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Assoc. Prof. Hellström: Many Swedes Feel That Rejudification Has Gone Too Far

September 11, 2026

by ECPS_admin with No Comment Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Interviews Migration

Ahead of Sweden’s September 13, 2026 election, Associate Professor Anders Hellström argues that the Sweden Democrats’ influence can no longer be measured only by their vote share. Positions once treated as extreme have increasingly become “the default position, the standard,” while nativist rhetoric has become “a kind of ‘common sense.’” He also warns of growing resistance to the consequences of this restrictive turn, especially the expulsion of people deeply rooted in Swedish society, noting that “many Swedes feel that rejudification has gone too far.” For Assoc. Prof. Hellström, the deeper democratic challenge is whether mainstream parties can construct an inclusive national vision without reproducing SD’s exclusionary understanding of belonging, welfare, identity, and Swedishness.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

As Sweden heads toward the September 13, 2026 general election, the country faces a political landscape increasingly shaped by the long-term normalization of the Sweden Democrats (SD) and by a broader mainstreaming of restrictive positions on migration, integration, citizenship, and national belonging. Once treated as a stigmatized outsider, SD has become a central actor in Swedish politics and is now deeply embedded in the governing architecture created through the Tidö Agreement. At the same time, the party continues to compete with the Moderates (M) for leadership of the Swedish right, while its core themes have increasingly influenced the language and policy priorities of mainstream parties.

In an interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Associate Professor Anders Hellström, Senior Lecturer in International Migration and Ethnic Relations at Malmö University and affiliated with the Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM), argues that the most important transformation may not be SD’s electoral strength alone, but the extent to which ideas once considered politically extreme have become normalized. According to Assoc. Prof. Hellström, positions on immigration that would have been regarded as beyond the mainstream a decade ago have increasingly become “the default position, the standard.”

This development, he suggests, has altered the political balance between stigmatization and accommodation. SD, once able to mobilize as an excluded underdog, has become part of the establishment. Yet mainstream accommodation has not necessarily weakened the party. As Assoc. Prof. Hellström puts it, from the voter’s perspective, “why should we vote for the copy when we have the original?” He also argues that nativist rhetoric has itself become “a kind of ‘common sense,’” reflecting a deeper transformation in the boundaries of legitimate political discourse.

The interview situates these developments within broader struggles over national identity, political myth, welfare chauvinism, and the meaning of Swedishness. Assoc. Prof. Hellström emphasizes the continuing importance of Folkhemmet as a powerful national narrative whose boundaries can be drawn inclusively or exclusively. He also highlights SD’s restorative vision of Sweden, built around nostalgia for an earlier and more homogeneous society.

At the same time, Assoc. Prof. Hellström points to growing resistance against the consequences of increasingly restrictive policies. He notes that many Swedes are uncomfortable with the expulsion of people who were born in Sweden, speak fluent Swedish, and have contributed to Swedish society, concluding that “many Swedes feel that rejudification has gone too far.”

Against the backdrop of the September 13 election, the interview therefore moves beyond the immediate question of who will govern Sweden. It asks whether the deeper transformation lies in SD entering government—or in the extent to which the political mainstream itself has already been reshaped by SD’s language, assumptions, and conception of national belonging. As Assoc. Prof. Hellström observes, “the Sweden Democrats have already won” in one important sense: Sweden’s major parties now broadly accept the need for a highly restrictive immigration policy.

Here is our interview with Associate Professor Anders Hellström, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.

The SD’s Views on Immigration Policy Have Become the Default Position

Professor Hellström, welcome! Just days before the September 13 election, the Sweden Democrats remain close to 20 percent and are again competing with—or polling ahead of—the Moderates for leadership of the Swedish right. More than a decade ago, you described SD as the stigmatized “beast” of Swedish politics, excluded by mainstream parties but able to mobilize precisely through that exclusion. Today, SD is deeply embedded in the Tidö governing arrangement. Does this election mark the completion of SD’s journey from stigmatized outsider to normalized pillar of the Swedish party system, or does some element of its outsider status remain politically indispensable to its appeal?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: Yes and no. There is a concept we might call the mainstreaming of previously extreme positions. Ten years ago, derogatory statements about immigration and immigrants were regarded as extreme. The Sweden Democrats (SD) said things that the mainstream parties did not. Today, however, SD does not even have to say very much, because other parties—and their leaders—are themselves using very hostile language when talking about immigration and immigrants. They argue that Sweden needs a very restrictive immigration policy, and so forth.

So, what was depicted as extreme 10 years ago has become mainstream today. But you can also talk about a third stage. From the beginning, the Sweden Democrats were regarded as too extreme. Then they came to be seen as more radical challengers of the establishment: you could vote for the Sweden Democrats because they wanted to challenge the government and the establishment. But now something very interesting has happened. The Sweden Democrats have themselves become part of the establishment.

All the other parties are also saying insane things. Of course, the Sweden Democrats are still a little more extreme. But they are no longer seen as the underdog, because their views on immigration policy have become the default position, the standard.

Therefore, of course, I do not know what will happen in the election or how big they will become, but there is a feeling in society that many Swedes think developments toward rejudification have gone too far. Why do we expel people who were actually born in Sweden, who earn a lot of money, who speak fluent Swedish, and send them back to countries where perhaps their grandfather came from, even though they themselves have never been there? Why do you expel people who have done nothing wrong? So there is a tendency for many Swedes to feel that rejudification has gone too far.

The Beast Has Been Tamed

In “Feeding the Beast,” you and Peter Hervik challenged the idea that anti-immigration sentiment simply accumulates beneath an elite-imposed consensus until it eventually erupts. Instead, you argued that nativist rhetoric itself can make immigration anxieties more salient and thereby nourish radical-right support. Looking at Sweden in 2026, where restrictive migration rhetoric is now common across much of the mainstream, has the political system effectively “fed the beast” by adopting the language and problem definitions that originally distinguished SD?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: Yes. When we wrote this article, the Sweden Democrats were actually the beast. They were seen as something that should not be part of the establishment—something the cat had dragged in. But now, the beast has been tamed, so it has become, as I said before, something default, something standard. I would say that nativist rhetoric has become a kind of “common sense.”

Why Should We Vote for the Copy When We Have the Original?

The Moderates (M), Christian Democrats (KD), and Liberals (L) have progressively abandoned the cordon sanitaire around SD, while migration, crime, citizenship, and integration policies have moved markedly in a restrictive direction. Mainstream parties often justified this shift as a strategy for neutralizing SD by responding to voter concerns. Yet SD remains close to one-fifth of the electorate. Does this suggest a fundamental failure of the accommodation strategy—that mainstream parties can adopt radical-right policies without recovering the voters who originally demanded them?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: Yes, I would say so, because from the voter’s perspective, you vote for the original, not the copy. So it doesn’t matter if the Moderates and the other parties are becoming more friendly toward SD or if they no longer see SD as a beast. Rather the opposite: they have understood the truth. Then voters say, “Okay, why should we vote for the copy when we have the original?” Therefore, this has actually strengthened their momentum, because, from the voter’s perspective, why should they vote for the copies?

The Stigma—That Tool for Mobilization—Is Gone

Your earlier work showed how the stigma attached to SD could paradoxically be politically productive because the party could portray itself and its voters as unfairly excluded from the legitimate political community. Now that institutional exclusion has largely disappeared, has SD lost an important mobilizational resource? Or has the party successfully transferred the old stigma from itself onto other antagonists—immigrants, Muslims, “liberal elites,” the media, or supranational institutions?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: It has lost that because there is a potential advantage in being a radical underdog. That can also be attractive to voters—you want to vote for the newcomer. But now, that stigma—that tool for mobilization—is gone. So it is good to be radical, but not to be seen as too extreme. You want to be close to the sum of equations, so to speak.

But now people are saying that maybe they have got too much power. And there may be, as I said, reactions against too many restrictions. But, of course, I don’t know that. Maybe there are a lot of people. We will see. It could be very interesting to see the election results on Sunday. There is a fraction of the Swedish population who actually like the policies that have been suggested by SD, but I don’t know how large that fraction is.

They Want to “Bring Sweden Back”

Your work on Nordic populist radical-right parties shows that the Sweden Democrats have been particularly active in constructing national myths around a lost “golden age” of ethnic homogeneity and social cohesion. How important is this nostalgic structure to SD’s appeal in the 2026 election? Is the party fundamentally mobilizing voters against immigration, or is immigration functioning as a symbol of a broader narrative that Sweden has lost something culturally, socially, and politically valuable?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: One thing that is important to understand is that SD does not want to create a new niche or anything like that. They want to restore Sweden. They want to bring Sweden back—to make Sweden great again, as Donald Trump says. For them, Sweden was great in the 1950s and 1960s, before the official adoption of multiculturalism in 1997 and before refugee migration.

For instance, an interesting fact is that in 1960, 4% of the Swedish population were foreign-born. Now, the figure is at least 20%. So this kind of demographic shift has created fissures in the population. This strategic appeal resonates with voters because they want to return to the period when they and their parents were young. They remember their childhood as a time when things were easier and society was more homogeneous. That is a fact: Sweden has become more diverse, and some people in the electorate dislike that demographic shift.

The Folkhemmet Has Always Had Both Inclusive and Exclusive Features

You have shown that SD has been unusually successful in appropriating the historical language of the Folkhemmetand linking the Social Democratic welfare-state tradition to a culturally bounded conception of national belonging. Has this appropriation altered the very meaning of the Swedish welfare state—from a universalist social project toward something increasingly conditional on national, cultural, or civilizational belonging?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: That is, of course, hard to tell. But if you have to remember one thing about the Folkhemmet, it is that it is a myth used strategically by political actors, but it is also a narrative of what Sweden is. Folkhemmet conveys the idea of Sweden as a people’s home. It is deeply embedded in many people’s minds, and the people’s home has always had both inclusive and exclusive features.

So, we welcome everyone—yes, everybody can become Swedish—but there have always been boundaries defining those who are not part of the people. Whether the people’s home becomes more inclusive or more exclusive depends, for instance, on which parties hold power. But the people’s home remains a major historical narrative that binds Swedes together. And it can be both inclusive and exclusive.

Who Actually Has the Right to Welfare Resources?

The concept of ‘welfare chauvinism’ captures the combination of social protection for insiders with exclusion or conditionality for outsiders. As migration politics has moved into the mainstream, do you see welfare chauvinism itself becoming normalized in Sweden—not merely as an SD position, but as an increasingly accepted way of defining solidarity and deservingness across the party system?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: Welfare chauvinism says that we want to have welfare. But for whom do we want welfare? Welfare for our people. It is the idea that you combine an active welfare state with social cohesion or cultural conformity. That also means having an idea of who is included among “the people.” Are immigrants included, or is it only for native Swedes? Who actually has the right to welfare resources?

And again, what will happen in the future depends very much on who actually leads the country. There are parties and movements representing both regressive and progressive forces in society and within the party-political structure as well. So there is a struggle right now, and I do not know exactly which direction Sweden will take.

For the SD A Muslim Can Never Truly Be Swedish

In your work on racism as a political activity, you emphasize that political struggles concern not only whether racism exists but also who gets defined as victim and perpetrator. You identify victim–perpetrator reversal as an important feature of far-right discourse. How significant is the growing rhetoric of ‘svenskfientlighet’ —hostility toward Swedes—in this transformation of Swedish political language? Does it allow majority-group grievance to be recoded as victimhood while simultaneously making structural inequalities affecting minorities more difficult to articulate?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: Yes, exactly. The victim-perpetrator reversal concerns the question of who the immigrant is. Is he or she a victim, or is he or she actually a perpetrator who threatens our Swedish values and can never become like us? This rhetoric—who is the victim and who is the perpetrator?—can also be applied, for instance, to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Who is the perpetrator, and who is the victim? That makes it important to look at the ideological motives behind such statements. According to the actor, who is the perpetrator and who is the victim? That can actually shift.

For instance, something I am looking at right now is the discussion about whether it is possible to be both Muslim and Swedish. For the Sweden Democrats, you have to make a choice between being a Muslim believer and being a Swede. You have to let go of one of those two identities. For them, a Muslim can never truly be Swedish. Or he or she can, but only by first letting go of the Islamic identity.

The SD Is No Longer Stigmatized

One of the puzzles running through your earlier research was that SD could expand despite overwhelmingly negative treatment from mainstream political and media actors. Your work on the “politics of shame” suggests that stigmatization may help create counterpublic identities in which supporters experience themselves as silenced, morally condemned, or excluded. Has Swedish democracy underestimated the political power of this counterpublic dynamic—particularly the way perceived exclusion can strengthen identification with populist radical-right movements?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: Yes, in the politics of shame, it is about how stigmatization can be used to create a shared identity. We have been stigmatized together, so we have something in common. They are evil, and we are the good guys. We come together, and that can trigger or stimulate a sense of in-group mobilization. But, as I said before, when SD is seen as part of the establishment, it loses that capacity. The party is no longer stigmatized. Increasingly, the risk SD faces is that it becomes associated with old news.

Liberal Democrats Need to Mobilize People Around a Common Vision

If condemnation and exclusion can reinforce populist counterpublics, but accommodation can normalize their worldview, mainstream democratic parties appear trapped between two strategies that can both strengthen the radical right. Is there a genuine democratic alternative between stigmatization and accommodation ? What would an effective strategy toward SD look like if the objective is neither moral ostracism nor ideological imitation?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: You’re right: there is probably no single correct answer. But what you can do is focus on your own liberal-democratic institutions and build up their resilience. You also need to articulate clear visions—visions that can bring people together. Perhaps you can focus on other issues around which people can unite, such as fighting climate change, or something else that can mobilize people around a common purpose.

And when it comes to immigration, one-fifth of the Swedish population are immigrants. That is a reality. It is too late to say that immigrants should go home. Instead, you need to mobilize people around a common vision and be secure and confident in your own institutions.

Of course, you can disagree with someone and not share their views, but that does not mean you need to kill or beat them. At least you can talk. It is perfectly legitimate to have different opinions. The key is not to eliminate conflict, because conflict is natural and is part of politics. If you combine that recognition with the understanding that not everyone needs to agree with you, then you can be clear about your own vision—and create a vision that includes more people.

Democratc Necessitates Both Majority Rule and Minority Protection

Sweden continues to rank as a strong liberal democracy, yet democratic resilience is not only about the survival of elections and institutions. It also concerns the boundaries of legitimate political discourse, minority protection, pluralism, and social trust. Should we therefore understand the normalization of nativist language as a form of democratic erosion even when formal institutions remain stable? Or would that stretch the concept of democratic backsliding too far?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: If you look at what democracy is, Jonathan Bouffe wrote about the democratic paradox. Democracy is a paradox because it involves both majority rule and the protection of minorities. There is always a tension between the two; it is a compromise. There is no final, perfect solution. It is a balance that needs to be discussed continuously. You cannot simply say, “This is the perfect solution; this is how we do it.” That is why we have different people with different opinions.

Regarding your question, yes, problems can arise if you have a democracy that protects only the majority and disregards minorities. That creates a risk of sliding toward a more authoritarian state. You can end up with an illiberal democracy. But in order to have a liberal democracy, you need both majority rule and minority protection.

Sweden Was a Role Model for Integration Policy

The success of SD has often been explained through failures in immigration policy, integration, crime prevention, or political responsiveness. But could the deeper failure of mainstream parties be representational rather than policy-specific—their inability to articulate a persuasive account of national belonging that acknowledges insecurity and social change without translating them into an exclusionary distinction between a virtuous native “people” and threatening outsiders?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: In a way, it is very interesting that you raised that, because what actually triggered my interest in the Sweden Democrats in the first place, a long time ago when I started, was a big paradox. Everyone, from the left to the right, was talking about the failure of integration. Then I looked at the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), and according to it, Sweden was the best in class. So Sweden was a role model for integration policy, while everyone on the street was talking about the failure of integration.

This paradox interested me. If you have this mantra of the failure of integration—and I am not saying that integration has been super successful—I am saying that if you have a population with more than 20% immigrants, of course, you can find examples of very successful integration, and you can also find examples of very poor integration. Because there are so many people, you can find many examples, depending on what you are looking for.

If you have this mantra, it has actually been very good news for the Sweden Democrats, because they can say, “We have an answer to that problem.” And for them, it is like: “don’t let them come here, and for those who do come, give them money so they can leave the country. And we don’t want to spend any money on integration.” But they have a recipe, while all the other parties, or most of the other parties, are talking about how integration has been so bad, so horrible, and that we have to do something. From the voter’s perspective, do you vote for someone who can say, “Okay, we have a solution”? Because everyone agrees that there is a problem.

Apart from that, you can also mention that it is very common in the debate to say that nobody wants to return to 2015, when you had the big reception crisis. I actually wrote a report on that period, and I concluded that it was a window of opportunity for both progressive and regressive forces in society. Yes, it created enormous pressure on municipalities. At the same time, you had a period when people opened their homes, there were language cafés, and there were very strong forces in civil society and in the Swedish Church. Everybody was saying, “Let’s fight together; we want to help the refugees.”

So there you have this tendency: both progressive and regressive forces. It is important to remember that. And when it comes to integration, you have examples of very good integration and also very poor integration. You can have both.

Politics Also Needs Stories

In your scholarship, political myths do not simply falsify history; they provide narratives through which communities establish continuity, belonging, and moral meaning. SD has been particularly effective at constructing a story in which contemporary Sweden represents a fall from an earlier, more cohesive national community. Why have mainstream parties been so much less effective at producing an alternative national narrative capable of combining diversity with social solidarity and a credible sense of collective continuity?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: That’s a very good question. From my perspective, you need to appreciate the storytelling dimension of representative politics. There is nothing wrong with telling stories that bind people together. In that sense, populism can be seen as a protest against politics as usual. It offers something beyond pragmatism—also a sense of redemption. It says: come together and find this emancipatory glue that can bind us together.

I think the answer—the key to addressing this—is not to reduce politics to technocratic means, because that becomes too rational. Politics also needs stories. For instance, you can tell a story about diversity: Sweden has become a much more exciting country to live in than it was 50 years ago. It is much more interesting, I would say, also from an outsider’s perspective. Yes, it is more exciting these days.

The SD Radicalizez Mainstream Popular Concerns

One of your articles distinguishes different strands within far-right ideology and argues that racism should be understood as a struggle over meaning rather than simply as an individual prejudice. As SD has professionalized and moderated parts of its public language, should scholars pay less attention to explicit racist statements and more attention to the underlying political work performed by categories such as culture, civilization, integration, national values, and “Swedishness”?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: That is one common distinction between the extreme and the radical. The thing is, if you look at the Sweden Democrats, they no longer use that language—that race-revolutionary language. Maybe they did in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They want to appear like the common man.

And their opponents normally make a mistake. They look at them and say, “No, don’t vote for SD.” Why? Or they portray them as very bad people, as evil guys. But the thing is, the Sweden Democrats do not use this kind of explicit racist rhetoric.

Instead, you can say that they radicalize mainstream popular concerns. And you can say that they rely on an identitarian logic—the logic of difference. It is like: “One people belongs to one country. Yes, those people are very nice, but they should not be here in Sweden. I don’t have anything against you, but you are not welcome in Sweden. It’s only for the Swedes. And the Swedish people are based on an ethnically homogeneous community.”

Politics Is Not Only About Distribution; It Is Also About Identity

The September 13 election appears increasingly structured not simply by a conventional left–right cleavage but by competing understandings of nation, migration, identity, and political community. Are we witnessing a durable transformation of Sweden’s cleavage structure in which the central conflict is becoming less about redistribution and more about who belongs to the nation, who deserves solidarity, and whose version of Swedishness is politically legitimate?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: I would say that it’s not an either-or question. Questions of distribution are important, and so are questions about identity and other issues. More and more, these have become political issues, so political cleavages are no longer only between the left and the right, but also between good and evil, or some kind of moralization of politics. So, these kinds of identity-related issues matter. But it doesn’t mean that redistribution does not matter. It only says that politics is not only about distribution; it is also about identity.

The Sweden Democrats Have Already Won

And lastly, Professor Hellström, looking beyond the immediate question of who governs after September 13, what would you regard as the more consequential long-term outcome: that SD formally enters government, or that its nativist conception of nationhood becomes sufficiently normalized that the distinction between the Sweden Democrats and the democratic mainstream becomes progressively harder to identify? In other words, is the deeper test of Swedish democratic resilience about keeping the radical right out of office, or about preventing the political mainstream itself from being transformed in its image?

Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: The thing is, we don’t know that yet. But both the current Prime Minister and the leader of the largest opposition party (Social Democrats) are talking about the need for a very restrictive immigration policy. So, from that perspective, the Sweden Democrats have already won. The biggest parties—the mainstream parties—agree that Sweden needs a very restrictive immigration policy.

But I can only say that there is considerable resistance to this. People are not very comfortable with it, especially when people who were actually born in Sweden, who may be well known, speak fluent Swedish, and have contributed a great deal to Swedish society are expelled from the country. A lot of Swedish people dislike that development.

What will happen in the future, we don’t know. We can only hope for the best. And it is important to acknowledge the storytelling dimension of representative politics and to build a vision that people can share and believe in.

From Mobility Inequality to Populist Grievance: Passport Privilege, Travel Influencers, and the Politics of the Digital Tourist Gaze

September 10, 2026

by ECPS_admin with No Comment Commentaries Digital-populism Editor’s Choice Home

In this commentary, author Zeynep Temel examines how passport hierarchies and unequal mobility shape not only who can travel, but also who gains the authority to represent the world through digital tourism. Drawing on research on visa regimes, mobility infrastructure, the tourist gaze, and platform-mediated representation, she argues that passport privilege can become representational privilege. Travel influencers do not simply document destinations; they participate in constructing their meanings for global audiences. Yet access to this representational power is structured by nationality, class, wealth, and mobility rights. Temel further shows how such inequalities can feed broader grievances around globalization, exclusion, sovereignty, and dignity, creating discursive conditions in which populist narratives may resonate without claiming that mobility inequality itself directly causes populism.

By Zeynep Temel*

A striking map of the world has circulated repeatedly on social media. Produced by Sightsmap from geotagged photographs uploaded to Google’s former Panoramio service, it visualizes photographic activity as points of light. Europe glows. North America is heavily illuminated. Other parts of the world appear far more sparsely represented. In the ranking associated with the map, New York, Rome, and Barcelona occupied the first three positions among the world’s most photographed cities (Marcus, 2014; Swanson, 2015).

