Commentaries

Why Starmer Could Not Outflank Reform UK: Immigration, Culture Wars and the Collapse of Labour’s Anti-Populist Strategy

June 22, 2026

by ECPS_admin with No Comment Commentaries Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Migration

Why did Keir Starmer fail to neutralize Reform UK despite commanding a large parliamentary majority? In this incisive commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that Reform UK’s greatest achievement was not electoral but discursive. By transforming immigration, sovereignty, national identity, and culture-war politics into the central measures of political authority, Nigel Farage’s party compelled Labour to react on terrain it did not control. Drawing on the scholarship of populism and radical-right agenda-setting, Dr. Dias shows how attempts to accommodate populist themes often strengthen rather than weaken their appeal. The result, he argues, was a politics of defensive adaptation that left Labour trapped between technocratic governance and populist mobilization, ultimately exposing the limits of mainstream anti-populist strategies.

Keir Starmer did not fall simply because he lacked charisma or because Labour mismanaged government. He fell because Britain’s populist right succeeded in turning immigration and culture-war politics into the central test of political authority, and Labour never found a convincing answer. His resignation exposed a deeper crisis: a parliamentary landslide had not become political hegemony, and one of Europe’s oldest democracies was again being reorganized by forces outside the governing party.

The paradox of Starmer’s premiership is therefore not that a cautious leader struggled to inspire, but a government with an overwhelming majority found itself reacting to a party that did not hold power. Reform UK did not need to govern in order to discipline the government. It only needed to define what counted as political reality: borders, sovereignty, national identity, crime, “common sense,” and the betrayal of ordinary people by remote elites.

Reform as the Agenda-setter

There is a long-term debate in academia and the public sphere on how radical-right populist parties influence public debate and mainstream parties’ agendas. This influence is not only electoral. It is also discursive. Populist parties may lose elections, remain outside government, and still force the political system to speak their language (Meguid, 2005; Minkenberg, 2001; Mudde, 2019; Schmidt, 2025; Saldivia Gonzatti & Völker, 2026).

In many circumstances, parties — and especially governments — tend to address topics such as immigration, border control, national identity, and moral panic around Muslim migrants in terms already defined by the populist right (Poynting & Morgan, 2016; Mudde, 2019). This is one of the most important mechanisms of radical-right power: it wins when its opponents accept that its issues are the real issues, and that its vocabulary is the vocabulary of political seriousness.

As Cas Mudde argues, mainstream parties cannot address the radical-right agenda in its original terms. They must face the debate, the problems and public perceptions, but they must do so in democratic and moderate terms. Otherwise, they become contaminated by radical solutions or are perceived as opportunistic copies (Mudde, 2007, 2019).

This was Starmer’s first failure: the temptation to neutralize Reform UK by hardening Labour’s language on immigration and cultural values. The second failure was to do so while failing to recover public confidence, show authority, and offer ideological clarity.

Reform UK did not need to govern to impose its agenda. It shifted the debate to borders, sovereignty, national identity, crime, elites, and “common sense.” It made immigration not just one policy area among others, but the central test of whether the state still controlled the country.

That was the asymmetry. Farage could radicalize. Starmer had to calibrate. Reform could accuse. Labour had to administer. Reform could speak in symbols. Labour answered with management. And in a political moment dominated by anxiety, management was not enough.

Immigration as Reform UK’s Issue Ownership

Reform UK succeeded because it turned immigration into a symbol of state failure. It was no longer only about numbers, visas, asylum backlogs, or labor-market needs. It became a story about control, sovereignty and betrayal. This is why the issue was so powerful. Immigration became a metonymy for everything that seemed broken in Britain: pressure on housing, waiting lists, low wages, crime, cultural change, weak borders, and distant elites. The point was not simply that immigration was high. The point was that immigration could be used to explain almost every other failure.

For Reform UK, immigration was evidence that the state protected others before its own citizens. This is a classic populist grammar. The “people” are presented as abandoned; migrants become the visible beneficiaries of elite betrayal; and mainstream parties are accused of refusing to say what everyone allegedly knows (Mudde, 2007; Poynting & Morgan, 2016; Norris & Inglehart, 2019).

The concept of issue ownership helps explain why this was so damaging for Labour. Once Reform UK became the party most strongly associated with immigration control, any Labour attempt to sound tougher risked confirming Reform’s authority over the issue. Mainstream parties can change their position, but they do not automatically change who voters trust on the issue itself (Meguid, 2005; Bale et al., 2010; Abou-Chadi & Krause, 2020).

Starmer never found a convincing answer to this framing. When he hardened the discourse, he validated Reform’s premise that immigration was the central problem. When he moderated, he looked evasive or weak. He was trapped between moral discomfort and electoral fear.

Culture Wars as a Substitute for an Economic Programme

Reform UK did not need to present a detailed economic programme if it could keep politics focused on immigration, “woke politics,” crime, free speech, gender, patriotism, and resentment against Westminster. These themes worked because they were not just policy topics. They were identity markers.

The advantage of culture-war politics is that it simplifies the political field. It divides the country between those who allegedly see reality and those who hide behind elite language. It allows Reform UK to present itself as the party of “common sense,” while Labour appears as the party of caution, procedure, and institutional restraint.

This was another Starmer problem. Labour answered with competence, seriousness, and technocracy. Reform answered with conflict, identity, and emotion. Starmer promised delivery. Farage offered recognition. Starmer said the state could be repaired. Reform said the state had been captured.

This dynamic fits the broader cultural-backlash argument: radical-right populism does not grow only from material insecurity, but also from conflicts over identity, status, cultural change, and national belonging (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). This does not mean that Reform had better answers. It means that it had a clearer emotional structure. It knew who was guilty, who had been betrayed, and what had to be restored. Labour had policies, but Reform had a story.

The Mainstream Trap

The central mistake of mainstream parties is to believe that they can borrow the radical right’s themes without strengthening the radical right’s authority. But this rarely works. If a mainstream party copies the populist right, it confirms that the populist right identified the real problem first. If it refuses to engage, it looks detached from public anxiety.

This is the dilemma identified in much of the literature on mainstream responses to the radical right. Social-democratic parties, in particular, face a difficult strategic choice: they can ignore the radical right, confront it, or accommodate parts of its agenda. But accommodation often increases the salience of issues owned by the radical right, especially immigration and national identity (Bale et al., 2010; Akkerman et al., 2016; Meyer & Rosenberger, 2015).

This was Starmer’s dilemma. He could not ignore immigration, because silence would have allowed Reform to monopolize the issue. But he could not simply “out-Farage Farage,” because Reform would always sound more authentic on its own terrain.

The result was a politics of defensive adaptation. Labour tried to look tougher, but not too tough; moderate, but not weak; liberal, but not naïve. That balance may work in government documents. It does not work against a populist party that has reduced politics to betrayal, borders, and national decline.

Reform UK won the agenda because it forced Labour to react. And once Labour was reacting, its majority no longer looked like hegemony. It looked like “administration under pressure.”

Conclusion

Starmer’s fall shows that populist parties can shape politics before they capture power. Reform UK’s success was not only that it grew electorally. Its deeper success was that it made immigration, sovereignty, and culture-war politics the measure of political authority.

The lesson is not that mainstream parties should avoid immigration. That would be politically naïve and democratically dangerous. The lesson is that they must address immigration without accepting the populist frame that turns migrants into the master explanation for national decline.

A stronger Labour response would have linked immigration to state capacity, wages, housing, integration, public services and fairness. It would have spoken about control without cruelty, borders without scapegoating, and national solidarity without ethnic resentment.

Starmer could not outflank Reform UK because the contest was already being fought on Reform’s ground. Farage did not need to prove that he could govern. He only needed to prove that Labour was governing within a debate he had already defined.

References

Abou-Chadi, T., & Krause, W. (2020). “The causal effect of radical right success on mainstream parties’ policy positions: A regression discontinuity approach.” British Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 829–847.

Akkerman, T.; de Lange, S. L. & Rooduijn, M. (Eds.). (2016). Radical right-wing populist parties in Western Europe: Into the mainstream? Routledge.

Bale, T.; Green-Pedersen, C.; Krouwel, A.; Luther, K. R. & Sitter, N. (2010). “If you can’t beat them, join them? Explaining social democratic responses to the challenge from the populist radical right in Western Europe.” Political Studies, 58(3), 410–426.

Meguid, B. M. (2005). “Competition between unequals: The role of mainstream party strategy in niche party success.” American Political Science Review, 99(3), 347–359.

Meyer, S. & Rosenberger, S. (2015). “Just a shadow? The role of radical right parties in the politicization of immigration, 1995–2009.” Politics and Governance, 3(2), 1–17.

Minkenberg, M. (2001). “The radical right in public office: Agenda-setting and policy effects.” West European Politics, 24(4), 1–21.

Morgan, G. (2012). Global Islamophobia: Muslims and moral panic in the West. (S. Poynting, Ed.). Routledge.

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

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

Norris, P. & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press.

Saldivia Gonzatti, D. & Völker, T. (2026). “Far-right agenda setting: How the far right influences the political mainstream.” European Journal of Political Research, 65(1), 101–123.

Schmidt, V. A. (2025). “Populist agenda-setting: Shaping the narrative, framing the debate, captivating the ‘people,’ upending the mainstream, capturing power.” Journal of European Public Policy, 32(5), 1073–1096.

Decolonizing Climate Governance: Why Indigenous Knowledge Remains on the Margins of Global Climate Action

June 22, 2026

by ECPS_admin with No Comment Commentaries Editor’s Choice Environment & Climate Home

As climate change intensifies, global climate governance increasingly acknowledges the value of Indigenous knowledge while continuing to marginalize Indigenous peoples from meaningful decision-making processes. In this insightful commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja examines the paradox at the heart of contemporary climate governance: Indigenous knowledge is celebrated as essential for climate adaptation and environmental stewardship yet remains largely excluded from the institutions that shape climate policy. Drawing on debates surrounding epistemic injustice, decolonization, and democratic inclusion, Dr. Solaja argues that climate governance must move beyond symbolic recognition toward genuine power-sharing and knowledge co-production. The article highlights why the inclusion of Indigenous voices is not only a matter of justice but also a prerequisite for more effective, participatory, and sustainable climate futures.

By Dr. Oludele Solaja

Climate change is increasingly being labeled as the defining challenge of the twenty-first century, and although global climate governance now generally acknowledges the significance of Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems, their voices still remain marginalized from decision-making bodies. States, scientists, multinational bodies and technical processes, that privilege Western epistemologies, continue to dominate international climate negotiations. The result is that Indigenous knowledge is both celebrated publicly and yet hardly translated into practice in climate policy design, implementation and governance, and consequently raises issues of representation, knowledge justice and climate governance future.

The emerging awareness of Indigenous knowledge in the discourse around climate change is rooted in a widespread understanding that the environmental challenges necessitate plural knowledges to find solutions to climate change impacts. Indigenous peoples manage or hold tenure over approximately one-quarter of the Earth’s land surface, much of which is of critical importance for biodiversity conservation and serves as a significant carbon store (Orlove et al., 2023). Research consistently demonstrates that Indigenous peoples are rich holders of knowledge, possessing profound and extensive understandings of the environment and ecosystems derived from thousands of years of interaction with their local surroundings (Lam et al., 2020; Turner et al., 2022). This knowledge encompasses biodiversity conservation, climate adaptation, sustainable resource use, and the maintenance of ecosystem resilience (Akalibey et al., 2024; Dorji et al., 2024).

However, the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge often remains largely symbolic; the issue is not merely one of inclusion but of power. Climate negotiations generally take place within institutions that, by their very design, determine whose knowledge is considered valid, whose expertise is valued, and whose voices shape policy outcomes. In this context, Indigenous knowledge is frequently treated as a supplement to scientific knowledge rather than recognized as an equally legitimate epistemology for understanding and addressing climate change (Latulippe & Klenk, 2020). This unequal positioning of knowledge has come to be understood as epistemic injustice—a systematic undervaluation of particular forms of knowledge and ways of knowing, as well as of the people who hold them (Byskov & Hyams, 2022). Such injustice occurs when Indigenous environmental observations are ignored, when local knowledge is extracted without meaningful participation and inclusion, or when Indigenous representatives are consulted without being granted decision-making authority. In doing so, it reproduces colonial frameworks of knowledge production and governance, perpetuating the long-standing exclusion of Indigenous peoples from environmental decision-making processes.

There exists a great paradox: while climate agreements increasingly recognize Indigenous knowledge, the governance frameworks that marginalize Indigenous participation remain largely unchanged. Both the Paris Agreement acknowledges the importance of Indigenous knowledge for climate adaptation, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has established the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform (LCIPP) to strengthen Indigenous participation. Yet Indigenous peoples continue to receive only limited recognition in terms of meaningful participation in decision-making arenas, often serving merely as observers while states retain ultimate decision-making authority over climate-related issues.

In line with this observation, Carmona et al. (2024) demonstrate significant disparities in the integration of Indigenous rights and knowledge within Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the key instruments of the Paris Agreement, despite references to Indigenous peoples in some countries’ climate plans. This suggests a substantial gap between the theoretical acknowledgment and the practical incorporation of Indigenous knowledge in climate policy and implementation.

This situation is also evident in Canada, where numerous initiatives led by Indigenous peoples draw upon ancestral knowledge alongside modern sustainability measures for environmental conservation. Nevertheless, Indigenous leaders have argued that state climate policy design lacks genuine consultation and power-sharing mechanisms with Indigenous communities (Bell et al., 2025; McGregor, 2021), revealing the extent to which participation does not necessarily guarantee influence in decision-making processes. In contrast, Indigenous knowledge systems in Africa play significant roles in climate adaptation.

