Professor Lane Kenworthy (Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Yankelovich Chair in Social Thought at the University of California, San Diego).
Speakers
“The 2026 Midterms in Comparative Perspective: Shifting Support for Trumpism and the Issues Reshaping the Electoral Landscape,” byProfessor Sheri Berman (Professor at Department of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University).
“Explaining the Socialist Revival in the US,” by Professor Michael Kazin (Professor of History, Georgetown University).
“Democratic Resilience Amid Pernicious Political Polarization,” by Professor Jennifer McCoy (Regent’s Professor Emerita of Political Science, Georgia State University).
“Beyond Washington, DC: American Federalism and the Midterms,” by Professor Andrew Karch (Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota).
Lane Kenworthy is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Yankelovich Chair in Social Thought at the University of California, San Diego. He studies the causes and consequences of living standards, capabilities, poverty, inequality, mobility, employment, economic growth, social policy, taxation, public opinion, and politics in the United States and other wealthy, long-standing democracies. His books include The Good Society (thegoodsociety.net), Is Inequality the Problem? (2025), Would Democratic Socialism Be Better? (2022), Social Democratic Capitalism (2020), How Big Should Our Government Be? (2016), Social Democratic America (2014), Progress for the Poor (2011), Jobs with Equality (2008), Egalitarian Capitalism (2004), and In Search of National Economic Success (1995). More information on his research and teaching is available at lanekenworthy.net.
Professor Berman: “The 2026 Midterms in Comparative Perspective: Shifting Support for Trumpism and the Issues Reshaping the Electoral Landscape”
Professor Sheri Berman will discuss the issues dominating political competition in the run-up to the 2026 American midterm elections, examine the evolving fortunes of Trumpism in the United States, and compare its trajectory with the development of populism in other parts of the world today.
Sheri Berman is a professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research interests include European history and politics; the development of democracy; populism and fascism; and the history of the left. She has written about these topics for a wide variety of scholarly and non-scholarly publications, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and VOX. She currently serves on the boards of the Journal of Democracy and Political Science Quarterly. Her last book was Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day (Oxford University Press 2019). Her most recent book, The Political Consequences of Economic Ideas: Neoliberalism, the Left, and the Fate of Democracy is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Professor Kazin: “Explaining the Socialist Revival in the US”
Professor Michael Kazin will examine the roots of the contemporary socialist resurgence in the United States, tracing them back to the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s and the Great Recession of 2008–2009, which helped create the conditions that encouraged Bernie Sanders to run in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. Professor Kazin will then assess the achievements of contemporary socialists, particularly those affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), while also considering the limits of their political appeal and constituency.
Michael Kazin is a Professor in the Department of History, Georgetown University. He is an expert in US politics and social movements, 19th and 20th centuries. His most recent book is What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) which was named an Editor’s Choice by the NY Times Book Review and one of the best ten books published on US history in 2022 by Kirkus Reviews. His previous book War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918 (Simon and Schuster, 2017) was also named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review and was awarded the Elise M. Boulding Prize for the best book in peace history by the Peace History Society. His previous books include American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (Knopf, 2011), which was named a Best Book of 2011 by The New Republic, Newsweek/Daily Beast, and The Progressive. Kazin is emeritus co-editor of “Dissent,” a leading magazine of the American left since 1954.
Professor McCoy: “Democratic Resilience Amid Pernicious Political Polarization”
Professor Jennifer McCoy will examine how Americans are responding to extreme political polarization and contentious midterm elections. She will also consider how polarization may evolve after the midterms under different electoral outcomes.
Jennifer McCoy is Regent’s Professor Emerita of Political Science at Georgia State University and Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as Senior Fellow at Cornell University’s Center on Democracy and a Research Affiliate at CEU’s Democracy Institute in Budapest. She was named a 2024 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, one of 28 scholars nationwide who explore political polarization as well as what might help tackle division and strengthen American democracy. A specialist on democratic erosion, recovery, and renewal; polarization and depolarization; mediation and conflict prevention; election processes and election observation; and Latin American politics, Professor McCoy has authored or edited six books and dozens of articles. Her forthcoming book is How to Depolarize: Remaking Global Democracies in the 21st Century, with Murat Somer, (Princeton University Press, May 2027). McCoy has been a visiting scholar at Koc University in Istanbul, Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, and both the Democracy Institute and the Institute of Advanced Studies at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She was named a GSU Regent’s University Professor in 2023 (the highest honor bestowed by the University System of Georgia).
Professor Karch: “Beyond Washington, DC: American Federalism and the Midterms”
Professor Andrew Karch will examine the significance of the 2026 midterm elections beyond the national level. While most journalistic coverage focuses on partisan control of Congress, Professor Karch will emphasize that the stakes at the state level are also substantial. He will begin by reviewing recent trends in partisan control of state governments and discussing the state-level offices that will appear on the ballot. He will also highlight several significant ballot initiatives that voters in some states will consider.
The second part of Professor Karch’s presentation will examine the role of state governments at a moment of heightened partisan polarization. He will discuss how the Elections Clause of the US Constitution gives states a central role in administering elections, drawing congressional districts, and determining who is part of the American electorate. He will also examine how states have increasingly become sites of resistance, with state officials challenging national government policies and priorities. Professor Karch will argue that the significant impact of American federalism underscores the need to look beyond national-level results when assessing the midterm elections and their broader consequences.
Andrew Karch is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, where he has taught since 2010. His research centers on the political determinants of public policy choices in the contemporary United States, with a special focus on federalism and state politics. His most recent book, Responsive States: Federalism and American Public Policy, is co-authored with Shanna Rose of Claremont McKenna College and was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. His previous book, Early Start: Preschool Politics in the United States (University of Michigan Press), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013. He is also the author of Democratic Laboratories: Policy Diffusion among the American States (University of Michigan Press, 2007). He is currently serving on the editorial boards of State Politics & Policy Quarterly, Policy Studies Journal, and Publius: The Journal of Federalism. He is also a fellow of the Center for the Study of Federalism, and he previously served two terms as Chair of the Executive Council of the Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations Section of the APSA.
In an interview with ECPS, Professor Natália Sátyro argues that Brazil’s 2026 presidential election reflects a conflict extending far beyond the Lula–Flávio Bolsonaro runoff. At its center is a Bolsonarismo that, she says, “has already become bigger than Bolsonaro himself”—a durable movement combining neoconservative cultural politics, neoliberalism, anti-system mobilization, and competing notions of who deserves state protection. Professor Sátyro examines how family, religion, gender, race, class, and welfare policy have become intertwined in this struggle, contrasting Bolsonarismo’s “familialism by default” with a more state-centered social-protection model. Ultimately, she sees Brazil confronting two competing projects: “one very conservative and neoliberal, and the other more progressive and focused on social justice,” with profound implications for democracy, citizenship, and social rights.
Brazil’s 2026 presidential election has become more than a contest between President Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro. It has developed into a struggle over competing conceptions of democracy, citizenship, social protection, family, gender relations, and the role of the state. The first round placed Flávio Bolsonaro at 47 percent and Lula at 45.1 percent, sending the election to an October 25 runoff. Against this backdrop, Professor Natália Sátyro, Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), brings to the debate a distinctive perspective grounded in her scholarship on family policy, social protection, institutional change, state capacity, gender, and minority access to welfare.
At the center of Professor Sátyro’s analysis is the argument captured in the headline of this interview: “Bolsonarismo has already become bigger than Bolsonaro himself.” In her view, Bolsonarismo has developed into “a strong movement with neoconservative characteristics” and “a powerful neoliberal appeal,” combining anti-PT and anti-system politics with a differentiated conception of state protection for those considered deserving and undeserving. She argues that its electoral advance has come not only at the expense of the left but also of Brazil’s traditional mainstream right, making Bolsonarismo, in her words, “certainly here to stay.”
The durability of Bolsonarismo, Professor Sátyro suggests, cannot be understood solely through electoral competition. It is embedded in a broader cultural and institutional project in which the family occupies a central place. She describes an “explicit defense of a traditional patriarchal type of family” and emphasizes the political importance of evangelical networks in mobilizing support around family, gender, sexuality, education, and moral order. For Professor Sátyro, the cleavage is therefore not simply between cultural conservatism and redistribution. “What is at stake today,” she argues, “is democracy versus something non-democratic
Her analysis also brings welfare-state politics into this broader conflict. Professor Sátyro characterizes the Bolsonaro project as one of “familialism by default,” in which “the family and the market should be the pillars of social protection in Brazil.” This model, she argues, reinforces gendered caregiving roles and deepens class inequalities because affluent families can purchase care in the market while poorer families depend more heavily on extended family and community networks.
Ultimately, Professor Sátyro sees Brazil as confronting two competing political projects: “one very conservative and neoliberal, and the other more progressive and focused on social justice.” The runoff, therefore, is not merely about presidential succession. It raises a larger question about what kind of citizenship, welfare regime, social order, and democratic state Brazil will seek to consolidate in the years ahead.
Here is our interview with Professor Natália Sátyro, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Bolsonarismo Is Certainly Here to Stay
Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro poses with anti-riot police agents after cast their ballot in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil on November 29, 2020. Photo: Antonio Scorza.
Professor Sátyro, welcome, and thank you for joining us. Let me begin with Bolsonarism itself: Flávio Bolsonaro finished the first round ahead of Lula, while Bolsonarist candidates also performed strongly in congressional and gubernatorial contests. Does this suggest that Bolsonarism has become an institutionalized political identity capable of surviving Jair Bolsonaro’s personal leadership?
Professor Natália Sátyro: First of all, it’s important to emphasize that I’m not an expert on elections or political behavior, but I have no doubt that Bolsonarismo has already become bigger than Bolsonaro himself. It’s a strong movement with neoconservative characteristics and certainly a powerful neoliberal appeal. But, as I did show in the book, it embraces two conceptions of the state: one for those deemed deserving and another for those deemed undeserving. Essentially, however, it is an anti-PT—the Workers’ Party—and anti-system movement with strong popular appeal.
In the absence of a satisfactory response from the left over these 20 years, this far-right movement has defeated both the left and the mainstream right at the same time. Traditional and mainstream right-wing parties have shrunk, apparently irreversibly. In this election, even the Centrão, what we call the “Big Center” or broad bloc, which consists of transactional parties has lost ground. So, it’s a massive win for the far right.
We therefore need to understand this powerful movement in our society better and not think that it is unique to the Brazilian political arena at this moment. However, in Brazil, Bolsonarismo is certainly here to stay. It is strongly inspired by fascism. It is no coincidence that its first proposed move is to co-opt the judiciary.
I read recently that what is happening in Brazil and around the world is a far-right cultural revolution. The huge change that we need to study better—that description fits what we are seeing. Each country is identifying its enemies and determining its own setbacks.
There Is an Explicit Defense of a Traditional Patriarchal Type of Family
Your work shows how strongly family policy reflects the ideological project of the government in power. Does the Lula–Flávio Bolsonaro runoff represent two fundamentally different conceptions of the family and its relationship to the state?
Professor Natália Sátyro: Yes, absolutely. There is an explicit defense of a traditional patriarchal type of family, with no room for the diversity of family arrangements that is already part of our society. Bolsonaro has massive support from the Evangelical Church, and there is no doubt that this is one source of his power and broader reach. It is one of the mechanisms used for electoral mobilization.
Yet, this entire defense is deeply contradictory in itself because Bolsonaro, the father, has been married three times, and Flávio Bolsonaro’s running mate—the future vice president—has been accused of raping a five-year-old child. So, we are talking about a hypocritical defense. The fact remains, however, that any non-traditional family arrangement will, at the very least, receive less attention from public policy.
In Brazil today, 52% of households are headed by women. This is equivalent to 41 million female-headed families in a population of 214 million. As I showed in the book, during Bolsonaro’s time in office, all concepts of family other than the traditional one were removed from official documents, as were any references to gender issues. In other words, despite the actual composition of our families, the type of arrangement being defended is already a minority one.
What Is at Stake Today Is Democracy Versus Something Non-Democratic
Supporters of Brazil’s former President (2019–2022) Jair Bolsonaro hold signs during a demonstration in São Paulo, Brazil, on September 7, 2025. Photo: Dreamstime.
You describe the Bolsonaro period as a “neoconservative turn” that elevated the traditional family and gender roles. Is this family-centered cultural politics still one of Bolsonarism’s strongest mechanisms of electoral mobilization in 2026?
Professor Natália Sátyro: Yes, that is the point I tried to make before, because this family-centered cultural politics is very closely linked with the Evangelical Church project. I have no doubt that they are very strongly territorialized in Brazil and that, for sure, this is one of the mechanisms for electoral mobilization. Not only in 2026; since 2018, this has already been mapped in the literature.
Can the second round be understood as a contest between Bolsonarism’s culturally conservative politics of identity and moral order, and Lulism’s emphasis on redistribution and social protection? To what extent is this divide still structured by class, and how far is it now mediated by religion and family values?
Professor Natália Sátyro: Analytically, that is what is happening, but it is more than that, because it is not limited to conservatism versus redistribution. What is at stake today is democracy versus something non-democratic. When Lula won in 2022, his coalition included former rivals from the far right that existed before Bolsonaro and what united that entire spectrum was a commitment to the rule of law.
The election was characterized by a contest between those who defend democracy and democratic institutions and those who openly spoke against the democratic regime, defending military dictatorship, torture, and a coup. That is the scenario once again. Flávio Bolsonaro performed well electorally without talking about his political project itself. Yet there are slogans directed against the Supreme Federal Court and the Federal Constitution of 1988.
That said, I will return to the core of your questions. Yes, there is a cultural war centered on the family and moral issues. The candidate for governor of Espírito Santo, one state in the Southeast, who is expected to win in the runoff now, was the politician who intervened to prevent an abortion for an 11-year-old girl who had been raped and was pregnant.
Amid all this, there is also the interesting ability of Brazilians to make jokes in difficult situations. There is now an online wave of gays and trans people saying that if Bolsonaro wins, they will expose heterosexuals who are not real ones. In some cases, they are already doing so. These are examples of the cultural and moral war that we are living now. Of course, I have just taken two instances, but it is spread across the digital and virtual debate today. It’s not only in the literature, but we can see it even in the cooperative media.
The Entire LGBTQI+ Community Is at Risk
Your research emphasizes that Brazilian governments differ not simply in how much they support families, but in what kind of family they recognize. How politically consequential is this distinction for women, single-parent families, LGBTQ+ citizens, and other non-traditional family arrangements?
Professor Natália Sátyro: As I said, if what we are discussing is democracy rather than competing government programs or projects, we can imagine the imminent risk—in other words, a civilizational setback. In a conservative society, the entire LGBTQI+ community is at risk. The study that I have recently shows how transphobic our society is.
Your recent research finds that transphobia can operate through street-level discretion in social assistance, restricting transgender citizens’ access to rights. How vulnerable are minority protections when political polarization legitimizes competing moral definitions of deservingness and citizenship?
Professor Natália Sátyro: As I said, if what we are discussing is democracy rather than competing government programs, you can imagine the imminent risk—in other words, a civilizational setback. In a conservative society, the entire LGBTQI+ community is at risk. The study in question shows how transphobic our society actually is, while other studies show that it is conservative, racist, hostile to poor people, and now fascist as well. This is cultural. The far right has found fertile ground and, in addition, is better than the left at using social media.
To answer your question directly, I would consider two dimensions. In terms of public policy, the answer is straightforward. I have no doubt that policies for this population have been dismantled and, for the most part, terminated. He has already promised to privatize everything possible and make the deepest cuts he can. So, it’s a very clear project.
But Bolsonaro and Bolsonarism are violent. They want to eliminate the enemy almost literally. That is why I call it fascism, despite the conceptual imprecision. The level of insecurity experienced by minority groups is therefore very high.
In 1968, one of the harshest years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, when Institutional Act Number Five was promulgated, constitutional rights and habeas corpus were suspended. A remark by Vice President Pedro Aleixo became well known. He was the only one who voted against this act, and his words are still quoted today in Brazil. Referring to the act, he said, “The problem with a law like this is not you”—he was addressing the president at the time—“nor those who govern the country. The problem is the policeman on the street corner.”
Thus, a government like the one Flávio Bolsonaro would lead, modeled on his father’s, would authorize everyday violence against these people. I have no doubt that this would be a civilizational setback, together with no protection for them from the government or from the rule of law.
Brazilian Society Has Always Been Conservative
Supporters of Flávio Bolsonaro gather on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo for an Independence Day rally under the slogan “Brazil Will Win.” Photo: Dreamstime.
The Bolsonaro governments promoted a heteronormative, patriarchal conception of family while seeking to roll back rights associated with sexual and gender minorities. To what extent has this become a durable component of Brazilian right-wing populism rather than merely a Bolsonaro-era policy agenda?
Professor Natália Sátyro: Studies from the 1990s show that Brazilian society has always been conservative. Other studies from the 2000s showed that even poor people were conservative, which is one reason Lula took so long to win the presidency. Unfortunately, I do not think this will end easily. To respond directly to your question, these people used to be ashamed, and they are still ashamed. Recent polls refer to a shy vote: voters who do not discuss or talk about their choice but vote for Flávio Bolsonaro.
Brazilian society is deeply marked by slavery, and its traces remain. White people struggle to acknowledge improvements in the well-being of poor people. Recent opinion polls from Quaest, conducted less than a month ago, show that the middle class feels it has not gained much under Lula’s government, although it has not lost either, but they resent improvements experienced by the poor classes. So, it’s a kind of class conflict as well.
The difference between now and 38 years ago is that half of the population now knows its rights, and our minorities have learned during these 38 years because last week the Constitution marked 38 years of our democracy. This part of the population now knows about their citizenship. They know that they are citizens. I can’t say that, at the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, it was so clear what citizenship was for most people.
The other side, however, wants to return to a time that was even close to slavery. I am saying that because elected senators are already saying they will abolish labor laws, that working 16 hours a day is acceptable, and that workers can negotiate such working conditions directly with their employers. This is also a culture war.
It’s a change, but it is also undoubtedly a class and racial conflict. For example, the Northeast votes overwhelmingly for Lula; the white South of the country votes for Flávio Bolsonaro. People in South Brazil see themselves as white and do not see Northeast Brazilians as white, and they see them as undeserving people.
Lula, the Left, and Mobilizing Younger Voters
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva walks among supporters on Augusta Street at São Paulo on the eve of the brazillian election on October 1, 2022. Photo: Yuri Murakami.
Conversely, the PT governments expanded social participation, women’s rights, racial-equality agendas, and policies directed toward vulnerable groups. Can Lula still mobilize these constituencies as effectively when his present coalition is broader and more politically constrained?
Professor Natália Sátyro: We will find out in two weeks whether he can mobilize enough people to turn the result around. There is no doubt that he mobilized these groups effectively, but the left in general has difficulty communicating with young people specifically. My generation failed to teach them that democracy and social rights can never be taken for granted.
A generation that grew up with universal public health care does not understand what a world without it would be. Research shows that young people are dissatisfied with the well-being produced by redistributive policies. They want more. They want the world of influencers from TikTok—a world of wealth that does not reflect the reality of Brazil.
In addition, the left has not yet gone digital, including in its campaign, as the right and far right have. The Brazilian left uses social media poorly and has not yet understood the power of the virtual world, at least so far, either to mobilize or to understand its impact on people.
The fact is that the PT, the Workers’ Party, has grown old just as Lula has. However, Lula made a very smart move on the eve of the election. He did not attend the debate on the country’s largest television network. It’s a very traditional one. Instead, he gave an interview to a podcast that is more right-wing than left; it’s not a left-wing channel, and it reaches young people outside this left bubble. In his closing remarks, he challenged young people, saying that if they think all politicians are corrupt, they should enter politics and do their part.
I don’t know whether this was the reason, but since Monday, social media has been flooded with messages about how to increase online engagement, and students and young people are taking to the streets across Brazil. There is a different mobilization underway. We will see whether it persuades some part of the 33 million people who do not vote, many of whom are young. The source is Jairo Nicolau, a political scientist who studied this. Nicolau said that most of the people who do not vote are young.
Lula remains particularly strong among poorer voters and beneficiaries of social programs. Does this indicate the continuing resilience of Lulism as a class-based social-protection coalition, or has redistribution become increasingly filtered through cultural and religious identities?
Professor Natália Sátyro: It’s a class-based social protection. Actually, this new religious identity has certainly changed the cultural and political scene in Brazil. It means that changes in culture and in the way, people see public policy are very important explanatory factors.
Evangelicals, Family, and the Seven Mountains
Brazil’s electoral divide also has a strong religious dimension, with Bolsonarism particularly strong among evangelicals and Lula stronger among Catholics. How has the politics of family transformed religious belonging into a broader political cleavage over gender, sexuality, education, and social order?
Professor Natália Sátyro: I am not sure if I can answer that question. It is very sociological for a political scientist. But studies show that evangelicals in Brazil have had a project of political power since at least the year 2000. It seeks to occupy the seven mountains: family, religion, education, politics, media, arts and entertainment, and business. So, your question makes perfect sense. The family is central to this project and is an institution to be preserved. This means that any arrangement that departs from these values is seen as a threat to this project, and every threat must be eliminated. This is the point that I was trying to make before with the LGBTQIA+ and other communities. I think it is on the same page here.
Your work distinguishes “familialism by default” from “supported familialism.” Where would you place the competing social-policy projects represented by the Lula and Bolsonaro camps along this continuum, and what do their differences reveal about the role assigned to the state, the family, and gender relations in Brazil’s welfare regime?
Professor Natália Sátyro: Bolsonaro would be strongly on the side of familialism by default, not the supported one, because of conservatism and the whole project of the Evangelical Church: women as caregivers and men as providers. Therefore, the advances made in recent years will certainly be lost. For example, since 2023, we have had a national care policy. But there will be no retrenchment; there will be termination of this policy, which is so central to social protection. So, it has a very low probability of surviving.
