Climate change.

Who Pays to Adapt? Climate Debt and Populist Politics of Climate Justice in Africa

by with No Comment CommentariesEconomicsEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHome

In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Mayowa Solaja uses the concept of “climate debt populism” to examine how climate vulnerability, sovereign debt, and distributive injustice are becoming politically intertwined across Africa. He argues that adaptation finance is not only a technical question of resource mobilization, but also a struggle over responsibility, legitimacy, and who ultimately bears the costs of climate survival. Drawing on examples from Senegal, Zambia, and Malawi, Dr. Solaja shows how climate shocks can intensify fiscal vulnerability, while debt servicing can restrict governments’ capacity to invest in resilience. He calls for a more just climate-finance architecture centered on grant-based adaptation, debt restructuring, accountability, participation, and recognition of Africa’s historically unequal contribution to global emissions

By Dr. Oludele Mayowa Solaja

Africa’s climate politics is entering a more consequential phase. The debate is no longer about whether vulnerable societies need adaptation finance, but how their political and financial relationship is shaped when they receive it through debt. The resources governments already have to service debt can create a paradox when small increases in debt are added to shield citizens from climate risks: the funds required to lessen vulnerability can create more vulnerability.

This commentary proposes the concept of ‘climate debt populism’ to reflect the political reasoning that can be forged from this paradox. I do not imply, in using the term, that there is an existing pan-African political movement, but rather use it as an analytical framework to examine the potential for linking climate vulnerability, fiscal pressure, and distributive injustice with the populist statement: communities that were least responsible for past greenhouse gas emissions should not bear the burden of additional fiscal costs just to be secure. This struggle is not fundamentally about people who want to act on climate change versus people who don’t. It is a conflict over who has the authority, responsibility, and resources to determine who pays for climate survival.

Why should those who contributed least to the climate crisis pay to survive it?

The Question Behind Climate Finance

Vulnerability is the language of climate change in Africa. With warming, droughts, flooding and food insecurity, adaptation is a pressing developmental need, with increasing water stress and disruption to livelihoods. But vulnerability is not the sole determinant of the politics of adaptation. The question of who pays for protection is becoming increasingly distributive: on whose conditions and at what cost to public finances and future generations?

The answer matters because Africa is in a unique position within the global climate economy. The continent has been responsible for a relatively small share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but faces the highest climate risks. According to the African Development Bank, Africa accounts for less than 4 percent of global emissions but receives only about 3 percent of global climate finance (AfDB, 2025). At the same time, many African countries struggle with limited fiscal space and high debt-service burdens. The outcome is a political economy where the need for adaptation meets the financial limits of the states that will be expected to provide it.

The problem is more than money. It’s about the conditions and modalities of climate finance. Grant financing can increase adaptive capacity without adding a new debt burden. Loans can offer short-term flexibility, but they can also shift the burden of financing adaptation to climate change into the future. The difference between resilience and recovery financing is a political question in situations of repeated climate shocks and additional borrowing.

Climate finance is thus not apolitical. It shares responsibilities among countries, generations and social groups. When people feel they are losing out because of climate change, and that public funding is being limited or restricted, finance becomes an issue of fairness and political legitimacy.

Changing the Conversation from Climate Populism to Climate Debt Populism

Climate debt populism is analytically different from the current discourse on climate populism and extends ideas in this conversation. Political representations of climate policy typically frame the issue as a clash between a righteous or derelict population and those who represent and are responsible for the environment and environmental transition policies, such as the state, the market, or the public interest. When the policy is contentious, as it becomes when measures like carbon pricing or subsidy reform and energy transition are felt to be economically burdensome, climate politics can get messy in these accounts.

Climate debt populism changes what is contended. Its main grievance might not be climate action. Instead, it’s about the inequity of funding climate action and climate harm. The conflict arises when the price of adaptation is seen as an indicator of an international order that is separate from responsibility and burden.

The populist logic may thus be expressed in three interconnected steps. First, a material injury is apparent: crops fail to produce, houses are destroyed by floodwater, electricity networks are weakened, livelihoods are lost, and public services are economically constrained. Second, the injury is read by making a moral judgment between those suffering and those seen to have disproportionate power to control the distribution of costs. Third, this distinction becomes a political demand for recognition, redistribution and accountability.

‘The elite’ concerned is therefore far less monolithic than in traditional national populist politics. It could involve national political and economic decision makers, foreign creditors, financial institutions, rich high-emitting countries and technocratic institutions thought to set the rules for accessing funding by vulnerable societies. This doesn’t mean these actors form a unified bloc. Instead, they can be symbolically linked in a popular story of unequal responsibility.

This matters because it avoids making the concept synonymous with anti-Westernism or with opposition to the international financial system. Climate debt populism is not a movement against debt, but a struggle about the legitimacy of an unequal burden of climate responsibility. Its basic moral principle is that adaptation costs should be assigned by considering historical responsibility, current exposure, and financial resources.

Debt Amplifies Climate Change as a Political Vulnerability

Young African woman carrying water.
Young African woman carrying water in a village near Bamako, Mali, symbolizing the human impact of drought and water scarcity. Photo: Dreamstime.

This political claim has material force through debt. According to ActionAid International’s analysis of 65 highly climate-vulnerable countries, in September 2026, these countries will have paid almost 25 times more on debt repayments than on climate action. It notes that debt servicing as a share of government revenue is estimated to consume about 65 percent in Global South countries and is about 225 times higher than the climate finance they receive via grants (ActionAid International, 2026). The statistics must be viewed with care as they are an amalgamation and do not represent a consistent African experience. Their importance, however, lies in the structural relationship they point to: obligations to repay fiscal resources can take up fiscal resources just when investment in adaptation has to increase.

The resulting mechanism is potentially self-reinforcing. High-severity climate events cause economic and physical damage. The funding of emergency relief, reconstruction and social protection in the face of the government must be made. If grants and concessional resources are insufficient, additional borrowing becomes attractive or unavoidable. This leaves less fiscal room for preventive investments because of debt-service obligations. Weak adaptation leaves communities exposed to subsequent shocks, which generate additional losses and renewed financing needs. Fiscal vulnerability can thus exacerbate climate risk, and climate risk can constrain capacity to reduce fiscal vulnerability.

This is not to say that climate change is solely responsible for debt crises in Africa. Sovereign debt is determined by domestic fiscal policies, commodity dependence, exchange-rate pressures, borrowing policies, governance, global interest rates and the structure of the international financial system. A credible argument in the name of climate justice must, therefore, withstand monocausal explanations. The more assertive position is that climate shocks exacerbate existing financial fragilities and can make an already challenging debt situation much tougher.

Senegal: When Debt Service Crowds Out Climate Ambition

Senegal is a case in point for the inseparability of politics and fiscal capacity in climate finance. According to ActionAid’s 2026 analysis, Senegal’s debt servicing is more than 96 percent of government revenue and over 600 times its planned spending on climate action. For every US$1 budgeted for climate action, US$605 is being spent on debt servicing, according to the calculation. The exact proportion should be regarded as a representation of the fiscal structure of a particular advocacy organization, and not as a yardstick for the country’s fiscal structure. Its political significance nevertheless remains striking.

Fiscal constraint is not a macroeconomic phenomenon, but a condition that affects citizens engaged in agriculture and reliant on infrastructure and functioning public services. It is felt when there is a risk, and the state is unable to protect people. A farmer confronting declining productivity does not experience sovereign debt as a balance-sheet category. The experience is mediated through access to irrigation, agricultural support, roads, electricity, social protection and the state’s capacity to respond when climate shocks occur.

This is where climate debt can acquire populist meaning. When citizens feel that public institutions can afford external debt but not internal security against environmental insecurity, the line between economic and climate injustice becomes a political debate. The question becomes less “How much finance has been mobilized?” and more “Whose obligations are being prioritized?”

Zambia: When a Climate Shock Becomes a Fiscal Shock

Zambia illustrates an aspect of the issue, where environmental shocks rapidly turn into macro-economic and political shocks. The World Bank described the country’s 2024 drought as the driest in decades; it affected approximately 9.8 million people, with 6.6 million experiencing severe food insecurity. Likewise, Zambia’s reliance on hydropower worsened a major electricity crisis, and agricultural production was also greatly affected (World Bank, 2024).

These pressures were added to a challenging debt restructuring process. The World Bank then approved US$100 million to finance development policy and provide a support facility for catastrophe events, highlighting the need for liquidity in the event of a climate shock. However, there is a deep challenge that needs to be addressed: emergency funding can mitigate and repair harm in the short term, but it will not necessarily close gaps in the longer term in the resources needed to prepare for adaptation.

Climate events remain a downside risk to Zambia’s debt-service capacity, according to the IMF’s 2026 assessment. This connection has political importance, as it links environmental insecurity to the state’s fiscal stability. A succession of shocks may then alter citizens’ perceptions of national governments and the international financial system as a whole. When the climate is made insecure, it tests institutions’ capacity to offer security without adding another generation of debt.

Malawi: The Politics of Rebuilding the Same Future

Malawi’s experience with Cyclone Freddy makes the distributional stakes equally visible. According to the World Bank (2023), material losses amounted to about US$505 million, while production losses were around US$36.4 million, equivalent to about 0.5 percent of Malawi’s 2023 GDP. These statistics concealed the destruction of homes, disruption of agriculture, damage to infrastructure and loss of livelihoods.

Reconstruction is a tough decision for a budget-constrained government—balancing the social and political costs of leaving communities exposed with the financial costs of borrowing to rebuild. Governments could continue to pay for the impacts of climate hazards without sufficiently reducing the likelihood or impact of further loss.

This is why it is as important as the amount of climate finance as it is well-designed. A dollar of grant finance and a dollar of sovereign borrowing are not politically equivalent. They distribute obligations differently across time and across social groups. The former can build the community’s public capacity without adding to the repayment burden; the latter can shift some of today’s adaptation burden onto future taxpayers. Therefore, it is not only a matter of mobilizing resources, but of their financial architecture as well, that is, a matter of climate justice.

From Climate Victims to Climate Creditors

One of the most profound political changes may be conceptual. African countries have often been portrayed internationally as weak recipients that need help. This is becoming an outdated perspective. Climate-justice claims are increasingly becoming language of responsibility, entitlement and institutional change, rather than “help us because we are vulnerable”; it is becoming “recognition of what is owed because responsibility and harm are unequally distributed.”

Warlenius (2018) proposed a shift from emissions to questions of responsibility, atmospheric space, and compensation through the concept of climate debt, which emerged within climate-justice movements. This argument considers the intersection of the moral grammar of climate debt, current sovereign debt, and the lived reality of adaptation under fiscal constraint.

This suggests a politically viable possibility of reversal. African countries cannot be read only as clients of a lender who comes to them for help. They can also speak in a way that makes them claimants in a just climate order. The language of ‘climate creditors’ can help here as a political metaphor; it emphasises the historical and distributive aspects of climate responsibility, but does not suggest that African states have traditional financial claims against specific governments.

Making this distinction is crucial. Climate-creditor politics does not absolve African governments of responsibility. Vulnerability may be exacerbated by corruption, weak institutions, unsustainable borrowing patterns and poor public spending and African governments should be held accountable at home. There is no conflict between international responsibility and national accountability. They work at various levels of the same political economy.

The New Political Antagonism

At this point, climate debt populism is analytically useful. It recognises a type of political opposition based on the unequal division of financial responsibilities, where material climate insecurity is expressed in this way. The applicable political boundary is not definitive. It could be between citizens and national elites, vulnerable states and creditors or historically high emitters and climate-sensitive societies. In practice, these boundaries can overlap.

The risk is that such a politics can go in two extremely different directions. It can create a democratic politics of climate justice, calling for transparency in finance, reorganization of debt, and reparative responsibility and greater public accountability. However, it can also be seized by the political entrepreneur who simplifies the weave of politics to an unchecked story of foreign conspiracy, domestic betrayal or perpetual victimhood. The concept should not therefore be considered – normatively – as progressive or regressive.

It is a democratic question in that it raises a public debate over who is best positioned to determine who will bear the costs of climate change. Failing to involve citizens in designing climate finance through technical negotiations and institutions far removed from the people can create a legitimacy deficit with political repercussions. On the other hand, if climate finance is transparent, locally accountable, and clearly linked to social protection and adaptation outcomes, it can reinforce democratic trust.

Preserving the Natural World within the Context of Non-Debt-Creating Adaptation (COP31)

This debate comes at an opportune moment. Adaptation, finance, and loss and damage are key themes of the climate negotiations to be discussed at COP31, to be held in Antalya from 9-20 November 2026. African governments should thus ask not just how much money is pledged, but how much they will receive in the end. What forms of finance are being provided, on which terms and at what cost to future generations?

The answer matters because a climate finance target can be achieved in several ways that produce very different politics. A significant share of adaptation resources could be financed through loans, which may provide immediate financial support to vulnerable states but create future debt obligations. This finance can be beneficial in certain instances, especially when concessionality is high, and investments have a productive return. However, borrowing does not always align with climate justice.

A more believable framework for getting climate finance to Africa would thus be based on four pillars. First, adaptation finance really needs to be far more grant-based, especially in highly vulnerable countries with limited fiscal space. Second, the support for loss and damage should be on top of, not instead of, adaptation finance. Third, countries already experiencing unsustainable debt levels should have trustworthy debt-restructuring instruments, so climate shocks are not necessarily a source of additional debt crises. Finally, African countries and affected communities should be more influential in designing, allocating and monitoring climate finance.

In particular, the fourth principle is important. Wealth redistribution is not the only issue of climate justice between North and South. It is also about redistribution within countries. External resources can fuel inequality when they fall into the hands of political elites, are concentrated in capital-heavy projects, or are not tied to the communities most vulnerable to climate risks. This is why a just climate-finance architecture should link international and domestic responsibility, transparency, participation, and accountability.

Beyond the Politics of Vulnerability

The politics of African climate change is thus shifting away from a politics of vulnerability. The danger remains very real, but it is no longer politically sufficient. More and more governments, movements, and citizens are asking what vulnerability means in a global context where the conditions of climate change and climate impacts do not align with the distribution of financial means.

One possible political result of this contradiction is climate debt populism. It emerges when climate insecurity and debt insecurity become legible as parts of the same injustice, and when citizens interpret adaptation financing as a test of who counts, who owes, and who has the authority to determine the future. The idea thus includes a political element to a policy discussion that is frequently framed as a purely technical matter of climate finance.

The broader importance of the study is to move from the question “How much climate finance is needed in Africa” to “What political order is being reproduced in the provision of climate finance?” That question is more complex, as it deals with responsibility, power, debt, legitimacy, and distribution at the same time.

Africa does not need a regime of climate finance that makes adaptation possible today and harder to sustain in the years to come. Nor does it need a politics that converts legitimate climate grievances into simplistic blame. What is needed is a system in which the three aspects of historical responsibility, financial capacity, domestic accountability, and democratic participation are seen as interlinked aspects of climate justice.

The decisive test of climate finance is not whether money reaches vulnerable countries. It is whether that money enables them to become less vulnerable without increasing their debt. This is indeed the political issue of climate adaptation. The language of vulnerability is giving way to the language of entitlement in Africa’s climate politics: from “Save us from a crisis” to “acknowledge the distribution of responsibility for a crisis.” If that shift becomes politically salient, climate finance will no longer be a technocratic subfield of international development. It will be at the heart of the battle for global justice, global sovereignty and democratic legitimacy.

