In this commentary, Associate Professor Anders Hellström examines why the Sweden Democrats emerged as one of the main losers of Sweden’s 2026 election after years of sustained growth and political influence. He identifies three factors: SD’s transformation from an anti-establishment challenger into part of the political establishment; growing resistance to increasingly restrictive immigration policies; and a mismatch between SD’s signature issues and voters’ wider priorities, particularly healthcare, education, and the economy. Assoc. Prof. Hellström also places the election within a broader debate about populism as democratic protest and the narrative foundations of representative politics. He argues that SD has successfully shaped dominant stories about integration, immigration, and Swedish identity, but that the 2026 result may indicate an opening for alternative political narratives as “the pendulum has swung back.”
When populists become the establishment, voters may seek new ways to protest the elite, as Sweden’s recent election suggests. The pendulum has swung back. This article outlines three reasons why the Sweden Democrats (SD) suffered electoral setbacks. It concludes by arguing that research needs to acknowledge the storytelling dimension of representative politics to open up space for progressive stories to be told in the future. What will be the dominant narrative in the years to come? But first, let us return to the election itself.
On 13 September, Sweden held local, regional, and national elections. At the national level, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s Tidö coalition faced an opposition led by the Social Democrats (S). The election resulted in a narrow victory for the center-left bloc. Among the opposition parties, the Social Democrats won 28.3% of the vote, followed by the Left Party (V) (8.4%), the Center Party (C) (7.0%), and the Green Party (MP) (6.1%) (see Table 1).
Three of the four Tidö coalition parties increased their vote share. The Moderate Party (M) rose to 19.9%, remaining the second-largest party, while the Christian Democrats (KD) and Liberals (L) increased to 6.2% and 5.2%, respectively. The main loser was the Sweden Democrats, whose support fell from 20.5% to 17.5% (see Table 1).
After all votes were counted, S leader Magdalena Andersson’s bloc secured 176 seats to the Tidö coalition’s 173. Over the past four years, the SD-backed government has tightened immigration policy, promoted repatriation, made temporary residence permits the norm, and introduced tougher criminal penalties. The Social Democrats did not consistently oppose these measures and have themselves embraced a more restrictive approach to immigration. Yet, despite this broad political consensus, the opposition won.
Why is it that the Sweden Democrats (SD) emerged as one of the election’s losers? I outline below three possible explanations.
1.From anti-establishment challenger to part of the establishment. After decades of rapid growth, often doubling its vote share from one election to the next, the Sweden Democrats’ momentum slowed in 2022 and turned into decline in 2026.
Initially, in the beginning of its parliamentary journey, the party was often portrayed as a devil in disguise of sorts, who concealed an extremely shady past under a fancy costume. Meanwhile, its elected representatives were sometimes ridiculed as political clowns (Hellström & Nilsson, 2010). They faced immense criticism in mainstream media and from the other mainstream political parties. Both the Moderates under Fredrik Reinfeldt and the Social Democrats under Mona Sahlin united in a show of repugnance against the Sweden Democrats, denying them any political influence and refusing to cooperate with them.
But times change.
As the Sweden Democrats have entered the political mainstream, they have sought to portray themselves as a responsible governing partner. Meanwhile, mainstream parties have moved closer to SD on immigration. M leader Ulf Kristersson has endorsed SD leader Jimmie Åkesson’s concerns about immigration, integration, and crime (Kristersson, 2026), while the Social Democrats also support lower immigration and stricter integration measures (Social Democratic Party, 2025).
As a result, political positions widely regarded as extreme a decade ago have become mainstream today. And when the extreme has become mainstream, young radicals are looking for even more extreme alternatives, as SD has become too moderate according to them.
2.Sweden’s immigration policy, which the SD actively promotes, has become too restrictive. Many voters, both natives and immigrants, now see Sweden’s immigration policy as too restrictive. When well-integrated immigrants face deportation, barriers to family reunification, uncalled-for surveillance of well-behaved immigrant voters, or demanding income requirements (ridiculously high), these policies may generate protest rather than public support. Can these protests be framed in populist terms? For some scholars, the answer is affirmative. In this regard, populism can be understood as a form of democratic protest (Abbott, 2007) rather than merely an anti-democratic force. To shed light on this issue, it helps to revisit Margaret Canovan.
Canovan (1999) identifies two faces of democratic politics: redemption and pragmatism. Democracy, understood as an ideal, embodies a redemptive vision through which citizens can collectively pursue and realize “the good society.” The pragmatic face, by contrast, is concerned with maintaining institutions capable of managing conflict and disagreement peacefully, without allowing political competition to become destructive. In its institutional form, this pragmatic dimension is reflected in arrangements such as free and fair elections, a multiparty system, and the rule of law. Representative politics, however, extends beyond politics-as-usual by also emphasizing redemptive impulses. In this reading, voters who feel that political developments have gone too far reject established politics (pragmatism) and instead support an alternative vision (redemption). Populism is not synonymous with the far right. It can also be understood as a democratic protest against a political system that, in the eyes of its critics, has become overly technocratic.
3.Sweden Democrats’ profile issues were not at the top of the political agenda. There was a clear mismatch between the Sweden Democrats’ priorities and those of the average voter. More broadly, no single issue dominated the election campaign. While some voters focused on climate change, others were concerned about their finances, healthcare, or education. Although society remained polarized, the SD’s agenda did not fully align with voters’ main concerns.
Some voters were protesting against climate change, while others were concerned about their personal finances or health. Even in a polarized political environment, it is fair to say that there was no perfect match between what average voters considered the most important issues and the priorities of the Sweden Democrats. According to the Swedish Television exit poll (SVT Nyheter, 2026), the three most important issues for voters in the 2026 election were healthcare, education, and the Swedish economy (ibid.). According to the same 2026 VALU exit poll, Sweden Democrats’ voters were primarily motivated by concerns about law and order, immigration, and integration (ibid.).
The Sweden Democrats have successfully built a consensus around their narrative of where Sweden is heading and what Swedish national identity is. This lies behind their policies and political rhetoric, at least up to now. I will end this article with two examples of when their narrative has established a consensus and achieved hegemony.
First, consider the failure of integration mantra. While many agree that integration has failed, few agree on what integration actually means. The SD offers a simple explanation: excessive immigration has weakened social cohesion and caused fragmentation. Yet this narrative is often one-sided. Immigrants now constitute more than one-fifth of Sweden’s population, and many have integrated successfully into Swedish society. But as long as the dominant (and only) narrative is that integration has failed, the SD stands to benefit.
A second example is the oft-repeated claim that Sweden must never return to 2015. Yet 2015 created opportunities for both regressive forces and progressive mobilization (Bevelander & Hellström, 2019). While many municipalities worried that immigration was stretching their capacity to the limit, civil society organizations, churches, and private citizens mobilized to help refugees by providing housing, language cafés, and other forms of support. These examples are seldom heard now.
Living with diversity in everyday life gives rise to social tensions in the population and between groups. Sweden has now elected a new parliament. Let us see what the new government will look like. Members of the Tidö government have packed their bags. Which narratives will the new government base its law proposals on? What will be the dominant story? Populism invites us to acknowledge the storytelling dimension of representative politics. It invites us, as researchers of populism, to expand beyond politics as usual. Since the pendulum has swung back, there is reason to hope that the story, Swedish case, will have a happy continuation.
(*) Anders Hellström is Associate Professor in Political Science. He is a senior lecturer in IMER at the Department of Global Political Studies and is connected to the Migration Research Institute MIM at Malmö University. He has published widely in the areas of populism, nationalism, the far right, racism, discourse theory, and the politics of migration and identity. He has published widely in academic journals, such as Government and Opposition, Journal of International Migration and Integration, and Ethnicities. His most recent article is “You Are Not a Racist, Right?”: Racism as a Political Activity, which examines the intersection between discourse and ideology in contemporary struggles over the meaning of racism.
References
Abbott, P. (2007). ‘“Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan”: Democratic Theory, Populism, and Philip Roth’s ‘American Trilogy’.” Canadian Review of American Studies, vol. 37, no. 3: 431–452.
Canovan, M. (1999). Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy. Political Studies, 47(1), 2-16.
Hellström, A. and Nilsson, T. (2010). “‘We Are the Good Guys’: Ideological Positioning of the Nationalist Party Sverigedemokraterna in Contemporary Swedish Politics’.” Ethnicities, 10(1), pp. 55-76.
Kristersson, U. (2026). Statement by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Stockholm: Government Offices of Sweden.https://www.government.se/ (accessed: 15 September 2026).
Mudde, Cas. (2019). The Far Right Today.
Social Democratic Party. (2025). Social Democrats Adopt New Program with Adjusted Immigration Policy. Available at: Sweden Herald. (accessed: 15 September 2026).
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Gefjon Off examines the Sweden Democrats’ 2026 electoral setback against the backdrop of their continuing political and ideological influence. She argues that declining vote share should not automatically be read as “denormalization,” stressing that electoral strength is only one measure of radical-right success. SD’s “agenda-setting power and policy influence have been very significant,” she notes, extending beyond the Tidö parties as migration-critical positions have spread across the wider party system. Dr. Off also discusses issue salience, youth voting, gender gaps, economic insecurity, tactical voting, coalition fragmentation, and comparisons with Germany’s AfD. Her central insight is that electoral losses can coexist with enduring normalization: “The influence of the Sweden Democrats is clear.”
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Gefjon Off, a postdoctoral research associate in Comparative Politics at the University of Hamburg, argues that the Sweden Democrats’ electoral setback in Sweden’s September 13, 2026 election should not be mistaken for a corresponding decline in the party’s broader political influence. At the center of Dr. Off’s analysis is a distinction between electoral strength and normalization. While acknowledging that electoral growth can be one indicator of normalization, she stresses that it is far from the only one. “There are many other indicators of normalization,” she notes, including how a party is treated by the media, discussed in public debate, and regarded as a legitimate political actor. For this reason, she cautions against reading SD’s losses as evidence of “denormalization”: “Electoral growth can be an indicator of normalization, but there are many other indicators that matter, too.”
This distinction becomes particularly important because, in Dr. Off’s assessment, SD’s agenda-setting and policy influence have extended well beyond its own electoral constituency. She observes that the party has exercised “considerable policy influence and agenda-setting power” and that this influence has not been confined to the Tidö parties. The Social Democrats have also moved toward more immigration-critical positions, leading Dr. Off to conclude that “SD’s agenda-setting power has extended beyond the right-wing bloc and some center parties.”
The interview therefore explores a central paradox of contemporary radical-right politics: a party may lose voters while some of the issues, narratives, and positions it helped elevate become increasingly embedded in mainstream political competition. Dr. Off suggests that once immigration and crime become widely politicized across the party system, the Sweden Democrats may lose part of the credibility advantage they previously enjoyed as the most prominent owners of those issues. “These issues have become mainstream,” she says, adding that SD’s earlier agenda-setting advantage “has become smaller.”
Yet electoral losses remain consequential. Dr. Off emphasizes that votes are ultimately indispensable to sustaining political leverage: “Without votes, a party eventually loses influence.” Still, she insists that the broader picture cannot be captured by vote share alone. “The influence of the Sweden Democrats is clear,” she concludes, and their “agenda-setting power and policy influence have been very significant.”
The interview thus examines SD’s 2026 setback not simply as an electoral story, but as part of a larger process through which radical-right ideas can reshape political agendas, party competition, coalition strategies, and the boundaries of what is considered politically mainstream.
Here is our interview with Dr. Gefjon Off, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
A Party Can Become More Normalized Even Without Continuing to Grow
Sweden’s 2026 general election produced a narrow parliamentary majority for the red-green parties, with 176 seats compared with 173 for the Tidö parties. The Social Democrats remained the largest party with 28 percent of the vote, followed by the Moderates at 19.8 percent and the Sweden Democrats at 17.5 percent. Source: SVT.
Dr. Off, welcome! Let me begin with your distinction between mainstreaming and normalization.In your work with Anna-Sophie Heinze, you distinguish between mainstream parties adopting far-right positions and the wider normalization of those positions in society. SD fell to around 17.5 percent in the September 13 elections after four years of major influence through the Tidö Agreement. Does this show that normalization does not necessarily lead to continued electoral growth? Can a radical-right party become more normalized even while losing votes?
Dr. Gefjon Off: Electoral growth is one indicator of normalization. As a party grows—especially a party that is new and was originally considered extremist, at least when it was founded, and clearly not normalized at that point—we can consider electoral growth an indicator of normalization.
But there are many other indicators of normalization. How does the media deal with this party? How is it talked about? Is it considered a legitimate political actor in society? So even people who do not vote for the party might consider it a legitimate party and a democratic actor in the political party landscape of the country.
And so, I wouldn’t say that a decline in electoral growth is a sign of denormalization or something like that. I would rather say that electoral growth can be an indicator of normalization, but there are many other indicators that matter, too.
It Is Quite Unusual for Center-Right Parties to Win Voters Back from the Far Right
This raises an important question about who benefits from mainstreaming. SD lost support even though migration, citizenship, integration, and crime remain central issues on the Swedish right. Can a radical-right party shape the agenda so successfully that mainstream conservative parties eventually benefit from positions it helped normalize? And does Germany show that policy mainstreaming can develop even when a party like the AfD remains formally excluded?
Dr. Gefjon Off: Usually, comparative research from other countries shows that center-right parties do not gain electorally by accommodating far-right positions. This pattern has been observed across many European countries, and there is quite a strong consensus on this in the research. So, yes, we would not normally expect center-right parties to win votes by accommodating the far right.
It is therefore quite unusual for center-right parties to win back voters from the far right, as has happened to some extent in Sweden. We usually do not expect this because far-right voters tend to support the party they consider most credible on the issues they care about. If immigration is especially important to them, the far-right party is usually seen as the most credible opponent of immigration because it made the issue its own in the first place. When a center-right party adopts a similar position, it may be seen as less credible because the far-right party was there first.
According to the exit polls, 7% of those who voted for the Sweden Democrats in 2022 voted for the center-right Moderate Party this time, and this is something we have not really seen much elsewhere, so it is quite unusual.
In Germany, regarding your second question—can policy mainstreaming develop even when a party like the AfD remains formally excluded? —yes, that is definitely happening. The center-right CDU still says it will not collaborate with the AfD or form coalitions with it, either at the national or federal-state level. This remains a formal exclusion rule. But, of course, the CDU is still adopting anti-immigration policies, and not only the CDU; we also see other parties doing this. So yes, the influence is still there, even though the AfD remains excluded from formal collaboration.
Can Now Use the Outsider Argument to Re-Establish That Image
Sweden Democrats’ Square Meeting in Umeå. Jimmie Åkesson speaks to the people on the city square in Umeå, Sweden on August 14, 2018.
SD’s position during the last four years was also unusual. It remained outside government but had major influence through the Tidö Agreement. Could its decline partly reflect the cost of becoming associated with government while losing some of its outsider appeal? And does the AfD’s exclusion in Germany help it preserve that outsider position?
Dr. Gefjon Off: I don’t think SD lost votes because it lost its outsider appeal. This is not a mechanism I would expect to find in other countries either, including cases where far-right parties have entered government. But this morning (Friday), the Sweden Democrats’ party leader, Jimmie Åkesson, made exactly this claim at the press conference. He argued that the party had lost some of its outsider appeal because it had worked with established parties.
I find this unlikely for two reasons. First, since becoming party leader in 2005, Jimmie Åkesson has consistently tried to make the Sweden Democrats appear more established. The party was founded by extremists, including Nazis, and since Åkesson came to power within the party, he has worked to clean up its image. Some people were expelled, the rhetoric was de-radicalized, and for a long time his strategy was precisely to make the party appear more established. So now, to claim that they lost votes because they worked with established parties—which has always been their goal—does not seem entirely convincing to me.
Of course, this is also rhetoric he can now use to re-establish more of an outsider image. The other reason is that, even though Åkesson himself does not usually engage in this kind of behavior—or does so only to a limited extent—there are leading figures within the party who have been around for a long time and who have made very controversial statements and sparked highly provocative public debates. In that sense, they have not always acted in an established way. They use provocative language, make controversial statements, and regularly trigger debates over whether such behavior is appropriate.
So, overall, I don’t think it is straightforward to say that SD lost votes because it worked with established parties.
Regarding the second question about the AfD: does its exclusion in Germany help it preserve its outsider position? Yes, of course. The AfD can use this exclusion to construct an identity around the idea that “we are the ones who are being unfairly excluded.” This strengthens an “us against them” group identity and helps the party build a partisan identity around being unfairly excluded.
The Right-Wing Bloc Remained Strong Despite SD’s Electoral Losses
The movement of voters within the Tidö bloc is also interesting. The Moderates moved ahead of SD, while the Liberals survived with around 5.3 percent, helped partly by tactical voting. Does this suggest that voters can move between parties for strategic reasons without changing their broader ideological views? Can SD lose votes while the wider right remains strong?
Dr. Gefjon Off: The exit polls show that the Liberal Party gained votes mostly from the Moderate Party, but not particularly from the Sweden Democrats. So, in this case, tactical voting was taking place, but not so much among Sweden Democrat voters. The Sweden Democrats’ losses therefore do not appear to have been driven by their voters switching to the Liberal Party.
This is also in line with what SD leader Jimmie Åkesson said. A few weeks before the election, he urged his own voters not to support the Liberal Party or engage in strategic voting. So, strategic voting did occur, but it came mainly from other right-wing parties, not from the Sweden Democrats, at least according to the exit polls.
The reason the rest of the right-wing bloc remained strong is probably, first of all, that the Sweden Democrats lost 3 percentage points, some of which went to the Moderate Party. But the Social Democrats also lost 2.3 percentage points, and some of that support went to the Moderate Party as well. This probably helps explain why the right-wing bloc remained quite strong overall.
In general, there was not much movement apart from the losses of the Social Democrats and the Sweden Democrats, who lost 2 and 3 percentage points, respectively. Otherwise, voter shifts were relatively limited. The election was also very tight. So, overall, we are talking about relatively small voter movements.
Once SD’s Issues Become Mainstream, Its Electoral Advantage Can Become Smaller
Your research also distinguishes between what people believe and which issues they consider most important. Could the 2026 election show that restrictive views on migration or crime remain widespread even if these issues no longer benefit SD as strongly at the ballot box? Can a radical-right party win the battle over the agenda but lose some of the electoral advantage once its issues become mainstream?
Dr. Gefjon Off: Yes, I would say these issues have become mainstream. In that sense, if other parties can act credibly in line with what SD stands for, it seems that other right-wing parties have become credible enough to SD voters on immigration and crime as well. That may mean the credibility advantage the Sweden Democrats gained through their agenda-setting power—by raising these issues, or at least by raising them most prominently in the first place—has become smaller. That could be one interpretation of the results.
Compared with 2022, however, immigration and crime were also somewhat less important to voters in 2026. They were still among the top-ranked issues, but we can see some movement. Healthcare, for example, has become even more important than before, and that is also a rather left-wing issue.
So perhaps part of the shift reflects the fact that immigration and crime have become less important in voters’ eyes. The question, then, is why. I can think of at least two possible explanations. One is that immigration and crime rates have gone down, so these issues may simply feel less urgent to many voters.
The other is that some of the immigration and crime policies proposed by the Tidö government were perceived by parts of the public as very harsh and therefore generated considerable public criticism. For example, debates about deporting children and teenagers, as well as incarcerating teenagers, sparked strong reactions. It may be that some voters reacted against the way these policies were ultimately implemented in practice.
So, these are two possible explanations for why immigration and crime may no longer have been as important as before. And that, in turn, could also have affected why SD was not as successful as it had been previously.
Values Tend to Remain Stable, but the Salience of Issues Can Change
This brings us to the importance of issue salience. Your earlier research showed that when gender equality becomes politically prominent, conservative gender attitudes can become more closely connected to SD support. Should we focus less on whether voters changed their values in 2026 and more on which issues parties successfully made important? Is radical-right support often about activating existing attitudes rather than creating entirely new ones?
Dr. Gefjon Off: Usually, research assumes that values are relatively stable. Attitudes may change somewhat more, but values are the deeper underlying beliefs people hold. Views on immigration or gender equality are often closely connected to values developed at an early age. People are generally socialized into these values while growing up, particularly during their teenage years and early adulthood, which we consider the formative years. After that, values tend to remain relatively stable. So, we would not expect people to completely change their minds between elections.
What can change are other factors: whom people trust, how they view political leaders, whether scandals occur, how the government performs, and so on. Another important factor is how salient a particular issue becomes. For instance, after 2015, when immigration increased in many countries, immigration became a more important political issue. It was discussed extensively by politicians, the media, and, of course, the far right. The same applies to other developments, such as the economic crisis or, later, worldwide feminist movements. When events like these occur, certain issues become more salient.
When an issue becomes more salient, the attitude people already hold toward it becomes more important in their vote choice. So, it is less about changing attitudes than about how important those attitudes become politically. This happens through major events, but also through the way political parties politicize particular issues.
Far-right parties across Europe—although the Sweden Democrats somewhat less so—have increasingly politicized anti-gender and anti-feminist views, as well as women’s rights and LGBTQI+ rights, by positioning themselves against these issues. Of course, if I am, say, a far-right voter who sympathizes with such a party and consumes its rhetoric and positions, this can also influence me. By politicizing an issue, the party therefore also increases its salience.
SD Lost 7%Points Among First-Time Voters, but the Broader Youth Picture Is More Stable
People shop in Gamla Stan (Old Town) in Stockholm, Sweden on August 23, 2018.
The youth vote is especially interesting in this respect. SD lost support among younger voters, while the gender gap between young men and young women remains substantial. Does this suggest a weakening of SD specifically rather than a reversal of the wider rightward movement among young men?
