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Ten Years on with Brexit / Prof. Corner: With Brexit, the UK Has Lost More Than It Has Gained

April 18, 2026

by ECPS_admin with No Comment Economics Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

As the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum approaches, debate has shifted from slogans to evidence. In this interview, Professor Mark Corner offers a measured but clear conclusion: “the UK has lost more than it has gained.” Drawing on political economy, constitutional analysis, and historical perspective, he revisits Brexit not as a singular rupture but as a dual crisis affecting both the European Union and the internal cohesion of the United Kingdom. Professor Corner highlights the paradox at the heart of Brexit—“taking back control” did not strengthen parliamentary sovereignty, but instead elevated popular sovereignty. At the same time, expectations of global economic freedom have given way to the enduring realities of geography and interdependence. His reflections situate Brexit as a revealing case of the gap between political promise and institutional consequence.

As the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum approaches, public debate has moved decisively beyond the binary language of Leave and Remain toward a more empirically grounded reckoning with Brexit’s long-term political and economic consequences. In this context, Professor Mark Corner, Emeritus Professor at the University of Leuven, offers a particularly valuable perspective. His work situates Brexit not simply as a rupture in Britain’s relationship with the European Union, but as a dual constitutional and political crisis—one affecting both the European project and the internal cohesion of the United Kingdom. Bringing together political economy, constitutional analysis, historical memory, and populist mobilization, his reflections illuminate how Brexit has reshaped not only policy but also political imagination.

In his interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Corner advances a sober conclusion captured in the headline of this conversation: “With Brexit, the UK has lost more than it has gained.” That judgment is not presented as a dramatic slogan, but as the outcome of a broader reassessment now taking place in British public life. As he puts it, “most economists would agree that the UK has lost more than it has gained,” and if that were not so, “the present government would [not] be trying so hard to move back toward a closer economic relationship with the EU.” In this sense, Brexit appears less as a fulfilled promise of renewed sovereignty than as a strategic rupture whose costs have become increasingly difficult to deny.

Yet Professor Corner’s account is more layered than a narrow economic audit. He draws attention to one of the central ironies of Brexit politics: that a project framed around “taking back control” did not, in fact, restore parliamentary sovereignty. On the contrary, he argues, the referendum “assert[ed] popular sovereignty over parliamentary sovereignty,”since most MPs would have preferred to remain. Similarly, the promise that Britain could flourish once “freed from the shackles of the EU” has, in his view, been undermined by the enduring reality of geography, interdependence, and trade. The fantasy of becoming “Singapore-on-Thames” has largely faded, replaced by the quieter recognition that “a very large share of our trade is conducted with Europe.”

The interview also places Brexit within a broader political and historical frame. Professor Corner shows how populist and radical-right actors have successfully shifted the argument away from economic performance toward sovereignty, border control, and cultural identity. In doing so, they have helped transform British political conflict from an older class-based divide into a more complex terrain shaped by “social and cultural division alongside economic division.” At the same time, he warns that Brexit’s most profound destabilizing effects may ultimately be domestic rather than European. While the feared cascade of exits from the EU never materialized, the United Kingdom itself remains vulnerable to centrifugal pressures, particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In his words, “in the long run, [these] may prove more troubling than the difficulties in the EU.”

In sum, Professor Corner’s reflections offer a penetrating and historically informed account of Brexit’s legacy. Far from vindicating the claims of its proponents, Brexit emerges here as a case study in the gap between populist promise and institutional consequence—one that continues to shape the future of Britain, Europe, and the politics of sovereignty itself.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Mark Corner, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

Brexit Strains Britain More Than Europe

Professor Corner, welcome. In A Tale of Two Unions, you argue that Brexit must be understood simultaneously as a crisis of both the European Union and the British Union. Ten years on, how would you assess the relative degree of strain placed on each union, and has Brexit ultimately proven more destabilizing domestically than internationally?

Professor Mark Corner: I think it has. When the UK left in 2016, I remember seeing a book titled The EU: An Obituary.A lot of people thought that the UK’s departure would trigger a stampede. People began to talk about Nexit or Swexit after Brexit. But it didn’t happen.

It is important to note that, despite all the recent difficulties with Hungary, it did not leave the EU. It was not expelled from the EU. Yes, pressure was brought upon it, and in the recent election, it got rid of Orbán. But all this has happened with Hungary remaining a member of the EU.

In the case of the UK, there is an instability built into the fact that it is effectively a multinational state: England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. It seems to me that the UK has done very little to develop some kind of stable constitutional structure around which these different nations can coalesce. I think there are difficulties. The forthcoming elections next month will show that there are difficulties. In fact, there will quite possibly be a nationalist first minister in Scotland, similarly in Wales, and there already is Michelle O’Neill in Northern Ireland. So, there will be difficulties in the UK, and in the long run, they may prove more troubling than the difficulties in the EU.

Economic Reality Undercuts Sovereignty Claims

Your work highlights the tension between parliamentary sovereignty and supranational governance. To what extent does the post-Brexit economic record—particularly reduced trade and investment—challenge the political narrative that “taking back control” enhances state capacity?

Professor Mark Corner: There are certain ironies here. There was a great deal of talk about taking back parliamentary control in 2016. But in fact, the Brexit vote did the very opposite. If Parliament had had the authority to decide on Brexit, a majority of MPs were against it. Effectively, what the referendum did was to assert popular sovereignty over parliamentary sovereignty. Members of Parliament—most of whom would have preferred to remain—accepted that this popular vote must be binding. I think that was the correct decision. But it hardly amounted to strengthening parliamentary sovereignty. So, I am not sure Brexit really led to that. It strengthened an idea of popular sovereignty, and that is something about which there can be a number of questions. But I do not think it strengthened parliamentary sovereignty.

As for the trade arguments, the general view in the UK now is that Brexit has not been beneficial to trade. In 2016, many people had the idea that, freed from the shackles of the EU, we could go out and strike ambitious trade deals with the far corners of the world—a deal with Japan, a deal with India—we would be free, no longer moored to Europe. But the reality is that, even in the 21st century, geographical proximity remains crucial, and a very large share of our trade is conducted with Europe. You can see the present government trying, as far as it can, to nudge itself back toward a closer economic relationship with the EU. This is quite different from the atmosphere under Boris Johnson, with all the talk of becoming “Singapore-on-Thames”—the idea that Britain could roam the world and secure major trade deals simply by freeing itself from Europe. That notion has largely disappeared.

Policy Shifts Signal Economic Costs

If we move beyond rhetoric to measurable indicators—GDP performance, trade volumes, FDI, labor market shifts—how would you construct a balanced “Brexit scorecard”? Does the empirical record validate or undermine the core claims of Brexit proponents?

Professor Mark Corner: Scorecards differ, and economists always arrive at different figures. You know the saying that an economist is someone who, if you ask for a phone number, gives you an estimate.

I would have to speak in general terms: most economists would agree that the UK has lost more than it has gained. If that were not the case, I do not think the present government would be trying so hard to move back toward a closer economic relationship with the EU.

In the last few days, there has been discussion of whether the UK could align with EU rules without having to secure a vote in Parliament on every measure. That is, in political terms, a dangerous way to proceed, but it is being considered because, economically, the government perceives the scorecard as pointing toward as close an alignment as possible for the UK’s benefit. I do not think it would pursue this course otherwise.

Populists Shift Debate to Identity

How has populist discourse, particularly on the radical and far right, managed to reinterpret or neutralize the economic costs of Brexit by shifting emphasis toward sovereignty, identity, and cultural autonomy?

Professor Mark Corner: That is an important point to make: the arguments are not simply about whether Brexit is economically beneficial. They also involve these other questions, and even during the 2016 campaign there were people on the Remain side who said, look, we are talking too much in terms of economics alone—we should think more broadly.

There is no doubt that issues like immigration were a very important factor in precipitating the Brexit vote. The idea that the UK could take back control of its borders, decide who was going to come in if it left the EU, and thereby maintain its cultural identity and its sovereignty was a very powerful argument at the time, and that has to be recognized. At the same time, there are some very powerful arguments against that position. There is a strong case in favor of multicultural and multinational society that has been built up in the UK over the last 50 years, and I do not think that is emphasized enough.

Because I am old, I can go back to the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, there were arguments about admitting members of the former British Empire, and there was talk of an “Asian” or “Black” invasion—the language was very racist. Yet at that time there was actually net emigration from the UK, so there was no real issue of rising numbers. The only objection could have been that people did not like those who were not white coming in.

I do not see that in the 21st century. There is still racism, of course, but it is not like it was in the 1960s or 1970s. People generally accept that society is made up of many different cultural backgrounds, and that this is worthwhile—that it is a benefit.

There is, however, a different kind of problem, which is that overall numbers—irrespective of color or ethnic background—have been rising very quickly. Any country whose population is increasing rapidly year by year is going to face difficulties adapting to that, whether or not it is beneficial in the long run. So, the nature of the argument is different from that of the 1960s or 1970s.

I also think it is rather unfortunate that even in 2016, when David Cameron tried to renegotiate terms with the EU, he did not say that we need a period in which to stabilize the numbers coming into the UK, regardless of their background. Within the EU, there are countries like Bulgaria, whose population fell from 9 million to 7 million and which face the opposite problem—they cannot stabilize their numbers because too many people have been leaving.

So, there might have been an opportunity to say that, yes, there is the principle of the four freedoms, but there are also moments when it is reasonable to argue that we need to stabilize population flows.

It has all become rather ironic, because the main issue over the last five or ten years since Brexit has not been large numbers of people coming from other parts of the EU, but from outside the EU. That is not in itself a problem, but rapid shifts in numbers, whether upward or downward, can create difficulties.

I find the idea of identity quite interesting. If you look at London, it has a Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan. He has won three times and may win a fourth in 2028. He is very keen on rejoining the EU. He is 100 percent a Londoner, but also 100 percent a Muslim. It seems to me that there is a very positive sense of a multinational, multicultural identity—certainly in cities like London, but also in other parts of the UK—which should not be underestimated.

Identity Politics Deepens Divisions

Recent research suggests Brexit has produced enduring identity-based polarization (“Leavers” vs. “Remainers”). How does this align with your analysis of narrative construction and “historical arcs” in British political consciousness?

Professor Mark Corner: There is no doubt that there is a divide between Leavers and Remainers—you are right about that. It is reflected, for example, in the fact that the Reform Party at present shows a strong degree of continuity with UKIP and the Brexiteers of ten years ago. So, there is certainly a divide in the country.

But, of course, there has always been a political divide in the UK; it has simply been understood in different terms. Traditionally, people spoke of UK politics in terms of a strong class divide between the middle class and the working class, with Labour representing the working class and the Conservatives the middle class. That has largely broken down.

To some extent, this kind of division—once seen primarily in economic terms—has not been replaced but rather supplemented by a division in more cultural and identity-based terms: between those who are comfortable living in a multinational society and those who are not, and who feel that they are losing their identity.

Of course, the question then becomes: within the UK, do we mean identity as English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, or British? There are all sorts of questions about which identity we are referring to. So, there has always been division, but it has perhaps become more complex—combining social and cultural divisions alongside economic ones.

You can now see people who might traditionally have voted Labour, who are working class, choosing instead to vote Reform because they feel their identity is under threat, and that this matters more than protecting their economic livelihood. It has become a more complicated picture.

Narratives Replace Clear Policy

You warn against selective historical narratives that privilege moments of “splendid isolation.” To what extent has the far right—particularly figures like Nigel Farage and his UK Reform—successfully mobilized such narratives to legitimize Brexit and its aftermath?

Professor Mark Corner: The key point about the far right is that it largely consists of people who feel fed up with the way things are but do not have a very clear idea of how they could be better. My idea of what a populist is—though this may be a definition open to question—is someone who does not actually have a very clear idea of what they believe in. For them, politics becomes something like a sport. They latch onto people’s resentments and think about how to express them more effectively, how to take them further, and how to turn them into a real political campaign. I do not think they necessarily have a clear policy agenda. You may disagree with this, but I think for many people populism is a kind of sport—a very dangerous one—in which they do not generate ideas themselves but instead observe what people are saying and try to express those views even more forcefully.

So, it is often very difficult to pin things down exactly. Who, for example, can say precisely what the economic program of Nigel Farage is? This is partly a reaction to the fact that it is also quite difficult to say what the economic program of Keir Starmer is. There is a kind of vacuum in the center of British politics as well. To that extent, the rise of the Green Party is rather significant, because it does appear to be offering—at some risk to itself—some very clear ideas about what it would like to see happen. I do not see that coming from any other part of the British political spectrum.

Reform UK Channels Public Discontent

A placard urging voters to support Richard Pearse, the Reform UK candidate at the general election in Weston-super-Mare, UK on July 4, 2024. Photo: Keith Ramsey / Dreamstime.

How do you interpret the rise of Reform UK within the broader trajectory of populist radical right (PRR) politics in Britain? Is it a continuation of Brexit-era mobilization or a transformation into a more permanent political force?

Professor Mark Corner: It is certainly linked to the Brexiteers, but it is more a reflection of feelings of resentment and of being left out on the part of a significant minority of the population—people who feel they have been bypassed and ignored by the mainstream parties. To some extent, I think that is true. The Labour Party has notoriously taken for granted the support of people in poorer areas of the country and has not paid sufficient attention to their needs. That is perfectly true.

But, as I said, the idea that the Reform Party has really developed a clear program that attracts some and rejects others, beyond its hostility to immigration, is questionable. If you take the other side of the political spectrum, one may disagree with what the Greens propose, but it comes down to some very concrete proposals. For example, a 2% tax on the very rich—one may think this would lead to them all running off to the Bahamas and be economically catastrophic, or one may think it is a very good way of raising money—but it is at least clear. I do not see that sort of clarity from Reform, and I therefore wonder whether it is more than an expression of disaffection.

Populists Turn EU Skepticism into Power

Before 2016, Euroscepticism was not a dominant voter concern. In your view, how did it become the central axis of political mobilization, and what role did populist entrepreneurs play in this transformation?

Professor Mark Corner: Oh, gosh—there is a long answer to that. There has always been a problem in the UK in seeing EU membership as being in its economic interest. It is partly because of when we joined in 1973, after dealing with a couple of vetoes from de Gaulle in the 1960s—we first applied in 1961. We got in at the very moment when the post-war boom collapsed. There was an oil crisis, a little bit similar to today, and this precipitated very difficult economic circumstances in the 1970s. So, it was very easy for people in the UK to say that it was when we joined that economic community that all our troubles began. The 1960s were good years economically, and then we joined at the moment of crisis.

We also joined when there were the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy, which, whether good or bad, did not particularly benefit the UK, given its relatively small agricultural sector. Then there were all those arguments in the 1980s, when it was said that Britain was paying too much into the EU budget, and Mrs. Thatcher was running around saying, “we want our money back.” In that situation, it was very difficult to argue that, overall, EU membership was economically beneficial.

Then, of course, you had the campaign in 2016, with Nigel Farage and his big red bus, saying this is what we pay into the EU, and that we would get all our money back and invest it instead in the National Health Service, as he wrote on the side of the bus—totally ignoring all the money that came the other way. But he got away with it, because there was a fairly widespread feeling in the UK that it had not done well economically from being in the EU, and had not from the beginning. There is more of a sense now that the UK would do well economically by being part of the EU than there was for a long time when we were inside it.

Brexit Accelerates Culture Wars

Protest — XR protest in solidarity with refugees and climate migrants in Westminster, London, April 23, 2023. Photo: Jessica Girvan / Dreamstime.

To what extent has Brexit accelerated the shift from class-based politics to culture-war polarization, and how has this benefited Populist Radical Right (PRR) actors in structuring political competition?

Professor Mark Corner: I think it has. If you leave a group of 28 and say, no, we want to be on our own—we had too much cooperation, we were too close to you, and we want to get further away—then it does rather support the idea that people want to shut themselves up within their own separate identity.

But at the same time, there is perhaps a greater awareness now that we benefit more by working together. That includes cooperation with other EU countries. If you think of how vulnerable the UK feels at the moment—in terms of everything happening in Ukraine and the perceived unreliability of Trump—there is a growing sense that we really do need to work together with the EU, because otherwise we could be picked off separately. Then, that you can see, in political as well as economic terms, a strong incentive to engage with European countries, for instance in sharing the defense burden. Every week, I read articles about how the UK needs to spend more money on defense, warning that otherwise we are going to be attacked at dawn.

One of the things to note is that there is a great deal of wasted spending in defense, partly because different European countries do not cooperate. Eight years ago, President Macron suggested a common European army, but you do not hear much about that when UK defense chiefs argue that we must increase defense spending.

So, there is a strong case—not just in the economic sphere but also in the defense sphere—for taking a much more serious European approach. That may be one of the most important factors in the years ahead, because there is no doubt that we are in a very dangerous and vulnerable situation, and in such circumstances, people naturally think we should come together with those who are our friends—and that is, obviously, the other European countries.

Brexit Costs Fail to Shift Votes

Given the documented decline in trade integration and investment, why has this not translated into a sustained electoral backlash against Brexit-aligned parties? Does this reflect the resilience of populist framing?

Professor Mark Corner: I do not think it is simply a matter of populist framing. Getting back into the EU would not be easy, and one cannot simply assume that 27 countries would welcome the UK with open arms. The UK has caused a good deal of difficulty by leaving, and people might reasonably ask whether it would create further complications by returning. So, I do not think there is an easy path back in.

We might also have to accept certain conditions if we were to rejoin—things that have not been popular in the past. For instance, the EU might say that, as a new applicant, the UK would have to join the Eurozone. One could easily imagine political arguments arising from that. So, it is not a straightforward route.

In some ways, it might be preferable for the UK to approach the question more along the lines of Norway. Norway voted not to join the EU, partly because of the Common Fisheries Policy and its 2,000 miles of coastline. At the same time, however, it is part of the single market and contributes financially in order to participate. It may be that something along these lines would be a better option for the UK.

There is a genuine debate about how the UK should move closer to Europe. There is, however, a growing sense that it should be closer—not only for economic reasons, but also for political ones. When one considers the current geopolitical context—one superpower pressing in from the east, as in Ukraine, and another expressing interest in places such as Greenland in the west—it may be sensible to work more closely with allies in between.

I do not want to see this only in economic terms. Cultural considerations matter as well, and one of those is the defense of democracy. Whatever our ethnic backgrounds, we are part of democratic societies, and on either side, there are powerful, sometimes autocratic states. So democratic values are something we may wish to emphasize when thinking about cultural identity—values that are shared with the rest of Europe, including Hungary, I am glad to say.

Brexit Fuels UK Fragmentation Risks

UK Map — Photo: Michele Ursi / Dreamstime.

Your book raises the possibility that Brexit could trigger centrifugal pressures within the UK itself. Ten years on, how do you assess the risks of fragmentation—particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland—and their connection to Brexit politics?

Professor Mark Corner: I think it could happen. Imagine yourself as a Scotsman for a moment. You had a vote in 2014 on whether to stay inside the UK, and David Cameron argued that leaving the UK would mean finding yourself outside the EU—and that this was not desirable. The Scots were quite influenced by this and voted to remain in the UK. Two years later, in the Brexit vote, the Scots voted to stay in the EU, yet the rest of the UK—England and Wales, at any rate—dragged them out. They may well feel that they were misled two years earlier. It is not surprising that many Scots feel betrayed. Another referendum is hardly impossible. At the time, it was described as a once-in-a-generation event. Well, fine—once in a generation—that was 2014. 2039 is not that far away; it is just over a decade from now. So, I would not be surprised if there were another referendum in the 2030s.

What has the UK done about this? It could have taken steps, and perhaps still could. It might say: look, we have this House of Lords—what is it actually doing? It is appointed, not democratic. It is, in effect, “North Korea on Thames.” It could be transformed into a second chamber in which the different nations and regions are represented, rather like the Bundesrat in Germany. This is especially relevant now, because it has often been argued that the imbalance in population—3 million Welsh, 5 million Scots, and 60 million English—makes such a structure unworkable. But the 60 million English can now be broken down: there is Andy Burnham in Manchester, a mayor of Liverpool, a mayor of the Northeast Combined Authority, and a mayor of London. They could form part of a second chamber with real powers, including, arguably, some veto authority. If that kind of constitutional reform were seriously developed in the UK—it has been suggested but never pursued very far—that is what is needed.

Without real constitutional reform, such as a powerful second chamber in which the nations and regions are represented, the centrifugal forces you mention are likely to prove too strong. It is not enough simply to talk about devolving more powers to Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland; they need to be brought into a genuinely national second chamber where they can exercise central authority.

Pressures Grow Within States, Not Between Them

Finally, do you see Brexit as a unique case, or as a broader “laboratory” illustrating the structural tension between globalization and national sovereignty—one that continues to fuel populist radical right movements across Europe?

Professor Mark Corner: There are obviously other dimensions to this. There are really two questions: do I think that other countries, or other member states, will try to leave the EU? In the short to medium term, I do not see that happening. There are, however, movements within member states—one might think, for example, of Catalonia—where there are quite powerful pressures, and it is possible that these will create certain difficulties in the years ahead. But they may not.

If nation-states are prepared to share power internally, in the same way that, as members of the EU, they share power externally, then such outcomes can be avoided. Of course, I cannot predict the future. But what I do not see is the kind of queue of member states leaving the EU that was once suggested — John Gillingham wrote The EU: An Obituary ten years ago. That scenario is not materializing. The pressure to leave exists primarily within nation-states rather than between them.