The emphasis among evangelicals and in what is called the far-right project is that the family and the market should be the pillars of social protection in Brazil. However, this brings with it a class divide. Rich people turn to the market, either by hiring a poor woman as a maid—usually a Black one—to care for those who need care, or by using services from the market, such as daycare centers and nursing homes. The poor, meanwhile, have to rely on extended family and community networks.
Public services will become increasingly precarious, and healthcare will be privatized under Bolsonaro. I have no doubt about that.
The Setback Is Therefore Already Looming
Senator Flávio Bolsonaro during a pro-amnesty demonstration in support of former President Jair Bolsonaro in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 16, 2025. Photo: Saulo Angelo | Dreamstime.
Your work on Brazilian social assistance stresses the importance of state capacity and federal coordination. How much would either candidate actually be able to redirect social and family policy given Brazil’s federal structure, congressional constraints, and uneven municipal capacities?
Professor Natália Sátyro: To answer these questions, we need to understand the elections in the first place. The far right has a majority in both houses. To give you an idea, in the Chamber of Deputies alone, the Bolsonaro party, the PL, will now hold 121 seats, representing 24 percent of the total. It’s only this party, and then, together with the others on the far right, they would be able to form a qualified majority relatively easily, which would even allow them to make constitutional amendments. The setback is therefore already looming. But a Lula victory would at least act as a brake because he could work with the judiciary to constrain congressional action. This is one point.
Regarding the policies that are the focus of your questions, it is important to remember how the Brazilian Federation is structured. Federative entities are politically autonomous, so municipalities can independently determine a policy if they want to and have the capacity to do so. The literature shows that they usually cannot. It distinguishes policymaking from policy decision-making because of the level of policy capacity of the municipalities. In other words, most municipalities depend on funding from the federal government.
However, the cited study found that during the presidency of Bolsonaro, the father, municipalities kept social assistance services operating even without federal funding because they are politically autonomous. Thus, to consider what the elected candidate may do, it’s important to consider both the composition of this new Congress and the autonomy of the municipalities and states.
I have no doubt about family policy. I already said that they will terminate it. If we think about conditional cash transfers, they will be different from services. Public services directed to families will survive only if municipalities put in their own financial resources, their own budget.
Thirty-Three Million People Did Not Go to the Polls
Looking toward the second round, which social cleavage deserves the closest attention: class, religion, race, gender, region, or attitudes toward the family—and how do these cleavages intersect rather than operate independently?
Professor Natália Sátyro: Thirty-three million people did not go to the polls, even though voting is compulsory in Brazil. Lula’s campaign is focusing, as I told you, strongly on young people and older adults, since they were the groups with the highest abstention rates. First, people over 70 are no longer required to vote.
I read research from yesterday saying that a huge number of women, poor women, are no longer required to vote and did not go to the polls, but they will certainly be affected by cuts, given that Bolsonaro has said he will change Social Security. So, one of the points is that Lula is trying to reach this part of the population. This would mean not adjusting—these cuts that I told you about mean not adjusting pensions and making it harder to enter the system.
There is also a strong campaign targeting women, who make up the majority of the electorate. The increase in Bolsa Família benefits is due to begin on October 19, before the runoff. The suspension of online betting, which was permitted by Bolsonaro and has now been suspended by Lula by decree, was also a measure aimed at this audience, that is, women.
Bolsonaro, meanwhile, is already speaking as if he had won and has been addressing the market, while emphasizing how he will cut the budget. So, for Lula, his aim is young people, women, and the elderly in the population because of the abstention.
Finally, Professor Sátyro, beyond the question of who wins the runoff, does the first-round result suggest that Brazil is consolidating two competing models of citizenship—one centered on social inclusion and state-backed protection, and another combining conservative family values, market-oriented responsibility, and populist cultural mobilization?
Professor Natália Sátyro: Yes, I have no doubt. I think my previous answers have already addressed that. We are really at a moment when we will choose between these two projects for Brazil. Today, we are a divided society between these two: one very conservative and neoliberal, and the other more progressive and focused on social justice. We will see in two weeks which one of them will win.
In this ECPS interview, Professor Daniel Schlozman examines the 2026 US midterms through the deeper crisis of American party organization. While arguing that “voters are tired of Trumpism,” he cautions that Democratic gains may reflect electoral fatigue rather than durable realignment. The interview traces Trumpism’s roots in long-standing currents on the American right, the centrality of immigration, the accommodation between populism and concentrated wealth, and structural vulnerabilities in the constitutional order. On the Democratic side, Professor Schlozman stresses class dealignment, weakened institutional loyalties, and the limits of policy “deliverism.” His central lesson is organizational: political loyalties are built through lived collective experience, and durable democratic politics ultimately requires renewed institutions, participation, and deep party organization.
As the United States approaches the November 3, 2026 midterm elections, the political landscape is marked by an unusual convergence of electoral fatigue, institutional strain, partisan asymmetry, and organizational weakness. In this wide-ranging ECPS interview, Professor Daniel Schlozman, Joseph and Bertha Bernstein Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, situates the midterms within a much longer transformation of the American party system. His central diagnosis is strikingly concise: “Voters are tired of Trumpism.” Yet Professor Schlozman is careful to distinguish electoral fatigue from a deeper realignment. Even if Democrats perform strongly, he argues, such gains may reflect “much more a reaction against an incumbent who’s been around for a long time than the stirring of Democratic forces” capable of generating a durable alternative.
That distinction frames the interview’s broader inquiry into Trumpism, MAGA, and the condition of American democracy. Professor Schlozman emphasizes continuity as much as rupture: Trump, he argues, emerged from “long-standing currents on the American right,” even as anti-immigration became perhaps the most consequential innovation in the contemporary Republican coalition. At the same time, the Republican Party’s transformation cannot be understood solely through ideology. Trumpism combines leader-centered populism, anti-immigration politics, cultural resentment, and alliances with concentrated economic power. As Professor Schlozman puts it, the contemporary tech elite has “basically made its peace with Trumpism,” creating a political configuration in which populist attacks on cultural elites can coexist with plutocratic power.
The interview then turns to the institutional foundations of democratic resilience. Professor Schlozman argues that the vulnerabilities exposed by Trumpism are not wholly new: “the Madisonian system … was always vulnerable.” The Supreme Court, presidential power, the pardon authority, Senate malapportionment, and the difficulty of constitutional amendment all reveal structural weaknesses that make a simple return to the pre-Trump status quo inadequate. For Professor Schlozman, the deeper problem is not merely constitutional design but the erosion of political organizations capable of translating interests into durable loyalties.
This is especially visible on the Democratic side. Working-class voters, he observes, are no longer being politically formed “in the union hall and the clubhouse”; increasingly, “they’re getting educated on TikTok.” His critique of Biden-era “deliverism” follows directly from this diagnosis: material benefits alone cannot generate political attachment when parties lack institutions embedded in voters’ everyday lives. “Political loyalties,” Professor Schlozman insists, “are made through the experiences of voters’ actual lives and the ways they see themselves in political collectivities.”
Across the discussion—from the DNC and party gatekeeping to democratic socialism, Zohran Mamdani, unions, civic associations, and digital political life—Professor Schlozman returns repeatedly to the same institutional imperative. Elections can be won through money, advertising, and mobilization, but durable politics requires something deeper. As he puts it, “If you want a politics that’s more durable than that, you go back to institutions and institution building.” The interview ultimately asks whether American democracy can rebuild those forms of organization before electoral competition becomes ever more personalized, fragmented, and detached from durable collective life.
Here is our interview with Professor Daniel Schlozman, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
These Midterms Are Not the Most Important Elections of Our Lifetime
Early voting sign directing voters to an in-person polling location in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, USA, May 26, 2026. Photo: Erin Alexis Randolph / Dreamstime.
Professor Schlozman, welcome! Let me begin with the broader stakes of the November 3 midterms. You and Sam Rosenfeld describe contemporary American parties as “hollow,” but argue that this hollowness manifests asymmetrically—as Democratic organizational weakness on one side and Republican extremism on the other. With the House narrowly divided and the Senate also highly competitive, should we understand the 2026 midterms primarily as an ordinary contest over congressional control, or as a test of whether elections can still provide an effective institutional constraint on an increasingly personalized presidency?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: Midterm elections in the United States tend to have this phenomenon called midterm loss, where the president’s party loses seats. In particular, this happens in the so-called “six-year itch,” after a president has been in power for six years. Donald Trump has been president for six years and has now dominated national politics for a decade. That’s what we’re seeing.
Trump is unpopular. He is basically not unpopular for the reasons that political scientists worry about his democratic erosion. He’s unpopular because the cost of goods and services is high, because he’s launched this war in Iran that nobody likes, and because his old tricks don’t seem to be working anymore. Voters are tired of Trumpism.
If Democrats do well, which it seems like they will—almost certainly recapture the House and probably take the Senate, or more likely than not take the Senate—the right way to describe the polls is that this is much more a reaction against an incumbent who’s been around for a long time than the stirring of Democratic forces that opponents of Trumpism as a phenomenon might hope for.
There are two other things to say. First, these midterms are not the most important elections of our lifetime. That was 2016. That was the arrival of Trump and the demonstration that this right populism had enough purchase to make it again, and then in 2024.
Yes, it means that Trump, who doesn’t have much of a legislative agenda to start with, will have even fewer options in his last two years. Yes, if a justice on the Supreme Court retires, Democrats have some leverage. But there’s only so much that we can say about the midterms.
The other is, not unrelatedly, that midterm elections tend not to be predictive of what happens in two years, and there are plenty of examples of parties that have really good midterms and then go on not to win the presidency two years later.
Neither Rubio nor Vance Has Trump’s Personal Appeal
MAGA has evolved from an insurgent faction into the Republican Party’s dominant organizing force, while Trump remains central to candidate selection and mobilization. How should we distinguish Trumpism as personalist leadership from MAGA as an institutionalized movement—and which elements are most likely to outlive Trump?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: It’s a hard one to answer because this is of the “predict the future” variety. What Trump has offered is personalist leadership that is very much about the flash and sizzle of him. But he says, “I am MAGA,” so it’s unclear whether what survives is MAGA or not.
Without going too deep into that, I’d say Trump has emerged from long-standing currents on the American right. Sam and I are very much in the continuity, not change, school of “Did everything change with Donald Trump?” No. The mobilization of resentment and the rather tactical deployment of issues are long-standing concerns.
The biggest single change that Trumpism offers is around immigration. Race is not as much a departure as some people like to imagine, and the anti-immigrant policies that Trump has adopted have now become de rigueur on the Republican side. The other is that Republicans’ commitment to fiscal rectitude was always in the breach. There are these big tax cuts—Reagan in 1981, Bush in 2001, etc.—but the claims of straightforward macroeconomic management are, with Trump, of a different order, and that is likely to continue.
The ways that comparativists will see Trumpism as resembling the very thin, leader-led populism around the world will also continue. We don’t know who the next Trump is. Marco Rubio is a much more traditional Republican who has successfully changed his stripes. J.D. Vance is much more focused on taking some of the currents of the grassroots right and moving with them. Neither of them has Trump’s personal appeal.
Trump Has Not Just Pushed Against Norms
Donald Trump delivers a victory speech after his big win in the Nevada caucus at Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, flanked by his sons Eric (right) and Donald Jr. (left) in Las Vegas, NV. Photo: Joe Sohm.
Populism claims to restore sovereignty to “the people,” yet it often collides with institutions designed to constrain power. At what point does populist majoritarianism become democratic erosion, and how should we understand the tension between electoral authorization and constitutional restraint in the Trump era?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: I was telling my students this week that if you ever have a question where they say, “On the one hand, on the other,” don’t just say one—say both, and then you’ll look very sophisticated. So, I’m going to be very sophisticated and say both.
In 2017, Trump arrives, shatters all sorts of norms, and the reaction of a lot of good, right-thinking liberals is to see this as an absolute, unmitigated disaster. A decade on, we are less in that. The two books by Levitsky and Ziblatt epitomize this. The first is very much that democracy is about norms, and the second is that maybe American democracy—and the institutions that we’ve got and the Constitution that we’ve inherited from the 18th century—aren’t all that to start with.
I am not the precise line-drawer of exactly where normal, ordinary politics descends. However, it’s very clear that, in all sorts of ways, Trump has not just pushed against norms but violated very basic pieces of what democracy is all about: going after his opponents and doing all of what he’s trying to do on voting rights. These are very fundamental violations of the core of democracy—and January 6th, above all, is a very fundamental violation. Calling that just populist majoritarianism is treating things lightly.
I think the response from the opponents of Trumpism is then to think in much bigger terms about remaking the American constitutional system, which is all to the good. There is a little bit of a “Well, we want our executive power too,” but the limits of left populism have meant that this is not as large a strand in American thinking about how to respond to the populist right as you’ll see in Europe.
US Can’t Just Return to a Status Quo That Wasn’t Working
You argue that today’s democratic dangers reflect both right-wing radicalization and structural weaknesses in the American constitutional order. Does Trumpism mainly expose pathologies already embedded in the Madisonian system, or has it fundamentally transformed how those institutions operate?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: I’m going to play both again. Actually, it’s probably that the Madisonian system—and this is all of the many veto points in the United States—was always vulnerable, and it’s always been vulnerable for a bunch of reasons, all of them going on their own timetables. The Supreme Court has life tenure and nine justices, now consistently following the partisanship of the president who appointed them. Republicans have a supermajority. Republican justices have taken their pre-Trump ideology, and even if they’ve gone against Trump when he’s done some of his most egregious stuff, or lawyered it poorly, the power of the Court, the power of the presidency, the presidential pardon power, and the Senate with its maldistribution of states—this is the most maldistributed legislative body in the world—all of these are long-standing problems with the American constitutional system that are newly salient.
And, to my answer to the last question, they are all problems that make it harder and harder to say, “We just need to return to a status quo that wasn’t working.” If you basically believe that presidential power is good for the system and Trump’s just done it poorly, that’s also an argument that doesn’t really wash at this point. Saying that we will give the loaded gun of the American presidency in the hope that virtue and norms restrain it is pretty weak sauce.
Now, the American Constitution is also the hardest to amend in the world, and so it’s very easy for me to say that this is a system with lots of problems, and it’s very difficult to figure out how to get from here to there.
Wanting a Secure Border Is Very Different from Roving Interior Enforcement
Border Patrol agents monitor an anti-ICE protest in downtown Los Angeles, June 8, 2025. Demonstrators rallied against expanded ICE operations and in support of immigrant rights. Photo: Dreamstime.
Why has anti-immigration become such an effective vehicle for right-wing populism? Does its potency derive primarily from material concerns, ethnonational identity, institutional distrust, or its role in defining “the people” against outsiders?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: You ask an excellent question to which I, as a scholar of party politics who reads the literature on immigration, want to get a good handle on, and I’m not going to try to BS my way through an answer by saying, on the one hand, and then repeating your question as an answer.
On the one hand, we see from all of the data—both from reading the papers that you and I read and from looking at the election returns—that immigration is the issue that motivates so many voters, some but not all of whom are erstwhile center-left voters, to support right populism. On the other hand, when we say immigration, what exactly is inside that black box, and why is it that voters are so worried about immigration in places where they don’t see many immigrants?
We do know that contact theory works, and if you get to know immigrants—they could be your co-workers and your friends—you become less anti-immigrant. But why is it that immigration has this magical power? Some people say it’s just immigration because it’s the issue that voters say is top of mind and comes to the top of our regression coefficients. That is both important and somewhat question-begging in exactly the way you were asking.
This is me not being a real immigration person—it’s important to know, but it doesn’t really tell me everything that I want to understand about what is, across the rich democracies, the issue. Donald Trump has been an anti-immigrant figure—I could use some not-nice words than that—for a long time. He intuited, in ways that nobody else did in 2015, just how potent this issue was. Then he’s ridden that, and many of his most effective political aides, Stephen Miller, have done that.
Now, there are limits to that. Americans are not crazy about—they want a secure border, but the interior enforcement, going after people on the streets, picking them off, that we saw in Minneapolis over the winter, is not something that most Americans are really signed up for. It is one of the places where the nuances of public opinion do matter: having ICE, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has interior enforcement, as a roving paramilitary unit taking people off the streets is a very different matter from voters wanting a secure border. So, I’m not sure that’s a great answer, but that’s what I know.
The Tech Elite Has Basically Made Its Peace with Trumpism
MAGA attacks “globalists” and cultural elites while coexisting with concentrated private wealth and donor power. How should we understand the relationship between populism and plutocracy? Can anti-elite politics flourish while economic inequality remains intact—or deepens?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: One of the important ways that Trump One is different from Trump Two is that, while Trump has been in office for basically separate reasons, economic inequality is a half-century-long story, but the tech elite’s wealth has absolutely ballooned. With the rise, first, of social media and then of AI, we now have a very elite stratum that has basically made its peace with Trumpism.
Now, an important part of that is the old-fashioned labor rebellion. Silicon Valley workers tried in the 2010s to unionize. They are worried about their own working conditions, they’re worried about the products that their companies are making, they’re worried about racism and sexism, and they see their employers implicated in that. Employers responded, as employers have responded ever since the Industrial Revolution, by joining forces of the right that they would otherwise find unsavory.
That is more or less how—someone like Elon Musk has got his own trajectory back to South Africa—but that’s more or less how a Mark Zuckerberg figure goes from being anti-Trump to being at the Trump inauguration and at the state dinner with Xi Jinping.
American parties—there are two of them—are big-tent parties, and so forces that, in a proportional representation system, would be in maybe uneasy alliance in a parliamentary majority in government are instead inside the same political coalition. There are all sorts of contradictions. Trumpism’s got all of these contradictions.
But two things are worth saying. The first is that there has been—and this is an important point in what Sam and I are writing—no cordon sanitaire in US politics in the way that many European parties have tried, sometimes succeeded and sometimes not, and sometimes it dissolves and sometimes not, to keep out parties on the extreme right. So, the pro-business right is in alliance with the most revanchist elements of MAGAism. Is that stable? No. But can it last for a pretty long time? Yes.
The other thing to say is that, with the rise of the tech right, the traditional US Chamber of Commerce pro-business right—and this is one of the salient parts of what’s happened with Trumpism—is at a pretty weak ebb. Instead, there are these very personal relationships, sort of neo-patrimonial relationships, between the most important figures in tech and someone like Trump, who is both going to his rallies and denouncing elites, by which he means cultural elites more than economic elites.
Jensen Huang of Nvidia is calling Trump, and they’re all buddy-buddy on the telephone. That’s the way that plutocracy and populism are working out in today’s GOP.
Working-Class Voters Are Getting Educated on TikTok, not in the Union Hall
A smartphone displaying the TikTok logo is seen in front of the flag of China. US President Donald Trump banned Chinese apps citing national security concerns. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your analysis of 2024 highlights continuing class dealignment, with Democrats gaining among affluent, educated voters and Republicans among lower-income, less-educated constituencies. Is this mainly ideological realignment, or the consequence of weakened unions, local parties, and other institutions that once translated material interests into partisan loyalty?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: This isn’t quite a both; it’s more that one explains the other. In a time of thicker institutional loyalties, those institutions shaped what voters knew and how they saw the world. Without those institutions, working-class voters are not getting politically formed and educated in the union hall and the clubhouse; they’re getting educated on TikTok, and that is very bad for a center-left that looks out of touch.
What’s notable about Democrats is that they see long-term class dealignment as a problem, but they don’t really think about it in institutional terms; they think about it just in policy terms. It’s: if we build some battery factories, then people will see that there are battery factories, and they will vote for Democrats because Democrats are the party that builds battery factories. It turns out not to work very well, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that it doesn’t. But that’s the puzzle: that they thought it would in the first place.
Democrats Tried to Solve Class Dealignment Through Means Incapable of Doing So
InThe Policy Bet, you argue that Biden-era “deliverism” could not reverse working-class defection. Is the deeper lesson that material gains do not generate political loyalty unless organizations connect policy benefits to collective identity and durable political attachment?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: Yes, that’s—you got it! Political loyalties are made through the experiences of voters’ actual lives and the ways they see themselves in political collectivities. Democrats, in a deinstitutionalized age, forgot that lesson and, in a sense, went big in ways that were unhelpful to them and that were, in turn, reflective of the often NGO-linked, funder-linked forces that were influential in the party in the first place. They look at 2016, they see the problem of class dealignment, they want to solve that problem, and they attempt to solve it through means that are more or less incapable of doing so.
Give Voters Political Connections Where They Are
You argue that Democrats need to become an “actual political party again.” What would rebuilding a mass party look like in 2026, and can unions, churches, immigrant associations, neighborhood groups, and local parties still anchor politics in an era of nationalized media and digital campaigning?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: This is the hard question, which is: “Schlozman, Rosenfeld, we love everything you say about the past, but we live in the present, and all those books you read about the past can’t help us now.” That is the charge against us, and point taken.
What I tend to say is, first, let’s see what we can do, and let’s see how we can move forward and try to think institutionally. The second is: what are your alternatives? It seems like the policy bet isn’t working. You run ads, and they can be pretty effective in their way, but voters forget them very quickly. The alternatives to institution building seem to be deeply flawed themselves.
The other piece is thinking about how forms of connection work, because they simply won’t be like those of the past. Someone I know in Democratic politics was saying that all these young people spend all their time on Twitch streams. I’ll sound like a middle-aged fogy and say I’m not really sure what that is, but they’re playing video games, talking to people, making friends, and receiving political content through the friends they’re making on their Twitch streams.
Whether or not that actually works, the idea is to figure out how to give voters political connections where they are and to take what is already present in their friendships and loyalties and develop it politically. That’s the right way of thinking about this. What we are offering from the past is a way to think institutionally about political loyalties, rather than a claim that the exact forms they take will be the ones we once saw, because that would just be an exercise in nostalgia, and I see the limits of that.
The DNC Is Salvageable
The Democratic Party’s donkey, a widely recognized symbol of the party despite not being its official logo. Photo: Dreamstime.
