From Pax Americana to Pax Silica, US grand strategy is undergoing a quiet but consequential transformation. In this timely commentary, Dr. Prerna Chahar argues that recent US security documents—the 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act—signal a shift away from global stewardship toward a selective, technology-centered, and leverage-driven order. Rather than underwriting international rules and alliances, Washington is increasingly exercising power through control over strategic technologies, supply chains, and infrastructural chokepoints—a model Dr. Chahar conceptualizes as Pax Silica. This reorientation prioritizes hemispheric consolidation, technological dominance, and transactional partnerships over normative leadership. For partners such as India, the implications are profound: engagement remains valuable but conditional, reinforcing the logic of strategic autonomy, calibrated cooperation, and multi-alignment in a fragmented global order.
By Prerna Chahar*
What is unfolding in US security policy is neither isolationism nor traditional internationalism, but a selective strategy centered on leverage, technology, and regional primacy. American grand strategy is undergoing a quiet yet consequential transformation one that redefines how power is exercised, how partnerships are valued, and how international order is sustained. Recent US strategic documents, the National Security Strategy (NSS), and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) point to a decisive shift away from managing global order toward consolidating national advantage, with far-reaching implications for allies and partners.
The National Security Strategy (NSS), published on December 4, 2025, and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2026, signed into law on December 18, 2025, together confirm that the era of Pax Americana characterized by institutional stewardship, alliance management, and normative leadership is giving way to a more selective, technology-centered, and transactional order. This emerging configuration may be described as Pax Silica: an order grounded less in alliances and rules and more in control over technology, supply chains, and strategic chokepoints.
NSS and NDAA: Reframing US Grand Strategy
The framing of the NSS 2025 itself signals a deliberate break from earlier approaches to American grand strategy. Four recurring themes encapsulate this reorientation.
First, the strategy explicitly rejects “old policies,” portraying past commitments to liberal internationalism, open-ended multilateralism, and interventionism as having diluted US sovereignty, weakened economic resilience, and overstretched strategic focus. This narrative of rupture legitimizes a more restrained and interest-driven approach to global engagement.
Second, the NSS defines what America wants with unusual clarity. Rather than emphasizing the maintenance of international order, it articulates bounded national priorities border security, economic nationalism, technological dominance, and hemispheric stability. Global leadership is no longer treated as an intrinsic responsibility but as a derivative of clearly specified national interests.
Third, both the NSS and the NDAA foreground American strength in material rather than normative terms. The NDAA 2026 authorizes over $900 billion in national defense funding, making it one of the largest defense policy bills in recent history. This level of spending underscores a sustained emphasis on military readiness, industrial capacity, and technological superiority. Military capability, innovation ecosystems, industrial depth, and technological leadership take precedence over values-based diplomacy, institutional rule-making, or normative influence.
The NDAA further operationalizes this shift through enhanced cybersecurity authorities, frameworks for the secure development and deployment of artificial intelligence and machine-learning systems and strengthened protections for US Cyber Command and digital infrastructure. It also expands authorities related to airspace security and counter-unmanned aerial systems under provisions such as the Safer Skies Act broadening civil and federal counter-drone capabilities. Together, these measures reflect the logic of Pax Silica, in which control over technology and infrastructure replaces institutional stewardship as the primary currency of influence.
Fourth, the NSS report clarifies the renewed strategic focus on the Western Hemisphere. While global competition remains important, the strategy prioritizes hemispheric stability, border control, migration management, and economic dominance within the Americas. This represents a modernized revival of Monroe Doctrine logic, where securing influence in the immediate neighborhood is treated as foundational to national security. Engagement beyond the hemisphere is increasingly selective and interest-driven, filtered through considerations of domestic security, economic resilience, and technological advantage rather than assumptions of automatic leadership. The NDAA reinforces this orientation by prioritizing resources for homeland protection, maritime domain awareness in the Atlantic and Caribbean, and defense readiness tied to territorial security. Together, these documents signal a shift from global managerial ambitions toward consolidation of power closer to home.
Taken collectively, these elements reflect a fundamental strategic reorientation. Rather than presenting the United States as the custodian of international order, the NSS positions it as a state intent on consolidating advantage, preserving autonomy, and exercising leverage. This underscores the durability of what may be termed the Trump Corollary: the notion that alliances, institutions, and global engagements are instruments to be justified by tangible returns rather than commitments sustained for systemic stability or normative leadership.
US ‘Pax Silica’: Renewed Instrument of Power
Within this hemispheric and technological reorientation, Pax Silica captures the defining feature of the emerging order: power exercised through technological and infrastructural dominance rather than institutional rule-making. Semiconductors, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, digital platforms, and financial networks now constitute the backbone of strategic competition. Control over access to these systems enables coercion and influence without overt force.
Edward Fishman, in his book Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, demonstrates how American power increasingly operates through the regulation of markets, technology flows, and supply chains, an approach clearly visible in export controls, investment screening, and technology-denial regimes embedded in both the NSS and the NDAA. Unlike Pax Americana, which relied on openness, predictability, and alliance cohesion, Pax Silica is exclusionary and conditional. Cooperation is granted rather than guaranteed; access replaces inclusion as the principal mechanism of influence.
The most consequential aspect of this transition is the decoupling of power from stewardship. The United States remains pre-eminent, but it no longer seeks to underwrite global order as a public good. Instead, it prioritizes regional consolidation, technological control, and transactional leverage. This is not withdrawal, but re-hierarchization: the Western Hemisphere first, strategic technologies second, and global commitments contingent on domestic advantage.
Implications for India
The renewed US focus on the Western Hemisphere carries important implications for India. While the Indo-Pacific remains relevant, it is no longer the singular organizing theatre of US grand strategy. Engagement in Asia is increasingly shaped by cost-benefit calculations and capability contributions rather than long-term commitments to regional order. For India, this creates both opportunity and uncertainty. Reduced ideological pressure allows greater strategic autonomy, but transactional partnerships demand constant negotiation. Cooperation in defense, technology, and supply-chain resilience particularly in semiconductors and critical technologies remains valuable yet inherently conditional. India’s participation in groupings such as the Quad must therefore be understood as calibrated engagement rather than alignment, reinforcing the logic of multi-alignment and diversification.
Conclusion
The shift from Pax Americana to Pax Silica reflects a profound transformation in US statecraft. The renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere, combined with technological competition and transactional diplomacy, marks a move away from global stewardship toward selective, leverage-based power. For partners such as India, the challenge is to engage without illusion cooperating where interests converge, hedging where vulnerabilities emerge, and sustaining strategic autonomy in a world where leadership is fragmented and power is increasingly exercised through control rather than consensus.
(*) Dr. Prerna Chahar is a scholar of International Relations with published research on US foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific, regional coalition-building, and India’s foreign policy. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Centre for the Study of the Americas (CCUS&LAS), School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
Davos 2026 revealed a global order no longer converging on a single liberal model, but sliding into a harsher era in which power increasingly outweighs rules and “integration” is reframed as vulnerability. The most striking paradox was that this diagnosis came not from critics at the margins, but from the system’s own architects—transforming elite “candor” into a strategy for managing declining legitimacy. In a world shaped by fragmentation and coercive interdependence, China’s state-capitalist model is increasingly perceived as a more effective crisis-response framework, while the United States and Europe drift toward a troubling hybrid: adopting not China’s developmental strengths, but its coercive instruments of control. This dynamic reflects an emerging logic of reverse convergence—the West is no longer guiding the world toward liberalism, but being pulled toward the governance style of its principal rival.
The Davos platform can be seen as a stage where dominant actors test narratives, identify legitimacy losses, and modify the public vocabulary they use to govern (or justify governing). It rarely makes formal decisions; instead, it indicates what elites believe they can still publicly defend—and what they can no longer convincingly pretend. Davos 2026, in that sense, can be viewed less as a policy summit and more as a diagnosis of the regime.
In this context, Davos 2026 is significant because the words spoken inside the room seemed less like a reaffirmation of the post-1990 liberal-global order and more like an early draft of its obituary. Larry Fink, Interim Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and CEO of BlackRock—one of the world’s largest asset managers—started with a blunt admission that the world trusts Davos and the WEF’s ability to shape the future “far less,” warning that the forum risks seeming “out of step with the moment: elites in an age of populism” (Fink, 2026). Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, took it even further. He suggested that the problem isn’t just declining trust in institutions; it’s the collapse of the narrative foundations of the “rules-based liberal multilateral order” itself. He described “the end of a pleasant fiction… and the beginning of a harsh reality,” emphasizing that “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” (Carney, 2026).
If anything was “announced,” then it was not a new treaty or a coordinated policy package. It was an elite confession: the old legitimating story no longer works.
What Exactly Is Ending?
The natural questions—What was declared at Davos? Is it the end of the Western system? Is Chinese-style state capitalism rising? —are the right ones. But they require careful separation of the West as power from the West as ideology, and of neoliberal globalization from liberal democracy. What seems to be ending is not “the West” as a geographical or civilizational fact, but a historically specific settlement—visible in three interlocking dimensions.
The end of the convergence myth:One part of the story traces back to assumptions about nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernization. Classical modernization thinking regarded history as a linear, stage-like process where societies would converge toward a single “advanced” model through diffusion, emulation, and integration—so that cross-civilizational differences would eventually appear as “time lags,” not alternative paths (Apter, 1965; Inglehart & Welzel, 2005; Rostow, 1960). In that framework, modernity was not just one option among many; it was seen as the expected endpoint of development.
Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis—initially presented as an essay and later expanded into a book—was a late-twentieth-century extension of this modernization perspective (Fukuyama, 1989, 1992). After the fall of Soviet-style planning, liberal capitalism seemed not just victorious but final: no significant systemic challengers remained, and future conflicts were seen as minor issues rather than real alternatives.
Davos 2026, however, seemed to quietly acknowledge that this convergence theory has run its course. After decades of “learning-by-doing” globalization, the idea that marketization, integration, and digitization would inevitably lead to liberal-democratic outcomes has become less convincing. Among many others, Öztürk (2025) calls this a fundamental “liberal fallacy,” revealed by post-2008 stagnation, growing inequality, and the resilience of authoritarian governance under capitalist conditions.
The decline of the authority of the “rules-based order” (as performance):A second aspect involves the public authority of institutional rules. Carney’s remarks illustrated a familiar phenomenon: states show belief in a rules-based order—displaying the “sign” publicly—while privately recognizing how often the rules break down in practice (Carney, 2026). His metaphor strongly mirrors Václav Havel’s assessment of late-socialist legitimacy: the system’s survival relied on ritualistic compliance and public participation in an official fiction, even when no one truly believed it (Havel, 1978).
In modern global politics, this is the credibility crisis of liberal internationalism: the rules exist, but enforcement seems selective; the universal language stays, but power distribution shapes outcomes. This is exactly where realism comes back—sometimes openly, sometimes disguised as “values-based pragmatism.”
The end of elite capitalism’s moral economy:Third, Davos 2026 hosted a legitimacy check on elite-led capitalism itself. Fink’s insistence that prosperity cannot be reduced to total GDP gains or stock-market success implicitly admits what critics have argued for decades: growth narratives do not automatically generate social approval when the distribution of wealth is unfair, public services decline, and opportunities disappear (Fink, 2026; Piketty, 2020).
This line closely mirrors Robert F. Kennedy’s well-known critique of national income accounting, asserting that GDP can measure “everything… except that which makes life worthwhile” (Kennedy, 1968). What once seemed like fresh wisdom at Davos in 2026 now appears as delayed recognition: a long-overdue admission that the legitimacy of capitalism cannot rely solely on aggregate indicators. Taken together, these three dimensions do not imply “the end of the West.” They signify the end of the West’s story about itself—the self-description of a system that universalizes its model as destiny, naturalizes its institutions as neutral rules, and considers legitimacy to be the automatic result of growth. Historically, when a hegemonic story collapses, systems rarely vanish overnight; instead, they change and adapt.
The Crisis of Corporate Capitalism as a Reflection of the System
Öztürk’s (2025) “reverse convergence” hypothesis provides one of the clearest ways to interpret Davos 2026. It avoids two lazy conclusions— (1) “China is replacing the West,” and (2) “nothing changes; it’s only noise”—by arguing that the direction of convergence has reversed. Liberal democracies are increasingly adopting illiberal governance techniques (expanded surveillance, executive discretion, securitized policy frames, controlled pluralism), while authoritarian regimes are adopting capitalist tools (market mechanisms, technological dynamism, corporate scale) without liberalizing. This is not ideological convergence through persuasion. It is functional convergence driven by systemic pressure.
Here, Karl Polanyi’s concept of the “double movement” becomes central: disembedded markets cause social division and political backlash, but the protective countermovement can be seized—redirected into nationalist, exclusionary, or authoritarian forms instead of democratic re-embedding (Polanyi, 1944). Fernand Braudel’s distinction is also important: capitalism is not the same as competitive markets; it is often a structure of lasting domination shielded from democratic accountability (Braudel, 1982, 1984).
Add the modern layer of digital political economy. The tools of governance increasingly function through infrastructures of data extraction, algorithmic control, and dependency rather than through persuasion or consent. This is the shared domain of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), vectoral power and information monopolies (Wark, 2004, 2019), and “techno-feudal” rent extraction via digital platforms and cloud infrastructures (Varoufakis, 2023). In this view, Davos 2026 was not just a geopolitical event; it also revealed that corporate capitalism has created a legitimacy gap that traditional liberal narratives can no longer fill.
When Fink’s speech is analyzed through the perspectives of Polanyi and Braudel, it seems to outline a plan to restore legitimacy. He urged the WEF to “regain trust,” boost participation, and modernize the language used to defend capitalism (Fink, 2026). Even if the diagnosis is sound, the messenger presents a problem. The contradiction is structural: the credibility crisis he describes is closely linked to the financial and corporate structures that BlackRock represents. When the “doctor” is also one of the system’s most powerful beneficiaries, criticism is often seen as mere damage control by elites rather than genuine reformist bravery.
Fink also emphasized that prosperity must become distributive, turning “more people into owners of growth,” not spectators (Fink, 2026). Yet this is where Davos rhetoric regularly stalls: it acknowledges the legitimacy problem but often proposes solutions at the level of communication rather than at the level of reconstruction. The 2026 shift, then, is not the defense of globalization’s moral premise; it is an attempt to rewrite capitalism’s legitimacy contract amid mass distrust.
A key concern running through the Davos discussions about AI is anxiety. The worry is that AI will repeat the distributional betrayal of globalization: early benefits go to owners of data, compute, models, and platforms, while the social costs are spread out to others. Without strong redistribution and governance, AI risks being less of a productivity leap and more of a new enclosure system—worsening dependence instead of expanding opportunities (Zuboff, 2019; Varoufakis, 2023).
From Benign Interdependence to Fortress Logic
Carney’s intervention was more impactful because it explicitly addressed what “trust” rhetoric often overlooks: the geopolitical and geoeconomic rupture of the rules-based order. His speech repeatedly suggested that the liberal promise of mutual interdependence has run its course. Integration can become a source of vulnerability and subjugation, leading states to pursue strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, finance, and supply chains (Carney, 2026).
At one point, Carney invoked a brutally realistic moral: “the strong can do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The phrase echoes the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides—a canonical statement of power politics rationality (Thucydides, trans. 1972). The significance is not the originality of the reference; it is that Davos discourse now treats such realism as publicly speakable.
This is where “weaponized interdependence” becomes relevant: network power can be transformed into coercion when states or firms control critical chokepoints in finance, infrastructure, trade, and digital platforms (Farrell & Newman, 2019). Carney’s prescription—strategic autonomy or a “world of fortresses”—is therefore less a nationalist shift than an acknowledgment that global integration is no longer seen as harmless.
Seen from the broader perspective of globalization discourse, Davos 2026 signifies a significant reversal of the assumptions that characterized the early 2000s. Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flatsummarized the era’s belief that digital connectivity and integrated supply chains were “flattening” the world into a more open, opportunity-filled, and ultimately convergent space (Friedman, 2005). Two decades later, David J. Lynch’s The World’s Worst Betreads like an obituary for that optimism: globalization now seems less like a benign force for shared prosperity and more like a risky gamble that has weakened industrial resilience, increased inequality, empowered strategic competitors, and fueled political backlash in the West (Lynch, 2025). The transition from “flatness” to “worst bet” reflects the same shift Carney now describes in geopolitical terms: integration is no longer assumed to be mutually beneficial; it is increasingly viewed as a potential pathway to dependence, coercion, and subjugation (Carney, 2026; Friedman, 2005; Lynch, 2025).
This closely aligns with Amitav Acharya’s argument that the liberal “rules-based order” was never entirely universal; it functioned as a Western-centered system with selective membership and inconsistent enforcement. What follows, according to Acharya, is not just “multipolarity,” but a decentralized “multiplex” world—more diverse, more contested, and less controlled by a single hegemon (Acharya, 2017; Acharya, 2018). Even defenders sympathetic to the liberal order acknowledge its historically Western core and its expansion after the Cold War (Ikenberry, 2008, 2018).
Davos 2026, therefore, seemed like a moment when elites started speaking more openly than before about a world they can no longer describe as heading toward a single institutional model. However, there is a deeper contradiction at Davos: many of the harshest critiques in 2026 were made not by independent critics but by the system’s own architects—CEOs, senior officials, and high-level political leaders. This doesn’t invalidate their diagnosis, but it should change how we interpret it: what looks like honesty may also be a form of preemptive storytelling, a controlled version of systemic self-criticism aimed at maintaining core power structures while giving rhetorical ground.
The US–EU–China Triangle: Three Paths, One Convergent Pressure
Against this backdrop, the question facing mainstream systems is no longer just whether globalization can be “fixed,” but which governance model is increasingly seen as the better response to a high-stress world full of uncertainty, fragmentation, and coercive interdependence. Under conditions of heightened geopolitical competition, supply-chain insecurity, volatility in energy and food, and rapid technological rivalry, the focus is quietly shifting toward the idea that China’s model—often called socialist state capitalism—may provide faster, more disciplined, and more strategically coordinated solutions than the liberal market approach, mainly because it can mobilize resources, direct finance, and prioritize long-term national goals. In this context, Davos 2026 didn’t just expose a legitimacy crisis; it also pointed to a growing competition over “effective modernity,” where resilience and the ability to command are beginning to matter more than openness and procedural legitimacy.
Indeed, an even more concerning sign is emerging from within the West itself: leading trends in the United States and the European Union increasingly indicate that what they are taking from China is not its potentially positive strengths—such as developmental coordination or strategic industrial policy—but rather its negative governance traits: securitization, surveillance expansion, executive centralization, and the normalization of emergency-style rule. This creates a growing zone of hybridization, where liberal democracies preserve electoral rituals while gradually adopting illiberal techniques of control and exclusion. In other words, the West seems to be entering a phase of reverse convergence—a process where the “center” shifts toward the logic of its challenger, often in its most coercive forms—a dynamic that I will explore in detail.
Öztürk’s (2025) structured comparison across five dimensions—surveillance regimes, populist discourse, regulatory architecture, market concentration, and distributional outcomes—acts like a decoder for Davos 2026. It does not claim that the US, EU, and China are becoming identical. Instead, it argues that all three are responding to the same structural pressures—tech-driven control, oligopolistic concentration, legitimacy erosion—while doing so through different institutional legacies.
China’s large-scale integration of state and capitalshows that advanced capitalism can exist without liberal democracy. It combines market activity and corporate growth within one-party control, increasingly extending worldwide through infrastructure, standards, and digital systems (Callahan, 2016; Creemers, 2018; Dai, 2020). Its governance tools—such as data-driven monitoring, biometric systems, and ideological control of platforms—provide an attractive model for regimes dealing with insecurity and social unrest, even though it also poses legitimacy challenges (Greitens, 2020).
The United States’ hybrid driftshows how liberal democracy can weaken internally due to inequality, institutional capture, and polarization, especially after the 2008 crisis delegitimized traditional economic promises and heightened distrust between elites and the public (Öztürk, 2025). Illiberal populism has proved to be a resilient narrative ecosystem (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018; Mounk, 2018). Meanwhile, corporate surveillance and algorithmic governance operate alongside expanding security measures, leading to convergence driven by technique rather than ideology (Zuboff, 2019).
The European Union’s regulatory ambition, even under legitimacy stress,stands as the strongest counterexample to simple convergence claims because it has built the most ambitious rights-based regulatory framework in the democratic world, especially in the digital area (Floridi, 2020; Véliz, 2021). However, it remains vulnerable to legitimacy stress: far-right normalization, internal rule-of-law conflicts, uneven fiscal capacity, and ongoing reliance on US platform power. Regulation can limit domination, but legitimacy ultimately depends on distributive foundations—not just technocracy (Brown, 2019; Piketty, 2020).
If one sentence embodies the West’s strategic trauma, it is this: China demonstrates that sophisticated capitalism can operate without liberal democracy—and at scale. The Davos concern is not just that China competes, but that China’s model is increasingly serving as a reference point for organizing power in the twenty-first century (Öztürk, 2025).
The Hidden Davos Declaration
If we summarize Davos 2026 into a single implicit statement, it is: The global order based on rules-based multilateralism, benign interdependence, and trickle-down legitimacy has reached a final crisis. What comes next is probably going to be centered around: i) strategic autonomy (energy, supply chains, critical minerals, digital sovereignty) (Carney, 2026), ii) narrative legitimacy repair (“inclusive prosperity,” participation, trust) (Fink, 2026). iii)technological control architectures (AI governance, surveillance trade-offs, platform regulation conflict) (Zuboff, 2019; Varoufakis, 2023), and iv)a reduced faith in universalism, and a greater acceptance of bloc rivalry, vulnerability management, and “value-based realism” (Acharya, 2017; Ikenberry, 2018).
This is why Davos 2026 felt like a turning point: elites are no longer pretending we still live in the 1990s. But the new order being outlined is not automatically democratic. It can just as easily shift toward market authoritarianism—combining capital preservation with control-first governance. A democratic solution is still conceptually possible: re-embedding markets in democratic institutions (Polanyi, 1944), rebuilding a distributive social contract (Piketty, 2020), and limiting both corporate and government power through enforceable rights (Floridi, 2020; Véliz, 2021). Davos 2026, however, raises a brutally practical question:Can democracies re-legitimate themselves quickly enough before surveillance, AI, and strategic autonomy become permanent justifications for executive insulation?
That question, more than any speech, was the true “announcement.”
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In this in-depth ECPS interview, Professor António Costa Pinto—one of Europe’s leading scholars of authoritarianism—offers a historically grounded analysis of Chega’s meteoric rise and André Ventura’s advance to the second round of Portugal’s 2026 presidential election. Far from an electoral accident, Professor Costa Pinto situates Chega’s breakthrough within long-standing structural conditions, recurrent political crises, and the fragmentation of the center-right. He traces how Ventura mobilizes authoritarian legacies of “law and order,” welfare chauvinism, and anti-elite resentment without openly rehabilitating Salazarism. Immigration, demographic change, and plebiscitary populism emerge as key drivers of Chega’s success. Crucially, Professor Costa Pinto argues that Orbán’s Hungary—not Trump or Bolsonaro—serves as Ventura’s primary model, raising urgent questions about democratic resilience in Portugal as uncertainty on the right deepens.
In this in-depth interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor António Costa Pinto—Research Professor (ret.) at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, and a leading authority on authoritarianism and the radical right—offers a historically grounded analysis of the unprecedented rise of Chega and its leader, André Ventura. The discussion is anchored in a critical political moment: Ventura’s advance to the second round of the 2026 presidential election, which Professor Costa Pinto describes as neither a mere accident nor a sudden rupture, but the product of deeper transformations within Portuguese democracy.
As Professor Costa Pinto explains, Chega’s breakthrough cannot be understood as an isolated electoral shock. “The Chega Party and André Ventura have, in a way, a short history in Portuguese democracy,” he notes, “but over the last four years, the party has gone from one MP and 1.5 percent to 23 percent.” This rapid ascent, he argues, reflects the convergence of long-standing structural conditions—most notably the persistence of conservative authoritarian values in Portuguese society—with a series of destabilizing political crises that created what he calls “populist junctures.”
A central theme of the interview is the fragmentation of the center-right, which Professor Costa Pinto identifies as a key enabling factor. Portugal now has “three parties representing the right in Parliament,” and Chega’s strategy is explicitly hegemonic: to replace the traditional center-right as the dominant force. Ventura, Professor Costa Pinto observes, has succeeded because “he was able to mobilize his electorate,” even as his capacity to expand it in a runoff remains uncertain.
The interview also situates Chega within Portugal’s authoritarian legacies without reducing it to a simple revival of Salazarism. While Chega does not openly rehabilitate the Estado Novo (the corporatist Portuguese state installed in 1933), Professor Costa Pinto notes that it selectively draws on the past, particularly through “law and order” and moral authority. “Salazar is presented as the example of a non-corrupt dictator,” Professor Costa Pinto explains, adding that Chega appropriates “the idea of a conservative regime in which law and order prevailed,”while avoiding deeper identification with an unpopular dictatorship.
Immigration emerges as the party’s most powerful mobilizing issue. According to Professor Costa Pinto, “the central card that Chega has been playing over the last four years—and one that is closely associated with its electoral success—is immigration.” He links this to recent demographic shifts, especially increased migration from South Asia, and to growing anxieties among working-class voters. These dynamics underpin Chega’s welfare chauvinism, which combines statist social policies with exclusionary nationalism.
Crucially, Professor Costa Pinto frames Ventura within a transnational authoritarian constellation. “In a way, Orbán is the model for Ventura,” he states plainly. “The type of regime that Ventura would seek to consolidate in Portugal… is precisely the kind of competitive authoritarian regime that Orbán has managed to establish in Hungary.” While Trumpist styles and Bolsonaro’s experience in Brazil matter symbolically, Professor Costa Pinto stresses that Ventura adapts these influences pragmatically to Portuguese political culture.
Ultimately, the interview raises pressing questions about democratic resilience. While Professor Costa Pinto believes that Ventura is unlikely to win the presidency, he cautions that “the game is not over” on the right. Portugal, he concludes, faces a period of sustained uncertainty—one in which democratic institutions remain intact, but increasingly contested.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor António Costa Pinto, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
A Historic Runoff and a Fractured Right
André Ventura of the Chega party speaking during the plenary session of the Portuguese Parliament debating the government’s motion of confidence, March 11, 2025.
Professor António Costa Pinto, thank you so much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: André Ventura’s advance to the second round of the 2026 presidential election marks a historic breakthrough for the Portuguese far right. From alongue duréeperspective, how should we interpret this moment: as an electoral shock, or as the culmination of structural shifts long underway within Portuguese democracy?
Professor António Costa Pinto: Let me tell you two things. First, the Chega Party and André Ventura have, in a way, a short history in Portuguese democracy. Over the last four years, the party has gone from one MP and 1.5 percent in legislative elections to 23 percent. The reason why André Ventura will be present in the second round of the presidential elections is therefore more complicated. The Portuguese center-right and right are going through a rather curious period of party fragmentation. We now have three parties representing the right in Parliament: the center-right that is in power, a liberal right with 7.5 percent, and the Chega Party with 23 percent.