Dr. Eszter Kováts is a political scientist, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Department of Political Science at University of Vienna. Photo: Photo credit: Zoltán Adrián / 24.hu

Eszter Kováts: Orbán’s Defeat Doesn’t Mean the End of Illiberal Politics in Europe

April 17, 2026

by ECPS_admin Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Interviews

In this ECPS interview, Dr. Eszter Kováts offers a measured reassessment of Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat and its wider implications for Europe. While the 2026 Hungarian elections mark a major rupture in domestic politics, she cautions against triumphalist readings that treat Orbán’s fall as the collapse of illiberalism itself. “It is something of a liberal dream,” she argues, to assume that the defeat of one leader means the defeat of the entire project. Kováts situates Orbánism within deeper structural, economic, and discursive dynamics, showing how it combined institutional power, culture-war politics, and claims to national sovereignty. At the same time, she underscores Hungary’s enduring polarization, the persistence of Fidesz’s electorate, and the unresolved conditions that continue to sustain illiberal-right politics across Europe.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

As Hungary enters the post-2026 electoral moment, the defeat of Viktor Orbán has been widely interpreted as a watershed in the trajectory of illiberal governance in Europe. For more than a decade, Orbán’s system stood as a paradigmatic case of what has often been termed “illiberal democracy”—a political formation combining electoral legitimacy with institutional centralization, ideological mobilization, and a sophisticated use of culture wars and transnational alliances. Yet, as this interview with Dr. Eszter Kováts makes clear, such interpretations risk overstating both the rupture and its implications.

In conversation with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Eszter Kováts—Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Vienna—offers a careful and analytically grounded reassessment of this moment. While the electoral outcome may appear decisive, she cautions against reading it as a definitive break. As she puts it, “it is something of a liberal dream to treat Orbán’s defeat as the defeat of his entire project.” The persistence of “many Fidesz voters,” alongside the broader constituency of “far-right and illiberal-right parties across Europe,”underscores the continued relevance of the political and social forces that sustained Orbánism.

This insight frames the central tension explored throughout the interview: whether the Hungarian case represents a genuine transformation or a reconfiguration of underlying structural dynamics. Dr. Kováts emphasizes that both the rise and the exhaustion of Orbán’s system can only be understood through a layered analysis that combines structural, contextual, and contingent factors. Economically, the regime rested on a distinctive model—often described as a hybrid of state intervention and market adaptation—which, for a time, delivered tangible improvements in living standards. Politically, it capitalized on what she identifies as “blind spots” within liberal and progressive frameworks, constructing an antagonistic narrative around migration, gender, and geopolitical conflict, each containing a “kernel of truth” but amplified into an “apocalyptic vision.”

At the same time, the interview challenges conventional narratives that frame right-wing mobilization simply as“backlash.” Such interpretations, Dr. Kováts argues, rely on overly teleological assumptions about democratic development and obscure the deeper systemic tensions that shape political contestation. Orbán’s success, in this reading, lay not merely in institutional control but in his ability to articulate these tensions—though this articulation ultimately faltered as economic conditions deteriorated and rhetoric became “increasingly detached from reality.”

The emergence of Péter Magyar introduces a further layer of complexity. Rather than a straightforward democratic reversal, Dr. Kováts describes the transition as, in part, a “democratic rebalancing,” but also as a moment fraught with uncertainty. Hungary remains “deeply divided,” with 94 percent of voters concentrated in two opposing camps, reflecting not only political polarization but competing “perceptions of reality.” Moreover, Magyar’s own political trajectory—rooted in Fidesz—raises questions about continuity as much as change, particularly given his constitutional majority and capacity to reshape state institutions.

Beyond Hungary, the implications for European populism are similarly ambiguous. Illiberal networks, Dr. Kováts notes, are not dependent on a single figure; they are embedded in national contexts and sustained by what she terms a “representation gap.” The assumption that Orbán’s exit signals the broader decline of illiberal politics is therefore, in her words, “a compelling discourse, but… a political one rather than an analytical description.”

In sum, Dr. Kováts’s reflections invite a more measured interpretation of Hungary’s political shift—one that resists both triumphalism and determinism. Rather than marking the end of a political era, the Orbán–Magyar transition may be better understood as a contingent episode within a longer and unresolved contest between competing visions of democracy in Europe.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Dr. Eszter Kováts, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

Exhaustion, Not Erasure

Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, arrives for a meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels, Belgium, on June 22, 2017. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.

Dr. Kováts, welcome. Drawing on your work on illiberalism and the structural drivers of populism, how should we interpret both the rise and the electoral defeat of Viktor Orbán’s system? Does this moment reveal inherent limits within the model, or rather the contingent exhaustion of a particular political configuration?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: This is already a very interesting and complex question, and we must consider both structural, contextual, and contingent elements in the rise of the system, its sustainability over 16 years, and its defeat or exhaustion, as well as how it could be defeated.

One must definitely mention the structural dimension in economic terms—essentially, the circumstances under which Orbán rose, the economic model he was building, how it functioned, and why it eventually exhausted itself. This is important because, in the international political science community, the focus is mostly on the democratic aspects—how Fidesz’s regime hollowed out democracy from within, removed checks and balances, and restricted press freedom, academic freedom, and so on.

But the system also had a very strong economic basis and a very particular economic model, often referred to as “Orbanomics.” This term comes from Gábor Scheiring, a political economist. I will not go into his writings here, but I would recommend them. It was a mixture of challenging neoliberalism while also building on several of its elements, combining state intervention with the construction of a national bourgeoisie.

For a long time, this model had a trickle-down effect. Together with favorable global economic conditions, ordinary Hungarians experienced standards between 2013 and 2019. Then came COVID and the war in Ukraine. When Péter Magyar entered the scene with the Tisza Party, there had been recession and worsening living standards. I would highlight this briefly as a structural element.

Obviously, there were also contextual elements, such as the weakness of the old opposition parties, which, by the time Tisza appeared, were already completely discredited. Then there is the role of Péter Magyar himself, who endured smear campaigns, demonstrated a strong will to power, and emerged at a moment when there was already a significant societal uprising—a large movement over the last two years that helped sustain this energy and desire for change.

However, we must also emphasize that Hungary has not simply switched from Orbán to Magyar. Hungarian society remains deeply divided. Although Tisza and Péter Magyar won the elections by a two-thirds majority, Fidesz still received 38–39 percent. That is not insignificant. The party has not disappeared, and neither have its voters.

At the same time, 94 percent of the Hungarian electorate voted for one of the two major parties, indicating an extremely polarized political landscape. This polarization extends to perceptions of reality, as well as to competing visions of society. That will remain a major challenge for the next government.

Fear Worked Until Reality Intervened

You have argued that mobilizations often framed as “backlash” are better understood as expressions of deeper systemic tensions. To what extent did Orbán’s political project succeed in articulating these tensions—and where did it ultimately fall short?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: It is a very widespread term in the literature to describe Orbán’s regime and similar regimes, in line with concepts such as democratic backsliding. All these approaches tend to have a very teleological view of history, as if societies are moving from less democratic regimes toward increasingly developed liberal democratic systems—with more rights for minorities, better deliberative processes, and so on. Within this framework, right-wing challenges are often interpreted as a backlash, as if they seek to push history back from its “normal” trajectory.

I have been challenging this view for many years, because I think it does not adequately explain Orbán’s regime. It assumes that all right-wing forces form one homogeneous group, without internal tensions, and that all so-called democratic or progressive forces also constitute a homogeneous group. It also presumes a Western blueprint, suggesting that all societies should move toward what the Western liberal mainstream currently defines as the normative model. Whenever someone defies this blueprint or this supposed direction of history, it is very easily labeled—also in social science literature—as right-wing or as advancing right-wing ideas. It is treated as an anomaly if one does not subscribe to a unified progressive front against a so-called right-wing backlash.

But this does not describe reality. Orbán was very skillful in tapping into these blind spots and into power relations that are not sufficiently addressed, including within the European Union. He capitalized on certain blind spots or blind alleys on the progressive side and constructed an expansive, often apocalyptic narrative around them.

Across his three main ideological projects—migration, gender, and the Russia–Ukraine war—there was always a kernel of truth. However, these were accompanied by a great deal of homogenization and apocalyptic framing. He presented these issues as existential threats, claiming that Brussels, the opposition, and liberal forces all sought to impose these dangers on Hungary, and that only he, Viktor Orbán, could protect the country.

This politics of fear was effective, but only as long as the economy was functioning and as long as those kernels of truth remained credible. Over the last three to four years, however, the economic foundation of this narrative has eroded, and in the final months, even the kernels of truth largely disappeared. The campaign became increasingly surreal—for example, the anti-Ukrainian discourse was exaggerated to the point where Ukraine was portrayed as seeking to “colonize” Hungary, and President Zelenskyy was depicted on billboards all over Hungary as a figure who would take over the country if Orbán lost the election. This was clearly disproportionate and increasingly detached from reality.

Crucially, Orbán’s narrative could function as long as there was no strong opposition. Péter Magyar, who comes from Fidesz, brought not only political instincts but also insider knowledge of how this communication machinery operates. He avoided many of the traps and managed to build a relatively narrow party structure alongside a broad social movement.

We will likely analyze the elements of his success for years to come, but one thing is clear: Orbán could operate like a tank as long as there was no counterforce. Once a credible challenger emerged, it became increasingly evident—especially in the final months of the campaign—that this strategy was no longer working.

Democratic Correction, Structural Uncertainty

Tisza leader Péter Magyar begins a symbolic “one million steps” march to Nagyvárad, Romania, addressing reporters with supporters in Budapest, Hungary on May 14, 2025. Photo: Istvan Balogh / Dreamstime.

In your critique of simplified ideological binaries, you highlight anti-pluralist tendencies across political camps. How should we understand the transition from Orbán to Péter Magyar in this light: as a democratic rebalancing, or as a reconfiguration of underlying structural conflicts?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: Yes, the anti-pluralism of right-wing forces is very well described, and that is their understanding of politics, at least in the case of the new right. Not everybody who is right-wing or conservative would defend this vision of politics, but within this illiberal or new right, there is clearly an understanding that politics consists of two antagonistic camps. Those who are not with us are against us. In the Hungarian case, this meant, if you are not with the government, you were portrayed as against Hungarians, against Christianity, or against children. These antagonisms are constructed continuously.

However, the other side is much less discussed, namely the progressive side, which also reproduces this binarism through the backlash narrative: we are the good people, the morally righteous, the democratic ones, and we are fighting against the other side. In the Hungarian context, this took a very specific form of anti-Orbánism. There were certain imperatives: if Orbán set the tone on something or placed an issue on the agenda, the opposition would automatically adopt the opposite position—defending stigmatized minorities, the rule of law, and democracy. Orbán deliberately reproduced these traps.

Magyar said: stop with this. Over the last two years, whenever Fidesz tried to create a rule-of-law trap—forcing him to engage in highly divisive debates, which are not framed in emotional language and are not what people feel they are fighting for—he avoided it. This is not to say these issues are unimportant, but politically they were not helpful and tended to divide the electorate.

As for whether this is a democratic rebalancing or a reconfiguration of underlying structural conflicts, in a way it is certainly a democratic rebalancing. There was a significant societal uprising. It became too much—too much coercion, too much hate, too much polarization on the side of the Orbán regime, which branded even ordinary voters as people who wanted to serve Ukraine and send children to war. There were also anti-democratic measures: in the final weeks of the campaign, whistleblowers from the police and the military revealed that Hungarian secret services were working against Tisza, the main opposition party. In that sense, this is a democratic correction.

However, as I mentioned, Péter Magyar comes from Fidesz, and until 2024 he had no problem with it. He was even a diplomat for Fidesz in Brussels and represented its EU policies. He shares core elements of Fidesz’s ideology. But we will see, because this is, in fact, a broad coalition. He may come from Fidesz and hold conservative views, but he won on a platform of broad societal unity, with one of his main promises being to reunite Hungary after deep polarization.

Regarding the structural elements, that is the key question. What room does he have to maneuver economically? There is a large hole in the budget. Will he pursue austerity? Will he be able to stimulate growth quickly? Will financial markets respond favorably to Hungary? How will he deliver on his promises? Another structural issue is his commitment to unblocking frozen EU funds—around €18 billion, which is a substantial sum. But to achieve this, he will need to negotiate with the EU, and he has already indicated that he will not compromise on certain Orbán-era policies, such as migration and Ukraine. This will be a significant challenge, as will the broader geopolitical environment involving the US, China, and Russia, which exerts pressure on Hungary.

I believe this geopolitical balancing was one of the reasons for Orbán’s defeat, as his model of maneuvering among these powers ultimately failed. Whether Magyar can manage this differently remains to be seen.

There is also the issue of restoring the rule of law and checks and balances. Now that Péter Magyar has a two-thirds, constitutional majority, he can change everything. He has already announced that he will remove Fidesz-appointed figures from key institutions, such as the Constitutional Court, the presidency, the Audit Office, the Budgetary Council, and the office of the Chief Prosecutor. At this point, we do not know whether he will appoint independent figures or loyalists.

We are therefore in a very difficult moment. There is great relief and even euphoria in opposition circles, but memories of Fidesz’s earlier two-thirds majority in 2010 remain vivid, when it reshaped the state in its own image. Magyar promises not to repeat that. The expectation is that he should not. But structurally, he could still follow a similar path. So, there are many uncertainties.

Ridicule as the Limit of Power

Over more than a decade, Orbán constructed a durable governing bloc through a combination of institutional control and narrative framing, including the strategic deployment of culture wars. Which elements of this hegemony proved most resilient, and which appear, in retrospect, more fragile?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: That is a very big question, and I am not going to answer it in detail. However, I find this understanding of hegemony very helpful, and Béla Greskovits, Dorothee Bohle, and Marek Naczyk wrote an excellent piece three years ago on how this was shifting, even before Péter Magyar and Tisza came onto the scene.

They argued that the consent elements gradually disappeared, while more coercive measures came in and the regime became more ideological. In the phase after 2010, it was much more pragmatic and opportunistic. Later on, it even took into account that EU funds were frozen, yet it continued in order to maintain power and preserve its ideological elements.

Apparently, in the last two years, coercion stopped working. It did not work because it became disconnected from reality, and it did not go beyond a certain level of coercion. We will certainly need to discuss this further in the months and years to come, but at least Hungary is not Russia or Belarus. It did not go beyond a certain point; it still maintained a minimalist understanding of democracy, which is why Orbán conceded on election night, saying that he accepted the results because the numbers were clear.

I do not want to trivialize this or suggest that what the Fidesz regime did was minor. As I mentioned, there was interference by secret services to undermine an opposition party, as well as an atmosphere of intimidation, constant smear campaigns, and sustained polarization and hostility. So, it was certainly not a harmless regime. However, it did not go beyond a certain level in practical terms, even though in discursive terms it went far beyond—constantly invoking threats.

But once a strong opposition emerged, this rhetoric no longer worked. In the final weeks of the campaign, statements that might previously have been effective instead sounded almost ridiculous. And I think ridicule is the greatest threat to autocrats—when people stop taking them seriously.

So, this was a very slow erosion of hegemony. It had economic causes, as well as contextual and contingent ones. By now, it seems that much of its base has eroded. In the days following the election, an interesting phenomenon emerged, captured by the Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy, who once said that “there is a traffic jam on the road to Damascus.” Many Fidesz loyals are now rapidly distancing themselves from the party and aligning with democracy. Suddenly, many claim they were always part of an internal opposition and had always been critical, even though they did not act on this for 16 years. Now, in the days just before and after the election, many of them have begun to speak out.

Reality Pushes Back

Campaign poster of Viktor Orbán ahead of the April 12, 2026, parliamentary elections. Photo: Bettina Wagner / Dreamstime.

Your work emphasizes the role of discourse, particularly the construction of political antagonisms. To what extent do the interpretive frameworks established during the Orbán era continue to shape political perception and competition in Hungary today?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: I belong to the soft constructivists, who argue that discourse has its limits. Not everything can be constructed. Every crisis, every enemy, ultimately encounters material reality, and that was, in a sense, the end of it. Discourse must be taken seriously, including the discourse of the left. But I also believe that, in social constructivist social science literature—and in approaches inspired by it—as well as in much of the Western media landscape, there is too strong an emphasis on, or belief in, the power of constructing things.

We can see this in debates about migration or gender. There are limits to this, and it does not convince people if it does not align with their material perceptions or lived realities. That was also, in a sense, the end of the Orbán era. However, as I said, it is not a simple switch where everything is suddenly debunked and over.

We are talking about around 800,000 people who moved from Fidesz to Tisza. There was one opposition party that managed to unite the previous opposition, and besides that Magyar succeeded in attracting over 800,000 voters. But this does not mean a complete transformation of reality in every respect. It is devastating for Fidesz, and there is clearly a process of soul-searching beginning within the party. What will happen to Orbán and to this right-wing illiberal project remains to be seen. So, we should be cautious not to discard all our analytical frameworks altogether.

Bread-and-Butter Politics Against Culture War

Tisza Party volunteer collecting signatures in Mosonmagyaróvár, Hungary on June 5, 2024 during a nationwide campaign tour ahead of the European Parliament elections. Photo: Sarkadi Roland / Dreamstime.

Hungary has often been described as a polity divided into parallel informational and political realities, in part structured through enduring culture war cleavages. Does the 2026 election represent a genuine rupture in this duality, or merely a shift in the dominant narrative without deeper societal reconciliation?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: I think it is a genuine rupture, in the sense of how Magyar has developed his discourse over the last two years. As I said, he did not simply take up the opposite position. He did not do what Fidesz wanted him to do by stigmatizing a minority and making very threatening statements, such as getting rid of NGOs and media financed from abroad or banning Pride parades. These were often presented in a way where you never knew how far they would go, but they frequently went quite far, creating major rule-of-law and minority-rights concerns. The old opposition would then respond by defending those minorities and liberal democratic institutions, the rule of law, and the right of assembly.

Magyar simply ignored this dynamic. Again, this is an ambivalent issue. On the one hand, it can be explained by his Fidesz instincts—these liberal causes or agendas may not mean much to him. On the other hand, it was a very smart tactic: he did not allow himself to be derailed and instead focused on rural Hungary.

A key element of his approach was to speak consistently about state failure—that hospitals do not function properly, that it is difficult to make ends meet, that the education system does not serve people well, and that housing costs are high. In other words, he focused on economic, bread-and-butter issues. He connected these to the failures of the state and kept the focus there, rather than on rule-of-law debates or culture war issues.

He also traveled extensively across Hungary. This may not sound like a novel strategy, but in the Hungarian context it proved significant. Since his appearance in March 2024, he has been constantly on the move, visiting a large number of settlements—around one-third of all Hungarian villages and cities. He met people directly, shook hands, and gave speeches even to small groups of 10, 30, or 100 people. This required a great deal of energy and is often underestimated. We tend to focus on structural factors, ideologies, and media narratives, but this basic element of presence—listening to people, asking about their concerns, and engaging directly with Fidesz voters—made a substantial difference.

When asked about culture war issues, he often simply repeated the Fidesz position. Again, this remains an open question, particularly regarding migration and Ukraine, and we will likely see in the coming weeks and months whether this was merely a tactical move or reflects a deeper strategic and ideological stance.

Culture Wars Were Central to Orbánism

You have shown that symbolic issues—such as debates around gender—can serve as vehicles for broader political mobilization and culture wars. How central were such symbolic frameworks to Orbán’s project, and do you expect them to retain salience in the post-Orbán period?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: It was very central to Orbán’s ideology, for both practical and power-related reasons. He knew that it served his interests, because whenever he introduced a symbolic issue, the urban liberal intelligentsia and the European elites would react in a predictable way—opposing it in very clear terms but not being able to mobilize a broad social movement around it. As a result, it became a kind of elite hysteria in the discourse. This then allowed him to position himself as defending Hungary, so to speak, against those elite dictates.

This became a rehearsed performance on all sides, and I believe this is one of the main takeaways from the last two years: this dynamic should probably stop, because Magyar stopped it, and it worked. However, Magyar won on a very broad voter base; it is a big-tent coalition. Many liberal and leftist voters, as well as the intelligentsia and urban elites, effectively swallowed the pill, accepting that if Orbán can be defeated this way, then be it.

But after his victory, they may seek to present the bill. I assume that in the weeks and months to come, these liberal and leftist sensibilities and ideas will not disappear; rather, they will resurface and attempt to exert pressure on Magyar. However, if they lack broader societal support, this may result only in empty gestures—open letters or outrage on social media—without real political impact.

If they want to represent these ideas—for example, to argue that not all minority rights are “woke” or trivial but are in fact important—then they will need to organize social movements or rethink opposition in a new configuration. For a long time, Péter Magyar will be able to respond by saying: stop this, because if you continue in this way, Orbán could return. This argument may be effective, given that he achieved a two-thirds majority against an autocratic system. He now has considerable credibility, and there is a sense of gratitude among many voters, which he can invoke to marginalize competing demands.

Orbán’s Exit Will Not End the Network

Given that many of these mobilizations were embedded in transnational networks, how might Hungary’s political shift alter its position within broader European and global constellations of right-wing and populist radical right actors?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: I agree with those who argue that this should not be overestimated. It is not the case that removing Orbán from the scene will cause everything to collapse. These networks exist beyond Hungary; they have their own national structures, and all these parties—from Rassemblement National to AfD, from Vox to others—have their own societal drivers and root causes.

Péter Magyar was asked exactly this question on Monday, the day after the elections, by international media. He responded by saying: look at your own countries. The people who vote for Rassemblement National or AfD are not necessarily far-right. Drawing on his own experience of speaking with Fidesz voters, he emphasized the importance of listening to them and understanding what is missing for them. Essentially, he was pointing to a representation gap—there are reasons why people vote for these parties, they see their concerns unaddressed by mainstream parties.

So, I think it is somewhat simplistic, or perhaps too comfortable, for some liberals to assume that if Orbán is gone, the illiberal challenge will also disappear. It may indeed create some uncertainty among illiberal elites—what do we do without Orbán?—but I do not think it will bring an end to these movements. They are rooted in national contexts, and their voters orient themselves toward their own far right or illiberal parties, not toward Orbán personally. In that sense, the underlying causes and structural problems will not disappear simply because Orbán is no longer in power.

