Commentaries

Why Environmental Displacement Is the Next Frontier in Populist Politics

July 15, 2026

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

As climate change increasingly reshapes patterns of human mobility, it is also transforming the political foundations of democratic citizenship. In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja argues that climate-induced displacement should no longer be understood solely as a humanitarian emergency or a security challenge, but as an emerging battleground over political membership and democratic inclusion. Introducing the innovative concept of Climate Citizenship Populism, Dr. Solaja demonstrates how environmental displacement is becoming a powerful resource for exclusionary populist narratives that redefine who belongs within the democratic community. By bringing together scholarship on populism, climate mobility, and democratic citizenship, the commentary offers an original analytical framework for understanding how environmental change is reshaping contemporary political conflict and why the future of democracy will increasingly depend on how societies respond to the politics of climate-driven belonging.

Climate change has progressed from being an environmental issue into a central political issue in the 21^st century. As the entire debate and politics concerning climate change revolved around the issues of temperature increase, carbon emission, and environmental damage, the effects of climate change do not just end there. It is transforming the patterns of human inhabitation, transforming the ways of life of people, and fundamentally changing the geographical bases on which our understanding of citizenship rests. As environmental factors drive humans away, democracies now face a crucial dilemma: Who belongs to a world changed by climate change?

This article situates climate migration at the nexus of debates surrounding democracy, citizenship and populism. While populism has been defined as the political logic that distinguishes between ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’ (Mudde, 2004; Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017), it is also shaped by debates over the ‘people’ and its boundaries. Populist movements often exploit existing anxieties over economics, culture, immigration and national identity. But in a warming, changing world, climate change-induced movement of people creates a new domain for this struggle.

Climate migration has become a key tool for constructing the ‘people,’ defining who is deserving and legitimating claims to belonging. Evidence for this transformation is widespread. The 2022 IPCC Report (2022) points to climate change as a major driver of increased human vulnerability due to weather extremes, ecosystem degradation and impacts on food and water. In recent years, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) has documented that weather-related events cause the majority of new internal displacements worldwide. Nevertheless, climate-induced displacement cannot be understood in purely environmentalist terms but is a product of interactions among environmental changes, poverty, inequality, failures of governance, and armed conflict (Gemenne, 2011; McLeman, 2014). Therefore, climate migration reflects a broader set of unequal social and political relations that influence people’s ability to stay, adapt or leave their places of origin. The political debate on climate mobility, however, tends to remain framed within two dominant and limiting perspectives.

Firstly, it is widely regarded as a problem requiring a humanitarian response to protect vulnerable displaced people. Secondly, climate migrants are perceived as a threat to national security, welfare systems, labor markets, and cultural identity. Yet both approaches obscure a more profound transformation: climate migration is increasingly becoming a question of membership in the polity. The critical issue is not so much why people migrate as how existing political communities draw the boundaries of membership and belonging in the face of collapsing territorial stability. It is precisely within this terrain of uncertainty that populist politics appears particularly well positioned to thrive.

Populism is fundamentally concerned with issues of borders and political membership, often drawing on the divide between insiders and outsiders (Laclau, 2005; Müller, 2016). Climate-induced displacement offers a rich symbolic site for these populist efforts, since it is deeply entangled with concerns over the sovereignty of the nation-state, the administration of borders, the distribution of public goods, and the management of national culture. Climate migrants can thus be politically reframed not simply as dispossessed people, but as symbols of wider fears about social and political disorder.

Introducing Climate Citizenship Populism

To describe this new political tendency, this commentary introduces the term Climate Citizenship Populism. It is a variant of populism that uses environmental displacement to redraw the lines of democratic membership by defining climate migrants as a threat to the rights, resources, identity and sovereignty of a national community.

Climate Citizenship Populism is not like previous forms of political conflict over the climate, where the conflict might have been over whether climate change is occurring or over opposition to regulating it. It is based on the assumption of environmental disruption, but it is the social consequences that are politicized. Thus, the central conflict changes from a question of climate change to one of who pays the repercussions of climate change and who deserves political representation in a climate-changed world.

This analysis makes a helpful contribution to the current debate on populism in three significant ways. First, it sees climate-induced mobility as a new material trigger for populist mobilization, alongside the more commonly suggested economic insecurity, immigration, and cultural backlash. Second, it suggests that the focus of populist opposition has moved from immigration to democracy itself as the political nature of citizenship is transformed by environmental change. Third, it presents a new analytical framework—Climate Citizenship Populism—to make sense of the conversion of environmental displacement into exclusionary narratives of democratic citizenship.

