Cockroach Janata Party.

India’s Gen Z Cockroach Protests: Youth Mobilization, Democratic Dissent, and the Limits of Modi’s Populism

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Dr. Amir Ali examines the emergence of India’s Cockroach Janata Party protests as the country’s first distinctive Gen Z protest movement, arguing that what began as a satirical online response to an official’s derogatory remark rapidly evolved into a nationwide campaign against educational injustice, government unresponsiveness, and democratic decline. Situating the movement within the broader trajectory of Indian politics, he explores how youth mobilization, meme culture, digital activism, and street protests combined to challenge the perceived invincibility of the Modi government. The article further assesses the movement’s implications for state-society relations, media credibility, educational governance, and the future of democratic dissent, suggesting that the Cockroach protests may represent a turning point in India’s contemporary politics.

By Amir Ali

When Gen Z protests took place in Nepal and Bangladesh in India’s neighborhood, and further afield in Morocco and Madagascar, a question arose in people’s minds whether such extraordinary political events could ever happen in India. India’s Cockroach Janata Party was the country’s very own bespoke Gen Z movement. The protests were prompted by remarks made by Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant. He disparagingly suggested that unemployed youngsters gravitating towards journalism and social activism were like cockroaches. An Indian student pursuing a master’s degree in public relations in Boston University in the US, Abhijit Dipke, saw an opportunity to make a meme out of the mention of cockroaches by the Chief Justice. He created the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), parodying the nation’s formidable ruling party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The result was an internet sensation as the CJP’s social media following easily surpassed that of the ruling BJP. 

From Student Anger to Political Accountability

These events played out in the middle of May of 2026 when Dipke was still in the US. A few days earlier the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) that close to two million youngsters in India had taken to gain admission to medical courses across the country, was cancelled. Dipke was set to return to India on the 6th of June. He announced that he would be going straight from the airport to a designated protest site in Central Delhi, called the Jantar Mantar, named after an 18th century astronomical observatory, that still stands. There was speculation that Dipke would be arrested on his arrival at the airport. He emerged in the glaring presence of India’s notoriously raucous media channels. He held a copy of B.R. Ambedkar’s autobiography to indicate his respect for the man whose name is associated with the drafting of the Indian constitution, and who is the iconic leader of India’s historically oppressed Dalit community.

Dipke was not arrested and he proceeded to Jantar Mantar where there was an underwhelming crowd that received him. This was perhaps the slightly disappointing first day of the movement that would in less than two months’ time extract a resignation from Narendra Modi’s Cabinet in the form of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Modi’s government in the twelve years that it has been in power has become synonymous with not yielding to demands for resignation on moral grounds from the opposition and civil society. There have been some exceptions such as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, MJ Akbar, who had to resign in 2018 when allegations of sexual assault were made against him. 

Pradhan is a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) which is an ultranationalist and supremacist political movement whose political front is the ruling BJP. The Cockroach Janata Party demanded Pradhan’s resignation as Education Minister as it was under his authority that regular leaks of questions for entrance examinations to prestigious courses like medicine and engineering happened. The NEET for medical courses that had been cancelled in mid-May, had been rescheduled for late June and there was youth discontent that the Cockroach movement was able to very effectively channelize. 

How the Cockroach Movement Gathered Momentum

The Modi government throughout June and most of July remained intransigent on the question of education minister Pradhan’s resignation. The mentality of the Modi government seems to be that resignation signals weakness on its part. This stonewalling and lack of responsiveness has become something of a character trait of the Modi regime. The earlier rare exception that underlines this intransigence was in late 2021 when the Modi government backtracked on a set of farm laws it was pushing through parliament as it had angry farmers from neighboring regions blockading major arterial roads into the capital city New Delhi, with their tractors.

The Cockroach Janata Party protests received a shot in the arm when Abhijit Dipke was joined by an educational reformer and environmental activist from a remote region in the Himalayas. This was a man called Sonam Wangchuk from Ladakh. Wangchuk had recently been in jail for protests he had organized and he promptly decided to go on hunger strike to express his solidarity with the Cockroach Janata Party. One of the features of agitational Indian politics is the hunger strike undertaken as a kind of imitation of the prolonged hunger strikes that India’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi was known to take recourse to. Wangchuk’s health kept deteriorating with the Modi government showing no signs of budging. 

When the Modi government finally moved on Saturday 18th July, exactly a week before Pradhan’s resignation on the next Saturday, it was to remove Sonam Wangchuk from the protest site by policemen who took him to a government hospital to monitor his health condition. Wangchuk demanded that the matter of examination paper leaks be taken up in the upcoming session of parliament, before breaking his hunger strike in the presence of senior government ministers. Meanwhile, the young ‘cockroach’ protesters at the Jantar Mantar protest site kept growing and the protests seemed to have graduated far beyond Sonam Wangchuk. 

When Youth Protest Shook the Modi Government

On the first day of the new parliament session on Monday July 20 when the protesters marched to Parliament, they were met by very heavy-handed police measures. Not only were they tear gassed and baton charged by the Delhi Police, but there were also allegations of pellet guns being fired. Protests were also happening across the country and in major provincial capitals like Patna and Kolkata, where provincial assembly elections had very recently returned governments from Mr. Modi’s BJP, consolidating his formidable political grip over the country. And yet, just as electorally his political grip was being strengthened in provinces which for many years had not yielded to the BJP’s political dominance, Mr. Modi was being challenged by impudent youngsters right under his nose in New Delhi.