Who pays to adapt—and, in the emerging politics of climate debt, who actually owes whom?

 

References

ActionAid International. (2026, September 16). Debt fuels the climate crisis: How the finance flows. https://actionaid.org/publications/2026/debt-fuels-climate-crisis

African Development Bank. (2025). African Economic Outlook 2025. https://www.afdb.org/sites/default/files/documents/publications/afdb25-01_aeo_highlights_english_020625.pdf

International Monetary Fund. (2026). Climate shocks, debt defaults and investment in climate adaptation: Squaring an impossible trilemma. IMF Working Paper No. 2026/128. https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2026/06/23/climate-shocks-debt-defaults-and-investment-in-climate-adaptation-squaring-an-impossible-577218

United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. (2026). Stakeholders close CCDA-14 with strong calls for climate finance, stronger agency and delivery ahead of COP31. UNECA. https://www.uneca.org/stories/stakeholders-close-ccda-14-with-strong-calls-for-climate-finance%2C-stronger-agency-and

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (2026). COP31. UNFCCC.

Warlenius, R. (2018). “Decolonizing the atmosphere: The climate justice movement on climate debt.” Development and Change, 49(2), 454–478. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12387

World Bank. (2023). Malawi economic update: New Malawi Economic Update calls for urgent action to address macroeconomic imbalances and increase energy access. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2023/07/19/new-afe-malawi-economic-update-calls-for-urgent-action-to-address-macroeconomic-imbalances-and-increase-energy-access

World Bank. (2024). World Bank steps up support to increase Zambia’s resilience to natural disasters.https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2024/12/18/world-bank-steps-up-support-to-increase-afe-zambias-resilience-to-natural-disasters

University teachers, researchers, and students demonstrate in Paris, France, on April 2, 2009.

Material and Cultural Convergence in French Youth Protest

by with No Comment CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHome

In this commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias examines how material grievances in France’s 2026 youth protests become intertwined with broader cultural, moral, and political claims. Rather than interpreting this simply as identity replacing class, Dr. Dias argues that concerns over education, housing, and employment are increasingly articulated alongside struggles over recognition, gender, racialization, colonial memory, and Palestine. He introduces the notion of a “hyper cause” to describe how certain issues can condense multiple struggles into a shared moral framework. The article also explores the risks of moral polarization, generational inequality, distrust in political institutions, and competing populist narratives, ultimately asking how liberal democracy can respond to legitimate grievances without allowing encompassing causes to erode pluralism and political restraint.

By João Ferreira Dias

How does a protest about classrooms become a statement about the moral order of society? A photograph from Nantes, circulated by Expresso during France’s autumn 2026 mobilizations, brings the question into focus. Demands for education funding stand beside denunciations of the police, sexual violence, hostility towards Muslims and the Rassemblement National (RN). One placard announces disagreement with the others. The scene suggests convergence without unanimity: a material grievance provides a meeting place for a broader cultural left.

From Material Grievances to a Broader Moral Grammar

The grievances are real. Teacher shortages, overcrowded classes, deteriorating buildings and anxiety surrounding Parcoursup, the university admissions platform, feature prominently in reporting (Lecherbonnier & Pommiers, 2026). Their legitimacy does not, however, explain the entire political meaning of the mobilization. The analytical question concerns how concrete failures become connected to a more encompassing account of domination.

It would be misleading to describe this simply as identity replacing class. Housing, education and employment remain material concerns; they become articulated with struggles over recognition, gender, racialization and colonial memory. Fraser’s (1995) distinction between redistribution and recognition helps identify these dimensions without treating them as separate worlds. My argument is that sections of the contemporary left increasingly interpret both through a common moral grammar. A school without teachers and an institution accused of racism can become evidence of the same system abandoning, excluding or subordinating particular populations.

Several intellectual traditions enter this interpretation. Postmodern suspicion towards legitimating grand narratives, associated with Lyotard (1979; 1984), differs from decolonial accounts of enduring colonial hierarchies and intersectional analyses of connected inequalities. They should not be collapsed into one doctrine or attributed to every protester. Yet their convergence in activist discourse invites an irony: criticism of universal narratives can coexist with an increasingly comprehensive narrative of oppression. Frame alignment helps explain how distinct struggles become mutually intelligible (Benford & Snow, 2000); whether they share the same causes remains an empirical question.

Palestine as a “Hyper Cause” and the Convergence of Struggles

Palestine makes this operation particularly visible in the wider activist field, beyond what can be established from the Nantes photograph. Salih et al. (2021) document connections between Palestinian activism and Black and Indigenous struggles, including Ferguson and Standing Rock. More recently, Mendoza Sandoval and Portos (2026), studying Spain, show how an anticolonial framing makes Palestine a prism for interpreting injustice within activists’ own societies. These studies identify mechanisms relevant to the French case, rather than proving their prevalence among its school protesters.

I would describe Palestine’s role in some of these networks as a “hyper cause”: a cause that condenses other struggles and helps organize their moral meaning. This is an analytical proposal, not an established category. Gaza then signifies both a concrete humanitarian catastrophe and a wider account of colonial violence, racial hierarchy and Western power. Solidarity becomes a way of locating oneself within that account. The danger appears when commitment to one cause becomes a test of legitimacy across unrelated questions, or when identifying a common adversary takes precedence over examining different institutions and responsibilities.

This convergence can generate effective coalitions. It can also encourage moral polarization. Research connects moralizedattitudes to resistance to political compromise (Ryan, 2017). The progressive Brazilian Instagram accounts that read French protests immediately as resistance to welfare dismantling suggest a related mechanism of transnational recognition. Their reception needs systematic study, but the hypothesis is clear: a foreign event can confirm an existing political identity before its national circumstances are examined.

Generational Insecurity and the Erosion of Democratic Confidence

Those circumstances complicate the interpretation. The OECD’s latest compilation places French public pension expenditure at roughly 13–14% of GDP (OECD, 2025). Meanwhile, households whose reference person was under 30 devoted 25.7% of income to housing after allowances in 2024, against less than 13% for those with a reference person aged 65 or older; student-reference households are excluded (Dufour et al., 2026). Substantial aggregate protection can coexist with unequal access to security. Lynch (2006) explains how institutions entrench the age distribution of welfare. Treating retirement entitlements as untouchable while younger generations’ prospects remain negotiable raises a distributive problem, without demonstrating that pensioners have captured the state or directly caused school shortages.

The democratic promise becomes vulnerable here. Education and work were expected to make independence attainable. When they cease to offer a credible route to it, ideological narratives supply explanations of betrayal and identify those responsible. The 2026 CEVIPOF survey records 82% attachment to democracy alongside just 22% trust in politics and 15% in parties (CEVIPOF, 2026). These population-wide figures reveal a tension, not the attitudes of the protesters themselves.

Attachment to which democracy? Zakaria (1997) distinguishes electoral government from constitutional liberalism. Endorsing popular sovereignty does not establish commitment to judicial independence, minority rights or legitimate opposition. Wuttke et al. (2022) challenge a uniform account of democratic decline while identifying, in some countries, citizens whose democratic self-description coexists with less democratic attitudes. Demands for democracy can therefore contain illiberal possibilities when the authority of a morally defined people is placed above constraints on its power.

Competing Narratives of “the People” and the Limits of Liberal Democracy

The political translation is contested. Muxel (2025) identifies divisions within French youth, including radical-left mobilization and growing attraction to the radical right. Mélenchon’s La France insoumise explicitly supported the October mobilization (La France insoumise, 2026). Le Pen’s camp offers a competing narrative of national decline and restored authority. These projects differ substantially, but neither the invocation of “the people” nor mobilization itself settles the question of liberal commitment.

The central problem is thus how material insecurity becomes organized into moral camps. The cultural left can connect social provision to recognition and decolonial solidarity; the radical right offers different accounts of dispossession and belonging. Both must be assessed through their acceptance of pluralism and limits on power. Liberal democracy needs to recover the credibility of an attainable future while ensuring that neither a just grievance nor an encompassing cause becomes a license to deny opponents their rights.

 

References

Benford, R. D. & Snow, D. A. (2000). “Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1146/​annurev.soc.26.1.611

CEVIPOF. (2026, February 9). Baromètre de la confiance politique CEVIPOF 2026 : La confiance s’effondre en politique, la proximité fait figure de refuge. Sciences Po. https:/​/​www.sciencespo.fr/​cevipof/​fr/​actualites/​barometre-​de-​la-​confiance-​politique-​cevipof-​2026-​la-​confiance-​s-​effondre-​en-​politique-​la-​proximite-​fait-​figure-​de-​refuge/​

Dufour, C.; Lartigau, T.; Parizeau, E. & Zedam, P. (2026, September 23). Le logement pèse moins sur le budget des ménages en 2024 qu’il y a dix ans, sauf pour les plus modestes (Insee Première No. 2128). INSEE. https:/​/​www.insee.fr/​fr/​statistiques/​9053584

Fraser, N. (1995). “From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a ‘post-socialist’ age.” New Left Review, I(212), 68–93. https:/​/​newleftreview.org/​issues/​i212/​articles/​nancy-​fraser-​from-​redistribution-​to-​recognition-​dilemmas-​of-​justice-​in-​a-​post-​socialist-​age

La France insoumise. (2026, October 4). Grande mobilisation étudiante et lycéenne mardi 6 octobre : Où manifester en France ? https:/​/​lafranceinsoumise.fr/​2026/​10/​04/​mobilisation-​6-​octobre-​lycee-​etu/​

Lecherbonnier, S. & Pommiers, E. (2026, October 5). “Why French high schoolers are protesting, and why their movement is already historic.” Le Monde. https:/​/​www.lemonde.fr/​en/​france/​article/​2026/​10/​05/​why-​french-​high-​schoolers-​are-​protesting-​and-​why-​their-​movement-​is-​already-​historic_6758257_7.html

Lynch, J. (2006). Age in the welfare state: The origins of social spending on pensioners, workers, and children. Cambridge University Press. https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1017/​CBO9780511606922

Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1979). https:/​/​www.upress.umn.edu/​9780816611737/​the-​postmodern-​condition/​

Mendoza Sandoval, L. & Portos, M. (2026). “‘We are not freeing Palestine, Palestine is freeing us’: Intellectuals and the anti-colonial framing of the Palestinian solidarity movement.” American Behavioral Scientist. Advance online publication. https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1177/​00027642261472333

Muxel, A. (2025, December 11). Les jeunes veulent-ils encore la démocratie ? Sciences Po CEVIPOF. https:/​/​www.sciencespo.fr/​cevipof/​fr/​actualites/​les-​jeunes-​veulent-​ils-​encore-​la-​democratie/​

OECD. (2025). Pensions at a glance 2025: OECD and G20 indicators. OECD Publishing. https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1787/​e40274c1-​en

Ryan, T. J. (2017). “No compromise: Political consequences of moralized attitudes.” American Journal of Political Science, 61(2), 409–423. https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1111/​ajps.12248

Salih, R., Zambelli, E., & Welchman, L. (2021). “‘From Standing Rock to Palestine, we are united’: Diaspora politics, decolonization and the intersectionality of struggles.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(7), 1135–1153. https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1080/​01419870.2020.1779948

Wuttke, A.; Gavras, K. & Schoen, H. (2022). “Have Europeans grown tired of democracy? New evidence from eighteen consolidated democracies, 1981–2018.” British Journal of Political Science, 52(1), 416–428. https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1017/​S0007123420000149

Zakaria, F. (1997). “The rise of illiberal democracy.” Foreign Affairs, 76(6), 22–43. https:/​/​doi.org/​10.2307/​20048274

Digital Propaganda.

The Nine Ps of Digital Populism as a Chameleonic Political Marketing Strategy

by CommentariesDigital-populismEditor’s ChoiceHome

In this commentary, Dr. Ana Filipa Joaquim develops a political-marketing framework for understanding the adaptive power of digital populism. Drawing on her book “The Age of Digital Populism,” she argues that populism’s “chameleonic” character lies in its ability to alter themes, leadership images, and audience appeals while preserving a recognizable antagonism between “the people” and their opponents. At the center of the analysis is a nine-P model—People, Polarization, Propaganda, Personification, Performance, Propagation, Precision, Permanence, and Participation—which connects symbolic positioning with the circulation and reproduction of political narratives. The framework highlights how adaptability, repetition, audience segmentation, leadership, and participation interact across digital environments, while distinguishing communicative visibility from persuasion, electoral success, and governing competence.

The book A Era do Populismo Digital: Como a Desinformação e a Propaganda Estão a Transformar a Política [The Age of Digital Populism: How Disinformation and Propaganda Are Transforming Politics] is currently available only in Portuguese and has not yet been published in an English-language edition.

By Ana Filipa Joaquim

Introduction

The conceptual diversity of populism research raises a question about how a politically recognizable phenomenon accommodates different ideological commitments and communicative environments. Drawing on The Age of Digital Populism – How Disinformation and Propaganda Are Transforming Politics, this article examines populism through an interdisciplinary political marketing perspective. Its argument is that populism’s chameleonic capacity allows themes, leadership images and audience appeals to change while sustaining a recognizable antagonistic relationship between the people and their opponents. 

The nine Ps model identifies the interconnected practices through which this adaptability becomes strategically meaningful: People, Polarization, Propaganda, Personification, Performance, Propagation, Precision, Permanence and Participation. The framework connects symbolic positioning with the circulation and reproduction of political narratives. It offers an interpretative contribution, with European illustrations, while distinguishing communicative visibility from persuasion, electoral success and governing competence.

Conceptual Disagreement and An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Populism occupies a central place in political debate without having acquired a single, universally accepted academic definition. Its frequent use as a term of political criticism compounds the problem: a label employed to discredit opponents can become detached from analytical criteria. In A era do populismo digital, this conceptual difficulty provides the starting point for examining the connections between political meaning, strategic communication and mobilization (Joaquim, 2026: 23–27).

The disagreement concerns the analytical status of populism as well as its defining features. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017) conceptualize it as a thin-centered ideology organized around a moral opposition between the people and the elite. Laclau (2007) approaches it through the discursive construction of a collective political subject and the articulation of demands. Moffitt (2016) foregrounds political style, embodiment and performance. Weyland’s (2017) political-strategic approach emphasizes personalistic leadership and its relationship with followers. These perspectives locate populism in different, sometimes competing, dimensions of political life.

Conceptual plurality does not mean that scholarship has failed to identify meaningful patterns. It indicates that ideological content, discourse, leadership and mediated performance cannot simply be treated as interchangeable objects. The question is how to examine their relationships without assuming that one perspective exhausts the phenomenon. Sorensen’s (2021) integration of ideology, performance and mediation supports the relevance of this broader communicative enquiry.

An exclusively classificatory debate can therefore be complemented by a question about strategic practice: how are social grievances translated into recognizable political offers, directed towards particular audiences and sustained through repeated interaction? Moving beyond a narrowly disciplinary reading of populism makes political marketing useful here. This broadens political analysis through attention to audience relationships, symbolic value and communication. It does not require abandoning ideological differences or treating citizens as equivalent to commercial consumers.

