Please cite as: Solaja, Oludele Mayowa. (2026). “Waste Sovereignty and Plastic Colonialism: Environmental Power and Populism in the Global Political Economy of Waste.” Journal of Populism Studies (JPS). June 11, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/JPS000124
Abstract
Plastic pollution is one of the most pressing environmental problems of the twenty-first century, but the governance of global plastic waste is remarkably unequal. Significant volumes of plastic waste from developed countries are exported to developing countries in the Global South, where waste management infrastructure and regulatory capacity are often limited. While this movement of waste across borders is frequently discussed in terms of recycling efficiency or waste management capacity, these transactions are deeply embedded in unequal power relations within the global political economy. This article proposes a theoretical framework called Waste Sovereignty Theory (WST), which explains how international waste trade reproduces environmental power asymmetries between exporting and importing nations. Drawing on political ecology, environmental justice, postcolonial environmental governance, and emerging scholarship on environmental populism, the paper conceptualizes transboundary plastic waste flows as a form of plastic colonialism in which the ecological costs of production and consumption in wealthy countries are displaced onto less powerful states. The article introduces a Waste Sovereignty Theory Framework (WST Framework) that links four key dynamics—plastic production, transnational waste trade, governance inequality, and sovereignty claims—to explain contemporary struggles over environmental authority in the Global South. Using illustrative cases from Southeast Asia and Africa, the article demonstrates how states and communities respond through waste import bans, stricter regulatory regimes, waste repatriation policies, and the promotion of domestic recycling industries. These responses are interpreted not only as efforts to reclaim environmental governance but also as expressions of environmental populism, whereby affected populations challenge environmental burdens perceived as imposed by distant political, economic, and technocratic elites. Waste sovereignty thus emerges as both a claim to environmental justice and a form of political resistance against unequal structures of global environmental governance. The article argues that addressing the global plastic crisis requires more than technological improvements in waste management; it demands institutional reforms capable of confronting the structural inequalities embedded in contemporary systems of production, consumption, and environmental governance.
Keywords: Waste Sovereignty, Plastic Colonialism, Environmental Populism, Global Waste Trade, Environmental Governance, Political Ecology, Environmental Justice, Circular Economy, Global South
Plastic waste constitutes one of the leading contemporary environmental problems in the 21st century. Over the last decades, production of plastics in the global South have rapidly increase from less than 1 million tons per year in the 1950s to more than 400 million tons in a year and rapidly growing international plastic waste trade networks (Geyer et al., 2017; Zhao et al., 2021; Clapp, 2022). Although plastic waste is created around the globe, its environmental burden has been distributed unevenly, that is, wealthy industrialized countries ship vast amounts of their waste to the Global South countries whose institutions and capabilities are often unable to manage this commodity (Brooks et al., 2018; Clapp, 2021). This paper considers that what often appears as technical problems with waste management or efficiency of recycling, are the consequences of underlying structural power relations within political economy that shaped global politics of waste management.
The political ecology literature frames such dynamics within a politics of unequal access to environmental resources. International industrial and consumer economies are producing vast flows of unwanted materials whose disposal is often externalized, whereby they can find an outlet within the weaker regulatory systems found in some Global South countries, leading to environmental contamination and informal dumping and recycling networks (Pellow, 2018; Liboiron, 2021). This is a pattern of waste colonialism where environmental harm produced by global industrial capitalism can be displaced from wealthy consumer economies to the periphery through the waste trade (Pellow, 2018; Liboiron, 2021). This in turn constitutes ecological distribution conflicts, whereby environmental burdens and their subsequent harm fall unevenly between social groups and geographic territories (Martinez-Alier, 2002).
Emergent trends in international waste markets highlight the politicization of these dynamics. The closure of the Chinese market to the majority of foreign waste exports under the National Sword policy in 2018 led to the redirection of massive flows of plastic waste to countries in Southeast Asia and Africa, overwhelming the existing domestic waste management systems of these recipient countries. Consequently, governments from the Global South such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and a host of African states have since imposed new regulations and repatriated illegal shipments of plastic waste, showing the burgeoning politics of the waste system.
Most academic literature on the global plastic crisis frames plastic waste as a technical problem of recycling efficiency or waste management systems, however there is an important politics of why environmental problems and the burden of waste are distributed unevenly. More focus has not been paid to the issue of environmental sovereignty – a State’s/Community’s authority over their environmental resource system, including regulation of trans-boundary flows and their control over development pathways, as a source of environmental power and control within global waste flows governed by the trade regime, global corporate supply chains, and disparities in regulation.
This article theorizes the politics of global waste governance by developing the Waste Sovereignty Theory (WST), which frames global waste systems as arenas of political struggle over authority where States and communities contest the uneven distribution of ecological burden. Waste Sovereignty Theory framework links four key mechanisms-production, trade networks, disparity in regulation, and sovereignty claims-to illuminate the operation of environmental power within current waste regimes. Waste sovereignty, within WST, signifies the authority of States, communities and social movements to assert control over the management of waste systems, including import flows, domestic recycling industry development and environmental common preservation.
In this article, waste sovereignty is defined as the capacity of states, communities, and social institutions to exercise political, ecological, and economic authority over the governance of waste within their territories. This includes the power to regulate transboundary waste flows, control domestic recycling infrastructures, determine environmental standards, and shape the economic systems through which waste materials are managed or transformed into resources. Within the Waste Sovereignty Theory Framework (WST Framework), waste sovereignty therefore represents a form of environmental authority through which political actors contest the unequal distribution of ecological burdens generated by global production and consumption systems.
The theory of Waste Sovereignty extends the field of environmental governance in three main ways; first, situating the plastic crisis within the politics of production, consumption and the externalization of environmental impact. Second, it develops the discourse of environmental justice by placing issues of ecological inequity alongside control over environmental governance systems. Third, it theorizes responses to plastic waste in the Global South as claims to sovereignty from the peripheries in the form of restrictions on imports, new legislation, domestic recycling industries development etc.
Therefore this paper answers the questions: how does global plastic waste trade create a power disparity and how can the Waste Sovereignty Theory frame the emergence of fights for environmental governance in the Global South? Showing the dynamics of the WST through cases from Southeast Asia and Africa, the paper argues that plastic waste has become a politically embedded global issue and its solutions need to transcend purely technical strategies of waste management and recycling, and include the politics of environmental power and sovereignty within the waste system.
India’s 2026 state elections have reopened fundamental debates about democracy, federalism, and political representation in the world’s largest democracy. In this timely ECPS interview, Yamini Aiyar, Visiting Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, examines the tensions between the BJP’s centralizing “One Nation” project and India’s plural federal structure. Discussing the BJP’s breakthrough in West Bengal, the dramatic rise of Vijay’s TVK in Tamil Nadu, and the emergence of youth-led movements such as the “Cockroach Janta Party,” Aiyar argues that democratic resistance is increasingly emerging outside formal institutions and party structures. While warning of growing democratic backsliding, she maintains that India’s enduring “democratic sentiment” remains a powerful resource for challenging authoritarian tendencies and renewing democratic life.
India’s 2026 state elections delivered some of the most consequential political surprises since Narendra Modi first came to power. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) achieved a historic breakthrough in West Bengal, ending fifteen years of Trinamool Congress rule and extending its political reach into one of India’s most symbolically important states. At the same time, Tamil Nadu witnessed the extraordinary rise of actor-turned-politician C. Joseph Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), which shattered the long-standing dominance of the state’s established Dravidian parties. Together, these electoral outcomes have reignited fundamental debates about democracy, federalism, political representation, and the future of opposition politics in India.
To explore these developments, the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) spoke withYamini Aiyar, Visiting Senior Fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and one of India’s leading public intellectuals on democracy, governance, state capacity, and democratic accountability. Drawing on her influential recent essay, “The Cracks in the India Model: Democracy Can Be Both Curse and Cure,” Aiyar offers a nuanced interpretation of India’s current democratic moment.
Rejecting both triumphalist and declinist narratives, Aiyar argues that India is experiencing a profound democratic dialectic. On the one hand, democratic institutions have increasingly been captured and instrumentalized by majoritarian political forces. On the other hand, democratic processes continue to generate unexpected forms of resistance and renewal. As she explains, India today is engaged in “a very important old-but-new conversation about what India is and who we are.”
A central theme of the interview is the growing tension between the BJP’s centralizing “One Nation” project and India’s deeply plural federal structure. Aiyar warns that the ruling party has increasingly used state institutions to consolidate power, while simultaneously noting that regional identities and democratic aspirations remain remarkably resilient. The unexpected success of Vijay’s TVK in Tamil Nadu, she argues, demonstrates that “young India is becoming exhausted with many of the older forms of politics.” Far from representing a rejection of Tamil subnational identity, the TVK’s rise illustrates how younger generations are seeking new political vehicles through which to express long-standing regional aspirations.
Indeed, one of the most original aspects of Aiyar’s analysis concerns the emergence of new forms of political mobilization beyond traditional party structures. She points to the recent appearance of the “Cockroach Janta Party,” a satirical youth-led movement that rapidly gained millions of followers after young Indians appropriated a derogatory label allegedly used by a senior public figure. For Aiyar, this phenomenon is not merely a social-media curiosity but evidence of deeper frustrations among younger generations facing unemployment, precarity, and declining faith in established political actors. As she notes, “there is a bubbling up of anxieties among young Indians for a variety of important reasons,” and these emerging forms of mobilization may become important sources of democratic resistance.
Reflecting on the broader political landscape, Aiyar observes that “the Constitution itself became almost a living political actor in the election,” while even within the BJP’s own support base “some voters started questioning the increasingly authoritarian methods being deployed.” These developments suggest that democratic sentiment remains deeply embedded within Indian society despite growing concerns about institutional erosion.
Yet Aiyar’s optimism does not rest primarily on formal institutions. While she is “deeply pessimistic” about the ability of party politics and institutional mechanisms alone to halt democratic backsliding, she remains “hugely optimistic” about the capacity of civic mobilization to generate democratic renewal. Ultimately, she argues that India’s most important democratic resource remains the enduring democratic instinct of its citizens—a “deep democratic sentiment” that will continue to find new avenues through which to challenge and resist authoritarianism.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Yamini Aiyar, lightly edited for clarity, readability, and publication.
West Bengal and Tamil Nadu Show Democracy’s Curse and Cure
Political demonstration in Puducherry, India, in December 2018, with protesters gathering in the streets against the policies of the Tamil Nadu government. Photo: Catherine Lprod / Dreamstime.
Yamini Aiyar, welcome! To begin, in “The Cracks in the India Model,” you argue that India’s democratic institutions can simultaneously function as both a constraint on governance and a corrective mechanism against excesses of power. How do the surprising outcomes of the 2026 state elections—particularly in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu—illustrate this dual character of Indian democracy?
Ms. Yamini Aiyar: It has been a dialectic in some ways. One side of the debate looks at the ways in which democratic institutions have been captured through political mobilization, which itself is a very democratic process. If you look at the history of India’s party system, particularly from the 1990s onwards, we witnessed an upsurge in the vernacularization of the political process as newer regional party formations used democratic mechanisms to bring hitherto marginalized voices into the democratic discourse.
What was surprising about this, however, was that these popular mobilizations effectively utilized democratic institutions in ways that pursued particularistic rather than universalist interests. This was perhaps best articulated through the mobilizations we saw in North India around lower-caste politics, which deployed democratic means to come into power. But once in power, or after capturing state power, these movements often deployed the resources of the state to protect the interests of their own caste groups rather than using state power to advance more universalistic public goods and services.
In the present context, these precise techniques have been deployed to facilitate and enable a far deeper and more majoritarian political agenda. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leads the alliance governing India today, has its roots in a strongly Hindu-majoritarian political discourse.
In some senses, India has always had this debate about what she is as a nation. Is India a nation of Hindus first and all others second? Or is India a nation for all, wherein our many diversities can cohere together?
At the time of independence, and during the making and formation of modern India through the Constitution, India made a very active choice. The consequences of Partition gave India a realistic understanding of what majoritarian religious nationalism could do to a nation. India chose to reject the forces that led to Partition and instead recognized itself as a modern nation where equity, fraternity, tolerance, and secularism would serve as the core constitutional values binding the country together.
It was an embrace of the idea that India is, as scholars call it, a state-nation. It is not homogeneous but heterogeneous. That state-nation would cohere within the broader framework of the Indian nation-state. I have a political identity as an Indian, but I also possess many subnational identities—as a Tamilian, as a Hindu, as a Muslim, or as a Christian—and all of these identities can coexist within the construct of the nation-state.
The BJP and its ideological roots represented the other idea of India, one centered much more on the notion of a Hindu nation. Once it captured power in 2014 through entirely democratic electoral means, India effectively reopened this conversation with itself. Over the last decade, as this debate has unfolded, the BJP has not shied away from using the coercive powers of the national government to facilitate and consolidate its hold on power.
The recent state elections in West Bengal offers an important example. The BJP was expanding its presence through what one might call democratic forms of political mobilization. However, in this election it also utilized powers available to it at the national level—military forces, paramilitary forces, and even the Election Commission, which is supposed to function as an impartial arbiter of elections—in ways that tilted the electoral playing field in its favor.
One of the most significant examples was the revision of electoral rolls. Ordinarily, this should be a routine process involving the removal of names of deceased persons or those who have migrated, and the updating of voter records. Instead, it was carried out in a manner that effectively disenfranchised 27 lakh (1 lakh = 100,000) voters, a significant number of whom were Muslim. It also opened up a highly polarizing discourse around who is Indian and who is an outsider.
Remember that West Bengal borders Bangladesh and has experienced considerable population movement as a consequence of the 1947 Partition. In this sense, state institutions were used to shift the electoral balance and alter the playing field of the election.
This is why I describe democracy as both a curse and a cure. In some respects, this institutional capture emerged through the same democratic processes that facilitated the BJP’s rise at the national level. Yet those democratic processes were subsequently used to capture state institutions. The election in West Bengal followed “legitimate procedures,” but the use of institutions such as the Election Commission effectively delegitimized the quality of the election itself.
Tamil Nadu presents a somewhat different case. There, a completely new political party emerged, seemingly from nowhere, and surprised observers by dislodging a long-standing political duopoly. In many ways, this is a positive example of what democracy can achieve. A new political formation captured the public imagination and, through democratic means, came to power while displacing entrenched political structures.
India today is living through this complex dialectic. It differs from the caste mobilizations of earlier decades, yet it employs some of the same tools in new and more complex ways. In doing so, it is prizing open a very important old-but-new conversation about what India is and who we are.
‘Democratic Sentiment’ Still Endures
Women from farming families participate in a peaceful protest against India’s farm laws in New Delhi, January 2021. The farmers’ movement drew millions of participants and became one of the largest protest mobilizations in contemporary India. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your work on democratic erosion emphasizes the persistence of what you call a deeply embedded “democratic sentiment” among Indian voters. To what extent do the 2026 state elections suggest that electoral competition continues to provide meaningful avenues of accountability despite concerns about democratic backsliding at the national level?
Yamini Aiyar: When India chose to adopt universal franchise at its founding moment, there was deep skepticism about how a country as poor, as unequal, and as illiterate as India would survive as a democracy. In this sense, India defied the odds. With the exception of the Emergency from 1975 to 1977, India has broadly remained democratic. On the core principles of what constitutes the minimum standard of democracy—elections and the routine transfer of power—India has maintained that commitment.
India’s electoral process has certainly gone through darker periods. Yet the independence of the electoral process has always recovered itself, largely through mechanisms such as the Election Commission, which oversees the objectivity of elections and has undergone repeated cycles of reform aimed at making the electoral process more transparent, inclusive, and effective.
There is no doubt, however, that even during these phases, India’s substantive democracy—the extent to which liberal norms became embedded in the everyday functioning of institutions and society—was much more of a work in progress than the broader institutional dimensions of democracy.
Nonetheless, it was a work in progress, and over the course of our 77 years of independence, we have experienced important moments of democratic deepening. A particularly significant one came in the 1990s, when vernacular parties used democratic space to mobilize and new marginalized communities found representation within the formal political process. The mid-2000s witnessed a major expansion of the welfare state at the national level, driven by pressures from civil society and social movements that sought to challenge a democratic process that had largely ignored questions of inequality and inequity.
What we are witnessing today is a significant democratic backslide. Liberal norms that had come to be accepted—the idea that basic notions of tolerance and equity should define the framework within which democratic competition operates—have increasingly begun to erode.
The capture of the judiciary, evident even in basic matters such as habeas corpus cases not reaching the Supreme Court; the capture of the media; the use of state power to co-opt and undermine the independence of the Fourth Estate; the targeting of civil society through state institutions such as the income tax authorities, the federal enforcement directorate, and criminal law enforcement agencies; and the systematic targeting of opposition voices and political parties—the scale and extent of all this is much greater than anything India has experienced before.
When India entered the 2024 general election, there was a widespread sense that this institutional capture was nearly complete. On the eve of the election, a senior opposition leader, the Chief Minister of Delhi, was jailed on criminal charges related to a liquor scam, with no clarity as to whether he would receive bail. Remember, one is presumed innocent until proven guilty, yet the case had not even begun.
At the same time, the Congress Party, India’s principal opposition party, announced that income tax authorities had frozen many of its accounts based on allegations of tax fraud that had yet to be proven.
The playing field appeared to have been decisively tilted in favor of the BJP and the Prime Minister, whose dominance seemed likely given the extent to which key institutional pillars of liberal democracy had been captured.
Yet once the election unfolded, the voices of ordinary citizens began to emerge. In surveys we conducted, we repeatedly heard expressions of frustration and exhaustion with this pervasive institutional capture. Recognition that the media had been compromised and that legitimate questions existed about the electoral process had entered everyday political conversation.
In regions where the BJP’s economic coalition was beginning to fray, particularly in Uttar Pradesh—one of India’s poorest and most populous states, where caste politics has long dominated—the narrative shifted dramatically. Constitutional rights and affirmative-action protections for lower-caste communities became central electoral issues. The Constitution itself became almost a living political actor in the election. To me, that was a very important indication that a latent democratic sentiment still exists.
The BJP had effectively built a social coalition centered on religious polarization between Hindus and Muslims. That, fundamentally, runs counter to India’s constitutional and democratic principles. Yet during the 2024 election, we began to see signs of resistance within that coalition itself. Some voters started questioning the increasingly authoritarian methods being deployed.
The 2026 elections are more difficult to compare directly with national elections, since local issues play a much larger role in subnational contests. Nevertheless, what we are witnessing since the 2024 general election is a much more blatant misuse of the electoral process. So far, these concerns have not fully penetrated the everyday dynamics of electoral competition. The BJP continues to win elections. Does that mean the democratic sentiment is dead? I would like to believe otherwise.
Many factors shape electoral outcomes, but the scale of the BJP’s use of mechanisms such as the Special Intensive Review (SIR) raises serious concerns about the integrity of the electoral process. It is also important to recognize the role played by the courts. When the Special Intensive Review and related electoral revisions were introduced, civil society activists challenged them legally. The courts have recently delivered judgments that largely endorse the Election Commission’s actions. Indeed, during one hearing, a senior judge reportedly remarked: So, what if 27 lakh voters in West Bengal have been disenfranchised for this election? There will be other opportunities.
The language being used by institutions that are meant to serve as checks and balances raises important concerns of its own. There is little doubt that we are currently in a dark period of democratic backsliding. One can only hope that opposition parties will be able to mobilize and re-nurture the democratic sentiment that, I believe, still runs deeply within the Indian electorate.
Regional Parties Borrowed the BJP’s Playbook
Congress activists display a portrait of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar during a protest against the central government in Kolkata, India, December 2024. Photo: Saikat Paul / Dreamstime.
