Please cite as: Streich, Gregory W. (2026). “Liberal Democracy in the United States: The Challenge of Trumpism.” Journal of Populism Studies (JPS). July 01, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/JPS000126
Abstract
Liberal democracy is increasingly challenged by the rise of populism in the twenty-first century. In the United States, the rise of President Donald Trump, a populist leader pursuing policies that differ from those of traditional Republican Presidents, is increasingly challenging the norms and institutions of liberal democracy. In this paper, I examine populism as an ideology, style, and strategy, and apply those criteria to Trumpism as a unique form of populism in the US. I also examine the economic, political, and cultural themes of Trumpism. And while Trumpism has a domestic orientation highlighted by the slogan “Make America Great Again,” it also has an international orientation highlighted by the slogan “America First.” In both orientations, it is transforming US liberal democracy from within and altering its position as a leading defender of liberal democracy and free trade on the international stage.
The twenty-first century has not been kind to liberal democracy: there are now fewer democratic nations in the world than at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In 2005, there were 27 democratizing regimes compared to 12 autocratizing regimes, but by 2025, the numbers flipped to 18 democratizing regimes compared to 44 autocratizing regimes (Nord et al., 2026). Researchers at V-Dem have found that liberal democracies declined from 22.03% of all nations in 2000 to 17.83% by 2023, while over the same period, electoral autocracies held steady, representing 32.2% of all nations in 2000 and 31.84% in 2023 (Nord et al., 2025). Additionally, V-Dem dedicated a section titled “USA – A Democratic Breakdown in the Making?” in their Democracy Report 2025, drawing attention to President Trump’s actions that purged military and civil servants as well as threatened independent media outlets, judges, universities, and more (Nord et al., 2025: 46-47). As a result, V-Dem’s 2026 report concluded that the United States has lost its status as a liberal democracy for the first time in fifty years, and instead joins the ranks of “electoral democracies” in which “liberal characteristics of established democracies – such as checks and balances on the executive, respect for civil liberties, and the rule of law – are eroding”(Nord et al., 2026: 10).
Similarly, a February 2025 report from Bright Line Watch found that the “overall performance of American democracy on a 0–100 scale has fallen to the lowest levels observed since they began tracking this measure in 2017: 53 among the public and 55 among experts” (Bright Line Watch, 2025). In their 2026 report, the public’s rating of democracy in the US dipped to 49 in April 2025 before rebounding back to 52 in early 2026, while expert ratings were relatively unchanged at 56 (Bright Line Watch, 2026). Additionally, the US has seen its Freedom House scores drop in recent years from 89/100 “free” to 84/100 in 2025 to 81/100 in 2026 (Freedom House, 2025, 2026). To be sure, the US is still a strong democracy. But when the world’s oldest, wealthiest, and, in many ways, most powerful democracy is identified as a case of democratic backsliding (Levitsky & Way, 2025), this is a significant development that has important ramifications for the health of liberal democracy both domestically and globally.
While liberal democracy is in retreat around the world for several reasons, one is the rise of populism. Both left- and right-wing populist leaders and political parties have emerged in various countries in reaction to the economic challenges of globalization and the rise of migration, both of which have sparked the anti-globalist and anti-immigration reactions that fuel populism (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018; Judis, 2016; Moffitt, 2016; Norris & Inglehart, 2019; Scheiring et al., 2024). As such, populism is a symptom of those underlying causes but also exacerbates those anxieties and fears. While the US has seen the emergence of a left-leaning populism in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the rise of Senator Bernie Sanders as a national political figure, in this paper, I focus on the rise of Trumpism as a right-leaning populism led by Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” and “America First” movement. Indeed, political journalists have claimed that President Trump is undertaking the “Orbánization” (Beauchamp, 2024; Marantz, 2022, 2025) or even the “Putinization” of the US (Glasser, 2025; Kasparov, 2025).
Donald Trump is not alone in using populist appeals and styles to consolidate power and pursue his agenda. Populists of the left and right, such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, have all come to power through legitimate electoral mechanisms. However, once in office, “these populist leaders have skewed political competition by implementing discriminatory electoral rules, orchestrating partisan takeovers of the judiciary and of other independent institutions, and launching constant attacks on the media” (Rovira Kaltwasser & Taggart, 2025, p. 97). President Trump is following a similar playbook by using the power of the Presidency to reward friends and punish foes, all while consolidating more power in the Executive branch. For example, Trump has used Executive Orders, the Justice Department, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to purge civil servants and attack judges, independent journalists, and political opponents. He has also intimidated and threatened legal action and regulatory review of universities, media outlets, late-night talk show hosts, and law firms. And, he has asserted (and attempted to assert) Executive control over independent agencies such as the Federal Reserve, National Labor Relations Board, and the National Science Foundation (among others), usurped Congress’s power of the purse, and has gone to war in Iran without Congressional consultation or approval (Luttig, 2025).
To the extent that Trumpism appeals to social conservatives who openly admire Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin for their defense of traditional gender roles and opposition to what they see as decadent liberalism, immigration, and LGBTQ rights, it is little wonder that the domestic policies of Trump reflect some of the same policies pursued by Orbán as he has turned Hungary into an illiberal democracy (Beauchamp, 2024b; Field, 2025: 17; Marantz, 2022; Rudolph, 2024). Indeed, Orbán has attended and spoken at several CPAC events in the US as well as hosted CPAC events in Hungary, cementing the ideological convergence of Orbánism and Trumpism. Further, Snegovaya et al. (2023) highlight many socially conservative policies on traditional gender roles and opposition to LGBTQ rights of Putinism that overlap with Trumpism in the US. While there are important differences, these overlapping policy interests are why some social conservatives in the US view Putin and Russia as an ally of the US in the battle against what they see as decadent liberal Western values.
Given the populist turn in the US and elsewhere, we are witnessing the formation of a new ideological conflict that will shape the twenty-first century: the battle between liberal democracy on one side and various forms of populism, autocracy, and authoritarianism on the other. An open question is which side the US will take in this battle, especially when it is being transformed from within by Trumpism.
The remainder of this paper consists of four parts. In Part 2, I review the literature on populism to argue that Trumpism meets the criteria of populism in its ideology, style, and strategy. I then examine the economic (Part 3), political (Part 4), and cultural dimensions (Part 5) of Trumpism and, in so doing, draw out some of its domestic and international manifestations. I then conclude (Part 6) with some observations about future research questions for the study of populism in general and Trumpism in particular.
Authoritarian governments, populist movements, and rising powers are increasingly challenging the liberal international order not only by contesting specific human rights norms but also by questioning the institutions that create and enforce them. In this interview with the ECPS, Assistant Professor Gino Pauselli of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign examines how international norms are negotiated, resisted, and reshaped in an era of geopolitical rivalry and democratic uncertainty. Drawing on research spanning LGBTQ+ rights, migration, border securitization, China’s influence in global governance, international organizations, and civil society, he argues that contemporary struggles over human rights are fundamentally contests over political authority, sovereignty, and the power to define international law itself.
Throughout the post-Cold War era, the international human rights regime has often been understood as one of the defining pillars of the liberal international order. Built upon the principles of universality, multilateral cooperation, and the progressive expansion of international legal protections, this order has contributed to significant advances in the promotion of civil liberties, minority rights, and transnational accountability. Yet, in recent years, these foundations have come under mounting pressure. Across both established and emerging democracies, populist leaders, authoritarian governments, and rising powers have increasingly challenged not only specific human rights norms but also the institutions and legal processes through which those norms are produced, interpreted, and enforced. Far from being confined to domestic politics, contemporary conflicts over sovereignty, migration, borders, LGBTQ+ rights, and civil society have become central battlegrounds in a broader contest over the future of global governance and the legitimacy of liberal universalism.
It is precisely these transformations that lie at the heart of the scholarship of Dr. Gino Pauselli,Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Combining insights from international relations, comparative politics, and human rights scholarship, Dr. Pauselli examines how international norms emerge, diffuse, and are contested through interactions among states, international organizations, NGOs, and transnational advocacy networks. His research offers an original perspective on the contemporary struggle between liberal and illiberal visions of international order, moving beyond simplistic accounts of democratic decline to reveal the complex political processes through which global norms are negotiated, resisted, and reshaped.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Pauselli argues that contemporary disputes over LGBTQ+ rights are ultimately less about sexuality than about political authority itself. As he puts it, “the ostensible subject is LGBT rights, but the deeper objection concerns who gets to make international law and how.” In his view, sexual orientation and gender identity have become powerful symbolic markers through which states signal their position in an increasingly polarized international order. Consequently, “LGBT rights have become the issue through which states perform that boundary—a way of signaling which side of a supposed civilizational divide a state stands on.”
Dr. Pauselli also offers important insights into the changing dynamics of authoritarian and populist politics. While acknowledging that anti-LGBT rhetoric often serves to divert attention from policy failures, he argues that it represents something more ambitious: “an active project to reshape society or build society around a notion of a heteronormative state.” Similarly, his research on border securitization demonstrates that restrictive migration policies can generate unintended human rights consequences. Rather than rhetoric alone, he finds that visible state projects such as border walls communicate heightened threat perceptions to border officials, thereby increasing the likelihood of abuse.
The interview further explores China’s growing influence within international institutions, the contestation surrounding sexual orientation and gender identity resolutions at the UN Human Rights Council, the emergence of illiberal NGO networks, and the evolving relationship between populism and international human rights governance. Throughout the conversation, Dr. Pauselli challenges conventional assumptions that rising powers necessarily reject global governance altogether. Instead, he argues that they increasingly seek to reshape existing institutions from within, because they “do value order and global governance,” while contesting the liberal content of the norms that sustain them.
Despite documenting an increasingly coordinated transnational backlash against liberal human rights norms, Dr. Pauselli remains cautiously optimistic about the future of the human rights project. Resistance to human rights, he observes, is hardly new; what is new is “the transnational coordination of this opposition at both the state and non-state levels.” Yet he also insists that attacks on the postwar human rights regime cannot ultimately succeed without offering a compelling alternative. The greatest challenge for liberal actors, he concludes, is not simply defending abstract legal principles but demonstrating, through people’s lived experiences, how universal human rights meaningfully improve everyday life. In an era increasingly shaped by populism, geopolitical rivalry, and normative contestation, this interview offers a timely and sophisticated examination of the future of democracy, international law, and the global human rights order.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Assistant Professor Gino Pauselli, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Opposition to LGBT Rights Is Ultimately a Contest Over International Authority
Homophobic counter-protesters from Malopolscy Patrioci organization, during manifestation against Krakow Equality March (Pride parade) at Main Market Square in Krakow, Poland on August 29, 2020.
Dr. Pauselli, welcome!Let me begin with your recent research on LGBTQ+ rights and authoritarian politics. You suggest that opposition to LGBTQ+ rights is often embedded within broader resistance to the liberal international order. Why have sexual orientation and gender identity issues become such powerful symbols in contemporary struggles over sovereignty, nationalism, populism, and global norms?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: First, international law has historically been understood through consent. Sexual orientation and gender identity norms, by contrast, expanded rapidly at the international level, largely through the interpretive work of courts, treaty bodies, and non-state actors rather than through explicit state agreement. That makes them an almost ideal target for a sovereigntist critique: they can be portrayed as obligations imposed without consent by unelected actors, thereby expanding the jurisdiction of international institutions. The ostensible subject is LGBT rights, but the deeper objection concerns who gets to make international law and how.
The second reason is that these issues rest upon the symbolic material that nationalism mobilizes: the family, reproduction, the gender order, and the continuity of the nation across generations. That makes them a clear boundary marker. In my own work, I think about this in terms of ingroups and outgroups. Criticism over human rights tends to produce compliance among states that see the critic as one of their own and backlash among those that see the critic as an adversary. LGBT rights have become the issue through which states perform that boundary—a way of signaling which side of a supposed civilizational divide a state stands on.
Third, opposition is cheap. Restricting these rights carries little material cost and threatens no powerful economic interests, while yielding a high identity return. It is a low-cost, highly visible signal of standing apart from the liberal international order.
Many authoritarian governments portray LGBTQ+ rights as foreign impositions or manifestations of “Western values.” How much does this rhetoric overlap with contemporary populist narratives that oppose cosmopolitanism, globalization, and transnational human rights norms in the name of national sovereignty?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: This is exactly what I was mentioning. It is true that populist and conservative governments have used anti-LGBT rhetoric to challenge what is perceived as a foreign imposition. But this rhetoric, as I mentioned before, is itself borrowed from transnational actors, including both non-state actors and organized state actors abroad.
Economic Growth Can Strengthen, Rather Than Weaken, Anti-LGBT Projects
To what extent do anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns serve as political instruments through which populist and authoritarian leaders mobilize conservative constituencies, manufacture moral panics, and divert public attention from governance failures or economic grievances?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: This is a very common interpretation of the instrumentalization of anti-LGBT rhetoric. I wouldn’t say that this is not the case. This powerful strategy of opposing LGBT rights and LGBT norms does, indeed, divert attention away from economic grievances. But in the research that I’m conducting with a graduate student at the University of Illinois, what we’ve been observing is that this is not the full story. There’s also an active project to reshape society or build society around a notion of a heteronormative state and heteronormative norms.
So, on the one hand, it is true that there’s the scapegoating thesis, which basically argues that anti-LGBT rhetoric is useful for leaders because it diverts attention from the failures of their own policies. But at the same time, there is some evidence that, during periods of economic growth and economic development, this rhetoric actually becomes even more powerful in strengthening the state and reinforcing certain ideas about the state. In other words, it is precisely when the state has the resources to impose and advance these anti-LGBT projects that this rhetoric becomes most effective.
The Real Contest Is Over Who Has the Authority to Shape International Law
The UN Human Rights Council has become a major arena for disputes over sexual-minority rights. What do the debates surrounding sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) resolutions reveal about the changing nature of global human rights governance and the growing contest between liberal and illiberal visions of international order?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: The idea of sexual orientation and gender identity being discussed and debated at global international institutions, especially human rights organizations, is relatively new. In the UN Human Rights Council, the first attempt to pass a SOGI resolution occurred in 2003, while the first resolution to be voted on and adopted came only in 2011. So, this is a very recent development—less than two decades old. And every time these initiatives have emerged, we have observed strong opposition from a bloc of countries. Although this bloc has changed over time, SOGI resolutions have consistently been among the most contested issues before the UN Human Rights Council.
So, this leads to the question that I’m essentially reframing from your question: Why is this the case, and what does it tell us about the contestation between liberal and illiberal visions of the international order?
One of the things that has become much clearer recently, especially after the many interviews I conducted in Geneva last summer, is that many states—particularly liberal states—are deeply concerned about the ability of multiple international institutions to reshape international law independently. The concern is that—or at least the way many states frame it—non-state actors, including the Human Rights Council and treaty bodies, have modified or reinterpreted international law beyond the consent of states. This challenges the basic, traditional understanding of international law, which has historically rested primarily on state consent.
What many states argue is that they never signed up for this. They basically say that they never consented to incorporating sexual orientation as one of the categories protected by international human rights law. They’re not necessarily contesting that these rights should not be protected. Rather, they do not accept this as part of the international human rights project because they never consented to it.
There is no international human rights treaty that explicitly includes it, and it is not part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So, the concern is deeper than sexual orientation and gender identity themselves. It is fundamentally about the ability of these bodies—these non-state actors—to reshape international law and then hold states accountable for standards to which they have never consented.
But there is also concern about these norms empowering domestic actors who are currently repressed and who might use these international frameworks to challenge the domestic status quo. For authoritarian rulers, this is particularly threatening. They fear allowing advances and changes at the international level that domestic actors could subsequently invoke to challenge their own rule.
Political Anxiety, Not LGBT Rights Themselves, Drives Much of the Conflict
Helsinki Pride parade on July 2, 2010. Photo: Dreamstime.
Looking ahead, do you expect conflicts over LGBTQ+ rights to remain one of the principal battlegrounds between liberal and authoritarian visions of international order, or are other human rights issues likely to supersede them?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: This is very hard to tell. It’s very difficult to predict the future, and every time social scientists have tried to do that, they usually fail because we’re not trained to know what’s going to happen. But one thing I’ve been observing is that the transnational LGBT movement is learning how to counteract the conservative backlash. Actors who have been promoting and protecting LGBT rights have been thinking very carefully about the frameworks and strategies that might be most helpful and effective in preventing the conservative backlash from gaining further ground. If these actors ultimately succeed in limiting the conservative backlash, then conservatives will probably find another issue to politicize. In that case, LGBT rights would gradually move away from the center of this contestation over the international liberal order.
At the end of the day, societies care about their well-being. The lack of progress and the anxieties generated by technological change have probably led many individuals to embrace anti-LGBT rhetoric as a way of resisting change and channeling their own anxieties. But the current challenge for the conservative side is that it ultimately needs to start delivering results and providing answers to those anxieties. If opposition to LGBT rights fails to do that, then they may find themselves in some trouble. They may need to turn to another issue or rely on something else to maintain their political power.
Rising Powers Prefer to Reshape Existing Institutions Rather Than Replace Them
In your research on China’s influence within the UN Human Rights Council, you show that Beijing’s presence systematically affects the voting behavior of other states. What does this finding tell us about how rising powers can reshape international norms from within existing institutions rather than by creating alternative ones?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: There are many things that are relevant to this issue. One is that, when we observe China being effective or successful in undermining international legal norms through its participation in the UN Human Rights Council, the first thing that comes to mind is that creating new institutions and providing them with legitimacy is very difficult. So, many authoritarian or illiberal states that oppose the international liberal order may find it much easier to advance their own agenda—even if it is an illiberal one—from within existing institutions that already enjoy high levels of legitimacy than through creating new institutions that few people know about and that may lack legitimacy in the eyes of the international community.
But, to address your question directly, the first thing this tells us is that rising powers like China are deeply interested in global governance. They’re not after anarchy, per se. So, by opposing the international liberal order, they are not opposing order itself. They do value order and global governance, but they may object to the content of the current norms that sustain that order. As China rises to the top of the global power hierarchy, it does not isolate itself. On the contrary, it actively participates in international institutions that help build and sustain order at the global level. It works through these institutions to advance its own goals.
Secondly, the other point I want to make is that international organizations are very important actors in shaping international norms. These norms essentially delineate what constitutes appropriate state behavior and what does not. They may not have teeth. We know that there is no global police force, and there is no United Nations army. But the norms that are developed and shaped within international organizations create a context—a normative structure—in which certain forms of state behavior become more or less costly. That normative environment may benefit some countries more than others. That is precisely where the contestation lies.
Independent Expert Bodies Are More Resistant to Political Contestation
Your research challenges the assumption that participation in international institutions necessarily socializes rising powers into liberal norms. Based on the case of China, under what conditions can international institutions instead become vehicles for norm revision, contestation, and the diffusion of illiberal ideas?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: This is a very interesting question, and it’s a very difficult one for me to answer. I don’t think I have a definitive answer. What I would say is that, based on research conducted by colleagues, it seems that institutions with broad participation—especially those characterized by direct state participation, where governments send representatives who ultimately decide whether to approve an institutional outcome, and where there are no independent experts or autonomous bureaucracies—are the institutions most likely to be used by illiberal states to challenge and contest international liberal norms. That’s the case with the UN Human Rights Council, for example. Every state has one vote, and every resolution is adopted if a simple majority of states votes in favor of it.
That is not the case, for example, with treaty bodies, where decisions are made by independent experts who adjudicate the cases brought before the institution. In those settings, states cannot—or at least do not necessarily—directly influence the outcomes through official channels.
Opposition to Human Rights Is Old—Its Transnational Coordination Is New
Turkish women rallied in Istanbul to protest proposed anti-abortion laws by then-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on June 18, 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey. Photo: Sadık Güleç.
How do you interpret the growing convergence between right-wing populist movements and authoritarian governments in their critiques of international human rights institutions? Are we witnessing the emergence of a transnational backlash against liberal universalism, and if so, what are its implications for the future of global human rights governance?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: One thing that I find very revealing when I teach international human rights to my students is that resistance to international human rights—and even to liberal conceptions of rights—has been with us for a long time, almost since the beginning of the universal human rights project in the post-war era. What I would say is that norms that provide tools for marginalized individuals, communities, and other actors to resist power, abuse, and the arbitrary exercise of power will always be resisted and criticized by those who benefit from the existing status quo.
What I do think is somewhat new in recent years, or perhaps over the past few decades, is the transnational coordination of this opposition at both the state and non-state levels. This coordinated opposition to the international liberal order and its norms—especially human rights—is something that is genuinely new. The opposition itself has always existed, but the coordination of that opposition is new.
I’m not sure what the future of the human rights project will be. But I would be very surprised if attacks on the human rights project were successful without offering an appealing alternative. What I do think is that, in the short run, attacking the international liberal order may be politically appealing to some individuals or actors, but, at the end of the day, something else has to replace it. I don’t see that happening right now. Nor do I think such an alternative would be particularly appealing to most actors.
Fear Flourishes Where Diversity Is Least Experienced
Your research on intergroup contact suggests that exposure to diversity can increase support for human rights. How should we understand this finding in light of the success of many contemporary populist movements that thrive on anti-immigrant, anti-minority, and exclusionary narratives?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: It’s actually quite consistent with what we’ve been observing regarding the success of these movements in advancing anti-group rhetoric and exclusionary visions of society. If we think about Brexit, or about some research that I’ve conducted on the LGBT-free zones in Poland, the areas that have embraced this rhetoric most strongly are precisely those that have had the least contact with these perceived outgroups. So, these movements tend to be particularly successful in areas—and among individuals—with relatively little exposure to migrants, minorities, or other perceived outgroups.
Securitization Changes How Border Agents Perceive Threats
In your work with Beth Simmons, you demonstrate that border hardening can increase allegations of torture and abuse by border and immigration officials. What does this reveal about the unintended human rights consequences of securitization policies in contemporary states?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: What we find in our research is that the construction of border walls predicts, in the short run—between one and four years—an increase in allegations of torture committed by border and immigration officials. Importantly, this effect is limited to that specific subset of state agents. We do not observe a corresponding increase in torture allegations against other state agents, such as the police or the military, but only among those tasked with enforcing the border.
What these findings tell us is that there is a human cost to promoting securitization projects. Expensive and highly visible initiatives, such as border walls, which are designed to restrict the entry of individuals into a given country or territory, may signal to the state agents responsible for border enforcement that there is a serious threat out there—even if, in reality, there is not.
The presence of these highly visible and costly projects may also signal that these agents need to rely on more extreme measures to protect the nation or its territory. This ultimately translates into concrete actions in the form of more cases of physical abuse and human rights violations. It’s not necessarily that border walls constitute a direct instruction from political authorities to torture individuals. Rather, these projects are interpreted by border agents in two ways: first, that there is a heightened threat, and second, that they should rely on a broader range of tools to prevent that threat from affecting their own country.
Border Walls Transform Political Messages into Enforcement Practices
Ramallah, Palestine, surrounded by the controversial Israeli wall that separates the State of Israel from West Bank. Photo: Giovanni De Caro.
Many governments justify stricter border controls in the language of security and sovereignty. To what extent has the rise of populism transformed migration governance by legitimizing policies that may undermine international human rights protections while claiming democratic legitimacy?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: What we actually find in our research is very interesting in terms of the connection between populist movements and rhetoric. Rhetoric alone—whether expressing anxiety over borders or anger about migration—does not predict greater abuse. Simply having a leader speak publicly about the border, migrants, and the need to protect the nation from an external threat does not, by itself, translate into border agents committing more acts of torture. This is conceptually and theoretically related to the idea that security and sovereignty are not necessarily at odds with human rights, or at least with sovereign border control. In principle, they can coexist.
The real risk lies in how this rhetoric is interpreted by the agents tasked with enforcing the border. The situation changes when this rhetoric is combined with a costly signal. One thing is for an agent simply to hear the leader talking about the border. But it is something quite different to hear the leader talking about the border while also observing a massive border wall that has cost millions of dollars. That is a much more concrete signal that this is a serious issue, that it is a priority for the state, and that there is a serious threat out there.