There is also an established basis for this connection. Winder and Tenscher (2012) examine populism as a political marketing technique concerned with communicative relationships, organization and mobilization. Lees-Marshment (2011) situates political marketing within strategic engagement with public expectations. The present argument draws these concerns together through the nine Ps model developed in Joaquim (2026). Conceptual disagreement alone does not establish that populism is marketing; the analytical justification lies in the strategic construction, differentiation and circulation of its political offer.

Chameleonic Adaptability as a Strategic Resource

Sign of the right-wing conservative political party Chega, led by André Ventura, in Faro, Portugal, March 16, 2023. Photo: Dreamstime.

The book explicitly identifies populism’s chameleonic nature as a source of political strength (Joaquim, 2026: 55). The metaphor describes adaptation with continuity. Populist actors can change the themes they priorities, the identities they invoke and the opponents they designate while retaining an antagonistic account of legitimate representation. Its flexibility concerns how the political division is expressed and made relevant within particular circumstances.

This interpretation is compatible with the thin-centered ideological approach. A limited ideological core can attach itself to different political projects, helping explain why populism is not confined to a single ideological family (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). It is also consistent with the book’s distinction between cultural, socioeconomic and anti-establishment configurations. These overlap in practice, allowing identity, material insecurity and institutional distrust to be combined in different proportions (Joaquim, 2026: 67–77).

The European illustrations clarify this flexibility without establishing a uniform strategy. The book discusses national identity in France’s Rassemblement National, or National Rally, and the combination of anti-corruption, cultural and socioeconomic appeals in Portugal’s Chega. The themes differ in emphasis, but both can be organized through a morally charged distinction between a deserving community and those represented as responsible for its predicament (Joaquim, 2026: 76–77, 111–113). These examples illustrate how national specificity shapes political communication.

From a marketing perspective, this adaptability involves the construction of perceived relevance. A political offer acquires value when it gives recognizable expression to grievances, offers belonging and identifies an apparently intelligible response. Positioning distinguishes that offer from established alternatives, while leadership and recurring symbols help maintain recognition. Changing an emphasis from insecurity to corruption need not dissolve the broader narrative if both are presented as consequences of an unresponsive or illegitimate establishment.

Adaptability does not imply the absence of ideology or unlimited freedom to change. As the book stresses, emotion reconfigures the experience of ideology rather than simply replacing it (Joaquim, 2026: 31–36). Historical conditions, institutional arrangements and existing political commitments shape the available appeals. The marketing perspective explains how these materials are organized in relationships with audiences; it cannot, by itself, explain every source of political dissatisfaction.

Chameleonic strength thus rests on a tension between variation and recognizability. Messages must respond to changing concerns while preserving enough continuity to sustain identification. The nine Ps make this relationship analytically accessible by connecting the definition of a political community with the practices through which its narrative is embodied, distributed and repeatedly renewed.

The Nine Ps as an Integrated Marketing Strategy

The model comprises People, Polarization, Propaganda, Personification, Performance, Propagation, Precision, Permanence and Participation. Developed in Chapter 15 of the book, these dimensions constitute an interpretative framework rather than a linear campaign sequence (Joaquim, 2026: 129–150). Their relevance derives from their interdependence. The preceding discussion of political marketing supplies the connection to segmentation, positioning, branding and the construction of symbolic value (Joaquim, 2026: 105–114). The nine Ps reorganize these concerns around the distinctive communicative practices of digital populism.

People identifies the collective subject in whose name the political project speaks. This is a discursively constructed community, endowed with moral legitimacy and boundaries of belonging. Its strategic importance lies in offering citizens a position within the narrative: their experiences become evidence of what has happened to the community. The political offer consequently combines proposed action with recognition. As different grievances gain prominence, the representation of the people can adjust without abandoning the claim to speak for a legitimate collective subject (Joaquim, 2026: 130–132).

Polarization gives that community an antagonistic relationship with its opponents. Differences become moralized, allowing political choices to be experienced as affirmations of identity. Within the model, this concerns a communicative practice of constructing conflict, not an independently measured level of polarization across society. Its strategic function is to distinguish the political offer through an intelligible attribution of responsibility. The relevant analytical question is how disagreement is transformed into a distinction between legitimate representatives and actors presented as undeserving of recognition (Joaquim, 2026: 132–134).

Propaganda organizes the problems through which antagonism acquires urgency. Selection, emphasis and dramatization can turn complex circumstances into emotionally charged interpretations. Entman’s (1993) account of framing clarifies the importance of defining problems and attributing responsibility. The book treats corruption, insecurity and immigration as recurrent themes through which this process operates. Propaganda may involve real grievances interpreted selectively; fabrication is not a necessary condition. Its place within the model is to connect attention with a politically consequential understanding of what is wrong and who should answer for it (Joaquim, 2026: 134–135).

André Ventura of the Chega party speaking during the plenary session of the Portuguese Parliament debating the government’s motion of confidence, March 11, 2025.

Personification concentrates the political offer in a recognizable leader. Image, biography and public conduct become resources through which a complex organization acquires an accessible identity. The book discusses André Ventura’s centrality to Chega as an illustration. The leader can provide continuity across changing themes because audiences recognize the person through whom the project is represented. Yet this concentration also creates dependency: damage to individual credibility can destabilize the wider narrative. Personification therefore combines an opportunity for identification with organizational vulnerability (Joaquim, 2026: 136–138).

Performance concerns how the narrative is enacted through gesture, tone, confrontation and staged proximity. Moffitt’s (2016) analysis of political style helps explain why the form of a political intervention matters to its reception. Informality or an emotionally intense appearance may support a perception of authenticity, even when carefully constructed. In this model, performance means communicative enactment, distinct from electoral results or governing effectiveness. Personification identifies the figure who embodies the offer; performance concerns the experience through which audiences encounter that figure and attach meaning to the message (Joaquim, 2026: 138–140).

Propagation concerns the circulation of messages across platforms, social networks and mediated encounters. Supporters, journalists and other intermediaries can extend the visibility of material beyond its original audience. Sharing also allows messages to be reinterpreted, so strategic circulation is not reducible to organizational control. The book relates propagation to the interaction between emotional engagement and platform visibility, while recognizing the role of informal networks. The dimension identifies how a political offer acquires communicative reach. That reach remains distinct from persuasion or evidence of electoral support (Joaquim, 2026: 140–142).

Precision describes the adjustment of content, tone and framing to particular audiences through segmentation and data use. This provides a direct connection between chameleonic adaptability and marketing practice: different concerns can be addressed through differentiated appeals within a recognizable narrative. Precision concerns the intended fit between a message and an audience; it does not certify targeting accuracy or imply that every campaign has equivalent technical capabilities. Its democratic significance lies partly in visibility, since citizens may encounter different political promises without being able to scrutinize the complete range of appeals (Joaquim, 2026: 142–144).

Permanence refers to sustained narrative presence through repeated themes, symbols and interpretations. The repetition need not be literal. Wording and format may change while preserving a familiar account of political responsibility. Research on illusory truth demonstrates that repetition can influence perceived truthfulness (Fazio et al., 2015), although this does not establish the effects of any particular campaign. Permanence gives the model a temporal dimension: recurring interpretations can become the frame through which subsequent events are understood. Its effectiveness remains conditional, since repetition can also generate saturation and fatigue (Joaquim, 2026: 144–146, 186).

Participation incorporates audiences into the reproduction of political meaning. Reactions, comments, shares and user-generated content can express belonging, extend circulation and supply visible signals of approval. It overlaps with propagation but identifies a distinct relationship: citizens contribute to the visibility and perceived legitimacy of the narrative. Their activity can also provide feedback that informs subsequent communication. Participation may broaden access to political expression while reinforcing homogeneous communities. Interaction counts therefore cannot be treated as measures of informed deliberation or representative public endorsement (Joaquim, 2026: 146–148).

Adaptation and Reinforcement Across the Nine Ps

The model’s interpretative value lies in the relationships among its dimensions. The construction of the people supplies a political identity, and polarization establishes the conflict within which that identity acquires significance. Propaganda selects problems that connect the conflict with recognizable experiences. Personification and performance give the offer an identifiable presence, while precision and propagation concern its adjustment and circulation. Permanence sustains recognition over time, and participation supplies further opportunities for amplification and renewal.

The connection between precision and permanence is particularly important to the chameleonic argument. Differentiated messages need not repeat identical language to sustain the same interpretation of political life. Appeals organized around corruption, economic insecurity or cultural threat can reproduce a common distinction between the community and those held responsible for its difficulties. Adaptation concerns the immediate appeal; continuity can reside in the underlying attribution of legitimacy and blame (Joaquim, 2026: 76–77, 142–146).

Participation helps connect this variation with visible social validation. When supporters share or reinterpret messages, they contribute to their persistence and can make them appear socially endorsed. Further interaction may then encourage additional circulation. This relationship explains why analyzing a single post, leader or engagement total captures only part of the communicative process. The framework directs attention to recurring connections among meaning, audience activity and visibility (Joaquim, 2026: 121–127, 146–148).

Such integration does not require a centrally controlled apparatus. Political organizations make strategic choices, but users and intermediaries can reproduce or modify messages autonomously. The book’s account of decentralized circulation prevents the marketing interpretation from becoming a claim that every manifestation results from deliberate planning. Strategy operates within an environment that political actors can influence without fully controlling.

Disinformation and the Limits of Communicative Success

Illustration: Shutterstock / Skorzewiak.

Disinformation can reinforce several dimensions of this strategy, connecting distorted claims with established grievances, recognizable leaders and repeated circulation. It is therefore examined across the relationships among the Ps. The distinction between deliberate deception and unintentional error remains necessary (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). Neither emotional intensity nor the use of marketing techniques is sufficient to classify a message as disinformation. Propaganda, deception and strategic distribution have related but analytically distinguishable functions (Joaquim, 2026: 95–118).

The explanatory limits are equally important. The framework synthesizes the book’s conceptual argument and illustrative European discussions; it does not present a new dataset or a comparative test of the nine dimensions. The available material does not establish the independent contribution of each P to persuasion or electoral outcomes. The analysis concerns strategic organization and plausible relationships among practices, with attention to their contextual conditions.

The book also identifies vulnerabilities associated with communicative success. Leadership dependence can turn personal credibility into organizational fragility; repetition can produce exhaustion; simplified promises can become difficult to sustain when confronted with governing responsibilities (Joaquim, 2026: 185–187). Chameleonic adaptability does not remove these tensions. A capacity to revise a message cannot be assumed to supply the institutional competence required to address the problem it describes.

Democratic assessment consequently extends beyond whether a strategy attracts attention. It concerns whose grievances acquire recognition, whose membership is denied, how differentiated appeals can be scrutinized and whether visible participation supports informed judgement. The book’s discussion of media literacy, platform transparency and political accountability addresses these connected concerns (Joaquim, 2026: 201–207). The analytical task is to understand how communication organizes influence while retaining criteria for evaluating its consequences.

Conclusion

The absence of a single academic conceptualization of populism creates a case for analytical dialogue across disciplines. Its chameleonic capacity makes political marketing particularly useful for examining how varied political contents are organized into recognizable offers of belonging and representation. The nine Ps specify the practices through which this organization acquires communicative form. Their contribution lies in connecting adaptation with continuity, and strategic intention with audience participation. Approached in this way, digital populism can be analyzed as a marketing strategy whose strength depends on sustaining identification across changing circumstances, while its effects remain contingent and its democratic consequences require scrutiny.

 

References

Entman, R. M. (1993). “Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm.” Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x

Fazio, L. K.; Brashier, N. M.; Payne, B. K. & Marsh, E. J. (2015). “Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), 993–1002. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000098

Joaquim, A. F. (2026). A era do populismo digital: Como a desinformação e a propaganda estão a transformar a política[The age of digital populism: How disinformation and propaganda are transforming politics]. Editora d’Ideias.

Laclau, E. (2007). On populist reason. Verso.

Lees-Marshment, J. (2011). The political marketing game. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299511

Moffitt, B. (2016). The global rise of populism: Performance, political style, and representation. Stanford University Press. https://www.sup.org/books/title?id=25175

Mudde, C., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780190234874.001.0001

Sorensen, L. (2021). Populist communication: Ideology, performance, mediation. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65756-7

Wardle, C. & Derakhshan, H. (2017). Information disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making (DGI(2017)09). Council of Europe. https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder/168076277c

Weyland, K. (2017). “Populism: A political-strategic approach.” In: C. Rovira Kaltwasser, P. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo, & P. Ostiguy (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of populism (pp. 48–72). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803560.013.2

Winder, G. & Tenscher, J. (2012). “Populism as political marketing technique.” In: J. Lees-Marshment (Ed.), Routledge handbook of political marketing (pp. 230–242). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203349908-28

Colorful LGBTQ+ rainbow stairs in Cihangir, Istanbul.

From ‘My Family Is Safe’ to Gendered Authoritarianism: Redrawing the Boundaries of Belonging in Turkey

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceGenderHomeHuman Rights

In this commentary, Dr. Hafza Girdap examines Turkey’s intensifying anti-gender politics through the interconnected concepts of gendered populism, gendered authoritarianism, and differentiated citizenship. Using the September 2026 “My Family Is Safe” crackdown as a focal point, she argues that family, morality, sexuality, childhood, and national belonging are increasingly mobilized to distinguish ‘legitimate citizens’ from threatening “Others.” Central to her framework is the proposition that “gendered populism” constructs and mobilizes the boundaries of legitimate belonging; “gendered authoritarianism” institutionalizes and enforces those boundaries; and the “established citizen” embodies the normative subject whom these processes simultaneously produce and claim to protect. The article situates contemporary anti-LGBTQ+ repression within a longer transformation of citizenship, political homophobia, and family-centered authoritarian governance in Turkey.

By Hafza Girdap

In September 2026, Turkish authorities launched a nationwide crackdown under the strikingly familial title “My Family Is Safe” (Ailem Güvende). According to the Turkish Minister of Justice, investigations encompassed 162 individuals, nine associations, and 13 businesses across 15 provinces. Police raids, arrests, searches, seizures, and restrictions on websites and social media accounts disproportionately affected LGBTQ+ organizations, activists, journalists, and spaces associated with queer communities. The authorities have framed the crackdowns through allegations including obscenity, prostitution, exposure of children to inappropriate content, and questionable financial relationships, while presenting the broader campaign as part of the state’s protection of children, families, and social order.

The prosecution of journalist Tuğba Tekerek makes the expanding boundaries particularly visible of this campaign. Tekerek was detained in connection with an article she had written two years ago for Kaos GL magazine/website about LGBTQ+ experiences surrounding elections in Georgia; she was subsequently arrested pending trial on suspicion of obscenity. The significance of these developments therefore extends beyond the immediate policing of sexuality. They raise a larger sociological question about how family, morality, gender, sexuality, childhood, and national belonging become politically interconnected categories through which ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ subjects are distinguished (Girdap, 2026).

It is important to note that the current campaign is not an isolated episode but a particularly visible manifestation of a longer transformation in the gendered politics of citizenship in Turkey. Well before the current anti-LGBTQ+ crackdown, women’s rights had increasingly been reframed through a family-centered policy discourse in which women were positioned predominantly through motherhood and wifehood; feminist organizations and LGBTQ+ identities were simultaneously subjected to delegitimizing discourses (Sarac et al, 2023). Following the failed coup attempt of July 2016, these processes intensified as women’s organizations were closed, women associated with political opposition were subjected to gender-specific forms of punishment, and women’s identities and familial relationships themselves became sites through which political repression could operate. Post-coup migration similarly demonstrates that state-led and state-sanctioned gendered violence increasingly targeted not only women but also people positioned outside dominant understandings of national belonging on the basis of gender and sexual identity, ethnicity, religion, and political affiliation.

