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

Dismantling an Embedded Autocracy

by with No Comment CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHome

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

By Attila Antal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dismantling the Institutional and Political Foundations of the Authoritarian Regime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Marine Le Pen

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

by with No Comment CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryExtremism & RadicalisationHome

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

By Gwenaëlle Bauvois

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

Orbán as a ‘Proof’ That the Model Works

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

Reframing Defeat as Democratic Confirmation

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

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

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

No Electoral Spillover into France

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

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

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

References

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

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

Helsinki Pride parade.

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

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryGenderHomeHuman Rights

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

By Gwenaëlle Bauvois

The Event: A Controversial Verdict

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

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

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

The Context:  Struggles over Gender and Sexuality 

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

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

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

“Flagship” for Transatlantic Conservative Networks

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

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

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

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

The Politics of Simplification: From Legal Nuance to Moral Narratives

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-Islam demonstration in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on January 20, 2017. Protesters carry signs opposing “Islamization.” Photo: Jan Kranendonk.

When Change Becomes Conflict: Immigration and the Politics of Cultural Backlash

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeMigration

This analysis by Yacine Boubia challenges the dominant economic explanations of populism by foregrounding the central role of cultural transformation. Drawing on Ronald Inglehart’s “silent revolution” and the cultural backlash thesis, it argues that immigration has become the most visible and politically charged symbol of broader shifts in identity, values, and social order. Populism, in this account, is not simply a reaction to material deprivation but a response to perceived cultural displacement and status loss. By linking economic disruption with identity-based anxieties, the article demonstrates how immigration functions as a focal point for wider conflicts over belonging, representation, and democratic legitimacy in contemporary Western societies.

By Yacine Boubia

The dominant narrative surrounding the rise of populism in Europe and the United States has long been grounded in economics. Globalization, automation, and trade shocks are often said to have produced a class of “left behind” voters who turned to populist leaders out of material deprivation. While this account captures an important dimension of structural change, it ultimately misdiagnoses the core political dynamics at work. Populism is not simply a reaction to economic hardship. It is, more fundamentally, a response to cultural transformation—one in which immigration has become the most visible and politically salient symbol of broader social change. 

To understand this shift, it is necessary to return to the long arc of value change identified by Ronald Inglehart. Beginning in the postwar decades, advanced industrial societies underwent what he termed a “silent revolution,” as rising prosperity and educational expansion reshaped public priorities. Survival-oriented values gradually gave way to self-expression, autonomy, and cosmopolitan openness (Inglehart, 1977; Inglehart & Norris, 2019). Over time, these shifts became embedded in institutions, elite discourse, and policy frameworks, particularly within urban, highly educated populations. 

Yet this transformation was never evenly distributed. Large segments of the population—often older, less formally educated, and more rooted in national or local traditions—did not merely lag behind this shift; they experienced it as a form of displacement. What appeared to some as progress appeared to others as erosion: of authority, of social cohesion, and of a familiar moral order. The political consequences of this divergence became increasingly visible after the late 1960s, when cultural liberalization accelerated across Western democracies and elite consensus around multiculturalism and individual autonomy solidified. 

It is within this context that immigration assumes its central political role. Immigration is not merely one issue among many; it is the issue through which broader cultural transformations are rendered visible, tangible, and politically immediate. Debates over borders, asylum, and integration are simultaneously debates about national identity, social trust, and the pace of cultural change itself. The European migration crisis did not create these tensions, but it crystallized them, transforming diffuse anxieties into direct political conflict across the continent. 

The differential reception of refugee populations further illustrates how cultural categorization shapes political responses. The Ukrainian refugee crisis, following Russia’s 2022 invasion, was widely framed in Europe as a conventional interstate war producing displaced populations that were more easily incorporated into existing asylum systems. By contrast, earlier inflows of refugees from Syria and parts of the Middle East were more frequently politicized through debates over long-term integration, welfare capacity, and security concerns. Material conditions alone cannot explain these differences. They reflect processes of perceived cultural proximity, geopolitical framing, and institutional response mechanisms within the European Union. 

Scholars of migration and political psychology have long noted that public attitudes toward migration are structured not only by economic calculations but also by perceived cultural distance and social trust. Emmanuel Todd’s recent work, La Défaite de l’Occident (2024), contributes to this discussion by emphasizing that societies interpret geopolitical and demographic change through deeper assumptions about cultural cohesion and civilizational identity. From this perspective, differential refugee reception reflects not simply policy design but underlying social narratives about similarity, belonging, and national self-understanding. 

The framework developed by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart captures these dynamics with particular clarity. Their “cultural backlash” thesis argues that support for populist parties is driven less by absolute economic deprivation than by perceived status loss among groups once embedded within dominant cultural hierarchies (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). Immigration, in this context, functions not merely as a policy issue but as a symbolic focal point through which broader anxieties about identity and social change are expressed. It becomes the terrain on which struggles over cultural authority are fought. 

The United States exhibits a parallel trajectory. The rise of Donald Trump cannot be fully understood through economic grievance alone. Empirical studies of the 2016 election have consistently shown that attitudes toward immigration, cultural change, and racial identity were among the strongest predictors of support for Trump (Sides et al., 2018). His appeal lay less in policy detail than in his ability to articulate a sense of loss—of border control, national coherence, and institutional trust. Immigration functioned as the central issue through which these concerns were politically mobilized. 

This mobilization was amplified by changes in the digital information environment. Scholars of political communication have highlighted how social media platforms and data-driven campaigning enabled more granular targeting of affective and identity-based grievances. While the precise influence of firms such as Cambridge Analytica is debated in the academic literature, broader research on “computational propaganda” and social listening suggests that political actors increasingly adapt messaging to pre-existing online sentiment patterns rather than shaping them from above (Bennett & Livingston, 2018). 

None of this implies that economic factors are irrelevant. On the contrary, the structural effects of globalization have played a crucial role in shaping the terrain on which cultural conflict unfolds. Trade exposure, deindustrialization, and regional inequality have increased perceptions of economic insecurity in many Western societies (Autor et al., 2013). However, these economic disruptions do not translate mechanically into political outcomes. Their salience is mediated through cultural interpretation. Economic decline becomes politically consequential when it is embedded within narratives of identity, recognition, and perceived neglect. 

In this sense, globalization operates as a force multiplier rather than a primary cause of populism. Communities experiencing economic stagnation are more likely to interpret immigration through lenses of competition and cultural threat, and more likely to view political elites as detached from their lived realities. Populist movements succeed precisely because they fuse economic anxiety with cultural grievance into a single coherent narrative—one that pits “the people” against both external pressures and internal elites (Mudde, 2004). 

Across Europe, parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the National Rally (RN) in France have institutionalized this synthesis. While differing in national context, these movements share a common structure: opposition to immigration, skepticism toward supranational governance, and a broader critique of liberal elite consensus. Their success underscores the extent to which cultural backlash has become embedded within contemporary political competition. 

The policy implications are significant. If populism were driven primarily by economic inequality, then redistribution and growth-oriented policies might be sufficient to mitigate its rise. But if it is rooted in cultural backlash, such measures will prove insufficient on their own. Economic policy cannot resolve conflicts over identity, belonging, and social norms. Nor can these conflicts be dismissed as irrational without further deepening political polarization. 

A more realistic approach begins by recognizing that populism emerges from genuine, if conflicting, experiences of social transformation. The “silent revolution” identified by Inglehart has reshaped Western societies in profound ways, but it has also produced new forms of cultural stratification. In the United States, this process was accelerated by the political economy of the 1980s and 1990s, where deregulation and neoliberal convergence under both Republican and Democratic administrations coincided with the rise of cosmopolitan urban centers and multicultural policy frameworks. These developments, reinforced during the Clinton and Obama eras, contributed to a perception among some voters that cultural and institutional change was occurring without adequate democratic mediation. 

Immigration, as the most visible manifestation of these broader transformations, will therefore remain central to political conflict in advanced democracies. Understanding populism requires moving beyond the false dichotomy between economics and culture. It is the interaction between structural change and subjective perception that drives political behavior. Until this interplay is fully acknowledged, explanations will remain partial, and policy responses will continue to fall short. 