Dr. Gefjon Off: It’s interesting. According to the exit polls, the Sweden Democrats lost 7 percentage points among first-time voters. That is quite substantial, considering that they lost 3 percentage points in the electorate overall. Among 18- to 21-year-olds—a very small group—they lost 7 percentage points.
I don’t think this is easy to explain, except by noting that first-time voters are a very volatile group. They are not yet fully socialized into the political system, do not really have a partisan identity, and have not yet developed strong partisan attachments. So perhaps it is not too surprising that voting patterns among first-time voters can change considerably from one election to another.
Still, it is quite striking that the Sweden Democrats lost 7 percentage points in this group. But if you look at slightly older voters, the picture is more stable. Among 22- to 30-year-olds, they actually gained 1 percentage point, according to the exit polls. So, what is happening among young voters depends a great deal on how you define “young.”
I prefer to include voters up to the age of 29 or 30, because if you focus only on first-time voters, the group becomes very small, making it difficult to draw substantive conclusions. Among somewhat older young voters, the Sweden Democrats still gained a little. So, the overall picture really depends on which age group you examine.
We Do Not Yet Fully Understand Why Youth Gender Gaps Are Widening
Your comparative research also warns against assuming that all young men are moving toward the far right in the same way. What conditions determine whether culturally conservative young men support a radical-right party rather than a mainstream conservative party? How important are economic conditions, party strategies, and political institutions?
Dr. Gefjon Off: We see that in some countries, young men have been moving toward the far right, and Sweden was one of these countries until this election. For this election, however, we still need to see the numbers to know whether this trend is continuing.
Sweden has been one such case. But in many other countries, the youth gender gap is driven more by young women becoming more progressive. So, the explanatory factors shaping these patterns remain somewhat unclear. We do not really know why young women become more progressive in some places while young men become more conservative in others. What we do see is a widening gender gap in many countries.
The patterns differ, however, and we do not yet fully understand why. Some research suggests—although this still needs to be tested more rigorously—that in countries where gender equality is more advanced, more young men may move toward the far right. But this remains tentative.
As for economic conditions and party strategies, these certainly matter. They matter for many far-right voters, not just young men. A great deal has to do with economic grievances related to housing, prices, inflation, and perhaps job conditions. But it is also very much about perceived grievances. People’s own economic situation may not always be objectively bad, but they may feel that it is worsening or could worsen in the future. So it is often more about perceptions than about objective conditions. The two can, of course, go hand in hand, but they do not always have to.
This does not necessarily affect men and women differently, however. Everybody experiences economic insecurity when it occurs. Party strategies, on the other hand, do matter. Far-right parties are very effective at mobilizing on social media. And because of gender differences in social media algorithms, far-right content is more often shown to young men than to young women. So, we do think that these party strategies, especially in social media communication, matter.
Political institutions probably matter as well, perhaps in terms of the level of gender equality in a country, but this remains very tentative, as I said.
Voters Can Change Parties Without Changing Their Broader Cultural Values
Your concept of “protective masculinity” helps connect these developments to wider cultural attitudes. It brings together views about immigration, gender equality, sexuality, crime, hierarchy, and national identity. Could these attitudes remain stable even when party support changes? Can voters move between SD and mainstream right-wing parties without changing their broader cultural outlook?
Dr. Gefjon Off: “Protective masculinity” is a concept coined by Katashina Voynitska; it’s not my concept. But I think it is much more about underlying cultural values concerning both immigrants and women, as well as the relationship between men and women, than about specific attitudes that might change from one election to another. That is why I expect these values to remain relatively stable. It is largely about how people view societal relationships between different groups. So, I do think these values remain stable, and they probably do not change even if, in this example, a person decides to vote for a party other than SD.
A More Diverse Electorate Is More a Sign of Far-Right Success Than a Hindrance
Black Lives Matters Protest in Stockholm, Sweden on June 3, 2020.
Your work also shows that radical-right voters are far from a single, uniform group. SD has drawn support from anti-immigration voters, economically insecure groups, former Social Democrats, and younger right-wing voters. Does its 2026 decline suggest that this coalition has become harder to hold together?
Dr. Gefjon Off: The growth of far-right parties necessarily means that their electorates become more diverse. As a party grows, more and more people vote for it, which naturally brings a wider range of voters into its electorate. This is more a sign of success than a hindrance. Being able to attract different population groups shows that these parties have become more successful, so I would not consider this a disadvantage for them. It is probably a good thing.
What is more interesting is that, at least in this case, some SD voters did not identify strongly enough with the party to remain loyal to it. This suggests that the partisan identity far-right parties often create very successfully may not have been as strong among some parts of the electorate. That is quite interesting. It suggests that in Sweden, perhaps this year at least, it was somewhat easier to win back voters from the far right than, for instance, what we have been seeing in Germany.
Far-Right Rhetoric Draws Heavily on a Sense of Unfair Treatment
Threat perceptions are another important part of your research. You show that cultural concerns can become stronger when combined with economic insecurity, distrust, and feelings of unfair competition. How useful is this framework for understanding Sweden today? Could these grievances remain strong while increasingly being expressed through parties other than SD?
Dr. Gefjon Off: As I said before, perceptions of economic insecurity, as well as the feeling of being unfairly disadvantaged in one’s own economic situation, can help fuel far-right support across Europe, not just in Sweden. But again, much of this is about perceptions and a sense of unfair treatment. This is something the far right often draws on in its rhetoric. They may tell people that they are being treated unfairly and that immigrants, for example, are being advantaged at their expense.
We have also seen some of this discourse directed toward men, especially young men, although less so in Sweden. They are told that they are being discriminated against, treated unfairly in society, and deprived of opportunities. This is part of the rhetoric, and it draws heavily on these kinds of perceived grievances.
At the same time, we see that many workers also vote for the far right. Workers traditionally voted for the Social Democrats, and they still do to a large extent, but many voters have also shifted from the Social Democrats to the far right. This has happened in both Sweden and Germany.
This year, 25% of workers voted for the Sweden Democrats, compared with 17.5% of the electorate overall. So, a substantial proportion of workers, who often live in more precarious economic circumstances, supported the party. Economic insecurity, therefore, definitely plays a role.
SD’s Agenda-Setting Power Has Extended Beyond the Right-Wing Bloc
Sweden’s Social Democrats campaign ahead of the general election in Malmö, Sweden, on September 2, 2022, in support of then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s bid for a second term. Photo: Francis Joseph Dean / Dreamstime.
The election also shows why different forms of political influence need to be separated. SD remains a major party, but electoral strength, policy influence, agenda-setting power, coalition leverage, and government participation are not the same thing. How useful is it to distinguish these different forms of normalization when assessing SD’s position?
Dr. Gefjon Off: I think this is important. As I said, electoral strength is one indicator of a party’s normalization, but there are many other ways to assess how successful it is. Over the past few years, SD has had considerable policy influence and agenda-setting power.
This influence has not been limited to the Tidö parties; it has gone beyond the coalition leverage SD exercised as a support party. The Social Democratic Party has also adopted more immigration-critical positions. So, SD’s agenda-setting power has extended beyond the right-wing bloc and some center parties.
There is therefore a great deal of influence, and it is useful to look at different indicators when assessing it.
The Rise of the Far Right Has Made Coalition Building More Complicated
Government formation shows how SD has affected the wider party system as well. The Center Party rejects dependence on SD, while also resisting Left Party participation in government, and the Left Party is demanding influence if its support is needed. Does this show that the rise of the radical right reshapes coalition choices even among parties that oppose it?
Dr. Gefjon Off: Yes. Since the rise of the far right across different European countries, party systems have become more fragmented, making coalition formation more difficult. Different countries have responded to this challenge in different ways.
For instance, in Germany, we have seen more grand coalitions over the past 20 years, with the center-left and center-right forming governments together to secure a majority. In Sweden, by contrast, we have not seen such grand coalitions in the past decade. Instead, governments have relied on minority arrangements supported by other parties. The Tidö government, for example, was a minority government that depended on the support of the Sweden Democrats.
A similar arrangement may now emerge with a new, more left-wing or center-left government, which could also be a minority government relying on support from another party. So, there are different ways of dealing with this challenge, but the broader pattern is that the rise of the far right has contributed to greater fragmentation in the party landscape, making coalition building more complicated.
The Liberals Survived with Help from Tactical Voting by Other Tidö Voters
The Liberals are particularly interesting here. Their survival strengthened the Tidö bloc, but the party has also struggled internally over cooperation with SD. Does this reveal a tension between electoral survival, ideological identity, and coalition strategy? Can the same tactics that help a party survive also make governing alliances more difficult?
Dr. Gefjon Off: The Liberals are a very interesting case because, traditionally, they were in favor of welcoming refugees. When they joined the Tidö government, which relied on the support of the Sweden Democrats, many prominent members left the party. There was also considerable internal disagreement, which significantly weakened the party. For a long time, it remained below the 4% threshold required to enter Parliament.
Now they have made it. But Simona Mohamsson, their party leader, has only been in the role for about a year. There were also strong disagreements between her and Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson over what it means to be Swedish and who can be considered a Swede, especially given Mohamsson’s own background as the daughter of immigrants.
So, the situation has been very unstable. In this case, what probably helped the Liberals survive was tactical voting by supporters of the other parties in the Tidö government—not so much by Sweden Democrat voters, but by voters of the other parties.
Swedish Opposition to SD Is Directed More at Its Policies Than at Its Legitimacy
Your experimental work with Amy Alexander and Nicholas Charron suggests that polarization can grow through both conservative backlash and liberal countermobilization. Could the September 13 elections reflect this two-sided process? Might years of SD influence have mobilized not only its supporters but also voters who are specifically concerned about its growing normalization?
Dr. Gefjon Off: I think there were definitely people reacting against some of the policies of the Sweden Democrats and the Tidö government. We see left-wing counterreactions to some of these policies, but I do not think we see a broader questioning of SD’s legitimacy as a political party. So, I would say that people are reacting more against particular policies than against the normalization of the party itself.
I am therefore not sure that there is such a strong concern in Swedish society about the normalization of the Sweden Democrats. In my impression, the question of whether SD is a legitimate democratic actor is not especially prominent in public debate. The opposition is directed more toward the party’s positions than toward its existence as a political actor.
In Germany, by contrast, there are major public debates about whether the AfD is a legitimate political actor, whether the party should be banned, or whether certain branches of it might be banned. Some branches have been labeled right-wing extremist and unconstitutional, the youth organization was dissolved, and a new organization was founded last year. So there is much more public debate, including formal statements by government authorities about whether the party can be considered a legitimate democratic actor and how it should be dealt with if it is not.
There have also been waves of demonstrations in which hundreds of thousands of people across different German cities have taken to the streets. These protests occur relatively regularly and are directed against the AfD as a political party and political actor.
So, I think the way people have reacted to normalization is quite different in the two cases. The counterreactions to particular policies may be similar, but the reaction to the normalization of the party itself is different.
Electoral Support Matters, but It Tells Only Part of the Story of SD’s Influence
And finally, Dr. Off, let me return to the broader meaning of radical-right success. Should we measure it mainly through vote share and government participation, or also through policy influence, agenda-setting power, mainstream adoption of its positions, and the weakening of stigma around them? If a party loses votes while many of its ideas become more accepted, does that suggest that electoral results alone tell us only part of the story?
Dr. Gefjon Off: Yes, I agree with this. SD lost votes, and it was also the party that lost the most votes in this election, which is probably an indication of the significance of that loss. But the party has gained considerable influence, and that influence remains.
It will be very interesting to see how the Social Democrats, having also lost votes, formulate migration policy in their coalition agreements. Will they continue along the rather conservative path they have been moving toward, or will they try to appeal to their more left-wing coalition partners and step back somewhat from these anti-immigration positions?
So, the situation is quite interesting, but the influence of the Sweden Democrats is clear. I am not sure they themselves would consider this a success, given that they lost votes. Of course, electoral support may still be the most important indicator because, without votes, a party eventually loses influence.
Still, their agenda-setting power and policy influence have been very significant, and that is certainly part of their success.
In an interview with the ECPS, Professor Adam Bodnar, Poland’s Minister of Justice from 2023 to 2025, reflects on Poland’s experience of democratic backsliding and rule-of-law recovery, arguing that electoral victory alone cannot reverse years of institutional capture. He stresses that democratic resilience depends on protecting independent institutions while strengthening civil society, civic education, professional associations, media, and academia before illiberal pressures intensify. Poland’s experience, he notes, showed that democratic forces had won “only partial power within the state” after 2023 and that restoration must proceed within constitutional constraints. For Professor Bodnar, civil society proved indispensable: “We would not have been able to win the elections in 2023 without civil society.” His broader lesson for Europe is preventive — democracies must build durable institutional and civic safeguards before the next crisis arrives.
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Adam Bodnar, a constitutional lawyer, human rights scholar and Senator of the Republic of Poland who served as Poland’s Minister of Justice from 2023 to 2025 and previously as Commissioner for Human Rights from 2015 to 2021, argues that the durability of democracy ultimately depends not only on constitutional design, courts, or European enforcement mechanisms, but also on the strength of civil society before an illiberal challenge emerges. His work has placed him at the center of both resistance to democratic backsliding and the difficult process of rule-of-law recovery. In this interview, we examine what Poland got right and wrong after the defeat of the Law and Justice Party (PiS), the dilemmas of restoring captured institutions, and the broader lessons for liberal democracy in Europe. We also discuss Hungary, Germany, EU enforcement, judicial independence, accountability, civil society, and democratic resilience.
Drawing on Poland’s experience of democratic backsliding and subsequent rule-of-law recovery, Professor Bodnar presents democratic resilience as an ecosystem in which independent institutions, civic organizations, professional associations, public-interest lawyers, judges, media, and citizens reinforce one another.
A central lesson of Poland’s experience, he stresses, is that electoral victory does not automatically translate into institutional control or democratic restoration. Looking back at the 2023 election, Professor Bodnar recalls that the democratic camp treated the result “as more or less a total victory,” only to discover that it had won “only partial power within the state.” The deeper difficulty was that eight years of PiS rule had transformed not only laws but also institutional personnel, incentives, and expectations. State capture, he explains, involved “filling institutions with people who are loyal to you” and producing “a chilling effect” on those seeking to remain independent.
For Professor Bodnar, however, the answer cannot lie solely in redesigning constitutional safeguards. His strongest emphasis is preventive: democracies must cultivate civic resilience before institutions come under sustained pressure. “Protecting ourselves against illiberal democracy also requires strengthening civic education and civil society,” he argues, adding that civil society actors must possess the capacity to protest, monitor governments, and make institutional capture more difficult. Poland’s own experience reinforces that conclusion. “We would not have been able to win the elections in 2023 without civil society,” Professor Bodnar says, recalling periods when civic organizations continued protesting even as political parties were preoccupied with political competition.
This leads to the interview’s broader argument: democratic resilience should be treated as a permanent institutional and societal investment rather than an emergency response. Professor Bodnar describes government support for civil society as “a form of insurance for unknown times to come.” His concluding principle is equally clear: following Timothy Snyder’s injunction to “protect institutions,” democracies must preserve as many independent strongholds of the rule of law as possible, while ensuring that civil society, professional associations, media, academia, and local institutions retain sufficient autonomy to sustain political pluralism.
The interview therefore moves beyond the question of how democracy can recover after capture. It asks a more fundamental question: how can democratic societies build enough institutional and civic resilience that, when illiberal actors return, the state is no longer so easy to capture?
Here is our interview with Professor Adam Bodnar, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
‘We Won the Election in 2023, but Not Full Power Within the State’
A father and child display their support for Poland’s membership in the European Union ahead of the 2023 parliamentary elections. Photo: Wieslaw Jarek / Dreamstime.
Professor Bodnar, welcome! Let me begin with Poland’s 2023 democratic breakthrough. Poland’s October 2023 election demonstrated that an illiberal governing party can be defeated through democratic mobilization. Yet your subsequent work makes clear that electoral turnover and democratic restoration are very different things. Looking back from 2026, what did Poland get right after removing the Law and Justice Party (PiS) from government, and where did the democratic camp underestimate the depth, durability, or legal complexity of state capture?
Professor Adam Bodnar: I think one of our major mistakes, or perhaps political miscalculations, was to treat the 2023 election as more or less a total victory because we had this sense of a revolutionary moment. The Polish elections of 2023 were quite often compared to the elections of 1989.
But, to be honest, looking back, we did not win full power, only partial power within the state, because the presidency remained in the hands of someone associated with the ancien régime and the previous political leadership. Moreover, we believed that we would be able to achieve significant progress in restoring the rule of law after the subsequent presidential election in June 2025. There was great hope—I would not say certainty, but certainly great hope—that a pro-European, pro-democratic candidate would win. Basically, we failed.
We are therefore still left with a parliamentary majority committed to rule of law recovery and a president affiliated with the right-wing camp who is not interested in that process. He is interested in polarization, in undermining the credibility of the current government, and in bringing the right-wing parties back to power.
In my opinion, this is the major problem because, at the end of the day, what we can achieve in terms of restoring the rule of law depends to a great extent on existing regulations, existing legislation, and the interpretative use of different institutions. We cannot proceed in the same way as is being done right now in Hungary; we never had that possibility. Moreover, we do not even have the ability to override the presidential veto, which makes things much more complicated. So, it is not even easy to pass legislation that would comply with basic rule of law standards.
Eight Years of State Capture Cannot Be Reversed Overnight
PiS was able to transform Poland’s Constitutional Court, prosecution service, public media, civil service, and judicial institutions without possessing a constitutional majority, often through ordinary legislation, institutional faits accomplis, and practices that violated constitutional constraints. Why has reversing those transformations proved so much harder? Does this reveal an inherent asymmetry whereby liberal democracy is procedurally constrained in repairing damage that illiberal actors were willing to inflict without equivalent restraint?
Professor Adam Bodnar: First of all, please note that this process of change lasted for eight years. Even without a constitutional majority, if you have the possibility to change legislation, you can achieve quite a lot because you can change the way institutions operate.
And it is not only about changing legislation. It is also about filling institutions with people who are loyal to you, or who at least will not create problems for you, and about creating a chilling effect on other actors who would like to remain independent.
Over such a long period, you can achieve a great deal. Sometimes we had the sense that this was the end of a liberal regime and that the Law and Justice (PiS) government would last forever. Interestingly, quite many judges, prosecutors, civil servants, and public media officials seemed to think: okay, we are going to work under this new power. We are going to serve this new power, or at least we are going to do our jobs. But we will not interfere in political relations. So, I will sit somewhere in the public media, remain silent, do my work, and basically they will not bother me. I will simply retain the possibility to earn money.
In this way, they were able to exploit different weaknesses in the Polish system and the fact that, through legislative acts, you can change the way institutions operate. Sometimes it was also about passing legislation that abused the language of the Constitution.
But please look at the major, most important reform, which began in 2015–2016 and concerned the political subordination of the Constitutional Court. Once that happened, even if legislation was passed that went against constitutional values, there was nobody able to check it because judicial review had effectively come under the control of the ruling party.
At the second stage—and I think this is quite interesting—you could see pieces of legislation aimed at gluing or cementing the legal system. A good example is the prosecution service. Just half a year before the elections, the law on the prosecution service changed the way deputy prosecutors general are appointed and dismissed. Basically, they have to be appointed after obtaining the opinion of the President of the Republic, but they cannot be dismissed without confirmation by the President.
So, even now, three years later, we still have deputy attorneys general who cannot be dismissed because of this law. As a result, you have to find different ways to circumvent their powers or limit their impact on the daily operation of the prosecution service. This is one of the difficulties we face today in restoring the rule of law.
Chairperson of Law and Justice (PiS), Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Photo: Tomasz Kudala.
Restoring the Rule of Law Requires More Than Formal Legalism
This asymmetry creates what might be called the central paradox of democratic restoration: a new government is expected to restore constitutional legality while operating through institutions partly captured by actors who violated that legality. How far can a democratic government legitimately go in correcting unconstitutional appointments, restructuring captured bodies, or refusing to recognize decisions produced by improperly constituted institutions without itself weakening legal continuity and the rule of law?
Professor Adam Bodnar: That’s a very good question, because we face this dilemma and debate on a daily basis. There is no easy or quick answer, but, at the end of the day, you should work in good faith to restore the proper functioning of constitutional institutions.
Second, you should adopt an approach that prevents existing institutions from paralyzing this effort. You should not be blocked by certain formal rules when adopting particular solutions. If you relied solely on formal legalism, you would simply end up doing nothing. So, you need to be somewhat constructive in taking certain actions, while also ensuring that those actions have political legitimacy.
Consider three central institutions that were important from the perspective of rule of law recovery: the public media, the National Council of the Judiciary (NCJ), and the Constitutional Court. In each case, legal action aimed at recovering those institutions was preceded by resolutions of the Polish Parliament. By adopting those resolutions and identifying the legal and constitutional problems, their sources, and the relevant jurisprudence of the Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, Parliament was essentially saying: we see a problem, we are going to repair it, and we are going to use certain measures that may not be typical but that we believe are necessary from the point of view of law. Even so, those measures were adopted in accordance with basic rules. Interestingly, they were still not accepted by the president who was serving the previous regime.
I think the most interesting and exemplary case of these dilemmas is the recovery of the National Council of the Judiciary (NCJ). Under the Polish system, the NCJ is composed of 25 members. It is a hybrid body, with roughly 10 politicians and 15 judicial members. The key question is: who appoints those judicial members? Traditionally, under Polish law, they were appointed by their peers—other judges.
But in 2018, Parliament changed the law so that those judicial members would be elected by Parliament, on the grounds that the sovereign should have more influence over the operation of the NCJ. Interestingly, after 2023, we twice passed legislation that would have returned this power to judges. But both laws were vetoed by the presidents—first Duda, then Nawrocki.