The week beginning from Monday 20 July when the Delhi Police brutally responded to protesters, up to Saturday 25 July, when Education Minister Pradhan resigned, progressed in a politically feverish sort of way. There was speculation that there would be a cabinet reshuffle to respond to the situation, but not a resignation. 

A veritable meme revolution started as youngsters mercilessly mocked the carefully cultivated media image of Modi as a great and strong leader. Modi seemed to desperately respond with a midnight Instagram post with his haggard face far too close to the camera, eyes appearing like slits. Modi appealed to youngsters with a supposed Gen Z style of addressing them as ‘friends,’ instead of the trademark nasalized Hindi word mitron that he frequently uses. This Instagram post was interpreted and ridiculed as a sign of Modi being nervous and ruffled.

The Cockroach protests made very clear demands in addition to the resignation of the education minister, like dropping all police charges on protesting students. Soon after the resignation announcement, the protests at Jantar Mantar were a little hastily withdrawn. After yielding on the resignation, the Modi regime is unrepentantly doubling down, evident in the choice of Mr. Pradhan’s successor as Education Minister, another RSS member, which means the same educational agenda.

What Did the Cockroach Protests Achieve?

There is no doubt, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, that these were India’s unique and indeed idiosyncratic Gen Z protests. Further, the Cockroach protests are very different from the India Against Corruption movement that happened 15 years earlier in 2011, the same year as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements took place in different parts of the world. The India Against Corruption Movement did not share the global concerns of those significant protests, democracy in the case of the Arab Spring and inequality in the case of Occupy Wall Street. 

The India Against Corruption movement was backed by the ultranationalist RSS. It contributed significantly to the catapulting of Modi to power three years later in 2014. On the contrary, the Cockroach protests have targeted the RSS and BJP’s polarizing politics of sowing division between majority Hindus and minority Muslims. Some of the slogans at this year’s Cockroach protests emphasized unity between the two religious communities. That way the Cockroach protests can be seen as extending the Shaheen Bagh protests initiated by Muslim women in a locality in Southeast Delhi to protest the Citizen’s Amendment Bill that was passed by the Modi Government in December 2019 and that threatened the citizenship status, especially of Muslims. Right wing media commentators supportive of the BJP argued that the Cockroach protests need to be suppressed. 

Continuing with the contrast between the India Against Corruption Movement of 2011 and the Cockroach protest of 2026, the differing role of the mainstream media is glaring. The 2011 India Against Corruption Movement was supported by and virtually a creation of the mainstream electronic media. Large sections excitedly beamed visuals of protestors holding candles, waving flags, and singing the national anthem to ward off corruption, in what Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) political scientist Ajay Gudavarthy called a television soap opera. That very same mainstream media became the infamous lapdog Godi media as they are called now in India (Godi means lap in Hindi) that has thrown all journalistic standards to the wind by never questioning the Modi government. It has also injected large doses of communal animosity into the Indian body politic by organizing inflammatory prime time debates, many blatantly Islamophobic. With the Cockroach protests, the same lapdog Godi media has met its comeuppance with Gen Z protesters chasing them away and ridiculing them for their biased and skewed coverage.

The cockroach protests have made a significant dent on the impregnable character of Modi’s government. They have done so by removing a pervasive fear across the country about criticizing the government and expressing dissent. The Cockroach protests forebode the inevitable end of the Modi regime at some point in the future. Mr. Modi’s powerful Home Minister, Amit Shah has arrogantly claimed that his party will be in power for at least another fifty years. If that were to happen, then today’s Cockroach protesters would have advanced from middle age to become elderly citizens in their sixties. The BJP’s regular electoral victories in provincial assembly elections, and especially its recent success in crucial provinces like West Bengal and Bihar, have led some to believe that it is electorally invincible. This invincibility arises in the view of its critics from a combination of massive party funds, the Election Commission of India forfeiting its constitutional neutrality by favoring the BJP, and a controversial electoral roll revision exercise called the SIR (Special Intensive Revision) that seems designed to disenfranchise some sections of the electorate. 

The Cockroach protests have laid bare India’s education crisis that twelve years of BJP rule have exacerbated. Those years have intensified the desperate situation of India’s Gen Z who would have been children when Mr. Modi came to power in 2014. Prior to the Modi regime, India’s educational system showed severe structural infirmities like unemployable graduates, and school children whose literacy and numeracy skills were way below desired levels. The BJP through its parent organization the RSS has foisted an educational policy that is uncritical, unscientific and chauvinistic in terms of claimed civilizational achievements. Rewritten textbooks are full of errors, spelling a lost generation. This is compounded by doubts about Mr. Modi’s claimed educational qualifications. Multiple Right to Information requests seeking details of his degrees have been routinely turned down.  

Cockroach Coda

The Chief Justice of India’s choice of word to characterize India’s youngsters was extremely unfortunate. In 2022 the Editors Guild of India noted a dangerous plunging of the media discourse when it compared India’s mainstream television media with Radio Rwanda, a reference to Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines that during the 1994 Rwanda genocide conveyed the chilling message to kill the cockroaches. The embrace of the word cockroach by India’s youngsters is the most significant challenge to Modi’s populist regime, jaded and clueless about how to handle India’s restive youngsters and their demands for a good education and proper employment. 