Author-generated visualization inspired by the historical geography represented in Sightsmap. Sightsmap combined crowdsourced digital traces, principally geotagged photographic metadata from Google’s former Panoramio service, with other sources to estimate the popularity of places of tourist interest. The visualization should be understood as an illustrative reconstruction of the unequal geography of visibility represented by this historical digital ecosystem, rather than as a reproduction of the original Sightsmap or a comprehensive measure of global photographic activity (Tammet et al., 2013).

The map is not a contemporary measure of Instagram or TikTok activity. Panoramio itself was discontinued, and the visualization reflects a particular platform, user population, and period of digital photography. It should therefore not be mistaken for a neutral map of where photographs are taken today. Yet this limitation arguably makes the image more interesting rather than less. As an early visualization of digital tourism, Sightsmap raises a question that has become considerably more important in the age of travel influencers: who gets to see the world; and, consequently, who gets to construct its image for everyone else?

Contemporary travel content often makes international mobility appear almost frictionless. Creators move from Bangkok to Paris, spend a weekend in Istanbul, “discover” villages in the Caucasus, or work remotely from Bali. Borders are rarely protagonists in these narratives. Travel appears primarily as a function of curiosity, money, and individual choice. But a British, German, or Japanese travel creator and an Afghan, Pakistani, Nigerian, or Syrian creator do not encounter the same world of borders. They may look at the same map, but the map does not offer them the same possibilities.

This matters beyond tourism. If travel influencers increasingly participate in constructing how destinations are imagined by audiences who may never visit them, unequal access to international mobility also produces unequal opportunities to participate in the production of the global tourist imaginary. Passport privilege can, in other words, become representational privilege.

The Unequal Geography of Global Mobility

The passport is one of the most consequential yet normalized mechanisms through which states distribute international mobility. Research on visa regimes shows that globalization has not produced a uniformly borderless world. Instead, borders have become more permeable for particular populations. Czaika, de Haas, and Villares-Varela (2018) demonstrate the persistent differentiation built into international visa regimes, while Mau and colleagues (2015) describe the resulting hierarchy as a “global mobility divide.”

For holders of powerful passports, this divide can remain almost invisible. International travel may require little advance planning beyond purchasing transportation and accommodation. For others, the same journey can involve consular appointments, proof of employment and income, bank statements, travel insurance, accommodation reservations, substantial fees, and uncertainty over whether permission will ultimately be granted.

The costs of this system are themselves unequally distributed. Recchi, Deutschmann, and Gabrielli (2020) show that visa costs impose disproportionate burdens on travelers from poorer countries. Neumayer (2006) similarly demonstrates how visa restrictions allow states to regulate access to foreign spaces selectively rather than simply opening or closing borders to everyone equally.

Spijkerboer’s (2018) concept of a global “mobility infrastructure” is particularly useful here. International movement depends upon a network of laws, airports, consulates, transportation systems, technologies, financial resources, and administrative categories. This infrastructure enables some people to move quickly and predictably while making movement considerably more difficult for others.

A powerful passport therefore represents more than convenience. It is a form of mobility capital. And in the age of social media, mobility capital can become cultural capital.

Who Constructs the Tourist Gaze?

Urry’s (1990) classic concept of the “tourist gaze” challenged the idea that tourists simply encounter destinations as they are. What travelers consider beautiful, authentic, exotic, romantic, or worth photographing is shaped by representations they have encountered before travelling. The Sightsmap visualization offers an unusually literal illustration of this process. It does not simply tell us where tourists went; it records where a particular population of digitally connected travelers chose to photograph and geotag their surroundings. Research using geolocated tourism data has since demonstrated both the usefulness and the limitations of such digital traces: different platforms capture different tourist practices and populations, meaning that no single dataset can straightforwardly represent tourism itself (Salas-Olmedo et al., 2018).

Social media has nevertheless dramatically accelerated the circulation of the tourist gaze. Before visiting Cappadocia, travelers encounter thousands of images of hot-air balloons at sunrise. Bali appears through temples, beaches, rice terraces, and infinity pools. Paris is repeatedly condensed into a recognizable repertoire of balconies, cafés, streets, and monuments. Travelers subsequently reproduce many of those images themselves.

Instagram therefore does not simply document tourism. Research suggests that it participates in the co-creation of destination image: tourists, residents, tourism organizations, and influencers continuously produce and reproduce visual understandings of places (Iglesias-Sánchez et al., 2020). Influencers occupy an especially interesting position within this process. Their authority depends partly on the appearance of personal experience. Unlike conventional tourism advertising, influencer content often presents itself as an individual encounter with a destination: this is what I saw; this is what I discovered; this is what you should experience.

Yet these narratives necessarily involve selection. Landscapes are chosen, neighborhoods included or excluded, encounters edited, and experiences organized into coherent stories. Research examining influencer representations of destinations such as Iran demonstrates how social-media creators can reshape destination images by foregrounding particular dimensions of everyday life, hospitality, culture, and perceived authenticity. (Saeidi Motahar et al., 2021)

A constructivist perspective makes the significance of this process clearer. Destinations do not possess internationally shared meanings independently of representation. Their identities as “dangerous,” “romantic,” “authentic,” “undiscovered,” or “adventurous” are socially produced and stabilized through repeated narratives and images. Travel influencers increasingly participate in this meaning-making. The important question, then, is not simply what they show. It is who gets to travel enough to become an authoritative narrator of the world in the first place.

When Passport Privilege Becomes Representational Privilege

The connection does not require an assumption that Instagram or TikTok deliberately privileges particular nationalities. The mechanism is more mundane. Consider the conditions necessary to build a career around international travel. A creator able to enter dozens of countries without obtaining visas in advance can respond quickly to cheap flights, tourism-board invitations, brand collaborations, and emerging destinations. Travel can be frequent and spontaneous. Content can consequently be produced at the regular pace demanded by platform economies.

A creator requiring visas for many of those destinations faces a different production environment. Trips may need to be planned months ahead. Applications cost money. Passports may remain at consulates during processing. Bookings can be required before a visa decision is known. An application may simply be rejected. Mobility advantage can therefore become a content-production advantage.

Successful content generates followers and commercial opportunities; those opportunities finance further travel; further travel produces additional content. Passport privilege does not determine who succeeds as an influencer, and creators from the Global South are neither absent nor passive within digital tourism. Wealth, class, language, domestic mobility, and platform access further complicate any simple North–South division.

But nationality still structures the administrative conditions under which cross-border content can be produced. This is also why Said’s (1978) much older question of representational authority remains relevant. Orientalism was concerned not merely with whether Western descriptions of other societies were accurate, but with the unequal power to classify, describe, and produce knowledge about them.

Digital tourism is obviously not equivalent to nineteenth-century Orientalism, and every outsider representation of another society should not be interpreted as domination. Yet the underlying questions remain surprisingly contemporary: Who moves? Who observes? Who narrates? And who appears primarily inside somebody else’s narrative?

From Unequal Mobility to Political Grievance

The political significance of this inequality lies partly in its visibility. Social media places radically different experiences of globalization on the same screen. One person documents spontaneous weekend trips across borders; another spends months assembling documents for permission to visit a single country. Research on passport discrimination suggests that mobility restrictions can be experienced not merely as administrative inconvenience but through questions of dignity, recognition, and unequal treatment. (Yasin et al., 2024)

It would be too strong to argue that these experiences produce populism. Visa rejection does not turn someone into a populist, and travel influencers do not cause nationalist politics. The relationship is more indirect. Populist narratives frequently acquire force by translating complicated structural inequalities into morally intelligible conflicts: ordinary people against privileged elites, the nation against external institutions, or those who are excluded against those perceived to benefit from globalization.

Mobility inequality provides unusually tangible material for such grievances because it exposes one of globalization’s central contradictions. The contemporary international order celebrates openness, connectivity, and circulation while continuing to distribute the practical freedom to move largely according to nationality.

Digital platforms make this contradiction particularly visible. Research on social-media populism has shown how online communication can transform perceived exclusion, foreign influence, and national grievance into politically resonant narratives (Ragragio, 2022). Mobility inequality can enter the same discursive environment, particularly where unequal treatment becomes interpreted through wider debates over Western privilege, sovereignty, globalization, or national dignity. Travel influencers do not create this inequality. They can, however, inadvertently become some of its most visible symbols.

The Politics Behind the Picture

This brings us back to the illuminated Sightsmap. Its brightest areas should not be read simply as a hierarchy of beautiful or interesting places. Nor can they straightforwardly be interpreted as a map of passport privilege: population, tourism infrastructure, platform adoption, wealth, connectivity, and the particular demographics of Panoramio users all shaped what became visible. But that is precisely the point. Maps of digital visibility are produced by social conditions. They do not simply mirror the world.

The same is true of contemporary travel influencing. Calls for greater diversity among travel creators are worthwhile, but representation cannot be separated from the conditions under which representation is produced. If some creators face substantially greater obstacles simply to reach destinations, the imbalance cannot be solved entirely through more inclusive influencer campaigns or changes in platform policy.

Part of the inequality exists before anyone opens Instagram. It exists in visa regimes, consular practices, passport hierarchies, income inequalities, transportation networks, and the broader infrastructure governing international movement.

A constructivist reading of travel influencing brings these elements together. Influencers do not merely reflect an already existing tourist world. Through repeated images, narratives, classifications, and recommendations, they participate in constructing that world; helping determine which destinations become desirable, which places appear dangerous or welcoming, and what counts as an “authentic” experience. But the opportunity to participate in this construction is itself structured by unequal mobility.

The digital tourist gaze therefore tells us something larger about globalization. The freedom to see the world and the power to represent it are not entirely separate privileges. Those who can cross borders most easily are particularly well positioned to narrate what lies on the other side. The question raised by that old map of illuminated photographs is therefore still worth asking: when the world becomes an image, who gets to take the picture?

(*) Zeynep Temel is a PhD candidate in International Political Economy at Marmara University, Istanbul, and is currently based in Shanghai conducting research for her doctoral dissertation. Her research interests span inequality, platform capitalism, popular culture, and gender, with a regional focus on East Asia. She works on how economic and political structures shape everyday practices, identities, and moral expectations, particularly through attention, consumption, and labor under contemporary capitalism.

References

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Iglesias-Sánchez, P. P.; Correia, M. B.; Jambrino-Maldonado, C. & de las Heras-Pedrosa, C. (2020). “Instagram as a co-creation space for tourist destination image-building: Algarve and Costa del Sol case studies.” Sustainability, 12(7), 2793. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12072793

Marcus, L. (2014, November 24). “The most photographed places in Europe.” Condé Nast Traveler.

Mau, S.; Gülzau, F.; Laube, L. & Zaun, N. (2015). “The global mobility divide: How visa policies have evolved over time.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41(8), 1192–1213. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1005007

Neumayer, E. (2006). “Unequal access to foreign spaces: How states use visa restrictions to regulate mobility in a globalized world.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31(1), 72–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2006.00194.x

Ragragio, J. L. D. (2022). “Facebook populism: Mediatized narratives of exclusionary nationalism in the Philippines.” Asian Journal of Communication, 32. https://doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2021.1993943

Recchi, E.; Deutschmann, E. & Gabrielli, L. (2020). “Assessing visa costs on a global scale.” SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3630141

Saeidi Motahar, P.; Tavakoli, R. & Mura, P. (2021). “Social media influencers’ visual framing of Iran on YouTube.” Tourism Recreation Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508281.2021.2014252

Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.

Salas-Olmedo, M. H.; García-Palomares, J. C. & Gutiérrez, J. (2018). “Tourists’ digital footprint in cities: Comparing big data sources.” Tourism Management, 66, 13–25.

Spijkerboer, T. (2018). “The global mobility infrastructure: Reconceptualising the externalisation of migration control.” European Journal of Migration and Law, 20(4), 452–469. https://doi.org/10.1163/15718166-12340038

Swanson, A. (2015, August 26). “The world’s most photographed places.” The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/26/the-worlds-most-photographed-places/

Tammet, T.; Luberg, A. & Järv, P. (2013). “Sightsmap: Crowd-sourced popularity of the world places.” In: Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2013 (pp. 314–325). Springer.

Urry, J. (1990). The tourist gaze: Leisure and travel in contemporary societies. Sage.

Yasin, R.; Ali, Ayesha; Namoco, Sarah. (2024). “Passport discrimination from the lens of critical phenomenological perspective.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSSP-04-2024-0169

ECPS Panel on Demographic Populism: Demography as a Political Battleground: Migration, Family, Race, Religion, and Radical-Right Populism

September 10, 2026

by ECPS_admin with No Comment Editor’s Choice Gender Home Migration Upcoming Events

Date/Time: Wednesday, September 30, 2026 – 16:15-18:30 (CET)

Click here to register!

Moderator

Klaudia Koxha (Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Lausanne).

Speakers

“Populist Strategies of Normalizing Demographic Fears,” by Oscar Mazzoleni (Professor in Political Science and Political Sociology at the University of Lausanne).

“The Scientific Normalization of ‘the Great Replacement’ Conspiracy,” by Alberta Giorgi (Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bergamo).

“From Demographic Winter to Civilizational Struggle: Anti-Abortion Networks and the Global Radical Right,” by Carol Mason (Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities and Professor at University of Kentucky, US).

“Mestizaje, Backlash, and the Politics of Demographic Populism: Race and Gender in Latin America,” by Carlos de la Torre (Professor at the Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Florida).

“Anti-Muslim Mobilization: Demographic Change and Radical-Right Populism in Austria,” by Reinhard Heinisch(Professor of Comparative Austrian Politics at the University of Salzburg, European Studies Center associate at the University of Pittsburgh and visiting lecturer at Renmin University of China).

Click here to register!

Brief Biographies

Klaudia Koxha is a Senior Researcher at the University of Lausanne, where she works on an international research project examining radical right populism and conspiracy theories across four European democracies. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Paris Lodron University of Salzburg and was a visiting researcher at American University in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on populism and the radical right, European integration and EU policy, gender equality, party politics, and comparative and multi-level politics. Alongside her academic work, she has contributed expertise to regional and international organizations on issues including gender equality and inclusion, integrity, and democratic governance. She regularly contributes to public and policy debates through invited talks, lectures, and expert commentary, with her work featured in outlets including EUobserver, El Mundo, The European Correspondent, and DeFacto. She is co-editor of The Radical Right and Demographic Populism (Manchester University Press, 2026), New Dynamics of Contestation in EU–Western Balkan Relations (Palgrave, 2026), and Perspectives on Populism (Nomos, 2024). Her recent research appears in Government and Opposition journal, with further work accepted for publication in Comparative European Politics and forthcoming with Presses de l’Université Laval.

Oscar Mazzoleni is a professor in political science at the University of Lausanne where he leads the Research Observatory for regional research. He has achieved an interdisciplinary educational path, with a degree in sociology and anthropology and a PhD in contemporary history between the universities of Lausanne and Turin. He has been visiting professor and research fellow at the Universities of Columbia, Cornell, Laval, Geneva, Groningen, Torino, Sorbonne-Panthéon- Paris, Science-Po-Paris, Valencia, Salzburg, European University Institute of Florence, La Tuscia, and Roma-Sapienza. His current interests are devoted on political parties, populism, nationalism, regionalism, electoral studies, and Swiss politics in comparative perspective.

Alberta Giorgi is an associate professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bergamo. Her work explores discursive boundaries and classifications, particularly at the intersection of politics, gender, religion, and science. She has recently co-edited with H. Eslen-Ziya, (Un)silencing Academia in Times of Epistemic Conflicts. Navigating Online Violence (Routledge 2026). She is co-editing with Pauline Cullen Mapping Political Sociology Ambiguities and Complexities for Unpredictable Futures (Routledge 2026)

Carol Mason is the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities and a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky, USA. She is the author of four books on various aspects of the rise of the Right since the 1960s. University of California Press published her latest monograph, From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary, in 2025.

Carlos de la Torre is a professor at the Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. He has authored several manuscripts and edited volumes on populism. His most recent books are Populism and Fascism, Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Global Populisms with Treethep Srisa-nga (Routledge Press, 2021); Populisms: A Quick Immersion (Tibidabo editions, 2019); and Populist Seduction in Latin America (Ohio University Press, second edition, 2010).

Dr. Reinhard Heinisch is a Professor of Comparative Austrian Politics at the University of Salzburg and head of the Department of Political Science. He received his academic training in the US where he completed his PhD at Michigan State University and then taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1994 to 2009. Heinisch’s research focuses on the rise of the radical right, populism, democracy, and political parties. Dr. Heinisch is the author of over 40 research articles and more than 50 other scholarly publications including 14 books. His research appeared in journals such as Journal of European Political Research, Political Studies, Journal of Common Market Studies, Party Politics, West European Politics, Democratization, Representation, and many others. His book publications include Understanding Populist Party Organization: The Radical Right in Western Europe (Palgrave 2016); The People and the Nation: Populism and Ethno-Territorial Politics in Europe (Routledge 2019), Political Populism. A Handbook, Nomos (2021), and Politicizing Islam in Austria (Rutgers University Press 2024).

Professor Andreas Jahrehorn Önnerfors is Full Professor in Intellectual History at Linnaeus University, and researcher and project leader at the Fojo Media Institute in Sweden.

Prof. Önnerfors: If SD Enters Government, Swedish Politics Will Enter a New Phase

September 9, 2026

by ECPS_admin with No Comment Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Interviews

As Sweden approaches a razor-thin 2026 election, Professor Andreas Jahrehorn Önnerfors argues that the Sweden Democrats’ significance lies not only in whether they enter government, but in how far they have already reshaped mainstream politics. He describes the Tidö Agreement as giving SD “a huge magnet” that has pulled governing parties to the right, while the collapse of the cordon sanitaire has blurred distinctions between SD and the Moderates. The interview also explores Folkhemmet nostalgia, “white melancholy,” migration, alternative media, conspiratorial narratives, enemy images, and information disorder. Looking beyond election day, Professor Önnerfors warns that Sweden may face prolonged coalition uncertainty and a deeper political realignment, concluding that “we are going to face a very hot autumn.”

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Sweden’s 2026 election on September 13 may mark a decisive stage in the normalization of the radical right. With the Sweden Democrats (SD) polling ahead of the Moderates in several surveys and the survival of the Liberals remaining uncertain, the central question is no longer whether SD has entered the political mainstream, but how far its influence has already transformed the structure, language, and ideological center of Swedish politics. In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS, Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors, Full Professor in Intellectual History at Linnaeus University and researcher and project leader at the Fojo Media Institute in Sweden, argues that a formal entry of SD into government would represent a qualitatively new phase—but also that the party has already achieved substantial success in reshaping mainstream political discourse.

Professor Önnerfors traces this transformation to the collapse of the traditional cordon sanitaire. Once the Moderates chose sustained cooperation with SD, he argues, voters were confronted with a simple logic: “Why choose the copy when I can vote for the original?” The result, in his view, has been an increasing convergence between the Sweden Democrats and parts of the traditional center-right, to the point where “in some cases it is indistinguishable whether a minister acts on behalf of the Moderate Party or on behalf of the Sweden Democrats.”

The Tidö Agreement is central to this process. Professor Önnerfors describes SD’s influence through the metaphor of “a huge magnet” that has pulled the governing parties “clearly to the right” on migration, integration, deportation, and criminal policy. This power has allowed SD to remain formally outside government while retaining its anti-establishment posture, even as it exercises substantial influence over policy. Yet this arrangement may be reaching its limits. Professor Önnerfors notes that SD has already declared its ambition to secure ministerial positions if the Tidö bloc wins, a development that would force the party to confront the contradictions between insurgent populism and the responsibilities of government.

The stakes are equally high for the Moderates and the Social Democrats. Professor Önnerfors argues that the former may face a profound identity crisis after drifting toward positions formulated by SD, while the latter must confront the failure of years of triangulation toward both neoliberal and increasingly punitive right-wing positions. In his formulation, “SD has already been successful in transforming mainstream Swedish politics.”

What follows, then, is not simply an interview about whether SD will enter government. It is a diagnosis of a deeper political realignment in which radical-right frames have moved from the margins into the core of Swedish political competition. With only a few percentage points separating the two blocs, Professor Önnerfors concludes that “we really don’t know in which direction it will go.” Whatever the result, he warns, “we are going to face a very hot autumn.”

Here is our interview with Professor Andreas Jahrehorn Önnerfors, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.

Why Choose the Copy When You Can Vote for the Original?

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. — Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson campaigns with members of the Moderate Party (Moderaterna) during an outdoor political rally in Uppsala, Sweden, on August 12, 2026. Photo: Krister Hägglöf / Dreamstime.

Professor Önnerfors, welcome! Four days before the election, the polls disagree substantially about the survival of the Liberals but agree on something potentially more consequential: the Sweden Democrats are polling ahead of the Moderates. How should we interpret this transformation of the Swedish right? Are we still looking at a mainstream center-right bloc dependent on a radical-right partner, or has the gravitational center of Swedish conservatism itself shifted toward SD?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: The situation in Sweden is, of course, similar to other situations around Europe. And the simplest explanation is that when the center-right party, Moderaterna (M), decided to enter into more or less a coalition with the Sweden Democrats (SD), voters came to an understanding: Why choose the copy when I can vote for the original? So, that is one reaction that we definitely can see. When Sweden decided against the cordon sanitaire, the cordon that supposedly would keep far-right politics out of the mainstream, that was a dangerous development, because then the two parties with most of the electoral support, the Sweden Democrats and the Moderates, were kind of joining positions, so much so that in some cases it is indistinguishable whether a minister acts on behalf of the Moderate Party or on behalf of the Sweden Democrats.

SD Successfully Appropriated the Social Democratic Ideal of Folkhemmet

SD’s support appears remarkably resilient at around 19–20 percent even amid considerable late-campaign volatility and a sharp decline in Social Democratic support. Does this suggest that SD has moved beyond the classic “protest party” phase and consolidated a durable political subculture and social constituency? If so, what are the deepest drivers of that consolidation—immigration, cultural insecurity, distrust of institutions, welfare concerns, status loss, or something more fundamental about Swedish identity?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: I think it is all of that. The Sweden Democrats have also capitalized on a triangulation pursued by the Social Democrats in relation to the previous Moderate-led governments, which focused much more on new public management, neoliberal solutions, and the economy. Meanwhile, classical Social Democratic themes of societal security—in Swedish, the concept of trygghet—disappeared from the political vocabulary, leaving space for the Sweden Democrats to capture them and connect them to the old Social Democratic ideal of Folkhemmet, the people’s home, which for decades represented the vision of creating a stable society.