The idea is to connect three lines of research that have been pursued independently so far: populism studies, climate mobility research and democratic citizenship theory. While existing studies have already provided interesting findings on adaptation and displacement, as well as on citizenship and territorial belonging, there is a lack of literature on climate migration and the governance of migration. The current body of research has shed light on migration and the governance of migration, adaptation and displacement, as well as on the relationship between territorial belonging and citizenship and rights, but there is a dearth of research on climate migration and the governance of migration. But there has been little effort to grasp how environmental displacement is influencing the political boundaries of citizenship through populist mobilization.

Climate Citizenship Populism thus draws attention to a more general shift in democratic politics. Climate change is not just an issue to be added to policy agendas but also a structural condition that alters the material and political conditions shaping societies’ notions of belonging. Populist players are now also trying to re-imagine the limits of the democratic community itself as patterns of human settlement are reconfigured amid environmental disruption. In the era of environmental disruption, patterns of human settlement are being redrawn, and populist actors are seeking to redefine the limits of the democratic community itself.

From Border Politics to Democratic Exclusion

Climate Citizenship Populism is not only possible politically; its reasoning can be seen in various regions. Whether it is a matter of humanitarianism or of political membership, sovereignty, and national belonging, a pattern is becoming increasingly recognizable: environmental displacement is increasingly understood as a political issue.

Climate mobility has increasingly been linked to broader European debates on immigration, border management, and national identity. Most contemporary migration movements are not solely a consequence of climate change, but the foreshadowing of future climate displacement has become a political issue. The incorporation of the theme of environmental mobility in more comprehensive narratives of demographic change, overburdened welfare states, housing crises and the failure of political elites to keep the nation together is becoming a hallmark of populist actors. In this sense, migrants are symbolic beings through which anxieties of globalization and social change are conveyed. It is not just the quantity, but the meaning associated with displacement in the stories of populism that has political dimensions.

These trends are also seen in North America, notably in political discussions about migration from climate-vulnerable Central America and the Caribbean. Studies have shown that economic insecurity, governance problems, and social vulnerability are interlinked with environmental pressures to shape migration decisions (McLeman, 2014; IOM, 2024). Political debates, however, tend to reduce such realities to a simple narrative about the border “crisis” and national insecurity. Climate displacement is integrated into a larger anti-immigration discourse, in which migrants serve as a symbol of the waning control of the state. Thus, environmental mobility becomes a political problem, ranging from global inequality to a perceived threat to national sovereignty.

Another facet of Climate Citizenship Populism is illustrated in the African context. In the Sahel and other affected areas of the Horn of Africa, there are growing incidences of internal, rather than trans-border, displacement driven by drought, desertification, flooding and resource pressures. These movements involve complex issues of land, livelihood, access to resources and political recognition. When resources are scarce, displaced people are sometimes portrayed as rivals for economic opportunities or public services, furthering narratives of territorial identity and belonging. In these settings, Climate Citizenship Populism does not appear as much as international border politics, but rather as a contestation over who is entitled to what land, resources, and community.

Perhaps the most profound challenge to conventional understandings of citizenship is provided by Small Island Developing States. Climate mobility raises more than just migration management questions, particularly for communities under existential threat from sea-level rise. Who, then, will be able to live on a land that is becoming uninhabitable, one where citizenship is organized? Climate displacement scholars have suggested that this type of event calls into question the notions of territorialized political membership (McAdam, 2012). They show how climate change is altering mobility patterns and destabilizing the sense of territory that underpins contemporary democratic citizenship.

Contributions to the study of Populism and Democratic Theory

Climate Citizenship Populism enriches the field of populism studies by introducing the idea that environmental disruptions should be considered a novel material condition of political mobilization. Previous scholarship has offered insightful accounts of populist politics as anti-elitism, cultural backlash, nationalism and immigration politics (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017; Moffitt, 2016). Climate Citizenship Populism is not an alternative to these explanations but an expansion of them, showing how political communities draw in their insiders/outsiders in the context of environmental instability.

This way of thinking takes the focus away from migration and towards citizenship. The classic discussions tend to revolve around whether migrants should be let in, kept safe, or kept out. Climate Citizenship Populism uncovers a more fundamental issue: What is the nature of democratic citizenship in an era when climate change is emerging as a primary factor in determining who can and cannot live? In this respect, climate migration is not just an issue for migration governance – it is an issue for the normative basis of democracy.