A Different Tone Toward Brussels

Hungary - EU — Flags of Hungary and the European Union displayed together in Budapest. Hungary has been an EU member since 2004. Photo: Jerome Cid / Dreamstime

You have highlighted the importance of East–West asymmetries in shaping political discourse in Central and Eastern Europe. How might a renewed orientation toward the European Union under Magyar reshape these dynamics?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: These far-right or illiberal right parties all have different backgrounds in their respective contexts, and in East-Central Europe, what they have been able to mobilize—also beyond Hungary—are these asymmetrical relationships within the EU, which are often denied. Orbán exposed this hypocrisy and double standards: what France can do, Hungarians cannot do, and how Eastern Europeans are sometimes treated as second-class Europeans.

Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes have written about this, arguing that right-wing populists in Eastern Europe have been able to capitalize on this second-class Europeanness, where societies feel judged by Western Europeans—whether they are European enough, civilized enough, and so on. These dynamics have economic, symbolic, and epistemic dimensions, shaping how Central and Eastern Europeans are perceived as inferior. There is extensive literature on this from the past decade.

I assume that Péter Magyar will not fulfill the expectations of Western liberals and mainstream center-right actors by simply aligning fully with the Western mainstream. He will likely preserve some of the room for maneuver that Orbán built. He has a well-known phrase: we do not want to be a stick among the spokes, but a spoke in the wheel—meaning a constructive partner within the EU. This will likely be a relief at the EU level, as he may avoid vetoing for its own sake or subordinating EU foreign policy so directly to imminent Hungarian party political interests.

However, in normative terms, as I mentioned, he was part of Fidesz and supported its EU policies for a long time. He also understands that Hungary’s structural position within the EU has not changed, so it is not in his interest to abandon everything Orbán established in recent years, whether for better or worse.

At the same time, Orbán placed Hungary in a very precarious position. In the weeks before the elections, conversations leaked by secret services to the media between Putin and Orbán, as well as between Lavrov and the Hungarian foreign minister Szijjártó, suggested a deeper connection between Hungary and Russia than previously acknowledged. If such information were further exposed, it could have deepened Hungary’s isolation in the event of an Orbán victory. So, I think that, in the corridors of Brussels, there is a sense of relief. There will likely be some realignment, but not the complete shift that some may expect.

Orbán Is Gone, the Project Is Not

Orbán positioned Hungary as both a challenger to and a critic of liberal democratic consensus within the EU. How significant is his electoral defeat for the broader trajectory of illiberal governance in Europe and the evolution of the far-right?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: As I said previously, I think it is something of a liberal dream to treat Orbán’s defeat as the defeat of his entire project. There are still many Fidesz voters, and there are voters of far-right and illiberal-right parties across Europe. At the moment, there is a sense of moral high ground — “look, he is gone, so everything was wrong and has been debunked.” I am not sure about that. It is a compelling discourse, but it remains a political one rather than an analytical description, and I am not convinced it will have the effect on the voters of those parties that such narratives might hope for.

Agency Matters, but So Do Structures

Finally, Dr. Kováts, stepping back, does the Orbán–Magyar transition mark a broader inflection point in European politics, or should it be understood as a contingent episode within a longer cycle of contestation between liberal and illiberal visions of democracy?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: We are going to spend many months and years discussing this question. I think social scientists tend to look for the reasons behind everything and to underestimate contingency. At the same time, those of us who prefer structural explanations also tend to underestimate agency, and I believe there is much to correct in this regard.

This is what Péter Magyar’s success demonstrates: he exercised agency. It was not predetermined in a system designed to keep Orbán in power that it could be challenged. It required creativity, hard work, and strategic thinking. Of course, the previous 14 years were also necessary—we learned collectively from many mistakes. Or perhaps not “we,” since liberals and the left were not central to this success; it was someone else who achieved it.

Magyar himself also learned, probably in part because he was inside the system. There were many elements that contributed to his success. Some were contingent, others structural; some related to talent, effort, good intuitions, and having the right people at the right time. There was also an important social movement dimension. For instance, in rural Hungary, some of the biggest losers of Orbán’s regime were small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, and they formed a core part of the Tisza movement. They had networks and were able to mobilize and organize effectively.

We will need further research to fully understand these elements and what made this outcome possible. But it is clear that there are many factors at play. I am not in favor of sweeping explanations that look for a single determining factor or draw definitive conclusions that one model has ended, and another has decisively triumphed.

Ten Years on with Brexit / Prof. Portes: Brexit Has Not Solved Britain’s Problems; It Made Them Worse

April 17, 2026

by ECPS_admin Economics Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Interviews Migration

As the United Kingdom nears the tenth anniversary of the 2016 Brexit referendum, Professor Jonathan Portes offers a sober, evidence-based reassessment of its economic and political legacy. In this ECPS interview, Professor Portes argues that Brexit did not resolve the structural problems it promised to overcome; rather, “the UK still confronts the same fundamental problems it did 10 years ago,” and, in key respects, they have worsened. Drawing on a decade of research on trade, migration, labor markets, and policy autonomy, he shows how weakened investment, reduced integration, and persistent political tensions have defined the post-Brexit settlement. Moving beyond slogans, Professor Portes situates Brexit within broader debates on sovereignty, interdependence, and populist politics in an increasingly unstable international order.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

As the United Kingdom approaches the tenth anniversary of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the debate has moved decisively from slogan to scrutiny, from promises of restored sovereignty to the measurable consequences of economic and political separation. In this context, the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) is pleased to host Professor Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the School of Politics & Economics, King’s College London, whose extensive scholarship has been central to understanding the economic and labor-market consequences of Brexit. Throughout the past decade, Professor Portes has offered one of the most rigorous and evidence-based assessments of how trade, migration, policy autonomy, and public expectations have evolved under the post-Brexit settlement.

This interview is framed by a stark and sobering conclusion that runs through Professor Portes’s reflections: Brexit did not resolve the structural dilemmas it claimed it would overcome. Rather, as he puts it, “the UK still confronts the same fundamental problems it did 10 years ago.” The core promise of Brexit, he argues, was that it would allow Britain to escape the constraints associated with globalization, immigration, and post-2008 economic stagnation. Yet the reality has been quite different. “Rather than solving those problems,” he observes, Brexit “has probably made them worse.” In Professor Portes’s analysis, the UK remains what it always was: “a middle-sized, advanced Western European economy,”still grappling with familiar pressures, but now doing so from a more exposed and less advantageous position.

The interview explores this argument across several interrelated domains. On the economic front, Professor Portes notes that the evidence on growth, trade, productivity, and investment has broadly confirmed the mainstream pre-referendum consensus: Brexit was never likely to produce collapse, but it would impose “significant and material long-term damage”on British economic prospects. Trade, especially goods trade, emerges in his account as the most enduring site of disruption, while weakened investment and reduced integration with the European market suggest an adaptation process that may culminate in a “permanent loss of integration.”

On migration, Professor Portes offers an especially illuminating account of Brexit’s unintended consequences. Rather than simply reducing immigration, Brexit reconfigured it, replacing free movement from within the EU with larger-than-expected inflows from outside it. That outcome, he suggests, exposed a contradiction at the heart of the Leave campaign: the demand for both lower migration and greater economic flexibility under national control. More broadly, the interview shows how the promise of sovereignty often failed to produce meaningful control in practice. As Professor Portes cautions, sovereignty “in the abstract legal and political sense does not necessarily translate into having control.”

Taken together, Professor Portes’s reflections offer a penetrating assessment of Brexit not as a completed nationalist correction, but as a prolonged and costly reconfiguration of Britain’s political economy. His analysis challenges triumphalist narratives from both the sovereigntist and populist right, while posing deeper questions about the limits of national autonomy in an interdependent world.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Jonathan Portes, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

Brexit Has Intensified, Not Resolved, Structural Economic Pressures

A Brexit Day ‘Independence’ parade was held at Whitehall and on Parliament Square in London to celebrate the UK leaving the European Union on January 31, 2020.

Professor Portes, welcome. You have been among the most careful and empirically grounded observers of Brexit’s economic and political consequences over the past decade. As we approach the ten-year mark since the 2016 referendum, how would you characterize the overall trajectory of the UK economy and policy landscape under Brexit? What stands out most when you step back and take a long view?

Professor Jonathan Portes: I think what stands out most, perhaps, is that the UK still confronts the same fundamental problems it did 10 years ago. The UK remains very much a middle-sized, advanced Western European economy, with many of the same issues and problems as other such economies. The difference, however, is that Brexit was, in some ways, touted as a means for the UK to escape some of those problems, issues, and constraints relating to globalization, immigration, and economic stagnation since 2008, as well as a range of political problems within the UK that arose from those economic challenges.

But rather than solving those problems, as Brexit was presented as doing by some of its proponents, it has probably made them worse. This is partly because it led, obviously, to a period of political chaos in the UK. Even after that, and despite a degree of relative stability being restored, it has possibly caused some damage to the UK’s political institutions. At the same time, rather than resolving any of these political economy problems, it has arguably exacerbated them.

In other words, the difficulties of managing globalization and its impacts were already very apparent when the UK was a member of the EU. They manifested themselves partly through EU membership and partly outside it. However, outside the EU, these difficulties have become even starker. Rather than being resolved by Brexit, as was hoped, they have become more visible and more difficult. This is partly due to the structural contradiction of Brexit itself. It is also, of course, partly the result of global developments since then—most notably the election of Trump—which have made the UK’s position outside the EU more difficult for fairly obvious reasons.

Growth, Trade, and Investment Have Weakened as Expected

Much of your work highlights the gap between political expectations and economic outcomes—particularly in areas like growth, trade, and migration. Looking across the evidence now available, how should we understand the real costs of Brexit compared to what was anticipated or promised at the time?

Professor Jonathan Portes: Of course, politicians on both sides said a lot about Brexit. In terms of the economic impacts of Brexit on things like growth, trade, and investment, this is one area where we economists can actually be rather pleased with ourselves. Economic forecasts rarely turn out to be accurate, and of course there is still quite a lot of debate about the precise impacts of Brexit. But we now have a wide range of economic evidence on the impact on growth, trade, and investment, and it is pretty much entirely consistent with the mainstream economic consensus that I and others formed part of, before Brexit: that Brexit would not be a complete catastrophe for the UK economy, but it would do significant and material long-term damage to our economic prospects by reducing growth, productivity growth, trade, and investment. And all of those have been fairly clearly borne out.

The interesting difference is on migration, where both I and others thought that Brexit would reduce migration through the free movement channel within the EU, which would only be partly offset by increased inflows from outside the EU. In fact, it has turned out that the direction for both of those numbers has been correct. But the relative magnitudes were wrong, and the increase in migration from outside the EU has more than offset the reduction in flows within the EU. As a result, the UK population and labor force are actually larger than they would have been without Brexit, not smaller. That provides, not a small, offset to the negative impacts of Brexit, although it has also generated a great deal of political backlash. From an economic point of view, however, this is a positive—though certainly not by anywhere near enough to offset the negative impacts of Brexit on trade and investment.

Trade Took the Hardest Hit, While Services Showed Resilience

If we think of Brexit as a large, multi-dimensional economic shock, where do you see its most significant and lasting effects—across trade, investment, labor markets, and productivity—and which of these have proven more resilient than many expected?

Professor Jonathan Portes: The biggest persistent shock has been to trade, particularly trade in goods. The UK did quite well out of EU membership in terms of being integrated into pan-European and hence pan-global supply chains for goods. We have seen that small and medium-sized exporters benefited from being able to export to the EU without regulation or red tape. And, of course, British consumers benefited from frictionless imports from within the EU. None of that has disappeared completely—you still have trade under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and the EU remains by far our largest trading partner. But nonetheless, there has been a significant impact, particularly for those manufacturers integrated into global supply chains, who have faced increased costs as a result, and also for some of those small and medium-sized businesses that benefited from frictionless trade within the single market.

On the more resilient side, there has also been some damage to the financial services sector, which, of course, was a major issue in the run-up to Brexit. Again, the UK’s financial services sector is large and resilient, and London remains by far the largest financial center in Europe, but it is nonetheless somewhat smaller than it would have been without Brexit. There has been some damage there, but the sector is not going anywhere and will continue to be an important part of the UK economy.

There has been more resilience in other areas of the high-productivity tradable services sector—things like consultancy, legal services, and accountancy—where trade barriers were never that large, because there are no tariffs and there is less in the way of regulation than in financial services. Hence, the UK has actually done pretty well; it has not just been resilient but has also seen very fast growth in those sectors. This has helped preserve the overall picture and means that the economic impacts have not been as clear, as severe, or as visible as they might have been, as some people at one end of the spectrum feared.

And then on the labor market, there was considerable concern that the end of free movement would do quite a bit of damage to sectors that relied on European migration. While migration from outside the EU is not a perfect substitute—because it involves different types of people in different sectors with different skills and so on— overall, the rather large increase in non-EU migration has done a lot to cushion the UK labor market and sectors that are dependent on migrant labor from what the impacts would otherwise have been. So, it has been a mixed picture.

Short-Term Adjustment, Long-Term Disintegration

There is now substantial evidence that UK trade with the EU has underperformed relative to its pre-Brexit trajectory, alongside signs of weakened investment. How should we interpret these developments in structural terms—do they reflect a permanent loss of integration, or an ongoing process of economic adaptation?

Professor Jonathan Portes: I think the answer is, in some ways, both. It is an ongoing process of adaptation that, eventually, leads to a permanent loss of integration, assuming that the new situation continues as it is. Of course, because this has done significant damage to the UK economy, both politicians and the public are now trying to think of ways to reverse that damage, at least in part. So, we do not know exactly where we will be in five or ten years. But if the current status quo continues, then you have, as you suggest, a process of adaptation that has partly happened but still has some way to run, leading to a permanent loss of integration.

On the other hand, as I said, there are now active discussions acknowledging that this is a bad outcome—recognized as such from an economic perspective by the UK public and policy establishment—and efforts are being made to think of ways to reverse it, at least to some extent.

Migration Fell from the EU, Rose from Elsewhere

Your research shows that Brexit fundamentally reshaped the composition of migration rather than reducing it overall, with declines in EU-origin workers offset by increases from non-EU countries. How should we interpret this outcome in relation to the central political promise of “taking back control”?

Professor Jonathan Portes: This is absolutely fascinating, because there was a very large implicit contradiction in some of the arguments made by pro-Brexit campaigners, which sought to present it both as a way of substantially reducing immigration overall and, by taking back control, ensuring that migration policy would be tailored to the needs of the UK economy or labor market, rather than dictated by EU rules.

But it turned out that, particularly at the time of Brexit and in the aftermath of the pandemic, the interpretation of the then-government—which was the government that delivered Brexit—was that what the UK economy needed was a significant increase in migration, and that is what we got. So, you had people within the Brexit movement saying, “We have been betrayed, immigration is going up,” and others saying, “No, we have control—yes, immigration is going up, but it is immigration that is entirely under our control and dictated by the needs of the UK economy and labor market.”

That contradiction was always implicit in some of the claims made by Brexit proponents at the time of the referendum, when it was never entirely clear whether they were making a concrete pledge to reduce immigration or not. But nobody, certainly not me, expected that contradiction to become so obvious and so large as it did in the post-pandemic period, because of the significant labor shortages that emerged post-Brexit and post-pandemic in the UK, and, to some extent, in other countries as well.

The result is that the UK political system has not really been able to cope with this. It has done a great deal of damage to the Conservative Party and has been one of the significant factors behind the rise of the Reform Party, contributing to divisions within the Conservative Party. Despite the fact that the Labour Party opposed Brexit but is now having to manage this new post-Brexit immigration system, it is also leading to very severe tensions within the Labour Party and the current government between those who believe that immigration needs to be reduced regardless of the needs of the economy, and those who, for economic or broader political reasons, think that, on the whole, a relatively liberal and open immigration system is a good thing.

Migration Policy Reveals the Limits of Political Steering

In your analysis, the UK has moved from a largely automatic free-movement regime to a highly managed, points-based system—yet with outcomes still strongly shaped by labor demand and external shocks. Does this suggest limits to how far governments can actually steer migration and labor markets?

Professor Jonathan Portes: It illustrates the difficulties and contradictions in having control. One of the perceived disadvantages, from a political point of view, of free movement was that we could not say who could come. People would simply come and go as they wished, and we had no control over that because of EU rules. But the upside, of course, was that this had two advantages. From an economic perspective, it meant that these flows were, to a significant extent, determined by the market. Labor demand led to people coming in, a weak labor market led to people leaving, and these things happened more or less automatically. From an economic perspective, that, on the whole, is a good thing.

But the second advantage was political, and I think people did not fully appreciate it. Governments could largely sit back and say, “well, these are market decisions, and we do not have the remit to interfere with them,” so migration could be somewhat removed from the political process. The disadvantage of the current system, as it has turned out, is that having control means there is a great deal of political pressure on governments to do something about migration, regardless of whether it is actually a problem in economic terms.

That leads to sharp swings in policy, and often, as we are seeing at the moment, swings that are somewhat counter cyclical. This reflects an old problem that we used to discuss as macroeconomists with demand management through fiscal policy in a Keynesian framework: in principle, it is good to cut taxes when the economy is weak and increase taxes when the economy is strong. But in practice, because governments react slowly and economic data comes through with delays, it often turns out that policies are implemented at the wrong time—by the time you cut taxes, the economy is already recovering, or by the time you raise taxes, the economy is already weakening.

We seem to be seeing something similar with migration. The government was panicked by the large rise in migration in 2022 and 2023 and has now put in place very draconian measures to reduce migration at exactly the time when migration to the UK was already falling very sharply. That is a very bad way of making policy. We have control—this is all entirely under government control—but we have ended up with policy where that control is being exercised in a way that is quite damaging economically and does not really convince the public that we actually have control. To the public, it looks as though the government is just flailing around and does not really know what it is doing. To be honest, they are not wrong about that.

Mismanaged Migration Policy Fuels Shortages and Bottlenecks

Air Travellers Proceed to Passport Control at a British Airport. Photo: Dreamstime.

You have described post-Brexit migration patterns as producing “unintended consequences,” particularly in terms of scale and sectoral distribution. To what extent do these dynamics help explain persistent labor shortages, sectoral imbalances, and broader economic bottlenecks?

Professor Jonathan Portes: I think it goes back to what I just said, which is that, as in many other things, a relatively free market is the worst possible way of managing the matching of supply and demand, except for all the other ways of doing it. So, when you have a government that is trying, in some way, to use the migration system to match supply and demand and is also doing so in an environment where it faces all these political constraints, real or imagined, it ends up getting things wrong.

Partly this is because you simply cannot manage an economy or a labor market in that way, and partly it is due to politics. Once you have said you are in control, and that everything is under control, you face pressure to make policy changes that are not necessarily justified by anything in particular, except perceived political pressures. As a result, the government ends up getting a number of things wrong.

This has been particularly evident in the health and care sector, where the government liberalized probably too much, too quickly, in a way that did not take account of the dynamics of the immigration system or the labor market, and has now tightened up too much, too quickly, again without taking those dynamics into account, or considering how the labor market works or its own role in shaping pay and conditions in this workforce.

The result is both poor policymaking and poor political outcomes—shortages, bottlenecks, and broader imbalances. It also causes significant harm to individuals caught up in this system, including migrants, who can find the rug pulled out from under them and are sometimes treated very badly, both by their employers and by the government, as well as the people who depend on care—the consumers of these services—who ultimately should be our primary concern.

Widespread Impact Undermines Claims of Uneven Gains

Brexit’s economic consequences have not been evenly distributed. How important are these distributional effects—for workers, firms, and regions—in shaping both the economic outcomes and the political sustainability of Brexit?

Professor Jonathan Portes: In one sense, there has been a great deal of work on the regional impacts of Brexit, and I am not sure it has demonstrated that they are as differential as one might expect. You can, of course, point to very specific examples, such as the loss of European regional funding in some disadvantaged areas. There has also been a particularly negative impact on parts of the food and agriculture sector. I mentioned the City of London and the financial services sector, but overall, the impact has been quite diffuse across the economy as a whole.

So, you can point to individuals or particular businesses that have been put out of business by Brexit, and there are people who are especially dependent on certain sectors. But beyond that, there has mostly been a general pattern of lower growth, lower trade, and lower investment, affecting pretty much the entire UK economy to a greater or lesser extent.

You can see that in the opinion polling. The view that Brexit has been an economic failure is very widely shared across UK society. It is very hard to find a section or interest group that says Brexit was great for them, even if it was bad for others. Rather, there is a broad consensus that, from an economic point of view, Brexit has been a failure across the board. So, while you can identify individuals or businesses that have suffered much more than someone like me, for the most part it has been a broadly shared, generalized negative impact.

Formal Sovereignty Cannot Override Economic Realities

Your work suggests that while Brexit restored formal policy autonomy, outcomes have remained difficult to control in practice. Does this point to a deeper structural tension between political sovereignty and economic interdependence in advanced economies?

Professor Jonathan Portes: Yes, and I think that goes back to what I was saying before. You may or may not have thought it was plausible for the UK to argue, in 2016, that as a middle-sized, advanced economy—like other European countries—dependent on global trade and investment, there were nonetheless various structural, political, and economic reasons why it should not be part of the EU. Partly political—we have a different political tradition—and partly structural and economic. We are much more dependent on services trade, particularly high-value services, and while we are economically integrated with the EU, it is not to the same extent as countries like Germany or France. So, the UK could, and should, for this combination of reasons, be independent, make its own trade policy, and make its own, to some extent, foreign policy, retain close economic links with the EU, but not subordinate its political, economic, or trade decision-making to the EU. And we could make a success of it as a global economy, just as some other countries—whether Singapore or Australia, or to some extent Switzerland—have done. That case was always flawed, and most economists thought it was flawed, but it was not obviously unreasonable.