 

References

Inglehart, R. (1977). The Silent Revolution – Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics, Princeton University Press.

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

Autor, D., Dorn, D., & Hanson, G. (2013). “The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade,” ANNUAL REVIEW OF ECONOMICS, Vol. 8:205-240 (Volume publication date October 2016)  https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-080315-015041

Sides, J., Tesler, M., & Vavreck, L. (2018). Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America, Princeton University Press.

Mudde, C. (2004). “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44483088

Bennett, W. L. & Livingston, S. (2018). “The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions.” European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118760317

Todd, E. (2024). La Défaite de l’Occident, Gallimard.

Lagos, Waste, Nigeria.

Survival Populism: How Environmental Crisis Fuels Democratic Distrust in the Global South

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHome

In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja introduces the notion of “survival populism” to capture how environmental crisis and material insecurity are reshaping democratic politics in the Global South. Moving beyond conventional ideational approaches, the article foregrounds lived experiences of hardship—linking fuel price shocks, flooding, energy insecurity, and inflation to moral claims about fairness, state responsibility, and distributive justice. Through the case of Nigeria, Dr. Solaja demonstrates how climate-related disruptions and policy reforms converge to erode institutional trust and reconfigure political contestation. Rather than rejecting climate policy per se, citizens contest its unequal burdens. The article thus reframes democratic distress as rooted in distributive conflict, offering a compelling framework for understanding how ecological crisis fuels new forms of populist mobilization and legitimacy crises.

By Dr. Oludele Solaja*

In much of the Global South, the politics of survival and the politics of environmental crisis have become deeply intertwined. What were once distinct policy domains—the politics of fuel prices, flood mitigation, food inflation, waste accumulation, and energy insecurity—have converged into a single, lived experience of persistent hardship. For millions of citizens, the environmental crisis is not primarily defined by climate reports, international negotiations, or adaptation frameworks, but by submerged homes, rising transport costs, prolonged electricity outages, disrupted livelihoods, and escalating prices for basic goods.

Within such contexts of livelihood insecurity, ecological degradation takes on political meaning. Citizens come to see hardship not just as the result of misfortune or climatic fluctuation, but as an instance of unequal protection, institutional neglect and democratic distance. Under such conditions, public politics enters a new phase: a populism of survival emerges.

“Populism of survival” names a distinct mode of political interpretation that links environmental and economic distress to moral claims about state responsibility, fairness, and sacrifice. It departs from classical theories of populism by foregrounding the lived experience of hardship. Unlike the variants often associated with populist mobilizations in the Global North and East—typically structured around a binary opposition between “the people” and “the elite”—populism of survival is rooted in citizens’ experiences of material insecurity. Fuel becomes political when rising prices constrain mobility and limit access to basic goods; flooding becomes political when relief is inadequate or unevenly distributed; waste becomes political when its unequal management deepens social inequalities and disproportionately endangers already vulnerable populations.

In such contexts, public anger arises not only from opposition to environmental policy reforms but also from citizens’ everyday moral intuitions about who bears the costs of environmental disruption, who is required to pay, and who is protected. The relationship between climate policy and democratic legitimacy begins to erode when policies are perceived as non-distributive or unfair. Increasingly, the roots of climate populism lie in conflicts over how the costs and benefits of environmental transition are allocated. As Harrison (2025) observes, “across many settings, opposition to environmental reforms may stem not from a rejection of climate policies per se, but from opposition to the inequities of how their costs are distributed.”

An illustrative example of these dynamics can be found in Nigeria, where the government removed fuel subsidies in May 2023 and framed the resulting increase in fuel prices as a necessary macroeconomic adjustment. Public discourse surrounding the policy quickly became highly politicized, as rising fuel costs contributed to significant inflation and tightened household budgets. While state officials justified the reform in terms of fiscal discipline and economic rationalization, many citizens interpreted it through a moral lens: why should those at the bottom struggle to make ends meet while those with access to power remain insulated from such burdens? As Gbadebo (2025) argues, public responses to subsidy removal were shaped not only by the material consequences of economic hardship but also by concerns over governmental credibility and the plausibility of promised developmental outcomes.

These processes were intensified by other long-standing environmental and structural vulnerabilities and crises that now affected a wider portion of society than in past years. Following the floods that devastated numerous states—destroying livelihoods, homes, and arable lands—rising costs merged with food insecurity and frequent blackouts to form an inseparable social and ecological predicament. The state could no longer frame this predicament as exclusively “natural” or solely as the outcome of a natural disaster or poor market conditions. The experience was one of combined, cumulative crisis, and the credibility of the state in addressing such predicaments is tied to its performance on both fronts.

Flooding has, in particular, emerged as a major site of citizen dissatisfaction and a potent factor driving democratic distress. Displaced communities that have lost homes and productive capacity immediately feel cheated when the amount or distribution of government aid seems to reproduce and reinforce existing patterns of social inequality, and they begin to ask why state assistance appears uneven across communities and is not delivered to them preferentially. Climate policy has entered a phase in which state legitimacy is judged not solely in terms of its objectives or rationale, but also in terms of the effectiveness and fairness of its management of combined environmental and social threats.

Studies such as those by Okonkwo and Ezenwegbu (2024), which find that subsidy removal in Nigeria sparked significant concern among citizens who lacked a clear understanding of mitigation strategies or social protection, as well as analyses of the success and failure of fossil-fuel subsidy reform across various settings by Droste et al (2024), indicate that, when it comes to distributing the burdens of adjustment policies effectively, “technical argumentation alone has rarely been able to overcome such deeply seated mistrust.” The need for state institutions to earn citizens’ confidence through fairness, reciprocity, and demonstrable competence is therefore crucial in contexts with lower levels of public trust.

These issues are exacerbated in countries such as Nigeria, which suffer from chronic failures in infrastructure provision. Hussainzad and Gou (2024) show, for instance, that informality places the burden of adapting to ecological threats onto already existing socio-ecological inequalities. The populism of survival therefore cannot be interpreted solely as a product of irrational or ideological anti-state discourse, but as a request for a visible display of state competence. It requires public recognition from the state that it is aware of how these crises disproportionately affect ordinary citizens and is therefore prepared to demonstrate fairness and protection when such crises occur. 

It may or may not amount to explicitly anti-government discourse; but at its core, it expresses a demand for visibility. What citizens seek is not just state intervention, but a demonstration of its commitment to justice when addressing both economic pressures and the demands of adapting to the climate crisis. These developments are interpreted by populists as a crucial and opening field of study centered on real, survival-oriented daily experiences, rather than on the ideologies and leaders of state actors. The main dilemma for democratic governments in the coming decade will be less about acknowledging that an environmental crisis is underway than about fairly distributing the costs of confronting it.

 

References

Droste, N.; Chatterton, B. & Skovgaard, J. (2024). “A political economy theory of fossil fuel subsidy reforms in OECD countries.” Nature Communications, 15, 5452. 

Gbadebo, A. D. (2025). “The political economy of fuel subsidy removal: Governance and sustainable development in Nigeria.” Journal of Governance and Administrative Reform, 6(1), 1–18. 

Harrison, L. (2025). “Climate populism: the limits of the ideational and discursive approaches.” Environmental Politics, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2025.2591469

Hussainzad, E. A., & Gou, Z. (2024). “Climate risk and vulnerability assessment in informal settlements of the Global South: A critical review.” Land, 13(9), 1357. 

Okonkwo, A. E., & Ezenwegbu, J. C. (2024). “Removal of petrol subsidies and its impact for democratic governance in Nigeria.” Nnamdi Azikiwe Journal of Political Science, 9(3), 38–47.

Gas-Nigeria

When Fuel Prices Turn Political: Trust, Climate Reform, and Everyday Populism in Nigeria

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHome

This commentary examines how fuel pricing in Nigeria has become a central site of democratic contestation, linking economic reform to everyday political experience. Drawing on recent scholarship, Dr. Oludele Solaja shows that the removal of fuel subsidies is interpreted less through macroeconomic logic than through lived realities—rising transport costs, food inflation, and declining purchasing power. In this context, fuel policy functions as a visible test of state credibility and fairness. The analysis highlights how “everyday populism” emerges as citizens frame reforms through moral distinctions between suffering publics and detached elites. Crucially, the study argues that climate and fiscal reforms cannot succeed without trust: where institutional credibility is weak, even economically rational policies risk generating political backlash and deepening democratic discontent.