InThe DNC Against Itself, you describe Democrats as rich in organizations but poor in organization. Has the rise of a para-party infrastructure hollowed out the DNC beyond repair, or could it still become a genuine coordinating institution?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: I want to say that the Democratic National Committee—and I wrote this long essay for The New Yorker, which was trying to understand the often baroque, insular politics of the National Committee—has, ever since 2016, been shorthand for the Democratic Party infrastructure, which is unhelpful. So, I was writing about the DNC itself.
I think getting a stronger DNC will require a Democratic president who makes it a priority and has a DNC chair who will knock heads and tell the state parties—the institutions in each of the 50 states that, because they control the ballot lines in those states, have a certain amount of formal power—to knock it off. If you want to build a strong party organization, you can’t just do it like we’ve been doing, and their interest in maintaining their prerogatives over things like fiddling around with the primary calendar for when the primaries are held in each state, just like convention delegates—enough with this. We are going to get serious.
That can be done. It would require a president who actually cares about these things to do it. That’s worth doing. But one of the tragedies of the DNC—and I tried to get this across in the piece—is that it has possibilities to be the nerve center for real organizing, but only if there are some drastic changes.
There are larger questions about what formal parties can do, and a lot of those are going to be answered at the state and local level. There’s also a very specific question about the Democratic National Committee. Even granting all of the structural challenges facing party organization, the DNC is both the worst example of—and it’s not the only time that, as they say in methods class, you learn things by looking at the extreme case—but because it’s the extreme case, it is salvageable in ways that are much less structural than a lot of the challenges for parties that we’re talking about.
Trump Emerges from Very Deep Currents on the Grassroots Right
Has the post-1968 shift toward candidate-centered primaries weakened parties’ ability to protect themselves—and democracy—from factional or anti-system candidates? Do American parties need more legitimate forms of internal gatekeeping?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: The answer is yes. In fact, I was just reviewing this week a book by Raymond La Raja and Zachary Albert. La Raja has long been a fellow party scholar in the tradition of his late teacher, Nelson Polsby at Berkeley, arguing that reform has destroyed American parties’ ability to set their own destiny.
A lot of the specifics that they advocate—empowering the national convention, having some kind of system of peer review again, having leading party officials vet candidates before they can appear on primary ballots, giving more money to the national committees, both the DNC and RNC, and then to the party congressional committees so they can throw it around rather than giving it direct handles—I’m in favor of all of these.
But the point where Schlozman and Rosenfeld—“Schlozenfeld,” as we like to call ourselves—differ from the political scientists who are beating that drum most loudly is that we are concerned about parties’ legitimacy, about parties’ ability to make the claim that parties matter, about parties’ standing in voters’ eyes, and about the stuff we were just talking about: parties’ lived presence in people’s everyday lives. That means that simply giving parties more formal power and more money is unlikely to solve the deeper legitimacy problems.
Now, the question of Trumpism and the Republican nomination is that, on the one hand, you can argue—and people like Raymond have—that Trump won in 2016 because of the post-reform nomination process: a different party, with a stronger ability to gatekeep, would have stopped Trump because party elites didn’t really like him. There’s a proximate question, which is that there was nobody left standing whom they really liked better, because they all loathed Ted Cruz, but leave that aside.
The deeper point is that Trump emerges from very deep currents on the grassroots right, and it is the rising of those currents, rather than simply the mechanical ability to stop that, that is how you get Trump. So, I would take issue with the larger implication that it is the post-reform nomination process that gives us Donald Trump.
The Key Phrase for Democratic Socialism Is ‘Not Yet’
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.
Democratic socialism increasingly shapes Democratic primaries and policy debate, but it has not captured the party as MAGA captured the GOP. Is this because it lacks comparable institutional depth, because Democrats are structurally more pluralistic, or because the American left has not yet built durable organizations capable of converting movements into governing power?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: I think the key phrase there—and you could probably apply it to all three of the clauses you gave me—is “not yet.” Democratic socialism is on the rise. It is on the rise in ways that allow us to tell a story that starts with the Occupy protests of 2011, runs through the Bernie Sanders campaigns, and then sees Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elected to Congress.
Democratic Socialists are clearly capable of winning elections in very Democratic places. In 2025, Zohran Mamdani gets elected mayor of New York City. What they have not shown is the ability to win in deeply contested territories, and especially to win elections that more moderate candidates cannot. So, that’s how you have this inter-party battle.
The important election this year, for these purposes, is in Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed, who is not a member of DSA and is not really a Democratic socialist, but is clearly a figure of the left—much more than anyone else who is running for Senate. If he wins, especially if he wins by a margin that looks pretty healthy rather than just being dragged across the finish line in a white Democratic year, that’s a sign of vitality for his movement. If not, then not.
All of the above is true. The Democratic Socialists of America are funny because it’s an organization that, on the one hand, looms very large in public consciousness and, on the other hand, has a little more than 100,000 members, which is a flyspeck. So, no, the organizational depth, to use your phrase, is really not there.
There’s a broader progressive tendency. That progressive tendency is on the rise, and the Democratic moderates have not been—and without going too deep into punditry when you want political science—particularly effective over the last generation in figuring out what they want the party to look like and bringing all their forces together.
There’s a lot of moderate money around, but it’s not particularly well connected to people. The money—a lot of it finance- and tech-related—is concentrated where the finance and tech money lives, in New York and California, not in places like the swing districts where it matters.
So, the Democratic Socialists and the left have been a lot more effective in trying to have a vision and articulate where it goes than the party center, the still-reigning center. One of the stories about the rise of the left is also that centrists still seem to be able to win elections in swing districts better, but they have not had the vision that their leftist counterparts have had.
DSA Is a Very Not-Hollow Party
MAGA defines “the people” largely through national, cultural, and immigration boundaries, while democratic-socialist populism pits workers and ordinary citizens against concentrated economic power. Does the US party system increasingly feature two competing constructions of “the people,” or is that comparison misleading because MAGA has captured a major party while the left remains an insurgent current within a broader coalition?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: That question is rolling together two things. The first is notions of “the people,” and the second is the different levels of movement capture in the Republican and Democratic parties. There are notions of “the people” in center-left politics, too. Barack Obama’s got an understanding of what “the people” is; it’s just not a people-against-the-interests, classic populist piece.
The ways Trumpism uses “the people,” in that classic exclusionary nationalist way that the populism literature describes, are probably more helpful for understanding where he’s coming from than the ways the left uses “the people.” The Chantal Mouffe left-populism peak has come and gone. If I read the DSA theorists, they are less enamored of that framing. You don’t really see AOC talking about “the people” in that way.
Yes, there is a hard-edged us-versus-them-ness in where the left edge of the Democratic Party is going, but I don’t think the comparative populism literature is the key to unlocking what is rooted in—DSA is a very not-hollow party. This is actual volunteers who have very deep connections, going door-to-door. That’s what elected Mamdani, along with a broader sense of system discontent. But it’s not quite left populism in that 2010 sense, and I don’t know quite what it is. Some of the instincts of a comparativist to look and say, “That’s it,” aren’t quite there.
Democrats Have to Figure Out How to Be Connected with the Civil Society
If anti-Trump constitutionalism is insufficient and progressive policy cannot substitute for organization, what would a durable Democratic alternative require? Can the party defend liberal-democratic institutions, rebuild working-class ties, accommodate ideological heterodoxy, and harness democratic-socialist energy without fragmenting?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: Damn, I hope so! You very carefully read everything I’ve written and identified all the things I’d like to have happen, and I hope this works. What I’d say is that big-tent parties with a sense of themselves are not parties with a litmus test where everybody agrees about everything. That’s unrealistic in the American electoral system in a pluralistic country.
They are parties that have some sense of where they want to go. Historically, the Republicans—Sam and I are writing about this—during the party’s founding generation from 1854 to 1877, the party that wins the Civil War, frees the Union, and brings equality into the Constitution, epitomize this. Various members of that party will want to go faster or slower, but they have a deep common—a deep common direction is not a great metaphor. They have a strong sense of their North Star, the place they want to go, and exactly how fast they want to do it. They are connected with the institutions of civil society.
That is what Democrats have to figure out how to do. Yes, there will be a fractious primary in 2028. That’s fine. The candidate who emerges—and on some level, what you’re asking is both an institutional question about how to organize a party, but it’s also, in a very proximate sense, not a question for political scientists like me to say, “Can they do it?” but a question for political leaders to figure out: do they understand that that’s the challenge, and how do they do it?
Successful presidential nominees—Trump is an exception. Trump is this kind of figure who disrupts the existing qualities of his party to a very great degree. But under ordinary circumstances, not Trumpian circumstances, successful presidential nominees are ones who don’t appear purely factional, don’t take one item from your list and say, “We’re doing only that.” They take a little from column A, a little from column B, some of this, some of that, and then orient toward the future rather than the issues that have internally divided their party for the last while.
So, there’s some heterodoxy, to use the term of the hour from my friend Adam Jellison, some sense of where democratic socialism is coming from, and some sense of institution building. The reason that Jon Ossoff of Georgia is getting such a moment right now is that he does have, intuitively, a sense of what that challenge is. That’s what makes him, to Democrats, an appealing prospect: that we can have someone who’s trying to do lots of the different things we want our party to do.
But, having said, “Oh, there’s a person,” this is not a great man story. This is, ultimately, a question of how political leadership is translated into institutional capacity, and that’s a much bigger story that I think will lead to your next question.
What do cases such as the Nevada Democratic–Culinary Workers alliance, Ben Wikler’s organizing in Wisconsin, and Zohran Mamdani’s campaign suggest about resisting democratic backsliding? Is democracy defended most effectively when constitutional commitments are embedded in organizations that produce participation, solidarity, and political efficacy?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: I certainly think so. This is an institutionalist story that Sam and I are trying to tell: you can win elections, and a lot of money is spent to win elections through advertising that voters remember very quickly, remember for a very short period, that affects their vote choice, and then they move on. But if you want to take your victory and make something of it, that requires deep institution building.
It was interesting for me that Hyperpolitics—Anton Jäger is to my left—has some sense of looking at the 2010s and seeing the failures. It’s pretty easy these days to organize a protest. You organize on social media, you get the word out on social media—it’s not really organizing. You go off, you’re in the streets, and then, poof, everything vanishes.
If you want a politics that’s more durable than that, you go back to institutions and institution building. How do you do that? It tends to be some version, without trying to romanticize the old ways of doing this, of people talking to people they know, and talking to people they know, with institutional fora in which they do that and with actual investment in the capacity for them to do it. But you also do it in ways that give people some ownership of their own work.
The incentives are not just to have a good time and talk to your neighbors, but often some of the—and this is where the hotel workers in Nevada, at the casinos, in the Culinary, come in—are incentives about better pay, better working conditions, a better life, and not just the mythic view, some of which can seem a little seamy and materialistic, of what a better life looks like.
So, how does that all work in the 21st century? Is it possible? That’s the drumbeat of what you’re asking. I wish I had better answers, but I don’t see any alternative to trying.
The Republican Party Trumpified, but Our Uncertain Journey Continues
Finally, Professor Schlozman, looking beyond November 3, what would you consider the deeper significance of the 2026 midterms for the evolution of the American party system? Are we moving toward a durable asymmetry in which the Republican Party becomes an increasingly cohesive, leader-centered populist formation while Democrats remain a fragmented coalition of institutional liberals, moderates, progressives, and democratic socialists? Or could electoral pressure itself force both parties into a new phase of organizational reconstruction—and with it a redefinition of who represents “the people” in American democracy?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: To start where we began, it’s unclear what role these midterms will play, and that will become clear only later on. Is this a midterm election that ultimately sets up durable Democratic majorities that will do big things? One of the things political historians know that the victories of Democrats in the great civil rights legislation of 1960, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and Medicare in 1965 are all rooted in the now totally forgotten 1958 midterm elections, when Democrats made huge gains across the North and West in long-traditionally Republican territory. Those are the key voters who, half a dozen years later, made all this liberal legislation possible.
So, if Democrats do really well, and then it’s in exactly these seats that a Democratic majority into the 2030s matters, then yes, we will do that. There’s another chance that it’s not really a way for Democrats, that our 50-50 politics endures, and then the 2026 midterms will be as forgotten as lots of others. They’ll matter only insofar as the precise balance of Senate seats then sets things up later on.
That’s a point about the midterms in particular. To answer the more general question about what is going on with American parties, asymmetry has been a word for a couple of decades now. Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker started off by noting the ways that, in the 2000s, rational-choice assumptions of symmetry were wrong, and Republicans seemed to be moving faster away from the median voter. Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins said that Democrats were about groups and Republicans about ideology in the early 2010s, a formulation that I think works better for Democrats and their fractious qualities. Donald Trump may be many things, but he is not an ideologue.
But the feeling—and it informs everything that Sam and I are doing—is that, looking at Democrats and Republicans separately and at the ways that hollowness manifested itself, these parties are very different, even as they compete with one another and even as their 50-50 competition seems to be going on longer than anybody would have expected when this pattern began pre-Trump. No party has actually won the durable majorities that, for most of American history, were pretty typical. This pattern of absolute knife-edge control, seesawing back and forth all the time, is very atypical.
So, these are very different parties. Will that pattern continue? I don’t know. But it is still the case that, to Europeans, Democrats are a pretty—every party’s different—but these are recognizable species. Yes, it’s a much broader tent than anything you’re going to see in a PR system, but all of its individual components seem roughly familiar, even if Europeans look at Americans and are still shocked by the bigness of anything, including the bigness of the tent of our parties.
But Republicans are not. This is something different. It’s in the amalgam of extreme right and mainstream right, in the anti-democratic tendencies, and where that goes, I don’t think we know. But Democrats and the Democratic intellectual classes are thinking more seriously about constitutional reconstruction, about the ways that we might rethink the system more generally, than they were a decade ago. What that means in a constitution that’s hard to amend is unclear.
But we are not in the same Democratic Party that we were in 2017, just as the Republican Party Trumpified, and who knows what that will mean with a political figure who does not have the juice of Donald Trump. But our uncertain journey continues.
In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Mayowa Solaja uses the concept of “climate debt populism” to examine how climate vulnerability, sovereign debt, and distributive injustice are becoming politically intertwined across Africa. He argues that adaptation finance is not only a technical question of resource mobilization, but also a struggle over responsibility, legitimacy, and who ultimately bears the costs of climate survival. Drawing on examples from Senegal, Zambia, and Malawi, Dr. Solaja shows how climate shocks can intensify fiscal vulnerability, while debt servicing can restrict governments’ capacity to invest in resilience. He calls for a more just climate-finance architecture centered on grant-based adaptation, debt restructuring, accountability, participation, and recognition of Africa’s historically unequal contribution to global emissions
Africa’s climate politics is entering a more consequential phase. The debate is no longer about whether vulnerable societies need adaptation finance, but how their political and financial relationship is shaped when they receive it through debt. The resources governments already have to service debt can create a paradox when small increases in debt are added to shield citizens from climate risks: the funds required to lessen vulnerability can create more vulnerability.
This commentary proposes the concept of ‘climate debt populism’ to reflect the political reasoning that can be forged from this paradox. I do not imply, in using the term, that there is an existing pan-African political movement, but rather use it as an analytical framework to examine the potential for linking climate vulnerability, fiscal pressure, and distributive injustice with the populist statement: communities that were least responsible for past greenhouse gas emissions should not bear the burden of additional fiscal costs just to be secure. This struggle is not fundamentally about people who want to act on climate change versus people who don’t. It is a conflict over who has the authority, responsibility, and resources to determine who pays for climate survival.
Why should those who contributed least to the climate crisis pay to survive it?
The Question Behind Climate Finance
Vulnerability is the language of climate change in Africa. With warming, droughts, flooding and food insecurity, adaptation is a pressing developmental need, with increasing water stress and disruption to livelihoods. But vulnerability is not the sole determinant of the politics of adaptation. The question of who pays for protection is becoming increasingly distributive: on whose conditions and at what cost to public finances and future generations?
The answer matters because Africa is in a unique position within the global climate economy. The continent has been responsible for a relatively small share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but faces the highest climate risks. According to the African Development Bank, Africa accounts for less than 4 percent of global emissions but receives only about 3 percent of global climate finance (AfDB, 2025). At the same time, many African countries struggle with limited fiscal space and high debt-service burdens. The outcome is a political economy where the need for adaptation meets the financial limits of the states that will be expected to provide it.
The problem is more than money. It’s about the conditions and modalities of climate finance. Grant financing can increase adaptive capacity without adding a new debt burden. Loans can offer short-term flexibility, but they can also shift the burden of financing adaptation to climate change into the future. The difference between resilience and recovery financing is a political question in situations of repeated climate shocks and additional borrowing.
Climate finance is thus not apolitical. It shares responsibilities among countries, generations and social groups. When people feel they are losing out because of climate change, and that public funding is being limited or restricted, finance becomes an issue of fairness and political legitimacy.
Changing the Conversation from Climate Populism to Climate Debt Populism
Climate debt populism is analytically different from the current discourse on climate populism and extends ideas in this conversation. Political representations of climate policy typically frame the issue as a clash between a righteous or derelict population and those who represent and are responsible for the environment and environmental transition policies, such as the state, the market, or the public interest. When the policy is contentious, as it becomes when measures like carbon pricing or subsidy reform and energy transition are felt to be economically burdensome, climate politics can get messy in these accounts.
Climate debt populism changes what is contended. Its main grievance might not be climate action. Instead, it’s about the inequity of funding climate action and climate harm. The conflict arises when the price of adaptation is seen as an indicator of an international order that is separate from responsibility and burden.
The populist logic may thus be expressed in three interconnected steps. First, a material injury is apparent: crops fail to produce, houses are destroyed by floodwater, electricity networks are weakened, livelihoods are lost, and public services are economically constrained. Second, the injury is read by making a moral judgment between those suffering and those seen to have disproportionate power to control the distribution of costs. Third, this distinction becomes a political demand for recognition, redistribution and accountability.
‘The elite’ concerned is therefore far less monolithic than in traditional national populist politics. It could involve national political and economic decision makers, foreign creditors, financial institutions, rich high-emitting countries and technocratic institutions thought to set the rules for accessing funding by vulnerable societies. This doesn’t mean these actors form a unified bloc. Instead, they can be symbolically linked in a popular story of unequal responsibility.
This matters because it avoids making the concept synonymous with anti-Westernism or with opposition to the international financial system. Climate debt populism is not a movement against debt, but a struggle about the legitimacy of an unequal burden of climate responsibility. Its basic moral principle is that adaptation costs should be assigned by considering historical responsibility, current exposure, and financial resources.
Debt Amplifies Climate Change as a Political Vulnerability
Young African woman carrying water in a village near Bamako, Mali, symbolizing the human impact of drought and water scarcity. Photo: Dreamstime.
This political claim has material force through debt. According to ActionAid International’s analysis of 65 highly climate-vulnerable countries, in September 2026, these countries will have paid almost 25 times more on debt repayments than on climate action. It notes that debt servicing as a share of government revenue is estimated to consume about 65 percent in Global South countries and is about 225 times higher than the climate finance they receive via grants (ActionAid International, 2026). The statistics must be viewed with care as they are an amalgamation and do not represent a consistent African experience. Their importance, however, lies in the structural relationship they point to: obligations to repay fiscal resources can take up fiscal resources just when investment in adaptation has to increase.
The resulting mechanism is potentially self-reinforcing. High-severity climate events cause economic and physical damage. The funding of emergency relief, reconstruction and social protection in the face of the government must be made. If grants and concessional resources are insufficient, additional borrowing becomes attractive or unavoidable. This leaves less fiscal room for preventive investments because of debt-service obligations. Weak adaptation leaves communities exposed to subsequent shocks, which generate additional losses and renewed financing needs. Fiscal vulnerability can thus exacerbate climate risk, and climate risk can constrain capacity to reduce fiscal vulnerability.
This is not to say that climate change is solely responsible for debt crises in Africa. Sovereign debt is determined by domestic fiscal policies, commodity dependence, exchange-rate pressures, borrowing policies, governance, global interest rates and the structure of the international financial system. A credible argument in the name of climate justice must, therefore, withstand monocausal explanations. The more assertive position is that climate shocks exacerbate existing financial fragilities and can make an already challenging debt situation much tougher.
Senegal: When Debt Service Crowds Out Climate Ambition
Senegal is a case in point for the inseparability of politics and fiscal capacity in climate finance. According to ActionAid’s 2026 analysis, Senegal’s debt servicing is more than 96 percent of government revenue and over 600 times its planned spending on climate action. For every US$1 budgeted for climate action, US$605 is being spent on debt servicing, according to the calculation. The exact proportion should be regarded as a representation of the fiscal structure of a particular advocacy organization, and not as a yardstick for the country’s fiscal structure. Its political significance nevertheless remains striking.
Fiscal constraint is not a macroeconomic phenomenon, but a condition that affects citizens engaged in agriculture and reliant on infrastructure and functioning public services. It is felt when there is a risk, and the state is unable to protect people. A farmer confronting declining productivity does not experience sovereign debt as a balance-sheet category. The experience is mediated through access to irrigation, agricultural support, roads, electricity, social protection and the state’s capacity to respond when climate shocks occur.
This is where climate debt can acquire populist meaning. When citizens feel that public institutions can afford external debt but not internal security against environmental insecurity, the line between economic and climate injustice becomes a political debate. The question becomes less “How much finance has been mobilized?” and more “Whose obligations are being prioritized?”
Zambia: When a Climate Shock Becomes a Fiscal Shock
Zambia illustrates an aspect of the issue, where environmental shocks rapidly turn into macro-economic and political shocks. The World Bank described the country’s 2024 drought as the driest in decades; it affected approximately 9.8 million people, with 6.6 million experiencing severe food insecurity. Likewise, Zambia’s reliance on hydropower worsened a major electricity crisis, and agricultural production was also greatly affected (World Bank, 2024).