This concept was then successfully appropriated by the Sweden Democrats, with all that this implies: policy proposals intended to improve people’s daily lives, but also the broader package of Folkhemmet nostalgia—the idea of a people’s home that supposedly reached its peak in the 1950s and 60s, before the arrival of mass migration. This is something the Sweden Democrats have been able to tap into psychologically and culturally, and we continue to see that to this day.

The Far Right Exploits Imagined Grievances

Your writings engage with the idea of “white melancholy” and with nostalgia for the Folkhemmet, suggesting that radical-right success may be rooted as much in culture and collective self-perception as in material economics. You have discussed nostalgia, melancholy, and “retrotopia” as powerful mobilizing forces, particularly when combined with existential fear and perceived loss. How much of SD’s contemporary strength should therefore be understood as a politics of material grievance, and how much as a politics of imagined loss?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: That ties into the same complex of ideas, doesn’t it? On an objective level, Swedish society is not characterized by huge economic gaps. People are generally well off. It is a prosperous society with good infrastructure and so on. So I would say that, in contrast to other countries—or, for instance, if you were to compare it with Eastern Germany—the grievances people talk about are more imagined than material.

These imagined grievances can then be exploited by the rhetoric of the far right. The immigrant population is portrayed as an internal enemy of the people, as draining resources from society, while the white majority population is depicted as being at risk of replacement in the future by immigrants who are presented as parasiting the Swedish economy. That is the image being sold, and it is successful with parts of the electorate.

The Sweden Democrats Have Won the Agenda-Setting Battle on Migration

A Sweden Democrats (SD) campaign poster. — A Sweden Democrats (SD) campaign poster ahead of Sweden’s September 13, 2026 parliamentary elections, featuring the slogan “This is how we make Sweden Sweden again” and highlighting the party’s policies on immigration, crime, Islamism, citizenship, welfare, and the economy.

Relatedly, you have argued that immigration can become much more than one policy field because the immigrant “other” provides a screen onto which wider anxieties about social transformation can be projected. Sweden has now adopted substantially more restrictive migration policies across much of the political spectrum. Does this weaken SD by depriving it of issue ownership, or does it demonstrate that SD has already won the deeper ideological struggle by successfully redefining how mainstream Swedish politics understands migration, integration and national belonging?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: I would say the latter. It is absolutely clear that the agenda setting has gone into that field and that SD has been incredibly successful in launching the idea that you can boil down basically any societal problem to immigration, migration, or integration.

You can take the recent PISA results as an example. They came in just the other day and also confirmed a trend that you can see across educated nations globally: that pupils’ reading capacities are decreasing and so on. But the Sweden Democrat framing of the problem is that it is down to the fact that we have an immigrated population that drags down the Swedish picture. So, anything from education to fuel prices to climate change, or whatever, can be boiled down to this entire issue of migration, immigration, and integration.

And with that agenda-setting the Sweden Democrats have really succeeded, which also makes it impossible to discuss big problems, both within the country, such as criminality and its deeper roots, or foreign policy issues, for instance, the war in Gaza and so on. Because if you park these issues on the parking lot of “it has all to do with immigration,” you don’t need to go back and ask your own values what is actually happening here, but you always have a scapegoat upon which you can project the perceived downfall of Sweden and the Swedish people.

The Tidö Agreement Has Given the Sweden Democrats Magnetic Power

The Tidö arrangement represents a remarkable transition from cordon sanitaire to institutionalized cooperation with SD. From the perspective of radical-right normalization, is the most important development of the past four years what SD itself has done, or what the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals have become willing to say and do? In other words, does mainstream accommodation moderate radical-right parties—or does it instead normalize radical-right frames throughout the party system?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: One could use an analogy here and say that, since the Sweden Democrats are not officially part of the government, what they are amassing through the Tidö Agreement is some kind of magnetic power. So, imagine that the Sweden Democrats, with this agreement, have created a huge magnet through which the issues of Swedish politics are framed. And this magnet has dragged the other parties that are part of the Tidö Agreement clearly to the right—in the area of, for instance, critique against immigration and integration, deportation, and things like that; a tough stance against criminality, and so on. That is the power that the Tidö Agreement has shaped. It has given this magnet an incredibly large power that has also made some of the government ministers more or less move over to the other side.

The Tidö Agreement Has Allowed SD to Retain Its Anti-Establishment Role

There is also a paradox here. SD can simultaneously present itself as an anti-establishment insurgent and exercise substantial influence over government policy. How sustainable is populist anti-elitism once a party becomes deeply embedded in policymaking? Can SD continue to depict “the establishment,” bureaucracies, journalists and cultural elites as hostile forces while increasingly becoming part of the governing establishment itself?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: That’s a very good question, and there are, of course, different answers to it. The Tidö Agreement has allowed SD to continue playing that role because they remain formally outside the government, in the sense that they do not appoint their own ministers. Now they have raised the stakes and said that they want to have ministers if the Tidö party family wins the elections. And that will ultimately provide an answer to this question.

At the same time, SD itself has become so powerful that it has been able to expel party members who have behaved well beyond the limits of any reasonable democratic discourse—people with Nazi or far-right sympathies who have been prosecuted and sentenced in court, and so on. Yet they have had so much electoral support that these scandals have had little effect.

The Tidö Agreement has allowed them to retain their role as an anti-establishment party. But we see time and again that SD-appointed politicians, at the local, regional, and national levels, collide with the realities of sound governance. So, if the Tidö party family succeeds in the elections, we will see this trend deepen: the incompetence of populist politicians will become even more visible, and this anti-establishment flair will begin to disappear.

This is, by the way, something that parties even further to the right than the Sweden Democrats have also capitalized on. We have a number of small micro-parties that style themselves as being outside the eight parties currently represented in the Swedish parliament. And they are already framing SD as an establishment party, which you can see in the political propaganda leading up to the elections right now.

The Sweden Democrats’ Politics of Gender Is Deeply Ambivalent

Sweden Democrats’ Square Meeting in Umeå. Jimmie Åkesson speaks to the people on the city square where opposition left-wingers have formed a chain and protest in Umeå, Sweden on August 14, 2018. Photo: Shutterstock.

Your work on “white melancholy” also discusses the perceived loss of white masculinity and the capacity of radical-right politics to mobilize across older class divisions. How important is gender to understanding SD’s electorate today? Should the persistent gender gap in radical-right support be interpreted mainly through attitudes toward immigration and crime, or does it reflect a broader politics of masculinity, authority, family, social hierarchy and resistance to changing gender norms?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: It’s an ambivalent thing because, on the one hand, it’s absolutely clear that the Sweden Democrats belong to the party families in Europe that kind of resist the idea that there would be something like toxic masculinity and so on. When we’re talking about the gender gap, we see a clear gender gap in Sweden between the parts of the electorate that are voting for SD or other parties, where we have a clear gender divide. So, male voters in all age groups are flocking to SD, and female voters are more flocking to the green and red parties.

That is a true gender gap, but beyond the true gender gap, SD also frames itself as LGBTQ+ friendly. Not because they really are, because, on the other hand, they hate Pride and drag queens and things like that, but because it’s a way of framing anti-Muslim positions. They’re highlighting their support for LGBTQI or women’s issues because of the fact that they believe that it’s so provocative for the immigrants. Of course, the projection is that the very moment they would get to power, they would get rid of these positions. They’ve just adopted them to make typical racist arguments against the perceived other.

But it’s really a little bit ambivalent because, on the one hand, they are rejecting the entire idea that there would be something that you could call toxic masculinity, and they are adopting, ambivalently, both feminist and LGBTQI positions, but for the purpose of basically using them in Islamophobic rhetoric. That makes it very difficult to untangle things. Then it’s a party where very many people have been sentenced for domestic violence, which also runs completely contrary to this image that we are the supporters of women’s rights.

The Sweden Democrats Have Captured the Frame of ‘Telling the Truth’

In your work with Emma Ricknell, you examine how Swedish right-wing alternative media contest the authority of legacy journalism by presenting mainstream media as disconnected from ordinary people while constructing their own claims to authenticity and truth. Has this alternative-media ecosystem become an independent driver of radical-right support, rather than merely an amplifier of pre-existing preferences? And does it increasingly allow SD-adjacent voters to inhabit an alternative epistemic environment in which distrust of mainstream institutions continually reproduces itself?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: Yes, an absolutely crucial element of the right-wing surge in Sweden has been the conquest of alternative and social media spaces. This is one area where the established parties have largely failed. The anti-establishment component has been strengthened by the fact that the Sweden Democrats have been very effective at using the affordances and logics of the alternative media sphere. They operate across the full spectrum—from social media, influencers, and YouTube videos to formats that imitate mainstream media, such as morning shows, as well as their own news channel, and the encouragement of so-called citizen journalism. Across this entire spectrum, the media ecosystem has been part and parcel of the right-wing surge in Sweden over the last 10 years.

Moreover, quality journalism has not been able to withstand this development. Even when scandals have been exposed—for instance, a troll factory run more or less by the party headquarters, or behavior that would never be accepted from an independent journalist—such revelations have still largely been accepted by the electorate, because the Sweden Democrats have managed to capture the frame of “telling the truth.” In that sense, the broader media environment has enabled frame capture in Swedish politics and has become an integrated part of the far-right surge.

It is very smart because it works across platforms and media forms. We can even see the Sweden Democrats engaging in popular culture, such as Schlager music in Sweden, with songs that are popular among the population and produced by or involving SD politicians. This has been an important force behind the right-wing surge.

Dog Whistle Allows Conspiratorial Ideas to Enter Mainstream Politics

Your research treats conspiracy theories not simply as bizarre false beliefs but as powerful “meaning-making narratives.” You emphasize their recurring architecture: events are not accidental, everything is connected, hidden actors are malevolent, evidence is supposedly concealed, and society faces existential danger. To what extent has this conspiratorial grammar migrated from Sweden’s political margins into more conventional discussions of immigration, crime, elites, media, EU power and national decline? Where should scholars draw the boundary between radical-right populist rhetoric and explicitly conspiratorial politics?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: The salience of conspiratorial meaning-making in Sweden accelerated during the pandemic, which allowed people to use conspiratorial meaning-making as a frame to conceptualize politics. And this has been used in different ways. The Sweden Democrats have not allowed outright conspiracy theories in the sense of allowing politicians who say that climate change is a hoax, or who promote anti-Semitic or Islamophobic conspiracy theories in an outright manner. They try to separate these things and adopt a language that is much more of a dog whistle language, which implicitly rests on conspiratorial ideas. On the other hand, they have also played with certain terms that are around. For instance, instead of demographic change, they talk about an exchange of the population, which we internationally would call the Great Replacement Theory, this conspiracy theory purporting that some elites are trying to replace the natural national populations of European countries with mainly Muslim immigrants.

The establishment of far-right populism has tried to tone down the outright use of conspiracy theories, but has still been using those frames. They don’t believe in climate science. They don’t believe that immigration is caused by international conflicts, and so on. But they don’t say it openly, and the people within their party who say these things openly are also excluded from the party. But, in the wider far-right ecosystem and among party members, and particularly in social media posts, you can see these conspiracy theories expressed outright time after time, and even more so among the more radical offshoots of the far-right parties. You can see that you have explicit conspiracy theories.

Now, I’m leading a project ahead of the Swedish elections, and what we can see, for instance, on social media is the idea that the Social Democrats are associated with gang criminals, that gang criminals have been admitted to Sweden through Social Democratic policies, and that the Social Democrats have allowed mass migration as a way to create voting cattle and preserve their own power. That is a very strong conspiratorial narrative that is circulating.

Within that same sphere, a much more outlandish conspiracy theory holds that Sweden’s economic powerhouse family, the Wallenbergs, are the wire-pullers behind politics. This is far more conspiratorial and ties into QAnon and deep-state conspiracy theories that remain more on the fringes. I hope that gives you an answer to that question.

A Polarized Information Environment Is a Perfect Target for Manipulation

You have also shown how conspiratorial narratives can function as vectors of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, precisely because they exploit pre-existing grievances and provide emotionally compelling causal explanations. As Sweden approaches an exceptionally close election, how should we distinguish between authentic domestic radical-right mobilization and the external amplification of the same divisions by foreign actors? Is the principal vulnerability disinformation itself, or the pre-existing distrust and polarization that make particular narratives persuasive?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: It goes both ways. In order for conspiratorial narratives to function as vectors of foreign information manipulation, you have to have either existing or imagined grievances that you can exploit among your target audiences. That can be used by a foreign actor in many different ways.

Now, ahead of the elections, we haven’t seen that actually happening straight away, for many different reasons, but we have had a campaign before that targeted Sweden while we were in our NATO accession talks: a legend that Swedish social services are stealing Muslim children and giving them to sexually deviant foster parents. That was a campaign that grew very big in different parts of the world and was amplified through foreign information manipulation and interference, as well as domestic amplification.

Then you can argue that, in certain policy fields, the potential objectives of foreign actors—foreign threat actors—might already be fulfilled, in the sense that there is considerable doubt about the consensus around climate science in Sweden. We recently had a report about wind energy in Europe that shows that Sweden is a hotbed of anti-wind-power disinformation. So, if you were a foreign threat actor that you don’t need to construct a campaign against Sweden, because opinion is so divided on this issue that it already reaches government levels.

So, it’s a tricky one. Then, of course, as you say, we are moving into the absolutely hottest phase of the election now. We are looking at things right now in the information environment where we don’t exactly know who the sender is. Like I was talking previously about this conspiracy theory that the Social Democrats are supported by gang criminals who have been imported to Sweden. They are siding up with the Muslim Brotherhood. They have imported voting cattle from the MENA region to Sweden to stay in power and stuff like that. Who is planting these narratives? Is this really some kind of independent distribution of political opinions ahead of the elections, or is this coordinated? It’s premature; we can’t tell that right now. But of course, if you imagined yourself as a threat actor sitting on this kind of red toolbox of campaigning, then this would be a perfect thing to throw into this very polarized information environment ahead of an election, trying to manipulate the results.

We should also talk about the fact that Sweden, over the last two elections, has had very narrow results that have resulted in very prolonged periods in which we had to find a viable government, and most projections right now point in the same direction for this year. It would be extremely narrow. We are living in a kind of 50% democracy right now, where we don’t know exactly which side will win, and in any case, the formation of a government will be very tricky.

Very Different Political Positions Can Unite in a General Attack on the System

The Swedish LVU (Swedish Care of Young Persons Act) controversy demonstrated that distrust of institutions can also emerge within migrant communities, while your collaborative work has examined emotional mobilization around Swedish social services and the construction of “us” and “them.” Does this complicate the common assumption that conspiratorial distrust belongs primarily to the radical right? Can very different constituencies—anti-immigration movements, marginalized migrant communities and foreign influence actors—converge around a shared narrative of an untrustworthy Swedish state, even when their ideological starting points are completely different?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: Exactly. That gets to the heart of the issue. The LVU campaign, which concerns decisions by Swedish social services to place children in foster care, was framed as something that unfairly targeted migrant communities. The campaign lasted for more than two years. But from our research, we know that an almost identical narrative had already been directed against the Norwegian social services, Barnevernet, this time by Russian actors and amplified in the Russian information space. So the basic storyline remains the same, while the groups portrayed as victims of this supposedly dictatorial welfare state—or, more broadly, the system—can be exchanged.

In the aftermath of the LVU campaign, which primarily targeted Muslim minorities in Sweden, we have also seen the same narrative of a dictatorial welfare state taken up by Catholic extremist groups and, more recently, by American Christian nationalists supporting a Romanian family that wanted to raise its children according to Christian values. So the point of convergence is that very different political positions can be united through a general attack on the system. We are increasingly talking about a form of anti-system, anti-government extremism that questions the very existence of institutions and the expertise of the state.

That said, of course, no system is without failures. Many decisions leading to the foster care of children in Sweden can be questioned on very good grounds. That is not what I am saying. But we have procedures in place for doing so. Many journalists are also working on these cases, and some of them are absolutely preposterous. The distinction, however, is between legitimate criticism of the exercise of governmental authority and the conspiratorial accusation that the system itself is corrupt and that a deep state exists with the sole purpose of manipulating the entire population. In the end, that kind of belief may discourage people from exercising their voting rights or from identifying with society at large.

Enemy Images Have the Potential to Radicalize into Lethal Violence

Black Lives Matters Protest in Stockholm, Sweden on June 3, 2020.

In your work on “enemy images,” the out-group becomes an existential threat and politics is organized around an increasingly unbridgeable distinction between “us” and “them.” How useful is this framework for understanding contemporary Swedish debates about migrants, Muslims, criminal gangs and allegedly disloyal elites? At what point does legitimate political debate about migration, integration or crime cross into the construction of an enemy image that begins to undermine equal citizenship and democratic pluralism?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: We are already seeing this, and, as with most enemy images, they are fueled in particular by conspiratorial imagination. Internal and external enemies are identified, and the figure of the immigrant captures both, because it is a figure that comes from the outside in and asserts itself. Mostly, it is the idea of male immigrants that is perceived as threatening—entering the body politic of Sweden and being seen as a danger. This fantasy can grow so deep and so wide that it leads to lethal violence.

We had two school attacks in Sweden recently. They have not officially been called acts of right-wing terrorism, but if you dig deeper, you see clear connections to the people who were targeted, particularly in the attack in Örebro, where those targeted were almost exclusively of immigrant origin. So, to my mind, that is an absolutely clear example of how these enemy images have the potential to radicalize into lethal violence.

When it comes to internal enemies, it is the same thing. We were talking before about anti-system, anti-government extremism. A couple of years ago, during a Swedish political getaway week, one of the most hated party leaders of the Center Party—which is basically the only Liberal Party left in Sweden—was the target of a planned attack. The attacker could not carry out the attack and instead killed a government health official. Behind that person’s radicalization process was an entire ecosystem of people spreading hatred against “these internal enemies who were destroying Swedish society from inside.” Because the target was an ethnic Swedish government official, that person was accused of colluding with these external enemies and was therefore, in the language of extremist radicalization, cleared to be killed. There you can see that this has real potential, because if you frame people living in your society as enemies, this can have real-life consequences. The construction of the enemy can go so deep that people are also accused of collusion.

Of course, extremist violence is the most radical expression of this, but we also have many everyday expressions of these kinds of enemy images. They frame and reduce the entire problem to one of immigration, which then leads to calls for tougher measures on criminality and deportations, and even to very absurd deportations in Sweden right now, where people who pay their taxes and work are being deported, and post-Brexit British citizens are being expelled from the country because we have to be tough on migration. This means that the enemy image has been adopted to such a degree that it leads to a bureaucratic logic that, at least in my mind, evokes the 1930s in Germany.

High Trust and Deep Suspicion Can Coexist at the Same Time

An intriguing feature of the Swedish case is that high institutional and media trust has historically coexisted with increasingly powerful counter-publics characterized by skepticism toward journalists, experts and political institutions. Your pedagogical work identifies “hot-button issues,” science denial, distrust in democracy and social identity as four domains of conspiratorial imagination. Which of these is most politically consequential in Sweden today, and has the country’s celebrated high-trust model obscured the depth of alienation among certain sections of the electorate?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: That’s a very good question, because it points to one of the inconsistencies. Sweden is frequently placed in the upper-right corner of the World Values Survey, where high levels of self-realization and trust are among the factors that push a country into that very extreme position, even compared with many other countries. Sweden scores very highly on trust, happiness, wealth, and so on. But at the same time, there is also a strand of deep skepticism and a counter-public in the country. That is a strange equation, isn’t it? Sweden had some of the least restrictive anti-COVID public health policies, yet tens of thousands of people still marched through the streets of Stockholm against vaccine mandates that the government was about to introduce.

This is very difficult to explain, but in my book on conspiracy theories, I explore a thesis borrowed from a political psychologist that can be formulated like this: “Don’t control me, but protect me.” That captures the crisis of the modern self in relation to governmental power. It helps explain why people can react with both an authoritarian impulse and a libertarian one. In other words: “I don’t want to be controlled, but if something goes wrong, I want to be protected.” And who is the power that protects me? Somehow, it has to be a strong state.

At the same time, however, you want to be as free as possible in your own choices—driving your car without thinking about the climate, going on holiday without thinking about the climate, or building houses without thinking about the environment. You want to be free to realize yourself. But on the other hand, you also have the authoritarian impulse: you want to be rescued if something goes wrong.

From a psychological point of view, that is a very complicated position for a modern liberal state to accommodate. But it may help explain the popularity of more authoritarian-style politics, because they present themselves as protecting the liberty of the people, which seems like a contradictory element in political psychology. As I said, it is very difficult to pinpoint, but I think this tension in political psychology helps explain how high trust and suspicion can coexist at the same time.

I wish I could have an entire interview about that topic on another occasion, because I think it explains quite a lot. And this applies more broadly to Nordic-style countries. You could go to the Netherlands and ask yourself: why is the right-wing population so large there? You could go to Denmark, Norway, or even Finland and ask: how is it possible that countries with high levels of trust, wealth, happiness, GDP, and infrastructure also contain such extreme political positions? Why do these positions coexist in societies that we perceive as so stable?

Not All Expressions in Democratic Discourse Are Equally Valid

You have been deeply involved in factchecking, verification and efforts to strengthen Sweden’s resilience against information disorder. Yet populists frequently portray fact-checkers, public broadcasters, academics and psychological-defense institutions themselves as components of an elite information-control apparatus. How can liberal democracy defend the integrity of the information environment without inadvertently reinforcing the populist claim that a self-protecting establishment decides what citizens are permitted to regard as true?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: That is yet another of these very deep questions. I frequently make the joke that democracy cannot live with fact-checking, because Socrates was killed by Athenian democracy and forced to drink poison. And if you take Plato’s dialogues at face value, what Socrates did was constantly correct and fact-check people, trying to bring citizens in Greek democracy to a better understanding of concepts by defining things and so on. That made them so upset that, in the end, they said: we cannot tolerate this behavior in a democracy. Because democracy must live on the persuasion of people, not on whether concepts are true or not.

But then, of course, that is also a very uncanny idea of democracy, isn’t it? So, I think the problem here is to strike a balance between allowing democratic discourse that is fair and open and ensuring that it is not poisoned by foreign manipulation, interference, or deceptive actors. What we must allow is a fair and open democratic discourse, while at the same time maintaining this kind of Socratic position: not all expressions in an open and fair democratic discourse are equally valid from the point of view of truthfulness and trustworthiness. And for that, we have methods such as fact-checking and verification.