But it is now pretty clear that geopolitical developments over the last ten years have been very unfavorable to that strategy. It is much easier to pursue such a strategy when there is a benign, liberal hegemon—or perhaps two hegemonic powers, the US and China—both with a strong interest in a stable, liberal international trading order that accommodates countries in the position I have just described. You can argue about what might have happened without Trump. I think it is plausible that even without Trump, we would have been moving, to some extent, in the direction we are already going, which would have made that strategy increasingly implausible. But it is clear that Trump has accelerated this trajectory, to the point where that strategy now looks unrealistic.

That is where we are now, unfortunately. Even if Trump himself were reversed, it is very hard to see a return to the sort of benign, liberal international trading order I described—one in which a middle-sized power like the UK can comfortably pursue an independent path while still participating fully in global trade.

Brexit Reconfigures Long-Standing Migration Debates

In your work on free movement and the UK, you situate Brexit within a longer trajectory of labor mobility and political contestation. From that perspective, does Brexit represent a rupture, or a reconfiguration of deeper structural tensions within the British political economy?

Professor Jonathan Portes: It is very much the latter. Immigration—both its political, economic, and social consequences—has been an issue in British politics that has gone up and down in prominence for a very long time, certainly in the post-war era, from the mid-1950s to now, over the last 70 years. Brexit has clearly changed things. It has changed the system, as we have just discussed, and it has changed the environment. But many of the issues being contested now are very much the same as those that were contested in the 1960s, in the Powell era, were contested again in the 2000s immediately after enlargement, and are being contested today.

These include questions such as: to what extent is the UK—like other European countries, albeit in a different context—a country shaped by migration? What is the role of migration in a modern economy and labor market? What is its role given the demographic challenges and ageing that all our countries face? And what are the implications of migration for a country’s national and cultural identity?

We are not, for the most part, countries of immigration in the same way as the US, but equally, certainly in the UK—and in most of Europe—we are no longer monocultural or ethnically homogeneous societies either. Those who seek to take us back to that are very dangerous. So, the question becomes: what is the model of a multi-ethnic European democracy? That is something we are all struggling with. The UK was struggling with it before Brexit, and it is struggling with it now.

Brexit Pushed the Far Right Toward a European Strategy

Brexit was widely seen as a landmark moment for populist and sovereigntist politics, including the rise of far right and populist radical right mobilization around migration and national control. Looking back, how do you assess the relationship between Brexit and these broader political currents—both at the time and in their evolution over the past decade?

Professor Jonathan Portes: It has been quite interesting in that Brexit has, in a sense, forced European far-right movements to reconfigure their offer. What most of them seem to have recognized is that Brexit is neither a success nor is it perceived as a success, either domestically in the UK or in their own countries. So, you have far-right movements that were, at the time and immediately afterwards, flirting with their own ideas of exit from the European Union, but have now reconfigured themselves to retain the same focus on migration issues while embedding those concerns within a European frame rather than a purely domestic one.

This has, if anything, been bolstered by what we see from across the Atlantic, with figures such as J.D. Vance talking about European culture or European Christian values, rather than Italian or French values. So, you have this form of ethnically based, anti-immigrant nationalism that has, in a sense, shifted toward a European-level identity, alongside a domestic one.

In that respect, these movements have been, whether one likes it or not, quite effective in adapting. When you look at figures like Le Pen and Meloni, they have pivoted away from overt anti-Europeanism toward a form of European white nationalism.

Populist Right Is Here to Stay—but Its Shape Is Uncertain

Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party UKIP. Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, speaking at Chatham House in London on March 31, 2014. Photo: Dominic Dudley / Dreamstim.

In the same context, how do you interpret the continued prominence of Nigel Farage and the rise of Reform UK within the UK’s political landscape? Does their trajectory suggest that Brexit has consolidated a durable populist radical right (PRR) and far-right constituency, or are we witnessing a more fluid and contingent phase of political realignment?

Professor Jonathan Portes: I hesitate to make predictions on this. But the obvious answer is a bit of both. The presence of Farage and the populist right in the UK is now well established; it is no longer a flash in the pan. We now have some years of it, so I think it is not going away. But how the current political shake-up in the UK plays out is very difficult to assess.

Structurally, our political system is configured around a two or two-and-a-half-party system. We have a roughly 50–50 division between right and left blocs, with a group of voters in the middle who are willing to support either side on occasion. That is a reasonably stable political configuration. But when you have four or five parties, the system becomes much more unstable, especially when these cleavages cut across both economic and socio-cultural dimensions.

It is not clear that the current first-past-the-post system is well suited to this new context. Whatever one thinks in the abstract about first-past-the-post versus different forms of proportional representation, the dynamics look very different in a two or two-and-a-half-party system than in a four or five-party system, where instability increases significantly.

So, it is very unclear how this will shake out. Populism—and in particular far-right populism—is certainly not going away in the UK. But how it will reconfigure the right of the UK political spectrum, and to what extent the more traditional conservative right, which still has a constituency in the UK, can reassert itself and regain control, remains very uncertain at the moment.

Economic Reality Challenges Populist Narratives

To what extent do the economic and migration outcomes of Brexit challenge or reinforce the core claims of populist narratives about globalization, elites, and national sovereignty?

Professor Jonathan Portes: As discussed, they illustrate some of the limitations of national sovereignty and the fact that sovereignty in the abstract legal and political sense does not necessarily translate into having control. There is a fundamental issue here: people felt that they wanted more control over their lives, and Brexit was sold to them as a way of achieving that, yet they certainly do not feel that this has been delivered. That is a fundamental problem.

It is also a fundamental problem for politicians, because it is very difficult to explain to people that, on the one hand, politicians need to demonstrate concretely that they have given people back some control over their lives, while on the other hand they must also be honest about the fact that there are areas where national governments simply cannot exercise control and must be realistic about those limits.

We are seeing this right now with oil and gas prices. The UK government cannot stop global oil and gas prices from rising. At some point, politicians have to be honest and say that we can try to protect the most vulnerable households and mitigate the impact of this economic shock, but it remains an economic shock, and that means the country as a whole is poorer, and we have to live with that.

Populists Shift Strategy as Exit Loses Appeal

Finally, for other sovereigntist or “exit” movements across Europe that have looked to Brexit as a model, what lessons—economic, political, or institutional—should be drawn from the UK’s experience over the past decade?

Professor Jonathan Portes: As I said, populists have correctly learned that Brexit, or its equivalent, is largely going to be a political loser, and they have pivoted away from that. They have shifted towards a more pan-European, ethnically based opposition to immigration—a form of pan-European white nationalism that mirrors some of what is going on in the US at the moment. To some extent, they have done this quite successfully in countries such as France and Italy.

To my mind, the challenge is for those of us who are not part of these movements and do not want to see them succeed: what is the narrative—economic, political, and cultural—that we use to push back against this and say that this is not the sort of Europe we want? The kind of Europe we seek to build is not one that will be economically successful, nor one that most people would want to live in. That is the challenge, and frankly, I do not think we have met it yet.

Security at What Cost? Punitive Populism and Democratic Trade-offs in Ecuador

April 16, 2026

by ECPS_admin Authoritarianism Commentaries Editor’s Choice Environment & Climate Home Human Rights

In this commentary, Emilio Hernández examines Ecuador’s recent security crisis through the lens of punitive populism, offering a nuanced account of how crime control becomes intertwined with political legitimacy. Moving beyond conventional policy analysis, he demonstrates how states mobilize insecurity not only to justify coercive measures but to reshape the very logic of governance. By situating Ecuador’s militarized response within broader theoretical debates—from Bottoms and Garland to Simon’s “governing through crime”—the piece highlights how emergency discourse, symbolic action, and the construction of internal enemies converge to produce authority. Hernández’s analysis ultimately raises a critical question: when security becomes a political performance, what are the long-term costs for democratic institutions, rights, and accountability?

By Emilio Hernandez*

Security crises are rarely only about security. They are moments in which states redefine the boundaries of authority, recalibrate the balance between coercion and rights, and reconstruct their relationship with the public. In such contexts, crime ceases to be treated solely as a policy problem and becomes instead a central organizing principle of political action. The language of emergency, the visibility of force, and the promise of immediate control begin to shape not only how governments respond to violence, but also how they seek to be perceived. What emerges is not simply a shift in security policy, but a transformation in the political logic through which legitimacy is produced.

Ecuador provides a particularly illustrative case of these dynamics. Following a rapid deterioration of security conditions and the onset of a major crisis in early 2024, the government adopted a series of highly visible and coercive measures, including the militarization of public security, the expansion of punitive legal frameworks, and the articulation of a confrontational discourse centered on the identification of an internal enemy, often labeled as “terrorists” (Voss, 2024).

These responses, while framed as necessary to restore order, also reconfigured the relationship between crime control and political authority. Rather than operating solely as instruments of crime control, these measures point toward a broader shift in governance, where punishment, coercion, and political communication converge. In this sense, Ecuador’s response can be understood as part of a wider turn toward punitive populism, in which the management of insecurity becomes inseparable from the construction of political legitimacy.

Punishment, Power, and the Politics of Insecurity

Moments of acute insecurity tend to reorganize the relationship between crime, politics, and state authority. In such contexts, criminality is no longer framed exclusively as a social problem to be addressed through technical or institutional responses. Instead, it becomes a central axis of political articulation, around which governments construct narratives of crisis, order, and control. As Jonathan Simon (2007) argues in his notion of “governing through crime,” crime increasingly operates as a framework through which political authority is exercised and communicated. A key feature of this transformation lies in the growing importance of visibility and immediacy.

Political responses to insecurity are evaluated not only in terms of their effectiveness, but also in terms of their capacity to signal action, decisiveness, and control. As David Garland (2001) notes, contemporary crime control strategies are deeply embedded in a political logic that prioritizes responsiveness to public anxieties, often privileging symbolic action over expert-driven policy. In this sense, punitive measures acquire a dual function: they operate both as instruments of policy and as mechanisms of political communication.

It is at the intersection of crime control and political communication that the concept of punitive populism becomes analytically useful. Originally conceptualized by Anthony Bottoms (1995) and further developed by David Garland (2001) and John Pratt (2007), punitive populism refers to the political mobilization of crime and punishment in ways that appeal to public sentiment while expanding the scope and severity of penal intervention.

Crucially, as Elena Larrauri (2006) suggests, these dynamics are not merely a response to public demand but are actively shaped and amplified by political actors themselves. Under these conditions, the appeal of punitive action lies less in its long-term effectiveness than in its capacity to provide immediate reassurance and to align political authority with perceived public expectations. Punishment, in this sense, becomes not only a tool of control, but a central mechanism in the construction of political legitimacy.

From Crisis to Exception

Ecuador’s recent security crisis emerged from a rapid and profound transformation in patterns of violence, driven by the expansion and fragmentation of organized criminal groups, as well as the erosion of state control over key territories and prison systems. After years of relatively low levels of violence, homicide rates increased dramatically between 2020 and 2023, positioning the country among the most violent in the region (UNODC, 2023; Voss, 2024). This escalation culminated in early 2024 with a series of highly visible and coordinated events, including prison uprisings, attacks on public institutions, and the escape of a high-profile criminal leader, Adolfo Macías from a maximum-security prison, which exposed the limits of state capacity and intensified public perceptions of insecurity.

The government’s response took the form of a series of exceptional measures that went beyond conventional crime control strategies. These included the formal declaration of an internal armed conflict, the expanded use of the military in domestic security roles, and the legal reclassification of criminal groups as terrorist organizations (International Crisis Group, 2025).

At the same time, these policies were embedded within a broader transformation of legal frameworks and political discourse, in which insecurity was increasingly portrayed as an existential threat demanding immediate and decisive action. This approach has also relied heavily on the sustained use of emergency powers. According to the Ecuadorian Conflict Observatory (2025) some key provinces, including Guayas, Los Ríos, Manabí, and El Oro remained under states of exception for approximately 82% of the first two years of President Daniel Noboa’s administration, allowing the military to support policing functions while suspending certain constitutional protections.

Although these measures initially received broad public support and were associated with short-term reductions in violence, their longer-term impact has been more ambiguous. Levels of insecurity have remained persistently high, and in some cases have intensified, raising questions about the sustainability of this approach (International Crisis Group, 2025; Voss, 2026).

Reframing Crime as War

Crucially, these developments did not simply transform Ecuador’s security landscape; they redefined the political meaning of crime. The government’s framing of the crisis as an “internal armed conflict” marked a decisive shift from a criminal justice approach to a war-based logic of governance, in which crime is no longer treated as a social phenomenon but as an existential threat. This reframing enabled the expansion of executive power and the normalization of exceptional measures, while simultaneously constructing a clear moral boundary between “law-abiding citizens” and criminal actors, portrayed as enemies of the state.

In this context, security policy became not only a tool for controlling violence but also a central mechanism for demonstrating political authority. The visibility of coercive action, including military deployment, mass arrests, and punitive reforms, served to signal decisiveness and control, reinforcing the government’s claim to legitimacy. Rather than being evaluated solely in terms of effectiveness, these measures functioned as political performances, aligning state authority with public demands for order and protection. As recent analyses suggest, the government’s “war on gangs” has struggled to produce sustained control, instead contributing to cycles of violence and instability (Dudley, 2025; Newton, 2026).

Mechanisms of Punitive Populism and Political Legitimacy

The Ecuadorian case shows that punitive populism operates through a set of mechanisms that translate insecurity into political authority. Rather than simply responding to crime, these mechanisms reshape how it is governed and communicated. First, crisis conditions enable the expansion of executive power. The declaration of an internal armed conflict facilitated the adoption of exceptional measures and the suspension of ordinary legal constraints, contributing to the normalization of emergency governance (Observatorio Ecuatoriano de Conflictos, 2025).

Second, public security has become increasingly militarized. The deployment of the armed forces in domestic roles reinforces a war-based understanding of crime, privileging confrontation over institutional or preventive approaches.

Third, political discourse constructs criminal actors as “internal enemies,” often labeled as terrorists. This framing simplifies complex dynamics into a moral binary, legitimizing punitive responses and aligning political authority with public fears (Pratt, 2007).

Finally, punishment functions as a form of political communication. Visible and immediate measures, such as mass arrests and harsher penalties, signal control and decisiveness, often prioritizing symbolic impact over long-term effectiveness (Garland, 2001). These dynamics also carry heavy electoral implications. President Daniel Noboa’s re-election in 2025 occurred in a context shaped by sustained militarization and emergency governance, suggesting that punitive strategies can generate political legitimacy through visibility and immediacy.

Normalization of Emergency and the Costs of Punitive Governance

However, the expansion of punitive populism raises important concerns for democratic governance. Measures initially justified as temporary responses to crisis, such as states of exception and military involvement in policing, risk becoming normalized, blurring the line between extraordinary and ordinary rule. This process reshapes the balance between security and rights. When insecurity is framed as an existential threat, restrictions on due process and legal safeguards are more easily justified and publicly accepted. Over time, this can weaken institutional oversight and reduce the capacity of democratic systems to limit executive power.

At the same time, reliance on punitive strategies as a source of legitimacy may narrow the space for alternative responses. Governments become incentivized to prioritize visible and immediate action over long-term institutional solutions, reinforcing a cycle in which political authority depends on the continued performance of control.

Ecuador’s recent crisis illustrates how insecurity can be transformed into a central mechanism of political governance. Punitive populism operates not only through policy, but through the visible exercise of authority and the construction of legitimacy. As similar dynamics emerge elsewhere, understanding how crime is politically mobilized becomes essential for assessing the future of democratic governance.

(*) Emilio Hernández is an Ecuadorian lawyer and PhD candidate in Criminology at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). His research focuses on punitive populism, criminal policy, and the relationship between security crises, political narratives, and justice systems.

References

Bottoms, A. (1995). “The philosophy and politics of punishment and sentencing.” In: C. Clarkson & R. Morgan (Eds.), The politics of sentencing reform (pp. 17–50). Clarendon Press.

Dudley, Steven. (2025). “How organized crime shaped the agenda of Ecuador’s presidential elections.” InSight Crime. February 5, 2025. https://insightcrime.org/news/organized-crime-agenda-ecuadors-presidential-elections/

Garland, D. (2001). The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. University of Chicago Press.

Newton, Christopher; Manjarrés, Juliana; Cavalari, Marina and Macías, Luis Felipe Villota. (2026). “2025 homicide round-up.” InSight Crime. March 11, 2026. https://insightcrime.org/news/insight-crime-2025-homicide-round-up/

International Crisis Group. (2025, November 12). Paradise lost? Ecuador’s battle with organised crime (Latin America Report No. 109). https://www.crisisgroup.org/rpt/latin-america-caribbean/ecuador/109-paradise-lost-ecuadors-battle-organised-crime

Larrauri, E. (2006). Populismo punitivo… y cómo resistirlo. Jueces para la Democracia, (55), 15–22.

Observatorio Ecuatoriano de Conflictos. (2025). Ecuador en llamas: Conflictividad y seguridad en Ecuador[Report]. https://www.llamasuce.com/_files/ugd/7c86d8_532216924def4fb8a8d7845c0609cd1f.pdf

Pratt, J. (2007). Penal populism. Routledge.

Simon, J. (2007). Governing through crime: How the war on crime transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear. Oxford University Press.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). (2023). Global study on homicide 2023. https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/gsh/2023/Global_study_on_homicide_2023_web.pdf

Voss, Gavin. (2024) “Gamechangers 2024: Ecuador finds victory elusive in ‘war on gangs’.” InSight Crime.December 27, 2024. https://insightcrime.org/news/gamechangers-2024-ecuador-finds-victory-elusive-war-gangs/

Voss, Gavin. (2026). “From airstrikes to cooperation: Will the “new phase” of Ecuador’s drug war deliver?”InSight Crime. March 31, 2026. https://insightcrime.org/news/airstrikes-cooperation-will-the-new-phase-of-ecuadors-drug-war-deliver/

Peter Magyar, a popular opposition politician of celebrity status meeting the press at the site of a soccer arena and miniature train station in Viktor Orban's village in Felcsut, Hungary. on May 24, 2024. Photo: Blue Corner Studio.

Dismantling an Embedded Autocracy

April 15, 2026

by ECPS_admin Commentaries Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home

In this timely and analytically rich commentary, Associate Professor Attila Antal examines the aftermath of Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat and the formidable challenge of dismantling an entrenched authoritarian system. Moving beyond the electoral outcome, Assoc. Prof. Antal argues that the core question is whether Hungary is witnessing a mere сhange of government or a deeper regime transformation. He identifies three interrelated arenas—propaganda and moral panic, institutionalized autocracy, and transnational authoritarian networks—as central to this process. The analysis underscores that while electoral victory is decisive, it is insufficient on its own: the durability of Orbánism lies in its embedded structures. The piece ultimately frames Hungary as a critical test case for democratic resilience and the possibility of reversing authoritarian consolidation within the European Union.

By Attila Antal

The Orbán government, which had been in power since 2010, was defeated in the 2026 Hungarian parliamentary elections. The Tisza Party, which formed a united opposition, will in all likelihood hold a two-thirds, i.e., constitutional, majority in the National Assembly. The most important question for the coming period is whether this strong mandate will be sufficient to dismantle an institutionalized authoritarian regime.

The election resulted in a landslide victory for the opposition, and although final/official results are not yet available and recounts are still underway (98.94% of votes have been tallied), the current results show that Hungarian society has risen up against the Orbán government: the ruling parties’ list received 2,375,468 votes (39.53% of the votes cast), the Tisza Party received 3,128,859 votes, representing 52.1% of the total, and the far-right Mi Hazánk party will also enter parliament with 343,684 votes (5.74% of the total).

All this means that currently (as of April 15, 2026), with 137 members (having won 93 individual districts and 44 seats on the party list), the Tisza Party is the largest faction in the 199-member Hungarian parliament, while the former ruling party, Fidesz-KDNP, received a dramatically small 56 seats (the collapse of the ruling parties occurred at the level of individual constituencies, where they managed to win 14 seats, accompanied by 43 list seats), and the far-right Mi Hazánk party received 6 seats from the party list.

The collapse of the Orbán government was thus caused, on the one hand, by the radical loss of individual constituencies (traditional rural constituencies belonging to Fidesz were lost to the Tisza Party, where non-Orbánist candidates had previously almost never won), and this was compounded by the record-high voter turnout, which can be interpreted within the context of the mood for systemic change: 5,988,778 people cast their votes, representing 79.56% of eligible voters.

In my view, the fact that the authoritarian Orbán government could be removed through an election does not negate the regime’s authoritarian nature, and only time will tell whether what has occurred is merely a change of government or a change of regime. However, despite its very significant mandate, the Tisza Party will have a very difficult task dismantling the remnants of the authoritarian Orbán regime. In what follows, I will examine this from three perspectives: Orbán’s politics of hatred, the institutionalization of autocracy, and the international network of autocracies.

Dealing with the Hatred and Moral Panic Generated by the Orbán Regime

One of the most important challenges in dismantling the authoritarian regime is dismantling the Orbán propaganda machine, which has been a fundamental pillar of Orbán’s power politics since 2010. This culminated in the 2026 campaign, in which the Orbán regime effectively functioned as a tool of Putin’s propaganda.

Starting in 2015, the fabrication of enemy stereotypes was continuous: refugees and immigrants, NGOs and civil society, the EU and Brussels, domestic political opponents, George Soros and his institutions. From 2022 onward, however, the Orbán regime was increasingly defined by overt Putinist hate-mongering and daily moral panic.

All of this led to President Zelenskyy becoming the greatest enemy in the 2026 campaign, with Hungarian propagandists portraying the Tisza Party as if it represented no Hungarian interests whatsoever and served Ukrainian and Brussels interests. The main message was that if the opposition came to power, Hungary would be dragged into the war—in other words, only Orbán could prevent the worst from happening.