The idea also emphasizes the issue of climate justice. The concept of climate mobility is defined by deep global inequalities, including unequal historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and unequal ability to adapt to climate change (Caney, 2010; Shue, 2014). Responses to climate migration which exclude are likely to become new forms of democratic exclusion, building on the history of unequal climate impacts. There is a need for effective adaptation and migration policies and political frameworks that acknowledge shared vulnerability and differentiated responsibilities in the context of climate mobility.

Conclusion: Citizenship in a Climate-Changed World

Climate crises have become an essential part of the democratic political landscape. Along with the changing landscape of environmental mobility, environmental disruption is also changing the political questions of belonging, rights and membership. The question for democracies is not only how to deal with climate migration, but also how to maintain democratic inclusion in a world where territorial stability is no longer guaranteed.

Climate Citizenship Populism offers a framework for understanding how environmental displacement is becoming integral to current political identity and conflicts over democratic boundaries. It shows that climate change is not only adding to migration pressures, but also to political opportunities to draw lines about who is in and who is out. What this means is important. What populism is all about is the building of “the people”—and in the future, climate change will be a major factor in the picture of “the people. Debating emissions, adaptation, and environmental governance will thus be a part of the politics of the climate age, but so too will be debates over citizenship itself.

Class, industrialization and social redistribution were significant issues of the twentieth century. The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen globalization, migration and national identity come into conflict. Climate citizenship is likely to become a recurring battle in the next decades. Democracies are now at a pivotal point where they must decide whether climate insecurity strengthens their pursuit of exclusion or provides a moment to reconsider political belonging on the basis of ideas of justice, solidarity and shared fragility.

The future of democracy in a climate-changed world will ultimately depend not only on how societies respond to environmental transformation, but on how they answer the most basic political question of all: who belongs?

References

Benhabib, S. (2004). The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. Cambridge University Press.

Caney, S. (2010). “Climate change and the duties of the advantaged.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 13(1), 203–228.

Gemenne, F. (2011). “Why the numbers don’t add up: A review of estimates and predictions of people displaced by environmental changes.” Global Environmental Change, 21(S1), S41–S49.

Gemenne, F. (2015). “One good reason to speak of ‘climate refugees’.” Forced Migration Review, 49, 70–71.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Cambridge University Press.

Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. (2024). Global Report on Internal Displacement 2024. IDMC.

International Organization for Migration. (2024). World Migration Report 2024. IOM.

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

Marshall, T. H. (1950). Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge University Press.

McAdam, J. (2012). Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law. Oxford University Press.

McLeman, R. (2014). Climate and Human Migration: Past Experiences, Future Challenges. Cambridge University Press.

Moffitt, B. (2016). The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford University Press.

Mudde, C. (2004). “The populist zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563.

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.

Shue, H. (2014). Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection. Oxford University Press.

The Game They Cannot Win: Nativist Populism, Agenda-Setting, and the Weaponization of Football

June 29, 2026

by ECPS_admin Commentaries Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Migration

As Morocco and the Netherlands prepare to meet in the FIFA World Cup Round of 32 on June 30, 2026, Yacine Boubia examines how European populist radical-right parties increasingly transform sporting events into opportunities for anti-immigration mobilization. Drawing on agenda-setting theory, democratic theory, and comparative political analysis, Boubia argues that football matches involving teams associated with immigrant communities have become powerful vehicles for constructing civilizational threat narratives while diverting attention from unresolved structural challenges such as housing, demographic decline, and labor shortages. From the Netherlands to Hungary, the commentary situates contemporary nativist politics within a broader crisis of governance, showing why cultural mobilization has become a substitute for policy delivery—and why liberal democracies must resist the weaponization of sport for illiberal political ends.

By Yacine Boubia

It is World Cup month, and I have been watching more football than is perhaps professionally defensible. There is something about the tournament format—the compressed stakes, the improbable trajectories, the way national narratives crystallize around eleven players on a pitch—that makes it simultaneously the most democratic and the most politically charged sporting spectacle on earth. I follow these games as a football fan. I analyze what surrounds them as a researcher with a background in media and political communication. And what surrounds tomorrow’s (June 30) Round of 32 match between Morocco and the Netherlands has very little to do with football.

