Interviews - ECPS

Ten Years on with Brexit / Prof. Corner: With Brexit, the UK Has Lost More Than It Has Gained

April 18, 2026

by ECPS_admin with No Comment Economics Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

As the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum approaches, debate has shifted from slogans to evidence. In this interview, Professor Mark Corner offers a measured but clear conclusion: “the UK has lost more than it has gained.” Drawing on political economy, constitutional analysis, and historical perspective, he revisits Brexit not as a singular rupture but as a dual crisis affecting both the European Union and the internal cohesion of the United Kingdom. Professor Corner highlights the paradox at the heart of Brexit—“taking back control” did not strengthen parliamentary sovereignty, but instead elevated popular sovereignty. At the same time, expectations of global economic freedom have given way to the enduring realities of geography and interdependence. His reflections situate Brexit as a revealing case of the gap between political promise and institutional consequence.

As the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum approaches, public debate has moved decisively beyond the binary language of Leave and Remain toward a more empirically grounded reckoning with Brexit’s long-term political and economic consequences. In this context, Professor Mark Corner, Emeritus Professor at the University of Leuven, offers a particularly valuable perspective. His work situates Brexit not simply as a rupture in Britain’s relationship with the European Union, but as a dual constitutional and political crisis—one affecting both the European project and the internal cohesion of the United Kingdom. Bringing together political economy, constitutional analysis, historical memory, and populist mobilization, his reflections illuminate how Brexit has reshaped not only policy but also political imagination.

In his interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Corner advances a sober conclusion captured in the headline of this conversation: “With Brexit, the UK has lost more than it has gained.” That judgment is not presented as a dramatic slogan, but as the outcome of a broader reassessment now taking place in British public life. As he puts it, “most economists would agree that the UK has lost more than it has gained,” and if that were not so, “the present government would [not] be trying so hard to move back toward a closer economic relationship with the EU.” In this sense, Brexit appears less as a fulfilled promise of renewed sovereignty than as a strategic rupture whose costs have become increasingly difficult to deny.

Yet Professor Corner’s account is more layered than a narrow economic audit. He draws attention to one of the central ironies of Brexit politics: that a project framed around “taking back control” did not, in fact, restore parliamentary sovereignty. On the contrary, he argues, the referendum “assert[ed] popular sovereignty over parliamentary sovereignty,”since most MPs would have preferred to remain. Similarly, the promise that Britain could flourish once “freed from the shackles of the EU” has, in his view, been undermined by the enduring reality of geography, interdependence, and trade. The fantasy of becoming “Singapore-on-Thames” has largely faded, replaced by the quieter recognition that “a very large share of our trade is conducted with Europe.”

The interview also places Brexit within a broader political and historical frame. Professor Corner shows how populist and radical-right actors have successfully shifted the argument away from economic performance toward sovereignty, border control, and cultural identity. In doing so, they have helped transform British political conflict from an older class-based divide into a more complex terrain shaped by “social and cultural division alongside economic division.” At the same time, he warns that Brexit’s most profound destabilizing effects may ultimately be domestic rather than European. While the feared cascade of exits from the EU never materialized, the United Kingdom itself remains vulnerable to centrifugal pressures, particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In his words, “in the long run, [these] may prove more troubling than the difficulties in the EU.”

In sum, Professor Corner’s reflections offer a penetrating and historically informed account of Brexit’s legacy. Far from vindicating the claims of its proponents, Brexit emerges here as a case study in the gap between populist promise and institutional consequence—one that continues to shape the future of Britain, Europe, and the politics of sovereignty itself.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Mark Corner, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

Brexit Strains Britain More Than Europe

Professor Corner, welcome. In A Tale of Two Unions, you argue that Brexit must be understood simultaneously as a crisis of both the European Union and the British Union. Ten years on, how would you assess the relative degree of strain placed on each union, and has Brexit ultimately proven more destabilizing domestically than internationally?

Professor Mark Corner: I think it has. When the UK left in 2016, I remember seeing a book titled The EU: An Obituary.A lot of people thought that the UK’s departure would trigger a stampede. People began to talk about Nexit or Swexit after Brexit. But it didn’t happen.

It is important to note that, despite all the recent difficulties with Hungary, it did not leave the EU. It was not expelled from the EU. Yes, pressure was brought upon it, and in the recent election, it got rid of Orbán. But all this has happened with Hungary remaining a member of the EU.

In the case of the UK, there is an instability built into the fact that it is effectively a multinational state: England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. It seems to me that the UK has done very little to develop some kind of stable constitutional structure around which these different nations can coalesce. I think there are difficulties. The forthcoming elections next month will show that there are difficulties. In fact, there will quite possibly be a nationalist first minister in Scotland, similarly in Wales, and there already is Michelle O’Neill in Northern Ireland. So, there will be difficulties in the UK, and in the long run, they may prove more troubling than the difficulties in the EU.

Economic Reality Undercuts Sovereignty Claims

Your work highlights the tension between parliamentary sovereignty and supranational governance. To what extent does the post-Brexit economic record—particularly reduced trade and investment—challenge the political narrative that “taking back control” enhances state capacity?

Professor Mark Corner: There are certain ironies here. There was a great deal of talk about taking back parliamentary control in 2016. But in fact, the Brexit vote did the very opposite. If Parliament had had the authority to decide on Brexit, a majority of MPs were against it. Effectively, what the referendum did was to assert popular sovereignty over parliamentary sovereignty. Members of Parliament—most of whom would have preferred to remain—accepted that this popular vote must be binding. I think that was the correct decision. But it hardly amounted to strengthening parliamentary sovereignty. So, I am not sure Brexit really led to that. It strengthened an idea of popular sovereignty, and that is something about which there can be a number of questions. But I do not think it strengthened parliamentary sovereignty.

As for the trade arguments, the general view in the UK now is that Brexit has not been beneficial to trade. In 2016, many people had the idea that, freed from the shackles of the EU, we could go out and strike ambitious trade deals with the far corners of the world—a deal with Japan, a deal with India—we would be free, no longer moored to Europe. But the reality is that, even in the 21st century, geographical proximity remains crucial, and a very large share of our trade is conducted with Europe. You can see the present government trying, as far as it can, to nudge itself back toward a closer economic relationship with the EU. This is quite different from the atmosphere under Boris Johnson, with all the talk of becoming “Singapore-on-Thames”—the idea that Britain could roam the world and secure major trade deals simply by freeing itself from Europe. That notion has largely disappeared.

Policy Shifts Signal Economic Costs

If we move beyond rhetoric to measurable indicators—GDP performance, trade volumes, FDI, labor market shifts—how would you construct a balanced “Brexit scorecard”? Does the empirical record validate or undermine the core claims of Brexit proponents?

Professor Mark Corner: Scorecards differ, and economists always arrive at different figures. You know the saying that an economist is someone who, if you ask for a phone number, gives you an estimate.

I would have to speak in general terms: most economists would agree that the UK has lost more than it has gained. If that were not the case, I do not think the present government would be trying so hard to move back toward a closer economic relationship with the EU.

In the last few days, there has been discussion of whether the UK could align with EU rules without having to secure a vote in Parliament on every measure. That is, in political terms, a dangerous way to proceed, but it is being considered because, economically, the government perceives the scorecard as pointing toward as close an alignment as possible for the UK’s benefit. I do not think it would pursue this course otherwise.

Populists Shift Debate to Identity

How has populist discourse, particularly on the radical and far right, managed to reinterpret or neutralize the economic costs of Brexit by shifting emphasis toward sovereignty, identity, and cultural autonomy?

Professor Mark Corner: That is an important point to make: the arguments are not simply about whether Brexit is economically beneficial. They also involve these other questions, and even during the 2016 campaign there were people on the Remain side who said, look, we are talking too much in terms of economics alone—we should think more broadly.

There is no doubt that issues like immigration were a very important factor in precipitating the Brexit vote. The idea that the UK could take back control of its borders, decide who was going to come in if it left the EU, and thereby maintain its cultural identity and its sovereignty was a very powerful argument at the time, and that has to be recognized. At the same time, there are some very powerful arguments against that position. There is a strong case in favor of multicultural and multinational society that has been built up in the UK over the last 50 years, and I do not think that is emphasized enough.

Because I am old, I can go back to the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, there were arguments about admitting members of the former British Empire, and there was talk of an “Asian” or “Black” invasion—the language was very racist. Yet at that time there was actually net emigration from the UK, so there was no real issue of rising numbers. The only objection could have been that people did not like those who were not white coming in.

I do not see that in the 21st century. There is still racism, of course, but it is not like it was in the 1960s or 1970s. People generally accept that society is made up of many different cultural backgrounds, and that this is worthwhile—that it is a benefit.

There is, however, a different kind of problem, which is that overall numbers—irrespective of color or ethnic background—have been rising very quickly. Any country whose population is increasing rapidly year by year is going to face difficulties adapting to that, whether or not it is beneficial in the long run. So, the nature of the argument is different from that of the 1960s or 1970s.

I also think it is rather unfortunate that even in 2016, when David Cameron tried to renegotiate terms with the EU, he did not say that we need a period in which to stabilize the numbers coming into the UK, regardless of their background. Within the EU, there are countries like Bulgaria, whose population fell from 9 million to 7 million and which face the opposite problem—they cannot stabilize their numbers because too many people have been leaving.

So, there might have been an opportunity to say that, yes, there is the principle of the four freedoms, but there are also moments when it is reasonable to argue that we need to stabilize population flows.

It has all become rather ironic, because the main issue over the last five or ten years since Brexit has not been large numbers of people coming from other parts of the EU, but from outside the EU. That is not in itself a problem, but rapid shifts in numbers, whether upward or downward, can create difficulties.

I find the idea of identity quite interesting. If you look at London, it has a Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan. He has won three times and may win a fourth in 2028. He is very keen on rejoining the EU. He is 100 percent a Londoner, but also 100 percent a Muslim. It seems to me that there is a very positive sense of a multinational, multicultural identity—certainly in cities like London, but also in other parts of the UK—which should not be underestimated.

Identity Politics Deepens Divisions

Recent research suggests Brexit has produced enduring identity-based polarization (“Leavers” vs. “Remainers”). How does this align with your analysis of narrative construction and “historical arcs” in British political consciousness?

Professor Mark Corner: There is no doubt that there is a divide between Leavers and Remainers—you are right about that. It is reflected, for example, in the fact that the Reform Party at present shows a strong degree of continuity with UKIP and the Brexiteers of ten years ago. So, there is certainly a divide in the country.

But, of course, there has always been a political divide in the UK; it has simply been understood in different terms. Traditionally, people spoke of UK politics in terms of a strong class divide between the middle class and the working class, with Labour representing the working class and the Conservatives the middle class. That has largely broken down.

To some extent, this kind of division—once seen primarily in economic terms—has not been replaced but rather supplemented by a division in more cultural and identity-based terms: between those who are comfortable living in a multinational society and those who are not, and who feel that they are losing their identity.

Of course, the question then becomes: within the UK, do we mean identity as English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, or British? There are all sorts of questions about which identity we are referring to. So, there has always been division, but it has perhaps become more complex—combining social and cultural divisions alongside economic ones.

You can now see people who might traditionally have voted Labour, who are working class, choosing instead to vote Reform because they feel their identity is under threat, and that this matters more than protecting their economic livelihood. It has become a more complicated picture.

Narratives Replace Clear Policy

You warn against selective historical narratives that privilege moments of “splendid isolation.” To what extent has the far right—particularly figures like Nigel Farage and his UK Reform—successfully mobilized such narratives to legitimize Brexit and its aftermath?

Professor Mark Corner: The key point about the far right is that it largely consists of people who feel fed up with the way things are but do not have a very clear idea of how they could be better. My idea of what a populist is—though this may be a definition open to question—is someone who does not actually have a very clear idea of what they believe in. For them, politics becomes something like a sport. They latch onto people’s resentments and think about how to express them more effectively, how to take them further, and how to turn them into a real political campaign. I do not think they necessarily have a clear policy agenda. You may disagree with this, but I think for many people populism is a kind of sport—a very dangerous one—in which they do not generate ideas themselves but instead observe what people are saying and try to express those views even more forcefully.

So, it is often very difficult to pin things down exactly. Who, for example, can say precisely what the economic program of Nigel Farage is? This is partly a reaction to the fact that it is also quite difficult to say what the economic program of Keir Starmer is. There is a kind of vacuum in the center of British politics as well. To that extent, the rise of the Green Party is rather significant, because it does appear to be offering—at some risk to itself—some very clear ideas about what it would like to see happen. I do not see that coming from any other part of the British political spectrum.

Reform UK Channels Public Discontent

A placard urging voters to support Richard Pearse, the Reform UK candidate at the general election in Weston-super-Mare, UK on July 4, 2024. Photo: Keith Ramsey / Dreamstime.

How do you interpret the rise of Reform UK within the broader trajectory of populist radical right (PRR) politics in Britain? Is it a continuation of Brexit-era mobilization or a transformation into a more permanent political force?

Professor Mark Corner: It is certainly linked to the Brexiteers, but it is more a reflection of feelings of resentment and of being left out on the part of a significant minority of the population—people who feel they have been bypassed and ignored by the mainstream parties. To some extent, I think that is true. The Labour Party has notoriously taken for granted the support of people in poorer areas of the country and has not paid sufficient attention to their needs. That is perfectly true.

But, as I said, the idea that the Reform Party has really developed a clear program that attracts some and rejects others, beyond its hostility to immigration, is questionable. If you take the other side of the political spectrum, one may disagree with what the Greens propose, but it comes down to some very concrete proposals. For example, a 2% tax on the very rich—one may think this would lead to them all running off to the Bahamas and be economically catastrophic, or one may think it is a very good way of raising money—but it is at least clear. I do not see that sort of clarity from Reform, and I therefore wonder whether it is more than an expression of disaffection.

Populists Turn EU Skepticism into Power

Before 2016, Euroscepticism was not a dominant voter concern. In your view, how did it become the central axis of political mobilization, and what role did populist entrepreneurs play in this transformation?

Professor Mark Corner: Oh, gosh—there is a long answer to that. There has always been a problem in the UK in seeing EU membership as being in its economic interest. It is partly because of when we joined in 1973, after dealing with a couple of vetoes from de Gaulle in the 1960s—we first applied in 1961. We got in at the very moment when the post-war boom collapsed. There was an oil crisis, a little bit similar to today, and this precipitated very difficult economic circumstances in the 1970s. So, it was very easy for people in the UK to say that it was when we joined that economic community that all our troubles began. The 1960s were good years economically, and then we joined at the moment of crisis.

We also joined when there were the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy, which, whether good or bad, did not particularly benefit the UK, given its relatively small agricultural sector. Then there were all those arguments in the 1980s, when it was said that Britain was paying too much into the EU budget, and Mrs. Thatcher was running around saying, “we want our money back.” In that situation, it was very difficult to argue that, overall, EU membership was economically beneficial.

Then, of course, you had the campaign in 2016, with Nigel Farage and his big red bus, saying this is what we pay into the EU, and that we would get all our money back and invest it instead in the National Health Service, as he wrote on the side of the bus—totally ignoring all the money that came the other way. But he got away with it, because there was a fairly widespread feeling in the UK that it had not done well economically from being in the EU, and had not from the beginning. There is more of a sense now that the UK would do well economically by being part of the EU than there was for a long time when we were inside it.

Brexit Accelerates Culture Wars

Protest — XR protest in solidarity with refugees and climate migrants in Westminster, London, April 23, 2023. Photo: Jessica Girvan / Dreamstime.

To what extent has Brexit accelerated the shift from class-based politics to culture-war polarization, and how has this benefited Populist Radical Right (PRR) actors in structuring political competition?

Professor Mark Corner: I think it has. If you leave a group of 28 and say, no, we want to be on our own—we had too much cooperation, we were too close to you, and we want to get further away—then it does rather support the idea that people want to shut themselves up within their own separate identity.

But at the same time, there is perhaps a greater awareness now that we benefit more by working together. That includes cooperation with other EU countries. If you think of how vulnerable the UK feels at the moment—in terms of everything happening in Ukraine and the perceived unreliability of Trump—there is a growing sense that we really do need to work together with the EU, because otherwise we could be picked off separately. Then, that you can see, in political as well as economic terms, a strong incentive to engage with European countries, for instance in sharing the defense burden. Every week, I read articles about how the UK needs to spend more money on defense, warning that otherwise we are going to be attacked at dawn.

One of the things to note is that there is a great deal of wasted spending in defense, partly because different European countries do not cooperate. Eight years ago, President Macron suggested a common European army, but you do not hear much about that when UK defense chiefs argue that we must increase defense spending.

So, there is a strong case—not just in the economic sphere but also in the defense sphere—for taking a much more serious European approach. That may be one of the most important factors in the years ahead, because there is no doubt that we are in a very dangerous and vulnerable situation, and in such circumstances, people naturally think we should come together with those who are our friends—and that is, obviously, the other European countries.

Brexit Costs Fail to Shift Votes

Given the documented decline in trade integration and investment, why has this not translated into a sustained electoral backlash against Brexit-aligned parties? Does this reflect the resilience of populist framing?

Professor Mark Corner: I do not think it is simply a matter of populist framing. Getting back into the EU would not be easy, and one cannot simply assume that 27 countries would welcome the UK with open arms. The UK has caused a good deal of difficulty by leaving, and people might reasonably ask whether it would create further complications by returning. So, I do not think there is an easy path back in.

We might also have to accept certain conditions if we were to rejoin—things that have not been popular in the past. For instance, the EU might say that, as a new applicant, the UK would have to join the Eurozone. One could easily imagine political arguments arising from that. So, it is not a straightforward route.

In some ways, it might be preferable for the UK to approach the question more along the lines of Norway. Norway voted not to join the EU, partly because of the Common Fisheries Policy and its 2,000 miles of coastline. At the same time, however, it is part of the single market and contributes financially in order to participate. It may be that something along these lines would be a better option for the UK.

There is a genuine debate about how the UK should move closer to Europe. There is, however, a growing sense that it should be closer—not only for economic reasons, but also for political ones. When one considers the current geopolitical context—one superpower pressing in from the east, as in Ukraine, and another expressing interest in places such as Greenland in the west—it may be sensible to work more closely with allies in between.

I do not want to see this only in economic terms. Cultural considerations matter as well, and one of those is the defense of democracy. Whatever our ethnic backgrounds, we are part of democratic societies, and on either side, there are powerful, sometimes autocratic states. So democratic values are something we may wish to emphasize when thinking about cultural identity—values that are shared with the rest of Europe, including Hungary, I am glad to say.

Brexit Fuels UK Fragmentation Risks

UK Map — Photo: Michele Ursi / Dreamstime.

Your book raises the possibility that Brexit could trigger centrifugal pressures within the UK itself. Ten years on, how do you assess the risks of fragmentation—particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland—and their connection to Brexit politics?

Professor Mark Corner: I think it could happen. Imagine yourself as a Scotsman for a moment. You had a vote in 2014 on whether to stay inside the UK, and David Cameron argued that leaving the UK would mean finding yourself outside the EU—and that this was not desirable. The Scots were quite influenced by this and voted to remain in the UK. Two years later, in the Brexit vote, the Scots voted to stay in the EU, yet the rest of the UK—England and Wales, at any rate—dragged them out. They may well feel that they were misled two years earlier. It is not surprising that many Scots feel betrayed. Another referendum is hardly impossible. At the time, it was described as a once-in-a-generation event. Well, fine—once in a generation—that was 2014. 2039 is not that far away; it is just over a decade from now. So, I would not be surprised if there were another referendum in the 2030s.

What has the UK done about this? It could have taken steps, and perhaps still could. It might say: look, we have this House of Lords—what is it actually doing? It is appointed, not democratic. It is, in effect, “North Korea on Thames.” It could be transformed into a second chamber in which the different nations and regions are represented, rather like the Bundesrat in Germany. This is especially relevant now, because it has often been argued that the imbalance in population—3 million Welsh, 5 million Scots, and 60 million English—makes such a structure unworkable. But the 60 million English can now be broken down: there is Andy Burnham in Manchester, a mayor of Liverpool, a mayor of the Northeast Combined Authority, and a mayor of London. They could form part of a second chamber with real powers, including, arguably, some veto authority. If that kind of constitutional reform were seriously developed in the UK—it has been suggested but never pursued very far—that is what is needed.

Without real constitutional reform, such as a powerful second chamber in which the nations and regions are represented, the centrifugal forces you mention are likely to prove too strong. It is not enough simply to talk about devolving more powers to Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland; they need to be brought into a genuinely national second chamber where they can exercise central authority.

Pressures Grow Within States, Not Between Them

Finally, do you see Brexit as a unique case, or as a broader “laboratory” illustrating the structural tension between globalization and national sovereignty—one that continues to fuel populist radical right movements across Europe?