Dr. Oludele Solaja*

In Nigeria, fuel isn’t simply a commodity but perhaps one of the most immediate points through which Nigerians engage with the state. Changes at the pump influence transport prices, the distribution of food, the nature of informal work, substitutes to electricity, household coping mechanisms. Any significant change at the pump is rapidly translated through market and commuters’ routes, domestic budgets, turning fiscal policy into political experience. Consequently, fuel pricing has evolved into perhaps the most visible site of democratic validation and of state-society trust (Gbadebo, 2025; Okonkwo & Ezenwegbu, 2024). 

The lifting of a long-standing petrol subsidy as part of recent reforms re-ignited an ever recurrent and sensitive national debate around governance, fairness and burden-sharing. The declared rationale for subsidy removal was correction of unsustainable fiscal spending, drain on public finances and constraint on welfare and infrastructure investment (Gbadebo, 2025). Nevertheless, macroeconomic rationales never fully determine political meaning. In the view of many Nigerians, what is primarily being assessed in post subsidy withdrawal policy aren’t ratios in macro-economic indicators, but transport fare hikes, food price volatility, diminishing purchasing power and pervasive uncertainty; studies found mitigation measures to be inadequate and unevenly distributed, which compounded distrust in the government (Gbadebo, 2025; Okonkwo & Ezenwegbu, 2024). 

This dilemma reveals the more important sociological aspect of the problem: economic reform easily gains political meaning in fragile trust situation. Populism is not merely about elite discourse or electoral tactics, but also everyday interpretation where citizens divide the social world along the moral lines of “normal citizens in suffering” and “detached politicians.” Petrol pricing is one aspect where it comes into the citizen vocabulary as its impact is immediate, transparent, and social inequal (Yang et al., 2021; Moerenhout et al., 2021). Rather than seeing it as the market correction, for many citizens the rising of petrol price is viewed as an indication of their anxieties over issues of justice, elite benefit and the credibility of the state. 

Public conversations often return to questions such as: Why must austerity begin with ordinary households? Why do reforms demand sacrifice where visible political restraint appears limited? These questions contribute to what may be called everyday environmental populism — a form of public meaning‑making in which environmental and economic reforms are judged through moral experiences of inequality and institutional betrayal (Gbadebo, 2025). While classic fuel subsidy literature focuses on economic costs and distributional effects, political economy research highlights that reform success depends on public trust and the social contract between state and citizens (Yang et al., 2021). 

The contradiction is clear: long‑term fiscal rationality collides with short‑term social hardship. In principle, subsidy removal may improve efficiency and reduce distortions in consumption. But in an unequal society with fragile institutional credibility, citizens encounter “energy transition” through transport costs, generator fuel, food inflation, and daily mobility (Esekpa, 2024). 

Within an urban environment, such as Lagos, rises in fuel price can rapidly influence commuter patterns, market costs and flow of informal economy money. In peri-urban and rural settings electricity is already unreliable, with generators being extensively used. Here price of fuel is likely to define the profitability of a micro business. In a local study within Nigeria, increases in fuel price are seen to correlate with economic suffering and an increase in the cost of living, therefore reinforcing the public opinion that the burden of reforms is primarily on the common man (Abaddah, 2025). 

This explains why trust becomes central to policy legitimacy. Historical memory matters: earlier reforms were often accompanied by promises of safety nets, infrastructure improvements, or welfare expansions that many citizens believe were never fully realized. Consequently, new fuel adjustments are interpreted not in isolation but against accumulated experiences of unfulfilled government commitments and governance shortfalls (Okonkwo & Ezenwegbu, 2024). 

Public reactions in both formal surveys and public commentary reflect this complex interpretation. A nationally representative household study finds that opposition to fuel subsidy reform is strongly linked with beliefs about government corruption and capacity to deliver compensatory programs; respondents were more likely to support reform only where they believed in transparent governance and effective social protection (Yang et al., 2021). 

There is also a profound communication gap in Nigerian fuel governance. Policy announcements often emphasize fiscal necessity while underestimating how reforms are emotionally and morally received. Citizens rarely oppose reform simply because they reject technical economics; rather, they resist because they doubt institutional fairness. This creates fertile ground for populist framing and political contestation around trust and governance (Gbadebo, 2025; Yang et al., 2021). 

The political symbolism is intensified by Nigeria’s oil‑dependent identity. In a major oil‑producing country, public expectations remain shaped by the belief that resource wealth should translate into broad social benefit. When hardship deepens in an oil-rich economy, citizens often interpret such contradictions politically. Research on global subsidies also shows that fuel subsidy reforms often generate political controversy where institutional quality is low and trust weak (Droste et al., 2024). 

While some assessments confirm that reducing subsidies can yield macroeconomic benefits, these gains do not automatically produce democratic legitimacy where hardship expands faster than visible welfare delivery. The result is a politics of resentment, where state actions are judged through everyday experiences of inequality rather than abstract fiscal reasoning (Gbadebo, 2025). For this reason, fuel policy should be understood not merely as economic reform but as democratic communication. The challenge is not only whether subsidy should exist, but whether citizens can trust that reform burdens are socially shared, publicly justified, and institutions remain accountable (Yang et al., 2021). 

This is where Nigeria’s climate politics becomes especially instructive. The democratic sustainability transition in developing democracies can no longer be carried out through technocratic sequencing. It will demand overt distribution, convincing social protection and credible assurance that burdens are not unilateral (Gbadebo, 2025). Fuel becomes politicized in the sense that it encapsulates a variety of societal fears including inequalities, citizenship, institutional trust and the moral narrative of the state itself. Therefore, the sociology of petrol prices illustrates how the politics of environment is evaluated by “the governed,” in relation to everyday politics of trust, fairness and public meaning (Yang et al., 2021; Esekpa, 2024). 

The lesson here is stark: climate and fiscal reforms implemented without democratic trust are politically dangerous, even when economically defensible. For the citizen in Nigeria asks the basic and obvious question of who bears the cost, who reaps the reward, and to whom should believe (Gbadebo, 2025; Okonkwo & Ezenwegbu, 2024).

 

(*) Dr. Oludele Solaja is an Environmental Sociologist and Developmental Scholar based in Olabisi Onabanjo University, Nigeria. His research focuses on environmental governance, climate policy, and everyday political populism in African contexts. He is a Nonresident Research Fellow at the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) and has published extensively on climate governance, citizen trust, and socio-political interpretations of environmental reforms. 

 

References

Abaddah, G. A. (2025). Effect of fuel subsidy removal on the Nigerian economy: Implications for households in Nigeria. BIMA Journal. https://journal.pdmbengkulu.org/index.php/bima/article/view/1984

Droste, N., Chatterton, B., & Skovgaard, J. (2024). A political economy theory of fossil fuel subsidy reforms in OECD countries. Nature Communications, 15, 5452. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49835-4

Esekpa, O. I., Ekarika, W. A., & Njama, G. J. (2024). Economic implications of fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria: Challenges and prospects. Journal of Public Administration, Policy and Governance Research.https://jpapgr.com/index.php/research/article/view/131

Gbadebo, A. D. (2025). The political economy of fuel subsidy removal: Governance and sustainable development in Nigeria. Journal of Social Political Sciences, 6(3), 206–224. https://doaj.org/article/e97ce91a0aff459a9106ff8fc6cff551

Okonkwo, A. E., & Ezenwegbu, J. C. (2024). Removal of petrol subsidies and its impact on democratic governance in Nigeria. Nnamdi Azikiwe Journal of Political Science, 9(3), 38–47. https://najops.org.ng/index.php/najops/article/view/267

Yang, J., Moerenhout, T., & others. (2021). Fuel subsidy reform and the social contract in Nigeria: A micro‑economic analysis. Energy Policy, 156, 112336. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421521002068

Donald Trump.