Human Rights Monitoring Depends on Networks of Trust
Your research on international organizations and NGOs emphasizes the importance of trust-based relationships in the production of credible human rights information. Why are some NGOs more influential than others in shaping international responses to rights violations?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: Here’s where we move to the micro level of these actors. As political scientists, we’ve traditionally thought about international organizations and NGOs as actors. We call them non-state actors, but, in reality, they are made up of individuals. NGOs do not walk down the street by themselves. We cannot observe an NGO in the same way we observe a person. An NGO doesn’t have a conscience, nor do international organizations. Individuals do. They are the staff of these organizations, and they are the ones who actually carry out their work. So, trust between organizations is often built through trust between the individuals who belong to those organizations.
In our research, we find that interactions between NGO members and international organization staff over time increase the likelihood that the international organization will later speak out about issues in the countries those NGOs care about. For example, during a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, certain NGOs participate in the proceedings. They interact with Commission members, have conversations, and even share coffee with them. Then, months or even a couple of years later, because they now have their WhatsApp number or email address, they can contact the Commission and say, “Look, this is what’s happening in this country right now.”
It’s not that the Commission would have been unaware of those violations if the NGO staff had not reached out. Rather, because the information comes from an NGO with which Commission members have already established a relationship, that information is trusted—or at least trusted more—than the same information arriving through other channels, where they may not have the same ability to assess the credibility of the source.
This is how interactions between NGOs and international organizations can shape the monitoring role of international organizations in holding states accountable to international norms. It’s not that NGOs are the only providers of this information. Rather, because of prior contacts and repeated interactions, the information they provide carries greater credibility and is therefore more likely to influence the organization’s response.
Illiberal Regimes Are Building Their Own NGO Networks
Across Europe and the Americas, populist leaders frequently frame international organizations, NGOs, and human rights advocates as unelected elites disconnected from ordinary citizens. How has this populist critique affected the legitimacy and effectiveness of global human rights institutions?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: That’s a very interesting question. At the moment, I’m not aware of research that provides a clear answer to it. But I can imagine a few ways in which we might approach it. I think rhetoric is a very powerful tool for advancing political goals. But at the same time, these same populist and authoritarian leaders have also used NGOs themselves to boost their own legitimacy and advance their own agendas. So, while they argue that nobody elected these organizations and that it is unclear whom these NGOs actually represent, they also send their own NGOs abroad and rely on the credibility of the broader NGO community to shield themselves from international criticism.
I am currently developing research with a colleague, Sarah Bush, in which we examine what we call “illiberal NGOs,” or “cheerleader NGOs.” These organizations essentially participate in international institutions to praise authoritarian governments. We’re still not sure whether this is an effective strategy, but these populist and authoritarian regimes are clearly relying on NGOs to advance their own rhetoric. At the same time, whenever NGOs say things these governments don’t like, they respond by arguing that nobody elected them. That they do not necessarily represent or enjoy the support of society.
Norms Are Contested Because They Redistribute Power
A young woman on street enjoy holding gay pride banner during a protest. Photo: Dan Rentea.
Across your scholarship, a recurring theme is that international norms are not simply imposed from above but are contested, negotiated, and reshaped through interactions among states, international organizations, and civil society actors. How should we rethink the process of norm diffusion in an increasingly multipolar world where populist, nationalist, and sovereigntist actors challenge the universality of human rights norms?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: This is a tough question. I’d like to begin by saying that we should think about norms and international norms as not being value-free. They’re not value-free. At their core, a norm is an expectation of appropriate behavior. The content of these norms may reflect liberal ideas, but they can also generate expectations about illiberal behavior. It’s not the case that, simply because a norm exists, it is, by definition, a liberal one.
At the end of the day, norms are about what constitutes appropriate or expected behavior for states, actors, or individuals in general. That behavior may be either consistent or inconsistent with the status quo. The expectation may be for individuals or actors to behave differently from how they have behaved in the past, or to behave in ways that challenge the existing distribution of power.
Because norms create expectations about certain forms of behavior over others, multiple actors naturally become interested in how those norms are developed, diffused, or resisted, since they affect the status quo in one way or another. They either reinforce it or challenge it. The contestation and negotiation that you’re asking about are really about the content of these norms. Norm diffusion should be understood as the diffusion of normative frameworks that benefit certain groups over others, depending on the content of the norm.
The Future of Human Rights Depends on Their Relevance to Everyday Life
And lastly, Professor Pauselli, taken together, your work examines authoritarian resistance, rising powers, borders, human rights, international organizations, and civil society. Do you see contemporary populism as primarily a challenge to specific liberal policies, or as a broader challenge to the universalist foundations of the postwar human rights regime? What does this imply for the future of democracy and global human rights protection in the twenty-first century?
Asst. Prof. Gino Pauselli: Many colleagues might not agree with this, but the way I understand populism, or the concept of populism, is that it is, by definition, at odds with liberal conceptions of the polity and of how societies are organized. In terms of what populism implies for the future of this project, populism is the latest effective tool that certain sectors of the elite have found for gaining and maintaining power. I’m not sure whether they even think about the future of the international human rights regime. Populism is simply instrumental for them in maintaining or gaining power. It is effective because of the contemporary anxieties that societies face—anxieties that many members of society do not necessarily see being addressed by liberal democracy or liberal norms.
So, basically, there are two things going on here. On the one hand, we have the supply side, where elites find populist strategies and rhetoric effective for gaining or retaining power. On the other hand, we have the demand side, where members of society are looking for alternatives that can reduce their anxieties over issues such as economic development, progress, and inequality in general. And this is why populism is so effective right now.
Now, turning specifically to the human rights project, those actors who are engaged—or have long been engaged—in promoting and protecting human rights, the liberal actors, in some way, should be thinking about developing and strengthening tools that effectively communicate, through people’s lived experiences, how these norms—how human rights—positively affect their lives. Their everyday lives, in the areas and issues they care most about. I know this is very difficult. It is very hard for a human rights NGO to communicate to rural communities, or even marginalized urban communities, that an abstract text signed 70 or 80 years ago is relevant to them if they cannot see exactly how it connects to their own lives, especially when their lives lack so many basic things. This is the main challenge if the human rights project is to survive in the future: for constituents, broadly speaking—not just elites—to understand the value of that project for their own lives.
Peru’s 2026 presidential election has reopened fundamental debates about populism, democratic resilience, institutional decay, and constitutional governance in one of Latin America’s most politically volatile democracies. In this timely interview with the ECPS, Professor Martín Tanaka, Full Professor of Political Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Peruvian Studies, argues that while “populism remains a risk,” it is “much more controlled and limited” than many feared. He explains why Peru’s democratic crisis stems less from executive authoritarianism than from party fragmentation, legislative dysfunction, and institutional weakness, while cautiously suggesting that the country’s new political balance may create opportunities for negotiation, institutional reform, and democratic stabilization.
Peru’s 2026 presidential election has once again thrust one of Latin America’s most fragile democracies into the center of international attention. A razor-thin presidential runoff, renewed allegations of electoral fraud, deepening institutional distrust, chronic party fragmentation, and mounting public insecurity have revived long-standing debates over democratic resilience, populism, political representation, and constitutional governance. While Peru has long been viewed as an outlier for combining macroeconomic stability with persistent political instability, the election of Keiko Fujimori has introduced a new layer of uncertainty by reopening unresolved questions about the country’s post-authoritarian trajectory. At a moment when many democracies are struggling with populist polarization and democratic erosion, Peru offers an important case for examining whether institutional recovery remains possible after years of political fragmentation and declining public confidence.
Few scholars are better positioned to assess these developments than Professor Martín Tanaka, Full Professor of Political Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Peruvian Studies. Widely recognized for his pioneering scholarship on weak party systems, ‘brokered democracy’, clientelism, populism, and democratic deterioration, Professor Tanaka has spent more than two decades analyzing why Peru’s democratic institutions have struggled to consolidate despite sustained economic growth. His research has fundamentally shaped comparative debates on party institutionalization, democratic accountability, and the paradoxes of governance in contemporary Latin America.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Tanaka offers a measured yet cautiously optimistic assessment of Peru’s political future. Although he acknowledges that the 2026 election reproduced many of the structural weaknesses that have characterized Peruvian politics over the last decade—including institutional fragmentation and declining trust—he nevertheless argues that the outcome may represent an important turning point. As he observes, “the results are much better than our worst expectations,” because many of the parties most closely associated with irresponsible populism and legislative obstruction suffered significant electoral defeats. Rather than signaling the consolidation of anti-system politics, the new Congress may create stronger incentives for negotiation and coalition-building.
Throughout the interview, Professor Tanaka challenges several conventional assumptions about Peru’s democratic crisis. He argues that Peru’s recent democratic erosion has been driven less by executive aggrandizement than by “the decay of parties and the control of parties by particular interests and very narrow interest groups.” Unlike many contemporary cases of democratic backsliding, Peru’s principal danger has not been excessive presidential power but institutional fragmentation, legislative clientelism, and the collapse of effective political mediation. Yet he also sees reasons for cautious hope, emphasizing that “the distribution of political forces puts on the agenda the need to negotiate and to achieve agreements between parties with different perspectives,” while noting that “the risk of the continuation of this populist logic still exists, but it is much more controlled and limited.”
The conversation also explores broader theoretical questions concerning the evolution of populism, democratic legitimacy, corruption, judicial activism, and institutional reform. Professor Tanaka reflects on Peru’s distinctive combination of economic orthodoxy and political instability, examines why anti-corruption campaigns have generated widespread public disappointment, and assesses whether bicameralism and a more structured party system can help restore democratic governance.
Looking beyond the current electoral cycle, he concludes that rebuilding Peru’s democracy will ultimately depend on strengthening the state’s administrative capacity, professionalizing the civil service, and reconstructing political parties capable of reconnecting citizens with representative institutions. As he puts it, “state reform and civil service reform are the major issues in Peru,” alongside political reforms that can begin “to reverse the dynamic of deterioration that we have faced in recent years.”
Here is the revised version of our interview with Professor Martín Tanaka, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Peru Has Entered a New Political Era Beyond the Post-Fujimori Consensus
Alberto Fujimori, President of Peru from 1990 to 2000, whose presidency combined economic stabilization and counterinsurgency efforts with growing authoritarianism and institutional erosion. Photo: Luis Antonio Rosendo / Dreamstime.
Professor Tanaka, welcome.Let us begin with the broad political significance of this election before turning to the deeper institutional and theoretical questions it raises. Peru’s 2026 presidential election appears to have reproduced many of the structural pathologies that have characterized Peruvian politics for nearly a decade: extreme party fragmentation, widespread distrust of institutions, and an intensely polarized second round. To what extent do these election results represent continuity with Peru’s post-2016 political trajectory, and where, if anywhere, do you see evidence of genuine political realignment rather than merely another episode in an ongoing cycle of institutional instability?
Professor Martín Tanaka: That’s a very difficult question. If we analyze the election itself, the diagnosis would be that we are facing a repetition of the dynamics we’ve seen over the last decade—and, even more, not only a repetition but a worsening of the situations that we faced before regarding the fragmentation that you mentioned. At the same time, we had a very narrow result. If Roberto Sanchez had won, we would be saying that we are facing something that resembles a repetition of the 2021 election. I mean, a radical leftist, populist candidate who won the presidency and who faces a situation where he is in the minority in Congress.
But the result that we’ve had is that Keiko Fujimori won the election. This places us in a very different scenario from the previous years because, during this century, we faced what I call the post-Fujimori era regarding Alberto Fujimori’s presidency, the father of Keiko Fujimori. I mean, the main challenge that Peruvian democracy had in this century was to deal with the heritage of the 1990s neoliberal and authoritarian government that Alberto Fujimori led, and now we are facing this particular situation where her daughter is now the president of Peru.
What is she going to do? Are we going to go back to the 1990s? Are we going to see the continuity of the last 25 years? Is she going to try a different path? Those are the questions that Peruvians are now asking themselves.
Despite Growing Distrust, the New Congress Creates Space for Political Negotiation
The narrow outcome of the runoff, accompanied by competing allegations regarding electoral integrity and the refusal of sections of the political class to fully accept the result, has once again raised concerns about democratic legitimacy. From a comparative perspective, should these post-election disputes be interpreted primarily as symptoms of democratic backsliding, or do they instead reflect the normalization of distrust in a political system whose institutions have already suffered prolonged erosion?
Professor Martín Tanaka: Yes, in this election, we’ve faced these allegations regarding electoral integrity, but I believe that this problem has worsened in this particular election. First, in previous elections, we’ve had allegations, but I believe that the electoral authorities had the credibility to say that the election was correct and the results were fair, and that the allegations were simply the result of bad losers.
We had candidates from the right who behaved in this way, presenting allegations and claiming fraud, but they had no consistent and strong proof to support those allegations. We could say that they were bad losers, and these bad losers developed this kind of behavior because of the polarization and radicalization of some sectors of the political spectrum, mainly on the right. But in this particular election, during the first round, we had a rightist candidate claiming fraud. Now, in the second round, we have a leftist candidate also alleging fraud.
In this particular election, we also had the electoral authorities committing mistakes in the organization of the electoral process regarding, for example, the distribution of electoral material to the voting centers. So, these three things combined have weakened, to a great extent, the credibility of the electoral institutions.
However, the one thing that I believe is important to mention on the positive side is that the composition of the new Congress is based on six political parties that are among the most coherent and promising parties in the competition. We had 36 parties competing, and the six that obtained representation are the ones that one can say are the most consistent or coherent.
The distribution of political forces puts on the agenda the need to negotiate and to achieve agreements between parties with different perspectives. So, this is a promising possibility. The logic of polarization and confrontation can change a little bit and lead to a more negotiated political process.
No Political Bloc Can Govern Alone, and That May Benefit Democracy
Supporters gather in the streets of Puno, Peru, during the campaign for the 2010 local elections, August 2010. Photo: Dreamstime.
Much of your scholarship has emphasized that Peru’s crisis stems less from ideological polarization than from the extraordinary weakness of political parties and intermediary institutions. After the 2026 election, has Peru finally reached the point where party institutionalization can no longer recover through incremental reforms, requiring instead a fundamental redesign of political representation itself?
Professor Martín Tanaka: As I’ve just mentioned, the results and the configuration of Congress open the way to moderate optimism. Because no major bloc has an easy majority. The rightist bloc is near or under a simple majority, so the opposition has some room for maneuver. Therefore, major setbacks will be difficult to implement under the Fujimori government. This kind of balance between a leftist and a rightist sector opens the way to finding an intermediate point where changes and reforms in different areas are possible.
In the economic area, it will be easier to achieve agreements in terms of strengthening market economy institutions. It will be a little more difficult, of course, regarding institutional aspects, such as judicial reform or political reform. Those reforms will be much harder. The clashes will be more intense in that area, but it’s not impossible.
The Election Results Were Far Better Than Our Worst Expectations
In your recent work, you argue that Peru experienced the emergence of a conservative-populist governing coalition that transcended traditional left-right divisions while jointly opposing institutional reforms. Has the 2026 election strengthened this coalition, transformed it, or exposed its internal contradictions? More broadly, what does this tell us about the changing nature of populism in contemporary Peru?
Professor Martín Tanaka: If we compare the results that actually emerged from the election with what we had speculated would happen at the beginning of the campaign, I’m really convinced that the results are much better than our worst expectations. One possibility was that the new Congress would be a continuation of the dynamic that we’ve seen over the last couple of years, where populists and irresponsible politicians were in control of the decisions. The parties most identified with these kinds of practices didn’t win the elections. Most of them received a very low number of votes. They even lost their political registration. They no longer exist in legal terms.
The parties that achieved representation are more structured and have more programmatic lines, both on the left and on the right. So, I believe that the risk of the continuation of this populist logic still exists, but it is much more controlled and limited. Of course, we never know, but I am quite optimistic about the possibility of limiting or changing the dynamic that we’ve seen in the last Congress.
A Centrist Majority Could Limit the Appeal of Populist Politics
Peruvian politics has frequently been described through the lens of anti-establishment leadership, from Alberto Fujimori to Pedro Castillo and, in different ways, several subsequent candidates. Yet these figures often differ substantially in ideology, governing style, and institutional strategy. How useful is the concept of populism for understanding Peru today, and where do you think it risks obscuring more than it explains?
Professor Martín Tanaka: I believe it has been useful. Over the last 10 years—we’ve seen the proliferation of discourses and decisions that can be better understood through the lens of populism. But if we look at the period from 2000 to 2015, the diagnosis would have been the opposite. What struck me most when analyzing Peruvian politics in the context of Latin America was the continuity of the neoliberal orthodox consensus among the major political and social players. Whereas the rest of the region was turning to the left and was being conquered by a populist discourse, Peru maintained continuity under neoliberal, market-oriented reforms. One may even find politicians who won elections by appealing to populist features, but under their presidencies, their administrations maintained a kind of political orthodoxy in terms of political economy, as well as in their management and policy decisions.
However, things changed from 2016. Now, the current results of the last election make us think that maybe Keiko will return, at least to some extent, to the neoliberal orthodoxy. It’s different to be in Congress and in opposition. She has the responsibility to deliver in economic terms, so I believe that things will change a little bit. Although Fuerza Popular also has bases that may pressure it toward populist discourse and redistribution, I believe that we will find a kind of return to orthodoxy.
Regarding the opposition, we have an extreme left that is close to the conventional populist discourse. But they are not in the majority. They are at the extreme of the political spectrum, and there is the possibility of creating a center consensus in Congress that may limit the space for populist discourse and decisions.
Fragmentation, Not Authoritarianism, Remains Peru’s Greatest Democratic Risk
Protesters march in Arequipa, Peru, during a demonstration against corruption and the rising cost of living, August 2010. Photo: Dreamstime.
Across Latin America and beyond, democratic erosion increasingly occurs through gradual institutional weakening rather than abrupt authoritarian ruptures. Does Peru illustrate a distinctive pathway of democratic backsliding—one driven less by executive aggrandizement than by the cumulative decay of parties, Congress, and mechanisms of accountability?
Professor Martín Tanaka: In the last 10 years, Peru has been an example of a particular pathway of democratic backsliding, not driven by a strong executive but by the decay of parties and the control of parties in Congress by particular interests and very narrow interest groups. That’s what we have been looking at over the last 10 years.
I believe that this may change. I’m a little bit optimistic. I believe this dynamic may change a little bit. Now we have Keiko Fujimori in the presidency. A lot of colleagues have expressed concern about the possibility of a government with authoritarian features. Keiko Fujimori has vindicated the image of her father and his style of government. But at the same time, the distribution of forces in Congress will not allow it, and the mobilization of civil society would not allow her to follow an authoritarian path. So, the risk and danger of a strong executive are relatively low. That’s my particular opinion. Maybe other colleagues will not agree with me.
The main problem would be disorder, chaos, indiscipline, and fragmentation. This risk is still very strong, very high in Peruvian politics nowadays. The possibility of a dynamic that resembles the last 10 years is still strong. But the parties that obtained representation are a little more structured and coherent than the parties that we had before.
Bicameralism Could Help Contain Peru’s Fragmented Politics
You have long argued that Peru represents a form of ‘brokered democracy,’ in which local intermediaries often substitute for institutionalized political parties. Two decades later, has this brokerage model become even more deeply entrenched, or are we witnessing its transformation into something more fragmented and potentially more dangerous for democratic governance?
Professor Martín Tanaka: That’s a good question. We are now beginning to know each of the representatives who have achieved representation in Congress. In this particular election, there’s an important novelty: we have reintroduced a bicameral system. We had a Congress working with only one chamber. Now we have a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies. So, in the Senate, we have more experienced politicians. Across the different political groups, you can identify strong political leaders who have a long tradition and a clear identification with their political parties. In the lower chamber, things are a little bit different. The representation of the different regions is stronger because of the electoral system. There is a greater presence of inexperienced politicians across all parties in the lower chamber. So, the possibility that these particularistic interests will be present in the lower chamber is very high.
I ask myself whether the main parties will be able to guarantee discipline and build a parliamentary agenda among their individual members. That will be a major challenge for all parties. But ultimately, the political dynamic will be marked by the initiatives of the executive of the central government. And the weight of the Senate will also help to discipline what may happen in the lower chamber.
Peru Still Lives with the Paradox of Economic Success and Institutional Weakness
One striking paradox of Peru is that prolonged macroeconomic stability has coexisted with chronic political instability. How do you explain the persistence of democratic dissatisfaction in a country that, until recently, outperformed many of its regional peers economically? Does this challenge modernization theories that associate economic success with democratic consolidation?
Professor Martín Tanaka: That’s a good and complex question. Peru has had a kind of learning process marked by trauma. We had terrible hyperinflation at the end of the 1980s. We then experienced a very radical, drastic, strong, and traumatic neoliberal reform. The neoliberal reform ultimately stabilized the country, lowered inflation, and allowed Peru to regain growth. So, in the minds of the political and social elite, the continuity of the neoliberal model, or a market-oriented economy, became established as something very important that should not be touched. I believe this consensus has survived even until now. Of course, making changes while preserving the stability of macroeconomic institutions is still a consensus that remains valid in contemporary Peru.
At the same time, the weakness of political parties doesn’t permit, doesn’t allow presidents and politicians to capitalize on macroeconomic stability. For example, there have been many corruption scandals that have weakened and destroyed the legitimacy of political parties and political figures. So, there is still this huge gap between macroeconomic performance and the very low legitimacy of political institutions.
The prospects for the years to come are that Keiko Fujimori will try to make some improvements on the economic front. It will be more difficult to see institutional reforms that go together with these economic reforms. So, Peru will continue to show this paradox of moderate economic success coexisting with very, weak political institutions.
In recent years, the deterioration of democratic institutions has been very striking. We are now wondering in Peru what Keiko Fujimori will do because her political party, Fuerza Popular, was one of the major protagonists of this weakening of democratic institutions in recent years. The question that we may ask ourselves is whether Fuerza Popular will continue to behave as it did while it was an opposition party, and how much it will change now that it has the responsibility of governing.
Peru Must Rethink How It Fights Corruption
Peruvian policewomen stand in formation during an International Women’s Day march in Lima, Peru on March 8, 2019. Photo: Morgan Eborzee / Dreamstime.
Your work has repeatedly highlighted the interaction between corruption scandals, judicial activism, and political instability. After nearly a decade in which anti-corruption investigations reshaped Peruvian politics, do you believe accountability mechanisms have ultimately strengthened democracy, or have they unintentionally contributed to institutional fragmentation and public disillusionment?
Professor Martín Tanaka: This is a very difficult question to answer. But we may say that this drive to fight corruption, initiate investigations, and judicialize the political dynamics in Peru has been a disappointment. Disappointment is the dominant sentiment among Peruvians. The fact that Keiko Fujimori has won the election is a good illustration of this. The judiciary initiated investigations against Keiko Fujimori. Those investigations even led to her incarceration. Months and years went by, and the cases, the investigations, and the accusations against Keiko Fujimori couldn’t continue. Most of the trials, allegations, and accusations against her ultimately did not proceed. So, she had the opportunity to run for the presidency, and she has now won.
Even more, the fact that she was accused and even incarcerated has turned into political capital for her. She can present herself as a victim, as a martyr. This has helped her in this electoral campaign.
This is a major issue. There is a widespread perception that corruption is everywhere. It is a very important concern for everybody, but at the same time, there is also a consensus that judicial initiatives to fight corruption have not produced good results. So, what to do with anti-corruption initiatives, and what to do with the judicial system, are major issues in Peru—and even more so for Keiko Fujimori, who has been accused and has, in a sense, become a victim of those judicial initiatives.
Moderate Politics Still Has a Chance in Peru
In many democracies, populist leaders portray constitutional checks and independent institutions as obstacles to popular sovereignty. Yet in Peru, citizens often appear equally distrustful of both elected politicians and institutional constraints. How can democratic reformers defend liberal institutions when public confidence in nearly every component of the political system has eroded?
Professor Martín Tanaka: Another difficult question. Of course, the easy answer is that we have to defend and maintain democratic liberal institutions while, at the same time, achieving greater efficiency in addressing the problems that are the main concerns of the population. Of course, this is easy to say but very difficult to achieve. But, 2026 election allows us to be moderately optimistic about the possibility of limiting the spread of extreme discourses and more extreme populist appeals.