Professor Mark Corner: There are obviously other dimensions to this. There are really two questions: do I think that other countries, or other member states, will try to leave the EU? In the short to medium term, I do not see that happening. There are, however, movements within member states—one might think, for example, of Catalonia—where there are quite powerful pressures, and it is possible that these will create certain difficulties in the years ahead. But they may not.

If nation-states are prepared to share power internally, in the same way that, as members of the EU, they share power externally, then such outcomes can be avoided. Of course, I cannot predict the future. But what I do not see is the kind of queue of member states leaving the EU that was once suggested — John Gillingham wrote The EU: An Obituary ten years ago. That scenario is not materializing. The pressure to leave exists primarily within nation-states rather than between them.

Dr. Eszter Kováts is a political scientist, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Department of Political Science at University of Vienna. Photo: Photo credit: Zoltán Adrián / 24.hu

Eszter Kováts: Orbán’s Defeat Doesn’t Mean the End of Illiberal Politics in Europe

April 17, 2026

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

In this ECPS interview, Dr. Eszter Kováts offers a measured reassessment of Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat and its wider implications for Europe. While the 2026 Hungarian elections mark a major rupture in domestic politics, she cautions against triumphalist readings that treat Orbán’s fall as the collapse of illiberalism itself. “It is something of a liberal dream,” she argues, to assume that the defeat of one leader means the defeat of the entire project. Kováts situates Orbánism within deeper structural, economic, and discursive dynamics, showing how it combined institutional power, culture-war politics, and claims to national sovereignty. At the same time, she underscores Hungary’s enduring polarization, the persistence of Fidesz’s electorate, and the unresolved conditions that continue to sustain illiberal-right politics across Europe.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

As Hungary enters the post-2026 electoral moment, the defeat of Viktor Orbán has been widely interpreted as a watershed in the trajectory of illiberal governance in Europe. For more than a decade, Orbán’s system stood as a paradigmatic case of what has often been termed “illiberal democracy”—a political formation combining electoral legitimacy with institutional centralization, ideological mobilization, and a sophisticated use of culture wars and transnational alliances. Yet, as this interview with Dr. Eszter Kováts makes clear, such interpretations risk overstating both the rupture and its implications.

In conversation with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Eszter Kováts—Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Vienna—offers a careful and analytically grounded reassessment of this moment. While the electoral outcome may appear decisive, she cautions against reading it as a definitive break. As she puts it, “it is something of a liberal dream to treat Orbán’s defeat as the defeat of his entire project.” The persistence of “many Fidesz voters,” alongside the broader constituency of “far-right and illiberal-right parties across Europe,”underscores the continued relevance of the political and social forces that sustained Orbánism.

This insight frames the central tension explored throughout the interview: whether the Hungarian case represents a genuine transformation or a reconfiguration of underlying structural dynamics. Dr. Kováts emphasizes that both the rise and the exhaustion of Orbán’s system can only be understood through a layered analysis that combines structural, contextual, and contingent factors. Economically, the regime rested on a distinctive model—often described as a hybrid of state intervention and market adaptation—which, for a time, delivered tangible improvements in living standards. Politically, it capitalized on what she identifies as “blind spots” within liberal and progressive frameworks, constructing an antagonistic narrative around migration, gender, and geopolitical conflict, each containing a “kernel of truth” but amplified into an “apocalyptic vision.”

At the same time, the interview challenges conventional narratives that frame right-wing mobilization simply as“backlash.” Such interpretations, Dr. Kováts argues, rely on overly teleological assumptions about democratic development and obscure the deeper systemic tensions that shape political contestation. Orbán’s success, in this reading, lay not merely in institutional control but in his ability to articulate these tensions—though this articulation ultimately faltered as economic conditions deteriorated and rhetoric became “increasingly detached from reality.”

The emergence of Péter Magyar introduces a further layer of complexity. Rather than a straightforward democratic reversal, Dr. Kováts describes the transition as, in part, a “democratic rebalancing,” but also as a moment fraught with uncertainty. Hungary remains “deeply divided,” with 94 percent of voters concentrated in two opposing camps, reflecting not only political polarization but competing “perceptions of reality.” Moreover, Magyar’s own political trajectory—rooted in Fidesz—raises questions about continuity as much as change, particularly given his constitutional majority and capacity to reshape state institutions.

Beyond Hungary, the implications for European populism are similarly ambiguous. Illiberal networks, Dr. Kováts notes, are not dependent on a single figure; they are embedded in national contexts and sustained by what she terms a “representation gap.” The assumption that Orbán’s exit signals the broader decline of illiberal politics is therefore, in her words, “a compelling discourse, but… a political one rather than an analytical description.”

In sum, Dr. Kováts’s reflections invite a more measured interpretation of Hungary’s political shift—one that resists both triumphalism and determinism. Rather than marking the end of a political era, the Orbán–Magyar transition may be better understood as a contingent episode within a longer and unresolved contest between competing visions of democracy in Europe.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Dr. Eszter Kováts, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

Exhaustion, Not Erasure

Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, arrives for a meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels, Belgium, on June 22, 2017. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.

Dr. Kováts, welcome. Drawing on your work on illiberalism and the structural drivers of populism, how should we interpret both the rise and the electoral defeat of Viktor Orbán’s system? Does this moment reveal inherent limits within the model, or rather the contingent exhaustion of a particular political configuration?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: This is already a very interesting and complex question, and we must consider both structural, contextual, and contingent elements in the rise of the system, its sustainability over 16 years, and its defeat or exhaustion, as well as how it could be defeated.

One must definitely mention the structural dimension in economic terms—essentially, the circumstances under which Orbán rose, the economic model he was building, how it functioned, and why it eventually exhausted itself. This is important because, in the international political science community, the focus is mostly on the democratic aspects—how Fidesz’s regime hollowed out democracy from within, removed checks and balances, and restricted press freedom, academic freedom, and so on.

But the system also had a very strong economic basis and a very particular economic model, often referred to as “Orbanomics.” This term comes from Gábor Scheiring, a political economist. I will not go into his writings here, but I would recommend them. It was a mixture of challenging neoliberalism while also building on several of its elements, combining state intervention with the construction of a national bourgeoisie.

For a long time, this model had a trickle-down effect. Together with favorable global economic conditions, ordinary Hungarians experienced standards between 2013 and 2019. Then came COVID and the war in Ukraine. When Péter Magyar entered the scene with the Tisza Party, there had been recession and worsening living standards. I would highlight this briefly as a structural element.

Obviously, there were also contextual elements, such as the weakness of the old opposition parties, which, by the time Tisza appeared, were already completely discredited. Then there is the role of Péter Magyar himself, who endured smear campaigns, demonstrated a strong will to power, and emerged at a moment when there was already a significant societal uprising—a large movement over the last two years that helped sustain this energy and desire for change.

However, we must also emphasize that Hungary has not simply switched from Orbán to Magyar. Hungarian society remains deeply divided. Although Tisza and Péter Magyar won the elections by a two-thirds majority, Fidesz still received 38–39 percent. That is not insignificant. The party has not disappeared, and neither have its voters.

At the same time, 94 percent of the Hungarian electorate voted for one of the two major parties, indicating an extremely polarized political landscape. This polarization extends to perceptions of reality, as well as to competing visions of society. That will remain a major challenge for the next government.

Fear Worked Until Reality Intervened

You have argued that mobilizations often framed as “backlash” are better understood as expressions of deeper systemic tensions. To what extent did Orbán’s political project succeed in articulating these tensions—and where did it ultimately fall short?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: It is a very widespread term in the literature to describe Orbán’s regime and similar regimes, in line with concepts such as democratic backsliding. All these approaches tend to have a very teleological view of history, as if societies are moving from less democratic regimes toward increasingly developed liberal democratic systems—with more rights for minorities, better deliberative processes, and so on. Within this framework, right-wing challenges are often interpreted as a backlash, as if they seek to push history back from its “normal” trajectory.

I have been challenging this view for many years, because I think it does not adequately explain Orbán’s regime. It assumes that all right-wing forces form one homogeneous group, without internal tensions, and that all so-called democratic or progressive forces also constitute a homogeneous group. It also presumes a Western blueprint, suggesting that all societies should move toward what the Western liberal mainstream currently defines as the normative model. Whenever someone defies this blueprint or this supposed direction of history, it is very easily labeled—also in social science literature—as right-wing or as advancing right-wing ideas. It is treated as an anomaly if one does not subscribe to a unified progressive front against a so-called right-wing backlash.

But this does not describe reality. Orbán was very skillful in tapping into these blind spots and into power relations that are not sufficiently addressed, including within the European Union. He capitalized on certain blind spots or blind alleys on the progressive side and constructed an expansive, often apocalyptic narrative around them.

Across his three main ideological projects—migration, gender, and the Russia–Ukraine war—there was always a kernel of truth. However, these were accompanied by a great deal of homogenization and apocalyptic framing. He presented these issues as existential threats, claiming that Brussels, the opposition, and liberal forces all sought to impose these dangers on Hungary, and that only he, Viktor Orbán, could protect the country.

This politics of fear was effective, but only as long as the economy was functioning and as long as those kernels of truth remained credible. Over the last three to four years, however, the economic foundation of this narrative has eroded, and in the final months, even the kernels of truth largely disappeared. The campaign became increasingly surreal—for example, the anti-Ukrainian discourse was exaggerated to the point where Ukraine was portrayed as seeking to “colonize” Hungary, and President Zelenskyy was depicted on billboards all over Hungary as a figure who would take over the country if Orbán lost the election. This was clearly disproportionate and increasingly detached from reality.

Crucially, Orbán’s narrative could function as long as there was no strong opposition. Péter Magyar, who comes from Fidesz, brought not only political instincts but also insider knowledge of how this communication machinery operates. He avoided many of the traps and managed to build a relatively narrow party structure alongside a broad social movement.

We will likely analyze the elements of his success for years to come, but one thing is clear: Orbán could operate like a tank as long as there was no counterforce. Once a credible challenger emerged, it became increasingly evident—especially in the final months of the campaign—that this strategy was no longer working.

Democratic Correction, Structural Uncertainty

Tisza leader Péter Magyar begins a symbolic “one million steps” march to Nagyvárad, Romania, addressing reporters with supporters in Budapest, Hungary on May 14, 2025. Photo: Istvan Balogh / Dreamstime.

In your critique of simplified ideological binaries, you highlight anti-pluralist tendencies across political camps. How should we understand the transition from Orbán to Péter Magyar in this light: as a democratic rebalancing, or as a reconfiguration of underlying structural conflicts?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: Yes, the anti-pluralism of right-wing forces is very well described, and that is their understanding of politics, at least in the case of the new right. Not everybody who is right-wing or conservative would defend this vision of politics, but within this illiberal or new right, there is clearly an understanding that politics consists of two antagonistic camps. Those who are not with us are against us. In the Hungarian case, this meant, if you are not with the government, you were portrayed as against Hungarians, against Christianity, or against children. These antagonisms are constructed continuously.

However, the other side is much less discussed, namely the progressive side, which also reproduces this binarism through the backlash narrative: we are the good people, the morally righteous, the democratic ones, and we are fighting against the other side. In the Hungarian context, this took a very specific form of anti-Orbánism. There were certain imperatives: if Orbán set the tone on something or placed an issue on the agenda, the opposition would automatically adopt the opposite position—defending stigmatized minorities, the rule of law, and democracy. Orbán deliberately reproduced these traps.

Magyar said: stop with this. Over the last two years, whenever Fidesz tried to create a rule-of-law trap—forcing him to engage in highly divisive debates, which are not framed in emotional language and are not what people feel they are fighting for—he avoided it. This is not to say these issues are unimportant, but politically they were not helpful and tended to divide the electorate.

As for whether this is a democratic rebalancing or a reconfiguration of underlying structural conflicts, in a way it is certainly a democratic rebalancing. There was a significant societal uprising. It became too much—too much coercion, too much hate, too much polarization on the side of the Orbán regime, which branded even ordinary voters as people who wanted to serve Ukraine and send children to war. There were also anti-democratic measures: in the final weeks of the campaign, whistleblowers from the police and the military revealed that Hungarian secret services were working against Tisza, the main opposition party. In that sense, this is a democratic correction.

However, as I mentioned, Péter Magyar comes from Fidesz, and until 2024 he had no problem with it. He was even a diplomat for Fidesz in Brussels and represented its EU policies. He shares core elements of Fidesz’s ideology. But we will see, because this is, in fact, a broad coalition. He may come from Fidesz and hold conservative views, but he won on a platform of broad societal unity, with one of his main promises being to reunite Hungary after deep polarization.

Regarding the structural elements, that is the key question. What room does he have to maneuver economically? There is a large hole in the budget. Will he pursue austerity? Will he be able to stimulate growth quickly? Will financial markets respond favorably to Hungary? How will he deliver on his promises? Another structural issue is his commitment to unblocking frozen EU funds—around €18 billion, which is a substantial sum. But to achieve this, he will need to negotiate with the EU, and he has already indicated that he will not compromise on certain Orbán-era policies, such as migration and Ukraine. This will be a significant challenge, as will the broader geopolitical environment involving the US, China, and Russia, which exerts pressure on Hungary.

I believe this geopolitical balancing was one of the reasons for Orbán’s defeat, as his model of maneuvering among these powers ultimately failed. Whether Magyar can manage this differently remains to be seen.

There is also the issue of restoring the rule of law and checks and balances. Now that Péter Magyar has a two-thirds, constitutional majority, he can change everything. He has already announced that he will remove Fidesz-appointed figures from key institutions, such as the Constitutional Court, the presidency, the Audit Office, the Budgetary Council, and the office of the Chief Prosecutor. At this point, we do not know whether he will appoint independent figures or loyalists.

We are therefore in a very difficult moment. There is great relief and even euphoria in opposition circles, but memories of Fidesz’s earlier two-thirds majority in 2010 remain vivid, when it reshaped the state in its own image. Magyar promises not to repeat that. The expectation is that he should not. But structurally, he could still follow a similar path. So, there are many uncertainties.

Ridicule as the Limit of Power

Over more than a decade, Orbán constructed a durable governing bloc through a combination of institutional control and narrative framing, including the strategic deployment of culture wars. Which elements of this hegemony proved most resilient, and which appear, in retrospect, more fragile?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: That is a very big question, and I am not going to answer it in detail. However, I find this understanding of hegemony very helpful, and Béla Greskovits, Dorothee Bohle, and Marek Naczyk wrote an excellent piece three years ago on how this was shifting, even before Péter Magyar and Tisza came onto the scene.

They argued that the consent elements gradually disappeared, while more coercive measures came in and the regime became more ideological. In the phase after 2010, it was much more pragmatic and opportunistic. Later on, it even took into account that EU funds were frozen, yet it continued in order to maintain power and preserve its ideological elements.

Apparently, in the last two years, coercion stopped working. It did not work because it became disconnected from reality, and it did not go beyond a certain level of coercion. We will certainly need to discuss this further in the months and years to come, but at least Hungary is not Russia or Belarus. It did not go beyond a certain point; it still maintained a minimalist understanding of democracy, which is why Orbán conceded on election night, saying that he accepted the results because the numbers were clear.

I do not want to trivialize this or suggest that what the Fidesz regime did was minor. As I mentioned, there was interference by secret services to undermine an opposition party, as well as an atmosphere of intimidation, constant smear campaigns, and sustained polarization and hostility. So, it was certainly not a harmless regime. However, it did not go beyond a certain level in practical terms, even though in discursive terms it went far beyond—constantly invoking threats.

But once a strong opposition emerged, this rhetoric no longer worked. In the final weeks of the campaign, statements that might previously have been effective instead sounded almost ridiculous. And I think ridicule is the greatest threat to autocrats—when people stop taking them seriously.

So, this was a very slow erosion of hegemony. It had economic causes, as well as contextual and contingent ones. By now, it seems that much of its base has eroded. In the days following the election, an interesting phenomenon emerged, captured by the Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy, who once said that “there is a traffic jam on the road to Damascus.” Many Fidesz loyals are now rapidly distancing themselves from the party and aligning with democracy. Suddenly, many claim they were always part of an internal opposition and had always been critical, even though they did not act on this for 16 years. Now, in the days just before and after the election, many of them have begun to speak out.

Reality Pushes Back

Campaign poster of Viktor Orbán ahead of the April 12, 2026, parliamentary elections. Photo: Bettina Wagner / Dreamstime.

Your work emphasizes the role of discourse, particularly the construction of political antagonisms. To what extent do the interpretive frameworks established during the Orbán era continue to shape political perception and competition in Hungary today?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: I belong to the soft constructivists, who argue that discourse has its limits. Not everything can be constructed. Every crisis, every enemy, ultimately encounters material reality, and that was, in a sense, the end of it. Discourse must be taken seriously, including the discourse of the left. But I also believe that, in social constructivist social science literature—and in approaches inspired by it—as well as in much of the Western media landscape, there is too strong an emphasis on, or belief in, the power of constructing things.

We can see this in debates about migration or gender. There are limits to this, and it does not convince people if it does not align with their material perceptions or lived realities. That was also, in a sense, the end of the Orbán era. However, as I said, it is not a simple switch where everything is suddenly debunked and over.

We are talking about around 800,000 people who moved from Fidesz to Tisza. There was one opposition party that managed to unite the previous opposition, and besides that Magyar succeeded in attracting over 800,000 voters. But this does not mean a complete transformation of reality in every respect. It is devastating for Fidesz, and there is clearly a process of soul-searching beginning within the party. What will happen to Orbán and to this right-wing illiberal project remains to be seen. So, we should be cautious not to discard all our analytical frameworks altogether.

Bread-and-Butter Politics Against Culture War

Tisza Party volunteer collecting signatures in Mosonmagyaróvár, Hungary on June 5, 2024 during a nationwide campaign tour ahead of the European Parliament elections. Photo: Sarkadi Roland / Dreamstime.

Hungary has often been described as a polity divided into parallel informational and political realities, in part structured through enduring culture war cleavages. Does the 2026 election represent a genuine rupture in this duality, or merely a shift in the dominant narrative without deeper societal reconciliation?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: I think it is a genuine rupture, in the sense of how Magyar has developed his discourse over the last two years. As I said, he did not simply take up the opposite position. He did not do what Fidesz wanted him to do by stigmatizing a minority and making very threatening statements, such as getting rid of NGOs and media financed from abroad or banning Pride parades. These were often presented in a way where you never knew how far they would go, but they frequently went quite far, creating major rule-of-law and minority-rights concerns. The old opposition would then respond by defending those minorities and liberal democratic institutions, the rule of law, and the right of assembly.

Magyar simply ignored this dynamic. Again, this is an ambivalent issue. On the one hand, it can be explained by his Fidesz instincts—these liberal causes or agendas may not mean much to him. On the other hand, it was a very smart tactic: he did not allow himself to be derailed and instead focused on rural Hungary.

A key element of his approach was to speak consistently about state failure—that hospitals do not function properly, that it is difficult to make ends meet, that the education system does not serve people well, and that housing costs are high. In other words, he focused on economic, bread-and-butter issues. He connected these to the failures of the state and kept the focus there, rather than on rule-of-law debates or culture war issues.

He also traveled extensively across Hungary. This may not sound like a novel strategy, but in the Hungarian context it proved significant. Since his appearance in March 2024, he has been constantly on the move, visiting a large number of settlements—around one-third of all Hungarian villages and cities. He met people directly, shook hands, and gave speeches even to small groups of 10, 30, or 100 people. This required a great deal of energy and is often underestimated. We tend to focus on structural factors, ideologies, and media narratives, but this basic element of presence—listening to people, asking about their concerns, and engaging directly with Fidesz voters—made a substantial difference.

When asked about culture war issues, he often simply repeated the Fidesz position. Again, this remains an open question, particularly regarding migration and Ukraine, and we will likely see in the coming weeks and months whether this was merely a tactical move or reflects a deeper strategic and ideological stance.

Culture Wars Were Central to Orbánism

You have shown that symbolic issues—such as debates around gender—can serve as vehicles for broader political mobilization and culture wars. How central were such symbolic frameworks to Orbán’s project, and do you expect them to retain salience in the post-Orbán period?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: It was very central to Orbán’s ideology, for both practical and power-related reasons. He knew that it served his interests, because whenever he introduced a symbolic issue, the urban liberal intelligentsia and the European elites would react in a predictable way—opposing it in very clear terms but not being able to mobilize a broad social movement around it. As a result, it became a kind of elite hysteria in the discourse. This then allowed him to position himself as defending Hungary, so to speak, against those elite dictates.

This became a rehearsed performance on all sides, and I believe this is one of the main takeaways from the last two years: this dynamic should probably stop, because Magyar stopped it, and it worked. However, Magyar won on a very broad voter base; it is a big-tent coalition. Many liberal and leftist voters, as well as the intelligentsia and urban elites, effectively swallowed the pill, accepting that if Orbán can be defeated this way, then be it.