How Communication Style Shapes Political Trust More Than Populist Content in Domestic and International Politics

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceForeign PolicyHomeLeadership & Persona

This commentary advances a critical intervention in debates on political persuasion by foregrounding original pilot research on communication and trust. Based on an online experiment with 322 UK participants, the study isolates the effects of communication style from semantic content by comparing responses to a still image, an untranslated video, and a subtitled populist message. The findings are striking: trust in political leaders is shaped more by audiovisual and paralinguistic cues—such as tone, gesture, and perceived authenticity—than by populist content itself. Notably, participants reported higher trust when exposed to communication they could not understand than when presented with translated political messaging. These results challenge conventional assumptions about persuasion and highlight the central role of communication form in shaping political judgement.

By Ihsan Yilmaz*, Ana-Maria Bliuc**, Tetsuro Kobayashi*** & John Betts****

Public debate often assumes persuasion comes from ideology, populist rhetoric, or misinformation. When people worry about political manipulation, propaganda, or foreign interference, they usually focus on what is being said. Is a message false? Is it extremist? Is it conspiratorial? Is it anti-democratic?

Those questions matter. But they do not capture the full problem.

Political influence may depend as much on how messages are communicated as on what they say. In the digital attention economy, communication format, emotional cues, and presentation style shape political judgement. Citizens do not encounter political communication as detached analysts. They encounter it as viewers, listeners, social media users, and members of social groups, responding not only to claims and arguments but also to tone, confidence, visual presence, rhythm, repetition, and emotional force. Research has shown that falsehood spreads rapidly online, that emotional processing can increase belief in misleading information, and that anger can heighten partisan vulnerability to political misperceptions (Vosoughi et al., 2018; Martel et al., 2020; Weeks, 2015).  

How Communication Shapes Trust Beyond Content

That matters not only for domestic politics but also for international politics. Strategic narratives research in IR has long argued that actors exercise power by shaping stories about who “we” are, what kind of crisis we face, and what political future is possible (Freedman, 2006; Miskimmon et al., 2013). Sharp power research has shown that authoritarian influence often works not through open persuasion alone but through manipulative, coercive, and opaque forms of projection that distort democratic information environments (Walker, 2018; Nye, 2018; Pinto, 2023). And scholarship on emotions in world politics has demonstrated that fear, resentment, nostalgia, pride, and humiliation are not peripheral to politics. They are part of how power works, both domestically and internationally (Hutchison & Bleiker, 2014; Valentino et al., 2011; Van Rythoven, 2021).  

If this is right, then the key issue is not only whether citizens encounter false claims. It is how political messages are delivered, processed, remembered, and made to feel credible. That is where our pilot research becomes important.

Our pilot study, which serves as the basis for this commentary, examines how a political leader’s communication style shapes trust. In an online experiment, participants (322 UK residents) were exposed to three versions of the same political message, varying in communication richness: a still image of a (Romanian) political leader taken from a video (control condition), the video in Romanian without translation, and a subtitled version containing populist content. The aim was to disentangle the effects of visual and paralinguistic cues—such as tone, gestures, facial expressions, and emotional cadence—from those of semantic content. Put simply, the study asks whether people respond more to how a leader communicates than to what the leader actually says. It measures perceptions of the leader’s credibility, trustworthiness, appeal, and emotional impact, alongside relevant moderating variables.

Media Modality, Memory, and the Construction of Trust

The result is striking. Communication condition significantly affects trust in the candidate. Video with content but no meaning produces the highest trust, while the static picture produces the lowest. Trust in the leader is also higher when people are exposed to communication only (foreign language), compared to when they are exposed to the translated message. Just as importantly, perceptions of populism do not mediate trust in the speaker. Instead, trust appears to be shaped more by delivery cues—such as tone, credibility, authenticity, and leader appeal—than by populist framing alone.

This should make us stop and think.

A dynamic audiovisual performance can make a political figure appear stronger, more sincere, more persuasive, or more leader-like even when audiences cannot understand the words being spoken. A still image, by contrast, strips away much of what creates immediacy and emotional connection. This does not mean content is irrelevant. It means content is not the whole story. Political trust may be built through cues that sit alongside semantic meaning and sometimes outrun it.

The significance of this finding becomes even clearer when placed beside Kobayashi’s broader work on modality, memory, and political processing. The basic point is simple but important: people do not process text, still images, and video in the same way. Different media formats shape attention differently. They influence what is encoded, what is remembered, and what lingers as a political impression. Visual and multimedia formats can strengthen memory and recall, even when the content itself is weak, misleading, or only partly understood. This means that persuasion is not only about the literal content of a message. It is also about how the message enters cognition and what remains afterward.

That insight matters in domestic politics because democratic contestation now unfolds across short-form video, reels, clips, speeches, memes, livestreams, and highly personalized feeds. In such settings, communication style is not a surface feature. It becomes part of the mechanism through which trust is built. A leader who appears authentic may be granted credibility beyond the evidence. A speaker who appears forceful may seem persuasive even when the argument is thin. A compelling audiovisual fragment may leave a stronger impression than a detailed correction delivered later as plain text. Recent work also shows that democratic publics can become receptive to illiberal narratives under certain conditions, including aversion to protest and responsiveness to authoritarian framing (Kobayashi, Toriumi & Yoshida 2025; Kobayashi et al. 2025). 

Strategic Narratives, Emotion, and the Transnational Politics of Influence

But this also matters for foreign policy and IR. Contemporary influence campaigns do not simply try to convince publics through formal argument. They work through strategic narratives, emotional resonance, symbolic performance, and technologically amplified circulation. States and state-aligned actors increasingly compete not only over territory, institutions, or material resources, but also over meaning, perception, and legitimacy. Public diplomacy, strategic communication, soft power, sharp power, and digital authoritarian influence all operate in this wider environment of mediated political judgement (Miskimmon et al., 2013; Walker, 2018; Nye, 2018; Roberts & Oosterom, 2025; NED, 2024).  

The domestic and the international are not separate spheres here. They overlap through digital platforms, diasporas, transnational narratives, and emotionally charged content that travels across borders and is then reinterpreted in local settings. IR scholars have long argued that ideas, norms, and frames do not simply move intact from one place to another. They are localized, contested, adapted, and selectively internalized (Acharya, 2004; Wiener, 2008). That matters enormously today. A communication style that builds trust at home can also be effective abroad. A leader’s visual authenticity, emotional cadence, and symbolic performance can travel transnationally through clips, commentary networks, subtitled fragments, and influencer ecosystems. Narratives that appear domestic can be amplified internationally; narratives projected from abroad can be domesticated by local actors.

This is one reason why the distinction between domestic polarization and foreign influence is often less clear than policymakers assume. Influence is not just broadcast. It is processed through emotion, identity, memory, and media form. That is also why our broader scholarship has focused on how digital politics, civilizational narratives, and sharp-power dynamics travel through both domestic and transnational channels. Yilmaz and Morieson have shown how civilizational narratives are politically mobilized through crisis, victimhood, moral hierarchy, and claims of threatened identity (Yilmaz & Morieson, 2023; Yilmaz & Morieson 2025). Yilmaz and Shakil have shown that soft and sharp power do not circulate as neutral content but are received through affect, identification, and local meaning-making (Yilmaz & Shakil, 2025). Yilmaz, Bliuc, Betts, and Morieson (2025) have argued that foreign interference can remain hidden in plain sight when it works through sharp power rather than obvious coercion.  

The same is true of the work by Bliuc and Betts on online communities, identity, cohesion, and polarization. Bliuc and colleagues have shown how online communities intensify collective identity, emotional alignment, and hostility under certain socio-political conditions (Bliuc et al., 2019; Bliuc et al., 2020; Bliuc, Smith, and Moynihan 2020). Betts and Bliuc have shown how influencers can shape polarization dynamics, and later work by Betts, Bliuc, and Courtney extends this to charismatic digital actors (Betts & Bliuc 2022; Betts et al., 2025). Taken together, this body of scholarship suggests that political persuasion operates through social context, emotional cues, memory, and communication form, not simply ideological content.  

Rethinking Persuasion: Trust, Media Form, and Democratic Resilience in the Digital Age

That is why the pilot matters for IR as much as for political psychology. It offers a small but important piece of evidence about a much larger problem: how trust is manufactured in mediated politics. If citizens can form more trusting evaluations of a political figure from audiovisual performance even when they do not understand the message itself, then we need to rethink what persuasion means in a digital and internationalized public sphere.