The BJP’s landslide victory in West Bengal appears to represent both the success of nationalized politics and the collapse of a long-dominant regional force. Does this outcome confirm your earlier argument that the growing distinction between national and regional political arenas is weakening the bargaining power of regional parties?
Ms. Yamini Aiyar: It has been a dialectical process. The 2024 election was an interesting moment in which regional parties were able to recover some of their bargaining power at the national level. They did so, however, by more or less copying the BJP’s playbook.
I have looked at this very closely in the context of welfare schemes, which matter enormously in Indian elections because of the scale of inequality and the extent to which large numbers of Indians depend on the state for their everyday needs. India runs the world’s largest food program, the Public Distribution System, through which nearly 80 crore (800 million) Indians receive free food. This gives a sense of just how vast the Indian welfare state is and how important it is to the daily lives of Indian citizens.
What Modi did very successfully was to use technology to centralize the political distribution of welfare. In India’s federal system, responsibility for welfare had traditionally been shared between the central and state governments, allowing regional parties governing states to claim some of the political credit for delivering these schemes. Modi effectively transformed this dynamic by tying welfare delivery to his own political persona. Through powerful branding, welfare programs were presented as gifts and guarantees from the Prime Minister himself.
This strategy paid significant dividends in the 2019 election. Between the 2019 and 2024 general elections, regional parties began adopting the BJP’s approach, embracing heavily personalized branding around welfare delivery, expanding welfare programs, and building political narratives around them.
West Bengal provides a particularly good example. The recently ousted Chief Minister was highly effective in using welfare schemes to cultivate her personal brand and establish an emotional connection with women voters in the state. This paid substantial dividends in the 2024 election. Nearly 60 percent of respondents in our survey attributed political credit for these welfare schemes to Mamata Banerjee, and almost 80 percent of those voters supported her electorally. This demonstrates a strong correlation between the centralization of welfare, personalistic politics, and electoral behavior.
Thus, in the 2024 general election, regional parties were able to reclaim some bargaining power. This is one reason why the BJP returned to office without a full majority and had to rely on two regional parties to form a coalition government at the national level.
The story at the state level has evolved somewhat differently. As I mentioned earlier, once the BJP realized after 2024 that it was losing its grip, it became much more aggressive in its use of institutions under its control, including the Election Commission.
At the same time, state elections are deeply shaped by local anti-incumbency dynamics. One of the challenges of concentrating political credit in the hands of a single leader is that it weakens the internal democratic processes of political parties and removes the feedback loops necessary for responding to public dissatisfaction. Anti-incumbency, a term we use frequently in Indian politics, reflects precisely this sense of public frustration and exhaustion with governments in power.
When power becomes centralized, those corrective mechanisms begin to disappear. One aspect of the West Bengal story is exactly this: an overly centralized political structure that lacked effective feedback loops and therefore failed to respond to mistakes, public fatigue, and shortcomings in governance. This created an opening for the BJP to make gains. It then supplemented those gains with its institutional advantages, ensuring that its hold on power would be firm rather than fragile. So, while centralization and the personalization of welfare served regional parties well in 2024, we are now beginning to see the weaknesses of that model emerge.
One final point concerns the national level. In a country composed of multiple states, the role of regional parties in articulating and representing subnational identities has become increasingly important. The BJP’s ideological vision is far more homogenizing, and regional parties have often functioned as a counterweight to that tendency. This, too, helped correct for the highly centralized and homogenized ideological vision promoted by the BJP at the national level. What we are seeing today, however, is that this dynamic does not necessarily translate into success at the local level. In Tamil Nadu, for example, efforts to explain the DMK’s defeat by a new political party have highlighted how the DMK framed the 2024 general election as a contest between Delhi and Tamil identity, or between North Indian and Tamil subnational identity.
That framing was effective in a national election. It proved far less compelling in a state election, where concerns about governance and everyday administration moved to the forefront. I think something very similar happened in West Bengal.
What we are witnessing, therefore, is an interaction between very different political dynamics at the national and state levels. Centralization is creating opportunities for regional parties to regain bargaining power nationally, but it does not appear to have the same political traction, at least for now, at the subnational level. But this remains an evolving space.
Young India Is Exhausted with Old Politics
At the same time, Tamil Nadu witnessed the remarkable rise of Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), which disrupted the long-standing dominance of both the DMK and AIADMK. Does this indicate that regional political identities remain resilient even as national political centralization advances?
Ms. Yamini Aiyar: Yes, it absolutely does. It is very important to emphasize that while the TVK arguably came out of nowhere—in the sense that it is a two-year-old party that suddenly captured over 37 percent of the vote share and went on to form a government—Vijay, the leader of the TVK, was very careful to reassert his political philosophy within the framework of Dravidian subnational politics and the ideological underpinnings of the Dravidian parties. So, in a sense, Tamil Nadu was making a choice within the context of its own political and ideological identities.
Within that space, there was growing frustration and exhaustion with the DMK. Tamil Nadu is an interesting case because it is one state that has experienced rapid and robust economic growth over the last five years. In fact, by almost every indicator, the DMK had performed very well, both in terms of governance and economic growth. It also continued, in a robust way, to pursue the social development policies of Dravidian politics that are central to Tamil identity. Moreover, it played a very important role in asserting Tamil identity on the national stage. So, by most conventional measures, it appeared that the DMK should have won this election. But it did not. It lost because of this fledgling party that emerged from seemingly nowhere. Yet that party is not challenging the core subnational foundations of Tamilian politics.
What it is doing, however, is raising important questions about the limits of what the DMK has achieved, while also capturing the imagination of young Indians. This is a very important aspect that is often underappreciated in our political debates. Young India is becoming exhausted with many of the older forms of politics.
Even in Tamil Nadu, in 2016–17, if I am not mistaken, there was a largely unorganized mobilization of young people in response to a Supreme Court order that effectively banned a traditional folk bullfight on animal-rights grounds. No formal political party was involved. The issue itself was not necessarily popular, but it generated a great deal of anger, and people mobilized in large numbers. It was a sign that young Tamilians were looking for something different. Those same young people became the most important mobilizers behind Vijay’s success. One repeatedly hears stories of young voters saying, “I convinced my mother not to vote for the DMK and to vote for TVK instead.” They were at the core of what brought TVK to victory.
Moreover, we are seeing similar developments at the national level. Just a few weeks ago, a satirical political formation called the Cockroach Janta Party emerged among young Indians. They adopted the name “Cockroach” after a comment by the Chief Justice suggesting that unemployed young Indians were cockroaches and parasites. Almost overnight, they attracted 22 million followers on Instagram. Even they seemed surprised by the scale of the response, and they organized a major protest in Delhi two days ago.
There is a bubbling up of anxieties among young Indians for a variety of important reasons. Vijay represents a very good example of how that phenomenon can translate into political power at the state level.
So, to answer your question, this is, in many ways, a continuation of core Tamilian subnational identity, but expressed in a new form that represents the voices of young India. How this ultimately shapes the evolution of Dravidian philosophy is something we will need to watch closely.
India’s Federal Future Is Up for Grabs
In your writings on Indian federalism, you have argued that the BJP’s “One Nation” project seeks to consolidate political authority and strengthen national coordination. How should we interpret the divergent electoral trajectories of West Bengal and Tamil Nadu in light of ongoing tensions between centralization and federal pluralism?
Yamini Aiyar: In the run-up to the 2026 elections in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, the national government, led by the BJP, announced a special session of Parliament to debate amendments to the Women’s Reservation Act, without offering any clear explanation as to why. This was a law passed by Parliament in September 2023 that reserved one-third of the seats in India’s lower house for women. However, its implementation was deferred because the redrawing of territorial constituency boundaries—what we call delimitation in India—and the census were to serve as the basis for allocating these reserved seats. As a result, the reservation provisions would only come into effect after 2030, once the next census had been completed.
There was no obvious reason why the government chose to reopen what appeared to be a settled issue. But another important process was unfolding simultaneously. India has been preparing for a reapportionment of its electoral boundaries, a process that is expected to take place after the census, which is scheduled to be completed in 2027. The historical background is complex, and I will not go into it here. But the central concern is that the more populous parts of India are located in the north, where the BJP enjoys much deeper electoral roots. The less populous regions are largely in the south, where subnational identities have served as an important bulwark against the BJP’s expansion.
Several southern political parties are worried that if constituency boundaries are redrawn strictly on the basis of population, representation will become increasingly imbalanced. The more populous northern states would naturally gain additional parliamentary seats, a development that could strengthen the BJP’s electoral position. The less populous southern states, where regional parties remain dominant, would lose relative representation, thereby diminishing their voice in Parliament and their influence over national policymaking.
This has generated an intense political debate, with strong arguments on all sides. The BJP, however, has never been entirely clear about how it intends to address this fundamental issue. What it attempted to do during that special parliamentary session was to introduce the delimitation process under the guise of women’s reservation in the middle of these elections. As a result, both the DMK, the incumbent party in Tamil Nadu, and the TMC, the incumbent party in West Bengal, found themselves confronting a national political issue in the midst of state-level contests.
The opposition eventually came together and succeeded in blocking the delimitation bill, arguing that the issue required much broader consultation and that any reforms needed to ensure equitable representation. In some ways, this amounted to a national victory for subnationalism against the centralizing juggernaut of the BJP’s “One Nation” project.
The electoral outcomes, however, raise important questions about how these debates will proceed in the future. The DMK, which had served as a major voice for subnationalism and regional interests at the national level, lost the election. It remains unclear how the TVK will position itself on these broader national questions.
The TMC, which retains a substantial parliamentary presence—around 29 members, if I am not mistaken, perhaps even more—continues to be an important actor in these debates. Yet it, too, is undergoing a period of significant internal churn following its electoral defeat.
As a consequence, it remains uncertain how opposition voices will coordinate around these issues going forward. At the moment, much remains up for grabs. We do not yet know how the post-election dynamics within these parties, or their roles within the broader INDIA alliance, will evolve. A great deal will depend on how the immediate political consequences of these elections unfold and how the affected parties respond to them.
One-Nation Politics Creates Space for Regional Assertion
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is showing victory sign with both hand to supporters at Bharatiya Janata Party office amid the results of the Indian General Elections 2024 in New Delhi, India on June 4 2024. Photo: PradeepGaurs.
Do the 2026 elections suggest that Indian federalism remains an effective institutional safeguard against democratic erosion, or are state-level political arenas increasingly being absorbed into a centralized national political narrative?
Yamini Aiyar: The BJP is going to use every tool in its arsenal to pursue its One Nation politics. Of that, there is no doubt. It is evident in the way it has deployed institutions such as the Election Commission and the judiciary, as I mentioned earlier, to tilt the playing field of electoral competition in its favor.
There has also been a push for what it calls “One Nation, One Election,” a system of simultaneous elections that, again, has the potential to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor. The BJP has not been shy about using the fiscal instruments at its disposal to squeeze state finances, and it will continue to do so.
So, there is no question that the BJP will pursue its agenda with full force. It will use both legitimate and illegitimate means to weaken regional parties by coaxing them into its fold. Don’t forget that the current BJP Chief Minister of West Bengal began his political career as a very important player in the TMC, the very party he has now defeated. The BJP is not shy about horse-trading and appropriating powerful political actors, using all kinds of legitimate and illegitimate means to bring them into its fold in order to capture power. It is going to play its tricks.
The extent to which regional parties are able to hold on to federalism as a core element of their political agenda will effectively determine the strength of the bulwark against the BJP. The more the BJP advances its One Nation agenda at the national level, the greater the opportunities for regional parties to carve out political space around subnational identity politics. That space is likely to remain significant because the federal sentiment in the everyday lives of Indians, and the multiplicity of our identities, are fundamental to how India understands the structure of the nation, provided that elections remain fair.
At the state level, however, we are witnessing a shift. There appears to be a certain willingness to experiment with the BJP and explore whether, at the subnational level, its homogenizing force is something that the Indian electorate is willing to accept. That question remains open.
For the moment, I do not envisage a situation in which the BJP will be able, through fair elections, to make deeper inroads beyond what it has already achieved in states such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and, to some degree, Andhra Pradesh. These are very important states that keep the conversation on federalism alive at the national level.
So, I remain hopeful that this will continue to be the case. But the BJP’s capacity to misuse the institutions at its disposal is significant, and we have seen that it does not shy away from trampling over constitutional practices.
Civil Society Holds the Key to Democratic Resistance
Looking beyond electoral outcomes, what do the 2026 state elections tell us about the future of democratic opposition in India? Are opposition forces developing new organizational forms capable of challenging centralized political power, or do structural asymmetries continue to place them at a disadvantage?
Yamini Aiyar: I would argue that, at the subnational level, structural asymmetries continue to place opposition forces at a significant disadvantage. But I also think that something else is happening in India that we need to talk about more.
If you look at the last twelve years, since the BJP acquired dominance and India returned to a single-party dominant model of party politics, the most significant political challenges the BJP has confronted have not come from the formal electoral or party-political arena. They have come from what one could broadly call civil society.
The first major movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which gained momentum in 2019, was a very important moment. It effectively stalled the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act all the way through to 2024, when, on the eve of the elections, the rules were finally enforced.
Even more significant was the farmers’ movement in North India against the three agricultural laws passed in 2020. Over a period of roughly two and a half years, that movement became such a powerful political force that the BJP was ultimately compelled to roll back legislation that it had originally pushed through Parliament.
These are important examples of moments in which social formations outside the formal party-political process acted as pressure points on the government. It is also one of the reasons why the BJP’s authoritarian tentacles have become so sharp and extensive. The party uses every means available to curb dissent.
Some of the key political actors involved in mobilizations against the Citizenship Amendment Act, such as Omar Khalid, have now spent years in jail without even a basic charge sheet clearly laying out the accusations against them. They have been denied bail for more than six years. These protests are therefore dangerous for those who participate in them. The BJP recognizes this vulnerability and, as a result, deploys state power aggressively to suppress dissent wherever possible.
The new ferment we are seeing among young Indians—the Cockroach Janta Party is just one small illustration of it—may represent another potential source of resistance. Mobilizations emerging outside formal political structures could create new sites of political action capable of placing limits on the BJP’s increasingly centralized and authoritarian project.
My sense is that the answers to India’s current political dilemmas are more likely to emerge from outside the formal party system than from within it. The opposition remains weak, partly because of its own failures, but also because the BJP has done everything in its power to tilt the playing field against it. It will take deep and sustained mobilization to counter the challenges that opposition forces face today.
I am not entirely confident that they will be able to do so on their own. The political openings available to them are more likely to come from these new social formations that are mobilizing and challenging the BJP’s dominance, and which the formal opposition can then leverage during elections.
Democracy Is More Than Institutions
And finally, your recent work suggests that democracy itself may provide the resources necessary to resist democratic erosion. In light of the 2026 state elections, are you optimistic that India’s democratic institutions retain sufficient resilience to withstand ongoing pressures toward centralization, majoritarianism, and executive dominance?
Yamini Aiyar: I’m deeply pessimistic about the possibility of resistance emerging through the structures of formal institutions, formal party politics, and formal electoral competition. At the same time, I’m hugely optimistic about the possibility of new sites of mobilization emerging outside these formal spaces and then being able to exert the kinds of pressures necessary to tilt the balance toward a fairer and freer electoral competition—one that can challenge the authoritarian backsliding we are witnessing today.
So, I don’t know if that directly answers your question, but I think democracy is about much more than institutions. It is also about forms of mobilization and the capacity of those forms of mobilization and association to place pressure on institutions, ensuring that formal democratic processes function more effectively.
It’s going to be a long and difficult struggle. The odds are certainly stacked against us. But I believe that the deep democratic sentiment that continues to exist in the everyday lives of Indians will find spaces and avenues through which to challenge and resist the authoritarian juggernaut that confronts us today.
The European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) is looking for motivated interns to join our team. As an intern, you will have the opportunity to enhance your analytical thinking, academic writing, research skills, and organizational and networking abilities in a dynamic multicultural environment. The internship will begin at the end of February and willlast for six months.
Main Tasks
• Conduct academic research (primarily desk research) and write essays, commentaries, and articles on topicscovered by ECPS research programs, including authoritarianism, digital populism, economics, gender, migration, environment and climate, extremism and radicalization, foreign policy, human rights, global peace and order, and leadership.
• Prepare briefs and reports summarizing monthly and annual activities (such as panels, seminars, and conferences) for publication on the ECPS website.
• Assist ECPS experts in organizing various events (including book talks, seminars, panels, summer schools, and symposiums).
• Support the ECPS team with communication activities, such as preparing the online newsletter and managing social media accounts.
• Contribute to project applications (e.g., EU-funded projects).
• Help implement ongoing projects, including data collection, report writing, dissemination, communication activities, and event organization, depending on ECPS’s role in the project.
Who We Are
The European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization based in Brussels dedicated to researching and analyzing the challenges posed by rising political populism. ECPS promotes anopen society by adhering to the principles of liberal democracy, including the rule of law, human rights, pluralism, freedom of speech, gender equality, social and environmental justice, transparency, and accountability. We facilitate collaboration among networks of academics, practitioners, policymakers, media, and other stakeholders. We offer a platform for exploring policy solutions related to rising populism and provide insights for effective policymaking and critical analysis. To achieve this, ECPS produces research publications, policy reports, white papers, and commentaries, conducts interviews with experts, and organizes events, seminars, workshops, and conferences.
Qualifications and Experience
Essentials
• Possess at least a master’s degree in social sciences (applications from master’s students at the stage of dissertation writing will be accepted)
• Knowledge and/or interest in global politics and populism-related topics, particularly in, but not limited to, the European context
• Knowledge and experience in academic writing
• Knowledge of scientific methodology (qualitative or quantitative research methods)
• Fluency in the English language (both verbal and written)
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• A collaborative team member
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• Possess a creative, proactive and open mindset with high respect for deadlines.
What We Offer
• Enlarge your network with academics, policymakers, project experts and other stakeholders across Europe
• Learn about populism and gain a deeper insight into contemporary issues in European and global politics
• Publish your research product and related outputs through ECPS
• Take part in the EU events, academic conferences, seminars, workshops, project preparation and implementation activities in Brussels
• Improve your organizational, communication and networking skills through actively taking part in ECPS events
• Opportunity to be a permanent member of the ECPS Youth
• Gain invaluable experience in an international and multicultural environment
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The internship is unpaid, remote and part-time for 6 months starting at the end of September 2026.
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If you are interested in joining us and making ECPS your next professional experience, please send your CV and cover letter (a maximum of one page) to Seyma Celem at scelem@populismstudies.org midnight CET on September 15, 2026, with the subject line “Internship at ECPS.”
Unfortunately, we cannot respond to every application; only short-listed candidates will be contacted. However, allapplications will be kept in file, and candidates will be contacted if a suitable opportunity arises. The information provided in the applications is subject to EU legislation on the protection of personal data and confidentiality of information.
ECPS is committed to diversity and inclusion to ensure that everyone has equal opportunities for employment, advancement, and retention, regardless of their gender, age, nationality, ethnic origin, religion or belief, cultural background, sexual orientation, or disability.
In this timely ECPS interview, Rudy deLeon—former US Deputy Secretary of Defense and Senior Vice President for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress (CAP)—offers a far-reaching assessment of the mounting challenges confronting the liberal international order. Drawing on decades of experience in national security and alliance management, de Leon argues that the world is entering a period of profound uncertainty marked by geopolitical rivalry, democratic strain, technological disruption, and a vacuum of strategic leadership. Criticizing what he describes as an increasingly unpredictable and insular US foreign policy, he warns that “what America says on Monday is not what it says on Thursday.” The interview explores NATO’s future, transatlantic relations, US–China competition, populism, artificial intelligence, migration, and the strategic dilemmas shaping global governance in the twenty-first century.