But after his victory, they may seek to present the bill. I assume that in the weeks and months to come, these liberal and leftist sensibilities and ideas will not disappear; rather, they will resurface and attempt to exert pressure on Magyar. However, if they lack broader societal support, this may result only in empty gestures—open letters or outrage on social media—without real political impact.

If they want to represent these ideas—for example, to argue that not all minority rights are “woke” or trivial but are in fact important—then they will need to organize social movements or rethink opposition in a new configuration. For a long time, Péter Magyar will be able to respond by saying: stop this, because if you continue in this way, Orbán could return. This argument may be effective, given that he achieved a two-thirds majority against an autocratic system. He now has considerable credibility, and there is a sense of gratitude among many voters, which he can invoke to marginalize competing demands.

Orbán’s Exit Will Not End the Network

Given that many of these mobilizations were embedded in transnational networks, how might Hungary’s political shift alter its position within broader European and global constellations of right-wing and populist radical right actors?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: I agree with those who argue that this should not be overestimated. It is not the case that removing Orbán from the scene will cause everything to collapse. These networks exist beyond Hungary; they have their own national structures, and all these parties—from Rassemblement National to AfD, from Vox to others—have their own societal drivers and root causes.

Péter Magyar was asked exactly this question on Monday, the day after the elections, by international media. He responded by saying: look at your own countries. The people who vote for Rassemblement National or AfD are not necessarily far-right. Drawing on his own experience of speaking with Fidesz voters, he emphasized the importance of listening to them and understanding what is missing for them. Essentially, he was pointing to a representation gap—there are reasons why people vote for these parties, they see their concerns unaddressed by mainstream parties.

So, I think it is somewhat simplistic, or perhaps too comfortable, for some liberals to assume that if Orbán is gone, the illiberal challenge will also disappear. It may indeed create some uncertainty among illiberal elites—what do we do without Orbán?—but I do not think it will bring an end to these movements. They are rooted in national contexts, and their voters orient themselves toward their own far right or illiberal parties, not toward Orbán personally. In that sense, the underlying causes and structural problems will not disappear simply because Orbán is no longer in power.

A Different Tone Toward Brussels

Hungary - EU — Flags of Hungary and the European Union displayed together in Budapest. Hungary has been an EU member since 2004. Photo: Jerome Cid / Dreamstime

You have highlighted the importance of East–West asymmetries in shaping political discourse in Central and Eastern Europe. How might a renewed orientation toward the European Union under Magyar reshape these dynamics?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: These far-right or illiberal right parties all have different backgrounds in their respective contexts, and in East-Central Europe, what they have been able to mobilize—also beyond Hungary—are these asymmetrical relationships within the EU, which are often denied. Orbán exposed this hypocrisy and double standards: what France can do, Hungarians cannot do, and how Eastern Europeans are sometimes treated as second-class Europeans.

Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes have written about this, arguing that right-wing populists in Eastern Europe have been able to capitalize on this second-class Europeanness, where societies feel judged by Western Europeans—whether they are European enough, civilized enough, and so on. These dynamics have economic, symbolic, and epistemic dimensions, shaping how Central and Eastern Europeans are perceived as inferior. There is extensive literature on this from the past decade.

I assume that Péter Magyar will not fulfill the expectations of Western liberals and mainstream center-right actors by simply aligning fully with the Western mainstream. He will likely preserve some of the room for maneuver that Orbán built. He has a well-known phrase: we do not want to be a stick among the spokes, but a spoke in the wheel—meaning a constructive partner within the EU. This will likely be a relief at the EU level, as he may avoid vetoing for its own sake or subordinating EU foreign policy so directly to imminent Hungarian party political interests.

However, in normative terms, as I mentioned, he was part of Fidesz and supported its EU policies for a long time. He also understands that Hungary’s structural position within the EU has not changed, so it is not in his interest to abandon everything Orbán established in recent years, whether for better or worse.

At the same time, Orbán placed Hungary in a very precarious position. In the weeks before the elections, conversations leaked by secret services to the media between Putin and Orbán, as well as between Lavrov and the Hungarian foreign minister Szijjártó, suggested a deeper connection between Hungary and Russia than previously acknowledged. If such information were further exposed, it could have deepened Hungary’s isolation in the event of an Orbán victory. So, I think that, in the corridors of Brussels, there is a sense of relief. There will likely be some realignment, but not the complete shift that some may expect.

Orbán Is Gone, the Project Is Not

Orbán positioned Hungary as both a challenger to and a critic of liberal democratic consensus within the EU. How significant is his electoral defeat for the broader trajectory of illiberal governance in Europe and the evolution of the far-right?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: As I said previously, I think it is something of a liberal dream to treat Orbán’s defeat as the defeat of his entire project. There are still many Fidesz voters, and there are voters of far-right and illiberal-right parties across Europe. At the moment, there is a sense of moral high ground — “look, he is gone, so everything was wrong and has been debunked.” I am not sure about that. It is a compelling discourse, but it remains a political one rather than an analytical description, and I am not convinced it will have the effect on the voters of those parties that such narratives might hope for.

Agency Matters, but So Do Structures

Finally, Dr. Kováts, stepping back, does the Orbán–Magyar transition mark a broader inflection point in European politics, or should it be understood as a contingent episode within a longer cycle of contestation between liberal and illiberal visions of democracy?

Dr. Eszter Kováts: We are going to spend many months and years discussing this question. I think social scientists tend to look for the reasons behind everything and to underestimate contingency. At the same time, those of us who prefer structural explanations also tend to underestimate agency, and I believe there is much to correct in this regard.

This is what Péter Magyar’s success demonstrates: he exercised agency. It was not predetermined in a system designed to keep Orbán in power that it could be challenged. It required creativity, hard work, and strategic thinking. Of course, the previous 14 years were also necessary—we learned collectively from many mistakes. Or perhaps not “we,” since liberals and the left were not central to this success; it was someone else who achieved it.

Magyar himself also learned, probably in part because he was inside the system. There were many elements that contributed to his success. Some were contingent, others structural; some related to talent, effort, good intuitions, and having the right people at the right time. There was also an important social movement dimension. For instance, in rural Hungary, some of the biggest losers of Orbán’s regime were small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, and they formed a core part of the Tisza movement. They had networks and were able to mobilize and organize effectively.

We will need further research to fully understand these elements and what made this outcome possible. But it is clear that there are many factors at play. I am not in favor of sweeping explanations that look for a single determining factor or draw definitive conclusions that one model has ended, and another has decisively triumphed.

Ten Years on with Brexit / Prof. Portes: Brexit Has Not Solved Britain’s Problems; It Made Them Worse

April 17, 2026

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

As the United Kingdom nears the tenth anniversary of the 2016 Brexit referendum, Professor Jonathan Portes offers a sober, evidence-based reassessment of its economic and political legacy. In this ECPS interview, Professor Portes argues that Brexit did not resolve the structural problems it promised to overcome; rather, “the UK still confronts the same fundamental problems it did 10 years ago,” and, in key respects, they have worsened. Drawing on a decade of research on trade, migration, labor markets, and policy autonomy, he shows how weakened investment, reduced integration, and persistent political tensions have defined the post-Brexit settlement. Moving beyond slogans, Professor Portes situates Brexit within broader debates on sovereignty, interdependence, and populist politics in an increasingly unstable international order.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

As the United Kingdom approaches the tenth anniversary of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the debate has moved decisively from slogan to scrutiny, from promises of restored sovereignty to the measurable consequences of economic and political separation. In this context, the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) is pleased to host Professor Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the School of Politics & Economics, King’s College London, whose extensive scholarship has been central to understanding the economic and labor-market consequences of Brexit. Throughout the past decade, Professor Portes has offered one of the most rigorous and evidence-based assessments of how trade, migration, policy autonomy, and public expectations have evolved under the post-Brexit settlement.

This interview is framed by a stark and sobering conclusion that runs through Professor Portes’s reflections: Brexit did not resolve the structural dilemmas it claimed it would overcome. Rather, as he puts it, “the UK still confronts the same fundamental problems it did 10 years ago.” The core promise of Brexit, he argues, was that it would allow Britain to escape the constraints associated with globalization, immigration, and post-2008 economic stagnation. Yet the reality has been quite different. “Rather than solving those problems,” he observes, Brexit “has probably made them worse.” In Professor Portes’s analysis, the UK remains what it always was: “a middle-sized, advanced Western European economy,”still grappling with familiar pressures, but now doing so from a more exposed and less advantageous position.

The interview explores this argument across several interrelated domains. On the economic front, Professor Portes notes that the evidence on growth, trade, productivity, and investment has broadly confirmed the mainstream pre-referendum consensus: Brexit was never likely to produce collapse, but it would impose “significant and material long-term damage”on British economic prospects. Trade, especially goods trade, emerges in his account as the most enduring site of disruption, while weakened investment and reduced integration with the European market suggest an adaptation process that may culminate in a “permanent loss of integration.”

On migration, Professor Portes offers an especially illuminating account of Brexit’s unintended consequences. Rather than simply reducing immigration, Brexit reconfigured it, replacing free movement from within the EU with larger-than-expected inflows from outside it. That outcome, he suggests, exposed a contradiction at the heart of the Leave campaign: the demand for both lower migration and greater economic flexibility under national control. More broadly, the interview shows how the promise of sovereignty often failed to produce meaningful control in practice. As Professor Portes cautions, sovereignty “in the abstract legal and political sense does not necessarily translate into having control.”

Taken together, Professor Portes’s reflections offer a penetrating assessment of Brexit not as a completed nationalist correction, but as a prolonged and costly reconfiguration of Britain’s political economy. His analysis challenges triumphalist narratives from both the sovereigntist and populist right, while posing deeper questions about the limits of national autonomy in an interdependent world.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Jonathan Portes, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

Brexit Has Intensified, Not Resolved, Structural Economic Pressures

A Brexit Day ‘Independence’ parade was held at Whitehall and on Parliament Square in London to celebrate the UK leaving the European Union on January 31, 2020.

Professor Portes, welcome. You have been among the most careful and empirically grounded observers of Brexit’s economic and political consequences over the past decade. As we approach the ten-year mark since the 2016 referendum, how would you characterize the overall trajectory of the UK economy and policy landscape under Brexit? What stands out most when you step back and take a long view?

Professor Jonathan Portes: I think what stands out most, perhaps, is that the UK still confronts the same fundamental problems it did 10 years ago. The UK remains very much a middle-sized, advanced Western European economy, with many of the same issues and problems as other such economies. The difference, however, is that Brexit was, in some ways, touted as a means for the UK to escape some of those problems, issues, and constraints relating to globalization, immigration, and economic stagnation since 2008, as well as a range of political problems within the UK that arose from those economic challenges.

But rather than solving those problems, as Brexit was presented as doing by some of its proponents, it has probably made them worse. This is partly because it led, obviously, to a period of political chaos in the UK. Even after that, and despite a degree of relative stability being restored, it has possibly caused some damage to the UK’s political institutions. At the same time, rather than resolving any of these political economy problems, it has arguably exacerbated them.

In other words, the difficulties of managing globalization and its impacts were already very apparent when the UK was a member of the EU. They manifested themselves partly through EU membership and partly outside it. However, outside the EU, these difficulties have become even starker. Rather than being resolved by Brexit, as was hoped, they have become more visible and more difficult. This is partly due to the structural contradiction of Brexit itself. It is also, of course, partly the result of global developments since then—most notably the election of Trump—which have made the UK’s position outside the EU more difficult for fairly obvious reasons.

Growth, Trade, and Investment Have Weakened as Expected

Much of your work highlights the gap between political expectations and economic outcomes—particularly in areas like growth, trade, and migration. Looking across the evidence now available, how should we understand the real costs of Brexit compared to what was anticipated or promised at the time?

Professor Jonathan Portes: Of course, politicians on both sides said a lot about Brexit. In terms of the economic impacts of Brexit on things like growth, trade, and investment, this is one area where we economists can actually be rather pleased with ourselves. Economic forecasts rarely turn out to be accurate, and of course there is still quite a lot of debate about the precise impacts of Brexit. But we now have a wide range of economic evidence on the impact on growth, trade, and investment, and it is pretty much entirely consistent with the mainstream economic consensus that I and others formed part of, before Brexit: that Brexit would not be a complete catastrophe for the UK economy, but it would do significant and material long-term damage to our economic prospects by reducing growth, productivity growth, trade, and investment. And all of those have been fairly clearly borne out.

The interesting difference is on migration, where both I and others thought that Brexit would reduce migration through the free movement channel within the EU, which would only be partly offset by increased inflows from outside the EU. In fact, it has turned out that the direction for both of those numbers has been correct. But the relative magnitudes were wrong, and the increase in migration from outside the EU has more than offset the reduction in flows within the EU. As a result, the UK population and labor force are actually larger than they would have been without Brexit, not smaller. That provides, not a small, offset to the negative impacts of Brexit, although it has also generated a great deal of political backlash. From an economic point of view, however, this is a positive—though certainly not by anywhere near enough to offset the negative impacts of Brexit on trade and investment.

Trade Took the Hardest Hit, While Services Showed Resilience

If we think of Brexit as a large, multi-dimensional economic shock, where do you see its most significant and lasting effects—across trade, investment, labor markets, and productivity—and which of these have proven more resilient than many expected?

Professor Jonathan Portes: The biggest persistent shock has been to trade, particularly trade in goods. The UK did quite well out of EU membership in terms of being integrated into pan-European and hence pan-global supply chains for goods. We have seen that small and medium-sized exporters benefited from being able to export to the EU without regulation or red tape. And, of course, British consumers benefited from frictionless imports from within the EU. None of that has disappeared completely—you still have trade under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and the EU remains by far our largest trading partner. But nonetheless, there has been a significant impact, particularly for those manufacturers integrated into global supply chains, who have faced increased costs as a result, and also for some of those small and medium-sized businesses that benefited from frictionless trade within the single market.

On the more resilient side, there has also been some damage to the financial services sector, which, of course, was a major issue in the run-up to Brexit. Again, the UK’s financial services sector is large and resilient, and London remains by far the largest financial center in Europe, but it is nonetheless somewhat smaller than it would have been without Brexit. There has been some damage there, but the sector is not going anywhere and will continue to be an important part of the UK economy.

There has been more resilience in other areas of the high-productivity tradable services sector—things like consultancy, legal services, and accountancy—where trade barriers were never that large, because there are no tariffs and there is less in the way of regulation than in financial services. Hence, the UK has actually done pretty well; it has not just been resilient but has also seen very fast growth in those sectors. This has helped preserve the overall picture and means that the economic impacts have not been as clear, as severe, or as visible as they might have been, as some people at one end of the spectrum feared.

And then on the labor market, there was considerable concern that the end of free movement would do quite a bit of damage to sectors that relied on European migration. While migration from outside the EU is not a perfect substitute—because it involves different types of people in different sectors with different skills and so on— overall, the rather large increase in non-EU migration has done a lot to cushion the UK labor market and sectors that are dependent on migrant labor from what the impacts would otherwise have been. So, it has been a mixed picture.

Short-Term Adjustment, Long-Term Disintegration

There is now substantial evidence that UK trade with the EU has underperformed relative to its pre-Brexit trajectory, alongside signs of weakened investment. How should we interpret these developments in structural terms—do they reflect a permanent loss of integration, or an ongoing process of economic adaptation?

Professor Jonathan Portes: I think the answer is, in some ways, both. It is an ongoing process of adaptation that, eventually, leads to a permanent loss of integration, assuming that the new situation continues as it is. Of course, because this has done significant damage to the UK economy, both politicians and the public are now trying to think of ways to reverse that damage, at least in part. So, we do not know exactly where we will be in five or ten years. But if the current status quo continues, then you have, as you suggest, a process of adaptation that has partly happened but still has some way to run, leading to a permanent loss of integration.

On the other hand, as I said, there are now active discussions acknowledging that this is a bad outcome—recognized as such from an economic perspective by the UK public and policy establishment—and efforts are being made to think of ways to reverse it, at least to some extent.

Migration Fell from the EU, Rose from Elsewhere

Your research shows that Brexit fundamentally reshaped the composition of migration rather than reducing it overall, with declines in EU-origin workers offset by increases from non-EU countries. How should we interpret this outcome in relation to the central political promise of “taking back control”?

Professor Jonathan Portes: This is absolutely fascinating, because there was a very large implicit contradiction in some of the arguments made by pro-Brexit campaigners, which sought to present it both as a way of substantially reducing immigration overall and, by taking back control, ensuring that migration policy would be tailored to the needs of the UK economy or labor market, rather than dictated by EU rules.

But it turned out that, particularly at the time of Brexit and in the aftermath of the pandemic, the interpretation of the then-government—which was the government that delivered Brexit—was that what the UK economy needed was a significant increase in migration, and that is what we got. So, you had people within the Brexit movement saying, “We have been betrayed, immigration is going up,” and others saying, “No, we have control—yes, immigration is going up, but it is immigration that is entirely under our control and dictated by the needs of the UK economy and labor market.”

That contradiction was always implicit in some of the claims made by Brexit proponents at the time of the referendum, when it was never entirely clear whether they were making a concrete pledge to reduce immigration or not. But nobody, certainly not me, expected that contradiction to become so obvious and so large as it did in the post-pandemic period, because of the significant labor shortages that emerged post-Brexit and post-pandemic in the UK, and, to some extent, in other countries as well.

The result is that the UK political system has not really been able to cope with this. It has done a great deal of damage to the Conservative Party and has been one of the significant factors behind the rise of the Reform Party, contributing to divisions within the Conservative Party. Despite the fact that the Labour Party opposed Brexit but is now having to manage this new post-Brexit immigration system, it is also leading to very severe tensions within the Labour Party and the current government between those who believe that immigration needs to be reduced regardless of the needs of the economy, and those who, for economic or broader political reasons, think that, on the whole, a relatively liberal and open immigration system is a good thing.

Migration Policy Reveals the Limits of Political Steering

In your analysis, the UK has moved from a largely automatic free-movement regime to a highly managed, points-based system—yet with outcomes still strongly shaped by labor demand and external shocks. Does this suggest limits to how far governments can actually steer migration and labor markets?

Professor Jonathan Portes: It illustrates the difficulties and contradictions in having control. One of the perceived disadvantages, from a political point of view, of free movement was that we could not say who could come. People would simply come and go as they wished, and we had no control over that because of EU rules. But the upside, of course, was that this had two advantages. From an economic perspective, it meant that these flows were, to a significant extent, determined by the market. Labor demand led to people coming in, a weak labor market led to people leaving, and these things happened more or less automatically. From an economic perspective, that, on the whole, is a good thing.

But the second advantage was political, and I think people did not fully appreciate it. Governments could largely sit back and say, “well, these are market decisions, and we do not have the remit to interfere with them,” so migration could be somewhat removed from the political process. The disadvantage of the current system, as it has turned out, is that having control means there is a great deal of political pressure on governments to do something about migration, regardless of whether it is actually a problem in economic terms.

That leads to sharp swings in policy, and often, as we are seeing at the moment, swings that are somewhat counter cyclical. This reflects an old problem that we used to discuss as macroeconomists with demand management through fiscal policy in a Keynesian framework: in principle, it is good to cut taxes when the economy is weak and increase taxes when the economy is strong. But in practice, because governments react slowly and economic data comes through with delays, it often turns out that policies are implemented at the wrong time—by the time you cut taxes, the economy is already recovering, or by the time you raise taxes, the economy is already weakening.

We seem to be seeing something similar with migration. The government was panicked by the large rise in migration in 2022 and 2023 and has now put in place very draconian measures to reduce migration at exactly the time when migration to the UK was already falling very sharply. That is a very bad way of making policy. We have control—this is all entirely under government control—but we have ended up with policy where that control is being exercised in a way that is quite damaging economically and does not really convince the public that we actually have control. To the public, it looks as though the government is just flailing around and does not really know what it is doing. To be honest, they are not wrong about that.

Mismanaged Migration Policy Fuels Shortages and Bottlenecks

Air Travellers Proceed to Passport Control at a British Airport. Photo: Dreamstime.

You have described post-Brexit migration patterns as producing “unintended consequences,” particularly in terms of scale and sectoral distribution. To what extent do these dynamics help explain persistent labor shortages, sectoral imbalances, and broader economic bottlenecks?

Professor Jonathan Portes: I think it goes back to what I just said, which is that, as in many other things, a relatively free market is the worst possible way of managing the matching of supply and demand, except for all the other ways of doing it. So, when you have a government that is trying, in some way, to use the migration system to match supply and demand and is also doing so in an environment where it faces all these political constraints, real or imagined, it ends up getting things wrong.