The question surrounding this presidential election is, in a way, simple. There was an independent candidate who was expected to be the winner a year ago. Admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo was a sort of hero of the response to the pandemic a couple of years ago. In this sense, the presidential election is unusual in terms of the number of candidates, with four candidates competing on the right-wing side of the political spectrum.
The reason why Ventura is in the second round is straightforward. The main reason is that he was able to mobilize his electorate. The more difficult challenge for Ventura lies in the second round: whether he will be able to expand his electorate, because, in theory, he is going to lose.
Why the Far Right Arrived Late in Portugal
Portugal was long considered an outlier in Southern Europe for its resistance to far-right populism. In your view, what factors delayed the emergence of a party like Chega, and what has changed—politically, socially, or culturally—to make its rise now possible?
Professor António Costa Pinto: There are structural factors and conjunctural factors. The structural factor is, first of all, that since the 1980s we have known already quite clearly from surveys that around 80 percent of Portuguese society has expressed conservative authoritarian values. That was very clear. The main problem, of course, was the opportunity to express these values in electoral and political terms. Until very recently, the two main parties, especially on the right-wing side of the political spectrum—and particularly the main center-right party—had the capacity, in a way, to frame and absorb this electorate to their right.
What happened in the meantime? There were two general elements. The first was what we could call a populist juncture. A couple of years ago, a Socialist prime minister, António Costa—who now holds a position in the European Union institutions—faced, while in office, an accusation from the court system. Not exactly for corruption but associated with corruption. His response was basically to resign. The president then decided to call early elections. This was the first populist juncture responsible for the initial breakthrough of the Portuguese radical right in Parliament. Over the last four years, there have been three early elections, all associated with this kind of populist juncture.
The most recent one, seven months ago, was also the result of a problem involving a conflict of interests, in which a center-right prime minister was accused in Parliament of maintaining a small family business that was incompatible with the role of prime minister. So, Portugal has experienced several electoral populist junctures over the past four years, and these conjunctural elements have driven the growth of the Chega Party during this period.
We therefore have structural dimensions, of course, but above all, we have conjunctural dynamics that explain this development. There is also a central element in this process: the leader of the Chega Party. He is a very charismatic figure, extremely well known in the media. He began as a football commentator in the press, closely connected to popular segments of Portuguese public opinion. He then emerged as a party leader, and we must admit that, for the first time in Portugal, a right-wing political entrepreneur managed to establish direct contact with potential voters of a radical right party—and he succeeded in doing so.
Old Repertoires, New Populism?
Sign of the right-wing conservative political party Chega, led by André Ventura, in Faro, Portugal, March 16, 2023. Photo: Dreamstime.
Drawing on your work on the “Estado Novo,” to what extent does Chega represent a reactivation of authoritarian political repertoires—such as moralism, punitive order, and anti-pluralism—rather than a novel populist phenomenon detached from Salazarist legacies?
Professor António Costa Pinto: When we look at populist radical right-wing parties in Europe, discussing their origins can become a political trap. Why? Because the trajectories are highly diverse. We know, for instance, that the Swedish populist party emerged from a very small neo-Nazi group; Fratelli d’Italia in Italy also originated in a marginal neo-fascist party; while in Spain, Vox comes from the center-right.
In the Portuguese case, the Chega Party has a very small core of leaders—essentially one figure—who comes from the political culture of the Portuguese extreme right of the past. However, the majority of its leadership, including André Ventura, comes from the main center-right party, as is also the case in Spain. Ventura himself ran for a municipal position many years ago through the Social Democratic Party, Portugal’s main center-right party, mobilizing a Roma-chauvinistic discourse. He contested a former communist municipality and played on anti-Roma sentiment in very populous suburbs of Lisbon, and this strategy proved effective. That was the starting point of his political career.
When it comes to the past, two elements are particularly important in the radical right’s mobilization of authoritarian legacies. These are not directly tied to Salazarism, but rather to a more homogeneous conception of the nation-state: the glorification of Portugal’s past, the narrative of the “Discoveries,” the Portuguese Empire, and, in many cases, the mobilization of veterans of the colonial wars. Portugal experienced a deeply traumatic decolonization, and this remains the central historical reference in how Chega engages with the past—especially the colonial wars in Africa, in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau.
At the same time, and this is especially interesting, Chega represents a break with the political culture of the conservative right. Traditionally, the conservative right promoted a loose or “tropical” notion of empire, arguing that the Portuguese Empire was not racist and was, overall, a positive historical experience. Chega breaks with this tradition. Its chauvinistic, anti-immigration discourse—targeting African, Brazilian, and Asian immigration—marks a clear rupture with the conservative right’s legacy in Portugal.
What emerges, then, is a new-old conception of national identity. Chega occasionally invokes Salazar, but above all it mobilizes the past through the theme of corruption: fifty years of corruption, fifty years of an oligarchic political class—coinciding, symbolically, with the fifty years of democracy Portugal celebrated last year. Salazar himself poses a problem as a reference, as he is associated with repression and with a period that remains unpopular in Portugal, except in one key dimension: law and order.
These, ultimately, are the two elements Chega draws most clearly from the authoritarian past: the myth of a glorious colonial empire and, above all, the appeal to law and order.
Presidentialization and the Rise of Plebiscitary Populism
Parliament building in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo: Dreamstime.
While Chega does not explicitly rehabilitate Salazar, do you see elements of what you have described as Salazarism’s “politics of order” and depoliticization resurfacing in Ventura’s discourse, particularly his emphasis on discipline, punishment, and national moral renewal?
Professor António Costa Pinto: As I mentioned earlier, Chega draws on Salazar primarily through two elements. First, Salazar is portrayed as an example of a non-corrupt dictator. Second, Salazarism is evoked as a conservative regime in which law and order prevailed. These are essentially the two aspects Chega appropriates from the Salazarist past. However, as I also noted, most of the references to authoritarian legacies are linked less to Salazar himself than to the former greatness of the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa.
In your comparative work on charisma and authoritarian leadership, you note that charisma need not be revolutionary or mass-mobilizing. How would you characterize Ventura’s leadership style: as plebiscitary populism, mediated celebrity politics, or a new post-charismatic form of personalization?
Professor António Costa Pinto: Ventura clearly belongs to the plebiscitary, authoritarian populist parties in Europe. By this I mean that the main elements of political mobilization of the Portuguese radical right revolve around law and order, the idea of corruption associated with the oligarchic political class that has dominated Portuguese democracy since its transition, and a set of conservative values typically linked to this form of plebiscitary authoritarian democracy—such as proposals for the sterilization of pedophiles, or even the reintroduction of the death penalty in Portugal.
These are dimensions tied to this broader political vision, and a significant segment of Portuguese society does support such ideas. As a result, this is not primarily about the functioning of parliamentary institutions, but rather about a plebiscitary, referendum-style conception of political power.
This is also how Ventura behaves in the current presidential elections. He seeks, in a sense, to use the powers of the presidency to advance many of these political proposals, through a form of presidentialization within Portugal’s semi-presidential system.
Electoral Strategies of Chega Is Cannibalizing the Right
Salazarism relied on corporatist and technocratic governance rather than mass populist mobilization. Does Chega’s rise suggest a transition from elite-managed authoritarianism to popular authoritarianism, or are we witnessing a hybrid form adapted to democratic institutions?
Professor António Costa Pinto: As with many other radical right-wing parties in Europe, Chega operates within democratic institutions. It is primarily an electoral party. There are very small segments—one could describe them as a residual effect—of neo-fascist and extreme right-wing groups, but these remain marginal. For the most part, Chega plays the electoral card.
In fact, in the current presidential election and campaign, an important dynamic concerns the right-wing side of the political spectrum in Portugal. Ventura and Chega are present, but Ventura is the only right-wing candidate to advance to the second round. His strategy is to combine two approaches: on the one hand, mobilizing the radical right and, at times, even the extreme right; on the other, presenting more conservative and moderate political proposals. The objective is straightforward: to become the main party representing the right-wing side of the political spectrum in Portugal and to cannibalize the conservative right-wing electorate.
The cards have been played, but the outcome remains highly uncertain. We will see what happens in these presidential elections, even if Ventura does not ultimately win.
Selective Moralism in Portugal’s Populist Right
Your research highlights the role of political Catholicism in shaping authoritarian moral frameworks. To what extent does Chega’s moralized discourse on family, crime, and social order echo these traditions, even in a formally secular and pluralist society?
Professor António Costa Pinto: Chega has clear, or very conservative, values associated with religion—not only with the Roman Catholic Church. We should also not underestimate the role of small evangelical groups, particularly among certain popular segments of Portuguese society. Undoubtedly, Chega has adopted pro-life positions, anti-abortion values, and other conservative stances. At the same time, however, Chega is a populist party. For that reason, it does not consistently play the anti-abortion card. Why? Because its leaders look at opinion surveys and recognize that the majority of Portuguese society supports the legalization of abortion, as is currently the case in Portugal.
What we see, then, is a core of conservative values, but above all a strong emphasis on anti-corruption rhetoric, hostility toward the political class, and the idea that Portuguese society is being held back by centrist, non-reformist center-right and center-left governments. So yes, conservative values matter for Chega, but the party does not emphasize all of them when it realizes that they do not translate into electoral gains.
There is, however, one aspect I would like to stress: As in many other European democracies, Chega is a typical social welfare–chauvinistic party. It does not embrace ultra-liberalism, unlike some other right-wing populist figures outside Europe, such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Javier Milei in Latin America. Instead, Chega clearly plays the card of a welfare state “for the Portuguese,” combined with anti-immigrant narratives that accuse immigrants of exploiting the welfare state and the national health system. At the same time, it advances a vision of social policy that is explicitly not anti-statist.
From Emigration Country to Immigration Backlash
Ventura’s campaign placed immigration at the center of political conflict, despite Portugal’s relatively recent experience as a destination country. How do you explain the salience of immigration in a context historically defined by emigration rather than immigration?
Professor António Costa Pinto: The central card that Chega has been playing over the last four years—and one that is closely associated with its electoral success—is immigration. Portugal was long accustomed to immigration from Portuguese-speaking African countries and to some extent from Brazil. However, over the past five years—a very recent development—there has been a sharp increase in immigration from Asia, which is new in the Portuguese context. Migrants from Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are now highly visible across different segments of Portuguese society and the economy, from delivery services and other forms of urban transport in major cities to the agro-export sector in the south of the country. In that sector alone, around 70 percent of the labor force now comes from Asian countries such as Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Similar patterns are visible in tourism as well.
This shift is driven, of course, by economic needs. Portugal is one of the most rapidly aging societies in Europe, and demographic aging is a central structural feature of the Portuguese economy and society. Immigrants already play a crucial role in sustaining pensions, social benefits, and key sectors of the labor market.
However, the social reaction to this new wave of immigration—particularly among lower-middle-class and working-class segments of Portuguese society—is perhaps the most important explanation for Chega’s electoral success. At the same time, as Chega has come to dominate the political agenda on immigration, the center-right government, feeling electorally threatened, has responded by negotiating with the radical right and adopting new restrictive policies on immigration, access to Portuguese nationality, and related issues.
The Crisis of the Traditional Right in Portugal
The PSD’s historically weak performance and its refusal to endorse a runoff candidate point to a crisis of the traditional right. How important is center-right fragmentation in enabling Chega’s claim to leadership of the “non-socialist space”?
Professor António Costa Pinto: Undoubtedly, Chega is cannibalizing segments of the center-right, much more so than voters on the left or the radical left. At the same time, Chega is now present in many areas of Portuguese society—particularly in the South—that were electorally communist in the past. However, this is less significant today, given that the Portuguese Communist Party now represents around 2 percent of the vote.
What is more important is that Chega has increased its vote share in many areas, especially in the south and in the outskirts of Lisbon, which previously voted for the Communists and the Socialist Party. Today, however, Chega has become a national party with a very homogeneous electorate. As a result, it is primarily cannibalizing votes from the right.
The only real challenge to Chega, aside from the center-right, comes from a small right-wing liberal party that appeals mainly to younger and more educated voters. Chega, by contrast, is clearly dominant on the right-wing side of the political spectrum among segments of Portuguese society with less than secondary education. For this reason, any further electoral growth for Chega can only come from right-wing voters.
In the last legislative elections, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the main center-right party, did increase its vote share. It is now in power with a minority government that is forced to negotiate much of its legislation with the radical right. Labor reform is a clear example: the only viable negotiating partner is the radical right, since the center-left has already decided to vote against it.
So yes, the challenge posed by the radical right is very significant, and the game is far from over. While the cards have been played, there remains considerable fluidity and uncertainty on the right-wing side of the political spectrum. On the left, by contrast, the Socialist Party lost the election and many voters, but it has nonetheless survived as the main force of the center-left.
From Trump to Orbán: How Transnational Models Shape Portugal’s Radical Right
Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister arrives to attend in an informal meeting of Heads of State or Government in Prague, Czechia on October 7, 2022. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.
Observers have described Ventura’s rise as part of the “Trumpification” of the right. To what extent do transnational populist styles, media strategies, and narratives of cultural grievance matter more today than domestic historical legacies?
Professor António Costa Pinto: Domestic legacies are important, but undoubtedly Chega and Ventura are, first of all, integrated into the radical right political family in the European Parliament. There is a strong sense of identification with Giorgio Meloni, and also with Vox in Spain.
Above all—and this is very important—even when it is not openly emphasized, there is a strong sense of identification with Orbán. In a way, Orbán is the model for Ventura. The type of regime that Ventura would seek to consolidate in Portugal, if he were to win elections and gain access to power, is precisely the kind of competitive authoritarian regime that Orbán has managed to establish in Hungary.
In the Portuguese case, and in Portuguese political culture more broadly, we should not forget Portugal’s strong links with Brazil. Chega was a strong supporter of the Bolsonaro experience in Brazil, firmly anti-Lula and anti-left, and this reflects deeper cultural and political connections between Portugal and Brazil.
More recently, however, Trump’s challenge to NATO and episodes such as the “Greenland affair” have made Ventura more cautious. He is aware that, within Portuguese public opinion, Trump’s positions on NATO and the European Union are problematic. This matters because the Portuguese electorate is generally optimistic about the European Union and not receptive to such positions, so Ventura avoids adopting them openly.
So, as in many other radical right-wing populist experiences in Europe, there is a core of values associated with right-wing authoritarianism, but there is also a popular strategy that plays the cards that are popular and avoids those that are unpopular.
Uncertainty on the Right and the Future of Portuguese Democracy
And finally, Professor Pinto, from the perspective of democratic theory and historical comparison, does the 2026 election represent a critical juncture for Portuguese democracy—or does Portugal still possess institutional and cultural buffers capable of containing far-right populism in the long run?
Professor António Costa Pinto: That is a very interesting question, and it is not easy to answer. For the first time, this presidential election has prompted a clear stance among many figures on the right, including several politicians from the center-right, in support of the moderate candidate of the left. This is the first time such a development has occurred in Portugal. Why? Because in the last legislative elections, seven months ago, the Social Democratic Party completely abandoned any strategy of maintaining red lines against the radical right and entered into negotiations with it.
For the second round of the presidential election, both the prime minister and the main leader of the conservative party supporting the government chose not to take public positions. However, they gave instructions to most local leaders—mayors and other municipal figures—to support the center-left candidate. This was also a very pragmatic decision.
They know that, as president, the center-left candidate would respect democratic norms and the formal and informal rules governing relations between the president and the government. We should not forget that Portugal is a semi-presidential democracy. They also know very clearly that if, by any chance, the radical right was to win the election and Ventura became president—which is not going to happen—it could lead to a presidentialization of the system and favor his party in terms of cabinet influence.
In that sense, Portuguese democracy could be subverted not only through legislative elections but also through presidential ones, if Ventura were to gain presidential power—and that is not going to happen.
Overall, Portuguese democracy will continue to face a degree of uncertainty, particularly on the right-wing side of the political spectrum, where the game is not over. At this stage, we do not know which party will ultimately become the dominant force on the center-right. Will Portugal move toward an Italian-style scenario, in which the radical right dominates and the center-right becomes a junior partner? Or will it continue, as it does today, with a minority center-right government supported by a liberal democratic party such as Iniciativa Liberal? With Chega holding 23 percent of the vote, the future of the right-wing political landscape in Portugal remains highly uncertain.
Please cite as: ECPS Staff. (2026). “Virtual Workshop Series — Session 10: Resisting the Decline: Democratic Resilience in Authoritarian Times.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). January 26, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00141
ECPS convened Session 10 of its Virtual Workshop Series, bringing together scholars to examine how democracies endure, adapt, and contest authoritarian pressures amid the normalization of populist discourse and the weakening of liberal-constitutional safeguards. Chaired by Dr. Amedeo Varriale, the session framed resilience as an active democratic project—defending rule of law, pluralism, and civic participation against gradual forms of authoritarian hollowing-out. Presentations by Dr. Peter Rogers, Dr. Pierre Camus, Dr. Soheila Shahriari, and Ecem Nazlı Üçok explored resilience across market democracies, local governance, feminist self-administration in Rojava, and diaspora activism confronting anti-gender politics. Discussants Dr. Gwenaëlle Bauvois and Dr. Gabriel Bayarri Toscano connected these contributions through probing questions on the ambivalence, burdens, and transformative potential of resilience.
Reported by ECPS Staff
On Thursday, January 22, 2026, the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) convened Session 10 of its Virtual Workshop Series, titled “We, the People” and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Held under the theme “Resisting the Decline: Democratic Resilience in Authoritarian Times,” the session brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to examine how democratic systems, institutions, and civic actors seek to withstand—and, at times, transform—the pressures generated by authoritarian resurgence, the normalization of populist discourse, and the erosion of liberal-constitutional guarantees across diverse political contexts.
The workshop opened with welcoming remarks by ECPS’s Reka Koleszar, who introduced the session’s theme, outlined the format, and presented the contributing scholars and discussants. Her opening situated Session 10 within ECPS’s broader intellectual agenda: advancing comparative, theory-informed, and empirically grounded research on populism and its implications for democratic governance, civic space, and rights-based politics.
The session was chaired by Dr. Amedeo Varriale (PhD, University of East London), whose framing remarks offered a synthetic lens for the panel. Drawing attention to the contemporary “populist zeitgeist,” Dr. Varriale underscored how authoritarianism increasingly advances not merely through abrupt ruptures, but through gradual practices that hollow out democratic norms while preserving formal institutional shells. Against this backdrop, he proposed democratic resilience as an active project: the defense of rule of law, pluralism, and rights through institutions and civic participation, as well as the re-engagement of citizens whose disillusionment can become a resource for anti-democratic entrepreneurs.
Four presentations explored resilience across distinct but connected domains. Dr. Peter Rogers (Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Macquarie University) delivered “Resilience in Market Democracy,” interrogating resilience as a traveling concept shaped by market logics, welfare-state capacities, and shifting moral expectations of citizenship. Dr. Pierre Camus (Postdoctoral Fellow, Nantes University) presented “The Contradictory Challenges of Training Local Elected Officials for the Future of Democracy,” analyzing how professionalization and training—often justified as democratizing—can also reproduce inequalities and widen the distance between representatives and citizens. Turning to conflict and non-state governance, Dr. Soheila Shahriari (EHESS) offered “The Rise of Women-Led Radical Democracy in Rojava,”examining feminist self-administration as civil-society resilience amid regional authoritarianism and geopolitical exclusion. Finally, Ecem Nazlı Üçok (PhD Candidate, Charles University) presented “Feminist Diaspora Activism from Poland and Turkey,” conceptualizing exile-based feminist organizing as a site of transnational resistance to anti-gender politics and authoritarian repression.
Discussion was enriched by two discussants: Dr. Gwenaëlle Bauvois (University of Helsinki) and Dr. Gabriel Bayarri Toscano (Rey Juan Carlos University), whose interventions connected the papers through shared questions about the ambivalence of resilience, the distribution of democratic burdens, and the conditions under which resilience becomes transformative rather than merely adaptive.
Moderator Dr. Amedeo Varriale: From Populist Zeitgeist to Democratic Resistance
Dr. Amedeo Varriale earned his Ph.D. from the University of East London in March 2024. His research interests focus on contemporary populism and nationalism.
In his opening remarks as chair of the session, Dr. Amedeo Varriale framed the panel within a broader moment of profound geopolitical, socioeconomic, and sociocultural transformation. He emphasized that contemporary politics is increasingly shaped by what Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde has described as a “populist zeitgeist”—a diffuse mood or historical moment in which populist ideas have become normalized across political systems.
Dr. Varriale argued that the current rise of authoritarianism cannot be separated from this populist moment, particularly within an emerging multipolar global order. While authoritarian regimes continue to consolidate power in contexts where liberal democracy has historically lacked deep institutional roots—such as China and Russia—he noted with concern that authoritarian tendencies have also re-emerged within long-standing democracies, most notably the United States. In these cases, authoritarianism does not typically appear as outright regime change but rather manifests through populist discourse, attitudes, and political practices that challenge the liberal-constitutional foundations of democracy.
He highlighted how the rule of law, as well as individual and minority rights, are increasingly threatened by actors once confined to the political fringes but now progressively mainstreamed. Against this backdrop, Dr. Varriale stressed that resisting authoritarianism requires the active strengthening of democratic resilience. This entails defending institutions, constitutional norms, and civic participation, while re-engaging disillusioned and passive citizens.
Democracy, he concluded, can survive authoritarian pressure only when citizens, leaders, and state systems actively uphold accountability, pluralism, freedom of expression and association, human rights, and the rule of law. Previewing the session’s contributions, Dr. Varriale noted that the papers would address these challenges through analyses of civil society, activism, democratic resilience, and contemporary feminism, before inviting the first presenter to begin.
Dr. Peter Rogers: “Resilience in Market Democracy”
Dr. Peter Rogers is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University.
In his presentation at the 10th Session of the ECPS Virtual Workshop series, Dr. Peter Rogers offered a wide-ranging and conceptually rich reflection on the notion of resilience in contemporary market societies. Drawing on material from his forthcoming book, he approached resilience not as a fixed or neutral concept, but as a “traveling” one—whose meaning, moral coding, and political implications shift depending on whether it is encountered through the lens of market society, welfare-state governance, or democratic resilience.
Dr. Rogers began by laying out a set of foundational assumptions to frame his argument. First, he proposed that contemporary societies should be understood as market societies, in which market mechanisms—competition, supply and demand, profit, and efficiency—have expanded far beyond the exchange of goods and services to become the dominant organizing principles of social life. These mechanisms, he argued, increasingly shape cultural norms, moral values, and the boundaries of what is perceived as wise, legitimate, or even lawful action. Whether embraced or resisted, market logic has become the pragmatic reference point through which social and political possibilities are assessed.
Second, Dr. Rogers suggested that market society has grown more extreme than the market economy from which it emerged. Whereas earlier market arrangements were embedded within broader ethical and social frameworks, contemporary market society increasingly extends its logic into domains once governed by moral, communal, or political considerations. Individual freedom is framed primarily as freedom of choice within markets, while minimal government and entrepreneurial self-reliance are prioritized. This model, he noted, was historically shaped by postwar efforts to protect liberty from authoritarian state power. Yet because markets are not inherently moral, unregulated market systems tend toward exploitation, inequality, and the concentration of wealth among elites.
To mitigate these outcomes, Dr. Rogers introduced his third assumption: that the excesses of market society are, in principle, balanced by the welfare state. Welfare institutions intervene where markets are blind to collective interests, providing social protections such as healthcare, pensions, and employment benefits. Through redistribution mechanisms and regulatory frameworks, welfare states seek to correct market failures and protect citizens from the risks generated by individual self-interest. In this sense, modern governance rests on a fragile balance between market-driven individual liberty and state-supported social equity.
Against this backdrop, Dr. Rogers positioned resilience as a concept that operates across these competing systems. In market society, resilience resonates strongly with ideals of individual autonomy and responsibility. It is framed as a personal trait or capacity—the ability to endure shocks, adapt to disruption, and persevere in the face of adversity. The resilient individual is expected to anticipate risks, respond proactively to crises, and reorganize personal resources to maintain financial, physical, and psychological well-being amid economic instability, precarious employment, or systemic disruption. This understanding aligns with influential global development narratives, such as those advanced by the World Bank, which emphasize individual recovery and functional improvement following negative shocks.
In contrast, resilience takes on a very different meaning within welfare-state contexts. Here, the focus shifts away from individual capacities toward the resilience of institutions, legal frameworks, ethical norms, and governance practices. Building resilience in this sense requires investment in social infrastructure, public services, and decommodified essential goods. Rather than emphasizing self-reliance, welfare-based resilience aims to foster stability, trust, and collective protection through state intervention and social solidarity.
Dr. Rogers emphasized that these differing models of resilience generate distinct expectations of citizenship. Market-based resilience places responsibility primarily on individuals, with the state acting largely as a facilitator of market processes. Welfare-based resilience, by contrast, relies on the state as a central provider of security and social protection. Both models depend on collective investments in social capital and networks of solidarity, yet they distribute moral responsibility and political obligation in markedly different ways.
These tensions, he argued, become especially visible in policy domains such as disaster management, climate adaptation, civil defense, and even democratic governance. As resilience becomes institutionalized through technical practices, guidelines, and risk-management frameworks, it increasingly shapes the rules of governance themselves. This gives rise to what Dr. Rogers described as a broader “politics of resilience,” in which choices about how resilience is defined also determine who bears the burden of coping with crisis.
While acknowledging the appeal of resilience as a positive and empowering concept, Dr. Rogers also addressed critical perspectives. He noted that resilience can function as a tool of neoliberal governance, shifting responsibility for managing systemic crises—from financial instability to climate change—from the state onto individuals. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Peter Bloom, he raised concerns that contemporary narratives of individualized resilience may reinforce a moral framework in which citizens are held personally responsible for adapting to the failures of systems they neither designed nor control.
At the same time, Dr. Rogers cautioned against dismissing resilience outright. Psychological and behavioral approaches to resilience, he argued, can foster agency, learning, and growth, enabling individuals and communities to recover from setbacks and engage in collective action. The challenge lies in balancing personal responsibility with social connectivity, altruism, and institutional support. Notably, he observed that market societies often struggle to fund and sustain initiatives that build social cohesion, as such projects rarely align with profit-driven investment models.
Concluding his presentation, Dr. Rogers returned to the central theme of balance. Resilience, he argued, can be a force for both empowerment and depoliticization, depending on how it is framed and enacted. The task for scholars and policymakers is not simply to promote resilience, but to ask what kind of resilience is being built—for whom, by whom, and at what cost. As a traveling concept, resilience demands continual critical reflection, particularly in democratic contexts where the relationship between citizens, markets, and the state remains deeply contested.