The campaign surrounding the Istanbul Convention provides an especially important bridge between these earlier developments and the present moment. As I have previously argued, contemporary right-wing populism frequently makes gender and sexuality central to the production of political antagonism: the heteronormative family is elevated as the normative model of social organization, while reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ identities, and gender ideology are constructed as challenges to it. In Turkey, the government’s renaming of the Ministry of Women and Family as the Ministry of Family and Social Policy symbolically relocated women within the family, while political discourse increasingly presented motherhood, children, religion, and the traditional family as markers of legitimate gendered belonging. The subsequent representation of the Istanbul Convention as a threat to the family demonstrates how gender discourse can participate in constructing an antagonistic ‘Other’ while simultaneously legitimizing the consolidation of political authority.

I conceptualize this process as gendered populism operating through gendered authoritarianism (Girdap, 2026). Gender here is not merely another policy domain upon which authoritarian politics happens to act. Rather, it becomes one of the mechanisms through which political membership itself is imagined and regulated. Populist distinctions between the ‘legitimate people’ and ‘threatening Others’ acquire gendered, sexualized, familial, religious, and moral content. Authoritarian power can subsequently translate those distinctions into institutional practices through law, policing, prosecution, censorship, restrictions on civil society, and regulation of public visibility. The family consequently functions not simply as a private institution or conservative value but as a political technology of boundary-making: protecting the family simultaneously requires defining which families, gender performances, sexualities, bodies, relationships, and forms of public participation are recognizable as legitimate.

Drawing on the conception of gendered citizenship, Turkish citizenship has historically been organized through hegemonic masculinities and heteronormative requirements of belonging, while nationalism, militarism, religion, ethnicity, and gender intersect in producing differentiated access to social and political membership (Unlu, 2023). Turkishness, thus, is not merely a formal legal identity but an institutionalized regime of belonging in which gendered, racialized, ethnic, and religious hierarchies regulate who can inhabit the national subject without having their belonging questioned. This distinction between formal citizenship and substantive belonging is particularly important: minority women and LGBTQ+ individuals may be citizens in law while remaining positioned outside a narrower heteronormative conception of the socially legitimate Turkish citizen (Girdap, 2026).

I therefore employ the concept of the established citizen to capture this relationship between formal membership and normative belonging. The established citizen is not simply the person who possesses Turkish citizenship. Rather, it is the subject whose gender, sexuality, familial position, religion, ethnicity, political comportment, and relationship to dominant national narratives most readily conform to the historically shifting expectations of legitimate Turkishness. Importantly, this ideal is neither historically fixed nor produced exclusively by contemporary political Islam. Competing hegemonic masculinities, including modernist-secularist, Islamist, ultranationalist, and other political formations, have differed in their prescriptions while repeatedly making women’s bodies, appearance, sexuality, reproduction, and public participation sites upon which competing projects of nationhood are enacted (Özbay & Soybakis, 2020). Gendered authoritarianismtherefore does not invent gendered citizenship; it intensifies, reorganizes, and politically mobilizes its already existing boundaries.

Seen through this framework, the September 2026 crackdown poses a question considerably larger than whether the Turkish state is becoming more hostile toward LGBTQ+ people. It asks who can inhabit citizenship without having to continually establish their legitimacy. When family, morality, childhood, sexuality, national values, foreign influence, and public order converge within the same political vocabulary, the boundary between protecting an institution and policing a population becomes analytically crucial.

The current moment can therefore be read as an intensified stage in a longer process through which gendered populismidentifies the normative people, gendered authoritarianism disciplines those positioned beyond its boundaries, and the established citizen ideal supplies the gendered and moral architecture of belonging. Hence, rather than treating today’s crackdown as the beginning of a new politics, I ask what its vocabulary of family, morality, danger, and protection reveals about the gendered architecture of citizenship that made this politics possible in the first place.

Homophobic Populism, Populist Homophobia, and Anti-Gender Politics

Political homophobia is not merely hostility toward LGBTQ+ identities; it can function as a technology of political boundary-making through which the ‘legitimate people,’ the ‘threatening Other,’ and the moral boundaries of national belonging are constructed (Unal, 2024). Drawing on the concept of ontological security, Unal (2024) examines people’s need for a relatively stable sense of self, identity, continuity, and social world. Populist crisis discourse can generate ontological insecurity by presenting family, nation, morality, and culture as endangered. From the perspective developed here, this insight adds another dimension to the established citizen: the established citizen is not only the citizen who conforms to normative expectations but can also be constructed as the citizen who must be protected.

The contemporary mobilization against LGBTQ+ rights should be understood not as an isolated national political development but as part of a broader transnational anti-gender movement whose organizational strategies and discursive repertoires have developed through earlier anti-abortion campaigns (Kahlina et al., 2025; Ojeda et al., 2024). In this transformation, political struggles previously organized around opposition to abortion have increasingly expanded toward opposition to transgender rights, LGBTQ+ visibility, feminism, and what activists and political actors describe as gender ideology. Since the 2010s, populist leaders in diverse political contexts have adopted increasingly aggressive anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-feminist positions, often using gender and sexuality as politically mobilizing issues. While these strategies frequently seek alliances with conservative religious constituencies, their appeal is not limited to religious voters; anti-gender politics can also mobilize secular constituencies through broader narratives concerning family, children, morality, social stability, and national values (Corrales & Kiryk, 2022).

Homophobic populism, the strategic adoption of homo- and transphobic positions by populist political actors seeking electoral and political advantages, can create what amounts to a marriage of convenience among anti-pluralist populists, socially conservative secular actors, and conservative religious groups (Corrales & Kiryk, 2022). Populist politicians may promise socially conservative gender and sexuality policies in exchange for electoral support and, importantly, the political acquiescence of religious authorities toward other illiberal or anti-pluralist practices. Homophobic populism therefore operates simultaneously as an electoral strategy and a co-optation strategy. Gender and sexuality become useful not only for attracting socially conservative constituencies but also for constructing alliances that can facilitate broader challenges to political pluralism and democratic constraints.

A related but analytically distinct phenomenon is populist homophobia. Whereas homophobic populism describes political actors’ strategic deployment of homo- and transphobia, populist homophobia refers more specifically to the discursive mechanism through which anti-LGBTQ+ politics is translated into populist language (Corrales & Kiryk, 2022). Its central rhetorical mechanism is harm or victim inversion: groups that have historically experienced marginalization are reconstructed as powerful actors allegedly threatening the majority (Corrales & Kiryk, 2022). LGBTQ+ communities consequently cease to appear as minorities seeking equal rights and instead become represented as an intrusive or privileged elite whose demands are portrayed as radical, foreign, coercive, or dangerous to children, families, religion, and society.

This inversion is particularly important because it enables anti-gender politics to be articulated through the language of protection rather than exclusion. Opposition to LGBTQ+ rights can be presented not explicitly as hostility toward sexual and gender minorities but as the defense of apparently universal public goods: children, families, parental autonomy, religious freedom, morality, social stability, or even sustainable development. Within this discursive structure, the political subject is reorganized through a binary opposition: “ordinary people / families / children” versus “gender ideology / LGBTQ+ activists / foreign influence / threatening elites.”

Gender and sexuality thus become central terrains upon which the populist distinction between ‘a legitimate people’ and ‘an illegitimate Other’ is constructed. Unal (2024) similarly identifies the distinction between the ‘morally superior us’and the ‘morally corrupt them’ as central to populist constructions of ‘the people.’ ‘The Other’ is not merely different but is represented as threatening the homogeneous nation. Once positioned outside ‘the good people,’ such groups may become targets of stigmatization through discourse, policy, and legislation.

This framework also explains why cultural panic is politically consequential beyond LGBTQ+ rights themselves (Corrales & Kiryk, 2022). By representing gender and sexuality as existential threats to families and children, political actors can encourage voters to prioritize cultural and moral conflicts over material questions such as economic redistribution (Corrales & Kiryk, 2022). Anti-gender mobilization can therefore facilitate a broader political realignment in which disputes concerning sexuality become vehicles for constructing political identities, consolidating coalitions, and legitimizing anti-pluralist politics. The restriction of LGBTQ+ rights is consequently not necessarily the endpoint of homophobic populism; rather, attacks on gender and sexuality may function as an entry point through which broader restrictions on pluralism become politically acceptable.

These distinctions provide an important theoretical foundation for the gendered populism argument in this article that captures a broader process in which gender, sexuality, reproduction, and family are not peripheral themes within populist politics but constitutive mechanisms for defining ‘the people.’ The imagined legitimate citizen is produced relationally against subjects represented as violating normative gender, sexual, reproductive, familial, or moral expectations. Anti-gender discourse therefore does more than identify political enemies: it establishes normative boundaries around belonging.

Unal (2024) identifies three modalities through which political homophobia operated during Turkey’s 2023 election campaign: culturalist and nativist othering at the intersection of Islam and anti-genderism; the vilification of political opponents as “inner enemies”; and movement toward the legal and institutional incorporation of political homophobia. These modalities are particularly significant for understanding how anti-gender discourse can move from rhetorical boundary-making toward institutionalized forms of exclusion.

When this discursive politics becomes embedded in institutions, it intersects with what I conceptualize as gendered authoritarianism. The distinction is analytically important: gendered populism constructs and mobilizes the boundary; gendered authoritarianism institutionalizes and enforces it. The former identifies who supposedly threatens the family, children, morality, nation, or “the people”; the latter can translate those representations into law, policing, prosecution, censorship, surveillance, restrictions on organizations, and other mechanisms of state power. The relationship can therefore be conceptualized as:

If populist anti-gender politics establishes the heteronormative family as a symbolic representation of the legitimate social order, conformity to particular gendered and sexual norms can become intertwined with the conditions of legitimate national membership. Family is therefore not simply something the state claims to protect; it becomes a political template through which ‘the legitimate citizen’ is imagined.

Unal’s (2024) concept of the crisisification of policymaking further helps explain how this boundary-making can become institutionalized. Crisisification describes the transformation of policymaking around a continuing sense of urgency, exceptionality, and insecurity, through which crisis becomes normalized rather than treated as an exceptional condition. Within the framework proposed here, this process provides an important link between gendered populism and gendered authoritarianism: once gender and sexuality are constructed as existential threats to family, morality, and nation, extraordinary forms of state intervention can increasingly be presented as necessary acts of protection.

This framework allows the analysis of Turkey to move from contemporary anti-LGBTQ+ mobilization toward the deeper historical question at the center of this article: How have gender, sexuality, family, religion, ethnicity, and political loyalty historically structured the boundaries between the established citizen and those whose belonging remains conditional, contested, or punishable?

The political function of anti-gender populism is therefore not exhausted by the production of an LGBTQ+ ‘Other.’Through that ‘Other,’ the normative citizen is simultaneously produced. Political homophobia tells us not only who does not belong but also who the state imagines as properly belonging.

 

References

Corrales, Javier and Jacob Kiryk. (2022.) “Homophobic Populism.” In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.2080

Girdap, H. (2026). “Gendered authoritarianism, social death, and state violence in post-2016 Türkiye.” Journal for Humanitarian Conflict Resolution, 1(1).

Girdap, H. (2026). “Contextual racialisation of women in Turkey: Their response through embodied identification.” In: Shilan Fuad Hussain (Ed.), Women, power, and gender in the Middle East. Routledge.

Kahlina, K.; Ristivojevic, D. & Rudgren, H. (2025). “Transnational politics of anti-gender mobilizations.” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory, 28(1).

Ojeda, T.; Holzberg, B. & Holvikivi, A. (2024). “A transnational feminist approach to anti-gender politics.” In: A. Holvikivi, B. Holzberg, & T. Ojeda (Eds.), Transnational anti-gender politics: Feminist solidarity in times of global attacks (pp. 1–32). Palgrave Macmillan.

Özbay, C. & Soybakis, O. (2020). “Political masculinities: Gender, power, and change in Turkey.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 27(1), 27–50.

Sarac, B. N.; Girdap, H. & Hiemstra, N. (2023). “Gendered state violence and post-coup migration out of Turkey.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 99, 102796.

 Unlu, B. (2023). “The Turkishness contract and the formation of Turkishness.” In: F. M. Gocek & A. Alemdaroglu (Eds.), Kurds in Dark Times. Syracuse University Press.

The parliament (Riksdag) building in Stockholm.

The Pendulum Swings Back: Why the Sweden Democrats Lost Ground in Sweden’s 2026 Election

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHome

In this commentary, Associate Professor Anders Hellström examines why the Sweden Democrats emerged as one of the main losers of Sweden’s 2026 election after years of sustained growth and political influence. He identifies three factors: SD’s transformation from an anti-establishment challenger into part of the political establishment; growing resistance to increasingly restrictive immigration policies; and a mismatch between SD’s signature issues and voters’ wider priorities, particularly healthcare, education, and the economy. Assoc. Prof. Hellström also places the election within a broader debate about populism as democratic protest and the narrative foundations of representative politics. He argues that SD has successfully shaped dominant stories about integration, immigration, and Swedish identity, but that the 2026 result may indicate an opening for alternative political narratives as “the pendulum has swung back.”

By Anders Hellström*

When populists become the establishment, voters may seek new ways to protest the elite, as Sweden’s recent election suggests. The pendulum has swung back. This article outlines three reasons why the Sweden Democrats (SD) suffered electoral setbacks. It concludes by arguing that research needs to acknowledge the storytelling dimension of representative politics to open up space for progressive stories to be told in the future. What will be the dominant narrative in the years to come? But first, let us return to the election itself.

On 13 September, Sweden held local, regional, and national elections. At the national level, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s Tidö coalition faced an opposition led by the Social Democrats (S). The election resulted in a narrow victory for the center-left bloc. Among the opposition parties, the Social Democrats won 28.3% of the vote, followed by the Left Party (V) (8.4%), the Center Party (C) (7.0%), and the Green Party (MP) (6.1%) (see Table 1).

Three of the four Tidö coalition parties increased their vote share. The Moderate Party (M) rose to 19.9%, remaining the second-largest party, while the Christian Democrats (KD) and Liberals (L) increased to 6.2% and 5.2%, respectively. The main loser was the Sweden Democrats, whose support fell from 20.5% to 17.5% (see Table 1).

After all votes were counted, S leader Magdalena Andersson’s bloc secured 176 seats to the Tidö coalition’s 173. Over the past four years, the SD-backed government has tightened immigration policy, promoted repatriation, made temporary residence permits the norm, and introduced tougher criminal penalties. The Social Democrats did not consistently oppose these measures and have themselves embraced a more restrictive approach to immigration. Yet, despite this broad political consensus, the opposition won.

Why is it that the Sweden Democrats (SD) emerged as one of the election’s losers? I outline below three possible explanations.

1. From anti-establishment challenger to part of the establishment. After decades of rapid growth, often doubling its vote share from one election to the next, the Sweden Democrats’ momentum slowed in 2022 and turned into decline in 2026.