All of this had a devastating effect on Hungarian public discourse, and the lies and hatred propagated became unbearable for Hungarian society. Orbán sought to make people believe that he wanted to avoid war, but in reality, from a communicative and ideological standpoint, he had long since entered it—on Putin’s side.

All of this was further underscored by the fact that, in the final stretch of the campaign, unprecedented leaks began to emerge from Western intelligence agencies via the independent Hungarian press. These confirmed that the Orbán regime had committed itself, at the highest levels (including the foreign minister), to representing Russian interests and had attempted to use the Hungarian police and intelligence services to undermine the Tisza Party.

These leaks played a key role in preventing the Orbán regime—which presumably cooperates continuously with the Russians—from successfully carrying out any gray-zone operations, while also reinforcing the Hungarian opposition’s belief that the Orbán regime had committed treason.

It has thus become clear that the Orbán regime is capable of stoking hatred to the extreme, and addressing this both socially and institutionally must be a key task for the next government. Maintaining the remnants of Orbán’s autocracy and failing to hold those responsible to account will create a situation that could pave the way for the next authoritarian backlash.

Dismantling the Institutional and Political Foundations of the Authoritarian Regime

There is no doubt that the next government’s second-biggest challenge will be dismantling the institutionalized autocracy—a task that will not be easy for the new government, even with a supermajority to amend the constitution. For this reason, Péter Magyar called on the most important public officials of the Orbán regime to resign on election night, even though they have so far indicated that they will not step down.

A key issue for the new democracy and constitutional order to be built is the neutralization of the remnants of the Orbán regime embedded in the public and political system. A related question is how the new government will act to ensure accountability and whether it will find a way to reclaim the assets that the oligarchs of the Orbán regime have stashed away in private capital funds.

All of this has significance beyond itself, since it is precisely the nature of law in authoritarian systems to declare solutions and matters that are unacceptable from a democratic perspective to be legal; however, this seriously jeopardizes both the functioning of democracy and the constitutional norms intended to be institutionalized.

The Collapse of Orbán’s Regime in the Context of the International Authoritarian Right

Not only did the Orbán regime collapse unexpectedly in a political sense, but so too did the international authoritarian right-wing structure that Orbán had sought to build. It proved to be a significant sign that, on April 5, 2026, explosives were found on the Serbian section of the Turkish Stream gas pipeline, and although Orbán’s propaganda tried to use this against the Ukrainians in line with the campaign, President Vučić surprisingly did not prove to be a partner in supporting Orbán.

Just before the election, on April 7, US Vice President J.D. Vance visited Hungary—a visit in which the government had placed enormous hopes. Vance had already stated at that time that the US would cooperate with a new government, and after the election, he remarked that Orbán’s defeat “did not surprise” him.

The most surprising development, however, was that the Kremlin quickly let go of Orbán’s hand (at least on the surface). Orbán, who had represented Russian interests to the very end, was met with a remark from Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, who stated, “we were never friends,” adding that they were satisfied that Hungary remained open to pragmatic cooperation.

***

The Hungarian opposition’s victory over the Orbán regime could therefore serve as an important lesson in several respects for the European Union and, more broadly, for authoritarian political regimes. On the one hand, it is a significant lesson that illiberal authoritarian regimes operating under one-party hegemony can be defeated through elections; however, the international political environment and the cooperation that supports the opposition through political and other means can play an important and indispensable role in this (as was the case with the Western and Central and Eastern European forces supporting the Tisza Party).

Through the Orbán regime’s constant vetoing, its incitement of hatred against Ukraine, and its representation of Putinist interests within the EU, it has essentially provoked a form of international and Hungarian cooperation that can rightly be described as the first manifestation of a cross-border “militant democracy” within the EU.

The coming period will determine whether the success of the April 2026 election will bring about merely a change of government or something more: the removal of an embedded authoritarian regime. For this to happen, the new Hungarian government and the EU must work together to dismantle the remnants of the Orbán regime; this could deal a decisive blow to the international authoritarian right.

What Orbán’s Defeat Changes—and Does Not Change—for France’s Far Right

April 15, 2026

by ECPS_admin Commentaries Editor’s Choice European Observatory Extremism & Radicalisation Home

In this incisive commentary, Dr. Gwenaëlle Bauvois examines the broader European implications of Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat, focusing on its strategic significance for France’s Rassemblement National (RN) ahead of the 2027 presidential race. Moving beyond surface-level interpretations, she argues that Orbán functioned as a crucial “proof of concept” for sovereigntist politics within the EU—an external validation that strengthened the RN’s claims to governability. His defeat, therefore, does not destabilize the party electorally but compels a recalibration of its narrative. By reframing the outcome as democratic alternation rather than ideological failure, the RN preserves its political coherence. The analysis offers a nuanced account of how transnational references shape—and are reshaped within—contemporary far-right strategy.

By Gwenaëlle Bauvois

The defeat of Viktor Orbán is not merely a Hungarian political event. It constitutes a broader stress test for the coherence of the European far right—and, more specifically, for the strategic positioning of the Rassemblement National (RN) ahead of the pivotal 2027 French presidential election. For years, Orbán was more than an ally for Marine Le Pen and her party; he served as a demonstration case—a tangible and living example that a sovereigntist, anti-liberal project could not only attain power within the European Union but sustain it over time.

Orbán as a ‘Proof’ That the Model Works

Hungary under Orbán has long served as a proof of governability, allowing the RN to argue that its political project is not theoretical but already implemented in another EU member state. Marine Le Pen’s participation in the Budapest rally on March 23, 2026, illustrated this alignment. During the event, she explicitly praised Viktor Orbán, describing him as “a visionary” and “a pioneer,” while also referring to him as her “friend” (Le Monde, 2026). This reflects a broader pattern in far-right politics: the use of cross-national examples as legitimacy tools, where foreign governments become narrative evidence of domestic feasibility. However, the RN’s strong endorsement of Orbán, followed by his significant electoral setback, forced the party to reinterpret the result in a way that preserves its own political narrative.

Reframing Defeat as Democratic Confirmation

The RN has strategically reframed the meaning of the defeat. Rather than appearing weakened by its strong support for a losing leader, it presents the outcome as evidence of normal democratic functioning. Orbán is depicted as a legitimate leader who, after a prolonged period in power, is simply being replaced through free elections. In this narrative, he is not discredited; instead, his defeat is recast as part of routine democratic alternation.

RN leading figure Jean-Philippe Tanguy stated: “We see that not only are voters free, but they are free to make a massive choice… After 16 years in power […] it is the desire for alternation expressed by a sovereign people,” (France Inter, April 13, 2026).

In this reading, Orbán’s defeat does not call his political model into question, because it is explained as the result of voters freely exercising their sovereignty. The RN therefore maintains a dual posture: continued political sympathy for Orbán’s project combined with respect for electoral sovereignty. This allows the party to neutralize any potential credibility costs associated with its earlier endorsement, while also reinforcing the idea that national political changes do not disrupt the broader continuity of sovereigntists politics across Europe.

No Electoral Spillover into France

Electorally, the impact on the RN in France is likely to be limited. Despite Orbán’s defeat, the RN remains one of the strongest political forces ahead of 2027 and is consistently ranked as the leading party in voting intention polls. Its support base continues to be shaped primarily by domestic factors, including immigration, cost-of-living pressures, and persistent dissatisfaction with traditional governing parties. Orbán’s setback does not significantly alter these underlying dynamics.

However, it does remove an important external reference point that the RN had used to demonstrate that its political model had already been successfully implemented elsewhere in Europe. Without this example, the argument shifts from demonstrative to more declarative, weakening the party’s comparative narrative without significantly affecting its core electorate.

Orbán’s weakening, therefore, does not destabilize the RN’s position in France, nor does it alter its trajectory toward the 2027 presidential election. What it does affect is a narrative structure—the party’s ability to rely on external validation as evidence of political feasibility. The key development, then, is not an ideological rupture but an interpretative adjustment.

References

Le Monde. (2026, March 23). “Marine Le Pen voices support for her ‘friend’ Viktor Orbán.”
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/03/23/marine-le-pen-voices-support-for-her-friend-viktor-orban_6751749_4.html

France Inter. (2026, April 13). “Interview with Jean-Philippe Tanguy. https://youtu.be/ZzXNS8REZH8?si=h_7Qj50qux6ldvsm

Professor Pepper Culpepper is Vice Dean for Academic Affairs and Blavatnik Chair in Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

Prof. Culpepper: Populism Is Democracy’s Way of the People Telling Elites to ‘Listen Harder’

April 15, 2026

by ECPS_admin Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

In an interview with the ECPS, Professor Pepper Culpepper argues that populism should not be treated as inherently anti-democratic. Rather, under certain conditions, it can function as a corrective force that exposes failures of responsiveness and pressures elites to address neglected public demands. Drawing on his work on quiet politics, corporate scandal, and democratic accountability, Professor Culpepper distinguishes between populism rooted in political failure and that driven by economic unfairness. While the former can erode pluralism, the latter may help rebalance distorted relations between citizens, markets, and institutions. The interview offers a nuanced reflection on public anger, corporate power, and the democratic potential—as well as the dangers—of contemporary anti-elite mobilization.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

At a moment when democratic systems are under strain from two mutually reinforcing pressures—rising populist mobilization and the growing concentration of corporate power—the question of whether public anger can renew democratic accountability has acquired unusual urgency. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Pepper Culpepper, Vice Dean for Academic Affairs and Blavatnik Chair in Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, offers a careful but provocative answer. Drawing on his influential scholarship—from Quiet Politics to his recent book Billionaire Backlash— Professor Culpepper argues that populism should not be understood simply as a threat to democracy. Under certain conditions, it can function as a corrective force, signaling failures of responsiveness and compelling elites to confront public demands they have too long ignored.

This argument runs directly through the spirit of the interview’s headline: “Populism Is Democracy’s Way of the People Telling Elites to ‘Listen Harder’.” Rather than treating populism as inherently pathological, Professor Culpepper urges a more discriminating view. In his recent Journal of Democracy article, “When Populism Can Be Good,” co-authored with Taeku Lee, he distinguishes between two broad dimensions of anti-elite sentiment: one rooted in political failure, the other in economic unfairness. For Professor Culpepper, this distinction is decisive. A populism centered on political failure—marked by distrust in elections, media, and institutions—can become corrosive to pluralism. By contrast, populist energies organized around economic unfairness may serve as a democratizing counterweight to entrenched power. As he puts it, “there are, of course, many negative aspects of populism, but one positive dimension is its potential to enhance responsiveness.”

The interview shows that this concern with responsiveness is inseparable from Professor Culpepper’s broader work on corporate scandal, media narratives, and regulatory change. Across cases ranging from the Beef Trust and The Jungle to Cambridge Analytica, AI regulation, and Big Tech, he explores how moments of public outrage can disrupt what he famously described as “quiet politics”—those domains in which organized business interests dominate because public attention is weak. Scandals, in his account, operate like “earthquakes”: they release latent pressure, render previously obscure issues politically salient, and sometimes create openings for institutional reform. Yet these openings do not arise automatically. They depend on policy entrepreneurs, compelling narratives of blame, and political actors capable of translating outrage into durable regulation.

What emerges from this conversation is a deeply textured account of the ambivalence of populism in contemporary democracy. Professor Culpepper does not romanticize anti-elite anger; he repeatedly underscores the dangers of polarization, scapegoating, and demagogic capture. Still, he insists that democratic theory must take seriously the possibility that public outrage, when directed at economic concentration and political unresponsiveness, can help rebalance distorted systems of power. The key question, as he suggests, is not whether populism exists, but which grievances it channels and toward what ends. In that sense, this interview is both an analysis of populism and a meditation on democracy’s capacity for self-correction.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Pepper Culpepper, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

When Anti-Elitism Strengthens Rather Than Undermines Democracy

Professor Culpepper, welcome. Let me begin with a broader conceptual question: In “When Populism Can Be Good,” you distinguish between a pluralism-threatening populism and a corrective, anti-elite populism. Under what institutional, discursive, and socio-economic conditions does the latter emerge as a democratizing force rather than degenerating into illiberal majoritarianism?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: Thanks for that question. It’s a big one, so let me try to unpack it. In our recent article in the Journal of Democracy, “When Populism Can Be Good,” my co-author, Taeku Lee, and I examine the different components that sit within populism. We distinguish between two broad dimensions, which we can discuss further: one focused on political failure and the other on economic unfairness. We ask whether it is really true, as many people—especially elites like us—tend to assume, that populism is necessarily bad for democracy.

In our view, a form of populism that undermines pluralism is indeed harmful to democracy. By pluralism, I mean a community composed of multiple members coming from different backgrounds, with different allegiances—religious, racial, or political. Anything that weakens our willingness to work together as a community is detrimental to democratic life. We find that such dynamics are more closely associated with political failure than with economic unfairness, though I can say more about that later.

Your question, then, is about the conditions under which one dimension comes to dominate over the other. I think the answer is ultimately contingent, and it depends on what we might call the bulk of latent public opinion—what people are really concerned about. That is one side of the equation. The other concerns what political parties choose to offer within the system in response. Do they mobilize around political failure, which is associated with many of the elements that undermine pluralism, or around economic unfairness, which is not associated with those same dynamics?

Which Grievances Make Populism More Democratic?

Your framework identifies “political failure” and “economic unfairness” as distinct but overlapping sources of anti-elite mobilization. How do these dimensions interact in shaping the trajectory of populist politics, and which is more conducive to democracy-enhancing outcomes?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: These tendencies can coexist in a single person’s mind, but what we do is use factor analysis from 36,000 interviews across four countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—to understand which types of views cluster more closely together.

On the political failure side, these are people who tend to agree with statements such as: elections don’t matter; you can’t trust what you read in the mainstream media; and conspiracy-type views, such as the idea that a small group of people run the world. All of these reflect perceived failings of political institutions, suggesting that the game is politically rigged.

On the other side is the economic unfairness dimension, which is much more associated with the notion that the economic system is rigged—that elites have succeeded only because of this system and that they cannot understand the problems faced by ordinary people.

Thus, these two dimensions capture two aspects of failure: one concerns the responsiveness of the political system, and the other concerns the economic system within which it is embedded. I think it is important to step back and consider how the two relate, which is your question. That relationship is shaped by where we are structurally within capitalism. We are currently in a period marked by the enormous concentration of very large companies—particularly, though not exclusively, in the tech sector—and these firms shape many of the conditions of our lives.

Historically, this period resembles the era leading up to 1900, when there was a strong populist movement in the United States, associated with William Jennings Bryan and his famous “Cross of Gold” speech. That movement, like populist movements today, was driven by grievances against urban elites and the sense that ordinary people were being taken advantage of. At its core, populism is a moralized claim about the divide between the common person and the elite.

That earlier phase gave way to the Progressive movement, a period in which both Democrats and Republicans agreed that large trusts—big steel, big oil, and big finance—had grown too powerful and needed to be brought back under control. When these two dimensions come together, they can become powerful forces. In particular, the economic unfairness dimension can generate a strong pushback against large corporations, and we think—both in this article and in our book—that there are good reasons to expect this dynamic to shape developments in the years ahead.

How Episodic Shocks Recalibrate Accountability

In “Billionaire Backlash,” you conceptualize corporate scandals as focusing events that can disrupt entrenched policy equilibria. How do such episodic shocks compare to longer-term populist mobilizations in their capacity to recalibrate democratic accountability?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: Think of them a little bit like earthquakes. They release pressure—pressure that has built up in public opinion. If I can go back for a moment to the Progressive Era in the United States, there was one particular trust—the Beef Trust, that is, the meatpackers—that dominated American food production. Its dominance was such that around 200 laws were proposed between 1880 and 1900 to improve food hygiene, largely because Europeans would not even import American meat due to its poor sanitary conditions. All of those laws failed. That is the kind of blocked politics we often see today, where it is very difficult to get anything through Congress or many parliaments.

What changed in 1906 was the emergence of a corporate scandal with the publication of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. This released latent public opinion. It was, as you suggest, an episodic shock—a one-time disruption—but it triggered institutional change. It led to the creation of the American Food and Drug Administration, and American food was thereafter regulated. This did not eliminate business power; industry remained strong, and food producers continued to wield influence. But it did establish a regulatory framework within which those interests had to operate. In that sense, episodic shocks can generate institutional changes that constrain actors who previously enjoyed much greater freedom.

To return to your question, the recalibration of democratic accountability occurs when governments actually deliver what people want. Colleagues such as Steve Macedo and Jenny Mansbridge have argued that populism is democracy’s way of the people telling elites to “listen harder.” We believe that is the moment we are in. There are, of course, many negative aspects of populism, but one positive dimension is its potential to enhance responsiveness. We have witnessed a period in which corporate power has grown while governments have remained strikingly unresponsive. Large majorities favor some form of AI regulation, yet meaningful regulation has not emerged.

Democratic accountability, then, requires institutions that respond to what citizens actually want, rather than primarily to what business interests demand. In this sense, accountability often advances through episodic shocks; it rarely emerges through other mechanisms.

Blame, Narrative, and the Politics of Reform

Building on your work on media effects, how do framing, narrative construction, and attribution of responsibility mediate the translation of scandal-driven outrage into sustained regulatory change rather than transient symbolic responses?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: That ultimately depends, as we discuss at length in the book, on the emergence of policy entrepreneurs. You are right that framing and narrative construction are key to how we interpret what a scandal means, and there is always an effort to advance competing interpretations when a scandal emerges, including over who is responsible. But effective scandals tend to attribute blame quite efficiently. A scandal is corporate malfeasance that is made public and becomes salient; that is what a scandal is, by definition.

So, blame typically involves something going wrong within the corporate system, brought into the public eye by the malfeasance, and people respond by saying, “I always thought that was going on.” That generates public outrage, but outrage alone does not produce legislation. If laws are to be passed, you need actors who have been working for a long time to advance reform.

These policy entrepreneurs are, in a sense, the central figures of our book, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy, because they are the ones—whether inside the political system, like the EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, or outside it, like the Austrian activist Max Schrems or the California property developer Alastair McTaggart—who use moments of corporate scandal to push for concrete change. They step in and say, “Here is what needs to happen, and the government must respond.” When a compelling narrative is already in place and public demand is high, that is when politicians begin to pay attention.

Scandals and the Limits of Business Power

Cambridge Analytica. — Photo: Dreamstime.

To what extent can scandal-induced public attention overcome the structural advantages of “quiet politics,” or are these moments better understood as temporary punctuations within a broader equilibrium of business dominance?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: I think they are the latter. They are best understood as temporary punctuations within a broader equilibrium of business dominance. But that is the nature of capitalism. Democracy rests on the idea that each person of electoral age is equally valuable—one person, one vote. That is not how resources are allocated in capitalism. Capitalism allocates resources, often quite unequally, in order to maximize efficiency. This produces a strong concentration of financial resources, which can then be translated into political resources. So, capitalism is always going to be unbalanced in favor of business. I have spent my whole career writing about that, and I feel quite comfortable saying it. But the imbalance can take different forms and degrees.

What we see in corporate scandals is a partial redressing of that imbalance. These moments can constrain the ability of business interests to dominate by making certain issues highly salient issues on which the public is watching closely and pressing politicians to deliver outcomes that impose some limits on business power.

You can see this in the kinds of cases we study, often involving quite complex issues such as privacy regulation or financial regulation. Scandals like Cambridge Analytica or Goldman Sachs bring these otherwise abstruse issues into public view. Once they become salient, people demand a response, and governments often provide one. That institutional change then shifts the balance of power in politics, even if only partially.

We are not suggesting that this leads to a fully equal democracy in which everyone has the same level of influence. Large businesses will always remain powerful, and there is a certain legitimacy to that, since they are often engines of economic growth, which is itself important for democracy. But the current distribution of power—so heavily concentrated in the hands of a small number of controlling owners—is not what many people want. What we find is that scandals can play a meaningful role in redressing that imbalance.

Affect, Elections, and Democratic Pushback

Your research highlights the role of affect—particularly anger—in catalyzing support for regulation. How can democratic systems channel such emotions into constructive policy change without amplifying the risks of polarization, scapegoating, or demagogic capture?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: We are already living in an age of polarization, scapegoating, and demagogic capture. So, the question is not simply how to worry about those risks, but how to overcome them. Anger that goes unaddressed leads precisely to the outcomes we are seeing. But anger, when properly channeled—through political parties that seek to respond to it and articulate a democratic program—is how these dynamics can be pushed back.

I do not need to explain this, especially in light of the recent Hungarian election, where a party like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, which has been in power for a long time and has served as a leading example of nationalist populism, faced significant pressure. You even had figures like J.D. Vance attempting to support Orbán’s government as part of a broader alignment among populist right-wing governments globally—I use the word “axis” advisedly.

And yet, despite gerrymandering and the structural advantages embedded in the system—despite the fact that Orbán’s allies control many of the largest industries—you still see moments of public anger and surges of popular support that can operate powerfully through democratic institutions. As long as elections continue to be held, leaders remain accountable to them.

Populism, Redistribution, and the Limits of State Trust

In your work on inequality narratives, framing the economy as “rigged” appears to shift redistributive preferences. How does this narrative intersect with populist discourse across the ideological spectrum, and where do its democratizing potentials encounter normative or institutional limits?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: Let me say a bit about that article, since it may not be familiar to all your readers. We conducted a study in which we exposed people in various countries to a “rigged system” narrative. We essentially presented the same story about inequality in each country, framing it as a rigged system, based on a paper by Joseph Stiglitz, but substituting country-specific statistics. So, people were reading about their own country, its level of inequality, and the idea that the system was rigged.

In every country we studied, this led to a shift in opinion in favor of redistribution—except in the United States. There, we did not observe the same shift. People appeared to accept that the system was indeed rigged when they read the article, but they did not trust the state to carry out redistribution.