These pressures were added to a challenging debt restructuring process. The World Bank then approved US$100 million to finance development policy and provide a support facility for catastrophe events, highlighting the need for liquidity in the event of a climate shock. However, there is a deep challenge that needs to be addressed: emergency funding can mitigate and repair harm in the short term, but it will not necessarily close gaps in the longer term in the resources needed to prepare for adaptation.
Climate events remain a downside risk to Zambia’s debt-service capacity, according to the IMF’s 2026 assessment. This connection has political importance, as it links environmental insecurity to the state’s fiscal stability. A succession of shocks may then alter citizens’ perceptions of national governments and the international financial system as a whole. When the climate is made insecure, it tests institutions’ capacity to offer security without adding another generation of debt.
Malawi: The Politics of Rebuilding the Same Future
Malawi’s experience with Cyclone Freddy makes the distributional stakes equally visible. According to the World Bank (2023), material losses amounted to about US$505 million, while production losses were around US$36.4 million, equivalent to about 0.5 percent of Malawi’s 2023 GDP. These statistics concealed the destruction of homes, disruption of agriculture, damage to infrastructure and loss of livelihoods.
Reconstruction is a tough decision for a budget-constrained government—balancing the social and political costs of leaving communities exposed with the financial costs of borrowing to rebuild. Governments could continue to pay for the impacts of climate hazards without sufficiently reducing the likelihood or impact of further loss.
This is why it is as important as the amount of climate finance as it is well-designed. A dollar of grant finance and a dollar of sovereign borrowing are not politically equivalent. They distribute obligations differently across time and across social groups. The former can build the community’s public capacity without adding to the repayment burden; the latter can shift some of today’s adaptation burden onto future taxpayers. Therefore, it is not only a matter of mobilizing resources, but of their financial architecture as well, that is, a matter of climate justice.
From Climate Victims to Climate Creditors
One of the most profound political changes may be conceptual. African countries have often been portrayed internationally as weak recipients that need help. This is becoming an outdated perspective. Climate-justice claims are increasingly becoming language of responsibility, entitlement and institutional change, rather than “help us because we are vulnerable”; it is becoming “recognition of what is owed because responsibility and harm are unequally distributed.”
Warlenius (2018) proposed a shift from emissions to questions of responsibility, atmospheric space, and compensation through the concept of climate debt, which emerged within climate-justice movements. This argument considers the intersection of the moral grammar of climate debt, current sovereign debt, and the lived reality of adaptation under fiscal constraint.
This suggests a politically viable possibility of reversal. African countries cannot be read only as clients of a lender who comes to them for help. They can also speak in a way that makes them claimants in a just climate order. The language of ‘climate creditors’ can help here as a political metaphor; it emphasises the historical and distributive aspects of climate responsibility, but does not suggest that African states have traditional financial claims against specific governments.
Making this distinction is crucial. Climate-creditor politics does not absolve African governments of responsibility. Vulnerability may be exacerbated by corruption, weak institutions, unsustainable borrowing patterns and poor public spending and African governments should be held accountable at home. There is no conflict between international responsibility and national accountability. They work at various levels of the same political economy.
The New Political Antagonism
At this point, climate debt populism is analytically useful. It recognises a type of political opposition based on the unequal division of financial responsibilities, where material climate insecurity is expressed in this way. The applicable political boundary is not definitive. It could be between citizens and national elites, vulnerable states and creditors or historically high emitters and climate-sensitive societies. In practice, these boundaries can overlap.
The risk is that such a politics can go in two extremely different directions. It can create a democratic politics of climate justice, calling for transparency in finance, reorganization of debt, and reparative responsibility and greater public accountability. However, it can also be seized by the political entrepreneur who simplifies the weave of politics to an unchecked story of foreign conspiracy, domestic betrayal or perpetual victimhood. The concept should not therefore be considered – normatively – as progressive or regressive.
It is a democratic question in that it raises a public debate over who is best positioned to determine who will bear the costs of climate change. Failing to involve citizens in designing climate finance through technical negotiations and institutions far removed from the people can create a legitimacy deficit with political repercussions. On the other hand, if climate finance is transparent, locally accountable, and clearly linked to social protection and adaptation outcomes, it can reinforce democratic trust.
Preserving the Natural World within the Context of Non-Debt-Creating Adaptation (COP31)
This debate comes at an opportune moment. Adaptation, finance, and loss and damage are key themes of the climate negotiations to be discussed at COP31, to be held in Antalya from 9-20 November 2026. African governments should thus ask not just how much money is pledged, but how much they will receive in the end. What forms of finance are being provided, on which terms and at what cost to future generations?
The answer matters because a climate finance target can be achieved in several ways that produce very different politics. A significant share of adaptation resources could be financed through loans, which may provide immediate financial support to vulnerable states but create future debt obligations. This finance can be beneficial in certain instances, especially when concessionality is high, and investments have a productive return. However, borrowing does not always align with climate justice.
A more believable framework for getting climate finance to Africa would thus be based on four pillars. First, adaptation finance really needs to be far more grant-based, especially in highly vulnerable countries with limited fiscal space. Second, the support for loss and damage should be on top of, not instead of, adaptation finance. Third, countries already experiencing unsustainable debt levels should have trustworthy debt-restructuring instruments, so climate shocks are not necessarily a source of additional debt crises. Finally, African countries and affected communities should be more influential in designing, allocating and monitoring climate finance.
In particular, the fourth principle is important. Wealth redistribution is not the only issue of climate justice between North and South. It is also about redistribution within countries. External resources can fuel inequality when they fall into the hands of political elites, are concentrated in capital-heavy projects, or are not tied to the communities most vulnerable to climate risks. This is why a just climate-finance architecture should link international and domestic responsibility, transparency, participation, and accountability.
Beyond the Politics of Vulnerability
The politics of African climate change is thus shifting away from a politics of vulnerability. The danger remains very real, but it is no longer politically sufficient. More and more governments, movements, and citizens are asking what vulnerability means in a global context where the conditions of climate change and climate impacts do not align with the distribution of financial means.
One possible political result of this contradiction is climate debt populism. It emerges when climate insecurity and debt insecurity become legible as parts of the same injustice, and when citizens interpret adaptation financing as a test of who counts, who owes, and who has the authority to determine the future. The idea thus includes a political element to a policy discussion that is frequently framed as a purely technical matter of climate finance.
The broader importance of the study is to move from the question “How much climate finance is needed in Africa” to “What political order is being reproduced in the provision of climate finance?” That question is more complex, as it deals with responsibility, power, debt, legitimacy, and distribution at the same time.
Africa does not need a regime of climate finance that makes adaptation possible today and harder to sustain in the years to come. Nor does it need a politics that converts legitimate climate grievances into simplistic blame. What is needed is a system in which the three aspects of historical responsibility, financial capacity, domestic accountability, and democratic participation are seen as interlinked aspects of climate justice.
The decisive test of climate finance is not whether money reaches vulnerable countries. It is whether that money enables them to become less vulnerable without increasing their debt. This is indeed the political issue of climate adaptation. The language of vulnerability is giving way to the language of entitlement in Africa’s climate politics: from “Save us from a crisis” to “acknowledge the distribution of responsibility for a crisis.” If that shift becomes politically salient, climate finance will no longer be a technocratic subfield of international development. It will be at the heart of the battle for global justice, global sovereignty and democratic legitimacy.
Who pays to adapt—and, in the emerging politics of climate debt, who actually owes whom?
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (2026). COP31. UNFCCC.
Warlenius, R. (2018). “Decolonizing the atmosphere: The climate justice movement on climate debt.” Development and Change, 49(2), 454–478. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12387
ECPS has joined TRACE – Tracing Colonial Legacies in Climate Vulnerabilities, a new 24-month project funded by the European Union’s Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme. TRACE examines how Europe’s colonial history continues to shape contemporary climate vulnerability, inequality, migration, and environmental justice. Focusing especially on young people aged 15–30, including those from migrant and postcolonial backgrounds, the project combines climate education, historical reflection, democratic participation, and public engagement. Activities will include workshops, exhibitions, public debates, documentary screenings, student-led case studies, and foresight exercises. TRACE will culminate in a Youth Charter on Climate Migration and Vulnerability, bringing young people’s perspectives into wider European debates on climate justice, historical responsibility, and intergenerational equity.
ECPS (Brussels)
The European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) has joined TRACE – Tracing Colonial Legacies in Climate Vulnerabilities, a new 24-month project funded by the European Union’s Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme.
TRACE explores how Europe’s colonial history continues to shape patterns of vulnerability to climate change today. By examining the connections between colonial legacies, climate inequality, migration, and environmental justice, the project seeks to explain why communities experience the consequences of the climate crisis so differently and how more equitable and inclusive responses can be developed.
The project focuses primarily on young people aged 15–30, including secondary school students, university students, and young professionals, with particular attention to participants from migrant and postcolonial backgrounds. It also engages educators, policymakers, and civil society organizations, especially those working on migration, youth participation, climate change, and environmental justice.
At the heart of TRACE is an effort to strengthen young people’s understanding of colonial history and its relationship to contemporary climate and environmental inequalities. The project also aims to equip participants with the knowledge and critical tools needed to engage with debates on climate change, migration, historical responsibility, and intergenerational justice.
A Participatory and Youth-Led Approach
TRACE is built around participatory and youth-led activities designed to combine historical reflection, climate education, democratic participation, and public engagement. Planned activities include workshops on climate science, open forums where young participants can share experiences, emotions, and testimonies, and intergenerational conversations exploring how historical memories and contemporary climate challenges intersect.
The project will also organize exhibitions, public debates, documentary screenings, student-led case studies, and foresight exercises encouraging participants to imagine possible patterns of climate mobility by 2050.
An important dimension of TRACE will be its engagement with European climate policy. Participants will examine initiatives including the EU Clean Industrial Deal through a decolonial perspective, considering how contemporary climate strategies relate to questions of historical responsibility, inequality, and justice.
Young participants will also work together to develop a conceptual framework connecting colonization and contemporary climate vulnerability. Their findings and reflections will be communicated through a youth-led Instagram channel, helping extend the project’s discussions beyond formal workshops and events.
From Historical Reflection to Democratic Participation
One of the project’s central objectives is to connect historical understanding with democratic practice. TRACE will culminate in the collaborative drafting of a Youth Charter on Climate Migration and Vulnerability. Developed through a participatory process, the Charter will articulate young people’s perspectives on climate vulnerability, migration, historical responsibility, and justice.
The final document will be shared with policymakers, activists, civil society organizations, and other relevant stakeholders, ensuring that the voices and experiences of young participants contribute to wider European debates about climate policy and migration.
By looking critically at the past, TRACE seeks to deepen understanding of how colonial histories continue to influence the unequal distribution of climate risks in the present. At the same time, the project aims to foster inclusive remembrance, intergenerational justice, democratic participation, and climate resilience.
A European Partnership
TRACE brings together organizations from across Europe with expertise in education, environmental sustainability, human rights, youth participation, democratic engagement, and research.
TRACE brings together organizations from across Europe with expertise in education, environmental sustainability, human rights, youth participation, democratic engagement, and research. The consortium consists of:
🇵🇹 EducPro — Portugal
🇮🇹 Fondazione CREDA ETS – Centro Ricerca Educazione Documentazione Ambientale — Italy
🇪🇸 Altekio Iniciativas hacia la Sostenibilidad, S. Coop. Madrid — Spain
🇸🇮 PIC – Legal Center for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment / Pravni center za varstvo človekovih pravic in okolja — Slovenia
🇧🇪 Sumatra Innovation ASBL — Belgium
🇧🇪 European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) — Belgium
The consortium recently held its kick-off meeting in Portugal, where project partners came together to establish the framework for cooperation and set the course for the activities to be carried out over the coming two years. The launch of TRACE also received local media attention in Portugal, with the project featured in the Portuguese newspaper Diário do Minho.
Through its participation in TRACE, ECPS will contribute to the project’s broader examination of historical legacies, democratic participation, inequality, climate vulnerability, and the political dimensions of climate justice. The partnership also extends ECPS’s engagement with European research and civil society initiatives addressing the intersection of democracy, social justice, youth participation, and contemporary political challenges.
Over the coming months, ECPS will share updates on TRACE’s research, workshops, exhibitions, public debates, youth activities, and other project outputs through its website and social media channels.
In this Voice of Youth (VoY) commentary, Emmanouela Papapavlou reflects on the wave of student protests sweeping France and asks what lies beneath the barricades, tear gas, and confrontations with police. She argues that the unrest should not be reduced to disorder alone but understood as the expression of accumulated frustration with teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating school conditions, academic pressure, and a growing sense that institutions listen only when young people make themselves impossible to ignore. Without excusing violence, Papapavlou calls for attention to the grievances that precede it. Her central warning is stark: when a generation is repeatedly told to wait while its future feels increasingly insecure, frustration can become political anger—and democratic institutions risk teaching young people that being heard requires escalation.
By Emmanouela Papapavlou*
There is something deeply unsettling about watching a seventeen-year-old stand in front of a line of riot police. Not because young people are incapable of anger. But because we have somehow become so accustomed to ignoring them that we only seem to notice them once they are standing in the streets.
And the images are difficult to look away from. Students running through clouds of tear gas. Police in riot gear standing opposite teenagers. Barricades burning in the streets. Arrests. Injuries. A fifteen-year-old boy losing his hand during a confrontation involving a police grenade. And suddenly, everyone has an opinion: Some say the students have gone too far. Some say the police have gone too far. Some blame political parties. Some blame immigrants. Some blame the far left. Some blame the government. Some blame the students themselves.
But somewhere between all the shouting, the actual question is being lost. Why are these students so angry in the first place? Because this is not really about one protest. It is not really about one school. And it is not really about one government decision. It is about what happens when young people spend years being told that education is the key to their future, only to enter an education system that increasingly feels incapable of giving them one. They sit in overcrowded classrooms. They wait for teachers who never arrive. They study in buildings that have been allowed to deteriorate. They carry schedules that leave them exhausted. They face constant academic pressure and an increasingly competitive path toward university. And then they are told to work harder. To be patient. To understand. To wait… But how long are young people supposed to wait before frustration becomes anger?
When Patience Turns Into Anger
France’s education ministry found that almost one in ten teaching hours in public secondary schools went untaught during the 2024–2025 school year, with a significant proportion lost because replacement teachers could not be found. Students have repeatedly pointed to teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, poor infrastructure and the pressure surrounding university admissions as reasons for taking to the streets. And maybe the most painful part is that none of this is new. That is what makes it worse. The students are not discovering that their system is imperfect. They are discovering that the adults who have known it was imperfect for years have still allowed it to remain that way. And that changes everything.
Because there is a difference between being failed once and being failed repeatedly. There is a difference between hearing that something will be fixed and watching nothing change. There is a difference between being told that your voice matters and being listened to only after you start shouting. That is what I think we are watching in France. Not simply a student protest. But a generation reaching the point where patience no longer feels like virtue. It feels like surrender. And when that happens, the question is no longer why are they protesting? The question becomes: Why did they have to protest to be heard?
The Fire Is Not the Beginning
Of course, not everything happening in the streets is justified. Burning schools does not repair schools. Throwing objects at police officers does not make education better. Violence against teachers, students or police officers cannot be excused simply because the cause behind a protest is legitimate. But we should be equally careful not to make the opposite mistake.
Because once violence appears, it becomes very easy to stop asking why the protest began. It becomes easy to look at the flames instead of what started the fire. And it becomes even easier to look at a teenager throwing a bottle and forget that there is a teenager underneath it who may have spent years feeling that nobody was listening. That does not excuse violence. It explains why understanding the cause matters. Because, if all we do is extinguish the fire, without asking why the building keeps catching fire, we will eventually be standing in the same place again.
When Institutions Hear Only Shouting
The French government has promised dialogue and changes, including a review of the university admissions system and measures addressing school conditions. But the response has also been dominated by policing, political accusations and arguments over who is responsible for the violence. On October 7, the government temporarily suspended the use of stun grenades at student protests after the Lens incident, while investigations into police conduct continue.
And perhaps that is the tragedy. A generation is asking to be taken seriously. And the country is arguing about how loudly they asked. But students should not have to become perfectly behaved victims before their problems become worthy of attention. They should not have to be injured before we ask what they were protesting. They should not have to fill the streets before we look inside their classrooms. They should not have to become a national crisis before we remember that they are the people who will inherit the country we are building now.
A Generation Asking to Be Seen
Because education was never supposed to be about simply surviving. It was supposed to be about becoming. Becoming educated. Becoming independent. Becoming capable of thinking for ourselves. Becoming the people who will eventually decide what kind of society we live in.
So, what are we teaching them now? Are we teaching them that institutions listen? Or are we teaching them that institutions listen only when they are forced to? Are we teaching them that democracy gives them a voice? Or are we teaching them that their voice matters only when it becomes impossible to ignore? Are we teaching them that their future belongs to them? Or are we quietly asking them to accept a future that we have failed to build?
Because young people are watching. They are watching their schools deteriorate. They are watching their teachers disappear. They are watching their parents’ struggle. They are watching politicians argue. They are watching institutions promise. And they are watching nothing change.
And eventually, something inside a person breaks when they realize that the people responsible for protecting their future have become more comfortable with the problem than they are. That is why this is bigger than France. Because every generation eventually reaches a moment when it looks at the world it has inherited and asks: Is this really all you have prepared for us? And if the answer is yes, then perhaps we should not be surprised when they refuse to accept it.
They Are Not the Future—They Are Here
The students of France are not simply asking for better classrooms. They are asking for proof that their future matters. They are asking to be respected. To be heard. To be considered. And maybe, more than anything, they are asking the adults around them to remember something that should never have needed reminding: They are not the future. They are the present. They are already here. They are already watching. They are already speaking.
And if we continue to ignore them, they will only have one thing left to do. To speak louder. So, listen carefully. Because beneath the shouting, beneath the sirens, beneath the tear gas and the barricades, there is a generation trying to tell us something. They are tired of being told to wait. They are tired of being told that change takes time. They are tired of being told that their concerns are complicated, that the budget is difficult, that reform is coming, that someone is working on it. They have heard enough promises. They want to see change.
And perhaps that is why the streets are burning. Not because young people have suddenly become violent. But because their frustration has been allowed to burn for far too long. The question now is not whether the fire can be put out. The question is whether anyone is finally willing to ask why it started.
Because the students are saying: We are catching fire, and if we burn, you burn with us.
(*) Emmanouela Papapavlou is a high school student from Thessaloniki, Greece, deeply passionate about social and political issues. She has actively participated in Model United Nations and other youth forums, serving as a chairperson in multiple conferences and winning awards in Greek debate competitions. Writing is her greatest passion, and she loves using it to explore democracy, civic engagement, and human rights. Her dream is to share her ideas, inspire action, and amplify the voices of young people who want to make a difference. Email: emmanpapapavlou@gmail.com
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Jasmin Hasanović analyzes Bosnia and Herzegovina’s October 4 elections through the lens of inter-, intra-, and cross-ethnic populism. He argues that the post-Dayton order continues to structure political competition around ethnically segmented constituencies, allowing parties to present themselves not merely as representatives but as protectors of threatened communities. This dynamic, he contends, helps explain why political change often fails to produce systemic transformation: institutional safeguards become “political currency,” while blockades and recurring crises reproduce the same underlying logic. As Dr. Hasanović puts it, “the algorithm that continually reproduces the crisis” is ethnically defined power sharing. The interview also explores the limits of civic alternatives, the weakness of cross-ethnic mobilization, and the prospects for a credible democratic left.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s October 4 elections combined an important procedural innovation with striking political continuity. Biometric voter identification strengthened the integrity of the electoral process, yet turnout fell to around 42 percent, while the country’s major ethnonational parties remained dominant within their respective constituencies. SNSD consolidated its position in Republika Srpska, SDA retained substantial strength among Bosniak voters despite Bakir Izetbegović’s defeat in the presidency contest, and HDZ BiH secured the Croat seat in the state presidency. These outcomes provide the immediate backdrop to our conversation with Dr. Jasmin Hasanović, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Sarajevo, about populism, ethnopolitics, democratic representation, and the structural legacies of the Dayton order.
At the center of Dr. Hasanović’s analysis is the argument that Bosnia’s political crises cannot be understood simply as the product of particular leaders or parties. Rather, they are embedded in a system in which ethnicity has become “a central organizing principle, not only in politics, but also in public and social life.” Electoral competition, he argues, operates largely through ethnically segmented party systems, while the populist construction of “the people” takes place between, within, and across ethnic communities. The October 4 elections, in his view, therefore illustrate “a continued dominance of inter-ethnic politics,” even as significant intra-ethnic competition persists, and cross-ethnic alternatives remain comparatively weak.
The interview’s central argument is captured most sharply in Dr. Hasanović’s assessment of the Dayton system itself. The power-sharing architecture, he argues, has tied access to power to ethnic representation in ways that make it politically rewarding for leaders to present themselves as “protectors, not only representatives, of their communities.” Institutional safeguards can consequently become “political currency,” while blockades and crises are repeatedly reproduced. As he puts it, replacing a governing party or overcoming a single institutional blockade does not alter “the algorithm that continually reproduces the crisis.” That algorithm, he concludes, “is ethnically defined power sharing.”
This structural perspective also helps explain why political change so often fails to become systemic change. In Republika Srpska, opposition to SNSD may challenge corruption or personalized rule without challenging the underlying ethnonational framework. Among Bosniaks, party pluralism can itself be portrayed as weakness when Serb and Croat political blocs appear more consolidated. And even when citizens share grievances over corruption, unemployment, inequality, public services, or institutional failure, Dr. Hasanović warns that “having the same problems does not produce a shared political identity.”
The interview therefore moves beyond the question of who won or lost on October 4. It asks whether Bosnia can generate a political subjectivity capable of transcending ethnic exclusivity—and whether democratic, socioeconomic, and civic demands can eventually reshape a system whose institutional logic continues to reproduce the very divisions it was designed to manage.