So, what I want to say is that if a politician honestly, with honest motives, enters a political debate and talks about a vision of society that is not based in reality, he or she might be free to do that, provided it is honest rather than deceptive, disinformation, or conspiracy theory. But, on the other hand, this same open society and its open debate must allow other people to say that what this person claims is actually not true, and that it is also not trustworthy because it has not been tested before. That is a delicate balance that we must uphold. And we have to make clear that many of the people who accuse fact-checking and verification of representing some outgrowth of the censorship-industrial complex are also claiming to represent Western values.

I would say that those of us who argue for fact-checking and verification are actually much more dedicated to Western values, because the ability to separate truth from fiction, and to determine what kind of information is more trustworthy than other information, has always been part of Western thought over the last 2,000 years. That is what many major intellectual movements were about. Not only Socrates; you could go to the Reformation or the Enlightenment and say that these were core issues in the development of Western thought.

Of course, it is also a very naive conception of democracy to think that democracy is a place where everything can be said and is equally valid. That is not true. People who claim that have a mistaken conception of democracy, and we have to make that case. Historically, of course, this has led to different political systems and forms of government. But if you have the super-populist idea that only the will of the people at this very moment is the most valid basis for framing and solving problems, we will end up in very horrible, dire political conditions.

That is the political-philosophical explanation. Of course, if you dig deeper and say that we do not want deceptive behavior in our public discourse, we do not want disinformation, and we do not want conspiracy theories, then verification and fact-checking are absolute virtues for every citizen to have in the digital information environment.

The Narrative Is Transnational, but Its Content Is National

You have described the radical right as increasingly transnational, with political narratives, symbols, conspiracies and strategies circulating across national boundaries. To what extent should SD therefore still be understood as a specifically Swedish phenomenon rooted in the Folkhemmet, the migration crisis and Sweden’s own political history? Or is it now better understood as the Swedish expression of a broader transnational radical-right ecosystem connecting debates over migration, demographic replacement, gender, climate, sovereignty and hostility toward liberal institutions across Europe and beyond?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: I think it is both. We have seen that the broader transnational radical-right ecosystem you are describing, which connects these different debates, always has to be translated into national contexts. What is true in Saxony-Anhalt, the German state where the AfD received 44% of the vote, is not true for Sweden, so the same narrative has to be framed differently depending on the context.

In that sense, the narrative is transnational, but its content is national. The grievances in Sweden are not the same as those in Saxony-Anhalt, France, or Italy. The same elements are present—elite critique, migration, post-industrial society, and nostalgia—but they manifest themselves differently and to different degrees.

For instance, in Saxony-Anhalt, you can connect to grievances rooted in a sense of loss after the German Democratic Republic. That is not something you can exploit in Sweden. In Sweden, however, you can exploit the concept of Folkhemmet, which serves as a parallel form of nostalgic mobilization to that found in other radical-right movements.

So I would say that the frames are shared, but the content of those frames has remained very national.

Whatever Happens, Sweden Is Going to Face a Very Hot Autumn

Sweden’s Social Democrats campaign ahead of the general election in Malmö, Sweden, on September 2, 2022, in support of then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s bid for a second term. Photo: Francis Joseph Dean / Dreamstime.

Finally, the 2026 election may represent a decisive moment in the normalization of Sweden’s radical right. SD is currently polling above the Moderates across several major surveys, while the Liberals’ survival—and therefore the parliamentary arithmetic—remains exceptionally uncertain. If the election confirms SD as the largest force on the right, what would constitute the more historically significant outcome: SD formally entering government, SD remaining outside government but exercising even greater policy leverage, or the broader transformation of mainstream Swedish politics around themes and diagnoses that originated on the radical right? And looking beyond September 13, are we witnessing the culmination of SD’s normalization—or the beginning of a more fundamental realignment of Swedish democracy?

Professor Andreas J. Önnerfors: These are three very different scenarios. If SD enters government, it would be a very hard blow, almost on the scale of when SD entered the Swedish Parliament for the first time. If SD remains outside government, they are already talking about an election victory in 2030. They will certainly strengthen their image as an anti-establishment party even further, and they will go all in on winning the elections in 2030.

On the other hand, if the Tidö party family does not survive, the Moderate Party will almost certainly face a wipeout on the scale of the CDU in Germany—or in Eastern Germany, at least—in the sense that they will have to seriously redefine themselves. So many of their ministers and party officials have drifted toward positions formulated by this magnet, the Sweden Democrats, that they have become almost indistinguishable from them. That means they will have to go back and do some soul-searching: “If we, as the Moderate Party, want to come back, how are we going to come back? Or will we always be the fifth wheel on the wagon that SD rolls through Swedish politics?” So, in that sense, SD has already been successful in transforming mainstream Swedish politics.

When it comes to the Social Democrats, who over the last few weeks have experienced quite a radical loss of electoral support—several percentage points—they also need to do similar soul-searching. Over the last 10 years, they have been triangulating their own positions toward the neoliberal politics of the Moderate Party and the increasingly right-wing, punitive, authoritarian positions of the new radical right in Sweden, and that has certainly not paid off. So we have seen some gains in the center of Swedish politics right now, particularly for the Center Party, but also for other parties.

And what that means is that, equally, if SD were to enter government, the Social Democrats themselves would have to go back and do some serious thinking about how to reconnect what they stand for with the electorate. I can only think of an analogy with Great Britain, where you can see that movement happening right now, and the contrast between Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham, where the rhetoric of the new Prime Minister is much more geared toward typical social democratic Labour positions. The Social Democrats in Sweden will have to realize that they do not win by jumping on the bandwagon of the mainstreaming of SD positions.

If SD enters government, we may also see a similar wipeout on the side of the Social Democrats as would be the case with the Moderates. That could lead to a collapse. Perhaps they (The Social Democrats) would have to redefine themselves, and my prognosis would be that what emerges from that would be a party much more aligned with Labour under Andy Burnham.

But we don’t know. It is razor-thin right now. Only a couple of percentage points divide the two power blocs in Sweden, so we really don’t know in which direction it will go. Even if the Social Democrats were to win the election, I think Sweden will, as in 2018 and 2022, be trapped in months of debate and negotiation over how a government will be formed. Maybe there will even be a new election that clears the way. So, we are going to face a very hot autumn.

Stealing from the Future: Erdogan’s Medium-Term Program and Economic Populism for Electoral Survival

September 8, 2026

by ECPS_admin with No Comment Commentaries Economics Editor’s Choice Home

Professor Ibrahim Ozturk argues that Turkey’s 2027–2029 Medium-Term Program is less a credible development strategy than a politically sequenced exercise in economic populism. While promising lower inflation, faster growth, and technological upgrading, the program simultaneously expands current transfers, procurement, interest payments, and fiscal deficits while squeezing productive capital expenditure. Professor Ozturk contends that this structure reproduces a familiar electoral cycle: benefits are front-loaded, while the costs are deferred through inflation, taxation, debt, currency depreciation, and declining real wages. He further warns that Turkey is shifting from a developmental state toward a transfer state in which politically protected rents crowd out productivity-enhancing investment. The ultimate cost, he argues, is not merely fiscal instability but the erosion of Turkey’s long-term productive capacity and competitive advantage.

By Ibrahim Ozturk

Economic Populism: A Brief Conceptual Background

The classical paradigm of macroeconomic populism, articulated by Rüdiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards in The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America, describes a self-defeating political-economic cycle in which governments prioritize short-term growth and redistribution while discounting inflation, fiscal sustainability, productive capacity, and external constraints. These programs generally emerge in societies marked by deep socioeconomic inequality, declining trust in established institutions, and accumulated demands for redistribution. Governments respond by combining expansionary fiscal policies, rapid credit growth, substantial nominal wage increases, administered prices, subsidies, and attempts to suppress exchange-rate volatility. During the initial phase, the resulting demand shock can generate a temporary boom: capacity utilization rises, employment expands, real wages may initially improve, and politically visible consumption increases.

The apparent success of this first phase reinforces the government’s claim that conventional fiscal and monetary constraints can safely be disregarded. Yet the expansion does not necessarily increase productive capacity. When aggregate demand exceeds domestic supply, production bottlenecks intensify, imports rise, foreign-exchange requirements increase, and inflationary pressures accumulate. Attempts to suppress inflation through price controls, subsidized credit, fiscal transfers, or an overvalued exchange rate merely postpone—and often magnify—the eventual adjustment.

As foreign-exchange reserves decline and fiscal and external imbalances become increasingly difficult to finance, inflation accelerates, confidence deteriorates, capital moves abroad or into foreign currency, and the domestic currency depreciates. The government is ultimately forced to adopt stabilization measures involving tighter credit, higher interest rates, fiscal retrenchment, tax increases, and real-wage compression. The central paradox identified by Dornbusch and Edwards is therefore distributive: the social groups whom populist policies initially promise to protect frequently bear the heaviest burden of the subsequent crisis and adjustment.

A second strand of the literature explains why such policies remain politically attractive despite their recurrent economic costs. Acemoglu, Egorov, and Sonin argue that politicians may strategically adopt radical or economically costly positions to signal that they are not controlled by established elites. This signaling mechanism can make policy extremism electorally advantageous even when its longer-term economic consequences are damaging.

Dani Rodrik, in turn, emphasizes that globalization, technological disruption, regional inequalities, and distributional shocks generate genuine grievances that populist actors can mobilize. Populism therefore cannot be understood solely as manipulation from above. It also draws strength from real failures of representation, social protection, and economic inclusion. Once political leaders weaken institutional constraints and subordinate economic policy to electoral survival, however, legitimate grievances can become a mechanism for sustaining increasingly discretionary and unsustainable policies.

The conceptual distinction is crucial. Redistribution is not inherently populist, nor is every expansionary fiscal policy economically irresponsible. Redistribution becomes part of populist macroeconomic management when politically visible benefits are concentrated before an electoral deadline, their financing is concealed or deferred, productive and institutional constraints are disregarded, and the eventual adjustment is transferred to society through inflation, taxation, currency depreciation, public debt, unemployment, and declining real wages.

From the Classical Populist Cycle to Turkey’s Growth-Inflation Trap

Turkey’s recent experience does not reproduce every element of the classical Latin American model mechanically. It nevertheless displays several of its central political-economic mechanisms: the subordination of monetary policy to political objectives, credit-led demand expansion, the erosion of central bank credibility, extensive reliance on administrative interventions, the depletion of foreign-exchange buffers, and the postponement of adjustment until after politically critical moments.

Figure 1 places Turkey’s real GDP growth and officially reported year-end consumer-price inflation side by side. Between 2018 and 2025, inflation rose dramatically without a corresponding durable acceleration in real economic growth. The exceptional growth recorded in 2021 largely reflected the post-pandemic recovery, strong credit expansion via artificially subsidized negative real interest rates, and favorable base effects; it should not be interpreted as evidence that higher inflation generated structurally stronger growth.

2018–2025 growth figures of Turkish economy. — Note: 2018–2025 growth figures are annual changes in real GDP, and inflation figures are December year-on-year CPI rates. For 2026, the figure uses Q2 year-on-year GDP growth and June year-on-year CPI inflation. The correlation is descriptive and does not imply causality. Source: Author’s compilation based on TurkStat and CBRT data.

The simple contemporaneous correlation between the two variables is positive but only moderate—approximately 0.44—and does not establish causality. More importantly, the temporal pattern reveals a widening divergence between nominal instability and real economic performance. Inflation exceeded 64 percent in 2022 and 2023, while real GDP growth remained close to 5 percent. As officially reported inflation subsequently declined, growth also weakened, reaching 2.3 percent year on year in the second quarter of 2026.

The central issue is therefore not whether inflation and growth occasionally move in the same direction, but whether inflationary expansion produces sustainable improvements in productivity, investment quality, technological capacity, employment, and household welfare. Turkey’s experience provides little evidence that it does. An inflationary growth strategy can temporarily support consumption, construction, government-directed investment, and politically connected sectors without generating comparable improvements in total factor productivity or long-term supply capacity. Measured GDP growth may consequently coexist with deteriorating income distribution, declining purchasing power, inefficient capital allocation, and eroding institutional credibility.

Turkey’s 2027–2029 Medium-Term Program (MTP) should be read through this conceptual and empirical lens. Although presented as a medium-term framework, its macroeconomic targets, expenditure composition, revenue assumptions, and sequencing of policy measures reveal a considerably shorter political horizon. The central question is whether the program constitutes a credible transition towards price stability, productive investment, institutional normalization, and distributive justice—or another attempt to defer structural adjustment while protecting Erdogan’s immediate political survival.

The Three Tests of an Economic Program

Every serious economic program must answer three elementary questions. First, how will the economy produce more and better goods and services? Second, how will scarce capital, labor, public revenue and foreign exchange be allocated to their most productive uses? Third, how will the resulting national income be distributed across households, firms, regions and generations? Growth, allocation and distribution are not separate chapters. They are a single system.

Analytical Frame: What the MTP Must Demonstrate

Judged by this triad, the MTP fails at a deeper level than forecast inconsistency. It subordinates production to demand management, efficiency to politically protected transfers, and distributional justice to a sequence in which organized beneficiaries receive secure returns while the wider public absorbs inflation, taxation and deteriorating public services.

A Program Without an Institutional Kitchen

The MTP reads less like the output of an autonomous professional planning process than a document assembled backward from a political requirement. The targets appear first; the behavioral mechanisms, policy instruments, implementation responsibilities, risk scenarios and trade-offs needed to make them mutually consistent are either missing or underdeveloped. This is what a program produced under political pressure looks like: arithmetic without architecture.

That weakness is inseparable from institutional history. The State Planning Organization (SPO), which accumulated specialized staff, sectoral memory and a culture of medium-term coordination, was abolished as a distinct organization in 2011 and transferred into the Ministry of Development. In 2018, the Presidency reorganized planning and budgeting functions under the Strategy and Budget Presidency. Formal responsibilities remained, but the center of gravity shifted from relatively autonomous technocratic coordination to a vertically controlled executive structure. The 2018 Presidential Decree establishing the Strategy and Budget Presidency documents these institutional changes. The analytical conclusion follows from the MTP itself: when autonomy, professional challenge, and collective deliberation are weakened, implausible assumptions are less likely to be questioned before publication. The issue is not the personal competence of every civil servant involved. It is the institutional environment in which competence can no longer constrain politics. Merit, teamwork and professional dissent cannot correct a program when the desired electoral conclusion is fixed in advance.

A Medium-term Program with a Short-term Political Horizon

The MTP projects faster growth, lower inflation, falling unemployment, a smaller current-account deficit and—after a temporary 2027 deterioration—a lower budget deficit. None of these outcomes is impossible in isolation. Their simultaneous delivery, however, requires a major productivity shock, stronger expectations, sustained capital inflows and unusually high policy credibility. The MTP states the destination more clearly than the transmission mechanism.

The Fiscal Fingerprint of an Early Election

The program’s political character is clearest in the 2027 budget. Expenditure rises faster than revenue; the budget deficit increases by almost 47 percent; and the already modest primary surplus is nearly halved. The MTP therefore does not begin its disinflation story with fiscal restraint. It begins with fiscal expansion.

The deficit-to-GDP ratio rises from 3.1 percent in 2026 to 3.5 percent in 2027, while the primary surplus almost disappears. In other words, the fiscal stance loosens just as the MTP claims inflation expectations will be decisively anchored.

Against the MTP’s roughly 25 percent 2027 deflator, current transfers rise by about 16 percent in real terms and purchases of goods and services by roughly 15.5 percent, while capital spending falls by about 17 percent in real terms. The contradiction is not rhetorical; it is embedded in the allocation. The MTP’s narrative promises technological upgrading; its budget finances current transfers, procurement and interest.

The 2023 Cycle Is Being Reconstructed

Turkey’s 2023 election cycle combined subsidized credit, public wage and pension increases, retirement arrangements, tax restructuring, energy support and extensive foreign-exchange and credit interventions. After the election came sharp depreciation, higher indirect taxes, tighter monetary policy and declining real purchasing power. The sequencing mattered: the benefit was immediate and politically visible; the correction was delayed and socially dispersed.

The MTP’s 2027–2029 path risks reconstructing the same political technology. The 2027 expansion supplies the distributive moment; the lower deficits and inflation promised for 2028–2029 imply the later correction. This is the classic time structure described by the economic-populism literature.

Distribution: Poverty Is Not a Footnote

The MTP discusses per-capita income and social policy, but aggregate averages conceal the depth of the subsistence crisis. Labor union TURK-IS calculated the August 2026 monthly food-only hunger threshold for a four-person household at TRY 37,388 and the broader poverty threshold at TRY 121,786; the estimated living cost of a single employee was TRY 48,305. These benchmarks show how far ordinary labor income has fallen behind the cost of basic reproduction.

The comparison permits a forceful but precise conclusion: the average household income of the poorest 40 percent is below the TURK-IS hunger threshold, while the average income of the bottom 80 percent is below its poverty threshold. This does not mean every household in those quintiles falls below the relevant line; the figures are quintile averages, and the TURK-IS thresholds refer to a four-person household. (See TURK-IS, August 2026 Hunger and Poverty Threshold. TUIK’s official relative-poverty rate—13.0 percent in 2025—uses an equivalized median-income methodology and therefore answers a different question. The two measures should not be conflated).

The methodological caution does not weaken the substantive conclusion. When the minimum wage is below a food-only threshold for a representative family, and the broader basic-needs budget is multiples of ordinary earnings, distributional stress is systemic. The MTP’s reliance on indirect taxation, inflationary erosion, and delayed adjustment means that lower- and middle-income households finance a disproportionate share of the program.

Economic populism does not correct this injustice. It temporarily compensates selected groups, then recreates poverty through inflation, currency depreciation, taxation, and compressed real wages. It distributes relief politically and distributes the bill socially.

Tax More, Privatize More, Borrow More

The revenue side does not solve the contradiction; it exposes it. In 2027, tax revenue is programmed to grow by 36.5 percent, faster than nominal GDP growth of about 30.3 percent. Tax revenue rises from 17.1 to 17.9 percent of GDP, while the total tax burden, including social-security contributions, moves from 24.3 percent in 2026 to 24.8 percent in 2027 and 25.1 percent by 2029. The MTP therefore couples visible expenditure with a rising social tax burden.

Privatization revenue jumps by roughly 70 percent in 2027, yet the MTP does not identify the assets, valuation logic or economic rationale behind that acceleration. Even if fully realized, the proceeds would finance less than 5 percent of the projected budget deficit. This is not a structural revenue strategy; it is a temporary financing device. Tax more, sell more and borrow more—then channel the proceeds into current expenditure, interest and guaranteed returns.

From a Developmental State to a Transfer State: Interest as Upward Redistribution

The MTP projects approximately TRY 13.9 trillion in cumulative interest payments during 2027–2029, against only about TRY 7.1 trillion in capital expenditure. In 2027 alone, interest is 2.15 times capital spending and close to 20 percent of tax revenue. At TRY 3.98 trillion, interest expenditure even exceeds the projected TRY 3.87 trillion budget deficit.

Interest is not merely a technical cost of debt. Under these conditions, it becomes a distributional mechanism: broad-based taxation and inflation-generated fiscal revenue are transformed into secured financial returns. Resources that could support education, research, technological upgrading, industrial capability and social resilience are transferred to holders of public debt.

Guaranteed Rent Capitalism

A second transfer channel lies outside the interest line: public–private partnership guarantees. For 2026, approximately TRY 136.1 billion was discussed for rent and service payments to 18 city hospitals, while about TRY 101.3 billion was allocated for bridge, motorway and tunnel guarantees. Together, these visible channels approach TRY 237.5 billion. Parliamentary budget proceedings on city hospitals and reporting on transport guarantees illustrate how these obligations are dispersed across rents, availability payments, services, traffic or revenue guarantees and exchange-rate adjustments. The problem is not the Public–Private Partnership (PPP) instrument in principle. It is the allocation of demand and currency risk to the state, the protection of corporate revenue over long horizons, and the limited transparency of effective returns and renegotiation terms. Profit is privatized while risk is socialized.

The MTP repeatedly invokes artificial intelligence, semiconductors, digitalization, green transformation and high-value-added exports. Yet its budget composition crowds out the very capital formation needed to make those ambitions credible. The state’s function shifts: its developmental and social capacities weaken, while its tax-collecting, interest-paying and guarantee-providing roles expand.

This changes incentives throughout the economy. Firms gain more by securing public contracts, guarantees and regulatory privilege than by building capabilities, raising productivity or competing internationally. Connections and rents displace innovation and competitive advantage.

Production: Growth Without Upgrading

The MTP treats a rising GDP growth path as evidence of development. But growth generated by public consumption, protected construction, credit expansion and imported inputs is not equivalent to a durable increase in productive capacity. The relevant question is not only how fast output grows, but what is produced, with which technology, at what import content, and with what learning effect.

The OECD Economic Survey of Türkiye 2025 concludes that future convergence must increasingly come from productivity because the demographic dividend is fading and investment is already high. Yet productivity has slowed, investment has flowed disproportionately into lower-productivity areas such as housing, and intellectual-property investment has been roughly half the European share. High-technology exports have remained around 3.5 percent of manufactured exports, far below comparable upper-middle-income economies.

This is precisely why the MTP’s expenditure composition is so damaging. A country that needs skills, research, digital diffusion and export sophistication cannot treat capital spending as the residual item after interest, transfers and procurement. The program may raise measured demand in 2027 while lowering the economy’s ability to generate non-inflationary supply thereafter.

Allocation: The Destruction of Efficiency

Resource allocation is the bridge between today’s spending and tomorrow’s productive frontier. An efficient system directs finance, land, public procurement, skills and foreign exchange toward firms and sectors capable of learning, innovating and competing. A rent-based system directs them toward political access, guarantees, sheltered markets and balance-sheet protection.

The MTP deepens the second pattern. Interest payments reward the holders of financial claims; public–private partnership guarantees protect selected corporate cash flows; current transfers and procurement grow rapidly; and capital expenditure is squeezed in real terms. The result is not merely waste in a static accounting sense. It is dynamic misallocation: productive firms face high financing costs and uncertainty while politically connected activities enjoy protected returns.

The OECD’s assessment reinforces this diagnosis: productivity is impaired by skill mismatch, barriers to business dynamism, state intervention and weak competition in network sectors. It estimates that pro-competition reforms in infrastructure-dependent sectors could materially raise firm-level productivity (See the OECD’s competitiveness and innovation chapter.) The deepest cost is not this year’s deficit. It is the competitive capability that Turkey fails to build.