This suggests that, in most contexts, populist discourse around redistribution can be quite effective in moving public opinion toward greater support for redistribution. But in the United States, there is such deep skepticism about the state that this effect is much more limited.

When thinking about the normative or institutional limits, I would say they are largely shaped by political context—by the extent to which people have developed views about the state’s capacity to bring about change, and about what they perceive to be the main threats within the system. In the United States, many people tend to see government primarily as a source of red tape and bureaucracy, rather than as an instrument for promoting equality or reducing inequality of opportunity. Most people, in fact, are uncomfortable with inequality of opportunity, even if they do not expect full equality of outcomes.

So, when we talk about normative or institutional limits, we are really referring to the political demands that exist within each country. These are legitimately and democratically contested, and they vary across national contexts.

Why Some Scandals Escape Partisan Filters

How does partisan polarization reshape the effects of corporate scandals, particularly in fragmented media environments where competing narratives assign blame in divergent ways and potentially blunt consensus for reform?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: Yes, that is really the core argument of our book on corporate scandals. Corporate scandals are among the few types of scandals that can sometimes escape this polarization effect—though not always. They can escape it because partisan scandals—most political scandals you are familiar with—do not resonate equally across the political spectrum. People interpret them through partisan lenses. If a scandal involves a party on the left, those on the left tend to defend the individual involved, while those on the right attack them, and vice versa.

That is not typically the case with corporate scandals. Here, you have CEOs, senior executives, or controlling shareholders engaging in behavior that people across the political spectrum may not find surprising but still find outrageous. Because of this, corporate scandals can sometimes cut across partisan divides and break through polarization.

However, this does not always hold. It can break down when the issue at stake in a corporate scandal has already become politically contested and polarized. We see this clearly in the case of climate change in the United States. In the early 1990s, climate change was among the least polarized issues, with Republicans and Democrats holding broadly similar views. By 2015 and beyond, it had become one of the most polarized issues. As a result, scandals involving companies like ExxonMobil elicit very different responses from Republicans and Democrats.

Another situation in which the effect breaks down is when a corporate leader is personally politically polarizing. Take the example of Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. He was widely seen as a major Democratic donor, even though he also contributed to Republicans in an effort to influence policy. The political left interpreted the FTX scandal as evidence of the need for stronger regulation, while the right framed it as a case of moral hypocrisy and individual wrongdoing—something akin to a “bad apple” problem, often with the added emphasis that he was a Democratic donor.

This divergence in interpretation has shaped how the American public now views cryptocurrency regulation, producing a clear partisan divide—even though most people have only a limited understanding of how cryptocurrency works. Once polarization becomes embedded in an issue, corporate scandals have a much harder time generating broad-based resonance.

Personalizing Power, Mobilizing Outrage

Your analysis of financial regulation suggests that personalization of blame can intensify public engagement. To what extent is such personalization a necessary heuristic for mobilization, and to what extent does it obscure deeper structural dynamics of capitalist power?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: When I give presentations about the book, I sometimes have very wealthy people in the audience—occasional centimillionaires, if not billionaires. Their reaction is often: I understand what you are saying about large companies, but what is wrong with billionaires? What have they ever done? They have simply been very successful. Why should we be angry about them?

I do not take a normative position on that, but I can say that people do take a view. Public opinion, broadly speaking, does not clearly distinguish between the actions of large corporations and those of billionaires. Billionaires provide easily recognizable faces for what are otherwise more complex and abstract dynamics—what you refer to as the structural dynamics of capitalism.

In that sense, billionaires put a face on what people perceive as problematic or unreasonable in corporate behavior. Take, for example, debates about AI firms building data centers without local approval, even when such projects may raise local energy prices. That is a complicated political issue. But if you place figures like Sam Altman, the head of a major AI company, in front of the public, people recognize him, and he becomes a focal point. Similarly, Elon Musk—who spans AI and the broader tech sector through Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI—serves as a highly visible figure around whom public attention can coalesce.

So, billionaires, as individuals, help make these dynamics more intelligible. If the goal is to mobilize people politically, discussing structural dynamics may work well in a graduate seminar or a policy school like the one where I teach. But in broader political life, recognizable individuals make those dynamics more concrete and significantly increase public engagement.

Big Tech, Public Resentment, and Regulatory Demand

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce in Washington, D.C., April 11, 2018. Photo: Dreamstime.

In an era marked by the concentration of power in platform capitalism and Big Tech, do corporate scandals retain their capacity to generate broad reform coalitions, or are we witnessing the limits of scandal-driven accountability in highly networked economies?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: Well, we will see. The argument of our book is that what people respond to is the reality of their daily lives. That is what latent opinion is all about. It suggests that people feel constrained by the fact that corporations are making choices that are not democratically accountable.

So, when we send rockets into space, we tend to cheer the government—for example, NASA in the United States, which has recently sent a rocket around the moon. But in reality, it is a private company, SpaceX, that is doing much of the production and effectively running large parts of the space program. Private companies are increasingly performing roles that governments used to play.

As a result, people have growing resentment toward large corporations that, once they reach monopoly positions—whether it is Amazon or Facebook—can engage in what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification,” making people’s lives worse while extracting monopoly rents. This is a major source of public concern.

So, when you ask whether we have reached the limits of scandal-driven politics, I would say that scandal-driven politics works particularly well when the structural conditions of capitalism make people especially sensitive to the inability of politics to restrain large companies. These firms are responsible for much of the economic growth, while many others do not benefit in the same way. This creates a strong demand for regulatory constraints, because people do not necessarily believe that these companies act in the public interest—they act in their own private interest, which is what private companies are designed to do.

There is, in other words, a growing disjuncture between the power of these companies and the degree to which they are held accountable by the political system. For that reason, I do not think scandal-driven politics will diminish; if anything, it is likely to intensify over time.

Cambridge Analytica and Divergent Regulatory Paths

How do focusing events such as transnational scandals—Cambridge Analytica being a paradigmatic example—travel across jurisdictions, and under what conditions do they produce convergent versus divergent regulatory responses?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: To answer this question, I want to return to my concept of the policy entrepreneur. What happened with Cambridge Analytica was that it was revealed that the data of nearly 90 million Facebook users, many of them in the United States, had been taken by this political consulting firm. Cambridge Analytica claimed to use these data to run micro-targeted advertisements, suggesting that it could influence outcomes such as the Brexit referendum and the 2016 Clinton–Trump election. There is no evidence that Cambridge Analytica actually affected electoral outcomes, but it is certainly true that the 2018 revelations by The Guardian and The New York Times made the issue of privacy enormously salient and severely damaged Facebook’s reputation—something from which Facebook, now Meta, has never fully recovered. Indeed, Facebook remains one of the most distrusted institutions in public opinion as a result of this episode.

In terms of divergent regulatory responses, the European Union had already passed privacy regulation in the form of the GDPR—the General Data Protection Regulation—building on earlier controversies such as the PRISM scandal, in which major tech companies were found to be cooperating with intelligence agencies like the NSA and GCHQ. In Europe, policymakers such as Margrethe Vestager were able to build on the public outrage generated by Cambridge Analytica to advance further regulation, including the Digital Markets Act in competition policy and the Digital Services Act in online safety, thereby strengthening the regulatory framework governing Big Tech.

In the United States, by contrast, national-level politics proved highly constrained. Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress, where both Democrats and Republicans criticized him following the Cambridge Analytica revelations. However, a telling moment occurred when Senator Orrin G. Hatch asked Zuckerberg how Facebook made money without charging users, to which Zuckerberg replied, “Senator, we sell ads.” That exchange illustrated a broader problem: many policymakers lacked a clear understanding of the digital economy, which limited their capacity to impose effective regulation.

As a result, while federal action stalled, regulatory innovation emerged at the state level. In California, the property developer Alastair McTaggart seized on the surge in public concern following Cambridge Analytica and pushed for a referendum to introduce strong privacy protections, comparable in some respects to the GDPR. Faced with this prospect, tech companies negotiated a legislative compromise, resulting in a new law passed in 2018. When subsequent amendments threatened to weaken it, McTaggart mobilized public opinion again and successfully backed another referendum in 2020, which passed with a clear majority and included provisions preventing the law from being diluted.

What we see, then, is that different jurisdictions respond to transnational scandals in distinct ways, depending on their institutional contexts and prior regulatory trajectories. In California, new privacy regulation emerged where none had existed before; in the European Union, existing regulatory frameworks were deepened and expanded. In both cases, however, the transnational shock of the Cambridge Analytica scandal prompted significant regulatory responses.

When Populism Corrects and When It Corrodes

If certain forms of populist mobilization can enhance democratic accountability, what distinguishes “bounded” or policy-focused anti-elitism from system-level populism that ultimately erodes liberal democratic institutions?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: I am not sure that system-level populism necessarily erodes liberal democratic institutions. We, in the policy elite tend to assume that populism involves people espousing simple solutions that are unlikely to work, and therefore not being serious. But what populism is doing at a systemic level is expressing something deeper. Policy-focused anti-elitism is not really the distinction we should be making. Rather, the key question is which part of the system people are upset about. Do they focus on political failure, or on economic unfairness? And I think there are people who focus on both.

These are not simply policy-driven positions. They reflect deeper forms of public dissatisfaction with what the system is delivering. It is a question of public outrage, and whether that outrage is channeled along the lines of political failure or along the lines of economic unfairness. I think that this distinction ultimately shapes whether populism acts as a constructive rebalancer of democracy or as a force that undermines it.

Associate Professor Jason Anastasopoulos.

Assoc. Prof. Anastasopoulos: AI May Transform Populism by Mobilizing Highly Skilled Workers

April 11, 2026

by ECPS_admin Digital-populism Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos argues that AI is not merely a tool of efficiency, but a political force that may reconfigure both democratic governance and populist mobilization. In this ECPS interview, he warns that replacing bureaucrats with AI can erode “democratic legitimacy” and produce what he calls “automated majoritarianism,” where average cases are processed efficiently while minorities and outliers are disadvantaged. He also challenges the assumption that AI automatically strengthens authoritarian rule, showing instead how false positives, false negatives, and “threshold whiplash” can generate resistance within authoritarian systems. Most strikingly, he suggests that AI may transform populism itself: unlike earlier technological disruptions centered on manual labor, AI increasingly threatens “intellectual work and highly skilled labor,” potentially broadening the social base of anti-elite backlash and reshaping the future of political discontent.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

At a moment when artificial intelligence is increasingly presented as a transformative force in governance, public administration, and political control, Jason Anastasopoulos, Associate Professor of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, offers a far more cautious and analytically nuanced perspective. In this ECPS interview, he argues that the effects of AI cannot be understood through simplistic assumptions of either technological salvation or authoritarian omnipotence. Instead, AI emerges in his account as a politically embedded system whose consequences depend on data quality, institutional incentives, and the broader regime context in which it operates.

A central theme running through the interview is the challenge AI poses to conventional understandings of democratic legitimacy and representation. Anastasopoulos warns that “replacing bureaucrats with AI has the potential to erode democratic legitimacy and decrease the extent to which people not only perceive the legitimacy of the system but also actually receive fair outcomes.” This concern is rooted in his broader claim that algorithmic governance does not merely automate decisions; it subtly transforms the normative foundations of administration itself. Because AI systems rely on “data from the past and on statistical averages,” whereas human officials can apply individualized judgment, the shift toward automation risks creating what he calls “automated majoritarianism,” in which average cases are processed efficiently while minorities and outliers are systematically disadvantaged.

At the same time, Assoc. Prof. Anastasopoulos highlights the political implications of AI beyond democratic administration, particularly in relation to populism and authoritarianism. Against the widespread belief that AI necessarily strengthens authoritarian rule, he emphasizes the “autocrat’s calibration dilemma,” showing how false positives and false negatives generate what he terms “threshold whiplash.” Far from ensuring seamless control, AI can create backlash, misclassification, and resistance, even within highly monitored societies. In this respect, the interview complicates dystopian assumptions about authoritarian omniscience by showing how predictive technologies can also destabilize the very regimes that rely on them.

Most strikingly, however, Assoc. Prof. Anastasopoulos suggests that AI may reshape populist politics in new ways. Whereas earlier waves of technological disruption primarily displaced manual and industrial labor, contemporary AI increasingly threatens “intellectual work and highly skilled labor.” This shift, he argues, may transform the social basis of political discontent. Populist mobilization, long rooted in anti-elite appeals to economically dislocated working-class constituencies, may now expand to incorporate professional and knowledge-sector groups who find themselves newly exposed to technological precarity. In that sense, AI may transform populism not only by intensifying backlash against opaque governance, but also by mobilizing constituencies that have not historically stood at the center of populist revolt.

In sum, Assoc. Prof. Anastasopoulos’s reflections offer a sophisticated intervention into contemporary debates on AI and politics. His analysis underscores that AI is neither politically neutral nor institutionally self-executing. Rather, it is a force that can unsettle democratic legitimacy, complicate authoritarian control, and reconfigure the social terrain of populist mobilization. Far from being merely a tool of efficiency, AI may become a catalyst for profound political realignment.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Associate Professor Jason Anastasopoulos, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

AI Doesn’t Simply Strengthen Authoritarian Control

AI generative technology, big data, globalization, and analytics management concepts. Photo: Dreamstime.

Professor Anastasopoulos, welcome. In “The Limits of Authoritarian AI,” you introduce the “autocrat’s calibration dilemma,” where predictive systems must tradeoff between false positives and false negatives. How does this structural constraint reshape prevailing assumptions that AI inherently strengthens authoritarian control?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: That’s a really good question. I think the common conception of AI is that it will strengthen authoritarian control in a linear fashion, and this makes sense to a certain extent. It is also true in the short run. One of the recurring themes in dystopian narratives is the emergence of a surveillance state in which authoritarian governments exert control over their populations through cameras, social credit systems, and similar technologies. To some extent, this does seem to be the case in the short term. In the long run, however, the use of AI is much more complicated.

This is because of the errors that it generates—namely, Type 1 and Type 2 errors. For readers who may not be familiar with these concepts, they refer to false positives and false negatives, respectively, and are commonly introduced in basic statistics. A Type 1 error occurs when someone is incorrectly identified as a positive case—for example, when a COVID test indicates that a person has the virus when they do not. A Type 2 error, by contrast, occurs when the test indicates that someone does not have the virus when they actually do.

All AI systems, as fundamentally predictive systems, operate under these same constraints. They can misclassify individuals—identifying someone as a threat to the regime when they are not or failing to identify someone who actually poses a risk. These errors carry political consequences, and managing those consequences becomes an inherent challenge for authoritarian regimes. Each type of error entails distinct political trade-offs, which I would be happy to elaborate on further.

**Authoritarian Regimes Risk ‘Threshold Whiplash’ When Using AI for Control**

Building on this dilemma, to what extent does the probabilistic nature of AI undermine the aspiration of authoritarian regimes to achieve total informational dominance and preemptive repression?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: This is where the political consequences of Type 1 and Type 2 errors come into play. This is where authoritarian regimes run into resistance when using AI in the long run, as opposed to the short run. In the short run, these tools are indeed tremendous for monitoring populations. Facial recognition systems can be linked to databases that identify people instantaneously. In China, for example, a social credit system is being developed that could potentially track movements and shape behaviors in ways consistent with regime preferences. But in the long run, the calibration dilemma that autocrats face becomes decisive.

This is something authoritarian regimes actually institutionalize. In China, bureaucracies exist to calibrate AI systems for these kinds of Type 1 and Type 2 errors. Let me outline the political issues that arise from these errors. For Type 1 errors, the biggest problem in an authoritarian context—where a leader is trying to predict who is risky—is that individuals are labeled as threats when they are not. When too many false positives are generated, opposition to the regime itself increases. In other words, you might have 100 individuals who are genuinely threatening, and the AI system identifies them—but it also identifies 100,000 others who are not. Those individuals, ironically, may become threats precisely because they are falsely labeled as such.

So, because of false positives, the regime creates more threats than it would have had otherwise. Authoritarian rule depends on a belief that compliance leads to tolerable outcomes—being left alone, not punished, not having one’s mobility restricted. Type 1 errors undermine this expectation, producing backlash and fueling social movements.

We have seen this in cases such as Zero-COVID policies and the Henan bank protests, which we discuss in the paper. Individuals were falsely labeled as COVID-positive to prevent them from protesting a banking scandal. This generated public outrage and forced the government to scale back. In other words, the use of AI produced the very instability it was meant to prevent.

For Type 2 errors, the problem is reversed. The regime faces real threats, and if AI systems fail to detect them, those threats can operate in the shadows. This dynamic produces what we call a cycle of “threshold whiplash.” Initially, regimes set thresholds low to maintain tight control, which increases Type 1 errors and triggers backlash. In response, they raise the threshold, which increases Type 2 errors, allowing real threats to go undetected.

At the same time, individuals alienated by false labeling may become politically active and organize against the regime. In this way, AI generates a cycle in which efforts at control inadvertently produce the very resistance the regime seeks to suppress.

Authoritarian Incentives to Report Stability Degrade AI from Within

Artificial Intelligence. — Artificial intelligence as a next-generation technology shaping the digital era. Photo: Dreamstime.

Your work suggests that prediction systems are not merely technical tools, but political instruments embedded in institutional incentives. How do bureaucratic and party-level incentives distort AI outputs in authoritarian settings?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: That’s a really good question. The focus here is primarily on China, where regional bureaucratic leaders have incentives to report stability metrics to Beijing. There is a strong desire for Beijing to see that, across all regions within China, things are looking good—that conditions are stable.

What happens with AI systems, then, is that officials tend to downplay any activity identified by these systems that might suggest instability in a region. As a result, when such distorted data is fed into the new AI systems being developed, it creates a significant gap between on-the-ground realities and what the AI system reports, ultimately degrading the quality of the system itself. In this way, bureaucratic incentives to report stability end up undermining AI performance over time, as these systems are trained on data that is simply of low quality.

AI Decision-Making Can Erode Both Perceived and Actual Fairness

In your research on democratic administration, you argue that replacing human discretion with AI risks eroding accountability and reason-giving. How should we theorize the relationship between algorithmic governance and democratic legitimacy?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: One of my papers on the problem of replacing bureaucratic discretion with AI identifies a recent trend in many places; some of it is aspirational, and some of it has actually been implemented. The trend is that many regimes, not just authoritarian regimes but democratic countries as well, are seeking to replace bureaucratic discretion, and bureaucrats more generally, with AI systems.

For example, Keir Starmer is one of the figures who is very interested in doing so in the UK. Widodo in Indonesia has actually replaced a few levels of the bureaucracy with AI systems. One of the problems that the paper identifies is that when you replace bureaucratic discretion with AI systems, you remove some of the important safeguards that exist for democratic governance.

Specifically, AI systems have this issue where they do not think like human beings—that is the fundamental problem. Democratic legitimacy, in many ways, is based on the idea that another human being will review your case and be able to reason through whatever decision needs to be made by the state in your particular situation. What I argue in that paper is that there are certain types of decisions—decisions relating to rights, and decisions involving very important issues where someone’s rights could be taken away—that should not be delegated to automated systems. This is because the idea of justice and democracy itself depends on a human being assessing your case at an individual level and applying human judgment in a way that would be deemed fair both theoretically, from a philosophical perspective, and in terms of the perceptions of those being judged.

So, a lot of it comes down to the fact that replacing bureaucrats with AI has the potential to erode democratic legitimacy and decrease the extent to which people not only perceive the legitimacy of the system but also actually receive fair outcomes.

Another problem I identify in that paper is a technical one. I have training in machine learning and statistics, as well as in political philosophy, and I try to understand how these systems work and what their technical implications are. One of the problems with AI, and with any prediction system, is that it does a very good job of assessing the average case, but a very poor job of assessing cases that would be considered edge cases. If the circumstances that a person brings to an AI system are very unusual, the system is not going to be able to provide a good prediction.

As a result, you have what I call automated majoritarianism, where the AI system performs well for most people, but for minority groups and for individuals whose cases fall outside the norm, it performs very poorly. This can ultimately alienate a large segment of the population. These are some of the key issues I identify regarding the risks of replacing bureaucratic discretion with AI.

Automated Majoritarianism Leaves Minority Cases Behind

AI facial recognition in a crowded urban setting, highlighting risks to privacy and personal freedom (AI-generated). Photo: Irina Yeryom / Dreamstime.

If democratic governance depends on individualized judgment and justification, can AI ever be reconciled with these normative commitments, or does it fundamentally reconfigure the meaning of administrative fairness?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: I think it actually does end up fundamentally reconfiguring the meaning of administrative fairness, and it does so in a way that is subtle and not very obvious. A lot of it, again, comes down to how AI systems make decisions versus how humans make decisions.

Humans make decisions based on their experience and their adherence to norms that are either embedded in institutions or exist in society. Whereas AI systems simply make decisions based on data from the past and on statistical averages. So, with a human being, you get an individualized decision, whereas with an AI system, you get a decision based on aggregate data.

That has implications for the future of administrative fairness, because the types of decisions made by AI systems, given how they function, are fundamentally different from those made by humans. How those decisions differ will depend on the circumstances to a certain extent. But we have already seen, for example, in cases from the criminal justice system, that AI systems, when they try to predict whether someone is likely to be a recidivist, can produce problematic outcomes. There is a system called the COMPAS.

This is not really an AI system per se; it is more of a machine learning algorithm, although most AI systems are based on machine learning to some extent. What the COMPAS system does is to make predictions about who would be considered at high risk of recidivism in the future. Imagine someone is arrested, their data is collected, and it is fed into this algorithm. The algorithm then predicts whether that person is risky, on a scale from 1 to 10, and this affects how they are treated within the criminal justice system. If they are predicted to be high risk, they may receive a harsher sentence and be treated more punitively; if they are predicted to be low risk, they are more likely to receive leniency.

