to contribute to the rise to power of forces that already seek to subordinate them politically and culturally. This denial of Iran’s internal diversity by large sections of the opposition creates a major barrier to forming a genuinely powerful nationwide opposition bloc. Each opposition group on its own is too small or too weak to overthrow the regime, yet the discourses they deploy and the strategies they pursue also prevent them from agreeing even on a minimal common program to confront the Islamic Republic.

I would argue that, in addition to massive levels of violence, what sustains the regime is precisely the fractured nature of the opposition, its disorganization, and the absence of a political discourse that appeals equally to the main segments of society. The Women, Life, Freedom slogan did manage to do this briefly. However, as I noted earlier, it was quickly undermined both by internal divisions within the opposition and by the regime itself. Within weeks, an alternative slogan emerged—“Man, Motherland, Development”—which is strikingly reminiscent of fascist slogans from Mussolini’s Italy. Woman, Life, Freedom versus Man, Motherland, Development. Until recently, Reza Pahlavi even displayed this slogan on his profile on X. I think the brief hegemonic role played by the Women, Life, Freedom slogan was significant, but it was actively undermined by substantial sections of the Iranian opposition. 

Necro-politics in Practice: How the Regime Governs Through Maiming, Fear, and Exemplary Violence

Pro-government demonstrators march in support of the regime after the weekly Friday Prayers on January 05, 2018 in Tehran.

Reports describe systematic maiming, mass casualties, and targeted injuries amid an intensifying crackdown under communication blackouts. How should we conceptualize this repertoire of violence—deterrence, exemplary punishment, strategic mutilation, or biopolitical terror—and what does comparative evidence suggest about its medium-term political effects on mobilization, radicalization, and regime cohesion?

Dr. Kamran Matin: The Islamic Republic has a very complex necro-politics. Even the treatment of the dead has a particular political economy. In addition to what you mentioned in the question, many people have been shot in the eyes. This is very deliberate, because the aim is for those who are injured to remain alive and visible, walking around in public, so that others see this as the fate of anyone who opposes the regime.

This is particularly striking because, in the past, the Islamic Republic sought to conceal its violence. Even now, it is only in recent years that there has been some acknowledgement that in 1988 around 3,000 to 5,000 political prisoners were executed. At the time, almost nobody knew; most Iranians were unaware because it was carried out entirely in secrecy. By contrast, today state media actually show the protests and even display bodies in morgues and other locations.

What is also remarkable is that when families of those who have been killed go to collect the bodies of their loved ones, they are required to pay for the bullets that were fired at them. For each bullet, they are reportedly asked to pay around seven million Iranian tomans, which at the current exchange rate is roughly $80 or so—I cannot recall the exact figure. In other words, families are literally required to pay for the bullet that killed their loved one in order to retrieve the body.

On top of that, there are reports that families are offered the option of signing a document stating that the person who was killed was a member of the Basij, the pro-government militia—thus turning them, quote-unquote, into a “martyr.” This allows the government to claim that large numbers of security forces were killed by terrorists allegedly backed by Israel, the US, and others. If families refuse, the bodies may be buried in unmarked graves, and the family may never know where their loved one is buried. In some cases, families are confronted with this choice in addition to the financial demand.

I should add, however, that demanding money for bullets or for the return of bodies is not new. This practice was widespread in the 1980s, especially in Kurdistan, but also in cases involving political prisoners who were executed or hanged in prisons. The Islamic Republic therefore deploys violence in a highly complex and sophisticated manner. It uses exemplary punishment to deter others from protesting and to instill fear across society. When people see injured individuals everywhere, or witness bodies being withheld, mishandled, buried anonymously, or simply disappearing, the psychological impact is deeply traumatizing.

In the short term, this strategy may work for the regime by frightening people into submission. In the longer term, however, it produces enormous anger and even hatred within society—among individuals, families, and communities. This accumulated resentment is likely to erupt again in future protest waves. Yet the Islamic Republic is almost built on periodic crises; in a sense, it thrives on them. Just before we began, I saw a pro-regime journalist or activist claiming that, thanks to God, these recent events have extended the life of the Islamic Republic by fifty years.

They feel that they have not only repressed the protests, but that the very fact of having done so successfully has given them a sense—not of legitimacy, but of unassailability. This, in turn, makes people think twice before participating in the next round of protests.

Why Iran’s Opposition Is Unprepared for Transition

During revolutionary moments, the question of political succession becomes decisive. How would you characterize the current opposition landscape in terms of organizational depth, ideological coherence, and governing capacity, and what risks emerge when maximalist anti-regime unity is not matched by institutional preparedness for transition?

Dr. Kamran Matin: The opposition has none of these: neither organizational depth, nor a clear plan, nor the human capacity to run post-regime governance in any meaningful way at the moment. The material elements are there, but they are not organized in any coherent way. Again, I would distinguish between the situation in Kurdistan and the rest of Iran, because there are important differences.