Over the past week, a coordinated mobilization has taken shape across Dutch political and media ecosystems—amplified by far-right networks, social media influencers, and the deliberate interventions of Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom—that has transformed a round of 32 fixture into a site of civilizational anxiety and explicit immigration politics. The central claim propagated by Wilders and his allies is as structurally revealing as it is empirically unfalsifiable: that Moroccans will burn Amsterdam regardless of the result. If Morocco wins, the riots confirm the threat. If the Netherlands wins and incidents follow, they become evidence of Moroccan inability to accept defeat. If nothing occurs, the vigilance is credited. Every possible empirical outcome confirms the narrative that was constructed before a single player set foot on the pitch.

This is not a security analysis. It is political strategy—and it is a strategy with a recent precedent. Last month, French political and media actors spent ten days of prime media real estate anticipating disorder surrounding the PSG Champions League final, ultimately producing a few isolated incidents far smaller in scale than the anticipatory frame had constructed. The pattern is now establishing itself across European radical-right ecosystems: sporting events involving teams associated with immigrant communities are being systematically converted into opportunities for anti-immigration mobilization—moments when the cultural threat narrative can be activated, amplified, and installed as the dominant interpretive lens through which social reality is understood, at minimal political cost and with maximum emotional intensity.

This commentary examines that strategy analytically. It argues that the mobilization surrounding the June 30 match is not simply opportunistic xenophobia—though it is certainly that—but a deliberate and structurally significant political operation through which radical-right populist parties, operating within the imperatives of the contemporary attention economy, compensate for the absence of serious governing programmes addressing the structural conditions that actually shape their citizens’ lives. Understanding why requires examining both the agenda-setting mechanism that the strategy exploits and the structural conditions of European nativist populism that make sporting events politically necessary as substitutes for governance.

Radical Right Populism and the Weaponization of Sporting Events

Populist radical-right (PRR) parties share a defining structural characteristic that distinguishes them analytically from both classical conservative parties and the broader category of populist movements: they combine a maximalist identitarian programme, organized around ethnic, cultural, and civilizational threat narratives, with a conspicuous absence of serious governing proposals addressing the structural conditions that produce the material grievances their constituencies experience. Housing affordability, wage stagnation, demographic sustainability, and public service provision—the actual conditions shaping the daily lives of their voters—receive rhetorical acknowledgment but no policy architecture capable of addressing their structural causes. What these parties offer instead is what their governing vacuum requires: the permanent mobilization of cultural emergency.

Sporting events involving teams associated with immigrant communities have emerged as particularly efficient vehicles for this mobilization. They concentrate public attention at a predictable moment. They activate identity and belonging as primary emotional registers. They provide a binary narrative structure—us against them—that maps directly onto the populist frontier between the authentic people and the threatening other. And, crucially, they generate media amplification that radical-right parties cannot reliably produce through the routine operations of parliamentary politics. The anticipatory threat narrative surrounding a football match achieves in seventy-two hours what months of policy debate cannot: the installation of immigration as the dominant interpretive framework for social reality, occupying the prime media real estate that democratic governance should be using to address the structural conditions that the parties campaigning around this match have no programme to resolve.

Bernard Cohen (1963) observed that the press may not tell people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling people what to think about. McCombs and Shaw’s (1972) subsequent empirical development of agenda-setting theory demonstrated that the salience of issues in media coverage directly and measurably predicts their salience in public opinion—not through direct persuasion, but through the allocation of attention that determines which problems citizens regard as most important. The radical right’s systematic deployment of sporting events as vehicles for anti-immigration mobilization represents an intuitive mastery of this mechanism, adapted to the contemporary attention economy’s imperatives of emotional intensity, narrative simplicity, and viral amplification.

The unfalsifiable structure of the Wilders threat narrative surrounding June 30’s match is the mechanism’s most sophisticated expression. A frame constructed so that no empirical outcome can disconfirm it does not function as a security assessment—it functions as a permanent agenda-installation device. It ensures that, whatever occurs on June 30 evening in and around Amsterdam, immigration will be the interpretive framework through which it is processed. The disorder that materializes in these contexts—where it occurs at all—is typically produced by a specific and demographically narrow subgroup of peripheral urban youth whose tensions are the product of structural exclusion, decades of concentrated social housing policy, spatial segregation, and underinvestment in public services, rather than of cultural disposition or community-wide political orientation.