The implications are significant.

First, media literacy needs to move beyond the simple binary of true versus false. Citizens need tools to ask harder questions: Why does this message feel persuasive? Why does this speaker seem credible? What role is tone playing in my judgement? What is the visual format doing to my attention and memory? What impression is being created before I have even evaluated the substance of the claim?

Second, policymakers need to treat communication form as a matter of democratic resilience and national security, not merely as a media issue. If audiovisual style can shape trust independently of content, then strategies to counter misinformation and foreign interference cannot focus only on debunking claims after the fact. They must also address the affective and cognitive mechanisms through which trust is built in the first place. This is particularly relevant in democracies facing sustained information pressure from domestic polarization, transnational propaganda, and digitally enabled authoritarian influence. Democratic resilience is not only about institutional robustness. It is also about how citizens process and evaluate political communication under conditions of emotional and informational strain (Lieberman et al., 2021).  

Third, IR needs to take communication psychology more seriously. Strategic narratives are not only elite texts. They are delivered through media systems, performances, visual formats, emotional triggers, and infrastructures of circulation. Sharp power does not only manipulate facts; it manipulates the conditions under which facts are judged, remembered, and trusted. Foreign policy analysis, therefore, needs to pay closer attention to modality, cognition, affect, and platformed attention. A narrative that fails as a written claim may succeed as a clip. A weak argument may become potent when fused with charisma, symbolism, and repetition. In an age of generative AI, synthetic media, and personalized feeds, these questions will only grow more urgent (NED, 2024; Roberts & Oosterom, 2025).  

Conclusion: Hidden in Plain Sight

To support democratic resilience, countering disinformation requires more than factchecking. Democracies must address how political messages influence cognition and emotion. Research priorities should include identifying communication formats that increase susceptibility, understanding how trust is shaped by nonverbal and audiovisual cues, and designing interventions that strengthen public resilience without drifting into censorship or paternalism. That is not only a domestic challenge. It is also a foreign policy challenge, because contemporary influence operations work precisely by blurring the line between internal debate and external manipulation.

The key question is no longer simply, “What messages are citizens exposed to?” It is, “How are those messages delivered and processed?”

If we fail to ask that question, we will continue to underestimate how persuasion works in contemporary politics. And if we continue to treat manipulation only as a problem of obvious lies, we will miss the subtler but often more effective techniques that shape trust, memory, and judgement in plain sight.

 

Funding: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [ARC] under Discovery Grant [DP220100829], Religious Populism, Emotions and Political Mobilisation and ARC [DP230100257] Civilisationist Mobilisation, Digital Technologies and Social Cohesion.

 

(*) Professor Ihsan Yilmaz is Research Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Research Chair in Islamic Studies and Intercultural Dialogue, and Deputy Director at the Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Deakin University, Australia. He is a leading scholar of authoritarianism, civilizational populism, digital authoritarianism, political Islam, and transnationalism. His recent research examines the diffusion of authoritarian practices, the weaponization of civilizational narratives, and the emotional and cognitive effects of disinformation in democratic and hybrid regimes.  

(**) Dr. Ana-Maria Bliuc is an Associate Professor of Social and Political Psychology in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at the University of Dundee. She joined Dundee in 2019 after holding academic positions at Western Sydney University, Monash University, and the University of Sydney. Her research examines the role of social identity in shaping behavior across health, environmental, and socio-political contexts, including collective action, social change, and political polarization. More recently, her work has focused on online communities and digital environments, investigating how collective identities and behaviors are formed, sustained, and transformed through online interaction. 

(***) Dr. John Betts is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, Australia. He specializes in computational modelling, optimization, simulation, and data science, with applications across the social sciences, health, and industry. His research focuses on understanding complex systems, variability, and resource allocation, and he has contributed to interdisciplinary work on political polarization, online behavior, and agent-based modelling, alongside projects in areas such as medicine and manufacturing.  

(****) Dr. Tetsuro Kobayashi is a Professor in the School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University, Japan. He holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Tokyo. Before joining Waseda University in 2023, he held academic positions at the National Institute of Informatics and City University of Hong Kong and was also a visiting researcher at Stanford University. His research lies at the intersection of political communication, political psychology, and public opinion, with a particular focus on how media environments shape political attitudes and behavior. His work has been published widely in leading journals across political science, communication, and psychology.  

 

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Bliuc, A-M.; L. G. E. Smith and T. Moynihan. (2020). “‘You Wouldn’t Celebrate September 11’: Testing Online Polarisation Between Opposing Ideological Camps on YouTube.” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 23(6): 827–844.

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Walker, C. (2018). “What Is ‘Sharp Power’?” Journal of Democracy, 29(3): 9–23.

Weeks, B. E. (2015). “Emotions, Partisanship, and Misperceptions: How Anger and Anxiety Moderate the Effect of Partisan Bias on Susceptibility to Political Misinformation.” Journal of Communication, 65(4): 699–719.

Wiener, A. (2008). The Invisible Constitution of Politics: Contested Norms and International Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yilmaz, I.; A.-M. Bliuc; J. Betts and N. Morieson. (2025). “Foreign Interference Can Be Hidden in Plain Sight: Here’s How Countries Use ‘Sharp Power’ in Australia.” The Conversation.

Yilmaz, I. and K. Shakil. (2025). Reception of Soft and Sharp Powers: Turkey’s Civilizational Populist TV Dramas in Pakistan. Singapore: Springer.

Yilmaz, I. and N. Morieson, eds. (2023). Religions and the Global Rise of Civilizational Populism. Singapore: Springer.

Yilmaz, I. and N. Morieson. (2025). Weaponizing Civilizationalism for Authoritarianism: How Turkey, India, Russia, and China Challenge Liberal Democracy. Singapore: Springer.

People walk along a flooded road after heavy rain in Lagos, Nigeria.

When Floods Become Political: Disaster Relief, Democratic Trust, and Everyday Environmental Populism in Nigeria

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHome

In this insightful commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja reconceptualizes recurrent flooding in Nigeria as a site of political contestation rather than merely an environmental crisis. Introducing the concept of “everyday environmental populism,” the piece shows how lived experiences of disaster, unequal relief, and institutional failure generate bottom-up political claims that reshape democratic trust. Drawing on case studies from Delta, Anambra, and Niger states, the analysis demonstrates how citizens’ responses—from grassroots mobilization to digital dissent—reconfigure perceptions of state legitimacy. Situated at the intersection of environmental governance and populism studies, this commentary advances a novel framework for understanding how climate-related risks can catalyze political agency and redefine state–society relations in vulnerable democracies.

By Dr. Oludele Solaja

In Nigeria, recurring floods have moved beyond being environmental disaster to become political events that shape relations between citizens and states and influence democratic trust. In the context of recent floods and uneven relief, this commentary introduces a new political concept-everyday environmental populism-to conceptualize citizens’ bottom-up political claims rooted in everyday experience of environmental hazards, institutional inadequacies, and inequitable disaster relief delivery. 

In contrast to elite-driven claims, everyday environmental populism emerges from lived experiences of vulnerability in the face of environmental disasters and from citizen-centered complaints about institutional shortcomings, which in turn generate bottom-up political dynamics. The states of Delta, Anambra, and Niger provide illustrative case studies, showing how floods stimulate civic engagement, trigger institutional critique, and reshape popular evaluations of state legitimacy. 

Situated within the broader frameworks of environmental governance, climate security, and democratic legitimacy, this commentary argues that flood disasters are transformative political events that generate bottom-up agency in Nigeria. It also discusses the implications for policy and academia, as well as for community-led resilience in environmentally vulnerable contexts.

Conceptualizing Everyday Environmental Populism

In Nigeria, devastating floods recur, with the 2022 floods alone displacing more than 1.4 million people and wreaking widespread damage to infrastructure, livelihood and housing (Agbiboa, 2024; Solaja et al., 2020). More than mere destruction, they represent the confluence of environmental hazard and political accountability. Political response—how it is delivered, and how resources and infrastructure are distributed and allocated—serves as a barometer of the state’s democratic legitimacy. Existing research has already linked environmental hazards such as recurrent floods to public critique, collective agency, and political attitudes (Obatunde, Akanle, & Solaja, 2025; Barnett, 2001; Dalby, 2013).