Traditional institutions have developed various methods for coping with climate variability, generating knowledge that enables communities to adapt to environmental changes through diverse ecological resource-management techniques. However, this knowledge is rarely reflected in state-level climate adaptation policies, which tend to prioritize externally developed technical solutions (Makondo & Thomas, 2018; Chanza & De Wit, 2016), thereby reflecting ongoing postcolonial epistemological hierarchies (David, 2024).

These dynamics have important implications for policy design, as local climate challenges cannot be effectively addressed through broad scientific models that ignore specific ecological, cultural, and economic contexts. As Orlove et al. (2023) note, the unique understanding Indigenous peoples possess of local environments in the Arctic, for instance, has proven vital for the early identification of environmental changes, including shifts in ice conditions and wildlife migration patterns.

Efforts in the Arctic, along with various similar initiatives led by Indigenous peoples (Bell et al., 2025), further demonstrate the benefits of knowledge co-production—an approach that seeks to bridge scientific and Indigenous knowledge in environmental research and governance. The challenge lies in the fact that these knowledge systems are often treated as separate and incompatible when, in reality, sustainability transformations must draw upon the interaction of multiple forms of knowledge in ways that are equitably structured, as argued by Lam et al. (2020).

However, calls for the integration of Indigenous knowledge into climate governance are not without complications. Critics have raised concerns about the transferability of context-specific Indigenous knowledge within international governance mechanisms, noting that environmental knowledge generated within a particular ecological setting may not be readily applicable to other contexts. Others have expressed concerns about representation, emphasizing the diversity that exists within Indigenous communities and arguing that no single individual or organization can represent the entirety of Indigenous knowledge systems.

Additional controversies arise from the differences between the verification procedures of scientific inquiry and knowledge rooted in oral traditions, cultural practices, and lived human experience. These issues warrant careful consideration and appropriate responses. However, they do not justify the continued marginalization of Indigenous knowledge. Rather, they highlight the need for governance systems that foster communication, mutual learning, and fair access to diverse knowledge systems.

The question is not whether Indigenous knowledge should be incorporated into governance mechanisms, but rather how institutions can create conditions that support knowledge co-production while respecting both scientific and Indigenous ways of knowing.

Decolonizing climate governance represents efforts toward the alteration of institutions, decision-making processes, and knowledge systems that still favor Western scientific approaches and marginalize Indigenous ways of knowing and learning. It is an attempt not only to include but also to redistribute power, authority, and governance over knowledge. Decolonization of climate governance, therefore, is not simply about the participation of Indigenous people at global conferences; it is about how climate knowledge is constructed, validated, and applied. Indigenous representatives must participate in decision-making processes as rights holders instead of mere advisors; climate funds must be allocated to support projects led by Indigenous peoples; intellectual property rights should be respected; and Indigenous knowledge should be recognized as a valid epistemology.

Calls for the decolonization of climate agreements, such as that of Reed et al. (2024), assert that strengthening Indigenous participation would bolster not only the legitimacy but also the efficacy of climate action and decision-making, among many other positive outcomes beyond what has traditionally been understood. Thus, the matter extends beyond climate issues and deep into questions of democracy, representation, and justice in governance.

The marginalization of Indigenous voices within global climate governance also raises important questions about contemporary forms of exclusionary governance often associated with technocratic and elite-driven policymaking. While climate negotiations increasingly claim to represent global interests, decision-making processes remain concentrated among state actors, scientific experts, and international institutions. This concentration of authority creates a democratic deficit that mirrors broader concerns in populism studies regarding representation, voice, and the exclusion of marginalized communities from policy processes. Indigenous demands for greater participation therefore reflect not only environmental concerns but also broader struggles for recognition, representation, and democratic inclusion.

The increasing magnitude of climate impacts will continue to demand innovative and contextual solutions, and in this regard, Indigenous peoples have proven to be adaptable and capable environmental stewards through millennia of interaction with and knowledge generation about their environments. Thus, for a sustainable future, climate governance must seek to go beyond nominal engagement and move toward true recognition of power-sharing and the pluralism of knowledges. Therefore, the decolonization of climate governance is not simply a matter of justice for Indigenous peoples, but also a necessary condition for creating more effective, participatory, and sustainable climate futures. Indigenous knowledges can no longer remain peripheral actors in the processes that determine climate futures if global climate governance is to be truly transformative.

References

Akalibey, S.; Hlaváčková, P.; Schneider, J.; Fialová, J.; Darkwah, S. & Ahenkan, A. (2024). “Integrating indigenous knowledge and culture in sustainable forest management via global environmental policies.” Journal of Forest Science.https://doi.org/10.17221/20/2024-jfs

Bell, E.; Tremblay, C.; Carodenuto, S.; Downie, B.; Dearden, P.; Kileli, E. O. & McDougall, S. (2025). “Indigenous knowledge-bridging to support ecological stewardship in Canada and Tanzania.” People and Nature, 7, 1139–1150. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.70034

Byskov, M. F. & Hyams, K. (2022). “Epistemic injustice in climate adaptation.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 25(5), 1099–1115. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-022-10301-z

Carmona, R.; Reed, G.; Ford, J.; Thorsell, S.; Yon, R.; Carril, F. & Pickering, K. (2024). “Indigenous Peoples’ rights in national climate governance: An analysis of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).” Ambio, 53(1), 138–155. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-023-01922-4

Chanza, N. & Wit, A. D. (2016). “Enhancing climate governance through indigenous knowledge: Case in sustainability science.” South African Journal of Science, 112, 7–7. https://doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2016/20140286

Dorji, T.; Moktan, K.; Tshering, K. & Wangchuk, T. (2024). “Understanding how Indigenous knowledge contributes to climate change adaptation and resilience: A systematic review.” Environmental Management, 74(3), 456–472. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-024-02032-x

Lam, D. P. M.; Hinz, E.; Lang, D.; Tengö, M.; Wehrden, H. & Martín-López, B. (2020). “Indigenous and local knowledge in sustainability transformations research: A literature review.” Ecology and Society, 25(3). https://doi.org/10.5751/es-11305-250103

Latulippe, N. & Klenk, N. L. (2020). “Making room and moving over: Knowledge co-production, Indigenous knowledge sovereignty and the politics of global environmental change decision-making.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 42, 7–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2019.10.010

Makondo, C. & Thomas, D. (2018). “Climate change adaptation: Linking indigenous knowledge with western science for effective adaptation.” Environmental Science & Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2018.06.014

McGregor, D. (2021). “Indigenous knowledge systems in environmental governance in Canada.” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies. https://doi.org/10.18357/kula.148

Orlove, B.; Sherpa, P.; Dawson, N.; Adelekan, I.; Alangui, W. V.; Carmona, R.; Coen, D.; Nelson, M. K.; Reyes-García, V.; Rubis, J.; Sanago, G., & Wilson, A. (2023). “Placing diverse knowledge systems at the core of transformative climate research.” Ambio, 52, 1431–1447. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-023-01857-w

Reed, G.; Alook, A. & McGregor, D. (2024). “Decolonizing climate agreements strengthens policy and research for all future generations.” Nature Communications, 15, Article 4810. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49143-x

Turner, N.; Cuerrier, A. & Joseph, L. (2022). “Well grounded: Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge, ethnobiology and sustainability.” People and Nature. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10321

Data and Drought: A Community Fights Back

June 17, 2026

by ECPS_admin Commentaries Digital-populism Editor’s Choice Environment & Climate Home

As artificial intelligence drives an unprecedented expansion of data-center infrastructure, questions of climate sustainability, democratic accountability, and technological governance are becoming increasingly urgent. In this timely commentary, Dr. Heidi Hart examines the controversy surrounding Utah’s proposed Stratos Project, a massive AI data-center complex planned for a drought-stricken region of the American West. Moving beyond conventional debates about innovation and economic growth, Dr. Hart explores how concerns over water scarcity, environmental degradation, energy consumption, and surveillance technologies have galvanized an unlikely coalition of local residents. Bringing together insights on climate politics, technocracy, populism, and grassroots mobilization, the commentary highlights how resistance to AI infrastructure is creating new political alignments and raising fundamental questions about who gets to decide the future of technology, land, and democratic participation.

By Heidi Hart

In the steppe geography of northern Utah in the US, sagebrush carries a spicy, resinous scent after a rare rainstorm. Cattle ranchers eye the land for better grazing amid historic drought. A dark rock cluster marks a 500-year-old Indigenous burial site. The northern tip of the Great Salt Lake, where Robert Smithson’s famous Spiral Jetty once disappeared underwater, now resembles a moonscape. Toxic dust from decades of industrial pollution blows across the valleys toward the heavily populated foothills of the Wasatch Mountains.

In this already stressed land, a hyperscale data center project – originally planned to be the largest in the world, at over twice the size of Manhattan – has drawn international attention. At a time when the UN is warning about the environmental costs (including and extending beyond greenhouse emissions) of AI infrastructure, a recent study has shown that most data centers are being proposed for drought-stricken lands, and US legislatures debate the economic benefits versus costs to local communities’ quality of life, the Stratos Project in Utah has become a flashpoint for imagining the future of AI ecosystems. An unexpected side-effect of these debates has been a growing grassroots protest movement across political divides, from rural Trump-voter communities in the US South to the NAACP.

The Stratos project in Utah, conceived by Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame and railroaded past any local or environmental review under the guise of military necessity, was first proposed at over 40,000 acres (62.5 square miles or 162 sqare kilometers). It would create a thermal load of close to 16 gigawatts or “the equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy … every single day,” according to Utah State University physics professor Robert Davies. With no existing electrical grid and plans to draw on the Ruby Pipeline for natural gas, the project would affect northern Utah’s already poor air quality and increase carbon emissions by 55% to 75%. At or above 90 decibels, noise from data centers is notorious for causing hearing loss, insomnia, and even nausea in humans, not to mention the effects on wildlife in precarious desert ecosystems.

The problem of water looms largest over the Stratos plan. Though the county government’s information site, which reads like marketing copy, estimates around 2,000 acre feet for year drawn from groundwater in a “closed-loop system,” that water is not an infinite resource, even in wetter periods, and environmental groups are only now making some headway in efforts to protect the shrinking Great Salt Lake. With global heating and atmospheric weather changes, the occasionally low-snow winters that have reduced spring runoff in the past could become the norm. Rapid population growth before and during the Covid years has also increased stress on Utah’s water supply. From irrigation and watering restrictions to the toxic dust problem, everyone in the crowded northern part of the state senses the scarcity. Add to this a massive power- and water-draining data complex, with its additional function as a surveillance machine, and locals have a reason to rise up.

When the project was first announced earlier this year, Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox expressed enthusiasm for what O’ Leary called “Wonder Valley Utah” – and frustration with critics calling out the lack of review, discussion, and transparency. After finding that state leaders had approved a massive project that would affect their communities and ecosystems for generations to come, around 80 protesters confronted the Box Elder County Commission to decry lack of public input. The protests spread to the Utah State Capitol, where, on May 23, 2026, concerned citizens from across the political spectrum voiced their anger, as well as some humor about accusations that they were being paid by China.

As a result of this pushback, and a poll finding that a majority of Box Elder County residents oppose the Stratos project, Governor Cox softened his stance in favor of public discussion and environmental review. O’Leary has agreed to scale down the project by 20,000 acres, a reduction by half. Still, local activists are not convinced. Nearly 700 protests have been filed with the Utah Division of Water Rights, a time-consuming process that has resulted in the withdrawal of two water rights applications for the data center. As of this writing, Box Elder County has approved a 180-day moratorium on data centers.

The Stratos fight is far from over, but as in other US states, and in this one, where religious and political divides run deep, the data center threat has brought together unlikely collaborators. While not the form of populism that usually makes the news (the recent cage-fighting spectacle in front of the White House as a case in point), Utah’s anti-technocracy protest movement brings out cattle ranchers, university professors, hunters, eco-activists, churchgoers and nonbelievers, Republicans and Democrats. It’s hardly a cozy coalition, but it opens up a broader space for “the people” in a traditionally deep-red state.

The movement also calls on Indigenous perspectives to ground its efforts. Darren Parry of the Northwest Band of the Shoshone Nation, interviewed for ECPS in 2021, has been a vocal opponent of the Stratos project, noting the Hansel Valley’s fragile ecosystem and rock-mound burial sites in the area. Parry has shared contrasting images of the high-desert valley (his own photograph) and the planned complex dominating the scene with glowing glass rectangles and steaming cooling towers. The sci-fi quality of the image is partly its point. AI can generate imaginary utopias or doomscapes, but it will take a messy, persistent human movement to keep the land itself alive.

The Politics of Attention: Visibility, Legitimacy, and the Transformation of Democratic Competition

June 17, 2026

by ECPS_admin Commentaries Digital-populism Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home

As digital platforms increasingly shape how citizens encounter politics, longstanding assumptions about democratic competition are being challenged. In this insightful commentary, Yacine Boubia argues that attention has emerged as a distinct and increasingly decisive political resource, reshaping the foundations of legitimacy, influence, and power in contemporary democracies. Drawing on democratic theory, media studies, and political communication, he traces the historical transformation from an era of informational scarcity to one of informational abundance, where political success depends increasingly on the ability to command visibility. The commentary explores the rise of the influencer politician, the structural relationship between attention and populism, and the democratic consequences of communication systems optimized for engagement rather than deliberation. It offers a timely contribution to debates about democracy, media, and political power in the digital age.