The conflation of this subgroup with an entire diaspora, and then with immigration as a political category, is the logical operation through which the agenda-setting strategy converts a sporting event into an immigration crisis. It is an operation that serves parties whose governing programmes offer no answer to the structural exclusion that produces the tensions they then attribute to immigration itself.

The Red Tie Without the Conditions: European Nativist Imitation and Its Structural Limitations

Populism, as Ernesto Laclau argued, is not defined by ideological content but by a specific discursive logic: the construction of a frontier between an authentic people and a corrupt elite, the equivalential articulation of diverse grievances into a unified political identity, and the emergence of a leadership that claims to embody the popular will against its institutional betrayers. This logic is structurally indifferent to ideological direction, but it is not structurally indifferent to the material conditions within which it operates. Populism requires more than rhetoric; it requires conditions of possibility that rhetoric alone cannot supply.

The global resonance of Donald Trump’s political project has generated an imitative dynamic across Western democracies that systematically misreads the sources of its success. From Wilders in the Netherlands to Milei in Argentina, from the remnants of Fidesz’s international network to the nativist movements proliferating across Central and Eastern Europe, a recognizable political style has travelled: the combative social media register, the civilizational threat narrative, and the explicit identification of immigration as the master explanation for national decline. These movements wear the red tie of European nativist respectability without the structural conditions that made the American original politically sustainable. They perform the rhetoric without the infrastructure. They campaign for cultural homogeneity in societies whose population replacement already depends on the immigrant fertility they campaign against.

Trump operated within a specific constellation of structural advantages that has no European equivalent. Continental scale—9.8 million square kilometers, of which Texas alone covers an area approximately five times the total surface area of France—that absorbs the contradictions of cultural conflict and provides physical space for demographic growth without the density pressures defining European housing politics. Military and technological supremacy—satellite infrastructure, digital platform dominance, and the algorithmic architecture of the very social media networks that Wilders uses to conduct his cultural sovereignty campaign—that insulates domestic nationalist posturing from its geopolitical consequences. And a demographic reserve in Latin America that operates within the American economic and geopolitical sphere of influence, rendering immigration restriction simultaneously performable and practically reversible: the door can be closed and reopened as political and economic conditions require because the reserve does not diminish in the interim.

Wilders possesses the aesthetic without the architecture. He campaigns against immigration in a country of 41,543 square kilometers—approximately the size of the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area—whose housing crisis is so acute that young Dutch people cannot afford to form independent households, whose fertility rate of 1.46 sits well below the 2.1 replacement threshold, and whose economy is structurally dependent on the immigrant labor force he campaigns against.

Poland—whose successive nationalist governments have maintained some of the most hostile positions toward immigration in the EU, and whose fertility rate of 1.14 is among the lowest in Europe—simultaneously constitutes by far the largest source of EU labor migrants in the Netherlands, concentrated in the transport, logistics, and service sectors that the Dutch economy structurally requires, attracted by Dutch wages, which are among the highest in continental Europe, and by a professional environment that operates largely in English. These are not anomalies within the nativist project. They are its structural consequences: the emigration of the native workforce that pro-natalist and anti-immigration politics cannot retain, absorbed by the receiving economies that the same political movements claim to protect.

The football mobilization is the clearest possible expression of this governing vacancy. When a political movement with no serious housing programme, no credible fertility policy, and no coherent account of how its economy functions without the immigrant labor it campaigns against requires a Round of 32 World Cup fixture to generate the cultural conflict it cannot produce through governance, it reveals the depth of that vacancy. The game is not incidental to the political project. It is necessary to it—a substitute for the governing capacity the movement does not possess and the structural conditions it cannot address.

It is worth noting the precise character of the Moroccan squad’s relationship to Dutch society. Three players on the Moroccan national team hold Dutch nationality. In the Wilders framework, this detail does not complicate the nativist argument—it confirms it. Legal citizenship, in the nativist worldview, does not confer cultural belonging. A person of Moroccan origin holding a Dutch passport who chooses to represent Morocco demonstrates, for Wilders and his allies, the impossibility of genuine integration rather than its achievement: evidence of dual loyalty, of the fundamental unassimilability of a population that cannot be made Dutch regardless of its institutional status.

The frame therefore does not turn on passport holding. It turns on ethnic and civilizational categories that civic citizenship cannot alter—which is precisely what liberal democracy’s foundational commitment to civic, rather than ethnic, citizenship is designed to reject. Wilders conducts this campaign on X, a platform owned by an American billionaire and running on American digital infrastructure. The tools of civilizational defense are provided by the very American technological dominance that the populist critique of globalism targets in other registers. The contradiction is structural, not rhetorical.