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

From Conspiracy Theory to State Policy: Trump, MAGA, and the Specter of ‘Cultural Marxism’

by AuthoritarianismCommentariesEditor’s ChoiceHome

US President Donald Trump’s intervention in the Smithsonian Institution signals a new phase in America’s culture wars. In this insightful commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the notion of “cultural Marxism” has evolved from a conspiracy theory into a category of governance used to legitimize state intervention in museums, universities, and other institutions that shape public knowledge. Tracing the concept’s genealogy from Nazi-era “cultural Bolshevism” to the contemporary MAGA movement, the article explores how culture-war narratives become instruments of illiberal memory politics. It further demonstrates the irony that, while denouncing a supposed Marxist “long march through the institutions,” the Trumpist right is itself engaged in a Gramscian struggle to reshape American history, national identity, and democratic citizenship.

By João Ferreira Dias

Donald Trump’s latest intervention in the Smithsonian Institution marks a significant development in the American culture wars. The idea of “cultural Marxism” is no longer functioning solely as a conspiratorial explanation for social and cultural change. Under MAGA, it is increasingly becoming an administrative category used to justify governmental intervention in museums, universities, archives and other institutions responsible for producing public knowledge. Tracing the genealogy of this political specter from interwar Germany to the American conservative movement, this commentary argues that the campaign against “cultural Marxism” is part of a broader illiberal politics of memory. Ironically, while denouncing a supposed Marxist “long march through the institutions,” the Trumpist right is conducting its own Gramscian war of position over American history and national identity.

From Political Rhetoric to Executive Action

On July 24, 2026, Donald Trump signed an executive order entitled “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution.” The measure followed a report prepared by the White House Domestic Policy Council, Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. The executive order does not literally command the immediate removal of every “trace of Marxist ideology” from all the museums, libraries and educational collections that comprise the Smithsonian Institution. Its legal and administrative scope is more specific. It directs several federal authorities to identify and use the legal, financial and contractual mechanisms available to encourage the Smithsonian to address the alleged problems identified in the Domestic Policy Council’s report.

It also orders the installation of temporary signs and exhibitions on National Park Service property surrounding the National Museum of American History. These signs are intended to warn visitors about what the administration calls the museum’s “ideological capture” and to direct them towards supposedly more accurate interpretations of American history.

The broader political message is less restrained. In its official fact sheet, the White House accuses the Smithsonian’s leadership of replacing historical education with extreme political activism “rooted in Marxism.” Exhibitions and programmes concerning slavery, race, migration, gender, Indigenous peoples, LGBT rights and social justice are grouped together as expressions of a single ideological project allegedly designed to divide and demoralize the American people (The White House, 2026a; Domestic Policy Council, 2026).

This episode represents more than another rhetorical confrontation between Trump and progressive cultural institutions. It marks the conversion of “cultural Marxism” from a polemical label into a category legitimizing state intervention in the production of historical knowledge.

The Genealogy of a Political Specter

To understand the significance of this development, it is necessary to reconstruct the historical genealogy of the concept.One of the principal antecedents of what is now called “cultural Marxism” appeared in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. Conservative, nationalist and subsequently Nazi political actors used the term Kulturbolschewismus—“cultural Bolshevism”—to classify modern art, secularism, sexual reform and other forms of cultural experimentation as parts of a communist assault on German society.

In Nazi propaganda, modernist and avant-garde art was frequently described as the product of Jewish and communist influences allegedly seeking to weaken the German nation. “Cultural Bolshevism” thus became intertwined with the antisemitic mythology of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy against Western civilization (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2020). It would be historically reductive to claim that every contemporary use of “cultural Marxism” is simply a reproduction of Nazi ideology. There is no straightforward organizational continuity connecting the propaganda of the Third Reich to all present-day conservative actors who employ the expression. There is, nevertheless, a significant narrative continuity. In both cases, complex and decentralized social transformations are attributed to the coordinated actions of a hostile intellectual minority. Cultural change is interpreted not as the outcome of political conflict, generational replacement, technological transformation or social mobilization, but as evidence of a deliberate plan to destroy the nation, religion and the traditional family from within.

The Weimar Republic provided a particularly fertile environment for this political imaginary. Berlin became an intense laboratory of cultural modernity, associated with artistic experimentation, new forms of sexuality, cabaret culture, drugs and popular dances such as the foxtrot. Yet this cultural effervescence coexisted with political corruption, organized crime, economic instability and escalating street violence. The television series Babylon Berlin offers a dramatic representation of this atmosphere. The streets and cultural institutions of the German capital became battlegrounds between competing visions of society: Nazi racial nationalism, which glorified the German nation and its mythological past, and communism, which advanced a transnational and class-based conception of political identity.

The conflicts of this period helped shape political cosmologies that continue to reappear in altered forms. The tension between cultural progressivism and moral conservatism did not disappear with the end of the interwar period. It became one of the organizing antagonisms of modern culture-war politics.

The Frankfurt School as a Political Scapegoat

The Institute for Social Research was established in Frankfurt in 1923. Under the intellectual leadership of Max Horkheimer, it brought together thinkers including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Friedrich Pollock. The intellectual tradition subsequently known as the Frankfurt School examined capitalism, authoritarianism, antisemitism, mass culture, social psychology and fascism. Its thinkers were influenced by Marxism but did not constitute a homogeneous doctrinal bloc. Several were deeply critical of Soviet communism, economic reductionism and orthodox versions of Marxist theory (Jay, 1973).

After the Nazi seizure of power, the Institute was closed by the Gestapo. It moved first to Geneva and then, in 1934, to New York, where it became affiliated with Columbia University. Its members’ experiences of exile, fascism and antisemitism shaped their research into authoritarian personality structures, propaganda and the political uses of mass culture. The Frankfurt School unquestionably influenced sections of the post-war New Left, particularly through the writings of Herbert Marcuse. Intellectual influence, however, is not evidence of political coordination.