Economic Populism as a Strategy of Regime Reproduction

The political logic extends beyond ordinary electoral opportunism. Erdogan needs a renewed coalition, a favorable parliamentary balance and a constitutional or electoral route to reproduce the regime. Article 116 of the Constitution provides that if parliament renews elections during the president’s second term, the incumbent may stand once more. This provision does not prove a 2027 election, but it makes the concentration of fiscal expansion in 2027 politically significant. See the official English text of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey. The MTP’s timing fits a strategy in which benefits are immediate and attributable, while costs are postponed, fragmented, and depoliticized.

Gambling with Turkey’s Future

The central problem is not that Turkey lacks resources. The program simultaneously damages all three foundations of the economy. It produces growth without sufficient productive upgrading; it allocates capital away from its highest social return; and it distributes income and adjustment costs in favor of organized financial and politically protected interests.

The immediate casualty is distributive justice. The medium-term casualty is fiscal and macroeconomic sustainability. The longest-lasting casualty, however, is competitive advantage. Inflation can eventually be reduced, and a budget can eventually be tightened. Capabilities not built, skilled people lost, firms excluded from finance, technologies not absorbed and export markets surrendered are far harder to recover.

In that sense, the MTP is less a medium-term development program than an intertemporal political bargain drafted inside a weakened institutional order. The Erdogan regime borrows from Turkey’s future to purchase support in its present. It sacrifices not only fairness in distribution, but efficiency in resource allocation and sustainability in production. The recovery can be staged; the underlying model cannot be sustained. The election comes in 2027. The taxes, inflation, debt and lost development arrive in 2028.

Prof. Bolin: The Sweden Democrats Have Normalized Without Becoming Less Populist

September 8, 2026

by ECPS_admin with No Comment Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Interviews

Professor Niklas Bolin argues that the Sweden Democrats’ most consequential transformation is institutional normalization rather than ideological moderation. As Sweden approaches the September 13 election, SD has become deeply integrated into the political mainstream while retaining a resilient populist configuration centered on people-centrism, anti-elitism, popular sovereignty, and antagonism. Professor Bolin stresses that “institutional normalization does not necessarily mean ideological moderation,” even as SD has gained substantial influence through the Tidö Agreement. He also notes that the party has won “an important ideological battle” as restrictive migration positions have become mainstream. Yet normalization creates a paradox: the more successful SD becomes, the more it becomes part of the establishment it has long defined itself against.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Five days before Sweden’s September 13 parliamentary election, the country enters the final stretch of the campaign with an unusually fluid electoral landscape. The latest Novus/TV4 poll places the opposition at 50.3 percent and the Tidö parties at 47.9 percent, with the gap still within the statistical margin of error. The Liberals (L) have climbed to 4.3 percent—just above the parliamentary threshold—while other recent polls still place them below it, making their survival one of the most consequential variables in government formation. At the same time, the Social Democrats (S) remain the largest party overall, while the Sweden Democrats (SD) continue to challenge or surpass the Moderates (M) for leadership of the Swedish right.

In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Niklas Bolin, Professor of Political Science at Mid Sweden University, argues that the most significant transformation of the Sweden Democrats is not necessarily ideological moderation but institutional normalization. As he puts it, “Institutional normalization does not necessarily mean ideological moderation.” A party, he stresses, can become “more professional, more accepted by the other parties, and more integrated into the political mainstream without changing its ideological worldview.”

This distinction is crucial for understanding SD’s trajectory. The party has moved from pariah status to substantial policy influence through the Tidö Agreement, while its core populist configuration—people-centrism, anti-elitism, popular sovereignty, and antagonism—has remained resilient. Professor Bolin therefore cautions that the party’s normalization and growing political influence should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that it has “become less populist” or that “its ideology has changed to the same degree.”

The interview also explores how SD’s success has reshaped the wider party system. Professor Bolin notes that Swedish migration policy has “clearly moved in a more restrictive direction” and that positions considered controversial 10 or 15 years ago are “today almost political mainstream.” In that sense, he argues, “the Sweden Democrats won an important ideological battle.” Yet this mainstreaming produces a paradox: when other parties adopt similar positions, they both legitimize SD and reduce the salience of issues the party once dominated electorally.

Bolin further suggests that SD’s growing success creates a tension between outsider identity and establishment power. The party has benefited from substantial influence without formal governmental responsibility, but “the more successful the party becomes, the more it becomes part of the establishment itself.”

Against this backdrop, the 2026 election is about more than which bloc wins. It tests whether Sweden is consolidating a new party system in which the radical right has not merely entered the mainstream, but helped redefine it.

Here is our interview with Professor Niklas Bolin, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.

SD’s Almost Automatic Growth Is Probably Over

Swedish political parties intensified their campaigning ahead of the critical September 13, 2026 parliamentary elections. — Swedish political parties intensified their campaigning ahead of the critical September 13, 2026 parliamentary election, setting up campaign stands in prominent public squares to promote their platforms and election promises. The image shows party campaign stands in the square connecting the two sections of Åkersberga Centrum in Österåker, Sweden. Photo: Bulent Kenes.

Professor Bolin, welcome! In your analysis of the Sweden Democrats’ setback in the 2024 European Parliament election, you asked whether it was merely a “speed bump” or the beginning of an “uphill journey.” Two years later, with SD polling around 19–20 percent but no longer showing the almost exponential growth that characterized its rise since 2010, how would you answer that question today? Has SD reached a structural ceiling, or is it simply becoming a normalized large party subject to ordinary electoral fluctuations?

Professor Niklas Bolin: I’m not sure that we can talk about a structural ceiling, but the Sweden Democrats have clearly entered a different phase. When you have reached around 20%, it’s obviously much more difficult to continue growing at the same pace. So, we should expect more normal electoral fluctuations. This doesn’t mean that the Sweden Democrats cannot grow further, but this almost automatic growth that we have seen for many years is probably over.

The Sweden Democrats Won an Important Ideological Battle

You explained SD’s poor 2024 European election partly through an “agenda effect”: immigration had declined in salience compared with peace, democracy, and climate. Looking toward September 13, are we reaching the limits of the electoral advantage that anti-immigration politics has given SD? Or has SD already won the ideological battle by pushing restrictive migration policies into the mainstream, even if it no longer monopolizes their electoral benefits?

Professor Niklas Bolin: We need to separate the importance of immigration as an electoral issue from the development of migration policy. When migration is high on the political agenda, this benefits the Sweden Democrats because voters associate the party with this issue. But when other issues dominate, as, for instance, in the European election of 2024, this advantage becomes smaller.

If we, on the other hand, look at policy, the Sweden Democrats have been extremely successful. Swedish migration policy has clearly moved in a more restrictive direction, and positions that were controversial 10 or 15 years ago are today almost political mainstream. In that sense, the Sweden Democrats won an important ideological battle. But at the same time, the political conflict has become less salient, and therefore it becomes less important when voters decide who to vote for.

Other Parties’ Shifts Give Legitimacy to SD

The Sweden Democrats entered parliament as an isolated radical-right challenger, whereas today much of the Swedish center-right accepts positions on migration, crime, and integration once associated primarily with SD. Does this “mainstreaming paradox” strengthen SD by legitimizing its diagnosis of Swedish society, or weaken it by allowing mainstream parties to compete on issues SD once owned?

Professor Niklas Bolin: It does a little bit of both, actually. On the one hand, it has clearly strengthened the Sweden Democrats. When other parties adopt similar positions that the Sweden Democrats have argued for over a long period of time, it gives legitimacy to the party, of course. But this success might also be a problem for the Sweden Democrats. When parties move closer to the party on migration, for instance, and crime, there is less political conflict over these issues. So, this can make voters focus on other issues instead.

Political Mainstreaming Does Not Require Ideological Change

Your recent research shows that although the frequency of SD’s populist statements declined between 2010 and 2024, its underlying populist configuration—people-centrism, anti-elitism, popular sovereignty, and antagonism—remained resilient. Should we therefore distinguish between SD’s institutional normalization and ideological moderation? Has governmental influence made the party more respectable without necessarily making it less populist?

Professor Niklas Bolin: I think this distinction is important. Institutional normalization does not necessarily mean ideological moderation. A party can become more professional, more accepted by the other parties, and more integrated into the political mainstream without changing its ideological worldview. So, although the Sweden Democrats have become, at least to some extent, normalized and have significant political influence, we should not automatically conclude from this that the party has become less populist or that its ideology has changed to the same degree.

Governing Together Is Different from Staying Together in Opposition

The parliament (Riksdag) building in Stockholm. — The parliament (Riksdag) building in Stockholm, Sweden. Photo: Dreamstime.

The 2022 election fundamentally reconfigured Swedish politics through the mainstream right’s abandonment of the cordon sanitaire and the creation of a government dependent on SD through the Tidö Agreement. Four years later, how should we assess the Tidö experiment? Has it created a durable two-bloc structure, or has governing together exposed deeper contradictions within the center-right?

Professor Niklas Bolin: Many people, including myself, are probably surprised by how well the cooperation between the government and the Sweden Democrats has worked. Before 2022, it was sort of an open question whether the center-right parties and the Sweden Democrats could cooperate closely over a full electoral period, and they have now shown that they can.

But I would still, to some extent, hesitate to describe Sweden as having a stable two-bloc system.

There are also clear tensions on the left side of politics. In particular, the Center Party (C) and the Left Party (V) have very different positions, primarily on economic policy, and may find it very difficult to cooperate after the election.

And I’m not sure that the parties to the right will necessarily stay together if they lose the election. It’s one thing to cooperate in government and another thing to stay together in opposition.

It Is Becoming Harder for SD to Present Itself as an Opposition Party

SD gained unprecedented policy influence through the Tidö Agreement without formally entering government. Has this allowed the party to enjoy the benefits of incumbency without fully bearing its costs? After four years of visible influence, can SD still credibly present itself as an anti-establishment force confronting political elites?

Professor Niklas Bolin: To some extent, yes. This was one of the advantages of this arrangement for the Sweden Democrats. The party has received great influence without taking formal responsibility for government, so if voters are dissatisfied, the party can distance itself from the government while, at the same time, taking credit for policies that it has supported. But I also think that this becomes increasingly difficult over time. Voters know that the Sweden Democrats have been deeply involved in government policy. And it becomes more difficult to say that you are an opposition party when you have this level of influence. So, the party has built much of its political identity on being an outsider and criticizing the political establishment. But the more successful the party becomes, the more it becomes part of the establishment itself.

The Liberals Have Long Struggled to Define Their Political Role

The Liberals may now be the most consequential variable in government formation, with recent polls placing them below the 4-percent threshold. You have written about the party’s conflictual leadership transition and changing political orientation. To what extent is its present crisis rooted in an unresolved identity conflict between its socially liberal, pro-European tradition and participation in a bloc dependent on SD?

Professor Niklas Bolin: The Liberals have, for a long time, had difficulty defining their role in Swedish politics, and the cooperation with the Sweden Democrats has made this problem perhaps even more visible. The party traditionally combined center-right economic policy with social liberalism and strong support for European integration, and, of course, a very critical stance towards the Sweden Democrats. Moving from that position to close cooperation with the Sweden Democrats is obviously a major change. So, voters need to understand why they should vote for a small party rather than one of the larger ones. And that has been a difficult question for the Liberals to answer.

Pro-Tidö and Anti-SD Voters Both Have Larger Alternatives

More specifically, has cooperation with SD contributed to the Liberals’ prolonged position below the threshold? Have they entered a strategic trap in which voters comfortable with the Tidö bloc prefer M or SD, while socially liberal anti-SD voters have moved toward C or the center-left? Has the pursuit of governmental relevance endangered the party’s parliamentary survival?

Professor Niklas Bolin: I wouldn’t say that cooperation with the Sweden Democrats is the only explanation. The Liberals were already struggling before the agreement with the Sweden Democrats, but the current strategy creates a different and perhaps even more difficult electoral position. Voters who strongly support the Tidö cooperation can choose the Moderates or the Sweden Democrats, which are much larger parties. At the same time, voters who identify with the socially liberal tradition but strongly oppose the Sweden Democrats can choose the Center Party or the center-left. So, I guess the Liberals are a bit squeezed from both directions.

Swedish Politics Is No Longer Only About Left and Right

Sweden, SD — Politicians and campaigners engage with voters at the Sweden Democrats’ election hut in a city square in Uppsala, Sweden, on August 17, 2026, ahead of Sweden’s parliamentary elections. Photo: Krister Hägglöf / Dreamstime.

The Center Party has moved away from cooperation with SD, while the Liberals chose the opposite path and now risk disappearing from parliament. Does the 2026 election therefore signal the dissolution of Sweden’s traditional bourgeois or blå-gula political space? If so, what new structure is replacing it?

Professor Niklas Bolin: For many years, the Moderates (M), the Center Party (C), the Liberals (L), and the Christian Democrats (KD) formed one political bloc, even if there were important differences between these parties. The rise of the Sweden Democrats has changed this drastically. All these parties have made different choices in relation to the Sweden Democrats. The Moderates and the Christian Democrats have accepted close cooperation with the Sweden Democrats, and the Liberals eventually chose the same path, while the Center Party has moved in the opposite direction.

So, Swedish politics is no longer only about left and right. Attitudes towards the Sweden Democrats have also been important for determining which parties can cooperate with each other. As long as the Sweden Democrats remain a large party—and I don’t see anything that suggests this will change in the near future—it’s difficult to see a return to the old bloc system, at least as long as the Center Party maintains its current stance towards the Sweden Democrats.

Kristersson Will Remain the Right’s Prime Ministerial Candidate

Current polls show an unusual asymmetry: the Social Democrats (S) remain the largest party overall, while SD often polls ahead of the Moderates on the right. If the Tidö parties retain a majority, would it remain politically sustainable for M to provide the prime minister while being considerably smaller than SD? At what point would an SD claim to cabinet participation—or eventually the premiership—become difficult to resist?

Professor Niklas Bolin: For this election the situation is quite clear. The parties have agreed that Ulf Kristersson is their candidate for Prime Minister, and also that the Sweden Democrats will enter the government if they win. Even if the Sweden Democrats become somewhat larger than the Moderates, Kristersson will remain Prime Minister. So, the more interesting question is what happens in the longer term, so to speak. I mean, if the Sweden Democrats become larger than the Moderates also in the next election, and especially if this continues, it will become increasingly difficult for the Sweden Democrats to accept that the Moderates automatically get the position of Prime Minister.

C–V Differences Make the Post-Election Equation Difficult

Conversely, if the polling advantage of S, V, C and MP survives election day, what government do you regard as most plausible? Could Sweden sustain a Social Democratic-led röd-grön government relying simultaneously on V and C, despite their major differences on taxation, labour markets, welfare and economic policy?

Professor Niklas Bolin: A Social Democratic-led government would be the most likely outcome, but it’s quite hard to say exactly what such a government would look like. At the moment, it’s difficult to see how the Center Party (C) and the Left Party (V) would agree, especially on economic policy. I also think it would be difficult for the Left Party to immediately give up its demand to be part of the government. So, forming a government after this election could take time, I guess. It’s possible that one or more proposals will be voted down before the parties are ready to compromise. But in the end, they will find a solution. Few parties would want to risk a new election, and that may make possible compromises that might seem difficult today.

A Change of Government Would Not Mean a Return to Pre-Tidö Policies

Critics of the Tidö period argue that tougher migration and citizenship policies, expanded coercive powers, and increasingly majoritarian rhetoric have altered aspects of Sweden’s liberal-democratic political culture; supporters see them as legitimate responses to crime and failed integration. If a Social Democratic-led government supported by V and C emerges, how much of the Tidö-era transformation could realistically be reversed? Or has Swedish politics undergone a deeper rightward recalibration?

Professor Niklas Bolin: I think much of this more restrictive migration and crime policy will remain, even if there is a change of government. The Social Democrats have moved quite close to the government on many of these issues. One of the reasons for this is that they want to reduce the political conflict over migration and crime and move the focus to their issues.

And I don’t think the Social Democrats want to risk being criticized again for having a migration policy that is sort of too generous. So, it will be difficult for the parties to the left of the Social Democrats to push policy very far in another direction. Some policies may change, but I would not expect a major return to the policies that we had before the Tidö government.

There Is No Single Explanation for Sweden’s Growing Gender Gap

Sweden is also witnessing a striking gender divergence among younger voters: young women increasingly lean toward progressive, green, and left parties, while young men disproportionately support conservative and radical-right alternatives. What explains this widening gap? Are young women and men responding differently to the same social changes, or increasingly inhabiting different educational, social, and digital worlds that generate distinct political outlooks?

Professor Niklas Bolin: There’s probably no single explanation for this gender gap. Education is one important factor. Young women are more likely than young men to go to university, and education is related to political attitudes on issues such as immigration, climate, and gender equality. There are also growing differences between young men and women on some of these political issues. But, we should be careful about explaining too much. The gender gap is clear, but we still need more research to understand why it has grown.

Career-Oriented Youth Members Tend to Be Less Radical

Your research shows that youth wings do not simply reproduce the preferences of senior parties: radicals remain prominent, especially in center-left organizations, while politically motivated members seek to influence their parties more than career-oriented members do. What does this tell us about the generation now entering Swedish politics? Could youth wings reinforce rather than moderate ideological and gender polarization?

Professor Niklas Bolin: It’s difficult to say. There’s not much research on what happens when youth members move on to the senior parties. Our research shows that more radical members are often more interested in influencing policy, while those interested in a political career tend to be less radical. But we do not know what happens when they move on, so to speak. Do the more radical members become more moderate, or do they try to change the party? We need more research to see.

More Women in Politics Does Not Necessarily Mean Ideological Change

Your research on young women in party youth wings finds that women report greater increases than men in their desire to influence party policy and stand as candidates, particularly in center-right youth wings. Could this growing political efficacy eventually transform not only voting patterns but also the gender composition and ideological direction of Swedish party elites?

Professor Niklas Bolin: Many Swedish parties are already quite gender-balanced, at least when we look at candidates and elected politicians. But if participation in youth wings increases young women’s willingness to influence policy and become candidates, this could, of course, help maintain or even strengthen that balance in the future. When it comes to ideological effects, I’m not sure. More women in politics does not necessarily mean that parties move in a particular ideological direction.

A Center-Left Victory Is the Most Likely Outcome

Sweden election campaign. — Swedish political parties conducted their final day of campaigning in Malmö ahead of the 2022 general elections. Photo: Francis Joseph Dean.

Finally, just days before the election, the Social Democratic (S)-led side remains ahead, SD is larger than M (Moderate Party) in several polls, and the Liberals hover around the threshold. Taking together the electoral arithmetic, the Tidö legacy, Center Party’s changing position, and SD’s transformation from pariah to pivotal party, what is your projection for the next government? And what kind of party system will emerge: renewed left–right competition, a consolidated two-bloc system centered on attitudes toward SD, or a deeper political realignment?

Professor Niklas Bolin: I’m not sure that we social scientists are very good at making predictions, but if I had to make one, I would look at the polls that indicate that the opposition still has a small lead, at least. So, I would say that a victory for the center-left is the most likely outcome, but I’m not certain, of course.

The more difficult question is what happens after the election. At the moment, it’s hard to see what kind of left-leaning government could get enough support in the parliament. On the other hand, if the center-right wins, the situation is much clearer.

In the longer term, I think the Sweden Democrats will continue to become more accepted as a normal political party. Things that seem impossible today can change quite quickly in politics. We’ve seen that with the Sweden Democrats over the last 10 years.

So, it’s possible that the Center Party, or even the Social Democrats, become less negative towards the Sweden Democrats in the future, even if government cooperation seems quite unlikely today. And we know from the past that once the cordon sanitaire has been broken, it’s very difficult to build it up again.

How to Explain the AfD’s Victory in Eastern Germany

September 8, 2026

by ECPS_admin with No Comment Commentaries Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Migration

Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the AfD’s strength in Eastern Germany cannot be explained by poverty alone. Instead, its rise reflects the interaction of nativist attitudes, political alienation, territorial decline, demographic shrinkage, and the enduring memory of post-reunification disruption. The AfD’s political success lies in converting disparate grievances—over immigration, economic insecurity, public services, identity, and distant decision-making—into a unified anti-elite narrative. Dr. Dias stresses that the Brandmauer may remain necessary as an institutional safeguard, but it is insufficient as a political strategy. A durable democratic response, he argues, must address material insecurity, regional neglect, state capacity, immigration, and recognition while offering citizens a credible sense of belonging and a recognizable future.

By João Ferreira Dias

Some election results change governments. Others force a country to reconsider the story it tells about itself. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt belongs to the second category. When a radical-right party comes close to winning half the electorate in a German state, it is no longer enough to speak of a “protest vote.” The question becomes a different one: how did the AfD manage, in parts of Eastern Germany, to become a socially rooted and electorally dominant political force?

The easy answer would be poverty. It is also, to a large extent, the wrong answer. The available research shows that attitudes towards immigration, national identity and political elites explain support for the AfD far better than individual economic deprivation does (Hansen & Olsen, 2024; Kailitz & Rippl, 2026; Schröder et al., 2026). But this does not mean that economics, place and abandonment are irrelevant. It points instead to something more interesting: what matters is less absolute poverty than the experience of loss — or what might be called the “fear of falling”: the loss of status, population, opportunity, recognition and control over the future. Such experiences can produce political alienation. It is the AfD, however, that supplies the nativist and anti-establishment language capable of giving that alienation meaning.

To understand this mechanism, we need to begin before the AfD itself. After 1990, Eastern Germany underwent an economic and social transformation of extraordinary intensity. Reunification was unquestionably an act of political liberation, but it also meant the disappearance of companies, careers, professional hierarchies and institutions that had structured the daily lives of millions of people. Steffen Mau describes this process in terms of status demotion, the transfer of elites, demographic transformation and the loss of biographical security (Mau, 2019). It was not simply that some people lost their jobs. For many, an entire social world suddenly lost its value.

When Economic Loss Becomes Political Memory

There is now evidence that these experiences left lasting political consequences. Kellermann (2024), studying workers affected by the privatizations carried out by the Treuhandanstalt, found lower levels of trust and greater detachment from institutions and established parties decades later. This does not mean that the Treuhand “caused” the AfD. It means that an economic experience can become a political memory when the loss is attributed to decisions made by distant institutions. There is a difference between thinking, “my job disappeared,” and thinking “they decided that the world I belonged to no longer had value.

That experience also acquired a concrete geography. Since reunification, Saxony-Anhalt has lost roughly a quarter of its population. Depopulation on this scale does not simply mean fewer inhabitants. It means young people leaving, schools with fewer pupils, shops closing, services becoming harder to sustain and communities growing progressively older. Höhne, Kölzer and Träger (2025), analyzing more than 1,400 municipalities in Eastern Germany, found a robust relationship between long-term population decline and support for the AfD. The most important finding, however, is that the same pattern does not appear with equal strength in support for the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. Territorial decline, then, does not determine political choice; it creates conditions that a party may or may not be able to mobilize.