I could talk for hours about this, but briefly, there are organized Kurdish parties with bases very close to the border, and there is an organic connection with society. As we remember from 1979, the moment the Shah fell, the Kurdish regions became autonomous and self-governing because this organizational infrastructure was already in place. We see similar patterns in Rojava after 2011, or in Iraq after the 1991 Kuwait War. But in the rest of Iran, we do not have this, and I think this absence is absolutely crucial.

Apart from state violence, this lack of an organized alternative—ideologically, discursively, and organizationally—is a key factor keeping the regime in power. Many people ask themselves, “What comes next?” And this is precisely why many were reluctant to take to the streets in the past. One reason Reza Pahlavi’s name was chanted in some protests is that people believed he had a workable plan, although we later saw that he really did not. He called on people to go to the streets and suggested that help was on the way, echoing Trump’s rhetoric, and obviously nothing materialized. In fact, many people now blame him for a significant portion of the casualties in Iran. So, overall, the opposition is rather weak.

Trump’s Iran Rhetoric Aims at Behavioral Change, Not Regime Change

US Presidential candidate Donald Trump held a campaign rally at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 4, 2024. Photo: Chip Somodevilla.

US President Trump’s call for Iranians to “keep protesting” and his claim that “help is on its way” mark an unusually explicit rhetorical intervention. How do such statements reshape internal protest dynamics, regime threat perceptions, and escalation logics—and where do they sit on the spectrum between moral encouragement, strategic signaling, and coercive diplomacy?

Dr. Kamran Matin: I think for Trump all three are objectives—strategic signaling, coercive diplomacy, and moral encouragement. But ultimately, he is pursuing his own interests. And his primary interest is not regime change, but a change in the regime’s behavior. That is crucial, because it means that Trump may seek to instrumentalize the protests in order to extract a deal from the regime.

The problem is that Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, cannot make such a deal, because it would be perceived as a form of submission. Any agreement—at least one based on US conditions—would be seen as a defeat of the regime. And those conditions are unacceptable: no nuclear enrichment, no long-range missiles, and no proxy forces. These are core pillars of the Islamic Republic, so they simply cannot concede them. This means that even though US preference is for behavioral change rather than regime change as such—and this is clearly articulated in the US National Security Strategy released a few weeks ago, as well as reflected in recent US interventions, such as in Venezuela—this strategy has inherent limits.

Trump was hoping that internal pressure within Iran, combined with the threat of intervention, could be leveraged to secure a deal that would advance US objectives in the Middle East, open Iranian markets, and distance Iran from China, among other goals. This has not happened. And the United States does not appear to have a clear plan for what to do if a deal proves impossible. This is where US and Israeli positions diverge to some extent. For Israel, any attack would need to lead to a radical outcome; otherwise, it would incur the costs of Iranian retaliation without achieving a clear political objective. This helps explain the confusion over recent developments, including why Trump has not followed through on what he initially appeared to signal.

That said, revolutions have historically been aided—often indirectly and unintentionally—by foreign powers. The October Revolution succeeded in part because of World War I and the weakening of the Tsarist regime. The French Revolution was linked to a severe fiscal crisis driven by geopolitical rivalry with England. More broadly, many classical revolutions have occurred in the context of war and wider geopolitical crises. In this respect, Iran is not exceptional.

The key issue, however, is whether there is sufficient organization on the ground to take advantage of these geopolitical and inter-imperialist rivalries. Unfortunately, to a large extent, there is not.

Why Rojava’s Future Lies Beyond Counterterrorism

Turning to Syria, with Kurdish-held areas under renewed assault and the future of Rojava/AANES increasingly uncertain, what are the plausible political trajectories—forced integration, negotiated autonomy, territorial rollback, or renewed international guarantees—and which are structurally most likely given current regional alignments?

Dr. Kamran Matin: The current so-called transitional government is clearly no different in terms of what it wants to do with the Kurdish parts of the region in Syria, or with other minorities. We have seen what it has done to the Druze and the Alawites. The fact that it is not doing more, or has not been able to do so, is because there has been resistance against it. So, I would say the long-term aim of this government is to control the entirety of Rojava, while making some sort of symbolic concessions—such as the decree announced yesterday (January 16, 2026)  recognizing the Kurdish language to some extent—but without any constitutional guarantee of self-governance of the kind the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) demands.

From what happened in Aleppo in recent weeks, we know that this followed very quickly after a meeting in Paris between Israel, the Syrian transitional government, and the United States; I believe Turkey was present as well. It seems there has been an agreement that areas under SDF or Rojava control should be limited to east of the Euphrates. At the moment, the SDF is being evacuated from other regions. Leaders of the Autonomous Administration might think this will become the natural border between their autonomous region and the rest of Syria, and that may be the case in the short term, but I am confident that pressure will continue and that the government will push for more.