Dr. Pierre Camus: “The Contradictory Challenges of Training Local Elected Officials for the Future of Democracy”
Dr. Pierre Camus is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Nantes University.
In his presentation, Dr. Pierre Camus offered a sociologically grounded examination of an often-overlooked dimension of democratic governance: the training of local elected officials. Drawing on his doctoral research and ongoing work on political training in France, Europe, and parts of North America, Dr. Camus argued that what appears at first glance to be a technical or administrative issue in fact raises fundamental questions about democracy, political equality, and populism.
Focusing on the French case, which he described as particularly instructive, Dr. Camus advanced the central claim that training for local elected officials constitutes a “democratic paradox.” While officially justified in the name of accessibility, equality, and democratic inclusion, training programs often produce empirical effects that contradict these stated objectives. His analysis rested on two main arguments: first, that training does not reduce inequalities of access to political office and may even widen the gap between elected officials and citizens; and second, that training reproduces inequalities among elected officials themselves, particularly along territorial and gender lines.
Dr. Camus grounded his argument in a mixed-methods research design. Quantitatively, he drew on data from the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations covering more than 30,000 local elected officials who participated in training programs between January 2022 and December 2025. Qualitatively, his analysis was informed by several dozen interviews with elected officials conducted over an extended period. Together, these sources allowed him to assess both formal institutional arrangements and their concrete social effects.
He began by outlining the French legal framework governing the training of local elected officials. In France, training is legally recognized as a right directly linked to the exercise of political mandate. It is publicly funded and explicitly justified on democratic grounds, with the stated aim of ensuring that political office is accessible to all citizens regardless of education, profession, or prior political experience. Training is intended to compensate for inequalities in knowledge and skills and to enable any citizen, once elected, to govern effectively.
This framework is structured around two main mechanisms: local authorities are required to allocate part of their budget to the training of elected officials, and each elected official has access to an individual annual training entitlement. From a formal perspective, Dr. Camus noted, this arrangement appears inclusive and egalitarian, premised on the idea that political competence can be acquired institutionally rather than inherited through social background. Yet it is precisely here that the first paradox emerges.
Training, Dr. Camus argued, intervenes only after electoral selection has already taken place. It does not help citizens gain access to political office; rather, it supports those who have already been elected. As a result, the social inequalities that structure electoral access—such as education, profession, gender, social capital, and political networks—remain largely unchanged. More critically, training may reinforce the distance between elected officials and citizens by concentrating key forms of democratic knowledge within closed institutional settings accessible only to representatives.
Legal rules, public finance, administrative procedures, and other forms of governing expertise are transmitted in spaces from which ordinary citizens are excluded. In this way, democratic knowledge becomes a specialized resource reserved for elected officials, reinforcing the notion that governing requires expertise available only to a professional political class. Dr. Camus suggested that this dynamic challenges a core element of the French republican tradition: the idea of the elected official as an ordinary citizen temporarily entrusted with political responsibility. Paradoxically, a device designed to strengthen democracy may instead deepen the symbolic and practical separation between representatives and the represented.
The second paradox concerns inequalities within the group of elected officials themselves. Although training rights are formally equal, access to training is highly unequal in practice. Dr. Camus showed that elected officials in large municipalities, metropolitan areas, or higher levels of local government are significantly more likely to participate in training. They benefit from larger budgets, higher allowances, stronger administrative support, and closer ties to political parties that actively encourage professional development.
By contrast, elected officials in small and rural municipalities face structural constraints, including limited financial resources, time scarcity, fewer training opportunities nearby, and weaker institutional support. Drawing on longitudinal data from his doctoral research, Dr. Camus demonstrated that training participation rates are relatively high among regional and departmental officials but approach zero in municipalities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. Training thus accelerates political professionalization for some while leaving others on the margins of institutional competence.
Gender inequalities further complicate this picture. While men and women participate in training at similar overall rates, they tend to enroll in different types of programs. Male elected officials are overrepresented in training related to strategically valued policy areas such as public finance, urban planning, and infrastructure. Female elected officials, by contrast, are more likely to receive training in social policy, education, childcare, and cultural affairs—domains that, while essential, carry less political prestige and are less associated with executive power. Rather than correcting gender inequalities, training may therefore stabilize existing divisions in political roles.
In conclusion, Dr. Camus emphasized that the French case reveals a broader structural tension in contemporary democracies. How can political systems respond to the growing complexity of governance without transforming representation into a professional monopoly? And how can competence be promoted without reinforcing new forms of exclusion—especially at a time when populist discourses increasingly challenge expertise and political elites? These questions, he argued, extend far beyond France and invite comparative reflection on the future of democracy, political equality, and populism.
Dr. Soheila Shahriari: “The Rise of Women-Led Radical Democracy in Rojava: Global Democratic Decline and Civil Society Resilience Amidst Middle Eastern Authoritarianism”
Dr. Soheila Shahriari holds a doctorate in political science, awarded by the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in 2024.
In her presentation, Dr. Soheila Shahriari examined the emergence of women-led radical democracy in Rojava as a rare and fragile counter-hegemonic experiment in an era marked by global democratic decline and entrenched Middle Eastern authoritarianism. Situating her analysis within the broader context of democratic recession, civil war, and geopolitical realpolitik, Dr. Shahriari argued that Rojava represents not merely a local anomaly, but a diagnostic case that exposes the structural limits of contemporary democracy at both regional and global levels.
Dr. Shahriari’s research focused on the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), commonly known as Rojava, which emerged amid the Syrian Civil War and consolidated itself after 2012. Her analysis was framed by three intersecting developments: the global democratic recession since the mid-2000s, the consolidation of authoritarianism in the Middle East, and the persistence of Rojava’s experiment in democratic confederalism despite sustained violence and political marginalization. She emphasized that Rojava’s significance lies not only in its survival under extreme conditions, but in its substantive challenge to dominant models of governance rooted in the nation-state, patriarchy, and centralized sovereignty.
To contextualize Rojava, Dr. Shahriari situated it within what scholars such as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have described as a global democratic recession characterized by institutional decay, executive centralization, and declining public trust. While this recession has taken the form of democratic backsliding in many parts of the Global North, she stressed that the Middle Eastern trajectory is distinct. In the region, the dominant pattern is not democratic erosion but the consolidation of authoritarianism. Drawing on Hamid Bozarslan’s work, she described regional authoritarianism as an anti-democratic system that actively dismantles democratic aspirations while maintaining a façade of legality through elections, constitutions, and populist narratives. In countries such as Turkey, Iran, and Syria, civic space has been systematically constricted and pluralism delegitimized.
Against this backdrop, Rojava emerged as a feminist and pluralist project grounded in the ideology of democratic confederalism developed by Abdullah Öcalan. This model explicitly rejects the nation-state and draws heavily on Murray Bookchin’s theory of social ecology. It emphasizes decentralized self-administration, grassroots participation, ecological sustainability, and radical pluralism across ethnic and religious lines. Dr. Shahriari stressed that Rojava should not be understood as an improvised response to state collapse, but as a deliberate counter-model rooted in a coherent ideological and political project. Scholars such as Dilar Dirik, Janet Biehl, and David Graeber have described Rojava as a rupture in regional history, challenging both ethno-nationalism and patriarchal political orders.
A central pillar of Dr. Shahriari’s analysis was women’s leadership as a structural driver of democratic resilience in Rojava. She highlighted the institutionalization of gender equality through mechanisms such as the co-chair system, which mandates joint male–female leadership across political bodies. As scholars like Joost Jongerden have argued, this arrangement transforms gender equality from a symbolic commitment into a foundational principle of governance. Women’s institutions, including autonomous councils and the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), disrupt the masculinized logic of militarized resistance and reframe security through care, solidarity, and collective responsibility. Drawing on recent feminist scholarship, Dr. Shahriari suggested that women-led civil society functions as a form of “symbolic infrastructure” that sustains resilience under conditions of chronic insecurity.
However, Dr. Shahriari emphasized that Rojava’s survival has been increasingly constrained by both regional authoritarianism and global geopolitical recalibration. Although Rojava gained international visibility during the Battle of Kobane and the defeat of ISIS, it has remained politically marginalized. The collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024 and the emergence of a transitional government led by Ahmed al-Sharaa did not alter this trajectory. Instead, she argued, exclusionary state logics have persisted. The new authorities continue to frame Kurdish self-determination as a separatist threat to national unity, reproducing earlier statist narratives that prioritize elite-driven transition over negotiated autonomy and pluralism. Rojava representatives remain excluded from constitutional negotiations, reflecting a broader regional consensus against non-state democratic models.
Dr. Shahriari also examined the role of global realpolitik in reinforcing this marginalization. She pointed to Western selective engagement and recalibration, particularly the European Union’s decision to provide substantial financial support to Syria’s transitional authorities despite ongoing concerns about their origins and human rights practices. Such policies, she argued, reflect a hollowing out of democratic commitments in favor of geopolitical stability, state-centric sovereignty, and security governance. In this context, Rojava’s exclusion should be read not as a local failure, but as a symptom of the global democratic recession.
In concluding, Dr. Shahriari framed Rojava as a critical test case for the future of democracy. Its endurance demonstrates that popular sovereignty can be institutionalized through feminist, horizontal, and non-statist forms of governance, even under conditions of extreme repression. At the same time, its marginalization exposes the narrowing boundaries of what is considered “acceptable” democracy in the contemporary international order. Rojava, she argued, not only challenges authoritarianism in the Middle East, but compels a deeper rethinking of democracy itself—beyond the nation-state, beyond patriarchy, and beyond the limits imposed by global realpolitik.
Ecem Nazlı Üçok: “Feminist Diaspora Activism from Poland and Turkey: Resisting Authoritarianism, Anti-Gender Politics, and Reimagining Transnational Solidarity in Exile”
Ecem Nazlı Üçok is a PhD Candidate at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University in Prague.
PhD candidate Ecem Nazlı Üçok presented a theoretically rich and empirically grounded analysis of feminist diasporic activism emerging from Poland and Turkey in response to authoritarianism and transnational anti-gender politics. Drawing on her ongoing doctoral research, Üçok framed her presentation around the concept of “feminist diaspora activism” and explored how feminist activists in exile resist authoritarian regimes, challenge anti-gender ideologies, and reimagine transnational solidarity beyond the confines of the nation-state.
Üçok began by outlining the conceptual and methodological foundations of her research. Inspired by Zapatista thought and decolonial feminist theory, she positioned her work within a broader inquiry into how marginalized groups generate new political imaginaries when existing political systems no longer serve them. Rather than treating exile and migration solely as experiences of loss or displacement, her research conceptualizes feminist diasporic spaces as generative sites where new forms of political subjectivity, solidarity, and democratic practice are actively produced.
The research adopts a comparative framework, focusing on Poland and Turkey—two countries that, despite significant differences in historical trajectories, religious contexts, and institutional settings, share striking similarities in the rise of right-wing populism and state-led anti-gender politics. Üçok argued that existing scholarship has tended to examine anti-gender movements within nationally bounded frameworks, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, while parallel developments in regions such as Turkey are often analyzed in isolation. Her research seeks to bridge this gap by bringing Poland and Turkey into conversation, demonstrating that anti-gender politics operate transnationally through shared narratives, strategies, and moral panics.
A central argument of the presentation was that local political actors in both Poland and Turkey are not passive recipients of transnational anti-gender discourses imported from elsewhere. Instead, they actively produce, adapt, and circulate these narratives, positioning “gender ideology” as an existential threat to the nation, family, and children. In Poland, Üçok noted, gender has been framed by right-wing elites as a force more dangerous than communism, while homosexuality has been depicted as a civilizational threat. Similarly, in Turkey, anti-gender rhetoric has been articulated through a fusion of nationalist and Islamic discourses, portraying feminism and LGBTQ+ rights as Western impositions incompatible with Turkish and religious values.
Üçok emphasized the symbolic power of family-oriented policies in both contexts. Despite Poland’s Catholic identity and Turkey’s secular–Islamic framework, governing elites in both countries have mobilized the family as a moral anchor to legitimize authoritarian governance and suppress dissent. She highlighted key moments such as Poland’s tightening of abortion laws and both countries’ withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, arguing that these developments illustrate how moral panic travels across borders and reinforces populist authoritarian agendas. The temporal overlap of elections in Poland and Turkey further underscored the uneven but persistent nature of right-wing populism, even when electoral outcomes diverge.
Methodologically, Üçok’s research is rooted in feminist qualitative approaches. She conducted in-depth life-history interviews with feminist activists who migrated from Poland and Turkey to various European countries due to political repression and anti-gender policies. These interviews explored activists’ pre-migration political identities, experiences of repression, and post-migration transformations. In a second research phase, Üçok organized visual focus groups that brought together Polish and Turkish feminist diaspora activists, enabling a comparative analysis of post-migrant activism and transnational solidarity practices.
A key analytical lens employed in the research is the concept of “prefigurative politics.” Üçok used this framework to examine how feminist diaspora activists do not merely resist authoritarian regimes from afar, but actively embody the social and political values they wish to see realized in the future through their everyday organizing. In exile, activism becomes not only oppositional but also constructive—centered on care, mutual support, horizontal decision-making, and inclusive community-building.
Üçok’s findings highlighted the emotional and political dislocation experienced by activists following migration. Many participants described a sense of losing their political voice or feeling distanced from the political life of their host societies. However, this rupture did not result in passivity. Instead, it prompted the creation of new activist collectives and feminist diaspora networks across countries such as Germany, Belgium, Austria, and the Czech Republic. These spaces allowed activists to reconstruct political belonging outside national frameworks and to develop what Üçok described as a “politics of space”—a form of activism that prioritizes embodied presence, visibility, and affective connection over formal institutional engagement.
Visual protest practices played a particularly important role in these diasporic spaces. Üçok presented examples of performative demonstrations, symbolic imagery, and creative interventions staged in front of embassies and public institutions. These acts served multiple purposes: drawing attention to gender-based violence and authoritarian repression in home countries, confronting European audiences with the transnational nature of anti-gender politics, and fostering collective healing and solidarity among activists themselves. While emotionally demanding, these practices enabled feminist diasporas to transform vulnerability into political agency.
Üçok also underscored the intersectional challenges faced by feminist activists in exile. Gendered political identities were compounded by migrant status, producing layered experiences of marginalization and emotional strain. Yet, these intersecting identities also facilitated new alliances and solidarities across national and cultural boundaries. Drawing on Edward Said’s reflections on exile, Üçok framed diasporic activism not only as oppositional but as deeply generative—capable of producing new forms of belonging, care, and political imagination.
In concluding, Üçok argued that feminist diasporic activism from Poland and Turkey illustrates a broader politics of possibility in authoritarian times. Migration, while often forced and traumatic, can enable the reconfiguration of democratic practice beyond the nation-state and normative citizenship frameworks. Rather than viewing activism solely as resistance, her research emphasizes everyday practices of solidarity, mutual care, and community-building as essential components of democratic resilience. Through these transnational feminist networks, exile becomes not an endpoint, but a space for reimagining democracy, plurality, and collective life under conditions of global authoritarian resurgence.
Discussants’ Feedback Dr. Gwenaëlle Bauvois
Dr. Gwenaëlle Bauvois is a sociologist based at the University of Helsinki.
Serving as discussant for the session, Dr. Gwenaëlle Bauvois offered a wide-ranging and incisive set of reflections that situated the four presentations within the broader global moment of democratic fragility. She opened by emphasizing the particular timeliness of the session, noting that democratic resilience is no longer a question confined to protecting democracy “elsewhere,” but one that increasingly concerns established and powerful democracies themselves. In this context, resilience must be understood not simply as a defensive response to external authoritarian threats, but as a concept deeply entangled with how democracy is reshaped, strained, and hollowed out from within.
Across the panel’s diverse empirical settings—market democracies, local institutions, revolutionary experiments, and diasporic activism—Dr. Bauvois observed that resilience was consistently presented not as a straightforward remedy to democratic decline, but as an ambivalent and politically charged concept. While resilience can protect democratic practices, it can also normalize crisis, reproduce inequality, and shift the burdens of democratic maintenance onto specific groups. She identified this critical treatment of resilience, rather than its celebration, as one of the session’s central intellectual contributions.
Turning first to Dr. Peter Rogers’s presentation, Dr. Bauvois praised his conceptualization of resilience as a polysemic and “travelling” concept. Rather than attempting to impose a fixed definition, the paper illuminated how resilience derives its political power precisely from its multiplicity of meanings. This, she suggested, raised an important methodological challenge: how to operationalize resilience analytically without flattening its conceptual richness. She was particularly struck by the idea of resilience as an emergent institution of contemporary democracy—an insight that moves beyond seeing resilience as merely reactive and instead positions it as something that actively structures democratic expectations, behaviors, and norms.
At the same time, Dr. Bauvois raised a series of critical questions about the institutionalization of resilience. If resilience becomes an expectation rather than a choice, she warned, it risks functioning as a mechanism through which citizens are asked to endlessly adapt to crisis rather than challenge its structural causes. She asked who ultimately bears responsibility for maintaining democratic resilience—the citizenry, the state, or political elites—and whether the discourse of resilience could be appropriated to claim democratic robustness even as rights, participation, and accountability quietly erode.
Engaging with Dr. Pierre Camus’s paper on the training of local elected officials in France, Dr. Bauvois highlighted its strength in translating abstract debates about resilience into a concrete, empirically grounded paradox. Training programs, she noted, are officially framed as tools to democratize access to political office and “re-enchant” local democracy. Yet, as Dr. Camus demonstrated, they simultaneously reinforce the idea that politics requires specialized expertise accessible only to certain actors endowed with specific forms of capital. In this sense, training functions as a form of institutional resilience that stabilizes local governance, but potentially at the cost of representativeness. While narrowing gaps in technical competence, it widens the symbolic distance between elected officials and ordinary citizens.
Dr. Bauvois posed a provocative question arising from this paradox: what would local democracy look like without such training regimes? Would it become more chaotic, or might it be more inclusive? She also invited reflection on whether alternative, more collective or open forms of political learning could strengthen democratic resilience without reinforcing political elitism—both in France and in other democratic contexts.
Dr. Bauvois then turned to Dr. Soheila Shahriari’s analysis of Rojava, which she described as productively unsettling many conventional assumptions about democracy and resilience. She emphasized how the Rojava case reframed resilience not as institutional continuity, but as collective survival and feminist transformation under conditions of extreme precarity. Democracy, in this account, is not safeguarded by stable state structures but lived through everyday practices of care, participation, and horizontal governance. Dr. Bauvois underscored the importance of Dr. Shahriari’s critique of Western “selective solidarity,” whereby democratic values are rhetorically endorsed but abandoned when supporting non-state or radical democratic actors becomes geopolitically inconvenient.
This led her to pose challenging theoretical questions: What are the minimum conditions for democracy? Can democratic resilience persist without state sovereignty, security guarantees, or international recognition? And how should democratic theory account for forms of resilience that are inseparable from permanent geopolitical threat?
Finally, commenting on the presentation by Ecem Nazlı Üçok, Dr. Bauvois highlighted the paper’s contribution in shifting attention to transnational and diasporic spaces of democratic practice. She commended its framing of exile not only as loss, but as a site of political possibility where agency is recomposed through care, solidarity, and prefigurative politics. At the same time, she suggested that the analytical clarity of the paper could be sharpened by harmonizing its use of overlapping terms such as “far-right,” “neo-fascist,” “conservative,” and “right-wing populist.” She also raised questions about the relationship between feminist diasporic activism and other struggles in exile, including labor rights, anti-racist mobilization, and migrant justice, asking whether feminist frameworks offer a transferable model of resilience for broader political movements.
In closing, Dr. Bauvois posed three overarching questions that cut across all four papers: Is resilience always democratic, or can it merely enable system survival without renewal? Who bears the costs of resilience, particularly given its reliance on the labor of women and grassroots actors? And finally, is resilience ultimately conservative—helping democracies endure as they are—or transformative, opening pathways toward fundamentally different democratic futures? These questions, she concluded, provided a powerful agenda for further discussion and comparative inquiry.
Dr. Gabriel Bayarri Toscano
Gabriel Bayarri Toscano is an Assistant Professor, Department of Audiovisual Communication, Rey Juan Carlos University.
In his role as discussant, Dr. Gabriel Bayarri Toscano offered a conceptually rich and politically attuned commentary that framed the four papers within what he described as the current “populist moment”—a period marked by crisis-driven politics, accelerated decision-making, and what he evocatively termed a form of global political “carnivalism.” Referring to contemporary manifestations of Trumpism and its symbolic excesses, Dr. Bayarri Toscano suggested that this broader context makes the question of democratic resilience not only urgent but analytically indispensable.
He opened by noting that, despite their diverse empirical settings, all four papers converged on a shared concern: how democratic practices, institutions, and movements endure, adapt, and are reinvented under sustained authoritarian pressure. Rather than treating resilience as simple endurance, he proposed a broader interpretive frame in which resilience is intimately tied to democracy’s relationship with time, legitimacy, and hope.
Dr. Bayarri Toscano argued that authoritarian and populist politics thrive on speed and simplification. They promise rapid solutions, depict procedures as weaknesses, and frame checks and balances as obstacles. Democracy, by contrast, operates through slower rhythms—deliberation, accountability, and incremental change. This temporal gap, he suggested, has profound political consequences. Leaders often fear the “charisma cost” of admitting that democratic reform takes time. Instead, they sustain political momentum through permanent crisis, keeping publics emotionally engaged while postponing tangible improvements. In this sense, the news cycle becomes a sequence of shocks, not merely reporting events but actively producing urgency and distraction.
Within this framework, resilience becomes deeply future-oriented. Dr. Bayarri Toscano observed that many citizens, especially those facing precarious work, high rents, and weakened public services, attach hope to technoutopian promises—innovation, artificial intelligence, growth, and prosperity perpetually “just around the corner.” When democratic projects fail to translate such future-oriented narratives into material improvements, authoritarian shortcuts can begin to appear effective. Resilience, he suggested, thus operates at the intersection of hope deferred and legitimacy strained.
He also emphasized that resilience is shaped by global power asymmetries and what he termed “colonial conditions of meaning.” In fragmented institutional settings—drawing in particular on examples from Latin America—governance often becomes more vertical and hierarchical. Citizens experience policy as something done to them rather than built with them. In such contexts, resilience risks becoming a language that masks domination rather than enabling participation.
Turning to Dr. Peter Rogers’s paper, Dr. Bayarri Toscano praised its treatment of resilience as a polysemic concept and as an emerging institutional norm within contemporary democracies. He found this move analytically powerful, as it revealed how resilience shifts from description to expectation, and ultimately to moral obligation. In market democracies, resilience can become a demand placed on citizens: adapt, cope, remain flexible. The danger, he warned, is that this discourse hides structural insecurity and reframes endurance in the face of precarity as personal strength rather than systemic failure. In crisis-driven political environments, resilience may slide into a form of “managed survival,” normalizing insecurity rather than transforming it. His guiding question to Dr. Rogers asked how one might distinguish analytically between resilience that is genuinely transformative and resilience that merely institutionalizes lowered expectations.
Engaging with Dr. Pierre Camus’s presentation, Dr. Bayarri Toscano highlighted the paradox at the heart of training local elected officials. While designed to open politics and renew local democracy, training can unintentionally reinforce specialization and widen the distance between representatives and citizens. He linked this to a broader Bonapartist tendency in contemporary politics, where legitimacy increasingly derives from competence, executive know-how, and administrative mastery. Training risks signaling that politics is a technical profession requiring certification, thereby narrowing democratic imagination. His question to Camus focused on whether alternative training designs might simultaneously build competence and democratic closeness, rather than reinforcing vertical authority.
Dr. Bayarri Toscano then turned to Dr. Soheila Shahriari’s paper on Rojava, which he described as a crucial shift in perspective. Here, resilience is not about preserving stable liberal institutions but about the everyday production of democratic life under conditions of war, embargo, and geopolitical abandonment. He emphasized the international dimension of democratic decline, noting how Western states may rhetorically support democratic experiments like Rojava while abandoning them when strategic costs rise. His question centered on what concrete forms of international support and responsibility are necessary for such projects to sustain democratic life over time.
Finally, commenting on Ecem Nazlı Üçok’s work, Dr. Bayarri Toscano underscored its contribution in conceptualizing resilience through transnational feminist activism in exile. He highlighted the importance of care infrastructures, solidarity networks, and political practices formed in host societies. At the same time, he raised concerns about the digital infrastructures on which diaspora activism often relies, pointing to trade-offs between visibility and safety amid risks of surveillance and transnational repression. His guiding question asked which practices—formal organizations, informal networks, or care-based relations—most effectively sustain solidarity over time in exile.
In closing, Dr. Bayarri Toscano posed a unifying question for the panel: where is the line between resilience as democratic persistence and resilience as accommodation that quietly reshapes democracy itself? Identifying the first signs of this slide, he suggested, is essential for understanding not only how democracies survive authoritarian pressure, but whether they emerge transformed—or diminished—in the process.
Questions by Participants
The questions raised by participants extended the panel’s discussion by probing the conceptual boundaries of democracy and the political–economic alternatives emerging amid global democratic decline.
Fatima Zahra Ouhmaida, drawing on her background in gender studies, reflected on Dr. Soheila Shahriari’s analysis of Rojava as a feminist and horizontal democratic experiment operating beyond the nation-state. She observed that in contexts such as Morocco, debates on democratic reform and women’s rights remain largely confined within state-centered and institutional frameworks. Rojava, by contrast, revealed how democracy could be imagined as a practice rooted in collective decision-making rather than state authority or international recognition. Her question asked whether projects like Rojava are marginalized primarily because they confront authoritarian power or because they challenge the dominant, state-centric model of democracy itself. She further questioned whether similar feminist and participatory models could emerge within relatively stable states without being framed as existential threats to political order.
Dr. Bülent Keneş addressed Dr. Peter Rogers with a broader political–economic concern, focusing on the global “market” of political systems. He noted that inequalities and distributive failures within liberal market economies are increasingly exploited by far-right and populist actors, and occasionally by left-populist movements as well. In this context, Keneş questioned the growing appeal of “state capitalism” as a purported remedy to democratic deficits and backsliding, particularly following the perceived effectiveness of China’s model during the COVID-19 period. While expressing skepticism toward state capitalism, he asked what critical arguments scholars should advance against it and what democratic dangers might arise from promoting such a model as an alternative to liberal democracy.
Responses by Presenters
Dr. Soheila Shahriari
In her response to the comments and questions raised by discussants and participants, Dr. Soheila Shahriari offered a sobering and deeply critical reflection on the structural conditions that marginalize Rojava’s experiment in feminist radical democracy. She reiterated that Rojava should not be understood as an improvised outcome of Syria’s state collapse, but as the institutional realization of democratic confederalism—an ideology theorized by Abdullah Öcalan over several decades and practiced in various forms long before 2012. As such, Rojava represents a sustained, bottom-up model of governance grounded in pluralism, gender equality, ecological principles, and collective self-administration.