The contemporary conspiracy theory transforms a diverse and frequently internally divided intellectual tradition into the command center of a centralized plan to capture universities, the media, the family and the moral foundations of Western society. It retrospectively fuses the Frankfurt School with Antonio Gramsci’s writings on cultural hegemony, despite the substantial theoretical, historical and political differences between these traditions. In this account, Marxists supposedly concluded that Western workers would not support a proletarian revolution because they remained attached to Christianity, nationalism and the traditional family. The alleged solution was therefore to undermine those institutions through universities, entertainment, feminism, multiculturalism and movements for racial and sexual equality.

There is no historical evidence of such a coordinated programme. The theory produces unity at the level of the imagined enemy rather than at the level of intellectual history. Marxism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, feminism, critical race theory, queer theory and liberal multiculturalism are treated as interchangeable components of one political project, even though they emerged from different traditions and are often theoretically incompatible. As Martin Jay (2010–2011), Jérôme Jamin (2018) and Joan Braune (2019) demonstrate, the Frankfurt School has consequently become a political scapegoat onto which anxieties concerning cultural transformation can be projected.

The contemporary use of “cultural Marxism” cannot always be reduced to conscious antisemitism. Many who repeat the term may be unaware of its historical genealogy. Nevertheless, the conspiracy frequently reproduces older antisemitic structures: cosmopolitan intellectuals, often identified as Jewish, are imagined as operating behind the scenes to control education, culture and the media while dissolving religion, national identity and traditional morality.

The American Consolidation of “Cultural Marxism”

Although anti-communist paranoia remained politically active throughout the Cold War, the contemporary American narrative of “cultural Marxism” consolidated during the culture wars of the 1990s. In a 1999 “Letter to Conservatives,” the influential conservative strategist Paul Weyrich equated political correctness with cultural Marxism. He argued that universities, the entertainment industry and other cultural institutions had been deliberately captured by an ideology fundamentally hostile to Western Judeo-Christian civilization.

The following year, William S. Lind systematized this interpretation in his speech “The Origins of Political Correctness.” According to Lind, Marxism had transferred its revolutionary strategy from economics to culture. The opposition between proletarians and the bourgeoisie had supposedly been replaced by conflicts involving racial, sexual and cultural identities.Under this interpretation, women, racial minorities and LGBT people became substitute revolutionary subjects, while white people, men, Christians and heterosexuals were recast as the new bourgeoisie. Political correctness was presented as the disciplinary language of this new revolutionary order (Lind, 2000).

This formulation became part of the ideological DNA of the contemporary conservative reaction. It offered a comprehensive explanation for feminism, multiculturalism, secularization, changing sexual norms, affirmative action and the increasing public recognition of historically marginalized groups. Its analytical weakness was also the source of its political strength. Because “cultural Marxism” lacked a precise definition, it could incorporate almost any development regarded as culturally threatening. It became what might be called a conspiratorial master signifier: a category capable of transforming heterogeneous opponents into manifestations of a single hostile force.

The discourse subsequently circulated beyond the United States. As research into Australia and Brazil demonstrates, the conspiracy theory can be adapted to different national contexts while retaining its central narrative of institutional capture and moral subversion (Busbridge et al., 2020; Silva, 2021).

MAGA, Cultural Backlash and the Mythic Past

Donald Trump’s rise and the emergence of the MAGA movement revitalized this political grammar. The cultural backlash thesis developed by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart helps explain the social conditions under which such narratives become effective. Their argument does not suggest that every supporter of populist radical-right movements is economically deprived or culturally conservative. Rather, it identifies the political consequences of perceived status loss among social groups that once occupied more secure positions within dominant cultural hierarchies (Norris & Inglehart, 2019).

Changes associated with racial equality, feminism, secularization, immigration and LGBT rights can be experienced by some groups not simply as the extension of citizenship to others, but as the displacement of their own identity and social authority. Populist entrepreneurs convert these perceptions into a narrative of cultural dispossession. Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” operates through this temporal logic. As Jason Stanley argues, fascist and authoritarian politics frequently construct a mythic past: an imagined period of national greatness, social unity and moral order that existed before the nation was corrupted by internal and external enemies (Stanley, 2018).

The MAGA past does not correspond to one historically coherent period. It is a selective composite. It combines industrial prosperity, energy expansion, patriarchal family structures, white Christian morality and American geopolitical supremacy while suppressing the history of racial segregation, Jim Crow legislation, gender inequality and political exclusion. The political purpose of this myth is not historical accuracy. It is to define the present as a period of national decline and to identify those allegedly responsible for it.

In classical populist discourse, society is divided between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” (Mudde, 2004). The cultural-Marxist narrative adds another layer to this division. The elite is not merely corrupt or self-interested. It is portrayed as the institutional agent of an ideological project seeking to transform the identity of the nation. Professors, teachers, curators, journalists, civil servants and cultural workers are therefore represented as members, or at least instruments, of an internal occupying force.

The Smithsonian and Illiberal Memory Politics

The intervention in the Smithsonian reveals how this conspiratorial worldview can be translated into an illiberal politics of memory. The Domestic Policy Council’s report presents the National Museum of American History as an institution captured by an intersectional form of critical theory allegedly rooted in Marxism. Its criticism is directed not only at factual inaccuracies but also at the museum’s interpretative orientation.