The Syrian government is prepared to make every concession possible to Israel in order to prevent intervention and then, with the help of Turkey, to deal with the Autonomous Administration in a gradual manner. Initially, it was thought that the so-called resolution process in Turkey—including PKK disarmament and dissolution—was the price the Kurdish movement was paying to keep Rojava safe. But I think this assessment has changed. At first, the Turkish state was clearly worried about Israel attempting to recruit allies in the region, as well as about Iran and the possibility of Iran fragmenting. Over time, however, Turkey regained its momentum. Now it is using the so-called resolution process precisely to keep the PKK, or whatever it is now called, out of the Rojava scene, and in fact to use the absence of conflict with the PKK in order to concentrate its efforts on Rojava.

I have written about this in recent weeks and days, and I do not know how much the Rojava leadership reads or listens to external advice, but I think they should be very concerned. This process is not going to end. Pressure will advance step by step, and attempts will be made to retake territory incrementally. The Autonomous Administration must ensure that its relationship with the United States is not based solely on counterterrorism and ISIS. It needs to push for some form of political recognition and for a decentralized or federal system. Otherwise, renewed conflict between the two sides is inevitable.

Regional Powers Prefer a Weakened Iran to a Collapsing One

Iran-Map

How do regional power calculations—the Erdogan regime’s anti-Kurdish security doctrine, Damascus’s centralization drive, Russia’s brokerage role, and US/Gulf/Israeli threat perceptions—intersect with Iran’s internal crisis, and what implications does each Iranian outcome (hardening, fragmentation, or transition) carry for the fate of Rojava?

Dr. Kamran Matin: This is a very complex question. In terms of existing states—not just Turkey, but also the transitional government in Syria—they are ultimately driven by a vision of a centralized, unified, and homogeneous state. In societies characterized by a multiplicity of peoples, this model clearly does not work except through violence. And violence begets violence, which is precisely what we have witnessed over the past hundred years.

In that sense, any event or process that leads to de facto decentralization of power in these states—for example, what happened in Iraq in 2003—is viewed as a major threat. Turkey still regrets having allowed the KRG to emerge in the first place, and it now harbors similar concerns regarding Iran. As a result, Turkey—which is ostensibly a regional competitor of Iran—is now openly assisting the Islamic Republic. It opposes US intervention and provides intelligence against Kurdish armed forces, because it believes that the moment the Iranian state weakens, another Kurdish entity could emerge. Such a development would have direct implications for the Kurdish question within Turkey itself.

In this sense, the Kurdish question is a challenge for all these states, but at the same time it also constitutes the basis for their tactical cooperation—and even strategic alignment—at critical moments. If Iran were to weaken significantly, or if a situation similar to Syria in 2011–12 were to unfold there, this would pose a serious challenge for Turkey. At the same time, it is important to note that Iran has a large Azeri Turkish population. Some observers are concerned that Turkey might seek to instrumentalize this segment of Iranian society through Turkish nationalist sentiments in order to establish a foothold in northwestern Iran. There is also the question of Azerbaijan and whether the two might coordinate in such a scenario.

That said, from the perspective of regional states, the overall calculus appears to be that a weakened Islamic Republic is preferable to one that collapses entirely. This helps explain why Arab states, too, have urged the United States not to attack Iran. A breakdown of central authority and a deeply unstable Iran are outcomes that alarm everyone. At the same time, while many regional actors are hostile to the Islamic Republic, they also do not want to see an unmanaged, uncontrolled, and unplanned collapse of the Iranian state. As a result, they are actively seeking to prevent such an outcome.

Populism, Trump, and Changing Transatlantic Relations

by EventsUpcoming Events

Populism, Trump, and Changing Transatlantic Relations

Date: 3 February 2026

Time: 14:30 – 16:30 CET.

ECPS Role: Co-host

Language: English

Venue: Room 3E2 Spinelli, Brussels  / European Parliament

Description: This event is organized with the European People’s Party (EPP). This event is private.

Event Details

The European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) and  European People’s Party (EPP) are pleased to invite you to the Launch Event for the ECPS annual report, Populism, Trump, and Changing Transatlantic Relations, at the European Parliament in Brussels on February 3rd, from 14.30 to 16.30.

This year’s report focuses on populism and transatlantic relations during the Trump administration, based on four pillars of the relations: security, trade, international institutions, and democratic values. Each section includes a background chapter introducing the overarching debate, followed by three case studies that address specific questions and enable cross-comparison. Authors also provide policy suggestions where possible. 

The event will be hosted by MEP Radan Kanev, the keynote address will be delivered by MEP Valérie Hayer, and remarks will be given by MEP Brando Benifei. The editors of the report, Prof. Marianne Riddervold, Associate Prof. Guri Rosén, and Prof. Jessica Greenberg, will present the report’s findings. 

In this project, ECPS collaborates with the ARENA at the University of Oslo, the European Union Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IES at the University of California, Berkeley, and CES at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The report is partially funded by the Jean Monnet-TANDEM and Transat-Defence Projects.

The event will be at the European Parliament, Room 3E2 Spinelli, Brussels, Tuesday, 3 February 2026,14:30 – 16:30 CET.

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