Partly this is because you simply cannot manage an economy or a labor market in that way, and partly it is due to politics. Once you have said you are in control, and that everything is under control, you face pressure to make policy changes that are not necessarily justified by anything in particular, except perceived political pressures. As a result, the government ends up getting a number of things wrong.

This has been particularly evident in the health and care sector, where the government liberalized probably too much, too quickly, in a way that did not take account of the dynamics of the immigration system or the labor market, and has now tightened up too much, too quickly, again without taking those dynamics into account, or considering how the labor market works or its own role in shaping pay and conditions in this workforce.

The result is both poor policymaking and poor political outcomes—shortages, bottlenecks, and broader imbalances. It also causes significant harm to individuals caught up in this system, including migrants, who can find the rug pulled out from under them and are sometimes treated very badly, both by their employers and by the government, as well as the people who depend on care—the consumers of these services—who ultimately should be our primary concern.

Widespread Impact Undermines Claims of Uneven Gains

Brexit’s economic consequences have not been evenly distributed. How important are these distributional effects—for workers, firms, and regions—in shaping both the economic outcomes and the political sustainability of Brexit?

Professor Jonathan Portes: In one sense, there has been a great deal of work on the regional impacts of Brexit, and I am not sure it has demonstrated that they are as differential as one might expect. You can, of course, point to very specific examples, such as the loss of European regional funding in some disadvantaged areas. There has also been a particularly negative impact on parts of the food and agriculture sector. I mentioned the City of London and the financial services sector, but overall, the impact has been quite diffuse across the economy as a whole.

So, you can point to individuals or particular businesses that have been put out of business by Brexit, and there are people who are especially dependent on certain sectors. But beyond that, there has mostly been a general pattern of lower growth, lower trade, and lower investment, affecting pretty much the entire UK economy to a greater or lesser extent.

You can see that in the opinion polling. The view that Brexit has been an economic failure is very widely shared across UK society. It is very hard to find a section or interest group that says Brexit was great for them, even if it was bad for others. Rather, there is a broad consensus that, from an economic point of view, Brexit has been a failure across the board. So, while you can identify individuals or businesses that have suffered much more than someone like me, for the most part it has been a broadly shared, generalized negative impact.

Formal Sovereignty Cannot Override Economic Realities

Your work suggests that while Brexit restored formal policy autonomy, outcomes have remained difficult to control in practice. Does this point to a deeper structural tension between political sovereignty and economic interdependence in advanced economies?

Professor Jonathan Portes: Yes, and I think that goes back to what I was saying before. You may or may not have thought it was plausible for the UK to argue, in 2016, that as a middle-sized, advanced economy—like other European countries—dependent on global trade and investment, there were nonetheless various structural, political, and economic reasons why it should not be part of the EU. Partly political—we have a different political tradition—and partly structural and economic. We are much more dependent on services trade, particularly high-value services, and while we are economically integrated with the EU, it is not to the same extent as countries like Germany or France. So, the UK could, and should, for this combination of reasons, be independent, make its own trade policy, and make its own, to some extent, foreign policy, retain close economic links with the EU, but not subordinate its political, economic, or trade decision-making to the EU. And we could make a success of it as a global economy, just as some other countries—whether Singapore or Australia, or to some extent Switzerland—have done. That case was always flawed, and most economists thought it was flawed, but it was not obviously unreasonable.

But it is now pretty clear that geopolitical developments over the last ten years have been very unfavorable to that strategy. It is much easier to pursue such a strategy when there is a benign, liberal hegemon—or perhaps two hegemonic powers, the US and China—both with a strong interest in a stable, liberal international trading order that accommodates countries in the position I have just described. You can argue about what might have happened without Trump. I think it is plausible that even without Trump, we would have been moving, to some extent, in the direction we are already going, which would have made that strategy increasingly implausible. But it is clear that Trump has accelerated this trajectory, to the point where that strategy now looks unrealistic.

That is where we are now, unfortunately. Even if Trump himself were reversed, it is very hard to see a return to the sort of benign, liberal international trading order I described—one in which a middle-sized power like the UK can comfortably pursue an independent path while still participating fully in global trade.

Brexit Reconfigures Long-Standing Migration Debates

In your work on free movement and the UK, you situate Brexit within a longer trajectory of labor mobility and political contestation. From that perspective, does Brexit represent a rupture, or a reconfiguration of deeper structural tensions within the British political economy?

Professor Jonathan Portes: It is very much the latter. Immigration—both its political, economic, and social consequences—has been an issue in British politics that has gone up and down in prominence for a very long time, certainly in the post-war era, from the mid-1950s to now, over the last 70 years. Brexit has clearly changed things. It has changed the system, as we have just discussed, and it has changed the environment. But many of the issues being contested now are very much the same as those that were contested in the 1960s, in the Powell era, were contested again in the 2000s immediately after enlargement, and are being contested today.

These include questions such as: to what extent is the UK—like other European countries, albeit in a different context—a country shaped by migration? What is the role of migration in a modern economy and labor market? What is its role given the demographic challenges and ageing that all our countries face? And what are the implications of migration for a country’s national and cultural identity?

We are not, for the most part, countries of immigration in the same way as the US, but equally, certainly in the UK—and in most of Europe—we are no longer monocultural or ethnically homogeneous societies either. Those who seek to take us back to that are very dangerous. So, the question becomes: what is the model of a multi-ethnic European democracy? That is something we are all struggling with. The UK was struggling with it before Brexit, and it is struggling with it now.

Brexit Pushed the Far Right Toward a European Strategy

Brexit was widely seen as a landmark moment for populist and sovereigntist politics, including the rise of far right and populist radical right mobilization around migration and national control. Looking back, how do you assess the relationship between Brexit and these broader political currents—both at the time and in their evolution over the past decade?

Professor Jonathan Portes: It has been quite interesting in that Brexit has, in a sense, forced European far-right movements to reconfigure their offer. What most of them seem to have recognized is that Brexit is neither a success nor is it perceived as a success, either domestically in the UK or in their own countries. So, you have far-right movements that were, at the time and immediately afterwards, flirting with their own ideas of exit from the European Union, but have now reconfigured themselves to retain the same focus on migration issues while embedding those concerns within a European frame rather than a purely domestic one.

This has, if anything, been bolstered by what we see from across the Atlantic, with figures such as J.D. Vance talking about European culture or European Christian values, rather than Italian or French values. So, you have this form of ethnically based, anti-immigrant nationalism that has, in a sense, shifted toward a European-level identity, alongside a domestic one.

In that respect, these movements have been, whether one likes it or not, quite effective in adapting. When you look at figures like Le Pen and Meloni, they have pivoted away from overt anti-Europeanism toward a form of European white nationalism.

Populist Right Is Here to Stay—but Its Shape Is Uncertain

Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party UKIP. Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, speaking at Chatham House in London on March 31, 2014. Photo: Dominic Dudley / Dreamstim.

In the same context, how do you interpret the continued prominence of Nigel Farage and the rise of Reform UK within the UK’s political landscape? Does their trajectory suggest that Brexit has consolidated a durable populist radical right (PRR) and far-right constituency, or are we witnessing a more fluid and contingent phase of political realignment?

Professor Jonathan Portes: I hesitate to make predictions on this. But the obvious answer is a bit of both. The presence of Farage and the populist right in the UK is now well established; it is no longer a flash in the pan. We now have some years of it, so I think it is not going away. But how the current political shake-up in the UK plays out is very difficult to assess.

Structurally, our political system is configured around a two or two-and-a-half-party system. We have a roughly 50–50 division between right and left blocs, with a group of voters in the middle who are willing to support either side on occasion. That is a reasonably stable political configuration. But when you have four or five parties, the system becomes much more unstable, especially when these cleavages cut across both economic and socio-cultural dimensions.

It is not clear that the current first-past-the-post system is well suited to this new context. Whatever one thinks in the abstract about first-past-the-post versus different forms of proportional representation, the dynamics look very different in a two or two-and-a-half-party system than in a four or five-party system, where instability increases significantly.

So, it is very unclear how this will shake out. Populism—and in particular far-right populism—is certainly not going away in the UK. But how it will reconfigure the right of the UK political spectrum, and to what extent the more traditional conservative right, which still has a constituency in the UK, can reassert itself and regain control, remains very uncertain at the moment.

Economic Reality Challenges Populist Narratives

To what extent do the economic and migration outcomes of Brexit challenge or reinforce the core claims of populist narratives about globalization, elites, and national sovereignty?

Professor Jonathan Portes: As discussed, they illustrate some of the limitations of national sovereignty and the fact that sovereignty in the abstract legal and political sense does not necessarily translate into having control. There is a fundamental issue here: people felt that they wanted more control over their lives, and Brexit was sold to them as a way of achieving that, yet they certainly do not feel that this has been delivered. That is a fundamental problem.

It is also a fundamental problem for politicians, because it is very difficult to explain to people that, on the one hand, politicians need to demonstrate concretely that they have given people back some control over their lives, while on the other hand they must also be honest about the fact that there are areas where national governments simply cannot exercise control and must be realistic about those limits.

We are seeing this right now with oil and gas prices. The UK government cannot stop global oil and gas prices from rising. At some point, politicians have to be honest and say that we can try to protect the most vulnerable households and mitigate the impact of this economic shock, but it remains an economic shock, and that means the country as a whole is poorer, and we have to live with that.

Populists Shift Strategy as Exit Loses Appeal

Finally, for other sovereigntist or “exit” movements across Europe that have looked to Brexit as a model, what lessons—economic, political, or institutional—should be drawn from the UK’s experience over the past decade?

Professor Jonathan Portes: As I said, populists have correctly learned that Brexit, or its equivalent, is largely going to be a political loser, and they have pivoted away from that. They have shifted towards a more pan-European, ethnically based opposition to immigration—a form of pan-European white nationalism that mirrors some of what is going on in the US at the moment. To some extent, they have done this quite successfully in countries such as France and Italy.

To my mind, the challenge is for those of us who are not part of these movements and do not want to see them succeed: what is the narrative—economic, political, and cultural—that we use to push back against this and say that this is not the sort of Europe we want? The kind of Europe we seek to build is not one that will be economically successful, nor one that most people would want to live in. That is the challenge, and frankly, I do not think we have met it yet.

Professor Pepper Culpepper is Vice Dean for Academic Affairs and Blavatnik Chair in Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

Prof. Culpepper: Populism Is Democracy’s Way of the People Telling Elites to ‘Listen Harder’

April 15, 2026

by ECPS_admin with No Comment Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

In an interview with the ECPS, Professor Pepper Culpepper argues that populism should not be treated as inherently anti-democratic. Rather, under certain conditions, it can function as a corrective force that exposes failures of responsiveness and pressures elites to address neglected public demands. Drawing on his work on quiet politics, corporate scandal, and democratic accountability, Professor Culpepper distinguishes between populism rooted in political failure and that driven by economic unfairness. While the former can erode pluralism, the latter may help rebalance distorted relations between citizens, markets, and institutions. The interview offers a nuanced reflection on public anger, corporate power, and the democratic potential—as well as the dangers—of contemporary anti-elite mobilization.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

At a moment when democratic systems are under strain from two mutually reinforcing pressures—rising populist mobilization and the growing concentration of corporate power—the question of whether public anger can renew democratic accountability has acquired unusual urgency. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Pepper Culpepper, Vice Dean for Academic Affairs and Blavatnik Chair in Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, offers a careful but provocative answer. Drawing on his influential scholarship—from Quiet Politics to his recent book Billionaire Backlash— Professor Culpepper argues that populism should not be understood simply as a threat to democracy. Under certain conditions, it can function as a corrective force, signaling failures of responsiveness and compelling elites to confront public demands they have too long ignored.

This argument runs directly through the spirit of the interview’s headline: “Populism Is Democracy’s Way of the People Telling Elites to ‘Listen Harder’.” Rather than treating populism as inherently pathological, Professor Culpepper urges a more discriminating view. In his recent Journal of Democracy article, “When Populism Can Be Good,” co-authored with Taeku Lee, he distinguishes between two broad dimensions of anti-elite sentiment: one rooted in political failure, the other in economic unfairness. For Professor Culpepper, this distinction is decisive. A populism centered on political failure—marked by distrust in elections, media, and institutions—can become corrosive to pluralism. By contrast, populist energies organized around economic unfairness may serve as a democratizing counterweight to entrenched power. As he puts it, “there are, of course, many negative aspects of populism, but one positive dimension is its potential to enhance responsiveness.”

The interview shows that this concern with responsiveness is inseparable from Professor Culpepper’s broader work on corporate scandal, media narratives, and regulatory change. Across cases ranging from the Beef Trust and The Jungle to Cambridge Analytica, AI regulation, and Big Tech, he explores how moments of public outrage can disrupt what he famously described as “quiet politics”—those domains in which organized business interests dominate because public attention is weak. Scandals, in his account, operate like “earthquakes”: they release latent pressure, render previously obscure issues politically salient, and sometimes create openings for institutional reform. Yet these openings do not arise automatically. They depend on policy entrepreneurs, compelling narratives of blame, and political actors capable of translating outrage into durable regulation.

What emerges from this conversation is a deeply textured account of the ambivalence of populism in contemporary democracy. Professor Culpepper does not romanticize anti-elite anger; he repeatedly underscores the dangers of polarization, scapegoating, and demagogic capture. Still, he insists that democratic theory must take seriously the possibility that public outrage, when directed at economic concentration and political unresponsiveness, can help rebalance distorted systems of power. The key question, as he suggests, is not whether populism exists, but which grievances it channels and toward what ends. In that sense, this interview is both an analysis of populism and a meditation on democracy’s capacity for self-correction.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Pepper Culpepper, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

When Anti-Elitism Strengthens Rather Than Undermines Democracy

Professor Culpepper, welcome. Let me begin with a broader conceptual question: In “When Populism Can Be Good,” you distinguish between a pluralism-threatening populism and a corrective, anti-elite populism. Under what institutional, discursive, and socio-economic conditions does the latter emerge as a democratizing force rather than degenerating into illiberal majoritarianism?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: Thanks for that question. It’s a big one, so let me try to unpack it. In our recent article in the Journal of Democracy, “When Populism Can Be Good,” my co-author, Taeku Lee, and I examine the different components that sit within populism. We distinguish between two broad dimensions, which we can discuss further: one focused on political failure and the other on economic unfairness. We ask whether it is really true, as many people—especially elites like us—tend to assume, that populism is necessarily bad for democracy.

In our view, a form of populism that undermines pluralism is indeed harmful to democracy. By pluralism, I mean a community composed of multiple members coming from different backgrounds, with different allegiances—religious, racial, or political. Anything that weakens our willingness to work together as a community is detrimental to democratic life. We find that such dynamics are more closely associated with political failure than with economic unfairness, though I can say more about that later.

Your question, then, is about the conditions under which one dimension comes to dominate over the other. I think the answer is ultimately contingent, and it depends on what we might call the bulk of latent public opinion—what people are really concerned about. That is one side of the equation. The other concerns what political parties choose to offer within the system in response. Do they mobilize around political failure, which is associated with many of the elements that undermine pluralism, or around economic unfairness, which is not associated with those same dynamics?

Which Grievances Make Populism More Democratic?

Your framework identifies “political failure” and “economic unfairness” as distinct but overlapping sources of anti-elite mobilization. How do these dimensions interact in shaping the trajectory of populist politics, and which is more conducive to democracy-enhancing outcomes?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: These tendencies can coexist in a single person’s mind, but what we do is use factor analysis from 36,000 interviews across four countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—to understand which types of views cluster more closely together.

On the political failure side, these are people who tend to agree with statements such as: elections don’t matter; you can’t trust what you read in the mainstream media; and conspiracy-type views, such as the idea that a small group of people run the world. All of these reflect perceived failings of political institutions, suggesting that the game is politically rigged.

On the other side is the economic unfairness dimension, which is much more associated with the notion that the economic system is rigged—that elites have succeeded only because of this system and that they cannot understand the problems faced by ordinary people.

Thus, these two dimensions capture two aspects of failure: one concerns the responsiveness of the political system, and the other concerns the economic system within which it is embedded. I think it is important to step back and consider how the two relate, which is your question. That relationship is shaped by where we are structurally within capitalism. We are currently in a period marked by the enormous concentration of very large companies—particularly, though not exclusively, in the tech sector—and these firms shape many of the conditions of our lives.

Historically, this period resembles the era leading up to 1900, when there was a strong populist movement in the United States, associated with William Jennings Bryan and his famous “Cross of Gold” speech. That movement, like populist movements today, was driven by grievances against urban elites and the sense that ordinary people were being taken advantage of. At its core, populism is a moralized claim about the divide between the common person and the elite.

That earlier phase gave way to the Progressive movement, a period in which both Democrats and Republicans agreed that large trusts—big steel, big oil, and big finance—had grown too powerful and needed to be brought back under control. When these two dimensions come together, they can become powerful forces. In particular, the economic unfairness dimension can generate a strong pushback against large corporations, and we think—both in this article and in our book—that there are good reasons to expect this dynamic to shape developments in the years ahead.

How Episodic Shocks Recalibrate Accountability

In “Billionaire Backlash,” you conceptualize corporate scandals as focusing events that can disrupt entrenched policy equilibria. How do such episodic shocks compare to longer-term populist mobilizations in their capacity to recalibrate democratic accountability?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: Think of them a little bit like earthquakes. They release pressure—pressure that has built up in public opinion. If I can go back for a moment to the Progressive Era in the United States, there was one particular trust—the Beef Trust, that is, the meatpackers—that dominated American food production. Its dominance was such that around 200 laws were proposed between 1880 and 1900 to improve food hygiene, largely because Europeans would not even import American meat due to its poor sanitary conditions. All of those laws failed. That is the kind of blocked politics we often see today, where it is very difficult to get anything through Congress or many parliaments.

What changed in 1906 was the emergence of a corporate scandal with the publication of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. This released latent public opinion. It was, as you suggest, an episodic shock—a one-time disruption—but it triggered institutional change. It led to the creation of the American Food and Drug Administration, and American food was thereafter regulated. This did not eliminate business power; industry remained strong, and food producers continued to wield influence. But it did establish a regulatory framework within which those interests had to operate. In that sense, episodic shocks can generate institutional changes that constrain actors who previously enjoyed much greater freedom.

To return to your question, the recalibration of democratic accountability occurs when governments actually deliver what people want. Colleagues such as Steve Macedo and Jenny Mansbridge have argued that populism is democracy’s way of the people telling elites to “listen harder.” We believe that is the moment we are in. There are, of course, many negative aspects of populism, but one positive dimension is its potential to enhance responsiveness. We have witnessed a period in which corporate power has grown while governments have remained strikingly unresponsive. Large majorities favor some form of AI regulation, yet meaningful regulation has not emerged.

Democratic accountability, then, requires institutions that respond to what citizens actually want, rather than primarily to what business interests demand. In this sense, accountability often advances through episodic shocks; it rarely emerges through other mechanisms.

Blame, Narrative, and the Politics of Reform

Building on your work on media effects, how do framing, narrative construction, and attribution of responsibility mediate the translation of scandal-driven outrage into sustained regulatory change rather than transient symbolic responses?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: That ultimately depends, as we discuss at length in the book, on the emergence of policy entrepreneurs. You are right that framing and narrative construction are key to how we interpret what a scandal means, and there is always an effort to advance competing interpretations when a scandal emerges, including over who is responsible. But effective scandals tend to attribute blame quite efficiently. A scandal is corporate malfeasance that is made public and becomes salient; that is what a scandal is, by definition.

So, blame typically involves something going wrong within the corporate system, brought into the public eye by the malfeasance, and people respond by saying, “I always thought that was going on.” That generates public outrage, but outrage alone does not produce legislation. If laws are to be passed, you need actors who have been working for a long time to advance reform.

These policy entrepreneurs are, in a sense, the central figures of our book, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy, because they are the ones—whether inside the political system, like the EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, or outside it, like the Austrian activist Max Schrems or the California property developer Alastair McTaggart—who use moments of corporate scandal to push for concrete change. They step in and say, “Here is what needs to happen, and the government must respond.” When a compelling narrative is already in place and public demand is high, that is when politicians begin to pay attention.

Scandals and the Limits of Business Power

Cambridge Analytica. — Photo: Dreamstime.

To what extent can scandal-induced public attention overcome the structural advantages of “quiet politics,” or are these moments better understood as temporary punctuations within a broader equilibrium of business dominance?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: I think they are the latter. They are best understood as temporary punctuations within a broader equilibrium of business dominance. But that is the nature of capitalism. Democracy rests on the idea that each person of electoral age is equally valuable—one person, one vote. That is not how resources are allocated in capitalism. Capitalism allocates resources, often quite unequally, in order to maximize efficiency. This produces a strong concentration of financial resources, which can then be translated into political resources. So, capitalism is always going to be unbalanced in favor of business. I have spent my whole career writing about that, and I feel quite comfortable saying it. But the imbalance can take different forms and degrees.