At a moment when the liberal international order faces mounting pressures from geopolitical rivalry, democratic backsliding, technological disruption, and the resurgence of authoritarian power, questions about the future of American leadership have acquired renewed urgency. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Rudy deLeon—former US Deputy Secretary of Defense and Senior Vice President for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress (CAP)—offers a sobering assessment of the strategic challenges confronting the United States and its allies in an increasingly fragmented world.
Drawing on decades of experience in defense policy, alliance management, and international security, de Leon, as one of Washington’s most experienced national security practitioners, argues that the world is entering a period of profound transition marked by uncertainty and the absence of strategic leadership. While emphasizing that the post-1945 order helped prevent great-power war, preserve peace in Europe, and facilitate the rise of global economic integration, he warns that many of the assumptions underpinning that order are now under strain. As he puts it, “all these things are in play,”from climate change and migration to artificial intelligence, shifting demographics, and renewed geopolitical competition. Yet, he contends, the situation has been aggravated by “a president and an administration that are not strategic, that are not diplomatic, and that are very insular.”
Throughout the interview, deLeon repeatedly returns to the importance of long-term strategic thinking. Contrasting the institution-building vision of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower with contemporary policymaking, he argues that today’s American leadership often operates without a coherent strategic framework. “What America says on Monday is not what it says on Thursday,” he remarks, describing a pattern of unpredictability that has generated anxiety among allies and weakened confidence in US commitments.
The discussion examines a wide range of contemporary issues, including NATO’s future, transatlantic relations, the rise of China, the implications of populism for international cooperation, and the evolving relationship between democracy and globalization. De Leon also explores how technological transformations, particularly artificial intelligence, may reshape labor markets, democratic governance, and international competition. In his view, policymakers remain overly distracted by ongoing military conflicts while neglecting the strategic questions that will define the coming decades. “The most pressing issue right now,” he argues, “is to figure out what the rules are for artificial intelligence and what that means for the nature of work.”
Ultimately, this interview is not simply an assessment of American foreign policy under Donald Trump. It is a broader reflection on leadership, institutions, and the future of international order in an era when, as de Leon suggests, the questions confronting policymakers may be more consequential than the answers currently available.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Mr. Rudy deLeon, lightly edited for clarity, readability, and publication.
Has the Postwar US Leadership Model Ended?
Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign rally at the Phoenix Convention Center, where thousands gathered to hear him speak as protesters demonstrated outside. Photo: Danny Raustadt.
Mr. Rudy deLeon, welcome! To begin, for decades, the United States positioned itself as the principal guarantor of the liberal international order. How do you assess the Trump administration’s apparent shift from alliance leadership toward a more transactional understanding of international relations? Does this represent a temporary deviation or a structural transformation in America’s global role?
Rudy deLeon: That’s an excellent question, and it’s being asked in the capitals of Europe, in Asia, but particularly here in the United States.
We had a period from 1945 to 2016, where there was an architecture globally to prevent another big war. NATO, outreach in Asia—if you go back to the big summit of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin as World War II was coming to an end, Stalin was all about the boundaries of Poland, and Churchill wanted to reestablish the British Empire, particularly in the Levant. What FDR and the Americans wanted were institutions to prevent a third world war from occurring. One of those institutions was the Marshall Plan, which later became the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Another was, simply, to reconcile Germany with France and England.
The only way that meeting would occur was if Eisenhower returned to active duty and became president of Columbia University in New York. Truman recalled him to active duty, and he chaired the first NATO meeting between Germany, Britain, and France. The alliance grew and expanded. It had different roles in the Cold War. The key was those institutions that would prevent another big war from occurring. It allowed for the mostly peaceful rise of China into this modern period. It also kept the peace in Europe.
One of the downsides, as much as we protested, was that Americans became the policemen of the world. Usually, it didn’t end well. Nonetheless, the intentions were there. That gets us to the 2016 presidential election. So now, you’re right: what is the status of America’s global alliances?
We have a lot of economic changes that are in progress. We also have generational changes going on now. All of those are on the table. So, the current president, Donald Trump, comes along, and he stirs the pot everywhere.
But whereas FDR, Eisenhower, and Truman were very strategic at the beginning, the current administration does it one day at a time. What it says on Monday is not what it says on Thursday. As a consequence, there is an insecurity, a disruption that is in progress, all while hotspots remain. China is potentially gaining economic centers. All these things are in play right now.
Why Strategic Leadership Matters More Than Ever
Many scholars now speak of a process of “negative convergence,” in which democratic and authoritarian powers increasingly adopt similar practices of executive centralization, nationalism, and disregard for international norms. Do you see evidence of such convergence in contemporary global politics, and what implications does it have for the future of democratic governance?
Rudy deLeon: You’ve described the current global situation, which is one of change. In many ways, it’s remarkable how, from 1945 to 2016, there was a consensus. You know, when Neil Armstrong set down on the moon, the population of the planet was 3 billion. Today, it’s 9 billion, and it’s increasing very quickly. And with that have come these new issues of climate and migration, as well as the issue of globalization and economic distribution.
In ways that the US and Europe were once central, they are now key partners. So, we’re in a period of change, and what we would like most right now would be a steady leader—one who had a strategic bone, who could create a consensus with the Congress, as well as allies. We don’t have that right now, and that is part of the disruption. Again, what America says on Monday is not what it says on Thursday.
Considering the role that the Americans have played, not simply in balancing a lot of rivalries and tensions around the world, but also in navigating their own sometimes complicated politics, that’s part of the tension points that we see right now. Add to that the role of climate. Add to that migration.
Then there is the rise of technology, first going from analog to digital and now, soon, potentially to artificial intelligence. What does this mean for the Americans, for the Europeans, for the Chinese, in terms of their own economic solvencies? All these things are in play. And yet there’s a vacuum of leadership and strategic thinking globally, and that is to our detriment.
NATO’s Enduring Value Beyond Military Power
NATO headquarters and monument in Brussels, Belgium, the political and administrative center of the North Atlantic Alliance. Photo: Dreamstime.
President Trump’s decision to reduce the US military presence in Germany has raised concerns about the future of transatlantic security. How significant is this move for NATO’s credibility, and could it accelerate Europe’s search for greater strategic autonomy?
Rudy deLeon: We’re best when we find ways to work together and to share common interests as well as values. The decision to remove 5,000 troops from Germany may not necessarily reflect a long-term change. Definitely, it reflects Trump’s thinking. And again, as we’ve noted, this is not a strategic administration. This is something that changes day to day, and we see that in our politics.
I think Congress, particularly the Senate, has had a long-time vested interest in institutions like NATO. They were a military alliance, but they were also a political alliance. And, as we see these new forums—Shangri-La in Asia, but also Munich—the Munich Security Conference has become a key moment in terms of the transatlantic dialogue.
So, right now, you can hear some of the strongest voices coming from the Senate and the congressional delegations that go and attend, while the administration, the Secretary of State, and the National Security Advisor play a secondary role.
So, yes, the administration in power, the Trump administration, would like to cut back on NATO. The institutionalists in Congress, who actually, at the end of the day, write the appropriations bills, have a different view—a more long-term view. But that’s playing out, and it played out in the 2024 election. It’ll play out again in the midterms that are coming up here in 2026, and then in the 2028 presidential election.
The long-term view in America and the world—Americans were isolationists. Coming out of World War I, it left a reminder of why young Americans should not necessarily end up on European battlefields. There was a tremendous discussion in the country on that topic. But, at the end of World War II, we’re back to FDR’s view that these institutions could hold a global dialogue together. And that was Eisenhower. That was certainly Truman. Definitely Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton, too.
But since then, we’ve seen sort of less of a focus. we’re back to the policemen of the world, whether it’s Afghanistan or the Korean Peninsula, South Korea. You know, entangling ourselves in these long-term regional conflicts has not worked out very well for the Americans, but we learn this lesson over and over.
There’s still a little bit of a residue from the long-term deployments of troops to Iraq, as well as Afghanistan. And so now, we see those changes reflected in the current administration. They’re not necessarily long-term. But I’m back to it being a much larger world, going from 3 billion to 9 billion. And migration—going to where the food and the water are—is part of that story.
All these things are in play. We’re in a turbulent time, made even more turbulent by a president and an administration that are not strategic, that are not diplomatic, and that are very insular.
Are US Allies Losing Confidence in Washington?
You have previously argued that American leadership remains indispensable to regional and global security. In light of recent developments, are traditional US allies beginning to view Washington less as a security guarantor and more as a source of strategic uncertainty?
Rudy deLeon: I think that’s a fair description of the messages that are coming from Washington, and if you’re not a Washington policy insider, you can quickly come to that conclusion. These long-term relationships are at risk. The relationship between the United States and NATO was—is—more than simply a security arrangement. It is a diplomatic center of dialogue and exchange that covered issues well beyond Europe, including the Middle East process.
When peacekeepers need to go in, you’ll see Americans, but more likely you’ll also see British, French, Italian, and sometimes now even German peacekeepers join those deployments. When NATO countries are deployed into a tense third-party area, the Americans and their European partners bring with them a dedication to the rule of law, a commitment to diplomacy, and an open door in terms of dialogue and exchange.
It’s been tough in the Middle East. There have been a lot of painful lessons for Americans and the French, in particular, as peacekeepers in challenging areas. The Turks can sometimes play a constructive role here. But to step back from that is to invite chaos coming forward. And again, this period from 1945 to 2016 was one of mostly great stability and continuous dialogue.
The Americans still have to come to grips with this intense, intrinsic desire to be the policeman to settle disputes. But indeed, these relationships have been essential, need to be essential, and these will be topics for the presidential debate in 2028.
Global Governance in an Era of Strategic Drift
The Indian Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, is pictured with the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, and the President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, in Goa, India on May 25, 2019. Photo: Shutterstock.
Across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, we are witnessing efforts by states to hedge against American unpredictability. To what extent do initiatives such as the 2026 Shangri-La Dialogue reflect a broader search for alternative security architectures beyond US-led frameworks?
Rudy deLeon: Good question and the answer is well decided and written about by historians. But I think that you have other factors. First, we have the unpredictability of the Trump administration. They don’t know where they are on Monday, let alone on Thursday. So there is a lack of a strategic approach.
Second, you have the rise of China, not so much as a regional power, but in particular as a global economic power. And so that is changing relationships. The notion of “made in China,” rather than “made in Europe” or “made in the United States,” has definitely been a factor in globalization.
The migration of people, again, as populations increase, from areas where there is not food and water to trying to get to other places, particularly North America or Western Europe, is a challenge that needs a long-term solution.
So I would say that in 2026, we are dealing with a world that is now much different. Not quite 100 years later, but much different from the world that was created at the end of World War II. Dean Acheson referred to that as Present at the Creation, which is about how to build peace across the European continent and then peace across the Pacific. And so now, with these factors of population, the unpredictability of American leadership, and a Middle East that tries to move in a progressive way but, it seems, takes one step forward and then two steps back, all these are challenges on the agenda. They suffer from an administration that right now is not strategic, that has simply a short-term view of all of these factors, and tends to go back and forth.
Why Dialogue Still Matters in Global Politics
How do you interpret the relationship between contemporary populism and the weakening of the rules-based international order? Are populist governments inherently skeptical of multilateral institutions, or is something deeper occurring in the structure of global politics?
Rudy deLeon: I think the generations have changed. We had a World War II generation that Americans would sometimes call their greatest generation. Then we have the baby boomers. If Truman, Eisenhower, and Roosevelt are World War II generation, then Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton were part of the baby boomers in their period. Now, as we’re into this next changing generation that has mostly risen with computers, lived in the digital world, and has more information flow than any previous generation, not only have the politics of the era changed, but the nature of work has changed, as well as the distribution of resources. All of these things need to be settled out.
I do think that if the Americans can continue to have a strategic rather than a populist orientation, then we can develop those partnerships that have been so valuable over the last 80 years. But it’s a challenge. The modes of communication are so much different. The availability of information is instantaneous. I can read the papers in Europe, or the China Daily, the papers from San Francisco or Seattle with regularity in Washington, D.C.. The availability of information has made everything instantaneous. Yet, our processes for making decisions still require consensus and dialogue back and forth. As we come to grips with how we use all of these new tools of information in constructive ways—because I think we’re still learning—that will be a big change.
There’s an interesting parallel to this in terms of American history, and that was the arrival of the telegraph in the early nineteenth century. Prior to the telegraph, information would move only as quickly as a horse could ride from one town to the next. But with the telegraph, the debates in New England could suddenly be shared in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. And so the politics, the issues, started to change because the regions could talk to each other.
Now, we have constant back and forth. One thing that unites the ‘souk’ shopping area in the Emirates and the student in Shanghai is the earbuds. You see young people connected to that Apple iPhone with earbuds in. So that is making some changes as well.
We can look beyond the disruptors in our politics, but also recognize that the economic relationships are changing, and the sharing of information is changing. Now, what Americans, along with the British and the Soviets, did was learn how to lead. They created their separate spheres of interest, but they always were able to maintain a dialogue. I think right now, the notion that somehow everybody can go their own way and take care of themselves turns out not to be a recipe that works. We’ve seen that play out far too many times.
The Information Age and the Limits of Liberal Assumptions
Photo: Dreamstime.
The post-Cold War order rested heavily on the assumption that economic integration would reinforce liberal democracy. Yet today, authoritarian powers appear increasingly confident and influential. Has that assumption fundamentally failed?
Rudy deLeon: I don’t think it’s failed. I think it’s the vulnerability of transitioning into this information-based world, where everyone can dial into the information that they want. What does that mean? It means you’re going to dial into a place where you have an agreement with them. You’re not going to necessarily dial into places that are offering a different viewpoint. So, you’re susceptible to an echo chamber of political thought.
But I do think that, at the end of the day, the rise of the powerful individualist nationalists will have to give way to a common world that has to deal with climate. It has to deal with the distribution of resources, the West and its engagement with the developed and developing worlds of Africa and Asia. Those will have huge consequences for everyone.
At the same time, in Asia, for example, we see the deployment of DPRK, North Korean soldiers, to Ukraine to fight with the Russians. We see that as the emergence of an unexpected power center in Asia. That should be sending off alarm bells in Tokyo, Seoul, as well as Beijing. Because suddenly, an unexpected Asian power has demonstrated an expeditionary capability to send troops to Europe.
What does that mean in the long term? It’s an interesting discussion in terms of what goes on in Tokyo. Thought in Tokyo is less examined than what Kim Jong-un is wanting to do right now. The North Korean soldiers end up with better food and better equipment on the Russian side in Ukraine. So that’s a surprise—the expeditionary nature of the North Koreans going to Europe. What does that mean for the Republic of Korea, which has its own internal disputes right now, its own set of arguments? And then what does that mean for a rising China that looks at the North Koreans on its border and has to wonder: What is our relationship with that country, and what kind of a threat does that essentially mean for the region?
The Unfinished Story of China’s Global Role
You have written extensively about US–China cooperation and competition. In an era marked by growing geopolitical rivalry, do you still see meaningful space for cooperation between Washington and Beijing on global challenges, or are we entering a prolonged period of strategic fragmentation?
Rudy deLeon: That chapter is still to be written. In terms of China and its integration with the West, it’s a different model than we have seen historically. When Japan rose in the 1930s, it was an exceptional builder of ships, airplanes, and the tools of war. China has those skills. But as a global supplier of, essentially, products ranging from electronics—not automobiles, which Europeans and Americans still dominate on the consumer side—but other utilitarian items, China has to decide: Does it want to be a global military power? It has a long way to go to achieve that, as opposed to being an economic power.
David Miliband, who was the Foreign Minister of Britain while President George W. Bush was in office, came to Washington and said, “Well, you Americans are focused on Iraq and the Middle East. The rest of the world now notes that everything is made in China. That’s an issue for you to consider and to think about.” Power is being redefined in that period from 2016 going forward, as part of Trump’s tenure.How are we going to deal with the economic power of China, its potential use of political influence, and Russia, which is in decline but still has the ability to project military power?And then, despite all of the efforts to secure some kind of regional balance in the Middle East, that’s become extremely difficult.
So agendas are changing. I think you’re right to postulate that question. China’s going to play a big role. They seem to be more interested in their economic role as a manufacturing power than they do in terms of being a diplomatic or political power.
Why Policymakers Must Look Beyond Current Wars
Some analysts argue that the retreat of the United States from global leadership creates opportunities for authoritarian powers to shape international norms and institutions. Do you share this concern, and if so, where do you see the most significant risks emerging?
Rudy deLeon: I agree with the first part of the question, which is that the Americans have been less strategic, particularly since 2016. Can that change? The twenty-first century began in 2001 with the highest of expectations, but here we are in 2026, a quarter of a century later, and we’re once again facing all of these challenges. The distribution of economic resources. Military conflicts that don’t have an easy end. Troublesome diplomacy.
So, I would say the future is still to be shaped. The next 25 years are still open to be shaped, and they could go in many different directions. The most pressing issue right now for policymakers is to figure out what the rules are for artificial intelligence and what that means for the nature of work.
For Americans and Europeans alike, the availability of work was one of the things that made for healthy democracies. However, the availability of work today is certainly changing. If you have high-end skills in one economy, but lesser skills in another, you’re at minimum wage and don’t have as many opportunities.
So, these are all factors in play right now. We’re too distracted by wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, by Ukraine, or now by Iran. We need to get back to some of the strategic issues that are going to be so critical going forward.
What King Charles Revealed About America’s Political Moment
King Charles III during a wreath-laying ceremony at St. Nikolai Memorial in Hamburg, Germany, during his state visit, March 31, 2023. Photo: Heide Pinkall / Dreamstime.
The Trump administration often frames international politics in terms of sovereignty and national interest rather than shared democratic values. What impact does this discourse have on democratic forces and civil societies operating under authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes around the world?
Rudy deLeon: We’ve always had this notion of Jacksonian democracy, going back to Andrew Jackson in the nineteenth century. In shorthand, it was that “one man smells like the next,” meaning the farmer in West Tennessee or Ohio had as much right to economic opportunity as the banker in Philadelphia. That populist battle has remained present in America and has always been part of our political life. And I think we’re seeing it move forward right now. Again, in terms of the nature of work being a great equalizer, I’ll end with that: work, learning, and change. The distribution of resources is changing as well.
So, I think we start not so much with an answer, but by constantly trying to reframe and narrow the questions into areas that are workable in terms of reaching out. But I was just going to add the great irony of having the King of England speaking to the Congress of the United States.
King Charles, along with his mother, Queen Elizabeth, are the only monarchs of that nature to come and speak to the Congress. King Charles was very warmly received for the clarity of his remarks and for the stability of his personality. Remember, the Americans are still the creation of the Europeans, with a lot from Britain, not so much from France, but a great deal from Germany and Italy, as well as from Ireland and Scotland.
I think the King’s remarks were a reminder of our roots and of the fact that we have more to gain from each other. It was also a reflection of the fact that the clarity with which the King spoke was probably a wish that our own leadership right now could have that same clarity of strategy, purpose, and integrity when they speak.
Can the West Renew Strategic Leadership?
You have participated in and written about major security dialogues throughout your career. Looking beyond the 2026 Shangri-La Dialogue, what kinds of alliances, institutions, or coalitions are most likely to shape the next phase of global governance? Will the future belong to renewed multilateralism, competing blocs, regional security architectures, or entirely new forms of international cooperation?