The report objects to the idea that museums should “reframe” celebratory national narratives, promote social justice or examine how historical institutions reproduced racial, gendered and economic inequalities. It contrasts this approach with a conception of the museum as a patriotic institution intended to cultivate gratitude, national pride and confidence in American exceptionalism.

This is ultimately a conflict over the democratic function of public history. Museums are not ideologically neutral repositories of objects. They select events, construct narratives and determine which voices and experiences are incorporated into the national memory. A museum that addresses slavery, colonialism or racial exclusion is not necessarily replacing history with ideology. It may instead be expanding the historical community whose experiences are considered worthy of public recognition.

Legitimate disagreements can exist concerning curatorial balance, political activism, historical interpretation and the use of public funds. The conspiratorial move occurs when these disagreements are explained through a single totalizing cause: the coordinated capture of cultural institutions by Marxist activists. The Trump administration resolves the controversy by claiming that one interpretation is ideological while its own is merely truthful and patriotic. State intervention is consequently presented not as the politicization of culture but as the restoration of neutrality.

This is a characteristic illiberal operation. The government denies that it is imposing an official interpretation of history. Instead, it claims to be liberating institutions from an ideology already imposed by others. The result is a reversal of power. Although the executive possesses administrative authority, access to public funding and the capacity to pressure institutions, it continues to represent itself as the insurgent victim of an entrenched cultural elite. Governmental coercion is thereby reframed as democratic restoration.

The Gramscian Irony of the MAGA Right

There is an important intellectual irony at the center of this campaign. While condemning an alleged Marxist “long march through the institutions,” the radical right has increasingly adopted a strategy that can itself be described as Gramscian. It recognizes that political power depends not only on winning elections or controlling the state, but also on shaping common sense, collective memory and the moral vocabulary through which society understands itself.

Recent research on transnational radical conservatism demonstrates that sections of the right have consciously appropriated concepts such as hegemony, counter-hegemony, metapolitics and the “war of position” (Abrahamsen et al., 2024). Think tanks, publishing houses, universities, legal organizations, religious networks and digital platforms become sites of counter-hegemonic struggle. Their purpose is to challenge the cultural authority of liberal institutions and make previously marginal ideas appear legitimate, reasonable and eventually dominant.

The MAGA campaign against the Smithsonian should be understood within this broader strategy. The objective is not merely to correct individual exhibitions. It is to redefine the legitimate purpose of a national museum, determine which interpretations of American history can receive public support and discredit critical historiography as evidence of ideological subversion. The right accuses the left of capturing institutions while developing its own programme for their political realignment. This does not mean that the two projects are normatively or historically identical. It does mean that the Trumpist right has understood a central Gramscian insight: durable political power requires the transformation of cultural authority.

From Paranoid Style to a Technology of Government

Richard Hofstadter’s concept of the “paranoid style” remains useful for understanding the emotional and narrative structure of the cultural-Marxist conspiracy. The term does not constitute a clinical diagnosis. It describes a political style in which history is interpreted as the product of an immense, coordinated and morally evil conspiracy (Hofstadter, 1964).

Yet the Smithsonian episode demonstrates that the phenomenon can no longer be understood as rhetoric alone. Under MAGA, the paranoid style is becoming a technology of government. The accusation of ideological capture creates the justification for investigations, funding restrictions, administrative pressure, public warnings and the political supervision of cultural institutions.

The operation is relatively simple. First, institutions are declared to have been captured. Second, every critical interpretation of national history is transformed into evidence of that capture. Finally, governmental intervention is presented not as the politicization of culture, but as the restoration of historical neutrality.

There is no evidence of a centralized Marxist plan controlling American universities, museums and media organizations. The narrative nevertheless fulfils an important political function. It consolidates the MAGA electorate, converts social complexity into moral conflict and transforms political opponents into agents of civilizational subversion. Trump is therefore doing more than accusing the Democratic Party and progressive institutions of Marxism. He is mobilizing his political base through a genuine war of position over the soul of America.

The struggle concerns who have the authority to tell the national story, which historical experiences deserve public recognition and whether democratic citizenship requires patriotic reassurance or the critical examination of the past. The specter of “cultural Marxism” may have little correspondence with intellectual or institutional reality. Its political consequences, however, are becoming increasingly real.

 

References

Abrahamsen, R.; Drolet, J.-F.; Williams, M. C.; Vucetic, S.; Narita, K. & Gheciu, A. (2024). World of the right: Radical conservatism and global order. Cambridge University Press.

Braune, J. (2019). “Who’s afraid of the Frankfurt School? ‘Cultural Marxism’ as an antisemitic conspiracy theory.” Journal of Social Justice, 9, 1–25.

Busbridge, R.; Moffitt, B. & Thorburn, J. (2020). “Cultural Marxism: Far-right conspiracy theory in Australia’s culture wars.” Social Identities, 26(6), 722–738. doi: 10.1080/13504630.2020.1787822 

Domestic Policy Council. (2026). Saving America’s story: How ideological capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History erases our heritage. The White House.

Hofstadter, R. (1964). “The paranoid style in American politics.” Harper’s Magazine, 229(1374), 77–86.

Hunter, J. D. (1991). Culture wars: The struggle to define America. Basic Books.

Jamin, J. (2018). “Cultural Marxism: A survey.” Religion Compass, 12(1–2), e12258. doi: 10.1111/rec3.12258

Jay, M. (1973). The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Little, Brown and Company.