Populism research has generally focused on elite-led constructions opposing “the people” to “the elite” (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). Extending this tradition, the concept of everyday environmental populism is introduced here as “citizens’ collective understanding and articulation of political claims shaped by their experiences and interpretations of environmental risk, disaster-relief inequalities, and institutional failures” (Solaja et al., 2020; Solaja, 2025). While elite populism is framed against political actors/elites, the idea of everyday environmental populism foregrounds ordinary citizens whose everyday experiences of vulnerability lead to complaints and grassroots political action which then fuels the distrust against political figures.

This conception centers on the agency of citizens, as they challenge the political status quo, express their expectations for accountable and equitable disaster responses and seek state actions beyond the traditional structures of politics (Obadare, 2020; Solaja, 2025).

Figure 1: Everyday Environmental Populism: How Flood Catches Political Capital.

This diagram illustrates how floods trigger citizens’ responses and shape political opinions, ultimately influencing levels of public trust in the state and in its policy formulation.

Floods and Democratic Trust in Nigeria

Repeated floods expose critical failings in Nigeria’s disaster response and governance structures, thereby politicizing environmental disasters (Adebayo, 2018; Agbiboa, 2024). More broadly, the scale of such disasters can undermine citizens’ confidence in political institutions (Barnett, 2001; Dalby, 2013). 

In Nigeria, successive floods have consistently triggered similar public reactions, as affected citizens cope with material losses while evaluating the adequacy of government responses. When state intervention is inconsistent, delayed, or inequitable, declining democratic trust leads citizens to rely on community-based assistance or to express dissent through social media, public meetings, and civil society organizations (Solaja et al., 2020; Solaja, 2025). Even prior to state involvement, citizens often self-organize, cultivating forms of autonomous political agency that can, in turn, shape public perceptions of state legitimacy (Obatunde, Akanle, & Solaja, 2025).

Citizens’ Response and Political Opinion

As illustrated in Figure 1, community mobilization in the initial stages of a flood event constitutes the foundation of everyday environmental populism, as citizen-led relief and response processes shape public political opinion and perceptions of the state’s democratic credentials. Grassroots relief initiatives often emerge in response to the absence or inadequacy of state intervention. In flood-affected areas, community leaders frequently assume responsibility for organizing shelters, disseminating alerts, and mobilizing local volunteers to assist victims, thereby demonstrating forms of self-reliance in disaster management (Solaja et al., 2020; Solaja, 2025).

These actions are inherently political, as they prompt evaluations of state responsiveness, challenge governmental priorities, and articulate demands for accountability. The internet serves as a platform where individual grievances coalesce into collective claims, transforming environmental crises into indicators of trust in the democratic system. In this sense, they exemplify everyday environmental populism, with citizens initiating forms of political mobilization from below (Obadare, 2020; Solaja, 2025).

Policy and Governance Challenges

It is crucial to address floods as political problems requiring preventive, equitable, and citizen-oriented governance. Such response mechanisms should include robust early warning systems, as well as transparent processes for the disbursement of funds and the allocation of resources to affected communities (International Rescue Committee & EU, 2025; Barnett, 2001; Solaja et al., 2020). Neglecting governance dimensions of disaster risk management fuels citizen distrust and intensifies public discontent. Conversely, equitable relief and fair governance can reinforce the legitimacy of democratic institutions (Dalby, 2013; Solaja, 2025).

Scholarly and Theoretical Contribution

The contribution of this commentary to populism studies and environmental governance lies in framing environmental disasters as triggers of political contestation. Through the concept of everyday environmental populism, it argues that lived experiences of disaster—driven by environmental threats—can empower citizens with the agency to resist injustice and challenge governmental actions (Solaja et al., 2020; Obadare, 2020).

The concept calls for further research into how environmental hazards shape citizens’ political attitudes and how such bottom-up agency influences the democratic legitimacy of state structures. Beyond political dynamics, it also intersects with debates on sustainability and the circular economy, opening new avenues for community-based initiatives—such as recycling plastic into productive materials through projects like EcoBalls and other entrepreneurial models (Solaja, 2025).

Conclusion: Politics in the Water

Floods are not merely natural disasters; in Nigeria, they constitute defining political events that shape the relationship between the state and its citizens, as well as perceptions of governmental legitimacy and responsiveness. The way citizens interpret state responses influences their assessment of whether democratic governance can deliver efficient, accountable services and provide support in times of crisis. Everyday environmental populism offers a useful framework for understanding these dynamics, highlighting how citizens’ responses are shaped by their exposure to environmental threats and by perceived inadequacies in governmental management (Solaja et al., 2020; Obadare, 2020).

There is a need to strengthen anticipatory governance, integrate citizen participation into flood management, and ensure that relief resources reach affected communities without being filtered through partisan interests. From an academic perspective, more extensive research is required to examine the political impacts of environmental hazards on mobilization, citizenship, and the pursuit of democratic accountability in flood-prone societies worldwide (Solaja et al., 2020; Obadare, 2020; Barnett, 2001).

 

References

Adebayo, B. (2018). “Nigeria overtakes India in extreme poverty ranking.” CNN.

Agbiboa, D. E. (2024). “Deep waters: Flooding and the climate of suffering in Nigeria.” PS: Political Science & Politics.

Barnett, J. (2001). The meaning of environmental security: Ecological politics and the United Nations. London: Zed Books.

Dalby, S. (2013). “Climate change and the security state: Critical perspectives.” Security Dialogue, 44(3), 191–206. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010613481291

International Rescue Committee & EU. (2025). Strengthening flood preparedness in Nigeria.

Mudde, C., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Obadare, E. (2020). Everyday politics in Africa: Publics, grievances, and popular engagement. Cambridge University Press.

Obatunde, B. A., Akanle, O., & Solaja, O. M. et al. (2025). “Doing sociology in Nigeria.” International Journal of Sociology, 16(1), 14–26. https://doi.org/10.13169/ijs.16.1.0014

Solaja, M.O., Awobona S., & Adekanbi, O.O. (2020). “Knowledge and practice of recycled plastic bottles (RPB) built homes for sustainable community-based housing projects in Nigeria.” Cogent Social Sciences, 6(1), 1778914. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2020.1778914

Solaja, O.M. (2025). “EcoBall as a sport-based intervention for community engagement, behavioural change, and sustainable solutions to plastic pollution.” Discovery Environment, 3, 186. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44274-025-00347-y

Assembleia da República.

Gender and the Return of Culture Wars in the Portuguese Parliament

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHome

In this timely commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias examines how recent parliamentary debates on gender identity in Portugal signal the consolidation of culture-war politics within the legislative arena. Moving beyond the technicalities of legal reform, the analysis shows how competing moral frameworks—centered on “non-negotiable values”—are reshaping political conflict and generating affective polarization. The 20 March 2026 vote reveals a coordinated right-wing effort to reframe gender as a matter of state authority and child protection, while opponents view it as a rollback of rights. Situated within broader debates on populism and cultural backlash, this piece highlights the growing centrality of symbolic politics in contemporary European democracies.

By João Ferreira Dias

Debates on gender identity in Portugal have brought to the fore one of the core logics of contemporary culture wars: the notion of non-negotiable values, rooted in deeply held ethical commitments and/or religious beliefs. Precisely because these values are framed as non-negotiable, they tend to generate what the literature describes as “affective polarization,” thereby intensifying the conditions for culture-war politics.

The Event

On 20 March 2026, Portugal’s right-wing parliamentary parties secured approval in principle for three bills on gender identity, tabled by Chega, CDS-PP, and PSD. All three passed with the support of PSD, Chega, and CDS-PP, while the opposition bloc — Socialist Party (PS), Liberal Initiative, Livre, Communist Party, BE (Left Bloc), PAN (Party of Animals and Nature), and JPP (an Azorian new party) — voted against. A separate Left Bloc proposal was rejected at the same stage. 