It is in this sense that Andrés Rodríguez-Pose (2018) speaks of “the revenge of the places that don’t matter.” The problem is not simply that such places are poor. It is the feeling of living in a territory from which the future has withdrawn. A region may be materially far richer than it was thirty years ago and, at the same time, feel that it has lost relevance. Universities expand elsewhere. The most prestigious jobs appear somewhere else. Young people leave. Decision-makers live far away. The country can prosper in aggregate while particular communities see, above all, what is disappearing. Inequality then ceases to exist only between individuals; it begins to exist between places.

From Collective Disadvantage to Populist Mobilization

This is where the economic explanation meets the cultural one. Recent research is quite clear on two points that have to be held together. First, nativist, anti-immigration and anti-elite attitudes are genuine political drivers of the AfD vote; they should not be reduced to some form of economic false consciousness (Hansen & Olsen, 2024; Schröder et al., 2026). Second, political alienation and feelings of collective disadvantage are particularly strong in the East and help explain why such attitudes find more fertile ground there (Kailitz & Rippl, 2026; Pickel & Pickel, 2026). Kailitz and Rippl put it especially well: the seeds are not necessarily different; the soil is more fertile.

This is how the false choice between “economics” and “culture” can be resolved. A closed factory does not automatically produce xenophobia. A distant hospital does not produce nationalism. But accumulated experiences of loss, distance and inadequate recognition can nourish the sense that institutions no longer represent “people like us.” At that point, a populist narrative becomes more plausible: there is a forgotten people, and there are elites who govern for others. That is precisely the narrative the AfD learned to build.

The party founded in 2013 did not begin with the ideological configuration we know today. It emerged above all from the euro crisis, with a Eurosceptic, conservative and economically liberal profile. Between 2015 and 2017, however, immigration, refugees, Islam and national identity shifted the party’s center of gravity, bringing it closer to what Cas Mudde defines as the populist radical right: a combination of nativism, authoritarianism and populism (Arzheimer & Berning, 2019; Mudde, 2007). The euro crisis created the organization; the refugee crisis turned it into a mass political force.

Since then, the AfD has shown an extraordinary capacity to adapt. Hansen and Olsen (2024) describe it as a populist issue entrepreneur: a party able to retain ownership of the issues on which it already enjoys an advantage — above all immigration — while continually absorbing new conflicts. The euro, refugees, the pandemic, climate, energy, gender, Ukraine and the politics of memory are very different issues. The AfD manages to present them as manifestations of the same problem. That is its central political talent.

The Brandmauer Paradox and the AfD’s Anti-Elite Narrative

A railway station that closes is a transport problem. A factory that shuts down belongs to economics. Immigration is migration policy. The war in Ukraine is foreign policy. Gender belongs to the culture wars. The AfD turns all of them into a single story: the elites in Berlin and Brussels have stopped governing in the name of ordinary people. The issues change. The culprit remains the same.

Immigration occupies a central place in this narrative because it functions both as a real political issue and as a symbolic condensation of several anxieties. It can be connected to security, housing, schools, the welfare state, Islam, borders and identity. In a territory that has already experienced profound transformations decided in distant centers of power, it can also be presented as yet another change carried out “without us.” The interpretation does not need to be empirically accurate in order to be politically effective. Populism often succeeds not because it explains each problem better, but because it connects different problems within a single moral explanation.

This is also why it is no longer sufficient to speak simply of a “protest vote.” Mudde (2019) draws attention to the contemporary normalization of the radical right: ideas that once existed on the political margins gradually enter everyday politics. The Eastern German case adds a troubling generational dimension. Heinze and Scheuer (2026) find among young AfD voters not merely volatility or rebellion, but relatively stable partisan identification, closely associated with nativism. These young people did not experience the GDR, the Treuhand or reunification. Historical experience is no longer only biographical memory. It has become, at least in part, a political inheritance.

This is where the dilemma of the Brandmauer emerges: the firewall through which Germany’s mainstream parties refuse to govern with the AfD. There are powerful democratic reasons for maintaining it. Winning elections does not give any party the right to weaken fundamental rights, pluralism, or institutional independence. But an obvious political problem arises when the excluded force comes close to winning half the vote: the more all the other parties have to cooperate in order to keep it out of power, the easier it becomes for the AfD to say that “they are all the same” and that it alone represents a genuine alternative.

Why the Brandmauer Is Necessary but Not Enough

Yascha Mounk (2018) helps illuminate the paradox: populism seeks to present the liberal institutions that constrain majority power as obstacles to democracy itself. The Brandmauer (firewall) may therefore be necessary as an institutional defense and insufficient as a political strategy. It answers the question, “how do we stop the AfD from governing?” It does not answer the prior question: “why do so many people want it to govern?”

Understanding the answer to that second question does not mean excusing it. Anne Applebaum (2020) reminds us that the contemporary illiberal threat rarely begins with the immediate destruction of democracy. It can advance through the gradual occupation of institutions, administrative changes, appointments, education, culture and the media. In Saxony-Anhalt, a move by the AfD from opposition into government would give it access to precisely these areas. Sociologically explaining an electorate does not require us to minimize the consequences of the programme it chooses.

But historical memory is not enough either. Tony Judt (2010) reminded us that post-war European democracies did not survive because of constitutions alone. They built welfare states, public services, security and the expectation that the future could be better. A democratic order becomes fragile when it can tell its citizens only two things: “adapt to change” and “do not vote for them.” The first offers no security. The second offers no project.

Perhaps this is, in the end, the best way to understand the result in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD did not win simply because a population became poorer, or because nearly half the electorate suddenly became radicalized. It won because it managed to transform experiences of territorial decline, downward mobility and inadequate recognition into a political narrative combining nativism, anti-establishment alienation and the promise of national restoration.

It did not merely say: “you lost.” It said: “you lost because they chose others over you.” It is this move — from loss to resentment, from resentment to identity, and from identity to the ballot box — that helps explain its strength.

And that is also why the democratic response will have to be more demanding than copying the AfD, increasing fiscal transfers or reinforcing the firewall. It will have to combine credible control of immigration, state capacity, services and opportunity in peripheral regions, recognition of Eastern Germany’s distinctive historical experience, and an idea of national belonging strong enough to create community without having to turn minorities into enemies.

Because citizens do not abandon a political order only when they become poor. They can also drift away from it when they cease to believe that it contains a recognizable future for people like them, and for places like the ones in which they live.

References

Applebaum, A. (2020). Twilight of democracy: The seductive lure of authoritarianism. Doubleday.

Arzheimer, K., & Berning, C. C. (2019). How the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and their voters veered to the radical right, 2013–2017. Electoral Studies, 60, 102040.

Hansen, M. A., & Olsen, J. (2024). The Alternative for Germany (AfD) as populist issue entrepreneur. German Politics, 33(4), 643–667.

Heinze, A.-S., & Scheuer, T. (2026). Growing up far right? Youth support for the AfD in Eastern Germany. German Politics, 35(3), 485–515.

Höhne, B., Kölzer, J., & Träger, H. (2025). Geography of shrinkage: Local population decline and electoral support for the anti-establishment parties AfD and BSW in East German state elections. German Politics, 34(3), 449–477.

Judt, T. (2010). Ill fares the land. Penguin Press.

Kailitz, S., & Rippl, S. (2026). Same seeds, more fertile ground: Sources of AfD dominance in Eastern Germany. German Politics, 35(3), 437–462.

Kellermann, K. L. (2024). Trust we lost: The impact of the Treuhand experience on political alienation in East Germany. Journal of Comparative Economics, 52(1), 54–75.

Mau, S. (2019). Lütten Klein: Leben in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft. Suhrkamp.

Mounk, Y. (2018). The people vs. democracy. Harvard University Press.

Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, C. (2019). The far right today. Polity.

Pickel, G., & Pickel, S. (2026). The election of the AfD and the collective identity of East Germans. German Politics, 35(3), 412–436.

Rodríguez-Pose, A. (2018). The revenge of the places that don’t matter. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 11(1), 189–209.

Schröder, M., Rehm, M., & Röcke, A. (2026). Supporters of Germany’s far-right AfD party are concerned about immigration rather than feeling deprived. PLOS ONE, 21(7), e0350403.

Toward a Three-Dimensional Understanding of Populism: Discourse, Ideology, and Democratic Mediation

September 6, 2026

by ECPS_admin Articles Editor’s Choice Home Journal of Populism Studies

Please cite as:
Tauil, Rafael Marchesan. (2026). “Toward a Three-Dimensional Understanding of Populism: Discourse, Ideology, and Democratic Mediation.” Journal of Populism Studies (JPS). September 6, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/JPS000131

Abstract
The diversity of conceptual approaches to populism has enriched the study of the phenomenon while leaving unresolved the problem of identifying its common structure across different historical, national, and ideological contexts. This article addresses this problem by proposing a three-dimensional understanding that brings together Ernesto Laclau’s conception of populism as an ontological-discursive process, Cas Mudde’s understanding of populism as a thin-centred ideology, and Pierre Rosanvallon’s account of populism as a form of democratic indetermination. We argue that these perspectives should not be treated as competing or merely complementary definitions, but as analytically distinct and constitutive dimensions of the same political dynamic. Our hypothesis is that populism can be identified through the articulation of three processes: the constitution of an antagonistic fissure between “we” and “they”, the organization of this fissure through moral polarization and its projection onto democracy through the simplification of representation, mediation, and popular sovereignty. To assess the analytical plausibility of this proposition, the article examines four heterogeneous cases—Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Erdogan, Daniel Ortega, and Evo Morales—drawing on peer-reviewed secondary studies and the Global Populism Database’s classification. The analysis provides preliminary evidence that the three dimensions can be identified across substantially different contexts while their substantive contents remain contingent. The article first examines existing multidimensional approaches, then develops the relationship between ontology, ideology, and democracy, and finally applies the proposed approach to the four cases before discussing its implications and limitations.

Keywords: Populism, Discourse, Ideology, Democracy, Ernesto Laclau, Cas Mudde, Pierre Rosanvallon, Political Antagonism, Moral Polarization, Democratic Mediation, Popular Sovereignty, Plebiscitary Democracy

By Rafael Marchesan Tauil

Introduction

The article takes as its starting point a conceptual problem arising from theoretical debates on populism: the diversity of conceptual formulations of the phenomenon has stimulated the construction or mobilization of highly valuable interpretative frameworks but has not yet satisfactorily resolved the problem of identifying a minimal structure capable of recognizing populism across distinct national, historical, and ideological contexts. This article seeks to address this problem through a three-dimensional theoretical-conceptual framework, bringing together the formulations of Ernesto Laclau, Cas Mudde, and Pierre Rosanvallon on populism.[1] The challenge is to preserve the conceptual variability of populist contents and manifestations without allowing the interpretation to become so broad that it is forced to adapt contextually to the different expressions of the same phenomenon.

This is a predominantly theoretical-conceptual study, complemented by an exploratory empirical exercise involving the analysis of four distinct cases. The hypothesis is that the articulation of these three dimensions makes it possible to apprehend the fundamental properties of populism in a coordinated manner, while simultaneously preserving its conceptual unity and contextual variation.

The framework distinguishes three analytical levels that do not correspond to independent phenomena, but rather to constitutive dimensions of the same political dynamic. At the ontological-discursive level, Laclau makes it possible to apprehend the logic through which frustrated social demands, initially particular and heterogeneous, produce an antagonistic fissure within the social sphere and reorganize political positions and identities around an opposition between “we” and “they.” This division thus constitutes the relational structure through which political identities and hegemonic forms are rearticulated in populism.

At the ideological level, Mudde makes it possible to apprehend the specific way in which this antagonistic relationship is organized by populism through moral polarization. Because of its thin-centered character, populist ideology does not substantively determine the constitutive essence of the two poles but structures their relationship through a moral division between the people and the elite. The concrete contents of these poles remain contingent: different actors and groups may occupy the position of the elite or represent the people according to the context. What constitutes the populist dimension is the persistence of the moral polarized form of the relationship, rather than the stability of its contents.

At the democratic level, Rosanvallon makes it possible to apprehend the unfolding of this antagonistic and polarized configuration within democracy itself. The opening of an antagonistic fissure and its ideological organization as moral polarization tend to reduce the plurality of forms of representation and mediation to a conception of direct, immediate, and polarized popular sovereignty. Democratic indetermination thus appears not as a third property simply added to the previous ones, but as the level at which the political consequences of the articulation between antagonism and polarization become manifest. The plebiscitary simplification of democracy therefore constitutes the unfolding of the specific way in which populist conflict organizes the relationship between the people, power, and representation.

The relationship between these levels is therefore constitutive rather than causally linear. At the ontological-discursive level, antagonism structures the political fissure constituted through frustrated demands; at the ideological level, populist ideology organizes this fissure into a moral polarization whose content remains contingent and currently assumes the form of an opposition between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite”; and, as this configuration is projected onto democracy, it tends to produce its simplification in terms of direct, immediate, and plebiscitary sovereignty.

The framework thus articulates discursive-ontology, ideology, and democratic indetermination as different analytical dimensions of the same process, allowing for the formulation of three distinct but complementary questions through which the cases analyzed here can be empirically examined: 1) does the article identify the presence of an antagonistic fissure that divides the social field between “we” and “they” and produces new political identities through processes of hegemonic rearticulation? 2) does the article identify the organization of this antagonistic division through an ideological form that divides the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” according to a moral yardstick? 3) does the article identify the simplification of forms of democratic representation, mediation, and sovereignty, expressed through the production of a unitary, direct and/or immediate popular will exercised in a polarized and plebiscitary manner?

The empirical exercise consists of assessing the plausibility of this architecture through the analysis of four scientific articles addressing distinct manifestations of populism, selected for the diversity of their national, historical and ideological contexts. The analysis seeks to identify, in each case, the presence and articulation of the three dimensions, assessing whether the framework is capable of producing a common interpretation of empirically heterogeneous manifestations of populism.

The cases selected for the empirical assessment were chosen according to the criteria of the Global Populism Database (GPD) populist classification. The project aims to identify populist features in the speeches of leaders from different countries and periods. The GPD emerged from a project initiated in 2006 to construct a database on the populist discourse of political leaders, initially focused on Latin America and subsequently expanded to different countries and historical periods. The methodology employed is holistic grading, a technique originally developed to assess latent aspects of texts, such as tone, style, and argumentative quality. In the GPD, trained coders assign speeches a score from 0 to 2 according to a rubric that identifies the presence and intensity of populist elements. For a discourse to be considered populist, it must present some conception of popular will; the mere existence of a Manichean worldview is insufficient. For each term in office, the sample normally includes four speeches: a campaign speech, a domestic/commemorative speech, an international speech, and a speech considered representative or famous of the leader.

In addition to this classification, the GPD separates cases and selected speeches according to different ideological, temporal, and geographical dimensions. To maintain case diversity in this analysis, populist leaders were selected with the greatest possible diversity across cases, thereby preventing potential methodological bias. Leaders from the Philippines, Turkey, Nicaragua, and Bolivia were considered, classified across the left, center, and right, with GPD scores of 1.375 (Duterte), 1.466 (Erdogan), 1.25 (Ortega), and 1.462 (Morales), and who were in government between 2002 and 2022. This temporal period was defined in order to test the empirical application of the framework to the political context of the twenty-first century.

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Prof. Lavine: The Democrats Are Making Themselves Vulnerable by Using the Socialist Label

September 5, 2026

by ECPS_admin Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

Professor Howard Lavine argues that the Democratic Party’s path to renewal lies less in ideological repositioning than in economic populism, political energy, and credible material outcomes. While MAGA remains rooted in status threat and a revanchist politics of cultural restoration, Professor Lavine sees greater opportunity for Democrats in focusing on affordability, wages, healthcare, and economic security. He cautions that the “socialist” label may create unnecessary electoral vulnerability, even as the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani current helps reorient the party toward working-class concerns. For Professor Lavine, most voters are not moved primarily by ideological sophistication but by whether political leaders deliver tangible improvements. The strategic imperative is therefore clear: Democrats should “pivot purely to economics” and demonstrate what they can concretely achieve for working-class voters.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In an interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Howard Lavine, Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota and former Director of the Center for the Study of Political Psychology, argues that the Democratic Party’s central challenge is less one of ideological definition than of political branding, economic credibility, and mobilizational energy. His assessment is particularly relevant ahead of the 2026 US midterm elections, as Democrats confront both a weakened but still deeply entrenched Trumpism and the growing influence of figures associated with democratic socialist and economic-populist politics. For Professor Lavine, however, the label itself may be more liability than asset: “The Democrats are making themselves vulnerable to some degree by using the socialist label.”

Professor Lavine draws a sharp distinction between the cultural politics underpinning MAGA and the economic terrain on which Democrats may have greater room to rebuild. MAGA, he argues, remains rooted in status threat and “a revanchist impulse to restore the prior order in which white Christian men feel comfortable in their dominant status.” Yet he does not believe racial and cultural identities necessarily foreclose an economic realignment. Swing voters, he stresses, are generally not those most deeply embedded in MAGA ideology. For Democrats, the crucial question is whether they can translate economic-populist appeals into tangible results: “What matters is the economic outcomes.” Policies themselves are comparatively less important because “most people aren’t going to understand what you say. They’re going to understand what’s happening on the ground.”

This emphasis on economics also shapes Professor Lavine’s interpretation of the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani current. He resists treating it primarily as an ideological socialist project, describing it instead as an effort to rebrand Democrats as more clearly aligned with working-class interests. Indeed, he argues that “the energy is in economic populism. It’s nowhere else.” At the same time, he warns that invoking socialism risks obscuring that advantage: “Too many people don’t like it; it’s not helping Democrats.”

More broadly, Profesor Lavine questions whether ideology itself is what moves most voters. “It’s really not about ideology,” he says of progressive candidates’ recent appeal; what voters are responding to is energy, anger, and a clearer sense of political purpose. In his view, Democrats should therefore move away from cultural issues that animate the academic left and “pivot purely to economics.” The strategic lesson is straightforward: “The more it focuses on economics, the better.” But electoral success ultimately requires more than rhetoric or branding. Once in power, Democrats must demonstrate “what they can do,” and, crucially, “what they can do specifically for the white working class.”

Here is our interview with Professor Howard Lavine, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.

The Trump Administration Is Ginning Up Status Threat

Donald Trump delivers a victory speech after his big win in the Nevada caucus at Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, flanked by his sons Eric (right) and Donald Jr. (left) in Las Vegas, NV. Photo: Joe Sohm.

Professor Lavine, welcome! Your recent work with Christopher Parker describes MAGA as a reactionary movement driven substantially by “status threat”—the perception among historically dominant groups that social change has diminished their standing. Two years ago, Trumpism returned to governing power. Does holding power reduce that sense of threat, or can MAGA continually regenerate feelings of cultural dispossession even while controlling the presidency?

Professor Howard Lavine: It’s a very good question. One could reasonably assume that when the party in power is doing everything it can to restore the dominance of heritage groups—white Christian men—status threat would be assuaged. Howvere, we don’t find any evidence of that. We’ve been tracking status threat since the beginning of the Biden administration through July of this year, and status threat scores have not changed.

It hasn’t changed in part because Trump is ginning it up. And I don’t mean just Trump, but the entire apparatus within the MAGA movement. These are independent actors that are coordinating with one another and reaching millions and millions of people, continuing to present them with evidence that social and demographic change is going to lead to the decline of men, the decline of Christians, and the decline of whites.

Now, part of that is demographic change that no political party can control. Whites will become a minority of the population in about 2045, and Christians sometime between 2040 and 2060. So it’s not entirely related to partisan politics. But, the Trump administration is—whether it is doing this wittingly or not, consciously or not—ginning up status threat.

The Republican Party Has Been Captured by MAGA

You describe MAGA as a movement that ultimately “has taken over a party.” Should we therefore understand today’s Republican Party as a case of movement capture rather than ordinary ideological evolution? And what particular difficulties does that create for Democrats trying to oppose a Republican Party whose identity has become so closely fused with Trumpism?

Professor Howard Lavine: No, it’s the former. The movement has captured the party. Ideological evolution would suggest something different. Think about the change in 2016. I know that most of your readers might not have seen the Republican debates in 2015, but there were 17 people on the stage, and almost all of them were presenting themselves as Reaganite Republicans. Except for Trump.

Now, what Trump might have known—again, consciously or not—was that the Republican Party was no longer a party of Reaganite supporters. It had become a party of ethno-nationalists, concerned with immigration and with the prestige of heritage Americans, who felt besieged not only by the Obama presidency but by the longer sweep of American politics since the 1990s. So, things like political correctness and other sorts of mostly insular academic movements have reverberated somewhat beyond academia, but this is too abrupt a shift to consider it cultural evolutionary change. No, it’s an abrupt capture by a movement.

What this has to say for Democrats is what you began to see under George W. Bush, was an educational realignment, mostly among whites. Whites without a college education moved over to the Republicans. Whites with a college education who were Republican moved over to the Democrats. So, that was an early indication that the Democratic Party was going to be realigned, just as the Republican Party has been captured by MAGA.

But if you’re thinking about this in narrow electoral terms, in American politics, midterm elections are really referendums on the president. What we have in 2026 is just a very clear sense of dissatisfaction with issues related to affordability and the war in Iran.

Under Biden, let’s say in 2022, inflation was 8%, and that crashed his popularity. That was the case all over the West. Inflation was just as high in Belgium, France, and Germany. So, I guess the point I’m making here is that what people are seeing now is not just that gas prices are too high, but that Trump’s actions are clearly responsible. Inflation in Western Europe is half to a third of the size that it is in the United States. And people—not only those who are highly attentive to politics, but those who are around the median, even below the median—are very angry.

So, Trump is underwater everywhere, and I don’t think it much matters. We can get more into the Democratic split, but I don’t think what the Democrats say or do matters very much.

It’s Really Not About Ideology—It’s About Energy

US President Donald Trump greets supporters at MAGA rally for Presidential election 2020 at Harrisburg airport in Middletown, PA on September 26, 2020.

MAGA offers supporters a powerful account of who “the people” are, what they have lost, and who is responsible. Democrats have a much more heterogeneous coalition and often lack an equally clear organizing narrative. Is this one of their principal psychological disadvantages—a coalition broad enough to win elections but too fragmented to generate a comparably strong political identity?