Jay, M. (2010–2011). “Dialectic of counter-enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as scapegoat of the lunatic fringe.” Salmagundi, 168/169, 30–40.

Lind, W. S. (2000). “The origins of political correctness.” Accuracy in Academia.

Mirrlees, T. (2018). “The alt-right’s discourse on ‘cultural Marxism’: A political instrument of intersectional hate.” Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, 39(1), 49–69.

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

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

Silva, M. (2021). “O marxismo cultural no Brasil: Origens e desdobramentos de uma teoria conservadora.” Cultura y Religión, 15(1), 180–222.

Stanley, J. (2018). How fascism works: The politics of us and them. Random House.

The White House. (2025). Executive Order 14253: Restoring truth and sanity to American history.

The White House. (2026a). Fact sheet: President Donald J. Trump restores trust in the Smithsonian Institution.

The White House. (2026b). Executive order: Restoring trust in the Smithsonian Institution.

Weyrich, P. M. (1999). “Letter to conservatives.” National Center for Public Policy Research.

Musk, Bezos

From Wealth Concentration to Anti-Immigrant Populism: The Strategic Alliance Between Super-Rich and the Far Right

by CommentariesDigital-populismEconomicsEditor’s ChoiceHomeMigration

Why do some of the world’s wealthiest individuals openly support populist radical right and far-right movements whose central political message revolves around anti-immigrant and anti-minority mobilization? In this commentary, Dr. Bulent Kenes argues that this alliance is best understood not as an ideological convergence but as a pragmatic strategy for deflecting public attention from the structural roots of social injustice, economic inequality and wealth concentration. Drawing on John Rawls’s concept of the veil of ignorance, the article examines how immigrants—among the principal victims of contemporary economic and social inequalities—are transformed into convenient scapegoats. It further explores how the growing concentration of economic and digital power enables technology billionaires to amplify exclusionary narratives while marginalizing pluralistic voices, raising profound questions about democracy, algorithmic governance, and contemporary capitalism.

By Bulent Kenes

If we were to apply John Rawls’s famous veil of ignorance thought experiment, developed in A Theory of Justice, to today’s world, there is little doubt that immigrants would emerge as one of the most disadvantaged and the most vulnerable social groups. Immigrants, political refugees, in particular, as well as individuals forced to migrate for economic reasons, are compelled at some stage of their lives to leave behind their accumulated economic, social, and professional capital and begin life anew in a different country. Consequently, they typically enter their host societies from the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. In terms of cultural, economic, and professional resources, their starting point is often below zero.

In this respect, immigrants constitute one of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable segments of society in terms of social justice and income distribution. Yet, while attempting to rebuild their lives, they are forced to contend not only with economic and social hardships but also with the prejudices generated by the rising populist radical right (PRR) and far-right parties and movements. Moreover, by being portrayed as the principal culprits behind economic inequality and social injustice, they are turned into scapegoats, a process that imposes severe socio-psychological costs on an already vulnerable population.

One point can be stated unequivocally: economically (and even culturally) driven anti-immigrant sentiment is not a phenomenon that emerges spontaneously. Social injustice and income inequality are undoubtedly real societal problems, and angry eyes are constantly searching for those responsible for them. Unfortunately, they do not always succeed in identifying the real causes. Meanwhile, for far-right actors who incite, inflame and ride the wave of resentment generated among these groups, targeting immigrants—one of the weakest, least organized, and least capable social groups in socio-political and economic terms—is both the easiest and the least politically costly strategy. Although the attempts of far-right political actors, whose humanitarian sensitivities have been considerably weakened, to exploit and simultaneously provoke this wave for political gain deserve the strongest ethical condemnation, it is nevertheless understandable why they choose this strategy within the context of political competition, which is driven less by values than by the pursuit of power. The fact that populist far right politicians such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, Robert Fico, Jarosław Kaczyński, Jimmie Åkesson, and many others have placed anti-immigrant politics at the center of political mobilization can be understood within this framework.

What is particularly striking, however, is why dollar billionaires—and even the owners of trillion-dollar companies—whose activities are largely confined to technology and the global economy, support far-right actors, PRR parties and movements, and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

In my view, the principal explanation lies in pragmatic interests. The anti-immigration discourse of the populist radical right and the far right systematically recasts those who are most severely affected by income inequality and social injustice from victims into perpetrators of these very problems. In reality, however, immigrants—alongside other disadvantaged groups—are among the greatest losers of the contemporary global economic order and the structural inequalities it generates. This is precisely where the core of the issue lies. By systematically constructing immigrants as scapegoats, far-right actors divert public attention away from the structural sources of economic inequality and social injustice. In doing so, they help obscure the role of the super-rich, who are not only the principal beneficiaries of the existing distribution of wealth but also key beneficiaries of the economic structures that reproduce and deepen these inequalities.

It is precisely at this point that the logic behind the support given by figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—the greatest beneficiaries of the existing global economic order—to populist radical right parties and far-right actors becomes apparent. Historically, just as the East India Company and the West India Company represented the corporate actors that benefited most from the global colonial order of their time, today’s technology giants occupy a comparable position as the greatest beneficiaries of contemporary global hi-tech capitalism. The strengthening of political discourse centered on anti-immigrant sentiment diverts public attention away from these structural causes of economic inequality and wealth concentration.