Here is our interview with Dr. Jasmin Hasanović, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Inter-Ethnic Politics Still Dominates
A voter casts a ballot against the backdrop of the flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo: Oleg Kachura / Dreamstime.
Professor Hasanović, welcome! Your recent article distinguishes between inter-ethnic, intra-ethnic, and cross-ethnic forms of populism. If we treat the October 4 elections as an empirical test of that framework, which of these dynamics appears to have been strengthened most clearly by the election results? Or does the election demonstrate that all three operate simultaneously, with different political consequences across Bosnia and Herzegovina?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: First of all, let me try to clarify what I understand by populism, because I think that would be the most important point at the beginning. I also want to distinguish populism from something that may appear as opposition politics within an ethnic community. That doesn’t have to be populist at all.
My understanding of populism, which is also described in the paper that you mentioned, is very much Laclauian. I see populism not as a kind of thin ideology or something like that, but as a political logic through which different unmet demands are brought together to construct a collective political subject, “the people.” And those demands establish a dividing line between “us” and “them.” So, the political identity of “us” is then constructed in relation to “them,” whether a ruling elite, another ethnic community and its political elites, or the institutional order itself.
Why I see this framework as important for understanding and explaining populism in Bosnia and Herzegovina is that, after the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed, Bosnia and Herzegovina has operated under a power-sharing system designed to ensure the political representation of the three dominant ethnic groups: the Bosniaks, the Croats, and the Serbs. They are defined as constituent peoples of the country. But the politicization of ethnicity very soon extended beyond the political aim of representation. It made ethnicity a central organizing principle, not only in politics, but also in public and social life.
This has two important consequences for Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the one side, we see that electoral competition takes place within ethnically segmented party subsystems, so voters are not formally required to vote along ethnic lines. However, the institutional arrangements, territorial divisions, and party mobilization, which we saw very clearly in those elections, strongly reinforce that pattern.
Secondly, given this ethnically structured political order, the populist construction of political subjectivity can take place in relation to ethnic communities. It cannot construct a political identity without referring to ethnic communities. So, depending on how it relates to ethnic communities, it can relate either between them, within them, or across them. That is why I made this distinction between inter-ethnic, intra-ethnic, and cross-ethnic populism, rather than relying on a simple, linear division between horizontal and vertical forms of populism.
Now, going back to your question and referring to the recent elections, I wouldn’t see the elections as an empirical test. Rather, I would see them as an illustration of how this framework works and interacts. What those elections demonstrated was, as you already mentioned, a continued dominance of inter-ethnic politics. So, the dominant parties remain the ethnonationalist parties, which mobilize around competing political claims and visions over the country. And every political party claims to represent and protect the demands of its respective community.
However, if we take a closer look, we will see that there is still significant competition, of course asymmetrical, within the ethnic groups and within the ethnic electoral arenas. For instance, we see the tension surrounding the dominant Bosniak political party, SDA, the Party of Democratic Action. As you mentioned, there is this tension between its relative electoral performance, which, of course, dominated in the elections within the areas of the country where Bosniaks are the dominant ethnic group, and, on the other side, the fact that its leader was defeated for the presidency.
What we also saw was the emergence of a stronger opposition within the Croat camp than there used to be before. What I want to say here is that ethnic homogenization was driven not only by opposition to other ethnic groups, but also by competition within them, as rival parties try to establish themselves as more credible defenders of the ethnic groups than the dominant ethnic political parties.
On the other side, cross-ethnic demands are still present, but they have not developed into a comparably strong electoral project, partially because electoral competition remains concentrated largely within monoethnic party subsystems, which makes it quite difficult for shared grievances to be connected across ethnic boundaries.
Dodik’s Influence Extends Beyond Office
Perhaps the most striking result came from Republika Srpska: Milorad Dodik was not himself on the ballot, yet SNSD retained its dominance, Željka Cvijanović won the Serb seat in the state presidency, and the party remained overwhelmingly powerful at entity level. Does this suggest that Dodik’s populism has become institutionalized beyond his personal leadership, or is this better understood through your category of inter-ethnic populism, in which voters are ultimately choosing their national “side” rather than an individual leader?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: It doesn’t mean that he was not an active part of the campaign. He remained the central political figure of SNSD during the campaign. He was present on billboards and at party rallies, so he was not missing from the public sphere. And not to forget that he also visited Moscow, where he met Vladimir Putin only days before the elections, together with the then Prime Minister of Republika Srpska, Savo Minić, who is now elected as the president of the entity. Vladimir Putin explicitly expressed support for the governing SNSD-led coalition.
When we see the results, it is obvious that Dodik’s political influence extends beyond holding an elected office. But what we also see is that SNSD probably could not reproduce the same dominance without him. He was not running, but he was still a dominant political figure. It is definitely the case that Dodik will remain and have influence behind the scenes in the political life of Bosnia and Herzegovina. His political party and all the ideology behind it, which he dominantly shapes, will remain central to government formation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This also shows the inefficiency of the Troika coalition in suspending Dodik and Dodik’s politics. I mean, he’s not running for office, but still, his presence is dominant, as we can see. Most Bosniak voters saw this as evidence that the Troika didn’t succeed in efficiently eliminating Dodik’s political rhetoric, which is threatening to the country. But also, Dodik’s victory was a slap in the face of the European Union and the internationals in this election.
Also, I don’t want to forget SNSD’s organization and patronage networks, because they allow Dodik’s leadership to operate through other candidates and through the established institutions of Republika Srpska. On the other side, his inter-ethnic populism reinforces that power by equating support for the party with support for Republika Srpska and the Serb people in the country.
Replacing Dodik Would Not Transform the Framework
Milorad Dodik greets supporters in Pale, Bosnia and Herzegovina, following a meeting and referendum on Republika Srpska’s National Day, September 25, 2016. Photo: Vladimir Stanisic / Dreamstime.
Your concept of intra-ethnic populism is especially useful because it distinguishes opposition to an entrenched ethnonational elite from opposition to ethnonationalism itself. In Republika Srpska, opposition actors may challenge SNSD over corruption, patronage, or personalized power while remaining committed to Serb autonomy and national interests. Does the October 4 result reinforce your argument that intra-ethnic competition can pluralize an ethnic political arena without necessarily weakening the underlying ethnonational conception of “the people”?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: Yes, here the distinction is between challenging the ruling elite of one ethnic community, on the one side, and challenging the ethnic principle of political representation, on the other. As we saw, and as you mentioned, opposition actors can mobilize around corruption, injustice, and personalized power, as was the case with Dodik’s opposition or the opposition to HDZ, although we also didn’t have Dragan Čović running for the presidency. But they do so without constructing, to go back to the case of Republika Srpska, a political people beyond Republika Srpska and Serb national interests.
That might open space for accountability, but it doesn’t produce different politics. The politics remains basically the same. This is most visible within the opposition in Republika Srpska. All the actors of the opposition in Republika Srpska share the same idea of what Republika Srpska is and should be. They share the same idea that Republika Srpska needs to remain a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, even with stronger autonomy, and everything is understood as the main Serb national interest.
Every time Dodik defined Republika Srpska as being under threat, opposition parties aligned with Milorad Dodik. We saw that in practice. The recent reactions of prominent opposition leaders in Republika Srpska, mourning and paying tribute after the death of Ratko Mladić, who was a convicted war criminal and died while serving a life sentence, convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, illustrate that ethnonationalist and revisionist positions remain, unfortunately, deeply embedded in Serb politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This extends beyond SNSD as a political party or Milorad Dodik as a leader.
So, replacing Dodik or SNSD at this point would not by itself transform the political framework within which both sides compete. The democratic potential of intra-ethnic competition depends on whether the demands for justice can become substantive commitments to creating a new political subjectivity, rather than simply claiming that another leadership will defend the same national project better than the previous one.
Because if you have a competition between the original and the fake copy, of course, you will always go for the original. So, I would explain that as one of the reasons why Milorad Dodik and SNSD still maintain a dominant position.
SDA Shapes Bosniak Political Identity
The Bosniak result presents an intriguing variation: SDA performed strongly at the party level, yet Bakir Izetbegović lost the presidency contest to Denis Bećirović. How would you interpret this apparent separation between party strength and leadership preference? Could it represent precisely the kind of intra-ethnic differentiation you describe—where voters challenge who legitimately represents the community without necessarily abandoning the ethnically structured political field itself?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: Yes, that’s something I already mentioned when I started answering your first question. What I would also like to point out here is that the relative success of SDA should be distinguished from an absolute expansion of its electorate. If we look at the preliminary results, we see that SDA mobilized and retained its voters more efficiently than its other competitors. Of course, we need to wait until all the results are finalized. But I see neither that SDA gained more votes nor that SDA lost some votes. I see that SDA is very stubborn in general and that it succeeded in mobilizing its strong voting base.
But I have to be very clear here regarding Izetbegović, because Izetbegović’s candidacy was a political risk for SDA from the very beginning. There were earlier signs of dissatisfaction with his leadership, so SDA was not really sure whether Izetbegović should be the candidate or not. There were also speculations about some other possible candidates before he was officially nominated to run for the presidency. It gave me the impression that SDA was not sure whether he was a good option or whether he would be a political risk for them, while, on the other side, also showing some inner weakness in lacking an adequate candidate to run for the presidency.
So, Izetbegović’s defeat, despite SDA’s strong performance, shows that support for the party goes beyond loyalty to its current leader. Where SDA gains its political power is rather symbolic. It comes from, of course, reliance on religion, the wartime legacy, and the symbolic authority of Bakir’s father, Alija Izetbegović, who was the founder of SDA and the first president of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
SDA has connected these sources of legitimacy with the claim that excluding SDA from power means excluding Bosniaks from political representation. This brings different demands together around the idea that SDA is not only the authentic political voice of Bosniaks, but also a defining force in shaping and safeguarding Bosniak national identity as a political nation.
Its ability to maintain a stable core of voters, despite a lot of splinter parties that have formed over the last 10 years, suggests that this identification that SDA is pushing forward remains very powerful in the relationship between SDA and the construction of Bosniaks as a political identity. What we also saw is that a lot of former leading figures who left SDA, after leaving SDA and trying other political organizations or forming their own political parties, failed to maintain comparable influence outside SDA.
Referring to Bećirović, unlike Izetbegović, who was the candidate of SDA in both election cycles, Bećirović was gaining broad coalition support in both cycles. Yet what we saw is that his lead over Izetbegović has now narrowed. He had more than 100,000 votes more than Izetbegović in 2022, and now the difference is only around 20,000 in the preliminary results of 2026. So, I believe that his earlier victory mobilized votes against Izetbegović rather than for himself.
This year, however, Semir Efendić, the president of the Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina, complicated this dilemma between Izetbegović and Bećirović and offered an alternative outside that binary.
So, the point is that voters may distinguish between the party and its leadership but still choose within an ethnically structured political field. Maybe that was not part of the question, but it’s also interesting that, although the presidency members are elected from one of the constituent peoples, they only have to present those constituent peoples in the presidency, not to represent them. However, their campaigns took place within a predominantly monoethnic political arena, so the candidates largely addressed only monoethnic electorates and the interests of the group they want to present and represent.
Collective Representation Is Not Automatically Populist
Among Croats, HDZ BiH again demonstrated its capacity to present itself as the principal guardian of collective representation, with Darijana Filipović winning the Croat presidency seat. How does the longstanding discourse of “legitimate representation” fit into your distinction between ethnonationalism and populism? At what point does a constitutional claim about group representation become a populist claim that one party uniquely embodies the authentic will of the Croat people?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: The demand for collective representation is not automatically populist. But it can become populist when the demand for legitimate representation connects different demands, from electoral reform to autonomy, under a common narrative of collective ethnic vulnerability. It can also become populist when it politically constructs the Croat people as a political subject whose rights and interests are under threat. This is the logic through which HDZ has largely shaped the discourse and agenda of Croat politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The dispute over representation, together with the asymmetrical federal system in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which generated unmet political demands among Croats, helped HDZ consolidate its dominance within the Croat political arena. We also had, during the last 10 years or even more, very weak parts of the Croat opposition to HDZ. But that opposition also adopted the same narrative, challenging HDZ’s leadership while still sharing the central demands from which HDZ gains political relevance.
The victory of Darijana Filipović now gave HDZ something that it was lacking after previous elections: representation inside the presidency. Her victory also institutionally aligned HDZ’s political influence in the country, giving power to HDZ across all levels of the political system.
What may arise as a question right now is whether HDZ’s presence in the presidency can make it harder to sustain the claim that Croats are being excluded by Bosniaks outvoting their candidates, potentially exposing how the representation issue has also served HDZ in consolidating the party’s power. Filipović announced during the election campaign a plan to open an office in Mostar, the office of the Croat member of the presidency in Mostar, something similar to what Milorad Dodik also did regarding the office of the Serb member of the presidency in Republika Srpska.
That can be read not only as something that reinforces the deeper ethnic segregation of the country and the territorial identification of a state-level position with a particular ethnic constituency, but also as an aim of HDZ to consolidate its power.
Also, regarding the opposition, it is interesting territorially that the opposition to HDZ comes from political organizations of Croats from the central part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while HDZ has a strong political base in Herzegovina, in the south of the country.
The question is whether this consolidation of power that HDZ gained can now weaken the narrative that was connecting different grievances around the idea of legitimate representation. Can it now allow the opposition to mobilize around other demands? That opening is possible, but it will depend on whether the opposition can offer more than a competing claim to defend the same national interests of Croats. Of course, those national interests are being defined exclusively by HDZ.
The People Is Not a Fixed Category
Muslims gather for a funeral in Maglaj, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 2016, with an effendi wearing a turban visible among the crowd. Photo: Damir Đuhera / Dreamstime.
Your article argues that Bosnia is distinctive because political actors compete not only over who represents “the people,” but over which people constitutes the legitimate political community in the first place. After this election, we again have powerful Serb, Bosniak, Croat, and civic conceptions of political belonging operating simultaneously. Does this make Bosnia a particularly revealing case for populism theory precisely because the demos itself remain fundamentally contested?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: Yes, because Bosnia makes visible something that the dominant theories of populism take for granted: that the people is politically constructed rather than simply being a fixed category waiting to be represented. In terms of Bosnia and Herzegovina, we do not talk about Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks as fixed and essential ethnic groups, but rather as political identities that are defined and constructed through their political demands, which interact with institutions, territorial divisions, and struggles over the state itself. This is because all three dominant ethnic political parties do not share the same perception of how Bosnia and Herzegovina should be, how it should be defined, or what the future of the country should be. Of course, their political identities are also defined in relation to the boundaries of what and who can represent them, not only among themselves, but also within the same ethnic group and ethnic community.
Without Alternatives, Abstention Becomes Rational
The election introduced biometric identification and significantly reduced opportunities for manipulation, yet turnout fell to roughly 42 percent and established ethnonational patterns remained remarkably resilient. How should we interpret this combination of cleaner electoral procedures and deep political disengagement? Does it suggest that improving electoral integrity is insufficient when citizens perceive the underlying structure of political choice as closed, repetitive, or ethnically predetermined?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: It was very important to secure those new voting technologies. It was interesting to see that, before introducing the new technologies, you always had complaints from political parties that didn’t gain enough votes, claiming that they had been defrauded or whatever. Now, only one political actor claims that somebody stole his votes or whatever. It gave a bit of legitimacy to the process, and securing electoral procedures is very important.
But I wouldn’t say that electoral integrity and democratic engagement are separate questions, because biometric identification can reduce fraud and make the election procedure more transparent, so that you know that nobody voted who was not supposed to vote, or voted twice, or so on. But it doesn’t do anything if citizens do not see a meaningful political alternative. So, you can have a very transparent and good electoral procedure, but the question is what is offered in the elections.
One of my concerns is that Bosnia and Herzegovina, in recent years, has very often offered changes in governing personnel, but it leaves the main structures of political choice and power largely intact. Even if we have new political actors, those are, in many ways, splinter parties from previously dominant political parties. So, you don’t have new leaders; you just have unsatisfied politicians who could not agree with leaders from their previous political parties, so they decided to form a new political party.
If people do not see alternatives, if they are not satisfied with the previous government but also don’t want to choose the previous actors again, or they simply feel that no party represents their demands strongly, then, in those circumstances, abstention from elections seems to be rational. It can reflect either frustration, a lack of choice, or just the weak mobilization potential of some of the political parties.
However, what I would like to point out here about the turnout, which is around 42%, is that we need to consider that percentage more carefully, because it is based on the official electoral register, which is not the same as the resident population. Citizens who have moved away may remain officially registered, even if they are not participating in the elections. So, we cannot simply conclude that 42% of adults actually living in Bosnia and Herzegovina really voted. What I want to say is that a turnout of 42% of registered voters does not mean that 42% of adults actively living in Bosnia and Herzegovina and registered really voted. They are still on the electoral register, but they are not in the country anymore.
Civic Alternatives Are Needed Across All Constituencies
Your work has repeatedly examined the difficulty of constructing political alternatives to Bosnia’s ethno-determined order. The multi-ethnic Troika suffered an electoral setback while established ethnonational parties remained resilient. Does this result expose a structural weakness of civic politics in Bosnia—namely, that civic actors must compete within institutions that already define political representation through constituent peoples?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: The preliminary results really show an electoral setback for Troika, but I would say it is an uneven setback within Troika. Individual parties of Troika received fewer votes, which is true. But the overall vote share of Troika remained roughly stable—not as influential as before, but roughly stable. Again, I’m saying this based on preliminary results, and it may change in the meantime.
Most of the losses within Troika were concentrated in the People and Justice Party and Naša Stranka (Our Party), while SDP experienced only a smaller decline. This increased SDP’s power within Troika and made Troika, if the coalition lasts—which I’m a bit skeptical about—more dependent on SDP’s electoral strength.
The previous mandate, as I also mentioned in the beginning, shows that replacing one party with another party or coalition does not automatically change the system or the political practices that are being institutionalized. Taking this experience of Troika, Troika is a very unusual ideological and political project. Troika replaced SDA as the predominant Bosniak component of the power-sharing government. But Troika’s alternative to nationalism remained concentrated only within the Bosniak electoral space, without comparable support among the Croat and Serb electorates.
This is the reason why parts of the public interpreted Troika’s compromises with nationalist coalition partners from the Serb and Croat political camps, with whom they shared power, as concessions at the expense of Bosnian political interests. This strengthened the narrative in which pluralism among Bosniak parties appears as fragmentation and weakness against two other more consolidated ethnopolitical blocs.
Overcoming that asymmetry would require credible civic alternatives within all three electoral constituencies, capable of constructing the people around shared democratic and socioeconomic demands beyond ethnic belonging. If such alternatives develop sufficient support and cooperation, they could make coalitions with nationalist parties less politically unavoidable. Otherwise, actors presenting themselves as alternatives to nationalism remain dependent on agreements with those parties.
Shared Problems Do Not Produce Shared Identity
Men play on a giant chessboard in a park in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo: Henrique Weiss / Dreamstime.
Your concept of cross-ethnic populism suggests that common grievances—corruption, unemployment, inequality, institutional failure, lack of accountability—can potentially construct a political “people” across ethnic boundaries. Yet such mobilizations have repeatedly struggled to become durable electoral projects. Why are socioeconomic grievances so easily re-ethnicized in Bosnia, and what does the October 4 result tell us about the ability of ethnonational elites to convert class, governance, or anti-corruption conflicts back into questions of collective ethnic survival?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: What we saw is that having the same problems does not produce a shared political identity. We also see that, on the other side, ethnonationalist parties can use and reinterpret demands about jobs, corruption, or public services as questions of ethnic politics: who controls resources and whether our community is being disadvantaged in relation to other communities.
We could hear this narrative very clearly at the SDA’s final central rally in Sarajevo, where restoring positions to Bosniaks was linked to returning SDA members to those positions. Its control over employment and institutions is seen as a way of restoring Bosniak political strength. We see the same pattern in SNSD, Dodik’s party, in HDZ, and in other political parties.
Meanwhile, as you mentioned, why can’t these mobilizations construct the people across ethnic boundaries? The other problem is that we have a very fragmented media and public sphere in the country, and because of that, it is difficult for citizens to recognize similar problems and similar conflicts that are more essential and existential elsewhere in the country.
Overcoming this would require organizations that can collect everyday grievances into an equivalential chain of demands that can be sustained beyond a single protest or election, which is not happening. This may be a very unpopular option, but those organizations must first build credible support within the ethnic groups, within their own ethnic electoral arenas, and then connect those struggles across ethnic boundaries.
Because there is a significant ideological gap within monoethnic electoral arenas, where opposition to national elites does not develop around redistribution or public services, but around ethnic representation. Of course, only within the Bosniak electoral subsystem do we also see some kind of ideological opposition, but not within the Serb or Croat constituencies.
That is where I see an opening for—and this also may be very unpopular—a populist left within the ethnic groups to bring those demands together and construct the people around shared experiences of inequality and exclusion, rather than their ethnic belonging or party loyalty.
Dayton Rewards Leaders Who Act as Protectors
One of the most important implications of your recent article is that Dayton does not merely constrain populism; its power-sharing architecture may actually structure and reproduce populist possibilities. Thirty years after Dayton, do these election results strengthen the argument that institutional incentives themselves continuously reproduce the political need for Serb, Croat, and Bosniak leaders to demonstrate that their communities are threatened and therefore require exclusive political protection?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: Yes, it is a paradox, and it is interesting that the power-sharing principle in Dayton tied access to power to ethnic representation, which made it politically rewarding for leaders to present themselves as protectors, not only representatives, of their communities.
All three ethnic groups have different views of the country and, based on those views, different views of Dayton and the peace that was established. But the common ground among all three ethnic groups is that the Dayton framework is not satisfying for the group.
That’s the reason why the same actors can control institutions, on the one side, while, on the other side, portraying the constitutional order as a threat to their people and claiming that if we, as the legitimate representatives of our people, are not present in the institutions, then the other two groups are present, so we are threatened again.