So, in the end, the ruling majority decided to appoint the judicial members in accordance with the existing law. Parliament formally voted to select them, but the preselection of candidates was carried out by judges themselves. They organized local general assemblies and selected the judges they wanted to see on the NCJ. In this way, we essentially implemented the constitutional spirit.
Although we did this on the basis of existing law, which should not be binding, we had no other solution in such circumstances. So, basically, you have to resolve these dilemmas constructively, while adhering very closely to constitutional language and constitutional values, and keeping in mind the ultimate need to restore and recover certain state institutions.
Poland Must Resolve the “Neo-Judges” Question Without Creating Chaos in the Judiciary
President Karol Nawrocki campaigning ahead of Poland’s 2025 presidential election in Łódź, Poland on April 27, 2024. Photo: Tomasz Warszewski.
Your work anticipated that the status of so-called “neo-judges” would become one of the most difficult questions of Poland’s transition. How should a recovering democracy distinguish between judges who actively participated in political capture, those who accepted promotion within a distorted system, and those who simply continued functioning within it? Is individualized review the only defensible solution, even if it makes restoration painfully slow?
Professor Adam Bodnar: You’re absolutely right that the status of neo-judges was the central issue in resolving these problems. I spent more or less the whole of 2024 trying to find a legislative solution to this dilemma: how to make the process, on the one hand, as automatic as possible and, on the other, how to provide remedies and individualize the assessment. There was also a third consideration: within this group of so-called neo-judges, there were different categories.
There were judges who voluntarily accepted first appointments or higher positions in the judiciary, but there were also those who were simply graduates of the School of Judiciary and had little say in how the nomination process unfolded in their cases.
In my opinion, we found a solution, and we presented it more or less in March or April 2025. This solution was subject to the opinion of the Venice Commission. But because of the result of the presidential election in June 2025, we no longer have any real political chance of implementing it. So, to some extent, this has become a theoretical discussion, based on existing draft laws, but with a low probability that the law could ever enter into force.
In general, our idea was to proceed in this direction: on the one hand, we wanted to secure the proper functioning of the judiciary; on the other, we tried to make the process as swift as possible. The third element was that, in cases involving promotion, a judge would either be sent back to the court from which their position and career originated or be dismissed from the judicial position and return to another legal profession—as an attorney, legal advisor, prosecutor, or scholar—with remedies allowing an appeal to the court.
But please note that this was only a proposal. As I said, it was enshrined in the draft law, but it did not enter into force. To be honest, we are now in a very difficult moment because we still have one year to go before the parliamentary elections due to take place in October 2027. It seems to me that the issue of what to do with these new judges will become part of the political debate in the context of the elections. But my feeling is that there will be little willingness on either side of the political spectrum to reach a compromise.
On the other hand, we have jurisprudence from the Court of Justice, as well as the European Court of Human Rights, questioning the status of these judges. So, we cannot avoid thinking about what to do with them and how to evaluate their status, or at least how to confirm it. Most probably, this discussion will continue after the elections of October 2027. At the end of the day, we will have to find some kind of compromise solution to this question.
But let me add one more point. The general philosophical difficulty with this problem is that, on the one hand, you can argue that these judges should be questioned from the point of view of the legitimacy and legality of their appointments. On the other hand, they have been adjudicating cases in courts on a daily basis.
Moreover, it has been difficult to determine what should happen to judgments issued by them, because if we were to say, simply by virtue of legislation or some other measure, that all those judges were invalid, it would create a total disaster for the Polish judiciary. So, it has been a little like repairing the sails while the boat is still moving.
But, as I said, this discussion is now much more abstract because of the position of the president. The president maintains that all his judicial appointments are valid and is not going to accept any challenge to them. So, the question will be whether, after the elections, there will be some room for compromise and for finding solutions that could serve everyone.
Public Demands for Immediate Justice Can Collide with the Rule of Law
The Constitutional Tribunal (Trybunał Konstytucyjny), Poland’s constitutional court, in Warsaw, Poland, on December 31, 2021. Photo: Dreamstime.
You have stressed that recovery requires accountability for abuses—from the partisan use of public funds to Pegasus surveillance—but that accountability must proceed through fair-trial guarantees rather than revolutionary justice. How can a democracy satisfy legitimate public demands for accountability without allowing transitional justice to be portrayed as political revenge? And conversely, at what point does excessive procedural caution turn constitutional immunity into practical impunity?
Professor Adam Bodnar: First of all, to be honest, we do not have a proper theory of transitional justice for periods like this. If you look at typical theories of transitional justice, they usually concern moments following major reconfigurations in a nation’s history. We can point to different examples of transitional justice in the United States, after wars, or after periods of authoritarian or totalitarian rule.
In Poland, certainly, we are a liberal democracy, but if you look at the level of rights abuses, it was, of course, significant. There were numerous abuses involving freedom of assembly, police brutality, surveillance, and so on. But still, this is incomparable to communist times, when people were killed in prisons, police stations, or police units, or when there were sweeping restrictions on fundamental rights. The same applies to Hungary. There have been different abuses of rights, but you still cannot compare them to the situation before 1989.
So, the broader problem we face as a community is what kind of transitional justice system we should adopt and to what extent we should create new institutions to implement it. Once again, Hungary is an interesting example because they created this Office for the Recovery of State Assets. It is quite an interesting institution. If I had tried to create that kind of institution, I would simply have faced a presidential veto, and that would have been the end of it. I would have had no chance of creating such an institution.
So, I had to rely either on the regular operation of the Polish Prosecution Service or on investigative committees established in the Polish Parliament. Basically, I could pursue accountability through existing procedures for auditing, investigating, and examining the conduct of previous authorities. We have been extremely creative in doing this.
But then, if you do this and provide voters with a great deal of information—if you disclose different abuses and try to recover assets—what becomes apparent quite quickly, and this was to some extent a surprise to me, is that people expect immediate results. People think that because they suffered so much, all those political actors they hated will almost immediately be prosecuted, jailed, convicted, and put behind bars.
When you proceed in accordance with fair-trial guarantees, however, you cannot do things just like that, because you do not have revolutionary mechanisms. Moreover, if you follow fair-trial standards, the process takes time. A proper investigation takes time, the defense needs time to prepare, immunities have to be lifted, and so on.
Why do I mention this? Because the absence of immediate results creates frustration among voters. They start to say: okay, if you have not delivered on this, if we still see all those actors who perpetrated political abuses in the past, then maybe you are not competent enough, maybe you are not effective enough. So, there is this sense that, while you are carrying out rule of law recovery, you are also expected to act like a sheriff who restores order and uses every possible mechanism to do so.
In my opinion, one of the mistakes we may have made is that perhaps we promised too much. There was this political promise when we were fighting for power: sooner or later, those guys will be prosecuted and jailed. Maybe we should instead have promised that we would do everything possible to disclose the truth and engage all state institutions in a general state audit and a broad investigation into different cases. But perhaps we should not have promised that we knew what results the courts would deliver or what judgments they would issue, because we have no influence over that.
So, if I were now advising a government in a similar situation, I would probably say: be careful with this. Check your resources. Check the loyalties of people working in institutions such as the Prosecution Service, the secret services, or the police. Promise only those things that you can realistically deliver. Of course, be energetic in pursuing accountability, but perhaps you should promise the delivery of truth—an account of how the state operated—rather than the delivery of convictions. Otherwise, you may create too much frustration and dissatisfaction among voters, and that may ultimately undermine your future electoral prospects.
It Is Easy to Demand Faster Restoration in Retrospect
Donald Tusk speaks at an election rally after a televised debate on government television at the end of the campaign in Warsaw, Poland on October 9, 2023. Photo: Shutterstock.
In an earlier essay you warned that “time is of the essence” when European institutions confront rule-of-law deterioration. Does the same principle apply to democratic restoration? Looking back at the first years after 2023, did the Polish government move quickly enough on the Constitutional Tribunal, judicial governance, prosecution service, and accountability—or did constitutional obstacles and the desire to proceed legally create delays that allowed the old institutional networks to consolidate their defensive positions?
Professor Adam Bodnar: No, by now we are all wiser about what worked and what did not. It is easy to criticize in retrospect, but I remember that we really tried to use every day to pursue rule of law recovery properly and to repair the state. I also think we do not sufficiently appreciate the scale of the damage we had to repair after those eight years—how many abuses there were and how much time it takes to properly examine them. So, in my opinion, it is quite easy to say: you should have moved faster, you should have acted immediately, you should not have waited, and so on. But, to be honest, when I look back, I do not see any really good examples of what could have been done more efficiently.
I also remember moments when I considered possible political compromises with the president in order to avoid a veto and move forward with the restoration of the rule of law. But, at the same time, there was no appetite or support for political compromise. There was a sense that because we had won the elections, we should pursue all possible changes without making moral or legal compromises.
Maybe one of our mistakes was that we assumed the presidential election result would be in our favor. If we had had a pro-democratic, pro-European president, then by the end of 2025 we would have had all the necessary laws passed. They would already have been in force and would have made it possible to restore the rule of law. After that failure, we had to look for alternatives and other solutions.
But when I look at the situation now, the National Council of the Judiciary, as I said, has been resurrected and is functioning properly. There is a certain chance that the Constitutional Court will also begin to operate properly. The Prosecution Service may not be a perfect institution, but its current shape still guarantees the independent exercise of prosecutorial power and accountability.
Interestingly, we have a very good example today. One of my successes, and something I am really proud of, was Poland’s joining the European Public Prosecution Office (EPPO). Today, the EPPO won an important victory in the Polish Parliament because it obtained consent to lift parliamentary immunity and also consent to arrest a member of Parliament. What is particularly interesting is that this member of Parliament is associated with the existing ruling coalition.
So, if the EPPO is able to go after a member of the existing coalition, it shows that we are restoring quality in terms of the independence of the prosecution service and the operation of European institutions on Polish soil. The vote in the committee was something like 14 votes in favor and two against. So, there was no defense of “our guy” by the ruling coalition against the accusations made by the EPPO.
In my opinion, a lot of things also happen on a daily basis at this symbolic level. When you look at the operation of the courts and the prosecution service, they are much more independent and much more trusted than they were during the illiberal period. I think this is also the consequence of a certain approach to, and a certain way of thinking about, the state.
Democratic Recovery Also Means Restoring Public Servants’ Trust in the State
Your recent comparison of Poland and Hungary argues that democratic transition is not merely constitutional or legislative reconstruction but also a matter of regaining the trust of institutions and citizens. What actually restores that trust? Is it successful prosecution of abuses, functioning public services, impartial courts, transparency, political restraint—or the visible demonstration that institutions will no longer be treated as spoils of electoral victory?
Professor Adam Bodnar: I think the truth lies in all the things you have mentioned, but creating institutions that are genuinely independent from politicians—and that also project an image of independence through real action—is extremely important.
One aspect that is often neglected is how the legislative process works and how transparent the operation of the state is. My feeling is that trust in the legislative process is now much greater than it was before. Moreover, decisions are made with a high degree of transparency regarding how the state operates, even if this sometimes comes at a daily political cost.
But, in my opinion, one of the most neglected aspects of recovery is the question of people: to what extent those serving in the judiciary, the prosecution service, public media, and other institutions feel that they have regained trust in the state and can act in accordance with their professional oath, ethical commitments, and the law. My feeling is that when politicians stop pushing the state in particular directions, judges and prosecutors gradually regain the sense that what they are doing is simply part of the ordinary, day-to-day functioning of the state. In turn, this affects public perceptions.
Let me give you one example. It was certainly not a typical rule of law recovery case, but recently there was a case involving a drunk driver who killed four people in a car accident in Warsaw. He escaped to Germany, was brought back under the European Arrest Warrant, and was subsequently convicted. The trial was conducted properly and did not last very long—only a couple of months. The court sentenced him to 25 years in prison and provided a very strong justification for the judgment. What I found particularly interesting was that the judgment was applauded across the political spectrum: left, right, far right, extreme right—whatever. Everybody was basically satisfied with both the court’s decision and the reasoning behind it.
In my opinion, when you have that kind of moment, you can see that something is changing. The case is no longer interpreted politically but is instead understood simply as a matter of public interest and as an instance in which justice has been done. So, I would hope that we will see more and more cases like this, in which courts are assessed on the basis of what they actually do, rather than through calculations about whether this or that judge is politically affiliated.
TISZA Must Avoid Reproducing the Winner-Takes-All Logic It Inherited
Péter Magyar speaks at a public demonstration near the Hungarian Parliament building in Budapest on April 6, 2024. Photo: Istvan Balogh / Dreamstime.
You argue that Péter Magyar’s victory and TISZA’s constitutional majority potentially give Hungary far greater room for institutional reconstruction than Poland possessed after 2023. But does that greater capacity also create a greater democratic danger? How can Hungary dismantle deeply entrenched Orbán-era structures without reproducing Orbán’s own winner-takes-all constitutional logic under new political ownership?
Professor Adam Bodnar: I remember when I made this point, it was just at the beginning of the transition in Hungary. But it seems to me that Péter Magyar is handling this quite intelligently, and even the reconstruction concerning the President of the Republic has been carried out in a way that respects some basic guarantees. The clearest proof of this is that the person who accepted the position of the new president is one of the judicial dissidents from the Orbán era—András Baka. So, let’s hope that Hungary continues in this direction.
What concerns me more is the accountability process. With the passage of time, there may be growing dissatisfaction among voters with what TISZA is doing. People will expect miracles and major economic change; they will look at the promises that were made, and the government will not be able to deliver on everything. We may also begin to see a struggle for power within the TISZA movement. We can imagine all kinds of things happening.
The question is whether accountability will proceed effectively, especially at the local level. If the prosecution service and the secret services were built over 16 years by Orbán, there are many people within those institutions who received their appointments to a great extent thanks to Fidesz. They may have developed internal networks and connections that are not even visible to the general public, particularly at the local level. The question, then, is how this will affect the accountability process and how strong that process will ultimately be. This is where I see the major danger in Hungary’s transition.
Civil Society Is Democratic Insurance for Unknown Times to Come
One lesson from Poland and Hungary seems to be that constitutional democracies often assume political actors will exercise self-restraint, respect conventions, and accept institutional pluralism. Populist governments exploit precisely those assumptions. Should European democracies now redesign their constitutional architecture on the premise that future governments may be deliberately hostile to liberal-democratic constraints—through stronger appointment rules, dispersed powers, entrenched judicial protections, independent prosecution, and more robust safeguards for public media?
Professor Adam Bodnar: In my opinion, they should, but the question is whether they will have enough popular support to make that kind of change. Some countries are already moving in this direction. Look at the Netherlands or Germany. We also have solutions at the European level, such as the European Media Freedom Act, which is intended to support public media.
But, to be honest, I believe that protecting ourselves against illiberal democracy also requires strengthening civic education and civil society. Society needs instruments of resilience and pressure, and civil society actors need the capacity to protest and keep the democratic flame alive when populists come to power. They should be able to monitor government actions, scrutinize what is actually being done, and make institutional capture much more difficult.
The question, then, is whether European societies have enough energy for this. A great deal can be achieved through pro-democratic support for civil society organizations, by building national and transnational networks, and by supporting independent judicial associations, bar associations, and similar institutions. The real question is whether we are doing enough in this area, or whether we have become too accustomed to taking the existence of these institutions for granted.
Democratic Resilience Depends on People Willing to Defend Institutions
March of a Million Hearts. Hundreds of thousands march in anti-government protest to show support for democracy in Warsaw, Poland on October 1, 2023. Photo: Shutterstock.
Your account of Poland’s resistance places unusual emphasis on civic activism, lawyers, judges, the Ombudsman, and what you describe as the emergence of constitutional patriotism. Does Poland demonstrate that democratic resilience ultimately depends less on constitutional text than on a social infrastructure of people willing to defend it? If so, how can democracies cultivate that civic capacity before a crisis rather than discovering its importance only after institutions come under attack?
Professor Adam Bodnar: I truly believe that we would not have been able to win the elections in 2023 without civil society. I remember many moments when it was only civil society organizations that were still protesting, while political parties were simply playing political games and were not so deeply interested in what was happening on a daily basis in the judiciary, the prosecution service, and public media. But because of civil society, we were still able to protest.
A good example is the operation of judicial associations, but also different forms of civic education and other formats. Of course, the question is to what extent this was specific to Poland and whether it is a global phenomenon. But right now, I see that in the United States some of the Polish practices are being repeated, and they are very interested in what we were doing during those difficult times.
I believe that the result of the 2023 elections was the result of a combination of, on the one hand, political motivation and, on the other, different civil society streams and concerned people who came together and fought for the same values.
What should be done in a situation when you have a relatively stable position? In my opinion, you should constantly create space for the development of civil society. You should create different incentives for new NGOs to appear on the scene, for private donations, for crowdfunding, and for different forms of support. The government should be a guardian supporting civil society, because by supporting it, it is creating a form of insurance for unknown times to come.
My feeling is that right now the government is making this effort, and I believe that, in the event of another challenge, there will be enough actors willing to protest and ready to make sacrifices for the sake of defending democratic values.
EU Must Protect the Institutions That Sustain Democratic Values
You have written that populist governments do not necessarily silence criticism through spectacular censorship; they can instead use state advertising, friendly ownership, public broadcasters, litigation, and government-sponsored Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) to make criticism progressively more costly. Should media pluralism, academic freedom, and protection against legal harassment be understood as part of Europe’s constitutional security architecture rather than merely as sectoral rights?
Professor Adam Bodnar: If I look at statements by Ursula von der Leyen, State of the Union addresses, and different speeches by Věra Jourová, former Commissioner, my feeling is that Europe understands this. The adoption of the European Media Freedom Act, the creation of funds supporting independent NGOs, the adoption of anti-SLAPP legislation, and support for local media are all movements in this direction.
The question is to what extent these measures really have an impact domestically—to what extent policies developed at the EU level, such as the Democracy Shield or democracy resilience policies, are actually implemented at the local level. Here, I am a little concerned that EU policies do not always receive the same recognition locally. Please note that I am saying this from the Polish perspective. I think national governments should also be taking certain actions in this regard.
Certainly, academic freedom is extremely important, but my feeling is that, in Europe at least, academic freedom is suffering too much because of bureaucratism and a certain kind of commercialization. It is not so much based on promoting values as the most important component; rather, it is increasingly about treating science and scholarship as part of the EU economy. That is why there is so much emphasis on grants, proficiency, excellence, and not necessarily on fighting for values.
So, in my opinion, at the end of the day, we should remember that without actors such as civil society, the media, and academia, democratic values will not survive. The European Union, but also its member states, should be very much aware that taking care of these actors is a precondition for the survival of democratic values. Of course, this should be a predominant consideration in the EU’s different political strategies.
Poland Became a Laboratory for the EU’s Rule-of-Law Instruments
Photo: Dreamstime.
Your writings repeatedly point to a timing problem in European rule-of-law enforcement: Article 7 became politically stalled, litigation took years, and domestic institutional capture often produced immediate political benefits while European legal consequences arrived much later. Has the EU learned this lesson? Or does its rule-of-law architecture still operate too slowly to stop an elected government determined to transform institutions before Brussels, Luxembourg, or Strasbourg can react?
Professor Adam Bodnar: When I commented on the operations of the European Union, it was partly out of frustration, because we observed the decay and destruction of the rule of law on a daily basis, while the government learned how to play the game regarding Article 7. But later on, more or less at the end of 2017 and in 2018, the European Commission started to use the infringement procedure in a very efficient way. Thereafter, we had a series of judgments from the Court of Justice of the EU, and finally, we had the conditionality regulation and the suspension of EU recovery funds. In my opinion, the Polish case was a little bit like a laboratory for the practical use of all those instruments. So, I think that right now, the European Union is much more powerful.
But, on the other hand, the EU is perhaps not using enough of its capabilities to check whether this so-called democratic front-sliding is being done in a proper way. There should be better observance of how different states are complying with the rule of law. I have read papers by my friends Thomas Pavone and Christophe Hillion about this relationship between the EU and so-called democratic front-sliding. So, this kind of compliance check by the EU is an important element of the European Union’s rule-of-law architecture.
Protect Every Democratic Stronghold Before It Is Captured
And lastly, Professor Bodnar, if you were to draw one overarching lesson from Poland for Hungary, Germany, and other European democracies confronting populist radical-right pressure, what should “democratic resilience” mean in institutional terms? Is the priority stronger courts and constitutional safeguards, more effective EU enforcement, independent media, social and territorial inclusion, civic education, accountable political parties—or, ultimately, a democratic culture capable of accepting electoral conflict while refusing the idea that winning an election gives a majority the right to capture the state?
Professor Adam Bodnar: I think I would concentrate on what Timothy Snyder called lesson number two: protecting institutions. Because, in my opinion, if I look back, we would not have been able to survive if we had not trusted state institutions that created room for maneuver, protest, resilience, and different forms of change. One of them was the Ombudsman’s office. But it was also the Polish Senate, the upper chamber of Parliament, which, after 2019, was really important in terms of preventing backsliding.
On the other hand, we would not have been able to survive without civil society. Civil society, of course, may operate separately from state institutions, but when it has support from some state institutions and when they can cooperate with one another, this can have a significant impact, because it gives you a sense that pluralism still exists. Maybe it is not pluralism in Parliament, because you have the domination of one political party, and that political party has a great deal of influence over decision-making. But still, this pluralism exists in different state institutions that continue to perform their checks-and-balances function.
It also exists at the local level, and I think that in a number of countries, including Turkey, we can see how important the existence of pluralism at the local level is. But it is also in the hands of civil society, civil society leaders, bar associations, judicial associations, and all those institutions that have not been captured and that still preserve the spirit of citizenship and the spirit of true democratic values.
So, I would go in this direction: protecting as many institutions as possible that believe in and serve as strongholds of the democratic state and the rule of law. If you have this, then it gives you enough power to fight for the values you believe in and for the survival of the democratic regime.