By Yacine Boubia

The dominant frameworks for understanding contemporary democratic politics remain, in their essential structure, remarkably stable. Elections are interpreted as contests between competing ideological visions. Political success is attributed to organizational strength, policy credibility, or the capacity to mobilize voters around shared material and cultural concerns. Institutions are evaluated according to their capacity to translate popular preferences into governing outcomes. These frameworks capture real and important dimensions of political life, and the scholarship they have generated—from electoral sociology to institutional analysis to the study of political communication—constitutes an indispensable foundation for understanding how democracies function.

Yet they have proven increasingly insufficient for explaining a transformation that has reshaped the terms of democratic competition over the past two decades: the emergence of attention as an autonomous political resource, distinct from votes, organizational capacity, or policy credibility, and increasingly determinative of political influence, legitimacy, and power.

This insufficiency is not accidental. The frameworks that dominate political analysis were developed within a communication environment that no longer fully exists. They assumed, often implicitly, that political information was relatively scarce, that citizens encountered it through a limited number of institutionally mediated channels, and that political competition was therefore primarily a competition for votes organized around the capacity to persuade.

The contemporary communication environment inverts each of these assumptions. Information is not scarce but superabundant. Citizens encounter political content through a multiplicity of channels whose institutional character has been progressively dissolved by commercial and algorithmic logics. And political competition, while still ultimately organized around the capacity to win elections, increasingly unfolds as a prior competition for something that votes cannot capture: the capacity to command public attention, to dominate communicative space, and to shape the political reality that citizens encounter before they have formed the preferences that democratic theory assumes they bring to the political process.

Understanding this transformation requires not a new theory of voting behavior but a historical account of how attention became political currency—and what its ascendancy has done to the conditions of democratic governance.

The Scarcity That Democracy Lost

Democratic theory has always assumed a particular relationship between citizens and political information. The deliberative tradition associated with Habermas (1989) posited a public sphere in which citizens encounter competing arguments, evaluate them against shared standards of reasonableness, and form political judgments through processes of communicative exchange. The aggregative tradition associated with electoral democracy assumed that citizens arrive at preferences through exposure to political alternatives and cast votes that translate those preferences into governing authority. Both traditions assumed, in different ways, that the problem confronting citizens was insufficient information — that the challenge of democratic participation was obtaining enough of the right kind of political content to make informed judgments. This assumption structured the institutional architecture of twentieth-century mass democracy: public broadcasting obligations, fairness doctrines, editorial standards, and regulatory frameworks governing media ownership were all, in different ways, responses to the perceived problem of informational scarcity and the democratic imperative to address it.

That problem no longer describes the condition of citizens in advanced democracies. The average American adult is estimated to encounter between six and ten thousand advertising messages per day — a figure that captures only a fraction of the total informational environment within which political content now competes for attention. News alerts, social media feeds, podcasts, video streams, online commentary, and the continuous production of digital content have created an environment not of informational scarcity but of informational superabundance — what the cognitive scientist Herbert Simon (1971) identified, with considerable prescience, as a condition in which the abundance of information creates a corresponding scarcity of attention.

The political implications of this inversion are profound and have been insufficiently theorized. When the scarce resource is not information but attention, the competition that matters is no longer primarily the competition to inform. It is the competition to be noticed—and the rules governing that competition are structured not by the norms of democratic deliberation but by the commercial and algorithmic logics of the platforms and media systems within which it takes place.

How Attention Became Political Capital

The transformation of attention into political capital did not occur suddenly with the emergence of social media platforms. It was prepared by a longer history of media commercialization whose political consequences were identified by critical scholars well before the digital age confirmed them empirically. The postwar settlement that organized mass media in most Western democracies rested on a partial and contested separation between commercial and civic imperatives: broadcasting was regulated as a public good, journalism maintained professional norms that distinguished it from entertainment, and the political information environment was organized, however imperfectly, around standards of balance, accuracy, and democratic accountability. These arrangements were neither neutral nor without their own distortions. But they embedded within the media system a set of institutional resistances to the pure logic of attention maximization that the subsequent decades of deregulation and commercialization systematically dismantled.

The consequences of that dismantling were theorized with particular clarity by scholars working at the intersection of media studies and democratic theory. Neil Postman’s (1985) diagnosis of television’s restructuring of public discourse—its substitution of image, emotion, and entertainment for the sustained argumentative exchange that print culture had historically demanded — identified the fundamental mechanism through which commercial media logic reshapes political communication. Guy Debord’s (1967) account of the society of the spectacle, developed within a different theoretical tradition, converged on the same structural observation: that the commercialization of communication progressively elevates visibility above substance, appearance above reality, and the capacity to capture attention above the capacity to govern. Daniel Boorstin’s (1961) earlier identification of the pseudo-event—the manufactured occurrence designed primarily for media coverage rather than emerging from genuine social processes—provided the most concrete institutional illustration of how the logic of attention transforms political communication from within.

Writing in different contexts and from different theoretical perspectives, each of these scholars identified the same underlying dynamic: that media systems organized around the capture and monetization of attention progressively reward political actors who can supply what those systems demand, regardless of whether that supply serves the informational requirements of democratic citizenship.

The digital revolution accelerated and intensified this dynamic rather than reversing it. Social media platforms did not introduce the logic of attention maximization into democratic politics. They industrialized it—providing the technical infrastructure to measure attention with unprecedented precision, optimize content for its capture with algorithmic efficiency, and distribute the results at a scale and speed that no previous communication system had achieved.

The political consequences of this industrialization were not the product of platform design choices made in bad faith. They were the structural output of commercial systems optimizing for engagement in an environment where engagement is measured by emotional activation, identity confirmation, and conflict — the precise communicative register that political communication organized around attention maximization has always, as Postman (1985) and Debord (1967) recognized, tended to favor.

Visibility, Legitamcy, and the Influencer Politician

The transformation of attention into political capital has produced consequences that extend beyond the familiar observations about media spectacle and political performance. Its deepest implication concerns the structural relationship between visibility and legitimacy in democratic politics — a relationship that has been quietly but fundamentally altered by the communication systems within which contemporary democratic competition takes place. Democratic legitimacy has historically been understood as deriving from a set of sources that are, in principle, independent of communicative visibility: electoral mandate, institutional position, policy expertise, party authority, and the capacity to govern effectively. These sources of legitimacy did not require continuous public attention to remain operative. An effective administrator, a competent legislator, or a credible party organization could exercise significant political authority while maintaining a relatively modest public profile.

The contemporary attention economy has disrupted this relationship in ways whose full implications are still being worked out. When political information reaches citizens primarily through platforms that rank content by engagement rather than by institutional authority or deliberative relevance, visibility itself becomes a source of legitimacy—not merely an instrument for communicating it.

The political actor who commands sustained public attention acquires a form of democratic authority that is structurally independent of, and in some contexts more immediately potent than, the authority derived from institutional position or electoral mandate. This is not simply because attention-commanding actors reach more citizens, though they do. It is because the continuous presence in citizens’ informational environments that platform-mediated visibility provides constitutes, in itself, a form of political relationship—an ongoing communicative connection that substitutes, at the level of felt political reality, for the institutional relationships through which democratic authority has traditionally been organized and experienced.

The emergence of what might be termed the influencer politician represents the clearest institutional manifestation of this shift. Political authority has traditionally derived from the mediating structures of democratic governance: parties, legislatures, bureaucracies, and the formal processes through which citizens delegate authority to representatives accountable to collective institutions. The influencer politician — a figure whose political authority derives substantially from direct audience relationships built through continuous digital communication, personal branding, and the cultivation of online communities — represents a structural departure from this model that existing frameworks of democratic accountability were not designed to address.

The boundaries separating political communication from celebrity culture and digital content creation have become genuinely blurred, not as a cultural curiosity but as a political-institutional development with significant consequences for how authority is constructed, legitimized, and challenged in contemporary democracies. Zeynep Tufekci’s (2017) account of how digital tools have transformed political organizing captures part of this dynamic, but the influencer politician phenomenon represents a further development: not merely the use of digital tools to organize existing political constituencies, but the construction of political authority itself through the logic of platform visibility.

The Communication Advantage and Its Democratic Costs

The history of modern democratic politics offers a consistent and instructive pattern: political leaders who master the dominant communication technologies of their era acquire advantages that transcend the specific content of their policy programs or the strength of their organizational support. Roosevelt’s fireside radio addresses exploited the intimacy of broadcast audio in ways that opponents trained in the conventions of print-era political oratory were unprepared to match. Ronald Reagan’s command of television — his capacity to project emotional warmth, moral clarity, and direct personal address within a medium that rewarded image and affect over argumentative substance — redefined the terms of presidential communication for a generation, demonstrating that the political resources derived from communication mastery could, in the right conditions, substantially compensate for weaknesses in policy credibility or institutional support. The pattern these cases illustrate is not merely that new media create new political opportunities. It is that new media restructure the entire field of political competition, altering the relative value of different political resources and systematically advantaging actors whose communicative capacities align with the demands of the new environment.

The political actors who have most effectively navigated the attention economy have demonstrated an intuitive understanding of this pattern. Donald Trump’s political communication represented not merely an adaptation to social media but a recognition—more explicit and more strategically deliberate than his opponents acknowledged—that the communication environment had undergone a structural shift whose implications mainstream political practice had not yet absorbed.

His capacity to generate continuous attention through provocation, conflict, and the deliberate violation of communicative norms that the previous media environment had enforced was not a deviation from rational political strategy. It was a precise calibration to the incentive structures of platforms optimized for engagement, in an environment where engagement is disproportionately generated by content that is emotionally activating and conflict-driven. The platform algorithm did not produce his political style. But the convergence between that style and the reward structures of the attention economy gave him communicative resources that the institutional logic of democratic competition was not equipped to neutralize.

The democratic costs of this dynamic are real but require careful specification to avoid the twin errors of technological determinism and institutional nostalgia. The attention economy does not make deliberative democracy impossible. Citizens retain the capacity to evaluate political arguments, hold leaders accountable, and form political judgments that resist the simplifications that attention-maximizing communication encourages. What the attention economy does is alter the cost structure of different forms of political communication—making conflict cheaper than consensus, simplicity cheaper than complexity, and emotional activation cheaper than deliberative persuasion—in ways that systematically disadvantage the communicative forms that democratic theory has historically associated with informed political participation. This is not a claim about citizen irrationality. It is a claim about institutional design: that communication systems optimized for commercial engagement create structural incentives that are, at their core, in tension with the communicative requirements of democratic governance, and that this tension has political consequences that compound over time.

Attention, Populism, and the Restructuring of Democratic Competition

The relationship between the attention economy and the contemporary rise of populism is neither causal nor coincidental. It is structural. Populism, understood as a discursive political logic that constructs a frontier between an authentic people and a corrupt elite (Laclau, 2005), has always depended on communicative forms that the attention economy systematically rewards: emotional intensity, adversarial simplicity, the clear identification of enemies, and the cultivation of a direct affective relationship between leader and followers that bypasses the mediating institutions of representative democracy. These communicative requirements are not incidental features of populist politics. They are, as Laclau (2005) argued, constitutive of its discursive logic—the means through which diverse and otherwise disconnected grievances are articulated into a unified political identity capable of challenging established power. What the attention economy has done is not create these requirements but dramatically lower the cost of meeting them, providing the technical infrastructure through which populist communication can reach mass audiences at a scale and speed, and with a directness and emotional intensity that previous communication systems did not permit.

The implications extend beyond the electoral fortunes of specific populist movements. The deeper consequence is the progressive restructuring of democratic competition itself around the logic of attention—a restructuring that affects not only explicitly populist actors but all political actors operating within the same communication environment. When visibility becomes a prerequisite for political influence, all political actors face pressure to adapt their communication strategies to the demands of the attention economy, regardless of their ideological commitments or governing ambitions.

The result is a gradual convergence of political communication styles toward the emotional, the conflictual, and the spectacular—a convergence that the attention economy rewards and that democratic deliberation, in its classical sense, cannot easily survive. Margaret Canovan’s (1999) observation that populism represents the permanent shadow of democracyacquires particular resonance in this context: the communication systems through which contemporary democracy operates have created conditions in which that shadow falls more heavily, and more continuously, than the institutional architecture of liberal democracy was designed to accommodate.

Conclusion: Attention, Democracy, and the Question of Institutional Design

The transformation of attention into political capital is not a temporary disruption produced by the novelty of digital platforms or the exceptional character of specific political figures. It reflects a structural shift in the communication environment within which democratic politics operates — a shift whose origins lie in the deregulation and commercialization of media that began in the 1980s and whose acceleration through platformization has produced a political information environment organized around fundamentally different imperatives than those that shaped the institutional architecture of postwar liberal democracy.

The political consequences of this shift—the premium on visibility over competence, the restructuring of political legitimacy around audience relationships rather than institutional authority, the systematic rewarding of communicative forms that are in tension with deliberative democratic norms — are not the product of technology alone. They are the product of choices about how communication systems are designed, regulated, and governed, choices that reflect and reproduce particular distributions of power and particular understandings of what democratic communication is for.

The conventional responses to these developments — calls for platform regulation, media literacy education, the reform of campaign finance, or the restoration of public broadcasting — each address real dimensions of the problem without capturing its structural depth. The challenge is not merely to correct specific malfunctions within the existing communication environment but to recover a prior question that the attention economy has rendered increasingly difficult to ask: what kind of communicative infrastructure does democratic self-governance actually require?

Habermas’s account of the public sphere as a constitutive condition of democratic legitimacy remains analytically indispensable here, not as a nostalgic ideal to be restored but as a standard against which the communicative conditions of contemporary democracy can be evaluated and found wanting. The public sphere that democratic theory requires is one in which citizens can encounter competing political arguments, evaluate them against shared standards of evidence and reason, and form political judgments through processes of collective deliberation. The communication environment that the attention economy has produced systematically undermines each of these requirements — not through overt censorship or deliberate political manipulation, but through the structural logic of systems optimized for engagement rather than understanding, visibility rather than accountability, and emotional activation rather than deliberative exchange.