Professor Howard Lavine: The Democrats are, right now, in a very specific place: voters want to see energy. They want to see their representatives and candidates express outrage. But the public is not ideologically informed, apart from a very small stratum at the top. Ten or 15% understand left and right. So, it’s really not about that. It’s more about candidates who, in the past, mostly campaigned in a way that was not as sharply critical of the other party as Democrats are craving now. They want that. To the extent that progressive or Democratic Socialist candidates are winning—for example, in Michigan, House seats in Manhattan, and a couple of other places, including Colorado—it’s mainly about the energy and the sort of tough talk. It’s really not about ideology.

Now, you have other people surrounding the insurgent candidates, and Sean Piker, for example, and these people have millions of followers. They’re much more likely to couch their preferences in ideological terms, but they’re much less salient. They’re only reaching people who are already going to vote for Democrats, especially in a year when Democratic enthusiasm is extremely high. They’re not reaching the voters who swing elections—mostly independents and unhappy members of the incumbent party, of whom there are now more.

So it’s really not about ideology. It’s about, especially among younger voters, wanting to see their candidates become more animated, more angry, and meet Trump’s rhetoric from the opposite perspective. Mamdani is somewhat like AOC, too, but Mamdani is an executive and can do more. He’s a mayor. He has more of a socialist policy agenda, but that doesn’t really translate outside New York. The policy agenda is very concrete and easy to understand. It’s about affordability, subsidized housing, and government-owned grocery stores that will bring prices down and such. That isn’t really what the Democratic Socialists are mostly about. AOC and Mamdani are exceptions.

Democratic Inversion Is a Bad Thing

Your concept of “democratic inversion” suggests that citizens increasingly adjust their policy beliefs to fit their partisan identity rather than choosing parties on the basis of prior beliefs. If so, does ideological uncertainty within the Democratic Party become especially costly because the party itself is less able to provide clear cues about what being a Democrat means?

Professor Howard Lavine: The parties are extremely polarized. When the choice presented to the electorate is simply Republican versus Democrat, it doesn’t really matter what the policy is. Democrats will prefer the Democratic policy. They’re not going to scrutinize it terribly deeply, and most of them won’t understand much about its specifics. Even Democrats running for Congress realize that it’s not really about policy. It’s about showing energy to counter Donald Trump.

The idea of democratic inversion has been around for decades. It’s probably a little bit higher among Democrats, but it’s very high among partisans of both parties, in part because the structure of choice is simply one party or the other. You’re not invited to make up your own policy. Democratic inversion is a bad thing. People should arrive at their political judgments before they pick a party and a candidate. But most of the population—nearly all of it—doesn’t do that. If any sector or stratum of the population does, it’s surprisingly people who are not politically sophisticated. They don’t know what the party’s messages are, so they can’t conform to them, and therefore inversion can’t occur.

Which is ironic. You’d think that the people who are most sophisticated, most knowledgeable, and most aware would start with their own beliefs. It’s just the opposite. I’m only saying this because this is what the research shows over and over again: the most aware partisans are willing simply to adopt the positions of their parties.

Elections Turn Very Much on Recent Economic Change

The November midterms provide an unusually important test. Democrats currently appear more energized than Republicans, and Trump’s approval remains weak. Should the election primarily be understood as a referendum on Trump, or will it also tell us whether Democrats have developed a compelling affirmative identity of their own?

Professor Howard Lavine: Again, largely a referendum on Trump. People are very angry. If you look at it, the issues are inflation and affordability. It’s not about democratic decline. Americans care about democracy, but not that much. Elections turn very much on recent economic change. What we’re seeing here is not only an average 50% increase in gas prices, but also high inflation that can be traced directly to Trump’s policies. And he only seems to be making it worse.

So, a lot of Republican candidates do not want to be seen with him, which is often the case when the president has a low approval rating. Trump’s approval rating is anywhere from the mid- to high 30s, but the most recent polls are in the low 30s, so we might be seeing a decline to a point that we almost never see. Bush left office in 2008 with a 32% approval rating. That’s historic. Nixon did for other reasons, but Bush did because of the economy, and Trump for the same reason.

He’s even underwater on immigration, meaning more people oppose than support his immigration policy, and that is his most important policy. People don’t like the way it’s being implemented. They don’t believe that what was advertised is anything like what Trump is currently doing. They’ve tried to make it more on the quiet. They turned Minneapolis into Fallujah for a couple of months, realized that was unpopular, but the number of arrests and deportations is at an all-time high.

But no, I don’t think the Democrats have much. It may be that in Michigan, some voters might look at Al-Sayed somewhat more negatively than they would his more establishment opponent, but he’s ahead in all the polls. There hasn’t been a single poll where Mike Rogers was ahead, but I think the energy matters. I think Trump has really engulfed the field. There’s really almost nothing outside of Donald Trump.

**The Word Socialism Is Just a Very Bad Choice**

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. — Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the “Bernie Is Back” political rally in Queensbridge Park, Queens, New York, on October 19, 2019. Photo: Aleksandr Dyskin / Dreamstime.

That question becomes especially important as democratic socialist figures seek to shape what that affirmative identity might look like. Before assessing their electoral and organizational potential, however, it may be useful to clarify the concept itself. What distinguishes contemporary democratic socialism in the United States from classical socialism and communism, but also from European-style social democracy? Is the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani current best understood as a genuinely socialist project seeking a deeper transformation of capitalism, or as a more radical version of social democracy operating within a liberal-democratic framework?

Professor Howard Lavine: I don’t even think it’s a radical version of European social democracy. It’s simply projecting a brand—a reputational brand within the Democratic Party—to be more favorable toward the working class, which is probably both morally admirable and strategically correct. The Democrats did a lot better when they were able to win the working class. Since the party inverted, the Republicans have done considerably better. The Democrats simply prefer to be the party of the working class rather than the party of expensively educated elites. Because, there aren’t as many of them. They have cultural and economic power, but they don’t have political power because there aren’t enough of them.

I think the rhetoric—the word socialism—is just a very bad choice. Not that Americans know what it means; they just know they don’t like it. Socialism, Nazism, all the -isms are unpopular. What they want to hear is that the party cares more about them than it does about the more culturally based concerns of highly educated people. The Democrats have gone through a woke period, which AOC recently condemned as crazy, mostly because she realizes that there’s just no political profit in continuing to push wokeism. But because Europe is so substantially to the left in its social democratic ideology and provision, the Democrats simply want to change their brand to attract working-class people who might be disenchanted with Trump.

Meanwhile, there is a crack in the MAGA movement. A lot of MAGA voters—three-time MAGA voters—are beginning to wonder whether the Trump administration cares more about tech oligarchs than the working class. So, it’s a strategically advantageous pivot, both because it does seem to be more squarely focused on the working class economically rather than the upper middle class culturally, and also because, in the late Trump years—he’s about to be a lame duck either way—he’s losing support among Republicans specifically on economic issues.

The Republican Party has mostly been about social or cultural issues, and now the party has captured a group of people who are concerned about economic issues, but the Republicans are not delivering. That’s not just Trump; that’s standard Republican policy from the time of Reagan: cut taxes, reduce them on the wealthy, and reduce the social safety net. So it is not Trump; it’s the Republicans.

Trump probably wouldn’t have wanted to do this, but the Republicans cut Medicaid, which is a social safety net policy that does a lot of things for the elderly and the non-elderly poor, and that will reverberate over the next 12 months. Benefits will be eliminated or substantially lower for MAGA people as much as for non-MAGA people, and so MAGA people are probably looking more than they were in 2016 at specifically economic issues.

Democratic Socialism Is No Longer a Fringe

Zohran Mamdani at the Dominican Heritage Parade on 6th Ave in Manhattan, New York City, August 10, 2025. Photo: Aleksandr Dyskin.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been joined by the success of Zohran Mamdani and a broader insurgent left, while Abdul El-Sayed’s Michigan Senate primary victory demonstrates the appeal of similar progressive economic politics even beyond explicitly democratic socialist candidates. Are we reaching the point where this tendency can no longer be regarded as the Democratic Party’s fringe?

Professor Howard Lavine: That’s a great question. I would like to think that will be true by the time of the 2028 election. That’s the goal: to rebrand the party. The party is seen by younger voters in particular—and this might include voters under 50—as somewhat ideologically stagnant. They’re not providing as strong a contrast to the Republican Party as younger voters need.

Again, this is both about energy and anger, which is what the Democratic base wants to see. But it’s also, as voters will come to find out, about preserving the safety net and refocusing the party on the working class. So, to answer the question provisionally, yes. I think it is no longer a fringe. It will become stronger.

The Democrats Have Lost Energy in the Trump Years

How seriously should we take the analogy between MAGA’s rise within the Republican Party and democratic socialism’s growing influence among Democrats? Could a movement once considered peripheral eventually reshape the Democratic Party’s agenda, candidate selection, activist base, and political vocabulary as profoundly as MAGA transformed the GOP—or are the two cases fundamentally different?

Professor Howard Lavine: No, I don’t think so. They’re fundamentally different in the sense that they’re somewhat apples and oranges. One is more focused on culture, which the Republicans always were. Now it’s ethno-nationalism. Now it’s pitting white Christians against everyone else.

It is about rebranding, as I said, and it’s about recapturing energy. The Democrats have lost energy in the Trump years. They were excited in 2020 because Trump was weakened, people were generally dissatisfied, and his approval rating was low. But the Democrats now realize they can’t rely on that. They need, as you say, an optimistic vision. They need not just to rely on negative partisanship.

I hate to refer to it as democratic socialism. They’ll drop the socialism part at some point, but that’s the only game in town. By 2028, the goal is to rebrand the party around something much more energetic. I hesitate to say policy, because policy doesn’t really move voters very much, but rather a brand, a reputation, an understanding of what the Democrats are. They need something more active.

The Democrats are also beholden to what we now call the Epstein class: billionaires. The Democrats need to shed that. Once they win the House, most likely—and they could win the Senate—but either way, they could start issuing subpoenas to people who are implicated in the Epstein situation, and that’s what Democrats want to see.

This is why Obama’s popularity, after he got into office, just plummeted, because he refinanced the banks and let ordinary Americans go bankrupt. That was very unpopular and a bad move, and I think you would agree with that now. But it’s what the Democrats need to do to re-energize their brand. Nobody knows what they stand for, at least outside of the people who are already gonna vote, no matter what.

The Energy Is in Economic Populism

From a more positive perspective, could democratic socialism help resolve the Democratic Party’s current deadlock? Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani offer ideological clarity, recognizable adversaries, grassroots enthusiasm, and a straightforward economic agenda centered on affordability, housing, healthcare, wages, and inequality. Could this provide the political identity and mobilizational energy mainstream Democrats have struggled to generate?

Professor Howard Lavine: Yes, absolutely. They need to do that. If they don’t, it will be strongly to their detriment. With a 50-50 electorate, the last three elections have basically been ties. Now, you can’t have an exact tie, so one party wins. But I think that, for the Democrats to break out and attempt to become the majority party, which they once were, that’s exactly what they’ll need to do. The energy is in economic populism. It’s nowhere else. There’s no other alternative being proposed.

Revanchist Impulse Getting Worse and Worse

Your work emphasizes that status threat is revanchist: it seeks to recover a social hierarchy perceived as lost. Democratic socialist rhetoric generally points in the opposite direction, promising future material gains and greater equality. Could this allow the left to channel dissatisfaction through an aspirational politics rather than the nostalgic politics of restoration that characterizes MAGA?

Professor Howard Lavine: It’s quite likely that what you’ll see as the result of a re-energized Democratic Party around social change is increased polarization. No, I don’t think that revanchist impulse is going to go away, because demographic change doesn’t require social change, which is what you’re talking about.

But as we get closer to becoming a majority-minority country, it will become inevitable that whites and Christians, both declining in numbers and as percentages of the population, are headed toward minority status. So, I don’t think the revanchist impulse is likely to disappear anytime soon. The question is how it’s packaged.

Trump is a rather crude communicator. I don’t mean crude simply in the sense that he says crude things, although of course he does, and that’s his calling card. But he’s not doing it in a way that, say, J.D. Vance or somebody else could, which runs counter to the conventional wisdom that Vance can’t hold together the MAGA movement.

But the MAGA movement is underpinned by what we would call status threat, as well as by a revanchist impulse to restore the prior order in which white Christian men feel comfortable in their dominant status. Right now, they’re not feeling that. So, I don’t see that revanchist impulse disappearing. I see it getting worse and worse as we move toward a more multiracial America.

What Matters Is the Economic Outcomes

Could a stronger economic-populist message help Democrats shift political conflict away from terrain favorable to Trump—race, immigration, cultural hierarchy, and status loss—and toward wages, housing, healthcare, corporate power, and economic insecurity? Or are racial and cultural identities now too deeply embedded in partisan politics for such a strategic shift to succeed?

Professor Howard Lavine: No, I don’t think they are, because the voters who swing elections are not those who are deeply embedded in MAGA’s ideology. But it’s not really about the policies. They can say anything they want; the policies will be understood only in some fractional sense. What matters is the economic outcomes. If they deliver on what they promise, they will do well. If they promise the moon and deliver none of it, they won’t. And the same is true with Mamdani. So, it’s really about economic outcomes.

But you have to start with policies, and policies have to start with branding. Of those three—branding, policies, and outcomes—policies are the least important. Most people aren’t going to understand what you say. They’re going to understand what’s happening on the ground. Are prices getting higher? Are they steadying out? Is the social safety net becoming stronger? Or is it always on the brink of leaving millions and millions of people in poverty?

If the outcomes are achieved, the brand will become more legitimate and longer-lasting, and will become more deeply embedded in the consciousness of the top 40–50% of aware voters.

Cultural Identities Versus Economics

US Dollar — Photo: Mar Tas / Dreamstime.

Your experimental research found that racial cues pushed Trump supporters and opponents in sharply different directions. Does this suggest a limit to the democratic-socialist assumption that material politics can reunify working-class voters? Can class-based appeals actually weaken status threat, or will economic questions themselves continue to be interpreted through racial and partisan identities?

Professor Howard Lavine: That’s another great question. I think the answer depends first on the economic context. Right now, the answer is yes. Under more prosperous conditions, I think it won’t. Then you tend to get cultural politics.

Right now, there’s a clamoring that is all about economics. I mean, not among the MAGA group. They’re concerned with restoring what they perceived—and what was, in reality—a country that privileged whites and Christians and where men ruled the roost. So, if economic times continue to be difficult, an economic-populist message will take root and be competitive.

At some point—and this is perhaps one of the largest debates in political science and political psychology—it comes down to identities, cultural identities versus economics. It really depends. At the end of the Clinton years, everything was looking great. People had every opportunity to say, “We can ignore economics because we’re all fine, and now we can become a party of identitarians,” which the Democrats began to do.

But I don’t see economics falling away from the top of the agenda anytime soon. I think it’ll dominate the 2028 elections, which will be to the great detriment of the Republican Party. I don’t think those cultural messages will be as important when people can’t afford gas, groceries, or their medical bills. People living on the edge are living much further on the edge, and I think that will matter, at least for 2028.

American politics doesn’t stay the same. It could be different in 2030, just as it was in 2010 and 2018, for that matter. Those were the first midterms of Obama and Trump. They got wiped out.

So, when we come back to outcomes, parties realize that the first Congress they have—which is when they most often have unified control of government—is the only time they’ll be able to do anything. By the end of a president’s first term, those effects are generally exhausted. And there’s usually no opportunity to do anything big again because you have lost the House of Representatives in your first midterm. That’s what happened to Clinton, that’s what happened to Obama, that’s what happened to Trump, and Biden didn’t even control the House.

Democratic Voters Will Continue to Push an Economically Populist Message

The 2026 midterms offer a particularly important test because insurgent-progressive candidates must now move from Democratic primaries into general elections. Michigan’s Senate race is especially significant. Will November help determine whether this politics can expand beyond safe urban constituencies into the competitive states and districts Democrats need to control Congress?

Professor Howard Lavine: Michigan’s gonna be looked at very carefully. But it’s one election, and it’s one state, and its dynamics are bounded by time and context. If Al-Sayed loses, I don’t think the entire apparatus of the Democratic left is going to collapse. There will be other interpretations.

So, no, I don’t think one example will be decisive. I think voters will become disenchanted if they see that the slate of candidates they regard as qualitatively different, or different in kind, from Democratic establishment candidates loses across the board. If they lose across the board, maybe they’ll come back to the drawing board.

But one election—the Michigan election—no, I don’t think that’s enough, because I think Democratic voters who control the brand of the party, to the extent that voters control the party’s brand, which I think they increasingly do, will continue to push an economically populist message.

I’d rather label it that way than democratic socialism. The word socialist is going to have to be excised. Too many people don’t like it; it’s not helping Democrats. It’s the influencers outside of party strategists who love the socialist label. Aside from that, it’s supporters of Bernie. Sadly. Trust me

**A Vague Term Like Socialism Just Can’t Compete**

Republicans are already trying to make socialism itself an issue in the midterms, including through congressional resolutions explicitly linking Democrats to democratic socialist politics. Does that indicate genuine electoral vulnerability for Democrats, or does it show that Republicans recognize the left’s potential to construct a competing populist narrative around economic inequality and concentrated wealth?

Professor Howard Lavine: I think both are true, but more importantly than either of those things, the Republicans don’t have much to campaign on. The running joke is that the only thing they can do is talk about trans athletes, of which there are about five in the country. They don’t really have much to say, but the Democrats are making themselves vulnerable to some degree by using the socialist label.

There will be some people who hesitate to vote for Democrats and may refuse to do so on that basis. It remains to be seen whether this is almost entirely a referendum on Trump or whether the Republicans gain any traction simply by using the word socialism. They’ve used that since Obama, and I don’t think it’s really done much, because most voters don’t understand it, and those who do are already committed to voting for one party or the other.

But this year, voters are so singularly concerned with their economic pocketbooks that a vague term like socialism just can’t compete.

Young MAGA Voters Are Unstable

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

Your work on resistance to persuasion shows that politically engaged voters are particularly capable of rejecting counter-attitudinal messages, sometimes becoming even more certain of their existing views. Does that mean Democrats waste too much effort trying to win committed MAGA voters? Should their priority instead be less-engaged citizens, irregular voters, younger voters, and those whose partisan identities remain relatively weak?

Professor Howard Lavine: Young MAGA voters are unstable. They haven’t formed strong partisan identities. Once they do, it’ll become a lot harder. But there is always competition for swing voters, meaning voters who don’t have a strong party identification. Then there are young voters who are not socialized into the party system. They might vote Republican, and they might even identify as MAGA, but they’re not so deeply embedded in both a belief system and a social world that they can’t be persuaded. So there is such a thing as the persuadable voter, and it’s not a trivial portion of the electorate. I think resistance to persuasion and backfire are generally seen when you’re talking about people who have strong priors.

The Persuadable Voter Is Less Burdened by Strong Party Ties

There is also a normative danger in the MAGA analogy. If democratic socialists became dominant within the Democratic Party, could they eventually reproduce the “democratic inversion” you identify on the right—where movement loyalty determines policy beliefs and internal dissent becomes suspect? What separates healthy ideological renewal from another form of partisan capture?

Professor Howard Lavine: Democratic inversion has been so robust and stable for so long that it’s a permanent feature of the dynamics of democratic citizenship, so it’s a failure of democratic citizenship. But that’s not something that’s going to go anywhere. Again, what I said earlier is that those people who tend to follow the leader, who are inverted, tend to be voters who are, first, certain to vote, second, certain to vote for their party’s candidate. So those people are lost to democratic inversion. And again, those are the people who are most aware and most interested in politics.

The persuadable voter is one who is less burdened by strong party ties and is willing to weigh the evidence, come to a conclusion, and then, potentially, move into a party based on a non-inverted process, meaning that they have come to believe certain values, hold certain policy preferences or goals for the country, and see one party or the other as the basis of that.

We see that already with respect to the growing influence of a fairly heritable personality trait called authoritarianism. That is more strongly structuring American politics, and that’s not inversion. That’s a personality—a deep, heritable personality characteristic—that is sorting the public, mostly the white public, into the Democratic and Republican Party, so inversion isn’t everything. But it’s a dominant dynamic, and there are non-inversion dynamics that are occurring as well. The authoritarianism-to-partisan-identity process is one of them.

The More It Focuses on Economics, the Better

Finally, the November midterms may offer an early answer to the Democratic Party’s larger dilemma. Could the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani phenomenon provide the economic narrative, organizational energy, and political purpose needed to rebuild the party against Trumpism? Or could moving too far toward democratic socialism sacrifice precisely the moderate and cross-pressured voters Democrats need to regain Congress and eventually the presidency?

Professor Howard Lavine: Another great question. I would say the answer is the first one. What they realized—and AOC has, by stating that woke was crazy, or woke one was crazy—is that focusing on cultural issues, especially cultural issues that animate the academic left, is extremely damaging to the party’s brand. So, what AOC and others recognize is that you have to pivot purely to economics. Again, it’s less about how extreme the policies are and more about what they do with power if they take it, and how successful they are with it.

Biden was pretty successful. But inflation and the perception of him as elderly and not fit to run again—which he had promised he wouldn’t do before changing his mind—will probably determine whether the next democratic-left projects succeed. So, the bottom line is: the more it focuses on economics, the better. Beyond that, once they take power, they have to show what they can do, and specifically what they can do for the white working class.

Chinese lanterns displayed during an event promoting cultural exchange and tourism between the EU and China near the European Commission building at Schuman Roundabout.

From Tariffs to Conditional Integration: An EU Strategy for Chinese Electric-Vehicle Investment under the Industrial Accelerator Act*

September 3, 2026

by ECPS_admin Articles Economics Editor’s Choice Home Policy Papers

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Please cite as:
Yang, Li; Yeh, Ray; Raza, Hassan; Abdelbaki, Mohamed; Incani, Noemi; Koleszar, Réka; Ruttencutter, Sarah & Camoletto, Virginia. (2026). “From Tariffs to Conditional Integration: An EU Strategy for Chinese Electric-Vehicle Investment under the Industrial Accelerator Act.” Policy Papers. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). September 3, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/pop0006

Abstract

Europe does not face a simple choice between admitting inexpensive Chinese electric vehicles and closing its market to protect domestic producers. The harder question is how foreign manufacturing can support decarbonization without hollowing out the industrial and employment base that makes the transition politically sustainable. The European Commission’s proposed Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) is an important but incomplete answer. Tariffs can buy time and origin rules can anchor production, but neither instrument alone can create software capabilities, retrain workers or strengthen regional suppliers. This paper compares defensive localization, managed openness and conditional integration, and recommends the third. Its three core proposals are a European Automotive Investment Compact, a Skills and Regional Transition Covenant, and a ring-fenced European Automotive Transition Financing Window. A software and data pillar and a structured implementation dialogue with China would support delivery. The aim is not decoupling or unconditional access, but the conversion of market-seeking investment into capabilities that Europe can retain.