So, refusing to cooperate with other ethnic representatives can also increase their power, while the institutional safeguards can very easily become political currency rather than simply a tool of protection against domination. Then you have different ways of blocking institutional procedures, meaning blocking the country from fulfilling its basic duties.
This is also why replacing a governing party or overcoming one institutional blockade doesn’t change the consequences—the algorithm that continually reproduces the crisis. The algorithm, of course, is ethnically defined power sharing.
Bosnia Needs a New Political Subjectivity
Photo: Dreamstime.
You make the provocative argument that intra-ethnic populism can, under some conditions, have a democratizing effect by breaking monopolies of representation within monoethnic political subsystems. Looking at the October 4 results, do you see evidence of such productive pluralization anywhere in Bosnia? Or has intra-ethnic competition largely remained competition over who can more credibly represent the same ethnonational project?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: Yes, much of that competition still concerns who can defend the same national interests more credibly. So, its potential democratizing effects still remain limited. There is also this dangerous asymmetry, where we can see this pluralism best among predominantly Bosniak parties. But this pluralism can be framed as weakness when the other two ethnic blocs appear more consolidated, which strengthens the ethnonational political party among Bosniaks by claiming that Troika is not sufficient to represent Bosniaks because it is more liberal or whatever and is making concessions to the other two very consolidated ethno-political projects. So, Bosniaks also need a very strong ethno-political project to represent Bosniaks.
The problem is that positioning themselves as intra-ethnic successors to the dominant ethnonationalists means, now in a theoretical way, that you are sharing the same inter-ethnic signifier, which risks becoming a floating signifier whose meaning is suspended or contested between two alternative equivalent frontiers. What you need is another political subjectivity, because sharing the same inter-ethnic signifier complicates the construction of a populist subjectivity that would reconfigure already existing demands and incorporate new demands needed for creating a new political subjectivity beyond the ethnic subjectivity.
Bosnian Populism Is Both Horizontal and Vertical
Bosnia’s populist politics also involves an unusual vertical dimension because “the elite” can mean not only domestic political establishments but also the Office of the High Representative, EU institutions, foreign embassies, and other international actors. How does this external layer alter the classic populist opposition between “the people” and “the elite”? Can international supervision itself become a resource through which domestic actors construct popular sovereignty against an allegedly external governing establishment?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: Yes, international involvement, which is described and defined within the Dayton Peace Agreement, complicates the distinction because domestic leaders can be part of the governing establishment while presenting themselves as opponents of an external elite. It also provides a way to redirect responsibility for their own failures, not only horizontally towards other ethnic groups, but also vertically towards decisions presented as externally imposed.
One example I mentioned in the paper is Milorad Dodik’s description of opposition leaders as “Schmidt Serbs,” associating them with the High Representative, Christian Schmidt, and portraying them as political groups representing the interests of foreigners rather than those of genuine Serb people. SDA also repeatedly portrayed Troika as imposed by international actors against the will of the Bosniak people. This brings an external enemy into an internal political struggle. That’s what I meant by saying that it complicates this distinction, because opponents are framed as serving foreign authority against their own people.
That’s also the reason why we cannot easily place populism in Bosnia and Herzegovina only on a horizontal or vertical line, because it has these overlapping moments and dynamics in relation to ethnic groups, as well as to the political framework and institutions within which the groups are functioning and operating.
The ‘Original Dayton’ Claim Is Paradoxical
Dodik responded to SNSD’s victory by reviving the language of returning to the “original Dayton,” including demands to restore competencies to Republika Srpska. How should we understand such claims within your framework? Is this primarily inter-ethnic populism, a sovereignty discourse, or a particularly Bosnian form of populism in which the constitutional order is simultaneously invoked as legitimate and attacked as having been corrupted by hostile elites?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: That’s an interesting claim. Dodik’s appeal to the original Dayton combines inter-ethnic populism with a claim to sovereignty, but it also involves SNSD presenting itself as giving the genuine interpretation of Serbian interests intra-ethnically. What this means in practice is that it presents Republika Srpska and the Serb people as victims of a political order that is not in their political interests. Their political interest in the 1990s was either autonomy or the idea of remaining in a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, or something like that. Bosnia and Herzegovina is seen as a political project that was, and is, made up by international actors.
Politically, what I see as important is the question of what this language authorizes in practice. Is it further obstruction of the country and its institutions? Is it building parallel institutions? Or is it a general attempt to weaken the state, rather than simply a dispute about the constitutional history of the country?
It is also interesting why the original Dayton is important for Dodik and his populist claims: in the first version of the Constitution, the authority of state institutions used to be very weak. Referring to the original institutions also means that there is a stronger reliance on international actors. He claims to want to avoid the interference of international actors, which again is a paradox.
Justice Became Trans-Ethnic, but Not Political
Bosnian civil war. Naim Pasić mourns the loss of his wife and daughter at Lion Cemetery in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on June 2, 1993. Pasić, 58, had left home to gather food for his family and returned to find his house destroyed and his wife and daughter dead. Tens of thousands of Bosnian civilians had been killed during the first year of the war. Photo: Mark Milstein / Northfoto / Dreamstime.
Your wider research on social movements and civic participation asks whether citizens can construct political subjectivities outside established ethnopolitical structures. From the 2014 plenums to accountability movements and other forms of civic mobilization, Bosnia has periodically produced moments in which ordinary citizens articulate an “us” against unresponsive institutions. Why have these moments proved so difficult to translate into sustained cross-ethnic electoral organization? Is the problem organizational weakness, institutional design, depoliticization, elite co-optation—or the absence of a sufficiently powerful alternative conception of “the people”?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: I will start with the last one: a sufficiently powerful alternative conception of the people has not been able to be politically constructed because of a combination of organizational weaknesses, institutional obstacles, very strong ethnonationalist backlash and countermobilization, and the difficulty of sustaining a common political identification that crosses ethnic borders.
The movements around Dženan Memić in Sarajevo and David Dragičević in Banja Luka are an important example because that was the first time there was one political idea—the idea of justice—that became trans-ethnic, that both ethnic groups could rely on and see as a strong political demand. However, that demand could not create a stable chain of equivalence that would provide a joint, common construction of the people capable of crossing ethnic identification.
As my research shows, that common demand for justice also carried different objectives. It was not sufficiently an empty signifier in that manner because, in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Sarajevo, it required stronger institutional accountability, while in Republika Srpska, it was a more direct challenge to the ruling regime.
But both actors in the protests never challenged the political system or the political constitution and never had any other goal beyond fighting for their own problem, for their own aim, which was very personal and very tragic because of the personal experience they faced. There was also no political actor that could transfer those demands into one wider political project.
So, solidarity crossed entity and ethnic borders, but it did not engage all constituencies equally. For instance, it was a matter between Bosniaks and Serbs, but it was not something that affected Croats in any way. It also did not consolidate into a shared political project capable of constructing a political identity in the first place.
A Credible Left Is Needed Across All Communities
And finally, Professor Hasanović, your work on the post-Dayton possibilities for the Left asks whether an alternative to ethno-determined politics can emerge from within the very system that entrenches it. After October 4, what pathway appears more plausible: attempting to construct an immediately cross-ethnic civic demos, or first pluralizing political competition within Serb, Bosniak, and Croat constituencies so that ideological, socioeconomic, and democratic cleavages gradually become more important than ethnic ones? Could such intra-ethnic pluralization eventually provide the bridge toward genuinely cross-ethnic politics?
Dr. Jasmin Hasanović: I believe that you referred to my work on the paper about the Left after Dayton—the earlier attempts to build a multi-ethnic left failed to gain support across electoral arenas. SDP is the best example of that because SDP presents itself as multi-ethnic, which is true, but its electoral support remains concentrated in predominantly Bosniak arenas.
Also, SDP’s prominent figures, like Denis Bećirović, who has now again been re-elected to the presidency from SDP, often speak in terms of exclusively Bosniak concerns. It is understandable that parties adapt their language to the voters who elect them. But, in that way, a multi-ethnic identity would require more than a declaration. It would require building support and trust across communities, which is very hard.
SDP has often been criticized for becoming a Bosniak left. My criticism is different. My criticism is not that SDP is becoming a Bosniak left, but that SDP is not a Bosniak left. It has neither articulated what a left would stand for—and, in practice, it shows very un-left politics—nor managed to build a convincing political left project among Bosniaks.
The problem is less where its voters come from than which demands mobilize them and whether those demands can be connected with similar struggles among Serbs and Croats. If you are democratizing and pluralizing within Serb, Bosniak, and Croat constituencies, but that pluralization is only for the continuation of ethnic representation, that is not the point.
What I see as a way of building the left is to work within the ethnic constituencies while deliberately building connections across them. So, a credible left is needed among Serbs and Croats as much as among Bosniaks. A credible left, even if that can be unpopular, can populistically create a political subjectivity demanding secure jobs, decent wages, and affordable housing. For instance, housing is a very common problem, not only in the world, but also in Bosnia. Universal healthcare, education, the problem of depopulation—a lot of people from Bosnia, from all three ethnic groups, are leaving the country.
Also, the credible left should talk about freedom from dependence on party connections but also oppose historical revisionism and the glorification of war criminals in all of its forms and be built on anti-fascist ideas. Such a politics must challenge elites within each community first, while refusing to make ethnic exclusivity the basis of its own program. But this development might be uneven between different ethnic groups. This is something that is still a challenge to be built, and those oppositions that I mentioned earlier are opening the space, but the dynamics that will shape those possibilities remain to emerge.
In this commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias examines how material grievances in France’s 2026 youth protests become intertwined with broader cultural, moral, and political claims. Rather than interpreting this simply as identity replacing class, Dr. Dias argues that concerns over education, housing, and employment are increasingly articulated alongside struggles over recognition, gender, racialization, colonial memory, and Palestine. He introduces the notion of a “hyper cause” to describe how certain issues can condense multiple struggles into a shared moral framework. The article also explores the risks of moral polarization, generational inequality, distrust in political institutions, and competing populist narratives, ultimately asking how liberal democracy can respond to legitimate grievances without allowing encompassing causes to erode pluralism and political restraint.
How does a protest about classrooms become a statement about the moral order of society? A photograph from Nantes, circulated by Expresso during France’s autumn 2026 mobilizations, brings the question into focus. Demands for education funding stand beside denunciations of the police, sexual violence, hostility towards Muslims and the Rassemblement National (RN). One placard announces disagreement with the others. The scene suggests convergence without unanimity: a material grievance provides a meeting place for a broader cultural left.
From Material Grievances to a Broader Moral Grammar
The grievances are real. Teacher shortages, overcrowded classes, deteriorating buildings and anxiety surrounding Parcoursup, the university admissions platform, feature prominently in reporting (Lecherbonnier & Pommiers, 2026). Their legitimacy does not, however, explain the entire political meaning of the mobilization. The analytical question concerns how concrete failures become connected to a more encompassing account of domination.
It would be misleading to describe this simply as identity replacing class. Housing, education and employment remain material concerns; they become articulated with struggles over recognition, gender, racialization and colonial memory. Fraser’s (1995) distinction between redistribution and recognition helps identify these dimensions without treating them as separate worlds. My argument is that sections of the contemporary left increasingly interpret both through a common moral grammar. A school without teachers and an institution accused of racism can become evidence of the same system abandoning, excluding or subordinating particular populations.
Several intellectual traditions enter this interpretation. Postmodern suspicion towards legitimating grand narratives, associated with Lyotard (1979; 1984), differs from decolonial accounts of enduring colonial hierarchies and intersectional analyses of connected inequalities. They should not be collapsed into one doctrine or attributed to every protester. Yet their convergence in activist discourse invites an irony: criticism of universal narratives can coexist with an increasingly comprehensive narrative of oppression. Frame alignment helps explain how distinct struggles become mutually intelligible (Benford & Snow, 2000); whether they share the same causes remains an empirical question.
Palestine as a “Hyper Cause” and the Convergence of Struggles
Palestine makes this operation particularly visible in the wider activist field, beyond what can be established from the Nantes photograph. Salih et al. (2021) document connections between Palestinian activism and Black and Indigenous struggles, including Ferguson and Standing Rock. More recently, Mendoza Sandoval and Portos (2026), studying Spain, show how an anticolonial framing makes Palestine a prism for interpreting injustice within activists’ own societies. These studies identify mechanisms relevant to the French case, rather than proving their prevalence among its school protesters.
I would describe Palestine’s role in some of these networks as a “hyper cause”: a cause that condenses other struggles and helps organize their moral meaning. This is an analytical proposal, not an established category. Gaza then signifies both a concrete humanitarian catastrophe and a wider account of colonial violence, racial hierarchy and Western power. Solidarity becomes a way of locating oneself within that account. The danger appears when commitment to one cause becomes a test of legitimacy across unrelated questions, or when identifying a common adversary takes precedence over examining different institutions and responsibilities.
This convergence can generate effective coalitions. It can also encourage moral polarization. Research connects moralizedattitudes to resistance to political compromise (Ryan, 2017). The progressive Brazilian Instagram accounts that read French protests immediately as resistance to welfare dismantling suggest a related mechanism of transnational recognition. Their reception needs systematic study, but the hypothesis is clear: a foreign event can confirm an existing political identity before its national circumstances are examined.
Generational Insecurity and the Erosion of Democratic Confidence
Those circumstances complicate the interpretation. The OECD’s latest compilation places French public pension expenditure at roughly 13–14% of GDP (OECD, 2025). Meanwhile, households whose reference person was under 30 devoted 25.7% of income to housing after allowances in 2024, against less than 13% for those with a reference person aged 65 or older; student-reference households are excluded (Dufour et al., 2026). Substantial aggregate protection can coexist with unequal access to security. Lynch (2006) explains how institutions entrench the age distribution of welfare. Treating retirement entitlements as untouchable while younger generations’ prospects remain negotiable raises a distributive problem, without demonstrating that pensioners have captured the state or directly caused school shortages.
The democratic promise becomes vulnerable here. Education and work were expected to make independence attainable. When they cease to offer a credible route to it, ideological narratives supply explanations of betrayal and identify those responsible. The 2026 CEVIPOF survey records 82% attachment to democracy alongside just 22% trust in politics and 15% in parties (CEVIPOF, 2026). These population-wide figures reveal a tension, not the attitudes of the protesters themselves.
Attachment to which democracy? Zakaria (1997) distinguishes electoral government from constitutional liberalism. Endorsing popular sovereignty does not establish commitment to judicial independence, minority rights or legitimate opposition. Wuttke et al. (2022) challenge a uniform account of democratic decline while identifying, in some countries, citizens whose democratic self-description coexists with less democratic attitudes. Demands for democracy can therefore contain illiberal possibilities when the authority of a morally defined people is placed above constraints on its power.
Competing Narratives of “the People” and the Limits of Liberal Democracy
The political translation is contested. Muxel (2025) identifies divisions within French youth, including radical-left mobilization and growing attraction to the radical right. Mélenchon’s La France insoumise explicitly supported the October mobilization (La France insoumise, 2026). Le Pen’s camp offers a competing narrative of national decline and restored authority. These projects differ substantially, but neither the invocation of “the people” nor mobilization itself settles the question of liberal commitment.
The central problem is thus how material insecurity becomes organized into moral camps. The cultural left can connect social provision to recognition and decolonial solidarity; the radical right offers different accounts of dispossession and belonging. Both must be assessed through their acceptance of pluralism and limits on power. Liberal democracy needs to recover the credibility of an attainable future while ensuring that neither a just grievance nor an encompassing cause becomes a license to deny opponents their rights.
References
Benford, R. D. & Snow, D. A. (2000). “Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611
Dufour, C.; Lartigau, T.; Parizeau, E. & Zedam, P. (2026, September 23). Le logement pèse moins sur le budget des ménages en 2024 qu’il y a dix ans, sauf pour les plus modestes (Insee Première No. 2128). INSEE. https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/9053584
Lynch, J. (2006). Age in the welfare state: The origins of social spending on pensioners, workers, and children. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511606922
Mendoza Sandoval, L. & Portos, M. (2026). “‘We are not freeing Palestine, Palestine is freeing us’: Intellectuals and the anti-colonial framing of the Palestinian solidarity movement.” American Behavioral Scientist. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642261472333
Ryan, T. J. (2017). “No compromise: Political consequences of moralized attitudes.” American Journal of Political Science, 61(2), 409–423. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12248
Salih, R., Zambelli, E., & Welchman, L. (2021). “‘From Standing Rock to Palestine, we are united’: Diaspora politics, decolonization and the intersectionality of struggles.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(7), 1135–1153. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2020.1779948
Wuttke, A.; Gavras, K. & Schoen, H. (2022). “Have Europeans grown tired of democracy? New evidence from eighteen consolidated democracies, 1981–2018.” British Journal of Political Science, 52(1), 416–428. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123420000149
Please cite as: Sofos, Spyros A. (2026). “The Popular, the Populist, and the Plebeian: Mamdani as a Problem for Populism Studies.” Journal of Populism Studies (JPS). October 6, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/JPS000132
Abstract
This article develops a framework distinguishing plebeian rupture, populist closure, and plebeian-institutional articulation. It asks how popular agency can endure through institutions while those advancing demands retain the capacity to shape decisions and challenge their representatives. The analysis examines Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign from October 2024 to November 2025 through campaign statements, speeches, endorsement records, and organizational materials. Independent demands, endorsement rules, and public disagreement show organized constituencies seeking a continuing role in the project. Their influence over contested priorities and effective constraints on leadership are less clearly documented. The findings support understanding the campaign’s organizational project as plebeian-institutional articulation, alongside a left-populist reading of its construction of a common identity. The framework shifts attention from the presence of organizations to the authority constituent actors retain as popular projects enter institutions.
Keywords: populism; plebeian politics; plebeian-institutional articulation; political mediation; social movements; Zohran Mamdani.
By Spyros A. Sofos
Introduction
On 4 November 2025, New Yorkers elected Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City with just over 50.2 percent of the vote (New York City Board of Elections, 2025). By election day, the outcome was no longer wholly unexpected: a poll in September had already shown him with a commanding lead, and Bloomberg described him as the clear frontrunner heading into the vote (Quinnipiac University Poll, 2025; Bloomberg, 2025). Yet the victory still defied a coordinated effort to stop him. Anti-Mamdani political action committees enjoyed a substantial financial advantage, while more than twenty billionaires had contributed to efforts designed to block him; Reuters, meanwhile, noted opposition extending beyond the Democratic Party, including Donald Trump’s late endorsement of Cuomo, threatening to cut funds for New York City if Mamdani were to win the mayoral race (Bloomberg, 2025; Time, 2025; Reuters, 2025).
Mamdani’s lead in the polls and its translation into electoral victory was almost immediately interpreted through the familiar idiom of populism. Commentators across progressive, centrist, and conservative outlets described his campaign as “economic populism,” “left populism,” or as proof that people-centered anti-establishment politics had become endemic to the contemporary United States (O’Donnell, 2025; Sirota, 2025; Michael, 2025; Pilkington, 2025; Heer, 2025; Wimbish, 2025; Laleoğlu, 2025; Epstein, 2025). Some cast him as a left-wing counterpart to Donald Trump: a populist, different in content, but comparable in form, tone, and social appeal. Multiple sources framed Trump and Mamdani as structural equivalents in populism. Mechoui argued that “Trump and Mamdani are just as notable for their convergences as their contrasts,” emphasizing that both are “manifestations of the same development: the concentration of executive power” (Mechoui, 2025) as both figures strategically shape voter desires through populist messaging. The Economist similarly observed that “Like Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani promises ‘a new approach to power,'” noting that despite their ideological opposition, both represent a shared political method focused on executive action over procedural constraints (The Economist, 2026).
Others contended that “ideology matters, but method matters more,” highlighting how both leaders deploy decisiveness, norm-challenging, and narrative clarity as their primary tools, regardless of left-right positioning (CEO Today, 2026). Epstein positioned both Trump and Mamdani within a broader populist tradition, defining populism as rooted in “public distrust of established legal and social institutions” combined with “would-be champions of sweeping reform” (Epstein, 2025), a framework that encompasses both figures despite their ideological divergence. Even more cautious analyses still implied that Mamdani’s politics were populist, stressing anti-elite mobilization, the activation of disaffected voters, and the construction of a new majority coalition out of constituencies alienated from establishment politics (Dionne, 2025; Singh, 2025).
Mamdani’s campaign raises a problem that a populist classification alone cannot resolve. People-centered antagonism and the linking of grievances can occur in projects with different relations to plurality, representation, and institutional mediation. The more important and urgent task is to examine how popular claims are formulated, joined, authorized, and contested: whether a common identity extends constituent actors’ capacity to act together or concentrates authority to speak and decide in their name.
This article makes a theory-building intervention grounded in a bounded interpretive case study. It asks: How can analyses of popular politics distinguish institutional articulation that preserves autonomous voice and contestation from closure around an indivisible popular will, and what does Mamdani’s campaign reveal about that distinction? The argument proposes and develops an analytical typology distinguishing among plebeian rupture, populist closure, and plebeian-institutional articulation.
These three concepts address different questions about the politics of the popular. Plebeian rupture concerns political emergence: people previously excluded or assigned a subordinate position assert their standing as actors entitled to shape collective life. Plebeian-institutional articulation concerns how that agency can endure through organizations, representation, and institutional participation. Its distinctive feature is that those actors retain meaningful opportunities to formulate demands, influence priorities, and challenge their representatives. Populist closure concerns the treatment of disagreement: it develops when a leadership or organization claims exclusive authority to express an indivisible popular will and treats competing claims as illegitimate.
Their relationship involves no necessary sequence. Political emergence need not begin with a dramatic rupture, and a disruptive mobilization may already contain claims to exclusive representation. Institutional articulation can sustain agency and provide protections against closure through independent organizations, accountable representation, and procedures that keep collective priorities open to revision. These protections do not merely depend on the existence of institutions of representation but on their effective function. They require continuing political work. Where they weaken, representatives may increasingly displace the agency of those they represent. Making binding decisions or establishing leadership does not itself constitute closure; what is important is whether those represented retain legitimate and effective means of questioning and redirecting that authority.