Dr. Shahriari emphasized that what ultimately renders Rojava illegible—and expendable—within the international system is precisely this radical departure from the nation-state model. In international relations, she noted, the nation-state remains the dominant unit of analysis, leaving little conceptual or political space for non-state democratic actors. Rojava’s existence as a feminist, non-state democratic entity challenges this foundational assumption, making it structurally incompatible with prevailing geopolitical logics.
She traced this contradiction through Western engagement with Rojava during the battle against ISIS. At the height of the Kobani resistance, Kurdish women fighters were widely celebrated in international media as symbols of freedom and emancipation. Yet, once the immediate strategic threat of ISIS receded, this rhetorical support evaporated. Dr. Shahriari argued that the subsequent Turkish invasions of Rojava in 2018 and 2019—and the ongoing pressure following the post-2024 Syrian transition under Ahmad al-Shara—have unfolded amid striking Western indifference. The same actors once framed as allies were effectively abandoned once they ceased to serve short-term strategic interests.
Responding directly to questions about democratic resilience, Dr. Shahriari identified civil society—particularly women and feminist actors—as those who shoulder the burden of resilience in Rojava. This resilience, she argued, is transformative in intent but tragically constrained by the absence of any meaningful balance of power, whether militarily or institutionally. Under such conditions, resilience becomes an act of survival rather than a pathway to sustainable democratic consolidation.
Addressing calls for concrete forms of international support, Dr. Shahriari expressed deep skepticism about the adequacy of existing measures such as petitions or symbolic political pressure. While not dismissing these actions entirely, she questioned whether they are remotely sufficient to halt ongoing violence, rising death tolls, and the systematic marginalization of Kurdish-led democratic forces. She concluded by leaving the audience with an unresolved but pressing question: in the face of persistent war and geopolitical abandonment, what forms of solidarity and intervention can genuinely protect radical democratic experiments like Rojava from extinction?
Dr. Peter Rogers
In his response to the discussants’ interventions and participants’ questions, Dr. Peter Rogers framed the debate on resilience within what he described as an emerging era of political realism and pragmatic recalibration. Acknowledging the breadth of the comments, he focused particularly on the question raised about state capitalism and the shifting responsibilities between markets, states, and citizens.
Dr. Rogers argued that the relocation of resilience from the state to the individual has already produced new and often troubling market formations, including what he termed “disaster capitalism.” In this context, market forces increasingly step into domains once associated with public protection, not to safeguard collective welfare, but to extract profit from crisis. This trend, he suggested, reflects a broader and ongoing retreat of the welfare state, as public investment is redirected toward security while resilience-building is increasingly outsourced to private actors, philanthropic foundations, and think tanks.
Rather than framing this shift in purely pessimistic terms, Dr. Rogers urged attention to the evolving metrics through which resilience is evaluated. Drawing on examples from global policy forums, he emphasized the growing importance of redefining “return on investment” beyond narrow fiscal calculations. For resilience to be democratically meaningful, he argued, its success must be measured not only in economic terms but also through moral and social outcomes—particularly the strengthening of social connectivity and collective capacity.
Central to his response was the concept of social capital as a bridge between market logic and democratic resilience. Social capital, he noted, has become an increasingly influential indicator precisely because it translates communal bonds and trust into measurable outcomes legible to policymakers. Investments in social cohesion and networks of solidarity thus offer a language through which collective resilience can be defended within pragmatic governance frameworks.
Dr. Rogers also addressed concerns that resilience discourse risks becoming a moral injunction that normalizes precarity. While acknowledging this danger, he posed a provocative counterpoint: in societies marked by declining welfare provision and weakened collective institutions, citizens may need to reclaim a more active role in shaping democratic life. Individual responsibility, in this sense, should not replace structural accountability but serve as a catalyst for renewed collective engagement against authoritarian and populist pressures.
Finally, Dr. Rogers returned to his core argument that resilience is an inherently polysemic concept. Its meaning, he stressed, shifts across institutional and professional contexts—from emergency responders to security planners to democratic activists. Recognizing these divergent interpretations is not a weakness but a prerequisite for meaningful dialogue. Only by understanding which form of resilience is at stake, he concluded, can scholars and practitioners remain relevant to the political and ethical challenges of democratic survival today.
Dr. Pierre Camus
In his response to the discussants’ comments and participants’ questions, Dr. Pierre Camus addressed the democratic tensions underlying the training of local elected officials, situating the French case within a broader historical and institutional perspective. He began by recalling that, historically, political training in France was largely embedded within political parties—particularly socialist and revolutionary socialist organizations—which played a central role in socializing activists and future officeholders into political skills, ideological frameworks, and the practical workings of government.
In contrast, Dr. Camus noted that contemporary training rights are now framed as individual entitlements rather than collective political processes. In practice, access to training depends heavily on personal resources, time availability, employer cooperation, and institutional position. As a result, training programs often reproduce existing social and political inequalities instead of mitigating them. This dynamic reflects a deeper democratic tension between competence and citizenship: while citizenship is formally treated as sufficient for political participation, competence increasingly operates as an informal prerequisite.
Dr. Camus emphasized that local authorities tend to remain largely passive in overseeing how training rights are implemented and who effectively benefits from them. This regulatory gap allows inequalities to persist, particularly disadvantaging elected officials from working-class backgrounds, small municipalities, or those whose employers restrict time off for political duties. Although he stressed that the current framework is preferable to the absence of training altogether, he argued that its symbolic character limits its democratizing potential.
Responding to questions about alternative models, Dr. Camus highlighted the example of the Australian state of Victoria, where political training is structured in three stages: mandatory pre-nomination training for candidates, compulsory induction for newly elected officials, and ongoing training during the mandate. This model, he argued, “de-enclaves” political competence by circulating basic democratic knowledge before electoral selection, thereby reducing the divide between representatives and citizens.
However, he concluded that such a model remains politically difficult to implement in France, where mandatory training is widely perceived as an illegitimate barrier to candidacy and a threat to the republican ideal that citizenship alone should suffice for political participation.
Ecem Nazlı Üçok
In her response to the comments and questions raised by the discussants and participants, PhD candidate Ecem Nazlı Üçok offered a reflective clarification of her conceptual approach to democratic resilience, transnational solidarity, and feminist diasporic activism. She began by expressing appreciation for the feedback and emphasized her intention to briefly synthesize the main issues rather than extend the discussion.
Üçok directly engaged with questions concerning the limits and sustainability of coalitions and solidarities, particularly those raised by the discussants. She challenged linear and teleological understandings of resistance and resilience that assume a steady progression toward long-term salvation or political resolution. Instead, she highlighted how the activists she studies are acutely aware of the temporality of solidarity. Many of the solidaristic formations she observed are intentionally short-lived, event-based, or situational rather than permanent structures.
For Üçok, the political significance of these formations lies not in their durability but in their capacity to create ruptures within dominant systems. These moments of collective action—however fleeting—allow participants to recognize shared moral frameworks, alternative ways of thinking, and the existence of parallel political imaginaries. In this sense, solidarity functions as a space of recognition and affirmation, even when it does not crystallize into lasting institutions.
Responding to questions about tactics and intersections with other struggles, Üçok emphasized the diversity and creativity of activist practices. She described how feminist diasporic groups intersect with labor rights, migrant rights, and broader political struggles through informal, grassroots initiatives. Examples included the creation of listening spaces centered on protest music, community-based support networks for migrant women from different countries, and hands-on solidarity practices embedded in everyday life.
She also underscored the importance of digital spaces as key infrastructures for sustaining transnational connections, visibility, and care. Üçok concluded by reiterating that resilience, in her research, is not solely about endurance but about creating alternative political spaces—however temporary—that enable new forms of belonging, care, and collective imagination.
Conclusion
Session 10 of the ECPS Virtual Workshop Series offered a nuanced and theoretically rich examination of democratic resilience at a moment when authoritarian pressures increasingly operate through gradual, normalized, and often legally sanctioned practices. Across diverse empirical contexts—from market democracies and local governance structures to revolutionary self-administration and diasporic feminist activism—the session underscored that resilience is neither a neutral concept nor an unambiguously democratic good. Rather, it is a contested political terrain shaped by power relations, institutional design, and the uneven distribution of social and moral burdens.
A key takeaway from the session was the ambivalence of resilience. As several contributions demonstrated, resilience can function as a mode of democratic defense and innovation, but it can also legitimize adaptation to structural injustice, shift responsibility from institutions to individuals, and normalize permanent crisis. Whether resilience becomes transformative or merely adaptive depends on who defines it, who enacts it, and who bears its costs. The presentations collectively challenged celebratory narratives by insisting on the need to interrogate resilience as an emerging norm of governance, citizenship, and political expectation.
At the same time, the session highlighted sites of democratic possibility. Feminist self-administration in Rojava and transnational diaspora activism illustrated how resilience can be grounded in care, solidarity, and prefigurative practice, expanding democratic imagination beyond state-centric and procedural models. These cases also exposed the limits of international democratic commitment, particularly when radical or non-state forms of democracy clash with prevailing geopolitical logics.
Taken together, Session 10 reaffirmed ECPS’s commitment to critical, comparative inquiry into populism and democratic decline. It concluded not with a singular prescription, but with an agenda of questions—about responsibility, transformation, and democratic futures—that remain essential for scholars, decisionmakers, practitioners, and citizens confronting authoritarian times.
In “From Farce to Tragedy,” the author traces the first year of Donald Trump’s second term as a turning point in American political life. What once carried elements of chaos and dark comedy has hardened into something more deliberate and consequential. Trump’s return to power, framed by him as total vindication, has brought an unprecedented expansion of executive authority, the systematic weakening of institutions, and the normalization of personal loyalty over law. Drawing on sharp observations from leading journalists and scholars, the piece shows how emergency powers, executive orders, and transactional politics have reshaped governance at home and abroad. The result is not renewed greatness, but a spectacle of democratic erosion—an American tragedy unfolding without the comfort of a happy ending.
By Cemal Tunçdemir*
“What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending,” the American critic William Dean Howells, who was a central figure in Gilded Age American literature, once said. The second coming of Donald J. Trump to the US Presidency was not an accident of fate, nor even absurdity of democracy. It was a sequel demanded by majority of American voters that having once liked the “first season” and asked upon longer run. The real tragedy was not that Trump was Trump, that was obvious from the start, but that so many Americans mistook his loudness for conviction and saw his challenge to the rules as bravery.
“The first time around, there was something almost thrilling about Donald Trump as president,”explains American historian and journalist Thomas Frank, “The respectable world came together against him with a gratifying unanimity: the legacy media, the nonprofits, the universities, the think tanks, the tech sector, the intelligence community. Insulting this imbecile became the most rewarding pastime on earth.” By contrast, according to Frank, for much of 2025, the feeling was darker. “Absolute despair” if you will.
The difference in the second term wasn’t just the lack of the thrilling or accidental comedic elements of the first term. Donald Trump viewed his return to the White House as a profound vindication. In his telling, his four years of exile had proven that he was right about everything. About economy, about “stolen” election, about press, about elites, about universities, about institutions. This absolute conviction liberated him from all doubt, and all rules.
Trump’s unrestrained mind is on full display in a recent letter he sent to the Prime Minister of Norway as he wrote, “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”
“Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality,”observes Anne Applebaum, “one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him.”
“Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 in some ways but on steroids,”compares Peter Baker, New York Times’s chief White House correspondent who have covered six US presidents, including Trump in his first term, “A lot of the things that he talked about doing or exploring in the first term -or tried but failed to do or was dissuaded from doing-he’s now doing and in spades.”
Unlike the first term, in the beginning of his second term, there was less confusion, more intent. And more so preparation. Trump has rolled out many of the Project 2025, 900-page Heritage Foundation-led blueprint, he once claimed he has nothing to do with. Many of Trump’s executive orders reshaping the government were outlined in this right-wing policy plan. From the early days of his tenure, Donald Trump began advancing Project 2025’s primary objective: the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” a term coined by his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon. He has expanded the scope of executive power in ways unparalleled in modern history.
By the end of 2025, some 317,000 federal employees were out of the government, according to the Office of Personnel Management. This was the largest reduction of the federal workforce in American history. He even fired members and officials from various independent and bipartisan boards, agencies, and commissions, including dozens of inspectors general, key watchdogs for waste, fraud, and abuse across all government.
One of the things Trump learned was that it matters who is around him, Peter Baker observes, “Many of the people he surrounded himself with in his first term viewed their jobs as keeping him from going off the rails, from doing things they thought were reckless -or illegal even. This term, he’s surrounded by people who not only agree with him but are enabling him and empowering him and want to serve his desires.”
One of the Trump’s most daring test the limits of his presidential power was claiming powers that have typically resides with Congress. In his first year, executive orders have eclipsed actual legislation. Trump has signed 147 executive orders, setting a record for the most signed in any president’s first 100 days of office. By contrast, he has signed only five bills into law, a record low for the first 100 days.
What is truly worrying is that his blatant misuse of emergency powers, which are meant to temporarily increase executive authority only during urgent and rapidly developing situations. The Brennan Center has identified 123 different laws could be triggered by a presidential emergency declaration. Because these powers are extensive, strong safeguards are needed to prevent misuse. Since The National Emergencies Act lacks safeguards, a president can declare an emergency by executive order and renew it every year indefinitely. Congress may vote to terminate an emergency, but only with a veto-proof majority. This flaw was exposed when Trump declared a fake emergency to fund a border wall Congress had rejected.
As a striking example, instead of traditional tariff statutes (such as Section 301 or Section 232) he invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which is not a general trade statute, to impose sweeping import taxes. To justify invoking the IEEPA, Trump Administration declared “trade deficits” a national emergency. And this audacity has led to a legal drama that has now reached the Supreme Court.
The question is why the White House team ever invoked IEEPA at all, instead of traditional trade laws? The answer is not only that IEEPA provides the President broad authority to respond to a declaration of national emergency. The real answer probably lies in “political anthropology rather than jurisprudence,”writes Gillian Tett, “Trump’s team has a power structure more akin to a royal court than anything that adheres to 21st-century norms.” He always wants to have king-like powers, and his team is looking for loopholes that would allow him to acquire those powers.
This is the posture of a man who has looked at the institutions meant to restrain him -the courts, the lawmakers, the prosecutors- have done nothing and he concluded they are toothless. After the surviving of the fallout of January 6, five years ago, he now moves with the confidence of someone who believes he is beyond the reach of the old rules. He wants a power that is feared and given whatever it wants. For this reason, some critics are no longer debating policy; they are discussing a change in the American regime. But a change to what?
“There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism.” Jonathan Rauch answered the question in his now famous article. “Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing,” he wrote, “It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones.”
The Art of the Deal-Making Presidency
“Nice woman but she does not listen.”
After a reportedly tense phone call in early August, President Trump publicly criticized Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter with this condescending remark and quickly raised tariffs on Swiss imports to a punishing 39 percent. Couple of days later when two Swiss federal ministers and several government executives flew over to DC, but they got nowhere near Trump. Following months all the effort of traditional statecraft couldn’t resolved months of standoff. What ultimately break the deadlock was not diplomacy or policy talks. It was something shinier.
In early November, small delegation of Swiss titans -all male and, all billionaires- sidestepped the usual diplomatic channels, arriving at the Oval Office with a gold-plated Rolex desk clock and a 1-kilogram engraved gold bar. Before the guests had even leaved the White House, Trump shared a social media post announcing progress. Within the days, the previously urgent “national emergency” posed by Swiss trade deficit seemed to lose its urgency, and tariffs were trimmed to a comparatively modest 15 percent.
As that meeting so strikingly demonstrated, access to the American leader is no longer earned through shared values or sound policy. It is now won through the language of the deal and, above all, the weight of gold.
Trump received gold coated replica of a royal crown from the Silla Kingdom from South Korea President, a golden pager from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a gold-plated golf club from Japan, a golden boxing belt from Ukraine. Even Apple CEO Tim Cook presented Trump with a special glass disc on a 24-karat gold base in August 2025 and secured an exemption from 100% tariff on imported semiconductors. Apple gift was a favorite for Trump in the Oval Office until the Swiss came to town. “It was tough to beat Apple, but the Swiss did it,” one administration official told Axios.
Trump even kept original 24-karat gold Club World Cup Trophy for himself so FIFA had to give the winner team, Chelsea, a replica. Not only did he receive the trophy, but he was also awarded a gold medal, which FIFA presents to the players of the winning team.
“The golden age” that Trump promised in his second inaguration speech, has never seemed more literal. He wasn’t only for his trademark “Midas touch” flow, he seeks profit in every policy decision he makes. As Jonathan Rauch explained, in patrimonialism, every policy the president values is considered his own personal property. Some experts call it ‘pay-to-play,’ where foreign governments, businesses, and wealthy donors gaining political and financial advantages such as relaxed regulations and federal contracts by investing in the Trump Organization, supporting MAGA causes or by engaging in excessive flattery.
Trump Towers have been proposed from Damascus to Belgrade. Trump hotels or Trump Resorts are being built in many major cities around the world, primarily in Asia and Africa. As Amy Sorkin puts it Trump has made it clear that no gift is too much for him -even, and maybe especially, someone else’s Nobel Peace Prize medal.
Even presidential pardon power has become big business. In his first-year Trump has pardoned an unusually high numberof wealthy people accused of financial crimes, including money laundering, bank fraud and wire fraud. Wealthy individuals pay millions to lobbying and consulting firms to bring their cases to Trump’s attention.
Trump pardoned cryptocurrency mogul Changpeng Zhao, months after Zhao’s company has struck a $2 billions deal with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s new crypto venture. In another revealing example, executives of Wells Fargo Bank, instead of paying the $8.5 million fine imposed for fraudulent transactions, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration ceremony in January, and two months later, their fine was reduced to a mere $150,000.
In Trump’s World, Europe Is the Villain
“The foreign policy of President Donald Trump combines the worst of isolationism with the worst of interventionism in a uniquely disastrous way,”says Thomas Reese. He began his presidency as a firm isolationist, but “America First” quickly turned into a wrecking ball -a license to upend America’s role in the world, discarding rules and norms with little restraint.
“I never thought I’d feel nostalgia for the Iraq War,” said Nesrine Malik in The Guardian, but it turns out that the runup to that war, when American Administration did at least strive to convince the Congress and the world of the righteousness of its cause, was the “good old days.” The US removed Venezuela leader Nicolas Maduro based solely on national interest, bypassing all domestic, international authorization or public consent. Trump didn’t just break the rules it showed there aren’t any.
“No autocrat likes to see one of their own seized, shackled and renditioned,” wrote Adrian Blomfield in The Daily Telegraph. However, China and Russia are unlikely to be troubled by Maduro’s removal. They may see it as evidence of the US stepping back globally and focusing on regional dominance. A world divided into spheres of influence, where powerful states act freely, could benefit Moscow and Beijing, as noted by Gideon Rachman in the FT.
Even Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) plan within its 33-page framework argues that Russia and China are US peers or potential friends. Instead, it points the finger at a surprising villain: Europe. NSS argues that the real danger isn’t Russian tanks or Chinese factories, but rather the “erasure” of European culture caused by mass immigration and the power of the European Union bureaucracy. The liberal international order, already fragile, found itself mocked not only by adversaries but by its former custodian.
New Civil War and End of Forth Republic?
“Trump isn’t interested in fighting a new Cold War. He wants a new civilizational war,” wrote Thomas Friedman. Trump’s National Security Strategy language unlike any previous surveys, he observes, “It reveals a deep truth about this second Trump administration: how much it came to Washington to fight America’s third civil war, not to fight the West’s new cold war.” According to Friedman, after the Civil War of the 1860s and the second major civil struggle of the 1960s civil rights movement, America is now experiencing its third civil war. “This one, like the first two, is over the question ‘Whose country is this anyway?’ This civil war has been less violent than the first two—but it is early.”
Although the United States has operated under a single constitution, each civil war has produced a new political order, a new republic in all but name. For that reason, a “third civil war” would not just be another crisis; it would signal the end of what some analysts call the “Fourth American Republic.”
As Jamelle Bouie pointed, the Civil War and its aftermath constituted the Second Republic. The Third Republic came into this world through the overwhelming victory of the Democrats in the election of early 1930’s. The legacies of the Third Republic had lived on when the fourth republic began with the achievements of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement, which included a newly open door to the world. “This was an American republic built on multiracial pluralism. A nation of natives and of immigrants from around the world. Of political parties that strove to represent a diverse cross-section of society,” wrote Bouie, “It’s this America that they’re fighting to destroy with their attacks on immigration, civil rights laws, higher education and the very notion of a pluralistic society of equals.”
A Year of Revelation
The first year of Trump’s second term offered Americans not greatness, but clarity. It showed what happens when empty and noisy demagogic rhetoric substitutes for vision and when power outruns principles. His return to power did not resolve the contradictions of Trumpism; it intensified them. Nationalism that depended on global markets. Capitalism claims to be self-regulating, yet in reality it is owned by the state. Law invoked as rhetoric and rejected as restraint. Freedom of speech demanded abroad and denied at home. Declared himself ‘Peace President’ and change the Department of the Defense name to Department of War.
His supporters too—with their enduring appetite for loud certainty over quiet competence, find themselves caught in a season of paradox. Cheering the dismantling of the very institutions that once established the order they now claim to want again. They back tariffs, immigration, and social spending policies that heavily impact rural America, the backbone of their movement. And most ironically, this coalition of white Christians is led by one of the least religious presidents ever.
And yet, for all the noise he and his administration generate, the first year of his second term also revealed limits. Courts still blocked some actions. States resisted others. Markets reacted unpredictably. Bureaucracies slowed what they could not stop. Polls indicate declining support for him as the Congressional elections approach. Trump raged against these constraints, calling them sabotage, yet their persistence revealed an uncomfortable truth: even an “unbound president” cannot easily escape the structure of a constitutional federal system.
Even in the face of repeated failures to “make America great again,” Trump succeeded at making one thing undeniably great again. It was not the greatness of law, restraint, economy, international leadership or wisdom, but the greatness of spectacle. A spectacle of American tragedy, one that may not have a happy ending this time.
(*) Cemal Tunçdemir is a New York–based veteran journalist with extensive experience covering US politics and international affairs.
In this ECPS interview, Professor Daniel Treisman examines how Trump’s political style intersects with the logic of informational autocracy and democratic backsliding. Drawing on “Informational Autocracy,” he argues that contemporary authoritarianism often relies less on mass repression than on “controlling narratives, selective coercion, and performance legitimacy.” Trump’s pressure on comedians, broadcasters, universities, and law firms, Professor Treisman suggests, reflects a familiar “inclination” toward intimidation—yet “the outcome was different,” because democratic institutions can still generate pushback. The core issue, he stresses, is whether US checks and civil society can withstand “executive aggrandizement”—the drive to “go beyond the formal or traditional powers of the office and consolidate control.”
In an era marked by democratic backsliding, populist leadership, and the reconfiguration of informational power, the resilience of liberal democracy has become a central concern for scholars and policymakers alike. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Daniel Treisman—Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research—offers a nuanced and empirically grounded assessment of how Donald Trump’s political strategy intersects with the logic of informational autocracy, executive aggrandizement, and democratic fragility.
Drawing on his influential work Informational Autocracy (co-authored with Sergei Guriev), Professor Treisman situates Trump’s threats against comedians, journalists, universities, and other institutional actors within a broader global pattern in which contemporary autocrats rely less on mass repression than on “controlling narratives, selective coercion, and performance legitimacy.” While Trump’s behavior often resembles that of informational autocrats, Professor Treisman emphasizes a crucial distinction: “So, while the inclination is similar, the outcome was different.” Episodes such as the pressure placed on late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel reveal Trump’s “tendency to expand his power and to overstep traditional limits,” but also the continued—if uneven—capacity of democratic institutions and civil society to push back.
At the core of the interview lies a central analytical question: whether Trump’s conduct represents a failed or incomplete attempt to translate informational autocracy into a still-competitive democratic system. As Professor Treisman puts it, “The real question… is how resilient democratic societies and civil societies in democratic settings can prove to be in response to a leader who seeks what is often called executive aggrandizement.” This concern animates Professor Treisman’s discussion of selective intimidation, signaling repression, and the targeting of elite institutions—strategies designed to “score some visible victories” and deter broader resistance without resorting to outright censorship.
The interview also explores how new media ecosystems and the rise of a tech “broligarchy” complicate classical models of informational control. Professor Treisman highlights the hybrid arrangements created by platform ownership, algorithmic amplification, and strategic alignment between populist leaders and tech elites, noting that these dynamics allow political actors to undermine epistemic authority “without overt censorship.” While Trump has aggressively pressured legacy media through litigation and regulatory threats, his relationship with major technology firms remains more transactional and indirect—distinct from the tightly coordinated media control characteristic of full informational autocracies.
Beyond the US case, Professor Treisman offers comparative insights into charismatic populism in Latin America, bureaucratized authoritarianism in Russia and Hungary, and the structural uncertainties surrounding democratic decline. Reflecting on Democracy by Mistake, he cautions against deterministic readings of democratic erosion, stressing that “mistakes can be forces for good” as well as for authoritarian empowerment. In closing, Professor Treisman urges analytical humility: distinguishing between cyclical stress and durable authoritarian transformation, he argues, remains inherently uncertain, as history “does not come with labels that are easy to read.”
Taken together, this interview provides a sober, theoretically informed reflection on Trumpism, informational power, and the fragile boundaries between democratic contestation and authoritarian drift.
Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Daniel Treisman, slightly revised for clarity and flow.
Trump Has Shown Every Inclination of Informational Autocrats
US President Donald Trump held a campaign rally at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 4, 2024. Photo: Chip Somodevilla.[/caption]
Professor Daniel Treisman, thank you so much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: In “Informational Autocracy,” you argue that contemporary autocrats rely less on overt repression and more on controlling narratives, selective coercion, and performance legitimacy. How should we analytically situate Trump’s recent threats against broadcasters and comedians within this framework—are we observing an attempted translation of informational autocracy into a still-competitive democratic setting?
Professor Daniel Treisman: It’s very interesting to think about the various tactics and approaches that Trump has used and to compare them with the kinds of practices we see in informational autocracies. Clearly, there are many parallels, and a great deal looks very familiar.
For instance, in the early 2000s in Russia, President Putin was offended by a comedy show that portrayed him in an unflattering light. It was a satirical program called Kukly. He made it apparent to the authorities at that station that the show had to be canceled, and it was indeed canceled.
You mentioned Trump and comedy in the US, and we know about the recent Jimmy Kimmel case. What is interesting is that, on the surface, the situation looks very similar. Trump was offended by jokes Kimmel had been telling on his show, and he made it clear to the owners of the station that he thought Kimmel should be canceled. The head of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) then put pressure on the channel.
The outcome, however, was different. Kimmel was taken off the air for a few days—about a week—and then reinstated. He returned very forcefully, speaking about freedom and the need for separation between government and television.