What some authors at ProPublica found in a 2016 study was that these systems generated a much higher false positive rate for African American offenders compared to white offenders. In other words, they predicted that Black offenders were more likely to be a future risk even when they were not. This is what the well-known ProPublica article “Machine Bias”demonstrated.

In that case, it showed that AI systems can perpetuate biases into the future. They can create a situation where past discrimination becomes embedded in the criminal justice system, and once that happens, it is much more difficult to correct than with human decision-makers. With humans, you can intervene more directly—you can audit decisions or remove individuals—but with AI systems, you would have to change the entire system, including vendors and underlying models, which is far more complex.

So, these are some of the ways in which AI can reshape our understanding of administrative fairness. We will need to develop systems to audit AI in order to prevent bias, and we will have to continually ensure that these systems do not embed biases that could create long-term unfair outcomes for minority groups and others whose lives are affected by AI-driven decisions.

AI Should Inform Decisions, but Humans Must Remain in the Loop

You propose a “centaur model” where AI complements rather than replaces human decision-makers. What institutional safeguards are necessary to prevent this hybrid model from drifting toward de facto automation and accountability erosion?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: The idea behind the Centaur model is pretty simple. We need to ensure that when really important decisions are being made within government—decisions that can affect people’s lives and relate to issues of fairness or justice—there is always a human decision-maker in the loop. An AI system can be good at making predictions, but it should only be used as one piece of information within a broader file that a human decision-maker can draw upon.

The problem with this kind of Centaur model, however, is that it runs up against the incentives many governments have to cut costs. This is especially true at the state and local levels in the United States, and also for lower-level governments in Europe and elsewhere, where there are strong incentives to automate decisions.

What may ultimately prevent the Centaur model from being implemented—even though I think it is a good model—is the political economy of governance. A system that combines human judgment with AI could produce decisions that are both fairer and more just than those made by humans alone, who have biases, or by AI systems alone, which come with their own set of problems.

But these advantages may be outweighed by structural pressures. If there is insufficient tax revenue, sustained pressure to cut costs, and a broader cultural disposition—especially in the United States—that views bureaucrats as unnecessary or ineffective, then populist demands to reduce administrative capacity may lead to full automation. In such a scenario, the Centaur model would not take hold.

Instead, you could end up with layers of bureaucracy fully delegated to AI, which introduces its own risks. In that sense, the key issue is public pressure to shrink bureaucracies—something we have seen in various reform movements—combined with governments’ ongoing efforts to reduce costs. Together, these dynamics can push systems toward automated governance rather than hybrid models, and that is something people need to be aware of.

Addressing this requires a broader cultural shift. People need to understand that bureaucrats are not simply obstacles—such as those encountered at the Department of Motor Vehicles—but are integral to ensuring fairness and accountability in governance. Without that shift, we risk moving toward fully automated systems that may replicate the flaws of bureaucracies while simply making decisions faster, not better. That is the main concern I have.

AI Can Centralize Power by Aligning Decisions More Closely with Political Leaders

Three high-definition video surveillance cameras operated by the city police. Photo: Dreamstime.

Your work on delegation highlights how authority is structured through constraints and discretion. How does the delegation of decision-making authority to AI systems alter classic principal–agent problems in democratic governance?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: That’s a really good question. The way in which the delegation of authority to AI systems alters the classical problem is the following. The traditional principal–agent problem between bureaucracies and higher levels of authority is that, say in the United States, Congress wants a law passed. They pass the law and then expect it to be implemented in a way that is consistent with their intentions.

However, members of Congress and other elected leaders often lack the expertise required to implement laws themselves. For example, in the case of environmental legislation, they do not have the technical knowledge to determine how regulations should be applied in practice. As a result, they delegate this authority to expert bureaucrats, such as those in the EPA, who are responsible for implementation. The principal–agent problem arises because bureaucrats may have preferences that differ from those of elected leaders, meaning that delegation can produce outcomes that do not fully align with the preferences of those who delegated the authority.

In theory, AI could mitigate this problem. Elected leaders could design and select AI systems that align more closely with their own preferences, whether ideological or pragmatic. From the perspective of higher-level officials, AI systems can therefore be appealing, as they may replace bureaucrats who exercise independent discretion and might make decisions that leaders do not favor.

However, I think this is problematic from the public’s perspective. It leads to greater centralization of power and reduces discretion at the ground level. Bureaucrats often possess forms of expertise that elected leaders simply do not have and replacing that expertise with AI systems could introduce significant risks. Laws might not be implemented correctly, and outcomes might reflect not the interests of the public, but rather the preferences of elected leaders—or even the interests of the vendors who design the AI systems. This is where a new kind of principal–agent problem can emerge.

Perceived Unfair AI Decisions Can Fuel Populist Backlash

In the context of populism, how might the increasing use of AI in governance deepen representation gaps, particularly if citizens perceive decisions as opaque, impersonal, or technocratically imposed?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: I think that’s a real problem, and much of it comes down to the idea of backlash that I discuss in my paper on “The Limits of Authoritarian AI” with my co-author, Jason Lian.

If people perceive that AI systems are making decisions that are unfair, the resentment and backlash this generates can fuel an increase in populist movements and a desire to remove those who rely on AI systems but are not populists. That is one key risk I see emerging.

AI can certainly increase support for populist leaders. Such leaders are often somewhat anti-technology and frequently campaign on anti-technology platforms. If AI-based decisions generate sufficient backlash, this can provide them with powerful political fuel. In that context, we could see a sharp rise in support for populist leaders as a means of rolling back the system to a time before AI systems were producing decisions perceived as unfair.

Technological Displacement Expands the Social Base of Populism

Senior male manager addressing workers. — Senior male manager addressing workers in open plan office. Photo: Monkey Business Images / Dreamstime.

Your research on technological change and populism suggests that economic disruption can fuel political discontent. How might AI-driven labor displacement interact with democratic backsliding and the rise of populist movements?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: There’s a lot of research on this, which finds that populists often draw on the idea that technology—especially automation—will replace people and take their jobs away. This is something we’ve seen since in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The Luddites in England were, of course, a well-known populist movement that relied on an anti-technology stance.

The Luddite movement emerged in response to the invention of the steam engine, which displaced large amounts of guild labor in textile production. Whenever there is labor displacement due to technological change, there is almost certainly backlash from those who are unemployed or otherwise disaffected by these new automation systems.

In that sense, AI is no different. It gives populist leaders something to point to, allowing them to claim that they will provide solutions to AI-driven displacement. But in practice, when they are elected, they often fail to deliver those solutions. Instead, they may cooperate with those who develop AI systems and even promote their expansion.

Nevertheless, this remains a powerful and enduring populist position. Historically, populist leaders promise to address the consequences of technological change, yet technological progress continues regardless. Still, their ability to mobilize those affected by labor displacement is likely to grow as more jobs are disrupted.

What is particularly interesting about AI, compared to earlier technologies like the steam engine, is that it is displacing not only manual labor but also intellectual work and highly skilled labor. As a result, the nature of populist and social movements may evolve, as populists begin to incorporate these groups into their constituencies rather than focusing primarily on the working class. This could become an important new dimension of populist politics moving forward.

Distrust of Bureaucracy Could Enable ‘Algorithmic Populism’

To what extent does AI governance risk creating a new form of “algorithmic populism,” where political actors leverage automated systems to claim efficiency while obscuring responsibility?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: That’s exactly the problem I identified before. Could you explain what you mean by algorithmic populism more specifically? Political leaders or actors leveraging automated systems to claim efficiency while obscuring responsibility.

That’s the general problem with AI. It’s one of the key tensions. I’m not entirely sure about the idea of algorithmic populism in general, but one condition that could give rise to it is, especially in cultures like the United States where there is a deep distrust of bureaucracies, a situation in which AI systems are perceived as being better than human bureaucrats.

In those cases, it would be easy for a political actor—an “algorithmic populist,” as you put it—to accelerate the replacement of bureaucrats with AI in government, which would again lead to many of the problems I discussed earlier. And some figures—Donald Trump, for example, who could be considered a populist—might even be seen as algorithmic populists to a certain extent, in that they promote technology and advance a strong AI agenda.

In such situations, you create a scenario where you end up with the same problems associated with AI that I mentioned earlier, but the process continues to advance. I don’t know exactly what the future would look like in terms of how an algorithmic populist movement might develop, but it is an interesting idea to consider.

Data Quality Will Determine Whether AI Supports Democracy or Control

Internet Surveilance. — Photo: Shutterstock

And lastly, Professor Anastasopoulos, looking ahead, do you see AI as ultimately stabilizing or destabilizing democratic systems—and what key variables will determine whether it becomes a tool of democratic renewal or authoritarian entrenchment?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: I’m actually pretty hopeful about AI and its effect on democracy. I think it’s going to have two effects in general: one within democratic systems and the other within authoritarian systems.

I think a lot of it comes down to data quality. In democratic systems, AI can do a very good job of helping decision-makers make fairer, more just, and more efficient decisions. That’s because, within democratic systems, the information fed into AI systems comes from a range of democratic processes—deliberation, free speech, and so on. As a result, the quality of AI systems is very high when they are used to further democratic principles and support democratic rule.

However, in authoritarian systems—and this is something I discuss in “The Limits of Authoritarian AI”—authoritarian regimes seek to use AI to control their populations. The fundamental problem they encounter is one of information. This problem relates directly to the fact that when people are being monitored, they change their behavior and hide their preferences. As a result, the information that feeds into AI systems ends up being of much lower quality in authoritarian regimes than in democratic ones. I believe this tends to further destabilize authoritarian regimes as they attempt to tighten control through AI systems and encounter the kind of threshold whiplash I mentioned earlier. Over time, authoritarian regimes may come to realize that AI tools are not the panacea they may have expected. That realization could open the door for social democratic movements within authoritarian regimes to take advantage of the instability created by AI.

In sum, for democratic nations, as long as we avoid a situation in which we eliminate all layers of government and replace them with AI, it can be a stabilizing force. In contrast, in authoritarian regimes, it is likely to be destabilizing—at least temporarily—and may eventually push those systems toward greater democratization if they continue to rely on AI. They might, of course, decide to abandon AI systems and revert to older forms of authoritarian control, but I don’t think that is very feasible in the modern world. Instead, what we may see is a gradual broadening of democracy globally as AI systems are adopted for different purposes.

The Ripple Effect: How a Finnish Hate Speech Case Fuels Transatlantic Culture Wars

April 10, 2026

by ECPS_admin Commentaries Editor’s Choice European Observatory Gender Home Human Rights

Dr. Gwenaëlle Bauvois shows how a single legal case can reverberate far beyond its national context, becoming a transnational resource in contemporary culture wars. The conviction of Päivi Räsänen by the Finnish Supreme Court—carefully distinguishing between protected religious expression and punishable factual claims—has been rapidly reframed into a simplified narrative of “persecuted faith.” In this process, complex legal reasoning gives way to emotionally resonant claims about censorship and moral decline. Dr. Bauvois highlights how transatlantic conservative networks mobilize such cases to advance broader agendas, transforming local disputes into symbolic battlegrounds. The episode ultimately reveals how culture wars today are not merely domestic conflicts but globally circulated struggles over truth, authority, and the boundaries of legitimate speech.

By Gwenaëlle Bauvois

The Event: A Controversial Verdict

On 26 March 2026, Finland’s Supreme Court convicted Päivi Räsänen, a long-serving Christian Democrat MP and former Minister of the Interior, of incitement against a minority group. The conviction concerned a 2004 pamphlet by Räsänen, whose title roughly translates to “Male and Female He Created Them: Homosexual Relationships Challenge the Christian Understanding of Humanity.” The Court noted that Räsänen described homosexuality as “a disorder of psychosexual development” and a “sexual abnormality.”

The pamphlet’s claims about homosexuality were found to be framed as factual generalizations, not religious expression, and therefore fell within hate speech law. By contrast, her 2019 social media post—which quoted a Bible verse to criticize the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland for sponsoring Helsinki Pride and added that homosexuality was “shameful and sinful”—was deemed protected religious expression.

The political reaction was swift. Riikka Purra, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance from the Finns Party, wrote on social media: “Freedom of speech took another serious hit today through the supreme court’s voting decision.” But the ripple effect extended beyond Finland. The US Embassy in Finland called the verdict “a troubling ruling for religious freedom and freedom of expression.” A Washington Post editorial sharply criticized the decision, opening with: “Finland is often ranked as the happiest country on Earth, but that’s only if you like cold winters and harsh limitations on freedom of expression.” The conviction also drew a response from the Trump administration. Riley Barnes, a top official in the US State Department, argued on X that the conviction is “baseless” and that “in a democracy, no one should face trial for peacefully sharing their beliefs.”

The Context: Struggles over Gender and Sexuality

The Räsänen case is not an isolated legal dispute. It exemplifies a broader shift in Western democracies: the growing centrality of culture wars to populist mobilization. Increasingly, conflicts are driven by cultural backlash—a reaction against progressive value change that fuels today’s culture wars (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). Nowhere is this more evident than in the transnational struggles over gender and sexuality, which are the central front of contemporary culture wars (Ayoub & Stoeckl, 2024; Goetz & Mayer, 2023).

At stake in the Räsänen case is therefore not only a legal boundary but an epistemic conflict: a struggle over who has the authority to define truth, normality, and the limits of acceptable speech regarding gender and sexuality. On one side stand scientific and legal institutions that define homosexuality as a normal variation of human sexuality – a position codified by the WHO’s removal of homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1990. On the other side are religiously grounded claims asserting moral truths, often framed as non-negotiable values.

The Finnish Supreme Court’s reasoning reflects this tension. By classifying Räsänen’s pamphlet statements as factually incorrect generalizations, the court affirms the authority of scientific and legal knowledge. At the same time, it draws a clear line: religious belief remains protected, but its translation into degrading claims about a minority group is not.

“Flagship” for Transatlantic Conservative Networks

The significance of the Räsänen case extends far beyond Finland. It has become a resource in transnational culture wars, especially around gender and sexuality. Contemporary conservative politics are indeed increasingly organized through cross-border networks that coordinate legal strategies, political messaging, and legislative agendas (Cooper, 2017; Du Mez, 2020).

For instance, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) —a US-based conservative Christian legal advocacy group classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group—has supported Räsänen throughout her trial, providing legal aid and raising funds. ADF has framed her case as prime evidence of a growing threat to free speech and religious liberty in Europe.

This framing has reached the highest levels of US politics. On 4 February 2026—over a month before the Finnish Supreme Court’s final conviction—Räsänen testified before the US House Judiciary Committee at a hearing titled “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation.” She was invited by Republican lawmakers, including Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, who has very strong ties with the conservative Christian think-tank The Heritage Foundation. During her visit, Räsänen also attended a Prayer and Repentance gathering alongside Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a prominent conservative Republican who has expressed alignment with Project 2025, the ideological and political programme laid out by the Heritage Foundation.

For transatlantic conservative and Christian-right networks, Räsänen functions as a “flagship” —a symbolic figure they can brandish to illustrate how bad things are in Europe. Her experience is a cautionary tale used to support claims that Europe is suppressing Christian expression, that European legal systems are hostile to traditional religious beliefs, and that free speech protections are under threat from European regulatory models. The fact that she was actually acquitted of the Bible-quoting charge is conveniently omitted. The narrative that she was prosecuted for “quoting the Bible” is politically useful, even if factually false.

The Politics of Simplification: From Legal Nuance to Moral Narratives

The Räsänen case illustrates how complex legal judgments are translated into simplified moral narratives. Nuanced legal distinctions—such as the Supreme Court’s careful separation of protected religious speech (the social media post) from punishable factual generalizations (the pamphlet)—are flattened into binary oppositions: freedom versus censorship, faith versus secularism, Christian truth versus gender ideology.

Media coverage sympathetic to Räsänen conveniently ignores the complexity of the ruling—which found that context, framing, and genre matter. Conservative and Christian media outlets such as The European Conservative, Christian Network Europe, and The Hungarian Conservative have covered the case with simplifying headlines like “Is It Hate Speech to Call Homosexuality a Sin?” These outlets frequently refer to hate speech laws as instruments of secular oppression, ignoring the court’s explicit reasoning that religious expression remains protected.

This simplification is not accidental but constitutive of populist politics. It enables actors to construct clear moral boundaries, mobilize emotions, and reinforce collective identities. The Räsänen case thus functions as a symbolic resource, anchoring abstract claims about moral decline in concrete, personalized narratives that can travel across borders.

The distinction between protected belief and punishable speech is replaced by a more resonant narrative: Räsänen is a respectable Christian politician, a grandmother and physician, sanctioned simply for expressing her faith. This narrative ignores the court’s explicit acquittal on the Bible charge and its careful reasoning. But in the logic of culture war mobilization, accuracy is secondary to affective resonance. A long, complex legal judgment does not rally supporters. A story of martyrdom does.

Conclusion

The Räsänen case is no longer about what she wrote or said, but about what others have made of her. A complex verdict has been simplified and redeployed, its original details mattering less than its political and ideological utility.

The involvement of The Heritage Foundation and the broader MAGA movement is not coincidental. In recent years, The Heritage Foundation has actively cultivated alliances with European conservative, right-wing and far-right actors—politicians, think tanks, and nationalist movements—across Hungary, Czechia, Spain, France, and Germany, and has reportedly engaged with parliamentary groups such as Patriots for Europe.

Räsänen did not become a flagship on her own. Within these conservative circles, some ideas from Project 2025 are seen as transferable to European debates on immigration, sexuality and regulation. Räsänen’s case, her hearing, and her symbolic elevation by US conservative networks are small but significant components of this larger agenda.

The Räsänen case illustrates a wider pattern: culture wars are increasingly produced transnationally, circulating through networks that reframe narratives across borders. A local case becomes a global resource, translated and repurposed for the aims of the culture war.

References

Ayoub, P. M. & Stoeckl, K. (2024). The global fight against LGBTI rights: How transnational conservative networks target sexual and gender minorities. NYU Press.

Du Mez, K. K. (2020). Jesus and John Wayne: How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation. Liveright.

Goetz, J. & Mayer, S. (2023). Global Perspectives on Anti-Feminism. Edinburgh University Press.

Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge University Press.

Southern Poverty Law Center. (2017, July 24). “Alliance Defending Freedom through the years.” SPLC Hatewatch. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/07/24/alliance-defending-freedom-through-years

Washington Post. (2026, March 27). “A free-speech farce in Finland.” [Editorial]. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/27/finland-free-speech-religion-paivi-rasanen/

Dr. Azizi: The Islamic Republic Will Survive, but in a Less Ideological, More Pragmatic Form

April 10, 2026

by ECPS_admin Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

Dr. Arash Azizi of Yale University argues that the Iran Islamic Republic is likely to survive, but in a transformed form shaped less by ideology and more by pragmatism. In this ECPS interview, he suggests that Iran’s longstanding strategy of “sustained hostility toward the United States and enmity toward Israel… is not sustainable,” pushing the regime toward recalibration. Rather than collapse, Dr. Azizi foresees a shift: the decline of “Soleimaniism,” the rise of a securitized political order, and a growing emphasis on regional integration and diplomatic engagement. While power consolidates around military-security elites, Iran may simultaneously pursue normalization and reconstruction. The result, he argues, is not the end of the Islamic Republic, but its reconfiguration into a more technocratic, less ideological, and strategically adaptive state.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Amid an intensifying cycle of confrontation between Iran, Israel, and the United States, the Middle East is entering what can only be described as a structurally transformative moment. Long characterized by proxy conflict and calibrated ambiguity, regional dynamics have now shifted toward direct interstate confrontation, leadership rupture, and accelerating geopolitical fragmentation. The killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, the subsequent consolidation of power within a narrower elite, and sustained US–Israeli military pressure have together transformed a protracted shadow war into an overt systemic crisis. These developments raise urgent questions about the durability of the Islamic Republic, the reconfiguration of its strategic doctrine, and the broader implications for regional order.

In this context, this ECPS interview with Dr. Arash Azizi, who is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at Yale University, offers a timely and analytically rich intervention. As a scholar of Iranian politics and regional geopolitics, Dr. Azizi situates current developments within a longer trajectory of ideological evolution, institutional transformation, and strategic recalibration. His central argument—captured in the headline assertion that “the Islamic Republic will survive, but in a less ideological, more pragmatic form”—provides a unifying thread through the discussion.

At the heart of Dr. Azizi’s analysis lies the contention that the foundational logic of Iran’s revolutionary project is undergoing erosion. The model of regional power projection associated with Qassem Soleimani—what he describes as a “collection of militias that functioned very much as a unified multinational army”—has, in his view, reached the limits of its historical relevance. “That era is now largely over,” he notes, emphasizing that even prior to the latest war, “Soleimaniism was already under significant strain.” The cumulative effects of internal dissent in Iraq and Lebanon, combined with Israel’s military campaign and the collapse of allied structures in Syria, have rendered the “axis of resistance… even more out of vogue.”

Yet Azizi resists narratives of imminent regime collapse. Instead, he identifies a process of transformation rather than breakdown. The Islamic Republic, he argues, has come to recognize that its long-standing strategy of “sustained hostility toward the United States and enmity toward Israel… is not sustainable.” In its place, a more pragmatic orientation is emerging—one oriented toward “regional integration,” “a business-like relationship with the United States,” and eventual diplomatic normalization. This shift does not imply liberalization in a conventional sense, but rather a rebalancing of ideological ambition and strategic necessity.

Simultaneously, however, this transformation is unfolding alongside the consolidation of a more securitized political order. The post-Khamenei landscape, Dr. Azizi suggests, reflects “the rise of a security state, a militarized state… with important elements from the IRGC calling the shots.” This dual movement—toward external pragmatism and internal securitization—defines the paradox of Iran’s current trajectory.