Distinguishing these dimensions allows us to examine what happens to popular agency across different moments and relationships within a political project. The emergence of previously excluded actors establishes neither their continuing influence nor the accountability of their representatives. Organizational continuity tells us little, by itself, about whose demands guide the organization. Public disagreement demonstrates independent voice, while its consequences reveal more about the distribution of authority. A project may therefore expand political standing, develop durable institutions, and restrict contestation in different relationships or at different times. The distinction makes those developments visible and allows us to assess how institutional articulation preserves agency, where its protections become ineffective, and whether claims to exclusive popular representation produce closure.
By plebeian-institutional articulation I refer here to a mode of institutionalizing agency from below in which actors contesting unequal political standing retain the capacity to formulate independent claims, challenge representatives, and participate in revising collective priorities. Its defining combination is plebeian political authorship, the pursuit of institutional duration, and autonomous mediation. Populist closure, by contrast, treats an indivisible popular will as authorizing privileged representation and subordinates particular claims and independent contestation to that authority. The distinction concerns what organizational and institutional arrangements enable, not simply whether such arrangements exist.
Mamdani’s campaign is analytically useful in this respect because people-centered antagonism coexists with a dense movement ecology and extensive organizing infrastructures. That combination makes it a boundary case for examining the relationship between popular articulation and mediation. I approach his campaign as a possible experiment in plebeian-institutional articulation whose character must be assessed through the relationships among constituent organizations, campaign leadership, and collective priorities. Neither the presence of intermediaries nor electoral success establishes that those actors retained autonomous voice or effective influence. What is critical conceptually is to distinguish how popular agency acquires institutional duration and how that process may preserve or restrict contestability. Empirically, the article examines Mamdani’s campaign during the 2024–25 election period, focusing on its relationships with the organizations and networks that supported it. This assessment takes the left-populist interpretation seriously. In Mouffe’s account (2018), left populism can accommodate heterogeneous demands and pluralist institutions. Plebeian-institutional articulation may therefore specify relationships that a broader populist classification leaves open.
A democratic concern with plurality and equal political standing runs through the argument. It directs attention to whether participation gives those involved an effective role in shaping collective priorities and holding representatives to account. The article first develops its conceptual framework and research design, then examines Mamdani’s campaign in dialogue with the left-populist interpretation. It concludes by considering how plebeian-institutional articulation might endure and how the framework could apply beyond this case.
Associate Professor Guilherme Casarões argues Brazil’s October 4 election marks more than a contest between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro: it signals a deeper transformation of the country’s democratic order. Assoc. Prof. Casarões contends that “what really died, or what really was defeated on October 4th, was Brazil’s democratic pact itself,” while stressing that this does not mean democracy has ended. He sees Bolsonarism as still fundamentally personalistic, continuing to revolve around Jair Bolsonaro even as Flávio emerges as its electoral standard-bearer. The interview explores identity polarization, Christian nationalism, punitive security politics, Trumpism, and the transnational far right, while also examining Lulism’s growing association with the establishment. Together, these dynamics place Brazil at what Assoc. Prof. Casarões describes as a consequential political “crossroads.”
Brazil’s October 4, 2026 presidential election produced a first-round result that significantly altered the political landscape ahead of the October 25 runoff. Flávio Bolsonaro finished first with about 47% of the vote, ahead of incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on 45.1%, while right- and far-right forces also performed strongly in congressional and gubernatorial contests. The outcome sharpened the confrontation between Lulism and a post-Jair form of Bolsonarism, while also raising broader questions about the resilience of Brazil’s post-authoritarian democratic settlement, the institutionalization of the radical right, and the future of political representation in the country.
In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Guilherme Casarões, Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies at Florida International University, argues that the significance of October 4 extends well beyond the immediate electoral competition between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro. For Assoc. Prof. Casarões, the most consequential development is not simply the continued strength of Bolsonarism without Jair Bolsonaro on the ballot, but what the election reveals about the transformation of Brazil’s democratic order. As he puts it, “what really died, or what really was defeated on October 4th, was Brazil’s democratic pact itself.”
Assoc. Prof. Casarões is careful to stress that this does not mean Brazilian democracy has ended. Rather, he argues that the political pact sustaining democracy since the transition from military rule in the mid-1980s and its constitutional consolidation in 1988 “is now gone, or at least seems to be over for now.” In his view, this makes the 2026 election even more consequential than the watershed contests of 2018 and 2022. Brazil, he argues, has reached “a crossroads,” with the future character of its democratic system increasingly uncertain.
At the same time, Assoc. Prof. Casarões resists interpreting Flávio Bolsonaro’s success as evidence that Bolsonarism has already become fully institutionalized. Despite the son’s electoral rise and the growing importance of the Liberal Party, he maintains that the movement “still gravitates around the image of Bolsonaro the father” and remains “a very personalistic movement.” Ultimately, he suggests, Bolsonarism still resembles “a cult of a person,” and “this person is Jair Bolsonaro himself.”
The interview develops this diagnosis across a wider set of themes: the decline of policy-based competition and the rise of identity polarization; Christian nationalism and the religious-populist radical right; punitive approaches to crime; the transnational circulation of far-right ideas; and the interaction between Trumpism and Bolsonarism. Assoc. Prof. Casarões also examines the contrasting trajectory of Lulism, arguing that Lula has increasingly come to symbolize the establishment itself. Taken together, his analysis presents October 4 not merely as an electoral upset, but as a possible marker of a deeper reconfiguration of Brazil’s democratic and populist politics.
Here is our interview with Associate Professor Guilherme Casarões, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Bolsonarism Is Not Yet Institutionalized
Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro poses with anti-riot police agents after cast their ballot in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil on November 29, 2020. Photo: Antonio Scorza.
Professor Casarões, welcome. Let me begin with the transformation of Bolsonarism itself. Brazil’s first-round result appears to represent something more structurally significant than another confrontation between the political camps created around Lula and Jair Bolsonaro. With Jair Bolsonaro himself absent from the ballot and Flávio Bolsonaro not only emerging as the principal candidate of the right but actually finishing first with about 47% of the vote, are we witnessing the transformation of Bolsonarism from a highly personalized populist movement into a more durable political identity? What would distinguish the institutionalization of Bolsonarism from the simple continuation of the Bolsonaro family?
Assoc. Prof. Guilherme Casarões: That’s a great question and let me take a step back just to refer to what I think is the biggest change after the October 4th elections in Brazil. I think that—and this is something that I’ve argued in a very recent piece that I wrote for The Conversation website—what really died, or what really was defeated on October 4th, was Brazil’s democratic pact itself.
By saying this, I’m not implying that Brazilian democracy is over. What I’m trying to say is that the pact that has sustained Brazil’s democracy for over 40 years, starting in the mid-80s, being written into the Constitution of 1988, and sustaining Brazil’s democracy ever since then, is now gone, or at least seems to be over for now. There’s a big change going on in Brazil, therefore making the 2026 elections in the country even more consequential than the 2018 and 2022 elections. This is why we are at a crossroads right now. There’s something going on. We don’t know exactly how to describe what Brazil’s democracy is going to look like in the future, if at all, but this is an important caveat to make.
Now, as for Bolsonarismo, we have other examples around the world of children of very popular politicians who become leaders of movements themselves. That’s the case of Marine Le Pen in France. If we think about the transition between Jean-Marie Le Pen and Marine Le Pen, there’s a big inheritance, but also a big transformation between these two moments of leadership. We also have something along similar lines in Peru, with Alberto Fujimori back in the 1990s and early 2000s, and now we have Keiko Fujimori, who is Peru’s current president. So, this is not very unusual, if you think about it, politics is also hereditary in many ways.
Bolsonarism Is Still a Cult of Jair Bolsonaro
But I don’t think that the case of Brazil really represents a break, or an evolution, for that matter. We are not yet witnessing the institutionalization of Bolsonarismo in Brazil, because everything still revolves very much around the figure of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president who’s now serving 27 years in prison under house arrest for attempting a coup d’état back in 2022. He was convicted in 2025. But the references are almost entirely directed at him. The movement still gravitates around the image of Bolsonaro the father. He was the one, to be sure, who handpicked his oldest son, Flávio, to succeed him on the ballot in 2026.
However, I’m not sure, and I don’t believe that we are at the point of institutionalization of a movement yet. It’s still a very personalistic movement. We are yet to see what Flávio’s going to make of his own party. Flávio ran on the ticket of the Liberal Party of Brazil. Bolsonaro was also affiliated with this party. This has become more and more the party of Bolsonarismo in the country, but the Liberal Party has been around for much longer.
It never really represented Bolsonaro. He used it more than anything else. That was a very recent turn taken by Bolsonaro himself back in 2021 in order to run, because in Brazil you need to be affiliated with a party in order to run, and I think that if it depended entirely on Bolsonaro the father, he wouldn’t really have a party. He tried to create one from scratch, and he couldn’t.
What we have in Brazil, which is a multi-party-political system, is that the Bolsonarista movement captured one of the parties that was just lying there, a party that sees a great benefit in joining the rank and file of Bolsonarismo, and that’s where we are right now. Therefore, we might have to wait for another electoral cycle. Or this is something that’s going to happen along the way between right now and 2030, but the point is that it’s not fully institutionalized yet.
We might see this transition happen at some point down the road, but I still think that, if I could describe Bolsonarismo as a political movement, it really seems to me like a cult of a person, and this person is Jair Bolsonaro himself.
Lulism Became Personalistic, but Lula Remained Institutional
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva walks among supporters on Augusta Street at São Paulo on the eve of the brazillian election on October 1, 2022. Photo: Yuri Murakami.
Conversely, the first-round result also sharpens the succession problem for Lulism. Lula remains the principal integrative figure of the Brazilian left, yet he finished behind Flávio Bolsonaro despite entering the election expecting to win in the first round. Should Lulism itself be understood as a variety of left populism, and if so, how does its populism differ analytically from the moral polarization, anti-establishment rhetoric, and cultural politics associated with Bolsonarism?
Assoc. Prof. Guilherme Casarões: Let me unpack these points. The first thing readers have to understand about Brazil is that the very same political elites who took power back in the mid-80s, after the end of a 21-year military dictatorship in the country, are the same elites who are still in power today. That’s true for the right and the left. You see, Bolsonaro himself—now he’s in jail—but he was a congressman for 28 years before getting elected president in 2018. Even though he used to depict himself as an outsider, as an anti-establishment candidate, we know for a fact that the same guys who have been around for over 30 years now, they were the ones who, if not established the New Republic, as we call Brazil’s post-dictatorship moment, were there from the get-go.
I don’t think that this is something that a lot of people understand about Brazil. Lula himself has been around for a very long time. He was the founder of the Workers’ Party back in 1979, and he very quickly rose to become one of the most popular politicians in Brazil. He ran for president in Brazil’s first direct presidential elections in 1989. He ran again in 1994 and in 1998, and he was defeated in the first three elections he ran. Then he got elected in 2002, got elected again in 2006. He handpicked his successor, Dilma Rousseff, in 2010, who then won again in 2014.
Lula was about to make a comeback in 2018, but he was put in prison, and he couldn’t run at the end of the day, so he ran again in 2022. We’re talking about so many elections. I mean, six and a half, if we consider 2018 as an election that he could have run, and he ended up not being able to, and now it’s the seventh time. He ran for president. He runs for president. I’m not going to say things in the past because the election is still not decided, but let’s consider that, despite what happens on October 25th, Lula’s going to be a seven-timer when it comes to presidential elections.
People are tired of this. They are tired for many reasons. I mean, Lula is 80 years old. Of course, in today’s world, it’s not unusual to have leaders who are over 80 or over 70, and that’s totally fine. But the fact that he was president for three full terms, the fact that he was able to choose his own successor, who was impeached in 2016—and there are many explanations for the impeachment proceedings—she was very unpopular. She drove, according to many, Brazil to its worst economic crisis in generations.
Because of that, we are witnessing a politician who is very popular on the one hand and, of course, very acclaimed internationally because of all his diplomatic feats, but who’s also very much worn down on the other hand. He doesn’t look tired if you watch his speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations or if you watch Lula in action during the campaign. He doesn’t seem tired, but people are tired of him.
Is he a populist? I don’t think he’s a populist. If you look at the definitions of populism that we work with on a daily basis, it’s mostly about the division between the elite and the people and, of course, claiming that he, or the populist leader, is the only one able to speak on behalf of the people, maybe with a capital P. This is not Lula.
Lula Has Become the Target of Political Dissatisfaction
Let me explain to you why I think it’s not the case. Lula might have been very divisive during campaigns. Indeed, if you go back to 1989, or 1994, 1998, or even 2002, he was always talking about the elites versus the people. And he, being a former metal worker and somebody who came from a very poor background back in the 1950s or 1940s, identifies with the people, and that’s all true. But the behavior of populists must go beyond elections. Elections are naturally moments in which you see some division flourish because you have to draw lines between yourself and your opponents. Populism goes beyond that. A populist has to govern using the same strategies or the same narratives that have allowed this person to get elected in the first place.
This is not Lula. Ever since he was elected for the first time in 2002 and took office the next year, he’s been super institutional. He’s been one of the most institutional presidents that we’ve ever had, and that might explain at least part of his success. So, there is Lulismo in the sense that there was a time, especially with the first corruption scandals that go back to 2005, when we might have seen a moment when Lula detached himself from the Workers’ Party. This is when one very famous commentator in Brazilian politics, André Singer, wrote a book about the rise of Lulismo, or Lulism, as opposed to petismo, or Workers’ Partyism. He was basically describing the opposite trajectory of the far right. The far right moves from the personal to the institutional, and PT and Lula were moving from the institutional to a more personalistic approach to politics. That’s true, but Lula as a president has been something else. He has been very institutional. He has been very willing to make concessions and to cooperate and to negotiate.
You can look at it from a positive perspective and basically say, “okay, this is great.” Lula is a man who’s been able to advance a lot of very important policies regarding the reduction of inequality in the country, the reduction of poverty, and social welfare policies of many different kinds. That was all good, and that was all made through a lot of concession and a lot of negotiation.
But at the same time, because he’s been so willing to negotiate and to make concessions ever since he got elected for the first time, a lot of people identify him as the representative of the establishment. So, whenever there’s a corruption scandal, whenever there’s something that Brazil’s democracy can no longer deliver, people will naturally blame it on Lula himself because he’s the face of Brazil’s democratic pact. He’s the face of Brazil’s establishment in so many ways.
And the more people get frustrated with the establishment, the more people hate everything that’s going on in Brazilian politics, they will look at Lula and say, you are the one to blame because you’ve been around for so long. It’s not populism, but it’s a personalistic identification with the system, which is, by definition, the opposite of populism in so many ways, that has made Lula so popular, but also the preferential target of pretty much every single dissatisfaction we’ve seen in Brazil for the last 20 years or so.
Brazil’s Political Divide Is Now About Identity
Senator Flávio Bolsonaro during a pro-amnesty demonstration in support of former President Jair Bolsonaro in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 16, 2025. Photo: Saulo Angelo | Dreamstime.
The first round now seems to confirm that Brazil is confronting two highly developed political identities: Bolsonarism as a cultural, moral, religious, and anti-establishment formation, and Lulism as a socially redistributive and inclusion-oriented coalition. At the same time, the strength of Bolsonarista candidates in congressional and gubernatorial races suggests that the right’s political identity extends well beyond the presidential contest. Does this mean that Brazilian polarization is becoming more deeply institutionalized even as it becomes somewhat less dependent on Lula and Jair Bolsonaro personally?
Assoc. Prof. Guilherme Casarões: I believe so, and there’s a reason for this. You’ve correctly pointed out that polarization has just grown in Brazil. It’s hard to be super rigorous when it comes to polarization, because there are many different hypotheses about this. Some people just dismiss the idea that there is polarization to begin with. I think there is, and it shows not only in presidential elections, but also in the rhetoric that we have seen politicians embrace over the last eight years. It has become more divisive. It has become more violent and aggressive, especially on the side of the far right.
I would say that the big division, or the big chasm, between the two major political groups in the country today—Bolsonarismo on the one hand, and the left progressives or Lulismo on the other—happens around identity lines. So, it’s not necessarily a matter of policy.
You see, back in the 1990s or the 2000s, the PT, the Workers’ Party, was running against the Social Democratic Party, which was the center-right party of that time, and they were fundamentally disagreeing around policy. I mean, what’s the best policy for our economic adjustment? What is the best policy to tame inflation? What is the best policy to include more and more poor people into the job market or into the schooling system? So those were the conversations back in the day. To be fair, I really miss them because those were programmatic discussions. Those were relevant, tangible policy discussions. What we see today is mostly about identity.
On the one hand, you have a project that’s been around for at least 40 years. This is not the Workers’ Party. That was the consensus that Brazil got to after the end of the military dictatorship. What was this consensus about? Number one, the idea of Brazil being a diverse country. Diversity was part of the idea of what being a Brazilian was. Diversity of race, diversity of religion, even diversity of parties and political positions. This very pluralistic notion of a diverse country is at the base of Brazilian politics. That’s been around for a long time. I would even go as far as to say that even during the times of the military dictatorship, some of the consensus around what the Brazilian identity was already there. That was the identity consensus that the PT embraced and built upon.
What Bolsonaro offers, on the other hand, and he’s been offering this ever since he ran for the first time in 2018, and even more so now, is a very different identity that I could describe in one idea, which is the idea of Christian nationalism. You see, what the Bolsonaro family and movement are trying to push is the notion that you can only be a true Brazilian if you belong to a specific faith. Of course, it’s not just about religious affiliation. You can be a Catholic, you can be an evangelical Christian, a Protestant. You can be a spiritualist of any kind, as long as you think about the world in terms of these conservative culture-war values, you belong.
It was interesting because, just to illustrate this point, back in 2017, Bolsonaro was running. He was in his pre-campaign, and he was at a rally in a state in the northeast of Brazil, and he very explicitly said, unlike what people think, Brazil’s a Christian country. Minorities must bow to the majority of this country. He was basically saying this country belongs to Christians and not to anyone else.
The week after that, he was interviewed by a YouTube channel of the Jewish community in Brazil. There are a lot of Jews in Brazil who’ve supported Bolsonaro from the very beginning because they saw Bolsonaro as the savior of relations between Brazil and Israel at the time. Bolsonaro was the first and the only candidate so far who vowed to transfer the embassy of Brazil from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. We know that back in the early Trump years, that was something that mattered a lot to many countries. So, basically, he was interviewed by this Brazilian Jewish channel on YouTube, and he got the question: You said that Brazil is a Christian country. What about the Jews? And Bolsonaro then responded, “Aren’t Jews Christians too?”
Christian Nationalism Is Central to Bolsonarista Identity
So, it tells us that it’s not about religion. It’s about something bigger. It’s about the notion of belonging along the lines of identity. Jews can be Christians in this regard. Even some Muslims can be Christians in this regard, depending on your political views, depending on your worldviews in general. So, identity is key to understanding the big divide that we find ourselves in in Brazil right now. But there’s something that goes beyond that.
Brazil’s not the United States. Brazil has always had a multi-party system since the end of the Second World War. And because of that, Brazil’s democracy has always been built around consensus. Of course, consensus can be good and bad. If you pursue a lot of consensuses, then you’re probably not going to get very far. You’re not going to get anywhere, because you’re always trying to build a super-consensual position that’s possibly not going to work fully. But that’s what Brazil’s democracy has always looked like, at least over the last 40 years.
One of the things that Bolsonaro has proposed, and that’s another very important division right there, is a different democracy, not based on consensus, but based on the majority. But we can name this, if you want, the tyranny of the majority. This is, in many ways, what populism is also about: the notion that as long as I’m enabled to speak on behalf of the people, it doesn’t matter if 50% of the country voted for me, or 80%. I will be able to govern only for those who voted for me in the first place.
This divisive notion of democracy, which is certainly not compatible with our own understanding of what a liberal democracy is, is also part of Bolsonaro’s repertoire, is also part of what he’s been standing for. It’s a combination of things, but I think that it goes on a very social dimension and also runs to the institutional dimension along identity lines, which are very different from the ones that we have become used to in Brazil.
Bolsonarism Defines the People by Who Does Not Belong
Your work on populism emphasizes its capacity to divide political space between a morally legitimate “people” and forces portrayed as threatening that community. In the wake of the first round, who exactly constitutes “the people” in the Flávio Bolsonaro version of the Bolsonarista imaginary? Is he reproducing Jair Bolsonaro’s construction of ordinary Brazilians against political, judicial, cultural, and intellectual elites, or has the electoral success of October 4 encouraged a broader and potentially more institutionalized version of this populist identity?
Assoc. Prof. Guilherme Casarões: That’s a good question. Flávio has never really been openly explicit about who the people are. The people are basically those who vote for him, who voted for his father in 2018 and 2022. Of course, he throws some ideas around at times, such as: you got to be conservative. So, the true Brazilian is conservative. The true Brazilian respects family values. The true Brazilian is in favor of individual freedoms and liberties. The true Brazilian is Christian—and again, in a very enlarged, weak definition of what Christianity is, because it’s a Christian nationalist thing, not necessarily a religious thing. This is the people defined by Flávio Bolsonaro.
But most importantly, one of the great abilities of the far right in Brazil—and that’s also true for many other countries, the United States and some Latin American countries as well, but that also includes Europe—is that identity is not only defined by what you project about what the people should be, or what the people are. Identity is also established around the negatives, around what people are not. As important as saying that people are Christian and conservative and pro-family and whatnot, we also have the other side, which is demonizing different expressions of what Brazilian society should be. Of course, if you’re a follower of an Afro-Brazilian religion, it’s going to be very hard for you to fit into this notion of Christianity. If you’re progressive, or woke, as they call it, it’s going to be very hard for you to be part of that idea of society. If you’re LGBTQ, or if you’re a woman—especially a woman who stands for her own right to be autonomous and to do her own things—that doesn’t really sit well with the traditional family idea.