So, while the inclination is similar, the outcome was different. We often see in Trump a tendency to expand his power and to overstep traditional limits. The real question, for me, is how resilient democratic societies and civil societies in democratic settings can prove to be in response to a leader who seeks what is often called executive aggrandizement—going beyond the formal or traditional powers of the office and consolidating control in his own hands. This is precisely the process that characterizes democratic backsliding toward informational autocracy.
In that sense, this episode illustrates how Trump has shown every inclination to do the sorts of things that informational autocrats do, and if he were free to do so, I am sure he would move toward a more authoritarian or informationally autocratic setup. So far, however, we have seen a considerable degree of pushback and resilience on the part of American societal and democratic structures—through checks and balances and other mechanisms.
That said, it has been disappointing that we have not seen more resistance. The docility of Congress under Republican leadership and the questionable judgments of some courts have been troubling for those who view the White House’s attacks on the media, universities, and subnational governments as real threats to democracy. Those developments are certainly discouraging.
Nevertheless, across the board, we continue to see significant resistance, and that is what truly distinguishes full-fledged informational autocracies from developed democracies that manage to survive as democracies. It is not that democracies never produce populist politicians who want to push in an authoritarian direction—they do. These are politicians with authoritarian impulses, sometimes driven by narcissism or by a highly cynical political strategy. What ultimately varies is how far they are able to go.
Trump Is a Populist Proud of Defying Democratic Norms
Much of your work emphasizes that informational autocrats avoid crossing visible “red lines” that would trigger mass backlash. Does Trump’s increasingly explicit intimidation of the media suggest either miscalculation or a belief that democratic norms of speech protection have already eroded enough to absorb such shocks?
Professor Daniel Treisman: That’s a very good question, and it’s difficult to give a simple answer. I think there is sometimes an element of miscalculation. But let me step back for a moment—it’s not entirely clear that this is miscalculation, because we don’t fully understand what Trump’s strategy is.
In some ways, as I’ve said, he looks quite similar to various informational autocrats in authoritarian societies. But in other ways, he is quite different. As you noted, informational autocrats typically try not to appear overtly to be transgressing the rules of democracy. They present themselves as genuine, loyal democrats. They claim to follow constitutional procedures, often using legalistic language, and they frame their power grabs as legitimate exercises of authority for ostensibly valid purposes, such as protecting the public from pornography, terrorism, or similar threats.
The goal of genuine informational autocrats is not to challenge the system openly, but to create the impression that they are operating fully within democratic rules, while accusing their opponents of being undemocratic. They seek to project an image of competence, benevolence, and modernity, and to portray critics as those who threaten democracy.
There is an element of this in Trump’s behavior. He certainly accuses Democrats of being undemocratic. But there is also a distinct bravado—a deliberate defiance of democratic rules and norms. He openly states that when he pushes the Justice Department to investigate his critics and rivals, he is motivated by a desire for retribution. He rejects the idea of impartial justice and openly embraces the politicization of the justice system. In doing so, he often deliberately says things that are meant to provoke outrage and that are clearly undemocratic.
In this sense, he is not an authoritarian pretending to be a democrat. He is a populist politician who is, in some respects, openly proud of being undemocratic. He might argue that this is still democratic because his base supports him—and indeed, he does say that. But he also claims that there are no checks and balances, that the only constraint on him is his own morality, which amounts to a direct denial of the democratic system rather than a pretense of adherence to it.
So, it is difficult to determine whether this behavior reflects miscalculation or is simply part of his strategy, and whether he differs in this respect from informational autocrats. He appears to recognize that he is operating within a democratic system with a powerful civil society and has chosen to confront it directly and test its limits, rather than behaving like informational autocrats such as Orbán or early Putin, who presented themselves as ordinary democratic leaders supported by the majority while depicting their opponents as extremists seeking to undermine or overthrow democracy.
The Strategy Is to Score Visible Victories That Intimidate Others
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: oe Sohm.
Informational autocracies often rely on signaling repression—making examples rather than governing through mass coercion. How should we interpret Trump’s selective targeting of journalists, broadcasters, and universities in this light?
Professor Daniel Treisman: Well, it’s not just Trump, of course. This time he came in with a team that had thought carefully about how to attack various institutions in American society that they deeply opposed, including universities, law firms, some courts, and various subnational governments. The goal was quite directly to weaken those parts of what they viewed as a dominant political and cultural elite.
In part, yes, the strategy was to score some visible victories that would intimidate other members of a particular sector. So, you go after one university—like Columbia—very hard, essentially intimidating it into doing a deal, and then all the other universities would cave and negotiate individually with the Department of Education or the White House. There is an element here of signaling toughness, of attempting intimidation on a kind of wholesale scale.
That is quite similar to informational autocracies. There is less, as I mentioned earlier, of a concern with constraining actions to fit the appearance of democracy and normal democratic politics. Instead, there is a deliberate challenge—within the US context—to many of the legal underpinnings and long-standing understandings of the relationship between the presidency and other institutions, some of which have prevailed for decades or even centuries.
That said, this behavior is not entirely distinctive to authoritarian politics. All politicians try to signal their intentions by demonstrating, through particular cases, what their approach will be. What is distinctive here is that the goals of the Trump administration regarding universities and law firms have been very extreme. Essentially, they want greater control and a particular ideological orientation within universities, and they want to exclude intellectual approaches and philosophies they oppose.
With law firms, the aim is to discourage large, professional firms from opposing them or taking cases against them. That message was sent deliberately, through a barrage of attacks on different fronts very quickly during the first weeks and months of the administration, precisely in order to signal resolve and warn others.
So, in some respects, this does resemble informational autocracy. But it is also part of a broader phenomenon. Revolutionary politicians—or politicians seeking to implement fundamental changes—often come into office with a program and strike very hard at the outset to test how far they can go before resistance organizes and pushes back. Sometimes this is an effective strategy: if the initial blow is strong enough, opposition may fail to organize in time, allowing a new status quo to take hold.
Tech Billionaires Are Treated as Leverage Points
How does the rise of a tech “broligarchy”—with key digital venues controlled by figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—complicate the classic logic of informational control? How do platform ownership, algorithmic governance, and strategic collaboration with populist leaders such as Donald Trump reshape the dynamics of informational autocracy? To what extent do these hybrid arrangements—combining formal pluralism with asymmetric visibility and amplification—enable populist actors to undermine epistemic authority and institutional trust without resorting to overt censorship?
Professor Daniel Treisman: That’s a great—and complicated—question. I think both informational autocracy and populism are closely tied to information and media. They tend to thrive in periods of technological change, when new media forms emerge.
In the early days of mass newspapers, for instance, that medium created new opportunities for populists to appeal to broader constituencies than had previously been mobilized in politics. We see something similar with the internet. As it became more developed and central to everyday life, it opened up new avenues for outsiders to engage in a different kind of politics. In democracies, this has been a major foundation of the recent populist wave.
In authoritarian contexts, similar opportunities have allowed authoritarian leaders to use the internet to communicate in new ways and to present themselves as democratic and competent through manipulation—much more effectively than old-style propaganda, which relied heavily on intimidation but was less successful in creating a convincing, all-encompassing political image. In this sense, new information technologies have reshaped not only perceptions of individual politicians but also broader understandings of the political system itself.
New information technology is therefore a central driver of the changes we are seeing in both democratic and authoritarian systems. In the American case, more specifically, the relationship between Trump and major technology firms—led by tech billionaires such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others—is complex.
Going into Trump’s second term, there was something of a meeting of the minds between Silicon Valley and the Trump team. Many in the tech sector felt that the industry—and tech billionaires personally—had been mistreated by the Biden administration, citing what they perceived as hostility, attempts to censor right-wing or libertarian views, overregulation, and even the debanking of entrepreneurs involved in new areas such as cryptocurrency. This generated real antagonism toward the Democrats among parts of Silicon Valley, aligning well with the attitudes and plans of the Trump camp.
This was particularly evident in the case of Elon Musk, who was effectively given carte blanche to move aggressively against the federal bureaucracy and dismantle large parts of the government in a short period of time. At the same time, there have also been tensions—if not open confrontations—between the Trump administration and some tech leaders. Still, many of them appear to perceive shared opportunities.
Although Musk is no longer in the administration and clearly disagrees with Trump on certain issues, such as fiscal policy, he—and many other tech billionaires—continue to see opportunities in the current political environment. Not all, of course; some remain aligned with the Democrats. But many hold libertarian views and see Trump as more receptive to their ideas about technological development, the treatment of billionaires, and the balance between regulation and freedom.
The Trump administration has also actively sought to influence the media environment, particularly legacy media, by pressuring the owners of major networks. In ways reminiscent of informational autocracies, Trump has relied on defamation suits, libel actions, and other legal tools to intimidate and pressure media organizations.
With social media, however, the approach has been more indirect. Trump created his own social network and has shown little interest in directly regulating platforms such as X or Facebook. Instead, he treats tech billionaires much like other wealthy actors—as leverage points. If he wants something, he applies pressure, and as long as his demands are not too costly, they tend to comply. There is little incentive for them to engage in open confrontation.
That said, this does not amount to the kind of comprehensive, day-to-day control characteristic of full informational autocracies, where authorities maintain close, behind-the-scenes relationships with most media outlets and allow only marginal opposition voices without real influence or mass reach.
In short, the parallel between Trump and informational autocrats in this domain—much like in others—is imperfect. Some features are strikingly reminiscent of informational autocracy, while others differ substantially. These differences reflect both contextual factors—such as the scale and global reach of US-based technology companies compared to media in smaller authoritarian states—and Trump’s own distinctive political style.
Caricature: Shutterstock.
Pluralism Survives, but the Playing Field Is Tilted
You and Sergei Guriev stress that modern autocrats seek to preserve the appearance of pluralism while hollowing it out. To what extent do Trump’s regulatory threats and litigation strategies resemble this logic of simulated legality rather than outright censorship?
Professor Daniel Treisman: I don’t think there is outright censorship. I don’t see outright censorship. It is much more a matter of trying to persuade—trying to send signals to the media to tone down criticism—or, as I mentioned, of confronting them with defamation suits or costly regulatory interference.
So, I think pluralism does exist; we do see pluralism in the United States. At the same time, there are constant efforts to tilt the playing field. Many of these efforts are not new. Republicans in the US political system have been doing this for a very long time—and not just Republicans; Democrats often use similar tools—to gain small, localized advantages, or sometimes larger ones, through practices such as gerrymandering or by refining voting laws in ways they believe will favor them.
All of that is, sadly, part of the American political tradition. Trump has often turbocharged this kind of behavior, as in the Texas mid-decade gerrymandering of congressional constituencies, but it is not radically new.
So, pluralism survives. There are efforts to win within a pluralist context, and there are also efforts to intimidate the opposition in this Trumpian, rather anarchic and blatant way. But I do not see real censorship or the kind of cohesive system we find in fully developed informational autocracies.
It is much more anarchic. Who knows how things will develop? Nobody can predict the future, but at present, it looks rather different to me.
Mistakes Are Easier to See in Retrospect
In“Democracy by Mistake,” you highlight how democracy often emerges—and collapses—not through design but through elite error. Looking at the US today, which elite misjudgments (judicial restraint, partisan polarization, media fragmentation) most plausibly explain the vulnerability of democratic guardrails?
Professor Daniel Treisman: In the US, we don’t really know. We don’t yet know whether what we are witnessing is an intense challenge to the democratic system—one that the forces of democracy will ultimately defeat—or whether we are observing a more gradual, long-term erosion in the quality of American democracy. For now, we have to reserve judgment.
Mistakes are much easier to identify in retrospect than as they are happening. One could argue that Trump has made many mistakes, and one could equally argue that leaders of democratic forces in the US have made many mistakes as well. Mistakes are universal and ubiquitous. Not all mistakes lead to the collapse of a regime—far from it.
For that reason, it is difficult to look at the US system and identify a single fateful mistake whose consequences we will clearly see five years from now. The main message of that article, for the current situation is this: we should not assume that everything is rational or part of a carefully crafted plan. Mistakes can be forces for good when they contribute to the failure of anti-democratic politicians and regimes. But mistakes can also be forces for harm when they enable or empower authoritarian actors.
Trump Fits the Family of Charismatic Populists
This editorial image, captured in Belgrade, Serbia, showcases an array of novelty socks featuring the likenesses of Vladimir Putin, Aleksandr Lukashenko, Viktor Orban, and Donald Trump in Belgrade, Serbia on December 12, 2024. Photo: Jerome Cid.
Comparatively, how should we distinguish Trump’s personalization of power from Latin American charismatic populism (e.g., Chávez) and from the more bureaucratized authoritarianism of leaders like Putin or Orbán?
Professor Daniel Treisman: Clearly, Trump isn’t very good at bureaucracy. There are some people in his administration who do bureaucracy well—Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, for example—and that is why they have had a greater impact on the federal bureaucracy than in Trump’s first term. But as an individual, Trump is clearly not a very systematic bureaucratic operator.
In that respect, he is more like charismatic populists. Putin does not have this kind of anarchic character, and Orbán is also much more systematic and skilled in statecraft and bureaucratic politics—although, of course, Orbán is also an effective populist and could be described by some as charismatic.
With regard to Chávez and other Latin American populists, Trump is obviously not quite like the left-wing populists of Latin America. Chávez had a revolutionary, Bolivarian discourse and a semi-Marxist worldview, and he maintained close emotional and political ties with other left-wing administrations across Latin America and Central America. That is quite different from Trump. Trump, after all, arrested the leader of the regime that evolved out of Chávez’s rule.
That said, there are right-wing populists in Latin America as well—Bolsonaro, for example—who are much more similar to Trump. Although Bolsonaro has more of a military background, in terms of personality and political approach Trump is closer to that type. Even when compared with left-wing populists like Chávez, Trump shares the fact that he is a populist who appeals—at least rhetorically, if not always through policy—to the masses of ordinary people whom he claims have been neglected and disrespected. That was also a central part of Chávez’s appeal.
So, I would say that Trump is distinctive in many ways, but he also clearly fits within the broader family of charismatic populists.
History Does Not Come with Labels
Finally, drawing on your work on predictability and early warning, which indicators should scholars prioritize to distinguish between episodic democratic stress and the onset of durable authoritarian transformation?
Professor Daniel Treisman: I should say at the outset that my work on predictability and prediction is quite limited, but I have been thinking about what is a philosophically deep question: the difference between trends and cycles. And I think the basic answer is that there is no definitive answer. You cannot know whether what appears to be changing at a particular moment represents a shift in the underlying trend—a breakpoint toward a new trajectory—or merely a cyclical fluctuation.
We see this across many spheres. If we look at the spread of democracy over the past 200 to 250 years—focusing here on the West, on Europe and the Americas—we observe both a very strong upward trajectory, from almost no democracies (depending, of course, on how one defines democracy) to a much larger number of countries that can be considered at least electoral democracies.
At the same time, we have seen waves: periods in which the share of democracies increases, followed by periods in which it declines or at least plateaus. In each of these moments of cyclical slowdown or reversal, people have proclaimed, “This is the end of democracy.” In every reverse wave, there has been fear that what we were witnessing was not just a cycle but a permanent shift away from democracy as a long-term reality. So far, those fears have been proven wrong in each case.
That said, I do not think there is any particular indicator or observational technique that can reliably tell us whether a change will be permanent or temporary. This reflects a deep feature of the world we live in and of our ability to understand history from within, rather than in retrospect. Looking backward, it is easy to apply statistical tests or analytical frameworks to determine whether a change was cyclical or represented a trend shift—it is almost trivial. But as history unfolds, I do not think there is any way to know for sure whether we are seeing something genuinely new or something that is repeating in a familiar pattern.
Different scholars have developed different mental models of the world, emphasizing one perspective or the other. Some believe in progress; others emphasize stagnation or endless repetition. This tension has run through Western philosophy and social science from the very beginning. My own position is to emphasize the high degree of uncertainty involved, and to push back against claims that we can clearly identify a change in the trend when it may well be a change in the cycle.
This is why I have written critically about responses to what some describe as a democratic recession, or even a reverse wave of democracy, in recent years. I think the evidence has not—or at least has not yet—fully supported such claims. There is growing evidence of a slowdown in the rate of democratic advance, and probably some degree of average backsliding. But there is an important distinction between backsliding and the long-term collapse of democracy.
So, we all need to remain attentive to this distinction and recognize that events, as they unfold, do not come with easily readable labels. We should have some respect for long-term trends, without assuming that they will automatically continue. There does seem to be a certain structural logic at work in many domains. The same is true of the stock market: there are both trends and cycles, and it is impossible to know on any given day whether a sharp drop is cyclical or part of a new trend. As we know, people have made—and lost—trillions of dollars betting on precisely that distinction.
In this ECPS interview, Professor Stephan Klingebiel argues that Trump-era populism signals a durable shift in global governance rather than a passing disruption. He stresses that the “rise of populism, nationalism, and right-wing populism predates Trump,” and warns that Washington is now “actively fighting all forms of multilateralism” through withdrawal, defunding, and the systematic contestation of UN language on issues such as “climate change,” “gender,” and “diversity.” Professor Klingebiel links this normative erosion to the weaponization of trade, tariffs, and development finance, which turns rules-based cooperation into coercive bargaining. He also highlights how geoeconomic competition is reshaping North–South relations by expanding bargaining space for resource-holding states. Looking ahead, he proposes a “global order minus one” as a pragmatic pathway to sustain multilateralism amid fragmentation.
In an era marked by intensified geopolitical rivalry, the resurgence of right-wing populism, and the erosion of long-standing international norms, the future of multilateral governance has become a central question for scholars and policymakers alike. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Stephan Klingebiel—Head of the Department of Inter- and Transnational Cooperation at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS)—offers a sober and incisive assessment of how Trump-era populism is reshaping global governance and what realistic alternatives may still be available.
At the heart of Professor Klingebiel’s analysis is a rejection of the notion that Trump-era populism represents a temporary aberration. Instead, he situates it within a broader and more durable constellation of political, ideological, and technological shifts. As he emphasizes, “the rise of populism, nationalism, and right-wing populism predates Trump,” extending across parts of Europe and the Global South. Trump, in this sense, is not an anomaly but a catalyst—“a prominent role” within a system that is unlikely to disappear in the near future.
A central theme of the interview is the normative and material hollowing-out of multilateralism. Professor Klingebiel argues that populism does not merely weaken international cooperation through withdrawals and defunding; it reframes cooperation itself as a zero-sum loss. In Trump’s discourse, he notes, the United States is consistently portrayed as a victim: “Canada, Europe—[they] have long lived at the expense of the United States.” This logic underpins what Klingebiel bluntly describes as an administration that is “actively fighting all forms of multilateralism.”
The interview traces how this antagonism manifests across institutions and issue areas—from the US withdrawal from dozens of international organizations to the systematic erosion of consensus-based norms within the United Nations. Particularly alarming, Klingebiel warns, is Washington’s effort to excise concepts such as “climate change, gender, gender-based violence, and diversity” from multilateral language, producing a chilling effect that leaves international organizations “no longer in a position to be explicit about real global challenges.”
Beyond institutions, Professor Klingebiel examines the weaponization of trade, tariffs, supply chains, and development finance, describing a shift from rules-based governance to coercive bargaining. This marks, in his view, a decisive break with past practices, where even hegemonic power was at least nominally constrained by international law. Recent cases—such as US actions in Venezuela—signal a world in which legal justification is no longer even rhetorically necessary.
Yet the interview is not purely diagnostic. Looking ahead, Klingebiel introduces one of his most provocative ideas: the possibility of sustaining multilateralism through a “global order minus one.” If a broad coalition of states remains committed to multilateral norms, he argues, such an order could both isolate unilateral obstruction and create incentives for eventual re-engagement. While acknowledging that “we are most likely not going back to the situation we had five or ten years ago,” Klingebiel insists that political choices made now—particularly by Europe and like-minded partners—will decisively shape whether the future belongs to cooperative governance or competitive fragmentation.
Together, the interview offers a penetrating reflection on populism, power, and the fragile future of the international order.
Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Stephan Klingebiel, slightly revised for clarity and flow.
Trump-Era Populism and Global Governance
Donald J. Trump, the 47th President of the United States, at his inauguration celebration in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2025. Photo: Muhammad Abdullah.
Professor Stephan Klingebiel, thank you so much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: Is Trump-era populism best understood as a temporary disruption to global governance, or does it mark a structural shift toward a new “normal” defined by transactionalism and power asymmetries? What makes such a shift durable—or reversible?
Professor Stephan Klingebiel: Thank you very much for this question. It is, of course, not an easy one, as it touches on many different dimensions. To begin with, I do not think that what we are currently witnessing is something that will simply disappear in the near future. The rise of populism, nationalism, and right-wing populism predates Trump. We saw these developments earlier in parts of Europe, such as Hungary, and also in several regions of the Global South.
What we are dealing with, then, is a broader system or constellation in which Trump plays a prominent role, but he is by no means the only actor. There are numerous other political figures, institutions, and ideological currents that are unlikely to vanish any time soon. As a result, this is a reality we will probably have to contend with for the foreseeable future.
These dynamics are also connected to wider structural trends. In some parts of the world, for instance, we see growing frustration among younger generations—this is particularly evident on the African continent. At the same time, the influence of traditional media is declining, while social media is gaining prominence. Social media, in turn, has the capacity to mobilize emotions in ways that differ significantly from earlier forms of political communication. From this perspective, it is important to recognize that the impact of social media is not a temporary phenomenon, but one that is likely to remain with us for some time.
The United States Is Actively Fighting All Forms of Multilateralism
How does populism erode multilateral cooperation not only materially (through withdrawal or underfunding) but also normatively, by reframing cooperation as loss rather than collective gain?
Professor Stephan Klingebiel: I think we need to emphasize that, typically—and this is true for almost all populist leaders and movements—multilateral approaches are not really part of populist political identity or thinking. It is very much the opposite. As a populist leader, you emphasize national interest and present yourself as a victim. Just listening to many speeches by President Trump, including his most recent one in Davos, we see this clearly: he portrays the United States as a victim, arguing that the rest of the world—Canada, Europe—has long lived at the expense of the United States. The conclusion, of course, is that a populist leader then seeks to turn this around and make the rest of the world pay. In this narrative, the international system is framed as fundamentally unfair to the hegemon, to the United States. In that sense, the United States is actively fighting all forms of multilateralism.
We see this in many ways. The most visible manifestations are defunding and withdrawal from international organizations. At the beginning of January this year, President Trump announced that the US would withdraw from a total of 66 international organizations. We have also already seen the defunding of a number of other international institutions to which the United States was a part.
However, what I would stress is that there are many additional ways in which the US has, over the past months, weakened—and to some extent even undermined—multilateralism. One example is the International Conference on Development Finance held last summer in Sevilla, Spain. The United States remained involved in the preparatory process until the very last moment, largely in order to slow down and weaken the negotiations and to ensure that the final outcome document would be as weak as possible. At the very end, the United States announced that it would not participate in the conference at all. In that sense, it did not show up in Sevilla. What is particularly striking, however, is that the US had already been spoiling the process before the conference and then, immediately afterward, resumed efforts to weaken the outcome document, build alliances, and contest the results of the conference.
More broadly, we can see that the United States is pursuing a range of strategies. One additional point is that, from the very beginning of the second Trump administration—in February and March 2025—the US administration has been working with a list of key terms and concepts it actively seeks to oppose. These include concepts such as climate change, gender, gender-based violence, and diversity. As soon as an international organization publishes a report or document addressing climate change or any of these other issues, the United States attempts to eliminate this kind of language and thinking.
This is particularly dangerous because, in institutions such as the United Nations—where many decisions are consensus-based—we now face a situation in which, across executive boards and institutional bodies, the United States consistently intervenes to block or dilute agreed language. For example, it seeks to replace “climate change” with terms like “extreme weather.” This practice is already shaping the internal thinking and behavior of international organizations. Increasingly, they are no longer in a position to speak openly about major global challenges. Instead, they try to avoid explicit language in order to escape constant confrontation with the United States. At the same time, the United States is actively seeking allies to challenge what was previously a broad global consensus, further eroding the normative foundations of multilateral cooperation.
We Are Entering an Era of Competing Organizations and Conflicting Norms
The headquarters of the United Nations in New York City. Photo: Dreamstime.
Are we witnessing the end of universal multilateralism, or its mutation into selective, interest-based cooperation? How does your concept of like-minded internationalism fit into this transition?
Professor Stephan Klingebiel: It is probably too early to draw definitive conclusions about what kind of new era, we are entering. Much of this is still evolving. What is clear, however, is that there are very powerful forces actively trying to undermine the existing international order, most notably the United Nations. Even in the past, we saw situations in which certain actors—Russia, for example—did not accept international law in many respects, and similar patterns could be observed with other governments as well.
The key difference today, however, is that we previously had a very strong group of countries, including the United States, committed to ensuring that this international order functioned effectively. What we see now is that the United States itself is aligning with forces that are seeking to undermine—and in some cases even dismantle—this system.
Just a few days ago, President Trump publicly described the United Nations as an enemy. From this perspective, it is not difficult to understand that any international order in which the United States does not occupy a clearly dominant position is framed as contrary to American interests. The proposal of a so-called “peace council” by President Trump represents an open challenge to the United Nations. My assumption is that even if this initiative ultimately fails, and even if Trump is no longer president, the broader trend toward competing international organizations, rival groupings, and conflicting norms about the rules of the game will persist.
This brings us to the question of like-minded internationalism. On the one hand, a populist leader can seek out like-minded countries, as President Trump is doing. On the other hand, states that remain committed to multilateralism can also pursue cooperation among like-minded partners. This is something we can already observe. If you look at recent speeches in Davos—by leaders from Canada, France, and several other countries—you can see attempts to articulate collective action against the advance of right-wing populism.
At the same time, such efforts require substantial power backing to be effective. While we can see early signs of countries trying to organize this kind of counterpower, it remains a very difficult and uncertain undertaking.
We Are Seeing the Construction of a System Based on Coercive Power
Trump’s use of tariffs and trade threats as coercive tools, or as a “trade bazooka,” reflects a shift from rules-based trade to punitive bargaining. What are the long-term systemic risks of normalizing trade as a geopolitical weapon?
Professor Stephan Klingebiel: We can now observe this dynamic across many policy areas. It relates to trade and tariffs, but also to foreign investment, access to critical minerals, and other domains. What is particularly new is the extent to which Trump is explicitly weaponizing all of these tools—imposing, or threatening to impose, tariffs whenever a country is deemed, from his perspective, not to be behaving in a desirable way.
One positive feature of the past was that, to a large extent, different policy areas were kept separate. If there was a conflict related to trade, it was addressed through trade instruments and negotiation. Today, this separation has largely disappeared. From a European perspective, we increasingly see that almost everything can be linked to questions about US support and positioning—for example, in relation to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine—even when the issues at stake are, in principle, unrelated.