Initially, in the beginning of its parliamentary journey, the party was often portrayed as a devil in disguise of sorts, who concealed an extremely shady past under a fancy costume. Meanwhile, its elected representatives were sometimes ridiculed as political clowns (Hellström & Nilsson, 2010). They faced immense criticism in mainstream media and from the other mainstream political parties. Both the Moderates under Fredrik Reinfeldt and the Social Democrats under Mona Sahlin united in a show of repugnance against the Sweden Democrats, denying them any political influence and refusing to cooperate with them.

But times change.

As the Sweden Democrats have entered the political mainstream, they have sought to portray themselves as a responsible governing partner. Meanwhile, mainstream parties have moved closer to SD on immigration. M leader Ulf Kristersson has endorsed SD leader Jimmie Åkesson’s concerns about immigration, integration, and crime (Kristersson, 2026), while the Social Democrats also support lower immigration and stricter integration measures (Social Democratic Party, 2025).

As a result, political positions widely regarded as extreme a decade ago have become mainstream today. And when the extreme has become mainstream, young radicals are looking for even more extreme alternatives, as SD has become too moderate according to them.

2. Sweden’s immigration policy, which the SD actively promotes, has become too restrictive. Many voters, both natives and immigrants, now see Sweden’s immigration policy as too restrictive. When well-integrated immigrants face deportation, barriers to family reunification, uncalled-for surveillance of well-behaved immigrant voters, or demanding income requirements (ridiculously high), these policies may generate protest rather than public support. Can these protests be framed in populist terms? For some scholars, the answer is affirmative. In this regard, populism can be understood as a form of democratic protest (Abbott, 2007) rather than merely an anti-democratic force. To shed light on this issue, it helps to revisit Margaret Canovan.

Canovan (1999) identifies two faces of democratic politics: redemption and pragmatism. Democracy, understood as an ideal, embodies a redemptive vision through which citizens can collectively pursue and realize “the good society.” The pragmatic face, by contrast, is concerned with maintaining institutions capable of managing conflict and disagreement peacefully, without allowing political competition to become destructive. In its institutional form, this pragmatic dimension is reflected in arrangements such as free and fair elections, a multiparty system, and the rule of law. Representative politics, however, extends beyond politics-as-usual by also emphasizing redemptive impulses. In this reading, voters who feel that political developments have gone too far reject established politics (pragmatism) and instead support an alternative vision (redemption). Populism is not synonymous with the far right. It can also be understood as a democratic protest against a political system that, in the eyes of its critics, has become overly technocratic.

3. Sweden Democrats’ profile issues were not at the top of the political agenda. There was a clear mismatch between the Sweden Democrats’ priorities and those of the average voter. More broadly, no single issue dominated the election campaign. While some voters focused on climate change, others were concerned about their finances, healthcare, or education. Although society remained polarized, the SD’s agenda did not fully align with voters’ main concerns.

Some voters were protesting against climate change, while others were concerned about their personal finances or health. Even in a polarized political environment, it is fair to say that there was no perfect match between what average voters considered the most important issues and the priorities of the Sweden Democrats. According to the Swedish Television exit poll (SVT Nyheter, 2026), the three most important issues for voters in the 2026 election were healthcare, education, and the Swedish economy (ibid.). According to the same 2026 VALU exit poll, Sweden Democrats’ voters were primarily motivated by concerns about law and order, immigration, and integration (ibid.).

The Sweden Democrats have successfully built a consensus around their narrative of where Sweden is heading and what Swedish national identity is. This lies behind their policies and political rhetoric, at least up to now. I will end this article with two examples of when their narrative has established a consensus and achieved hegemony.

First, consider the failure of integration mantra. While many agree that integration has failed, few agree on what integration actually means. The SD offers a simple explanation: excessive immigration has weakened social cohesion and caused fragmentation. Yet this narrative is often one-sided. Immigrants now constitute more than one-fifth of Sweden’s population, and many have integrated successfully into Swedish society. But as long as the dominant (and only) narrative is that integration has failed, the SD stands to benefit.

A second example is the oft-repeated claim that Sweden must never return to 2015. Yet 2015 created opportunities for both regressive forces and progressive mobilization (Bevelander & Hellström, 2019). While many municipalities worried that immigration was stretching their capacity to the limit, civil society organizations, churches, and private citizens mobilized to help refugees by providing housing, language cafés, and other forms of support. These examples are seldom heard now.

Living with diversity in everyday life gives rise to social tensions in the population and between groups. Sweden has now elected a new parliament. Let us see what the new government will look like. Members of the Tidö government have packed their bags. Which narratives will the new government base its law proposals on? What will be the dominant story? Populism invites us to acknowledge the storytelling dimension of representative politics. It invites us, as researchers of populism, to expand beyond politics as usual. Since the pendulum has swung back, there is reason to hope that the story, Swedish case, will have a happy continuation.

(*) Anders Hellström is Associate Professor in Political Science. He is a senior lecturer in IMER at the Department of Global Political Studies and is connected to the Migration Research Institute MIM at Malmö University. He has published widely in the areas of populism, nationalism, the far right, racism, discourse theory, and the politics of migration and identity. He has published widely in academic journals, such as Government and Opposition, Journal of International Migration and Integration, and Ethnicities. His most recent article is “You Are Not a Racist, Right?”: Racism as a Political Activity, which examines the intersection between discourse and ideology in contemporary struggles over the meaning of racism.

 

References

Abbott, P. (2007). ‘“Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan”: Democratic Theory, Populism, and Philip Roth’s ‘American Trilogy’.” Canadian Review of American Studies, vol. 37, no. 3: 431–452.

Canovan, M. (1999). Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy. Political Studies, 47(1), 2-16. 

Hellström, A. and Nilsson, T. (2010). “‘We Are the Good Guys’: Ideological Positioning of the Nationalist Party Sverigedemokraterna in Contemporary Swedish Politics’.” Ethnicities, 10(1), pp. 55-76.

Kristersson, U. (2026). Statement by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Stockholm: Government Offices of Sweden.https://www.government.se/ (accessed: 15 September 2026).

Mudde, Cas. (2019). The Far Right Today. 

Social Democratic Party. (2025). Social Democrats Adopt New Program with Adjusted Immigration Policy. Available at: Sweden Herald. (accessed: 15 September 2026).

SVT Nyheter. (2026). Väljarnas viktigaste frågor. Publicerad 13 september 2026, uppdaterad 14 september 2026. Available at: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/valjarnas-viktigaste-fragor  (accessed: 15 September 2026)

Underground platinum and palladium mining operations and machinery in Johannesburg.

Green Colonialism or Green Sovereignty? Africa’s Critical Minerals and the Politics of the Energy Transition

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateForeign PolicyHome

Africa’s centrality to the global energy transition rests increasingly on its vast reserves of critical minerals, yet mineral abundance alone does not guarantee developmental sovereignty. Dr. Oludele Mayowa Solaja’s commentary argues that the key challenge is whether African states remain low-value extractive peripheries or convert geological advantage into industrial capacity, technological learning, regional value chains, ecological accountability, and democratic bargaining power. It develops the concept of transition sovereignty to capture the ability of resource-rich societies to shape extraction, processing, governance, knowledge, finance, and value distribution on their own terms. Rather than rejecting foreign investment, the article calls for strategic interdependence, stronger regionalism, and accountable institutions capable of ensuring that decarbonization produces not only cleaner technologies, but also more equitable and developmentally transformative outcomes for African societies.

By Dr. Oludele Mayowa Solaja

The global energy transition is frequently framed as a clean break from the extractive political economy of fossil fuels. But decarbonization technologies such as digital infrastructure, electricity grids, electric vehicles, batteries, and wind turbines rely on another extractive frontier—critical minerals. Strategic materials such as lithium, cobalt, copper, manganese, graphite, and rare earth elements are emerging as essential materials for a low-carbon economy. In Africa, this transition is dominated, yet its importance is underutilized: the continent provides substantial amounts of minerals needed by clean-technology industries. Still, it receives only a small share of the value (IEA, 2025). The big question is not whether Africa will provide the green transition, but what it will look like and whether African societies have the political, industrial, and technological capacity to define its terms.

This is different from green colonialism and what this commentary calls transition sovereignty. Green colonialism is not just the extraction of African minerals by foreign companies. It describes a larger political-economic trend that is creating a material geography of global decarbonization where the rents of processing, technological control, knowledge, finance, and supply chains lie disproportionately elsewhere, particularly in Africa. The language of the commodity shifts, from oil to coal, lithium to cobalt and copper—but so does the underlying asymmetry. The threat is not the exclusion of Africa from the green transition. It is that Africa will be represented on conditions that mirror its historical role as a low-value exporter of ecological wealth.

A new yardstick exists for measuring Africa’s involvement: transition sovereignty. It means the ability of resource-rich societies to decide on the extraction, processing, governance and distribution of transition minerals, as well as to develop their own and regional skills and expertise in industry, technology, knowledge, financing and ecological regulation. It’s less restrictive than state ownership and less strict than local content rules. A country has transition sovereignty if mineral wealth increases its bargaining power, builds productive capacity, benefits society, safeguards ecological and community interests, and lets African actors shape the organization of global green value chains. The issue is not only who owns the mine, but who decides and has the power to make the decisions and technologies that start underground and end up at the surface of the decarbonization technologies.

Beyond Resource Control: Building Productive and Technological Capacity

But Africa is starting to challenge the conditions of the transition. The African Union’s Green Minerals Strategy focuses on value addition at source, regional industrialization, climate resilience, and integrated value chains, rather than relying on raw mineral exports (African Union, 2025). National export controls also indicate a clear direction of travel. Since 2023, Africa has implemented at least 14 measures to limit the export of raw or semi-processed minerals, and in February 2026, Zimbabwe banned the export of all raw minerals and lithium concentrates to encourage in-country beneficiation and accountability (Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, 2026; Reuters, 2026a). Such measures cannot be idealized as definitions of sovereignty. They are better understood as efforts to renegotiate where value exits African economies.

Zimbabwe provides a revealing illustration of both the possibilities and limits of resource sovereignty. The action was directly tied to in-country value addition, accountability and beneficiation (Reuters, 2026a) in its February 2026 suspension of exports of raw minerals and lithium concentrates. This policy reflects a well-known model in which upstream mining companies in Africa export concentrates, and downstream processing and value-added manufacturing occur elsewhere. But restricting exports is just the first step. An export ban can generate ‘protected extraction without transformative industrialization’ without reliable electricity, transport, finance, processing technologies, skilled labor, industrial demand and credible institutions. The real question is: Does export restraint build productive capabilities, or does it merely shift rents at the mine gate?

Thus, the Zimbabwean example illustrates an overarching lesson in the theory of transition sovereignty: control of the commodity is not enough if it is not matched by control over the capabilities attached to it. Industrialization does not need to be confined within the national boundaries. It needs to develop, process, create, capitalize, and integrate mineral production resources into local economies. The IEA sees Africa’s opportunity in spreading the transition’s economic value across the global value chain, because its economic value is distributed unevenly along the chain (IEA, 2025). In this sense, sovereignty is not realized by stopping the extraction; it is realized by transforming a geological advantage into a sustainable productive capacity.

Knowledge Sovereignty and the Regionalization of Green Value Chains

Another aspect of the issue is related to knowledge sovereignty, as demonstrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In September 2026, the Congolese government stepped up its efforts to centralize geological information by creating a national geological databank, along with new aerial surveys and digital mapping. The goal is to strengthen state control, reduce the information imbalance, and boost the state’s negotiating leverage in mining deals (Reuters, 2026b). This is important because mineral sovereignty is also epistemic (knowledge-based). Information on the location, quality, access, and strategic value of deposits shapes investment, licensing, negotiation, and long-term planning. Formal ownership of mineral deposits can coexist with informational dependency, as long as geological intelligence, technical standards, and data infrastructures are externally dominated.

The DRC case also reminds us to see transition sovereignty beyond the state. If enhancing the bargaining power of government is to produce “public value,” “transparency” in contracts, “environmental accountability,” and “meaningful benefits” to “communities” and “workers,” then sovereignty is becoming “developmental.” It’s not just a matter of African States regaining control from foreign companies. It is the extent to which mineral control is institutionalized in institutions capable of making mineral governance socially accountable. Otherwise, the language of sovereignty can be used to justify a transfer of control from an outside entity to domestic elites, without changing who gets the benefits and who bears the costs.

The DRC-Zambia battery and electric-vehicle project provides a better regional prospect. Instead of treating copper and cobalt as a commodity that must leave the region before higher-value use can begin, the two nations have worked to develop a cross-border value-chain model that includes mineral processing, battery production, and industrial capabilities. The UN Economic Commission for Africa and other regional institutions have technically supported the activity. In 2025, measures were taken to strengthen engagement by firms, financial institutions, and other actors in the battery and electric-vehicle value chain. This is not limited to battery production. It shows how mineral-rich countries can be viewed as hubs of regional industrial coordination, not just sources of raw materials being bid for by foreign extractors.

Regionalism matters because many constraints to African benefaction are too great for individual states to overcome alone. Processing plants need stable energy, transport tie-ups, technical expertise, markets, capital, and volume. A regional strategy can then transform uncoordinated mineral resources into coordinated industrial systems. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) initiative on environmentally and socially responsible energy-transition mineral value chains also aims to keep mineral wealth within the region and encourage livelihoods and industrialization in several southern African nations (UNECA, 2026). This requires a multi-level understanding of transition sovereignty at the national, regional, and continental levels.

Strategic Interdependence: Partnerships on Whose Terms?

But the new mineral race reveals a more profound paradox. African minerals are now being talked about in terms of partnership, supply-chain security and strategic cooperation with powers, many of them global, who seek them out. The US, EU and China have legitimate reasons to acquire access to critical minerals. For instance, in September 2026, the US government announced its support for developing critical mineral processing in Kenya, including the proposed development of the Mrima Hill resource, while stressing the importance of local processing and value-added production (Reuters, 2026c). These partnerships could be real opportunities. Diversifying external partners is not sovereignty. African countries may expand the number of buyers of their products but not substantially alter the nature of their political economy if they switch from one big buyer to a few smaller ones and they still export their low-value resources.

That is why the question “with whom?” has to be asked alongside a deeper question: “with whom for?” or “with whom on whose terms?” Colonial elements in external capital, technology, and markets are not the same. The developmental consequences relate to bargaining power, institutional design, ownership structures, local linkages, environmental protection, and rent distribution. Hence, the target should not be autarky or opposition to foreign investment. Strategic interdependence means the ability to involve global partners without giving up control over the developmental paths of mineral societies.

From Mineral Abundance to Developmental Sovereignty

The politics of critical minerals also reveal the boundaries of a technologically driven view of decarbonization. A battery can have a range of emissions during its use, whereas its material components can include land dispossession, unsafe mining practices, water stress, labor exploitation, or ecological degradation. Thus, the environmental legality of green technologies cannot be judged solely by their carbon performance. This transition is likely to result in a “cleaner” global economy, but at the cost of African communities in the mining sector. The political feasibility of green development lies in jointly considering the costs of extraction and the benefits of decarbonization.

This will expand to include community and labor. Foreign ownership does not inevitably mean environmental damage, and state ownership does not necessarily mean that it is socially just. The key is whether the rights of people living and working around the mineral frontiers are meaningful and include access to information, voice, and benefits of extraction. Artisanal and small-scale miners are important in this context. Formalization cannot be used to criminalize informal miners; it should provide avenues to formalize their lives, safety, skills, and value addition. Otherwise, the switch could perpetuate the traditional scenario where people near the source of value bear the risk of extraction, while value is generated further up the chain.