Rudy deLeon: You have framed something important here. Sometimes generations are described by answers, and sometimes they are framed by questions. You have really, for 2026, framed so much that the questions right now are more important than the answers. Will the Americans and the West continue in a series of alliances that will bring stability to the global order? That’s been essential. We took it for granted. It was there, and now that we see it being less influential, we worry a little bit more.
Now, the American reach still remains. Our Navy can still reach places that no one else can reach. China is trying, and it can get to some places, but not all places. And those Americans in Germany had less to do with German security and more to do with keeping the historic European competitions from rising again and troubling each other on the European continent. Those 5,000 US soldiers in Germany were a reminder of the stability that was brought through the diplomatic and economic tools established at the end of World War II. For more than 75 years, we were able to keep broad peace in Europe, together with North America, and for the most part in Asia. So, we did better on strategic security than we did on our irresistible tendency to rely on a powerful military and end up being the policeman in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran.
When World War II came to an end, the Deputy Japanese Foreign Minister showed up on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay and, in his formal diplomatic attire, stood across from Douglas MacArthur. He offered what the British call a kowtow. It’s not a complete bow, but it is a lowering of the head and body. Conflicts don’t end like that now. They end up with murky lines of demarcation that require diplomacy and economic efforts.
So, I think that, for the Americans coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now dealing with Iran, the policing role is not necessarily a successful global strategy. We’ve got to get back to the broader question of how we maintain strategic dialogue. How do we maintain critical alliances? How do we talk to each other when we agree, and how do we talk to each other when we disagree?
History is full of surprises. What holds China back right now is the one-child policy. The assumption in the West was that China would become the largest consumer economy in the world and therefore come to dominate everything. Well, it turns out that, with the one-child policy, there aren’t enough consumers, let alone enough young people to join the Army and Navy of the People’s Republic of China. So, history has a way of introducing its own surprises. And that’s where we are right now.
But can Americans lead again in a constructive way after 2028? That is one of the big questions that hangs over American politics, our transatlantic dialogue, and the role of America and the West in the world.
Are you interested in global trade politics and the future of Europe in a shifting world order? Do you want to understand how populism, great-power rivalry, and geopolitical tensions are reshaping EU trade between the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific? The ECPS Academy Summer School 2026 offers a unique five-day program where leading scholars and policymakers explore the EU’s role in an era of economic uncertainty and strategic competition. Participants will engage in interactive lectures, small-group discussions, and a dynamic simulation game on EU trade strategy, gaining hands-on experience in policy analysis and recommendation drafting. Join an international, multidisciplinary environment, exchange ideas with peers worldwide, earn ECTS credits, and become part of a global network studying populism, political economy, and international relations.
Overview
In today’s rapidly shifting global order, the European Union can no longer afford to think in one direction. For decades, the transatlantic relationship has been the backbone of global trade, built on shared institutions, economic interdependence, and liberal values. Yet this foundation is no longer stable. As highlighted in the ECPS report Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations, domestic political polarization and the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic are reshaping trade policy, weakening trust, and challenging the very principles of open markets and multilateralism. The EU now faces a critical question: how to remain a global trade power when its closest partner is becoming less predictable.
At the same time, the center of gravity of global trade is shifting toward the Indo-Pacific. This region has become the epicenter of economic dynamism and geopolitical competition, where the future of global trade rules is increasingly being contested. The growing rivalry between the United States and China is not only a security issue but also a trade and technological struggle shaping supply chains, investment flows, and regulatory standards. As the US adopts more unilateral and strategic approaches to trade, moving away from traditional multilateralism, the EU must navigate a complex environment where cooperation, competition, and coercion coexist. Ignoring the transpacific dimension would mean missing where the future of global trade is being written.
For the European Union, the challenge and opportunity lie in managing both arenas simultaneously. The transatlantic relationship remains indispensable for economic scale, regulatory cooperation, and political alignment, while the transpacific region is crucial for diversification, resilience, and strategic autonomy. As scholars increasingly argue, the EU is no longer just a “junior partner” but an actor that must define its own role within a triangular system shaped by US–China competition. To lead in international trade today means mastering this dual engagement: stabilizing relations with the United States while actively shaping the Indo-Pacific order. This requires not only policy innovation but also a new generation of thinkers who understand trade through a geopolitical lens.
Against this backdrop, ECPS Academy Summer School-2026 brings together leading scholars and policymakers to examine how populism and great-power competition are reshaping EU trade policy across both transatlantic and transpacific arenas.
It offers a unique opportunity to explore:
The future of EU–US trade relations in an era of populism
The strategic importance of the Indo-Pacific and the US–China trade rivalry for the EU
How global trade is being reshaped by geopolitics, security, and ideology
The populist discourse around trade, policy, and power, and its implications for the EU’s trade relations
It also allows participating in an enjoyable and dynamic simulation game on the EU’s trade relations, trying to bring policy suggestions.
You will learn and actively engage in discussions, develop your own policy ideas, take part in simulation games, have the opportunity to publish on ECPS venues, and become part of an international network working at the intersection of political economy, international relations, and populism studies.
Tentative Program
Day 1 – Monday, July 6, 2026
Theme: The EU in the Global Trade Order: From Liberalism to Geoeconomics
This opening day sets the conceptual stage. It introduces how EU trade policy evolved from embedded liberalism to strategic autonomy, and how trade is now intertwined with security and geopolitics. It also establishes the role of populism and domestic politics in reshaping trade preferences and legitimacy crises in Europe and beyond.
Lecture One: (15:00-16:30) –Evolution of EU Trade Policy and Global Trade Order
Lecturer:Arlo Poletti (Professor of International Relations at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento).
Moderator:Sonali Chowdhry (Ph.D., Research Associate, DIW Berlin, Fellow, Kiel Institute for the World Economy).
Lecture Two: (17:30-19:00) –Populism, Legitimacy, and the Politicization of Trade
Lecturer:Kent Jones (Professor Emeritus of Economics, Babson College).
Moderator: TBC.
Day 2 – Tuesday, July 7, 2026
Theme: EU–US Trade Relations under Pressure: Cooperation, Conflict, and Populism
Focuses on the transatlantic pillar, still central but increasingly unstable. It examines tariff disputes, regulatory divergence, and how populist and protectionist politics in the US and Europe challenge long-standing cooperation and WTO-based norms.
Lecture Three: (15:00-16:30) – Political Economy of EU–US Trade Relations
Lecturer: Erik Jones (Professor of European Studies and International Political Economy, Director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute and Non-resident Scholar at Carnegie Europe).
Moderator:Elaine Fahey (Professor of EU Law, City Law School, City St. Georges, University of London).
Lecture Four: (17:30-19:00) –Populism and the Erosion/Reconfiguration of Transatlantic Trade Cooperation
Lecturer: Alasdair Young (Professor and Neal Family Chair in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Tech).
Moderator: TBC.
Day 3 – Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Theme: The EU Between the US and China: Trade, Power, and Strategic Autonomy
This session introduces the triangular dynamic (EU–US–China) and how the EU navigates between partnership and rivalry. It highlights de-risking, economic security, supply chains, and competing models of globalization.
Lecture Five: (15:00-16:30) –The EU’s Policy Towards Asia Amidst Changing US–China Security and Trade Dynamics
Lecturer: Giulio Pugliese (Professor, King’s College London, Lecturer at the European University Institute).
Moderator:Anita Tusor (Researcher in International Relations, Charles University, Prague).
Lecture Six: (17:30-19:00) –Strategic Autonomy, De-risking, and EU Economic Security Tools
Lecturer:Reuben Wong (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore).
Moderator: TBC.
Day 4 – Thursday, July 9, 2026
Theme: The Indo-Pacific Turn: EU Trade Strategy in a Shifting Global Centre
This session shifts focus to the transpacific dimension, emphasizing that the future of trade is increasingly shaped in the Indo-Pacific. It explores how US strategies toward China and the region reshape global trade, and how the EU responds through diversification and partnerships.
Lecture Seven: (15:00-16:30) –US Indo-Pacific Strategy and Its Trade Implications
Lecturer:Kristi Govella (Associate Professor of Japanese Politics and International Relations in the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies and the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford).
Moderator:Andrea Carteny (Professor of History of International Relations, Sapienza University of Rome).
Lecture Eight: (17:30-19:00) –EU Engagement in the Indo-Pacific (FTAs, Partnerships, Strategic Positioning)
Lecturer:Axel Berkofsky (Associate Professor at the University of Pavia and Co-Head of the Asia Centre at ISPI).
Moderator:Sebastien Goulard (Ph.D., Manager of Cooperans, Consultant in EU-Asia connectivity projects).
Day 5 – Friday, July 10, 2026
Theme: The Future of EU Trade Power: Between Fragmentation and Leadership
This session will ask whether the EU can become a global trade power amid fragmentation, populism, and great-power rivalry. It also allows for normative and policy-oriented discussions.
Lecture Nine: (15:00-16:30) – Scenarios for the Future of Global Trade Governance (Fragmentation vs Reform)
Lecturer:Manfred Elsig (Professor of International Relations and Managing Director of the World Trade Institute of the University of Bern). (TBC)
Moderator: TBC
Lecture Ten: (17:30-19:00) –Can the EU lead? Policy Tools, Regulatory Power, and Global Influence
Lecturer:Markus Kotzur (Professor of European and International Law, Vice Dean for International Relations and Chair for Public Law, European and International Public Law, Hamburg University).
Moderator:Camille Nessel (Ph.D., Lecturer in Political Science Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)-CEVIPOL).
Methodology
The program will take place on Zoom, consisting of two sessions each day and will last five days. The lectures are complemented by small group discussions and Q&A sessions moderated by experts in the field. Participants will have the opportunity to engage with leading scholars in the field as well as with activists and policymakers working at the forefront of these issues.
The final program with the list of speakers will be announced soon.
Furthermore, this summer school aims to equip attendees with the skills necessary to craft policy suggestions. To this end, a simulation game will be organized on a pressing theme within the broader topic to identify solutions to issues related to the future of the EU trade relations.
Who should apply?
This course is open to master’s and PhD level students and graduates, early career researchers and post-docs from any discipline. The deadline for submitting applications is June 16, 2026. As we can only accept a limited number of applicants, it is advisable to submit applications as early as possible rather than waiting for the deadline.
The applicants should send their CVs to the email address ecps@populismstudies.org with the subject line: ECPS Summer School Application.
We value the high level of diversity in our courses, welcoming applications from people of all backgrounds.
Evaluation Criteria and Certificate of Attendance
Meeting the assessment criteria is required from all participants aiming to complete the program and receive a certificate of attendance. The evaluation criteria include full attendance and active participation in lectures.
Certificates of attendance will be awarded to participants who attend at least 80% of the sessions. Certificates are sent to students only by email.
Credit
This course is worth 5 ECTS in the European system. If you intend to transfer credit to your home institution, please check the requirements with them before you apply. We will be happy to assist you; however, please be aware that the decision to transfer credit rests with your home institution.
In this ECPS interview, Associate Professor Stefano Bottoni offers a compelling assessment of Hungary’s post-Orbán transition and the formidable challenges of democratic reconstruction after sixteen years of institutional capture and democratic backsliding. Rejecting simplistic notions of democratic restoration, Assoc. Prof. Bottoni argues that Hungary is not merely returning to a previous democratic order but attempting to “invent a new democracy for the twenty-first century.” Reflecting on European reintegration, anti-corruption efforts, institutional reform, civic education, and political culture, he contends that democracy cannot be rebuilt through legal changes alone. Instead, lasting democratic consolidation requires the cultivation of democratic citizens, the restoration of public accountability, and the creation of a new civic patriotism that reconciles national identity with European belonging.
The electoral defeat of Viktor Orbán and Fidesz in Hungary’s April 12, 2026 election has triggered one of the most consequential political transitions in contemporary Europe. After sixteen years of increasingly centralized rule, democratic backsliding, institutional capture, and persistent conflict with the European Union, the rise of Prime Minister Péter Magyar has generated renewed debate about democratic restoration, post-populist governance, and the prospects for rebuilding liberal-democratic institutions. Yet, as scholars of democratization have long emphasized, the removal of an incumbent regime marks only the beginning of a transition rather than its successful completion.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Associate Professor Stefano Bottoniof the University of Florence—one of the foremost historians of contemporary Hungary and author of the forthcoming book The Orbán Enigma—offers a deeply historical assessment of Hungary’s uncertain democratic future. Drawing on his extensive scholarship on authoritarianism, nationalism, post-communist transformation, and democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe, Assoc. Prof. Bottoni argues that the challenges confronting Hungary today may, in important respects, be even greater than those faced during the democratic transition of 1989–1990.
Rejecting simplistic narratives of democratic restoration, Assoc. Prof. Bottoni cautions that the current moment cannot be understood merely as a return to a pre-Orbán political order. “This is not simply about restoring something. Rather, it is about inventing a new democracy for the twenty-first century,” he argues. For Assoc. Prof. Bottoni, Hungary’s predicament is rooted not only in the institutional legacy of Orbánism but also in the country’s longer historical experience, which offers “only brief and largely unsuccessful democratic experiments, followed by a succession of autocratic, authoritarian, or fully totalitarian regimes.”
Throughout the interview, Assoc. Prof. Bottoni emphasizes that democratic reconstruction will require far more than personnel changes or legal reforms. While supporting the new government’s efforts to rejoin the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), recover frozen EU funds, and confront systemic corruption, he stresses that institutional renewal must be accompanied by a profound transformation of political culture. The task is particularly difficult because, as he bluntly observes, “you cannot build democracy with a state apparatus forged by an autocratic system.”
One of the interview’s central themes is the distinction between formal institutional change and deeper democratic consolidation. Assoc. Prof. Bottoni warns against the illusion that democracy can be rebuilt quickly. “Building democratic consciousness takes 15, 20, or even 30 years,” he notes, arguing that genuine democratization requires sustained efforts across education, civil society, media, and local government. In his view, the most important test of democratic success will not be found in constitutional amendments or anti-corruption prosecutions alone, but in whether Hungary can cultivate future generations of democratic citizens rather than passive subjects.
At the same time, Assoc. Prof. Bottoni offers a nuanced interpretation of the emerging political landscape. He suggests that Hungary may be witnessing the formation of a new political cleavage across Europe, one that increasingly pits pro-European and pro-integration forces against sovereigntist and anti-European movements. Within this evolving framework, he sees the possibility of a “new civic patriotism” that reconciles national identity with European belonging.
Perhaps most strikingly, Assoc. Prof. Bottoni contends that Hungary’s current transition is “far more difficult and controversial” than that of 1989–1990 because it must confront not only political legacies but also the entrenched networks of wealth, patronage, and oligarchic power created during the Orbán era. For this reason, he concludes that “the transition taking place today is even more difficult and more challenging” than Hungary’s post-communist democratic breakthrough.
This interview offers a timely and thought-provoking exploration of democratic resilience, institutional reconstruction, political accountability, and the long-term challenges of overcoming authoritarian legacies in twenty-first-century Europe. It also raises a broader question with implications far beyond Hungary: how can democracies rebuild themselves after years of democratic erosion without reproducing the very illiberal practices they seek to overcome?
Here is the revised version of our interview with Associate Professor Stefano Bottoni, lightly edited for clarity, readability, and publication.
This Is Not About Restoring Democracy—It Is About Inventing a New One
Supporters of the TISZA Party gather on Andrássy Avenue in Budapest during a national march led by Péter Magyar on Hungary’s March 15 national holiday, March 15, 2026. Photo: Istvan Balogh / Dreamstime.
Professor Bottoni, welcome! Much commentary has framed Hungary’s 2026 election as the end of an era. Yet democratic transitions are often easier to proclaim than to consolidate. How should we conceptualize the current moment: as regime change, democratic restoration, elite circulation, or merely the beginning of a prolonged and uncertain post-Orbán transition?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: As we are speaking now, at the beginning of June, almost two months have passed since the elections held on April 12, 2026. We can clearly see that the crushing electoral defeat of Viktor Orbán and his party, Fidesz, was followed by the rapid collapse of the power structure as well, which was unexpected. Political analysts in Hungary are now saying that a genuine transfer of power is taking place. It is a regime change that can, of course, be compared to the regime change of 1989–1990. But it is also very different from that. It unfolds in a different geopolitical context. We are no longer in the Cold War; we are in a very different position. It is also different because János Kádár’s Hungary in the late 1980s was an opening regime, whereas Viktor Orbán’s regime was a closing one, especially in its final years.
Democratic restoration is one of the terms you mentioned. It is very catchy and very tempting, but it probably does not capture the complexity of the task. This is not simply about restoring something. Rather, it is about inventing a new democracy for the twenty-first century in a country like Hungary, where, from a historical perspective, democracy does not really offer many functional models to follow.
After the First World War, after the Second World War, and after the end of the Cold War, Hungary experienced only brief and largely unsuccessful democratic experiments, followed by a succession of autocratic, authoritarian, or fully totalitarian regimes. So, we are not merely speaking about the consolidation or restoration of democracy. We are speaking about a demanding, but also intellectually stimulating, transition toward something new. Hungarians genuinely need something new. Of course, when searching for something new, you can turn to existing models, draw on your own history, and learn from foreign experiences. But first and foremost, you must understand what went wrong on previous occasions and then adapt democratic models to the realities of the country.
Without European Support, Serious Accountability Would Be Difficult to Achieve
Flags of Hungary and the European Union displayed together in Budapest. Hungary has been an EU member since 2004. Photo: Jerome Cid / Dreamstime
The new government has moved rapidly to restore relations with Brussels, reopen discussions on frozen EU funds, and announce Hungary’s intention to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. To what extent are these measures primarily symbolic gestures of European reintegration, and to what extent do they represent deeper institutional transformations?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: They are not merely symbolic, primarily because access to European funds and Hungary’s accession to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office are necessary political steps for consolidating Péter Magyar’s power.
Péter Magyar first needs the frozen EU funds in order to revitalize the declining Hungarian economy. In that sense, these resources are essential to the idea of a fresh start from an economic perspective. At the same time, joining the European legal framework for combating corruption provides the new government and the emerging power structure with far greater opportunities to address the corruption associated with Orbán’s system.
We should not forget that the Hungarian legal system remains largely controlled by individuals appointed by Viktor Orbán. As a result, it will be difficult to initiate a serious prosecution of crimes in Hungary until the country joins the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. From this perspective, European support is extremely important for the new Hungarian political order.
So, this is not simply a symbolic reunion with Europe. It is also a very well-conceived and, politically speaking, rewarding set of measures that Magyar must pursue to consolidate his own power.
You Cannot Build Democracy with a State Apparatus Forged by Autocracy
One of the central challenges facing the Magyar government is rebuilding institutions that many observers argue were systematically politicized over the last decade and a half. In comparative perspective, what are the greatest difficulties democratic governments face when attempting to depoliticize state institutions after prolonged periods of dominant-party rule?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: There are multiple challenges facing the new power structure. Let us begin with the most immediate one: the president of the republic. Tamás Sulyok, the current president, is a lawyer who previously served as president of the Hungarian Constitutional Court. He was a Fidesz appointee and, during the last two years, was essentially Orbán’s puppet. He did absolutely nothing to prevent the democratic crisis from unfolding. He remained silent on all the major political, moral, and legal issues surrounding Orbán’s power.
Magyar immediately called on him to resign before a formal procedure for his dismissal could be initiated by the new government. Of course, this creates the possibility of a serious institutional conflict. Forcing a president who was democratically elected by the Hungarian parliament to resign—or removing or impeaching him, because that is essentially what this amounts to—is not part of standard democratic practice, at least in Western Europe. For example, such a scenario would be virtually inconceivable in Germany. It is very difficult to explain to German lawyers how this could occur in a normal democratic setting. Unfortunately, Hungary today is not in a normal democratic condition.