The question facing contemporary democracies is therefore not simply who commands attention — though that question has become, as this analysis has argued, increasingly central to the distribution of political power. It is whether the institutional conditions can be reconstructed under which attention follows argument rather than precedes it, under which visibility derives from democratic accountability rather than substituting for it, and under which the communicative requirements of self-governance take precedence over the commercial imperatives of the platforms through which democratic politics now predominantly unfolds. That reconstruction is among the most consequential institutional challenges of the present democratic moment — and it cannot be addressed without first understanding, in its full historical depth, how attention became the currency it has.

References

Boorstin, D. J. (1961). The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Harper & Row.

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

Debord, G. (1967). La Société du spectacle. Buchet-Chastel. [English translation: The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, 1994.]

Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. MIT Press.

Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. London: Verso (new edition, 2018).

Postman, N. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Viking.

Simon, H. A. (1971). “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” In: M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Yale University Press.

Street scene in Douala, Cameroon’s largest city.

Communaucratic Populism: Rethinking Identity-Based Electoral Mobilization in Postcolonial Africa

June 12, 2026

by ECPS_admin Commentaries Editor’s Choice Home

The authors introduce communaucratic populism as a novel conceptual framework for understanding a form of political mobilization in which electoral competition is structured less by ideological programs than by competing claims of communal belonging—ethnic, regional, or identitarian—to a state conceived as a collective patrimony. Drawing on Cameroon’s 2025 presidential election, the commentary argues that the dominant ideational, discursive, and strategic approaches to populism capture only fragments of postcolonial African electoral dynamics. Situated between ethnic populism and clientelism, communaucratic populism describes a moral economy of intercommunal rotation through which both incumbents and challengers seek legitimacy. The article identifies four constitutive dimensions of the concept, illustrates them empirically, and outlines a broader comparative research agenda on postcolonial democratic pluralism.

By Yves Valéry Obame*, Salomon Essaga Etémé** & Armand Leka Essomba***

Across sub-Saharan Africa, three decades of multiparty competition have produced a paradox that mainstream populism theory still struggles to name. Elections are held; oppositions mobilize; voters turn out, and yet executive turnover remains rare, while political contestation increasingly maps onto communal cleavages rather than programmatic ones. Cameroon offers an unusually clear instance of this puzzle. Since the 1990 return to multipartyism, no presidential alternation has occurred. The 2025 presidential election, which renewed the mandate of an incumbent in power since 1982, again unfolded along a familiar grammar: candidates summoned regional, ethnic, and identitarian solidarities; voters interpreted the state apparatus less as an instrument of policy delivery than as a collective resource to be conquered or defended; and post-electoral disputes were framed less as procedural grievances than as zero-sum struggles over communal access to power.

Such dynamics resist the standard analytical vocabulary of populism studies. They cannot be reduced to the binary opposition between “the people” and “the elite” (Mudde, 2004), nor fully captured by discursive theories of antagonism (Laclau, 2005), nor by strategic accounts centred on the unmediated personal leader (Weyland, 2001). Nor are they exhausted by the literature on ethnic politics or neo patrimonial clientelism. This commentary proposes a new analytical category – communaucratic populism – to designate this distinctive mode of political mobilization, and to begin specifying what its study requires.

Why African Electoral Politics Requires a New Conceptual Vocabulary

The three leading approaches to populism—ideational, discursive, and strategic—each illuminate a distinct facet of African electoral politics. Yet none adequately accounts for its defining feature: the routinized framing of elections as contests among communities for control of the state. The ideational approach (Mudde, 2004; Müller, 2016; Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017) defines populism as a thin-centred ideology pitting a “morally pure people” against a “corrupt elite.” But in many postcolonial African contexts, the morally charged unit of political contestation is not “the people” as singular sovereign but a plurality of communities, each laying claim to representation. The Manichean cleavage runs not vertically (people against elite) but horizontally (community against community) with the state positioned as the contested prize.

The discursive approach (Laclau, 2005) is more accommodating: its emphasis on the construction of equivalently chains and antagonistic frontiers allows for the emergence of a “people” out of heterogeneous demands. Yet Laclau’s framework still presupposes that successful populist articulation generates a singular popular subject. Communaucratic mobilizationworks differently. It does not seek to dissolve communal particularities into a higher unity; it preserves them, and indeed instrumentalizes them, as the very currency of electoral legitimacy. Each candidate becomes a community’s standard-bearer; coalitions take the form of inter-communal arithmetic rather than ideological synthesis.

The strategic approach (Weyland, 2001) emphasizes the unmediated personalistic appeal of a leader to an atomized mass. This captures certain aspects of postcolonial leadership cultures, but overlooks what is most salient in cases such as Cameroon: the leader is not unmediated. He is, on the contrary, deeply mediated by community elders, regional notables, diaspora figures, customary chiefs, and digital opinion-makers who function as relays of communal endorsement. The leader is not “of the people” in Weyland’s sense, he is of his people, and recognition by other communities must be politically negotiated. To these blind spots one might add a fourth: existing accounts of ethnic populism (Brubaker, 2017) and African ethnopolitics (Posner, 2005; Lynch, 2011) treat communal mobilization either as a derivative of ethnicity or as an effect of strategic elite manipulation. Communaucratic populism, by contrast, designates a logic of political signification in its own right.

The Four Constitutive Dimensions of Communaucratic Populism

Communaucratic populism is here understood as a mode of political mobilization in which electoral competition is structured around competing claims of communal belonging (ethnic, regional, religious, generational, or identitarian) to a state apparatus conceived as a collective patrimony to be distributed among groups. The concept articulates four constitutive dimensions.

The first is communitarian: Politics is organized around morally bounded we-groups that pre-date the electoral moment and persist beyond it. Communities are not residual identities awaiting modernization (Chabal & Daloz, 1999); they are political units in their own right, mobilized strategically but anchored in long-running histories of belonging (Nyamnjoh, 2006; Geschiere, 2009).

The second is identitarian: Communal claims do not function as raw expressions of ethnic interest but as moral narratives of dignity, recognition, and historical reparation. The demand is not merely for redistribution but for symbolic acknowledgment, the recognition that one’s community has been excluded long enough and deserves its turn.

The third is governmental: The state is figured not as a programmatic apparatus delivering public goods, but as a res communis, that is a common good to be circulated among communities. Incumbency by a single community is delegitimized over time not because policies fail, but because rotation has not occurred. Conversely, the incumbent’s coalition defends continuity through a symmetrical communal grammar: the defence of “our turn,” the avoidance of “their revenge.”

The fourth is discursive: Communaucratic mobilization deploys a distinctive vocabulary of patrimony, balance, equilibrium, and “the turn of others.” It produces a moral economy of electoral expectation in which losing is not merely defeat but exclusion, and winning is less mandate than custodianship. Communaucratic populism is therefore neither reducible to clientelism – which describes a transactional logic of patron-client exchange (Bach & Gazibo, 2012) – nor to ethnic populism in Brubaker’s (2017) sense, which presupposes a discursive construction of the people as ethnically delimited. It names a populism whose “people” is plural, whose antagonism is horizontal, and whose telos is rotation rather than rupture.

Cameroon’s 2025 Election as a Case of Communaucratic Mobilization

Cameroon’s 2025 presidential election illustrates each of these dimensions. With more than 250 ethnic communities and a long-standing regional cleavage structure – Northern, Centre-South, Western, Anglophone (Konings & Nyamnjoh, 2003) – electoral politics has long operated as a tacit accounting of communal weight. The incumbent’s longevity is itself read communaucratically: a particular regional constituency is perceived to have “had its turn” for too long, while others have not. This perception fuels mobilization not principally against authoritarianism per se, but against the retention of communal access to state power.

Three patterns observed during the 2025 electoral cycle substantiate the concept. First, alliance formation among opposition candidates followed a logic of inter-communal pooling: when a prominent Anglophone figure was excluded from the ballot, segments of his regional base redirected support not on ideological grounds but on the calculus of which alternative candidate could best aggregate non-incumbent communities. Second, digital political discourse – captured through nethnographic observation of social media debate – was saturated with communal markers: regional naming, ancestral references, and historical claims about precedence and exclusion. Third, post-electoral contestation, while invoking procedural irregularities, was decoded by participants and observers alike through a communaucratic frame: which group had been overrepresented in the tally, which underrepresented, and how the result would be received in each region.

Crucially, this is not “mere” ethnic politics. The communal grammar is articulated in the language of democratic legitimacy itself: rotation as fairness, balance as inclusion, alternation as the test of pluralism. Communaucratic populism does not reject democracy, it reinterprets it as a procedure for inter-communal distribution of state office (Bayart, 1989; Mbembe, 2001). This reinterpretation enriches existing analyses in three respects. i) Against the trope of failed transitions (Cheeseman, 2015), it specifies a coherent – if costly – logic of democratic operation under conditions of pluralism without programmatic differentiation. ii) Against the diagnosis of ethnic voting as informational shortcut, it highlights the moral and historical depth of communal claims. iii) And against the assumption that populism is a Northern import to be measured by Northern criteria, it foregrounds an indigenous configuration with its own conceptual demands (Resnick, 2014).

The Scope, Limits, and Future of the Concept

Communaucratic populism is not a universal key. Its analytical purchase depends on three contextual conditions: a politically salient pluri-communal structure; a state apparatus historically central to redistribution; and a democratic procedure understood – across the political spectrum – as a vehicle of inter-communal recognition. Where these conditions hold, the concept should travel productively: across the Gulf of Guinea (Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Gabon), into the Great Lakes region, and into postcolonial democracies beyond Africa where communal pluralism intersects with statist political economies.

Several limits should be acknowledged. The concept does not, on its own, account for coercion, electoral manipulation (Schedler, 2002), or the international determinants of incumbency. It works best in combination with – not as a replacement for – institutional and political economy analyses. Nor does it claim that ideology and policy are absent from African electoral life; it claims only those communal frames are routinely the dominant idiom through which they are translated. The agenda this opens is comparative and methodological: how to measure communaucratic intensity across cases? How to distinguish it operationally from clientelism and ethnic populism? And how to register its mutations under conditions of urbanization, digital mediation, and generational change?

Communaucratic populism is offered here as a working concept, not a finished theory. It seeks to render intelligible a political grammar that resists translation into the dominant categories of populism studies, and to do so without reducing African pluralism to deviation from a Northern norm. If populism describes, in its most general sense, a politics that makes the construction of “the people” its central operation, communaucratic populism names a variant in which that construction is irreducibly plural: where “the people” is always already a “people of peoples,” and where the democratic question is less who governs than whose turn it is to govern. The wager of the concept is that postcolonial pluralism deserves its own categories rather than borrowed ones. The discussion is only beginning.

The case of Cameroon is just a display of this reality since 1990. The initial idea has been that the Northern communities, through president Ahidjo have passed a turn to the Southern population of Cameroon through President Paul Biya. According to them, political power is supposed to go back to the North after Biya. In the year 1992, the ideology behind the Biya must go slogan was that it is the turn of the Anglophones. The Francophones have been managing power since independence. In 2018, the Bamileke populations, with in mind the ideology of Dongmo, the author of the Bamileke dynamism, stating that the Bamileke population must grab the power by demography, actually were convinced that it was their turn. The score of Issa Tchiroma Bakary in 2025, was partially due to a communaucratic coalition between the Bamileke and some Northern population, and some communacratic allies, who thought that communaucratic alliance could be the solution to overthrow the power of the Fang-Beti and Bulu. Politics in Cameroon has almost always been a matter of which is the new community to get into power? Whose turn is it?

(*) Dr. Yves Valéry Obame is affiliated with the University of Bertoua, the Cameroonian Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Societies (CERESC), and the Geneva Africa Lab (GAL).

(**) Dr. Salomon Essaga Etémé is affiliated with the University of Yaoundé I and the Cameroonian Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Societies (CERESC).

(***) Professor Armand Leka Essomba is affiliated with the University of Yaoundé I and the Cameroonian Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Societies (CERESC).

References

Bach, D. C. & Gazibo, M. (Eds.). (2012). Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond. Routledge.

Bayart, J.-F. (1989). L’État en Afrique: La politique du ventre. Fayard.

Brubaker, R. (2017). “Why Populism?” Theory and Society, 46(5), 357–385. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9301-7

Chabal, P. & Daloz, J.-P. (1999). Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Indiana University Press

Cheeseman, N. (2015). Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for Political Reform. Cambridge University Press.

Dongmo, J-L. (1981). Le dynamisme Bamiléké. Yaoundé: CEPER.

Geschiere, P. (2009). The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. University of Chicago Press.

Konings, P. & Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2003). Negotiating an Anglophone Identity: A Study of the Politics of Recognition and Representation in Cameroon. Brill.

Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. Verso.

Lynch, G. (2011). I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya. University of Chicago Press.

Mbembe, A. (2001). On the Postcolony. University of California Press.

Mudde, C. (2004). “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x

Mudde, C. & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Müller, J.-W. (2016). What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press.

Dongmo, J.-L. (1981). Le Dynamisme Bamiléké. (Vol. 1-2). Université de Yaoundé.

Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2006). Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa. Zed Books.

Posner, D. N. (2005). Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. Cambridge University Press.

Resnick, D. (2014). Urban Poverty and Party Populism in African Democracies. Cambridge University Press.

Schedler, A. (2002). “The Menu of Manipulation.” Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 36–50. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2002.0031

Weyland, K. (2001). “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics.” Comparative Politics, 34(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/422412

Residents flee burning homes in Belfast.