What was approved is not yet final law, but it marks a clear attempt to reverse the framework established by Law No. 38/2018, which enshrined self-determination in the legal recognition of gender identity. The core shift is the reintroduction of medical validation for changing name and sex in the civil registry, replacing the current model based on self-identification. In political terms, the vote signals a coordinated right-wing effort to re-medicalize legal gender recognition and to reframe the issue not primarily as a question of individual autonomy, but of state oversight and child protection. 

The CDS-PP bill goes further, proposing to ban puberty blockers and hormonal treatment for minors under 18 when used in the context of gender incongruence or gender dysphoria. Chega’s proposal, meanwhile, explicitly frames the revision in terms of the “protection of children and young people.” For supporters, these initiatives are presented as corrective safeguards; for opponents, they represent a rollback of rights, a renewed pathologization of trans identities, and a moral panic translated into lawmaking. 

Crucially, however, the parliamentary vote of 20 March was only a first reading. Approval “in principle” means that the bills now move to committee, where they will be debated and amended in detail before any final overall vote. Only after that stage could a final text proceed to presidential promulgation or constitutional review and, eventually, publication in the Diário da República. The immediate significance, then, is political rather than juridical: the Portuguese right has opened a legislative offensive against the country’s existing gender identity framework, but the legal outcome remains unsettled. 

The Context

For a long time, Portugal was portrayed as a country immune to populism. However, as Zúquete (2022) has shown, contrary to that illusion of “exceptionalism,” Portugal has experienced different types of populist solutions, from charismatic military figures to mainstream political actors, especially during the 1990s, when CDS-PP — the Christian-democratic party — began to articulate a low-intensity version of Camus’s “great replacement” thesis.

In fact, to understand this debate and political decision, it is necessary to frame it within a long tradition of culture wars in Portugal. As I argued in my book (Ferreira Dias, 2025), debates on moral values are part of the Portuguese political fabric, as illustrated by the so-called Revolta da Maria da Fonte (Maria da Fonte’s Revolt) in the nineteenth century, a popular uprising against heavy taxation on rural communities and the ban on burials in churches for public-health reasons.

However, the most critical topics of debate in Portugal are colonial memory and national self-esteem, both linked to the myth of the “good colonizer” (v.g. Cardina, 2025; Smith, 2025; Vala, Lopes & Lima, 2008). The so-called “lusotropicalism” produced a form of self-esteem grounded in the myth of colonial exceptionalism, that is, the supposedly distinctive Portuguese capacity to mix with native populations and to produce a mulato community free of racism.

With the emergence of postcolonial and critical studies, and of the Epistemologies of the South (Sousa Santos, 2016), there emerged a generation of Portuguese academics and activists who questioned those assumptions, giving greater room to the subalternized voices of history.

While this postcolonial, postmodern and critical generation gained space in Portuguese universities, global social changes were also taking place, with the rise of the so-called woke culture and a subsequent global response labelled “cultural backlash” (Norris & Inglehart, 2019).

A widespread paranoia gained ground in Western societies around the idea of “cultural Marxism,” helping to consolidate a radical right that claimed to be conservative while often operating in reactionary and illiberal registers, through populist leaders such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Viktor Orbán. At the same time, parts of the left became culturally radical, hyper-moralized, and at times susceptible to symbolic forms of historical and social purification (Mounk, 2025; McWhorter, 2021).

The struggle between this “conservative moral majority” and “progressivist morality” has accelerated culture wars. This context, together with the moral panic surrounding globalization, helps explain how Chega rose so quickly in Portugal — a country where cultural backlash, in many respects, arrived before woke culture acquired real social depth.

The Proper Debate

Paulo Núncio is one of the most visible CDS-PP deputies in this debate. He is well known for his ultraconservative positions and his opposition to woke culture. As coauthor of the CDS-PP bill on puberty blockers and hormonal treatment for minors, he is not initiating a new line of intervention but rather reaffirming a longstanding political agenda: for years, he has been one of the clearest exponents of culture-war politics within CDS-PP, and this initiative should be read as one more moment in that broader trajectory. In that sense, the issue of gender is not merely a policy question; it becomes a privileged arena for moral and political confrontation. Núncio has come to personify this agenda: he is the most visible CDS-PP figure in the field of culture-war politics and one of the most politically consequential voices of the Portuguese right on these matters.

What matters here, however, is not only the profile of one deputy, but the wider political grammar at work. The right is increasingly learning that moral conflict mobilizes more effectively than technocratic disagreement. Gender, in this setting, functions as a condensed symbol through which parties can speak about authority, family, childhood, education, and the limits of institutional neutrality.

That is why this debate exceeds the legal content of the bills themselves. At stake is a deeper dispute over who has the authority to name social reality: the individual, the family, the clinic, the school, or the state. Once framed in these terms, the controversy ceases to be a narrow disagreement over administrative procedure and becomes a struggle over moral sovereignty. This is the true grammar of culture wars: not distributive conflict, but symbolic boundary-making.

In Portugal, this grammar is still relatively recent in parliamentary form, but it is no longer marginal. What happened on 20 March 2026 suggests that the Portuguese right now sees legislative action on gender not as an isolated intervention, but as part of a broader attempt to reorganize the national moral agenda. Whether that attempt will prevail in law remains uncertain; that it has already shifted the political center of gravity is much harder to deny.

 

References 

Applebaum, A. (2021). Twilight of democracy: The seductive lure of authoritarianism. Vintage.

Cardina, M. (2025). “Portugal’s legacies of colonialism and decolonization.” Current History, 124(860), 101–106. https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2025.124.860.101

de Sousa Santos, B. (2016). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Routledge.

Ferreira Dias, J. (2025). Guerras culturais: Os ódios que nos incendeiam e como vencê-los. Guerra & Paz.

McWhorter, J. (2021). Woke racism: How a new religion has betrayed Black America. Portfolio.

Mounk, Y. (2025). The identity trap: A story of ideas and power in our time. Penguin Books.

Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595841

Smith, H. (2025). “Many races – one nation: Racial non-discrimination always the cornerstone of Portugal’s overseas policy.” In: C. Roldão, R. Lima, P. Varela, O. Raposo, & A. R. Matias (Eds.), Afroeuropeans: Identities, racism, and resistances (pp. 235–246). Routledge. 

Vala, J.; Lopes, D. & Lima, M. (2008). “Black immigrants in Portugal: Luso-tropicalism and prejudice.” Journal of Social Issues, 64(2), 287–302. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.00562.x

Zúquete, J. P. (2022). Populismo: Lá fora e cá dentro. Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos. 

Young African girl.

Algorithmic Environmental Populism and the Digital Politics of Waste in Africa

by CommentariesDigital-populismEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHome

Dr. Oludele Solaja’s analysis introduces the concept of “Algorithmic Environmental Populism” to illuminate how digital platforms are reshaping the politics of waste across African cities. Moving beyond conventional policy-centered approaches, Dr. Solaja demonstrates how environmental degradation—from plastic pollution to urban flooding—has become a site of algorithmically mediated political contestation. In this emerging landscape, complex ecological crises are reframed into morally charged narratives of blame, privileging visibility, outrage, and immediacy over systemic understanding. By linking populism theory with digital governance and environmental politics, the article offers a novel framework for understanding how platform logics transform ecological grievances into potent political forces. It is an essential contribution to debates on populism, digital media, and environmental governance in the Global South.

By Dr. Oludele Solaja

Environmental politics is now occurring not only at policy and infrastructure levels, but also through algorithms—from the clogged drains of Lagos to flood-prone Accra to landfills in South Africa. Environmental degradation has become a politically charged phenomenon on social media, and the sensational, outrage-driven, and immediate nature of these platforms has created an environment where narratives of blame outpace formal, institutional action. I refer to this new phenomenon as Algorithmic Environmental Populism, and I argue that digital infrastructure has become paramount in the formation, circulation, and contestation of ecological grievances.

The environmental crisis is no longer merely a management problem but a digitally mediated political language across the African continent, in which grievance, blame, and claims to power or moral legitimacy are performed. Plastic pollution, floods, burning dumpsites, and informal recycling have entered platform ecologies within which, according to a range of criteria, the most intense, visible, and confrontational content receives algorithmic attention. From this combination emerges a condition in which the environmental crisis is abstracted from complex systemic causes and reframed as a direct moral confrontation between “the people” and villains: polluters, corrupt elites, those who ship waste to Africa, and absent governments. In this process, platform algorithms prioritize the most engaging framing rather than the most policy-relevant one (Zeng & Schfer, 2023; Heidenreich et al., 2022).