The challenge, therefore, is to restore a more or less normal democratic order in the medium and long term by removing many individuals who were appointed by the previous regime solely on the basis of political allegiance. From an institutional perspective, this is not an elegant process. It represents a high degree of discontinuity and can create discomfort, because many people may perceive it as a purge. But it is what it is. Unfortunately, Magyar has very few alternatives, because you cannot build democracy with a state apparatus forged by an autocratic system. It is simply not possible. This is the very narrow path that Magyar must navigate, and it appears that he wants to move through it as quickly as possible.
At the moment, public support for this process is very strong. According to opinion polls, more than two-thirds of voters seem to support a rapid transition. That is what he wants to achieve. Afterwards, the real task begins: restoring democracy with new people. Once new people are in place, a new democratic framework must be built around them. At that point, it will no longer be possible to blame those appointed by Orbán, because they will have been removed—or will be removed—from key positions in the judiciary, the financial courts, the legal system, and the economic sphere.
Prosecutions will also begin against oligarchs and against those who made billions and billions of euros disappear. This is the huge difference between 1989 and 2026 in Hungary. In 1989, the struggle was about politics and ideology. It was about prosecuting crimes committed by the communist authorities—for example, after the 1956 Revolution. It was about the past.
In Hungary today, it is about money. It is not really about ideology. We are not prosecuting sovereignism or populism, because they cannot be prosecuted as such. They are debatable political positions. You cannot prosecute someone simply because he is a sovereignist or a populist, however we may define those terms.
But you can certainly prosecute an oligarch for the misappropriation of billions of euros. And if those oligarchs are closely connected to political power—and personally connected to former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—then we encounter the clear link between politics and business that was one of the defining features of the Orbán regime throughout its entire period in power since 2010.
For that reason, this transition will be far more difficult and controversial. It must address the challenge of transforming wealth accumulated through corruption back into public resources. This is a different task from that of 1989–1990, but it is no less significant. In some respects, I would argue that the transition taking place today is even more difficult and more challenging.
Building Democratic Consciousness Takes Decades, Not Election Cycles
The Hungarian case raises a broader theoretical question about democratic resilience. Can institutions that have undergone extensive partisan capture genuinely regain autonomy, or do they inevitably retain traces of the political order that created them?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: This is a huge issue, and I am not in a position to answer it now. In fact, I do not think anyone is in a position to answer it at this stage, because we do not yet have an empirical basis for doing so. That empirical basis will emerge in the coming months, following the top-level personnel reshuffle. Once that process has taken place, we will see what new people can do with these old institutions. Can they transform the institutional logic according to which these institutions operate, or can they not? This is a huge issue and a major question mark. At the moment, we do not have answers; we only have hopes.
My personal intuition is that a great deal of damage has been done. Even if one accepts the idea—which is not pessimistic but simply realistic—that such a regime change implies, first and foremost, educating people in democracy, that process takes 15, 20, or even 30 years. We should therefore expect such a transition, even if it is successfully implemented, to last several decades. It requires bringing together the media system, the educational system, public engagement, local administrations, civil society, and so on within a new way of thinking. Even if all these societal subsystems are interconnected through a new democratic mindset, it still takes several decades to achieve substantial results—not merely new Potemkin villages or superficial examples of democracy. After 1990, Hungary built a highly successful formal democracy with very little democratic substance.
The divergence between these two realities became dramatically evident after the 2008 financial crisis, when it became clear that the majority of the Hungarian population no longer supported liberal democracy as it had been presented to them after 1990. This is how Viktor Orbán became possible. If we do not want another Viktor Orbán—whether from the right, the far right, or even the left—to emerge and capture the state once again, and if we want to build a stable and sustainable democratic political culture, which would be something new in Hungary, then we must recognize that Hungary has never had such a stable and sustainable democratic political culture over the past hundred years or more.
If we want to build this, we have to take our time. We also need to be patient with ourselves, and we must ask for patience from our partners as well. Of course, it is possible to shorten the path toward becoming a more consolidated democracy. It is possible to perform well. But you cannot skip the necessary steps. You cannot avoid the intermediate phases involved in building a new democratic consciousness. You simply cannot.
Magyar Must Fight Corruption Without Creating Chaos
Péter Magyar speaks at a public demonstration near the Hungarian Parliament building in Budapest on April 6, 2024. Photo: Istvan Balogh / Dreamstime.
Prime Minister Magyar has promised anti-corruption reforms while simultaneously facing intense pressure to unlock billions of euros in frozen EU funds. How sustainable is this strategy politically if economic recovery becomes dependent upon satisfying external European conditions?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: He has to do both things at the same time. He has no choice. The Hungarian government and the new ruling elite can, rather amusingly, be described as a democratic one-party system. If we look at the polls, we can see that TISZA is now virtually above 70 percent, which is stunning. Fidesz is collapsing. They probably now have between 10 and 20 percent of genuine popular support, and they are still shrinking. Meanwhile, the far-right Mi Hazánk, or Our Homeland, which is represented in parliament and received 6 percent in the elections, seems unable to benefit from the collapse of Fidesz and remains stuck at around 5–6 percent.
So, we can speak of a democratic one-party system because we have a democratic party that is, paradoxically, in an almost unchallenged and unchallengeable position. They are in the best position to implement radical reforms because they cannot be challenged. But, of course, their responsibility is enormous, because they carry the full weight of difficult decisions on their own shoulders.
At the moment, there are no meaningful checks and balances through political competition. Fidesz cannot serve as a check and balance. When someone from Fidesz says, “You are doing this wrong,” the obvious response in parliamentary debates these days is, “I’m sorry, but after what you did to this country for sixteen years, be quiet.” That kind of response effectively closes every space for genuine political conversation.
But I understand your point. They have to do two very different and very difficult things simultaneously. First, they have to secure this money. I would say, whatever it takes, because Hungary’s financial and economic position is now so precarious that these 10-15 billion euros of fresh European funding are genuinely needed to fuel the economy. At the same time, they must send strong and unequivocal messages regarding corruption. Here I draw on my Italian background. I was born and raised in Italy. In 1993, the entire Italian political system collapsed under the weight of the anti-corruption campaign known as Mani Pulite—Clean Hands. It was a dramatic reshuffle. Eight thousand people were jailed, arrested, or placed in temporary custody. Entire parties that had dominated Italian political life for forty years—the Christian Democrats, the Socialist Party, the Liberal Party, and the Social Democratic Party—collapsed in little more than a year, between 1992 and 1993. And what did Italy get from all of this? We got Silvio Berlusconi and his long domination of Italian politics beginning in 1994.
Perhaps because I am a historian, and historians tend to be pessimistic, but also because I experienced this firsthand, I am acutely aware of how enthusiasm for an anti-corruption campaign can cause a democracy to derail in another direction, namely through chaos. Populism is often fueled by perceptions of chaos, by the feeling that things have become uncontrollable and that people must “take back control.” Berlusconi and his Forza Italia party successfully convinced many Italians that the chaos generated by the anti-corruption campaign was harmful, detrimental to the economy, and had to be stopped.
So Péter Magyar now has to carry out one of the most significant anti-corruption campaigns Europe has ever seen. I am not exaggerating. Experts on Hungary’s political economy consistently argue that the Orbán regime’s neopatrimonialism and appropriation of state resources are astonishing by European standards. These oligarchs cannot simply be allowed to walk away.
It is difficult to imagine that Viktor Orbán could still have a future in international politics. There are now rumors that he may be trying, with American support, to secure a senior position within the United Nations. That simply cannot happen. If it does, it would send a profoundly damaging message for democratic governance worldwide. It would suggest that you can cheat, deprive a country of its own resources, enrich yourself, and then simply leave office without any legal or political consequences. That cannot happen.
So, Magyar has to purge the former state apparatus—democratically, but still purge it. That means sending many people to jail, or at least confronting them with the prospect of jail. At the same time, he must prevent chaos from prevailing. The Hungarian public became accustomed to the stability of the system provided by Orbán. They would not tolerate a chaotic transition. You have to ensure at least the appearance of an orderly transition. This is what Magyar must deliver: democratic restoration of rights, an anti-corruption campaign, the prosecution of those who committed economic or ideological crimes, and action against those who organized what was perhaps the most remarkable Putin-era propaganda system in Europe.
It also means confronting those who helped support and finance populist and far-right parties across Europe. We now know that institutions such as Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Danube Institute in Budapest were central nodes in a transnational network connecting far-right actors across the Atlantic. This cannot be left unchallenged. At the same time, it must not lead to a chaotic transition, because that would be unbearable for the Hungarian public. It is an extremely difficult task. But it is something that can be done now, thanks to the enormous popular support that Magyar has gathered before and after the elections. He has to take advantage of this unique momentum.
Hungary Needs Publicly Funded and Politically Free Research
Several early initiatives—including joining the EPPO, strengthening the Integrity Authority, and reforming university foundations—appear designed to address longstanding rule-of-law concerns. Do these reforms represent technocratic adjustments, or do they amount to a fundamental redefinition of the relationship between state power, public accountability, and democratic governance?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: I am not currently part of the Hungarian higher education system, so I would not pretend to know these issues in their full depth. But what we can see is an unprecedented challenge. The government has to take back 22 formerly public universities across the country—not only in Budapest but also in the provinces—and transform them once again into public institutions.
What is the problem? The problem is that, as in many other European and non-European countries, Hungarian public higher education was severely underfunded. Salaries were miserable. Scholarships were limited. After these universities were transferred under the umbrella of semi-private, semi-public foundations, salaries increased. As a result, many people within Hungarian higher education now fear that returning under the umbrella of a poorly financed state could worsen the financial position of university professors and the Hungarian research system as a whole.
Of course, one can argue that European grants may once again become available to the Hungarian research system, and that is true. But we also know that this is a highly competitive environment. It is increasingly difficult to obtain EU research funding through the ERC, Horizon, or other programs. This is not helicopter money that automatically arrives to keep the system running.
In this respect, the coming months will allow us to test Péter Magyar’s commitment to a new set of priorities for the Hungarian government. I would say: less money for oligarchs, less money for stadiums and non-essential infrastructure, and much more money for public health and public education—from preschool all the way through universities and PhD programs. This commitment will be tested because the university system can only be successfully transformed back into a public system if substantial resources are invested in it. You cannot do it for free.
This challenge is not unique to Hungary; it exists in many European countries. Even if we reject the idea of partially privatizing the university system because we believe it undermines institutional independence and the capacity for critical thinking, we are still confronted with low salaries and a system that does not adequately reward performance. How do we make the system more effective and more attractive to young researchers without sacrificing democracy within it? This is yet another one of the great challenges.
I think the first steps taken by Magyar and by the Minister of Education and Technology, Zoltán Tanács, are moving in the right direction. They seem genuinely committed to this agenda, and I hope they continue along this path because Hungary has a great tradition in higher education and public research. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, for example, is now taking back control over research institutes that had previously been handed over to a questionably governed, half-public, half-private body. So, there is a major reshuffle taking place within the Hungarian research system.
Personally, as a former employee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, this is the part of the system I know somewhat better. There is a huge need for publicly funded and politically independent public research. The problem is funding. You cannot pay a university professor—as is currently the case in parts of the public sector—€1,000 per month. It is simply not possible. Salaries need to be adjusted to the current cost of living in Hungary, which is at least twice that amount.
The Greatest Mistake Hungarians Made Was Giving Politicians a Blank Check
Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, arrives for a meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels, Belgium, on June 22, 2017. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.
Democratic reconstruction often generates a paradox: governments must dismantle illiberal structures while avoiding the appearance of exercising illiberal power themselves. How can the Magyar government pursue institutional reform without reproducing the majoritarian logic it seeks to replace?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: As I tried to explain earlier, if we think seriously about this in the long run, and if we do not want to become democratic populists who pretend to build democracy on promises that cannot be delivered, then we have to accept the fact that it takes time. And time means not months, not even a couple of years, not even a single government cycle, but much more time—generations.
So, what can Magyar start now, and what does he have to start now? I hope he will begin by laying the foundations for a new democratic system. That means a new democratic framework for the education system, for example. New programs and curricular frameworks for the teaching of Hungarian language, literature, and history—the so-called ideological subjects. Not mathematics, of course, which remains more or less the same under every system, but social studies and civic education.
What does it mean to be a citizen in Hungary? What are the rights, commitments, and obligations of every citizen? What does it mean to live in a democracy? Democracy is not about the ombudsman. Of course, the ombudsman is a useful institution to have, but if people do not know how to turn to the ombudsman, what the institution is for, what fundamental rights are, or how they can be defended, then the whole thing becomes pointless. So, a huge effort has to be invested in building the mental preconditions that allow people to understand the long-term advantages of democracy over authoritarian rule.
Because we should not forget one thing. And this also helps answer your question about how democracy can be rebuilt without falling back into old authoritarian models. All the democratic and non-democratic systems that succeeded one another in Hungary over the last century—the Horthy regime in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, or the Kádár regime from the late 1950s until 1989—were not at all unpopular. They were highly successful in consolidating power, preserving power, and gathering remarkable public support.
Orbán himself always claimed democratic legitimacy. Of course, we can argue that the nearly 50 percent he received in almost every election up until April 12 was not entirely genuine because it was unfairly boosted by the misuse of state resources and state propaganda. But we cannot deny the fact that a substantial part of the Hungarian population genuinely believed in Viktor Orbán’s capacity to govern the country. The important point is that these people have not disappeared. They are still living among us.
It would be a mistake to forget that a substantial part of the country is still not mentally prepared to live in a democracy. People have to be patiently educated for it. We should not take for granted what is not, at least in my view, self-evident—that democracy can simply be restored by changing a few legal provisions or replacing one person with another at the head of an institution. Democracy is not about procedures. It is about how we imagine ourselves within society. What role do we imagine for the citizen? Is the citizen a subject of the state, or is he or she an equal partner in the social discourse?
What can we expect from Magyar? Of course, we know his past. He was a loyal associate of Viktor Orbán until 2022 or 2023. That much we know. Naturally, there are reasons to be skeptical. One can reasonably ask: how can someone who was once a loyal associate of Viktor Orbán suddenly discover the virtues of democracy? I think that is a legitimate concern. I do not want to play the role of the overly optimistic observer who dismisses such concerns as baseless. I cannot claim that. What I can claim is hope. Hope that a person like Péter Magyar, who went through what I would call a conversion to democracy—a painful one at that—and who spent two years in a full electoral campaign while facing an entire propaganda apparatus directed against him, has genuinely learned the difference between a functioning democracy and a fake one.
I also hope that the political community he has built, both from the top through his own charisma and from below through the TISZA Islands and the tens of thousands of people who, many for the first time in their lives, engaged in politics—joining a movement, collecting signatures, talking to their neighbors, trying to persuade others, becoming politically active—will not forget one of the most important democratic lessons.
One of the greatest democratic tasks in any country is to be able to control your politicians. You do not give them a blank check to use for whatever purpose they choose. That was the greatest mistake the Hungarian public made after 2010 with Viktor Orbán: they granted him unlimited credit. You cannot grant unlimited credit to anyone, even if you believe in them, even if you admire them. At least in Hungary, we have now seen that politicians can misuse such trust. They can exploit it. They can distort the public will. They can hollow out democratic institutions from within while relying on the democratic legitimacy that citizens themselves have granted them. I sincerely hope that this lesson—at least this one lesson—has now been learned in Hungary.
A New Civic Patriotism Is Emerging Alongside European Belonging
Hungary now finds itself in a unique position within Central Europe. Do you see the emergence of a new model of center-right governance that remains nationally oriented and culturally conservative while simultaneously embracing European integration and liberal-democratic institutions?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: I am not a political scientist myself. However, I do follow political science scholarship, and, as far as I can see, there is currently a major debate about the possible disappearance of the traditional right–left cleavage across much of the European Union. Instead, we seem to be witnessing the emergence of a different divide: mainstream, pro-European, and pro-integration forces on one side, and patriotic, sovereignist, pro-Russian, and anti-European forces on the other. If we take this new distinction seriously, we can see formerly center-right and center-left—or even left-wing—parties finding themselves on the same side of the political spectrum.
From this perspective, TISZA can be seen as part of this new experiment, and Hungary as a laboratory. In recent Hungarian history, we have often described Hungary as a laboratory of ideologies. Unfortunately, for most of the twentieth century, Hungary served as a laboratory for non-democratic ideologies. It would therefore be refreshing to see Hungary become a laboratory for something different.
Paradoxically, what we have today is a right-wing or center-right governing party that is, in some respects, the most progressive political project Hungary could have imagined. One really has the impression of living under a popular front, with many different parties and movements brought together—perhaps only temporarily—within a single broad political formation.
So, yes, this could be a sign that the old political divisions are no longer particularly useful, at least in this part of Europe and especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Take Romania, for example. Romania is facing a similar situation. What exactly is the Romanian Social Democratic Party today? In many respects, it appears just as populist as its opponents. Or consider Robert Fico, the Slovak prime minister and leader of a supposedly socialist party, whose positions have very little in common with what European socialists and social democrats advocate in Brussels and Strasbourg.
We are entering a new political landscape, and I think that TISZA and Péter Magyar fit quite naturally within it. It is possible that the political center of gravity is now much more right-wing—or at least much less left-wing—than it was twenty or thirty years ago. I would say that the average has shifted both to the right and toward a more nationally minded understanding of political identity.
Many foreign observers were struck on election night in Budapest by the widespread and entirely normal use of Hungarian songs, Hungarian flags, and Hungarian national symbols. But that is simply the reality. We live in a nationalized space. This is not just about Péter Magyar using national symbols. It is about ordinary Hungarians using them. And, I would argue, they do so without any toxic meaning attached to them. This is not about conquering other countries. It is not about seeking revenge for Trianon or for the territorial losses suffered after the First World War. It is simply the idea that being Hungarian is not a bad thing after all.
We like being Hungarian, just as Croats have every right to be proud of being Croatian, Serbs of being Serbian, Slovaks of being Slovak, Poles of being Polish, and so on. This is more about building what Jürgen Habermas called constitutional patriotism—a new patriotism grounded in a more civic and somewhat less ethnic understanding of the nation. This, too, is something new. Europe, as well as the European Union, is very much part of this process. It is impossible to imagine this new Hungarian patriotism without a strong sense of belonging to the European Union. The issue is no longer “we Hungarians versus the EU.” The idea is “we Hungarians within the EU.” The European Union has become inseparable from Hungary.
Today, this is true not only politically but also mentally. This is a new feature compared to twenty or thirty years ago, when such ideas still had to be explained. Now, especially among younger generations—those under thirty or forty—there is an instinctive sense of belonging to a larger European community. This no longer requires explanation. It has become part of the mental framework of these generations, regardless of their individual political opinions.
The State Must Return Where It Is Needed and Retreat Where It Is Not
Central European University building or CEU in Budapest on 27 July 2018.
Finally, if we revisit Hungary five years from now, what would convince you that the country has successfully completed a democratic transition? What concrete indicators should scholars watch most closely when evaluating whether democratic restoration has genuinely taken root?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: The first thing that comes to mind is the education system. History textbooks—or simply textbooks in general—are a very clear indicator of a country’s self-representation. A high school history textbook is compulsory. Students have to study it for their final examinations. It represents a compulsory body of knowledge about their own country. It is the self-representation that the state communicates to its citizens.
When I see that the Hungarian education system is striving to forge citizens rather than subjects—not young people who simply have to learn and memorize things, but individuals who are encouraged to think critically about them—that will be, for me personally, the sign that something has begun to change at a deeper level.