When Integration Falters, Nativism Advances: Europe’s Liberal Dilemma

June 12, 2026

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

Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the rise of anti-immigrant unrest across Europe reflects not simply tensions over migration, but a deeper crisis of democratic integration. In this timely commentary, he contends that diversity alone cannot sustain social cohesion without strong institutions capable of transforming difference into common citizenship. Drawing on scholarship by Robert Putnam, David Goodhart, Yascha Mounk, and others, Dr. Dias examines how weakening civic institutions, declining social trust, and unresolved integration challenges create fertile ground for nativist mobilization. Rather than framing the debate as a choice between openness and exclusion, he calls for renewed attention to the civic foundations that make pluralism politically sustainable. At stake, he argues, is Europe’s ability to reconcile diversity, solidarity, and democratic stability.

By João Ferreira Dias

Recent episodes of anti-immigrant unrest in cities such as Southampton and Belfast are often interpreted through the lens of public order, criminality, or political extremism. Yet these events may also be symptomatic of a deeper challenge confronting liberal democracies across Europe: the growing tension between openness and social cohesion.

One of the defining assumptions of the late twentieth-century liberal order was that increasingly open societies would naturally generate greater inclusion. Diversity, mobility, and multiculturalism were frequently treated not merely as compatible with democratic stability, but as self-evident expressions of it. What this assumption overlooks, however, is that openness alone does not produce integration.

Democratic societies require more than legal frameworks and economic opportunities. They depend upon a shared civic foundation capable of sustaining trust, cooperation, and political legitimacy. As Robert Putnam (2007) argued in his influential work on diversity and social capital, heterogeneity can enrich societies in the long term, but it may also create short-term challenges for social trust when institutions fail to mediate difference effectively.

The fragility of contemporary liberal democracies lies not in diversity itself, but in the weakening of the mechanisms that transform diversity into common citizenship. Schools, political parties, trade unions, local associations, and public institutions historically played a crucial role in integrating individuals from different backgrounds into a shared civic culture. When these mediating institutions weaken, identities that might otherwise coexist within a broader political community increasingly become sources of social fragmentation (Judt, 2010).

Immigration policy illustrates this dilemma particularly clearly. Contemporary European migration regimes often emerge from the intersection of several legitimate objectives: humanitarian obligations, historical responsibilities, labor market demands, and demographic decline. Yet political debate frequently neglects a more uncomfortable question: the absorptive capacity of receiving societies.

The notion that democratic states must continuously assess their capacity to integrate newcomers is often portrayed as morally suspect, as if limits necessarily imply exclusion. Yet a growing body of scholarship suggests the opposite. Sustainable inclusion requires not merely access, but incorporation into a common civic framework defined by rights and responsibilities, constitutional norms, linguistic participation, gender equality, and democratic values (Mounk, 2022; Miller, 2016).

Without such a framework, diversity risks evolving from pluralism into segmentation. Social groups become increasingly disconnected from one another, trust declines, and political entrepreneurs find fertile ground for mobilizing resentment. It is under these conditions that nativist movements gain traction.

The appeal of contemporary nativism rests on a powerful narrative: that European societies are losing control over their cultural continuity, historical identity, and political sovereignty. Whether empirically accurate or not, this perception acquires political force when citizens conclude that mainstream institutions are either unwilling or unable to address concerns related to integration, social cohesion, and public order.

Importantly, the rise of nativism should not be understood as a simple reaction to immigration itself. Such explanations are analytically insufficient. The same levels of migration can produce dramatically different political outcomes depending on the strength of institutions, the effectiveness of integration policies, and the degree of social trust present within a society (Goodhart, 2017; Krastev & Holmes, 2019).

The danger emerges when individual acts of crime, disorder, or social conflict cease to be interpreted as the actions of particular individuals and instead become symbolic markers of collective identity. In such contexts, immigrants are increasingly viewed as representatives of an undifferentiated out-group, while native populations come to see themselves as members of a threatened in-group. The resulting dynamic resembles what social psychologists have long identified as the transition from individual judgment to group-based political cognition.

History suggests that democracies become particularly vulnerable when they lose the ability to interpret and respond to the anxieties of their own citizens. Polarization thrives when complex social challenges are reduced to simplistic moral binaries, dividing societies into opposing camps of “us” and “them.” In this environment, both exclusionary nativism and uncompromising forms of ideological universalism feed off one another, narrowing the space for pragmatic democratic solutions.

The challenge facing Europe today is therefore not simply whether to accept more or fewer immigrants. It is whether liberal democracies can rebuild the institutional and civic foundations necessary to transform diversity into solidarity. The question is not openness versus closure, but whether openness can remain politically sustainable without a renewed commitment to integration.

The events witnessed in Southampton, Belfast, and elsewhere may not signal the inevitable triumph of nativism. They do, however, suggest that the political center is increasingly squeezed between competing certainties: on one side, an understanding of inclusion that often underestimates the importance of social cohesion; on the other, a nativist reaction that seeks belonging through exclusion.

Europe’s democratic future may well depend on its ability to recover the difficult middle ground between these two positions.

References

Goodhart, D. (2017). The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. London, UK: Hurst.

Judt, T. (2010). Ill Fares the Land. New York, NY: Penguin Press.

Krastev, I., & Holmes, S. (2019). The Light That Failed: A Reckoning. London, UK: Allen Lane.

Miller, D. (2016). Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mounk, Y. (2022). The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. New York, NY: Penguin Press.

Putnam, R. D. (2007). “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century.” Scandinavian Political Studies, 30(2), 137–174.

Survival Populism and the Crisis of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa

June 1, 2026

by ECPS_admin Commentaries Editor’s Choice Extremism & Radicalisation Home

In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja challenges conventional explanations of xenophobic violence in South Africa by underscoring the concept of “survival populism.” Rather than viewing anti-immigrant mobilization simply as irrational hatred or economic frustration, Dr. Solaja argues that it represents a decentralized form of grassroots political reasoning emerging from structural abandonment, fractured citizenship, and deep socio-economic inequality. Drawing on the legacies of apartheid, decolonial theory, and contemporary populism studies, the commentary explores how marginalized communities construct exclusionary notions of belonging in their struggle for resources, dignity, and recognition. By examining xenophobia as a political response to insecurity rather than merely a social pathology, Dr. Solaja offers a compelling reinterpretation of populism from below and highlights the profound crisis of citizenship, solidarity, and democratic inclusion in post-apartheid South Africa.

By Dr. Oludele Solaja

Familiar narratives about unemployment, criminality, poverty, and social frustration have been used repeatedly to account for recurrent attacks against foreign nationals in South Africa. Politicians, commentators, and sometimes even academics depict xenophobic violence as either “irrational hatred” or “spontaneous public anger” over economic decay. Such accounts, although not completely false, are analytically weak. They do not reflect the underlying political logic of anti-immigrant violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Xenophobia in this case is not only hatred toward foreigners; increasingly, it has come to constitute a form of grassroots political reasoning rooted in conditions of structural abandonment, economic precariousness, and fractured citizenship.

What we have witnessed in South Africa might best be described as survival populism: the everyday, decentralized form of exclusionary politics in which economically marginalized populations establish moral and territorial boundaries in an effort to safeguard their access to scarce resources, space, urban living, and social legitimacy. Unlike conventional populism mobilized by leaders with charismatic personalities in an electoral context, survival populism evolves horizontally through conversations, neighborhood watch meetings, community patrols, forums, taxi associations and informal markets, in addition to social networking sites. It is populism without populists; an everyday political reasoning that communities use to construct a definition of “the people” in contrast to outsiders.

The above understanding challenges popular thinking on populism within contemporary political theory. Most studies of populism concentrate on political actors of elite origin such as the United States’ Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, or Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who have mobilized nationalist resentment via an anti-elite and anti-immigrant stance (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). Within this context, populism is understood as an electoral strategy led by charismatic personalities. What takes place in South Africa is different in that xenophobic mobilization seldom appears through coherent ideologies and central leaders. Rather, exclusionary politics arise from what could be called everyday populism: everyday political reasoning that shapes a people against outsiders.

From Internal Foreigners to External Outsiders

This differentiation is critical because it exposes populism as not just a form of political expression occurring in parliaments, ballot boxes or rallies, but also an element that emerges from places of survival like informal settlements, townships economies, crowded taxi ranks and local markets where politics takes place through practical struggles.

The architecture of exclusion has much to do with the history of South Africa as not merely a racial but also a spatial and economic system defined by the containment of Black South Africans. Pass laws, migrant labor hostels, separate territorial structures, and fragmented spatial organization resulted in a society in which Black Africans were regarded as only temporary residents. For many decades, millions of Black South Africans were stripped of their permanent urban citizenship, yet they built South Africa’s cities through their labor.

Apartheid made many Black South Africans internal foreigners, with conditional residency in urban South Africa. Understanding the fact that Black South Africans were internal foreigners helps us realize how the modern form of xenophobia reproduces these spatial logics, with migrants presented as illegitimately possessing jobs, wealth and legitimate residency. The policing of migrants and their access to urban South Africa mirrors previous systems of apartheid governance.

One of the striking features of xenophobic attacks in South Africa is that they almost exclusively target foreign Africans from countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Nigeria, rather than European migrants and expatriates. This racial and national specificity of South African xenophobia reveals a history of unequal relations, the persistence of colonial hierarchies, and ideas of belonging that continue to shape post-apartheid South Africa (Mignolo, 2011). The most ironic and tragic fact is that it is precisely here—the place from which the international struggle against apartheid was championed and which was seen as a beacon of African liberation and pan-African unity—that a recurrent war against Africans takes place. The support that Africa provided in the struggle against apartheid has not been reciprocated with welcome and security for African immigrants in post-apartheid South Africa.

The Unfulfilled Promise of Democratic Citizenship

In 1994, the democratic dispensation promised inclusion, human dignity, and socio-economic justice. Yet political liberation has neither brought about structural transformation nor eliminated the socio-economic inequalities inherited from the apartheid state. South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, characterized by widespread poverty, high unemployment, and spatial segregation (Piketty, 2014). For many Black South Africans, formal citizenship and the promise of democratic rule remain shallow promises.

It is this disconnect between formal political inclusion and the lack of concrete socio-economic benefits for most South African citizens that helps explain how survival populism is born. While citizens exist on paper, they often fail to achieve basic human dignity. In a society where access to and the distribution of resources are fiercely contested, particularly where the state is absent in providing economic security, protection, and opportunities, people find themselves in conditions of chronic abandonment and exclusion. Xenophobia emerges as an ultimate response to exclusion from economic benefits in society, becoming a tool through which individuals establish an ethical claim to resources and place.

It is here that the township economy becomes an interesting phenomenon. While it provides alternative livelihoods, it also represents conditions of uncertainty, competition, and survival. Furthermore, it is a site where foreign migrants often display economic success, in part through the transnational networks and cooperative practices they share, as well as their lower overhead costs (Crush & Ramachandran, 2014). Their relative visibility within township economies allows them to appear as an important source of economic anxiety for some citizens in this society.

In many township spaces, foreigners and the shops they own are portrayed not merely as competitors but as those responsible for taking over opportunities. Such descriptions and narratives serve as a way of politicizing migrants as legitimate strangers who have illegitimately claimed a portion of the available resources, while local citizens have been abandoned and subjected to misery by their own government.

Here, a Laclauian understanding of populism becomes significant. According to Laclau, populism is essentially a political discourse structured around enmity between “the people” and their enemies (Laclau, 2005). In this context, “the people” are framed as deprived yet hard-working citizens of the South African state who have been excluded from its promises. Migrants are thus represented as foreigners who, despite lacking rights and a legitimate stake, have invaded the state and appropriated what rightfully belongs to South Africans.

Populism without Leaders: Informal Sovereignty from Below

The interesting dimension here is that no such political reasoning necessarily arises from the leadership of populist figures. Rather, it is reproduced within political networks on the ground, from street committees and neighborhood patrols to organizations like Operation Dudula, which not only advocate for stricter immigration policies but also actively patrol urban areas, monitor shops and businesses, and enforce exclusive boundaries, thereby performing informal sovereignty in the absence of legitimate state authority (Misago, 2019).

Such actions are a response to a deeper malaise within the post-apartheid state. It is clear that, in many cases, state institutions have become delegitimized; citizens, feeling neglected by the state, resort to popular measures to enforce governance. Thus, xenophobic movements are not merely attacks against immigrants but expressions of citizens’ anger over the state’s incapacity to provide. Communities assert control over their territory and defend it against perceived external threats.

However, an exclusively domestic reading of the popular dynamics of discontent obscures the decolonial underpinnings of xenophobic violence in South Africa. The reality of xenophobic violence is inextricably linked to a coloniality of power (Quijano, 2007) that persists beyond the period of colonial rule and continues to value and categorize people according to histories of colonial experience. African immigrants are often despised simply because they are African and are treated by many South Africans in ways similar to how they themselves would have been treated by colonial rulers.

This means that, in a tragic sense, one formerly oppressed population has turned against another. This has much in common with what Frantz Fanon warned about decades ago in The Wretched of the Earth—that without genuine redistribution, liberation could transform former victims into oppressors themselves.

Survival populism arises precisely in this vacuum of fractured solidarity. As citizenship loses its material content due to ever-increasing economic insecurity, a range of alternative political communities based on exclusion are formed by ordinary citizens. Migrants then become convenient targets onto whom structural frustrations can be projected. Xenophobia, in this sense, is not the absence of politics; it is politics under conditions of abandonment. Yet, while the political logic of xenophobia may be recognizable, its moral implications cannot be condoned.