It also opens up the possibility of building a majority around centrist politics, with political parties converging around the political center and reaching a consensus that may produce more efficient public policies. This possibility exists. The fact that the distribution of forces in Congress will not permit the adoption of extreme measures puts the need to build consensus firmly on the agenda. This provides a good foundation for better public policies. Of course, that’s only a possibility. We’ll see what happens next.
State Reform and Meritocracy Are Peru’s Most Urgent Priorities
And lastly, Professor Tanaka, looking beyond the immediate electoral cycle, if you were advising Peru’s next generation of political reformers, which institutional reforms would you prioritize to rebuild democratic legitimacy? More fundamentally, what must change if Peru is to move beyond recurring cycles of populism, personalistic leadership, institutional fragility, and democratic uncertainty toward a more resilient constitutional democracy?
Professor Martín Tanaka: The last question is even more difficult. If I had to choose, I would say that state reform and civil service reform are the major issues in Peru. Because one thing that is associated with political instability and corruption is the fact that, in recent years, a patronage logic in the use of the state has become widespread. And, talking about populism, this logic of patronage—this patrimonial use of the state—has been a major problem in recent years.
So, we face this paradox: because of economic growth, we have resources, but because we also have inefficiency and corruption, these resources cannot be translated into good public policies, tangible results, and effective delivery for citizens. This is a major issue. There is a great deal of room for improvement in this area. If the Keiko Fujimori government understands that we need to protect meritocracy and efficiency within the state, it will help her a lot, and it will greatly improve the political system’s ability to legitimize itself.
At the same time, political reform regarding the functioning of political parties, the need to strengthen political parties, and the need to improve their transparency and their relationship with citizens are also major issues. That could help begin to reverse the dynamic of deterioration that we have faced in recent years.
Please cite as: Sharma, Dinesh; Romagna, Britt; Lowenthal, Zara & Perez-Hosein, Jamilla. (2026). “Daughters of the Dynasties: Father-Daughter Succession in Asia and the United States.” Journal of Populism Studies (JPS). June 30, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/JPS000125
Abstract Why do some democracies consistently produce female national leaders from political dynasties while others—with equally prominent political families—do not? This article addresses this puzzle through a comparative analysis of father–daughter succession in South and Southeast Asia and the United States. Although both regions feature competitive electoral democracies, influential political families, and mass media politics, they have produced markedly different patterns of female executive leadership. While South and Southeast Asia has generated numerous female prime ministers and presidents from political dynasties, the United States has produced no comparable case of a daughter of a president ascending to the presidency. Drawing on psychohistory, political psychology, comparative politics, and gender studies, the article argues that populism assumes different institutional forms across democratic contexts. In much of South and Southeast Asia, populist politics frequently operates through dynastic legitimacy, allowing daughters to inherit symbolic authority from charismatic or martyred fathers. By contrast, American populism has historically defined itself against entrenched political dynasties, making hereditary succession a political liability rather than a source of democratic legitimacy. The analysis combines two complementary studies. The first compares patterns of political and corporate father–daughter succession across Asia and the United States, including contemporary comparisons such as Chelsea Clinton and Paetongtarn Shinawatra. The second presents a psychohistorical comparison of Indira Gandhi and Rosemary Kennedy, demonstrating how family socialization, gender norms, disability, political culture, and historical context shaped radically different life trajectories. The article concludes that female dynastic succession is shaped not by democracy alone but by the interaction of political institutions, populist narratives, patriarchal norms, historical memory, and elite family structures. By integrating comparative politics with psychohistory, it offers a novel framework for understanding how democracies construct legitimacy, political inheritance, and pathways to female executive leadership across cultures
Keywords:Populism, Political Leadership, Female Political Leadership, Political Dynasties, Leadership Succession, Gender and Politics, Political Psychology, Chelsea Clinton, Indira Gandhi, Rosemary Kennedy, India, United States, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Thailand
By Dinesh Sharma, Britt Romagna, Zara Lowenthal & Jamilla Perez-Hosein
Introduction
During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, South and Southeast Asia produced an unusually large number of female national leaders compared with global trends. Many of these women—including Indira Gandhi in India, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, and Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar—emerged from powerful political dynasties as daughters, widows, or wives of assassinated, persecuted, or charismatic male leaders. Scholars argue that these women inherited symbolic legitimacy through family lineage, particularly in contexts where political parties and nationalist movements were deeply personalized around founding fathers and political martyrs (Richter, 1990; Derichs et al., 2011).
Paradoxically, patriarchal political cultures sometimes facilitated rather than prevented the rise of elite women leaders. Because these women were viewed through traditional gender roles—as mothers, daughters, or widows of the nation—they were often perceived as morally virtuous and less threatening than male rivals (Choi, 2015). This gendered moral capital enabled them to unify fragmented political movements and inherit charismatic authority from deceased or persecuted male relatives. In the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, for example, her identity as the daughter of Burmese independence hero Aung San provided symbolic continuity that strengthened opposition to military rule (Fleschenberg, 2008).
However, scholars also note that the same patriarchal structures that enabled women’s political ascent often constrained their authority once in power. Female dynastic leaders frequently faced military coups, assassination, corruption allegations, or resistance from male political elites who expected them to serve symbolic rather than executive roles. Moreover, many studies conclude that these leaders did relatively little to advance broader women’s rights or challenge patriarchal systems, often relying instead on traditional gender norms and dynastic legitimacy to maintain political authority (Blackburn, 2004; Jalalzai, 2013). Thus, the rise of female dynastic leaders in Asia illustrates the complex relationship between patriarchy, populism, political inheritance, and gendered legitimacy in democratic and postcolonial societies.
Research Question
Why are some democracies able to consistently produce powerful female leaders from political dynasties, while others exhibit a lack, or near absence, of national female leadership? Utilizing a quasi-experimental design and a naturalistic or qualitative methodology that examines the life histories of the daughters of national leaders in different democratic contexts—namely South and Southeast Asia and the United States—reveals important differences in how these political systems construct female power and authority (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010). Both regions contain large electoral democracies with mass political participation, modern media environments, and long traditions of competitive politics (Dahl, 1971). Yet, the trajectories of the daughters of national leaders differ strikingly across these settings, with many prominent female leaders emerging from South and Southeast Asian political systems (Jalalzai, 2013). This paper attempts to address this comparative difference by using a multi-method approach.
By contrast, daughters of US presidents have rarely entered formal political leadership. Figures such as Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Bill Clinton, and Ivanka Trump, daughter of Donald Trump, participated in political campaigns or held advisory roles, yet neither became a nationally elected leader. Despite the prominence of political families in the United States, dynastic succession through daughters has not produced a female president or equivalent national executive leader (Kazin, 1995; Lipset, 1996).
This contrast creates a useful naturally occurring comparative experiment. Both regions share electoral democracy and highly visible political families, yet they produce different outcomes in the political careers of daughters of national leaders. Examining these divergent life histories helps illuminate how political institutions, dynastic networks, gender norms, and populist narratives shape pathways to female national leadership (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017).
As Morocco and the Netherlands prepare to meet in the FIFA World Cup Round of 32 on June 30, 2026, Yacine Boubia examines how European populist radical-right parties increasingly transform sporting events into opportunities for anti-immigration mobilization. Drawing on agenda-setting theory, democratic theory, and comparative political analysis, Boubia argues that football matches involving teams associated with immigrant communities have become powerful vehicles for constructing civilizational threat narratives while diverting attention from unresolved structural challenges such as housing, demographic decline, and labor shortages. From the Netherlands to Hungary, the commentary situates contemporary nativist politics within a broader crisis of governance, showing why cultural mobilization has become a substitute for policy delivery—and why liberal democracies must resist the weaponization of sport for illiberal political ends.
It is World Cup month, and I have been watching more football than is perhaps professionally defensible. There is something about the tournament format—the compressed stakes, the improbable trajectories, the way national narratives crystallize around eleven players on a pitch—that makes it simultaneously the most democratic and the most politically charged sporting spectacle on earth. I follow these games as a football fan. I analyze what surrounds them as a researcher with a background in media and political communication. And what surrounds tomorrow’s (June 30) Round of 32 match between Morocco and the Netherlands has very little to do with football.
Over the past week, a coordinated mobilization has taken shape across Dutch political and media ecosystems—amplified by far-right networks, social media influencers, and the deliberate interventions of Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom—that has transformed a round of 32 fixture into a site of civilizational anxiety and explicit immigration politics. The central claim propagated by Wilders and his allies is as structurally revealing as it is empirically unfalsifiable: that Moroccans will burn Amsterdam regardless of the result. If Morocco wins, the riots confirm the threat. If the Netherlands wins and incidents follow, they become evidence of Moroccan inability to accept defeat. If nothing occurs, the vigilance is credited. Every possible empirical outcome confirms the narrative that was constructed before a single player set foot on the pitch.
This is not a security analysis. It is political strategy—and it is a strategy with a recent precedent. Last month, French political and media actors spent ten days of prime media real estate anticipating disorder surrounding the PSG Champions League final, ultimately producing a few isolated incidents far smaller in scale than the anticipatory frame had constructed. The pattern is now establishing itself across European radical-right ecosystems: sporting events involving teams associated with immigrant communities are being systematically converted into opportunities for anti-immigration mobilization—moments when the cultural threat narrative can be activated, amplified, and installed as the dominant interpretive lens through which social reality is understood, at minimal political cost and with maximum emotional intensity.
This commentary examines that strategy analytically. It argues that the mobilization surrounding the June 30 match is not simply opportunistic xenophobia—though it is certainly that—but a deliberate and structurally significant political operation through which radical-right populist parties, operating within the imperatives of the contemporary attention economy, compensate for the absence of serious governing programmes addressing the structural conditions that actually shape their citizens’ lives. Understanding why requires examining both the agenda-setting mechanism that the strategy exploits and the structural conditions of European nativist populism that make sporting events politically necessary as substitutes for governance.
Radical Right Populism and the Weaponization of Sporting Events
Populist radical-right (PRR) parties share a defining structural characteristic that distinguishes them analytically from both classical conservative parties and the broader category of populist movements: they combine a maximalist identitarian programme, organized around ethnic, cultural, and civilizational threat narratives, with a conspicuous absence of serious governing proposals addressing the structural conditions that produce the material grievances their constituencies experience. Housing affordability, wage stagnation, demographic sustainability, and public service provision—the actual conditions shaping the daily lives of their voters—receive rhetorical acknowledgment but no policy architecture capable of addressing their structural causes. What these parties offer instead is what their governing vacuum requires: the permanent mobilization of cultural emergency.
Sporting events involving teams associated with immigrant communities have emerged as particularly efficient vehicles for this mobilization. They concentrate public attention at a predictable moment. They activate identity and belonging as primary emotional registers. They provide a binary narrative structure—us against them—that maps directly onto the populist frontier between the authentic people and the threatening other. And, crucially, they generate media amplification that radical-right parties cannot reliably produce through the routine operations of parliamentary politics. The anticipatory threat narrative surrounding a football match achieves in seventy-two hours what months of policy debate cannot: the installation of immigration as the dominant interpretive framework for social reality, occupying the prime media real estate that democratic governance should be using to address the structural conditions that the parties campaigning around this match have no programme to resolve.
Bernard Cohen (1963) observed that the press may not tell people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling people what to think about. McCombs and Shaw’s (1972) subsequent empirical development of agenda-setting theory demonstrated that the salience of issues in media coverage directly and measurably predicts their salience in public opinion—not through direct persuasion, but through the allocation of attention that determines which problems citizens regard as most important. The radical right’s systematic deployment of sporting events as vehicles for anti-immigration mobilization represents an intuitive mastery of this mechanism, adapted to the contemporary attention economy’s imperatives of emotional intensity, narrative simplicity, and viral amplification.
The unfalsifiable structure of the Wilders threat narrative surrounding June 30’s match is the mechanism’s most sophisticated expression. A frame constructed so that no empirical outcome can disconfirm it does not function as a security assessment—it functions as a permanent agenda-installation device. It ensures that, whatever occurs on June 30 evening in and around Amsterdam, immigration will be the interpretive framework through which it is processed. The disorder that materializes in these contexts—where it occurs at all—is typically produced by a specific and demographically narrow subgroup of peripheral urban youth whose tensions are the product of structural exclusion, decades of concentrated social housing policy, spatial segregation, and underinvestment in public services, rather than of cultural disposition or community-wide political orientation.
The conflation of this subgroup with an entire diaspora, and then with immigration as a political category, is the logical operation through which the agenda-setting strategy converts a sporting event into an immigration crisis. It is an operation that serves parties whose governing programmes offer no answer to the structural exclusion that produces the tensions they then attribute to immigration itself.
The Red Tie Without the Conditions: European Nativist Imitation and Its Structural Limitations
Populism, as Ernesto Laclau argued, is not defined by ideological content but by a specific discursive logic: the construction of a frontier between an authentic people and a corrupt elite, the equivalential articulation of diverse grievances into a unified political identity, and the emergence of a leadership that claims to embody the popular will against its institutional betrayers. This logic is structurally indifferent to ideological direction, but it is not structurally indifferent to the material conditions within which it operates. Populism requires more than rhetoric; it requires conditions of possibility that rhetoric alone cannot supply.
The global resonance of Donald Trump’s political project has generated an imitative dynamic across Western democracies that systematically misreads the sources of its success. From Wilders in the Netherlands to Milei in Argentina, from the remnants of Fidesz’s international network to the nativist movements proliferating across Central and Eastern Europe, a recognizable political style has travelled: the combative social media register, the civilizational threat narrative, and the explicit identification of immigration as the master explanation for national decline. These movements wear the red tie of European nativist respectability without the structural conditions that made the American original politically sustainable. They perform the rhetoric without the infrastructure. They campaign for cultural homogeneity in societies whose population replacement already depends on the immigrant fertility they campaign against.
Trump operated within a specific constellation of structural advantages that has no European equivalent. Continental scale—9.8 million square kilometers, of which Texas alone covers an area approximately five times the total surface area of France—that absorbs the contradictions of cultural conflict and provides physical space for demographic growth without the density pressures defining European housing politics. Military and technological supremacy—satellite infrastructure, digital platform dominance, and the algorithmic architecture of the very social media networks that Wilders uses to conduct his cultural sovereignty campaign—that insulates domestic nationalist posturing from its geopolitical consequences. And a demographic reserve in Latin America that operates within the American economic and geopolitical sphere of influence, rendering immigration restriction simultaneously performable and practically reversible: the door can be closed and reopened as political and economic conditions require because the reserve does not diminish in the interim.
Wilders possesses the aesthetic without the architecture. He campaigns against immigration in a country of 41,543 square kilometers—approximately the size of the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area—whose housing crisis is so acute that young Dutch people cannot afford to form independent households, whose fertility rate of 1.46 sits well below the 2.1 replacement threshold, and whose economy is structurally dependent on the immigrant labor force he campaigns against.
Poland—whose successive nationalist governments have maintained some of the most hostile positions toward immigration in the EU, and whose fertility rate of 1.14 is among the lowest in Europe—simultaneously constitutes by far the largest source of EU labor migrants in the Netherlands, concentrated in the transport, logistics, and service sectors that the Dutch economy structurally requires, attracted by Dutch wages, which are among the highest in continental Europe, and by a professional environment that operates largely in English. These are not anomalies within the nativist project. They are its structural consequences: the emigration of the native workforce that pro-natalist and anti-immigration politics cannot retain, absorbed by the receiving economies that the same political movements claim to protect.
The football mobilization is the clearest possible expression of this governing vacancy. When a political movement with no serious housing programme, no credible fertility policy, and no coherent account of how its economy functions without the immigrant labor it campaigns against requires a Round of 32 World Cup fixture to generate the cultural conflict it cannot produce through governance, it reveals the depth of that vacancy. The game is not incidental to the political project. It is necessary to it—a substitute for the governing capacity the movement does not possess and the structural conditions it cannot address.
It is worth noting the precise character of the Moroccan squad’s relationship to Dutch society. Three players on the Moroccan national team hold Dutch nationality. In the Wilders framework, this detail does not complicate the nativist argument—it confirms it. Legal citizenship, in the nativist worldview, does not confer cultural belonging. A person of Moroccan origin holding a Dutch passport who chooses to represent Morocco demonstrates, for Wilders and his allies, the impossibility of genuine integration rather than its achievement: evidence of dual loyalty, of the fundamental unassimilability of a population that cannot be made Dutch regardless of its institutional status.
The frame therefore does not turn on passport holding. It turns on ethnic and civilizational categories that civic citizenship cannot alter—which is precisely what liberal democracy’s foundational commitment to civic, rather than ethnic, citizenship is designed to reject. Wilders conducts this campaign on X, a platform owned by an American billionaire and running on American digital infrastructure. The tools of civilizational defense are provided by the very American technological dominance that the populist critique of globalism targets in other registers. The contradiction is structural, not rhetorical.
The Demographic Data That Nativism Cannot Answer
The fertility data across the European Union constitutes the most decisive empirical challenge to the nativist demographic project. According to Eurostat, the EU total fertility rate fell to 1.34 in 2024 — a historic low since the institution began tracking the aggregate figure in 2001, and a figure that stands at barely two-thirds of the 2.1 replacement threshold. Not a single EU member state reaches replacement level. The Netherlands sits at 1.46. Poland sits at 1.14.
In 2024, 24 percent of newborns across the European Union had a foreign-born mother. European population replacement is already structurally dependent on immigrant fertility to a degree that no nativist policy programme can realistically reverse. The parties mobilizing the June 30 football match as an immigration crisis have no policy response to this demographic reality—because acknowledging it would require acknowledging that the immigrant communities they campaign against are structurally necessary to the demographic survival of the societies they claim to protect.
The contrast with the United States is material. Trump’s America possesses, in Latin America, a demographic reserve operating within its economic and geopolitical sphere of influence—hundreds of millions of people, economically motivated to migrate, geographically proximate, and available for rapid mobilization at any moment of political opening. The performative restriction of immigration does not eliminate this reserve. It holds it in suspension. European nations have no equivalent. Their demographic survival requires immigration not as a policy preference but as a structural necessity—and the media apparatus that allocates its prime real estate to the anticipated disorder surrounding football matches involving immigrant-community teams is not informing citizens about this structural reality. It is systematically displacing it in favor of a cultural threat narrative that serves the parties with the least to offer on the actual conditions of European demographic survival.
The Orbán Laboratory: What Sixteen Years of the Nativist Project Produced
The most instructive empirical test of European nativist politics is Hungary under Viktor Orbán — and the results are now available with unusual completeness. In his 2014 Băile Tușnad speech, Orbán explicitly declared his intention to construct an illiberal state, rejecting the liberal democratic framework of institutional pluralism and cultural openness in favor of ethnic nationalist cohesion and demographic protectionism. His government subsequently allocated approximately five percent of GDP to pro-natalist subsidies and maintained the most sustained anti-immigration political programme in European history for sixteen consecutive years.
The demographic results are documented with precision. Hungarian emigration to other EU member states accounted for 37.8 percent of Hungary’s total population decline between 2014 and 2024. The Come Home, Young People repatriation initiative—funded at approximately 245,000 euros—returned 105 individuals before being abandoned. Hungary’s EV battery industry, the second largest in Europe and the government’s economic showcase, operates on migrant labor, primarily Filipino and Ukrainian workers recruited internationally to fill positions that the domestically depleted workforce cannot supply. The anti-immigration government became structurally dependent on the immigration it campaigned against.
On 12 April 2026, the Hungarian electorate delivered its verdict. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party defeated Fidesz, ending Orbán’s sixteen years in power. The laboratory is closed. The most sustained European attempt to construct a viable illiberal nativist project produced a demographically weakened country, an economically contradictory labor market, and, ultimately, an electoral rejection by the citizens it claimed to represent. The movements imitating this project across Europe—mobilizing football matches because they cannot mobilize governing results—are at earlier stages of a trajectory whose destination Hungary has now reached. The message is waning. The red tie travels. The conditions do not.
The Game and the Strategy: What Is Actually at Stake
Morocco and the Netherlands will play a round of 32 World Cup match on June 30, 2026. What is at stake on the pitch is a football match — ninety minutes of sporting competition that millions of people across the world will watch as a moment of collective experience, legitimate national pride, and the particular joy that football uniquely generates across cultural and national boundaries. What is at stake in the political theatre surrounding it is something considerably more consequential: the question of whether PRR parties can successfully convert a sporting event into an immigration mobilization vehicle that displaces housing, wages, demographic sustainability, and the structural conditions of democratic life from the public agenda.
The Moroccan players—three of whom hold Dutch nationality, the remainder of whom have lived, studied, and built careers across Europe and the world—are not participants in this political theatre. They are its object. They have been constructed, through the agenda-setting operation that Wilders and his allied media networks have conducted over the past week, as the embodiment of a civilizational threat that their presence on a football pitch is made to confirm.
The hundreds of millions of people across Morocco, the Moroccan diaspora, and the broader Global South who will watch this match are watching something that matters to them entirely independently of European radical-right politics: a moment in which their nation competes on genuinely equal terms in the world’s relatively most democratic sporting competition. That this moment has been instrumentalized—converted into prime media real estate for an immigration mobilization strategy—represents a precise and deliberate political choice by actors who have calculated that the emotional intensity generated by eleven footballers exceeds anything their governing programmes can produce.
The disorder that the anticipatory narrative predicts—and that the unfalsifiable structure of the frame will claim to have confirmed regardless of what occurs—will not, if it materializes, be the expression of a community or a culture. It will be the expression of a specific subgroup of peripheral urban youth whose relationship to structural exclusion is the product of fifty years of European urban policy, of the banlieues and the ring roads and the social housing projects built at a deliberate distance from economic opportunity and civic life. Naming that exclusion as its cause, rather than the cultural pathology that the nativist frame installs in its place, is the analytical and democratic responsibility that the media apparatus surrounding the match has thus far declined to discharge.
Conclusion: Liberal Democracy’s First Imperative
Football has historically offered democratic societies something rare and valuable: a space in which the political identities that governance enforces are temporarily suspended in favor of a shared human experience. The systematic weaponization of that space by PRR parties—its conversion into the primary vehicle through which immigration is installed as the permanent priority of the public agenda—is not incidental to the illiberal project. It is constitutive of it. Orbán declared in 2014 that he would build an illiberal state. What he built was a country that haemorrhaged its youth, imported the workers it ideologically rejected, and, on 12 April 2026, received the electoral verdict of its own citizens. The laboratory failed. The message is waning. The red tie travels across European borders. The conditions that would make the project viable do not.
Liberal democracies face a first imperative that is prior to any debate about immigration policy, border management, or cultural integration: the imperative to stabilize multicultural societies, preserve the institutional architecture that makes demographic diversity politically manageable, and refuse the transition to illiberal alternatives whose empirical record—as Hungary now conclusively demonstrates—produces the opposite of their stated goals. This imperative includes a media responsibility that the weaponization of sporting events makes urgent: to identify and name the agenda-setting strategy through which PRR parties convert football matches into vehicles for immigration mobilization, and to resist the allocation of prime media real estate to anticipatory threat narratives whose unfalsifiable structure serves no democratic function. It serves only the movements that require permanent civilizational emergency as a substitute for governing capacity—movements whose structural fragility the mobilization surrounding June 30 game reveals more clearly than any polling data could.
On June 30, 2026, Morocco and the Netherlands will play football. The players on both sides will contribute to a spectacle that brings joy to people across the world—people from the Global South who watch this tournament as one of the few arenas in which their nations compete on genuinely equal terms with the industrialized world, and who deserve to do so without their joy being instrumentalized for political projects whose failure the demographic data, the electoral record, and the structural analysis of the continent on which they are played have already confirmed. Liberal democracy should be larger than the fear of eleven players. It should be larger, above all, than the political strategy that requires eleven players to perform the work that a governing programme cannot.
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Levitsky, Steven and Ziblatt, Daniel. (2018). How Democracies Die. New York: Crown Publishing.