Only by cultivating new citizens—prospective citizens—and transforming today’s teenagers into future citizens over the next five, ten, or twenty years can Hungary seize the unique opportunity to overcome its long tradition of paternalism, nepotism, and state interference in the lives of ordinary people. So, I think this is the most important thing.
Then, of course, there is the legal system, corruption, and what I would call an education in private property and fair capitalism, which is also largely missing from the mental map of most Hungarians. For many Hungarians, the state is still seen as something that must provide a very broad range of services. There is a joke in Hungary nowadays: you have the state where you would not like it, and you do not have the state where you really need it.
For example, when you need a good hospital, you do not have good public hospitals. But you do have the state telling you how to live, how to procreate, and how to run your business. In other words, you have the state interfering in your life where it is not needed at all, while failing to be there for you as a citizen where you genuinely need its presence.
So, I think we have to reverse this balance by restoring the role of the state where it is truly necessary and removing it from areas where the private economy and civil society can perform more effectively.
In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja challenges conventional explanations of xenophobic violence in South Africa by underscoring the concept of “survival populism.” Rather than viewing anti-immigrant mobilization simply as irrational hatred or economic frustration, Dr. Solaja argues that it represents a decentralized form of grassroots political reasoning emerging from structural abandonment, fractured citizenship, and deep socio-economic inequality. Drawing on the legacies of apartheid, decolonial theory, and contemporary populism studies, the commentary explores how marginalized communities construct exclusionary notions of belonging in their struggle for resources, dignity, and recognition. By examining xenophobia as a political response to insecurity rather than merely a social pathology, Dr. Solaja offers a compelling reinterpretation of populism from below and highlights the profound crisis of citizenship, solidarity, and democratic inclusion in post-apartheid South Africa.
Familiar narratives about unemployment, criminality, poverty, and social frustration have been used repeatedly to account for recurrent attacks against foreign nationals in South Africa. Politicians, commentators, and sometimes even academics depict xenophobic violence as either “irrational hatred” or “spontaneous public anger” over economic decay. Such accounts, although not completely false, are analytically weak. They do not reflect the underlying political logic of anti-immigrant violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Xenophobia in this case is not only hatred toward foreigners; increasingly, it has come to constitute a form of grassroots political reasoning rooted in conditions of structural abandonment, economic precariousness, and fractured citizenship.
What we have witnessed in South Africa might best be described as survival populism: the everyday, decentralized form of exclusionary politics in which economically marginalized populations establish moral and territorial boundaries in an effort to safeguard their access to scarce resources, space, urban living, and social legitimacy. Unlike conventional populism mobilized by leaders with charismatic personalities in an electoral context, survival populism evolves horizontally through conversations, neighborhood watch meetings, community patrols, forums, taxi associations and informal markets, in addition to social networking sites. It is populism without populists; an everyday political reasoning that communities use to construct a definition of “the people” in contrast to outsiders.
The above understanding challenges popular thinking on populism within contemporary political theory. Most studies of populism concentrate on political actors of elite origin such as the United States’ Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, or Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who have mobilized nationalist resentment via an anti-elite and anti-immigrant stance (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). Within this context, populism is understood as an electoral strategy led by charismatic personalities. What takes place in South Africa is different in that xenophobic mobilization seldom appears through coherent ideologies and central leaders. Rather, exclusionary politics arise from what could be called everyday populism: everyday political reasoning that shapes a people against outsiders.
From Internal Foreigners to External Outsiders
This differentiation is critical because it exposes populism as not just a form of political expression occurring in parliaments, ballot boxes or rallies, but also an element that emerges from places of survival like informal settlements, townships economies, crowded taxi ranks and local markets where politics takes place through practical struggles.
The architecture of exclusion has much to do with the history of South Africa as not merely a racial but also a spatial and economic system defined by the containment of Black South Africans. Pass laws, migrant labor hostels, separate territorial structures, and fragmented spatial organization resulted in a society in which Black Africans were regarded as only temporary residents. For many decades, millions of Black South Africans were stripped of their permanent urban citizenship, yet they built South Africa’s cities through their labor.
Apartheid made many Black South Africans internal foreigners, with conditional residency in urban South Africa. Understanding the fact that Black South Africans were internal foreigners helps us realize how the modern form of xenophobia reproduces these spatial logics, with migrants presented as illegitimately possessing jobs, wealth and legitimate residency. The policing of migrants and their access to urban South Africa mirrors previous systems of apartheid governance.
One of the striking features of xenophobic attacks in South Africa is that they almost exclusively target foreign Africans from countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Nigeria, rather than European migrants and expatriates. This racial and national specificity of South African xenophobia reveals a history of unequal relations, the persistence of colonial hierarchies, and ideas of belonging that continue to shape post-apartheid South Africa (Mignolo, 2011). The most ironic and tragic fact is that it is precisely here—the place from which the international struggle against apartheid was championed and which was seen as a beacon of African liberation and pan-African unity—that a recurrent war against Africans takes place. The support that Africa provided in the struggle against apartheid has not been reciprocated with welcome and security for African immigrants in post-apartheid South Africa.
The Unfulfilled Promise of Democratic Citizenship
In 1994, the democratic dispensation promised inclusion, human dignity, and socio-economic justice. Yet political liberation has neither brought about structural transformation nor eliminated the socio-economic inequalities inherited from the apartheid state. South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, characterized by widespread poverty, high unemployment, and spatial segregation (Piketty, 2014). For many Black South Africans, formal citizenship and the promise of democratic rule remain shallow promises.
It is this disconnect between formal political inclusion and the lack of concrete socio-economic benefits for most South African citizens that helps explain how survival populism is born. While citizens exist on paper, they often fail to achieve basic human dignity. In a society where access to and the distribution of resources are fiercely contested, particularly where the state is absent in providing economic security, protection, and opportunities, people find themselves in conditions of chronic abandonment and exclusion. Xenophobia emerges as an ultimate response to exclusion from economic benefits in society, becoming a tool through which individuals establish an ethical claim to resources and place.
It is here that the township economy becomes an interesting phenomenon. While it provides alternative livelihoods, it also represents conditions of uncertainty, competition, and survival. Furthermore, it is a site where foreign migrants often display economic success, in part through the transnational networks and cooperative practices they share, as well as their lower overhead costs (Crush & Ramachandran, 2014). Their relative visibility within township economies allows them to appear as an important source of economic anxiety for some citizens in this society.
In many township spaces, foreigners and the shops they own are portrayed not merely as competitors but as those responsible for taking over opportunities. Such descriptions and narratives serve as a way of politicizing migrants as legitimate strangers who have illegitimately claimed a portion of the available resources, while local citizens have been abandoned and subjected to misery by their own government.
Here, a Laclauian understanding of populism becomes significant. According to Laclau, populism is essentially a political discourse structured around enmity between “the people” and their enemies (Laclau, 2005). In this context, “the people” are framed as deprived yet hard-working citizens of the South African state who have been excluded from its promises. Migrants are thus represented as foreigners who, despite lacking rights and a legitimate stake, have invaded the state and appropriated what rightfully belongs to South Africans.
Populism without Leaders: Informal Sovereignty from Below
The interesting dimension here is that no such political reasoning necessarily arises from the leadership of populist figures. Rather, it is reproduced within political networks on the ground, from street committees and neighborhood patrols to organizations like Operation Dudula, which not only advocate for stricter immigration policies but also actively patrol urban areas, monitor shops and businesses, and enforce exclusive boundaries, thereby performing informal sovereignty in the absence of legitimate state authority (Misago, 2019).
Such actions are a response to a deeper malaise within the post-apartheid state. It is clear that, in many cases, state institutions have become delegitimized; citizens, feeling neglected by the state, resort to popular measures to enforce governance. Thus, xenophobic movements are not merely attacks against immigrants but expressions of citizens’ anger over the state’s incapacity to provide. Communities assert control over their territory and defend it against perceived external threats.
However, an exclusively domestic reading of the popular dynamics of discontent obscures the decolonial underpinnings of xenophobic violence in South Africa. The reality of xenophobic violence is inextricably linked to a coloniality of power (Quijano, 2007) that persists beyond the period of colonial rule and continues to value and categorize people according to histories of colonial experience. African immigrants are often despised simply because they are African and are treated by many South Africans in ways similar to how they themselves would have been treated by colonial rulers.
This means that, in a tragic sense, one formerly oppressed population has turned against another. This has much in common with what Frantz Fanon warned about decades ago in The Wretched of the Earth—that without genuine redistribution, liberation could transform former victims into oppressors themselves.
Survival populism arises precisely in this vacuum of fractured solidarity. As citizenship loses its material content due to ever-increasing economic insecurity, a range of alternative political communities based on exclusion are formed by ordinary citizens. Migrants then become convenient targets onto whom structural frustrations can be projected. Xenophobia, in this sense, is not the absence of politics; it is politics under conditions of abandonment. Yet, while the political logic of xenophobia may be recognizable, its moral implications cannot be condoned.
Migrants themselves often become victims of precisely the neoliberal inequalities from which poor South Africans suffer. Many have fled persecution, economic disaster, or armed conflict in neighboring countries, only to be subjected to violence and exclusion in South Africa. Ultimately, xenophobic mobilizations provide scapegoats that divert anger away from structural causes—corruption, inequality, unemployment, and policy failures—and toward vulnerable migrants and poor South Africans. However, ignoring these factors will result in underestimating the significance of xenophobia as a political practice and force.
Xenophobia can persist only as long as it provides a language through which the abandoned can voice their grievances, articulate a form of resistance, and renegotiate access in contexts where formal citizenship offers little tangible substance—in other words, as a distorted political response to systemic marginalization. The global significance of such a phenomenon cannot be overstated.
The Global Lessons of Survival Populism
Everywhere across the globe—from Europe to Latin America, across Africa and into Asia—increasing economic precariousness can foster exclusionary ideologies targeting migrants and minority groups. However, South Africa is remarkable because it is the historically oppressed Black majority that is involved, largely without elite populist rhetoric or direction. This challenges our conventional ways of understanding populism, nationalism, and citizenship. While populism is usually understood in elite- and election-driven terms, in South Africa it demonstrates how a populist discourse can emerge from the ground up, be highly localized, and center on survival.
A populist mode of address can emerge whenever abandoned people face the struggle for self-defense and access to resources under conditions of precarity. It is South Africa’s greatest post-apartheid tragedy that populations once excluded under the apartheid system now themselves construct an “outsider” in order to re-establish their own space through exclusion.
Xenophobic violence is a testament to a deeper crisis of belonging within the democratic framework and to the lack of transformation of apartheid’s economic landscape. This is a world in which citizenship and political freedom coexist with mass abandonment, a world where the challenge lies not only in containing migration and the violence that accompanies it, but also in reforming society so that citizenship offers material benefits, the capacity to exercise and enjoy the material aspects of citizenship is more equitably distributed, and an inclusive sense of belonging becomes the norm rather than exclusion. Until that happens, survival populism will remain one of the defining languages of the post-apartheid urban sphere.
References
Crush, J., & Ramachandran, S. (2014). “Xenophobic violence in South Africa: Denialism, minimalism, realism.” Migration Policy Series, 66, 1–35.
Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.
Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason. Verso.
Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton University Press.
Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.
Misago, J. P. (2019). “Political mobilisation as the trigger of xenophobic violence in post-apartheid South Africa.” African Studies Review, 62(4), 111–135.
Mudde, C. & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
Neocosmos, M. (2010). From “foreign natives” to “native foreigners”: Explaining xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. CODESRIA.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.
Quijano, A. (2007). “Coloniality and modernity/rationality.” Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168–178.
In this commentary, Yacine Boubia examines why political disinformation has become one of the defining challenges of contemporary democratic life. Moving beyond conventional explanations that focus on misinformation as a mere failure of fact or technology, Boubia argues that disinformation increasingly functions as a mechanism of political identity formation. Within contemporary populist politics, false narratives often derive their power not from their factual accuracy but from their ability to reinforce collective belonging, distrust of institutions, and emotional engagement. Drawing on examples from the United States, Brazil, Hungary, India, and other democratic contexts, the commentary explores how digital media ecosystems, affective polarization, and populist communication have transformed the relationship between truth, politics, and democratic legitimacy. The result, Boubia warns, is the fragmentation of shared public reality and the erosion of the deliberative foundations upon which democratic societies depend.
Political disinformation has become one of the defining anxieties of contemporary democratic life. Governments increasingly legislate against it, social media companies develop moderation policies intended to contain it, and fact-checking organizations work continuously to identify and correct false claims circulating online. Yet despite the multiplication of these mechanisms, disinformation not only persists but often appears politically resilient. In some cases, attempts to debunk falsehoods seem to reinforce the political narratives they were intended to weaken.
The persistence of disinformation suggests that the phenomenon cannot be understood simply as a technological malfunction or as the result of insufficient access to accurate information. Nor can it be reduced to the assumption that democratic publics have suddenly become incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood. Such explanations remain insufficient because they misunderstand the political function disinformation increasingly performs within contemporary populist politics.
The central issue is not merely that false information circulates. Falsehood has always existed within political life. Rumors, conspiracies, propaganda, and manipulated narratives long predate the digital era. What distinguishes the contemporary moment is the transformation of the relationship between political identity, media consumption, and the perception of reality itself. Increasingly, political information is consumed less as neutral knowledge than as symbolic confirmation of collective belonging.
Within this context, disinformation often functions not primarily as a factual proposition requiring verification but as a mechanism of identity formation. It tells political communities who they are, who threatens them, and which institutions can no longer be trusted. The emotional and symbolic dimensions of such narratives frequently matter more politically than their empirical coherence.
The Populist Construction of Reality
At the heart of contemporary populist politics lies a deeply antagonistic understanding of democratic society. Politics is framed not as competition between legitimate ideological alternatives within a shared democratic framework, but as a moral struggle between a virtuous and authentic people on one side and corrupt elites on the other. This binary structure does not merely organize political preferences. It also reshapes the criteria through which truth itself is evaluated.
When populist leaders denounce mainstream media as “fake news,” portray judicial institutions as politically compromised, or present experts and academics as detached ideological actors, they are not simply criticizing specific institutions. They are constructing an alternative political epistemology — an alternative framework for determining who possesses legitimate authority to define reality.
Within this framework, distrust becomes politically productive. Suspicion toward institutional information sources functions as proof of political lucidity. The citizen who rejects mainstream narratives demonstrates independence from allegedly manipulated systems of information. Consequently, disinformation often succeeds not because it is universally believed in a literal sense, but because it reinforces existing emotional and political identities.
This helps explain why factual corrections frequently fail to reduce the circulation of false narratives. For many politically polarized audiences, fact-checking institutions themselves have become incorporated into the antagonistic political narrative. A correction issued by mainstream media may therefore strengthen rather than weaken distrust, since it appears as further evidence of elite coordination against the political community with which individuals identify.
The issue is therefore not simply informational. It is relational and symbolic. Political trust itself becomes fragmented.
Emotional Politics and the Collapse of Shared Reality
The transformation of political communication over the last two decades has intensified these dynamics considerably. Digital communication environments reward immediacy, emotional intensity, and visibility rather than reflection or deliberation. Content capable of generating outrage, fear, indignation, or moral conflict circulates more rapidly and more widely than nuanced analysis or institutional communication.
This transformation has altered the emotional structure of democratic politics.
Contemporary political communication increasingly functions according to the logic of affective mobilization. Citizens are not merely encouraged to support political programs or ideological projects; they are encouraged to consume politics emotionally and permanently. Anger, resentment, humiliation, fear, and cultural anxiety become continuous mechanisms of political engagement.
Social media platforms play a central role in this transformation. Their economic models depend fundamentally on maximizing user engagement, and emotionally activating content systematically generates higher levels of interaction than neutral or procedural information. Algorithms consequently privilege content capable of provoking strong emotional responses, creating information ecosystems increasingly organized around visibility, conflict, and polarization.
Under such conditions, populist communication acquires structural advantages. Simplified narratives opposing “the people” to enemies, elites, immigrants, globalists, or corrupt institutions adapt particularly effectively to digital environments privileging emotional intensity and rapid symbolic confrontation. Donald Trump’s communication style represented one of the clearest manifestations of this transformation. His political visibility depended not on maintaining ideological consistency or factual precision but on sustaining permanent symbolic conflict. Through X (Twitter), rallies, media provocation, and continuous attacks against institutional actors, Trump transformed political communication into a form of ongoing spectacle in which emotional engagement became more politically valuable than deliberative persuasion.
Yet Trump was not an isolated phenomenon. Comparable dynamics emerged across multiple democratic contexts. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines all deployed communication strategies combining direct digital engagement, hostility toward institutional mediators, and emotionally polarized narratives opposing authentic national communities to corrupt elites or threatening outsiders.¹
While the specific ideological content differs substantially across these contexts, the communicative logic remains remarkably similar. Political legitimacy increasingly derives from claims of authenticity, emotional proximity, and symbolic confrontation rather than institutional mediation or technocratic competence.
Media Visibility and the Spectacle Imperative
The contemporary media environment further amplifies these tendencies because visibility itself has become one of the central currencies of political power.
Twenty-four-hour news cycles and platform competition create continuous pressure for emotionally stimulating and conflict-driven content. Political actors capable of generating spectacle acquire disproportionate communicative advantages regardless of the substantive coherence of their positions. Outrage becomes economically profitable.
This dynamic was visible throughout the 2016 American presidential campaign. Research conducted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center demonstrated that Trump received extraordinary levels of media attention during the Republican primaries, often dominating news cycles despite relatively limited institutional support within the Republican establishment.² Coverage focused overwhelmingly on conflict, provocation, and campaign drama rather than substantive policy analysis.
Trump himself appeared highly conscious of this relationship between media economics and political visibility. In 2017, he remarked that television networks and newspapers depended heavily on his presence because “without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.”³ Although characteristically provocative, the statement reflected an important structural reality. Political spectacle had become deeply integrated into the economic logic of contemporary media systems.
This integration creates a paradox increasingly visible across democratic societies. Media institutions frequently denounce populist disinformation while simultaneously benefiting economically from the audience engagement it generates. Populist actors attack mainstream media as corrupt enemies of the people while simultaneously depending upon those same institutions for visibility and political amplification. The result is a mutually reinforcing cycle of outrage, polarization, and permanent symbolic conflict.
The Fragmentation of Democratic Public Space
One of the most significant consequences of digital political communication has been the fragmentation of shared public space itself. Traditional mass media systems, despite their limitations and ideological biases, historically exposed large segments of the population to relatively similar informational environments. Citizens consuming the same newspapers or television broadcasts could still disagree politically while operating within partially shared factual frameworks.
Contemporary digital ecosystems increasingly undermine those shared frameworks. Individuals now inhabit highly personalized informational environments shaped by algorithms, ideological preferences, and social networks. Political communities consume different sources, circulate different narratives, and often interpret political reality through entirely incompatible symbolic frameworks.
The consequence is not simply disagreement. Democratic societies have always contained disagreement. The deeper issue is the erosion of common epistemic reference points necessary for democratic deliberation itself.
When citizens no longer agree on which institutions possess legitimacy to verify information, political conflict risks becoming increasingly detached from deliberative negotiation. Politics transforms into a struggle between competing realities rather than competing interpretations of shared reality.
Under such conditions, democratic polarization becomes self-reinforcing. Every institutional intervention risks being interpreted through preexisting antagonistic narratives. Judicial rulings become evidence of political conspiracy. Journalistic investigations become proof of media manipulation. Electoral outcomes themselves become vulnerable to accusations of illegitimacy.
Disinformation therefore thrives not simply because false information circulates more effectively online, but because democratic publics increasingly lack shared mechanisms for collectively arbitrating truth claims.