Migrants themselves often become victims of precisely the neoliberal inequalities from which poor South Africans suffer. Many have fled persecution, economic disaster, or armed conflict in neighboring countries, only to be subjected to violence and exclusion in South Africa. Ultimately, xenophobic mobilizations provide scapegoats that divert anger away from structural causes—corruption, inequality, unemployment, and policy failures—and toward vulnerable migrants and poor South Africans. However, ignoring these factors will result in underestimating the significance of xenophobia as a political practice and force.

Xenophobia can persist only as long as it provides a language through which the abandoned can voice their grievances, articulate a form of resistance, and renegotiate access in contexts where formal citizenship offers little tangible substance—in other words, as a distorted political response to systemic marginalization. The global significance of such a phenomenon cannot be overstated.

The Global Lessons of Survival Populism

Everywhere across the globe—from Europe to Latin America, across Africa and into Asia—increasing economic precariousness can foster exclusionary ideologies targeting migrants and minority groups. However, South Africa is remarkable because it is the historically oppressed Black majority that is involved, largely without elite populist rhetoric or direction. This challenges our conventional ways of understanding populism, nationalism, and citizenship. While populism is usually understood in elite- and election-driven terms, in South Africa it demonstrates how a populist discourse can emerge from the ground up, be highly localized, and center on survival.

A populist mode of address can emerge whenever abandoned people face the struggle for self-defense and access to resources under conditions of precarity. It is South Africa’s greatest post-apartheid tragedy that populations once excluded under the apartheid system now themselves construct an “outsider” in order to re-establish their own space through exclusion.

Xenophobic violence is a testament to a deeper crisis of belonging within the democratic framework and to the lack of transformation of apartheid’s economic landscape. This is a world in which citizenship and political freedom coexist with mass abandonment, a world where the challenge lies not only in containing migration and the violence that accompanies it, but also in reforming society so that citizenship offers material benefits, the capacity to exercise and enjoy the material aspects of citizenship is more equitably distributed, and an inclusive sense of belonging becomes the norm rather than exclusion. Until that happens, survival populism will remain one of the defining languages of the post-apartheid urban sphere.

References

Crush, J., & Ramachandran, S. (2014). “Xenophobic violence in South Africa: Denialism, minimalism, realism.” Migration Policy Series, 66, 1–35.

Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.

Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason. Verso.

Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton University Press.

Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.

Misago, J. P. (2019). “Political mobilisation as the trigger of xenophobic violence in post-apartheid South Africa.” African Studies Review, 62(4), 111–135.

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

Neocosmos, M. (2010). From “foreign natives” to “native foreigners”: Explaining xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. CODESRIA.

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.

Quijano, A. (2007). “Coloniality and modernity/rationality.” Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168–178.

When Lies Become Political Identity: Populism, Disinformation, and the Emotional Logic of Contemporary Politics

June 1, 2026

by ECPS_admin Commentaries Digital-populism Editor’s Choice Home

In this commentary, Yacine Boubia examines why political disinformation has become one of the defining challenges of contemporary democratic life. Moving beyond conventional explanations that focus on misinformation as a mere failure of fact or technology, Boubia argues that disinformation increasingly functions as a mechanism of political identity formation. Within contemporary populist politics, false narratives often derive their power not from their factual accuracy but from their ability to reinforce collective belonging, distrust of institutions, and emotional engagement. Drawing on examples from the United States, Brazil, Hungary, India, and other democratic contexts, the commentary explores how digital media ecosystems, affective polarization, and populist communication have transformed the relationship between truth, politics, and democratic legitimacy. The result, Boubia warns, is the fragmentation of shared public reality and the erosion of the deliberative foundations upon which democratic societies depend.

By Yacine Boubia

Political disinformation has become one of the defining anxieties of contemporary democratic life. Governments increasingly legislate against it, social media companies develop moderation policies intended to contain it, and fact-checking organizations work continuously to identify and correct false claims circulating online. Yet despite the multiplication of these mechanisms, disinformation not only persists but often appears politically resilient. In some cases, attempts to debunk falsehoods seem to reinforce the political narratives they were intended to weaken.

The persistence of disinformation suggests that the phenomenon cannot be understood simply as a technological malfunction or as the result of insufficient access to accurate information. Nor can it be reduced to the assumption that democratic publics have suddenly become incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood. Such explanations remain insufficient because they misunderstand the political function disinformation increasingly performs within contemporary populist politics.

The central issue is not merely that false information circulates. Falsehood has always existed within political life. Rumors, conspiracies, propaganda, and manipulated narratives long predate the digital era. What distinguishes the contemporary moment is the transformation of the relationship between political identity, media consumption, and the perception of reality itself. Increasingly, political information is consumed less as neutral knowledge than as symbolic confirmation of collective belonging.

Within this context, disinformation often functions not primarily as a factual proposition requiring verification but as a mechanism of identity formation. It tells political communities who they are, who threatens them, and which institutions can no longer be trusted. The emotional and symbolic dimensions of such narratives frequently matter more politically than their empirical coherence.

The Populist Construction of Reality

At the heart of contemporary populist politics lies a deeply antagonistic understanding of democratic society. Politics is framed not as competition between legitimate ideological alternatives within a shared democratic framework, but as a moral struggle between a virtuous and authentic people on one side and corrupt elites on the other. This binary structure does not merely organize political preferences. It also reshapes the criteria through which truth itself is evaluated.

When populist leaders denounce mainstream media as “fake news,” portray judicial institutions as politically compromised, or present experts and academics as detached ideological actors, they are not simply criticizing specific institutions. They are constructing an alternative political epistemology — an alternative framework for determining who possesses legitimate authority to define reality.

Within this framework, distrust becomes politically productive. Suspicion toward institutional information sources functions as proof of political lucidity. The citizen who rejects mainstream narratives demonstrates independence from allegedly manipulated systems of information. Consequently, disinformation often succeeds not because it is universally believed in a literal sense, but because it reinforces existing emotional and political identities.

This helps explain why factual corrections frequently fail to reduce the circulation of false narratives. For many politically polarized audiences, fact-checking institutions themselves have become incorporated into the antagonistic political narrative. A correction issued by mainstream media may therefore strengthen rather than weaken distrust, since it appears as further evidence of elite coordination against the political community with which individuals identify.

The issue is therefore not simply informational. It is relational and symbolic. Political trust itself becomes fragmented.

Emotional Politics and the Collapse of Shared Reality

The transformation of political communication over the last two decades has intensified these dynamics considerably. Digital communication environments reward immediacy, emotional intensity, and visibility rather than reflection or deliberation. Content capable of generating outrage, fear, indignation, or moral conflict circulates more rapidly and more widely than nuanced analysis or institutional communication.

This transformation has altered the emotional structure of democratic politics.

Contemporary political communication increasingly functions according to the logic of affective mobilization. Citizens are not merely encouraged to support political programs or ideological projects; they are encouraged to consume politics emotionally and permanently. Anger, resentment, humiliation, fear, and cultural anxiety become continuous mechanisms of political engagement.

Social media platforms play a central role in this transformation. Their economic models depend fundamentally on maximizing user engagement, and emotionally activating content systematically generates higher levels of interaction than neutral or procedural information. Algorithms consequently privilege content capable of provoking strong emotional responses, creating information ecosystems increasingly organized around visibility, conflict, and polarization.

Under such conditions, populist communication acquires structural advantages. Simplified narratives opposing “the people” to enemies, elites, immigrants, globalists, or corrupt institutions adapt particularly effectively to digital environments privileging emotional intensity and rapid symbolic confrontation. Donald Trump’s communication style represented one of the clearest manifestations of this transformation. His political visibility depended not on maintaining ideological consistency or factual precision but on sustaining permanent symbolic conflict. Through X (Twitter), rallies, media provocation, and continuous attacks against institutional actors, Trump transformed political communication into a form of ongoing spectacle in which emotional engagement became more politically valuable than deliberative persuasion.

Yet Trump was not an isolated phenomenon. Comparable dynamics emerged across multiple democratic contexts. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines all deployed communication strategies combining direct digital engagement, hostility toward institutional mediators, and emotionally polarized narratives opposing authentic national communities to corrupt elites or threatening outsiders.¹

While the specific ideological content differs substantially across these contexts, the communicative logic remains remarkably similar. Political legitimacy increasingly derives from claims of authenticity, emotional proximity, and symbolic confrontation rather than institutional mediation or technocratic competence.

Media Visibility and the Spectacle Imperative

The contemporary media environment further amplifies these tendencies because visibility itself has become one of the central currencies of political power.

Twenty-four-hour news cycles and platform competition create continuous pressure for emotionally stimulating and conflict-driven content. Political actors capable of generating spectacle acquire disproportionate communicative advantages regardless of the substantive coherence of their positions. Outrage becomes economically profitable.

This dynamic was visible throughout the 2016 American presidential campaign. Research conducted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center demonstrated that Trump received extraordinary levels of media attention during the Republican primaries, often dominating news cycles despite relatively limited institutional support within the Republican establishment.² Coverage focused overwhelmingly on conflict, provocation, and campaign drama rather than substantive policy analysis.

Trump himself appeared highly conscious of this relationship between media economics and political visibility. In 2017, he remarked that television networks and newspapers depended heavily on his presence because “without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.”³ Although characteristically provocative, the statement reflected an important structural reality. Political spectacle had become deeply integrated into the economic logic of contemporary media systems.

This integration creates a paradox increasingly visible across democratic societies. Media institutions frequently denounce populist disinformation while simultaneously benefiting economically from the audience engagement it generates. Populist actors attack mainstream media as corrupt enemies of the people while simultaneously depending upon those same institutions for visibility and political amplification. The result is a mutually reinforcing cycle of outrage, polarization, and permanent symbolic conflict.

The Fragmentation of Democratic Public Space

One of the most significant consequences of digital political communication has been the fragmentation of shared public space itself. Traditional mass media systems, despite their limitations and ideological biases, historically exposed large segments of the population to relatively similar informational environments. Citizens consuming the same newspapers or television broadcasts could still disagree politically while operating within partially shared factual frameworks.

Contemporary digital ecosystems increasingly undermine those shared frameworks. Individuals now inhabit highly personalized informational environments shaped by algorithms, ideological preferences, and social networks. Political communities consume different sources, circulate different narratives, and often interpret political reality through entirely incompatible symbolic frameworks.

The consequence is not simply disagreement. Democratic societies have always contained disagreement. The deeper issue is the erosion of common epistemic reference points necessary for democratic deliberation itself.

When citizens no longer agree on which institutions possess legitimacy to verify information, political conflict risks becoming increasingly detached from deliberative negotiation. Politics transforms into a struggle between competing realities rather than competing interpretations of shared reality.

Under such conditions, democratic polarization becomes self-reinforcing. Every institutional intervention risks being interpreted through preexisting antagonistic narratives. Judicial rulings become evidence of political conspiracy. Journalistic investigations become proof of media manipulation. Electoral outcomes themselves become vulnerable to accusations of illegitimacy.

Disinformation therefore thrives not simply because false information circulates more effectively online, but because democratic publics increasingly lack shared mechanisms for collectively arbitrating truth claims.

Beyond Fact-Checking

None of this implies that factual accuracy no longer matters. Democratic societies remain dependent upon institutions capable of producing reliable information and sustaining informed public debate. Journalistic verification, academic expertise, and independent investigative institutions remain indispensable democratic resources. Yet the limitations of purely informational responses to disinformation have become increasingly visible.

Fact-checking alone cannot resolve political conflicts rooted in identity, emotional polarization, and institutional distrust. Correcting false claims does not automatically rebuild confidence in the institutions producing those corrections. Indeed, in highly polarized environments, such interventions may reinforce existing suspicions among audiences already convinced that institutional actors operate according to hidden ideological agendas.

The challenge confronting contemporary democracies is therefore not solely technological or informational; It is political and cultural. Democratic systems increasingly struggle to maintain the conditions necessary for shared public deliberation in environments characterized by fragmentation, emotional mobilization, and permanent symbolic conflict. The issue is not simply how to eliminate falsehood, but how to preserve forms of political coexistence within societies where citizens increasingly inhabit different informational and emotional realities.

The rise of contemporary populist disinformation reveals less about the irrationality of democratic publics than about the transformation of political communication itself. In an age defined by digital visibility, affective polarization, and fragmented media ecosystems, political identity increasingly shapes perceptions of truth more powerfully than truth shapes political identity.

Until democratic societies confront the emotional, symbolic, and communicative transformations underlying this crisis, disinformation will remain not an anomaly within democratic politics, but one of its defining features.

Footnotes

¹ Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Benjamin Moffitt. (2016). The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

² Thomas E. Patterson. (2016).“Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race: Trump’s Rise, Sanders’ Emergence, Clinton’s Struggle,” Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, June 13, 2016.

³ Donald Trump, quoted in Tom Jones, “Does the Media Miss Donald Trump?” Poynter, March 23, 2021.