The concept offers a way of extending understandings of populism and digital media, by foregrounding the environmental as a key site of algorithmically mediated political struggle. Classical theory on populism deals with the ideological construction of ‘the people’ and ‘the elite,’ while the infrastructures through which populist rhetoric is dispersed have been historically overlooked. Algorithmic Environmental Populism instead draws focus to platform logics, showing how they shape the contours and narratives of ecological complaint. By this it builds on research on algorithmic governance, the increasing role of algorithms in policy perception and the legitimacy of state power (Parthasarathy & Rajala, 2023).

In African cities the role of algorithms in producing a political context for waste is further amplified by its material presence on everyday life. Clogged drains, plastic-choked lagoons, burning dump sites and litter, produces and feeds readily available data streams, which produce, or a “condition of constant possibility” for data to be recorded and transmitted, resulting in environmental breakdown becoming rapidly politicisable. Take, for example, Nigeria. When the Lagos State government implemented restrictions on single-use plastics in 2025, environmental considerations took a back seat to narratives of bias, and selective policy enforcement. Viral image of floodwater pouring through plastic-clogged drains fed accusatory commentary that blamed the state, turning environmental degradation into a performance of political betrayal. 

Although it is true that a massive volume of plastic waste is annually dumped in Lagos State, these digital conversations tend to flatten the systems behind environmental degradation into morally legible pronouncements of blame and victimhood, which are amplified in the digital domain for emotional impact, rather than for systemic nuance (Couldry & Mejias, 2023). 

The significance of such arguments for politics in Africa is that these stories become diagnostically central. In such cases, a multiple-layered system of production, consumption, municipal service provision and global trade are collapsed into stark oppositional narratives because it is the only way in which environmental problems can be successfully broadcast within an algorithmic environment, where visibility takes priority over complexity. As digital media research shows, what gets amplified is content that triggers reactions: outrage, pity, and the assignment of blame. 

Similarly, we can observe this in Kenya where political activism is closely tied to moral pronouncements. Though debates exist surrounding extended producer responsibility, green economy initiatives, and refill systems; their manifestation in the digital space, in an effort to capture attention and elicit reaction, tends to focus on “blame-allocation” rather than the mechanics of institutional responsibility between citizens, corporations, and the state. Floods in Kenya’s urban centers of Nairobi and Mombasa provided highly visual and charged contexts to exacerbate these dynamics, producing further blame-oriented discourse regarding governmental incompetence and the inadequacy of infrastructure. In essence, the digitally mediated form of this political problem is not merely transmitting it; it is actively transforming it.

Another significant dimension of the digital landscape is how it also creates new forms of political subjectivity. Waste pickers and scavengers, once entirely invisible components of the informal city, are now visible. They challenge their invisibility through interventions in the digital domain, attempting to recover material flows and claim their political agency. They are now recognized as integral parts of urban recycling systems, while remaining ignored in the policy sphere (Njeru & Ochieng, 2025). Their visibility can be attributed to algorithms that amplify their stories, portraying them as overlooked labor fighting back against systemic neglect. Locally based actions, such as coastal clean-ups by youth groups in Kenya, become symbolical performances. The clean-up has the effect of politicizing the environment, either as an assertion of the citizen’s responsibility, as an attack on state incompetence or as a demonstration of collaborative effort. Environmental activism is transformed into a moral battlefield on the digital platform.

In South Africa we see a similar phenomenon of politically charged, algorithmically amplified resistance to landfill expansion and waste siting decisions. In 2026 protests against landfill development in urban periphery settlements, turned into a national narrative of social and environmental injustice through media mobilization; landfill as a continuance of structural violence through spatial inequalities. The discourse produced and amplified across the networks links contemporary exposure to historical environmental inequities through these landfill developments. Here Algorithmic Environmental Populism and environmental justice are closely interwoven, as the narratives attributed to technology and its governance are interpreted through morally loaded systems of victimhood and violence. The broader implications of Algorithmic Environmental Populism in Africa are that the histories of unequally mediated ecological flows, including plastics, second-hand goods and e-waste that flow into African cities and homes as waste from global consumption and production patterns. Such stories tend to produce a framing where the external imposition of blame arises from deeper historical conditions known as waste colonialism – an unequal world where states and their inhabitants bear uneven burdens of waste (Mah, 2024; Dauvergne, 2022).

This links directly into concepts of waste sovereignty – a state of ownership and control over material waste flows, their meanings and governance. In the digital space, sovereignty can now be enacted through the control of narrative. Those able to frame environmental crises in terms of simple, easily accessible, morally legible oppositions, are gaining political ground regardless of their technical knowledge. Environmental politics of waste is no longer a question of physical waste, or of policy-makers’ actions, but increasingly a matter of the visibility of what it is that matters and to whom it matters, a battle of recognition, and control, within platform governed space. 

Therefore, I suggest a three-stage process of digitally mediated waste politics: first, visible urban environmental decay; second, morally legible frames of attribution; and third, algorithmically favored amplification. It is in these stages that complexity is simplified and environmental disaster turns into visible, and therefore governable, political matter.

A certain democratizing aspect is that it allows for participation on new grounds, where citizens, informal waste workers and activist groups can join in debates around the environment on the internet. The downside is that these systems allow for a contraction of discourse: immediate visibility takes the form of sensation and outrage over deliberative engagement, bringing together political mobilization and propaganda (Heidenreich et al., 2022). Consequently, the environment has begun to be spoken of in conflicting terms: critical discourse clashes with simplified frameworks of accusation. A street in Accra that floods, or a dirty drainage canal in Kenya, or a burning landfill in South Africa, are instantly turned into evidence against the state, corporations, or the global system, obscuring underlying complexities.

This new discourse dynamic has major implications for environmental governance. Effectiveness is no longer solely about design and capacity but also about how environmental policies are understood, accepted, and engaged with on line. Municipalities and governments, as well as non-profit organizations need to operate in the digital space to manage the material and political aspects of waste. Scholars of environmental data governance agree that algorithms are key in framing environmental information (Gabrys, 2023). This is also significant for populist politics; waste cannot continue to be seen as an auxiliary or an afterthought. Instead, it has to be seen as a key component of the negotiations around citizenship, inequality, sovereignty and state power; the material traces of society that make social tensions visible and open to struggle. Algorithmic Environmental Populism provides an explanatory frame that connects environmental governance, digital media, and populist politics together, and helps to make sense of the way ecological grievance can be translated into potent political force by means of technologically managed visibility.

In short, the environmental politics of waste in Africa is no longer solely regulated by state and international institutions; its regulation is also about what becomes visible and how, within the spaces that platform logics control. What is now at stake is how we see waste, what we make of it in the discourse we construct, and the meaning that it is given within our digitally mediated attention economies. This transformation is an emblem of a broader shift: authority is no longer held by those who convene political discussions in spaces that are free from the influence of amplification. The management of waste, therefore, involves managing its meaning, a task that in the digital age depends greatly on the very politics of platforms.

 

References

Couldry, N. & Mejias, U. A. (2023). “Data colonialism and the future of social order.” New Media & Society, 25(4), 945–962.

Dauvergne, P. (2022). “Waste, pollution, and the global plastic crisis.” Global Environmental Politics, 22(1), 1–10.

Gabrys, J. (2023). “Digital waste and environmental data politics.” Information, Communication & Society, 26(9), 1785–1801.

Heidenreich, T., et al. (2022). “Populism and digital media: A comparative perspective.” Political Communication, 39(3), 345–362.

Mah, A. (2024). “Waste colonialism and global inequality.” Nature Sustainability, 7(1), 12–15.

Njeru, J. & Ochieng, C. (2025). “Plastic waste governance and informal economies in Africa.” Environmental Politics, 34(2), 256–275.

Parthasarathy, S. & Rajala, R. (2023). “Algorithmic governance and environmental policy.” Regulation & Governance, 17(4), 987–1003.

Zeng, J. & Schäfer, M. S. (2023). “Conceptualizing algorithmic populism.” New Media & Society, 25(8), 2015–2032.