Beyond Fact-Checking
None of this implies that factual accuracy no longer matters. Democratic societies remain dependent upon institutions capable of producing reliable information and sustaining informed public debate. Journalistic verification, academic expertise, and independent investigative institutions remain indispensable democratic resources. Yet the limitations of purely informational responses to disinformation have become increasingly visible.
Fact-checking alone cannot resolve political conflicts rooted in identity, emotional polarization, and institutional distrust. Correcting false claims does not automatically rebuild confidence in the institutions producing those corrections. Indeed, in highly polarized environments, such interventions may reinforce existing suspicions among audiences already convinced that institutional actors operate according to hidden ideological agendas.
The challenge confronting contemporary democracies is therefore not solely technological or informational; It is political and cultural. Democratic systems increasingly struggle to maintain the conditions necessary for shared public deliberation in environments characterized by fragmentation, emotional mobilization, and permanent symbolic conflict. The issue is not simply how to eliminate falsehood, but how to preserve forms of political coexistence within societies where citizens increasingly inhabit different informational and emotional realities.
The rise of contemporary populist disinformation reveals less about the irrationality of democratic publics than about the transformation of political communication itself. In an age defined by digital visibility, affective polarization, and fragmented media ecosystems, political identity increasingly shapes perceptions of truth more powerfully than truth shapes political identity.
Until democratic societies confront the emotional, symbolic, and communicative transformations underlying this crisis, disinformation will remain not an anomaly within democratic politics, but one of its defining features.
Footnotes
¹ Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Benjamin Moffitt. (2016). The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
² Thomas E. Patterson. (2016).“Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race: Trump’s Rise, Sanders’ Emergence, Clinton’s Struggle,” Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, June 13, 2016.
³ Donald Trump, quoted in Tom Jones, “Does the Media Miss Donald Trump?” Poynter, March 23, 2021.
Giving an interview to the ECPS, veteran Turkish political analyst, legal expert, author, and poet Dr. Ümit Kardaş argues that Turkey is experiencing not merely democratic backsliding but a profound constitutional rupture that has pushed the country toward what he calls a “form of pre-1876 absolutism.” Reflecting on the judicial intervention into the CHP congress, the imprisonment of opposition figures, and the growing use of courts as instruments of political control, Dr. Kardaş contends that the constitutional order has effectively ceased to function, elections and representation have lost much of their democratic substance, and the regime has evolved into a system of “civil absolutism.” He further warns that Turkey has become a “might makes right regime” sustained through arbitrariness, coercion, and a permanent state of exception. Yet he also argues that democratic renewal remains possible through a new social contract and a comprehensive process of democratic reconstruction.
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), veteran Turkish legal expert, academician, author, and poet Dr. Ümit Kardaş argues that Turkey is undergoing a profound constitutional and political rupture that extends far beyond the recent judicial intervention into the Republican People’s Party (CHP). According to Dr. Kardaş, the annulment of the CHP’s 2023 congress, the imprisonment of opposition figures such as Ekrem İmamoğlu, and the growing use of judicial mechanisms against political opponents are not isolated developments but symptoms of a broader transformation in the nature of the regime itself.
Recent events have intensified concerns that Turkey is entering a new phase of authoritarian consolidation. The court decision overturning the CHP congress that elected Özgür Özel and reinstating former leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu has triggered a leadership crisis within the country’s main opposition party, while legal pressure on opposition municipalities and political actors continues to mount. Against this backdrop, questions are increasingly being raised about the future of electoral competition, constitutional governance, and democratic representation in Turkey.
In this wide-ranging interview, Dr. Kardaş contends that Turkey has effectively “returned to a form of pre-1876 absolutism,” arguing that although a constitution formally exists, it no longer functions as a meaningful constraint on power. He maintains that “the constitution is being violated almost on a daily basis,” that “the social contract has, in a sense, disappeared,” and that the country is moving beyond competitive authoritarianism toward what he describes as a system of “civil absolutism.”
Dr. Kardaş further argues that elections and political representation have been stripped of much of their democratic substance, while opposition parties are increasingly prevented from functioning as autonomous political actors. In his view, the regime has evolved into a “might makes right regime,” sustained through arbitrariness, coercion, and the gradual erosion of legal guarantees. He also warns that the concentration of power, the weakening of judicial independence, and the normalization of a permanent state of exception have generated a deep crisis of legitimacy and a widespread sense of political helplessness within society.
At the same time, Dr. Kardaş insists that Turkey’s problems can no longer be resolved through limited reforms or institutional patchwork. Instead, he argues that the country requires a fundamentally new democratic foundation based on a “new social contract” capable of bringing together all segments of society within a genuinely pluralist constitutional order. As he puts it, “Turkey needs a new process of reconstruction” because it is “in no position to move forward through reforms or by patching things up here and there.”
In this interview, Dr. Kardaş discusses constitutional breakdown, judicialized politics, opposition fragmentation, democratic backsliding, legitimacy, decentralization, the Kurdish question, and the prospects for democratic reconstruction in contemporary Turkey.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Dr. Ümit Kardaş, translated from Turkish and lightly edited for clarity, readability, and publication.
A Court Cannot Invalidate What the Supreme Election Council Has Finalized
Özgür Özel, leader of Turkey’s main opposition CHP and a recent target of political judicial intervention, attends the inauguration of a cultural center named after the late Manisa Metropolitan Mayor Ferdi Zeyrek. Photo: Idil Toffolo / Dreamstime.
Dr. Ümit Kardaş, welcome. Should the “absolute nullity” (mutlak butlan) ruling regarding the CHP congress be viewed merely as an internal party legal dispute, or does this decision signal a broader regime transformation in which electoral law, political representation, and constitutional legitimacy are being redefined in Turkey?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: Of course, the latter. We cannot view this as merely an internal party dispute. It is true that one of the most significant deficiencies of our democracy is the absence of internal party democracy. However, what has recently occurred must certainly be regarded as a violation of the constitutional order and the Constitution itself.
This is because elections take place under the guarantee of legal certainty and under the supervision and oversight of judges. This is how the process operates. It is finalized through the decisions of the district electoral board, the provincial electoral board, and ultimately the Supreme Election Council. This is a constitutional arrangement. Former CHP presidential candidate Muharrem İnce has also pointed this out. Article 79 of the Constitution is very clear.
Election results must be legally finalized in order to ensure stability. Otherwise, everyone would object to something, and chaos would emerge. For this reason, electoral law constitutes a completely separate legal sphere. It is not possible for any other authority to review, audit, or invalidate decisions that have been finalized by the Supreme Election Council.
If you are doing this through the ordinary judiciary, through a court that lacks jurisdiction, and obtaining such a result, then it has no meaning. Legally, this amounts to “absolute nullity” (mutlak butlan). Nothing built upon such a legal void can be lawful or valid. Such a situation can only produce chaos, instability, and unrest.
There Is a Constitution, but It Is Not Being Implemented
You stated in a post on X that Turkey has “regressed to the pre-1876 period of constitutional absence.” How do you conceptualize the current political regime, as distinct from classical authoritarianism? Is the process unfolding in Turkey better explained through Carl Schmitt’s theory of the “state of exception,” or through the contemporary literature on populist authoritarianism?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: This needs to be explained in the following way. Carl Schmitt associates the exception and the state of exception with law; he evaluates it within the framework of law. Walter Benjamin, by contrast, describes it as a zone of lawlessness outside the law. When I say that Turkey has returned to the pre-1876 period, I am referring to the absolutism of that era. At that time, there was no constitution. We adopted our first constitution, the Kanun-i Esasi, in 1876. In fact, even 1876 was a late date. Many of the provinces affiliated with us had already acquired their own national identities and adopted constitutions much earlier. In other words, with 1876, you place limits on absolutism.
When you look at the present situation, there is a constitution, but it is not being implemented in practice. In fact, the constitution is being violated almost on a daily basis. Under such circumstances, it is not possible to say that the regime rests upon a constitutional foundation.
Given the social polarization and tensions that exist today, it is equally impossible to speak of harmony or consensus. In other words, the social contract has, in a sense, disappeared. In that respect, we have returned to a form of pre-1876 absolutism. This is because those exercising executive power now dominate everything and conduct the process to a large extent in an arbitrary manner.
Of course, when examining this issue, I think one must begin with the founding of the Republic. At the core of the Republican regime lies a monist ideology based on the Turkish-Islamic synthesis. This monist ideology has been reinforced and preserved up to the present day. Whenever attempts were made to move beyond it—that is, whenever efforts were made to replace this monist regime with a more pluralist one, in which legal rights and freedoms would be more fully guaranteed and a more libertarian order established—there were repeated military interventions. These interventions caused setbacks and once again served to reinforce the regime. Later, when political governments stepped beyond these red lines, they too were threatened and pulled back within the established boundaries.
In this regard, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government initially offered hope. It claimed that it would advance in harmony with the European Union, implement the Copenhagen criteria, and build a more democratic regime governed by the rule of law. This genuinely gave many of us hope. Indeed, it was supported up to a certain point. However, particularly after the December 17–25, 2013 corruption investigations and subsequently the July 15, 2016 coup attempt, the regime embarked on a path of re-entrenching and reproducing itself, almost with the logic of a counter-coup.
This suggests that throughout our century-long experience, the monist ideology based on the Turkish-Islamic synthesis has occasionally appeared to be in retreat, only to resume its course shortly thereafter. With the People’s Alliance (Cumhur İttifakı or AKP-MHP alliance), this process became even more firmly entrenched.
You come to power with certain promises. You promise more democracy, more law, and greater prosperity. When you arrive in office, you try to implement those promises. But events unfold in such a way that, while you believe you have captured the state, the state captures you instead, reshapes you in its own image, and draws you within its own boundaries.
This has perhaps become an unbearable burden. As the regime has tried to secure its own legitimacy, almost nothing has remained upon which that legitimacy can be based. As a result, hardening has steadily intensified; repression and coercion have been applied with increasing intensity. Turkey has experienced this throughout roughly the last hundred years, and it continues to experience it today.
The Opposition Failed to React When the Kurds Were Targeted
Selahattin Demirtaş, a Kurdish political leader and prominent rival of President Erdoğan, has been imprisoned since November 4, 2016. Photo: Sedat Güleç.
Do you see the judicial intervention against the CHP as a new stage in the trustee regime imposed on the Kurdish political movement in the past, the practice of party closures, and broader mechanisms of “political liquidation through the judiciary”? How has the opposition’s long-standing failure to mount a sufficiently strong objection to these practices contributed to the current situation?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: Of course, there is something else that needs to be considered here. Within the boundaries that have been drawn, it is not possible to imagine and implement a pluralist regime. Political parties, that is, opposition parties, appeared to exist. But their functions also remained within these red lines. In other words, politics became incapable of solving problems. And it still is.
Of course, the state exercised enormous violence against the Kurds, against their political demands and political organizations. It suppressed them. Perhaps even more severe things happened than what is now being done to the Republican People’s Party (CHP). Trustees were appointed. Yet we did not see the opposition react to this in a comprehensive manner. It was brushed aside with a few minor statements. In other words, the opposition also failed to fulfill its duty here. As a result, this process eventually turned toward the CHP.
What I mean is that political parties did not genuinely act as an opposition. Even today, we can see that there is no particularly strong unity. There are various statements and declarations, but these are not enough. Then a series of setbacks begins. Because the regime is so powerful that it prevents opposition parties from uniting around certain principles and is able to push them backward. This is Turkey’s problem. The opposition, too, failed to perform its function properly. It was unable to react where it should have reacted. It always remained on the line of thinking: “They are doing it to them; they are not doing anything to us.”
Political parties in Turkey are structured in the following way: they operate within a monist framework based on the Turkish-Islamic synthesis. They all become nationalist parties. Look, someone says, “I am a left-wing party,” yet a vein of nationalism emerges from within it. That is why we need to change this paradigm, this mentality. We must overcome it. We must move beyond it and transition to a pluralist regime—that is, to a participatory democracy and a system based on the rule of law. But with this mentality and with this opposition structure, there is no possibility of achieving that.
So how can it happen? A new political idea and a new political actor must emerge. This is, in fact, what the masses long for. People want justice, they want law, they want rights, they want social welfare, they want economic prosperity, they want equality, they want equality before the law, and they want freedom. These are genuinely the things that people want today. Because there is both economic deprivation and a restriction of freedoms, and there is neither law nor justice.
Now there is a need for a political actor capable of channeling this reaction and this anger. There is a need for a vanguard force. The matter has now moved beyond political parties. It has been left to the will of the people, to the people’s choice. This is also why Özgür Özel is being targeted and threatened. It is related to his desire to move slightly beyond the line that has been prescribed. The regime does not want to allow that. Within its own plan and program, it wants to carry the process forward through Abdullah Öcalan, Devlet Bahçeli, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, while incorporating the other political parties into this framework as well.
This Intervention Is Entirely Null and Void in Legal Terms
Despite the constitutional provision that designates the Supreme Election Council (YSK) as the “final authority” in electoral law, what kind of rupture does the intervention of the ordinary judiciary in the CHP congress create in terms of the separation of powers and the rule of law? Can this situation be explained through the concepts of “judicial usurpation of authority” and “legal nullity”?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: I regard this as a case of nonexistence. In fact, I regard it as a state of nothingness. We are now living in a state of nothingness. What matters now is how we are going to fill this void and emptiness.
From this point on, I do not engage in these discussions. When I watch them, I find it difficult even to continue watching. Various comments are being made as if that court decision were valid. People debate whether this or that will happen depending on the next court ruling. I see these as meaningless discussions. Turkey is genuinely in a state of nothingness.
We will now see how we are going to emerge from this situation, and we will discuss it. We will see in which direction this process evolves. From this perspective, I certainly believe that this intervention is entirely null and void in the legal realm.
Opposition Parties Are Allowed to Oppose Only Within Prescribed Limits
Do you think that the leadership crisis unfolding along the Özgür Özel–Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu axis is part of the government’s strategy to fragment and redesign the opposition? Are opposition parties in Turkey ceasing to be “autonomous political actors” in the classical sense?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: Of course I do. There is undoubtedly an intervention. This is now very clear and obvious. It can be seen that, in order to ensure Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s re-election, a kind of political “clearing operation” is being carried out. What is being done? Potential rivals and candidates are being eliminated. Ekrem İmamoğlu’s university diploma is being annulled. Perhaps something will also be done against Özgür Özel. We do not know.
In addition, the CHP, which is the most ambitious party and currently the leading party, is also being sidelined and divided. Therefore, this is genuinely an intervention. I see it as an operation aimed at ensuring the continuation of the current regime with its current actors. As I mentioned earlier, opposition parties are not autonomous entities. They are parties that are allowed to engage in opposition only to the extent permitted within the regime.
The Electoral Mechanism Has Been Reduced to a Formality
Opposition party deputies, members and the members of civil society organisations had to guard the ballots for days to prevent stealing by the people organized by Erdogan regime in Turkey. The photo was shared by opposition deputy Mahmut Tanal’s Twitter account @MTanal during the Turkish local elections on March 31, 2019.
Considering together the arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the operations against CHP municipalities, the appointment of trustees to DEM Party municipalities, and now the intervention in the CHP congress, is it still possible to say that elections in Turkey retain their character as a genuine mechanism for changing political power?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: No, it is not. Nor will it be possible from this point onward. I am saying that elections and representation no longer exist in any meaningful sense.
Can we still trust the elections that will be held? Can we trust that there will be no intervention in those elections and their results? For this reason, representation itself has been crippled.
In other words, this is a period of nothingness in which elections and representation no longer exist. There is nothing left. There is no constitution either. There is no possibility of expecting anything from this situation.
That is why I think this way. From now on, the mechanism of elections and representation will no longer perform any real function. It will remain merely as a formal mechanism envisaged for the continuation of the regime.
Indeed, while criticizing the opposition, it is necessary to point this out: the results of the 2017 referendum. As you know, two million unstamped ballots were deemed valid. At that point, the country should have been shaken to its core. The main opposition, and the leader of the main opposition, should have pursued this matter relentlessly. Instead, today we are realizing how severely this process was compromised and how little importance was attached to it.
The Regime Has Exhausted Its Capacity to Produce Legitimacy
In your writings, you frequently use the concepts of a “crisis of legitimacy” and the “collapse of the foundational consensus.” In your view, is the problem Turkey faces today merely the instrumentalization of law, or has the state also exhausted its capacity to produce legitimacy?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: Of course, its capacity to produce legitimacy has also been exhausted. The state can no longer generate internal legitimacy. Because you are obliged to fulfill the minimum requirements of democracy. Elections are held, representation is established, and as a result of elections a government comes to power and carries out its policies. This provides you with legal legitimacy. But real legitimacy is related to your practices and policies.
If you violate the constitution, abolish the separation of powers, destroy the rule of law, eliminate the right to a fair trial, and restrict rights and freedoms, you lose your legitimacy. That is what legitimacy is. You lose it afterward. In other words, winning an election does not always mean that you possess legitimacy.
Now, in Turkey, the government is trying to derive its legitimacy not from within, but from outside. From whom? It is trying to obtain it from Trump in the United States. Steve Bannon already said this: “We are giving him legitimacy.”
This is something tragic. It is a sad situation. You are deriving your legitimacy from Trump, but Trump himself is not legitimate. In fact, Trump’s own legitimacy is open to debate. So now you are trying to obtain legitimacy from outside, from a source that itself lacks legitimacy.
That is the issue of legitimacy. And I think it is very important. Because the reactions of the people are also related to the presence or absence of that legitimacy. If you possess legitimacy, you become a more peaceful, more stable society living in harmony. There would not be much conflict. If your legitimacy declines, violence, tension, and polarization increase. This is an inverse relationship.
Now look: there is already a crisis of legitimacy. There is no legitimacy internally. Where is it being sought? Abroad. And no good result will come from that.
What We Are Witnessing Is Civil Absolutism
Do you think that the Erdoğan government’s strategy toward the opposition has moved beyond competitive authoritarianism? Is Turkey now an electoral authoritarian regime, or a new form of “civil absolutism” in which elections and institutions of representation have effectively ceased to function?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: I believe that this is a system of civil absolutism. I definitely regard it as such. It is not possible to speak of competitive elections. There is no such thing in Turkey anymore. How can we speak of that in a situation where there is so much intervention? That is why I think this entirely. Exactly so.
Turkey’s Political Axis No Longer Runs Through Europe
Nested dolls depicting authoritarian and populist leaders Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan displayed among souvenirs in Moscow on July 7, 2018. Photo: Shutterstock.
How do you assess the reactions from the European Union, the Socialist International, and various international actors following the “absolute nullity” intervention against the CHP? Do you find these reactions sufficient and sincere? Moreover, do international democratic pressure mechanisms still have any meaningful influence on Turkey?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: Now, these international organizations, the European Union and the like, are of course important institutions. But when you look at the situation, every state, every nation-state, has its own interests. And certain inconsistencies emerge in line with those interests.
There is also another point. I do not want to exclude the European Union entirely, but the government in Turkey does not derive its legitimacy or support from the European Union. There is a tendency toward, and support from, the axis of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel.
There is already tension between the European Union and the United States, particularly in the Trump era. Under the NATO umbrella, will the European Union be able to provide for its own security? Trump opposes this. How will security against Russia be ensured? Europe is concerned about this.
And of course, European Union values are important—very important. But the extent to which those values are implemented in other countries, and the extent to which they can be supported, remains a question mark. Moreover, the European Union is itself searching for ways to ensure its own security. At present, it appears to be seeking answers to the question: “How can we provide our own security?” outside the framework of NATO.