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Schapendonk, Joris and Steel, Griet. (2022). “Mobility Power in the Migration Industry: Polish Workers’ Trajectories in the Netherlands.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48 (19): 4694–4711. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2061931
Peru’s razor-thin 2026 presidential election has reopened fundamental debates about democratic legitimacy, populism, institutional resilience, and political representation in Latin America. As Keiko Fujimori returns to power amid allegations of electoral fraud, rising insecurity, and deep public distrust, critical questions emerge about whether Peru is entering a period of democratic stabilization or renewed political crisis. In this timely interview, Professor Cynthia McClintock of George Washington University examines the structural forces reshaping Peruvian politics—from fragmented party competition and the enduring legacy of Fujimorismo to the regional rise of right-wing populism. She argues that “the desire for the iron fist” has helped shift Peru to the right while warning that the country remains democratically vulnerable despite important institutional and economic advances.
Peru’s 2026 presidential election represents one of the most consequential democratic tests in contemporary Latin America. The razor-thin runoff between Keiko Fujimori and Roberto Sánchez unfolded against a backdrop of escalating organized crime, allegations of electoral fraud, institutional reform, and profound public distrust in political institutions. Although the election culminated in the return of Fujimorismo to the presidency, it also exposed the enduring fragility of Peru’s democratic order and highlighted broader regional debates over populism, representation, democratic legitimacy, and state capacity. Rather than resolving Peru’s long-running political crisis, the election underscored the persistent tensions between demands for democratic accountability and growing public desires for order and security.
In this timely interview, Professor Cynthia McClintock, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and Director of GWU’s Latin American and Hemispheric Studies Program, offers a nuanced assessment of Peru’s political trajectory while placing recent developments within broader comparative debates on democratic resilience in Latin America. Drawing on decades of scholarship on Peruvian politics, electoral institutions, democratization, and runoff elections, Professor McClintock argues that the 2026 contest should not be understood simply as a story of ideological polarization. Instead, she contends that “most Peruvian voters were actually not at these extremes; rather, their vote fragmented,” pointing to the unprecedented presence of thirty-five presidential candidates and the collapse of the democratic center before the runoff.
Throughout the interview, Professor McClintock examines why democratic legitimacy has become increasingly fragile despite Peru’s comparatively strong macroeconomic performance. She warns that declining trust in electoral institutions constitutes “a very worrisome pattern,” while emphasizing that rising insecurity has fundamentally reshaped political competition. In her view, “there’s been a particularly tragic increase in extortion in Peru, which has led to this desire for the iron fist,” helping explain both the electoral shift to the right and the growing appeal of right-wing populism across the region.
At the same time, Professor McClintock cautions against simplistic interpretations of Peru’s political evolution. She argues that institutional reforms—including bicameralism and runoff elections—remain valuable, insisting that “institutions matter,” even though “there is no magic formula for high-quality democracy.” Likewise, while recognizing the continuing appeal of Fujimorismo, she stresses that Peru’s persistent fragmentation has prevented any single populist actor from fully consolidating power, making Alberto Fujimori “an exception” rather than the rule.
Ultimately, Professor McClintock presents Peru as a democracy caught between meaningful progress and persistent vulnerability. Although she concludes that the country “is still vulnerable to these problems,” she also reminds us that Peru has made remarkable democratic advances over recent decades. The conversation therefore offers not only an illuminating analysis of Peru’s turbulent political landscape but also broader insights into the evolving relationship between populism, democratic representation, institutional resilience, and political legitimacy across Latin America.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Professor Cynthia McClintock, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Peru Was Less Polarized Than Fragmented in 2026
Street art and colorful graffiti brighten a wall in Cusco, Peru, reflecting the city’s vibrant urban culture. Photo: Nicola Messana / Dreamstime.
Professor McClintock, welcome, and thank you for joining us. To begin, how should we interpret the outcome of Peru’s 2026 election? Keiko Fujimori appears to have secured the presidency by one of the narrowest margins in Peru’s democratic history. What does such an extremely polarized and contested outcome reveal about the current state of democratic legitimacy and political representation in Peru?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: It’s a very important question, and I worry a lot about democratic legitimacy in Peru. I think we all do. There’s definitely been a shift to the right in Latin American elections. I’m sure you’ve seen it too, and, of course, that’s represented here. It’s important to keep in mind that the third-place candidate was also involved in another razor-thin, delayed result, which was problematic for legitimacy, but it did signal the strength of the right. I assume that most of the votes for the third-place candidate went to Keiko Fujimori.
There’s been a particularly tragic increase in extortion in Peru, which has led to this desire for the iron fist, as we say. It’s clear that, with such a razor-thin result in the runoff, most folks would talk about polarization. But, in fact, Keiko Fujimori and Roberto Sanchez together received only 29% of the vote in the first round of the elections —it was 17% and 12%, respectively. So most Peruvian voters were actually not at these extremes; rather, their vote fragmented. There was serious fragmentation. There was a record 35 presidential candidates. So, it was a very fragmented, splintered vote, and unfortunately, from a lot of folks’ standpoints, the sort of more democratic center didn’t make it to the runoff.
Slow Vote Counts Are Fueling Distrust Across Democracies
Roberto Sánchez has refused to recognize the results and has alleged electoral fraud, echoing patterns seen in several democracies around the world. How concerned should we be about the normalization of post-electoral de-legitimization, and what does it suggest about the erosion of trust in democratic institutions?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: It’s a very serious problem. Ironically, Keiko Fujimori also alleged fraud in the 2021 election, which she narrowly lost to the leftist. It was a reversal of the 2021 runoff here in 2026 in Peru. Of course, the United States, Brazil, and so many others have experienced similar patterns. It’s a very serious problem. The percentage of Peruvians who believe in the elections, or trust that the elections represented their outcome, was 30% in 2021, and it’s going to go down and down. There were problems with the ballot boxes in the first round. There’s also this question of the overseas vote. Whenever there’s a slow count throughout the world, it leads to doubts. It’s a very worrisome pattern.
Peru’s Political Geography Is More Complex Than Rural Versus Urban
The 2026 election once again exposed the deep divide between Lima and Peru’s rural and indigenous regions. To what extent is Peru’s political crisis fundamentally a crisis of territorial representation and unequal citizenship rather than simply a crisis of institutions?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: This has been the case really since the conquest, and unfortunately, it does continue. It’s a very deep divide. Some of the folks reading this may remember the protests back in 2022 and 2023 in Peru. The name of the protest was “Take Over Lima”. It was people from the South, reflecting historical resentments. So it’s a very significant divide. By the same token, just as I was talking before about polarization versus fragmentation, as of the 21st century, more than two-thirds of the population of Peru is urban.
This is true throughout Latin America now. It’s not really this image of the coffee farmer way off in the Ceja de Selva. This is not really accurate anymore. There are an awful lot of Peruvians elsewhere, who live in the cities and in the informal sector, and they’re what we would probably call lower middle class. So, it’s true that there’s this major divide. We’ve seen this in every single election, where the Southern Highlands, in particular, vote to the left, and Lima and the north coast vote to the right. But it shouldn’t be exaggerated either. As I said, all of these sort of candidates, more or less in the democratic center, were closer to a majority than these two extremes.
Security Has Become Fujimorismo’s Strongest Political Asset
Keiko Fujimori has inherited and reshaped one of Latin America’s most enduring populist political legacies. To what extent can Fujimorismo still be understood as a form of right-wing populism, and how has its appeal evolved in the context of contemporary Peru’s demands for order, security, and political stability?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: Keiko Fujimori is now very much the establishment. This was the fourth time running to win, but she has held a lot of power in the country, especially since the razor-thin 2016 election. She can’t really claim to be an outsider any longer. Her tone has varied over time, so it’s a little unclear exactly how Fujimorismo is going to evolve going forward.
When she was campaigning this time, she campaigned as a Democrat who’s got her eyes on security. Yes, we’re going to be tough on security, but a lot of the things she proposed, most of us would say, “Yeah, go for it,” in this climate of severe crime. Bigger, better jails. Virtually 99% of Peruvians support that. When she was asked about human rights violations, she didn’t say much. She’s moderated her tone quite a bit, but then there’s also not quite as much self-criticism. There’s no criticism of the Fujimori era either.
There’s definitely still Fujimorismo and anti-Fujimorismo in Peru. The South is anti-Fujimorismo because of the concerns about human rights violations.
One of the reasons why she lost in 2021, in particular, was that memories of the corruption allegations against her were still strong. That was less the case now. There is a generation that’s less familiar with all of this and was probably more willing to vote for “Fujimorismo.” But given that it was 2026, (five, six years later,) the people who support it don’t see the human rights violations or the corruption allegations, so it’s a different vision, and we’ll see how it evolves.
Anti-Fujimorismo Has Weakened, But It Has Not Disappeared
Alberto Fujimori, President of Peru from 1990 to 2000, whose presidency combined economic stabilization and counterinsurgency efforts with growing authoritarianism and institutional erosion. Photo: Luis Antonio Rosendo / Dreamstime.
Does Keiko Fujimori’s apparent victory suggest that anti-Fujimorismo is finally losing its mobilizing power, or does the narrowness of the result indicate that the country remains deeply divided over the Fujimori legacy?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: I would say both. There’s still deep division about this. If you consider that the third-place candidate was far to the right, I assume that Keiko got a lot of those votes. But considering that you had both the first- and the third-place candidates on the right, one would have thought that she would have won by a much wider margin. So, there’s still a considerable anti-Fujimorismo vote.
On the other hand, she did prevail this time. So, as I was saying a little bit in response to the previous question, Some of the memories… corruption… the anti-Fujimorismo folks definitely highlight human rights violations and corruption under her father, as well as the protests and some of the more recent events. But those memories have faded a bit now. For younger folks, the 1990s are ancient history.
So, both are true. It exists. That’s why she didn’t win by a larger margin. Sánchez in the first round only got 12%. So, the vote for the far left in the first round was very low. The fact that he brought it to a virtual tie suggests there’s still a lot of anti-Fujimorismo, but she won.
Keiko’s Alliances Could Determine Peru’s Democratic Future
Throughout your scholarship, you have emphasized the importance of democratic legitimacy. Given both the contested outcome and Fujimori’s polarizing political history, what challenges will the incoming administration face in building a broadly accepted mandate to govern?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: I think she needs to continue with the more moderate positions that she tended to highlight during the campaign. The runoff tends to mean that candidates have to look toward the center, but then there’s the question of how they will govern afterward—their base versus trying to appeal to a broader center. She will have a plurality in both houses of Congress. For the first time since the 1990s, Peru has a Senate. It’s a very powerful Senate. She’ll have a little more than a third of the seats in both houses, so she’s in a very strong position.
She’ll be in an even stronger position if the third-place candidate, a former mayor of Lima named López Aliaga, who also finished third in 2021, supports her. We don’t know what his positions are going to be with respect to Keiko. It was not Sánchez charging fraud in the runoff; he was charging fraud in the first round. So he’s not happy with how that went, with Keiko. But, on the other hand, they’re both considered rightists. We’ll see how that relationship goes. Keiko, in the past, especially during this 2021–2026 term, often allied with the left.
Sánchez’s party is called Perú Libre. The current president of Peru is actually also from Perú Libre. His ascendance to the presidency was supported by Keiko’s party. So; she’s had a history of being able to make these kinds of deals and negotiations— I would argue, not necessarily for the best. There are big questions, for example, about illegal mining in Peru and how to deal with it. It’s a very difficult issue. Illegal mining is terrible for the environment, very dangerous for a lot of Indigenous communities, and for law and order in general. But there are a lot of folks who see this as a huge bonanza, with gold prices through the roof. On the right, a lot of people say it’s just bureaucracy that’s preventing more of this mining from becoming legal. On the left, there are a lot of poor people out there who want, need this kind of financial boon. So there often are positions that I might not favor, but that different groups on the left and the right can come together on.
There’s a lot of concern that if, for example, Keiko does forge an alliance with the rightist forces of López Aliaga, that could mean more of a mandate for authoritarianism. Hopefully not. We have now had something reasonably democratic in Peru for basically most of the period since the return to democracy in 1980, so hopefully the norms have settled in, and there are a lot of very honest, professional people doing their best to make democracy work and to make the country prosperous.
Peru’s Greatest Instability Is the Expectation of Failure
Peru has experienced extraordinary presidential turnover, with nine presidents in roughly a decade. Does the election of a candidate whose party possesses a stronger organizational structure than most competitors offer a genuine opportunity for political stabilization, or are the underlying drivers of instability still intact?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: It’s a really good question. On the one hand, there is a very long-standing driver of instability, which is the expectation that things are not going to work out very well. As you may know, Peru’s political parties are notoriously fragile. It’s a sharp contrast to countries like neighboring Colombia, where the Conservatives and the Liberals were present for something like 100 years.
Peru’s never had that, and there’s a tendency for people to expect failure, to say, “Oh, we’re going to abandon a sinking ship. Obviously, it’s not going to work out well for Keiko. Let’s go somewhere else.” Of course, that leads to, “Let’s get on the bandwagon of saying, no, we don’t like this president. Let’s have a new president.” Then you begin with this kind of hope, and then, again, cynicism, and turning against him. This was what happened a lot with Pedro Castillo. His view of things was that he was trying, he was being obstructed, and people didn’t give him a chance. That dynamic has been very common, unfortunately.
On the other hand, we can’t rule out the fact that Keiko’s been around a long time. As you said, she’s forged quite a lot of alliances. Almost all of us following Peru would say she’s been the primary architect of everything that’s happened since 2016. Even though the president elected in 2016, again by this very narrow margin, (former Peru President) Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, was also considered a very pro-market guy, more or less on the right, center-right, she was after him at every turn for a lot of different reasons. Anyway, she’s been a very powerful figure for quite a while. She has alliances. She has some very smart people, good tacticians, working with her.
So, there is this potential that, again, if she’s able to forge a good tie with López Aliaga and maintain the ties that she built with Perú Libre during the last couple of years, then this could be more “stable” than we want. Stability is always considered a good thing, and there are lots of problems with instability, particularly in Peru recently. All the turnover of ministers has made it very difficult to have continuity in security policy in particular. But that said, there are also concerns when you’re talking about the stability of an authoritarian regime or authoritarian tendencies.
A paraglider soars above the Larcomar waterfront district overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Lima, Peru. Photo: Jesse Kraft / Dreamstime.
The 2026 election unfolded under newly reformed institutional rules, including the return of a bicameral legislature and measures intended to reduce party fragmentation. Do these reforms represent a meaningful step toward strengthening democratic governance, or are Peru’s problems rooted more deeply than institutional engineering can address?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: It’s a very important question for political scientists, and we definitely believe institutions matter. I’ve worked a lot on the almost Latin America-wide implementation of runoff rules for the election of the president, and I definitely feel that they have been helpful. There’s never been any question in Peru about returning to elections without a runoff. You can imagine, in this case, if Keiko Fujimori had been elected president of the country after receiving only 17% of the first-round vote. All the questions that would have been raised if that had been the case. So there definitely are institutions that are helpful.
Most of my colleagues believe that bicameralism is a positive thing—a little more debate, a little more opportunity for checks and balances, and a little more opportunity for politicians to become senior in office, learn, and gain experience. That said, we’re also worried about the powers of this particular Senate and how they could be used. So there’s a lot of variation. Most institutions have pluses, but they also have minuses. Now, if there were some kind of magic formula for high-quality democracy, we’d have it. But there isn’t. Presidentialism versus parliamentarianism, no?
We believe that institutions matter, but so do social and historical norms and economic factors. “It’s the economy, stupid.” The famous phrase from Bill Clinton. Peru has enjoyed—it’s very ironic—an economy that has fared quite well over the last couple of years in particular, despite the political instability.
Campaign Moderation Does Not Always Survive Governing
In your work on run-off elections, you have argued that second-round systems can enhance legitimacy and encourage moderation. Looking at the Fujimori-Sánchez contest, do you believe the runoff system fulfilled those expectations, or did it instead reinforce polarization and anti-system mobilization?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: I do think it helped with moderation. Both Keiko Fujimori and Roberto Sánchez were acknowledging and recognizing, in their campaigns—and in the runoff in particular—what we might call the democratic center. That is one of the main reasons why Roberto Sánchez was able to increase his vote so much. As I mentioned, he only got 12% in the first round. Of course, a lot of the increase was due to the anti-Fujimorismo that we’ve talked about, but he was also campaigning on a much more moderate platform in the runoff than he had in the first round.
As we’ve said before, the big question is how they actually govern, and whether that changes. What we see in general in Latin America is that political leaders moderate during the runoff. Perhaps they move back a little toward their base once they’re in office, if they’re elected, but not entirely. So, it probably does help in terms of bringing the country together. But again, no panaceas.
Illegal Economies Have Undermined Democratic Consolidation
One of the most striking features of contemporary Peru is the coexistence of recurring political crises and long periods of macroeconomic stability. Why has economic performance repeatedly failed to translate into stronger democratic legitimacy and more institutionalized political competition?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: There is modernization theory, which is one of the classic theories in political science. We argue that with economic development and the growth of the middle class—which has happened in Peru, and I would argue very strongly that economic growth has been helpful—there’s really no doubt that economic growth, the emergence of a middle class, and the emergence of more educated and professional folks all help. If this were not happening, Peru would be in much worse shape today.
We don’t have to go that far back in history, to the Shining Path insurgency or the problems of political exclusion back in the 1930s, when the country was more or less a feudal society, to see that economic development has helped the country build middle classes, professional folks, and much more educated people who participate much more fully in a democratic society. But again, there are no panaceas.
We have to keep in mind that Peru was at the heart of the Spanish conquest in South America. It was incredibly traumatic. The Spanish arrived and, with a small group of men on horseback, conquered the country. This was the heart of the Incan civilization. So, when we’re talking about polarization in the South, this goes back to Atahualpa. The Spaniards said to him, “If you bring us all that gold and silver, your life will be saved. Everything will be fine.” Then they totally reneged on their promise and murdered Atahualpa. So this was an incredibly traumatic beginning.
Then, although there’s been economic growth, there’s also been incredible variation—a lot of booms and busts, historically. There was the infamous guano boom in the early twentieth century, and for about 10 years that was the motor of the Peruvian economy. Then, all of a sudden, there was a bust. So that meant all these changes in elites and changes in economic bases.
Currently, too, some of the economic growth comes from illegal mining. Some of the growth is in illegal sectors. Notoriously, coca, cocaine, and these illegal sectors reflect the robust demand from people in the North for gold, cocaine, and other drugs. That has meant the bolstering of illegal economies, and that’s been very unhelpful to the consolidation of democratic institutions.
Security Has Become Latin America’s Dominant Political Issue
The campaign highlighted competing visions of Peru’s future: Fujimori emphasizing order, security, and economic continuity, and Sánchez advocating constitutional reform, redistribution, and stronger state intervention. How should we understand this divide within broader debates about populism, representation, and democratic responsiveness?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: It’s classic, to a large degree. In general, the political right tends to appeal to groups that are doing better, are more prosperous, like the way things are going economically, are more pro-market, and believe that the market will solve other problems. In general, the left says, no, we need a lot of state intervention to have social policies that benefit everybody. The distribution of wealth here is very skewed.
So, given the social bases that we’ve talked about, it’s not that surprising. It’s very important for the left to deal with the security challenge. Almost all Peruvians are worried about security. Again, we’ve seen this throughout Latin America. Just look at the Colombian election. This is a key issue. It’s been very hard for a lot of Latin American countries to control organized crime.
We could spend lots of time talking about that. There are problems related to the role of the North. A lot of guns go across the border from the United States, which is not helpful. Lots of the demand for these goods comes from here. But that doesn’t change the fact that, on the ground in Latin America, for most people this is the number one concern: security, being able to go out in the street at night.
The political left should not ignore trying to solve this problem in a democratic fashion.
Weak Parties Continue to Fuel Political Fragmentation
A campaign billboard promoting Pedro Castillo ahead of Peru’s 2021 presidential election in Lima. Photo: John Kavanagh / Dreamstime.
Peruvian politics has increasingly been characterized by outsider candidates, weak parties, and personalized leadership. Has Peru become an archetype of what some scholars call “representation without parties,” and what are the democratic consequences of such a trajectory?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: That’s true, except for Fuerza Popular under Keiko. Fuerza Popular is the name of Keiko’s party. Fuerza Popular built on Alberto Fujimori and the popularity of some of his policies during the 1990s, but also tried to say, “Hey, no, we are more democratic than Alberto Fujimori was.” For most of the period since 2016, they’ve had a plurality, but they’re the only party that has consolidated.
Unfortunately, it’s just been very hard. As I said, there’s not a lot of social trust among Peruvians, and political leaders tend to have rivalries or quarrels and not be able to stick together. Bringing together the different parts of the country is hard, so it’s hard to consolidate political parties. Some of that’s worse now because of social media.
This is not uncommon. In the 2021 election, nobody had heard of Pedro Castillo until about a month before the election. So he was a classic outsider, but he was able to get 17% or 19% of the vote. Then, again, anti-Fujimorismo moved ahead. So it’s a classic example of an outsider being able to prevail. Once you have that example, lots of other people say, “Well, Pedro Castillo could do it. I can do it too. So let me throw my hat in the ring. Why not me?” So that was one of the reasons why there were 35 presidential candidates in the 2026 election.
It didn’t help that Fuerza Popular and some of the other parties believed they had enough of a political base to get into Congress. It’s a complicated situation, but Fuerza Popular was definitely hoping there would be this fragmentation so that they could get into the runoff with a relatively low percentage of the first-round vote, as they had in 2021.
Inclusion Depends on Trust, Presence, and Effective Public Policy
The Sánchez campaign drew substantial support from rural, indigenous, and historically marginalized constituencies. Regardless of the electoral outcome, what lessons should Peru’s political establishment draw from the persistence of these grievances and demands for inclusion?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: It’s always important for leaders to travel to these areas, listen, speak with folks there, and then try to resolve these problems by working with local people. One of the former Peruvian presidents after Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Martín Vizcarra, back in about 2018–2021, was one of the more popular Peruvian presidents. He was ultimately impeached, but he did a lot of getting out to local areas, and his popularity was based in good part on that. Peruvians really like it when the leader shows up, listens, and then tries to help.
Obviously, in 2026, too, social media is very important for leaders. It’s the way people communicate these days, and this was the case in Brazil and Colombia, etc. Leaders need to stay in touch with this space, trying to communicate, trying to say, “Yeah, this is what I’m doing for you lately.” Then they need to actually follow through, because people do notice. There are programs in Peru that have been quite successful. A lot of these conditional cash transfer programs throughout Latin America have been successful. It was under Ollanta Humala that there was a scholarship program, a pension program, and enhancements to the conditional cash transfer program. A lot of these programs were meaningful for people in these areas. So it’s a matter of continuing them.
Obviously, there’s always this question about Peru’s strong economy. A lot of analysts attribute its success to the central bank president. Peru has had the same central bank president, Julio Velarde, for a long time. They’ve been very good at keeping macroeconomics stable. So that’s important, but it’s also important to address inequality. Throughout Latin America, inequality is egregious. Peru is no exception, and there are programs that help.
The Hardest Question Is Balancing Local and Central Power
Your research on Peru’s mining conflicts highlights the importance of local state capacity in mediating social tensions. As social conflicts surrounding extraction continue to shape Peruvian politics, how important will governance reform be for preventing renewed cycles of protest and instability?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: Peru, back under Toledo in the early 2000s, implemented decentralization reform. Again, it comes back to, “Be careful what you wish for,” with institutions, because decentralization was something that we all favored. We’ve talked many times about the exclusion of folks in Peru’s highlands and Peru’s jungle, and the tremendous power that Lima is perceived to have. So this was considered really important in terms of trying to ameliorate that cleavage—to give more power to local governments and to what’s called departments in Peru, which are like states in a lot of other countries. It’s a subnational level of government, and then there are local governments as well.
There have been successes, and this has been very meaningful for folks on the ground. They like it. But it’s been hard. Some of it is education. Some of it is experience. It’s quite new. There are often problems of corruption, so you need accountability and vigilance. But, on the other hand, you don’t want to strangle people with red tape either. So, these are challenging questions that I’m not sure have really been worked out anywhere—how to get the best balance between power to the localities and power to the center.