Keywords: European Union; China; electric vehicles; Industrial Accelerator Act; conditional integration

By Li Yang, Ray Yeh, Hassan Raza, Mohamed Abdelbaki, Noemi Incani, Réka Koleszar, Sarah Ruttencutter & Virginia Camoletto

Introduction

Europe’s automotive debate is often framed as a contest between climate ambition and industrial protection. The issue is broader: can the European Union decarbonize transport while retaining enough productive, technological and social capacity to sustain public support? The sector provides direct and indirect work for approximately 13.8 million Europeans and supports extensive networks in steel, chemicals, electronics, software, logistics and services (European Commission, 2026a). When a major plant or supplier reduces production, the effects concentrate in towns where alternative employment may be scarce, and industrial identity remains politically important.

The pressure is real, but its causes are mixed. European producers face high energy costs, fragmented capital markets, uneven charging infrastructure, regulatory complexity and slow progress in software-defined vehicles (Draghi, 2024; European Commission, 2025; van Wieringen, 2024). They also confront a Chinese industry built on scale, intense domestic competition, integrated battery supply chains and rapid product development. China accounted for more than 70 percent of global electric-car production in 2024, while sales of Chinese-made electric cars in Europe continued to grow in 2025 (IEA, 2025; IEA, 2026). This is not merely an import surge, but a collision between industrial systems as EU regulation creates a large market for electric mobility (Ban & Šćepanović, 2026; van Wieringen, 2024).

This collision has a political dimension. The IAA proposal notes that more than 100,000 automotive job cuts were announced in 2024 and 2025 (European Commission, 2026c). Chinese competition is not the sole cause: weak demand, delayed investment, management choices and technological change also matter. Research on Germany shows that actual job loss and fear of future decline can produce different forms of protest, with right-wing populist support particularly responsive where manufacturing remains central to local identity, but its future appears insecure (Bayerlein, Kölzer & Metten, 2026). Trade shocks also make openness easier to portray as a bargain imposed on workers rather than negotiated with them (Poletti, 2026).

The EU has already responded. Following its anti-subsidy investigation, it imposed definitive countervailing duties on battery electric vehicles imported from China, with company-specific rates ranging from 7.8 to 35.3 percent in addition to the ordinary tariff (European Commission, 2024). The duties address identified subsidization and create breathing space for European manufacturers. They do not resolve Europe’s internal weaknesses. A tariff cannot build a battery plant, train a software engineer, connect a factory to affordable electricity or help a medium-sized supplier convert from combustion-engine components to power electronics.

The European Commission’s March 2026 proposal for the Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) moves beyond border measures. It would create lead markets for low-carbon and European-made products, simplify permitting and seek to ensure that major foreign investments generate value inside the Union. Its foreign-investment chapter would cover investments above EUR 100 million in strategic sectors when a single third country holds more than 40 percent of global manufacturing capacity. Under the Commission proposal, covered investments would have to meet at least four of six conditions concerning ownership, joint ventures, technology licensing, EU research spending, employment and local sourcing; the employment condition would be mandatory (European Commission, 2026c, 2026d).

This policy paper argues that the IAA should become the basis for a policy of conditional integration rather than defensive exclusion. Chinese investment can accelerate European electrification and add manufacturing capacity. Yet investment should not be treated as beneficial simply because a factory stands within EU borders. The relevant test is whether it strengthens capabilities that remain in Europe: skilled employment, local suppliers, research, engineering, data governance, circular production and regional resilience. The task for DG TRADE, DG GROW and the wider Commission is to make these conditions predictable, proportionate and common across the Single Market.

Europe’s Automotive Dilemma

The EU’s dependence on China runs through battery cells, processed materials, components and production equipment, not only finished vehicles. Chinese firms benefit from a dense ecosystem in which battery makers, car manufacturers, software providers and suppliers develop products quickly and at scale. European companies remain strong in engineering, premium brands, safety and research, but competition increasingly turns on vehicle software, battery management, data integration, user interfaces and rapid product cycles (IEA, 2025; IEA, 2026; van Wieringen, 2024).

This is why the present ‘China shock’ differs from a conventional import surge. European climate policy is deliberately expanding demand for electric mobility. If European firms and suppliers cannot respond quickly, the demand created by EU regulation will be met by imported vehicles and components. Decarbonization would proceed, but with fewer of the industrial learning effects, investments and jobs that policymakers expected. The dilemma is therefore not whether Europe should remain open. It is how to prevent openness from becoming a one-way transfer of market share while avoiding a protectionist turn that raises consumer prices and slows electric-vehicle adoption (IEA, 2026; van Wieringen, 2024).

Trade figures reinforce the sense of imbalance. In 2025, the EU exported EUR 199.6 billion in goods to China and imported EUR 559.4 billion, producing a deficit of EUR 359.8 billion (Eurostat, 2026). A bilateral deficit is not, by itself, evidence of unfair trade. It does, however, intensify political pressure when it coincides with plant closures and visible import growth in a strategic industry. Measures presented as technical trade defense can quickly become symbols in a wider argument about sovereignty, dependence and the distribution of globalization’s costs.

Hard protectionism would not solve the problem. Europe still needs affordable EVs, competitive batteries and private investment, as well as cooperation with China on climate, standards and trade. Closing the market would reduce competition, delay capacity expansion and invite retaliation. It could also divert Chinese exports towards Europe’s southern neighborhood, where European manufacturers already face stronger competition (Fulton, Lons & Tsang, 2026). A broader protectionist turn would also shrink a major market for Chinese firms and make EU rules less predictable (IEA, 2026; Tagliapietra, Trasi & Sebastian, 2025).

Unqualified openness is equally inadequate. Chinese car and battery manufacturers are investing in Europe or considering local production, which can create jobs and shorten supply chains. Yet local assembly does not necessarily create local capability. A plant may import high-value inputs, retain research and software functions elsewhere and generate mainly assembly jobs. Separate Member-State negotiations can therefore produce uneven benefits and a subsidy race in which the largest public budgets attract the most valuable projects (Tagliapietra, Trasi & Sebastian, 2025).

The green transition must therefore be understood as a political bargain. Consumers need affordable vehicles. Firms need predictable rules and access to finance. Workers need credible routes into new occupations. Regions need replacement investment before old capacity disappears. The EU needs resilience without autarky, and Chinese investors need access without assuming that access can remain detached from European social and industrial concerns. Conditional integrationoffers a way to connect these interests.

**Why the Industrial Accelerator Act Is Only a Partial Answer**

The proposed IAA is significant because it recognizes that trade policy, industrial policy and foreign investment can no longer be treated as separate fields. Its demand-side measures would use public procurement and support schemes to favor low-carbon and European-made products in selected sectors. Its permitting provisions would aim to reduce delays through digital procedures and industrial acceleration areas. Its investment chapter would seek to prevent strategic foreign projects from operating as isolated enclaves by linking approval to European participation, research, training and value-chain integration (European Commission, 2026c, 2026d).

These are useful corrections to a policy model that relied heavily on carbon regulation and market incentives while assuming that industrial capacity would follow. The proposed IAA also reflects the Draghi Report’s argument that decarbonization can support growth only when climate targets are matched by investment, innovation and coordinated industrial action (Draghi, 2024). In the automotive sector, the proposed Act could help create demand for European batteries and components and give public authorities leverage when negotiating with major investors.

The difficulty is that location is not the same as competitiveness. The proposed IAA is strongest on vertical questions: where a battery cell is produced, how much Union-origin content a supported vehicle contains, or whether an investment creates jobs. It is weaker on the horizontal systems that determine long-term performance, including software platforms, vehicle data, cybersecurity, testing environments, charging infrastructure and recycling (European Commission, 2025; van Wieringen, 2024). A factory may satisfy an origin rule while remaining dependent on technology and critical components controlled elsewhere.

The proposed foreign-investment provisions also need refinement. A four-out-of-six test gives flexibility, but investors may select the least demanding combination without producing the capabilities Europe most needs. The proposed 50 percent EU-workforce threshold cannot distinguish temporary assembly jobs from durable technical and research positions. Moreover, conditions tied directly to the purchase or use of domestic goods can create risks under the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures, while compulsory or uncompensated technology transfer would be politically and legally vulnerable (WTO, 1994). China’s Ministry of Commerce has criticized the proposal on precisely these grounds and warned of countermeasures (MOFCOM, 2026a, 2026b).

A further weakness is finance. The proposal warns that uncoordinated national measures can fragment the Single Market, but much industrial support still depends on national fiscal capacity. Germany or France can offer packages that smaller or more indebted Member States cannot match. Without a common EU layer, ‘Made in EU’ may in practice become ‘made in the Member States with the largest subsidy budgets.’ This would deepen regional inequalities and weaken the collective bargaining power that a common European approach is meant to create (Collin, García Bercero & McWilliams, 2026; Tagliapietra, Trasi & Sebastian, 2025).

Finally, the proposed IAA’s social logic remains too automatic. It assumes that anchoring production will anchor employment. Yet electrification changes the industry’s occupational structure, and new factories may be far from the regions losing old ones. Research on the European car industry shows that the transition can reproduce regional and social inequalities unless policy addresses who receives investment, who bears adjustment costs and who participates in decisions (Szabó & Newell, 2024). The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) is therefore right to call for mandatory training, worker participation and regional transition planning, not employment numbers alone (ETUC, 2026).

The proposal should not be abandoned. It should be completed. Its central insight is correct: access to the scale of the Single Market gives the EU bargaining power. That power should be used to secure outcomes rather than to build a wall. Recent assessments similarly caution that poorly calibrated origin and investment rules could delay capacity formation or distort the Single Market unless they are tied to clearer sectoral objectives (Collin, García Bercero & McWilliams, 2026).

Assessing Three Policy Options

At the present stage of the legislative debate, three policy approaches can be envisaged.

The first option is defensive localization. The EU would tighten ‘Made in EU’ rules, maintain or increase tariffs, restrict Chinese participation in public support and apply the proposed IAA’s ownership and technology conditions in their most demanding form. It offers a visible response to job losses and may create protected demand while European producers scale up.

The costs would be substantial. Strict exclusion would raise prices, reduce competitive pressure and delay capacity expansion. It would invite retaliation, while broad local-content requirements could conflict with WTO rules if they discriminated against imported goods (WTO, 1994). Protection would not guarantee innovation: firms could gain a sheltered market without closing gaps in software, batteries and production speed. Export diversion would also expose European manufacturers to stronger Chinese competition in nearby third markets (Fulton, Lons & Tsang, 2026).

This option carries a political paradox. Protection can temporarily reassure workers, but if it leads to expensive electric vehicles, weak demand and continued restructuring, populist actors will shift their argument. Brussels can then be blamed both for imposing the transition and for making it unaffordable. Evidence from manufacturing regions also cautions against assuming that one visible protective measure will settle deeper anxieties about status, employment and regional decline (Bayerlein, Kölzer & Metten, 2026; Poletti, 2026).

The second option is managed openness. The EU would retain countervailing duties and general investment-screening tools while welcoming Chinese factories case by case. Member States would remain free to negotiate investment packages, and the Commission would intervene mainly where subsidies, security risks or market distortions were evident. This approach could attract capital quickly and expand European production without the conflict generated by rigid joint-venture or technology-transfer requirements.

Managed openness is preferable to a trade war, but it is too weak for the scale of the transition. Individual Member States may compete to offer subsidies, land and tax advantages while accepting limited commitments on suppliers, research or skills. Investors could divide production across Europe in ways that maximize incentives rather than industrial coherence. A series of assembly plants would improve output statistics without necessarily strengthening European capability. The approach would also disadvantage smaller Member States and make monitoring uneven (Tagliapietra, Trasi & Sebastian, 2025).

The third option, recommended in this paper, is conditional integration. It starts from two propositions. First, Chinese investment is not inherently a threat; it can support decarbonization, competition and employment. Second, the value of an investment cannot be measured by its location alone. It should be judged by the capabilities it creates and retains in Europe.

Conditional integration would establish common EU rules for major electric-vehicle and battery projects, regardless of which Member State hosts them. Investment approval, eligibility for relevant public support and access to lead-market measures would remain available when investors make verifiable contributions to local research, skilled employment, supplier development, circularity and secure digital systems. The framework would not require firms to surrender corporate control or transfer proprietary technology. Instead, it would impose outcome-based obligations proportionate to the scale of the investment and the public support received.

This approach better balances openness and resilience. It uses the Single Market as leverage without treating investment as a zero-sum contest and aligns with proposals for a common European strategy towards Chinese EV investment (Tagliapietra, Trasi & Sebastian, 2025). Chinese firms would gain a predictable route into Europe: invest for the long term, build local capabilities and meet common standards. Europe would convert competitive pressure into learning and capacity-building rather than a sequence of trade disputes and national restrictions.

Political Feasibility on Both Sides

Conditional integration is viable only if it can be defended in domestic politics. In Europe, governments must show that openness does not mean accepting low-value assembly while research and supplier development remain elsewhere. Commitments on permanent technical jobs, paid retraining and regional supplier conversion should therefore be visible before public support is granted. This matters in industrial regions where expected decline can be as politically consequential as closures already recorded (Bayerlein, Kölzer & Metten, 2026), and it answers populist claims that trade policy protects abstract European interests while local communities absorb the costs (Poletti, 2026).

China faces a different constraint. Beijing is unlikely to accept a framework described as forced technology transfer, discriminatory localization or an anti-China ownership regime (MOFCOM, 2026a, 2026b). Chinese firms may nevertheless accept training, European R&D, supplier-development and carbon-performance commitments when these are presented as normal conditions for long-term investment and apply to all covered foreign investors. Deeper localization can then be framed as commercial adaptation rather than a political concession.

The framework should therefore privilege measurable outcomes over symbolic ownership tests. Country-neutral rules, protection of pre-existing intellectual property and a transparent route to approval make conditional integration easier to defend on both sides: Europe gains visible domestic value, while Chinese investors avoid openly punitive treatment.

Three Core Recommendations

1. Establish a European Automotive Investment Compact

The first step should be a European Automotive Investment Compact anchored in the proposed IAA framework. During the legislative negotiations, the co-legislators should strengthen Article 18 by making capability creation a mandatory element of covered EV and battery investments. In addition to the proposed employment requirement, each project should meet either the EU research-and-development condition or a strengthened supplier-development condition. The relevant legal bases are Articles 18(2)(d), 18(2)(f) and 18(3). The Commission should then use the implementing act foreseen in Article 18(5) of the proposal to establish a sector-specific verification scorecard (European Commission, 2026c).

The scorecard should test substance: technical and permanent jobs, engineering and research performed in Europe, paid training, supplier contracts and the treatment of jointly created intellectual property. An investor should not be able to meet formal ownership conditions while contributing little to learning, nor should a project be rejected merely because a joint venture is commercially inappropriate.

Technology cooperation must be handled carefully. The Compact should recognize paid licensing, joint research centers, jointly created intellectual property, testing facilities and university partnerships, while protecting pre-existing rights. Europe should seek competence rather than ownership of every foreign technology. Supplier conditions should be framed as verifiable value-chain development rather than a blanket obligation to purchase domestic goods, reducing WTO risk (WTO, 1994).

2. Attach a Skills and Regional Transition Covenant to Major Investments

The second recommendation is a Skills and Regional Transition Covenant. The Commission’s March 2026 IAA proposal would require at least half of the workforce in covered investments to be EU workers across occupational categories, accompanied by training. A qualitative plan should also identify the occupations created, qualifications required, share of permanent positions and routes for displaced automotive workers to enter them (European Commission, 2026c).

Investors should partner with vocational schools, universities and recognized training providers. Training should occur during paid working time and extend to affected supplier firms. Where projects receive significant public support, unions and worker representatives should participate in design and monitoring, preventing Europe from gaining mainly assembly jobs while high-value engineering remains elsewhere (ETUC, 2026).

The Commission should also favor projects linked to regions undergoing automotive restructuring, where infrastructure and skills conditions permit. Industrial Acceleration Areas should be tied to regional development, clean-energy access and supplier conversion rather than treated as deregulatory enclaves. A new battery plant does not automatically compensate for a distant components-factory closure; the connection must be designed and funded (Szabó & Newell, 2024).

3. Create a European Automotive Transition Financing Window

The third recommendation is a ring-fenced European Automotive Transition Financing Window under existing EU instruments, coordinated by the Commission and the European Investment Bank. The proposed IAA relies on synergies across the Innovation Fund, InvestEU, Horizon Europe, the Connecting Europe Facility and cohesion funds rather than a new spending envelope (European Commission, 2026c). The Commission should begin preparing a coordinated pilot in 2027, with implementation to follow once the IAA’s legal basis and the necessary budgetary arrangements are in place. In the longer term, the financing window could be incorporated into the European Competitiveness Fund if that instrument is established under the 2028-2034 Multiannual Financial Framework.

The window should finance shared European public goods rather than routine vehicle production: supplier conversion, battery recycling, testing facilities, worker training, grid connections and first-of-a-kind manufacturing. Cross-border value chains and shared research should receive priority over isolated plants with limited spillovers.

National aid could continue, but major packages should be listed on a common transparency platform with public contributions, expected jobs, training, supplier contracts and environmental performance. Investors would then face one European framework rather than a patchwork of national bargains, accepting consistent obligations in return for access to finance and lead markets.

Two Enabling Measures

A Software, Data and Innovation Pillar

The proposed IAA’s emphasis on manufacturing is understandable, but the competitive frontier is shifting towards software-defined vehicles, autonomous-driving systems, battery management, digital services and data. Europe could localize vehicle assembly while remaining dependent on external operating systems and data architectures. That would replace one form of dependence with another (European Commission, 2025; van Wieringen, 2024).

The Commission’s automotive action plan already points towards testing zones, connected and autonomous vehicle alliances and public-private research. These initiatives should be linked to the proposed IAA investment regime. Major projects should comply with EU cybersecurity, data-protection and competition rules; critical software updates and remote-control functions should face independent security auditing; and access to vehicle data generated in Europe should be governed by transparent legal rules (European Commission, 2025).

This pillar should remain open to Chinese firms. Exclusion from European research ecosystems would slow learning and encourage incompatible standards. Participation, however, should depend on interoperability, auditability and compliance with EU data governance. Joint testing facilities could allow European and Chinese firms to develop products for the EU market while ensuring that safety, cybersecurity and data standards are verified in Europe.

A Structured EU-China Implementation Dialogue

The second enabling measure is a structured EU-China implementation dialogue. It should not replace enforcement or offer China exemptions unavailable to others. A working group involving DG TRADE, DG GROW, relevant Chinese ministries, industry and social partners should instead reduce uncertainty during the proposed IAA’s legislative and implementation phases.

The agenda should cover Union-origin calculations, joint research and intellectual property, recognition of training expenditure, reporting and carbon accounting. It could also examine WTO-compatible alternatives to duties, including price undertakings where they address the subsidization identified by the Commission (European Commission, 2026b). Non-confidential guidance should be published for firms on both sides.

Reciprocity should remain on the agenda, but through defined sectors and measurable commitments rather than a demand that every market opens simultaneously. Progress on procurement, standards and research partnerships could be linked to greater confidence in implementation of the proposed IAA. The aim is managed bargaining, not rhetorical escalation.

Risks and Safeguards

Conditional integration will not eliminate conflict. China may challenge provisions of the proposed IAA or retaliate against European firms. The EU should prepare sector-specific contingencies, diversify critical inputs and use trade-defense instruments when evidence supports them. Rules should remain country-neutral and rest on transparent market-share, security and value-creation criteria, making them easier to defend legally (European Commission, 2026c; WTO, 1994).

Symbolic compliance is another risk. Research centers or training programmes may remain small relative to the investment. Approval decisions should therefore include measurable milestones and five-year reporting on permanent jobs, paid training, R&D, jointly developed intellectual property, supplier contracts, recycled content and carbon performance. Failure to meet commitments should trigger proportionate recovery of support or revised approval conditions.

Industrial policy can also become detached from affordability. Consumers cannot carry the full adjustment cost through higher vehicle prices. The Commission should preserve competition, expand charging infrastructure and target demand measures towards small and affordable EVs. Resilience will not be politically sustainable if electric mobility becomes a premium product (European Commission, 2025; IEA, 2026).

Finally, the proposed IAA should not be sold as a victory over China. Such language would strengthen nationalist narratives on both sides. It should be presented as a rule for all major investors: access to public support and the Single Market comes with responsibilities to workers, regions, innovation and climate goals. Visible local benefits are the strongest answer to populist claims that trade and decarbonization serve only distant institutions and large corporations (Poletti, 2026).

Conclusion

The European automotive transition cannot be secured by tariffs alone. Nor can Europe assume that any factory built within its borders will automatically deliver resilience. The decisive issue is the quality of industrial integration.

Defensive localization would protect selected producers but risk higher costs, retaliation and technological complacency. Managed openness would attract capital but leave Member States competing for investments that may create limited European spillovers. Conditional integration offers a more durable route. It welcomes Chinese electric-vehicle and battery investment when that investment creates capabilities Europe can retain skilled jobs, research, suppliers, secure digital systems, circular production and regional development.

The proposed Industrial Accelerator Act provides the beginnings of such a framework, but it needs clearer priorities, a realistic financing channel and stronger links to skills, software and regional policy. A European Automotive Investment Compact would turn broad legal conditions into predictable sectoral rules. A Skills and Regional Transition Covenantwould connect industrial location to social legitimacy. A European Automotive Transition Financing Window would limit fiscal fragmentation, while the two enabling measures would address future technological competition and reduce uncertainty without weakening enforcement.

Europe should not ask Chinese firms to become European. It should ask every major investor benefiting from the European market to make a measurable contribution to European capacity. The strategic shift is from market access to co-development, and from the location of output to the creation of capability. Implemented in that form, the proposed IAA could do more than manage a trade dispute. It could support decarbonization, democratic stability and a more balanced EU-China economic relationship.

(*) This policy paper is based on research conducted by the ECPS Summer School 2026 China Team during the case competition on the side of Summer School titled “Europe Between Oceans: The Future of EU Trade Between the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific,” held on July 6-10, 2026.

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