In this book review, Dr. João Ferreira Dias examines Lars Erik L. Gjerde’s forthcoming “Hegemony and Woke Strategy: A Study of Cultural Warfare”, highlighting its contribution to debates on culture wars, hegemony, identity politics, and liberal democracy. While crediting Gjerde for moving beyond polemical treatments of “wokeism” and for illuminating how cultural norms acquire institutional force, Dr. Ferreira Dias questions whether the language of “strategy” can be sustained when agency, coordination, and intentionality remain analytically bracketed. Drawing on his own concept of “identity grammars,” he argues for a framework that preserves the relationship between structure and agency. The review concludes with a sharp distinction: cultural warfare may produce hegemonic effects without centralized direction—“hegemony does not require a strategist. Strategy does.”
Culture wars are often treated as political noise: symbolic disputes distracting attention from economics, institutions, inequality or public policy. Lars Erik L. Gjerde’s Hegemony and Woke Strategy: A Study of Cultural Warfare starts from the opposite premise. Culture is not peripheral to politics. It helps make political order possible.
That premise is difficult to dispute. Political systems do not survive through institutions and coercion alone. They depend on legitimacy, shared meanings and a sufficient degree of agreement about what society considers normal, acceptable and just. This is where Gramsci remains useful well beyond Marxism. Hegemony is also about making a particular understanding of the world appear natural.
Gjerde takes this insight seriously. Drawing on Gramsci, Marxist theory and, especially, Laclau and Mouffe’s post-structuralism, he examines what he calls wokeism as an identitarian force engaged in a struggle over language, morality, identity and institutional norms. His concern is not simply to define wokeism, but to ask what it does: how identity politics, cancel culture, language politics and woke capitalism operate within a wider struggle for cultural hegemony. This is, indeed, one of the book’s central contributions.
Culture as a Struggle for Hegemony
Gjerde is also careful not to reduce the culture war to a mechanical opposition between left and right. The identitarian left is shown to clash not only with conservatism but also with liberalism, socialism, universalist anti-racism and earlier forms of feminism. This matters. Contemporary culture wars frequently cut through political families rather than simply separating them. A Marxist, a liberal and a conservative may object to the same form of identity politics, although for entirely different reasons.
This is particularly relevant because Gjerde does not equate every progressive cultural victory with wokeism. His account distinguishes the historical expansion of anti-racist, feminist and gay-rights norms from what he sees as a later identitarian turn. Wokeism is therefore treated not as the established Western hegemony, but rather as a counter-hegemonic challenger to an older liberal-progressive order still anchored, however imperfectly, in Enlightenment universalism.
That distinction is important. The struggle for recognition and the extension of equal citizenship should not be retrospectively collapsed into contemporary identitarian ideology. One may defend anti-discrimination, minority rights or affirmative measures without accepting that identity should become the primary unit through which society distributes moral authority, political legitimacy or epistemic standing.
Here Gjerde comes close to Yascha Mounk’s notion of identity synthesis, even though he retains the term wokeism. He is also explicit that the phenomenon is internally contradictory, heterogeneous and unstable. This makes the book considerably more interesting than the usual polemical literature surrounding “woke culture.” It also opens what I consider one of its most productive theoretical questions. The difficulty lies in the word strategy.
Can There Be Strategy Without Agency?
Gjerde repeatedly describes identity politics, cancel culture, ideological subversion and linguistic change as tactics belonging to a wider strategy. Yet, for analytical purposes, he deliberately brackets the agency of the actors involved. Individuals are described as “pieces on the ideological chessboard” and treated primarily as vehicles of ideas rather than as actors in their own right. Whether they understand themselves as woke, or consciously intend to participate in the ideological process under examination, is analytically secondary.
The same question emerges in his analysis of cultural guerrilla warfare. Gjerde acknowledges that some actors consciously engage in ideological practices while others genuinely understand the norms they reproduce as common sense. For his analytical purposes, however, this distinction does not substantially alter the broader pattern. The politics of concealment may therefore be examined structurally regardless of whether particular actors participate willingly or unwillingly.
The methodological choice is understandable. Indeed, it is one of the reasons why the book succeeds in making broad ideological patterns visible across institutions, actors and national settings. But it also raises a question about how far the language of strategy can be stretched.
Strategy and agency are not synonymous. Yet strategy normally presupposes at least a minimal theory of agency: an actor pursuing an objective through a selection of means. If different actors in different institutions reproduce similar vocabularies for different reasons and without coordination, we may certainly have a pattern. We may even have a powerful hegemonic effect. But it is less clear that we have demonstrated an overarching strategy.
This is not merely a semantic distinction. A university administrator may adopt identitarian language because she is personally committed to it. A corporation may do so because managers perceive reputational or commercial incentives. A journalist may reproduce the same vocabulary because it has become professionally normal. An activist may consciously seek institutional transformation. The resulting discourse may converge. The motives need not. There may, therefore, be strategists without there being one strategy.
Gjerde’s structural perspective makes patterns visible, which is its considerable strength. Yet some of the processes he identifies might also be described through diffusion, institutional imitation, professional incentives, moral conformity or the gradual sedimentation of a common political language. None of these mechanisms makes the phenomenon less politically significant. In some respects, the opposite may be true. The ability of an ideological grammar to reproduce itself without constant conscious mobilization may itself be evidence of cultural power. This is where my own research on culture wars suggests a slightly different analytical route.
From Strategy to Identity Grammars
In my doctoral research on Portuguese culture wars, I use the concept of identity grammars to describe broader systems of categories, narratives, moral assumptions and political distinctions through which actors make sense of disputes over historical memory, racism, immigration and cultural belonging. The concept was developed precisely to preserve the relationship between structure and agency. Individual political sensibilities articulate with wider identity grammars, but actors do not simply disappear inside them. They may reproduce a grammar, radicalize it, combine it with elements of another, resist it or attempt to move beyond it. A grammar structures political speech without writing every sentence in advance.
This distinction helps avoid two opposite temptations. The first is excessive voluntarism: imagining cultural transformation as the execution of a coherent master plan. The second is excessive structuralism: imagining subjects as little more than carriers of discourse.
The latter problem is particularly interesting because it resembles one of the difficulties Gjerde himself identifies in some of the theories he analyses critically. Strong structural accounts of racism, coloniality or identity can grant social structures such causal autonomy that individual dissent risks becoming analytically irrelevant. My own research has therefore insisted on preserving room for agency, even within highly unequal structures, and on resisting approaches in which subjects appear entirely captured by the social systems in which they participate. The same concern appears in my discussion of decolonial theory, particularly where historical continuity risks becoming so strong that the present is read in excessively deterministic terms.
This is less a rebuttal of Gjerde’s framework than an invitation to extend it. A fuller account of agency might make it possible to distinguish more clearly between conscious strategy, institutional convergence and hegemonic effect. That distinction becomes particularly important when the analysis reaches liberal democracy.
When Cultural Conflict Becomes a Liberal-Democratic Question
Gjerde persuasively identifies tensions between identitarian politics and liberal principles such as individualism, universalism and freedom of expression. But disagreement with philosophical liberalism is not in itself identical to a challenge to liberal democracy.
The difference matters.
Liberal democracy is not simply the institutional embodiment of a single comprehensive liberal philosophy. It is a political and constitutional order capable of accommodating social democratic, Christian democratic, conservative and other traditions that do not share identical philosophical premises. From a political-legal perspective, the decisive question is therefore not merely whether identity politics departs from liberal individualism. It is whether particular practices begin to undermine pluralism, equal citizenship, freedom of expression, due process, political competition or other basic guarantees of the liberal-democratic order.
When Cultural Norms Acquire Institutional Force
Here Gjerde is especially persuasive when cultural contestation acquires institutional form. His discussion of cancel culture moves from moral disagreement towards speech codes, administrative procedures, sanctions, chilling effects and, in some settings, attempts to translate cultural norms into legal or bureaucratic mechanisms. At that point, the relationship between culture war and liberal democracy becomes more than metaphorical. Cultural norms acquire institutional force.
The same distinction also helps preserve what was emancipatory in the original politics of recognition. Anti-racism, women’s rights and minority protection are not foreign bodies within liberal democracy. They are among its historical achievements. The problem emerges when recognition hardens into an identity system in which individuals are primarily understood as members of fixed groups and where group position begins to determine moral or epistemic authority.
Hegemony Does Not Require a Strategist
Gjerde’s book is valuable precisely because it takes this debate beyond slogans. It applies analytical instruments associated with critical theory to a political current deeply influenced by critical theory itself. It also takes seriously a field of identitarian politics that academic research has sometimes examined primarily through the discourse of its opponents.
Its central argument also invites further work. If wokeism is, as Gjerde himself insists, decentralized, unstable and internally contradictory, then its hegemonic effects do not by themselves settle the question of strategy. Future research may profit from moving closer to actors: asking who acts, with what degree of awareness, through which institutions, under which incentives and towards what objectives.
The culture war is certainly a struggle for hegemony. But hegemony does not require a strategist. Strategy does.
Disclosure
The author received a review copy of Hegemony and Woke Strategy directly from Lars Erik L. Gjerde.
Lars Erik L. Gjerde,Hegemony and Woke Strategy: A Study of Cultural Warfare. Routledge, forthcoming 2027.
References
Ferreira Dias, J. (2025). Entre as Brumas da Memória: gramáticas identitárias, guerras culturais e direitos fundamentais em Portugal, no século XXI. Doctoral dissertation, Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa.
Gjerde, L. E. L. (forthcoming 2027). Hegemony and Woke Strategy: A Study of Cultural Warfare. Routledge.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers.
McWhorter, J. (2021). Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Portfolio.
Mounk, Y. (2023). The identity trap: A story of ideas and power in our time. New York: Penguin Press.
Africa’s centrality to the global energy transition rests increasingly on its vast reserves of critical minerals, yet mineral abundance alone does not guarantee developmental sovereignty. Dr. Oludele Mayowa Solaja’s commentary argues that the key challenge is whether African states remain low-value extractive peripheries or convert geological advantage into industrial capacity, technological learning, regional value chains, ecological accountability, and democratic bargaining power. It develops the concept of transition sovereignty to capture the ability of resource-rich societies to shape extraction, processing, governance, knowledge, finance, and value distribution on their own terms. Rather than rejecting foreign investment, the article calls for strategic interdependence, stronger regionalism, and accountable institutions capable of ensuring that decarbonization produces not only cleaner technologies, but also more equitable and developmentally transformative outcomes for African societies.
The global energy transition is frequently framed as a clean break from the extractive political economy of fossil fuels. But decarbonization technologies such as digital infrastructure, electricity grids, electric vehicles, batteries, and wind turbines rely on another extractive frontier—critical minerals. Strategic materials such as lithium, cobalt, copper, manganese, graphite, and rare earth elements are emerging as essential materials for a low-carbon economy. In Africa, this transition is dominated, yet its importance is underutilized: the continent provides substantial amounts of minerals needed by clean-technology industries. Still, it receives only a small share of the value (IEA, 2025). The big question is not whether Africa will provide the green transition, but what it will look like and whether African societies have the political, industrial, and technological capacity to define its terms.
This is different from green colonialism and what this commentary calls transition sovereignty. Green colonialism is not just the extraction of African minerals by foreign companies. It describes a larger political-economic trend that is creating a material geography of global decarbonization where the rents of processing, technological control, knowledge, finance, and supply chains lie disproportionately elsewhere, particularly in Africa. The language of the commodity shifts, from oil to coal, lithium to cobalt and copper—but so does the underlying asymmetry. The threat is not the exclusion of Africa from the green transition. It is that Africa will be represented on conditions that mirror its historical role as a low-value exporter of ecological wealth.
A new yardstick exists for measuring Africa’s involvement: transition sovereignty. It means the ability of resource-rich societies to decide on the extraction, processing, governance and distribution of transition minerals, as well as to develop their own and regional skills and expertise in industry, technology, knowledge, financing and ecological regulation. It’s less restrictive than state ownership and less strict than local content rules. A country has transition sovereignty if mineral wealth increases its bargaining power, builds productive capacity, benefits society, safeguards ecological and community interests, and lets African actors shape the organization of global green value chains. The issue is not only who owns the mine, but who decides and has the power to make the decisions and technologies that start underground and end up at the surface of the decarbonization technologies.
Beyond Resource Control: Building Productive and Technological Capacity
But Africa is starting to challenge the conditions of the transition. The African Union’s Green Minerals Strategy focuses on value addition at source, regional industrialization, climate resilience, and integrated value chains, rather than relying on raw mineral exports (African Union, 2025). National export controls also indicate a clear direction of travel. Since 2023, Africa has implemented at least 14 measures to limit the export of raw or semi-processed minerals, and in February 2026, Zimbabwe banned the export of all raw minerals and lithium concentrates to encourage in-country beneficiation and accountability (Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, 2026; Reuters, 2026a). Such measures cannot be idealized as definitions of sovereignty. They are better understood as efforts to renegotiate where value exits African economies.
Zimbabwe provides a revealing illustration of both the possibilities and limits of resource sovereignty. The action was directly tied to in-country value addition, accountability and beneficiation (Reuters, 2026a) in its February 2026 suspension of exports of raw minerals and lithium concentrates. This policy reflects a well-known model in which upstream mining companies in Africa export concentrates, and downstream processing and value-added manufacturing occur elsewhere. But restricting exports is just the first step. An export ban can generate ‘protected extraction without transformative industrialization’ without reliable electricity, transport, finance, processing technologies, skilled labor, industrial demand and credible institutions. The real question is: Does export restraint build productive capabilities, or does it merely shift rents at the mine gate?
Thus, the Zimbabwean example illustrates an overarching lesson in the theory of transition sovereignty: control of the commodity is not enough if it is not matched by control over the capabilities attached to it. Industrialization does not need to be confined within the national boundaries. It needs to develop, process, create, capitalize, and integrate mineral production resources into local economies. The IEA sees Africa’s opportunity in spreading the transition’s economic value across the global value chain, because its economic value is distributed unevenly along the chain (IEA, 2025). In this sense, sovereignty is not realized by stopping the extraction; it is realized by transforming a geological advantage into a sustainable productive capacity.
Knowledge Sovereignty and the Regionalization of Green Value Chains
Another aspect of the issue is related to knowledge sovereignty, as demonstrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In September 2026, the Congolese government stepped up its efforts to centralize geological information by creating a national geological databank, along with new aerial surveys and digital mapping. The goal is to strengthen state control, reduce the information imbalance, and boost the state’s negotiating leverage in mining deals (Reuters, 2026b). This is important because mineral sovereignty is also epistemic (knowledge-based). Information on the location, quality, access, and strategic value of deposits shapes investment, licensing, negotiation, and long-term planning. Formal ownership of mineral deposits can coexist with informational dependency, as long as geological intelligence, technical standards, and data infrastructures are externally dominated.
The DRC case also reminds us to see transition sovereignty beyond the state. If enhancing the bargaining power of government is to produce “public value,” “transparency” in contracts, “environmental accountability,” and “meaningful benefits” to “communities” and “workers,” then sovereignty is becoming “developmental.” It’s not just a matter of African States regaining control from foreign companies. It is the extent to which mineral control is institutionalized in institutions capable of making mineral governance socially accountable. Otherwise, the language of sovereignty can be used to justify a transfer of control from an outside entity to domestic elites, without changing who gets the benefits and who bears the costs.
The DRC-Zambia battery and electric-vehicle project provides a better regional prospect. Instead of treating copper and cobalt as a commodity that must leave the region before higher-value use can begin, the two nations have worked to develop a cross-border value-chain model that includes mineral processing, battery production, and industrial capabilities. The UN Economic Commission for Africa and other regional institutions have technically supported the activity. In 2025, measures were taken to strengthen engagement by firms, financial institutions, and other actors in the battery and electric-vehicle value chain. This is not limited to battery production. It shows how mineral-rich countries can be viewed as hubs of regional industrial coordination, not just sources of raw materials being bid for by foreign extractors.
Regionalism matters because many constraints to African benefaction are too great for individual states to overcome alone. Processing plants need stable energy, transport tie-ups, technical expertise, markets, capital, and volume. A regional strategy can then transform uncoordinated mineral resources into coordinated industrial systems. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) initiative on environmentally and socially responsible energy-transition mineral value chains also aims to keep mineral wealth within the region and encourage livelihoods and industrialization in several southern African nations (UNECA, 2026). This requires a multi-level understanding of transition sovereignty at the national, regional, and continental levels.
Strategic Interdependence: Partnerships on Whose Terms?
But the new mineral race reveals a more profound paradox. African minerals are now being talked about in terms of partnership, supply-chain security and strategic cooperation with powers, many of them global, who seek them out. The US, EU and China have legitimate reasons to acquire access to critical minerals. For instance, in September 2026, the US government announced its support for developing critical mineral processing in Kenya, including the proposed development of the Mrima Hill resource, while stressing the importance of local processing and value-added production (Reuters, 2026c). These partnerships could be real opportunities. Diversifying external partners is not sovereignty. African countries may expand the number of buyers of their products but not substantially alter the nature of their political economy if they switch from one big buyer to a few smaller ones and they still export their low-value resources.
That is why the question “with whom?” has to be asked alongside a deeper question: “with whom for?” or “with whom on whose terms?” Colonial elements in external capital, technology, and markets are not the same. The developmental consequences relate to bargaining power, institutional design, ownership structures, local linkages, environmental protection, and rent distribution. Hence, the target should not be autarky or opposition to foreign investment. Strategic interdependence means the ability to involve global partners without giving up control over the developmental paths of mineral societies.
From Mineral Abundance to Developmental Sovereignty
The politics of critical minerals also reveal the boundaries of a technologically driven view of decarbonization. A battery can have a range of emissions during its use, whereas its material components can include land dispossession, unsafe mining practices, water stress, labor exploitation, or ecological degradation. Thus, the environmental legality of green technologies cannot be judged solely by their carbon performance. This transition is likely to result in a “cleaner” global economy, but at the cost of African communities in the mining sector. The political feasibility of green development lies in jointly considering the costs of extraction and the benefits of decarbonization.
This will expand to include community and labor. Foreign ownership does not inevitably mean environmental damage, and state ownership does not necessarily mean that it is socially just. The key is whether the rights of people living and working around the mineral frontiers are meaningful and include access to information, voice, and benefits of extraction. Artisanal and small-scale miners are important in this context. Formalization cannot be used to criminalize informal miners; it should provide avenues to formalize their lives, safety, skills, and value addition. Otherwise, the switch could perpetuate the traditional scenario where people near the source of value bear the risk of extraction, while value is generated further up the chain.
The strategic question for Africa is then no longer whether to accept or reject the green transition, but rather how to do so. It’s a choice between engaging in it as an extractive periphery and as an industrial, technological, and political actor. The latter requires reliable and affordable energy, transport infrastructure, mineral-processing capacity, regional markets, skills, research and development, transparent contracts, accountable institutions, and effective protections for communities and workers. It also demands that governments differentiate between resource nationalism and transformation. National control may be a tool for development, but it is not development.
Decarbonization on Africa’s Terms
The green colonialism and transition sovereignty binary should thus be viewed as a spectrum of political-economic options. An African country can boost state bargaining power without excluding communities from the benefits; it can boost local processing but remain highly technology-dependent; or it can attract several foreign investors but keep exporting the bulk of the value contribution of its minerals. On the other hand, through mineral policy, a country can pursue regional industrialization, develop its own capacities and skills, improve ecological governance, and increase democratic involvement. The shift is therefore not necessarily green, just, sovereign, or developmental. Its character is being politically constructed.
This is therefore a both-and situation for the developing critical-mineral economy. Africa’s strategic position, which it could use to renegotiate its role in global geopolitics, will not create sovereignty if it is merely geologically abundant. The important question is whether mineral extraction becomes a basis for industrial potential, technological learning, fiscal independence, ecological responsibility, and democratic negotiating strength. The question is no longer just whether the world can decarbonize, but how. It’s about who has the power to decide, who receives the value created along the chain, who pays the environmental and social costs, and who controls the material foundations of decarbonization.
If Africa is the source of the mines, then others are the source of the manufacture, and the color of colonialism can vary without its political economy changing. The energy transition may be more than just a change in energy systems if Africa’s mineral wealth is translated into regional industrial capability, technological capability, ecological responsibility, and democratic bargaining power. It may be a chance to reimagine Africa’s economics in the international arena. This is the true measure of transition sovereignty—whether Africa provides the green transition or whether Africa can help regulate the transition.
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Sophie Suda, Postdoctoral Researcher in Comparative Politics at the University of Basel, examines the AfD’s transformation from a protest party into a broader political force capable of mobilizing multiple grievances across Germany. She argues that the party’s rise cannot be explained by eastern German exceptionalism or immigration alone, but reflects the interaction of structural neglect, economic insecurity, political distrust, and effective grievance mobilization. Dr. Suda cautions that dismantling the Brandmauer or imitating AfD positions would further legitimize the radical right rather than win voters back. Instead, she emphasizes effective policy delivery, sustained investment in neglected regions, political representation, and clearer party differentiation as the more viable democratic response to the AfD’s continued advance.
Germany’s party system is entering a period of profound strain as the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) expands beyond its earlier identity as a protest formation and establishes itself as a durable force across an increasingly broad range of policy domains. In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Sophie Suda, Postdoctoral Researcher in Comparative Politics at the University of Basel, argues that the AfD’s recent trajectory cannot be reduced either to eastern German exceptionalism or to a single grievance such as immigration. Instead, she describes a party that has become “a broader political phenomenon rather than simply a vehicle for protest,” increasingly credited by voters not only on migration and security but also on the economy and social security.