The strategic question for Africa is then no longer whether to accept or reject the green transition, but rather how to do so. It’s a choice between engaging in it as an extractive periphery and as an industrial, technological, and political actor. The latter requires reliable and affordable energy, transport infrastructure, mineral-processing capacity, regional markets, skills, research and development, transparent contracts, accountable institutions, and effective protections for communities and workers. It also demands that governments differentiate between resource nationalism and transformation. National control may be a tool for development, but it is not development.

Decarbonization on Africa’s Terms

The green colonialism and transition sovereignty binary should thus be viewed as a spectrum of political-economic options. An African country can boost state bargaining power without excluding communities from the benefits; it can boost local processing but remain highly technology-dependent; or it can attract several foreign investors but keep exporting the bulk of the value contribution of its minerals. On the other hand, through mineral policy, a country can pursue regional industrialization, develop its own capacities and skills, improve ecological governance, and increase democratic involvement. The shift is therefore not necessarily green, just, sovereign, or developmental. Its character is being politically constructed.

This is therefore a both-and situation for the developing critical-mineral economy. Africa’s strategic position, which it could use to renegotiate its role in global geopolitics, will not create sovereignty if it is merely geologically abundant. The important question is whether mineral extraction becomes a basis for industrial potential, technological learning, fiscal independence, ecological responsibility, and democratic negotiating strength. The question is no longer just whether the world can decarbonize, but how. It’s about who has the power to decide, who receives the value created along the chain, who pays the environmental and social costs, and who controls the material foundations of decarbonization.

If Africa is the source of the mines, then others are the source of the manufacture, and the color of colonialism can vary without its political economy changing. The energy transition may be more than just a change in energy systems if Africa’s mineral wealth is translated into regional industrial capability, technological capability, ecological responsibility, and democratic bargaining power. It may be a chance to reimagine Africa’s economics in the international arena. This is the true measure of transition sovereignty—whether Africa provides the green transition or whether Africa can help regulate the transition.

 

References

Africa Center for Strategic Studies. (2026). Reciprocal and resilient mineral supply chains: Lessons from the Nacala Corridor. https://africacenter.org/spotlight/mineral-supply-chains-nacala-corridor/

African Union. (2025). Africa’s Green Minerals Strategy (AGMS). African Union Commission.https://au.int/sites/default/files/documents/44539-doc-AGMS_Final_doc.pdf

International Energy Agency. (2025). Stepping up the value chain in Africa. IEA, Paris.https://www.iea.org/reports/stepping-up-the-value-chain-in-africa

Reuters. (2026a, February 25). “Zimbabwe bans exports of all raw minerals and lithium concentrates, cites malpractices.” https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/zimbabwe-bans-exports-all-raw-minerals-lithium-concentrates-2026-02-25/

Reuters. (2026b, September 8). “Congo extends state control over mining with bid to lock down geological data.” https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/congo-extends-state-control-over-mining-with-bid-lock-down-geological-data-2026-09-08/

Reuters. (2026c, September 9). “US says it will help develop Kenya’s critical minerals processing.” https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/us-says-it-will-help-develop-kenyas-critical-minerals-processing-2026-09-09/

United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. (2024, April 15). “Zambia and DRC to implement an innovative transboundary battery and electric vehicle Special Economic Zone.” https://www.uneca.org/stories/zambia-and-drc-to-implement-an-innovative-transboundary-battery-and-electric-vehicle-special

United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. (2025, September 11). “ECA capacitates micro, small and medium enterprises in DRC and Zambia to tap battery and electric vehicle value chain opportunities.” https://www.uneca.org/stories/eca-capacitates-micro-small-and-medium-enterprises-in-drc-and-zambia-to-tap-battery-and

United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. (2026, June 2). “SADC launches landmark initiative to build sustainable energy transition mineral value chains.” https://www.uneca.org/stories/sadc-launches-landmark-initiative-to-build-sustainable-energy-transition-mineral-value

Tourists in Havana.

From Mobility Inequality to Populist Grievance: Passport Privilege, Travel Influencers, and the Politics of the Digital Tourist Gaze

by CommentariesDigital-populismEditor’s ChoiceHome

In this commentary, author Zeynep Temel examines how passport hierarchies and unequal mobility shape not only who can travel, but also who gains the authority to represent the world through digital tourism. Drawing on research on visa regimes, mobility infrastructure, the tourist gaze, and platform-mediated representation, she argues that passport privilege can become representational privilege. Travel influencers do not simply document destinations; they participate in constructing their meanings for global audiences. Yet access to this representational power is structured by nationality, class, wealth, and mobility rights. Temel further shows how such inequalities can feed broader grievances around globalization, exclusion, sovereignty, and dignity, creating discursive conditions in which populist narratives may resonate without claiming that mobility inequality itself directly causes populism.

By Zeynep Temel*

A striking map of the world has circulated repeatedly on social media. Produced by Sightsmap from geotagged photographs uploaded to Google’s former Panoramio service, it visualizes photographic activity as points of light. Europe glows. North America is heavily illuminated. Other parts of the world appear far more sparsely represented. In the ranking associated with the map, New York, Rome, and Barcelona occupied the first three positions among the world’s most photographed cities (Marcus, 2014; Swanson, 2015).

Author-generated visualization inspired by the historical geography represented in Sightsmap. Sightsmap combined crowdsourced digital traces, principally geotagged photographic metadata from Google’s former Panoramio service, with other sources to estimate the popularity of places of tourist interest. The visualization should be understood as an illustrative reconstruction of the unequal geography of visibility represented by this historical digital ecosystem, rather than as a reproduction of the original Sightsmap or a comprehensive measure of global photographic activity (Tammet et al., 2013).

The map is not a contemporary measure of Instagram or TikTok activity. Panoramio itself was discontinued, and the visualization reflects a particular platform, user population, and period of digital photography. It should therefore not be mistaken for a neutral map of where photographs are taken today. Yet this limitation arguably makes the image more interesting rather than less. As an early visualization of digital tourism, Sightsmap raises a question that has become considerably more important in the age of travel influencers: who gets to see the world; and, consequently, who gets to construct its image for everyone else?

Contemporary travel content often makes international mobility appear almost frictionless. Creators move from Bangkok to Paris, spend a weekend in Istanbul, “discover” villages in the Caucasus, or work remotely from Bali. Borders are rarely protagonists in these narratives. Travel appears primarily as a function of curiosity, money, and individual choice. But a British, German, or Japanese travel creator and an Afghan, Pakistani, Nigerian, or Syrian creator do not encounter the same world of borders. They may look at the same map, but the map does not offer them the same possibilities.

This matters beyond tourism. If travel influencers increasingly participate in constructing how destinations are imagined by audiences who may never visit them, unequal access to international mobility also produces unequal opportunities to participate in the production of the global tourist imaginary. Passport privilege can, in other words, become representational privilege.

The Unequal Geography of Global Mobility

The passport is one of the most consequential yet normalized mechanisms through which states distribute international mobility. Research on visa regimes shows that globalization has not produced a uniformly borderless world. Instead, borders have become more permeable for particular populations. Czaika, de Haas, and Villares-Varela (2018) demonstrate the persistent differentiation built into international visa regimes, while Mau and colleagues (2015) describe the resulting hierarchy as a “global mobility divide.”

For holders of powerful passports, this divide can remain almost invisible. International travel may require little advance planning beyond purchasing transportation and accommodation. For others, the same journey can involve consular appointments, proof of employment and income, bank statements, travel insurance, accommodation reservations, substantial fees, and uncertainty over whether permission will ultimately be granted. 

The costs of this system are themselves unequally distributed. Recchi, Deutschmann, and Gabrielli (2020) show that visa costs impose disproportionate burdens on travelers from poorer countries. Neumayer (2006) similarly demonstrates how visa restrictions allow states to regulate access to foreign spaces selectively rather than simply opening or closing borders to everyone equally.

Spijkerboer’s (2018) concept of a global “mobility infrastructure” is particularly useful here. International movement depends upon a network of laws, airports, consulates, transportation systems, technologies, financial resources, and administrative categories. This infrastructure enables some people to move quickly and predictably while making movement considerably more difficult for others.

A powerful passport therefore represents more than convenience. It is a form of mobility capital. And in the age of social media, mobility capital can become cultural capital.

Who Constructs the Tourist Gaze?

Urry’s (1990) classic concept of the “tourist gaze” challenged the idea that tourists simply encounter destinations as they are. What travelers consider beautiful, authentic, exotic, romantic, or worth photographing is shaped by representations they have encountered before travelling. The Sightsmap visualization offers an unusually literal illustration of this process. It does not simply tell us where tourists went; it records where a particular population of digitally connected travelers chose to photograph and geotag their surroundings. Research using geolocated tourism data has since demonstrated both the usefulness and the limitations of such digital traces: different platforms capture different tourist practices and populations, meaning that no single dataset can straightforwardly represent tourism itself (Salas-Olmedo et al., 2018).

Social media has nevertheless dramatically accelerated the circulation of the tourist gaze. Before visiting Cappadocia, travelers encounter thousands of images of hot-air balloons at sunrise. Bali appears through temples, beaches, rice terraces, and infinity pools. Paris is repeatedly condensed into a recognizable repertoire of balconies, cafés, streets, and monuments. Travelers subsequently reproduce many of those images themselves.

Instagram therefore does not simply document tourism. Research suggests that it participates in the co-creation of destination image: tourists, residents, tourism organizations, and influencers continuously produce and reproduce visual understandings of places (Iglesias-Sánchez et al., 2020). Influencers occupy an especially interesting position within this process. Their authority depends partly on the appearance of personal experience. Unlike conventional tourism advertising, influencer content often presents itself as an individual encounter with a destination: this is what I saw; this is what I discovered; this is what you should experience.

Yet these narratives necessarily involve selection. Landscapes are chosen, neighborhoods included or excluded, encounters edited, and experiences organized into coherent stories. Research examining influencer representations of destinations such as Iran demonstrates how social-media creators can reshape destination images by foregrounding particular dimensions of everyday life, hospitality, culture, and perceived authenticity. (Saeidi Motahar et al., 2021)

A constructivist perspective makes the significance of this process clearer. Destinations do not possess internationally shared meanings independently of representation. Their identities as “dangerous,” “romantic,” “authentic,” “undiscovered,” or “adventurous” are socially produced and stabilized through repeated narratives and images. Travel influencers increasingly participate in this meaning-making. The important question, then, is not simply what they show. It is who gets to travel enough to become an authoritative narrator of the world in the first place.

When Passport Privilege Becomes Representational Privilege

The connection does not require an assumption that Instagram or TikTok deliberately privileges particular nationalities. The mechanism is more mundane. Consider the conditions necessary to build a career around international travel. A creator able to enter dozens of countries without obtaining visas in advance can respond quickly to cheap flights, tourism-board invitations, brand collaborations, and emerging destinations. Travel can be frequent and spontaneous. Content can consequently be produced at the regular pace demanded by platform economies.

A creator requiring visas for many of those destinations faces a different production environment. Trips may need to be planned months ahead. Applications cost money. Passports may remain at consulates during processing. Bookings can be required before a visa decision is known. An application may simply be rejected. Mobility advantage can therefore become a content-production advantage.

Successful content generates followers and commercial opportunities; those opportunities finance further travel; further travel produces additional content. Passport privilege does not determine who succeeds as an influencer, and creators from the Global South are neither absent nor passive within digital tourism. Wealth, class, language, domestic mobility, and platform access further complicate any simple North–South division.

But nationality still structures the administrative conditions under which cross-border content can be produced. This is also why Said’s (1978) much older question of representational authority remains relevant. Orientalism was concerned not merely with whether Western descriptions of other societies were accurate, but with the unequal power to classify, describe, and produce knowledge about them. 

Digital tourism is obviously not equivalent to nineteenth-century Orientalism, and every outsider representation of another society should not be interpreted as domination. Yet the underlying questions remain surprisingly contemporary: Who moves? Who observes? Who narrates? And who appears primarily inside somebody else’s narrative?

From Unequal Mobility to Political Grievance

The political significance of this inequality lies partly in its visibility. Social media places radically different experiences of globalization on the same screen. One person documents spontaneous weekend trips across borders; another spends months assembling documents for permission to visit a single country. Research on passport discrimination suggests that mobility restrictions can be experienced not merely as administrative inconvenience but through questions of dignity, recognition, and unequal treatment. (Yasin et al., 2024)

It would be too strong to argue that these experiences produce populism. Visa rejection does not turn someone into a populist, and travel influencers do not cause nationalist politics. The relationship is more indirect. Populist narratives frequently acquire force by translating complicated structural inequalities into morally intelligible conflicts: ordinary people against privileged elites, the nation against external institutions, or those who are excluded against those perceived to benefit from globalization.

Mobility inequality provides unusually tangible material for such grievances because it exposes one of globalization’s central contradictions. The contemporary international order celebrates openness, connectivity, and circulation while continuing to distribute the practical freedom to move largely according to nationality.

Digital platforms make this contradiction particularly visible. Research on social-media populism has shown how online communication can transform perceived exclusion, foreign influence, and national grievance into politically resonant narratives (Ragragio, 2022). Mobility inequality can enter the same discursive environment, particularly where unequal treatment becomes interpreted through wider debates over Western privilege, sovereignty, globalization, or national dignity. Travel influencers do not create this inequality. They can, however, inadvertently become some of its most visible symbols.

The Politics Behind the Picture

This brings us back to the illuminated Sightsmap. Its brightest areas should not be read simply as a hierarchy of beautiful or interesting places. Nor can they straightforwardly be interpreted as a map of passport privilege: population, tourism infrastructure, platform adoption, wealth, connectivity, and the particular demographics of Panoramio users all shaped what became visible. But that is precisely the point. Maps of digital visibility are produced by social conditions. They do not simply mirror the world.

The same is true of contemporary travel influencing. Calls for greater diversity among travel creators are worthwhile, but representation cannot be separated from the conditions under which representation is produced. If some creators face substantially greater obstacles simply to reach destinations, the imbalance cannot be solved entirely through more inclusive influencer campaigns or changes in platform policy.

Part of the inequality exists before anyone opens Instagram. It exists in visa regimes, consular practices, passport hierarchies, income inequalities, transportation networks, and the broader infrastructure governing international movement.

A constructivist reading of travel influencing brings these elements together. Influencers do not merely reflect an already existing tourist world. Through repeated images, narratives, classifications, and recommendations, they participate in constructing that world; helping determine which destinations become desirable, which places appear dangerous or welcoming, and what counts as an “authentic” experience. But the opportunity to participate in this construction is itself structured by unequal mobility.

The digital tourist gaze therefore tells us something larger about globalization. The freedom to see the world and the power to represent it are not entirely separate privileges. Those who can cross borders most easily are particularly well positioned to narrate what lies on the other side. The question raised by that old map of illuminated photographs is therefore still worth asking: when the world becomes an image, who gets to take the picture?

 

(*) Zeynep Temel is a PhD candidate in International Political Economy at Marmara University, Istanbul, and is currently based in Shanghai conducting research for her doctoral dissertation. Her research interests span inequality, platform capitalism, popular culture, and gender, with a regional focus on East Asia. She works on how economic and political structures shape everyday practices, identities, and moral expectations, particularly through attention, consumption, and labor under contemporary capitalism.