What we see in corporate scandals is a partial redressing of that imbalance. These moments can constrain the ability of business interests to dominate by making certain issues highly salient issues on which the public is watching closely and pressing politicians to deliver outcomes that impose some limits on business power.

You can see this in the kinds of cases we study, often involving quite complex issues such as privacy regulation or financial regulation. Scandals like Cambridge Analytica or Goldman Sachs bring these otherwise abstruse issues into public view. Once they become salient, people demand a response, and governments often provide one. That institutional change then shifts the balance of power in politics, even if only partially.

We are not suggesting that this leads to a fully equal democracy in which everyone has the same level of influence. Large businesses will always remain powerful, and there is a certain legitimacy to that, since they are often engines of economic growth, which is itself important for democracy. But the current distribution of power—so heavily concentrated in the hands of a small number of controlling owners—is not what many people want. What we find is that scandals can play a meaningful role in redressing that imbalance.

Affect, Elections, and Democratic Pushback

Your research highlights the role of affect—particularly anger—in catalyzing support for regulation. How can democratic systems channel such emotions into constructive policy change without amplifying the risks of polarization, scapegoating, or demagogic capture?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: We are already living in an age of polarization, scapegoating, and demagogic capture. So, the question is not simply how to worry about those risks, but how to overcome them. Anger that goes unaddressed leads precisely to the outcomes we are seeing. But anger, when properly channeled—through political parties that seek to respond to it and articulate a democratic program—is how these dynamics can be pushed back.

I do not need to explain this, especially in light of the recent Hungarian election, where a party like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, which has been in power for a long time and has served as a leading example of nationalist populism, faced significant pressure. You even had figures like J.D. Vance attempting to support Orbán’s government as part of a broader alignment among populist right-wing governments globally—I use the word “axis” advisedly.

And yet, despite gerrymandering and the structural advantages embedded in the system—despite the fact that Orbán’s allies control many of the largest industries—you still see moments of public anger and surges of popular support that can operate powerfully through democratic institutions. As long as elections continue to be held, leaders remain accountable to them.

Populism, Redistribution, and the Limits of State Trust

In your work on inequality narratives, framing the economy as “rigged” appears to shift redistributive preferences. How does this narrative intersect with populist discourse across the ideological spectrum, and where do its democratizing potentials encounter normative or institutional limits?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: Let me say a bit about that article, since it may not be familiar to all your readers. We conducted a study in which we exposed people in various countries to a “rigged system” narrative. We essentially presented the same story about inequality in each country, framing it as a rigged system, based on a paper by Joseph Stiglitz, but substituting country-specific statistics. So, people were reading about their own country, its level of inequality, and the idea that the system was rigged.

In every country we studied, this led to a shift in opinion in favor of redistribution—except in the United States. There, we did not observe the same shift. People appeared to accept that the system was indeed rigged when they read the article, but they did not trust the state to carry out redistribution.

This suggests that, in most contexts, populist discourse around redistribution can be quite effective in moving public opinion toward greater support for redistribution. But in the United States, there is such deep skepticism about the state that this effect is much more limited.

When thinking about the normative or institutional limits, I would say they are largely shaped by political context—by the extent to which people have developed views about the state’s capacity to bring about change, and about what they perceive to be the main threats within the system. In the United States, many people tend to see government primarily as a source of red tape and bureaucracy, rather than as an instrument for promoting equality or reducing inequality of opportunity. Most people, in fact, are uncomfortable with inequality of opportunity, even if they do not expect full equality of outcomes.

So, when we talk about normative or institutional limits, we are really referring to the political demands that exist within each country. These are legitimately and democratically contested, and they vary across national contexts.

Why Some Scandals Escape Partisan Filters

How does partisan polarization reshape the effects of corporate scandals, particularly in fragmented media environments where competing narratives assign blame in divergent ways and potentially blunt consensus for reform?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: Yes, that is really the core argument of our book on corporate scandals. Corporate scandals are among the few types of scandals that can sometimes escape this polarization effect—though not always. They can escape it because partisan scandals—most political scandals you are familiar with—do not resonate equally across the political spectrum. People interpret them through partisan lenses. If a scandal involves a party on the left, those on the left tend to defend the individual involved, while those on the right attack them, and vice versa.

That is not typically the case with corporate scandals. Here, you have CEOs, senior executives, or controlling shareholders engaging in behavior that people across the political spectrum may not find surprising but still find outrageous. Because of this, corporate scandals can sometimes cut across partisan divides and break through polarization.

However, this does not always hold. It can break down when the issue at stake in a corporate scandal has already become politically contested and polarized. We see this clearly in the case of climate change in the United States. In the early 1990s, climate change was among the least polarized issues, with Republicans and Democrats holding broadly similar views. By 2015 and beyond, it had become one of the most polarized issues. As a result, scandals involving companies like ExxonMobil elicit very different responses from Republicans and Democrats.

Another situation in which the effect breaks down is when a corporate leader is personally politically polarizing. Take the example of Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. He was widely seen as a major Democratic donor, even though he also contributed to Republicans in an effort to influence policy. The political left interpreted the FTX scandal as evidence of the need for stronger regulation, while the right framed it as a case of moral hypocrisy and individual wrongdoing—something akin to a “bad apple” problem, often with the added emphasis that he was a Democratic donor.

This divergence in interpretation has shaped how the American public now views cryptocurrency regulation, producing a clear partisan divide—even though most people have only a limited understanding of how cryptocurrency works. Once polarization becomes embedded in an issue, corporate scandals have a much harder time generating broad-based resonance.

Personalizing Power, Mobilizing Outrage

Your analysis of financial regulation suggests that personalization of blame can intensify public engagement. To what extent is such personalization a necessary heuristic for mobilization, and to what extent does it obscure deeper structural dynamics of capitalist power?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: When I give presentations about the book, I sometimes have very wealthy people in the audience—occasional centimillionaires, if not billionaires. Their reaction is often: I understand what you are saying about large companies, but what is wrong with billionaires? What have they ever done? They have simply been very successful. Why should we be angry about them?

I do not take a normative position on that, but I can say that people do take a view. Public opinion, broadly speaking, does not clearly distinguish between the actions of large corporations and those of billionaires. Billionaires provide easily recognizable faces for what are otherwise more complex and abstract dynamics—what you refer to as the structural dynamics of capitalism.

In that sense, billionaires put a face on what people perceive as problematic or unreasonable in corporate behavior. Take, for example, debates about AI firms building data centers without local approval, even when such projects may raise local energy prices. That is a complicated political issue. But if you place figures like Sam Altman, the head of a major AI company, in front of the public, people recognize him, and he becomes a focal point. Similarly, Elon Musk—who spans AI and the broader tech sector through Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI—serves as a highly visible figure around whom public attention can coalesce.

So, billionaires, as individuals, help make these dynamics more intelligible. If the goal is to mobilize people politically, discussing structural dynamics may work well in a graduate seminar or a policy school like the one where I teach. But in broader political life, recognizable individuals make those dynamics more concrete and significantly increase public engagement.

Big Tech, Public Resentment, and Regulatory Demand

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce in Washington, D.C., April 11, 2018. Photo: Dreamstime.

In an era marked by the concentration of power in platform capitalism and Big Tech, do corporate scandals retain their capacity to generate broad reform coalitions, or are we witnessing the limits of scandal-driven accountability in highly networked economies?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: Well, we will see. The argument of our book is that what people respond to is the reality of their daily lives. That is what latent opinion is all about. It suggests that people feel constrained by the fact that corporations are making choices that are not democratically accountable.

So, when we send rockets into space, we tend to cheer the government—for example, NASA in the United States, which has recently sent a rocket around the moon. But in reality, it is a private company, SpaceX, that is doing much of the production and effectively running large parts of the space program. Private companies are increasingly performing roles that governments used to play.

As a result, people have growing resentment toward large corporations that, once they reach monopoly positions—whether it is Amazon or Facebook—can engage in what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification,” making people’s lives worse while extracting monopoly rents. This is a major source of public concern.

So, when you ask whether we have reached the limits of scandal-driven politics, I would say that scandal-driven politics works particularly well when the structural conditions of capitalism make people especially sensitive to the inability of politics to restrain large companies. These firms are responsible for much of the economic growth, while many others do not benefit in the same way. This creates a strong demand for regulatory constraints, because people do not necessarily believe that these companies act in the public interest—they act in their own private interest, which is what private companies are designed to do.

There is, in other words, a growing disjuncture between the power of these companies and the degree to which they are held accountable by the political system. For that reason, I do not think scandal-driven politics will diminish; if anything, it is likely to intensify over time.

Cambridge Analytica and Divergent Regulatory Paths

How do focusing events such as transnational scandals—Cambridge Analytica being a paradigmatic example—travel across jurisdictions, and under what conditions do they produce convergent versus divergent regulatory responses?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: To answer this question, I want to return to my concept of the policy entrepreneur. What happened with Cambridge Analytica was that it was revealed that the data of nearly 90 million Facebook users, many of them in the United States, had been taken by this political consulting firm. Cambridge Analytica claimed to use these data to run micro-targeted advertisements, suggesting that it could influence outcomes such as the Brexit referendum and the 2016 Clinton–Trump election. There is no evidence that Cambridge Analytica actually affected electoral outcomes, but it is certainly true that the 2018 revelations by The Guardian and The New York Times made the issue of privacy enormously salient and severely damaged Facebook’s reputation—something from which Facebook, now Meta, has never fully recovered. Indeed, Facebook remains one of the most distrusted institutions in public opinion as a result of this episode.

In terms of divergent regulatory responses, the European Union had already passed privacy regulation in the form of the GDPR—the General Data Protection Regulation—building on earlier controversies such as the PRISM scandal, in which major tech companies were found to be cooperating with intelligence agencies like the NSA and GCHQ. In Europe, policymakers such as Margrethe Vestager were able to build on the public outrage generated by Cambridge Analytica to advance further regulation, including the Digital Markets Act in competition policy and the Digital Services Act in online safety, thereby strengthening the regulatory framework governing Big Tech.

In the United States, by contrast, national-level politics proved highly constrained. Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress, where both Democrats and Republicans criticized him following the Cambridge Analytica revelations. However, a telling moment occurred when Senator Orrin G. Hatch asked Zuckerberg how Facebook made money without charging users, to which Zuckerberg replied, “Senator, we sell ads.” That exchange illustrated a broader problem: many policymakers lacked a clear understanding of the digital economy, which limited their capacity to impose effective regulation.

As a result, while federal action stalled, regulatory innovation emerged at the state level. In California, the property developer Alastair McTaggart seized on the surge in public concern following Cambridge Analytica and pushed for a referendum to introduce strong privacy protections, comparable in some respects to the GDPR. Faced with this prospect, tech companies negotiated a legislative compromise, resulting in a new law passed in 2018. When subsequent amendments threatened to weaken it, McTaggart mobilized public opinion again and successfully backed another referendum in 2020, which passed with a clear majority and included provisions preventing the law from being diluted.

What we see, then, is that different jurisdictions respond to transnational scandals in distinct ways, depending on their institutional contexts and prior regulatory trajectories. In California, new privacy regulation emerged where none had existed before; in the European Union, existing regulatory frameworks were deepened and expanded. In both cases, however, the transnational shock of the Cambridge Analytica scandal prompted significant regulatory responses.

When Populism Corrects and When It Corrodes

If certain forms of populist mobilization can enhance democratic accountability, what distinguishes “bounded” or policy-focused anti-elitism from system-level populism that ultimately erodes liberal democratic institutions?

Professor Pepper Culpepper: I am not sure that system-level populism necessarily erodes liberal democratic institutions. We, in the policy elite tend to assume that populism involves people espousing simple solutions that are unlikely to work, and therefore not being serious. But what populism is doing at a systemic level is expressing something deeper. Policy-focused anti-elitism is not really the distinction we should be making. Rather, the key question is which part of the system people are upset about. Do they focus on political failure, or on economic unfairness? And I think there are people who focus on both.

These are not simply policy-driven positions. They reflect deeper forms of public dissatisfaction with what the system is delivering. It is a question of public outrage, and whether that outrage is channeled along the lines of political failure or along the lines of economic unfairness. I think that this distinction ultimately shapes whether populism acts as a constructive rebalancer of democracy or as a force that undermines it.

Associate Professor Jason Anastasopoulos.

Assoc. Prof. Anastasopoulos: AI May Transform Populism by Mobilizing Highly Skilled Workers

April 11, 2026

by ECPS_admin Digital-populism Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos argues that AI is not merely a tool of efficiency, but a political force that may reconfigure both democratic governance and populist mobilization. In this ECPS interview, he warns that replacing bureaucrats with AI can erode “democratic legitimacy” and produce what he calls “automated majoritarianism,” where average cases are processed efficiently while minorities and outliers are disadvantaged. He also challenges the assumption that AI automatically strengthens authoritarian rule, showing instead how false positives, false negatives, and “threshold whiplash” can generate resistance within authoritarian systems. Most strikingly, he suggests that AI may transform populism itself: unlike earlier technological disruptions centered on manual labor, AI increasingly threatens “intellectual work and highly skilled labor,” potentially broadening the social base of anti-elite backlash and reshaping the future of political discontent.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

At a moment when artificial intelligence is increasingly presented as a transformative force in governance, public administration, and political control, Jason Anastasopoulos, Associate Professor of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, offers a far more cautious and analytically nuanced perspective. In this ECPS interview, he argues that the effects of AI cannot be understood through simplistic assumptions of either technological salvation or authoritarian omnipotence. Instead, AI emerges in his account as a politically embedded system whose consequences depend on data quality, institutional incentives, and the broader regime context in which it operates.

A central theme running through the interview is the challenge AI poses to conventional understandings of democratic legitimacy and representation. Anastasopoulos warns that “replacing bureaucrats with AI has the potential to erode democratic legitimacy and decrease the extent to which people not only perceive the legitimacy of the system but also actually receive fair outcomes.” This concern is rooted in his broader claim that algorithmic governance does not merely automate decisions; it subtly transforms the normative foundations of administration itself. Because AI systems rely on “data from the past and on statistical averages,” whereas human officials can apply individualized judgment, the shift toward automation risks creating what he calls “automated majoritarianism,” in which average cases are processed efficiently while minorities and outliers are systematically disadvantaged.

At the same time, Assoc. Prof. Anastasopoulos highlights the political implications of AI beyond democratic administration, particularly in relation to populism and authoritarianism. Against the widespread belief that AI necessarily strengthens authoritarian rule, he emphasizes the “autocrat’s calibration dilemma,” showing how false positives and false negatives generate what he terms “threshold whiplash.” Far from ensuring seamless control, AI can create backlash, misclassification, and resistance, even within highly monitored societies. In this respect, the interview complicates dystopian assumptions about authoritarian omniscience by showing how predictive technologies can also destabilize the very regimes that rely on them.

Most strikingly, however, Assoc. Prof. Anastasopoulos suggests that AI may reshape populist politics in new ways. Whereas earlier waves of technological disruption primarily displaced manual and industrial labor, contemporary AI increasingly threatens “intellectual work and highly skilled labor.” This shift, he argues, may transform the social basis of political discontent. Populist mobilization, long rooted in anti-elite appeals to economically dislocated working-class constituencies, may now expand to incorporate professional and knowledge-sector groups who find themselves newly exposed to technological precarity. In that sense, AI may transform populism not only by intensifying backlash against opaque governance, but also by mobilizing constituencies that have not historically stood at the center of populist revolt.

In sum, Assoc. Prof. Anastasopoulos’s reflections offer a sophisticated intervention into contemporary debates on AI and politics. His analysis underscores that AI is neither politically neutral nor institutionally self-executing. Rather, it is a force that can unsettle democratic legitimacy, complicate authoritarian control, and reconfigure the social terrain of populist mobilization. Far from being merely a tool of efficiency, AI may become a catalyst for profound political realignment.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Associate Professor Jason Anastasopoulos, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

AI Doesn’t Simply Strengthen Authoritarian Control

AI generative technology, big data, globalization, and analytics management concepts. Photo: Dreamstime.

Professor Anastasopoulos, welcome. In “The Limits of Authoritarian AI,” you introduce the “autocrat’s calibration dilemma,” where predictive systems must tradeoff between false positives and false negatives. How does this structural constraint reshape prevailing assumptions that AI inherently strengthens authoritarian control?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: That’s a really good question. I think the common conception of AI is that it will strengthen authoritarian control in a linear fashion, and this makes sense to a certain extent. It is also true in the short run. One of the recurring themes in dystopian narratives is the emergence of a surveillance state in which authoritarian governments exert control over their populations through cameras, social credit systems, and similar technologies. To some extent, this does seem to be the case in the short term. In the long run, however, the use of AI is much more complicated.

This is because of the errors that it generates—namely, Type 1 and Type 2 errors. For readers who may not be familiar with these concepts, they refer to false positives and false negatives, respectively, and are commonly introduced in basic statistics. A Type 1 error occurs when someone is incorrectly identified as a positive case—for example, when a COVID test indicates that a person has the virus when they do not. A Type 2 error, by contrast, occurs when the test indicates that someone does not have the virus when they actually do.

All AI systems, as fundamentally predictive systems, operate under these same constraints. They can misclassify individuals—identifying someone as a threat to the regime when they are not or failing to identify someone who actually poses a risk. These errors carry political consequences, and managing those consequences becomes an inherent challenge for authoritarian regimes. Each type of error entails distinct political trade-offs, which I would be happy to elaborate on further.

**Authoritarian Regimes Risk ‘Threshold Whiplash’ When Using AI for Control**

Building on this dilemma, to what extent does the probabilistic nature of AI undermine the aspiration of authoritarian regimes to achieve total informational dominance and preemptive repression?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: This is where the political consequences of Type 1 and Type 2 errors come into play. This is where authoritarian regimes run into resistance when using AI in the long run, as opposed to the short run. In the short run, these tools are indeed tremendous for monitoring populations. Facial recognition systems can be linked to databases that identify people instantaneously. In China, for example, a social credit system is being developed that could potentially track movements and shape behaviors in ways consistent with regime preferences. But in the long run, the calibration dilemma that autocrats face becomes decisive.

This is something authoritarian regimes actually institutionalize. In China, bureaucracies exist to calibrate AI systems for these kinds of Type 1 and Type 2 errors. Let me outline the political issues that arise from these errors. For Type 1 errors, the biggest problem in an authoritarian context—where a leader is trying to predict who is risky—is that individuals are labeled as threats when they are not. When too many false positives are generated, opposition to the regime itself increases. In other words, you might have 100 individuals who are genuinely threatening, and the AI system identifies them—but it also identifies 100,000 others who are not. Those individuals, ironically, may become threats precisely because they are falsely labeled as such.

So, because of false positives, the regime creates more threats than it would have had otherwise. Authoritarian rule depends on a belief that compliance leads to tolerable outcomes—being left alone, not punished, not having one’s mobility restricted. Type 1 errors undermine this expectation, producing backlash and fueling social movements.

We have seen this in cases such as Zero-COVID policies and the Henan bank protests, which we discuss in the paper. Individuals were falsely labeled as COVID-positive to prevent them from protesting a banking scandal. This generated public outrage and forced the government to scale back. In other words, the use of AI produced the very instability it was meant to prevent.

For Type 2 errors, the problem is reversed. The regime faces real threats, and if AI systems fail to detect them, those threats can operate in the shadows. This dynamic produces what we call a cycle of “threshold whiplash.” Initially, regimes set thresholds low to maintain tight control, which increases Type 1 errors and triggers backlash. In response, they raise the threshold, which increases Type 2 errors, allowing real threats to go undetected.

At the same time, individuals alienated by false labeling may become politically active and organize against the regime. In this way, AI generates a cycle in which efforts at control inadvertently produce the very resistance the regime seeks to suppress.

Authoritarian Incentives to Report Stability Degrade AI from Within

Artificial Intelligence. — Artificial intelligence as a next-generation technology shaping the digital era. Photo: Dreamstime.

Your work suggests that prediction systems are not merely technical tools, but political instruments embedded in institutional incentives. How do bureaucratic and party-level incentives distort AI outputs in authoritarian settings?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: That’s a really good question. The focus here is primarily on China, where regional bureaucratic leaders have incentives to report stability metrics to Beijing. There is a strong desire for Beijing to see that, across all regions within China, things are looking good—that conditions are stable.

What happens with AI systems, then, is that officials tend to downplay any activity identified by these systems that might suggest instability in a region. As a result, when such distorted data is fed into the new AI systems being developed, it creates a significant gap between on-the-ground realities and what the AI system reports, ultimately degrading the quality of the system itself. In this way, bureaucratic incentives to report stability end up undermining AI performance over time, as these systems are trained on data that is simply of low quality.