For Dr. Suda, the AfD’s rise reflects the convergence of long-term structural grievances, economic insecurity, distrust of political elites, demographic decline, and the party’s capacity to mobilize disaffected and previously non-voting citizens. In eastern Germany, post-reunification legacies still matter: unemployment, infrastructure deficits, regional neglect, and the perception that political elites “did not care about” large parts of the population have created fertile ground for the party. Yet she cautions against treating this as a uniquely eastern phenomenon, stressing that far-right and nativist attitudes have existed elsewhere as well and that the crucial change is the emergence of a party capable of effectively mobilizing them.
At the center of the conversation is the increasingly contested question of how mainstream parties should respond. Dr. Suda firmly rejects the idea that the Brandmauer, or firewall, has failed simply because the AfD has continued to grow. Its purpose, she argues, is not “to keep the AfD small,” but to define the limits of political cooperation and prevent its entry into office. Bringing the party into government, in her view, would produce “greater legitimization and inclusion, not fewer voters for the AfD.” Nor does she expect governing responsibility to moderate the party ideologically: institutional constraints may limit what populist or extremist parties can do, but “participation in government is more likely to lead to legitimization.”
Her prescription for mainstream parties is therefore sharply defined: do not dismantle the firewall, do not imitate the AfD, but deliver. Copying its positions—particularly on immigration—“does not win voters back either; it simply legitimizes those positions, while voters still choose the original in the end.” The more promising strategy lies in effective governance, sustained investment in neglected regions, political representation, and clear programmatic differentiation. As Dr. Suda puts it, parties must remain “distinguishable while also demonstrating that [they] can deliver.”
Dr. Sophie Suda is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Comparative Politics at the University of Basel.
Here is our interview with Dr. Sophie Suda, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
The AfD Is No Longer Simply a Protest Party
Dr. Sophie Suda, welcome! Let me begin with Saxony-Anhalt. AfD’s 43.8% victory appears to mark more than the consolidation of a marginal protest constituency. Should we interpret this primarily as the deepening of an eastern German exceptionalism rooted in post-reunification grievances and regional alienation, or as evidence that AfD has crossed a more consequential threshold—from protest party to potential governing force, with implications for Germany’s national party system and coalition politics?
Dr. Sophie Suda: In general, the AfD is strong across Germany, not only in the east. What is particularly striking is the extent of its strength and the positive trajectory it has shown, including doubling its vote share compared with the previous election there. So, this is not necessarily a phenomenon specific to Eastern Germany. What is especially interesting is how the party has evolved. You mentioned that it may once have been described as a protest party, but we have now reached a point where that characterization no longer seems adequate.
We can see this particularly in the policy areas in which citizens attribute competence to the AfD. Traditionally, these include migration and security, where the party is perceived as highly competent, but increasingly also areas such as the economy and social security. This suggests that the AfD has become a broader political phenomenon rather than simply a vehicle for protest. There are, of course, regional differences within Germany, but these relate more to the degree of legitimization than to a phenomenon confined to particular regions.
The AfD Has Been Able to Exploit Multiple Grievances
Germany was long regarded as one of Europe’s most resilient party systems, with strong institutions, stable coalitions, and a powerful cordon sanitaire against the radical right. What, in your view, went most fundamentally wrong: economic stagnation, migration politics, distrust of elites, weak political leadership, eastern German alienation, failures of representation—or the mainstream parties’ own strategic choices?
Dr. Sophie Suda: You mentioned a lot of points, and there isn’t really one reason I can give. There are long-term grievances, including economic grievances, as well as crises and weaknesses among other parties, and all of these factors contribute to one another. Some have longer-term effects, while others are more immediate.
Especially in Eastern Germany, many people have long felt that political elites did not care about them. After reunification, unemployment was high, and there are still infrastructure problems compared with the West. At the same time, nativist attitudes have always been present, and the AfD has been able to mobilize around them. What we can see, particularly in the last election but also more generally, is that the party is very effective at mobilizing people, especially non-voters. It managed to attract more non-voters than all other parties combined.
So, there is no single reason. It is more about all these factors coming together and the AfD being able to exploit them. There is also demographic decline in many areas. All of this contributes to distrust of political elites, the federal government, and incumbents, along with the perception that people are being left alone with their problems. So, it is more about this broader sense of how people perceive politics and political elites than about any single wrongdoing.
Cooperating with the AfD Would Lead to Greater Legitimization
Photo: Shutterstock.
The Brandmauer (firewall) was designed to isolate the AfD, yet the party has continued to grow. Has exclusion protected democratic norms, or has it unintentionally reinforced AfD’s outsider narrative by allowing the party to claim that an entire political establishment is conspiring against its voters? At what point does democratic containment risk becoming electorally counterproductive?
Dr. Sophie Suda: As you mentioned, the Brandmauer is not there to keep the AfD small, but rather to make clear which parties you are willing to cooperate with, allow into office, or include in your decisions. So, it is not a failure in any way, because it has kept, and continues to keep, the AfD out of office.
The first question is what the alternative would be. If the alternative were to bring the AfD into office or cooperate with it, that would lead to greater legitimization and inclusion, not to fewer voters for the AfD. Another important point is that the AfD is an anti-democratic party and, at least in Saxony-Anhalt, is classified as right-wing extremist. So, parties do not really have a great deal of choice. Where they can differ, however, is between cooperating with the AfD, on the one hand, and, on the other, taking the concerns of its voters seriously and responding to this part of the population.
Parties Should Not Adapt to and Tolerate the AfD
In your research with Andorff-Woller and colleagues, you find that coalitions including populists tend to be less stable, but that this destabilizing effect diminishes where populist participation becomes more common. Does Saxony-Anhalt suggest Germany may now be approaching precisely that moment—where the question is no longer whether AfD can be excluded indefinitely, but whether the system will begin adapting to its presence?
Dr. Sophie Suda: Yes, it’s quite a difficult situation. We do find, in general, that having populist parties in government correlates with premature government dissolution. At the same time, they are also more likely to enter government in situations where there is already instability, which may further reinforce this lack of cooperation.
So, if the question is whether the political system should adapt simply to their presence, this relates to the point I mentioned earlier: they are undemocratic and an extremist party. The real question is whether other parties should adapt to that and tolerate it, and I believe they should not. They should draw a clear line where certain forms of behavior begin to pose a risk of democratic decline.
Populists in Government Do Not Generally Become More Moderate
Your work raises a difficult possibility: populist parties may become institutionally normalized without becoming ideologically moderate. If AfD eventually enters a state government, should we expect governing responsibility to constrain it, or could normalization instead legitimate radical positions while leaving its anti-pluralist core largely intact?
Dr. Sophie Suda: To some extent, they would be institutionally constrained, because in a state or federal government, you cannot simply do whatever you want. There are constraints from the courts, the EU, and the federal government. But those constraints are institutional, not ideological. Ideologically, extremist or populist parties in government do not generally change their positions or become more moderate. Instead, participation in government is more likely to lead to legitimization.
Other research also shows that when such parties enter government—whether as a junior partner, senior partner, or in a single-party government—democratic quality immediately declines, particularly in terms of minority rights and liberal freedoms. So, this is not a situation in which governing responsibility would necessarily make them more moderate.
The AfD Is No Longer Defined Primarily by Anti-Immigration
AfD demo with slogan Stop Islamization and counter demonstration of the Left in Luetten Klein in Rostock, Germany on May 14, 2018. AfD, Alternative for Germany, is a right wing political party in Germany. Photo: Shutterstock.
AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt coincided with deep dissatisfaction with the CDU-led political establishment, economic insecurity, cost-of-living pressures, and very low confidence in Chancellor Merz. Yet immigration was not necessarily the dominant concern for all voters. Does this suggest AfD is now succeeding because it has transformed itself from a single-issue anti-immigration party into a broader vehicle for accumulated anti-system discontent?
Dr. Sophie Suda: The AfD has always been quite effective at incorporating many different sources of dissatisfaction. Even when it began as an anti-EU party and later became strongly associated with immigration, its appeal was never limited to that issue. During COVID, around pro-Russian attitudes, and amid various other crises, the party was able to capitalize on a wide range of grievances.
I think the main difference now is this broader approach. At least in Saxony-Anhalt, immigration was not even such a major issue, nor the most important one. Yet the AfD manages to gain credit, or to be perceived as competent, across a wide range of policy areas. That is what is new. So, becoming broader and being seen as competent in almost all policy areas marks a significant change.
Reunification Provided Fertile Ground for AfD Support
Your earlier work on Mecklenburg-Vorpommern highlighted persistent east-west differences, weaker economic performance in eastern districts, border effects, and the importance of regional neglect, while also warning against monocausal explanations. How much of AfD’s strength today can still be explained by post-reunification grievances, and how much has become a more contemporary rebellion against the Federal Republic itself?
Dr. Sophie Suda: Looking only at historical explanations is definitely too simplistic. Historical legacies matter, and they matter considerably in shaping the level of support, but they do not really explain why the AfD suddenly doubled its number of voters, or its vote share, and why this increase occurred.
There are still many structural factors that were, or are, the result of reunification, such as economic problems and infrastructure. Many companies were also dissolved or bought up by Western German firms. These are structural factors that can benefit the AfD everywhere, but in eastern Germany many of them come together. There are also longstanding far-right strongholds that the party can now draw on. In that sense, reunification created many of the conditions that help explain why people vote for the AfD and provided fertile ground for its support.
At the same time, when we look at social norms and the way far-right ideas have become normalized, this is not something specific to eastern Germany. Far-right and nativist attitudes existed elsewhere as well; what has changed is that there is now a party capable of mobilizing them. So, the recent increase is better explained by shorter-term factors that the AfD has been able to exploit and mobilize around.
Neglected Areas Can Be Won Back
Your 2021 analysis showed that targeted regional investment, stronger political attention to neglected areas, and a popular, credible incumbent helped the SPD cut into AfD strongholds in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Does the current AfD resurgence there suggest that those gains were temporary, or that mainstream parties failed to institutionalize the lesson that territorial neglect and political distance must be addressed continuously rather than episodically?
Dr. Sophie Suda: To some extent, it shows the latter. In 2021, several factors came together to explain why the SPD performed so well. There were a number of short-term factors: the incumbent was quite popular, the AfD candidate was very weak, and there was also a favorable federal trend for the SPD.
But the previous government had also pursued this Vorpommern strategy, especially in the east of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the AfD was, and remains, strong, and where it had previously been particularly strong. They had a long-term strategy of investing in the region. So, it was not only about short-term factors. They also had a parliamentary state secretary who focused on this region. It was therefore also about political attention and representation.
They also managed, perhaps more than now, to deliver on a number of policies, such as childcare. So, it was this combination of short-term factors and a longer-term strategy of reaching voters, especially in the East.
Saxony-Anhalt Could Produce Either AfD Momentum or Counter-Mobilization
AfD posters displayed on a stand during Germany’s 2025 federal election campaign. Such posters were relatively rare in public spaces, as they were often quickly torn down. Photo: Dreamstime.
AfD now leads the latest Mecklenburg-Vorpommern poll with 35%, while the SPD has recovered to 32%. Given that AfD received only 16.7% there in 2021, what would a possible AfD victory on September 20 signify? Would it confirm a durable realignment of eastern German politics, or could candidate effects, government satisfaction, and late mobilization still reproduce something closer to the 2021 outcome?
Dr. Sophie Suda: Looking at the polls now, it seems quite likely that the AfD will make enormous gains. At the same time, the candidate effect still favors (Minister-President of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) Manuela Schwesig, whom voters across most of the political spectrum continue to prefer over AfD’s Leif-Erik Holm —though not, of course, among AfD voters.
There are also still many undecided voters, so the key question now is who will be able to mobilize them. It will also be important to see whether the AfD can benefit from the momentum generated by its success in Saxony-Anhalt, or whether that result instead produces a counter-mobilization among other voters.
Berlin Would Show That the AfD Is Not Just a Rural Party
Berlin presents almost the opposite social and political environment: a large, diverse, metropolitan electorate in which CDU, Linke, Greens, and AfD are all competing near the top while the SPD has fallen sharply. If AfD approaches or exceeds 18–20% in Berlin, would that be more consequential than an even larger result in eastern rural Germany because it would demonstrate that AfD’s appeal has broken decisively out of its traditional geographic and sociological strongholds?
Dr. Sophie Suda: Yes, perhaps symbolically to some extent, because they can show that they are not just a rural party. But, in general, they are strong across all German states, and the difference is that in Berlin they will not be able to govern. So, the actual consequences would not be as significant as they potentially are in Saxony-Anhalt. This result would therefore confirm that the AfD is strong, but it would not necessarily have the same consequences as the party reaching almost 44% in other states.
Parties Must Cooperate without Losing Their Political Identity
Germany’s mainstream parties have increasingly been forced into ideologically awkward coalitions whose principal common denominator is excluding AfD. Can such alliances remain democratically persuasive if voters perceive them as programmatically incoherent? At what point does coalition engineering to contain AfD begin to deepen the very anti-establishment resentment on which AfD thrives?
Dr. Sophie Suda: It fits the AfD narrative quite well when all other parties are portrayed as the same and as part of a corrupt elite, while the AfD presents itself as the only alternative that looks after voters. But the AfD makes that claim regardless of who is governing. So, while this fits its narrative, it does not necessarily change what the party is doing or the approach it takes.
I think the more important point is that these coalitions have to govern and cooperate effectively. That is, of course, difficult when they bring together more parties with greater ideological differences. On the one hand, they have to cooperate; on the other, they must show voters what they stand for and demonstrate that not all elites are the same. Each party has to maintain a clear identity, deliver for its voters, and show that it can produce effective policies. That is the greater difficulty with these coalitions.
Cooperation and Efficiency Can Reinforce Each Other
Your research with Detlef Jahn shows that executive efficiency and consensus capacity need not be opposites and can jointly improve policy performance. Has Germany’s current problem become precisely a failure to combine the two—a political system still oriented toward consensus but increasingly perceived by citizens as unable to deliver decisively on growth, migration, infrastructure, energy, and public services?
Dr. Sophie Suda: Yes, this is exactly what we find. Sometimes cooperation and efficiency are perceived as a trade-off, but in fact they can reinforce each other and produce better policy outcomes. The key question is how to combine them, in which areas, and how governments coordinate effectively enough to achieve both.
There has always been competition between parties, and there still is. But when parties govern together, they also have to cooperate across many areas. At the same time, they need to remain sufficiently distinct for voters to understand what each party stands for. So, you need consensus to reach decisions, but also efficiency in implementing them.
To some extent, this is where Germany has struggled in the past. We had many grand coalitions in which center-left and center-right parties governed together, but the compromises they reached did not necessarily satisfy voters on either side. In recent years, parties have probably failed to communicate clearly enough what they stand for.
The AfD Is Very Effective at Exploiting Crises
Your recent work on critical events finds that governing parties tend to converge and project unity during externally driven shocks, whereas opposition parties have incentives to differentiate themselves and exploit grievances. Has AfD become unusually effective at turning successive crises—Ukraine, migration, inflation, energy insecurity, the Middle East, and economic stagnation—into a permanent opposition advantage?
Dr. Sophie Suda: Yes, they are quite good at exploiting this. In general, this is what all opposition parties do to some extent when there is a crisis or external event. They can use that to show how they are different, and they can criticize the government, especially when it is an important event. There have been many crises now, which also leads to a lot of insecurity, and the AfD works on that, builds on that, and exploits it, essentially.
We Should Not Expect a Change in German Foreign Policy
The Bundestag building at dusk, with German and EU flags waving in front, in Berlin, Germany, on November 17, 2024. The Reichstag dome is visible, symbolizing Germany’s democracy. Photo: Margarita Kosareva.
AfD’s pro-Russian orientation and opposition to continued support for Ukraine distinguish it sharply from the German foreign-policy mainstream. Your research shows that critical foreign-policy events usually strengthen cohesion among governing parties while opposition parties strategically distance themselves. Could AfD’s electoral rise eventually break Germany’s post-2022 foreign-policy consensus and constrain Berlin’s ability to lead within NATO and the EU?
Dr. Sophie Suda: At the moment, no. Part of the campaign in Saxony-Anhalt focused on foreign policy, but state governments do not decide foreign policy, so they have little power to change it. Supporting Ukraine, for example, is an essential part of Germany’s foreign policy, and there is no intention to change that.
Our research on cohesion shows that governing parties tend to stick together and become more cohesive during foreign-policy crises, at least to some extent and for a certain period. This is also an area where Friedrich Merz enjoys support within his own party and among voters, especially compared with other policy areas. So, for him, this is probably one area he should not change.
I therefore do not think he will. Of course, there will be pressure from the AfD, and there are other parties with different foreign-policy positions, such as the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance -BSW). But these parties are not governing at the federal level. So, there will certainly be debate, but I do not think we should expect a change in German foreign policy.
Don’t Break the Firewall, Don’t Imitate the AfD—Deliver
And lastly, Dr. Suda, stepping back, what should mainstream German parties do now? Continuing the firewall may reinforce AfD’s anti-establishment appeal; accommodating AfD risks normalizing its radical positions; imitating its migration and cultural agenda may validate its diagnoses; and broad anti-AfD coalitions can appear incoherent. Is there still a viable democratic strategy for defeating AfD electorally—and if so, does it require better policy delivery, renewed social and territorial representation, clearer ideological differentiation, or a fundamental reconstruction of Germany’s party system?
Dr. Sophie Suda: Unfortunately, there is no single strategy for winning back 44% of voters. But the first thing parties should not do is break the firewall, because that would only lead to further legitimization of the AfD and the radical right, normalize those attitudes, and reinforce those positions. It would not win voters back.
The same applies to trying to imitate the AfD, which is something the CDU in particular, but also other parties, have tried to do in the past, including by adopting its positions on immigration. That does not win voters back either; it simply legitimizes those positions, while voters still choose the original in the end.
What parties can do—and this is easier said than done—is deliver effective policies. We saw in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern that neglected areas can be won back if there is a long-term strategy to address voters, respond to their concerns, and give them a sense of being represented, including through policies on the economy, infrastructure, and public services.
This does not require a fundamental reconstruction of the party system. It may instead require parties to adapt how they work together so that politics is not reduced to the AfD versus all other parties. At the same time, each party has to ensure that its policies remain distinguishable while also demonstrating that it can deliver. I think that is the more difficult trade-off parties are facing now.
Ahead of the 2026 US midterms, Professor Lane Kenworthy argues that Trumpism’s apparent dominance should not be mistaken for permanence. Although the Republican Party has acquired “an entirely new identity,” he stresses that this “could easily change after Trump,” especially if a more appealing political agenda emerges. Professor Kenworthy places MAGA within a longer cycle of ideological realignment, cultural backlash, and generational change, while cautioning against reading election outcomes as durable historical trends. He is equally skeptical that rising billionaire influence necessarily amounts to a new plutocratic order. Instead, he points toward Nordic-style social democratic capitalism—combining markets, public provision, economic security, and liberal democracy—as a more promising long-term model. Politically, however, he reduces the path forward to a simple proposition: “Democrats need to win elections.”
Ahead of the 2026 US midterm elections, the durability of Trumpism—and the political future of the Republican Party after Donald Trump—has become one of the central questions confronting American democracy. In an interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Lane Kenworthy, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Yankelovich Chair in Social Thought at the University of California, San Diego, argues that the institutionalization of Trumpism should not be taken for granted. His scholarship on inequality, social policy, political economy, and shared prosperity provides the broader framework for a conversation that ranges from MAGA and executive power to plutocratic influence, democratic socialism, and the prospects for social democratic capitalism in the United States.
Professor Kenworthy cautions against interpreting the current Republican transformation as necessarily permanent. Reflecting on the rapid succession from George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” to the Tea Party and then to Trumpism, he stresses how unusually vulnerable the two major American parties are to sudden ideological takeover. “The two major American political parties are so weak, so hollow,” he observes, adding that they are “unusually susceptible to takeover in unpredictable ways.” Although the Republican Party has acquired “an entirely new identity” after a decade of Trump’s dominance, Professor Kenworthy emphasizes that “that could easily change after Trump.”
This uncertainty is even more pronounced when considering whether MAGA can survive its founder. Professor Kenworthy notes the “extraordinary passion” Trump supporters display toward him, but remains skeptical that this necessarily translates into a deeply rooted and durable ideological project. Historical precedents suggest caution: political agendas that once appeared dominant—Bush-era conservatism or the Tea Party—evaporated far more quickly than expected. J.D. Vance and others may attempt to preserve Trumpism, he argues, but its future will depend on whether the movement’s ideological commitments are genuinely deep or merely contingent. “It’s quite possible that it could disappear very easily,” Professor Kenworthy says, “if somebody with a more appealing agenda and a more appealing election campaign comes along.”
Professor Kenworthy also situates Trumpism within a longer cultural transformation. Drawing on the Inglehart-Norris thesis, he suggests that MAGA relies heavily on cultural traditionalists whose relative weight may decline through generational replacement. If that argument is correct, Trumpism “maybe survives another couple of election cycles, but after that, it could simply disappear.”
The interview ultimately places the 2026 midterms within a wider debate over American political economy. Professor Kenworthy questions both alarmist assumptions about an inevitable plutocracy and claims that democratic socialism offers a fundamentally different policy model. Instead, he repeatedly returns to the Nordic-inspired social democratic capitalism he has long advocated: combining markets with strong public provision, economic security, and liberal-democratic institutions. For Professor Kenworthy, the most plausible path toward that model remains politically straightforward, even if institutionally difficult: “Democrats need to win elections.”
Professor Lane Kenworthy is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Yankelovich Chair in Social Thought at the University of California, San Diego.