Peru’s Populism Remains Divided Rather Than Dominant
Comparative research often associates democratic erosion with populist leaders who claim exclusive representation of “the people” against corrupt elites and institutions. Does Peru’s experience suggest a different pattern, in which populism operates within a context of institutional fragmentation and state weakness rather than executive concentration of power?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: Alberto Fujimori was considered a rightist populist, and he was able to consolidate power. He has been an exception. Given the political fragmentation, it’s been challenging. Again, Martín Vizcarra, whom I mentioned before as being quite popular, definitely had populist traits. He might have been able to consolidate a movement, but, as we’ve talked about before, there was Keiko Fujimori as a rival, the fragmentation in the country, and others saying, “We don’t want him to consolidate a hegemonic position.”
So there have been moments of that. I’d say that, probably in the 2026 election, in part because Keiko has been around for so long, the politician who most claimed the mantle of rightist populism was López Aliaga, the former mayor of Lima. He clearly was not able to consolidate that position in the 2026 election.
How he’ll go forward is one of the biggest question marks because he could decide, as a rightist, to ally with Keiko, giving her a very strong position in Congress, which could lead her to become quite a hegemonic force. Or he could say, “It was Keiko who prevented me from getting to the runoff. I would have won easily. I’m angry.” That would very much be a continuation of division within the forces of populism. So, once again, you have both answers to both questions. Both positions are possible.
Security Is Driving the New Wave of Right-Wing Populism
Peruvian military personnel march during the Independence Day civic and military parade on Avenida Brasil in Lima, Peru. Photo: Rommel Gonzalez / Dreamstime.
Across Latin America, populism has appeared in both left-wing and right-wing forms, from Hugo Chávez/Nicolás Maduro and Andrés Manuel López Obrador to Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele. Where does contemporary Peru fit within this broader regional landscape, and what can the 2026 election tell us about the relationship between populism, democratic representation, and institutional resilience in the region?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: We see populism gaining force. In part, it’s related to social media and the capacity for these quick one-liners, reaching more people by being able to say, “I’m gonna be the savior.” In part, that’s also related to perceptions of corruption. As more information and corruption allegations come to light, more average folks say, “Yeah, no, I’m really angry at these elites.” To a certain extent, too, with economic growth, people are saying, “Oh, X has done really well, and I haven’t,” so there’s more resentment. It’s happening throughout the world, from the United States to Colombia to Argentina. It’s also the case that rightist populism has fared very well. We’ve referred to that a couple of times today.
Clearly, this is based on the desire for security, as we’ve talked about before—the iron fist. The Bukele model is often incorrectly understood. A lot of folks say, “Bukele succeeded because he was tough.” In El Salvador, Bukele had a lot of tactical advantages going for him. There had been truces between the gangs and the government for a long period of time. Gang members wear tattoos. El Salvador is a very small country. Criminals can’t hide very easily. It’s not a country like Peru or Colombia, where a lot of the criminal groups are out in remote parts of the country where there are no police. So, he had a lot of advantages.
Abelardo de la Espriella bills himself as this right-wing populist, and I was watching his speech on election night in Colombia, and he’s just a copycat. But anyway, it’s the security issue that’s fueling this a lot. There’s also, as in many parts of the world, this backlash against secularism and a desire for a return to religious Christianity. So that’s part of it, too. But definitely we’re seeing a move toward rightist populism.
Peru Has Come Far, But It Remains Democratically Fragile
Finally, after the turbulent 2026 election, what do you see as the most plausible scenarios for Peru over the next five years? Are you cautiously optimistic that institutional reforms and electoral competition can restore democratic stability, or do you believe the country remains vulnerable to further cycles of polarization, protest, and constitutional crisis?
Professor Cynthia McClintock: It’s still vulnerable to these problems. But all Peruvians, and everyone who knows about Peru, would be hoping that that is not the case. As we’ve talked about today, there’s this incredibly traumatic history in the country, the problems associated with economic growth, the expansion of organized crime, the difficulties in establishing and consolidating strong political parties, and the tendency, when there is a strong political party, for it to move in an authoritarian direction, which is obviously antithetical, by definition, to democracy. These are all very serious problems.
But at the same time, we have to acknowledge how far Peru has come in the twenty-first century. This is true of a lot of Latin American countries. Many of these countries had totally excluded the left, with a sort of veto against the left being in power at all, one of the factors behind the egregious inequality in so many of them. In Colombia, Petro became the first leftist president in the country’s history. It finally happened.
In the case of Peru, the election of Ollanta Humala and Alejandro Toledo brought forward people who were not your classic Lima-based politicians—people with Indigenous roots coming to the fore in the country.
So, in general, I’d say the 2026 election in Peru was very worrisome in terms of perceptions of whether it was free and fair. But overall, in most of these countries, we have free and fair elections, which would have been unheard of 80 years ago. So there have been big advances. But yes, Peru is vulnerable, and I’m glad you’re focusing on it, because attention is a positive for everybody trying to do better and learn.
Peru’s 2026 presidential election revealed far more than another episode of political volatility. It exposed deep and persistent weaknesses in political representation, institutional trust, and democratic legitimacy. In this timely interview, Professor Julio Carrión argues that Peru’s crisis is rooted not primarily in ideological polarization but in the fragmentation of the party system, the erosion of public confidence in institutions, and the growing normalization of illiberal political practices. Reflecting on the enduring appeal of Fujimorismo, anti-establishment politics, democratic fatigue, and declining rule of law, Professor Carrión warns that Peru may be entering a “post-populist” era in which democracy survives formally but steadily deteriorates in quality. The interview offers important insights into democratic resilience and democratic erosion across Latin America.
Peru’s 2026 presidential election has once again exposed the deep structural weaknesses that have long characterized the country’s democratic system. The narrow runoff victory of Keiko Fujimori over Roberto Sánchez followed an extraordinarily fragmented first-round contest involving dozens of candidates and revealed not only the persistence of anti-establishment sentiment but also the continuing erosion of political representation, institutional trust, and democratic legitimacy. While Peru remains formally democratic, growing concerns over political instability, institutional capture, declining public confidence, and the normalization of illiberal political practices have raised fundamental questions about the future of democratic governance in the country.
Few scholars are better positioned to assess these developments than Professor Julio Carrión, Professor of Comparative and Latin American Politics and Populism at the University of Delaware. Throughout his distinguished career, Professor Carrión has examined democratic legitimacy, populism, public opinion, political representation, and democratic accountability across Latin America, with particular attention to Peru’s enduring institutional vulnerabilities.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Carrión argues that Peru’s current predicament extends far beyond electoral volatility. The election results themselves, he contends, provide “prima facie evidence of the deep crisis of political representation,” noting that the two runoff candidates together secured only 29 percent of first-round votes, forcing the overwhelming majority of Peruvians to choose between candidates they had initially rejected. For Professor Carrión, this reflects a political system marked by extreme fragmentation and weakening links between citizens and parties.
The interview also explores the enduring appeal of Fujimorismo, anti-establishment politics, regional divisions, and the persistent tensions between Lima and the provinces. Yet Professor Carrión’s most sobering assessment concerns the broader state of Peruvian democracy. Repeated confrontations between presidents and Congress, institutional dysfunction, and the weakening of checks and balances have, in his view, produced not democratic resilience but democratic exhaustion. Indeed, he warns that Peru’s political trajectory has brought the country dangerously close to a systemic crisis of democratic governance.
“I am very pessimistic about the prospects for Peruvian democracy,” Professor Carrión states bluntly. In his assessment, informal political coalitions have significantly weakened the rule of law, secured influence over institutions designed to provide oversight, and created conditions under which democratic erosion can continue without the dramatic ruptures that characterized earlier authoritarian episodes.
At the same time, Professor Carrión offers a broader reflection on contemporary Latin American politics. He argues that the region may be entering a “post-populist” era in which populism has become normalized rather than exceptional. While democracy may not necessarily collapse outright, illiberal practices, polarization, hardball politics, and attacks on institutional constraints have increasingly become part of the political mainstream. The result, he suggests, is a political environment in which democracy survives but steadily declines in quality.
The interview offers a timely and penetrating analysis of Peru’s uncertain future and raises broader questions about democratic resilience, populism, representation, and institutional decay across Latin America.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Professor Julio Carrión, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
The Runoff Was Prima Facie Evidence of Peru’s Deep Crisis of Representation
A campaign mural promoting Keiko Fujimori, presidential candidate in Peru’s 2021 election, painted along the Pan-American Highway in Lima, Peru, on April 29, 2021. Photo: Christian Inga / Dreamstime.
Professor Carrión, welcome! Peru’s 2026 presidential election, marked by the contest between Keiko Fujimori and Roberto Sánchez, once again highlighted both the extraordinary volatility of Peruvian politics and the deep fragmentation of the country’s party system, while also revealing the continued appeal of anti-establishment narratives. How should we interpret these results in light of your longstanding argument that Peru suffers from a profound crisis of political representation and institutional trust rather than merely periodic electoral volatility?
Professor Julio Carrión: It’s a very good question. The actual results of the runoff show just how severe the crisis of political representation in Peru is. Keiko Fujimori obtained 17% of the vote and Roberto Sánchez obtained 12% of the vote in the first round. So, if you add the top two contenders together, it amounts to less than a third of the electorate—29%. Yet, 70% of those who did not vote for either of them in the first round were forced to choose between them in the runoff. That, for me, is prima facie evidence of the deep crisis of political representation. Eight out of ten voters had to choose between two candidates for whom they had not voted in the first round.
So, in a sense, what you have is a combination of a deeply fragmented political system, where 35 different candidates vied for votes in the first round, followed by a kind of artificial situation in the runoff in which the overwhelming majority of voters had to choose between Keiko Fujimori and Roberto Sánchez. It so happened that this time a slight majority—a hairline majority of forty-five thousand votes, or perhaps even fewer—decided to support Keiko Fujimori, putting her on top. This was the fourth time she had run for the presidency.
So, the election illustrates both the crisis of political representation and, at the same time, some of the deeper features of Peruvian society today—features that it has carried for the last two or three decades. Perhaps we can talk a little more about that later, but that’s where we are.
Fujimorismo Is Declining, But It Remains a Force No Candidate Can Ignore
Keiko Fujimori’s strong performance suggests that Fujimorismo remains one of the few durable political identities in Peru. What explains its continued resilience despite its association with both economic modernization and authoritarian rule?
Professor Julio Carrión: We have to recognize that perhaps the Fujimorista Party is the only real political party in Peru today. It is a party with national penetration. It has been around for at least 15 years, and it represents an important segment of the Peruvian electorate. But it is also important to note that this is a declining segment of the electorate, despite the fact that she won the runoff this time. In the first round this year, she obtained only 17% of the vote. Ten years ago, in 2016, in the first round, she received 33%. So, this time she obtained roughly half the votes she received in the 2016 election. For reasons that we can perhaps explore later, she was able to overcome her opponent in the second round. But it is important to remember that Fujimorismo remains a powerful political identity in Peruvian society, even though it is declining. It is declining especially among older voters. As that population gradually diminishes, identification with Fujimorismo also declines.
What explains its endurance? I think two factors are crucial. One is that there is a tradition in Peruvian politics whereby those who inherit the legacy of a dictatorship—especially if that dictatorship evokes positive memories among a segment of the electorate—tend to survive politically for some time. Hers is not the first case in which a party that represents, or claims the legacy of, a former dictator performs well electorally. She is simply the latest manifestation of that phenomenon.
It is true that a significant segment of the Peruvian electorate, although declining, still views her father’s decade in power positively. Her father was able to defeat a domestic insurgency, and he was able to bring under control a severe economic crisis. That legacy has provided the political foundation upon which she has been able to build a party. It is also important to note that, despite being a center-right party, it has maintained a certain degree of penetration among working-class and lower-income voters. It is not an upper-middle-class or upper-class party.
Despite its ideological orientation, it appeals to segments of the population that favor clientelistic policies and state assistance because they genuinely need it. These voters retain positive memories of her father’s government, in part because it implemented strong social programs that resonated with these sectors of society. The second factor is that, in Lima and the most important cities of northern Peru, there has been a clear reorientation of the electorate toward the right. Not the extreme right, but certainly further to the right than twenty years ago. The Fujimorista Party, in many ways, represents that ideological transformation within an important segment of the Peruvian electorate. It is not a majority—certainly not 60 or 70 percent of the electorate—but it is concentrated in Lima, a city of roughly 14 million inhabitants within a country of 33 million people, as well as in several important northern cities.
So, the combination of an electorate that has gradually shifted to the right and the enduring memories associated with her father’s government has helped sustain a party that continues to endure, even in the midst of a party system that, in many respects, barely exists because of the extraordinarily high level of political fragmentation. It is a complicated explanation, but that is what really explains it.
Alberto Fujimori, President of Peru from 1990 to 2000, whose presidency combined economic stabilization and counterinsurgency efforts with growing authoritarianism and institutional erosion. Photo: Luis Antonio Rosendo / Dreamstime.
The Real Divide Is Not Left Versus Right, but Lima Versus the Rest of Peru
Roberto Sánchez campaigned as a critic of the political establishment and promised political renewal, while the 2026 campaign more broadly was marked by strong anti-establishment rhetoric from multiple candidates. Does the appeal of such messages suggest that anti-establishment sentiment remains the dominant force in Peruvian politics, and do you see contemporary Peru as fertile ground for a new wave of populism, or has the turbulent experience of leaders such as Pedro Castillo made voters increasingly skeptical of populist appeals?
Professor Julio Carrión: Peruvian society is characterized by a number of important cleavages, and the anti-establishment cleavage is certainly one of them. But it is not the only one. Among the poor and the working class, there is a widespread sentiment that the establishment has not really done much for them during the more than two decades since Peru returned to democracy in 2000. As a result, anti-establishment sentiment constitutes an important cleavage that helps explain electoral outcomes. Parties that are perceived as part of the establishment often find themselves competing against parties or candidates who are viewed as anti-establishment figures. At the same time, however, this cleavage interacts with a couple of other important divisions.
The second cleavage is the one between the regions and the capital. As I mentioned, Lima has about 14 million people in a country of 33 million. It is a modern city, and one that has gradually been shifting to the right. It is also the seat of government, where parliament sits and where most political leaders reside. Unfortunately, it is also home to segments of the upper-middle class and upper class that can be deeply racist and that do not fully regard the southern part of Peru and the provinces as integral parts of the nation. So, you have this additional cleavage between the regions and the capital. For the last three national elections, the runoff has exemplified this divide. Regardless of who competed against Keiko Fujimori, that candidate generally received the majority of votes in the regions outside Lima, while Keiko Fujimori secured the majority of votes in Lima and in the larger cities of northern Peru. So, you have this additional cleavage that sometimes overlaps with the establishment-versus-anti-establishment divide. But it adds another layer because it is geographical rather than purely political.
Then there is a third cleavage, one that has helped explain electoral outcomes for the last fifteen years: the divide between those who embrace Fujimori’s legacy and those who reject it. Every runoff since 2011 has been a contest between Keiko Fujimori and a candidate who represented the anti-Fujimorista segment of the electorate.
So, you have this combination of three different cleavages, and the way electoral politics has functioned over the last fifteen years is that the candidate running against Keiko Fujimori in the runoff has generally been able to represent the overlap of all three.
This time, however, by a whisker—by the narrowest of margins—Fujimori was able to come out on top. That outcome can be explained partly by demographic changes, but also by the fact that Roberto Sánchez was a terrible candidate. During the first-round campaign, he placed considerable emphasis on the need to convene a constituent assembly. Then, in the second-round campaign, he essentially abandoned that demand. As a result, the runoff campaign never really developed a clear center. He moved toward the political center, but it was a move that took weeks to materialize, and he was never able to articulate a coherent political message for the runoff. That was basically the reason for his defeat.
Peruvians Do Not Trust Elections Because They No Longer Trust Institutions
An elderly woman sells fruits and vegetables at a street market in Cusco, Peru, dressed in traditional Andean clothing that reflects the country’s rich cultural heritage. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your research has consistently shown that Peru exhibits comparatively low levels of democratic satisfaction and institutional trust. To what extent did these attitudes shape voter behavior in the 2026 election?
Professor Julio Carrión: I think that certainly helps explain the dynamics of this particular election. Just yesterday (on Tuesday), Roberto Sánchez announced that he would not recognize the presidency of Keiko Fujimori because he claims that electoral fraud was committed through the votes of Peruvians residing abroad, which is not the case. I mean, there are no serious indications that electoral fraud was committed. But the fact is that neither Keiko Fujimori nor Roberto Sánchez was perceived by important sectors of the middle class as a democratic candidate or as someone genuinely committed to the democratic process. So, unlike previous elections, where the contest between Keiko Fujimori and her opponent became polarized along the lines of Fujimorismo versus anti-Fujimorismo, this time there was an important minority that advocated casting a null vote—voting for neither candidate. That might have given Keiko Fujimori the edge that she needed.
Those who identified as anti-Fujimoristas criticized the political actors advocating a null vote, arguing that they might be the reason why Fujimori would eventually win the election. They argued that voters should rally behind Roberto Sánchez. But the response from those advocating a null vote was that Roberto Sánchez was not really a democratic candidate either and that there were serious questions about his commitment to democratic procedures. Something that he just demonstrated yesterday by deciding not to recognize the electoral process.
This occurred in a context in which the great majority of Peruvians do not trust elections. And they have reasons for that. In 2021, it was Keiko Fujimori who advocated annulling elections in certain parts of the country, especially in the southern regions, because she claimed that fraud had been committed against her. Then it was Keiko Fujimori’s turn to allege electoral fraud. Today, it is Roberto Sánchez’s turn to make the same claim.
Public-opinion polls show that the great majority of Peruvians do not trust elections, even though one can say that, from 2000 until today, elections have been largely free and fair, especially in comparison with those held under Alberto Fujimori’s presidency.
So, you have this environment in which public opinion does not trust elections because Peruvians, in general—and this is another finding from public-opinion surveys—do not trust anyone. There is a very low level of interpersonal trust, and there is a very low level of trust in institutions. They do not trust the judiciary, for good reasons, because the judiciary is largely corrupt. They do not trust political parties. Fewer than 10% of Peruvians identify with a political party.
So, at election time, they have to choose a candidate from a party that does not really mean much to them. They have to vote because voting is compulsory in Peru. If you do not vote, you have to pay a fine. In an environment where citizen trust in institutions and elections is very low, these claims of electoral fraud find fertile ground in which to survive.
That happened in 2021, when many people were actually demanding military intervention, sadly. Today, you have a candidate demanding that the votes of Peruvians living abroad simply be annulled because he won inside Peru but lost once the votes from abroad were counted. So, he wants to erase those votes. Unfortunately, there will be important segments of the Peruvian population that will regard his allegations of electoral fraud as valid because they do not trust elections. I am sure that if the situation were reversed—if Keiko Fujimori were the loser—she would also be claiming electoral fraud.
Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a new situation, not only in Peru but more broadly in Latin America, where a significant number of elections over the last decade have been followed by allegations of fraud from the losing side and that seriously undermines democracy.
Take Colombia, for example. It is a very recent case. President Petro has questioned why election results should not be declared null and void because of alleged fraud. Before that, we had the case of Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro claimed electoral fraud after losing the election. Before that, we can go back to 2006, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico argued that he had lost because of electoral fraud. Of course, we have the United States, where Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and claimed that electoral fraud had been committed against him.
It is unfortunate that we now live in a hemisphere where it is almost expected that the loser will question the results by alleging fraud. That completely undermines the fundamental foundations of democracy in the region.
The Main Cleavage in Peru Is Not Ideological but Political and Territorial
Many analysts argue that Peru’s political crisis stems less from ideological polarization than from the collapse of effective representation. Did the Fujimori–Sánchez contest reveal competing ideological visions, or merely alternative responses to the same crisis of representation?
Professor Julio Carrión: The latter, definitely, rather than the former. This election, like the election in 2021, can be framed as a contest between right and left. But that is really incidental. In 2016, the election was a contest between Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who was a center-right candidate, and Keiko Fujimori, who was also a center-right candidate. So, the main cleavage has really been the competition between pro-Fujimoristas and anti-Fujimoristas.
Even in the most recent election, in 2026, although Roberto Sánchez was a candidate from the left, that was not really the ideological cleavage or the source of polarization. It was not fundamentally a contest between left and right. In a way—and this is very interesting—if one looks at the electoral performance of Roberto Sánchez, people were not really voting for him because of who he was. He also ran for the Chamber of Deputies in Lima. He received about 22,000 votes. He was not elected. He ran for the presidency, came in second in the first round, and was very close to winning the presidency in the runoff. But the number of voters who decided to vote for him personally was fewer than 25,000 in Lima. He was not elected to Congress.
Even within his own party, another candidate received more votes than he did in the first round. So, in the second round, Roberto Sánchez was not really mobilizing voters because of who he was. He was mobilizing voters because of what he represented. He was a vessel for those who rejected the centralism of politics in Peru. People residing in the provinces were voting against Keiko Fujimori because she represented, in their view, politicians living in the capital.
Roberto Sánchez also embodied the establishment-versus-anti-establishment cleavage that we discussed earlier. He was perceived as an anti-establishment figure, even though he was not really one, given that he has been a member of Congress—and still is, although he was not re-elected. He was also a member of the cabinet during the Pedro Castillo administration. He likewise represented anti-Fujimorista sentiment.
So, all of those currents of opinion used Roberto Sánchez as a vessel through which to vote against Keiko Fujimori. It was not really a vote for him; it was a vote against Keiko Fujimori. That has been the pattern in Peruvian elections since at least 2011, but especially since 2016, when the contest effectively became one between those voting for Keiko Fujimori and those voting against her.
The opponent was almost incidental. It could have been almost anyone and still attracted that anti-Fujimori vote. In 2016, it was a candidate from the right. In 2021 and 2026, it was a candidate from the left. But the main cleavage is not really ideological. The main cleavages are the ones I mentioned earlier: establishment versus anti-establishment, capital city versus regions, and, in addition, pro-Fujimori versus anti-Fujimori.
The Promise of Popular Sovereignty Often Ends with the Concentration of Power
Protesters march in Arequipa, Peru, during a demonstration against corruption and the rising cost of living, August 2010. Photo: Dreamstime.
In your recent work, you challenge the argument that populism strengthens popular sovereignty. Looking at Peru today, do citizens increasingly equate popular sovereignty with strong leadership in the name of “the people” rather than with institutional accountability and constitutional constraints?
Professor Julio Carrión: I’m glad that you mentioned that work, because there is a debate in populism studies among those who embrace, or see, populism in a more positive light. They argue that populism enhances popular sovereignty. My work has shown that when populism is not constrained—not always, but in some important cases, most of which have occurred in Latin America—populism reduces or diminishes the exercise of popular sovereignty.
If one understands popular sovereignty as the ability of the people to choose their representatives in free and fair elections, then it is not always the case that populist governments end up undermining democracy in significant ways, as my work, Kurt Weyland’s work, and the work of many others have shown. Only in certain cases does populism end up undermining democracy. It has also been shown that in no case does populism actually enhance popular sovereignty.
The best-case scenario is that it simply leaves popular sovereignty alone. It does not get worse, but it does not get better either; it remains more or less the same. Argentina under the Kirchners is a good example.
Unfortunately, in Peru, as in many other Latin American countries, there is a very strong plebiscitarian understanding of democracy. The idea is that democracy is simply majority rule, and whatever the majority wants is what should happen. The notion that majority rule must operate within a system of checks and balances and respect for minority rights is not deeply ingrained.
As a result, it is very common to find personalistic leaders arguing that the true exercise of popular sovereignty lies in giving one person all the power because that person represents the will of the people. They speak for the people. They give voice to the voiceless. Those claims now come not only from the left but also from the right. Obviously, the enemy is different. A right-wing populist will focus on the political class as the enemy. A left-wing populist will focus on economic powers, the rich, the aristocracy, or the oligarchy as the enemy. But in both cases, what they want is full power to “express popular sovereignty.”
What we know is that once they accumulate power—and if they are able to do so, because they are not always successful—popular sovereignty is no longer fully in place. It then takes significant societal mobilization to remove these populist leaders from power. So, there is an element in Latin American political culture that understands popular sovereignty as voting for a strong leader so that that leader can speak for all of us. Unfortunately.