 

References

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Iglesias-Sánchez, P. P.; Correia, M. B.; Jambrino-Maldonado, C. & de las Heras-Pedrosa, C. (2020). “Instagram as a co-creation space for tourist destination image-building: Algarve and Costa del Sol case studies.” Sustainability, 12(7), 2793. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12072793

Marcus, L. (2014, November 24). “The most photographed places in Europe.” Condé Nast Traveler.

Mau, S.; Gülzau, F.; Laube, L. & Zaun, N. (2015). “The global mobility divide: How visa policies have evolved over time.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41(8), 1192–1213. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1005007

Neumayer, E. (2006). “Unequal access to foreign spaces: How states use visa restrictions to regulate mobility in a globalized world.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31(1), 72–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2006.00194.x

Ragragio, J. L. D. (2022). “Facebook populism: Mediatized narratives of exclusionary nationalism in the Philippines.” Asian Journal of Communication, 32. https://doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2021.1993943

Recchi, E.; Deutschmann, E. & Gabrielli, L. (2020). “Assessing visa costs on a global scale.” SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3630141

Saeidi Motahar, P.; Tavakoli, R. & Mura, P. (2021). “Social media influencers’ visual framing of Iran on YouTube.” Tourism Recreation Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508281.2021.2014252

Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.

Salas-Olmedo, M. H.; García-Palomares, J. C. & Gutiérrez, J. (2018). “Tourists’ digital footprint in cities: Comparing big data sources.” Tourism Management, 66, 13–25.

Spijkerboer, T. (2018). “The global mobility infrastructure: Reconceptualising the externalisation of migration control.” European Journal of Migration and Law, 20(4), 452–469. https://doi.org/10.1163/15718166-12340038

Swanson, A. (2015, August 26). “The world’s most photographed places.” The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/26/the-worlds-most-photographed-places/

Tammet, T.; Luberg, A. & Järv, P. (2013). “Sightsmap: Crowd-sourced popularity of the world places.” In: Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2013 (pp. 314–325). Springer.

Urry, J. (1990). The tourist gaze: Leisure and travel in contemporary societies. Sage.

Yasin, R.; Ali, Ayesha; Namoco, Sarah. (2024). “Passport discrimination from the lens of critical phenomenological perspective.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSSP-04-2024-0169

A man counts money.

Stealing from the Future: Erdogan’s Medium-Term Program and Economic Populism for Electoral Survival

by CommentariesEconomicsEditor’s ChoiceHome

Professor Ibrahim Ozturk argues that Turkey’s 2027–2029 Medium-Term Program is less a credible development strategy than a politically sequenced exercise in economic populism. While promising lower inflation, faster growth, and technological upgrading, the program simultaneously expands current transfers, procurement, interest payments, and fiscal deficits while squeezing productive capital expenditure. Professor Ozturk contends that this structure reproduces a familiar electoral cycle: benefits are front-loaded, while the costs are deferred through inflation, taxation, debt, currency depreciation, and declining real wages. He further warns that Turkey is shifting from a developmental state toward a transfer state in which politically protected rents crowd out productivity-enhancing investment. The ultimate cost, he argues, is not merely fiscal instability but the erosion of Turkey’s long-term productive capacity and competitive advantage.

By Ibrahim Ozturk

Economic Populism: A Brief Conceptual Background

The classical paradigm of macroeconomic populism, articulated by Rüdiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards in The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America, describes a self-defeating political-economic cycle in which governments prioritize short-term growth and redistribution while discounting inflation, fiscal sustainability, productive capacity, and external constraints. These programs generally emerge in societies marked by deep socioeconomic inequality, declining trust in established institutions, and accumulated demands for redistribution. Governments respond by combining expansionary fiscal policies, rapid credit growth, substantial nominal wage increases, administered prices, subsidies, and attempts to suppress exchange-rate volatility. During the initial phase, the resulting demand shock can generate a temporary boom: capacity utilization rises, employment expands, real wages may initially improve, and politically visible consumption increases.

The apparent success of this first phase reinforces the government’s claim that conventional fiscal and monetary constraints can safely be disregarded. Yet the expansion does not necessarily increase productive capacity. When aggregate demand exceeds domestic supply, production bottlenecks intensify, imports rise, foreign-exchange requirements increase, and inflationary pressures accumulate. Attempts to suppress inflation through price controls, subsidized credit, fiscal transfers, or an overvalued exchange rate merely postpone—and often magnify—the eventual adjustment.

As foreign-exchange reserves decline and fiscal and external imbalances become increasingly difficult to finance, inflation accelerates, confidence deteriorates, capital moves abroad or into foreign currency, and the domestic currency depreciates. The government is ultimately forced to adopt stabilization measures involving tighter credit, higher interest rates, fiscal retrenchment, tax increases, and real-wage compression. The central paradox identified by Dornbusch and Edwards is therefore distributive: the social groups whom populist policies initially promise to protect frequently bear the heaviest burden of the subsequent crisis and adjustment.

A second strand of the literature explains why such policies remain politically attractive despite their recurrent economic costs. Acemoglu, Egorov, and Sonin argue that politicians may strategically adopt radical or economically costly positions to signal that they are not controlled by established elites. This signaling mechanism can make policy extremism electorally advantageous even when its longer-term economic consequences are damaging.

Dani Rodrik, in turn, emphasizes that globalization, technological disruption, regional inequalities, and distributional shocks generate genuine grievances that populist actors can mobilize. Populism therefore cannot be understood solely as manipulation from above. It also draws strength from real failures of representation, social protection, and economic inclusion. Once political leaders weaken institutional constraints and subordinate economic policy to electoral survival, however, legitimate grievances can become a mechanism for sustaining increasingly discretionary and unsustainable policies.

The conceptual distinction is crucial. Redistribution is not inherently populist, nor is every expansionary fiscal policy economically irresponsible. Redistribution becomes part of populist macroeconomic management when politically visible benefits are concentrated before an electoral deadline, their financing is concealed or deferred, productive and institutional constraints are disregarded, and the eventual adjustment is transferred to society through inflation, taxation, currency depreciation, public debt, unemployment, and declining real wages.

From the Classical Populist Cycle to Turkey’s Growth-Inflation Trap

Turkey’s recent experience does not reproduce every element of the classical Latin American model mechanically. It nevertheless displays several of its central political-economic mechanisms: the subordination of monetary policy to political objectives, credit-led demand expansion, the erosion of central bank credibility, extensive reliance on administrative interventions, the depletion of foreign-exchange buffers, and the postponement of adjustment until after politically critical moments.

Figure 1 places Turkey’s real GDP growth and officially reported year-end consumer-price inflation side by side. Between 2018 and 2025, inflation rose dramatically without a corresponding durable acceleration in real economic growth. The exceptional growth recorded in 2021 largely reflected the post-pandemic recovery, strong credit expansion via artificially subsidized negative real interest rates, and favorable base effects; it should not be interpreted as evidence that higher inflation generated structurally stronger growth.

2018–2025 growth figures of Turkish economy.
Note: 2018–2025 growth figures are annual changes in real GDP, and inflation figures are December year-on-year CPI rates. For 2026, the figure uses Q2 year-on-year GDP growth and June year-on-year CPI inflation. The correlation is descriptive and does not imply causality. Source: Author’s compilation based on TurkStat and CBRT data.

The simple contemporaneous correlation between the two variables is positive but only moderate—approximately 0.44—and does not establish causality. More importantly, the temporal pattern reveals a widening divergence between nominal instability and real economic performance. Inflation exceeded 64 percent in 2022 and 2023, while real GDP growth remained close to 5 percent. As officially reported inflation subsequently declined, growth also weakened, reaching 2.3 percent year on year in the second quarter of 2026.

The central issue is therefore not whether inflation and growth occasionally move in the same direction, but whether inflationary expansion produces sustainable improvements in productivity, investment quality, technological capacity, employment, and household welfare. Turkey’s experience provides little evidence that it does. An inflationary growth strategy can temporarily support consumption, construction, government-directed investment, and politically connected sectors without generating comparable improvements in total factor productivity or long-term supply capacity. Measured GDP growth may consequently coexist with deteriorating income distribution, declining purchasing power, inefficient capital allocation, and eroding institutional credibility.

Turkey’s 2027–2029 Medium-Term Program (MTP) should be read through this conceptual and empirical lens. Although presented as a medium-term framework, its macroeconomic targets, expenditure composition, revenue assumptions, and sequencing of policy measures reveal a considerably shorter political horizon. The central question is whether the program constitutes a credible transition towards price stability, productive investment, institutional normalization, and distributive justice—or another attempt to defer structural adjustment while protecting Erdogan’s immediate political survival.

The Three Tests of an Economic Program

Every serious economic program must answer three elementary questions. First, how will the economy produce more and better goods and services? Second, how will scarce capital, labor, public revenue and foreign exchange be allocated to their most productive uses? Third, how will the resulting national income be distributed across households, firms, regions and generations? Growth, allocation and distribution are not separate chapters. They are a single system.

Analytical Frame: What the MTP Must Demonstrate

 

Judged by this triad, the MTP fails at a deeper level than forecast inconsistency. It subordinates production to demand management, efficiency to politically protected transfers, and distributional justice to a sequence in which organized beneficiaries receive secure returns while the wider public absorbs inflation, taxation and deteriorating public services.

A Program Without an Institutional Kitchen

The MTP reads less like the output of an autonomous professional planning process than a document assembled backward from a political requirement. The targets appear first; the behavioral mechanisms, policy instruments, implementation responsibilities, risk scenarios and trade-offs needed to make them mutually consistent are either missing or underdeveloped. This is what a program produced under political pressure looks like: arithmetic without architecture.

That weakness is inseparable from institutional history. The State Planning Organization (SPO), which accumulated specialized staff, sectoral memory and a culture of medium-term coordination, was abolished as a distinct organization in 2011 and transferred into the Ministry of Development. In 2018, the Presidency reorganized planning and budgeting functions under the Strategy and Budget Presidency. Formal responsibilities remained, but the center of gravity shifted from relatively autonomous technocratic coordination to a vertically controlled executive structure. The 2018 Presidential Decree establishing the Strategy and Budget Presidency documents these institutional changes. The analytical conclusion follows from the MTP itself: when autonomy, professional challenge, and collective deliberation are weakened, implausible assumptions are less likely to be questioned before publication. The issue is not the personal competence of every civil servant involved. It is the institutional environment in which competence can no longer constrain politics. Merit, teamwork and professional dissent cannot correct a program when the desired electoral conclusion is fixed in advance.

A Medium-term Program with a Short-term Political Horizon

The MTP projects faster growth, lower inflation, falling unemployment, a smaller current-account deficit and—after a temporary 2027 deterioration—a lower budget deficit. None of these outcomes is impossible in isolation. Their simultaneous delivery, however, requires a major productivity shock, stronger expectations, sustained capital inflows and unusually high policy credibility. The MTP states the destination more clearly than the transmission mechanism.

The Fiscal Fingerprint of an Early Election

The program’s political character is clearest in the 2027 budget. Expenditure rises faster than revenue; the budget deficit increases by almost 47 percent; and the already modest primary surplus is nearly halved. The MTP therefore does not begin its disinflation story with fiscal restraint. It begins with fiscal expansion.

The deficit-to-GDP ratio rises from 3.1 percent in 2026 to 3.5 percent in 2027, while the primary surplus almost disappears. In other words, the fiscal stance loosens just as the MTP claims inflation expectations will be decisively anchored.

Against the MTP’s roughly 25 percent 2027 deflator, current transfers rise by about 16 percent in real terms and purchases of goods and services by roughly 15.5 percent, while capital spending falls by about 17 percent in real terms. The contradiction is not rhetorical; it is embedded in the allocation. The MTP’s narrative promises technological upgrading; its budget finances current transfers, procurement and interest.

The 2023 Cycle Is Being Reconstructed

Turkey’s 2023 election cycle combined subsidized credit, public wage and pension increases, retirement arrangements, tax restructuring, energy support and extensive foreign-exchange and credit interventions. After the election came sharp depreciation, higher indirect taxes, tighter monetary policy and declining real purchasing power. The sequencing mattered: the benefit was immediate and politically visible; the correction was delayed and socially dispersed.

The MTP’s 2027–2029 path risks reconstructing the same political technology. The 2027 expansion supplies the distributive moment; the lower deficits and inflation promised for 2028–2029 imply the later correction. This is the classic time structure described by the economic-populism literature.

Distribution: Poverty Is Not a Footnote

The MTP discusses per-capita income and social policy, but aggregate averages conceal the depth of the subsistence crisis. Labor union TURK-IS calculated the August 2026 monthly food-only hunger threshold for a four-person household at TRY 37,388 and the broader poverty threshold at TRY 121,786; the estimated living cost of a single employee was TRY 48,305. These benchmarks show how far ordinary labor income has fallen behind the cost of basic reproduction.

The comparison permits a forceful but precise conclusion: the average household income of the poorest 40 percent is below the TURK-IS hunger threshold, while the average income of the bottom 80 percent is below its poverty threshold. This does not mean every household in those quintiles falls below the relevant line; the figures are quintile averages, and the TURK-IS thresholds refer to a four-person household. (See TURK-IS, August 2026 Hunger and Poverty Threshold. TUIK’s official relative-poverty rate—13.0 percent in 2025—uses an equivalized median-income methodology and therefore answers a different question. The two measures should not be conflated).

The methodological caution does not weaken the substantive conclusion. When the minimum wage is below a food-only threshold for a representative family, and the broader basic-needs budget is multiples of ordinary earnings, distributional stress is systemic. The MTP’s reliance on indirect taxation, inflationary erosion, and delayed adjustment means that lower- and middle-income households finance a disproportionate share of the program.

Economic populism does not correct this injustice. It temporarily compensates selected groups, then recreates poverty through inflation, currency depreciation, taxation, and compressed real wages. It distributes relief politically and distributes the bill socially.

Tax More, Privatize More, Borrow More

The revenue side does not solve the contradiction; it exposes it. In 2027, tax revenue is programmed to grow by 36.5 percent, faster than nominal GDP growth of about 30.3 percent. Tax revenue rises from 17.1 to 17.9 percent of GDP, while the total tax burden, including social-security contributions, moves from 24.3 percent in 2026 to 24.8 percent in 2027 and 25.1 percent by 2029. The MTP therefore couples visible expenditure with a rising social tax burden.

Privatization revenue jumps by roughly 70 percent in 2027, yet the MTP does not identify the assets, valuation logic or economic rationale behind that acceleration. Even if fully realized, the proceeds would finance less than 5 percent of the projected budget deficit. This is not a structural revenue strategy; it is a temporary financing device. Tax more, sell more and borrow more—then channel the proceeds into current expenditure, interest and guaranteed returns.

From a Developmental State to a Transfer State: Interest as Upward Redistribution

The MTP projects approximately TRY 13.9 trillion in cumulative interest payments during 2027–2029, against only about TRY 7.1 trillion in capital expenditure. In 2027 alone, interest is 2.15 times capital spending and close to 20 percent of tax revenue. At TRY 3.98 trillion, interest expenditure even exceeds the projected TRY 3.87 trillion budget deficit.