This project of Bolsonarismo as a movement is not so much just about constructing who they think the people are but also defining the enemies of the people. That happens on a regular basis, and it happens as we speak. Those are moving targets because sometimes all it takes is somebody from Bolsonaro’s inner circle to call you a communist. Then you’re going to become a communist in the eyes of whoever’s looking at you. It’s not just about what you do; it’s about how people want to portray you. It’s interesting to see, for example, that in the political world, there were a lot of former Bolsonaro allies who’ve become communists overnight because Bolsonaro said so at some point in the past. This is an interesting thing. We’re talking about identity, and this identity is not yet institutionalized, because it would take maybe a generation of a different education system, a different perspective of history, and different laws to allow this identity to fully reveal itself and to become an integral part of Brazil’s institutions.
But the message is already there. Of course, with a strong presence in both chambers—we’re talking about pluralities, of course, not a majority of 50 plus 1%—Flávio Bolsonaro will probably have, if he gets elected, more than a quarter of the House of Representatives and more than a quarter of the seats in the Senate as well, just about a third, really. So, it’s unprecedented. Never before in Brazil’s 40-year democracy have we had a party with so many seats in both houses of the legislative branch. If they want to start changing laws, if they want to start changing education, if they want to start redefining what Brazil is as a country, now is the time for them to do it.
The Populist Right Turns Fear of Crime into a Promise
Streets of favela Vidigal in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on May 30, 2015. Photo: Donatas Dabravolskas.
Public security was one of the major concerns of voters in the first round, alongside the economy, sovereignty, and corruption. Flávio Bolsonaro has campaigned on a particularly punitive approach to crime, including proposals to designate gangs as terrorist organizations and create maximum-security prisons modeled on El Salvador. How does security become a specifically populist issue? Does radical-right populism gain traction by transforming legitimate concerns about violence into a broader moral distinction between “honest citizens,” dangerous outsiders, permissive elites, and supposedly obstructive institutions?
Assoc. Prof. Guilherme Casarões: People are afraid, people are scared, and violence plays a very important role in that. Of course, you can use many different scare tactics to bring people to your political camp. You can talk about transgender people using different-sex bathrooms. You can talk about transgender people in sports. You can talk about Muslims being a religious menace to the country.
But in the case of most developing countries out there—that might also be true for the United States, but let’s stick to the Third World for a minute, to the developing world—violence is very real. Violence is deeply structural because it runs on inequality. It runs deep into the big class divides of society. So, people have many reasons to be scared.
It used to be a middle-class problem, maybe back in the 1970s or the 1980s, but nowadays it’s more and more everyone’s problem. Even poor people are having their phones taken away. Even poor people are having their houses broken into. That’s a problem that somehow binds Latin American countries together, because these countries are going through the very same things. Violent crime is on the rise. We have a lot of organized crime groups that promote chaos in many of these countries. Drug trafficking is a real issue, gun trafficking and arms trafficking are real issues, and, of course, mortality rates are also going up because of gun violence in most of these countries.
So yes, I totally understand why people are scared. I also understand that it’s much easier for the right to tap into this fear and turn it into a promise. We don’t know if this promise is going to be fulfilled, and I don’t think it’s going to be fulfilled at all, unless you embrace a model along the lines of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, which is a very specific thing that might work for a country as tiny as El Salvador, but certainly won’t work for Colombia or Brazil or Argentina or Mexico, which are much bigger countries.
So, I think that we have a problem, because the only example that the right has, when it comes to being tough on crime, is an example of a semi-dictatorial or authoritarian regime at this point. But it’s interesting to see that all the opponents of Lula in this race of 2026 have, at some point, mentioned the Bukele model as something that they looked up to. Flávio Bolsonaro was no exception.
This also serves as a point of identity, because one of the first big divisions that Bolsonaro the father would play out, a couple of years before the presidential race, was between the good citizens and the criminals. So, if you support him, you’re a good citizen. If you support the Workers’ Party, if you support the left or communism, you’re also a criminal. Or at least you’re vouching for criminals all the time.
Populism Offers Simple Solutions to Complex Security Problems
Of course, it doesn’t add up in reality because they say they are against crime, but most of the people who’ve been elected on the right, and even Flávio Bolsonaro himself, have massive charges of corruption and a lot of investigations going around. These guys are not clean at all, and some of them—Flávio Bolsonaro himself—have a very close relationship with organized crime groups in Rio de Janeiro, which is one of the most populous states in the country.
Therefore, it’s a fictitious division, but it’s a division that really resonates with people because what they are basically saying is, if you vote for me, I’m going to prevent you from getting robbed again. I’m going to prevent you from having a gun pointed at you again.
Of course, there’s no magical solution for that. Bolsonaro the father, while he was in office, wasn’t able to change a lot. The only thing that he really changed during his tenure was that he passed a lot of laws deregulating gun control in Brazil, meaning that a lot of citizens now have more access to guns than ever before. It hasn’t really solved the problem of crime or violent crime.
So basically, that’s a good point, because this is extremely populist, if you think about it. Populism is also about coming up with magical solutions, very simple solutions for generally very complex problems. Public security is one of the realms in which the right has been able to offer the simplest of solutions, which is either putting everybody in prison—that’s the Bukele model—or what they believe is the US model, which is basically giving guns away to everyone. Neither of those models really solves the problem. But people still have hope that this is something they can hold on to: maybe Brazil’s going to be better in the future. I don’t think it’s going to be, not with that kind of policy.
Religious Politicization Is on the Rise
People take part in the celebration of Yemanjá in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil on February 2, 2019. Photo: Ember Stefano | Dreamstime.
Religion is central to your scholarship on Bolsonaro. In your work with Ricardo Barbosa Jr., you propose the category of the “religious-populist radical right,” arguing that religion provides not only ideas but also organizational resources and social power through which the radical right can capture institutions and participate in transnational culture wars. How useful is this concept for understanding the first-round result, particularly given Flávio Bolsonaro’s strength among evangelical Christians and Lula’s continuing advantage among Catholics?
Assoc. Prof. Guilherme Casarões: This is a very interesting paradox, because, as Pippa Norris and other authors have demonstrated very recently, religious affiliation is decreasing worldwide, meaning that we live in a world that’s not as religious as it used to be, certainly not 40 or 80 years ago. The paradox is precisely the fact that even though religious affiliation is declining, religious politicization is on the rise, meaning that those who are trying to hold on to religion are becoming more and more political.
We used to live in a society that had a clear division between what’s religious and what’s political. Of course, it’s impossible to prevent these things from overlapping occasionally. But all in all, secularism had prevailed, and that was the original thought.
Then, as early as 1993, an American sociologist called Mark Juergensmeyer wrote a book called The New Cold War?, in which he defends the idea that what’s new about the end of the Cold War is precisely the rise of religious nationalism. When he wrote this book back in 1993, he was talking about religious nationalism in some parts of the Middle East, religious nationalism in some parts of South Asia, religious nationalism in some parts of Africa, and that was that. He himself even treated that as a peripheral phenomenon.
What we have seen over the last 30 years, however, is the mainstreaming of religious nationalism. If you look at it today, a lot of far-right movements are very closely tied to this new identity of religious nationalism. If you think about Vladimir Putin in Russia, there was a turn at some point between 2012 and 2016 in which he became very close to Orthodox Christianity in Russia.
Erdoğan, in Turkey—he was elected as Prime Minister back in 2002. Of course, the AKP was always very religion-infused, but at the same time, it wasn’t a religious party, strictly speaking, and he has become more and more religious with time. The whole idea of making Russia Imperial Russia once again, or making Turkey Ottoman Turkey once again, these are all very strong religious tropes.
What’s interesting about religious nationalism today, and that’s one of Juergensmeyer’s theses, is that it attaches itself to an idea of civilization as well. No matter if you’re a Catholic, a Protestant, or an Evangelical Christian in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, or, above all, the United States, irrespective of your specific religious affiliation, you have this civilizational notion that has to be preserved. We have to protect what a lot of people across the hemisphere have called the Judeo-Christian tradition.
I could have mentioned other examples, and Israel and India are also very important examples of the mainstreaming of religious nationalism. If you look at Benjamin Netanyahu’s government right now, it’s pretty ethno-religious. It’s even more than just religious. If you look at India’s BJP and Modi, their core ideology is Hindutva, which is basically Hindu nationalism as well.
Religion and Populism Are Formidable Together
What I’m trying to say here, and that’s the reason why Barbosa and I came up with this notion of the religious-populist radical right, is basically that what we see today is precisely the mainstreaming of such religious ideas and the fusion of these religious ideas with populism. If populism is about creating this divide between the people and the elites, now the people are the religious ones. The religion of the people is the fundamental thing that has to be observed and has to be somehow preserved in these countries.
It was born out of a case study about Brazil. But it brings a more universal lesson for what we have experienced in many parts of the world. Religion and populism are formidable together. They are able to produce many important results, especially because they speak not only to the organizational side of things, they speak not only to the money that fuels all these movements, but they speak fundamentally about belonging and about identity. This is what makes it so strong.
Europe might be an exception. I just want to mention this, because I don’t want to elaborate on this, but I think it’s important to make a distinction here. We talk about the far right, treating them as though they were part of the very same set of ideas, and, of course, European far-right movements are also very much civilizational, but it’s not necessarily along religious lines.
France and Germany say little about religion, whereas Spain and Portugal say a little bit more about religion. Europe is a more complicated mosaic that we have to look into, but in Latin America and the United States, the hemisphere has become fundamentally Christian nationalist. That’s an important take on whatever’s going on right now in our part of the world.
Religion Is a Powerful Transnational Force in the Americas
Tourists enjoy the first sunset after a week of rain and thunderstorms from Corcovado Hill, overlooking Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on March 3, 2013, with the Christ the Redeemer statue above the city. Photo: Kseniya Ragozina / Dreamstime.
Your research also suggests that Christian nationalism under Bolsonaro was not merely domestic but transnational: religious narratives shaped alliances, culture-war agendas, relations with Israel, and participation in conservative international initiatives. To what extent has this transnational religious nationalism survived Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency and become embedded in the broader Brazilian right? Does Flávio Bolsonaro’s first-round victory suggest that this infrastructure can continue shaping Brazilian politics and foreign policy without Jair Bolsonaro personally returning to power?
Assoc. Prof. Guilherme Casarões: Over this summer, I taught a course called Transnational Politics in Latin America. My original idea was to talk about the transnational far right in Latin America. That was my obsession. But it turns out that I decided to take a step back and look at the much bigger picture of transnationalism in Latin America, from colonial times all the way down to today. Basically, it was a course on so many different angles of transnationalism in Latin America.
One of the things that I learned from that course, based on the readings that I put together and the discussions that I had in the classroom, was precisely that religion has been one of the most transnational things connecting countries in Latin America or in the Americas, by and large. Because if you think about the beginning of the colonization of the Americas, especially Spanish and Portuguese America, meaning Latin America in general, it all starts not only with Spain and Portugal, but with the Jesuits, with the Catholics from that time. So, colonization had a very strong transnational component, and this component was the Catholic faith, evangelization, missionary work, and so on and so forth.
What we see during the Cold War is another chapter of the same process. But now, we’re not talking about religion coming out of Europe to change the landscape of Latin America. From the 1960s on, in the middle of the Cold War, we’re talking about the Protestant faith, in a way, trying to challenge not only communist atheism but also, and most importantly, what became known as liberation theology in Latin America.
So, we have to put things in context and remember that in Latin America, the Catholic Church took a turn to the left in the 1960s and 1970s, so much so that Pope John Paul II from Poland went after these bottom-up grassroots movements of the Catholic Church because they were, according to the official doctrine of the church, becoming communists themselves.
Protestantism emerged out of the United States. Of course, Protestantism is also very national. We have national churches being built, or national movements being created in El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Paraguay, and the list is pretty long. But at the same time, there was a very important push by US administrations, by the CIA, by a number of US-based churches, to project this faith transnationally onto Latin America during the Cold War.
This is important because what we see right now—the growth of evangelicalism in Brazil, in Chile, in Argentina, in a lot of Central American countries—is precisely the unfolding of this process. It’s a long shot, of course, but it has paid off. Brazil, for example, when I was born in the 1980s, had around 5 to 7% evangelical Christians. In 2026, Brazil has about 30% of the population as evangelical Christians. It’s a big change.
Some countries have become evangelical-majority countries, as opposed to the Catholic majority that has always dominated the landscape in Latin America. My point is that evangelicals have become more and more consequential.
Evangelicalism Has Helped Turn Conservative Ideas into Policy
Of course, one of the transnational nodes that we can identify is precisely cultural war. One of the things that evangelical churches, movements, and leaders import from the United States, in exchange among them, is the fight against abortion, the fight against LGBTQ rights, the fight against drugs, which is framed in a very specific way, traditional family values, Christian nationalism, Christian Zionism, which is the love for Israel. All these things are, in many ways, the web that connects all these churches and movements around the region.
So, as much as Bolsonarismo as a movement is transnational, and religion plays an important role in that, the far right in Latin America is born out of transnational forces. And, of course, religion is also a very important point of that process.
Now, we have to make a distinction, however, and not treat all evangelicals as the same thing. Not all evangelicals are in favor of Israel. Not all evangelicals are in favor of Bolsonaro, for that matter. Not all evangelicals love the idea of Trump interfering with Brazilian elections. I would say that nowadays, because of religious values or because of even conservative worldviews, evangelicals vote for Bolsonaro, be it Flávio Bolsonaro the son or Jair Bolsonaro the father, at a 70–30 ratio. So, out of the around 60 million evangelicals that we have in Brazil, some 40 million consistently vote for Bolsonaro.
Some people blame the leaders. Some people say it’s just about these leaders of megachurches in São Paulo, in Rio, and in other urban areas. They are the ones who call the shots, and if we are able to defeat these people, then we’re going to be able to change the minds of the followers. That’s fundamentally wrong.
Of course, leaders have a very big influence on how followers vote. Even when they don’t talk about it explicitly, we have a lot of people who go to the services and who listen to the pastors and the leaders, and they fundamentally agree with that. It’s not about an imposition of vote or political positions; it’s just agreement. This is important because it also explains that maybe the role of leaders is limited, more limited than we think.
There’s an American scholar called Amy Erica Smith from the University of Iowa, and she wrote a book about evangelicals in Brazil. She basically says it’s important to consider the role of evangelical leaders, those who own churches, those who replicate churches, even internationally, but we cannot pretend that voters are not agents of their own decisions. Meaning that evangelical Christians might vote for Bolsonaro not because their leader has told them so, but because they believe in what they’re listening to. They believe in the promises. That’s an important thing. And, of course, what evangelicalism has done to countries like Brazil is not that it has transformed voters into more conservative voters. It’s different. Evangelicalism, because it’s a more outspoken faith, as opposed to Catholicism, has allowed these conservative ideas to flourish and to become more open.
It’s not about changing people’s minds. Brazilians, as much as Turks, as much as Argentinians, as much as whoever else you want to name, most people are conservative in one way or another. Religion is there to enable these conservative ideas to become policy. That’s where we are right now in Brazil.
Bolsonarism Began by Emulating Trump
Supporters of Brazil’s former President (2019–2022) Jair Bolsonaro hold signs during a demonstration in São Paulo, Brazil, on September 7, 2025. Photo: Dreamstime.
This brings us to Trumpism. Donald Trump became an explicit issue in the first-round campaign, with Lula accusing the US president of seeking to influence the election in Bolsonaro’s favor, while Flávio Bolsonaro openly advocated a closer relationship with Trump. How should we understand Trumpism’s influence on contemporary Bolsonarism after the first-round result: as imitation, ideological diffusion, strategic borrowing, or participation in a genuinely transnational populist network?
Assoc. Prof. Guilherme Casarões: I think it’s a transnational thing. It starts out with emulation or imitation. In the beginning, when Bolsonaro decided to run for president back in 2016, that was precisely the time Trump was about to get elected in the United States. And the moment Trump got elected, in November 2016, Bolsonaro started calling himself the Brazilian Trump, or Trump of the tropics. That’s another version of the story.
Of course, the beginning was mostly about emulating Trump’s playbook, because we have to concede something to Trump: his playbook was super successful. It was successful because it tapped into identity, it tapped into people’s fears, it tapped into people’s hate—hate for whatever they hate, either racial hatred or religious bigotry, it doesn’t matter. Trump was able to bring all of these things together into one movement, which was not cohesive, it was not super tight, but it was a loose movement that was able to get him elected in 2016. Bolsonaro attempted the very same things, and it worked. Emulation has paid off.
But emulation is not the whole story, because ever since Bolsonaro got elected, or even slightly before that, we could already notice some degree of circulation of ideas among these movements. Brazil and the United States have the two biggest and most important far-right movements in the hemisphere. We’re talking about the two biggest countries anyway.
The American and Brazilian Far Right Borrow from Each Other
It would be naive to say that everything that the Brazilian far right does is just a copy of what the United States did. If you look at the evolution of the two movements side by side, you’re going to see that there’s a lot of interaction between them. There were times when the Trump movement, or the MAGA movement, also borrowed from some of the strategies played out by Bolsonaro in Brazil. For example, the whole “dictatorship of the courts” argument is an old argument in US politics, but it started out with Brazil and then trickled up to the United States. It’s an interesting thing, because if you analyze these two movements closely, you’re going to see a lot of interaction. At this point, we can safely affirm that it’s a truly transnational movement with a lot of back and forth.
These movements talk to each other, they translate each other’s talking points, they resort to each other’s images at times. It wasn’t rare to see Trump, when outside of power in 2022 and 2023, using some images of Brazil and saying, this is what’s going to happen to the United States if Biden stays in power, or something like that. So, in many ways, there is a degree of interaction.
The interesting thing at this point is that it’s not just about the US and Brazil, because a lot of these things have also been incorporated into some other movements around the hemisphere, Argentina, Colombia, etc. Bernardo de la Espriella, Colombia’s new president, has a good relationship with Trump, but also with the Bolsonaro family. They show up at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) together at times. Eduardo Verástegui of Mexico, who is probably the least likely to win, because Mexico is a very much consolidated political system, and now it’s settled on the left. But he’s friends with Flávio Bolsonaro and Eduardo Bolsonaro, who’s Bolsonaro’s son as well. Eduardo Bolsonaro is a very young former congressman who lost his office because he had spent too much time in the United States, and he still lives in the United States, where he has kept lobbying in favor of the liberation of his father from prison ever since last year, and he’s got the ears of a lot of people in the White House as of now.
It’s interesting to see how these things are articulated and how these things circulate. I’m currently working on this, so that’s probably going to be my next paper or something—on the transnational routes of the Latin American far right. So, it’s not just about the mechanism; it’s also about the origin of these movements and the conditions that have enabled these movements to be considerably successful, if you look at them right now, in power in so many countries of Latin America.
The Workers’ Party Has No Alternative to Lula
People shout slogans during an International Workers’ Day demonstration in São Paulo, Brazil, on May 1, 2026. Photo: Dreamstime.
Finally, what does the October 4 first-round result tell us about the evolution of populism in Brazil? With Flávio Bolsonaro leading without Jair on the ballot and Lulism showing signs of weaker electoral dominance, are we moving from charismatic leadership toward more institutionalized populist identities—and what could this mean for Brazilian democracy?
Assoc. Prof. Guilherme Casarões: I don’t think so, and let me explain. Bolsonarism is still very much a populist movement. Of course, the leader now is the son, not the father, but as we’ve mentioned a few times before, the movement still gravitates very much around the image of Jair Bolsonaro. Of course, there might be an evolution, there might be successors outside of the family, and there might be some changes along the way. But the way things are as of right now, it’s a very personalistic and a populist movement in this regard, too.
Meanwhile, the left has a problem in Brazil. Lula might have been a populist very early on. He might have run so many elections, some unsuccessfully, on a populist platform. But Lula can no longer be considered a populist. Because nowadays, when people look at him, what they see is not an agent of transformation, an agent of change. What they see today when they look at Lula is a backward politician, somebody who acts on behalf of a corrupt system, of an outdated model of politics.
So, in many ways, we can draw a comparison between what happened in the United States under Biden and what happened in Brazil under Lula. This is not to say that Lula’s going to lose the second round of elections. Maybe he will, and most likely he will, but I’m not even taking that into account. What I’m trying to say is that what Lula represents today, regardless of whether he gets elected or not, is the establishment. People look at him and they see a failed model right there.
Of course, I understand that some people can be, as we say in Portuguese, chameleons. Some people can just change identities over time; some people can just build new identities from scratch. But Lula has been pretty much the same person ever since the beginning. Now, at 80, people look at him, and they can’t see any expectation of transformation.
Because of that, one of the biggest mistakes that we’ve had, both in the United States and in Brazil—that’s also true for Argentina and perhaps some other countries—is that these countries’ elites on the left, who used to be populist back in the day, or who could have become populist at some point, have failed to construct alternatives.
The Workers’ Party has no alternative to Lula. This is why he’s running for the fourth term. Very worn down, tired, old, but he’s still the only option. We don’t even have, in Brazil, a Kamala Harris option, which would be, maybe, Fernando Haddad, who’s the former finance minister of Brazil, who already ran in 2018 and lost to Bolsonaro’s father.
Brazil Missed the Chance for a Positive Left-Wing Populism
So, what we have today is a left, a progressive movement in Brazil, that has become, to speak directly to your question, so deeply institutionalized that it cannot really detach itself from the bad things people see in the system itself. As much as we see with the Democratic Socialists of America movement and Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani, all these guys—AOC, of course, was the first one to come up with that, and Bernie Sanders, of course, enabling the others—this is something that Brazil needs.
We don’t have a two-party system, so this is probably going to happen as a specific partisan movement in Brazil. But the feeling that I have is that, unfortunately, we have missed the opportunity to consider a positive left-wing populism emerging to counter the right-wing populism that we have so dominant in the country right now.