We have seen statements suggesting that if the European Union seeks to regulate US technology companies, this could have consequences for NATO. In reality, these issues are not directly connected, but this administration is deliberately trying to weaponize all the tools at its disposal. Tariffs, in particular, appear to be one of the most immediate and effective instruments Trump can use to respond to a situation. This is deeply concerning. It signals the construction of a system based on coercive power, rather than leadership through partnership. It is no longer about win-win outcomes or cooperation, but about imposing outcomes that align with what the US leadership wants to see.
As a brief aside—and this applies to many of the points I have made—this situation strongly reflects what European countries are currently experiencing, and it is highly relevant for them. At the same time, it is important to recognize that, from the perspective of many countries and actors in the Global South, such coercion and dominance—whether by the United States or by the West more broadly—is not new. These practices have long been part of their political reality.
From a European standpoint, the liberal international order now appears to be at serious risk, and this concern is entirely justified. Yet for many countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, or Africa, experiences such as military intervention are not unprecedented. In conversations I have had over recent weeks and months, academics, political leaders, and policymakers from these regions often say: this is our normal experience as relatively small and powerless countries. US-led military interventions, particularly in Latin America over past decades, are a familiar reference point. This perspective deserves to be taken seriously.
There is also an important additional dimension. In many respects, there is truth in the argument that the international system has never been fair to large parts of the world. What is new today is that Europe and other Western countries are now feeling the impact directly, because these same coercive tools are increasingly being used against them. Yet there remains a crucial difference compared to the past. Historically, the US government—and Western governments more broadly—at least operated with a set of double standards. There were formal commitments to principles such as territorial integrity and sovereignty, and when military interventions occurred, they were typically accompanied by some form of justification grounded in international law.
If we look at events such as what happened in Venezuela in early January 2026, it was clear from the outset that there was no attempt by the US administration to justify its actions on the basis of international law. This marks a significant departure from earlier practices. In the past, Western actors were at least under pressure to frame their actions within legal justifications. Today, the United States no longer appears interested in invoking international law even as a reference point. In this sense as well, we are confronting a new situation.
Geoeconomics Has Become a Very Crucial Dimension
How does the weaponization of trade, supply chains, and development finance reshape North–South relations, particularly for countries dependent on access to Western markets and institutions?
Professor Stephan Klingebiel: I think what we have already seen over the last couple of years—and this is only partly related to the second administration of President Trump, as we observed it especially during the COVID period and even before—is that we are now in a situation where supply chains, access to critical minerals, and energy security have become much more important. Geoeconomics has therefore become a very crucial dimension.
In many ways, this increasingly gives even poorer, or very poor, countries a relatively powerful bargaining instrument. Just look, for example, at the situation of a number of Sahel countries, which are now in a position to offer what they have—whether in terms of international support in United Nations General Assembly decisions or access to minerals such as uranium and other resources—to different actors: European countries, the United States, but also China and Russia, particularly when it comes to uranium.
This gives many relatively small or economically less important countries much more power at their own disposal. And this kind of multi-alignment is something that, from this perspective, is seen by many actors in the Global South—on the African continent and beyond—as a positive trend.
Greenland — Seeing Territorial Integrity Questioned Is Deeply Troubling
Colorful houses in Greenland. Photo: Dreamstime.
How should we interpret Trump’s renewed rhetoric and pressure around Greenland—symbolically and strategically? Does this signal a revival of territorial or quasi-imperial logics under populist leadership?
Professor Stephan Klingebiel: This is really—especially from a European perspective—a game changer. I think what we constantly see with the Trump administration is the need to make sense of what is actually going on. There is so much happening at the same time. Some of these activities may be relevant, while others appear to be mere rhetoric or deliberate distractions. At the beginning of his second term, or even before, Trump was already using narratives about Canada, the Panama Canal, and Greenland.
Many observers initially had the impression that this was little more than window dressing—aimed at domestic audiences rather than reflecting serious intentions. However, seeing these intentions articulated so explicitly—we want to take over Greenland—and accompanied by statements that the United States would be willing to use force or military power, including reiterations of this position in Davos and elsewhere, marks a clear escalation. Announcing, over a prolonged period, that the use of military power is not excluded represents a direct challenge to international law.
This is a genuinely new dimension, and it brings us back to an era when imperial ambitions were an accepted part of international politics. From the perspective of European countries, many countries in the Global South, and the normative framework of international law, there has long been a shared hope that the territorial integrity of states would remain a foundational principle of global order. Seeing this principle openly questioned by the world’s most powerful military actor is deeply troubling.
We are therefore at a turning point, and we are still grappling with what effective responses to this new situation might look like. At the same time, this rhetoric constitutes a real threat emanating from the administration. Over the past few weeks, we have seen at least some renewed movement toward European unity. It is also important to recognize that Europe—the European Union (EU) together with the UK, and other partners—as well as countries in the Global South, are not merely in a position to wait and observe. They also have the capacity to respond.
The United States itself depends heavily on the rest of the world—for trade, access to critical minerals, and political support, among other things. In this sense, the debate around Greenland is indeed a game changer. It is likely to shape strategic concepts and political priorities for years to come.
We Can Oppose Attempts to Establish a System of Hemispheres
In a fragmented, multipolar order, are spheres-of-influence politics becoming inevitable again? For smaller and middle powers, does this create new room for maneuver—or deepen structural dependency?
Professor Stephan Klingebiel: I think this is very much a concept associated with President Putin in Russia, and it seems to have been taken up by President Trump as well. If you look at the National Security Strategy from early December 2025, it reflects, more or less, exactly this kind of thinking—how the world should be organized by large powers such as the United States. In this view, regions are defined in which major powers exercise special influence, with the United States claiming its own hemisphere, understood as the Western Hemisphere.
Whether this will ultimately become the dominant way in which the world is organized remains to be seen. At the very least, however, we can observe a real risk that this kind of concept may become attractive to a number of countries.
At the same time, we need to recognize that the imperial era—when colonial powers simply ruled over other countries and territories—is quite different from today’s reality, characterized by a very different global economy. In many parts of the world, there is now an alternative understanding of how the international order should be organized. We also see significant economic and military potential in Europe and elsewhere.
So, in a sense, this intention—we want to rule our own hemisphere—is clearly present. But whether it will actually define the future organization of the international system is still uncertain. Importantly, this is also a moment in which many actors and countries are trying to push back against such ideas. European actors, for example—the European Union and the UK—have the potential to link up with partners in the Global South who are not in a weak position in many respects. So we can oppose those intentions and approaches that seek to establish a system of hemispheres.
Europe Needs the Capacity to React Within Days or Even Hour
European Commission headquarters with waving EU flags in Brussels. Photo: Viorel Dudau.
What realistic policy alternatives exist to prevent a spiral of authoritarianism, protectionism, and institutional decay? If you had to prioritize three concrete steps for Europe, what would they be?
Professor Stephan Klingebiel: I think one main challenge we need to overcome is organizing collective action. Collective action, as we know, is often difficult to organize because, within one group, there are different views and different interests. Just look at the tariff threats from the US over the past weeks and months. We saw a situation in which, for example, the interests of France, Germany, and other EU countries diverged, making it difficult to arrive at a clear, unified position.
But this is not impossible. With the Greenland escalation over the last few weeks, we saw that collective action can indeed be achieved. So, organizing collective action is crucial. A second point is that collective action among a like-minded group is a requirement—a precondition—for success. At the same time, we also need to recognize that, in certain moments, a smaller group of actors may need to provide leadership, particularly in shaping concepts and strategies.
It is also useful to consider one advantage President Trump has: as the leader in power, he can decide overnight what he wants to do. For the European Union, it is far more difficult to speak with one voice within a very limited timeframe. What this means is that Europe needs to develop the capacity to react within short periods—within days or even hours.
This kind of leadership by some European countries—without neglecting the views and interests of smaller EU members or other actors—should ensure that there is a capable, small group in a position to respond quickly. Like-mindedness is one requirement, but it must also translate into an approach that is agile in many ways: agile in terms of speed, and agile in terms of producing solutions that are ready to confront new challenges, such as political leaders openly stating their intention to take over another country.
In this regard, I think it requires a strong willingness to mobilize political, economic, and military resources, and the capacity to make decisions swiftly. These are some of my responses to your question.
A Global Order Minus One Could Become a Powerful Incentive
And finally, Professor Klingebiel, looking ahead, do you foresee a reconstitution of multilateralism, a stable equilibrium of fragmented governance, or a drift toward competitive blocs—and what political choices today will be decisive in shaping that outcome?
Professor Stephan Klingebiel: It is difficult to make any serious forecast at this point about how the world might look. However, what we have seen over the last couple of weeks is a growing discussion suggesting that we should consider—perhaps even actively push for—a global order that could be described as a “global order minus one.” This would mean that if there is a broad consensus among countries that want to uphold a multilateral approach, that want to keep the United Nations relevant—or even make it more relevant—while the United States takes a different position, it might still be possible to sustain a strong and effective form of multilateralism.
In such a scenario, we would be in a position to isolate, in many ways, what the United States is doing. Even from a conceptual perspective, this kind of global order minus one could become a powerful tool to incentivize the United States to rejoin the international consensus. If the United States were the only major player outside such an order, this would entail significant political and economic costs, as well as increased military risks for the United States itself.
What I want to emphasize is that we are most likely not returning to the situation we had five or ten years ago. Instead, we may be moving toward a different configuration in which global governance needs to be reformed in many ways—not least to incorporate rising actors from the Global South and to make the system fairer overall—but where this new arrangement could also generate substantial pressure on the United States to re-engage.
This perspective is also relevant when considering other actors that are not particularly committed to multilateralism, such as Russia. When it comes to China, the picture is somewhat different, but in all these cases, alignment remains necessary in various ways. A global order minus one may thus represent one possible pathway for navigating and potentially overcoming the difficult situation we currently face.
Giving an interview to the ECPS, Professor Francisco Rodríguez argues that today “Venezuela is no longer about Venezuela; it is about demonstrating power.” He reassesses Chavismo’s constitutional refoundation, noting that “not even the most hardline opponents of Chavismo question the Constitution today,” while stressing that redistribution collapsed when oil rents vanished: “The model of oil-rent redistribution simply does not work if there are no rents to distribute.” Professor Rodríguez highlights the durability of moral antagonism—“us versus them”—and shows how social policy can operate as rule: “We bring you food; we take care of your family’s needs.” Crucially, he links the post-Maduro landscape to Delcy Rodríguez’s room for maneuver, arguing that if she can claim Washington is no longer backing the opposition, she can frame Maduro’s seizure as “a strategic victory.” Yet he warns that US demands for “power-sharing with the opposition” would be “deeply problematic for Chavismo.” He concludes that Trump’s approach is transactional: “not demanding political reform… [but] asking Venezuela to sell oil.”
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Francisco Rodríguez—Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Faculty Affiliate at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies—offers a comprehensive analysis of Venezuela’s post-Maduro political trajectory. Situating the case at the intersection of populist state resilience, authoritarian adaptation, and shifting US power strategies, Professor Rodríguez advances a stark diagnosis: “Venezuela is no longer about Venezuela; it is about demonstrating power.” In his account, the country has become a geopolitical signal—a site through which coercive capacity, transactional hegemony, and the limits of democratic opposition are being tested.
Professor Rodríguez begins by reassessing the foundational pillars of the Chávez-era project—constitutional refoundation, oil-rent redistribution, and the moralization of politics—arguing that these were not merely leader-centered strategies but elements of a durable populist state architecture capable of surviving leadership decapitation. While personally critical of the 1999 Constitution, he notes that “not even the most hardline opponents of Chavismo question the Constitution today,” underscoring how deeply constitutional refoundation has been absorbed into Venezuela’s political ethos. Even critics, he observes, now invoke the Constitution “as a model that the Maduro government is failing to uphold.”
On political economy, Professor Rodríguez emphasizes that populist redistribution depends on material abundance. “The model of oil-rent redistribution simply does not work if there are no rents to distribute,” he argues, pointing to a 93 percent collapse in oil revenues between 2012 and 2020. This collapse, compounded by US sanctions, forced the regime toward pragmatic—and even neoliberal—adjustments, not as a matter of ideological conversion but constraint. As Professor Rodríguez puts it, the economy remained closed “not because the government didn’t want it open, but because the United States government didn’t allow it.”
A central theme throughout the interview is the durability of moralized politics. Chavismo’s framing of politics as an existential struggle between “the people” and apátridas (stateless persons in Spanish/Portuguese, S.C) continues to structure both regime and opposition behavior. Professor Rodríguez cautions that this antagonistic grammar cannot be easily abandoned, particularly because “the opposition has also embraced a moralized framework, albeit from the opposite angle.” This mutual entrenchment helps explain why moments that might have enabled institutional cohabitation—most notably the opposition’s 2015 parliamentary victory—instead produced escalation and breakdown.
Within this transformed landscape, Professor Rodríguez devotes particular attention to Delcy Rodríguez’s room for maneuver. He argues that her political viability now hinges on whether she can credibly claim that Washington is no longer backing the opposition. Under those conditions, Maduro’s seizure can be reframed as “a strategic victory,” preserving Chavismo’s narrative of confrontation. At the same time, Professor Rodríguez warns that any US demand for “power-sharing with the opposition” would be “deeply problematic for Chavismo,” requiring a fundamental rewriting of its moral and institutional grammar.
The interview culminates in Professor Rodríguez’s assessment of US intervention under Donald Trump. Contrary to expectations, Trump did not demand democratization or power transfer, but oil. “What Trump is effectively doing now is not demanding political reform,” Professor Rodríguez explains; “he is asking Venezuela to sell oil to the United States.” This approach reflects a broader logic of informal empire: “It is more efficient to rule through domestic elites who follow US directives than to administer the country directly.” In this sense, Venezuela becomes less a national case than a global message—one that signals the new rules of transactional power, and the risks they pose for democratic oppositions worldwide.
Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Francisco Rodríguez, slightly revised for clarity and flow.
Between ‘Us Versus Them’ and External Power: Chavismo After Maduro
Iconic sites in central Caracas, where buildings are decorated with murals promoted by the Chávez and Maduro governments. Photo: Dreamstime.
Professor Francisco Rodríguez, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start with the first question: With Nicolás Maduro removed yet the Chavista state apparatus largely intact, how should we reinterpret the foundational choices of the Chávez era—constitutional refoundation, oil-rent redistribution, and the moralization of politics—as elements of a populist state project capable of surviving leadership decapitation?
Professor Francisco Rodríguez: First of all, thank you very much for having me, and thank you for the opportunity to have a conversation about Venezuela and its populist model and evolution. Let me start by addressing the three aspects you mention. One of them is the Constitution. To a certain extent, constitutional refoundation is something Chavismo achieved quite remarkably, and it has become deeply ingrained in the Venezuelan ethos. The evidence for this is that there is very little, if any, discussion among Venezuela’s political actors about the need to change the Constitution. This is not to say that I think the current Constitution is good. On the contrary, I am quite critical of the way it expands executive power, and I believe that reform in this area will be necessary. But the reality is that not even the most hardline opponents of Chavismo question the Constitution today. In fact, they often invoke it as a model that the Maduro government is failing to uphold.
Turning to the other two points you raised—moralization of politics and oil rents—I think what we have seen over the past few years, roughly over the past decade, is that the model of oil-rent redistribution simply does not work if there are no rents to distribute. In Venezuela, those rents effectively disappeared. Oil revenues declined by 93 percent between 2012 and 2020. They have recovered somewhat since then, but they remain around 75 percent lower than their peak in 2012. As a result, the government has far fewer resources to redistribute, and, to some extent, it has already been forced to move toward a neoliberal policy paradigm. The main reason it has not gone further in that direction is that the economy has been under sanctions, which has prevented the implementation of some basic elements of the neoliberal model, such as opening the economy to foreign investment. This closure was not due to a lack of willingness on the government’s part, but rather because the United States government did not allow it.
Moralized Politics, External Pressure, and Strategic Uncertainty
This brings us to the third point: the demoralization of politics. This is something Chavismo will have to grapple with and much depends on how the current intervention evolves. Chavismo’s narrative has long been one of moralization—of us versus them—casting its opponents as apátridas, people without a sense of the fatherland. This narrative was effective over the past decade, during a period of open confrontation with the United States. But what has happened now is that the US has prevailed, in the sense that it has imposed its power on Venezuela and compelled Venezuelan authorities to react according to its dictates. Venezuelan authorities are therefore no longer acting autonomously. How do they sustain this narrative under these conditions? In the two weeks since Maduro’s seizure, they have been playing a dual game: complying with US demands while simultaneously maintaining the narrative that Maduro has been kidnapped and must be returned. In this way, they can still preserve the idea of confrontation.
The problem—and we will probably return to this later—is that this confrontation has its own dynamics. It is not something Chavismo can easily abandon, because the opposition has also embraced a moralized framework, albeit from the opposite angle: an “us versus them” discourse that pits the good against the bad, or decent society against a corrupt criminal mafia. This is not a narrative that can be changed at will. Yet if, for example, as a White House spokesperson suggested —and as President Trump has hinted—a White House visit by Delcy Rodríguez is being contemplated, it will become very difficult to sustain that confrontational narrative.
This leads to the final question: is there a way for Chavismo to continue evolving, and what will its core narrative be? Is this a strategic retreat—a case of “we have to do this to defend the project”? Or does it mean abandoning some of the project’s foundational tenets altogether?
It Is Too Early to Tell Whether Adaptation Will Become Strategy
Late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez attended the ceremony marking the laying of the foundation stone for a monument to Simón Bolívar in Moscow, Russia on October 15, 2010. Photo: Dreamstime.[/caption]
In your work, you highlight how Chavismo constructed politics as a moral antagonism between “the people” and existential enemies. After Maduro’s seizure, does this moralized populist logic appear less as a contingent discursive strategy and more as a durable institutional grammar that shaped courts, security forces, and rent allocation?
Professor Francisco Rodríguez: I am tempted to respond as Zhou Enlai is said to have responded to a question about the French Revolution: it is too early to tell. It later emerged that the question was lost in translation and was actually about the May ’68 revolts, but the answer certainly applies here as well. What we are seeing now is very short-term adaptation to external circumstances, which, depending on how events unfold, may later be interpreted as strategic. Let me illustrate this with the example of Chávez after the 2002 coup.
After returning to power following the 2002 coup, Chávez adopted a very conciliatory tone. He even asked for forgiveness for his previous attitude, acknowledging that he should not have fired the PDVSA (Venezuela’s state oil company) managers in the manner he did—an episode widely perceived as humiliating, or at least framed that way by Chávez himself. Crucially, at that moment he also acceded to the main demand of economic elites: changing the economic cabinet. He brought in a group of pragmatists to run the economy, and they remained in place for about a year. One year later, however, Jorge Giordani—Chávez’s chief architect and ideologue—was back in charge of economic policy.
Some interpret this episode as Chávez merely playing along, and there is certainly some truth to that. But there is also another dimension, linked to the enduring dynamics of confrontation. That economic cabinet survived through the general strike and the oil strike against Chávez and was only replaced once Chávez concluded that he was back in confrontation mode—that the opposition was again trying to overthrow him—and that he therefore needed a command economy capable of asserting control over oil resources. This entailed abandoning efforts to accommodate the private sector. If we look back at that moment, Chávez imposed exchange controls in January 2003 during the oil strike, but crucially, he did not lift them once the strike ended. In effect, he shifted from a strategy of trying to bring the private sector into a governing coalition and broadening his base of support to one centered on confrontation: controlling oil rents and disciplining the private sector through control of those rents and access to foreign exchange.
Trump Is Not Demanding Reform—He Is Asking for Oil
One of the key uncertainties today is how the United States will proceed. US policy will shape many of the constraints facing Venezuela. If the US were to station warships off Venezuela’s coast and dictate terms, Venezuela would have little room to maneuver. But this is a somewhat unusual version of coercion coming from the Trump administration. President Trump’s first administration was the one that stopped buying oil from Venezuela. What Trump is effectively doing now is not demanding political reform, elections, or the transfer of power to María Corina Machado. Instead, he is asking Venezuela to sell oil to the United States—something Venezuelan authorities had long been asking Trump to permit. This is not a demand that makes the Delcy Rodríguez regime uncomfortable.
To the extent that Venezuelan authorities can establish a working relationship with the Trump administration, and as long as Washington maintains this stance, the moral and institutional grammar you describe is likely to persist. This episode can easily be framed as yet another chapter in the “us versus them” struggle. It is important to recall that Chavismo’s confrontation has never primarily been with the United States, but rather with the domestic opposition and economic elites. If Delcy Rodríguez can credibly claim that Venezuela has won US support and that Washington is no longer backing the opposition, she can present this as a strategic victory. She does not need to deny that Maduro’s capture was problematic; she only needs to frame it as having defeated the opposition on that front.
Under those conditions, the discourse of confrontation would be preserved and would continue to be embedded in Venezuelan institutions. The real difficulty would arise if the US were to change course and demand power-sharing with the opposition. That scenario would be deeply problematic for Chavismo. While it might still be manageable, it would be extraordinarily difficult to justify to supporters. It would be just as challenging for Delcy Rodríguez as for María Corina Machado to explain why they should cooperate, why they should sit at the same table. Such a shift would require a profound rewriting of the moral narrative and the institutional grammar that accompanies it, because any genuine power-sharing arrangement would have to extend into the institutions themselves. That would represent a fundamentally different political game from the one Chavismo has played over the past quarter century.
Venezuelan opposition leader and ousted lawmaker María Corina Machado during a street protest movement of civil insurrection against the government of Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, Venezuela, 2017. Photo: Edgloris Marys.
The Difference Between Chávez and Maduro Is Abundance, Not Personality
From a populism studies perspective; to what extent did Chavismo succeed in transforming a charismatic, plebiscitary project into a post-charismatic regime—one in which moral legitimacy, clientelism, and coercion became routinized within the state itself?
Professor Francisco Rodríguez: That’s a great question. It is tempting to focus on the contrasting personalities of Chávez and Maduro, but I would place much greater emphasis on material and economic constraints. Chávez governed during an era of abundance. When he came to power, Venezuelan oil was selling for about $9 a barrel; by the time he died, it was selling for more than $100.
Those rents later collapsed for two main reasons. The first was the sharp decline in oil prices between 2014 and 2016. The second was the political crisis triggered by that collapse, which led, among other things, to US economic sanctions. This raises an unavoidable counterfactual question—one that is necessarily subjective: how would Chávez have reacted to the complete erosion of rents? Would he have behaved differently from Maduro? My view is that he probably would not have.
Had Chávez found himself unable to win elections and facing both a hostile domestic opposition and a US government effectively seeking his removal, I believe he would have become just as repressive as Maduro. There is little in Chávez’s governing style to suggest otherwise. We need only recall the period leading up to the 2004 recall referendum, when Chávez used the Maisanta list to regulate access to public employment in a highly clientelist manner—shoring up support before the vote and intimidating not so much committed opposition voters as potentially neutral citizens and public employees who might have contemplated opposing him. In that sense, similar dynamics would likely have prevailed under Chávez.
That said, as an economist, I am not best equipped—nor is my discipline particularly well suited—to analyze questions of popular or leader charisma. What I can say is that Chávez’s association with a period of prosperity, driven by oil rents and reflected in improvements in living conditions and social indicators through expansive social spending, would likely have made the ensuing crisis resemble Cuba’s “Special Period.” The enduring memory of better times, and of restored dignity and living standards for many of the poor, might have been sufficient to sustain Chávez’s support—something Maduro has been unable to claim.
Chavismo Was Surprised by the Scale of Its Own Electoral Defeat
This contrast is still evident in public opinion today: Chávez remains widely popular, while Maduro does not. As a result, Maduro has relied far more heavily on coercion and institutional control, a tendency that reached an extreme in the 2024 elections, when the government concluded that it had no option but to brazenly steal the vote. Ironically, the fact that Maduro resorted to fraud suggests that he believed victory was still possible. This episode marked a moment when Chavismo was genuinely surprised by the depth of its loss of popular support.
It is important to stress, however, that this surprise did not stem from ignorance of opinion polls or a failure to monitor public sentiment. Careful readings of polling data suggested the election would be relatively close. Nor was it due to an inability to track electoral performance in real time; the government possesses a fairly robust system for doing so, which led it to believe it had mobilized roughly five million votes—enough to make the contest tight even under the opposition’s most favorable assumptions.
What Chavismo was not prepared for was the possibility that, of those five million mobilized voters, around one million would ultimately vote not for Maduro but for Edmundo González. In that moment, the very structures the regime had built revealed their limits. Returning to your question, this suggests that mechanisms of coercion were not fully routinized. They had been routinized for a long period during which they functioned effectively, as evidenced in 2021, when the opposition participated in elections, European Union observers were present, and the government swept the regional contests. At that time, the clientelist model worked.
By 2024, however, something had shifted. That structural break is precisely what the model—one that had kept Maduro in power for twelve years—is now struggling to confront.
CLAPs, Causality, and the Mechanics of Populist Rule
Given that Chávez-era distributive systems continue to function after Maduro’s removal, how should we reassess social policy not merely as welfare provision but as a populist technology of rule—and what does your work on targeted benefits tell us about how redistribution becomes a mechanism of political loyalty under authoritarian populism?
Professor Francisco Rodríguez: I think it is important for me to explain briefly what my work does and what it does not do. This relates, in part, to the broader conversation between economics and the social sciences and to what economists typically try to accomplish. We generally aim to identify causal effects. In my World Development paper on how clientelism works, I use a natural experiment—the repetition of elections in the Venezuelan state of Barinas—to evaluate how social transfers respond to elections. More specifically, I examine the effect of electoral competitiveness on social transfers.
To do so, I use the government’s food package distribution system—the Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAPs). What I find is quite interesting. When this natural experiment is used to identify causal effects, the results show that, as a consequence of the election, social benefits were targeted more toward median voters—those located in the middle of the political spectrum. This has important implications for the standard narrative on populism. Much of the literature assumes that government supporters are more likely to receive social benefits. That is true as a correlation, as a descriptive statistic, and that point is undeniable. But descriptive statistics are not the same as causal effects. This pattern may exist because the government is actively targeting its followers, but it may also exist because supporters are more likely to self-select into these programs.
It is easy to find anecdotal evidence of opposition supporters saying, “I’m not going to take a food package from the government; I’m not going to give them my information, because that allows them to control me. I don’t like that food; I think it’s poor-quality or even dangerous.” This behavior must be disentangled from other causal factors, such as income differences. Pro-opposition supporters tend to have higher incomes and can therefore more easily opt out of these programs. That disentangling is precisely what the causal experiment helps to achieve.
Between Welfare and Control
So, it is one thing to say that the government uses these programs electorally to target median voters, which is what my paper demonstrates. But it is also important to recognize that, descriptively, government supporters still tend to be the main beneficiaries of these programs. Another key finding in the data is that when people are asked, “Why are you getting CLAP boxes?” or “Why are you not getting CLAP boxes?”, the overwhelming majority respond, “I’m getting them because I registered,” or “I’m not getting them because I didn’t register.” Very few respondents—less than 10 percent—say, “I’m getting them because I support the government,” or “because I have friends in the government,” or “I’m not getting them because I’m not on the government’s side.”