Peru Is Experiencing Democratic Fatigue, Not Democratic Resilience
Peru has experienced repeated confrontations between presidents and Congress, impeachments, and constitutional crises. Has this pattern produced democratic resilience through institutional contestation, or democratic fatigue among citizens?
Professor Julio Carrión: Oh, definitely fatigue. And even more than fatigue, it has pushed democracy to the brink of extinction. The political and institutional dysfunction, together with the informal alliance that has controlled Congress until today—today (Wednesday) is the last day of the Congress inaugurated in 2021, so there will be a new Congress operating in a new institutional environment because Peru will once again have a Senate, something it has not until next month.
This informal coalition has significantly eroded the rule of law in Peru. It has colluded to take control of important institutions responsible for checks and balances and judicial oversight, creating a situation in which Keiko Fujimori, upon coming to power, does not really need to undermine institutions because they have already been undermined. In a way, she has an easier task than her father did because, in order to take control of institutions, her father had to carry out a self-coup and rule by decree. She does not have to do that. All she needs to do is to assemble a modest congressional majority to maintain the control that her party has already established.
This is not a situation where political instability, as in the case of the UK, occurs within the context of democratic competition, with parties debating whether they should move a little further to the right, a little further to the left, or remain in the center. This is a situation in which those who controlled Congress from 2021 until now have created conditions that allow them to secure impunity for their actions, secure favorable laws for the private interests that sponsor them, and secure control of institutions so that the next president can preserve a situation of significantly weakened rule of law rather than strengthen it. So, I am very pessimistic about the prospects for Peruvian democracy.
The best-case scenario is that the situation remains as it is—bad, but not dramatically worse. Of course, the worst-case scenario would be one in which Keiko Fujimori reproduces the more autocratic practices of her father. I hope that does not happen. But it is still too soon to tell.
Democracy May Survive, Yet Continue to Decline in Quality
Supporters gather in the streets of Puno, Peru, during the campaign for the 2010 local elections, August 2010. Photo: Dreamstime.
You have written extensively about the relationship between populism, illiberalism, and democratic accountability. Are there signs that Peru’s democratic crisis could evolve into a more systematic form of democratic backsliding, or do the country’s fragmented institutions paradoxically prevent the concentration of power?
Professor Julio Carrión: It’s a very interesting question. I’m now working on an article for a textbook on Latin American democracy, and I think that we may be experiencing the beginning of a period that might be described as post-populism. What do I mean by post-populism? I mean the mainstreaming of populism.
Populism in the 1990s and the early 2000s in Latin America was transformational populism in the sense that it sought to re-found countries in significant ways. It enacted constituent assemblies to take control of institutions, as was the case with Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. Or it took power forcefully and ruled by decree, as in the case of Alberto Fujimori in Peru in 1992. These were forms of populism that relied on significant popular support to undermine the foundations of democratic rule. Of course, we have all studied the consequences. We are still living with those consequences.
Today we are moving into a period in which some of the practices associated with populism have become normalized.
Even though democracies do not necessarily end as a result of those practices, the practices associated with populism—for instance, polarization, confrontational politics, and hardball tactics—have become normalized. The idea is: I am going to take control of institutions if I can, not because I want to end democracy, but simply because I want to govern unencumbered by the opposition or by judicial constraints. I might not go all the way toward ending democracy, but I am going to govern at the borderline. Democracy will still be there. I will not really interfere with elections; they will remain free and fair. But once I have power, I will rule pretty much unencumbered by institutions. There is also the idea that if I lose an election, I will claim electoral fraud. I will undermine democratic norms by alleging electoral fraud.
Even if a politician is not a populist per se, some of these practices are now being normalized. So, I am afraid that we are living in an era in which democracies do not necessarily end, but they do not get better either. The quality of democracy declines, and these democracies survive in a context where politics are illiberal, where politics embrace some of the tactics associated with populism, and where governments become more status quo-oriented rather than transformational.
In some countries, certainly in the case of Peru, we might be entering that era that I would call post-populist. It is not that we are beyond populism; it is that populism has become normalized, mainstream. And that is not good for Latin American democracy.
Of course, there is the international environment. It is very important. We did not have to worry about the international environment 20 years ago. In fact, the United States was an actor that, to a certain extent, pushed for some degree of democratization in Latin America. Today, we are in an environment where President Trump will happily live with many of these presidents who may not end democracy, but who certainly erode the rule of law. Because they are, in a way, reproducing what Donald Trump is doing in the United States.
Democracy Is Not Bound to End in Peru, but Recovery Will Take Time
Looking ahead, are you optimistic that Peru can reconstruct democratic legitimacy through institutional reform and political renewal, or has the crisis reached a point where a more fundamental reconfiguration of the relationship between citizens, parties, and the state is required?
Professor Julio Carrión: That is a big question. I’m a little pessimistic.
I am optimistic in the sense that I do not think democracy is bound to end in Peru. Despite the erosion of the rule of law and the weakening of institutions, there are still significant political actors and a vibrant civil society that might pose meaningful opposition to any effort to end democracy. But it will take time to improve the quality of government, improve the quality of democracy, and rebuild the rule of law in Peru.
We are now operating under a different institutional architecture. Before July of this year Peru had a unicameral system. Now we are returning to the traditional bicameral system. So, the Senate might become a significant arena in which the political opposition can articulate a degree of influence that could prevent, or perhaps even reverse, further erosion of the rule of law, or at least improve the situation of the rule of law in Peru to some extent.
But it is ultimately in the hands of political actors, and we will have to wait and see what Keiko Fujimori does once is sworn in as president. Some of us are hoping that she will realize that she is a minority president and that she needs to reach out to other political forces in order to build some form of consensus government. Or she might simply embrace a horrible “my way or the highway” style of politics that would place even greater pressure on Peru’s democracy. I hope that she does not do that, and I hope that political actors in the Senate are able to think in medium- to long-term terms rather than focusing exclusively on the short term.
Armenia stands at a critical crossroads. In the aftermath of the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, amid efforts to normalize relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey, and against the backdrop of declining Russian influence, the country faces profound questions about democracy, national identity, state-building, and geopolitical orientation. In this ECPS interview, political analyst Eric Hacopian offers a candid and often provocative assessment of Armenia’s democratic trajectory. He examines the risks of democratic backsliding, the criminalization of political opposition, the implications of the government’s “Real Armenia” narrative, and the challenges of preserving freedom in a region dominated by authoritarian regimes. More broadly, Hacopian reflects on democratic resilience, national trauma, and the enduring struggle to build a competent and genuinely democratic state.
The aftermath of the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, the pursuit of a peace agreement with Azerbaijan, the normalization process with Turkey, the erosion of Russian influence, and Armenia’s gradual reorientation toward Europe have transformed the country’s political landscape and raised fundamental questions about the future of Armenian democracy. At the same time, debates over national identity, state-building, democratic resilience, constitutional reform, and the limits of geopolitical accommodation have become increasingly central to public life. As Armenia seeks to navigate a volatile regional environment marked by authoritarian neighbors, unresolved security dilemmas, and profound national trauma, the country has emerged as an important case for understanding the challenges facing democracies under conditions of war, defeat, and external pressure.
Against this backdrop, Eric Hacopian offers a critical and often unconventional assessment of Armenia’s current trajectory. An Armenian-American political analyst, public affairs consultant, and prominent commentator on Armenian politics, democracy, state-building, and regional geopolitics, Hacopian has become one of the most outspoken voices examining the consequences of the post-war political order. In this interview, he challenges many of the dominant assumptions shaping international discussions of Armenia, arguing that the country’s political divisions cannot be reduced to a simple choice between Russia and the West. Instead, he contends that deeper questions concerning sovereignty, accountability, national memory, and democratic legitimacy lie at the heart of contemporary Armenian politics.
Throughout the conversation, Hacopian warns against the growing tendency to frame political disagreement as evidence of foreign influence. While acknowledging Russian efforts to shape Armenian politics, he argues that democracies must avoid adopting authoritarian methods in response. As he puts it, “You cannot use Russian methods to fight Russian disinformation,” emphasizing that transparency and due process remain essential safeguards against democratic backsliding. In his view, the criminalization of opposition figures and the use of vague accusations of foreign influence risk undermining the very democratic principles that Armenia seeks to protect.
The interview also explores the contentious debate surrounding the government’s “Real Armenia” narrative and the legacy of the Nagorno-Karabakh struggle. Hacopian argues that attempts to reinterpret the Karabakh movement as a historical mistake are generating new forms of political polarization. More broadly, he warns that linking military defeat to democratization and westernization risks alienating younger generations and creating future instability. “Because Nikol Pashinyan is unwilling to take responsibility for his own failures,” Hacopian argues, the government is increasingly “identifying failure and defeat with democratization and westernization.”
At the same time, Hacopian reflects on Armenia’s efforts to build a more competent state, the historic decline of Russian influence after 2023, and the broader geopolitical pressures confronting the country. Yet despite his concerns, he remains optimistic about Armenia’s democratic future. For him, the country’s greatest strength lies not in any particular leader or government but in a deeply rooted political culture. “Countries become democracies—or become free—because the people in them demand it and are willing to fight for it,” he argues. This conviction underpins his broader belief that Armenia’s long-term resilience will ultimately depend less on geopolitics than on the continued determination of its citizens to defend their freedoms and democratic institutions.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Armenian-American analyst Eric Hacopian, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
The Real Issue Was Not Russia but the Finlandization of Armenia
Photo: Dreamstime.
Eric Hacopian, welcome! To begin, Armenia’s 2026 parliamentary election has been widely interpreted as a public endorsement of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s peace agenda and strategic reorientation toward Europe. Do you see the result primarily as a democratic mandate for peace, a geopolitical rejection of Russia, or evidence that Pashinyan’s brand of anti-establishment populism continues to resonate despite the trauma of Nagorno-Karabakh?
Eric Hacopian: There’s a simplistic narrative, which is very easy to understand in the West, that the elections were simply about Russia: you go towards Russia, or you go towards Europe and the West. But it’s much more complicated than that. One of the keys to understanding our election results is recognizing that multiple, sometimes contradictory or overlapping things can be true at the same time.
There was obviously an attempt by Russia to interfere in the elections here. You would have to be very naive not to believe that happened. One of the primary candidates—actually the leading person in the opposition now—was someone who made his fortune in Russia and has never been involved in politics. So, it’s highly unlikely that he would have gotten involved in this, running in any elections here, if he had not been encouraged by the Kremlin. That’s just not how the Russian system works.
However, the gist of the opposition to Mr. Pashinyan and his party was not based on support for Russia; it was based on his policies. For the first time ever, more than half the country voted against the current government and the current Prime Minister.
What they are aghast at is what’s perceived to be the Finlandization of the country, in which the country’s national interests are not pursued, and the country is entirely pursuing policies that are orchestrated or demanded by a very unpleasant regime in Baku. Some people in the West—obviously this government and some of their Western allies—want to portray this differently because they don’t want to talk about that. That’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room because it’s not comfortable.
The Russian narrative is much more saleable because people are used to it, especially in the West, because of Moldova and other places, and because of real and supposed Russian attempts at interfering in other elections. And I don’t want to dismiss it. But it’s much more complicated than that, because all of these foreign and domestic forces have absolutely no problems with the Finlandization of Armenia, which is something that many voters object to.
They, sort of, sweep everything under the rug by labeling it pro-Russian, but that’s not the case. The pro-Russian position in Armenia is actually much, much smaller than it is, for example, in Moldova. The Russian influence here, if I was to guess, and if you do a poll, is probably no more than 15–20 percent of voters who can be called “pro-Russian.” If you have spent any time in this part of the world, you will understand that some of that pro-Russian sentiment is actually pro-Soviet nostalgia.
It’s older people who remember a time when they were younger, they were prettier, and they remember all the good things and none of the bad. It’s just a normal, natural reaction. This is true of all of Eastern Europe and all of the former Soviet countries, whether it’s Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, or Lithuania. There’s always that element among people.
So, to simply portray this as pro-Russian is misleading. This government wants to hide its own, essentially, compliance and Finlandization by the Baku regime by portraying any opposition to it as pro-Russian, which is simply intellectually dishonest.
You Cannot Use Russian Methods to Fight Russian Disinformation
You have argued that Armenia is experiencing “dangerous democratic backsliding” and warned against the criminalization of political opposition under the banner of combating Russian influence. How should democracies defend themselves against foreign interference without undermining democratic pluralism and civil liberties?
Eric Hacopian: The question you just asked is really the ultimate question, not just for here, but for everywhere. I always start with this one simple rule: You cannot use Russian methods to fight Russian disinformation. Because if you do, they win. Because part of the Russian effort in these areas is really not to have certain people win, but to discredit democratic systems. Because that’s also a win. If you’re a totalitarian system, you don’t want any kind of democratic development. People thinking that the democratic system is not legitimate is a victory. It’s a victory for all kinds of authoritarians, whether it’s China, Russia, or, in certain cases, the Erdogans of the world.
So, what you need—it’s a very fine balancing act. If you’re serious about it, where it really starts is by putting the light on people. For example, if you have proof of Russian interference, you out it. In a very open manner. I’ll give you a perfect example. We have the head of the opposition, Samuel Karapetian. Right at this point, he’s under house arrest. Do I believe the Russians were involved in pushing him to run? Yes, but if you never put out any public evidence of it and then you go after the second person, you go after the third person on the same issue without providing any evidence of it, what are we supposed to think of it?
Obviously, I believe a Russian oligarch moving to Armenia to run is directed by the Russian state. But what about the second, or the third, or the fourth party? Or they’ll use this blanket claim: “Russia’s funding this.” Let’s just take it theoretically. What if Russia is funding someone who is not pro-Russian to disrupt our electoral process? Should that person be punished? It could easily be done, and I’ve seen it. Different sides were spending money promoting or attacking people who were going to finish fourth or fifth for that particular reason. So, on the one hand, you have to fight this interference, but you need to do it openly. You can’t just say, “Well, these are state secrets, and we don’t want to harm relationships with Russia.” Well, if Russia is attacking your political system, what’s more harmful than that? You have to do it openly.
Transparency Is the Only Democratic Answer to Russian Influence
At the same time, it cannot be an excuse to criminalize almost all of the opposition that you don’t like by connecting them, on the thinnest of evidence, to Russia. What we had, which was quite disturbing, is that there are a lot of Russian dissident sites that frankly do very good work exposing things that happen in Russia and between Russia and Ukraine. Many of these places were being used to dump blanket accusations. Imagine if I came up with a document claiming that you and three of your friends are involved in trafficking cocaine from Colombia. I put the name of a person who actually is trafficking cocaine from Colombia. And they have all of these schemes that they were going to ask you to help them, but there’s no evidence of them ever talking to you. Then, you understand, in the political context, you become a drug dealer. Because this is not a court. There’s no evidence. You’re in a document that’s put up on some credible site that has done good work. But who produced this? Obviously Western intelligence, whoever is involved, consultants that work for the current government.
So, it’s this very muddy situation where you need to fight disinformation without allowing governments like ours to use it to criminalize the opposition, or anybody they don’t like, by connecting them to Russia—which happened. Both of these things happened.
Is there a way out? To be honest with you, there’s no clean way out. There’s no perfect formula. It’s really a question of how you approach it in principle. If you’re going to maintain transparency while fighting this interference, that’s the best way to approach it. But holding these kangaroo courts, where evidence is never shown, is a very difficult process. It needs to be done in a way that, fundamentally, always goes back to this question: Is this what Russia would do to its own opponents?
I mean, you cannot use their methods. It’s a hard balancing act, but if you’re principled about it, you should come close to achieving it without ever arriving at a perfect formula, because it’s designed to be disruptive.
The Closest Political Figure to Pashinyan Is Actually Erdoğan
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan arrives for a meeting of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council (EAEU) in Yerevan, Armenia, on November 19, 2021. Photo: Dreamstime.
In your recent writings, you drew parallels between developments in Armenia and the post-2016 trajectory of Turkey. Do you believe Armenia faces a genuine risk of sliding toward a majoritarian or security-driven form of governance despite its democratic achievements since the Velvet Revolution?
Eric Hacopian: There are similarities to Turkey, and there are things that are clearly not similar. I do not think that we are heading in the same direction. Erdogan, for example, is essentially dismantling the last facade of a normal democratic process in Turkey, as we know it, by criminalizing the opposition. There’s some element of that here, but I don’t think we’ll get there.
What we’ll get is what we have today, only more magnified—this sort of demagoguery of “it’s me or Russia, it’s me or war.” The less popular he gets over time—and in almost any democratic system, you win your first election at 70, then you’re at 50, then you’re at 45—the problematic election comes when you could actually lose.
That’s when you’ll find out who’s a Democrat and who’s not, and who will be willing to leave. The similarity is actually not between countries; it’s between people. The closest political figure to Pashinyan is actually Erdogan. In their style and in their base. Erdogan has a base of 30 percent of voters who will never leave him under any circumstance. Because that base is really not about him; it’s about who he’s against. He’s the guy who broke the Kemalist white Turk world that oppressed them, however you want to describe it, for 70 or 80 years.
For Pashinyan, his base is rural, poor, and old—which is the same Erdogan base—and it’s based on social resentment over what was done to them by the old regime for 30 years. So, they’re both built on negative identity, or on what they’re historically against.
In that way, they’re quite similar. Mr. Erdogan had the famous line that democracy is a train, and I’ll get off when it takes me where I want to go. He’s already gotten off. Pashinyan is on the way.
Armenian political culture is anti-totalitarian. It always has been. There’s a difference between being pro-democratic and being anti-totalitarian. You cannot, for example, have the system they have in Azerbaijan, where you worship Heydar Aliyev or something. If you do that here, they’ll laugh at you. Political figures here are meant to be laughed at. They’re not there to be worshipped. So that authoritarian gene is very weak here.
So, I think where he’ll go is to use the system and, essentially, create these false binaries, between either being for Russia or being for him, or being for war or being for him. He will just take that to further and further extremes. By any measure, most of the elected opposition has been criminalized.
What does that tell you? Even during the periods when Erdogan didn’t do that, he only recently started doing it. Now, you can say they have evidence of this. Well, if you have evidence, show it. If you’re saying he’s a plant by the FSB, then bring it out and show it.
So, there are similarities, but there are also dissimilarities, and they have to do with cultural factors. There are lines that you cannot cross here. Those lines are further down the road in Turkey, unfortunately.
So, I don’t think Pashinyan will go there. It’ll be more a matter of manipulating the system to get the results that you want.
Nagorno-Karabakh Cannot Be Reduced to a Historical Mistake
Pashinyan has increasingly advanced a “Real Armenia” narrative centered on the internationally recognized Republic of Armenia rather than historical territorial claims. Is this the emergence of a new civic patriotism, or does it represent a new form of populist nation-building that seeks to redefine Armenian identity around a different conception of “the people”?
Eric Hacopian: It’s much more basic than that. It’s really about a leader not taking responsibility for his failures. The ethnic cleansing in Artsakh, or Nagorno-Karabakh, is the greatest disaster in Armenian history since 1915. So, you have two ways of approaching it. Obviously, he was not singularly responsible for that result. There are many other people responsible for that result, but you’re the leader of the country at the time. So, you have two options. You can take moral responsibility for your own failures in that outcome, or you can attack and try to discredit a very noble cause.
What was the noble cause? The noble cause is that, in 1988, the Armenian people as a collective decided that what happened to them in 1915 cannot repeat itself. That was the struggle of Nagorno-Karabakh. It was nothing beyond that. Now, how that would shape up in the end, what would it mean? Is Karabakh part of Azerbaijan? Is there a third option? Those are different things. But fundamentally, what drove millions of people to sacrifice, endure no heat, no water, and all of these things for all these years was that idea.
He is essentially saying that it was an illegitimate goal, or that it was a mistake. He is essentially saying that everybody who died, died for a no-good cause. That backfired entirely. This is a guy who was supposed to win by 60% of the vote, and not only did he not win by 60% of the vote, but he was also denied even a constitutional majority, which he’s trying to cheat his way into.
There were two kinds of opposition. There were these third-way, pro-Western, anti-Pashinyan parties, none of which made it into Parliament because they killed each other off. But the traditional old parties got 39% of the vote, and what happened is that 200,000–300,000 people came out who would have never voted and voted against him. Supporting people, they don’t even like.
So, this “Real Armenia” concept entirely backfired politically. Because it’s not seen as legitimate, and it isn’t legitimate. There are intellectual cases to be made for what he’s saying, but he’s not the person to make them. Because if he’s making them, you’re simply not taking responsibility for your own failures.
This refusal to take responsibility for one’s own failures is a classic Armenian political-class trait. Nobody does it. Maybe nobody does around the world, to be perfectly honest, but nobody thinks that they need to take moral responsibility for their failures.
Now, good or bad, you can just say, “This is my portion of it. It’s not 100% my fault, but 20% of it is mine, and I take it, and I own it.”
Instead, what he does is to attack people while running away. You cannot convince 80–90% of Armenians that Nagorno-Karabakh is not Armenian, in the sense that Armenians have lived there since time immemorial. You’re not going to win that war.
What he’s done, actually, is that he’s got the 20–30% base—that’s his strong base. What he managed to do during this election was to create an equal base that hates him with the same fervor that his base likes him. Because he’s crossed too many red lines with those kinds of people by attacking history, by falsifying history.
Now, we can have a thousand discussions about the issue of Artsakh and this and that. But to say that the initial instinct of the people acting there was not correct is intellectually dishonest.
Armenia May Be Laying the Groundwork for a Future War Without Realizing It
You have posed a series of pointed questions regarding the government’s reinterpretation of the Karabakh movement. More broadly, can a stable Armenian democracy be built on a political narrative that treats the Karabakh project as a historical mistake, or does such a narrative risk deepening social polarization?
Eric Hacopian: Pashinyan is making a classic mistake, one for which we and our region will probably pay for another two generations. Because he’s unwilling to take responsibility for his own failures, he is identifying failure and defeat with democratization and westernization.
There’s a big age gap in Armenia. There are only two generally democratic countries in the world in which younger people are more conservative than their elders. It’s Armenia and Israel. Under-30s in this country opposed this government by a factor of 3 to 1, 4 to 1. They oppose the peace agreement because they see it as a humiliation of the country.
What he’s doing is seeding a future generation that is not going to accept this framework. They would have accepted this framework if he had been honest about it. But they came out and voted against him to defend historical narratives and what they conceive to be the truth, or what their friends died for.
Essentially, in Armenia, voters are now divided into two blocks. I call one the Weimar group, which is this government. This government is closer to the Weimar Republic than any other example in history because it’s a period of democratization, economic growth—especially in the early years—and all of that. But it’s also a deeply, ideologically anti-nationalist state, which is quite rare in this part of the world.
It’s anti-nationalist ideologically. Some of the things they do—taking Ararat off stamps, stupid things—I’m sure no Turkish official ever asked for that. It’s almost ideological with them.
They’re right now the bare majority, or the largest minority. Against them are the people who came out and voted against this government, not to support the opposition. It’s what I call the Armenian Likud. That tends to be younger, better educated, and have more money. In the long run—five years, ten years—Armenian Likud is going to beat Armenian Weimar.
This is a country that is becoming more technologically adept. Per capita income has doubled in this country. It’s a country that’s getting wealthier and stronger over time. It’s projected that by 2035; Armenia’s per capita income is going to be larger than Turkey’s and Russia’s. It probably already is larger than Turkey’s, depending on whose numbers you believe, because of inflation and half a dozen other factors.
You’re going to have a situation where this country is more functional, wealthier, technologically more adept, with AI centers, cutting-edge IT, and half a dozen different things, at the same time that Azerbaijan is literally moving into the post-oil era. That is a recipe for war. At some point, the Aliyev regime, as it starts moving into its debt spiral, may start a war to save itself.
We know there’s a history of this, whether it’s the Greek colonels in 1974 or Argentina in 1982, where regimes try to solve domestic problems externally. One of the reasons Ilham Aliyev will never sign a peace treaty is because he needs to have that card.
His regime, without an Armenian mythical enemy, becomes quite problematic. Because the moment Azerbaijan signs a peace treaty with Armenia, every issue in that country becomes domestic. Domestically, what does he have to point to? They’re less free than Iranians, according to the US government. They’re getting poorer and poorer compared to their resource-poor neighbors, Georgia and Armenia.