AI Decision-Making Can Erode Both Perceived and Actual Fairness

In your research on democratic administration, you argue that replacing human discretion with AI risks eroding accountability and reason-giving. How should we theorize the relationship between algorithmic governance and democratic legitimacy?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: One of my papers on the problem of replacing bureaucratic discretion with AI identifies a recent trend in many places; some of it is aspirational, and some of it has actually been implemented. The trend is that many regimes, not just authoritarian regimes but democratic countries as well, are seeking to replace bureaucratic discretion, and bureaucrats more generally, with AI systems.

For example, Keir Starmer is one of the figures who is very interested in doing so in the UK. Widodo in Indonesia has actually replaced a few levels of the bureaucracy with AI systems. One of the problems that the paper identifies is that when you replace bureaucratic discretion with AI systems, you remove some of the important safeguards that exist for democratic governance.

Specifically, AI systems have this issue where they do not think like human beings—that is the fundamental problem. Democratic legitimacy, in many ways, is based on the idea that another human being will review your case and be able to reason through whatever decision needs to be made by the state in your particular situation. What I argue in that paper is that there are certain types of decisions—decisions relating to rights, and decisions involving very important issues where someone’s rights could be taken away—that should not be delegated to automated systems. This is because the idea of justice and democracy itself depends on a human being assessing your case at an individual level and applying human judgment in a way that would be deemed fair both theoretically, from a philosophical perspective, and in terms of the perceptions of those being judged.

So, a lot of it comes down to the fact that replacing bureaucrats with AI has the potential to erode democratic legitimacy and decrease the extent to which people not only perceive the legitimacy of the system but also actually receive fair outcomes.

Another problem I identify in that paper is a technical one. I have training in machine learning and statistics, as well as in political philosophy, and I try to understand how these systems work and what their technical implications are. One of the problems with AI, and with any prediction system, is that it does a very good job of assessing the average case, but a very poor job of assessing cases that would be considered edge cases. If the circumstances that a person brings to an AI system are very unusual, the system is not going to be able to provide a good prediction.

As a result, you have what I call automated majoritarianism, where the AI system performs well for most people, but for minority groups and for individuals whose cases fall outside the norm, it performs very poorly. This can ultimately alienate a large segment of the population. These are some of the key issues I identify regarding the risks of replacing bureaucratic discretion with AI.

Automated Majoritarianism Leaves Minority Cases Behind

AI facial recognition in a crowded urban setting, highlighting risks to privacy and personal freedom (AI-generated). Photo: Irina Yeryom / Dreamstime.

If democratic governance depends on individualized judgment and justification, can AI ever be reconciled with these normative commitments, or does it fundamentally reconfigure the meaning of administrative fairness?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: I think it actually does end up fundamentally reconfiguring the meaning of administrative fairness, and it does so in a way that is subtle and not very obvious. A lot of it, again, comes down to how AI systems make decisions versus how humans make decisions.

Humans make decisions based on their experience and their adherence to norms that are either embedded in institutions or exist in society. Whereas AI systems simply make decisions based on data from the past and on statistical averages. So, with a human being, you get an individualized decision, whereas with an AI system, you get a decision based on aggregate data.

That has implications for the future of administrative fairness, because the types of decisions made by AI systems, given how they function, are fundamentally different from those made by humans. How those decisions differ will depend on the circumstances to a certain extent. But we have already seen, for example, in cases from the criminal justice system, that AI systems, when they try to predict whether someone is likely to be a recidivist, can produce problematic outcomes. There is a system called the COMPAS.

This is not really an AI system per se; it is more of a machine learning algorithm, although most AI systems are based on machine learning to some extent. What the COMPAS system does is to make predictions about who would be considered at high risk of recidivism in the future. Imagine someone is arrested, their data is collected, and it is fed into this algorithm. The algorithm then predicts whether that person is risky, on a scale from 1 to 10, and this affects how they are treated within the criminal justice system. If they are predicted to be high risk, they may receive a harsher sentence and be treated more punitively; if they are predicted to be low risk, they are more likely to receive leniency.

What some authors at ProPublica found in a 2016 study was that these systems generated a much higher false positive rate for African American offenders compared to white offenders. In other words, they predicted that Black offenders were more likely to be a future risk even when they were not. This is what the well-known ProPublica article “Machine Bias”demonstrated.

In that case, it showed that AI systems can perpetuate biases into the future. They can create a situation where past discrimination becomes embedded in the criminal justice system, and once that happens, it is much more difficult to correct than with human decision-makers. With humans, you can intervene more directly—you can audit decisions or remove individuals—but with AI systems, you would have to change the entire system, including vendors and underlying models, which is far more complex.

So, these are some of the ways in which AI can reshape our understanding of administrative fairness. We will need to develop systems to audit AI in order to prevent bias, and we will have to continually ensure that these systems do not embed biases that could create long-term unfair outcomes for minority groups and others whose lives are affected by AI-driven decisions.

AI Should Inform Decisions, but Humans Must Remain in the Loop

You propose a “centaur model” where AI complements rather than replaces human decision-makers. What institutional safeguards are necessary to prevent this hybrid model from drifting toward de facto automation and accountability erosion?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: The idea behind the Centaur model is pretty simple. We need to ensure that when really important decisions are being made within government—decisions that can affect people’s lives and relate to issues of fairness or justice—there is always a human decision-maker in the loop. An AI system can be good at making predictions, but it should only be used as one piece of information within a broader file that a human decision-maker can draw upon.

The problem with this kind of Centaur model, however, is that it runs up against the incentives many governments have to cut costs. This is especially true at the state and local levels in the United States, and also for lower-level governments in Europe and elsewhere, where there are strong incentives to automate decisions.

What may ultimately prevent the Centaur model from being implemented—even though I think it is a good model—is the political economy of governance. A system that combines human judgment with AI could produce decisions that are both fairer and more just than those made by humans alone, who have biases, or by AI systems alone, which come with their own set of problems.

But these advantages may be outweighed by structural pressures. If there is insufficient tax revenue, sustained pressure to cut costs, and a broader cultural disposition—especially in the United States—that views bureaucrats as unnecessary or ineffective, then populist demands to reduce administrative capacity may lead to full automation. In such a scenario, the Centaur model would not take hold.

Instead, you could end up with layers of bureaucracy fully delegated to AI, which introduces its own risks. In that sense, the key issue is public pressure to shrink bureaucracies—something we have seen in various reform movements—combined with governments’ ongoing efforts to reduce costs. Together, these dynamics can push systems toward automated governance rather than hybrid models, and that is something people need to be aware of.

Addressing this requires a broader cultural shift. People need to understand that bureaucrats are not simply obstacles—such as those encountered at the Department of Motor Vehicles—but are integral to ensuring fairness and accountability in governance. Without that shift, we risk moving toward fully automated systems that may replicate the flaws of bureaucracies while simply making decisions faster, not better. That is the main concern I have.

AI Can Centralize Power by Aligning Decisions More Closely with Political Leaders

Three high-definition video surveillance cameras operated by the city police. Photo: Dreamstime.

Your work on delegation highlights how authority is structured through constraints and discretion. How does the delegation of decision-making authority to AI systems alter classic principal–agent problems in democratic governance?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: That’s a really good question. The way in which the delegation of authority to AI systems alters the classical problem is the following. The traditional principal–agent problem between bureaucracies and higher levels of authority is that, say in the United States, Congress wants a law passed. They pass the law and then expect it to be implemented in a way that is consistent with their intentions.

However, members of Congress and other elected leaders often lack the expertise required to implement laws themselves. For example, in the case of environmental legislation, they do not have the technical knowledge to determine how regulations should be applied in practice. As a result, they delegate this authority to expert bureaucrats, such as those in the EPA, who are responsible for implementation. The principal–agent problem arises because bureaucrats may have preferences that differ from those of elected leaders, meaning that delegation can produce outcomes that do not fully align with the preferences of those who delegated the authority.

In theory, AI could mitigate this problem. Elected leaders could design and select AI systems that align more closely with their own preferences, whether ideological or pragmatic. From the perspective of higher-level officials, AI systems can therefore be appealing, as they may replace bureaucrats who exercise independent discretion and might make decisions that leaders do not favor.

However, I think this is problematic from the public’s perspective. It leads to greater centralization of power and reduces discretion at the ground level. Bureaucrats often possess forms of expertise that elected leaders simply do not have and replacing that expertise with AI systems could introduce significant risks. Laws might not be implemented correctly, and outcomes might reflect not the interests of the public, but rather the preferences of elected leaders—or even the interests of the vendors who design the AI systems. This is where a new kind of principal–agent problem can emerge.

Perceived Unfair AI Decisions Can Fuel Populist Backlash

In the context of populism, how might the increasing use of AI in governance deepen representation gaps, particularly if citizens perceive decisions as opaque, impersonal, or technocratically imposed?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: I think that’s a real problem, and much of it comes down to the idea of backlash that I discuss in my paper on “The Limits of Authoritarian AI” with my co-author, Jason Lian.

If people perceive that AI systems are making decisions that are unfair, the resentment and backlash this generates can fuel an increase in populist movements and a desire to remove those who rely on AI systems but are not populists. That is one key risk I see emerging.

AI can certainly increase support for populist leaders. Such leaders are often somewhat anti-technology and frequently campaign on anti-technology platforms. If AI-based decisions generate sufficient backlash, this can provide them with powerful political fuel. In that context, we could see a sharp rise in support for populist leaders as a means of rolling back the system to a time before AI systems were producing decisions perceived as unfair.

Technological Displacement Expands the Social Base of Populism

Senior male manager addressing workers. — Senior male manager addressing workers in open plan office. Photo: Monkey Business Images / Dreamstime.

Your research on technological change and populism suggests that economic disruption can fuel political discontent. How might AI-driven labor displacement interact with democratic backsliding and the rise of populist movements?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: There’s a lot of research on this, which finds that populists often draw on the idea that technology—especially automation—will replace people and take their jobs away. This is something we’ve seen since in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The Luddites in England were, of course, a well-known populist movement that relied on an anti-technology stance.

The Luddite movement emerged in response to the invention of the steam engine, which displaced large amounts of guild labor in textile production. Whenever there is labor displacement due to technological change, there is almost certainly backlash from those who are unemployed or otherwise disaffected by these new automation systems.

In that sense, AI is no different. It gives populist leaders something to point to, allowing them to claim that they will provide solutions to AI-driven displacement. But in practice, when they are elected, they often fail to deliver those solutions. Instead, they may cooperate with those who develop AI systems and even promote their expansion.

Nevertheless, this remains a powerful and enduring populist position. Historically, populist leaders promise to address the consequences of technological change, yet technological progress continues regardless. Still, their ability to mobilize those affected by labor displacement is likely to grow as more jobs are disrupted.

What is particularly interesting about AI, compared to earlier technologies like the steam engine, is that it is displacing not only manual labor but also intellectual work and highly skilled labor. As a result, the nature of populist and social movements may evolve, as populists begin to incorporate these groups into their constituencies rather than focusing primarily on the working class. This could become an important new dimension of populist politics moving forward.

Distrust of Bureaucracy Could Enable ‘Algorithmic Populism’

To what extent does AI governance risk creating a new form of “algorithmic populism,” where political actors leverage automated systems to claim efficiency while obscuring responsibility?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: That’s exactly the problem I identified before. Could you explain what you mean by algorithmic populism more specifically? Political leaders or actors leveraging automated systems to claim efficiency while obscuring responsibility.

That’s the general problem with AI. It’s one of the key tensions. I’m not entirely sure about the idea of algorithmic populism in general, but one condition that could give rise to it is, especially in cultures like the United States where there is a deep distrust of bureaucracies, a situation in which AI systems are perceived as being better than human bureaucrats.

In those cases, it would be easy for a political actor—an “algorithmic populist,” as you put it—to accelerate the replacement of bureaucrats with AI in government, which would again lead to many of the problems I discussed earlier. And some figures—Donald Trump, for example, who could be considered a populist—might even be seen as algorithmic populists to a certain extent, in that they promote technology and advance a strong AI agenda.

In such situations, you create a scenario where you end up with the same problems associated with AI that I mentioned earlier, but the process continues to advance. I don’t know exactly what the future would look like in terms of how an algorithmic populist movement might develop, but it is an interesting idea to consider.

Data Quality Will Determine Whether AI Supports Democracy or Control

Internet Surveilance. — Photo: Shutterstock

And lastly, Professor Anastasopoulos, looking ahead, do you see AI as ultimately stabilizing or destabilizing democratic systems—and what key variables will determine whether it becomes a tool of democratic renewal or authoritarian entrenchment?

Assoc. Prof. Jason Anastasopoulos: I’m actually pretty hopeful about AI and its effect on democracy. I think it’s going to have two effects in general: one within democratic systems and the other within authoritarian systems.

I think a lot of it comes down to data quality. In democratic systems, AI can do a very good job of helping decision-makers make fairer, more just, and more efficient decisions. That’s because, within democratic systems, the information fed into AI systems comes from a range of democratic processes—deliberation, free speech, and so on. As a result, the quality of AI systems is very high when they are used to further democratic principles and support democratic rule.

However, in authoritarian systems—and this is something I discuss in “The Limits of Authoritarian AI”—authoritarian regimes seek to use AI to control their populations. The fundamental problem they encounter is one of information. This problem relates directly to the fact that when people are being monitored, they change their behavior and hide their preferences. As a result, the information that feeds into AI systems ends up being of much lower quality in authoritarian regimes than in democratic ones. I believe this tends to further destabilize authoritarian regimes as they attempt to tighten control through AI systems and encounter the kind of threshold whiplash I mentioned earlier. Over time, authoritarian regimes may come to realize that AI tools are not the panacea they may have expected. That realization could open the door for social democratic movements within authoritarian regimes to take advantage of the instability created by AI.

In sum, for democratic nations, as long as we avoid a situation in which we eliminate all layers of government and replace them with AI, it can be a stabilizing force. In contrast, in authoritarian regimes, it is likely to be destabilizing—at least temporarily—and may eventually push those systems toward greater democratization if they continue to rely on AI. They might, of course, decide to abandon AI systems and revert to older forms of authoritarian control, but I don’t think that is very feasible in the modern world. Instead, what we may see is a gradual broadening of democracy globally as AI systems are adopted for different purposes.

Dr. Azizi: The Islamic Republic Will Survive, but in a Less Ideological, More Pragmatic Form

April 10, 2026

by ECPS_admin Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

Dr. Arash Azizi of Yale University argues that the Iran Islamic Republic is likely to survive, but in a transformed form shaped less by ideology and more by pragmatism. In this ECPS interview, he suggests that Iran’s longstanding strategy of “sustained hostility toward the United States and enmity toward Israel… is not sustainable,” pushing the regime toward recalibration. Rather than collapse, Dr. Azizi foresees a shift: the decline of “Soleimaniism,” the rise of a securitized political order, and a growing emphasis on regional integration and diplomatic engagement. While power consolidates around military-security elites, Iran may simultaneously pursue normalization and reconstruction. The result, he argues, is not the end of the Islamic Republic, but its reconfiguration into a more technocratic, less ideological, and strategically adaptive state.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Amid an intensifying cycle of confrontation between Iran, Israel, and the United States, the Middle East is entering what can only be described as a structurally transformative moment. Long characterized by proxy conflict and calibrated ambiguity, regional dynamics have now shifted toward direct interstate confrontation, leadership rupture, and accelerating geopolitical fragmentation. The killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, the subsequent consolidation of power within a narrower elite, and sustained US–Israeli military pressure have together transformed a protracted shadow war into an overt systemic crisis. These developments raise urgent questions about the durability of the Islamic Republic, the reconfiguration of its strategic doctrine, and the broader implications for regional order.

In this context, this ECPS interview with Dr. Arash Azizi, who is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at Yale University, offers a timely and analytically rich intervention. As a scholar of Iranian politics and regional geopolitics, Dr. Azizi situates current developments within a longer trajectory of ideological evolution, institutional transformation, and strategic recalibration. His central argument—captured in the headline assertion that “the Islamic Republic will survive, but in a less ideological, more pragmatic form”—provides a unifying thread through the discussion.

At the heart of Dr. Azizi’s analysis lies the contention that the foundational logic of Iran’s revolutionary project is undergoing erosion. The model of regional power projection associated with Qassem Soleimani—what he describes as a “collection of militias that functioned very much as a unified multinational army”—has, in his view, reached the limits of its historical relevance. “That era is now largely over,” he notes, emphasizing that even prior to the latest war, “Soleimaniism was already under significant strain.” The cumulative effects of internal dissent in Iraq and Lebanon, combined with Israel’s military campaign and the collapse of allied structures in Syria, have rendered the “axis of resistance… even more out of vogue.”

Yet Azizi resists narratives of imminent regime collapse. Instead, he identifies a process of transformation rather than breakdown. The Islamic Republic, he argues, has come to recognize that its long-standing strategy of “sustained hostility toward the United States and enmity toward Israel… is not sustainable.” In its place, a more pragmatic orientation is emerging—one oriented toward “regional integration,” “a business-like relationship with the United States,” and eventual diplomatic normalization. This shift does not imply liberalization in a conventional sense, but rather a rebalancing of ideological ambition and strategic necessity.

Simultaneously, however, this transformation is unfolding alongside the consolidation of a more securitized political order. The post-Khamenei landscape, Dr. Azizi suggests, reflects “the rise of a security state, a militarized state… with important elements from the IRGC calling the shots.” This dual movement—toward external pragmatism and internal securitization—defines the paradox of Iran’s current trajectory.

Taken together, Dr. Azizi’s analysis points to a hybrid future: a state that sheds elements of its revolutionary identity while preserving—and in some respects intensifying—its coercive core. The result, as he suggests, is not the end of the Islamic Republic, but its reconstitution: less ideological, more technocratic, and increasingly embedded within a shifting regional order.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Dr. Arash Azizi, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

Iran’s Axis Strategy Is Fading as a New Regional Logic Emerges

Palestinians celebrate Iran’s missile strikes on US bases in Iraq, burning US and Israeli flags during a rally in Khan Yunis, Gaza, honoring Qasem Soleimani. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Dreamstime.

Dr. Azizi, welcome. Let me begin with the broader picture: In “The Shadow Commander,” you show how Qassem Soleimani institutionalized a model of regional power projection that fused ideological militancy, informal diplomacy, and IRGC autonomy. After the killing of Ali Khamenei, the elevation of Mojtaba Khamenei, and the direct US-Israeli war on Iran, how should we now think about the afterlife of “Soleimaniism” within a post-charismatic, wartime Islamic Republic?

Dr. Arash Azizi: Thank you—that’s a very good question. Soleimaniism, or the axis of resistance as it existed under Soleimani—namely, a collection of militias that functioned very much as a unified multinational army capable of operating across multiple battlefields simultaneously—had particular relevance at its height. That era is now largely over. The killing of Soleimani, of course, was significant.

But there were also important challenges in Iraq and Lebanon, the two heartlands of the axis of resistance. Within the Shia communities in both countries, the mass protests of 2019 posed a serious challenge to established parties. There is a clear and growing desire within Iraqi and Lebanese societies for more integrated, sovereign states, as well as for stronger connections with the Arab world—through the Arab League and a renewed emphasis on Arab identity. This, in turn, makes it problematic for large parts of their political systems to remain beholden to a non-Arab power like Iran.

For all these reasons, even if you had asked me this question in early 2023, I would have said that Soleimaniism was already under significant strain.

In the aftermath of October 7, with Israel’s decimation of several members of the axis, and the fall of the Syrian regime, the axis of resistance has become even more out of vogue. While there are now claims, in the context of the current war, that the axis has regained relevance, I remain skeptical. I do not think that “Soleimaniism,” as you call it, has a future in this sense.

This raises the question: if not, what will Iran’s relationship with these various militias look like going forward? I think the answer is that it will become more closely tied to Iran’s broader effort to act as a regional player, primarily through political support for these groups. That support is likely to become more political and less military in nature. As a result, power in Tehran will be transformed, and Iran’s relationship with these groups will also evolve. We are therefore likely to see greater integration of Iran into the region, and less reliance on the revolutionary militia model that operated under Soleimani.

Endless Hostility to the US and Israel Is No Longer Sustainable for Iran

To what extent do the recent US–Israeli strikes and aggression—explicitly coupled with regime-change rhetoric—redefine the Islamic Republic’s threat perception from chronic containment to acute existential insecurity, and how might this shift alter its long-term grand strategy?