This means that the system is politically targeted, but not necessarily in the way it is often assumed. As a result, voters’ reactions to it are also quite different from what is commonly presumed. In many respects, it appears as the state doing what it is expected to do: delivering food to people and to families. In another paper that I am about to publish in a collection with the Inter-American Development Bank, we estimate the calorie effect of the CLAP program and find it to be substantial—around 500 calories per person. In the context of a massive economic collapse, that can make the difference between famine and the avoidance of famine.
What we are seeing, then, diverges in important ways from standard assumptions. There are, of course, other mechanisms of control. The Carnet de la Patria, for example, operates much more in the classic quid pro quo clientelist manner: if you support me, you receive a monetary transfer. The government uses cash in this way, and it is often considered legitimate for it to do so. As Maduro once explicitly stated during a campaign speech, “This is dando y dando—you give, I give.” He was referring not to CLAP boxes, but to cash transfer programs.
How Everyday Welfare Became a Source of Regime Resilience
At the same time, there is another set of programs that is essentially universalistic. Even if these programs can be politically targeted for strategic reasons, they are universalistic in the sense that everyone is presumed to have access to them, and in practice, those who want access can obtain it. This closely resembles how the Misiones functioned under Chávez, or programs such as Misión Mercal. No one was asked for a government ID card or a Socialist Party card to buy subsidized food at Mercal supermarkets. You simply went in. Yet when you entered the store, saw the staff, and examined the packaging, it was clear that there was political messaging. The implicit message was that the government was doing good things for you. In this sense, it is comparable to Donald Trump signing COVID relief checks and sending them out as personal checks.
My view, then, is that when we try to understand why Chavismo’s popularity—and even Maduro’s support—has remained at around 30 percent, which appears to be roughly what he obtained in the election, we need to ask why, in the context of such a severe economic crisis, it did not fall to 10 percent. In Peru, for example, presidents often have single-digit approval ratings. Why did this not happen in Venezuela? Why was the revolution, in that sense, so resilient? The answer lies in its continued ability to build sources of legitimation, largely by conveying the idea that the state is being administered for you and on your behalf. Even amid economic crisis, the message remains: we are doing our job; we bring you food; we take care of your family’s needs.
When the Model Didn’t Change—but the Conditions Did
The persistence of Chavista governance raises questions about personalism. In retrospect, where do you see the key discontinuities between Chávez and Maduro—particularly regarding elite cohesion, coercive capacity, and the role of elections as rituals of legitimation rather than mechanisms of accountability?
Professor Francisco Rodríguez: Here again, I would return to the counterfactual I mentioned earlier: how different is what we are seeing now from what we might have seen under Chávez had he faced an economic crisis similar to the one Maduro confronted? My view is that the differences are not as pronounced as they are often assumed to be. I do not see major discontinuities in the political model itself, or even in the modes of governance. Many of the apparent discontinuities are better explained by external factors—most notably the collapse of oil revenues and the imposition of economic sanctions, both of which emerged from a particular evolution of the political conflict. That evolution did not stem from the imposition of a fundamentally different governing model, but rather from a deeper issue: the absence of compromise as a viable option within the political culture.
If there is a moment that can be identified as truly decisive—and again, this is not because Maduro is fundamentally different from Chávez—it is the opposition’s victory of a supermajority in the 2015 parliamentary elections, a result that Chavismo initially accepted. The government did not annul or steal the elections and formally recognized the outcome. It did, however, challenge the election of several legislators from the state of Amazonas, a move that ultimately deprived the opposition of its supermajority. That supermajority would have enabled the opposition to initiate proceedings against the Supreme Court or convene a constituent assembly. In that sense, it was a kind of nuclear option, and Chavismo neutralized it by invalidating those legislative seats, while still allowing the opposition to retain a simple majority.
In almost any political system, one would then expect negotiations over cohabitation to follow. Typically, a government in that position would approach the legislature and say, “Let’s work this out. Let’s find a way to govern together. What do you want, and what do we want?” But no such effort was made—by either side. There are, after all, different ways of operating within a political system. One is through negotiation; another is through economic incentives or coercion, which governments routinely employ. Minority parties are bought off; opposition blocs are peeled apart. The government controls the state apparatus and oil rents and can easily approach opposition legislators individually or target small centrist parties, offering ministerial posts or control over specific policy areas—housing, the environment, minority rights. These are standard political tools.
Moral Antagonism and the Breakdown of Political Compromise
In this case, the government had two basic options. It could have sat down with the opposition coalition to negotiate a coexistence arrangement that would allow governance and the passage of legislation. Alternatively, it could have pursued a piecemeal strategy, fragmenting the opposition to construct a working majority. Maduro did neither, and the opposition likewise refused to engage in such processes.
This is where I would locate the core problem. I would hesitate to call it a discontinuity in the political model itself, but it was certainly a discontinuity in outcomes. The system was simply not designed to operate under a constitutional arrangement that required cohabitation. And this is not unique to Chavismo. It reflects a deeper feature of Venezuelan political history. During the democratic period that began in 1958, parliamentary and presidential elections were held simultaneously, ensuring that presidents almost always governed with a compliant Congress. The lone exception was in 1993, when Rafael Caldera won the presidency with only a plurality, leaving his party without congressional control and forcing some form of accommodation.
The belief that governments do not need to negotiate with the opposition is deeply ingrained in Venezuelan political culture. That is where the system—on both sides—ultimately breaks down. And it breaks down, once again, because of the politics of moral antagonism we discussed earlier. How can you justify governing alongside an actor you have portrayed as an existential enemy, as the embodiment of unpatriotic or immoral behavior? You cannot. Neither side could.
This dynamic was evident on the opposition side as well. When Henry Ramos Allup assumed the presidency of the National Assembly, he announced that the opposition would seek a constitutional route to remove Maduro from office within six months. In effect, he was openly advocating regime change. Both sides were locked into this confrontational mode, and their inability to move beyond it precipitated the escalation of the political conflict—ultimately leading to the adoption of scorched-earth strategies that inflicted severe damage on the economy.
From Democratic Opposition to Zero-Sum Politics
And finally, Professor Rodríguez, drawing on your New York Times analysis of Machado’s hardliner identity—including the symbolic handing over of her Nobel Peace Prize medal to President Trump—what does this episode reveal about the risks of moral absolutism, charismatic personalization, and alignment with coercive external power in populist contexts? More broadly, what does the Venezuelan case tell us about Trump’s transactional approach to authoritarian regimes and the dangers it poses for democratic oppositions elsewhere?
Professor Francisco Rodríguez: It is a very revealing episode because it encapsulates a central dilemma in opposition politics. Moderates within the opposition struggle to mobilize voters around their projects and are highly vulnerable to being denounced as collaborationists or as having been co-opted by the government. As a result, moderate opposition figures tend to reach a political dead end. Once they attempt to articulate an alternative based on compromise, they quickly lose momentum.
Returning to my earlier point about confrontation as part of the modus vivendi, the issue is not that no one has questioned this logic. Rather, within the opposition, those who have challenged it have not been electorally successful. This is evident in the case of Henri Falcón, who failed as a candidate in 2018 despite Maduro being as unpopular then as he was in 2024, according to opinion surveys. The same dynamic is visible with Henrique Capriles, who was once a highly popular opposition leader but lost significant support after adopting a more moderate stance. It is also evident in the case of Manuel Rosales, the governor of Zulia, who emerged as a plausible replacement after Machado was disqualified. Rosales had credibility as someone who had reclaimed Zulia from Chavismo and governed from the opposition without framing politics as a zero-sum struggle. Yet he was ultimately sidelined, largely because Machado’s supporters undermined him on the grounds that they reject any form of collaboration.
It is also important to recall that Machado herself was a vocal critic of Juan Guaidó, whom she regarded as too conciliatory toward Maduro. Her main criticism was that, as president of the 2015 National Assembly and interim president, he failed to invoke constitutional powers to formally call for foreign military intervention—effectively inviting external troops into the country. She criticized him forcefully for this. Looking further back, Machado was present at the swearing-in of Pedro Carmona as de facto president following the 2002 coup against Chávez. This is not mentioned simply to question her democratic credentials—though it is often raised in that context—but to underscore the narrative that underpins her political stance: the belief that Chavismo was never democratically legitimate. In her view, Venezuela was already a dictatorship in 2002, and a coup against that dictatorship was therefore justified.
Crisis, Charisma, and the Appeal of No Compromise
Venezuela’s controversial President Nicolas Maduro speaks during a rally on the 22nd anniversary of the coup against Hugo Chavez in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 13, 2024. Photo: StringerAL.
This narrative resonates strongly in a country that has experienced the largest economic contraction ever recorded in peacetime, where roughly a quarter of the population has emigrated, poverty rates have exceeded 90 percent, malnutrition—virtually nonexistent in the mid-2010s—has risen to more than 25 percent, and the government has grown increasingly authoritarian. In such conditions, it is understandable that voters are drawn to a leader who argues that Maduro remains in power because previous challengers were not forceful or resolute enough. This is how Machado constructs her political persona: as the uncompromising figure, the leader unwilling to strike a deal with Chavismo, the one who promises not coexistence but defeat. Her slogan, hasta el final—“to the end”—signals a final confrontation in which victory is assured.
This narrative mobilized voters on two levels. Traditional opposition supporters embraced it enthusiastically, given their deep hostility toward Chavismo. At the same time, more centrist voters—some of whom had previously supported Chavismo—were also drawn to her. In many respects, Machado embodied characteristics associated with Chávez himself: a young, decisive, energetic leader offering a dramatic rupture. The promise she made closely resembled the promise Chávez made in 1999. This helps explain why roughly a third of the Venezuelan electorate reports supporting María Corina Machado while simultaneously viewing Chávez as a good president.
That support, however, did not entail a transformation of her underlying narrative or that of her core constituency. Instead, it reinforced a political posture fundamentally incompatible with governing alongside Chavismo. This is where the Trump administration’s intervention becomes especially revealing. The decision was to remove Maduro—to decapitate the regime—without fully dismantling it. Comprehensive regime change would have required military occupation, significant loss of US personnel, and a long-term commitment unlikely to be sustained by public opinion. As Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated, the costs of occupation often exceed those of initial military victory.
Instead, the United States adopted an approach reminiscent of earlier interventions, such as in Cuba and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War or in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua in the early twentieth century. The logic is straightforward: military leverage and conditionality remain in place, while local actors govern. It is more efficient to rule through domestic elites who follow US directives than to administer the country directly.
Why Machado Didn’t Fit the New Power Strategy
This framework also helps explain how Trump has framed his relationship with Machado. The implicit message is that she is admirable—even symbolic, as evidenced by the Nobel Peace Prize medal—but politically impractical. Incorporating her into governance would disrupt the broader strategy. After Maduro’s removal, Venezuela ceased to be primarily about Venezuela; it became a demonstration of power. The operation showcased the US capacity to remove a foreign leader with extraordinary efficiency, without the loss of American lives, and to detain him in the United States. Many observers, myself included, believe this likely involved internal collaboration, making it resemble a palace coup under the cover of military intervention. For Trump, however, the narrative is unambiguous: this is what American power looks like.
This is where Trump’s arrangement with Delcy Rodríguez acquires broader significance. The message is simple: compliance is rewarded. Speaking recently in Davos, Trump claimed—characteristically exaggerating—that Venezuela would earn more in the next six months than it had in the previous twenty years. That assertion is plainly false, given that those twenty years include the Chávez-era oil boom. But the rhetoric is less important than the underlying signal: the new Venezuelan authorities are doing what Washington demands, and they are being rewarded for it.
Trump delivered this message before an audience of European leaders, implicitly asking them which path they wished to follow—whether in relation to Venezuela, Greenland, or other geopolitical issues. Cooperation would bring benefits; resistance would invite hostility. This logic extends beyond Europe to the Middle East, including Gaza, and to Latin America more broadly. It reflects an effort to reassert US dominance in what Trump conceives as the Western Hemisphere, consistent with a revived Monroe Doctrine logic.
What emerges from this approach is an attempt to construct a functional protectorate—economically, and perhaps politically. Yet a protectorate, by definition, lacks full sovereignty. Under such conditions, the meaning of democracy becomes ambiguous. The likely outcome is an authoritarian system, potentially evolving into a form of competitive authoritarianism. Even if Venezuelan oil revenues were to increase by only a fraction of Trump’s exaggerated claims, the resulting economic growth—on the order of 20 to 25 percent annually for several years—would make such a regime politically viable.
Just as Maduro’s popularity collapsed with the economy, Delcy Rodríguez could gain substantial legitimacy if she presided over sustained economic expansion. That is the bargain Trump is offering—not out of benevolence, but because he wants Venezuela to serve as a showcase: a revitalized economy demonstrating the rewards of alignment with US hegemony. Ultimately, that is the message Trump seeks to send to democratic oppositions and authoritarian regimes alike: these are the new rules, and this is what you get when you play along.
Please cite as: Riddervold, Marianne; Rosén, Guri & Greenberg, Jessica R. (2026). “Introduction.” In: Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations: Challenges and Policy Options. (eds). Marianne Riddervold, Guri Rosén and Jessica R. Greenberg. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). January 20, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00121
This report examines how the resurgence of right-wing populism—most visibly under Donald Trump’s second presidency—reshapes the foundations of transatlantic relations. Moving beyond short-term diplomatic disputes, the authors argue that domestic polarization and illiberal democratic trends now pose the most serious long-term threat to EU–US cooperation. Anchored in the four liberal pillars of the Atlantic order—security, trade, international institutions, and democratic values—the analysis shows how populist governance undermines shared norms, weakens multilateralism, and destabilizes trust. The report concludes with policy options for the EU, emphasizing strategic adaptation without abandoning the liberal principles that have long sustained the transatlantic alliance.
Several years ago, John Peterson (2018, 647) wrote that
the future of US–European relations and the liberal international order depend less than we might expect on what the US or Europe do to invest in their alliance or in foreign policy more generally. What really matters is domestic democratic politics in Europe and America.
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in January 2025, together with the consequential shifts in United States (US) foreign policy, makes Peterson’s claim appear well-founded. We are now witnessing nothing short of a deep and potentially durable rift between the European Union (EU) and the US.
With weakening transatlantic relations, broader geopolitical uncertainties and war on the European continent, the EU must navigate simultaneous internal strains and external pressure. The increasing support for radical right parties across Europe and their influence on EU institutions and domestic agendas make it more challenging for the EU to unify and present a cohesive front in response to Trump’s attempt to destabilize the transatlantic alliance. The EU faces new challenges that are the consequence of Trump’s policies in defence, trade and his undermining of international institutions, democratic norms and the rule of law. At the international level, the EU’s goal to be a global leader in promoting democracy, human rights and international law both in its immediate vicinity and globally requires proactive and strategic actions to defend and enhance the current liberal order. With Trump’s return to the presidency, EU leaders must reevaluate transatlantic relations and recalibrate EU policy to mitigate risks from shifts in US foreign policy.
This report assesses how changes in US foreign policy under a right-wing populist president affect the EU–US relationship and offers concrete policy recommendations on pressing issues. Focusing on the links between foreign-policy shifts, domestic polarization and antiliberal democratic trends, the report examines how domestic dynamics may constitute the most severe long-term challenge to transatlantic cooperation. It also evaluates specific policy challenges and opportunities for strengthening that cooperation in the years ahead.
‘Transatlantic relations’ is a broad concept that refers to the historic, economic, strategic, cultural, political and social relations that exist between countries in North America and Europe. A key feature of international relations since the end of the Second World War, we here define it as the overall set of relations between the EU and the United States, ‘within the broader framework of the institutional and other connections maintained via NATO and other institutions’ (Smith 2018, 539). After several decades of close cooperation, no other regions in the world have such strong ties as North America and Europe. Transatlantic cooperation is a cornerstone of the United States-originated post-war liberal order, which originated from the liberal idea that democracy, human rights, liberalized trade and active participation in international institutions produce economic gains and advance stability, peace and human dignity. The transatlantic relationship emerged as a security alliance under American leadership, established to protect Europe from the Soviet Union. Its continuing relevance after the Cold War has been driven primarily by the shared values, identities and strategic outlooks that have united its members (Schimmelfennig 2012). Despite differences in specific policy issues, a core set of shared liberal values was always at the heart of this relationship. Risse (2016), for instance, describes the transatlantic relationship as a security community – one grounded not only in common strategic and economic interests, but also in shared liberal ideas. Ikenberry (2008; 2018) similarly frames the transatlantic relationship as the ‘Atlantic Political Order’, a security community that moved beyond its defence origins to rest on liberal tenets, free trade and cooperation through multilateral institutions within and outside the United Nations (UN) system (Riddervold and Newsome 2018, 2022; Risse 2012; Smith et al. 2024).
For West, and later most European nations, the Atlantic order provided a framework within which liberal democracies could secure greater protection and influence, and a framework within which the European integration project could evolve. Being part of this liberal hegemonic system meant integration into a comprehensive network of economic, political, and security institutions (Tocci and Alcaro 2012; Riddervold and Bolstad 2026; Smith et al. 2024). The relationship with the United States has thus been central to European states’ foreign policies, just as ties with Europe have long been a core element of US international strategy.
While there have always been disagreements both over values and interests in the transatlantic relationship, we seem to have reached a point where this contestation does not just affect domestic developments, but also the very basis of the transatlantic relationship itself (Riddervold and Bolstad 2026). There is no longer a clear consensus that European and US markets and political institutions are bound together by common goals and interests. Trump is withdrawing from international cooperation in the UN. In the realm of security, he has cast doubt on American security guarantees in NATO and its commitment to come to the aid of its European allies in the event of an external attack. In trade, the administration’s focus has been more on tariffs and trade restrictions than on the need to uphold global and transatlantic free trade and strong relations. And not least, as the US National Security Strategy of December 2025 clearly illustrates, the deepening transatlantic divide is fundamentally rooted in a clash of values between Trump’s America and the EU. This illustrates the growing value divide between the two partners and risks undermining the liberal basis of the different pillars on which transatlantic relations have rested and thus the transatlantic relationship writ large (Riddervold and Bolstad 2026). Viewed together, these developments mean the transatlantic relationship is at a critical crossroads, where substantive shifts are more probable now than continued adherence to long-standing institutional collaboration and norms (Jones 2025).
By exploring developments in US foreign policies and how these are linked to domestic polarization and antiliberal democratic ideas, chapters in this report shed light on how this domestic factor poses a severe challenge to the transatlantic relationship. Authors focus on how the rise of right-wing populism – with an increasing portion of the population resisting globalization, international institutions, free trade and even democratic values on both sides of the Atlantic (e.g., de Vries et al., 2021; Mansfield et al., 2021; Rogowski et al., 2021; Walter, 2021) – affects the transatlantic relationship. After all, ‘the futures of the liberal order, transatlantic alliance and western democratic politics are inextricably bound together’ (Peterson 2018, 638).
To gain a comprehensive understanding of how US policies under Trump affect EU–US relations, we draw on Ikenberry (2008, 2018) to distinguish between four liberal pillars on which the transatlantic relationship has rested: security, trade, international institutions and democratic values. The report is organized accordingly and is composed of four main parts that each start with a chapter giving a broader historical overview of developments in the domain, followed by three case studies of how US policies now affect the transatlantic relationship. To systematize the changes we observe, we distinguish between three possible scenarios that are discussed in the different chapters: that transatlantic relations are breaking apart due to domestic polarization and/or structural geopolitical changes, that they will muddle through due to ongoing changes based on functional cooperation, networks and interdependencies; or that we in fact over time, despite current challenges, may be witnessing a change towards a different and redefined but stronger relationship (Tocci and Alcaro 2012); Riddervold, Trondal and Newsome 2021).
Framework: The Four Pillars of Transatlantic Relations
Drawing on Ikenberry (2008, 2018), the ‘Atlantic Political Order’ has been built on four foundational, interlinked pillars established under US liberal hegemony: security alliances, trade and finance, common institutions and rules, as well as shared democratic, liberal norms.
Ikenberry identifies two mutually beneficial bargains that have underpinned the transatlantic relationship. The ‘realist bargain’ involved the United States using its military strength to support its European (and other) allies, with Europe agreeing to subsume a US-led system. This bargain was institutionalized through NATO and numerous bilateral security agreements between the United States and its Western allies. The ‘liberal bargain’ involved Europe accepting US leadership in exchange for security protection, access to US markets, technology and resources within an open world economy, amongst other things, resulting in a strong trade and financial relationship.
While security and trade form the first two pillars, the transatlantic relationship has also formed the core of what is often called the multilateral system, meaning international cooperation within the UN and other international organizations built under US leadership after the Second World War. Ruggie (1982) referred to key parts of this system as ‘embedded liberalism’, where economic liberalism was integrated into a managed global economy, giving governments greater control over trade and economic openness. Institutions designed to support this framework aimed to reinforce cooperation, while strengthening US ties with its post-war partners and reducing concerns about domination and abandonment. Over time, this rules-based order expanded beyond monetary and trade cooperation to cover security, development, health and, more recently, global challenges such as climate change, with states increasingly relying on multilateral frameworks for coordinated action (Zürn 2018). Multilateral cooperation and institutions have also been so central to the EU that it is described as part of the ‘EU’s DNA’ (Smith 2011).
Lastly, while focused on security and trade, the transatlantic relationship has, as discussed above, had a liberal value-based core, extending beyond economic and strategic cooperation and institutional rules and institutions to also include broader commitments to democracy and human rights. While the order’s principles, like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ and post-war multilateralism, were framed as universal, its structure was shaped by Cold War realities and centred on the United States and its democratic allies. Initially focused on Western Europe and Japan, the community of democracies expanded after the Cold War to include a larger and more diverse group of nations. While often being accused of double standards and with much variation in their foreign policies, from Wilson to Biden, US presidents before Trump have operated on the belief that democracies possess a unique ability to cooperate due to shared interests and values (Riddervold and Bolstad 2026). This belief reinforced the idea that the ‘free world’ was not merely a temporary alliance against the Soviet Union, but a growing political community united by a common liberal democratic vision. For Europe, the Atlantic order ‘provided a ‘container’ within which liberal democracies could gain greater measures of security, protection and economic prosperity as well. To be inside this liberal hegemonic order was to be positioned inside a set of economic, political and security institutions. It was both a Gesellschaft – a ‘society’ defined by formal rules, institutions and governmental ties – and a Gemeinschaft, a ‘community’ defined by shared values, beliefs and expectations (Ikenberry 2018, 17).
Changes under Trump: Three Possible Scenarios
Across the post-war era, US presidents – despite partisan differences – have consistently prioritized and maintained the transatlantic partnership. Successive administrations from both parties regarded robust NATO alliances, international cooperation and extensive trade links with Europe and other partners as vital to American security and economic prosperity.
With the re-election of Trump in 2024, all four pillars of the relationship are now being challenged. Domestic policies directly and indirectly disturb the shared interests, interdependence, institutions and values that have served to uphold a strong transatlantic relationship (Risse 2016; Riddervold and Newsome 2022; Smith et al 2024). Regarding security interests, Trump is questioning the United States’ commitments to NATO, forcing the EU to step up the game in security and defence. This change, however, also reflects longer-term structural and domestic trends. Indeed, the need to counter China’s global expansionism is one of the few issues where the US political elite, across both parties, agree. American voters also consider China one of the main threats to the United States (Smeltz 2022; Bolstad and Riddervold 2023). Domestically, the view on transatlantic relations is somewhat mixed. On the one hand, Congress continues to be less polarized on foreign policy than on domestic issues, and there are different perspectives on foreign policy within the Republican Party (see Alcaro, this volume). Polls also show a continued, although declining, commitment to NATO and European allies (Smeltz 2022). On the other hand, however, studies suggest that Democrats and Republicans are increasingly divided on whether the United States should focus on domestic problems or continue to support international engagement (Smeltz 2022). The United States’ changing security policies under Trump are also evident in the president’s more aggressive foreign policies and his apparent willingness to use the United States’ might to enforce American interests, also vis-à-vis its traditional allies.
Weak informal ties also make the transatlantic relationship vulnerable to changing US administrations. Despite close cooperation for decades, the transatlantic relationship rests on rather few formal institutional ties. There is for example no trade agreement between the EU and the United States. As Elsuwege and Szép (2023) note, many networks, in epistemic communities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations are essentially informal and political rather than based on formal legal or institutional structures. Hence, although many of these expert communities and diplomatic and other networks may persist under Trump (see Smith, this volume), and as such help stabilize the relationship somewhat, the lack of formal institutions makes the transatlantic relationship more vulnerable to changes introduced by the policy decisions of different administrations. Formal institutions are harder to break and are more consistent and stable over time compared to informal networks, which depend more on the people they consist of. Moreover, Trump and his team have extended the number of administrative positions referred to as political and thus subject to change substantially (Wendling 2024). Over time, this is likely to affect informal transatlantic diplomatic and expert networks.
At the same time, observers argue that the current challenges should not be exaggerated (Tocci and Alcaro 2012). The transatlantic relationship has withstood crises before, such as disagreements following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which at the time was described as the biggest crisis ever facing the transatlantic relationship (Abelson and Brooks 2022). Tocci and Alcaro (2012) even found that the transatlantic relationship has changed and reemerged through periods of stability and crisis, with structural changes, crises and disagreements leading to a renewed relationship between the United States and Europe, rather than to a breakdown or a weakening.
To discuss if and how transatlantic relations are changing under Trump, all our chapters engage with the following three scenarios:
A first scenario suggests that transatlantic relations disintegrate in one or more policy areas, owing to diverging interests and responses to structural geopolitical changes, or to domestic political changes linked to antiglobalization, America First or isolationist sentiments.
A second scenario suggests that the EU–US relationship will be able to muddle through contemporary geopolitical and domestic challenges by undergoing a functional adjustment where cooperation is maintained in policy areas where this is seen as mutually advantageous (Tocci and Alcaro 2012, 15). This adjustment is made possible by factors such as pre-existing interdependencies, networks and institutionalized relations or overlapping interests in issue-specific areas. If these types of agreements are found in many areas, the overall relationship will be stronger than if they are only found in some domains.
A third scenario posits that the transatlantic relationship might even move forward in the face of global uncertainty and common challenges. This scenario could, for example, arise in the face of external shocks, as part of a broader balancing game, and/or because changing global structures and shared challenges reinforce and strengthen existing networks and interdependencies. These new forms of cooperation will be more resilient if they are formally institutionalized. However, it is also possible that convergence in a new and redefined relationship follows populist or right-wing trends, for example, securitization of borders or a shared set of policy approaches intended to weaken liberal values like pluralism, civic freedoms and human rights.