The End of Inevitability? Hungary and the Future of Far-Right Populism in Central and Eastern Europe

May 28, 2026

by ECPS_admin Commentaries Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home

In this commentary, Nikoletta Syvak examines the political and regional implications of Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat after sixteen years in power in Hungary. Rather than interpreting the outcome as the end of far-right populism, Syvak argues that the election challenges the long-standing assumption that Orbán’s model of illiberal governance had become politically irreversible. Drawing on the works of Cas Mudde, Ágnes Batory, Zoltán Enyedi, Andrea Pirro, and Milada Vachudova, the analysis situates Hungary within the broader dynamics of democratic backsliding, ethnopopulism, and sovereignist politics across Central and Eastern Europe. The commentary further explores how Poland, Slovakia, Austria, and the Czech Republic continue to sustain political demand for anti-liberal and nationalist agendas despite Hungary’s transition

By Nikoletta Syvak*

Elections are often seen as a moment of political settlement: the campaign has ended, the votes have been counted, and the winner has been determined. But in the case of Hungary, the period following the election may prove more indicative than the day of the vote itself. After sixteen years in power, Viktor Orbán’s defeat is not merely an important milestone in the history of Hungary. Rather, this event shifts how Hungary is perceived throughout Central and Eastern Europe: long considered a shining example of stable right-wing populist rule in the EU, the country is now becoming an example of its susceptibility, as Péter Magyar’s TISZA party defeated Fidesz in the April 2026 elections, marking the end of Orbán’s sixteen-year rule.

Hungary as the End of Inevitable Progress

Over the years, Hungary has been one of the clearest examples of how far-right populism can not only win elections, but also turn into a sustainable model of governance. Orbánism has become not only a political style, but also a specific system that has transformed populist discourse: emphasizing national sovereignty and national interests, conflict with Brussels, Euroscepticism, cultural polarization, control over institutions, and presenting the government as a defender of the “people” from liberal elites.

The classic idea of Cas Mudde (2004) about the “populist zeitgeist” is useful here: populism has ceased to be a marginal phenomenon and has become part of the political mainstream, especially due to the confrontation between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” (Mudde, 2004). In the case of Hungary, this logic was not only used in election campaigns, but also transformed into a model of governance.

This is precisely why Ágnes Batory’s (2016) analysis of Fidesz as “populists in power” is particularly important: she demonstrates that the Hungarian case should be understood not only as an electoral success, but also as an institutional restructuring of the political system through constitutional majorities, party control, and the weakening of checks and balances (Batory, 2016). Zoltán Enyedi (2016) also helps us understand Orbánism more precisely: he shows that Fidesz combined populist rhetoric with paternalism and illiberal elitism—that is, it spoke on behalf of “the people” while simultaneously concentrating power in the hands of the ruling elite (Enyedi, 2016).

Therefore, Orbán’s defeat is significant not because it signifies the end of right-wing populism. Such a conclusion would be too hasty. Its significance lies elsewhere: it calls into question the idea of the political irreversibility of the Orbánist model. For a long time, Hungary demonstrated how right-wing populist power could become institutionally entrenched. Now it is showing that even such power can be challenged.

Regions Under Pressure

The significance of the Hungarian elections becomes clearer when viewed within the broader Central and Eastern European context. Andrea Pirro (2014) emphasizes that far-right populist parties in Central and Eastern Europe cannot be analyzed as mere replicas of Western European models: they are shaped by specific post-communist conditions, with distinct historical conflicts, party systems, and conceptions of the nation, the state, and sovereignty (Pirro, 2014).

Poland is the most important comparative case here. Under PiS (2015–2023), it was close to Hungary on issues of sovereignty, traditional values, criticism of Brussels, and conflict with the EU’s liberal mainstream. However, the Polish experience also shows that the defeat of a right-wing populist government does not mean the automatic restoration of liberal democracy. The institutional legacy of the previous government—a politicized media environment, judicial reforms, personnel appointments, and deep social polarization—continues to constrain the new government. This aligns well with Milada Vachudova’s (2020) analysis, which links ethnopopulism in Central Europe to democratic backsliding and the concentration of power (Vachudova, 2020).

Slovakia illustrates another aspect of regional dynamics. Robert Fico and SMER are not direct copies of Fidesz, but the Slovak case demonstrates the resilience of a political strategy built on criticism of liberal elites, a cautious stance toward supporting Ukraine, an emphasis on national interests, and conflict with parts of the European mainstream. This is important because it prevents us from interpreting Orbán’s defeat as the beginning of an automatic “post-populist” phase in the region. Rather, it shows that one center of right-wing populist power has been weakened, but the political demand for a sovereignist and anti-liberal agenda remains.

The Czech Republic adds another important component. Andrej Babiš and ANO represent a more pragmatic and less ideologically rigid form of populism than Fidesz. But ANO’s participation, alongside Fidesz and the Austrian FPÖ, in the creation of the Patriots for Europe alliance, formed in the European Parliament in June 2024, shows that Orbán’s influence spread not only through direct replication of the Hungarian model, but also through a shared political vocabulary: national sovereignty, criticism of Brussels, migration control, and the protection of “ordinary people.”

Although Austria is not part of Eastern Europe, it is important within the Central European context. The FPÖ demonstrates that far-right mobilization remains strong even in more established democratic systems. The FPÖ’s victory in the 2024 parliamentary elections showed that far-right parties in Central Europe retain significant electoral potential.

Therefore, Orbán’s defeat should not be interpreted as a regional decline of far-right populism. Rather, it may signal a shift in its political center: if Hungary is no longer the primary symbol of far-right populist resilience, momentum may shift to other actors—in Austria, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic.

What Comes After Orbánism?

The post-election period is important precisely because populism does not end the moment the votes are counted. Attila Bartha, Zolt Boda, and Dorottya Szikra (2020) propose analyzing populism not only as electoral rhetoric, but also as a mode of governance and political decision-making (Bartha et al., 2020). In this sense, the main question following Orbán’s defeat is not only how Fidesz lost power, but also to what extent the new government will be able to change the system built over the past sixteen years.

The Hungarian case allows us to draw three broader conclusions.

First, far-right populism in Central and Eastern Europe is not disappearing. Its social and political foundations remain significant: distrust of elites, economic uncertainty, cultural anxiety, migration policy, Euroscepticism, and tensions surrounding the war in Ukraine. These factors continue to create space for parties that base their politics on the opposition between “the people” and “the elites,” national sovereignty and external pressure.

Second, Orbán’s defeat weakens the aura of inevitability surrounding right-wing populist rule. If the most enduring example of such a model within the EU can be defeated at the polls, then this model is less stable than its supporters have claimed.

Third, the region’s future will depend not only on whether far-right populists win or lose elections. Equally important is whether democratic alternatives can translate electoral victory into sustainable institutional renewal. Poland has already demonstrated just how difficult this process can be following the departure of PiS. Hungary is now the next test.

For many years, Hungary has been viewed as a laboratory for right-wing populist rule. Following Orbán’s defeat, it may become a laboratory for post-Orbán transition. This does not mean the end of far-right populism in Central and Eastern Europe. But it may mean the end of its strongest illusion: the notion that once institutional dominance is achieved, it is irreversible.

(*) Nikoletta Syvak is a Graduate Student, Department of Political Science and International Relations, East China Normal University (ECNU). Email: syvaknikoletta@gmail.com

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References

Bartha, A., Boda, Z. & Szikra, D. (2020). “When populist leaders govern: Conceptualising populism in policy making.” Politics and Governance, 8(3), 71–81. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v8i3.2922

Batory, A. (2016). “Populists in government? Hungary’s “System of National Cooperation.” Democratization, 23(2), 283–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2015.1076214

Enyedi, Z. (2016). “Paternalist populism and illiberal elitism in Central Europe.” Journal of Political Ideologies, 21(1), 9–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2016.1105402

Mudde, C. (2004). “The populist zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x

Pirro, A. L. P. (2014). “Populist radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe: The different context and issues of the prophets of the patria.” Government and Opposition, 49(4), 599–628. https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2013.32

Vachudova, M. A. (2020). “Ethnopopulism and democratic backsliding in Central Europe.” East European Politics, 36(3), 318–340. https://doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2020.1787163

Özgür Özel, leader of Turkey’s main opposition CHP and a recent target of political judicial intervention, attends the inauguration of a cultural center named after the late Manisa Metropolitan Mayor Ferdi Zeyrek. Photo: Idil Toffolo / Dreamstime.

Turkey’s Managed Permanence: Lawfare, Institutional Capture, and the End of Democratic Uncertainty

May 22, 2026

by ECPS_admin Authoritarianism Commentaries Economics Editor’s Choice Home

In this timely and deeply analytical essay, Professor Ibrahim Ozturk examines how Turkey is moving beyond competitive authoritarianism toward what he terms a system of “managed permanence,” in which elections formally survive while meaningful democratic alternation becomes increasingly constrained. Focusing on the judicial intervention into the CHP, the encirclement of opposition municipalities, media capture, and the erosion of institutional autonomy, Professor Ozturk argues that the Erdoğan regime is no longer merely repressing opposition actors, but actively re-engineering the political field itself. The essay further explores how lawfare, economic fragility, transactional geopolitics, and institutional decay have become mutually reinforcing dynamics. Ultimately, the piece warns that Turkey’s crisis is no longer only democratic or economic, but fundamentally a crisis of institutional credibility and constitutional uncertainty.

By Ibrahim Ozturk

When Hungary’s 2026 elections produced an early wave of enthusiasm around the idea that “dictators, too, can be defeated,” the reaction was understandable but premature. In a recent ECPS long-read commentary on Péter Magyar and Hungary’s hybrid-authoritarian rupture, I warned against romanticizing Orbán’s defeat as automatic democratic restoration, and stressed that comparative analogies travel badly: what may be cooking in the neighbor’s house does not necessarily fall onto our plate — Turkey is not Hungary, and each authoritarian case rests on its own institutional, geopolitical, social, and economic architecture.

Turkey has now confirmed that warning with brutal speed. Before the optimism generated by Hungary’s rupture could settle into a broader democratic lesson, Ankara moved in the opposite direction: the main opposition was judicially destabilized, municipal autonomy was further encircled, a major university’s operating license was revoked, and the already fragile boundary between competitive authoritarianism and managed permanence narrowed even further. The message is unmistakable: authoritarian regimes may sometimes lose elections, but they do not necessarily accept political contingency — and in Turkey’s case, the regime appears determined to prevent meaningful alternation before it can happen.

Thus, Turkey has entered a new and more dangerous phase of competitive authoritarianism. The issue is no longer confined to the imprisonment of opposition figures, the removal of elected mayors, or the selective deployment of criminal investigations. The deeper transformation now concerns the legal and institutional re-engineering of the opposition itself. The court decision annulling the Republican People’s Party (CHP)’s 2023 congress—effectively removing Özgür Özel and reinstating Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu as party leader—marks a qualitative escalation: the judiciary is no longer merely disciplining opposition actors from the outside; it is intervening directly in the internal sovereignty of the main opposition party. Reuters reported that the ruling annulled the CHP’s 2023 leadership election, suspended Özel and the party executive, and reinstated Kılıçdaroğlu, while the CHP’s elected executives denounced the decision as a judicial coup.

In Turkish legal terminology, the concept of “absolute nullity” may appear technical. Politically, however, it functions as a mechanism of retroactive delegitimation. A past party congress is declared void; the current leadership is suspended; a former leadership is restored; and the organizational continuity of the opposition is plunged into legal uncertainty. The outcome is not merely a leadership change. It is the construction of a “lame-duck opposition”: formally present and electorally significant on paper, yet institutionally constrained, internally fragmented, and increasingly vulnerable to judicial veto.

From Electoral Defeat to Judicial Containment

The turning point came with the local elections of March 31, 2024. In those elections, the CHP delivered President Erdoğan and the AKP their most significant electoral defeat in decades, while retaining Istanbul and Ankara—long regarded as key opposition strongholds—and achieving major gains across the country. CHP secured approximately 37 percent of the nationwide vote, narrowly surpassing the AKP, and won municipalities in 36 of Turkey’s 81 provinces. The outcome was Erdoğan’s biggest electoral setback and Ekrem İmamoğlu had emerged as his “default nemesis.”

The result fundamentally altered the regime’s threat perception. The opposition was no longer merely a parliamentary minority or a symbolic protest bloc. It had acquired administrative capacity, access to local budgets, service-delivery networks, public visibility, and presidential contenders with nationwide appeal. İmamoğlu, Mansur Yavaş, and the renewed CHP leadership under Özgür Özel represented not only electoral competition, but the emergence of an alternative governing infrastructure.

The regime’s response has followed a recognizable authoritarian playbook: do not abolish elections outright; hollow them out. Do not ban the opposition; fragment, criminalize, and bureaucratically paralyze it. Do not formally dissolve local governments; restrict their fiscal instruments, remove or prosecute their elected leaders, and make every municipal decision vulnerable to criminalization. In this sense, the CHP ruling should not be read as an isolated party-law dispute. It is part of a strategy to convert the main opposition from an electoral threat into a controlled, divided, and procedurally disabled actor.

Lawfare and the Collapse of Rule of Law

The CHP case sits inside a wider pattern of lawfare against opposition mayors, party officials, journalists, lawyers, academics, and civil society actors. Freedom House’s 2026 assessment classifies Turkey as “Not Free,” with a score of 32 out of 100, including 16/40 for political rights and 16/60 for civil liberties. This is not a marginal decline. It signals a political system in which elections continue, but the freedoms necessary for meaningful electoral competition are structurally impaired.

The rule-of-law picture is equally severe. The World Justice Project’s 2025 Rule of Law Index places Turkey 118th out of 143 countries. Turkey also ranks near the bottom of its region and among upper-middle-income countries. The index measures constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, and criminal justice — precisely the institutional foundations now under stress in Turkey’s opposition cases.

This matters because authoritarianism in Turkey does not operate primarily through overt illegality. More often, it functions through excessive legality: sprawling investigations, procedural ambiguities, retroactive annulments, prolonged pre-trial detention, anonymous witnesses, and charges that are difficult to contest because the process itself becomes the punishment. In such a system, the courts do not need to formally ban the opposition as a political force. They can exhaust it, fragment it, delegitimize it, and keep it in a permanent state of defensiveness.