The Demographic Data That Nativism Cannot Answer

The fertility data across the European Union constitutes the most decisive empirical challenge to the nativist demographic project. According to Eurostat, the EU total fertility rate fell to 1.34 in 2024 — a historic low since the institution began tracking the aggregate figure in 2001, and a figure that stands at barely two-thirds of the 2.1 replacement threshold. Not a single EU member state reaches replacement level. The Netherlands sits at 1.46. Poland sits at 1.14.

In 2024, 24 percent of newborns across the European Union had a foreign-born mother. European population replacement is already structurally dependent on immigrant fertility to a degree that no nativist policy programme can realistically reverse. The parties mobilizing the June 30 football match as an immigration crisis have no policy response to this demographic reality—because acknowledging it would require acknowledging that the immigrant communities they campaign against are structurally necessary to the demographic survival of the societies they claim to protect.

The contrast with the United States is material. Trump’s America possesses, in Latin America, a demographic reserve operating within its economic and geopolitical sphere of influence—hundreds of millions of people, economically motivated to migrate, geographically proximate, and available for rapid mobilization at any moment of political opening. The performative restriction of immigration does not eliminate this reserve. It holds it in suspension. European nations have no equivalent. Their demographic survival requires immigration not as a policy preference but as a structural necessity—and the media apparatus that allocates its prime real estate to the anticipated disorder surrounding football matches involving immigrant-community teams is not informing citizens about this structural reality. It is systematically displacing it in favor of a cultural threat narrative that serves the parties with the least to offer on the actual conditions of European demographic survival.

The Orbán Laboratory: What Sixteen Years of the Nativist Project Produced

The most instructive empirical test of European nativist politics is Hungary under Viktor Orbán — and the results are now available with unusual completeness. In his 2014 Băile Tușnad speech, Orbán explicitly declared his intention to construct an illiberal state, rejecting the liberal democratic framework of institutional pluralism and cultural openness in favor of ethnic nationalist cohesion and demographic protectionism. His government subsequently allocated approximately five percent of GDP to pro-natalist subsidies and maintained the most sustained anti-immigration political programme in European history for sixteen consecutive years.

The demographic results are documented with precision. Hungarian emigration to other EU member states accounted for 37.8 percent of Hungary’s total population decline between 2014 and 2024. The Come Home, Young People repatriation initiative—funded at approximately 245,000 euros—returned 105 individuals before being abandoned. Hungary’s EV battery industry, the second largest in Europe and the government’s economic showcase, operates on migrant labor, primarily Filipino and Ukrainian workers recruited internationally to fill positions that the domestically depleted workforce cannot supply. The anti-immigration government became structurally dependent on the immigration it campaigned against.

On 12 April 2026, the Hungarian electorate delivered its verdict. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party defeated Fidesz, ending Orbán’s sixteen years in power. The laboratory is closed. The most sustained European attempt to construct a viable illiberal nativist project produced a demographically weakened country, an economically contradictory labor market, and, ultimately, an electoral rejection by the citizens it claimed to represent. The movements imitating this project across Europe—mobilizing football matches because they cannot mobilize governing results—are at earlier stages of a trajectory whose destination Hungary has now reached. The message is waning. The red tie travels. The conditions do not.

The Game and the Strategy: What Is Actually at Stake

Morocco and the Netherlands will play a round of 32 World Cup match on June 30, 2026. What is at stake on the pitch is a football match — ninety minutes of sporting competition that millions of people across the world will watch as a moment of collective experience, legitimate national pride, and the particular joy that football uniquely generates across cultural and national boundaries. What is at stake in the political theatre surrounding it is something considerably more consequential: the question of whether PRR parties can successfully convert a sporting event into an immigration mobilization vehicle that displaces housing, wages, demographic sustainability, and the structural conditions of democratic life from the public agenda.

The Moroccan players—three of whom hold Dutch nationality, the remainder of whom have lived, studied, and built careers across Europe and the world—are not participants in this political theatre. They are its object. They have been constructed, through the agenda-setting operation that Wilders and his allied media networks have conducted over the past week, as the embodiment of a civilizational threat that their presence on a football pitch is made to confirm.