Structure of the Report
Within each section of the report, a background chapter introduces the overarching debate, followed by three case studies focusing on observed changes, policy implications and recommendations for EU responses.
Section 1: Security (Alcaro, Pomorska and Morgenstern-Pomorski, Sus, Wong)
In security, NATO has traditionally served as the alliance’s institutional backbone, but the EU has also increasingly taken on a bigger role, especially after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine (Fiott 2023; Grand 2024; Rieker and Giske 2023). Originally established to deter and, if necessary, defend against Soviet expansionism, NATO’s survival beyond the Cold War was largely due to the common values, identities, and worldviews on which it was founded (Schimmelfennig, 2012). NATO is a trust-based pact whose deterrent power rests on the expectation that Article 5 will be honoured rather than on legal enforcement. Recent US conduct, however, has strained that normative foundation: proposals for a transactional, ‘two-tier’ NATO tied to defence spending and rhetoric about Greenland contribute to undermining the alliance’s values-based solidarity and the liberal principles of sovereignty and self-determination (Riddervold and Bolstad 2026). The clearest manifestation of an eroding liberal consensus and increasing strategic divide is visible in responses to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine: under Biden, the United States acted with Europe to condemn a breach of core international norms and lead a coordinated response grounded in multilateral and human rights arguments (Bosse 2022; Riddervold and Newsome 2022). Three years later, the Trump administration’s posture – advocating neutrality and even entertaining recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and other territorial areas – diverges sharply from the liberal principles that have sustained the transatlantic order since the Second World War.
Section 2: Trade (E. Jones, K. Jones, Poletti, Young)
A second foundational pillar of the transatlantic relationship has been a shared commitment to liberal trade principles, which holds that regulated free trade through rules-based institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), produces mutual economic gains and stabilizing interdependence (Ikenberry 2018; Keohane and Nye 2012). Both the United States and the EU have at times fallen short of these ideals: the EU has long sheltered its agricultural sector, and no comprehensive EU–US trade agreement has materialized despite deep commercial ties (Risse 2016), while public concerns about consumer protection and other values helped derail the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or TTIP (de Ville and Siles-Brügge 2016). Rising populism has amplified scepticism toward multilateral bodies such as the WTO and weakened domestic support for trade liberalization (Kerremans 2022). Under Trump’s second administration, protectionist policies, tariff measures and abrupt renegotiations have strained transatlantic trade and regulatory cooperation, undermined trust, and contravened core WTO principles such as the most favoured nation (MFN) principle, whereas the EU continues to champion the WTO and rules-based trade – summed up in the claim that ‘with Europe, what you see is what you get’ (von der Leyen 2025) – producing a widening divergence over economic liberalism and deepening the transatlantic divide.
Section 3: International institutions (Drieskens, Fiorino, Smith, Veggeland)
Right-wing populist, antiglobalization currents on both sides of the Atlantic have increasingly challenged multilateral cooperation and liberal institutions, with the Trump administration providing the clearest political expression of this transatlantic divergence. Under his second term, Trump has initiated a rolling back of American engagement with international bodies – reaffirming withdrawals from the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Human Rights Council (UNHCR) and the Paris Agreement, slashing foreign aid as ‘wasteful spending’, and framing multilateral institutions as inefficient, elite-driven constraints on national sovereignty. These moves reflect a broader ideological shift from liberal internationalism toward a sovereignty-first, ‘America First’ posture that casts multilateral commitments as threats to identity and autonomy. At the same time, the EU has become a focal point of populist ire in the US narrative – portrayed as an external extension of domestic liberal opponents (Belin 2024) – so that withdrawals and unilateralism both signal and deepen a growing rupture between US populist politics and the EU’s commitment to global governance.
At the heart of the widening transatlantic divide is a core value conflict between the Trump administration and the EU, where rising illiberal social trends erode the liberal democratic norms that long anchored transatlantic ties. Far-right populists on both sides of the Atlantic are actively critical of democratic and rule of law institutions that were so central to deepening US–European cooperation following the end of the Cold War (Carothers 2007). The US administration’s support has likewise emboldened self-proclaimed ‘illiberal’ leaders in Europe. This approach was starkly visible at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, where Vice President JD Vance echoed populist rhetoric and signalled support for Germany’s ostracized far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), while figures within the administration (and allied private actors) openly backed illiberal parties and attacked democratic institutions and higher education. The administration’s challenges to election legitimacy (e.g., claims about Romania’s 2025 vote), its cuts to federally funded research, its elimination of long-standing programs to support democracy, rule of law and humanitarian assistance, both in and in collaboration with European partners, and its differing approach to regulating misinformation further widened the values gap with Europe. Attacks on US higher education, and cuts to funding for programs that enhance European–US scholarly exchange, undermine scientific collaboration, threaten transatlantic opportunities for innovation and undercut long-standing commitments to citizen diplomacy. Although far-right movements in the United States and Europe vary in context, they share a populist, nativist orientation – what Mudde (2007, 19) describes as an exclusionary ideology hostile to nonnative elements – that reframes democracy as majoritarian rule and rejects liberal protections for minority rights and the rule of law.
Our conclusion sums up key findings and provides recommendations for how the EU should respond to changing transatlantic relations.
(*) Marianne Riddervold is a research professor at Arena, Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo and at the Norwegian Institute of international affairs (NUPI). She is also a senior fellow at the UC Berkeley Institute of European studies. Email: mariarid@arena.uio.no
(**) Guri Rosén is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is also a senior researcher at Arena, Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. Email: guri.rosen@stv.uio.no
(***) Jessica Greenberg is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a political and legal anthropologist, with expertise in the anthropology of Europe, postsocialism, human rights, social movements, revolution, democracy and law. Her most recent book is Justice in the Balance: Democracy, Rule of Law and the European Court of Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2025). Email: jrgreenb@illinois.edu
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Please cite as: Alcaro, Riccardo. (2026). “Overview and Background: Right-wing Nationalism, Trump and the Future of US-European Relations.” In: Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations: Challenges and Policy Options. (eds). Marianne Riddervold, Guri Rosén and Jessica R. Greenberg. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). January 20, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00122
Abstract The rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States is often seen as a threat to the transatlantic relationship. This movement challenges the internationalist, institutional and liberal principles that have long underpinned US–European ties and sustained American leadership. In the United States, Donald Trump has pushed conservatism toward nationalism and nativism. His administration’s multiple – often conflicting – approaches make both transformation and rupture of the transatlantic bond plausible outcomes. Traditional Republicans still see alliances as tools to contain rivals; MAGA conservatives advocate isolationism and protectionism, and the nativist right envisions a ‘civilizational alliance’ of Christian nation-states in the West opposing liberal internationalism. Trump himself treats alliances as client relationships, rewarding loyalty and punishing defiance. Understanding this interplay of forces is essential to interpreting the volatility of Trump-era policies toward Europe and evaluating their implications for the European Union (EU) and the continent’s security.
Keywords: transatlantic relations; national conservatism; New Right; Trump foreign policy; European strategic autonomy
There is a growing sense amongst experts and policymakers that the transatlantic relationship, as we have come to know it in the 80 years since the Second World War, has run its course (Fahey 2023). In part, transatlantic change reflects broader systemic change, as the United States adapts irregularly but inexorably to a global context in which the centre of geopolitical gravity has shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Equally important, however, is the questioning of the ideational and strategic foundations of the transatlantic relationship in the domestic landscapes of the United States and, to a lesser extent, Europe. Hence, while the transatlantic relationship will evolve in light of global structural shifts, the interplay between domestic political dynamics across the ocean will determine its quality and direction (Laderman 2024–25). For Europeans, the stakes are high indeed, given the United States’ role in the defence of Europe and the amplification of European clout in an international system built over decades around the Euro–Atlantic order.
Were political elites in the United States and Europe to forge a new alliance infused with ideational commonalities and grounded in strategic convergence, the relationship could be revived in a different form. Alternatively, ideological affinities may enhance a sense of common belonging across like-minded parties but may be insufficient to provide a platform for structured foreign policy coordination. The transatlantic relationship would thus become a series of arrangements based on the contingent interests of either side. Finally, absent any form of strong transnational ties, the relationship may drift apart, potentially giving way to systemic competition. Intermediate forms of these scenarios of partnership, functional relationship (a way of muddling through where cooperation is issue-contingent) and breaking apart are equally plausible (Alcaro and Tocci 2014). One such form that does not neatly fit into any of these three scenarios is a relationship in which the United States’ hierarchical centrality is reasserted through the weakening and fragmentation of the European side.
The manner in which the relationship adapts to systemic changes is thus being forged in domestic political struggles about the value and relevance of the transatlantic bond, especially in the United States. The main – although not the only – drivers of such political fights are forces that in the 2010s were grouped under the heading of right-wing populism, but which today should be described as distinct instances of national (or nationalist) conservatism. On the rise in a number of European Union (EU) member states, national conservatism has scored massive political victories in the United States, where President Donald Trump has served as its standard-bearer (The Economist 2024).
This introductory chapter briefly explains Trump’s Europe policy in light of the different strands of thought within his administration and his personalistic understanding of power. Next, it recaps how European countries have adjusted. Finally, it draws preliminary conclusions about how national conservatism and Trump’s personalistic hold on power can affect Europe’s domestic debate and choices regarding the transatlantic relationship.
Multifaceted American Conservatism and Europe
In the Trump administration, the Republican Party and the US conservative world at large coexist with different visions of America’s role in the world and the corresponding foreign policy priorities – including with regard to Europe (Dueck 2019). At the risk of oversimplifying, the conservative foreign policy debate breaks down into three broad categories – primacists, conservative realists and civilizational warriors – that define schools of thought conceptually distinct from one another, even if they are not always mutually exclusive in terms of policy options.
The primacists comprise what is left of traditional Republican internationalism (Ruge and Shapiro 2022). The liberal and universalist impetus that once positioned the United States as the leader of the free world and guarantor of the international system – a proposition extended to economic relations through the promotion of unrestrained movement of goods and capital and the globalization of efficiency-based supply chains – has faded. Yet the conviction endures that America’s hegemonic position should be preserved through deep involvement in global affairs (Schake 2024).
From this perspective, alliances and partnerships are essential to augment the United States’ capacity to push back against a coalition of adversaries whose strategic alignment is assumed to be strong and long-term due to their authoritarian regimes and anti-Western orientation: the ‘axis of four’ of China, Russia, North Korea and Iran (as well as their minions like Venezuela) (Kendall-Taylor and Fontaine 2024). Although of lesser importance, international organizations and treaties retain utility insofar as they can be used to promote narratives and policy recipes in line with US interests and thus isolate rivals.
Europe occupies a significant position in this vision because NATO guarantees the continental hegemony of the United States, and the European countries act as a first line of defence against Russia and as a check on Moscow’s ambitions. While important, Europe’s capacity to strengthen its military is not an absolute priority for primacists, as it may, after all, affect the United States’ ability to influence European countries’ foreign policy. It follows that continuous investment of political and military resources in NATO and the defence of Ukraine remains critical to weakening Russia and ensuring European followership (Michta 2024).
Although it no longer enjoys the same degree of public support as it once did, this school of thought retains significant influence within the US foreign policy establishment — particularly among Washington think tanks, conservative media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, senior members of Congress (with Senator Lindsey Graham leading the group of Republican foreign policy hawks), and within the administration itself, where it is represented primarily by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Conservative realists encompass a range of diverse voices united by a common desire to see the United States act upon narrowly defined national interests (Borg 2024). A segment of the public opinion sees US exceptionalism as a national peculiarity that does not need to be exported abroad and favours a limited international role for the United States, largely free of any binding commitments arising from alliances or membership in international institutions. Among foreign policy experts, this strand of thought has its roots in the realist school of International Relations, which appreciates alliances and multilateral regimes insofar as they can help limit the United States’ military exposure.
Those grouped under the conservative realism label tend to agree on certain foreign policy priorities, most notably the need to prevent or contain the emergence of China as a threat to geopolitical balances in East Asia and, potentially, globally too. Still, conservative realism is open to the construction of a multipolar system in which US military might (which remains of paramount importance) works primarily for deterrence and offshore balancing, and the defence of US interests is made more sustainable through the pursuit of stability-oriented arrangements with rival powers (Mearsheimer and Walt 2016).
From this perspective, the notion that allies and partners of the United States may acquire greater autonomy is acceptable inasmuch as they can better guarantee the stability of the geopolitical theatres that have absorbed a disproportionate share of US political and military resources – namely the Middle East and Europe – so that Washington can concentrate more extensively on the Asian front. A more integrated and potentially autonomous EU is less a threat to America’s primacy (to which conservative realists do not have an obsessive attachment) than it is an opportunity to share the burden for continental stability and the containment of Russia (Williams 2025). It is also the best option to reduce the security risks that a downgrading of the United States’ strategic commitment to Europe and its military presence across NATO countries would carry with it (Chivvis 2025).
While still in the minority, this strand of thought has moved beyond academia. It resonates with the inward-looking instincts of the MAGA crowd, but also with the section of the left-wing electorate that has grown weary of what it perceives as American militarism abroad. It has also entered the foreign policy debates inside the Beltway as a regular voice in favour of restraint. However, conservative realism has made little inroads into the administration, even if ‘China prioritizers’ like Undersecretary of Defence Elbridge Colby may be loosely associated with it.
The third category, the civilizational warriors, has its ideological roots in the national conservatism espoused by much of the US new right (Hazony 2022). This strand of thought holds together the forceful reassertion of American absolute sovereignty against any form of long-term international commitment with the conviction that America is the core, engine and apex of Western civilization. Civilizational warriors do not construct the West as an alliance of states bound by shared strategic interests and a common commitment to universalistic values such as human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Rather, they conceive of it as a community of nations from Europe and of European descent linked to one another by history, Christianity (or the Judeo-Christian tradition) and, to some at least, race.
Civilizational warriors see this community as threatened not so much by the authoritarianism and militaristic expansionism of rival powers like Russia. Instead, it is migrants with an alien ethnic, linguistic and religious background and globalist elites promoting open trade, globalized supply chains and the supposedly intolerant and degenerate ‘woke’ ideology that risk subverting Western freedoms, welfare and cultural traditions. This vision is shared, in whole or in part, by sections of the MAGA movement, as well as by tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and has its most prominent reference point in Vice President JD Vance (Lopez 2025).
Europe is both the object of nostalgia and the source of hatred for those holding this view. On the one hand, the EU is deeply resented not just because of its potential to empower its member states, but also because it embodies the set of values that this movement despises most: supranationalism, inclusivity, diversity, and cosmopolitanism (Franke 2025). On the other hand, the European nations are the natural candidates to join the United States in a ‘civilizational alliance’ against migrants and the enemies from within (Samson 2025).
US foreign policy under the second Trump administration comprises elements of these various strands of conservatism, which explains the at times wild oscillations in rhetoric and policy actions on display regarding the Ukraine war and the approach to NATO and Europe’s security in general. While this multiple origin makes US foreign policy look incoherent, another element gives it greater intelligibility – namely, Trump’s understanding of power (Moynihan 2025). The US president sees power as a never-ending exercise in renegotiating relations, in which the stronger side, the United States, uses its vast array of assets – from tariffs to military assistance to investment – to extract ever more concessions (Bertoldi and Buti 2025). He views US alliances and partnerships as a client system in which the US’s burden is diminished, and its advantage is aggressively pursued. Similarly, rival powers are less systemic enemies to be defeated than potential interlocutors for deals in which influence is shared according to each party’s relative power and interests (Feaver 2024).
What makes this combination of extreme transactionalism and penchant for unrestrained sovereignty unique is the construction of the US national interest as inexorably linked to Trump’s personal power, and the ensuing blurring of the line between public and private interests. The elevation of personal ties with Trump, his family and his closest entourage, above formal relations between state institutions, creates incentives for allies, partners and rivals alike to contribute to his political and private fortunes. Governments that do not have to worry excessively about domestic opposition, such as the Arab Gulf dynasties, which have struck multi-billion-dollar deals with the Trump administration (and generously contributed to the financial and crypto ventures of the president’s family), have adapted with relative ease. For European governments, which are often supported by multi-party parliamentary coalitions and are subject to greater scrutiny from the press and public opinion, the process is more complicated.
Europe’s Adjustments: The Benefits and Costs of Appeasement
European adjustment to US foreign policy under Trump has taken on different forms. There has been an extensive use of flattery to win the US president’s favour, with European leaders echoing his rhetoric or developing new language consistent with it (Shapiro 2025; Brands 2025). More significantly, European governments have made efforts to meet US expectations beforehand. They have raised military and security-related spending to address the US’s longstanding concern about NATO’s uneven burden-sharing, agreed to buy US weapons on behalf of Ukraine, maintained economic pressure on Russia, and shown readiness to support a post-war settlement through deployed military assets (Scazzieri 2025; Ondrych 2025). Some have signalled their value to the pursuit of strategic goals that the Trump administration deems priorities, as when Finland agreed to build icebreakers to strengthen the United States’ hold on the Arctic (Foroohar 2025).
In return, the Europeans have often resorted to damage limitation. The latter has involved absorbing the effects of Trump’s most disruptive policies – such as tariffs, the phasing out of military transfers to Ukraine, and threats to take Greenland from Denmark – through coordinated diplomatic engagement, notably at the level of leaders. The objective of these efforts has been to prevent unwelcome outcomes such as a deal with Russia to the detriment of Ukraine and Europe’s security, further tariff escalation or the opening of new disputes (for instance over climate or digital regulations) (Momtaz et al. 2025).
These tactics have yielded some results. Trump’s recurrent outbursts against NATO have ceased, and the administration’s rhetoric on Europe has improved. Most importantly, support for Ukraine has not been interrupted, and sanctions on Russia have been maintained, even if Moscow’s stubborn rejection of any US opening and Kyiv’s deft management of Trump’s expectations have arguably been more consequential than European entreaties (Mikhelidze 2025). Even so, Europe’s reactive approach has limits and carries risks and costs. As mentioned above, support for maintaining a significant military presence in Europe is fading in the US public and even among elites. Thus, the most the European governments can hope for is to coordinate the downgrading of US assets within NATO with Washington so that it does not leave them overly exposed, and cultivate bilateral military relations to keep as many of those assets as possible on their national soil.
In addition, Trump’s volatile nature and transactional approach force European governments into continuous efforts to appease him, which in turn feeds his tendency to renegotiate the terms of their arrangements and add new demands. An example is Trump’s initial insistence that US sanctions on Russia could happen if the EU first adopted impossibly high tariffs on China and India as retribution for purchasing Russian oil (he later cast aside this condition, but not because of European opposition) (Hoskins 2025). Even when no demand is explicitly uttered, the Europeans may opt for alignment to avoid injecting an irritant into the transatlantic relationship, as their endorsement of the US bombing of Iran (an eventuality they had long opposed) attests (Azizi and Van Veen 2025).
This highly reactive and largely accommodating attitude means EU and national policymakers end up sharpening the tension between the urgent need to keep the United States engaged, on the one hand, and the long-term goal of reducing European vulnerability to external pressure through more integrated EU institutions and capacities, on the other. The domestic incentives to invest diplomatic resources and political capital in greater EU integration, by nature a slow and cumbersome process, diminish if bilateral action can more easily secure gains from a US administration that is short on sympathy for the supranational EU.
The commitment to investing in a systematic and extensive upgrade of EU governance and capabilities is also affected by the fact that Trump’s power-based, sovereignty-driven foreign policy approach, which has been given an aura of legitimacy by European appeasement, has emboldened Eurosceptic forces that share ideological affinities with US national conservatism.
Trump and Europe’s Right: So Far, So Close?
There is much in common within the transatlantic right-wing galaxy, spanning a nationalist attachment to sovereignty, visceral opposition to immigration, revulsion at the ‘degenerate’ woke values of liberal progressivism, resentment against regulations in the digital and climate sectors, as well as impatience with political and constitutional checks and balances. Ideological affinities underpin growing ties between US and European right-wing movements, with institutions from Poland and Hungary (a central reference point for the US new right) quite active in promoting a transatlantic community of right-wing intellectuals and activists.
However, replicating the American right’s success in Europe is not as straightforward. The European right remains fractious and its relationship with its US counterpart anything but linear (Balfour et al.2025). On a number of issues, European right-wing parties follow national preferences that are not easily reconcilable – the Hungarians and Poles, for instance, oppose greater burden-sharing in migration management and stronger fiscal capacity in Brussels, both of which the Italians would support. Marked divisions also exist regarding Russia. Some, notably the Polish and Scandinavian right as well as parts of the Italian right, view Russia as a threat and favour support for Ukraine. The bulk of the European right continues to nurture some sympathy towards Moscow, although this has become much more muted in the wake of the Ukraine war. They see Russian nationalist and authoritarian conservatism as a natural interlocutor for the preservation of Europe’s cultural and religious heritage as well as its stability and energy security. Adding to these policy divergences are party and leadership rivalries, with three distinct right-wing groups in the European Parliament.
In short, the electoral strength of right-wing parties does not translate into an equally strong capacity to shape policies at the EU level, let alone create a coherent foreign policy platform on which to engage the United States. Right-wing parties, like anyone else, must also contend with the harm inflicted by US tariffs on EU exports and wavering security commitments, as well as with Trump’s scarce popularity in most of Europe (O’Brien 2025). Even internally, the US president’s average approval rating has been stuck in the mid-to-low 40s (RealClearPolitics 2025).
The reality is that the deliberately confrontational approach to politics of right-wing nationalism and Trump’s personality tends to generate counterbalancing dynamics of aggregation. Moreover, Trump’s power-based foreign policy, even when one shares its nationalist premises, fuels a demand in Europe for security and welfare that cannot be met in full through a critically unbalanced relationship with the United States, which is constantly open to review. Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine and Trump’s nationalistic and unilateralist re-orientation of US foreign policy are tangible manifestations of a geopolitical reality that is not just debated in foreign policy circles but felt across populations in Europe. It follows that the pragmatic logic underlying European appeasement of Trump can also be applied to the EU. Whether regarded as an alternative, a complement or merely an accessory to the relationship with the United States, the EU’s potential to improve member states’ military, energy, technological and industrial assets, as well as protect their regulatory sovereignty and trade – including to contain the costs of renewed US–China tensions – is easier to appreciate for elites and general public alike. The weakness of pro-EU political forces, which may be more a problem of leadership than policy, obscures but cannot erase these structural realities.
Political forces that remain committed to the transatlantic bond, or that regard the relationship with Washington primarily through a pragmatic lens, should recognize that the advantages of accommodation diminish over time. The current US administration, in all its iterations of conservative views of US foreign policy and with Trump’s power-infused understanding of foreign relations, is largely insensitive to European objections, not least because it perceives little or no cost in adopting positions that openly contradict European preferences. Persisting in appeasement not only reinforces this dynamic but also undermines collective efforts to enhance the EU’s capacity to withstand external pressure and adapt to a gradual recalibration of American commitments to the continent. By the same token, European nationalist movements that oppose deeper integration should reflect on the tangible costs of failing to forge a common stance in response to US measures (be they on trade, technology or other strategic issues) that harm the very constituencies these movements claim to defend.
An Uncertain Future
There can be little doubt that the political struggles on the future of the transatlantic relationship across Europe are being fought on a favourable terrain for the right-wing forces and President Trump himself. Nevertheless, those struggles are not settled yet, and the future is open to different scenarios.
In one possible scenario – consistent with the worldview of US primacists – the United States would maintain its commitment to Europe’s defence in exchange for a greater European contribution to continental security and, more broadly, Washington’s pursuit of global hegemony. This approach would not only entail participation in the containment of Russia but also complete alignment in pushing back against China’s influence and isolating other adversarial powers, such as Iran. Such an arrangement would loosely represent a continuation of the post-war transatlantic relationship, albeit one in which normative and institutional dimensions are downgraded since the development of European military capabilities becomes instrumental to the consolidation of a rigidly hierarchical Euro–Atlantic structure. The relationship would thereby assume the form of a hub-and-spoke system, characterized by a stronger bilateralization of US security and defence ties with individual European states, the relative marginalization of NATO as a locus of transatlantic consensus-building, and indifference or mild hostility towards the EU. Although not entirely compatible with President Trump’s aversion to long-term commitments, this configuration of US–European relations would nonetheless chime with his conception of America’s alliances and partnerships as a clientelist network reaffirming US centrality.
In another scenario, the development of integrated European capacities for resource generation and defence and security provision would endow EU member states with greater bargaining power in dealings with Washington across domains ranging from trade and relations with China to the security governance of Europe itself. This dynamic would clash with Trump’s anti-EU instincts and his ambition to reassert American primacy. Yet, it would resonate with his transactional understanding of international relations and with his preference, shared by conservative realists, for a substantial US retrenchment from Europe.
Both scenarios rest on the assumption that transatlantic political elites would frame their domestic political interests in terms of the strategic advantages of preserving a strong Euro–Atlantic coalition, although in the second case, the relationship would be more prone to engendering largely contingent, functional forms of cooperation. However, another scenario envisions the inverse dynamic, whereby strategic security concerns are subordinated to short-term political expediency, particularly on the European side.
In such a context, the containment of Russia, the management of tensions with China or the pursuit of stability in the Middle East would rank lower on the hierarchy of priorities than the quest for control over domestic centres of power through the continuous mobilization against internal political adversaries and, increasingly, against the supranational governance system of the EU. In this scenario, which reflects the ideological convictions of the civilization warriors, the transatlantic relationship would become ‘de-strategized’. It would in effect assume a partisan function, operating as a shared ideological framework through which right-wing parties mutually legitimize their respective domestic political struggles, with strategic coordination being relegated to either contingent arrangements or, again, European followership.
As mentioned at the start of this introduction, the evolution of the transatlantic relationship will be shaped as much by the capacity of political elites to reconcile strategic imperatives with domestic political pressures as by shifts in material power or institutional design. Whether this reconciliation yields a renewed yet asymmetrical alliance, a more equal but functional partnership or devolves into a fragmented, ideologically charged alignment will determine the degree to which the Euro–Atlantic area continues to constitute a coherent pole of order in a contested international system.
(*) Riccardo Alcaro is Research Coordinator and Head of the Global Actors Programme at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI). His main area of expertise is transatlantic relations, with a particular focus on US and European policies towards Europe’s surrounding regions. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a fellow of the EU-wide programme European Foreign and Security Policy Studies (EFSPS). He has coordinated the EU-funded TRANSWORLD project on transatlantic relations and global governance (7th Framework Programme) and the JOINT project on EU foreign and security policy (Horizon 2020). Riccardo is the author of Europe and Iran’s Nuclear Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and co-author of Conflict Management and the Future of EU Foreign and Security Policy: Relational Power Europe (Routledge, 2025). He also edited The Liberal Order and its Contestations (Routledge, 2018). He holds a summa cum laude PhD from the University of Tübingen. Email: r.alcaro@iai.it
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US President Donald Trump held a campaign rally at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 4, 2024. Photo: Chip Somodevilla.[/caption]