Taken together, Dr. Azizi’s analysis points to a hybrid future: a state that sheds elements of its revolutionary identity while preserving—and in some respects intensifying—its coercive core. The result, as he suggests, is not the end of the Islamic Republic, but its reconstitution: less ideological, more technocratic, and increasingly embedded within a shifting regional order.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Dr. Arash Azizi, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

Iran’s Axis Strategy Is Fading as a New Regional Logic Emerges

Palestinians celebrate Iran’s missile strikes on US bases in Iraq, burning US and Israeli flags during a rally in Khan Yunis, Gaza, honoring Qasem Soleimani. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Dreamstime.

Dr. Azizi, welcome. Let me begin with the broader picture: In “The Shadow Commander,” you show how Qassem Soleimani institutionalized a model of regional power projection that fused ideological militancy, informal diplomacy, and IRGC autonomy. After the killing of Ali Khamenei, the elevation of Mojtaba Khamenei, and the direct US-Israeli war on Iran, how should we now think about the afterlife of “Soleimaniism” within a post-charismatic, wartime Islamic Republic?

Dr. Arash Azizi: Thank you—that’s a very good question. Soleimaniism, or the axis of resistance as it existed under Soleimani—namely, a collection of militias that functioned very much as a unified multinational army capable of operating across multiple battlefields simultaneously—had particular relevance at its height. That era is now largely over. The killing of Soleimani, of course, was significant.

But there were also important challenges in Iraq and Lebanon, the two heartlands of the axis of resistance. Within the Shia communities in both countries, the mass protests of 2019 posed a serious challenge to established parties. There is a clear and growing desire within Iraqi and Lebanese societies for more integrated, sovereign states, as well as for stronger connections with the Arab world—through the Arab League and a renewed emphasis on Arab identity. This, in turn, makes it problematic for large parts of their political systems to remain beholden to a non-Arab power like Iran.

For all these reasons, even if you had asked me this question in early 2023, I would have said that Soleimaniism was already under significant strain.

In the aftermath of October 7, with Israel’s decimation of several members of the axis, and the fall of the Syrian regime, the axis of resistance has become even more out of vogue. While there are now claims, in the context of the current war, that the axis has regained relevance, I remain skeptical. I do not think that “Soleimaniism,” as you call it, has a future in this sense.

This raises the question: if not, what will Iran’s relationship with these various militias look like going forward? I think the answer is that it will become more closely tied to Iran’s broader effort to act as a regional player, primarily through political support for these groups. That support is likely to become more political and less military in nature. As a result, power in Tehran will be transformed, and Iran’s relationship with these groups will also evolve. We are therefore likely to see greater integration of Iran into the region, and less reliance on the revolutionary militia model that operated under Soleimani.

Endless Hostility to the US and Israel Is No Longer Sustainable for Iran

To what extent do the recent US–Israeli strikes and aggression—explicitly coupled with regime-change rhetoric—redefine the Islamic Republic’s threat perception from chronic containment to acute existential insecurity, and how might this shift alter its long-term grand strategy?

Dr. Arash Azizi: The Islamic Republic has just withstood 40 days of fighting with the United States and Israel. In the long term, I think the Iranian state—whether it is the Islamic Republic or whatever might replace it, and there may well be internal transformations—has realized that this trajectory of hostility, this grand strategy, to use the words of some like Vali Nasr, of sustained hostility toward the United States and enmity toward Israel, is not sustainable. As a result, I think they will increasingly look toward regional integration, an end to the historic dispute with the United States, and the emergence of Iran as a regional power that may still have disputes—within the region and beyond—but does not incorporate them into its revolutionary identity.

Iran & US. — Veiled woman walks past anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda mural outside the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Photo: Jack Malipan / Dreamstime.

Tehran Is Trying to Trade Brinkmanship for Regional Recognition

Recent cease-fire agreement suggests that Tehran is demanding not a temporary end of hostilities but binding guarantees against renewed attack, reparations, and recognition of its coercive leverage in the Strait of Hormuz. Do these demands indicate strategic weakness dressed up as defiance, or a regime conclusion that controlled brinkmanship has enhanced Iran’s bargaining position?

Dr. Arash Azizi: If you really look at these demands, they are an attempt to redefine Iran’s role in the region and a recognition that the status quo does not work. So, Iran’s thinking in terms of non-belligerence is significant, because it would mean that it also needs to end its belligerence toward the US.

Demands such as recognition of its control over Hormuz and recognition of its power make sense, not for a revolutionary revisionist actor, but for one that seeks to be part of—and recognized within—the status quo. So, while they still hold on to ambitions of expelling US forces from the region, they understand that the more likely outcome is Iran’s integration into the region and its recognition by its neighbors—Saudi Arabia and others.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan—these powers recognizing Iran—and a more business-like relationship with the United States. So, if the new leadership in Iran—and we should remind ourselves that this is a new leadership about whom we know relatively little; this is not about Mojtaba Khamenei, who is absent anyway, but about Bagher Ghalibaf and similar military figures who are now in charge—if they are able to press ahead and achieve some results in the talks in Islamabad or in future negotiations, they would have truly transformed the Islamic Republic and ushered Iran into a new era, one likely to be defined not by international isolation but by regional integration and global recognition by the US.

What We Are Seeing Is the Rise of a Militarized Security State

How has the death of Ali Khamenei and the contested authority of Mojtaba Khamenei changed the internal architecture of power? Are we witnessing a succession that strengthens clerical supremacy, or one that accelerates the long-term transfer of effective authority toward the IRGC and security institutions?

Dr. Arash Azizi: It is the latter. The death of Khamenei and the rise of Mojtaba, who is very much a stand-in for the security services of the regime, further the rise of security and militarized elements to power—those in the IRGC and beyond. Bagher Ghalibaf is very much an embodiment of the IRGC, and he is now the strongest man in Iran. In many ways, he is Iran’s de facto leader. The new National Security Advisor, Ali Akbar Ahmadian, is also an embodiment of IRGC insiders. So, this is very much the rise of a security state, a militarized state in Iran, with important elements from the IRGC calling the shots.

The question is what shape this order will take, and that is harder to answer. Will it be more like North Korea or more like Vietnam? That is one way of thinking about it. So far, we have seen many more signs pointing toward Vietnam than North Korea. The evidence for that can be seen, for example, in how Ghalibaf is operating. We should not forget that he has been a partner of reformists and centrists. He is now effectively praised by Rouhani and also by President Pezeshkian, who is a reformist. When he ran for president in 2024, he very much ran as a centrist. So, it looks like this militarized Iran will move toward a more centrist and more diplomatic direction, perhaps also a more technocratic and pragmatic one.

Iran May Survive, but It Will Not Resemble the Islamic Republic We Knew

Billboard depicting Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei and Imam Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini on a building wall in Tehran, Iran, April 2018. The portraits honor the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini (Supreme Leader 1979–1989), and his successor Ali Khamenei (Supreme Leader 1989–2026), whose images frequently appear in public spaces as symbols of the regime’s ideological authority. Photo: Dreamstime.

In your recent writing, you argue that the Islamic Republic may survive, but in a different form. What, precisely, is that altered form likely to be under wartime conditions: a more naked military-security state, a narrower dynastic-clerical regime, or an unstable hybrid unable to restore prewar equilibrium?

Dr. Arash Azizi: The main differences would be that Iran would drop a couple of the core policies of the Islamic Republic. It would abandon its social puritan repression. It will be less obsessed with being an Islamist puritan society, where women have to cover up and so on, and will liberalize in this respect.

It would also replace its traditional, ideologically Islamist, anti-American, anti-Israeli foreign policy with one that is more realpolitik-oriented and based on regional integration, a business-like relationship with the United States, and the resumption of diplomatic ties with the United States.

So, it will appear more like a country such as Pakistan, or in some ways Turkey, in terms of foreign policy. Of course, Turkey is different, as it is a member of NATO and has a democratic structure, with important distinctions. But Iran will become more of a non-aligned player, part of a multipolar world order that centers its own interests, rather than one that seeks to position itself within an anti-American order.

As I said, this would mean resuming diplomatic ties with the United States, and the overall shape of the regime would change significantly. It would be a country open to business with the West, and it would no longer resemble the Islamic Republic we have seen over the past few decades.

Tehran Is Using Escalation to Redefine Its Place in the Region

Iran’s retaliation across Israeli territory, US assets, and Gulf-linked energy infrastructure suggests that regionalization is no longer a latent option but an active strategy. Should we read this as a coherent deterrence doctrine, or as evidence that Tehran’s escalation ladder is becoming more improvised and risk-acceptant under existential pressure?

Dr. Arash Azizi: Iran has long had a plan that, if attacked, it would regionalize the conflict and raise its costs for everyone. I see these chaotic attacks on major neighbors—Kuwait, Cyprus, Qatar, Oman, and Saudi Arabia—as an attempt to redefine its role in the region and, ultimately, to gain recognition as a regional power.

This is part of the current interregnum after Khamenei, during which the Islamic Republic—the Iranian state—is trying to redefine its place in the region. It is engaging in various forms of maneuvering in order to eventually reach some form of peace and secure recognition of its position.

At the same time, it is plausible that IRGC generals who have now experienced war with these countries will continue to pursue a policy of brinkmanship. They may become accustomed to using kinetic action whenever they fail to achieve their goals, which could, at some point, reignite a larger war—one that might involve a regional effort to defeat Iran and force it to submit.

The Regime Is Increasingly Ruling over Ruins

Israeli strikes on petrochemical facilities, transport infrastructure, and broader economic assets appear designed not only to degrade military capability but to impose systemic economic pain. How might this reshape the regime’s social base, especially among urban middle classes, workers, and peripheral populations already strained by sanctions and repression?

Dr. Arash Azizi: The regime already has a very small base. Should wartime conditions end now, it will face massive economic problems. Iran has been severely degraded not just in military terms, but in its civilian capabilities as well. To give just one example, Iran barely has any civilian aircraft left. It faces major problems: most of its airports are destroyed, and even where airports remain intact, civilian aircraft have been destroyed. It is, in many ways, a regime ruling over ruins.

All of this makes it very difficult for the regime to continue without facing further social alienation and, ultimately, renewed protests and insurrections. The only way out is a deal with the United States that would lift sanctions, improve its regional status, and provide some financial relief—something it is also trying to secure through its control over the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, it needs diplomatic pathways if it is to reach any kind of social equilibrium. Otherwise, it will face recurrent crises.

The War Mobilized the Regime’s Base, but It Did Not Legitimize the Regime

“Woman, life, freedom”: London protest draws thousands following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody on January 10, 2022. Photo: Vehbi Koca.

Comparative research often shows that war can produce either nationalist rally effects or heightened de-legitimation. In Iran’s case, do you think external attack is more likely to temporarily consolidate the regime, or to deepen the public’s sense that the state is both repressive and strategically ruinous?

Dr. Arash Azizi: It has mobilized the regime’s base; it has not expanded it, but it has mobilized it. One reason for this is that the opposition had created a facade—an illusion that the regime was easy to bring down and that external attacks would quickly lead to its collapse. This meant that the regime’s very survival could be framed as a major victory. In many ways, it was the opposition that made this equation possible. So, the effect has been a mobilized base and, in many ways, a demoralized opposition.

But the regime has not gained legitimacy. There remains a deep gap between it and much of Iranian society, and this war has not helped; if anything, it has made matters worse. It has once again revealed itself as a trigger-happy state, one willing to engage in conflict without prioritizing the economic well-being of its citizens. Unless it changes course, it will continue to face serious crises of legitimacy.

Iran’s Democratic Opposition Still Lacks a Credible Unified Front

You have recently stressed that Iran lacks a credible, organized democratic alternative ready to inherit power. In light of wartime devastation and elite fragmentation, what would have to happen for a domestically rooted democratic bloc to emerge with sufficient legitimacy, coordination, and national reach?

Dr. Arash Azizi: Different opposition groups, both inside and outside Iran, would need to put their differences aside, come together, and build a united front, offering a credible, coherent, and solid alternative. This remains a tall order, but that is what needs to happen. Efforts such as the Iran Freedom Congress, recently launched in London, are a step in the right direction, but much more needs to be done. There also needs to be serious coordination with elements inside Iran. Still, it remains a very tall order, and it is harder to achieve in wartime than it would be in peacetime.

The Opposition Needs Discipline, Cohesion, and a Credible Forward-Looking Platform

Iranian citizens living in Turkey protest the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini and the Iranian government in front of the Iranian Consulate General in Istanbul on October 4, 2022. Photo: Tolga Ildun.

For exiled opposition figures seeking relevance at this moment, what institutional commitments would be indispensable for credibility inside Iran: constitutional guarantees, transitional justice mechanisms, minority protections, civilian control of the military, or something more foundational?

Dr. Arash Azizi: First of all, they would need to build organizations abroad that demonstrate a degree of political discipline, unity, and flexibility. They would need to create actual membership-based organizations that bring together different elite figures and reflect a degree of political cohesion. They have not done that.

They would then need to offer a political platform that seeks both to unify the opposition and to remain flexible. This would require balancing transitional justice mechanisms with amnesty provisions, for example, to signal that there is a path open to former security forces or other figures of the regime—and perhaps even a possibility of negotiating with them. They would also need to demonstrate an ability to galvanize public opinion and mobilize constituencies abroad.

In short, they would need to present a credible, forward-looking political alternative that can also be taken seriously internationally. This is a very tall order, and the opposition has done little that resembles it so far. What exists instead is a highly fragmented landscape.

In what might be described as the Republican, center-left segment of the opposition, there is fragmentation, a lack of organization and cohesion, and no meaningful strategic unity. The Iran Freedom Congress represents an attempt to address this. On the right-wing side, among Reza Pahlavi and monarchist groups, one finds a revanchist, somewhat chauvinistic, and disorganized opposition, marked by hostility toward other opposition actors. Much of its strategy appears tied to the Israeli-American attack, which has already occurred and is no longer particularly popular among Iranians.

Under these conditions, both sides of the opposition find themselves in disarray. Other groups, such as the MEK (The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran), have long functioned as a cult-like organization with a limited base and continue to struggle for relevance. Moreover, if negotiations between Iran and the United States were to succeed—improving Iran’s international standing not only with the US but also with Europe and others—this would further undercut the opposition.

In your recent analysis, you warned about the dangers of a Kurdish incursion strategy encouraged from outside. How serious is the risk that attempts to weaponize Iran’s peripheries could simultaneously weaken the regime and undermine the prospects for a democratic, territorially coherent post-Islamic Republic order?

Dr. Arash Azizi: They are not even that likely to weaken the regime. Rather, they are likely to send Kurds, Baluch, and others—especially the Kurds—into a strategic dead end, where the Iranian regime would be able to amass significant forces and crush them in blood. Moreover, to the extent that such efforts succeed—if they manage to “liberate” any part of Iranian territory—they would risk triggering prolonged civil war and fragmentation and would be unlikely to improve the prospects for any kind of democratic transition in Iran.

Brute Repression Has Become the Regime’s Main Instrument of Rule

How should we understand the regime’s current repression strategy—including executions and intensified securitization—under wartime conditions? Does conflict give the state a renewed ideological cover for crushing dissent, or does it reveal the extent to which coercion has become the regime’s primary remaining instrument of governance?

Dr. Arash Azizi: The Islamic Republic is very much relying on brute repression, and it believes that it has beaten back the opposition to some extent. It has significantly mobilized its base, energizing it after the war, and is now using that opportunity to clean house and to display naked brutality toward its opponents. But this is not sustainable in the long term. You cannot bring thousands of people onto the streets every day, as it has been doing during the war, especially when economic problems arise—and they will. The economic problems already exist, but they will deepen into specific crises.

In that sense, the repressive apparatus will eventually encounter limits. At present, however, figures such as Mohseni Eje’i, the head of the judiciary, Ali Akbar Ahmadian, the National Security Advisor, and the police chief are key political actors whose entire portfolios and profiles are rooted in judicial and security repression.

It may well be that those seeking to argue that Iran has changed and can offer a new social pact to its people would need to marginalize these figures—perhaps replace them, remove them from office, or constrain their power—in order to gain broader public support. At some point, the regime will need to expand its social base, and repression alone will not achieve that.

If Iran Overplays Hormuz, It Risks Alienating the Entire Region

The Strait of Hormuz has reemerged as both a military lever and a diplomatic bargaining chip. From the standpoint of regime survival, is Hormuz best understood as Tehran’s strongest deterrent asset, or as a dangerously costly instrument that internationalizes the conflict and narrows Iran’s room for political recovery?

Dr. Arash Azizi: Iran is not drunk on the power of using Hormuz. For many decades, it had threatened to close it, and now it has. It has obviously worked in a way: it has helped disrupt global trade. You could say it is the single most important element in the eyes of President Trump, and it is very clear that it is going to emerge as an important part of the negotiations.

At the same time, Trump has shown some openness to dealing over this issue, including the idea of using crypto as payment, and this may even be linked to some crypto companies that would be seen as favorable by the US. This shows that there are unprecedented aspects to the situation. At the same time, the European Union has strongly objected to Iran’s posture of wanting to claim tolls over the Hormuz Strait.

So, this is a new area. If Iran handles it well, it could gain recognition of its importance and control here, and perhaps even derive some financial benefits from it as part of its attempt to integrate into the region and gain recognition. If not, and if it overplays its hand, it will further alienate the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the broader international community, and at some point, perhaps even China and others will not be pleased if it continues to disrupt trade. So far, that has not been the case. China has been somewhat shielded from the war. It has strategic oil reserves, and Iran does allow some ships to pass, which can benefit China. But if this continues in the long term, it will become a liability.

Washington Wants an Interlocutor in Tehran More Than a Total Collapse

From a comparative and historical perspective, do the policies pursued by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu reflect a coherent long-term strategy aimed at restructuring Iran’s regional role, or do they risk generating unintended consequences such as regime hardening, regional fragmentation, or the empowerment of more radical actors within Iran’s security apparatus? In this context, how viable is externally induced regime change in Iran today, and which outcomes appear most plausible?

Dr. Arash Azizi: Externally induced regime change has not quite worked yet. Of course, President Trump claims that there is regime change, and that there has been important change within the regime, but it is still very much the same regime. Whether the strategy of the United States was for Khamenei to be replaced by Ghalibaf, I doubt that. It appears that their strategy was based on the hope that there could be some sort of capitulation or collapse of the regime—something of that sort—which did not occur.

The Israelis have a more long-term view, and also a more contingent one. By this I mean they were satisfied with some of the military degradations. They would have welcomed a national uprising to bring down the regime, but they were not necessarily relying on it. They may also try to activate elements inside Iran in the future, hoping that the post-war period will provide an opportunity to facilitate the regime’s fall. So, they maintain a longer-term, and as I said, more contingent perspective.

Ultimately, the United States, under President Trump, wants to engage with Iran and incorporate it into its regional security architecture—as a partner, or at least as an interlocutor. If Ghalibaf is willing to cooperate in certain ways, they would likely consider that a satisfactory outcome. Israel would be more cautious about such a development. However, if a deal with the United States includes the degradation of Iran’s nuclear program and the shipment of its enriched uranium abroad, Israel may also, perhaps reluctantly, come to view it as the least bad outcome.

Most Regional Powers Want Iran Contained, Not Broken

Iran-US war. — Photo: Pavel Kusmartsev / Dreamstime.

Regional actors are recalibrating in real time as the war disrupts energy markets and threatens wider escalation. How do you see Gulf monarchies, Turkey, and Russia interpreting a weakened but still dangerous Iran: as a partner to contain, an adversary to exploit, or a collapsing center whose instability could spill across the region?

Dr. Arash Azizi: Indeed, the countries you named are very different. Each of them has a distinct view of Iran. But let’s start with the GCC and Saudi Arabia. I think they would want an Iran that is contained, but not broken, and not driven into civil war. Not too weakened either, but contained and defined within a clear framework, so that it becomes less of a revolutionary, disruptive actor, less of a revisionist force, and more confined within its place.

Turkey would even more sympathetically prefer such a contained Iran that is also a partner, and one that could maintain its historic relationship with Turkey.

Russia is re-evaluating the importance of the Middle East in its strategy. At the moment, it has to deal with the fall of the Syrian regime, and it has been able to maintain a relationship with the new Syrian leadership. But, it is reassessing its Middle East policy and would be content to sustain relations with different regional actors, from Iran to Israel and others. I am not sure, however, that the Middle East occupies a central place in its broader strategic priorities.

Of course, one would be eager to see the work of scholars specializing in Iran and Russia–Middle East relations, such as Dr. Nikolay Kozhanov and others, who are better placed to offer a more precise prognosis of Russia’s evolving role.

The Most Plausible Outcome Is Transformation, Not Total Collapse

And finally, Dr. Azizi, looking ahead, which trajectory do you regard as most plausible: negotiated de-escalation with mutual guarantees, prolonged regional war, hardline consolidation under a narrower security elite, or a messy transition in which the Islamic Republic survives institutionally but loses much of its ideological and social coherence?

Dr. Arash Azizi: A few of these—a combination of several of these trajectories. I think the Islamic Republic will transform. It will lose its ideological coherence. I think we will see negotiated de-escalation. In due time, we are also likely to see Iran’s integration into the region and the opening of diplomatic ties with the United States, but this will occur alongside the persistence of a securitized state at the top.

That is my general prognosis. This outcome is more likely than a permanently mobilized, revolutionary, revisionist, ideological, North Korea-like state in Iran. That scenario remains less probable.

It is much more likely that Iran—the new Iran—will be more cynical but also more pragmatic and technocratic, and that it will attempt to undergo post-war reconstruction. And by post-war, I do not mean only the recent conflict, but also the longer period shaped by sanctions and Iran’s shadow war with the United States and Israel. I therefore expect the next phase to be one of economic development and reconstruction for Iran.