Dr. Arash Azizi: The Islamic Republic has just withstood 40 days of fighting with the United States and Israel. In the long term, I think the Iranian state—whether it is the Islamic Republic or whatever might replace it, and there may well be internal transformations—has realized that this trajectory of hostility, this grand strategy, to use the words of some like Vali Nasr, of sustained hostility toward the United States and enmity toward Israel, is not sustainable. As a result, I think they will increasingly look toward regional integration, an end to the historic dispute with the United States, and the emergence of Iran as a regional power that may still have disputes—within the region and beyond—but does not incorporate them into its revolutionary identity.

Iran & US. — Veiled woman walks past anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda mural outside the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Photo: Jack Malipan / Dreamstime.

Tehran Is Trying to Trade Brinkmanship for Regional Recognition

Recent cease-fire agreement suggests that Tehran is demanding not a temporary end of hostilities but binding guarantees against renewed attack, reparations, and recognition of its coercive leverage in the Strait of Hormuz. Do these demands indicate strategic weakness dressed up as defiance, or a regime conclusion that controlled brinkmanship has enhanced Iran’s bargaining position?

Dr. Arash Azizi: If you really look at these demands, they are an attempt to redefine Iran’s role in the region and a recognition that the status quo does not work. So, Iran’s thinking in terms of non-belligerence is significant, because it would mean that it also needs to end its belligerence toward the US.

Demands such as recognition of its control over Hormuz and recognition of its power make sense, not for a revolutionary revisionist actor, but for one that seeks to be part of—and recognized within—the status quo. So, while they still hold on to ambitions of expelling US forces from the region, they understand that the more likely outcome is Iran’s integration into the region and its recognition by its neighbors—Saudi Arabia and others.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan—these powers recognizing Iran—and a more business-like relationship with the United States. So, if the new leadership in Iran—and we should remind ourselves that this is a new leadership about whom we know relatively little; this is not about Mojtaba Khamenei, who is absent anyway, but about Bagher Ghalibaf and similar military figures who are now in charge—if they are able to press ahead and achieve some results in the talks in Islamabad or in future negotiations, they would have truly transformed the Islamic Republic and ushered Iran into a new era, one likely to be defined not by international isolation but by regional integration and global recognition by the US.

What We Are Seeing Is the Rise of a Militarized Security State

How has the death of Ali Khamenei and the contested authority of Mojtaba Khamenei changed the internal architecture of power? Are we witnessing a succession that strengthens clerical supremacy, or one that accelerates the long-term transfer of effective authority toward the IRGC and security institutions?

Dr. Arash Azizi: It is the latter. The death of Khamenei and the rise of Mojtaba, who is very much a stand-in for the security services of the regime, further the rise of security and militarized elements to power—those in the IRGC and beyond. Bagher Ghalibaf is very much an embodiment of the IRGC, and he is now the strongest man in Iran. In many ways, he is Iran’s de facto leader. The new National Security Advisor, Ali Akbar Ahmadian, is also an embodiment of IRGC insiders. So, this is very much the rise of a security state, a militarized state in Iran, with important elements from the IRGC calling the shots.

The question is what shape this order will take, and that is harder to answer. Will it be more like North Korea or more like Vietnam? That is one way of thinking about it. So far, we have seen many more signs pointing toward Vietnam than North Korea. The evidence for that can be seen, for example, in how Ghalibaf is operating. We should not forget that he has been a partner of reformists and centrists. He is now effectively praised by Rouhani and also by President Pezeshkian, who is a reformist. When he ran for president in 2024, he very much ran as a centrist. So, it looks like this militarized Iran will move toward a more centrist and more diplomatic direction, perhaps also a more technocratic and pragmatic one.

Iran May Survive, but It Will Not Resemble the Islamic Republic We Knew

Billboard depicting Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei and Imam Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini on a building wall in Tehran, Iran, April 2018. The portraits honor the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini (Supreme Leader 1979–1989), and his successor Ali Khamenei (Supreme Leader 1989–2026), whose images frequently appear in public spaces as symbols of the regime’s ideological authority. Photo: Dreamstime.

In your recent writing, you argue that the Islamic Republic may survive, but in a different form. What, precisely, is that altered form likely to be under wartime conditions: a more naked military-security state, a narrower dynastic-clerical regime, or an unstable hybrid unable to restore prewar equilibrium?

Dr. Arash Azizi: The main differences would be that Iran would drop a couple of the core policies of the Islamic Republic. It would abandon its social puritan repression. It will be less obsessed with being an Islamist puritan society, where women have to cover up and so on, and will liberalize in this respect.

It would also replace its traditional, ideologically Islamist, anti-American, anti-Israeli foreign policy with one that is more realpolitik-oriented and based on regional integration, a business-like relationship with the United States, and the resumption of diplomatic ties with the United States.

So, it will appear more like a country such as Pakistan, or in some ways Turkey, in terms of foreign policy. Of course, Turkey is different, as it is a member of NATO and has a democratic structure, with important distinctions. But Iran will become more of a non-aligned player, part of a multipolar world order that centers its own interests, rather than one that seeks to position itself within an anti-American order.

As I said, this would mean resuming diplomatic ties with the United States, and the overall shape of the regime would change significantly. It would be a country open to business with the West, and it would no longer resemble the Islamic Republic we have seen over the past few decades.

Tehran Is Using Escalation to Redefine Its Place in the Region

Iran’s retaliation across Israeli territory, US assets, and Gulf-linked energy infrastructure suggests that regionalization is no longer a latent option but an active strategy. Should we read this as a coherent deterrence doctrine, or as evidence that Tehran’s escalation ladder is becoming more improvised and risk-acceptant under existential pressure?

Dr. Arash Azizi: Iran has long had a plan that, if attacked, it would regionalize the conflict and raise its costs for everyone. I see these chaotic attacks on major neighbors—Kuwait, Cyprus, Qatar, Oman, and Saudi Arabia—as an attempt to redefine its role in the region and, ultimately, to gain recognition as a regional power.

This is part of the current interregnum after Khamenei, during which the Islamic Republic—the Iranian state—is trying to redefine its place in the region. It is engaging in various forms of maneuvering in order to eventually reach some form of peace and secure recognition of its position.

At the same time, it is plausible that IRGC generals who have now experienced war with these countries will continue to pursue a policy of brinkmanship. They may become accustomed to using kinetic action whenever they fail to achieve their goals, which could, at some point, reignite a larger war—one that might involve a regional effort to defeat Iran and force it to submit.

The Regime Is Increasingly Ruling over Ruins

Israeli strikes on petrochemical facilities, transport infrastructure, and broader economic assets appear designed not only to degrade military capability but to impose systemic economic pain. How might this reshape the regime’s social base, especially among urban middle classes, workers, and peripheral populations already strained by sanctions and repression?

Dr. Arash Azizi: The regime already has a very small base. Should wartime conditions end now, it will face massive economic problems. Iran has been severely degraded not just in military terms, but in its civilian capabilities as well. To give just one example, Iran barely has any civilian aircraft left. It faces major problems: most of its airports are destroyed, and even where airports remain intact, civilian aircraft have been destroyed. It is, in many ways, a regime ruling over ruins.

All of this makes it very difficult for the regime to continue without facing further social alienation and, ultimately, renewed protests and insurrections. The only way out is a deal with the United States that would lift sanctions, improve its regional status, and provide some financial relief—something it is also trying to secure through its control over the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, it needs diplomatic pathways if it is to reach any kind of social equilibrium. Otherwise, it will face recurrent crises.

The War Mobilized the Regime’s Base, but It Did Not Legitimize the Regime

“Woman, life, freedom”: London protest draws thousands following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody on January 10, 2022. Photo: Vehbi Koca.

Comparative research often shows that war can produce either nationalist rally effects or heightened de-legitimation. In Iran’s case, do you think external attack is more likely to temporarily consolidate the regime, or to deepen the public’s sense that the state is both repressive and strategically ruinous?

Dr. Arash Azizi: It has mobilized the regime’s base; it has not expanded it, but it has mobilized it. One reason for this is that the opposition had created a facade—an illusion that the regime was easy to bring down and that external attacks would quickly lead to its collapse. This meant that the regime’s very survival could be framed as a major victory. In many ways, it was the opposition that made this equation possible. So, the effect has been a mobilized base and, in many ways, a demoralized opposition.

But the regime has not gained legitimacy. There remains a deep gap between it and much of Iranian society, and this war has not helped; if anything, it has made matters worse. It has once again revealed itself as a trigger-happy state, one willing to engage in conflict without prioritizing the economic well-being of its citizens. Unless it changes course, it will continue to face serious crises of legitimacy.

Iran’s Democratic Opposition Still Lacks a Credible Unified Front

You have recently stressed that Iran lacks a credible, organized democratic alternative ready to inherit power. In light of wartime devastation and elite fragmentation, what would have to happen for a domestically rooted democratic bloc to emerge with sufficient legitimacy, coordination, and national reach?

Dr. Arash Azizi: Different opposition groups, both inside and outside Iran, would need to put their differences aside, come together, and build a united front, offering a credible, coherent, and solid alternative. This remains a tall order, but that is what needs to happen. Efforts such as the Iran Freedom Congress, recently launched in London, are a step in the right direction, but much more needs to be done. There also needs to be serious coordination with elements inside Iran. Still, it remains a very tall order, and it is harder to achieve in wartime than it would be in peacetime.

The Opposition Needs Discipline, Cohesion, and a Credible Forward-Looking Platform

Iranian citizens living in Turkey protest the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini and the Iranian government in front of the Iranian Consulate General in Istanbul on October 4, 2022. Photo: Tolga Ildun.

For exiled opposition figures seeking relevance at this moment, what institutional commitments would be indispensable for credibility inside Iran: constitutional guarantees, transitional justice mechanisms, minority protections, civilian control of the military, or something more foundational?

Dr. Arash Azizi: First of all, they would need to build organizations abroad that demonstrate a degree of political discipline, unity, and flexibility. They would need to create actual membership-based organizations that bring together different elite figures and reflect a degree of political cohesion. They have not done that.

They would then need to offer a political platform that seeks both to unify the opposition and to remain flexible. This would require balancing transitional justice mechanisms with amnesty provisions, for example, to signal that there is a path open to former security forces or other figures of the regime—and perhaps even a possibility of negotiating with them. They would also need to demonstrate an ability to galvanize public opinion and mobilize constituencies abroad.

In short, they would need to present a credible, forward-looking political alternative that can also be taken seriously internationally. This is a very tall order, and the opposition has done little that resembles it so far. What exists instead is a highly fragmented landscape.

In what might be described as the Republican, center-left segment of the opposition, there is fragmentation, a lack of organization and cohesion, and no meaningful strategic unity. The Iran Freedom Congress represents an attempt to address this. On the right-wing side, among Reza Pahlavi and monarchist groups, one finds a revanchist, somewhat chauvinistic, and disorganized opposition, marked by hostility toward other opposition actors. Much of its strategy appears tied to the Israeli-American attack, which has already occurred and is no longer particularly popular among Iranians.

Under these conditions, both sides of the opposition find themselves in disarray. Other groups, such as the MEK (The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran), have long functioned as a cult-like organization with a limited base and continue to struggle for relevance. Moreover, if negotiations between Iran and the United States were to succeed—improving Iran’s international standing not only with the US but also with Europe and others—this would further undercut the opposition.

In your recent analysis, you warned about the dangers of a Kurdish incursion strategy encouraged from outside. How serious is the risk that attempts to weaponize Iran’s peripheries could simultaneously weaken the regime and undermine the prospects for a democratic, territorially coherent post-Islamic Republic order?

Dr. Arash Azizi: They are not even that likely to weaken the regime. Rather, they are likely to send Kurds, Baluch, and others—especially the Kurds—into a strategic dead end, where the Iranian regime would be able to amass significant forces and crush them in blood. Moreover, to the extent that such efforts succeed—if they manage to “liberate” any part of Iranian territory—they would risk triggering prolonged civil war and fragmentation and would be unlikely to improve the prospects for any kind of democratic transition in Iran.

Brute Repression Has Become the Regime’s Main Instrument of Rule

How should we understand the regime’s current repression strategy—including executions and intensified securitization—under wartime conditions? Does conflict give the state a renewed ideological cover for crushing dissent, or does it reveal the extent to which coercion has become the regime’s primary remaining instrument of governance?

Dr. Arash Azizi: The Islamic Republic is very much relying on brute repression, and it believes that it has beaten back the opposition to some extent. It has significantly mobilized its base, energizing it after the war, and is now using that opportunity to clean house and to display naked brutality toward its opponents. But this is not sustainable in the long term. You cannot bring thousands of people onto the streets every day, as it has been doing during the war, especially when economic problems arise—and they will. The economic problems already exist, but they will deepen into specific crises.

In that sense, the repressive apparatus will eventually encounter limits. At present, however, figures such as Mohseni Eje’i, the head of the judiciary, Ali Akbar Ahmadian, the National Security Advisor, and the police chief are key political actors whose entire portfolios and profiles are rooted in judicial and security repression.

It may well be that those seeking to argue that Iran has changed and can offer a new social pact to its people would need to marginalize these figures—perhaps replace them, remove them from office, or constrain their power—in order to gain broader public support. At some point, the regime will need to expand its social base, and repression alone will not achieve that.

If Iran Overplays Hormuz, It Risks Alienating the Entire Region

The Strait of Hormuz has reemerged as both a military lever and a diplomatic bargaining chip. From the standpoint of regime survival, is Hormuz best understood as Tehran’s strongest deterrent asset, or as a dangerously costly instrument that internationalizes the conflict and narrows Iran’s room for political recovery?

Dr. Arash Azizi: Iran is not drunk on the power of using Hormuz. For many decades, it had threatened to close it, and now it has. It has obviously worked in a way: it has helped disrupt global trade. You could say it is the single most important element in the eyes of President Trump, and it is very clear that it is going to emerge as an important part of the negotiations.

At the same time, Trump has shown some openness to dealing over this issue, including the idea of using crypto as payment, and this may even be linked to some crypto companies that would be seen as favorable by the US. This shows that there are unprecedented aspects to the situation. At the same time, the European Union has strongly objected to Iran’s posture of wanting to claim tolls over the Hormuz Strait.

So, this is a new area. If Iran handles it well, it could gain recognition of its importance and control here, and perhaps even derive some financial benefits from it as part of its attempt to integrate into the region and gain recognition. If not, and if it overplays its hand, it will further alienate the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the broader international community, and at some point, perhaps even China and others will not be pleased if it continues to disrupt trade. So far, that has not been the case. China has been somewhat shielded from the war. It has strategic oil reserves, and Iran does allow some ships to pass, which can benefit China. But if this continues in the long term, it will become a liability.

Washington Wants an Interlocutor in Tehran More Than a Total Collapse

From a comparative and historical perspective, do the policies pursued by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu reflect a coherent long-term strategy aimed at restructuring Iran’s regional role, or do they risk generating unintended consequences such as regime hardening, regional fragmentation, or the empowerment of more radical actors within Iran’s security apparatus? In this context, how viable is externally induced regime change in Iran today, and which outcomes appear most plausible?

Dr. Arash Azizi: Externally induced regime change has not quite worked yet. Of course, President Trump claims that there is regime change, and that there has been important change within the regime, but it is still very much the same regime. Whether the strategy of the United States was for Khamenei to be replaced by Ghalibaf, I doubt that. It appears that their strategy was based on the hope that there could be some sort of capitulation or collapse of the regime—something of that sort—which did not occur.

The Israelis have a more long-term view, and also a more contingent one. By this I mean they were satisfied with some of the military degradations. They would have welcomed a national uprising to bring down the regime, but they were not necessarily relying on it. They may also try to activate elements inside Iran in the future, hoping that the post-war period will provide an opportunity to facilitate the regime’s fall. So, they maintain a longer-term, and as I said, more contingent perspective.

Ultimately, the United States, under President Trump, wants to engage with Iran and incorporate it into its regional security architecture—as a partner, or at least as an interlocutor. If Ghalibaf is willing to cooperate in certain ways, they would likely consider that a satisfactory outcome. Israel would be more cautious about such a development. However, if a deal with the United States includes the degradation of Iran’s nuclear program and the shipment of its enriched uranium abroad, Israel may also, perhaps reluctantly, come to view it as the least bad outcome.

Most Regional Powers Want Iran Contained, Not Broken

Iran-US war. — Photo: Pavel Kusmartsev / Dreamstime.

Regional actors are recalibrating in real time as the war disrupts energy markets and threatens wider escalation. How do you see Gulf monarchies, Turkey, and Russia interpreting a weakened but still dangerous Iran: as a partner to contain, an adversary to exploit, or a collapsing center whose instability could spill across the region?

Dr. Arash Azizi: Indeed, the countries you named are very different. Each of them has a distinct view of Iran. But let’s start with the GCC and Saudi Arabia. I think they would want an Iran that is contained, but not broken, and not driven into civil war. Not too weakened either, but contained and defined within a clear framework, so that it becomes less of a revolutionary, disruptive actor, less of a revisionist force, and more confined within its place.

Turkey would even more sympathetically prefer such a contained Iran that is also a partner, and one that could maintain its historic relationship with Turkey.

Russia is re-evaluating the importance of the Middle East in its strategy. At the moment, it has to deal with the fall of the Syrian regime, and it has been able to maintain a relationship with the new Syrian leadership. But, it is reassessing its Middle East policy and would be content to sustain relations with different regional actors, from Iran to Israel and others. I am not sure, however, that the Middle East occupies a central place in its broader strategic priorities.

Of course, one would be eager to see the work of scholars specializing in Iran and Russia–Middle East relations, such as Dr. Nikolay Kozhanov and others, who are better placed to offer a more precise prognosis of Russia’s evolving role.

The Most Plausible Outcome Is Transformation, Not Total Collapse

And finally, Dr. Azizi, looking ahead, which trajectory do you regard as most plausible: negotiated de-escalation with mutual guarantees, prolonged regional war, hardline consolidation under a narrower security elite, or a messy transition in which the Islamic Republic survives institutionally but loses much of its ideological and social coherence?

Dr. Arash Azizi: A few of these—a combination of several of these trajectories. I think the Islamic Republic will transform. It will lose its ideological coherence. I think we will see negotiated de-escalation. In due time, we are also likely to see Iran’s integration into the region and the opening of diplomatic ties with the United States, but this will occur alongside the persistence of a securitized state at the top.

That is my general prognosis. This outcome is more likely than a permanently mobilized, revolutionary, revisionist, ideological, North Korea-like state in Iran. That scenario remains less probable.

It is much more likely that Iran—the new Iran—will be more cynical but also more pragmatic and technocratic, and that it will attempt to undergo post-war reconstruction. And by post-war, I do not mean only the recent conflict, but also the longer period shaped by sanctions and Iran’s shadow war with the United States and Israel. I therefore expect the next phase to be one of economic development and reconstruction for Iran.

Prof. Berman: Democratic Backsliding Is Neither Sudden nor Surprising

April 8, 2026

by ECPS_admin Authoritarianism Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

In an interview with the ECPS, Sheri Berman challenges dominant crisis narratives by arguing that democratic backsliding is “neither unexpected nor, in many cases, recent in origin.” Situating current turbulence within long-term structural and historical trajectories, she emphasizes that democratic instability reflects the enduring difficulty of building and sustaining democratic institutions. Critiquing post–Cold War optimism, she characterizes today’s moment as “a kind of natural correction” to overly teleological expectations. Berman further conceptualizes populism as both symptom and driver of democratic dysfunction, rooted in representation gaps, economic insecurity, and institutional decay—dynamics that continue to reshape both domestic politics and the global liberal order.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Sheri Berman, Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University, argues that contemporary democratic erosion should not be understood as an abrupt rupture or an unprecedented crisis, but rather as the outcome of deeper structural, historical, and institutional processes long in the making.

At a time when democratic backsliding, populist mobilization, and institutional erosion are reshaping political landscapes across regions, Professor Berman’s intervention directly challenges prevailing interpretations that frame democracy’s troubles as sudden or exceptional. Instead, she insists that the current conjuncture must be situated within longer-term transformations affecting political representation, institutional trust, and the social foundations of democratic governance. As she puts it, these developments are “neither unexpected nor, in many cases, recent in origin.”

At the center of her argument lies a powerful critique of post–Cold War democratic optimism. The expansion of democracy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries fostered what she identifies as overly teleological assumptions about liberal democracy’s inevitability. Yet, drawing on historical patterns of democratic “waves” and their inevitable reversals, she emphasizes that “building stable, well-functioning democracies is extraordinarily difficult.” What many interpreted as linear progress was, in fact, always vulnerable to reversal. In this sense, today’s turbulence is best understood as “a kind of natural correction” to earlier expectations.

A central analytical contribution of Professor Berman’s framework is her insistence that populism should be understood simultaneously as symptom and driver. It reflects deep dissatisfaction with political institutions and representation—citizens do not support anti-establishment actors unless they believe existing systems are failing them. At the same time, once in power, populists can intensify polarization and further undermine democratic norms. As she notes, while populism begins as “a symptom of democratic dissatisfaction,” it can also “actively deepen the erosion of support for democracy” once it acquires political authority.