Since Turkey’s preference lies along the axis of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel, European Union sanctions do not carry much importance from Turkey’s perspective. The government openly declares: “I do not recognize the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. I do not implement them.” In such a situation, sanctions would have to be imposed. You would have to expel it from the Council. Those processes do exist. But at a certain point, they come to a standstill.
The European Union is also thinking along the lines of: “If we do this, are we going to lose Turkey?” In that respect, there is a deadlock. The European Union’s influence over Turkey is diminishing. At present, Turkey also has a particular attitude toward the European Union. In its foreign policy, it is operating on a completely different axis.
And then there is the question of maintaining a relationship with the Trump administration, with which the European Union is in conflict. There is a deadlock there as well, of course.
Law Has Become a Mechanism for Producing Political Loyalty
In your writings, you emphasize that law in Turkey has been transformed into an “instrumentalized technique of governance.” When considered together with the cases of Osman Kavala, Selahattin Demirtaş, Can Atalay, and the victims of the emergency decrees (KHKs), has the primary function of law in Turkey today become the generation of political loyalty rather than the generation of justice?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: Of course it has become that. It has virtually become a mechanism for producing political loyalty. The presumption of innocence has also been reversed. In other words, there is now a situation in which everyone is treated as though they are guilty until they prove their innocence.
There is no separation of powers. There is no right to a fair trial.
When you look at all of this, the regime in Turkey has truly transformed into such a system. I do not know whether there are examples of it. There probably are, but they would be found in very backward countries. It is a situation that can only be encountered in countries where democratic culture has not developed.
Human Dignity Was Ignored in the Treatment of KHK Victims
On 20 July 2016, Turkey’s Islamist-populist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared a state of emergency, enabling him and the AKP cabinet to bypass parliament and rule by decree. The crackdown on possible coup plotters has since been turned into an all-out witch-hunt not only against alleged Gulen sympathizers but also leftists, Kurds and anyone critical of the government.
Has the process that began with the State of Emergency Decrees (KHKs) and that you, like many others, describe as “civil death,” evolved into a broader governing paradigm that increasingly encompasses not only certain social groups but the entire opposition?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: Yes, it already has. The situation of the KHK victims is already grave. Approximately 125,000 people were dismissed from public service. Their legal rights were never recognized. Judicial processes did not function.
Many injustices were caused through these decrees, and they continue to this day. These people have no possibility of serving as witnesses in certain contexts or carrying out transactions at land registry offices. Together with their families, they constitute a broad segment of society, affecting a community of more than one million people.
I believe that what has occurred here is an injustice. I believe that human dignity has been disregarded.
“Civil death” can certainly be defined in this way. I think this is a very serious problem, a deep social wound.
Of course, the situation of the KHK victims will not be remedied under the current circumstances. But I believe that, following a change of government, their rights should be restored.
And then there are Osman Kavala, Selahattin Demirtaş, Can Atalay, and others. All of these people have been victimized. Think about it: they have lost the best years of their lives, and there is no real basis for the accusations leveled against them.
There are also judgments of the European Court of Human Rights concerning these individuals, and those judgments are not being implemented. These are grave consequences. All of these are actions and practices that can be regarded as violations of the Constitution.
The Regime Silences Those Who Move Beyond Prescribed Limits
You argue that, as the judiciary in Turkey lost its independence, the opposition continued for a long time to conduct politics as if the rule of law still existed. Do you think the current crisis is also a consequence of the opposition’s prolonged misreading of democratic backsliding?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: I have stated this before as well. The opposition either misread the situation or failed to read it at all. Or perhaps it understood it but was unable to do what was necessary.
Certainly, the opposition also bears responsibility for this democratic backsliding. However, within the regime framework we have described, we do not believe that the opposition has ever been a genuine opposition.
Nor is there any real possibility of acting as a genuine opposition. Look at what happened to Özgür Özel. Perhaps he wanted to move slightly beyond the prescribed line. He was immediately punished, and Kılıçdaroğlu was brought in, entirely unrelatedly. This is an intervention carried out solely to prevent votes from shifting toward the CHP and to ensure the continuation of the AKP’s rule.
In that respect, yes, we are witnessing that the opposition does not really have such a possibility. The moment you step beyond those limits, you are punished. In other words, the system, the regime, either destroys you, renders you ineffective, or simply ignores you.
As the Turkish poet Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar put it, I think you become the victim of an “assassination by silence” (sükût suikastı). In the end, that is what happens.
Democracy Cannot Exist Under Such Heavy Centralization
You argue that the centralized structure of the state is one of the greatest obstacles to democratization. Do the recent interventions against the CHP make it necessary to rethink debates on decentralization, local democracy, and pluralist governance in Turkey?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: It makes it absolutely necessary. Look, Turkey has a very rigid centralized structure. The administrative system is still a colonial system. It is a system of a colonial type. You appoint governors from the center, district governors from the center, directors of health, directors of national education, directors of public works and zoning from the center. The state has penetrated into the capillaries of society. In other words, there is a process of statization. Democracy cannot exist under such heavy colonization. It is unacceptable. Perhaps some dictator in a remote corner of Africa could administer such a system, but you cannot call this democracy.
Decentralization is extraordinarily important, and pluralistic participation is a fundamental principle of democracy. In fact, I have written extensively about this in my articles. It is called consociational democracy. There are many examples of consociational democracy in the world. They exist everywhere. Even countries that were once highly underdeveloped transferred powers from the center to the regions. Because democracy takes place at the local level.
You need local parliaments, and you need to transfer certain powers from the center to them. Then the democratic system begins to function there. If necessary, when a law concerning the region is being discussed in a regional parliament, local citizens should be able to go there and speak for five minutes. In this way, democratic education, civic culture, and democratic habits develop.
If you do not do this, if you try to do everything from the center, you simply cannot manage it. It will not work. And then you will be unable to solve any problems. Because regions have their own specific issues. Only the people of those regions know them, and only regional parliaments can address them. This is how the system works in Europe.
This does not harm the unitary structure of the state. On the contrary, it strengthens the unitary state’s capacity to represent political unity. If you transfer powers in this way, democracy develops.
Let us look at the process of resolving the Kurdish question in Turkey. In my view, the process is being handled incorrectly in certain respects. There is no point in conducting a process solely through Abdullah Öcalan. Abdullah Öcalan is already someone who is close to reaching an accommodation with the state. But Selahattin Demirtaş remains in prison. There is considerable interest in him among the Kurdish electorate. And Selahattin Demirtaş’s democratic stance resonates with a broad audience. Therefore, this issue should be resolved together with him and on the basis of Turkey’s democratization.
What the government wants to do is proceed along the line of: “How can I win this election? How can I secure Kurdish support?” The MHP itself says: “Citizenship is not open to debate.” It has already drawn its red lines by saying that this cannot be discussed and that cannot be discussed.
If none of these issues are going to be debated, and if the outcome is merely that some people are released from prison—of course they should be released. I support a general political amnesty. But limiting the process to that alone carries no real meaning. If that happens, the regime will simply reinforce itself by making a few concessions. That is not our objective.
Our objective should be this: we are currently in a state of nothingness. We have entered a period without a constitution. Therefore, we need a new social contract. To achieve this, we need to open a blank page, set taboos aside, and sit down together again. All actors, all stakeholders, and all segments of society must be included in this process. We must write the principles together on that blank page. What principles should guide us if we are to live together with our differences and under the protection of the law? On what principles will we agree?
This is what Turkey must do. Turkey needs a new process of reconstruction. Turkey is in no position to move forward through reforms or by patching things up here and there. Not at this moment.
Authoritarianism in Turkey Is Drifting Toward Totalitarianism
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan watching the August 30 Victory Day Parade in Ankara, Turkey on August 30, 2014. Photo by Mustafa Kirazli.
Do you think that the lawlessness, arbitrariness, and political polarization observed in Turkey in recent years have created a widespread sense of “helplessness” and “political ineffectiveness” within society? Can we say that authoritarian regimes become entrenched precisely on this psychological foundation?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: Yes, we can certainly say that. Unfortunately, this is how things are unfolding. We can think about it in the way you suggest.
There is an authoritarian regime in Turkey, but it appears almost as if authoritarianism is transforming into totalitarianism. The separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers has been completely eliminated, and everything has been concentrated in the executive. The right to a fair trial has also disappeared.
In that case, legal security no longer exists. Then what are we supposed to debate? The nature of the regime is no longer the most important issue, because the regime has already destroyed the very foundation upon which it rests. Even authoritarian regimes may have a certain legal framework, but in our case arbitrariness has reached an extreme point. In other words, you can do whatever you want on whatever grounds you choose.
For a long time, I have described the regime in Turkey as a “might makes right regime.” You see one power at the center forming an alliance with another power and saying, “Let’s beat this person.” They say, “He misbehaved,” and they beat him. Then you look again, and another power forms an alliance with yet another power, and this time they victimize someone else.
Turkey needs to escape this impasse. Instead of constantly joining forces to beat one another, we need to think about how to ensure legal security for everyone—for Kurds, for Alevis, for non-Muslims; in other words, for all citizens. Regardless of gender differences, how are we going to guarantee this security for everyone? That is what we should be pursuing.
Instead, we act according to the mentality of “Let us obtain power and govern through power.” We do this as if law still exists. It is made to appear as though law exists, but there is no law. Nor can this have a legal foundation.
There is only naked violence. The reason the state is granted a monopoly on violence is the assumption that it will use that violence within the framework of legal rules. Otherwise, when state power—governmental power—uses violence in a naked and unrestrained manner, it becomes no different from any other organization that does not operate according to law.
There is also something else I would like to say. The issue of political struggle in Turkey is causing us to drift outside the legal framework. The permanent state of exception that law professor Adem Sözüer has spoken about is not seen merely as something created through decrees. He argues that it is reinforced through criminal law. In other words, by incorporating the rules of the law of war into criminal law, a practice emerges in which the opposition is treated as if it were an enemy.
This is also the observation of Jean-Claude Paye, who, if I am not mistaken, is a French diplomat and writer. It is a correct observation. As I said earlier, this is a century-long process. Our penal code itself was derived from a fascist penal code. When the penal code was rewritten in 2005, many of these provisions were preserved exactly as they were. There are still numerous articles that remain from that fascist penal code.
What does this mean? It means importing the principles of enemy law and the law of war and applying them against political opponents.
Now, leave aside the decrees. If your regime’s penal code is already structured in this way, and if there is also an Anti-Terror Law, then how are you going to build a democracy and a state governed by the rule of law with all of these instruments?
What emerges, then, is this: beyond this permanent state of exception, a constituent law is needed. Perhaps even a somewhat abstract law.
The Future Lies in Reconstruction, Not Restoration
Finally, in light of all these developments, do you think that Turkey still has the potential for democratic restoration? Or is the issue now, rather than restoring the existing system, to develop what you have emphasized as a “new democratic social contract” and a new constituent political imagination?
Dr. Ümit Kardaş: Definitely the latter. I have already explained why the former is not possible. This is now a regime that has completed its course, surviving with difficulty and increasingly through violence. That is what Turkey needs, what Turkish society needs, and what the Turkish people need. I believe that is also what the Turkish people want.
But how will this happen? By which path will it happen, and through which political party? We have already discussed the condition of these political parties. That is why a new construction is needed. And, as I said, we are moving toward a new construction on a blank page. We will all come together again.
This is precisely what Nelson Mandela did in South Africa. After serving his prison sentence, he emerged and was able to transform the apartheid regime through a certain compromise, without succumbing to feelings of revenge. Today, South Africa has 11 official languages, all of which are recognized in the constitution. And there are also nine autonomous regions.
There are many examples of this in different countries. This can also be overcome. But Turkey has now reached a point where society is no longer in a position to carry this burden. This society deserves much better things.
Instead of following Trump and those like him, Turkey should seek to improve its relations with the European Union. The European Union will also provide support in this regard. Ultimately, certain standards will be attained. Even if Turkey does not become a member of the European Union, it is important to adopt those standards.
The issue is not becoming Western-like, but being compatible with the West. Because under the previous (Kemalist) regime, we also had the mentality that we would become Western-like, dress like them, act like them, and become modern. But when it came to democracy and the rule of law, there was nothing there. There is no meaning in such an approach. You do not need to become Western-like. Be compatible with the West. That is the whole issue. Turkey should be able to make its choice in that direction.
In this commentary, Nikoletta Syvak examines the political and regional implications of Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat after sixteen years in power in Hungary. Rather than interpreting the outcome as the end of far-right populism, Syvak argues that the election challenges the long-standing assumption that Orbán’s model of illiberal governance had become politically irreversible. Drawing on the works of Cas Mudde, Ágnes Batory, Zoltán Enyedi, Andrea Pirro, and Milada Vachudova, the analysis situates Hungary within the broader dynamics of democratic backsliding, ethnopopulism, and sovereignist politics across Central and Eastern Europe. The commentary further explores how Poland, Slovakia, Austria, and the Czech Republic continue to sustain political demand for anti-liberal and nationalist agendas despite Hungary’s transition
By Nikoletta Syvak*
Elections are often seen as a moment of political settlement: the campaign has ended, the votes have been counted, and the winner has been determined. But in the case of Hungary, the period following the election may prove more indicative than the day of the vote itself. After sixteen years in power, Viktor Orbán’s defeat is not merely an important milestone in the history of Hungary. Rather, this event shifts how Hungary is perceived throughout Central and Eastern Europe: long considered a shining example of stable right-wing populist rule in the EU, the country is now becoming an example of its susceptibility, as Péter Magyar’s TISZA party defeated Fidesz in the April 2026 elections, marking the end of Orbán’s sixteen-year rule.
Hungary as the End of Inevitable Progress
Over the years, Hungary has been one of the clearest examples of how far-right populism can not only win elections, but also turn into a sustainable model of governance. Orbánism has become not only a political style, but also a specific system that has transformed populist discourse: emphasizing national sovereignty and national interests, conflict with Brussels, Euroscepticism, cultural polarization, control over institutions, and presenting the government as a defender of the “people” from liberal elites.
The classic idea of Cas Mudde (2004) about the “populist zeitgeist” is useful here: populism has ceased to be a marginal phenomenon and has become part of the political mainstream, especially due to the confrontation between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” (Mudde, 2004). In the case of Hungary, this logic was not only used in election campaigns, but also transformed into a model of governance.
This is precisely why Ágnes Batory’s (2016) analysis of Fidesz as “populists in power” is particularly important: she demonstrates that the Hungarian case should be understood not only as an electoral success, but also as an institutional restructuring of the political system through constitutional majorities, party control, and the weakening of checks and balances (Batory, 2016). Zoltán Enyedi (2016) also helps us understand Orbánism more precisely: he shows that Fidesz combined populist rhetoric with paternalism and illiberal elitism—that is, it spoke on behalf of “the people” while simultaneously concentrating power in the hands of the ruling elite (Enyedi, 2016).
Therefore, Orbán’s defeat is significant not because it signifies the end of right-wing populism. Such a conclusion would be too hasty. Its significance lies elsewhere: it calls into question the idea of the political irreversibility of the Orbánist model. For a long time, Hungary demonstrated how right-wing populist power could become institutionally entrenched. Now it is showing that even such power can be challenged.
Regions Under Pressure
The significance of the Hungarian elections becomes clearer when viewed within the broader Central and Eastern European context. Andrea Pirro (2014) emphasizes that far-right populist parties in Central and Eastern Europe cannot be analyzed as mere replicas of Western European models: they are shaped by specific post-communist conditions, with distinct historical conflicts, party systems, and conceptions of the nation, the state, and sovereignty (Pirro, 2014).
Poland is the most important comparative case here. Under PiS (2015–2023), it was close to Hungary on issues of sovereignty, traditional values, criticism of Brussels, and conflict with the EU’s liberal mainstream. However, the Polish experience also shows that the defeat of a right-wing populist government does not mean the automatic restoration of liberal democracy. The institutional legacy of the previous government—a politicized media environment, judicial reforms, personnel appointments, and deep social polarization—continues to constrain the new government. This aligns well with Milada Vachudova’s (2020) analysis, which links ethnopopulism in Central Europe to democratic backsliding and the concentration of power (Vachudova, 2020).
Slovakia illustrates another aspect of regional dynamics. Robert Fico and SMER are not direct copies of Fidesz, but the Slovak case demonstrates the resilience of a political strategy built on criticism of liberal elites, a cautious stance toward supporting Ukraine, an emphasis on national interests, and conflict with parts of the European mainstream. This is important because it prevents us from interpreting Orbán’s defeat as the beginning of an automatic “post-populist” phase in the region. Rather, it shows that one center of right-wing populist power has been weakened, but the political demand for a sovereignist and anti-liberal agenda remains.
The Czech Republic adds another important component. Andrej Babiš and ANO represent a more pragmatic and less ideologically rigid form of populism than Fidesz. But ANO’s participation, alongside Fidesz and the Austrian FPÖ, in the creation of the Patriots for Europe alliance, formed in the European Parliament in June 2024, shows that Orbán’s influence spread not only through direct replication of the Hungarian model, but also through a shared political vocabulary: national sovereignty, criticism of Brussels, migration control, and the protection of “ordinary people.”
Although Austria is not part of Eastern Europe, it is important within the Central European context. The FPÖ demonstrates that far-right mobilization remains strong even in more established democratic systems. The FPÖ’s victory in the 2024 parliamentary elections showed that far-right parties in Central Europe retain significant electoral potential.
Therefore, Orbán’s defeat should not be interpreted as a regional decline of far-right populism. Rather, it may signal a shift in its political center: if Hungary is no longer the primary symbol of far-right populist resilience, momentum may shift to other actors—in Austria, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic.
What Comes After Orbánism?
The post-election period is important precisely because populism does not end the moment the votes are counted. Attila Bartha, Zolt Boda, and Dorottya Szikra (2020) propose analyzing populism not only as electoral rhetoric, but also as a mode of governance and political decision-making (Bartha et al., 2020). In this sense, the main question following Orbán’s defeat is not only how Fidesz lost power, but also to what extent the new government will be able to change the system built over the past sixteen years.
The Hungarian case allows us to draw three broader conclusions.
First, far-right populism in Central and Eastern Europe is not disappearing. Its social and political foundations remain significant: distrust of elites, economic uncertainty, cultural anxiety, migration policy, Euroscepticism, and tensions surrounding the war in Ukraine. These factors continue to create space for parties that base their politics on the opposition between “the people” and “the elites,” national sovereignty and external pressure.
Second, Orbán’s defeat weakens the aura of inevitability surrounding right-wing populist rule. If the most enduring example of such a model within the EU can be defeated at the polls, then this model is less stable than its supporters have claimed.
Third, the region’s future will depend not only on whether far-right populists win or lose elections. Equally important is whether democratic alternatives can translate electoral victory into sustainable institutional renewal. Poland has already demonstrated just how difficult this process can be following the departure of PiS. Hungary is now the next test.
For many years, Hungary has been viewed as a laboratory for right-wing populist rule. Following Orbán’s defeat, it may become a laboratory for post-Orbán transition. This does not mean the end of far-right populism in Central and Eastern Europe. But it may mean the end of its strongest illusion: the notion that once institutional dominance is achieved, it is irreversible.
(*) Nikoletta Syvak is a Graduate Student, Department of Political Science and International Relations, East China Normal University (ECNU). Email: syvaknikoletta@gmail.com
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References
Bartha, A., Boda, Z. & Szikra, D. (2020). “When populist leaders govern: Conceptualising populism in policy making.” Politics and Governance, 8(3), 71–81. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v8i3.2922
Pirro, A. L. P. (2014). “Populist radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe: The different context and issues of the prophets of the patria.” Government and Opposition, 49(4), 599–628. https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2013.32