Regrettably, I must note that approaches which, in recent years, have argued that anti-immigrant sentiment is fundamentally the product not of economic grievances but of a cultural backlash, even if unintentionally, contribute to strengthening this political strategy. The influence of cultural factors and identity politics cannot, of course, be denied. However, explaining anti-immigrant sentiment primarily through cultural dynamics diminishes the visibility of structural causes such as economic inequality and social injustice, while simultaneously providing the far right with an indirect—albeit problematic—source of legitimacy. The issue, therefore, is not merely one of cultural reaction; it should also be understood as a political mechanism of distraction that conceals underlying economic power relations and discourages scrutiny of the existing distribution of wealth.

If the support that the super-rich extend to the far right were merely an expression of their individual political preferences, it might not warrant such sustained attention. The issue, however, extends far beyond that. These billionaires, who have effectively acquired monopolistic positions in the technology sector, not only deploy their immense economic resources in support of far-right political movements but also possess the capacity to shape the boundaries of public discourse through the digital platforms they control, including X, Facebook, YouTube, and others. Through complex algorithmic mechanisms, these platforms are increasingly transformed into the principal channels for the circulation of far-right narratives, while alternative viewpoints, critical voices, and pluralistic perspectives experience a substantial loss of visibility.

In this process, observations suggesting that the digital visibility of actors defending liberal democratic values, pluralism, the rule of law, and humanitarian principles is being systematically weakened, while polarizing, provocative, and extremist content is algorithmically rewarded, are increasingly supported by empirical research. As a consequence, democratic actors using these platforms face not only declining public influence but also invisible, though perceptible, algorithmic barriers that make it increasingly difficult even to reach their own natural audiences.

This picture reveals the combined impact of the economic and digital power of technology barons who stand among both the principal creators and the greatest beneficiaries of the global income divide. Despite being among the primary causes and beneficiaries of wealth concentration, economic inequality, and social injustice, Elon Musk and similar actors openly support extremist, far-right political movements that systematically portray immigrants and other vulnerable socio-cultural minorities as those responsible for these problems and as convenient scapegoats. Elon Musk’s most recent extensive interview with The Economist, in which he reiterated positions supportive of the far right, together with his backing of Marine Le Pen, Alternative for Germany (AfD) and various other far-right parties and actors, is open to interpretation within this framework. The political positions, public rhetoric, and algorithmic maneuvers of Musk and other technology-baron billionaires function as a deliberate mechanism of distraction, obscuring the true sources of wealth concentration and structural economic inequality.

Perhaps the greatest contradiction that deserves attention, and the most fundamental question that requires an answer, is the following: Why do broad segments of society that are themselves victims of structural economic inequality and social injustice follow far-right political actors supported by the greatest beneficiaries of wealth concentration, rather than questioning the structural causes of these inequalities? More importantly, why are they tend to view immigrants and socio-cultural minorities—groups that share similar structural vulnerabilities—as the principal causes of these problems? This paradox points not only to the discursive success of the populist radical right and far right but also to a fundamental research problem requiring us to understand how public perceptions are reshaped through the influence of economic and administrative power over digital communication infrastructures.

UK PM Andy Burnham.

Burnham, Post-Neoliberalism, and the Rematerialization of the Left

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHome

Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the contemporary center-left may be entering a decisive post-neoliberal phase by re-centering politics on material security rather than cultural conflict. Using Andy Burnham’s political vision as a point of departure—and drawing comparisons with Zohran Mamdani—he contends that democratic renewal depends on reconnecting progressive politics with the everyday concerns of housing, employment, public services, and economic security. While defending the achievements of cultural inclusion, Dr. Dias suggests that the left must once again become the primary political organizer of material insecurity if it is to counter the appeal of ethnonationalist populism. This timely commentary offers a compelling contribution to current debates on populism, post-neoliberalism, democratic representation, and the future of liberal-social democracy in an era of deep political realignment.

By João Ferreira Dias

Andy (Andrew Murray) Burnham’s first speech in Downing Street, in reminding me of Zohran Mamdani, left me wondering whether we are witnessing a new tendency to recenter political action and political language on material questions. If this tendency is confirmed, it would mark a programmatic shift within Labour’s centrist and moderate left: one that is less ideological and more programme-driven than the radical left, which has lived off struggles for recognition and cultural emancipation. Put differently, the center-left wants to deprive the culture wars of their monopoly over the political agenda.

After decades in which the left increasingly became an interpreter of cultural transformations, Burnham is seeking to return it to its original function: politically organizing economic and social insecurity at a time when that insecurity has been captured largely by the radical right, through a clear articulation of economic resentment with conservative and nationalist appeals. Not because ethnonationalism follows automatically from economic insecurity, but because such insecurity creates fertile ground for converting material loss into cultural resentment (Gidron & Hall, 2020; Rodrik, 2021).

The causes of the erosion of the left’s social representativeness are by now well known. Both the radical left and the radical right identified a culprit behind growing economic unease and anxiety: the neoliberal policies that culminated in the 2008 crisis. Yet, following the success of the radical left during that period, left and right shifted their arenas of action, in a mirror game centered on the struggle for cultural hegemony between progressivism and cultural backlash (Hopkin, 2020; Mudge, 2018; Norris & Inglehart, 2019).

In the post-austerity turn, the left placed greater emphasis on policies recognizing voices historically rendered subaltern and on the struggle against white privilege. The agenda was commendable, but its timing proved challenging as immigration reshaped the social landscape and became an increasingly sensitive political and social issue, carrying with it both economic and cultural anxieties. The radical right, in turn, transformed these anxieties into an identitarian narrative according to which the loss of security, status, and control resulted not from the economic model, but from immigration, cosmopolitan elites, and the cultural transformation of Western societies (Norris & Inglehart, 2019).