The hundreds of millions of people across Morocco, the Moroccan diaspora, and the broader Global South who will watch this match are watching something that matters to them entirely independently of European radical-right politics: a moment in which their nation competes on genuinely equal terms in the world’s relatively most democratic sporting competition. That this moment has been instrumentalized—converted into prime media real estate for an immigration mobilization strategy—represents a precise and deliberate political choice by actors who have calculated that the emotional intensity generated by eleven footballers exceeds anything their governing programmes can produce.

The disorder that the anticipatory narrative predicts—and that the unfalsifiable structure of the frame will claim to have confirmed regardless of what occurs—will not, if it materializes, be the expression of a community or a culture. It will be the expression of a specific subgroup of peripheral urban youth whose relationship to structural exclusion is the product of fifty years of European urban policy, of the banlieues and the ring roads and the social housing projects built at a deliberate distance from economic opportunity and civic life. Naming that exclusion as its cause, rather than the cultural pathology that the nativist frame installs in its place, is the analytical and democratic responsibility that the media apparatus surrounding the match has thus far declined to discharge.

Conclusion: Liberal Democracy’s First Imperative

Football has historically offered democratic societies something rare and valuable: a space in which the political identities that governance enforces are temporarily suspended in favor of a shared human experience. The systematic weaponization of that space by PRR parties—its conversion into the primary vehicle through which immigration is installed as the permanent priority of the public agenda—is not incidental to the illiberal project. It is constitutive of it. Orbán declared in 2014 that he would build an illiberal state. What he built was a country that haemorrhaged its youth, imported the workers it ideologically rejected, and, on 12 April 2026, received the electoral verdict of its own citizens. The laboratory failed. The message is waning. The red tie travels across European borders. The conditions that would make the project viable do not.

Liberal democracies face a first imperative that is prior to any debate about immigration policy, border management, or cultural integration: the imperative to stabilize multicultural societies, preserve the institutional architecture that makes demographic diversity politically manageable, and refuse the transition to illiberal alternatives whose empirical record—as Hungary now conclusively demonstrates—produces the opposite of their stated goals. This imperative includes a media responsibility that the weaponization of sporting events makes urgent: to identify and name the agenda-setting strategy through which PRR parties convert football matches into vehicles for immigration mobilization, and to resist the allocation of prime media real estate to anticipatory threat narratives whose unfalsifiable structure serves no democratic function. It serves only the movements that require permanent civilizational emergency as a substitute for governing capacity—movements whose structural fragility the mobilization surrounding June 30 game reveals more clearly than any polling data could.

On June 30, 2026, Morocco and the Netherlands will play football. The players on both sides will contribute to a spectacle that brings joy to people across the world—people from the Global South who watch this tournament as one of the few arenas in which their nations compete on genuinely equal terms with the industrialized world, and who deserve to do so without their joy being instrumentalized for political projects whose failure the demographic data, the electoral record, and the structural analysis of the continent on which they are played have already confirmed. Liberal democracy should be larger than the fear of eleven players. It should be larger, above all, than the political strategy that requires eleven players to perform the work that a governing programme cannot.

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ODI Global. (2024). “Learning Lessons the Hard Way: Hungary, Immigration and Competitiveness.” Overseas Development Institute. https://odi.org/en/insights/learning-lessons-the-hard-way-hungary-immigration-and-competitiveness/

Orbán, Viktor. (2014). “Speech at the XXV. Bálványos Summer University and Student Camp.” Băile Tușnad, Romania, July 26, 2014. https://budapestbeacon.com/full-text-of-viktor-orbans-speech-at-baile-tusnad-tusnadfurdo-of-26-july-2014/

Schapendonk, Joris and Steel, Griet. (2022). “Mobility Power in the Migration Industry: Polish Workers’ Trajectories in the Netherlands.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48 (19): 4694–4711. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2061931

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 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.

By João Ferreira Dias

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 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.

Introducing Climate Citizenship Populism

From Border Politics to Democratic Exclusion

Contributions to the study of Populism and Democratic Theory

Conclusion: Citizenship in a Climate-Changed World

References

Radical Right Populism and the Weaponization of Sporting Events

The Red Tie Without the Conditions: European Nativist Imitation and Its Structural Limitations

The Demographic Data That Nativism Cannot Answer

The Orbán Laboratory: What Sixteen Years of the Nativist Project Produced

The Game and the Strategy: What Is Actually at Stake

Conclusion: Liberal Democracy’s First Imperative

References

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

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