The logic is as coercive as it is punitive. Opposition figures are pressured through detention, threats to personal assets, indictments, reputational attacks, and the prospect of escalating sentences. Where evidentiary standards are weak or politically contested, mechanisms such as anonymous witnesses and “effective remorse” provisions can become instruments of narrative production: lower-level actors are pressured to implicate higher-ranking opposition figures, while refusal may expose both them and their families to further legal vulnerability. This is not merely prosecution; it is political extraction through criminal procedure.

Of course, the authoritarian acceleration did not begin with the most recent CHP case. It was dramatically intensified after the failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016, which the government used to consolidate emergency rule, neutralize the unresolved political consequences of the December17–25, 2013 corruption allegations, and restructure the judiciary, bureaucracy, media, and civil society under executive command. Many opposition actors, including the CHP, underestimated or tolerated the early stages of this process; today, as thousands of cases reach the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) under Article 7 and Article 3 concerns, the same emergency-state machinery has expanded from alleged Gülenists to Kurds, socialists, liberals, journalists, mayors, academics, and now the main opposition itself.

Capturing the Public Sphere

Judicial pressure becomes far more effective when it operates inside a captured information environment. Turkey’s media landscape is already deeply distorted. In the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranks Turkey 163rd out of 180 countries, with a score of 27.94. RSF’s country profile places Turkey in the “very serious” category and notes that media pluralism remains under severe pressure.

Media repression in Turkey has evolved beyond the traditional closure or capture of media outlets into a hybrid authoritarian system of digital censorship, where online news links and social media content are removed without effective judicial review on elastic grounds such as national security, public order, religious or family values, and the unity of the state, while those who escape imprisonment may still be silenced through account suspensions and platform-level restrictions.

This means that electoral competition is distorted not only through courts, prosecutions, and candidate bans, but also through unequal access to information. When opposition leaders are criminalized, government-aligned media amplify the accusations, while independent journalism operates under conditions of fear, fines, arrests, ownership pressure, and regulatory intimidation. Elections may still take place, but voters encounter the opposition through a public sphere heavily structured by executive power.

This is the contemporary version of “open voting, secret counting.” Today, the mechanisms are more sophisticated. The ballot may remain secret, and the counting process may remain formally observable, yet the media landscape, judiciary, party autonomy, local government capacity, candidate eligibility, and financial environment are all subjected to sustained political pressure. Elections survive as ritualized procedures; democratic alternation is rendered increasingly improbable.

Municipal Counter-Power and Administrative Encirclement

The The attack on the CHP is inseparable from the broader assault on opposition-run municipalities. After the 2024 local elections, Istanbul, Ankara, and other major cities represented not merely electoral victories, but alternative centers of political legitimacy. Municipal governments possessed the capacity to deliver services, develop their own patronage networks, expose failures of the central government, and cultivate presidential contenders with executive credibility.

This is why the restriction of municipal autonomy has become so consequential. Turkish media reports indicate that recent legal changes now require presidential approval for municipalities and their affiliated entities to establish companies, acquire shares, or join cooperatives. Opposition critics argue that these measures transform local economic initiative into a permission regime ultimately controlled by the presidency.

The corruption data help explain why this matters. Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) gives Turkey a score of 31/100, ranking it 124th out of 182 countries. The CPI is not simply about bribery; it is about discretionary public power, weak accountability, and the erosion of impartial administration. In Turkey’s case, this means that municipal resources, public tenders, regulatory approvals, media licensing, universities, and courts increasingly operate within a political economy of executive discretion.

The closure of Istanbul Bilgi University on the same political night adds another layer to this broader pattern. The Erdoğan regime revoked the university’s operational license, effectively forcing it to shut down, after the institution had already been seized by the state through a criminal investigation the previous year. Under Decree-Law No. 667, 15 private and foundation universities were closed in July 2016. This pattern later continued with the closure of İstanbul Şehir University in 2020 and the revocation of İstanbul Bilgi University’s operating license on May 21, 2026, effectively bringing another major academic institution to an end.

This pattern demonstrates that university autonomy—like municipal autonomy, media autonomy, and party autonomy—has increasingly become conditional on executive tolerance rather than protected by constitutional guarantees. Universities, municipalities, opposition parties, media outlets, and civil society organizations all represent potential alternative centers of legitimacy. The current trajectory seeks not necessarily to abolish all of them outright, but to render their survival contingent upon executive tolerance.

The Constitutional Horizon: Erdoğan’s Problem of Time

The deeper strategic horizon concerns the presidency itself. Erdoğan’s rule faces a constitutional time problem. Current constitutional provisions limit the presidency to two terms, although scenarios involving early elections and constitutional reinterpretations have long been debated. Erdoğan’s coalition partner, Devlet Bahçeli, has already floated the possibility of a constitutional amendment that would allow Erdoğan to extend his tenure beyond the existing limits. In 2024, Bahçeli openly proposed such an amendment, while also acknowledging that Erdoğan would otherwise be serving his final term unless early elections were called.

This is precisely why the organizational integrity of the opposition matters so much. A unified CHP under Özgür Özel, with Ekrem İmamoğlu or Mansur Yavaş as credible national contenders, would constitute a serious obstacle to any attempt to redesign the constitutional calendar. By contrast, a fragmented CHP operating under sustained judicial pressure provides the ruling bloc with greater room for maneuver. Under such conditions, the government can call early elections when the opposition is weakened, pursue constitutional changes within an asymmetric political environment, or manufacture the appearance of pluralist consent through a domesticated opposition.

The objective is not necessarily to abolish elections altogether. It is to eliminate uncertainty. Turkey is increasingly moving toward a model of managed permanence: the ballot box remains, but the possibility of democratic alternation becomes structurally disabled.

External Complicity: Europe’s Dependency and Trumpian Transactionalism

The external environment has facilitated this authoritarian acceleration in Turkey. The European Union remains rhetorically committed to democracy and the rule of law, yet its leverage over Turkey has steadily weakened. The European Commission continues to define Turkey as a candidate country and an essential partner on issues such as climate policy, migration management, security, counterterrorism, and trade. CEPS has similarly arguedthat EU–Turkey relations increasingly expose the limits of transactionalism, noting that bilateral engagement now extends across energy security, foreign and security policy, trade, counterterrorism, and defense connectivity amid growing uncertainty in transatlantic relations.

This dependence produces a familiar European dilemma: democratic values are invoked rhetorically, but meaningful conditionality remains weak. The EU may express concern, but concern alone does not impose political cost. Turkey’s strategic role in migration control, NATO, Russia policy, Black Sea security, Middle Eastern diplomacy, and regional energy corridors has created an external environment that is increasingly permissive of democratic backsliding.

The United States under Trump adds another layer of transactional permissiveness to this environment. This does not necessarily mean that Washington explicitly endorses every domestic crackdown carried out by the Erdoğan government. It does, however, suggest that Erdoğan is increasingly able to exchange geopolitical utility for international normalization. The German Marshall Fund cited remarks by US Ambassador Tom Barrack in 2025 indicating that Trump wanted to give Erdoğan what he needed — “legitimacy” — within the framework of a more transactional and deal-oriented bilateral relationship.

This pattern is hardly new in American foreign policy. Across the Middle East and Latin America, Washington has often found authoritarian partners easier to manage than democratic societies. The rhetoric of democracy promotion has frequently coexisted with the practical support of rulers who provide security cooperation, military access, migration control, energy stability, or regional alignment. Turkey now appears to be increasingly drawn into this older geopolitical pattern: a strategically useful authoritarian partner whose domestic repression is treated as secondary to broader strategic bargaining.

The Political Economy of Repression

Authoritarian continuity also carries mounting economic costs. Every major judicial or administrative intervention against the opposition produces immediate financial repercussions. Following Ekrem İmamoğlu’s arrest in March 2025, the Turkish central bank reportedly sold roughly $50 billion in reserves and subsequently raised interest rates to 46 percent amid severe market turbulence. The EBRD similarly stated that the central bank sold more than $40 billion in foreign exchange during the weeks after İmamoğlu’s detention, reducing net reserves excluding swaps from above $60 billion to below $20 billion.

A similar pattern re-emerged following the CHP ruling. BIST 100 index fell sharply, while the Turkish lira reached a record low near 45.74 against the US dollar. Analysts warned that renewed political instability was once again undermining the currency at an already fragile moment. JPMorgan further projected that the central bank could be forced to raise interest rates from 37 percent to 40 percent in an attempt to stabilize the lira.

Inflation remains the clearest macroeconomic symptom of collapsing credibility. In April 2026, Turkey’s monthly inflation rate surged to 4.18 percent, while annual inflation reached 32.37 percent. By comparison, the OECD projects average headline inflation across the G20 at approximately 4.0 percent in 2026. Turkey’s inflation is therefore not merely above target; it stands several times higher than the broader G20 benchmark.

These cumulative distortions are also visible in Turkey’s growing decoupling from comparable emerging-market economies. Both inflation and the interest-rate premium required to sustain lira-denominated assets have risen far above emerging-market averages, making borrowing costs one of the clearest macroeconomic expressions of authoritarian-risk pricing.

Foreign direct investment also reflects the cost of institutional erosion. World Bank-based data show Turkey’s FDI net inflows at only 0.887 percent of GDP in 2024. For a G20-sized economy that claims to be a regional hub for production, logistics, energy, and finance, this is strikingly weak. Investors may still buy high-yield bonds or short-term assets, but a durable, productive investment requires legal predictability, property-rights protection, judicial neutrality, and confidence that political shocks will not suddenly destroy the investment environment

There are also signs that Turkey’s liquid external buffers have come under mounting pressure. Reporting based on US Treasury data indicated that Turkey’s holdings of US Treasury securities fell sharply in March 2026 as authorities sought to defend the lira, although such figures should be treated cautiously, since holdings are often routed through custodians and third countries.

The broader point, however, is unmistakable: political repression carries significant balance-sheet costs. It necessitates reserve sales, interest-rate hikes, credibility-restoration measures, and repeated interventions aimed at containing market panic. Turkey is therefore not experiencing a conventional emerging-market volatility cycle. It is paying a compounded authoritarian-risk premium.

Repression undermines confidence; weakened confidence places pressure on the lira; pressure on the lira forces reserve depletion or higher interest rates; elevated rates suppress growth and investment; deteriorating economic performance intensifies political anxiety; and that anxiety, in turn, generates further repression. This is the circular political economy of authoritarianism.

Conclusion: The Cost of Managed Permanence

Turkey’s crisis is no longer merely a crisis of democracy, nor solely a crisis of macroeconomic management. It has become a crisis of institutional credibility. The same political system that imprisons rivals, captures media institutions, weakens municipalities, subordinates the judiciary, and intimidates universities also generates persistent inflation, currency fragility, reserve depletion, heightened corruption risk, and declining long-term investment confidence.

The CHP ruling is therefore not simply a procedural dispute within a political party. It is a constitutional event. It signals that the regime is prepared to intervene directly in the organizational structure of the main opposition party in order to reshape the political field ahead of the next presidential contest. The intended outcome is increasingly clear: Erdoğan should not confront a united, administratively capable, and electorally confident opposition at the precise moment when his own constitutional future becomes uncertain.

The irony is that this strategy may stabilize the regime in the short term while simultaneously deepening Turkey’s long-term fragility. No country can indefinitely finance authoritarian control through reserve depletion, high interest rates, coercive legality, and transactional diplomacy. The more the regime suppresses political competition, the more costly economic stabilization becomes. The more it seeks external legitimacy, the more sovereignty it implicitly trades away. And the more it attempts to manufacture a controlled opposition, the more clearly it reveals that genuine electoral competition has become the central threat to its survival.

Turkey’s crisis, therefore, is not only about Erdoğan, the CHP, İmamoğlu, Özel, Kılıçdaroğlu, or even the 2028 election itself. It is about whether a country with a long electoral tradition will gradually be reduced to a system of formal voting without meaningful democratic alternation. The answer will depend not only on domestic resistance, but also on whether Europe and the United States continue treating Turkey’s authoritarian consolidation as an acceptable price for strategic convenience.

Reform as the Agenda-setter

Immigration as Reform UK’s Issue Ownership

Culture Wars as a Substitute for an Economic Programme

The Mainstream Trap

Conclusion

References

References

The Scarcity That Democracy Lost

How Attention Became Political Capital

Visibility, Legitamcy, and the Influencer Politician

The Communication Advantage and Its Democratic Costs

Attention, Populism, and the Restructuring of Democratic Competition

Conclusion: Attention, Democracy, and the Question of Institutional Design

References

Why African Electoral Politics Requires a New Conceptual Vocabulary

The Four Constitutive Dimensions of Communaucratic Populism

Cameroon’s 2025 Election as a Case of Communaucratic Mobilization

The Scope, Limits, and Future of the Concept

References

References

From Internal Foreigners to External Outsiders

The Unfulfilled Promise of Democratic Citizenship

Populism without Leaders: Informal Sovereignty from Below

The Global Lessons of Survival Populism

References

The Populist Construction of Reality

Emotional Politics and the Collapse of Shared Reality

Media Visibility and the Spectacle Imperative

The Fragmentation of Democratic Public Space

Beyond Fact-Checking

Footnotes

Hungary as the End of Inevitable Progress

Regions Under Pressure

What Comes After Orbánism?

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References

From Electoral Defeat to Judicial Containment

Lawfare and the Collapse of Rule of Law

Capturing the Public Sphere

Municipal Counter-Power and Administrative Encirclement

The Constitutional Horizon: Erdoğan’s Problem of Time

External Complicity: Europe’s Dependency and Trumpian Transactionalism

The Political Economy of Repression

Conclusion: The Cost of Managed Permanence

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