Inflammatory rhetoric, readily identifiable culprits—corrupt politicians, immigrants, and “leftists”—and simplistic solutions to complex problems gave the ethnonationalist right room to grow among segments of the working and middle classes who were materially vulnerable, culturally disregarded, and politically estranged from elites. Many of these voters felt anxious about cultural change while parts of the radical left pointed the finger at them as racists, xenophobes, and beneficiaries of racial privilege (Gidron & Hall, 2020).

Like Mamdani, Burnham seems to understand the elementary formula for combating the radical right. It does not lie in continuing to impose a moral framework centered on patriarchy and white privilege, nor merely in explaining that, for example, Nigel Farage is wrong and is a populist. On the contrary, it requires addressing the needs to which he responds: economic and employment security, social protection, public safety, the creation of a sense of belonging and identity within a multicultural framework, and the promise of a shared horizon.

Burnham and Mamdani do not, of course, occupy the same ideological position. What brings them together is less the programme than the political method: making the left intelligible again through the price and quality of everyday life and returning to the idea of a platform broader than the segmentations on which it has come to depend. Rather than first asking voters to subscribe to a moral or identitarian framework, they show them what public power can do for housing, transport, employment, and essential services.

The ethnonationalist right offers security through the border, belonging through the ethnic nation, and a future through restoration. Burnham seeks to offer security through public services, belonging through community and territory, and a future through investment and reindustrialization. He therefore does more than promise protection against decline: he seeks to recover an idea of progress, mobility, and collective capacity, without which the left risks becoming merely the administrator of decay (Hopkin, 2020).

This does not mean, however, that the culture wars can simply be declared over. The radical right will continue to mobilize immigration, national identity, gender, religion, and historical memory even if the left prefers to concentrate on economic questions. The response cannot be to abandon cultural achievements and minority rights, but to integrate them into a universalist language and an idea of common civic belonging. Material politics is necessary, but insufficient. Yet it is now the best and most urgent weapon available to centrists everywhere.

The rematerialization of the centrist left is an essential step towards rebuilding an electoral base amid the urgent need to safeguard the principles of liberal-social democracy. Burnham does not appear to want to replace culture with economics, but rather to reconstruct materially the conditions of democratic belonging—a belonging that is as much of the left as of the right, as much liberal as conservative—which the radical right has converted into an ethnonationalist promise.

 

References

Gidron, N. & Hall, P. A. (2020). “Populism as a problem of social integration.” Comparative Political Studies, 53(7), 1027–1059. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019879947

Hopkin, J. (2020). Anti-system politics: The crisis of market liberalism in rich democracies. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190699765.001.0001

Mudge, S. L. (2018). Leftism reinvented: Western parties from socialism to neoliberalism. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674984837

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

Rodrik, D. (2021). “Why does globalization fuel populism? Economics, culture, and the rise of right-wing populism.” Annual Review of Economics, 13, 133–170. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-070220-032416

Climate Change, Bangladesh.

Why Environmental Displacement Is the Next Frontier in Populist Politics

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHomeMigration

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.

By Dr. Oludele Solaja

Climate change has progressed from being an environmental issue into a central political issue in the 21st 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.

Morocco football fans.

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

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeMigration

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. 

 

References

Boubia, Yacine. (2026). “When Change Becomes Conflict: Immigration and the Politics of Cultural Backlash.” European Center for Populism Studies, April 8, 2026. https://www.populismstudies.org/when-change-becomes-conflict-immigration-and-the-politics-of-cultural-backlash/

Cohen, Bernard C. (1963). The Press and Foreign Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Direkt36 / VSquare. (2025). “Inside Viktor Orbán’s Failure to Achieve His Demographic Goal.” July 10, 2025. https://vsquare.org/inside-viktor-orbans-failure-to-achieve-his-demographic-goal/

European Labour Authority. (2025). “Netherlands — Fair Mobility Board.” November 2025. https://www.ela.europa.eu/en/country/netherlands

Eurostat. (2026). “Fertility Statistics.” European Commission, Statistics Explained. March 2026. Dataset: demo_find. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Fertility_statistics

Follow the Money. (2026). “Migrant Workers Risk Missing Out on Billions in Dutch Wage Dispute.” March 31, 2026. https://www.ftm.eu/articles/netherlands-temporary-employment-agency-wage-dispute-migrant-workers

Laclau, Ernesto. (2005). On Populist Reason. London: Verso.

Levitsky, Steven and Ziblatt, Daniel. (2018). How Democracies Die. New York: Crown Publishing.

McCombs, Maxwell E. and Shaw, Donald L.. (1972). “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.” Public Opinion Quarterly, 36 (2): 176–187. https://doi.org/10.1086/267990

Migration Policy Institute. (2024). “European Immigrants in the United States.” January 11, 2024. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/european-immigrants-united-states-2022

Mudde, Cas and Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Netherlands Embassy in Warsaw. (N.d.) “Labour Migration — Poland.” https://www.netherlandsandyou.nl/web/poland/themes/labour-migration

Norris, Pippa and Inglehart, Ronald. (2019). Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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

UK PM Keir Starmer

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

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeMigration

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.

Maasai people.

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

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHome

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 center campus.

Data and Drought: A Community Fights Back

by CommentariesDigital-populismEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHome

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.  

Social Media

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

by CommentariesDigital-populismEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHome

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 democracy acquires 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.