Here is our interview with Professor Lane Kenworthy, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Trumpism, MAGA, and the 2026 Midterms
Professor Kenworthy, welcome! The 2026 midterms are increasingly being framed as a referendum not simply on President Trump’s second administration but on the durability of Trumpism itself. You have argued that the rise of right-wing populism is driven less straightforwardly by economic hardship or inequality than by effective political entrepreneurs who mobilize already-existing cultural and political dispositions. If Republicans suffer substantial losses in November, should we interpret that as a rejection of Trump himself, a cyclical midterm correction, or evidence that the political coalition sustaining Trumpism has reached its limits? Conversely, if Republicans retain control of Congress despite Trump’s low approval ratings, what would that tell us about the depth and institutional durability of the MAGA transformation of the Republican Party?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: Interesting question. My view about the increased electability of right-wing populist parties comes mainly from Larry Bartels’s book from a few years back. I think the story of improved leadership among these types of parties is less about charismatic personalities like Trump—although that certainly played a role in the United States—and more about leaders who are willing to make their parties more acceptable to ordinary voters: shedding ties with neo-Nazis, embracing the welfare state, and taking moderate positions on some other issues.
I don’t think we know how things will play out over the midterms here in the United States. For a while in the early 2000s, it looked as though George W. Bush’s so-called compassionate conservatism was going to become the core Republican identity, replacing Reaganism and the idea that the central goal was to shrink the government. Then the Tea Party came into vogue after the 2010 wave elections, with its obsession with the national debt, the government deficit, and so on. And then came Trumpism, more or less out of the blue.
So, these things are very difficult to predict because the two major American political parties are so weak, so hollow. They are strong in some respects, but they are unusually susceptible to takeover in unpredictable ways, and that is basically the story of what happened with Trump in 2016. Almost nobody saw it coming. He entered the presidential nomination contest somewhat late, ended up winning the nomination narrowly, and then won the general election narrowly. Now we have had 10 years of this, and the Republican Party has an entirely new identity. But that could easily change after Trump. I don’t know if it will, but I think these things are very difficult to predict.
The other thing I would mention is that American elections since around 2000 have been somewhat unusual in that the country has been pretty closely divided—something along the lines of 45% Democrat, 45% Republican, and perhaps 10% of voters who may change their vote depending on what is happening. As a result, a lot of marginal, unpredictable factors can end up swinging election outcomes in ways that are very difficult to predict in advance. I also think it is dicey to interpret those outcomes as long-term trends—ones that are going to last or that are deeply embedded or deeply held among American voters.
Congressional Control and the Limits of Presidential Power
Republicans currently hold only a very narrow House majority, while Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take the Senate. How consequential is the congressional arithmetic for the trajectory of Trump’s presidency? If Democrats capture one or both chambers, would divided government meaningfully constrain what critics regard as Trump’s illiberal or executive-centered tendencies, or has presidential power expanded to the point that congressional control is less consequential than conventional separation-of-powers theory assumes?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: Here too, we don’t really know the answer to this question. Right now, it looks like Democrats will end up with a majority in the House of Representatives, although we’re still a little ways off from the election. Normally, in this kind of situation, when a president’s party holds majorities in both legislative bodies during the first two years, they get some things done but then typically lose one or both chambers in the midterm elections. The party that holds the presidency almost always loses one or both legislative bodies in the United States in the midterms. Then, typically, the president is able to get far less done, so his attention turns to foreign policy, where he has somewhat more autonomy and is able to take more action.
So I suspect that should be our default prediction for what happens in the last two years of this presidency. But this presidency has so far been very different. Trump has been trying much more aggressively to do things outside Congress, even though Republicans hold a majority in both houses. It’s a narrow majority, and Trump wants to do things that many Republicans in the Senate or House of Representatives don’t necessarily favor. So he has been trying to do a great deal through executive actions and concocting all sorts of justifications to get the Supreme Court and other judicial decision-makers to allow them. Sometimes they have; sometimes they haven’t.
My best guess is that he would continue along this path. But at the same time, because he has done so much outside what we have traditionally understood to be the bounds of presidential authority, my guess is that, especially if Democrats win the House of Representatives, they’ll launch a large number of investigations into actions he has taken in this first term, and possibly into things he did even before taking office. A lot of attention and time will be consumed by these investigations, as a great deal of media coverage, and the president—or the administration—will be forced to spend considerable time responding and reacting to them. So both the reality of what the administration will try to do and what it can do, and the narrative ordinary Americans are exposed to and think about, will shift pretty significantly.
But again, we’re in somewhat uncharted territory here with Donald Trump, so it’s difficult to have much confidence in predicting what’s going to happen in these last two years—hopefully the last two years.
Trump cannot constitutionally seek another term in 2028, yet the Republican Party remains organized to an extraordinary degree around his political identity. You emphasize the importance of capable populist leaders in converting latent cultural conservatism into electoral support. Does that imply that Trumpism may prove unusually dependent on Trump as an individual political entrepreneur? Or has he already constructed a sufficiently durable ideological coalition—around immigration restriction, protectionism, nationalism, hostility to liberal elites, and executive power—that figures such as JD Vance could successfully institutionalize Trumpism after Trump?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: Here I’ll go back to what I said in response to the first question, which is that the most important answer is that we just don’t know. It’s very difficult to predict this. Given the seemingly extraordinary passion that Trump supporters—or MAGA supporters—evince for Donald Trump, one might think there is a deep passion not only for him but also for his political project among a sizable segment of the American population.
But my best guess is that, as with almost all ideologies, movements, public philosophies, or whatever you want to call the set of policy proposals and the sort of aggressive approach to the presidency that Trump has pursued in his second term, it’s really difficult to know whether this is deep or lasting. Again, support for George W. Bush’s agenda seemed really strong, and public opinion surveys suggested that in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. But then, when the Iraq War went sour, it evaporated really quickly, and Democrats won a huge election in 2006 and an even bigger landslide in 2008.
The same thing happened with the Tea Party. It was widely thought to represent the overwhelming wave of the future. Members of the Tea Party, or those running on the Tea Party agenda, defeated some of the best-known and longest-serving Republican members of the House of Representatives in Republican primaries. And yet it, too, went away almost overnight in 2016 when Trump came along.
So J.D. Vance will certainly try, because he believes in a number of the same things that Trump does. But whether because of his limited skill as a politician, his limited ability to create the same passion among followers, or simply because commitment to this particular set of policy views is actually fairly thin, it’s quite possible that it could disappear very easily if somebody with a more appealing agenda and a more appealing election campaign comes along.
I should also say that there’s a view espoused most clearly by political scientists Ron Inglehart and Pippa Norris in a book they wrote about five years ago, which offers a long-term perspective on shifts in attitudes, especially on cultural and social issues. It suggests that since roughly the end of World War II, as rich democratic countries like the United States have become richer and richer, we’ve seen a slow but steady process of liberalization in views on all kinds of social and cultural issues. This happens mostly through cohort replacement.
Their hypothesis about the rise of right-wing populism is that we’re at a point in the evolution of this long-term shift where support for more traditionalist views on social and cultural issues is still fairly strong. It has been declining, but it remains fairly strong, and so this backlash against cultural liberalism, or social liberalism, is particularly fervent and particularly strong because we’re right at the point where this view is about to become—not disappear, but become—a clearly distinct minority.
Here too, Trumpism—the MAGA approach to politics—relies very heavily on cultural traditionalists in the United States. It’s not the only thing central to Trumpism, but it’s a really important part of that approach. If the Inglehart-Norris hypothesis is correct, maybe it survives another couple of election cycles, but after that, it could simply disappear. So there are lots of possibilities here, and again, I think we just don’t know.
Plutocracy and the Political Influence of the Rich
In your work on capitalism, inequality, and democracy, you acknowledge that affluent Americans have substantially more political influence than lower-income citizens, but you are cautious about concluding that increasing economic inequality has produced an ever-deepening plutocracy. How should we reassess that argument in the contemporary United States, where billionaire donors, super PACs, private political networks, and extraordinarily wealthy officeholders have become increasingly visible? At what point does disproportionate influence cease to be an inequality within democracy and become something more accurately described as oligarchic or plutocratic rule?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: Here too, I would say this is a possibility, but we don’t know. The problem with trying to draw any firm inference from what has happened during the first two years of this second Trump presidency is that he is a very idiosyncratic elected official. As a businessman, he strongly favored a transactional approach, and he has shown that he favors the same approach to politics. He is very interested in increasing the financial assets of himself and his family. He is also comfortable rewarding supporters and flatterers with positions in his company or, in this case, in his administration.
So, does the apparent rise in the influence of rich Americans and certain corporations in this second Trump administration represent a new era of plutocracy? Or is this simply an aberration, something unique to Trump? We won’t really know the answer until he’s gone.
One other thing to keep in mind is that although Trump has put billionaires in his cabinet and allowed Elon Musk to effectively destroy US foreign aid, the administration’s biggest policy changes have been in immigration and tariffs. And it is not America’s rich who have driven those policy commitments. Rather, it has been Trump himself and a few of his other non-billionaire advisors, such as Stephen Miller.
Tech Billionaires and New Forms of Political Power
The 2026 cycle has seen unprecedented political spending from technology, AI, cryptocurrency, and related sectors, while figures such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and other Silicon Valley billionaires have moved from financing politics to attempting to shape its ideological and institutional direction. Does the emergence of these “tech bros” represent merely another iteration of wealthy interest group influence, or are we witnessing the formation of a qualitatively new political elite whose control over capital, platforms, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and information infrastructure gives it forms of power that earlier industrial magnates did not possess?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: Yes, once again, this is a possibility, but it’s too early to know. One thing that makes me skeptical is that, because the United States is such a large country, the landscape of sources of influence—including mainstream media, social media, think tanks, universities, and more—is quite broad and fairly diverse. Even if a conservative billionaire like Larry Ellison buys a major media outlet such as CBS or Paramount, or Elon Musk buys Twitter, there are still plenty of other sources and alternatives, including new ones that emerge all the time for people to turn to.
So, yes, it is very much possible that we are seeing new forms of influence and new ways—and degrees—in which affluent individuals or companies can exert influence. But it is also possible that they will try and fail, or at least not succeed very much.
Does Extreme Wealth Produce Unlimited Political Power?
Anti-Trump protesters gather across from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue during the annual Labor Day Parade in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on September 6, 2025. Photo: Dreamstime.
One of your more counterintuitive arguments is that although money clearly produces unequal political influence, there may be diminishing returns to additional wealth: once affluent actors already possess substantial access and influence, further increases in inequality may not produce proportionately greater political power. Does the extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top—and the ability of individual billionaires to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on elections—challenge that thesis? Is there perhaps a threshold beyond which wealth ceases to yield merely diminishing returns and instead produces new forms of agenda-setting, institutional capture, and veto power?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: Possibly, yes. Like all the other questions or issues we’ve gone through so far, this is very much an empirical question, and we’ll have to see how it plays out. Here, I would emphasize that income and wealth inequality in the United States have been rising for roughly half a century, and the richest tend to give disproportionately to the Republican Party.
Despite that, and despite the Citizens United Supreme Court decision in 2010, which made it even easier for big money to enter politics—especially elections in the United States—Democrats have so far matched Republicans in campaign contributions and election spending.
It’s also important that a great deal of messaging and advertising now goes through the free channel of social media, so it’s simply not clear. Again, it’s quite possible that things will play out as your question suggests, but I also think there is reason for skepticism. Ultimately, we just have to wait and see how this plays out.
Non-Inclusive Growth and the Rise of Populism
You have described the United States since the late 1970s as a paradigmatic case of “non-inclusive growth,” in which economic growth continued while wages and middle-class incomes stagnated and a disproportionate share of gains flowed to the top 1 percent. How politically consequential is this “great decoupling” today? Even if inequality itself is not the primary cause of right-wing populism, has the failure to translate aggregate prosperity into broadly shared improvements weakened the legitimacy of liberal capitalism and made both Trumpist nationalism and democratic socialism more politically plausible?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: I strongly suspect that it has contributed, but I don’t think we know by how much, because there are so many competing explanations for the rise in support for right-wing populism and left-wing populism more generally, not only in the United States but in other countries as well. In addition to economic inequality, there is income stagnation. There is also regional and local decline—decline in particular cities, areas, and regions—which cannot be reduced simply to incomes or inequality.
There is cultural backlash, the pervasive negativity of social media, and rising loneliness and mental health concerns, especially among teenagers and people in their twenties. There has also been a strong reaction to the inflation of the early 2020s, which was relatively new. Inflation had been very limited for almost a generation, so many people grew up in a world where it simply was not a major concern. Then, all of a sudden, it returned, much as it had in the 1970s.
And then there is the interaction of these factors, perhaps alongside others. So, yes, I do believe economic inequality has contributed, but I’m not at all certain that it has been the main factor driving these political developments.
Inequality Versus Improving Ordinary Lives
Your work repeatedly makes a distinction that is often blurred on the American left: inequality is not necessarily the same problem as poverty, insecurity, weak opportunity, or stagnant living standards. Indeed, your recent framework treats inequality reduction as “sensible but secondary.” In an era of extraordinary billionaire wealth, is that distinction still politically and normatively sustainable? Should progressives concentrate less on how much Elon Musk or other billionaires possess and more on whether ordinary Americans enjoy secure healthcare, housing, education, employment, childcare, and rising incomes?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: In terms of actual policy, I strongly favor focusing on the latter—that is, secure healthcare, housing, and so on: bringing up the bottom and ensuring that as many people as possible have access to these critical components of a good life.
In terms of winning elections, the question may be somewhat separate. It’s possible that the same approach—focusing on particular policies—will also help you win elections. But it’s also quite possible that, especially at this moment in the United States, you’re more likely to win by focusing on inequality, billionaire wealth, and the evils of particular billionaires like Elon Musk.
So it may be that this more extreme or radical approach is better for winning elections. But once you do win, I’m very much convinced that the way forward is to bring up the bottom and expand access to these goods and services, rather than focusing first and foremost on reducing inequality or the income and wealth of billionaires.
Rawls, Billionaires, and the Least Well-Off
St. Patrick’s Cathedral with pedestrians, pigeons and a homeless man outside in Manhattan, Fifth Avenue on September 11, 2023. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your approach to distributive justice draws significantly on John Rawls, particularly the proposition that inequality can be justified if it improves the absolute position of the least well-off. But how should the Rawlsian “difference principle”be applied to an economy in which the wealth of the top has multiplied while many households still struggle with housing, healthcare, childcare, and economic insecurity? Is the relevant Rawlsian question whether billionaires deserve their fortunes, or whether the institutions that permit those fortunes simultaneously generate the best realistically attainable conditions for those at the bottom?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: Good question. My view on this is loosely inspired by Rawls’ emphasis on lifting up the floor first and reducing inequality of outcomes second. If it turns out that the best way to lift up the floor is to prevent people from becoming billionaires, or perhaps to tax away a substantial share of their wealth once they become billionaires, then I’d be in favor of doing that. If, however, a society can allow people to become billionaires—even mega-billionaires—while still doing a very good job of ensuring a high floor and a good life for the rest of the population, then I don’t worry as much about billionaires.
For me, it’s ultimately a pragmatic question. The experience of the Nordic countries in particular, but also some other Western European countries and, in historical comparative terms, even the United States—where things have improved considerably over the past 100 years, even if we are still a long way from performing as well as the best countries—suggests that the latter is possible. It is possible to have a good society even in the presence of individuals or corporations with enormous wealth and power.
But perhaps we are reaching a point where that is changing—where extreme wealth has become so concentrated that it prevents the United States, or perhaps other societies, from achieving good outcomes. Or perhaps the power of these unelected wealthy individuals and corporations will prevent further policy progress. If that is the case, then, again, for purely pragmatic reasons, we would be in a situation where we need to worry much more about inequality.
Democratic Socialism and the Nordic Model
In“Would Democratic Socialism Be Better?”, you argue that democratic socialism would likely reduce inequality but may not outperformsocial democratic capitalismacross most dimensions of well-being. Yet Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed, and others have made democratic socialist ideas increasingly viable. Are they diagnosing the right problems—concentrated wealth, insecurity, weak worker power, and corporate influence—but prescribing too radical a remedy, or does their success suggest that incremental social democracy is no longer enough for much of the Democratic electorate?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: The so-called democratic socialists you mentioned actually favor something very much like the Nordic model in terms of the policies they would like the United States or New York City to adopt and implement. The fact that they call themselves socialists is an idiosyncrasy of American politics. Bernie Sanders came of age in the 1970s, at a time when it was acceptable in parts of the American left to call yourself a socialist, and he has consistently run for election in Vermont, where that has not hurt him politically. So he simply kept doing it. Because he received so much attention and support when he ran for president in 2016, some others followed in his path and called themselves democratic socialists. In some cases, they have not paid a political price for it either.
That has very much been the case with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and it also turned out to be the case with Mamdani in New York. We’ll see how that plays out with the Michigan Senate election in November. So, for the most part, I think they are prescribing the correct remedy because, in policy terms, they basically favor the Nordic model. Are they diagnosing the problems correctly? Here again, we should distinguish between what will make for effective policy and what will get people elected. I’m not convinced that concentrated wealth and monopolies are the main obstacles to getting better policy enacted in the United States, but focusing on them when you’re running for election might be a very effective strategy for getting yourself into office in at least some districts and states in the US at the moment.
Social Democratic Capitalism as a Democratic Governing Project
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the “Bernie Is Back” political rally in Queensbridge Park, Queens, New York, on October 19, 2019. Photo: Aleksandr Dyskin / Dreamstime.
You describe“social democratic capitalism”as a democratic polity combined with a mostly capitalist economy, strong education, extensive public insurance, employment-promoting services, and moderate regulation. Could this provide the Democrats with a more coherent post-neoliberal governing philosophy than either technocratic centrism or democratic socialism? And if so, why has the Democratic Party struggled to articulate such a model as a recognizable political project capable of competing emotionally and symbolically with the much clearer identity offered by Trumpism?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: Here too, I think we want to distinguish between the policies that are actually being enacted, implemented, and favored by many who call themselves Democrats, and what seems to resonate with at least a certain share of voters in the country at this moment. I do think movement toward the Nordic model, or what I call social democratic capitalism, is the direction the Democratic Party has been heading in, especially since around 2020, but to some degree even before that.
During the Biden administration, from 2021 to 2024, much of the policy emphasis was on expanding healthcare and childcare, creating a child allowance, and considering other elements of these public services. The administration and its Democratic allies in Congress ultimately chose to emphasize the transition to clean energy over these services, at least in terms of their rhetoric and symbolism, and I think they were right to do so. This is a really important and time-limited policy focus, whereas shifting toward the Nordic model can be done over a longer period.
But there is actually much more support within the party and in adjacent organizations for expanding public services and public goods these days than there used to be. As I just said, this is mainly what so-called democratic socialists are advocating in policy terms. If we look at Democratic Party-dominated states across the country—California, Massachusetts, New York, and some others—we also see real movement in this direction, through the enactment and implementation of these types of public services and public goods, or their expansion where they already exist.
But this policy approach might not have the same emotional resonance for many voters as right-wing or left-wing populism. So it could be that we’ll see more Democrats getting elected as so-called socialists while nevertheless governing as normal Social Democrats.
I would characterize what we see so far in the Mamdani administration as exactly that. He is governing mostly as a normal left-of-center Democrat, or what you might call a social democrat, while rhetorically continuing his commitment to what he calls democratic socialism and to certain issues that resonate strongly, especially with younger left-wing voters. Yet, in policy terms, those issues turn out to be secondary to what he is doing as an executive in a very large and important city.
Predistribution, Public Provision, and the Future of Wages
You have been skeptical that “predistribution” alone—raising wages through market institutions, stronger bargaining power, or labor-market reform—can solve the problem of stagnant earnings, and you have emphasized public insurance and transfers as essential mechanisms for ensuring shared prosperity. Given the long-term weakening of unions and the changing structure of work, should Democrats stop promising to reconstruct the mid-twentieth-century wage bargain and instead build a twenty-first-century social settlement in which government more explicitly socializes the costs of healthcare, childcare, education, retraining, and income security?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: I do think that’s partly true—that Democrats should focus more on the public provision of these services and public goods, and, to some extent, on transfers. As I just said, I do think that’s the direction many who consider themselves Democrats are moving in.
But at the same time, I also think government needs to step in more actively on the predistribution side to try to ensure that wages, as much as possible, rise more or less in sync with the economy. In the absence of strong labor unions and collective bargaining, I think this means using monetary and fiscal policy to keep the labor market tight.
We know that tends to be effective here in the United States. We saw it in the late 1990s, and we’ve seen it in the period since around 2015 or 2016. When the unemployment rate is below 5%, we almost always see wages rise—in many cases, or in fact most cases, faster than inflation. And that’s true all the way down to the bottom of the distribution.
This probably means doing more with minimum wages, and we’ve seen a lot of action at the state and local level in the United States. Going forward, we probably need to think more about shifting toward a system in which, instead of a crude universal minimum wage, we have occupation-specific or sector-specific minimum wages. Here in California, the state government has just enacted a specific minimum wage for the food service industry, and so we probably need to go further in that direction.
The Earned Income Tax Credit is another mechanism that can help. This is a government transfer, but it’s closely tied to wages and pay. There should perhaps also be more support for the widespread adoption of profit sharing.
So yes, I do think predistribution can also be critical. We see movement in this direction in Western Europe as well, with greater emphasis on minimum wages, first and foremost, as labor unions in many countries appear to be weakening. Not quite as dramatically as here in the United States, but nonetheless significantly, and in some cases collective bargaining is weakening as well.
CEO Pay, Bargaining Power, and Corporate Governance
Your comparative work on executive compensation shows that market forces alone cannot explain enormous differences in CEO pay and that the relative power of labor and executives matters significantly. Does this imply that today’s extreme top-end inequality should be understood less as an inevitable reward for productivity and innovation than as an institutional outcome shaped by bargaining power, corporate governance, taxation, and political choices? If so, what reforms would most effectively rebalance power without undermining the dynamism that you believe capitalism can provide?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: Bargaining power, corporate governance, taxation, and political choices have all mattered, and the rise of top incomes and top wealth is not simply a story about the economy or supply and demand.