One of the things you’ve got to look at economically is the way the income gap between these countries is starting to open up—where Armenia and Georgia are going, and where Azerbaijan is going. Post-2035, according to their energy minister, they’re essentially moving into the post-oil era. Because oil, as a major export commodity, essentially will no longer be there, as production is declining by about 10 percent a year.
What we’re dealing with here is that we’re setting up a future war, except no one knows it. Pashinyan’s brand of anti-nationalism just drives that even further. Because when the new generation comes back to power, their entire ethos will be to undermine what they perceive to be the humiliation of the country over the last five or six years. It’s a very historically predictable scenario. We’ve seen it countless times.
Unfortunately, we’re probably heading toward a very uncertain world for the next twenty years. If you really want to understand our world today, we’re somewhat in a period resembling the era between the two World Wars—a setting in which there are rules, but there really aren’t rules. There’s a hegemon, but the hegemon has gone crazy.
You have these perceptions of different powers rising. Actually, that isn’t the case. Everyone is declining, in a way. The US is declining. China is going to have half the population it has today fifty years from now. How is that rising?
Turkey itself—everybody with brains wants to leave the country. I always love it when people talk about Turkey as a rising power. A rising power with an Argentine economy just doesn’t work.
So, this is a very uncertain timeframe, which means the threat of war is much greater. You can go from zero to war in three months. That’s my fear. My fear is that my objection to him and to his regime is that unbeknownst to them, they’re laying the groundwork for a future war.
The Biggest Challenge Facing Armenia Is Not Ideology but Competence
Anti-government protesters gather in front of the Armenian government building in Yerevan on December 9, 2020, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan following the Nagorno-Karabakh war. Photo: Corneius Brandt / Dreamstime.
One of your recurring themes is the need for Armenia to build a competent state. Looking back on the years since the Velvet Revolution, where has Armenia succeeded in strengthening state capacity, and where has it fallen short?
Eric Hacopian: I was born in Iran, lived in the United States most of my life, and then moved to Armenia. I learned one thing: there are three kinds of states in the world. There are the complete failed states—the Somalias and Syrias of the world—which are very few. Then you have the top 20 or 30 countries in the world, which have planning capacity, where you can actually think about where you want to be 20 years from now and plan for the future. Then you have this vast number of countries, and Armenia is one of them, that fall somewhere in between. You have a functional state. The police work. If you get assaulted, you can go to them. You can resolve property disputes. But you don’t have planning capacity.
State capacity in certain sectors in Armenia has vastly improved since 2018, mostly because taxes are being collected much more honestly. The budget has almost tripled. We now have a budget that’s close to the $8–10 billion range. It used to be in the $2–3 billion range. So, some things are actually starting to work. Some of that is a reflection of a private sector in this country that is far more functional than the public sector, as is true in almost every country in this region. Private sectors are always way ahead of the public sector in their capacity to function.
So, I would say that in certain areas—whether it’s setting up a new intelligence agency or reforming parts of the military—progress is happening. You’re getting a slightly more competent state. However, it’s nowhere near first-world standards, and it’s nowhere near progressing as fast as it should. Mostly because the talent level isn’t there.
One of the realities in countries like this is that the best and the brightest left the country for 30 years. Over time, that starts affecting what I would call the middle-management layer. Every political and economic system in the world is run by middle management. It’s not the Steve Jobses of the world. You’ll have the Elon Musks and the Steve Jobses, but then you also need 500,000 competent people who can run whatever they built. That’s what’s missing in this country. It’s missing in most of the countries in our region because of the brain drain.
The biggest issue in state-building in Armenia is competence. It’s not even ideological. We can say that Mr. Pashinyan may have the best intentions. I believe he actually does want to build a competent state—except in the realm of the judiciary, because he wants to keep that politicized. After all, which political actor doesn’t want the opportunity to politicize or criminalize their opponents? But for the most part, he genuinely wants to build a competent state. The cadre just aren’t there yet, or they’re still in the pipeline. So, yes, there has been some level of improvement in state-building, but it is nowhere near where it should be.
Russia Turned Armenia into the Most Pro-Western Country in the Region
Russia appears to have failed in its effort to prevent Pashinyan’s re-election. Does the election mark a decisive decline in Russian influence, or does Moscow still retain substantial leverage through economic ties, media networks, and security structures?
Eric Hacopian: I always tell our Russian colleagues or friends who visit that, in two years, Mr. Putin undid 200 years’ worth of work by the Tsars and the commissars. A Russia that allowed the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh and the imprisonment of its leaders is not a Russia that’s worth anything to Armenia. Russia died in those few weeks in September 2023. The Russian position has collapsed, and it will not be rebuilt for generations. They actually managed to take the least hostile country toward them in the region and turn it into the most pro-Western country in the region. It’s entirely their doing.
I have no sympathies for that state. Not for the people—for the state. I have absolutely no sympathies for them because they get everything they deserve. But do they have leverage? Yes, they absolutely have leverage, mostly for economic reasons. Through natural gas and many other areas, we’re still very closely tied to Russia. So, they can activate their capacity to cause problems here—by not allowing goods to pass through and through half a dozen other measures. They can do all of that. And they are doing it. But that essentially speeds up the death cycle of their influence.
The thing with the Russians is that it’s all sticks and never any carrots. The West, at least, will promise carrots and, in many cases, deliver carrots. With them, it’s just sticks. “This will happen to you if…” Who wants to live that way?
Then you have to understand, from the perspective of most people here—or most young people here—and in societies like ours, young people matter a lot more than older people because they’re the competent ones. If you ask an average person in Armenia, or anybody in this region, “Do you want Poland or do you want Belarus?” Poland is going to win 90–10. The problem with Russia is that its position collapsed long ago on an ideological level because it’s simply not an attractive model.
So, all that’s left are these forms of leverage: “We won’t allow your apricots to go through.” Well, you can endure that for one or two years, but eventually you’ll find other markets. It’s not easy, and it will harm a lot of people, granted. I don’t want to understate the problems. But I also think that the Russians do not want to burn the last bridges they have here. So, they’ll go to a certain extent, but they won’t go beyond that. Because if you want to understand the Russian approach, they do not understand democratic societies, or specifically democratic peoples. Interfering directly in elections here is the stupidest thing you could do. Absolutely the stupidest thing you could do. Because then the governing power makes you the issue. They turn the election into a referendum on you, and you’re not popular. I see this country moving west for many different reasons. Frankly, most of our region is moving west—not because the West is nirvana or because it has some great, bright future, but because the Russian system is collapsing and is no longer viable.
You Cannot Satisfy Authoritarians by Giving Them What They Want
Azerbaijan continues to demand constitutional changes as a condition for a final peace agreement. Should Armenians view such demands as a legitimate component of conflict resolution, or as an unacceptable intrusion into Armenia’s sovereign constitutional order?
Eric Hacopian: Absolutely, it should be rejected if you understand the purposes behind it. What Aliyev is demanding, technically, is actually not even in the Constitution; it’s in the Declaration of Independence. So, it’s not even a constitutional issue. The Armenian courts have essentially ruled that that statement is not binding on the Constitution, so that’s already been settled.
Mr. Aliyev needs a reason not to sign the peace treaty, and this is the best one. Demanding a constitutional vote serves several purposes for him. First of all, it takes away the onus of him not signing. When the Armenian side is willing to sign, it shifts the issue onto us.
Second, it causes a political civil war inside Armenia because he understands how difficult it is to pass a constitutional amendment. You not only need to win; you need a certain number of votes to win. You can get 58 percent of the vote and still not pass. You need to get to 650,000 votes, so it’s a difficult process. He knows that. He knows this will cause a political civil war inside Armenia, and he knows that if it fails, he can turn around and tell the world, “See, the Armenian people voted against peace.”
So, it’s a complete trap.
For this government to accept this as anything legitimate, when it actually violates one of the 17 points of the agreement—that you do not interfere in the other country’s internal political process—tells you the extent to which they’re Finlandized by the other side.
But if you really want to understand it, I’m sure you’re well aware of how totalitarian systems work. Totalitarian systems fundamentally operate through humiliation. This is an attempt to humiliate our population, not the leaders. This is an attempt to get people to vote for their own humiliation. That’s what he wants.
There’s a psychological component here. One of the reasons totalitarian systems work is that they force you to do things you don’t want to do, or to lie about things. By lying, you’re weakening yourself.
Why does North Korea have elections? Because they want to humiliate the population. They want to force you to participate in something that you know is a farce. So, based on everything I’ve outlined, any democratic society would need to reject his demand, because this will not be the last demand. He will come back and say, “Well, you know what? Now you need to allow 300,000 people to come back to Western Azerbaijan.”
Just yesterday, they held a giant festival—the Western Azerbaijan Festival. They were talking about the right of return and all of these other issues. So, what are we really talking about here?
This is an attempt to humiliate our population. If we have any democratic sense, we should vote against this if it’s ever put before us. It needs to be rejected.
It’s also completely illegitimate. If this was so important to you, why didn’t you negotiate it into the 17 points? You didn’t. You accepted the agreement without it. So, you’ve already initialed a peace agreement without this provision. What’s the logic here?
But as a small-d democrat—and by that I mean someone who believes in democratic systems and democratic processes—to me, it’s completely unacceptable for people who do not come from democratic processes to impose conditions and demands on democratic peoples. I don’t care if it’s Putin, I don’t care if it’s Aliyev, I don’t care who it is.
Because we know what those people think. We know what they want, and you can’t satisfy them by giving them what they want. They will always come back for more—and for more humiliation.
Armenia Can Remain an Oasis of Freedom in a Region of Authoritarians
In several of your writings, you have argued that Armenia should define itself internationally as an “island of freedom in a sea of tyrannies.” How sustainable is that vision when Armenia must normalize relations with increasingly authoritarian neighbors such as Azerbaijan and Turkey?
Eric Hacopian: Let’s be honest. I sit here, and I’m very critical of this government. I’m critical of our military, I’m critical of our prime minister, I’m critical of our intelligence services, and no one’s ever knocked on my door. It doesn’t mean that that moment won’t come.
That’s what you struggle against. But if you are principally dedicated to preserving freedom, there’s freedom and there’s democracy, and they’re completely different things sometimes. They’re not always the same.
If you have a culture of freedom—and this country, in a way, does have a culture of freedom—freedom is almost like a birthright. Armenians do not do tyrants. It just doesn’t work here.
If you have that resistance gene, you can likely protect a good part of your freedoms, even if you don’t have a completely democratic system, while living in an area surrounded by authoritarians.
Frankly, there are countless examples of this in history. You go to Amsterdam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and there were places that functioned as small islands of freedom in vast seas of tyranny, yet they managed to preserve that character. Even today, you go to Holland, and they still have that culture of freedom. It’s defined in different ways, but it still exists.
You walk down the street here and you’ll see dissidents from Uzbekistan, dissidents from Chechnya, dissidents from Russia, and people from Ukraine. So, we already are that oasis. You’ll see Iranians everywhere.
I don’t think we lose that, because it’s not really tied to a government. It’s tied to a culture. I can say this, I can say that, or I can insult someone. We protect our right to insult our leaders very strongly. So, I think we can preserve it, but because of the cultural background of the country, not because of the political system.
Authoritarianism Has No Market in Armenia
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made the opening of the Natural Gas Pipeline (Turkstream) in Istanbul, Turkey on November 19, 2018.
And lastly, at a time when democratic backsliding, geopolitical coercion, and populist mobilization are reshaping politics across the world, Armenia remains one of the few competitive democracies in the post-Soviet space. What lessons—both positive and cautionary—does Armenia offer for understanding the relationship between populism, democratic resilience, military defeat, and national renewal under conditions of external pressure and profound national trauma?
Eric Hacopian: One of the things that I’ve learned, and that we’ve learned in a really hard way through the recent elections, is that countries become democracies—or become free—because the people in them demand it and are willing to fight for it. Freedom in Armenia was brought about by Armenians struggling for their own freedom, in the same way that one day freedom will come to Iran because Iranians have struggled for it, and one day it will come to Turkey because Turks have struggled for it.
So, I do not believe in any of these external forces “bringing you democracy”—these NGO complexes or whatever. We have a democracy because we were willing to fight for it, and we’re willing to keep it. People need to understand that.
I see this among our Georgian friends. They think that you go toward the EU and magically transform the country into Germany. It doesn’t work like that. What is your culture? Are you building a democratic culture? Are you building a culture in which the person who loses leaves, or a culture in which people don’t prosecute the opposition?
People always have to struggle against the state. The state is always the enemy, no matter how good it is. It’s always an enemy of people’s fundamental rights. So, you always have to have that struggle in you. I think we have that. We have to have that capacity to fight, and hopefully we can become an example for other people by fighting, because everybody has to win their own struggle.
As far as the trauma of war is concerned, Armenia faced a very fundamental choice after Azerbaijan lost the war in 1993–94. They decided to sacrifice freedom for safety by turning the country over to a corrupt family dynasty. But normally, at the end of that, you either get freedom, prosperity, or security. Because every Aliyev-type regime has an Assad- or Gaddafi-type ending. There’s always the last day when you’re on a plane to Ankara or you’re on a plane to Moscow. That’s how it’s going to end. There are no other scenarios in that scheme.
Armenia made a very conscious decision that, yes, we lost the war, but we don’t want to lose our freedoms, and we don’t want to lose our democracy. It was a very conscious decision. In a way, it was a very brave one. Because it was very uncertain. It is very easy at a moment like that to say, “I want the strong hand.” This country rejected the strong hand and took the risks. It might pay off; it might not pay off. I can’t say. The verdict is still out. But it was a fundamental choice.
People in this part of the world instinctively understand that authoritarianism does not have a future, and that you cannot build the future you want for your children—economically, politically, or even militarily—through authoritarianism. Because the corruption that accompanies these systems eventually leads to what it always leads to: some level of collapse. So, we made that decision. History will judge whether it was the correct one. But people here understand that. One of the reasons I’m confident about freedom in this country is that authoritarianism has no market here, and people understand that you cannot build the future you want by being corrupt, oligarchic, or non-democratic.
At a time when democratic backsliding, populist polarization, and executive aggrandizement dominate political debate across the globe, Professor Javier Corrales offers a timely challenge to one of the most pervasive assumptions in contemporary political science: that democratic erosion inevitably culminates in consolidated authoritarianism. Drawing on his recent article, co-authored with Susan Stokes, Professor Corrales argues that elections, opposition mobilization, party coordination, and institutional constraints continue to provide viable pathways for removing democracy-eroding leaders. In this wide-ranging interview, he examines why even heavily manipulated elections can remain competitive, how opposition movements can overcome demoralization and fragmentation, why excessive presidential popularity may itself constitute a democratic vulnerability, and how courts, parties, and legal institutions shape democratic survival. His reflections offer both analytical insight and cautious optimism about the resilience of democratic politics in an age of global democratic uncertainty.
Across much of the contemporary world, democratic pessimism has become increasingly pervasive. From Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Asia and the United States, concerns about democratic backsliding, executive aggrandizement, institutional capture, and the erosion of liberal norms have fueled a growing belief that once elected leaders begin dismantling checks and balances, democratic decline becomes almost irreversible. In this climate, elections are often viewed with skepticism, particularly when incumbents manipulate institutions, tilt the playing field, and exploit state resources to entrench themselves in power.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Javier Corrales challenges this prevailing narrative. As the Dwight W. Morrow Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and one of the foremost scholars of democratic backsliding, populism, and authoritarianism, Professor Corrales has spent decades examining how democracies erode and how leaders concentrate power. Yet his recent work, co-authored with Susan Stokes and published in the Journal of Democracy under the title “How Aspiring Autocrats Exit,” offers a more nuanced and cautiously optimistic perspective. Rather than focusing exclusively on how democracies die, Professor Corrales asks an equally important question: How do aspiring autocrats leave power?
The answer, he argues, is more encouraging than many observers assume. While acknowledging that “there is plenty of evidence that illiberal presidents and hyper-populist presidents can undermine democracy, concentrate power, and erode liberal democracy,” Professor Corrales emphasizes that “they often do not go much farther than that, and they may even get ejected from office.” Indeed, one of the central findings of his research is that the most traditional democratic mechanism remains surprisingly resilient. As he puts it, “the most old-fashioned route is still available, which is defeating them at the polls.”
This conclusion runs counter to widespread assumptions about electoral politics under conditions of democratic erosion. Professor Corrales notes that many backsliding leaders continue to maintain elections even after weakening institutional constraints. Although such contests are frequently marred by irregularities and heavily skewed in favor of incumbents, they often remain meaningful arenas of political competition. “These elections,” he observes, “are very often incredibly rigged in favor of the incumbent. But the election still happens, and there can be enough opportunities for competition.”
The key challenge, according to Professor Corrales, is not merely institutional manipulation but political demoralization. Autocratizing leaders seek to convince citizens, and opposition forces that resistance is futile. Yet the comparative evidence from countries as diverse as Poland, Hungary, Brazil, Zambia, and elsewhere suggests that democratic recovery remains possible when opposition forces overcome fragmentation, mobilize new voters, and maintain faith in electoral competition.
In this interview Professor Corrales discusses the resilience of elections, the importance of opposition unity, the dangers of excessive presidential popularity, the role of courts and parties in democratic survival, and the common authoritarian playbook shared by populist leaders across ideological divides. His reflections offer a timely reminder that democratic backsliding is neither predetermined nor irreversible—and that even under adverse conditions, democratic institutions can still provide pathways to political renewal.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Professor Javier Corrales, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Many Aspiring Autocrats Can Still Be Removed Through Elections
Then Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro attends the 74th Anniversary of the Parachutist Infantry Battalion at the Military Village in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on November 23, 2019. Photo: Celso Pupo Rodrigues.
Professor Corrales, welcome, and thank you for joining us. Let me begin with your recent research on how aspiring autocrats leave power. In your recentJournal of Democracy article, you challenge the widespread assumption that democratic backsliding inevitably culminates in consolidated authoritarianism. What motivated you to study how aspiring autocrats actually leave office, and what does this tell us about the resilience of democratic institutions in the twenty-first century?
Professor Javier Corrales: Let me preface this by saying that there is plenty of evidence that illiberal presidents and hyper-populist presidents can undermine democracy, concentrate power, and erode liberal democracy. There is ample evidence that this can happen. But they often do not go much farther than that, and they may even get ejected from office.
What prompted this research was Susan Stokes; she has just come out with a fantastic book on backsliding. We would give talks about the process of backsliding and all its dangers, and people always wanted to know: What can we do? So, we started to look at the evidence from cases where it was actually possible to put a stop to it. And we found that, many times, it is indeed possible to stop them and remove them from office. So that is the motivation: answering people’s call for what can be done. The most important point we make is that the most old-fashioned route is still available, which is defeating them at the polls.
The Biggest Mistake Is Believing the Election Is Already Lost
Your research identifies elections as the most common mechanism through which democracy-eroding leaders are removed from power. How do you explain the continued effectiveness of elections even in political systems where incumbents have already weakened checks and balances and tilted the playing field in their favor?
Professor Javier Corrales: This is a trend that we may not have a good answer for, but it is one that we have been able to identify ever since the field of democratic backsliding emerged. Presidents will concentrate a great deal of power and change the rules, but they still maintain elections. Obviously, we know—and this is where the term from Levitsky and Way comes in—about competitive authoritarianism and electoral autocracies. We are not really sure that we have settled the debate as to why they keep elections, but they do.
Now, these elections, of course, are full of irregularities. They are, very often, incredibly rigged in favor of the incumbent. But the election still happens, and there can be enough opportunities for competition. The problem is that many times leaders, as well as voters, give up. They think that the system is so unevenly stacked in favor of the incumbent that they say, “Why bother?”
What we find is that those opposition parties that counteract this tendency among voters to abstain and, of course, form a coalition can actually generate a coalition that is capable of winning an election. It is possible. It happens. But first, you have to overcome the tendency to abstain and also the tendency of the opposition to divide into multiple candidacies.
The First Battle Is Defeating Opposition Demoralization
Many opposition movements become demoralized once democratic backsliding reaches an advanced stage. Based on your findings, what strategic lessons should opposition parties draw from cases such as Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and Zambia regarding electoral mobilization under uneven conditions?
Professor Javier Corrales: Exactly, you’re totally right. One of the main objectives of autocratizing presidents is to demoralize the opposition. There is probably more intentionality behind demoralizing the opposition than behind repressing it, although they do some of that as well. The goal is to get the opposition to feel that the game is set, that they should not even bother. To almost make that perception credible. They almost do not hide the fact that this system—we are never going to admit it, but it is true—is stacked against you. They create this sense that we are invincible, that there is nothing you can do.
Those cases you mentioned, and others, show that the real objective of the opposition is to overcome that demoralization. In fact, in most of these cases, what you get is a surge in voting. So, you cannot simply rely on the conventional electorate that always votes. You have to be able to produce more voters, which means you actually have a very difficult battle in front of you. We find—I find in the vast majority of these electoral successes; the opposition wins only if it generates a voter surge. The number of people registering and voting increases significantly. We know that, many times, that surge tends to favor the opposition in autocratizing environments.
The Rise of Irregularities Is Not a Reason to Give Up
In your work on Venezuela, you have shown how electoral irregularities can coexist with regular elections and gradually contribute to democratic erosion. How can scholars and practitioners distinguish between elections that remain meaningful instruments of democratic accountability and those that have become largely authoritarian rituals?
Professor Javier Corrales: There is a fine line between a system that has a lot of irregularities but can still produce a competitive election and one in which those irregularities become so overwhelming that the situation is almost hopeless. All I can say is that you want to think like an athlete who faces increasingly difficult obstacles. In autocratizing environments, as the incumbent president introduces more and more irregularities, the way to think about this is to act like an amazing athlete. Consider what is happening as a series of new obstacles, and develop the skills needed to overcome them.
I understand that there comes a point when it becomes impossible. You can have an electoral authority that is so biased against you, or a type of malapportionment, or gerrymandering, or misallocation of funding, or attacks on the opposition. Sometimes the obstacles can become insurmountable, but there is a long way to go before you reach that point.
The point is not to feel defeated by the rise in irregularities, but to say, alright, we face a greater challenge—let’s see what we can do.
I know it’s easier said than done when you live in a country like this one. It’s so easy to come to the realization that the game is so rigged against you that you ask yourself, why bother trying? I get that. But the cases of electoral ejection of autocratizing presidents all show that the opposition engaged in effective strategies of voter mobilization.
The Biggest Institutional Challenge Is Opposition Fragmentation
Your research frequently emphasizes the importance of party systems. To what extent does the strength, cohesion, or fragmentation of opposition parties determine whether a backsliding leader ultimately exits through elections or succeeds in consolidating authoritarian rule?
Professor Javier Corrales: Thank you for bringing up that point, because I do think we need to talk about it. In many ways, Susan Stokes and I have been giving answers that have to do with agency. What is it that an opposition leadership ought to do? But in many ways, it also depends on the institutional context. I happen to think that the party system you have makes agency either easier or harder. To me, a crucial variable is what I call the potential fragmentation of the opposition. Other than the tendency of voters to abstain, this is perhaps the biggest institutional challenge facing the opposition.
Many times, we tend to think that a common foe unites. This is like what people say: people come together to defend themselves against a common foe. We assume that in situations of democratic backsliding, the opposition has a common enemy and therefore should reunite. But the central tendency is the opposite. The opposition tends to bicker among itself and engage in enormous disagreements about the right strategy, the right candidates, where to negotiate, what not to negotiate, and so on. This can lead to a splintering of the opposition.
This is probably why I hear people all the time saying, “Oh my God, you have a strongman, but the opposition is split.”Well, that is exactly what you are typically going to get. That is the starting point. The key issue is identifying those cases that manage to reduce the effective number of parties in the opposition. In other words, they lessen what I call the asymmetry of party fragmentation.
It is initially asymmetric because the ruling party is large and coherent and tends to operate like a personalist machine. It is a big tank. The opposition, by contrast, is fragmented. So, you need to restore some balance by reducing the effective number of parties representing the opposition and, ideally, by having unified candidates for every post being contested in an election.