Interest is not merely a technical cost of debt. Under these conditions, it becomes a distributional mechanism: broad-based taxation and inflation-generated fiscal revenue are transformed into secured financial returns. Resources that could support education, research, technological upgrading, industrial capability and social resilience are transferred to holders of public debt.

Guaranteed Rent Capitalism

A second transfer channel lies outside the interest line: public–private partnership guarantees. For 2026, approximately TRY 136.1 billion was discussed for rent and service payments to 18 city hospitals, while about TRY 101.3 billion was allocated for bridge, motorway and tunnel guarantees. Together, these visible channels approach TRY 237.5 billion. Parliamentary budget proceedings on city hospitals and reporting on transport guarantees illustrate how these obligations are dispersed across rents, availability payments, services, traffic or revenue guarantees and exchange-rate adjustments. The problem is not the Public–Private Partnership (PPP) instrument in principle. It is the allocation of demand and currency risk to the state, the protection of corporate revenue over long horizons, and the limited transparency of effective returns and renegotiation terms. Profit is privatized while risk is socialized.

The MTP repeatedly invokes artificial intelligence, semiconductors, digitalization, green transformation and high-value-added exports. Yet its budget composition crowds out the very capital formation needed to make those ambitions credible. The state’s function shifts: its developmental and social capacities weaken, while its tax-collecting, interest-paying and guarantee-providing roles expand.

This changes incentives throughout the economy. Firms gain more by securing public contracts, guarantees and regulatory privilege than by building capabilities, raising productivity or competing internationally. Connections and rents displace innovation and competitive advantage.

Production: Growth Without Upgrading

The MTP treats a rising GDP growth path as evidence of development. But growth generated by public consumption, protected construction, credit expansion and imported inputs is not equivalent to a durable increase in productive capacity. The relevant question is not only how fast output grows, but what is produced, with which technology, at what import content, and with what learning effect.

The OECD Economic Survey of Türkiye 2025 concludes that future convergence must increasingly come from productivity because the demographic dividend is fading and investment is already high. Yet productivity has slowed, investment has flowed disproportionately into lower-productivity areas such as housing, and intellectual-property investment has been roughly half the European share. High-technology exports have remained around 3.5 percent of manufactured exports, far below comparable upper-middle-income economies.

This is precisely why the MTP’s expenditure composition is so damaging. A country that needs skills, research, digital diffusion and export sophistication cannot treat capital spending as the residual item after interest, transfers and procurement. The program may raise measured demand in 2027 while lowering the economy’s ability to generate non-inflationary supply thereafter.

Allocation: The Destruction of Efficiency

Resource allocation is the bridge between today’s spending and tomorrow’s productive frontier. An efficient system directs finance, land, public procurement, skills and foreign exchange toward firms and sectors capable of learning, innovating and competing. A rent-based system directs them toward political access, guarantees, sheltered markets and balance-sheet protection.

The MTP deepens the second pattern. Interest payments reward the holders of financial claims; public–private partnership guarantees protect selected corporate cash flows; current transfers and procurement grow rapidly; and capital expenditure is squeezed in real terms. The result is not merely waste in a static accounting sense. It is dynamic misallocation: productive firms face high financing costs and uncertainty while politically connected activities enjoy protected returns.

The OECD’s assessment reinforces this diagnosis: productivity is impaired by skill mismatch, barriers to business dynamism, state intervention and weak competition in network sectors. It estimates that pro-competition reforms in infrastructure-dependent sectors could materially raise firm-level productivity (See the OECD’s competitiveness and innovation chapter.) The deepest cost is not this year’s deficit. It is the competitive capability that Turkey fails to build.

Economic Populism as a Strategy of Regime Reproduction

The political logic extends beyond ordinary electoral opportunism. Erdogan needs a renewed coalition, a favorable parliamentary balance and a constitutional or electoral route to reproduce the regime. Article 116 of the Constitution provides that if parliament renews elections during the president’s second term, the incumbent may stand once more. This provision does not prove a 2027 election, but it makes the concentration of fiscal expansion in 2027 politically significant. See the official English text of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey. The MTP’s timing fits a strategy in which benefits are immediate and attributable, while costs are postponed, fragmented, and depoliticized.

Gambling with Turkey’s Future

The central problem is not that Turkey lacks resources. The program simultaneously damages all three foundations of the economy. It produces growth without sufficient productive upgrading; it allocates capital away from its highest social return; and it distributes income and adjustment costs in favor of organized financial and politically protected interests.

The immediate casualty is distributive justice. The medium-term casualty is fiscal and macroeconomic sustainability. The longest-lasting casualty, however, is competitive advantage. Inflation can eventually be reduced, and a budget can eventually be tightened. Capabilities not built, skilled people lost, firms excluded from finance, technologies not absorbed and export markets surrendered are far harder to recover.

In that sense, the MTP is less a medium-term development program than an intertemporal political bargain drafted inside a weakened institutional order. The Erdogan regime borrows from Turkey’s future to purchase support in its present. It sacrifices not only fairness in distribution, but efficiency in resource allocation and sustainability in production. The recovery can be staged; the underlying model cannot be sustained. The election comes in 2027. The taxes, inflation, debt and lost development arrive in 2028.

AfD posters.

How to Explain the AfD’s Victory in Eastern Germany

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeMigration

Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the AfD’s strength in Eastern Germany cannot be explained by poverty alone. Instead, its rise reflects the interaction of nativist attitudes, political alienation, territorial decline, demographic shrinkage, and the enduring memory of post-reunification disruption. The AfD’s political success lies in converting disparate grievances—over immigration, economic insecurity, public services, identity, and distant decision-making—into a unified anti-elite narrative. Dr. Dias stresses that the Brandmauer may remain necessary as an institutional safeguard, but it is insufficient as a political strategy. A durable democratic response, he argues, must address material insecurity, regional neglect, state capacity, immigration, and recognition while offering citizens a credible sense of belonging and a recognizable future.

By João Ferreira Dias

Some election results change governments. Others force a country to reconsider the story it tells about itself. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt belongs to the second category. When a radical-right party comes close to winning half the electorate in a German state, it is no longer enough to speak of a “protest vote.” The question becomes a different one: how did the AfD manage, in parts of Eastern Germany, to become a socially rooted and electorally dominant political force?

The easy answer would be poverty. It is also, to a large extent, the wrong answer. The available research shows that attitudes towards immigration, national identity and political elites explain support for the AfD far better than individual economic deprivation does (Hansen & Olsen, 2024; Kailitz & Rippl, 2026; Schröder et al., 2026). But this does not mean that economics, place and abandonment are irrelevant. It points instead to something more interesting: what matters is less absolute poverty than the experience of loss — or what might be called the “fear of falling”: the loss of status, population, opportunity, recognition and control over the future. Such experiences can produce political alienation. It is the AfD, however, that supplies the nativist and anti-establishment language capable of giving that alienation meaning.

To understand this mechanism, we need to begin before the AfD itself. After 1990, Eastern Germany underwent an economic and social transformation of extraordinary intensity. Reunification was unquestionably an act of political liberation, but it also meant the disappearance of companies, careers, professional hierarchies and institutions that had structured the daily lives of millions of people. Steffen Mau describes this process in terms of status demotion, the transfer of elites, demographic transformation and the loss of biographical security (Mau, 2019). It was not simply that some people lost their jobs. For many, an entire social world suddenly lost its value.

When Economic Loss Becomes Political Memory

There is now evidence that these experiences left lasting political consequences. Kellermann (2024), studying workers affected by the privatizations carried out by the Treuhandanstalt, found lower levels of trust and greater detachment from institutions and established parties decades later. This does not mean that the Treuhand “caused” the AfD. It means that an economic experience can become a political memory when the loss is attributed to decisions made by distant institutions. There is a difference between thinking, “my job disappeared,” and thinking “they decided that the world I belonged to no longer had value.

That experience also acquired a concrete geography. Since reunification, Saxony-Anhalt has lost roughly a quarter of its population. Depopulation on this scale does not simply mean fewer inhabitants. It means young people leaving, schools with fewer pupils, shops closing, services becoming harder to sustain and communities growing progressively older. Höhne, Kölzer and Träger (2025), analyzing more than 1,400 municipalities in Eastern Germany, found a robust relationship between long-term population decline and support for the AfD. The most important finding, however, is that the same pattern does not appear with equal strength in support for the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. Territorial decline, then, does not determine political choice; it creates conditions that a party may or may not be able to mobilize.

It is in this sense that Andrés Rodríguez-Pose (2018) speaks of “the revenge of the places that don’t matter.” The problem is not simply that such places are poor. It is the feeling of living in a territory from which the future has withdrawn. A region may be materially far richer than it was thirty years ago and, at the same time, feel that it has lost relevance. Universities expand elsewhere. The most prestigious jobs appear somewhere else. Young people leave. Decision-makers live far away. The country can prosper in aggregate while particular communities see, above all, what is disappearing. Inequality then ceases to exist only between individuals; it begins to exist between places.

From Collective Disadvantage to Populist Mobilization

This is where the economic explanation meets the cultural one. Recent research is quite clear on two points that have to be held together. First, nativist, anti-immigration and anti-elite attitudes are genuine political drivers of the AfD vote; they should not be reduced to some form of economic false consciousness (Hansen & Olsen, 2024; Schröder et al., 2026). Second, political alienation and feelings of collective disadvantage are particularly strong in the East and help explain why such attitudes find more fertile ground there (Kailitz & Rippl, 2026; Pickel & Pickel, 2026). Kailitz and Rippl put it especially well: the seeds are not necessarily different; the soil is more fertile.

This is how the false choice between “economics” and “culture” can be resolved. A closed factory does not automatically produce xenophobia. A distant hospital does not produce nationalism. But accumulated experiences of loss, distance and inadequate recognition can nourish the sense that institutions no longer represent “people like us.” At that point, a populist narrative becomes more plausible: there is a forgotten people, and there are elites who govern for others. That is precisely the narrative the AfD learned to build.

The party founded in 2013 did not begin with the ideological configuration we know today. It emerged above all from the euro crisis, with a Eurosceptic, conservative and economically liberal profile. Between 2015 and 2017, however, immigration, refugees, Islam and national identity shifted the party’s center of gravity, bringing it closer to what Cas Mudde defines as the populist radical right: a combination of nativism, authoritarianism and populism (Arzheimer & Berning, 2019; Mudde, 2007). The euro crisis created the organization; the refugee crisis turned it into a mass political force.

Since then, the AfD has shown an extraordinary capacity to adapt. Hansen and Olsen (2024) describe it as a populist issue entrepreneur: a party able to retain ownership of the issues on which it already enjoys an advantage — above all immigration — while continually absorbing new conflicts. The euro, refugees, the pandemic, climate, energy, gender, Ukraine and the politics of memory are very different issues. The AfD manages to present them as manifestations of the same problem. That is its central political talent.

The Brandmauer Paradox and the AfD’s Anti-Elite Narrative

A railway station that closes is a transport problem. A factory that shuts down belongs to economics. Immigration is migration policy. The war in Ukraine is foreign policy. Gender belongs to the culture wars. The AfD turns all of them into a single story: the elites in Berlin and Brussels have stopped governing in the name of ordinary people. The issues change. The culprit remains the same.

Immigration occupies a central place in this narrative because it functions both as a real political issue and as a symbolic condensation of several anxieties. It can be connected to security, housing, schools, the welfare state, Islam, borders and identity. In a territory that has already experienced profound transformations decided in distant centers of power, it can also be presented as yet another change carried out “without us.” The interpretation does not need to be empirically accurate in order to be politically effective. Populism often succeeds not because it explains each problem better, but because it connects different problems within a single moral explanation.

This is also why it is no longer sufficient to speak simply of a “protest vote.” Mudde (2019) draws attention to the contemporary normalization of the radical right: ideas that once existed on the political margins gradually enter everyday politics. The Eastern German case adds a troubling generational dimension. Heinze and Scheuer (2026) find among young AfD voters not merely volatility or rebellion, but relatively stable partisan identification, closely associated with nativism. These young people did not experience the GDR, the Treuhand or reunification. Historical experience is no longer only biographical memory. It has become, at least in part, a political inheritance.

This is where the dilemma of the Brandmauer emerges: the firewall through which Germany’s mainstream parties refuse to govern with the AfD. There are powerful democratic reasons for maintaining it. Winning elections does not give any party the right to weaken fundamental rights, pluralism, or institutional independence. But an obvious political problem arises when the excluded force comes close to winning half the vote: the more all the other parties have to cooperate in order to keep it out of power, the easier it becomes for the AfD to say that “they are all the same” and that it alone represents a genuine alternative.

Why the Brandmauer Is Necessary but Not Enough

Yascha Mounk (2018) helps illuminate the paradox: populism seeks to present the liberal institutions that constrain majority power as obstacles to democracy itself. The Brandmauer (firewall) may therefore be necessary as an institutional defense and insufficient as a political strategy. It answers the question, “how do we stop the AfD from governing?” It does not answer the prior question: “why do so many people want it to govern?”

Understanding the answer to that second question does not mean excusing it. Anne Applebaum (2020) reminds us that the contemporary illiberal threat rarely begins with the immediate destruction of democracy. It can advance through the gradual occupation of institutions, administrative changes, appointments, education, culture and the media. In Saxony-Anhalt, a move by the AfD from opposition into government would give it access to precisely these areas. Sociologically explaining an electorate does not require us to minimize the consequences of the programme it chooses.

But historical memory is not enough either. Tony Judt (2010) reminded us that post-war European democracies did not survive because of constitutions alone. They built welfare states, public services, security and the expectation that the future could be better. A democratic order becomes fragile when it can tell its citizens only two things: “adapt to change” and “do not vote for them.” The first offers no security. The second offers no project.

Perhaps this is, in the end, the best way to understand the result in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD did not win simply because a population became poorer, or because nearly half the electorate suddenly became radicalized. It won because it managed to transform experiences of territorial decline, downward mobility and inadequate recognition into a political narrative combining nativism, anti-establishment alienation and the promise of national restoration.

It did not merely say: “you lost.” It said: “you lost because they chose others over you.” It is this move — from loss to resentment, from resentment to identity, and from identity to the ballot box — that helps explain its strength.

And that is also why the democratic response will have to be more demanding than copying the AfD, increasing fiscal transfers or reinforcing the firewall. It will have to combine credible control of immigration, state capacity, services and opportunity in peripheral regions, recognition of Eastern Germany’s distinctive historical experience, and an idea of national belonging strong enough to create community without having to turn minorities into enemies.

Because citizens do not abandon a political order only when they become poor. They can also drift away from it when they cease to believe that it contains a recognizable future for people like them, and for places like the ones in which they live.

 

References

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Mau, S. (2019). Lütten Klein: Leben in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft. Suhrkamp.

Mounk, Y. (2018). The people vs. democracy. Harvard University Press.

Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, C. (2019). The far right today. Polity.

Pickel, G., & Pickel, S. (2026). The election of the AfD and the collective identity of East Germans. German Politics, 35(3), 412–436.

Rodríguez-Pose, A. (2018). The revenge of the places that don’t matter. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 11(1), 189–209.

Schröder, M., Rehm, M., & Röcke, A. (2026). Supporters of Germany’s far-right AfD party are concerned about immigration rather than feeling deprived. PLOS ONE, 21(7), e0350403.