So, what would help? I’m pretty pessimistic about resurrecting labor union strength. I hope I’m wrong about this, but the fact that union membership has declined so much in nearly all rich democratic countries, not just here in the US, suggests that the story we’ve told for half a century in the United States—that we have bad laws that make it too easy for employers to fend off unions or get rid of them when they exist—no longer seems very compelling, given declining union membership in so many other rich democratic nations.
A shift in corporate governance back toward emphasizing stakeholders rather than only shareholders would be really good, but here, too, I have trouble seeing the path forward. The governance model that was in place in the decades right after World War II was heavily influenced by the fear among business leaders and politicians of a return to economic depression, and especially by the fear of communism becoming more attractive. As a result, they were willing to give workers rising wages and a seat at the bargaining table in order to ensure that the whole system survived. But that is long gone now.
I think policies requiring works councils within firms and allowing employees to elect a third or half of the board of directors would be helpful. To get more money from those at the top, taxes are our main recourse at the moment.
I don’t want to see another world war if that’s what it takes to get business leaders or conservative politicians to say, “Oh yeah, okay, we need to go back to accommodating labor unions.” But in the absence of that, I don’t really see what the path is.
I think the focus probably has to be on these two institutional requirements—work councils and workers being allowed to elect board members—and then on taxes.
Liberalism and the Contemporary Backlash
Tea Party protest rally in Boston, Massachusetts. The demonstration, attended by roughly 5,000 people, took place near the historic site of the original Boston Tea Party. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your conception of liberalism places individual well-being, equal moral worth, and evidence-based reasoning at its core. Yet contemporary populists increasingly portray liberalism as an ideology of technocratic elites, cultural cosmopolitanism, weak borders, and indifference to community and national belonging. Does liberalism today suffer primarily from a communication problem, a problem of institutional performance, or a deeper philosophical tension between individual autonomy and citizens’ demands for solidarity, identity, order, and collective membership?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: This is a very difficult question for me, and I don’t have a strong view on it—or, I should say, a confident one. The main point I would make is that liberalism has been criticized and challenged for centuries, and I’m not convinced that the negative views of it today are any more widely or deeply held than they were during previous periods of backlash.
Unlike some people, I’m not fully convinced that liberalism needs a dramatic reappraisal or fundamental shift. It’s possible that, 10 years from now, much of this backlash will have weakened or disappeared, and we’ll look back and say that the period from the mid-2010s through the mid- to late 2020s was simply another episode in a long history of intense criticism, rethinking, and backlash. These things ebb and flow.
I might be wrong. There are quite a number of thinkers making the case for a more dramatic reconsideration. I’ve just been reading Daron Acemoglu’s book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy. It is a very new book and one among many arguing for a significant shift or reappraisal of liberalism, but I’m simply not convinced that such a shift is actually warranted. And I hope I’m right, though I might turn out to be wrong.
Toward an Expanded Rawlsian Conception of Social Justice
A striking implication of your work is that a society can tolerate substantial income or even wealth inequality and still achieve high levels of economic security, opportunity, freedom, inclusion, and subjective well-being—as the Nordic cases suggest. Does that mean the left should reconceptualize social justice away from equality of outcomes and toward what might be called an “expanded Rawlsian” framework: strong basic liberties, genuine opportunity, income security, universal public goods, and steadily improving living standards for the least advantaged? What, then, becomes of the traditional egalitarian aspiration to narrow the distance between the top and the rest?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: Yes, that is exactly my view. I do consider myself an egalitarian, and I think reducing inequality of outcomes remains a goal worth pursuing, especially in a high-inequality nation like the United States. But I do think it should be secondary to the other goals you mentioned.
The Deeper Choice in the 2026 Midterms
And lastly, Professor Kenworthy, stepping back from individual races, what do you see as the deeper political choice represented by the 2026 midterms? Is the United States choosing between Trumpist right-wing populism and a liberal-democratic alternative, between plutocratic capitalism and a more egalitarian political economy, or between competing visions of how capitalism itself should be governed? And if your evidence is correct that social democratic capitalism remains the most successful institutional arrangement yet devised, what would have to happen politically for the United States to move in that direction rather than toward either more radical market nationalism on the right or democratic socialism on the left?
Professor Lane Kenworthy: Because the United States is so large and geographically diverse, and because in our elections we vote for individual candidates rather than parties, I think very few US elections actually pose such a clear, big-picture choice between competing visions of policy, capitalism, liberalism, or democracy. We often over-interpret elections here in exactly those terms. But in most cases, people are voting for many different reasons. It may be about individual candidates, a single issue, or a particular set of issues, or they may simply have picked their party and stick with it no matter what.
Now, if that’s true, then for the United States to move toward something like the Nordic model in policy terms, Democrats need to win elections. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but basically, that’s how we’ve seen the country move historically over the last century in the direction of something like social democratic capitalism.
That’s also what we see at the state and local levels today. I mentioned before that a number of states have moved quite aggressively in this direction. There are limits to what states and cities can do, both because they have limited money at their disposal and because they face institutional constraints. They can’t do certain things that only the federal government can do. But they can do a lot.
When Democrats hold the governorship and both houses of the legislature, as they have in California, Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon, and elsewhere, we see substantial movement in this policy direction. My guess is that this will continue. And if and when Democrats again control all three decision-making bodies at the federal level, they’ll probably move in that direction again, as they did in 2021 when Biden came in, and in 2009 when Obama came in with Democratic majorities.
They’ll make limited progress, but they’ll probably make some real progress, and in most cases that progress lasts. There are no guarantees, of course. But it turns out that this is a pretty simple story, and I think it’s the right one.
Ahead of Sweden’s September 13, 2026 election, Associate Professor Anders Hellström argues that the Sweden Democrats’ influence can no longer be measured only by their vote share. Positions once treated as extreme have increasingly become “the default position, the standard,” while nativist rhetoric has become “a kind of ‘common sense.’” He also warns of growing resistance to the consequences of this restrictive turn, especially the expulsion of people deeply rooted in Swedish society, noting that “many Swedes feel that rejudification has gone too far.” For Assoc. Prof. Hellström, the deeper democratic challenge is whether mainstream parties can construct an inclusive national vision without reproducing SD’s exclusionary understanding of belonging, welfare, identity, and Swedishness.
As Sweden heads toward the September 13, 2026 general election, the country faces a political landscape increasingly shaped by the long-term normalization of the Sweden Democrats (SD) and by a broader mainstreaming of restrictive positions on migration, integration, citizenship, and national belonging. Once treated as a stigmatized outsider, SD has become a central actor in Swedish politics and is now deeply embedded in the governing architecture created through the Tidö Agreement. At the same time, the party continues to compete with the Moderates (M) for leadership of the Swedish right, while its core themes have increasingly influenced the language and policy priorities of mainstream parties.
In an interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Associate Professor Anders Hellström, Senior Lecturer in International Migration and Ethnic Relations at Malmö University and affiliated with the Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM), argues that the most important transformation may not be SD’s electoral strength alone, but the extent to which ideas once considered politically extreme have become normalized. According to Assoc. Prof. Hellström, positions on immigration that would have been regarded as beyond the mainstream a decade ago have increasingly become “the default position, the standard.”
This development, he suggests, has altered the political balance between stigmatization and accommodation. SD, once able to mobilize as an excluded underdog, has become part of the establishment. Yet mainstream accommodation has not necessarily weakened the party. As Assoc. Prof. Hellström puts it, from the voter’s perspective, “why should we vote for the copy when we have the original?” He also argues that nativist rhetoric has itself become “a kind of ‘common sense,’” reflecting a deeper transformation in the boundaries of legitimate political discourse.
The interview situates these developments within broader struggles over national identity, political myth, welfare chauvinism, and the meaning of Swedishness. Assoc. Prof. Hellström emphasizes the continuing importance of Folkhemmet as a powerful national narrative whose boundaries can be drawn inclusively or exclusively. He also highlights SD’s restorative vision of Sweden, built around nostalgia for an earlier and more homogeneous society.
At the same time, Assoc. Prof. Hellström points to growing resistance against the consequences of increasingly restrictive policies. He notes that many Swedes are uncomfortable with the expulsion of people who were born in Sweden, speak fluent Swedish, and have contributed to Swedish society, concluding that “many Swedes feel that rejudification has gone too far.”
Against the backdrop of the September 13 election, the interview therefore moves beyond the immediate question of who will govern Sweden. It asks whether the deeper transformation lies in SD entering government—or in the extent to which the political mainstream itself has already been reshaped by SD’s language, assumptions, and conception of national belonging. As Assoc. Prof. Hellström observes, “the Sweden Democrats have already won” in one important sense: Sweden’s major parties now broadly accept the need for a highly restrictive immigration policy.
Here is our interview with Associate Professor Anders Hellström, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
The SD’s Views on Immigration Policy Have Become the Default Position
A Sweden Democrats (SD) campaign poster ahead of Sweden’s September 13, 2026 parliamentary elections, featuring the slogan “This is how we make Sweden Sweden again” and highlighting the party’s policies on immigration, crime, Islamism, citizenship, welfare, and the economy.
Professor Hellström, welcome! Just days before the September 13 election, the Sweden Democrats remain close to 20 percent and are again competing with—or polling ahead of—the Moderates for leadership of the Swedish right. More than a decade ago, you described SD as the stigmatized “beast” of Swedish politics, excluded by mainstream parties but able to mobilize precisely through that exclusion. Today, SD is deeply embedded in the Tidö governing arrangement. Does this election mark the completion of SD’s journey from stigmatized outsider to normalized pillar of the Swedish party system, or does some element of its outsider status remain politically indispensable to its appeal?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: Yes and no. There is a concept we might call the mainstreaming of previously extreme positions. Ten years ago, derogatory statements about immigration and immigrants were regarded as extreme. The Sweden Democrats (SD) said things that the mainstream parties did not. Today, however, SD does not even have to say very much, because other parties—and their leaders—are themselves using very hostile language when talking about immigration and immigrants. They argue that Sweden needs a very restrictive immigration policy, and so forth.
So, what was depicted as extreme 10 years ago has become mainstream today. But you can also talk about a third stage. From the beginning, the Sweden Democrats were regarded as too extreme. Then they came to be seen as more radical challengers of the establishment: you could vote for the Sweden Democrats because they wanted to challenge the government and the establishment. But now something very interesting has happened. The Sweden Democrats have themselves become part of the establishment.
All the other parties are also saying insane things. Of course, the Sweden Democrats are still a little more extreme. But they are no longer seen as the underdog, because their views on immigration policy have become the default position, the standard.
Therefore, of course, I do not know what will happen in the election or how big they will become, but there is a feeling in society that many Swedes think developments toward rejudification have gone too far. Why do we expel people who were actually born in Sweden, who earn a lot of money, who speak fluent Swedish, and send them back to countries where perhaps their grandfather came from, even though they themselves have never been there? Why do you expel people who have done nothing wrong? So there is a tendency for many Swedes to feel that rejudification has gone too far.
‘The Beast’ Has Been Tamed
In “Feeding the Beast,” you and Peter Hervik challenged the idea that anti-immigration sentiment simply accumulates beneath an elite-imposed consensus until it eventually erupts. Instead, you argued that nativist rhetoric itself can make immigration anxieties more salient and thereby nourish radical-right support. Looking at Sweden in 2026, where restrictive migration rhetoric is now common across much of the mainstream, has the political system effectively “fed the beast” by adopting the language and problem definitions that originally distinguished SD?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: Yes. When we wrote this article, the Sweden Democrats were actually the beast. They were seen as something that should not be part of the establishment—something the cat had dragged in. But now, the beast has been tamed, so it has become, as I said before, something default, something standard. I would say that nativist rhetoric has become a kind of “common sense.”
Why Should We Vote for the Copy When We Have the Original?
Sweden Democrats’ Square Meeting in Umeå. Jimmie Åkesson speaks to the people on the city square where opposition left-wingers have formed a chain and protest in Umeå, Sweden on August 14, 2018. Photo: Shutterstock.
The Moderates (M), Christian Democrats (KD), and Liberals (L) have progressively abandoned the cordon sanitaire around SD, while migration, crime, citizenship, and integration policies have moved markedly in a restrictive direction. Mainstream parties often justified this shift as a strategy for neutralizing SD by responding to voter concerns. Yet SD remains close to one-fifth of the electorate. Does this suggest a fundamental failure of the accommodation strategy—that mainstream parties can adopt radical-right policies without recovering the voters who originally demanded them?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: Yes, I would say so, because from the voter’s perspective, you vote for the original, not the copy. So it doesn’t matter if the Moderates and the other parties are becoming more friendly toward SD or if they no longer see SD as a beast. Rather the opposite: they have understood the truth. Then voters say, “Okay, why should we vote for the copy when we have the original?” Therefore, this has actually strengthened their momentum, because, from the voter’s perspective, why should they vote for the copies?
The Stigma—That Tool for Mobilization—Is Gone
Your earlier work showed how the stigma attached to SD could paradoxically be politically productive because the party could portray itself and its voters as unfairly excluded from the legitimate political community. Now that institutional exclusion has largely disappeared, has SD lost an important mobilizational resource? Or has the party successfully transferred the old stigma from itself onto other antagonists—immigrants, Muslims, “liberal elites,” the media, or supranational institutions?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: It has lost that because there is a potential advantage in being a radical underdog. That can also be attractive to voters—you want to vote for the newcomer. But now, that stigma—that tool for mobilization—is gone. So it is good to be radical, but not to be seen as too extreme. You want to be close to the sum of equations, so to speak.
But now people are saying that maybe they have got too much power. And there may be, as I said, reactions against too many restrictions. But, of course, I don’t know that. Maybe there are a lot of people. We will see. It could be very interesting to see the election results on Sunday. There is a fraction of the Swedish population who actually like the policies that have been suggested by SD, but I don’t know how large that fraction is.
They Want to “Bring Sweden Back”
Your work on Nordic populist radical-right parties shows that the Sweden Democrats have been particularly active in constructing national myths around a lost “golden age” of ethnic homogeneity and social cohesion. How important is this nostalgic structure to SD’s appeal in the 2026 election? Is the party fundamentally mobilizing voters against immigration, or is immigration functioning as a symbol of a broader narrative that Sweden has lost something culturally, socially, and politically valuable?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: One thing that is important to understand is that SD does not want to create a new niche or anything like that. They want to restore Sweden. They want to bring Sweden back—to make Sweden great again, as Donald Trump says. For them, Sweden was great in the 1950s and 1960s, before the official adoption of multiculturalism in 1997 and before refugee migration.
For instance, an interesting fact is that in 1960, 4% of the Swedish population were foreign-born. Now, the figure is at least 20%. So this kind of demographic shift has created fissures in the population. This strategic appeal resonates with voters because they want to return to the period when they and their parents were young. They remember their childhood as a time when things were easier and society was more homogeneous. That is a fact: Sweden has become more diverse, and some people in the electorate dislike that demographic shift.
The Folkhemmet Has Always Had Both Inclusive and Exclusive Features
You have shown that SD has been unusually successful in appropriating the historical language of theFolkhemmetand linking the Social Democratic welfare-state tradition to a culturally bounded conception of national belonging. Has this appropriation altered the very meaning of the Swedish welfare state—from a universalist social project toward something increasingly conditional on national, cultural, or civilizational belonging?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: That is, of course, hard to tell. But if you have to remember one thing about the Folkhemmet, it is that it is a myth used strategically by political actors, but it is also a narrative of what Sweden is. Folkhemmet conveys the idea of Sweden as a people’s home. It is deeply embedded in many people’s minds, and the people’s home has always had both inclusive and exclusive features.
So, we welcome everyone—yes, everybody can become Swedish—but there have always been boundaries defining those who are not part of the people. Whether the people’s home becomes more inclusive or more exclusive depends, for instance, on which parties hold power. But the people’s home remains a major historical narrative that binds Swedes together. And it can be both inclusive and exclusive.
Who Actually Has the Right to Welfare Resources?
The concept of ‘welfare chauvinism’ captures the combination of social protection for insiders with exclusion or conditionality for outsiders. As migration politics has moved into the mainstream, do you see welfare chauvinism itself becoming normalized in Sweden—not merely as an SD position, but as an increasingly accepted way of defining solidarity and deservingness across the party system?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: Welfare chauvinism says that we want to have welfare. But for whom do we want welfare? Welfare for our people. It is the idea that you combine an active welfare state with social cohesion or cultural conformity. That also means having an idea of who is included among “the people.” Are immigrants included, or is it only for native Swedes? Who actually has the right to welfare resources?
And again, what will happen in the future depends very much on who actually leads the country. There are parties and movements representing both regressive and progressive forces in society and within the party-political structure as well. So there is a struggle right now, and I do not know exactly which direction Sweden will take.
For the SD A Muslim Can Never Truly Be Swedish
Jimmie Åkesson speaks to the people on the city square where opposition left-wingers have formed a chain and protest in Umeå, Sweden on August 14, 2018.
In your work on racism as a political activity, you emphasize that political struggles concern not only whether racism exists but also who gets defined as victim and perpetrator. You identify victim–perpetrator reversal as an important feature of far-right discourse. How significant is the growing rhetoric of‘svenskfientlighet’—hostility toward Swedes—in this transformation of Swedish political language? Does it allow majority-group grievance to be recoded as victimhood while simultaneously making structural inequalities affecting minorities more difficult to articulate?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: Yes, exactly. The victim-perpetrator reversal concerns the question of who the immigrant is. Is he or she a victim, or is he or she actually a perpetrator who threatens our Swedish values and can never become like us? This rhetoric—who is the victim and who is the perpetrator?—can also be applied, for instance, to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Who is the perpetrator, and who is the victim? That makes it important to look at the ideological motives behind such statements. According to the actor, who is the perpetrator and who is the victim? That can actually shift.
For instance, something I am looking at right now is the discussion about whether it is possible to be both Muslim and Swedish. For the Sweden Democrats, you have to make a choice between being a Muslim believer and being a Swede. You have to let go of one of those two identities. For them, a Muslim can never truly be Swedish. Or he or she can, but only by first letting go of the Islamic identity.
The SD Is No Longer Stigmatized
One of the puzzles running through your earlier research was that SD could expand despite overwhelmingly negative treatment from mainstream political and media actors. Your work on the “politics of shame” suggests that stigmatization may help create counterpublic identities in which supporters experience themselves as silenced, morally condemned, or excluded. Has Swedish democracy underestimated the political power of this counterpublic dynamic—particularly the way perceived exclusion can strengthen identification with populist radical-right movements?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: Yes, in the politics of shame, it is about how stigmatization can be used to create a shared identity. We have been stigmatized together, so we have something in common. They are evil, and we are the good guys. We come together, and that can trigger or stimulate a sense of in-group mobilization. But, as I said before, when SD is seen as part of the establishment, it loses that capacity. The party is no longer stigmatized. Increasingly, the risk SD faces is that it becomes associated with old news.
Liberal Democrats Need to Mobilize People Around a Common Vision
If condemnation and exclusion can reinforce populist counterpublics, but accommodation can normalize their worldview, mainstream democratic parties appear trapped between two strategies that can both strengthen the radical right. Is there a genuine democratic alternative betweenstigmatizationandaccommodation? What would an effective strategy toward SD look like if the objective is neither moral ostracism nor ideological imitation?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: You’re right: there is probably no single correct answer. But what you can do is focus on your own liberal-democratic institutions and build up their resilience. You also need to articulate clear visions—visions that can bring people together. Perhaps you can focus on other issues around which people can unite, such as fighting climate change, or something else that can mobilize people around a common purpose.
And when it comes to immigration, one-fifth of the Swedish population are immigrants. That is a reality. It is too late to say that immigrants should go home. Instead, you need to mobilize people around a common vision and be secure and confident in your own institutions.
Of course, you can disagree with someone and not share their views, but that does not mean you need to kill or beat them. At least you can talk. It is perfectly legitimate to have different opinions. The key is not to eliminate conflict, because conflict is natural and is part of politics. If you combine that recognition with the understanding that not everyone needs to agree with you, then you can be clear about your own vision—and create a vision that includes more people.
Democracy Necessitates Both Majority Rule and Minority Protection
Sweden continues to rank as a strong liberal democracy, yet democratic resilience is not only about the survival of elections and institutions. It also concerns the boundaries of legitimate political discourse, minority protection, pluralism, and social trust. Should we therefore understand the normalization of nativist language as a form of democratic erosion even when formal institutions remain stable? Or would that stretch the concept of democratic backsliding too far?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: If you look at what democracy is, Jonathan Bouffe wrote about the democratic paradox. Democracy is a paradox because it involves both majority rule and the protection of minorities. There is always a tension between the two; it is a compromise. There is no final, perfect solution. It is a balance that needs to be discussed continuously. You cannot simply say, “This is the perfect solution; this is how we do it.” That is why we have different people with different opinions.
Regarding your question, yes, problems can arise if you have a democracy that protects only the majority and disregards minorities. That creates a risk of sliding toward a more authoritarian state. You can end up with an illiberal democracy. But in order to have a liberal democracy, you need both majority rule and minority protection.
Sweden Was a Role Model for Integration Policy
Celebrating Sweden’s National Day in Norrköping, Sweden, on June 6, 2014. Immigrants and native Swedes participate together in National Day celebrations. Sweden’s National Day is an official public holiday. Photo: Dreamstime.
The success of SD has often been explained through failures in immigration policy, integration, crime prevention, or political responsiveness. But could the deeper failure of mainstream parties be representational rather than policy-specific—their inability to articulate a persuasive account of national belonging that acknowledges insecurity and social change without translating them into an exclusionary distinction between a virtuous native “people” and threatening outsiders?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: In a way, it is very interesting that you raised that, because what actually triggered my interest in the Sweden Democrats in the first place, a long time ago when I started, was a big paradox. Everyone, from the left to the right, was talking about the failure of integration. Then I looked at the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), and according to it, Sweden was the best in class. So Sweden was a role model for integration policy, while everyone on the street was talking about the failure of integration.