Term Limits Are Often the Last Barrier to Executive Aggrandizement
You argue that term limits remain one of democracy’s most effective safeguards against executive aggrandizement. Yet many contemporary populists seek to weaken or abolish them. What explains the persistent attraction of term-limit removal among aspiring autocrats, and why do such efforts sometimes backfire politically?
Professor Javier Corrales: I started working on term limits before I began focusing on the theory of democratic backsliding, and I was looking at exactly that question: why is it that some presidents, not all of them, want to relax term limits or even abolish them? And I have come to the realization that there are times when term limits are all that works. Not always, because, as you say, the natural tendency of autocratizing presidents is to eliminate term limits. Here’s the logic.
One could argue that, in a liberal democracy, the strongest check on presidential power is the expiration date of an administration. The date that the Constitution says it’s over for you. If you think about it, that is probably the strongest check. This helps answer the question of why illiberal presidents focus on eroding term limits. We know that, by definition, illiberal presidents want to weaken checks on executive power. So, of course, when they encounter term limits, they are going to want to go after them, relax them, and try to circumvent them. As a result, we see many efforts in that direction.
But there are times when they fail to do so. There are times when that is the one thing, they are unable to change. And they end up respecting it. We saw a perfectly good example of this in Mexico in 2024. Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the president of Mexico at the time, entertained the possibility of ending term limits. Historically, they have been very firmly established in Mexico. He had the popularity to try it, but he didn’t. He respected the term limit, and so he stepped down.
Term limits simply mean that you are going to bring an end to an illiberal administration. They do not automatically replace it with a new democracy, but they provide a chance for the political system to reset itself.
Popularity Can Become a Populist Tool for Capturing the State
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan watching the August 30 Victory Day Parade in Ankara, Turkey on August 30, 2014. Photo by Mustafa Kirazli.
Your work on presidential re-election in Latin America highlights the role of power asymmetries and presidential popularity. How should we understand the relationship between electoral popularity and democratic vulnerability? Can highly popular leaders become the greatest threat to constitutional constraints?
Professor Javier Corrales: I think there are two extremes that one could argue are bad for democracy. One is having a democratically elected president who is very unpopular. That always ends badly. So, we should not pray for presidents to become super unpopular. Normally, what leads to that unpopularity is bad news, and the way presidents react to low popularity can also be dangerous. But I would go as far as to say that high popularity may be bad as well.
There was a time when we used to think, “Oh my God, this leader is so beloved, so well-liked. Citizens and voters really love him. He has a lot of popularity.” And we used to think that was great—that it was exactly what a leader needed to achieve. But what we now know is that illiberal presidents can weaponize that popularity. They can use it to create asymmetrical party-system fragmentation and turn it into an instrument for autocratizing the regime.
So now, after the research I have done, I think that if you have a populist president who wins by a very large margin and enjoys a great deal of popularity, rather than representing a triumph of democracy, this may actually constitute a democratic vulnerability. Because it creates an opportunity for the president to weaponize that popularity, capture state institutions, and go after detractors.
For example, this weekend there was a major election in Colombia. It was a close election, perhaps a little too close; it should not have been that close. But it may very well be that the new president, a far-right populist, will come to office with a small margin. Psychologically, it matters for both the president and the opposition to know that we do not have a president who was elected with an overwhelmingly broad mandate.
Voters need to know that, and the president does not need yet another advantage—high popularity—that can be used as an instrument for capturing the state. So, I now feel that these two extremes—an incredibly unpopular president on the one hand and a highly popular president on the other—represent serious democratic vulnerabilities.
There Is a Cost to Impeachment—and a Cost to Not Using It
One of the more surprising findings in your article is that impeachment has rarely succeeded in ending democratic backsliding. Does this suggest that constitutional accountability mechanisms are less effective than commonly assumed, or does it reveal deeper structural advantages enjoyed by incumbents?
Professor Javier Corrales: This point in our paper is still somewhat open to interpretation because there have been cases in which impeachments have worked to stop presidents who were on a path toward autocratization.
The thing is this: in many polarized democracies—and polarization is often even higher in autocratizing democracies—every attempt to remove a president through something other than a vote, namely an election, is immediately portrayed by the president’s defenders as a miscarriage of justice. It is presented as evidence that the other side is not playing by the rules.
As a result, illiberal forces can take full advantage of impeachment and make the case that it is their opponents who are trying to cheat their way into power. The hyper-politicization of the legislature can therefore work to the advantage of the incumbent.
For that reason, impeachment often fails. Presidents manage to secure popular or even legislative support to remain in office. They can create the perception that it is the opposition that is engaging in foul play.
That is why we do not see many cases of autocratizing presidents being removed through impeachment. We saw it in Peru with Pedro Castillo, and we saw it recently in South Korea. But for the most part, many of these presidents survive impeachment attempts. In fact, some autocratizing presidents emerge even stronger. This is what Donald Trump achieved during his first administration in the United States. He came out stronger after each impeachment.
So, while there is some evidence that impeachments can work, I also see considerable evidence that impeachment can backfire in ways that help autocratizing presidents more than they help the cause of democracy.
Now, here is the thing: when a president is breaking rules and norms and violating the Constitution, if you do nothing about it, people begin to think, “Oh my God, you can get away with murder. There are no consequences.” So, there is a cost to not using impeachment. It is important to recognize that. But we may need to understand that this cost is the price we pay for pursuing something that may not work, even if it appears to be the right thing to do from the standpoint of legality.
Polarization Diverts Attention Away from Democratic Erosion
Stop Trump Coalition march, Central London, United Kingdom, September 17, 2025. Protesters dressed as Musk, Farage, Vance, Putin, Trump, and Netanyahu. Photo: Ben Gingell.
In your work on intentional polarization, you argue that backsliding executives often deploy ideological extremism and policy radicalization strategically. How does polarization help aspiring autocrats survive politically, and under what conditions can it eventually undermine them instead?
Professor Javier Corrales: Right, the argument there is that we were trying to study why some presidents who seek to concentrate power end up adopting very radical ideologies, extremist ideologies, and sometimes even extreme policy positions. Not everywhere, but often enough. The argument we make in that paper is that, in many ways, this serves to shift attention away from debates about whether the president should have more power or less power, whether we should scrutinize the president’s illiberal actions, and instead redirect attention toward policy debates. But it is also a way of provoking the opposition—of encouraging the opposition to become more extremist, to scream very loudly, and to do crazy things.
There is, of course, a risk for incumbent presidents when they radicalize. The danger is that their radicalism may not sit well with moderates. So, there is a risk to them. But in the paper, we discuss how they mitigate that risk. In other words, they radicalize themselves while knowing that moderates may become less enthusiastic about them. So, they develop strategies to split the opposition, say bad things about the opposition, and co-opt parts of the opposition so that the other pole never becomes strong enough. Or they encourage the other pole to commit its own excesses. In other words, they provoke the opposition into becoming equally radical in certain ways.
So, you’re right that intentional polarization can backfire on the incumbent president. But we also discuss the strategies that incumbents deploy in conjunction with intentional polarization to protect themselves from those risks.
Populism’s Democratic Sugar Comes with Anti-Pluralist Salt
You have described populism as the “sugar, salt, and fat” of contemporary politics—highly appealing yet potentially toxic for democracy. How does populism interact with democratic backsliding, and why do populist movements often remain electorally resilient even after their leaders leave office?
Professor Javier Corrales: I developed this metaphor while reading about the food industry. Research has demonstrated that the food industry, at least in the United States, creates what are called ultra-processed foods by taking natural nutrients—things like sugar, salt, and fat. These are all macronutrients, and we should consume them. But if you manipulate the dosage—for example, if you make a chocolate bar with a lot more sugar, a lot more fat, and a lot more salt—you can create addiction. In other words, you manipulate the natural elements of food to produce a certain degree of addictiveness. That is what got me thinking that populism is a little bit like that.
Populists take the natural elements of democratic politics: sugar, fat, and salt. Sugar is the desire to do something for the little guys—the crowd-pleasing policies that are always characteristic of populism.
Salt is the condiment that heightens flavor. It is the transgressive speech directed against opponents, oligarchs, elites, and the perceived enemies of the community. It is intense and emotionally charged.
And fat, which is the equivalent of agenda density, comes from populists arriving with the idea that they are going to change everything, rewrite the Constitution, and take over the entire state—packing the system with energy and punch.
So, they oversupply these elements, and this produces followership, not unlike the way junk food produces addiction. It also produces opposition. It creates people who do not like these foods. Now, the point I wanted to make is that many people who continue to defend populism do so by focusing only on the sugar component. The sugar component of populism is the part that seeks to help the little guys, provide assistance to low-income groups if you are on the left, provide security for communities that feel threatened, and amplify the voices of those who are not being heard. All populist movements contain that element. Many people continue to argue that this makes populism democratic.
But what I wanted to emphasize is that populism also comes with a lot of fat and, especially, a lot of salt. The salt component—the high salt content—is the transgressive rhetoric directed at critics, the constant division of the electorate into “we, the good guys” and “you, the bad elites,” the privileged people. It is the notion that we must constantly restrict your rights. This is always part of populism, together with the sugar. They come as a package.
That is what I wanted to convey with this analogy. It helps explain why populism has always been so difficult to study within the context of democracy. It contains a deeply democratic component—the desire to include the little guys, the sugar coating. But it also contains what other scholars, such as Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, have described as an inherently anti-pluralistic element—an element that generates antagonism toward those who dissent. That is what that thought piece was about.
When the Referee Is Captured, the Game Is Over
Your scholarship on Venezuela demonstrates that democratic erosion often occurs incrementally through institutional capture rather than dramatic constitutional breakdown. Which institutions are most critical for preventing the transition from democratic backsliding to full authoritarianism, and why?
Professor Javier Corrales: They all matter, of course. But if I had to pick one—if I had to identify the institution whose fall would most concern me, the one that, once fully captured by the executive branch and the ruling party, signals the greatest danger—it would have to be the court system. More broadly, I mean the legal system: the Attorney General’s Office, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Justice Department.
This is not to say that the other institutions matter any less. But this one is especially important because, in a liberal democracy, the name of the game is competition—competition between the government and the opposition. And that competition can be ferocious.
You need an arbiter. You need a referee. It is essential.
The moment that referee becomes partial, becomes rigged, or becomes an instrument of one of the players, it is over.
The court system then gives you permission to engage in what I call autocratic legalism, whereby you begin to apply laws in ways that favor yourself and go after your critics.
Illiberal Leaders Need Institutional Vehicles to Succeed
Modern building of the Supreme Court of Poland in Warsaw, photographed on January 7, 2020. Photo: Dreamstime.
Many observers focus on charismatic leaders when analyzing democratic decline. Yet your research frequently highlights the importance of ruling parties, courts, electoral authorities, and state institutions. Are we still overestimating the role of leaders and underestimating the institutional foundations of autocratization and democratic recovery?
Professor Javier Corrales: In political science we have always had a debate between the role of agency and the role of institutions. Perhaps we should not be trying to choose between them. Rather, we should continue to recognize that agency operates within institutional contexts and that individual choices vary according to those contexts. At the same time, institutions alone, without taking agency into account, may not necessarily provide strong predictive power.
That said, I think the literature on democratic backsliding has come a long way in understanding the role of institutions. Let me give you an example. One of the best books on the subject that I have read recently focuses on whether a president has a ruling party that has become highly personalistic. This is work by Erica Frantz and her colleagues. The argument is that you may have an illiberal president with a great deal of illiberal agency. But that president may not go very far. They may not be able to advance democratic backsliding very far unless they possess the institutional mechanism of a personalized party. Frantz and her colleagues define precisely what they mean by that, and they make a very compelling case that you need a war tank—and that is what a personalistic party provides.
Now, the concept of a personalistic party has a long lineage in political science. We have been studying the rise, role, and institutionalization of parties since Huntington in the 1960s. So, we have long been familiar with the notion that parties can either become highly institutionalized machines or little more than rubber stamps for the leader in office. We are now at a point where important lines of research successfully incorporate both agency and institutional analysis into the study of democratic backsliding.
Corruption and Incompetence Are Authoritarianism’s Greatest Vulnerabilities
Your comparative work suggests that only a small number of backsliding cases ultimately culminate in consolidated authoritarianism. What explains why countries such as Venezuela and Nicaragua crossed that threshold while others, despite serious democratic erosion, eventually experienced electoral turnover?
Professor Javier Corrales: Two words: corruption and incompetence. Let me expand. A natural, almost inevitable tendency of all autocratizing presidents is to engage in a significant amount of corruption. All the evidence I have seen, both from the work of others and from my own research, shows that as soon as you begin to erode the system of checks and balances, corruption proliferates. Corruption damages the popularity of all presidents. It is their greatest vulnerability. They can survive it, but it becomes a very significant weakness. These strongmen eventually become associated with highly corrupt regimes, and voters see it. They see it with their own eyes. So that is vulnerability number one.
The second vulnerability is less inevitable. Not all autocratizing presidents fall into this trap, and that is public-administration incompetence. Obviously, some autocracies are very technocracy oriented. That can happen. But we also know—and this comes from the work of Barbara Geddes in the 1990s—that autocratizing presidents, when deciding how to staff the bureaucracy and public administration, often face a choice between appointing technical experts and appointing loyalists. They choose loyalty. To the detriment of technical competence. Think about it. If you diminish technical competence and elevate loyalty, you may end up with a bureaucracy that always says yes to the president, but public administration is going to suffer.
And so, over time—not immediately—what happens is this: Many autocratizing presidents come to power with a specific problem they want to solve, and often they succeed. People appreciate it, and they get re-elected. But as time passes, that problem recedes and new problems emerge. By then, the bureaucracy has been transformed, with more loyalists and fewer technical experts. As new public-policy challenges arise, the government becomes less equipped to deal with them and increasing levels of incompetence become visible. This is why, over time, many autocratizing presidents lose popularity and electoral advantage.
That does not necessarily mean it is the end of the line for them. They can survive it. But I think those two elements—corruption and incompetence—are natural vulnerabilities associated with autocratization and the move away from liberal democracy.
Orbán and Chávez Followed Remarkably Similar Playbooks
Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister arrives to attend in an informal meeting of Heads of State or Government in Prague, Czechia on October 7, 2022. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.
Lastly, Professor Corrales, looking beyond Latin America, do you see common patterns connecting the trajectories of leaders such as Hugo Chávez, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador? Or are regional and institutional differences ultimately more important than the shared label of populism?
Professor Javier Corrales: This is really the debate about what matters more. There are policy differences, and those differences can be very significant. There is no question that a far-right populist has policy preferences that appear very different from those of a left-wing populist president. No doubt about it.
Or should we focus instead on their commonalities? The commonality lies in their hostility toward checks and balances, their desire to expand presidential power through executive aggrandizement, and their disdain for pluralism. When we look at policy agendas, a right-wing leader like Orbán and a left-wing leader like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela appear to be polar opposites. But when you examine their approaches to government-opposition relations, they follow a remarkably similar playbook. They seek to do many of the same things: capture the state, engage in autocratic legalism, co-opt the legal system, attack the press, and portray critics as elites or privileged groups. The convergence is striking. They may have very different policy prescriptions for addressing poverty. But when it comes to dealing with the opposition, they converge.
I spend a great deal of time thinking about democracy—which is fundamentally about regulating relations between governments and oppositions—I personally find the similarities more striking than the differences. It is remarkable that leaders who enter politics with such different ideological perspectives on the policy problems of the day ultimately converge on a very similar governing playbook. That is why the policy differences matter less than these commonalities. So, I would be comfortable saying that, in many ways, an illiberal president like Orbán and a left-wing president like Chávez represent different sides of the same coin.
Why did Keir Starmer fail to neutralize Reform UK despite commanding a large parliamentary majority? In this incisive commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that Reform UK’s greatest achievement was not electoral but discursive. By transforming immigration, sovereignty, national identity, and culture-war politics into the central measures of political authority, Nigel Farage’s party compelled Labour to react on terrain it did not control. Drawing on the scholarship of populism and radical-right agenda-setting, Dr. Dias shows how attempts to accommodate populist themes often strengthen rather than weaken their appeal. The result, he argues, was a politics of defensive adaptation that left Labour trapped between technocratic governance and populist mobilization, ultimately exposing the limits of mainstream anti-populist strategies.
Keir Starmer did not fall simply because he lacked charisma or because Labour mismanaged government. He fell because Britain’s populist right succeeded in turning immigration and culture-war politics into the central test of political authority, and Labour never found a convincing answer. His resignation exposed a deeper crisis: a parliamentary landslide had not become political hegemony, and one of Europe’s oldest democracies was again being reorganized by forces outside the governing party.
The paradox of Starmer’s premiership is therefore not that a cautious leader struggled to inspire, but a government with an overwhelming majority found itself reacting to a party that did not hold power. Reform UK did not need to govern in order to discipline the government. It only needed to define what counted as political reality: borders, sovereignty, national identity, crime, “common sense,” and the betrayal of ordinary people by remote elites.
Reform as the Agenda-setter
There is a long-term debate in academia and the public sphere on how radical-right populist parties influence public debate and mainstream parties’ agendas. This influence is not only electoral. It is also discursive. Populist parties may lose elections, remain outside government, and still force the political system to speak their language (Meguid, 2005; Minkenberg, 2001; Mudde, 2019; Schmidt, 2025; Saldivia Gonzatti & Völker, 2026).
In many circumstances, parties — and especially governments — tend to address topics such as immigration, border control, national identity, and moral panic around Muslim migrants in terms already defined by the populist right (Poynting & Morgan, 2016; Mudde, 2019). This is one of the most important mechanisms of radical-right power: it wins when its opponents accept that its issues are the real issues, and that its vocabulary is the vocabulary of political seriousness.
As Cas Mudde argues, mainstream parties cannot address the radical-right agenda in its original terms. They must face the debate, the problems and public perceptions, but they must do so in democratic and moderate terms. Otherwise, they become contaminated by radical solutions or are perceived as opportunistic copies (Mudde, 2007, 2019).
This was Starmer’s first failure: the temptation to neutralize Reform UK by hardening Labour’s language on immigration and cultural values. The second failure was to do so while failing to recover public confidence, show authority, and offer ideological clarity.
Reform UK did not need to govern to impose its agenda. It shifted the debate to borders, sovereignty, national identity, crime, elites, and “common sense.” It made immigration not just one policy area among others, but the central test of whether the state still controlled the country.
That was the asymmetry. Farage could radicalize. Starmer had to calibrate. Reform could accuse. Labour had to administer. Reform could speak in symbols. Labour answered with management. And in a political moment dominated by anxiety, management was not enough.
Immigration as Reform UK’s Issue Ownership
Reform UK succeeded because it turned immigration into a symbol of state failure. It was no longer only about numbers, visas, asylum backlogs, or labor-market needs. It became a story about control, sovereignty and betrayal.This is why the issue was so powerful. Immigration became a metonymy for everything that seemed broken in Britain: pressure on housing, waiting lists, low wages, crime, cultural change, weak borders, and distant elites. The point was not simply that immigration was high. The point was that immigration could be used to explain almost every other failure.
For Reform UK, immigration was evidence that the state protected others before its own citizens. This is a classic populist grammar. The “people” are presented as abandoned; migrants become the visible beneficiaries of elite betrayal; and mainstream parties are accused of refusing to say what everyone allegedly knows (Mudde, 2007; Poynting & Morgan, 2016; Norris & Inglehart, 2019).
The concept of issue ownership helps explain why this was so damaging for Labour. Once Reform UK became the party most strongly associated with immigration control, any Labour attempt to sound tougher risked confirming Reform’s authority over the issue. Mainstream parties can change their position, but they do not automatically change who voters trust on the issue itself (Meguid, 2005; Bale et al., 2010; Abou-Chadi & Krause, 2020).
Starmer never found a convincing answer to this framing. When he hardened the discourse, he validated Reform’s premise that immigration was the central problem. When he moderated, he looked evasive or weak. He was trapped between moral discomfort and electoral fear.
Culture Wars as a Substitute for an Economic Programme
Reform UK did not need to present a detailed economic programme if it could keep politics focused on immigration, “woke politics,” crime, free speech, gender, patriotism, and resentment against Westminster. These themes worked because they were not just policy topics. They were identity markers.
The advantage of culture-war politics is that it simplifies the political field. It divides the country between those who allegedly see reality and those who hide behind elite language. It allows Reform UK to present itself as the party of “common sense,” while Labour appears as the party of caution, procedure, and institutional restraint.
This was another Starmer problem. Labour answered with competence, seriousness, and technocracy. Reform answered with conflict, identity, and emotion. Starmer promised delivery. Farage offered recognition. Starmer said the state could be repaired. Reform said the state had been captured.
This dynamic fits the broader cultural-backlash argument: radical-right populism does not grow only from material insecurity, but also from conflicts over identity, status, cultural change, and national belonging (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). This does not mean that Reform had better answers. It means that it had a clearer emotional structure. It knew who was guilty, who had been betrayed, and what had to be restored. Labour had policies, but Reform had a story.
The Mainstream Trap
The central mistake of mainstream parties is to believe that they can borrow the radical right’s themes without strengthening the radical right’s authority. But this rarely works. If a mainstream party copies the populist right, it confirms that the populist right identified the real problem first. If it refuses to engage, it looks detached from public anxiety.
This is the dilemma identified in much of the literature on mainstream responses to the radical right. Social-democratic parties, in particular, face a difficult strategic choice: they can ignore the radical right, confront it, or accommodate parts of its agenda. But accommodation often increases the salience of issues owned by the radical right, especially immigration and national identity (Bale et al., 2010; Akkerman et al., 2016; Meyer & Rosenberger, 2015).
This was Starmer’s dilemma. He could not ignore immigration, because silence would have allowed Reform to monopolize the issue. But he could not simply “out-Farage Farage,” because Reform would always sound more authentic on its own terrain.
The result was a politics of defensive adaptation. Labour tried to look tougher, but not too tough; moderate, but not weak; liberal, but not naïve. That balance may work in government documents. It does not work against a populist party that has reduced politics to betrayal, borders, and national decline.
Reform UK won the agenda because it forced Labour to react. And once Labour was reacting, its majority no longer looked like hegemony. It looked like “administration under pressure.”
Conclusion
Starmer’s fall shows that populist parties can shape politics before they capture power. Reform UK’s success was not only that it grew electorally. Its deeper success was that it made immigration, sovereignty, and culture-war politics the measure of political authority.
The lesson is not that mainstream parties should avoid immigration. That would be politically naïve and democratically dangerous. The lesson is that they must address immigration without accepting the populist frame that turns migrants into the master explanation for national decline.
A stronger Labour response would have linked immigration to state capacity, wages, housing, integration, public services and fairness. It would have spoken about control without cruelty, borders without scapegoating, and national solidarity without ethnic resentment.
Starmer could not outflank Reform UK because the contest was already being fought on Reform’s ground. Farage did not need to prove that he could govern. He only needed to prove that Labour was governing within a debate he had already defined.
References
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Bale, T.; Green-Pedersen, C.; Krouwel, A.; Luther, K. R. & Sitter, N. (2010). “If you can’t beat them, join them? Explaining social democratic responses to the challenge from the populist radical right in Western Europe.” Political Studies, 58(3), 410–426.
Meguid, B. M. (2005). “Competition between unequals: The role of mainstream party strategy in niche party success.” American Political Science Review, 99(3), 347–359.
Meyer, S. & Rosenberger, S. (2015). “Just a shadow? The role of radical right parties in the politicization of immigration, 1995–2009.” Politics and Governance, 3(2), 1–17.
Minkenberg, M. (2001). “The radical right in public office: Agenda-setting and policy effects.” West European Politics, 24(4), 1–21.
Morgan, G. (2012). Global Islamophobia: Muslims and moral panic in the West. (S. Poynting, Ed.). Routledge.
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Mudde, C. (2019). The far right today. Polity Press.
Norris, P. & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press.
Saldivia Gonzatti, D. & Völker, T. (2026). “Far-right agenda setting: How the far right influences the political mainstream.” European Journal of Political Research, 65(1), 101–123.
Schmidt, V. A. (2025). “Populist agenda-setting: Shaping the narrative, framing the debate, captivating the ‘people,’ upending the mainstream, capturing power.” Journal of European Public Policy, 32(5), 1073–1096.