This paradox interested me. If you have this mantra of the failure of integration—and I am not saying that integration has been super successful—I am saying that if you have a population with more than 20% immigrants, of course, you can find examples of very successful integration, and you can also find examples of very poor integration. Because there are so many people, you can find many examples, depending on what you are looking for.
If you have this mantra, it has actually been very good news for the Sweden Democrats, because they can say, “We have an answer to that problem.” And for them, it is like: “don’t let them come here, and for those who do come, give them money so they can leave the country. And we don’t want to spend any money on integration.” But they have a recipe, while all the other parties, or most of the other parties, are talking about how integration has been so bad, so horrible, and that we have to do something. From the voter’s perspective, do you vote for someone who can say, “Okay, we have a solution”? Because everyone agrees that there is a problem.
Apart from that, you can also mention that it is very common in the debate to say that nobody wants to return to 2015, when you had the big reception crisis. I actually wrote a report on that period, and I concluded that it was a window of opportunity for both progressive and regressive forces in society. Yes, it created enormous pressure on municipalities. At the same time, you had a period when people opened their homes, there were language cafés, and there were very strong forces in civil society and in the Swedish Church. Everybody was saying, “Let’s fight together; we want to help the refugees.”
So there you have this tendency: both progressive and regressive forces. It is important to remember that. And when it comes to integration, you have examples of very good integration and also very poor integration. You can have both.
Politics Also Needs Stories
In your scholarship, political myths do not simply falsify history; they provide narratives through which communities establish continuity, belonging, and moral meaning. SD has been particularly effective at constructing a story in which contemporary Sweden represents a fall from an earlier, more cohesive national community. Why have mainstream parties been so much less effective at producing an alternative national narrative capable of combining diversity with social solidarity and a credible sense of collective continuity?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: That’s a very good question. From my perspective, you need to appreciate the storytelling dimension of representative politics. There is nothing wrong with telling stories that bind people together. In that sense, populism can be seen as a protest against politics as usual. It offers something beyond pragmatism—also a sense of redemption. It says: come together and find this emancipatory glue that can bind us together.
I think the answer—the key to addressing this—is not to reduce politics to technocratic means, because that becomes too rational. Politics also needs stories. For instance, you can tell a story about diversity: Sweden has become a much more exciting country to live in than it was 50 years ago. It is much more interesting, I would say, also from an outsider’s perspective. Yes, it is more exciting these days.
The SD Radicalizes Mainstream Popular Concerns
One of your articles distinguishes different strands within far-right ideology and argues that racism should be understood as a struggle over meaning rather than simply as an individual prejudice. As SD has professionalized and moderated parts of its public language, should scholars pay less attention to explicit racist statements and more attention to the underlying political work performed by categories such as culture, civilization, integration, national values, and “Swedishness”?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: That is one common distinction between the extreme and the radical. The thing is, if you look at the Sweden Democrats, they no longer use that language—that race-revolutionary language. Maybe they did in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They want to appear like the common man.
And their opponents normally make a mistake. They look at them and say, “No, don’t vote for SD.” Why? Or they portray them as very bad people, as evil guys. But the thing is, the Sweden Democrats do not use this kind of explicit racist rhetoric.
Instead, you can say that they radicalize mainstream popular concerns. And you can say that they rely on an identitarian logic—the logic of difference. It is like: “One people belongs to one country. Yes, those people are very nice, but they should not be here in Sweden. I don’t have anything against you, but you are not welcome in Sweden. It’s only for the Swedes. And the Swedish people are based on an ethnically homogeneous community.”
Politics Is Not Only About Distribution; It Is Also About Identity
People shop in Gamla Stan (Old Town) in Stockholm, Sweden on August 23, 2018.
The September 13 election appears increasingly structured not simply by a conventional left–right cleavage but by competing understandings of nation, migration, identity, and political community. Are we witnessing a durable transformation of Sweden’s cleavage structure in which the central conflict is becoming less about redistribution and more about who belongs to the nation, who deserves solidarity, and whose version of Swedishness is politically legitimate?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: I would say that it’s not an either-or question. Questions of distribution are important, and so are questions about identity and other issues. More and more, these have become political issues, so political cleavages are no longer only between the left and the right, but also between good and evil, or some kind of moralization of politics. So, these kinds of identity-related issues matter. But it doesn’t mean that redistribution does not matter. It only says that politics is not only about distribution; it is also about identity.
The Sweden Democrats Have Already Won
And lastly, Professor Hellström, looking beyond the immediate question of who governs after September 13, what would you regard as the more consequential long-term outcome: that SD formally enters government, or that its nativist conception of nationhood becomes sufficiently normalized that the distinction between the Sweden Democrats and the democratic mainstream becomes progressively harder to identify? In other words, is the deeper test of Swedish democratic resilience about keeping the radical right out of office, or about preventing the political mainstream itself from being transformed in its image?
Assoc. Prof. Anders Hellström: The thing is, we don’t know that yet. But both the current Prime Minister and the leader of the largest opposition party (Social Democrats) are talking about the need for a very restrictive immigration policy. So, from that perspective, the Sweden Democrats have already won. The biggest parties—the mainstream parties—agree that Sweden needs a very restrictive immigration policy.
But I can only say that there is considerable resistance to this. People are not very comfortable with it, especially when people who were actually born in Sweden, who may be well known, speak fluent Swedish, and have contributed a great deal to Swedish society are expelled from the country. A lot of Swedish people dislike that development.
What will happen in the future, we don’t know. We can only hope for the best. And it is important to acknowledge the storytelling dimension of representative politics and to build a vision that people can share and believe in.
In this commentary, author Zeynep Temel examines how passport hierarchies and unequal mobility shape not only who can travel, but also who gains the authority to represent the world through digital tourism. Drawing on research on visa regimes, mobility infrastructure, the tourist gaze, and platform-mediated representation, she argues that passport privilege can become representational privilege. Travel influencers do not simply document destinations; they participate in constructing their meanings for global audiences. Yet access to this representational power is structured by nationality, class, wealth, and mobility rights. Temel further shows how such inequalities can feed broader grievances around globalization, exclusion, sovereignty, and dignity, creating discursive conditions in which populist narratives may resonate without claiming that mobility inequality itself directly causes populism.
By Zeynep Temel*
A striking map of the world has circulated repeatedly on social media. Produced by Sightsmap from geotagged photographs uploaded to Google’s former Panoramio service, it visualizes photographic activity as points of light. Europe glows. North America is heavily illuminated. Other parts of the world appear far more sparsely represented. In the ranking associated with the map, New York, Rome, and Barcelona occupied the first three positions among the world’s most photographed cities (Marcus, 2014; Swanson, 2015).
Author-generated visualization inspired by the historical geography represented in Sightsmap. Sightsmap combined crowdsourced digital traces, principally geotagged photographic metadata from Google’s former Panoramio service, with other sources to estimate the popularity of places of tourist interest. The visualization should be understood as an illustrative reconstruction of the unequal geography of visibility represented by this historical digital ecosystem, rather than as a reproduction of the original Sightsmap or a comprehensive measure of global photographic activity (Tammet et al., 2013).
The map is not a contemporary measure of Instagram or TikTok activity. Panoramio itself was discontinued, and the visualization reflects a particular platform, user population, and period of digital photography. It should therefore not be mistaken for a neutral map of where photographs are taken today. Yet this limitation arguably makes the image more interesting rather than less. As an early visualization of digital tourism, Sightsmap raises a question that has become considerably more important in the age of travel influencers: who gets to see the world; and, consequently, who gets to construct its image for everyone else?
Contemporary travel content often makes international mobility appear almost frictionless. Creators move from Bangkok to Paris, spend a weekend in Istanbul, “discover” villages in the Caucasus, or work remotely from Bali. Borders are rarely protagonists in these narratives. Travel appears primarily as a function of curiosity, money, and individual choice. But a British, German, or Japanese travel creator and an Afghan, Pakistani, Nigerian, or Syrian creator do not encounter the same world of borders. They may look at the same map, but the map does not offer them the same possibilities.
This matters beyond tourism. If travel influencers increasingly participate in constructing how destinations are imagined by audiences who may never visit them, unequal access to international mobility also produces unequal opportunities to participate in the production of the global tourist imaginary. Passport privilege can, in other words, become representational privilege.
The Unequal Geography of Global Mobility
The passport is one of the most consequential yet normalized mechanisms through which states distribute international mobility. Research on visa regimes shows that globalization has not produced a uniformly borderless world. Instead, borders have become more permeable for particular populations. Czaika, de Haas, and Villares-Varela (2018) demonstrate the persistent differentiation built into international visa regimes, while Mau and colleagues (2015) describe the resulting hierarchy as a “global mobility divide.”
For holders of powerful passports, this divide can remain almost invisible. International travel may require little advance planning beyond purchasing transportation and accommodation. For others, the same journey can involve consular appointments, proof of employment and income, bank statements, travel insurance, accommodation reservations, substantial fees, and uncertainty over whether permission will ultimately be granted.
The costs of this system are themselves unequally distributed. Recchi, Deutschmann, and Gabrielli (2020) show that visa costs impose disproportionate burdens on travelers from poorer countries. Neumayer (2006) similarly demonstrates how visa restrictions allow states to regulate access to foreign spaces selectively rather than simply opening or closing borders to everyone equally.
Spijkerboer’s (2018) concept of a global “mobility infrastructure” is particularly useful here. International movement depends upon a network of laws, airports, consulates, transportation systems, technologies, financial resources, and administrative categories. This infrastructure enables some people to move quickly and predictably while making movement considerably more difficult for others.
A powerful passport therefore represents more than convenience. It is a form of mobility capital. And in the age of social media, mobility capital can become cultural capital.
Who Constructs the Tourist Gaze?
Urry’s (1990) classic concept of the “tourist gaze” challenged the idea that tourists simply encounter destinations as they are. What travelers consider beautiful, authentic, exotic, romantic, or worth photographing is shaped by representations they have encountered before travelling. The Sightsmap visualization offers an unusually literal illustration of this process. It does not simply tell us where tourists went; it records where a particular population of digitally connected travelers chose to photograph and geotag their surroundings. Research using geolocated tourism data has since demonstrated both the usefulness and the limitations of such digital traces: different platforms capture different tourist practices and populations, meaning that no single dataset can straightforwardly represent tourism itself (Salas-Olmedo et al., 2018).
Social media has nevertheless dramatically accelerated the circulation of the tourist gaze. Before visiting Cappadocia, travelers encounter thousands of images of hot-air balloons at sunrise. Bali appears through temples, beaches, rice terraces, and infinity pools. Paris is repeatedly condensed into a recognizable repertoire of balconies, cafés, streets, and monuments. Travelers subsequently reproduce many of those images themselves.
Instagram therefore does not simply document tourism. Research suggests that it participates in the co-creation of destination image: tourists, residents, tourism organizations, and influencers continuously produce and reproduce visual understandings of places (Iglesias-Sánchez et al., 2020). Influencers occupy an especially interesting position within this process. Their authority depends partly on the appearance of personal experience. Unlike conventional tourism advertising, influencer content often presents itself as an individual encounter with a destination: this is what I saw; this is what I discovered; this is what you should experience.
Yet these narratives necessarily involve selection. Landscapes are chosen, neighborhoods included or excluded, encounters edited, and experiences organized into coherent stories. Research examining influencer representations of destinations such as Iran demonstrates how social-media creators can reshape destination images by foregrounding particular dimensions of everyday life, hospitality, culture, and perceived authenticity. (Saeidi Motahar et al., 2021)
A constructivist perspective makes the significance of this process clearer. Destinations do not possess internationally shared meanings independently of representation. Their identities as “dangerous,” “romantic,” “authentic,” “undiscovered,” or “adventurous” are socially produced and stabilized through repeated narratives and images. Travel influencers increasingly participate in this meaning-making. The important question, then, is not simply what they show. It is who gets to travel enough to become an authoritative narrator of the world in the first place.
When Passport Privilege Becomes Representational Privilege
The connection does not require an assumption that Instagram or TikTok deliberately privileges particular nationalities. The mechanism is more mundane. Consider the conditions necessary to build a career around international travel. A creator able to enter dozens of countries without obtaining visas in advance can respond quickly to cheap flights, tourism-board invitations, brand collaborations, and emerging destinations. Travel can be frequent and spontaneous. Content can consequently be produced at the regular pace demanded by platform economies.
A creator requiring visas for many of those destinations faces a different production environment. Trips may need to be planned months ahead. Applications cost money. Passports may remain at consulates during processing. Bookings can be required before a visa decision is known. An application may simply be rejected. Mobility advantage can therefore become a content-production advantage.
Successful content generates followers and commercial opportunities; those opportunities finance further travel; further travel produces additional content. Passport privilege does not determine who succeeds as an influencer, and creators from the Global South are neither absent nor passive within digital tourism. Wealth, class, language, domestic mobility, and platform access further complicate any simple North–South division.
But nationality still structures the administrative conditions under which cross-border content can be produced. This is also why Said’s (1978) much older question of representational authority remains relevant. Orientalism was concerned not merely with whether Western descriptions of other societies were accurate, but with the unequal power to classify, describe, and produce knowledge about them.
Digital tourism is obviously not equivalent to nineteenth-century Orientalism, and every outsider representation of another society should not be interpreted as domination. Yet the underlying questions remain surprisingly contemporary: Who moves? Who observes? Who narrates? And who appears primarily inside somebody else’s narrative?
From Unequal Mobility to Political Grievance
The political significance of this inequality lies partly in its visibility. Social media places radically different experiences of globalization on the same screen. One person documents spontaneous weekend trips across borders; another spends months assembling documents for permission to visit a single country. Research on passport discrimination suggests that mobility restrictions can be experienced not merely as administrative inconvenience but through questions of dignity, recognition, and unequal treatment. (Yasin et al., 2024)
It would be too strong to argue that these experiences produce populism. Visa rejection does not turn someone into a populist, and travel influencers do not cause nationalist politics. The relationship is more indirect. Populist narratives frequently acquire force by translating complicated structural inequalities into morally intelligible conflicts: ordinary people against privileged elites, the nation against external institutions, or those who are excluded against those perceived to benefit from globalization.
Mobility inequality provides unusually tangible material for such grievances because it exposes one of globalization’s central contradictions. The contemporary international order celebrates openness, connectivity, and circulation while continuing to distribute the practical freedom to move largely according to nationality.
Digital platforms make this contradiction particularly visible. Research on social-media populism has shown how online communication can transform perceived exclusion, foreign influence, and national grievance into politically resonant narratives (Ragragio, 2022). Mobility inequality can enter the same discursive environment, particularly where unequal treatment becomes interpreted through wider debates over Western privilege, sovereignty, globalization, or national dignity. Travel influencers do not create this inequality. They can, however, inadvertently become some of its most visible symbols.
The Politics Behind the Picture
This brings us back to the illuminated Sightsmap. Its brightest areas should not be read simply as a hierarchy of beautiful or interesting places. Nor can they straightforwardly be interpreted as a map of passport privilege: population, tourism infrastructure, platform adoption, wealth, connectivity, and the particular demographics of Panoramio users all shaped what became visible. But that is precisely the point. Maps of digital visibility are produced by social conditions. They do not simply mirror the world.
The same is true of contemporary travel influencing. Calls for greater diversity among travel creators are worthwhile, but representation cannot be separated from the conditions under which representation is produced. If some creators face substantially greater obstacles simply to reach destinations, the imbalance cannot be solved entirely through more inclusive influencer campaigns or changes in platform policy.
Part of the inequality exists before anyone opens Instagram. It exists in visa regimes, consular practices, passport hierarchies, income inequalities, transportation networks, and the broader infrastructure governing international movement.
A constructivist reading of travel influencing brings these elements together. Influencers do not merely reflect an already existing tourist world. Through repeated images, narratives, classifications, and recommendations, they participate in constructing that world; helping determine which destinations become desirable, which places appear dangerous or welcoming, and what counts as an “authentic” experience. But the opportunity to participate in this construction is itself structured by unequal mobility.
The digital tourist gaze therefore tells us something larger about globalization. The freedom to see the world and the power to represent it are not entirely separate privileges. Those who can cross borders most easily are particularly well positioned to narrate what lies on the other side. The question raised by that old map of illuminated photographs is therefore still worth asking: when the world becomes an image, who gets to take the picture?
(*) Zeynep Temel is a PhD candidate in International Political Economy at Marmara University, Istanbul, and is currently based in Shanghai conducting research for her doctoral dissertation. Her research interests span inequality, platform capitalism, popular culture, and gender, with a regional focus on East Asia. She works on how economic and political structures shape everyday practices, identities, and moral expectations, particularly through attention, consumption, and labor under contemporary capitalism.
References
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Iglesias-Sánchez, P. P.; Correia, M. B.; Jambrino-Maldonado, C. & de las Heras-Pedrosa, C. (2020). “Instagram as a co-creation space for tourist destination image-building: Algarve and Costa del Sol case studies.” Sustainability, 12(7), 2793. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12072793
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Klaudia Koxha(Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Lausanne).
Speakers
“Populist Strategies of Normalizing Demographic Fears,” by Oscar Mazzoleni (Professor in Political Science and Political Sociology at the University of Lausanne).
“The Scientific Normalization of ‘the Great Replacement’ Conspiracy,” by Alberta Giorgi (Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bergamo).
“From Demographic Winter to Civilizational Struggle: Anti-Abortion Networks and the Global Radical Right,” by Carol Mason (Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities and Professor at University of Kentucky, US).
“Mestizaje, Backlash, and the Politics of Demographic Populism: Race and Gender in Latin America,” by Carlos de la Torre (Professor at the Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Florida).
“Anti-Muslim Mobilization: Demographic Change and Radical-Right Populism in Austria,” by Reinhard Heinisch(Professor of Comparative Austrian Politics at the University of Salzburg, European Studies Center associate at the University of Pittsburgh and visiting lecturer at Renmin University of China).
Klaudia Koxha is a Senior Researcher at the University of Lausanne, where she works on an international research project examining radical right populism and conspiracy theories across four European democracies. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Paris Lodron University of Salzburg and was a visiting researcher at American University in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on populism and the radical right, European integration and EU policy, gender equality, party politics, and comparative and multi-level politics. Alongside her academic work, she has contributed expertise to regional and international organizations on issues including gender equality and inclusion, integrity, and democratic governance. She regularly contributes to public and policy debates through invited talks, lectures, and expert commentary, with her work featured in outlets including EUobserver, El Mundo, The European Correspondent, and DeFacto. She is co-editor of The Radical Right and Demographic Populism (Manchester University Press, 2026), New Dynamics of Contestation in EU–Western Balkan Relations (Palgrave, 2026), and Perspectives on Populism (Nomos, 2024). Her recent research appears in Government and Opposition journal, with further work accepted for publication in Comparative European Politics and forthcoming with Presses de l’Université Laval.
Oscar Mazzoleni is a professor in political science at the University of Lausanne where he leads the Research Observatory for regional research. He has achieved an interdisciplinary educational path, with a degree in sociology and anthropology and a PhD in contemporary history between the universities of Lausanne and Turin. He has been visiting professor and research fellow at the Universities of Columbia, Cornell, Laval, Geneva, Groningen, Torino, Sorbonne-Panthéon- Paris, Science-Po-Paris, Valencia, Salzburg, European University Institute of Florence, La Tuscia, and Roma-Sapienza. His current interests are devoted on political parties, populism, nationalism, regionalism, electoral studies, and Swiss politics in comparative perspective.
Alberta Giorgi is an associate professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bergamo. Her work explores discursive boundaries and classifications, particularly at the intersection of politics, gender, religion, and science. She has recently co-edited with H. Eslen-Ziya, (Un)silencing Academia in Times of Epistemic Conflicts. Navigating Online Violence (Routledge 2026). She is co-editing with Pauline Cullen Mapping Political Sociology Ambiguities and Complexities for Unpredictable Futures (Routledge 2026)
Carol Mason is the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities and a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky, USA. She is the author of four books on various aspects of the rise of the Right since the 1960s. University of California Press published her latest monograph, From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary, in 2025.
Carlos de la Torre is a professor at the Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. He has authored several manuscripts and edited volumes on populism. His most recent books are Populism and Fascism, Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Global Populisms with Treethep Srisa-nga (Routledge Press, 2021); Populisms: A Quick Immersion (Tibidabo editions, 2019); and Populist Seduction in Latin America (Ohio University Press, second edition, 2010).
Dr. Reinhard Heinisch is a Professor of Comparative Austrian Politics at the University of Salzburg and head of the Department of Political Science. He received his academic training in the US where he completed his PhD at Michigan State University and then taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1994 to 2009. Heinisch’s research focuses on the rise of the radical right, populism, democracy, and political parties. Dr. Heinisch is the author of over 40 research articles and more than 50 other scholarly publications including 14 books. His research appeared in journals such as Journal of European Political Research, Political Studies,Journal ofCommon Market Studies, Party Politics, West European Politics, Democratization, Representation, and many others. His book publications include Understanding Populist Party Organization: The Radical Right in Western Europe (Palgrave 2016); The People and the Nation: Populism and Ethno-Territorial Politics in Europe (Routledge 2019), Political Populism. A Handbook, Nomos (2021), and Politicizing Islam in Austria (Rutgers University Press 2024).
After all votes were counted, S leader Magdalena Andersson’s bloc secured 176 seats to the Tidö coalition’s 173. Over the past four years, the SD-backed government has tightened immigration policy, promoted repatriation, made temporary residence permits the norm, and introduced tougher criminal penalties. The Social Democrats did not consistently oppose these measures and have themselves embraced a more restrictive approach to immigration. Yet, despite this broad political consensus, the opposition won.