This dual perspective is closely tied to her emphasis on structural transformations, particularly the emergence of representation gaps and the long-term consequences of neoliberal economic change. Rising inequality, economic insecurity, and technological disruption—alongside cultural tensions around identity and migration—have combined to produce a multifaceted crisis of democratic legitimacy. Importantly, these forces do not operate in isolation but reinforce one another, generating a political environment marked by both widespread dissatisfaction and a striking absence of coherent ideological alternatives.

Extending her analysis to the global level, Professor Berman offers a sobering assessment of the liberal international order. In one of her most striking remarks, she observes that “the American-led international order, at least for now, is pretty much dead.” Yet even here, she resists simplistic explanations: the disruptive impact of Trumpism, she argues, reflects not only leadership choices but also preexisting structural vulnerabilities within both American democracy and the broader international system.

Taken together, Professor Berman’s reflections offer a historically grounded and analytically nuanced account of democratic decline. Rather than treating the present as an anomaly, her assessments invite a deeper reckoning with the long-term political, economic, and institutional dynamics that have made contemporary democratic backsliding both possible—and, in many respects, predictable.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Sheri Berman, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

From Democratic Waves to Undertows

Berlin Wall. — Two rows of stones embedded in Berlin’s streets mark the former path of the wall dividing East and West Berlin. Photo: Ine Beerten / Dreamstime.

Professor Berman, welcome. In your recently published article “Democracy’s Troubles Should Be No Surprise,” you argue that current democratic backsliding reflects long-term structural and historical dynamics rather than a sudden rupture. In light of ongoing crises, how does this perspective challenge prevailing “crisis narratives” that frame democratic decline as unexpected or recent?

Professor Sheri Berman: I would say that the most obvious way is that these developments are neither unexpected nor, in many cases, recent in origin. Let me begin by differentiating between two types of cases. The first involves backsliding in recently transitioned countries. By this, I mean those that moved from authoritarianism to democracy during what we now refer to as the third wave—that is, the large set of countries that democratized during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These are relatively recent transitions, meaning that democracy in these contexts is still comparatively young.

Then we have a second set of countries—those with long-standing democracies, including the country I am currently in, which is at the forefront of this not very auspicious group—where we have also seen significant democratic problems, even democratic backsliding.

It is important to distinguish between these two types of cases because the nature and causes of backsliding in recent versus more established democracies differ. However, in neither set of cases should these developments be considered surprising.

Let me explain why. With regard to recent cases, when we look back at history and examine previous democratic waves—such as those following the First and Second World Wars in the 20th century, as well as in Europe in 1848—we see that all of them were followed by undertows. This is precisely why we use the term “wave”: every wave has an undertow, referring to the failure or reversal of some of these new democratic experiments. Thus, the very concept of a wave should have reminded scholars and observers that such reversals are to be expected.

This is not simply a matter of history repeating itself; there is a causal logic at work. Building stable, well-functioning democracies is extraordinarily difficult. While it may seem that the hardest task is removing an authoritarian regime—and that is indeed difficult—it is, in fact, even harder to construct a stable democracy afterward.

We can observe this in the historical record: there are far more examples of democratic transitions than of successful democratic consolidations. Therefore, we should have anticipated that many countries undergoing transitions during the third wave would struggle or fail to consolidate democracy. This should not have come as a surprise.

What is more unusual—and what we were less theoretically and historically prepared for—is the extent of the problems now facing long-established democracies such as the United States. These countries were long considered “consolidated,” a term implying that they were stable and secure. That assumption has proven incorrect.

In my recent article in the Journal of Democracy, I outline some of the reasons for this. I argue that if we had paid closer attention to the social and economic foundations upon which scholars believed democracy rested, we would have seen that these foundations had been eroding for quite some time. As a result, the institutional weaknesses and political dissatisfaction currently affecting long-established democracies should not be regarded as particularly surprising.

Today’s Democratic Turbulence as a Correction, not a Collapse

Your work suggests that earlier waves of democratic optimism—especially after the Cold War—rested on overly teleological assumptions about liberal democracy’s inevitability. To what extent is today’s turbulence, including rising geopolitical conflict and democratic polarization, better understood as a correction of those expectations rather than a systemic breakdown?

Professor Sheri Berman: They are definitely a correction of those earlier, overly optimistic expectations. The advantage of being a scholar is that you get to study both history and contemporary events. Anyone familiar with the history of democracy would have understood, based on previous democratic waves, that the idea that all the countries transitioning in the late 20th and early 21st centuries would, within a generation or two, become something like Sweden was clearly unrealistic.

At the same time, the optimism is understandable. The late 20th century was, in many ways, a remarkable period. In some respects, I wish we were still living in it. It is better to be surrounded by optimism than by pessimism, which is now quite pervasive, particularly across the West. But while that optimism reflected genuine democratic progress and the expansion of freedom and liberty in formerly authoritarian societies, it was also bound to fade.

So, on one level, what we are experiencing today is a kind of natural correction. The specific trajectories—how newer democracies have backslid or how older democracies are encountering difficulties—are hard to predict in detail. But the broader shift away from the extraordinary optimism of the late 20th century—the belief that liberal democracy would not only succeed in the short term but also consolidate over the long term, bringing freedom and prosperity to all parts of the globe, even those not yet reached in that period—was always likely to be followed by significant disappointment. Anyone with a solid understanding of history, and of what it actually takes to make democracy work, should have recognized that.

Populism as Both Symptom and Accelerator of Democratic Decay

Labour Day celebrations at Old Town Square in Prague on May 1, 2017, featuring a banner depicting democracy as a leaf eaten by caterpillars labeled Putin, Kaczyński, Orbán, Babiš, Trump, and Fico.
Photo: Jolanta Wojcicka.

You have famously argued that populism is a symptom rather than a cause of democratic dysfunction. In the current conjuncture—marked by inflation, migration pressures, and governance crises—how should scholars distinguish between populism as a reactive phenomenon and as an active driver of democratic erosion?

Professor Sheri Berman: I think populism is both of those things, as you suggest. It is definitely a symptom. At the same time, once populist parties or politicians gain a certain degree of power, they acquire the ability to intensify dissatisfaction, polarization, and related dynamics. Let me unpack that a bit. Populism is a symptom in the sense that people will not vote for anti-establishment parties if they believe the establishment—that is, existing mainstream parties and political institutions—is doing a good job. That is simply a truism.

So, when politicians and parties begin to gain support by criticizing existing parties, politicians, and institutions as corrupt, ineffective, or unrepresentative, they are doing so because a significant portion of the population believes this to be true. In that sense, such parties should be understood as a symptom of dissatisfaction among a not insignificant number of citizens with the establishment and the existing order. They are, as you noted, clear indicators of democratic dysfunction.

However, once these actors begin to gain power—once they have a voice within the system, participate regularly in the political process, and perhaps even enter government or coalitions—they can further deepen this dissatisfaction. The most obvious way they do so, though not the only one, is through rhetoric. By persistently portraying the system as corrupt, demonizing opponents, and framing both rival politicians and voters not merely as people with different policy preferences but as actors opposed to the common good—people who do not have your best interests at heart or who would threaten you if they gained power—they amplify polarization and democratic discontent.

This dynamic operates alongside the policies that populists implement when in power, which, as numerous studies show, are often counterproductive. Thus, while populism originates as a symptom of democratic dissatisfaction, it can also actively deepen the erosion of support for democracy and broaden dissatisfaction once it gains voice and power within the system.

When Mainstream Parties Drift, Populists Fill the Void

How does this “symptom” framework reshape our understanding of the rise of the populist radical right in Europe and Trumpism in the United States, particularly in relation to declining trust in institutions and widening representation gaps?

Professor Sheri Berman: This is another way of getting at the same issue. It is absolutely correct for both scholars and concerned citizens to view populist parties—on both the left and the right—and actors like Trump as drivers of polarization and potential undermining of democratic institutions. However, if we fail to recognize that they are also symptoms of widespread dissatisfaction, frustration, and discontent with existing parties and political institutions, then we will never be able to, so to speak, “solve” the problem of populism.

You mentioned representation gaps, which I and many other scholars have examined closely. If we look at Europe—since this is an ECPS interview—there is no doubt that establishment parties, both center-left and center-right, have developed significant representation gaps, even with their own voters, on key issues. Center-left parties, for instance, moved away from their traditional, broadly defined left-wing economic profile in the late 1990s, which alienated many of their former working-class and otherwise disadvantaged supporters.

At the same time, both center-left and center-right parties drifted away from voters more broadly on a range of social and cultural issues, most notably immigration in the European context. Studies of party positions in the early 21st century show that these parties were often quite distant from the preferences of the median voter on this issue.

As a result, they opened up political space not only for new or challenger parties to advance positions that mainstream parties had effectively abandoned, but also for the perception to take hold that these established parties had lost either the willingness or the capacity to represent voters’ preferences.

Beyond Monocausal Explanations: The Complex Roots of Populism

In your review of populism’s causes, you emphasize the limits of monocausal explanations. In today’s context of digital campaigning, algorithmic amplification, and economic insecurity, how should we conceptualize the interaction between demand-side grievances and supply-side political entrepreneurship?

Professor Sheri Berman: This is a difficult issue, sometimes more so for scholars than for concerned citizens. When people look around today, in what feels like a world of pervasive pessimism, they see a wide range of problems. If you were to ask the proverbial man or woman on the street why Trump has been so popular, or why he was able to get elected twice, they would likely point to broad economic grievances—a sense that the economy is not doing well, that people’s futures are uncertain, and that they are worried about their children’s prospects. They might also point to perceived breakdown and dysfunction in their communities, concerns about illegal immigration and uncontrolled borders, anxieties about tech companies being out of control, and social media “frying” their children’s brains while making everyone more polarized and angrier.

In other words, the average person intuitively understands that multiple factors are contributing to dissatisfaction with the existing order and, in turn, feeding into populism. Scholars, however, tend to look for a single explanatory variable—an independent variable that allows for a clear causal account. The difficulty is that the world we are dealing with is simply too complex for such simplification.

There are clearly many forces driving the current moment, including support for populism and, more broadly, the democratic dissatisfaction and dysfunction we see today. These include significant economic challenges; the serious consequences of rapid demographic change in American and European societies, often—though not exclusively—linked to unprecedented levels of immigration; and, as you noted, technological transformations such as automation, social media, and now AI.

All of these are substantial challenges, and it would be difficult for any party or government to address them effectively. While one can imagine more effective responses than those we have seen, these pressures are nonetheless real and complex. They are shaping the current conjuncture, particularly in the West.

Democratic Erosion as the Product of Both Agency and Structural Decay

Figure from the V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026.

Given your skepticism toward rigid structure-versus-agency dichotomies, how can we better theorize elite responsibility in democratic backsliding—especially in cases where political leaders actively challenge electoral norms or judicial independence—without neglecting broader structural transformations?

Professor Sheri Berman: There is absolutely no doubt that we need, as both scholars and citizens, to focus closely on political actors who are playing fast and loose with the democratic rules of the game. If leaders pack or ignore the judiciary, sideline the legislative branch, or undermine the independence of civil society and the media, these are clear causes and drivers of democratic backsliding, and they deserve sustained attention.

Political actors who actively seek to undermine democracy are, therefore, a legitimate focus of scholarly analysis. We need to understand the processes of democratic erosion carried out by populist, illiberal, and anti-democratic politicians and parties. Citizens, too, should remain attentive to these developments, since democracy is what enables societies to function—at least potentially—in a peaceful way, to resolve conflicts, and to address collective challenges.

That said, this is the agency side of the story: the actors who are undermining norms and institutions. But we also need to recognize, as we have discussed, that widespread frustration with establishment parties, political elites, and democratic institutions is equally important. In other words, we need a kind of two-level analysis, recognizing that the actions of populist politicians and parties often represent the final step in a broader causal chain.

Donald Trump, for example, sought political office earlier, in the 2000s and again in 2012, but received virtually no support. He rose to power in 2016 when the broader context had deteriorated, and even then, the damage he caused was more limited compared to what we have seen more recently. The ability of politicians and parties to undermine democracy depends not only on their agency, but also on the strength of the institutions and norms they confront. When those institutions and norms have weakened, actors are able to exercise their agency far more effectively.

We therefore need to understand not only the multi-causal nature of democratic backsliding, but also the broader structure–agency dynamic that underpins political life in general and is especially visible in processes of democratic erosion.

Democratic Collapse Begins Long Before It Becomes Visible

Building on your engagement with How Democracies Die, how do you assess the relative importance of formal institutional weakening versus the erosion of informal norms—such as mutual toleration—in highly polarized democracies like the United States?

Professor Sheri Berman: That is, in a way, a follow-on question to the previous one. How Democracies Die, the seminal book by Dan Ziblatt and Steve Levitsky, helped both political scientists and concerned citizens understand that we had reached a point where politicians like Donald Trump and others were beginning to undermine norms and institutions in ways that were pushing democracies toward backsliding, or even autocratization.

To my mind, what they were doing—tracing these developments historically and highlighting their dangers—was identifying the end stage of a broader process. We had reached a point where politicians and parties were coming to power and actively engaging in democratic erosion. At the same time, we are now at a stage where we understand much more about how this process unfolds. Scholars like Ziblatt, Levitsky, and many others have done an excellent job of tracing what is now often referred to as the authoritarian playbook: how democratic backsliding occurs. In the West, this typically does not happen through coups, as it often did in the past, but through a gradual process in which norms and institutions are weakened from within.

However, this should be understood as the endpoint of a longer causal process. It is a crucial stage—one at which intervention is still possible—but by the time a system reaches this point, its norms and institutions have already weakened to a degree that makes them vulnerable. In that sense, we are now moving beyond the dynamics highlighted in How Democracies Die toward a broader recognition that the processes described in that book are rooted in deeper structural conditions.

Gradual Backsliding Is Harder to Recognize—and Resist

Do you see today’s pattern of democratic erosion—often gradual, legalistic, and electorally legitimated—as fundamentally different from earlier authoritarian breakdowns, or as part of a longer historical continuum that includes past democratic crises?

Professor Sheri Berman: These questions are helpful because they build on one another. As I mentioned, and as many scholars have emphasized, coups and immediate ruptures—quick authoritarian takeovers—were quite common in the past. What we are experiencing in the West today, less so than in other parts of the world, is different. We still see coups and rapid democratic breakdowns elsewhere, but in the West, the kind of post–third wave decay we are discussing has largely occurred through what is often called the authoritarian playbook—through a much more gradual undermining and hollowing out of democracy from within.

This pattern is therefore more common today, particularly in the West, than what we have seen historically. In a way, this also makes it more difficult to respond effectively, because there is often debate about how serious the erosion really is. Are we truly facing democratic backsliding? Is any particular move decisive in either accelerating or stopping the process? This creates a kind of puzzle for both scholars and citizens.

Many people do not fully recognize what is happening until it is too late, and this dynamic also generates significant divisions within the small-d democratic camp. For example, in the United States, while most within the Democratic Party believe that Trump and the Republicans pose a threat to democracy, there are very different views about how to respond—what the appropriate strategy is and where the core problem lies.

By contrast, when there are troops in the streets, it is clear to everyone that the priority is to get them back into the barracks. In a situation like this, however, where erosion is gradual and incremental, it becomes much harder to generate consensus and to coalesce around an effective strategy for resisting democratic decline.

Why Economic Insecurity Amplifies Cultural Grievances

Dutch farmers protest against measures to reduce nitrogen emissions in the city centre of The Hague, the Netherlands, on June 28, 2022. Photo: Dreamstime.

Your work links democratic instability to the long-term consequences of neoliberal capitalism. In light of current cost-of-living crises and inequality debates, to what extent should contemporary populism be understood as a political economy crisis rather than a cultural backlash?

Professor Sheri Berman: I think it’s both. As we have discussed before, there are a number of causes. On the demand side, both economic challenges and the grievances they generate are absolutely crucial. But social and cultural grievances are also important, along with, as we noted earlier, technological changes that are increasing polarization and dissatisfaction in our societies. It is very difficult to understand the democratic dissatisfaction that is feeding populism—and, partially through populism, democratic decay—without looking at economic grievances. That is to say, without considering rising inequality, growing insecurity, and disruptions stemming from automation, trade, and, potentially in the not-too-distant future, AI.

These are all factors creating a great deal of dissatisfaction among citizens. In turn, we know from strong scholarship that in such contexts it becomes much easier to increase the salience of social and cultural grievances, which are also central to contemporary democratic dysfunction. It becomes easier to direct attention to the perceived downsides of immigration when people believe that immigrants may be taking their jobs or using scarce public resources. Why, they might ask, should their tax money go toward housing for immigrants when there is not enough public housing for them? Why should they support a welfare state that can barely respond to their own needs, rather than helping those who have come from outside? These dynamics are therefore very difficult to disentangle, and they feed off each other in deeply pernicious ways.

From Grand Ideologies to Fragmented Discontent

You describe ideological transformation as a two-stage process requiring both the de-legitimation of existing paradigms and the emergence of alternatives. Are we currently in an “interregnum” where dissatisfaction is high but coherent ideological replacements—whether on the left or right—remain underdeveloped?

Professor Sheri Berman: I would say that this is indeed true. Part of this is that, as a historically minded social scientist, when I look back at previous eras of ideological ferment—the 1930s, for instance, the interwar period, or even the post-war period—we had real ideological alternatives. In the interwar period, we had fascism, National Socialism, and communism. These were ideologies—entire Weltanschauungen, or worldviews. They were not only opposed to liberal democracy—both clearly were—but also aspired to remake society and the economy.

What we have today are rather grievance-based movements on both the right and the left that share some similarities with their predecessors. On the left, we see anti-capitalist, anti-elite rhetoric, often accompanied by a degree of illiberalism. On the right, we see strong elements of nativism, xenophobia, and racism, as part of a broader illiberal backlash, along with, in some sectors, a kind of idealization of the past—the idea that society can return to a more traditional, often implicitly Christian, social order.

But these currents are much more inchoate than their predecessors. They draw on bits and pieces of earlier ideologies without the same coherence or power. I would also say they are more negative than positive on both the left and the right. They consist largely of grievances that have been brought together: dissatisfaction with capitalism on the left, anger about geopolitical issues such as Israel and Gaza, and on the right, resentment toward social change and elites.

It is important to remember, however unattractive it may seem to us now, that communism, fascism, and National Socialism also offered what I would carefully call positive visions. They articulated a sense of what a new future would look like. They did not only seek to destroy the old order but to create something new. I do not see that today.

That does not mean that these contemporary movements are not dangerous—they are, in many ways, very dangerous—but we are not dealing with the same kind of ideological conflict that characterized what Eric Hobsbawm and others have called the ideological twentieth century.

Why Exclusion of Populists Becomes Impossible

How does your framework help explain the persistence and normalization of far-right actors within democratic systems, even in relatively stable economies, and their increasing presence in mainstream coalition politics?

Professor Sheri Berman: To some degree, this is simply a result of their electoral success. It is very hard to keep out parties in proportional representation systems, as in Europe, that are getting 20–25% of the vote. The parties that have come to power in Europe have done so simply because they have won elections—not majorities, but enough that it is not possible to keep them out of power. In that sense, it is fairly straightforward to understand why they have gained the power and influence that they have. And it creates a number of knock-on effects, returning to the idea we discussed earlier about symptom and cause. If we look at a situation like the one that currently exists in Germany, the AfD is polling so high that it is almost impossible in many German states—and may very well soon be impossible at the national level—to put together a coalition government that does not include them.

You are therefore facing a situation in which the alternatives are either incoherent or minority governments, both of which have difficulty putting together coherent policy packages capable of solving society’s problems, thereby driving dissatisfaction further, or including in your coalition—especially in the German case, because the AfD is among the more radical right-wing parties in Europe today—a party that is clearly illiberal and potentially even anti-democratic.

This is a very difficult situation, simply from a mathematical perspective, in many of these countries. In other European countries, we have seen right-wing populists come to power, and, honestly, they have not had that much impact on democracy. We have had right-wing populists in power in the Netherlands, in Finland, and now, obviously, in Italy, and there, I would say that while they may be problematic in some ways, we have not seen the kind of democratic erosion that some predicted would occur.

So, you really have to look at these developments on a case-by-case basis. The AfD in Germany is something most observers are watching closely, because it is a much more radical right-wing party than its counterparts in places like the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, or even Italy.

Trumpism as a Symptom of Deep Structural Divisions

Donald Trump’s supporters wearing “In God We Trump” shirts at a rally in Bojangles’ Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, on March 2, 2020. Photo: Jeffrey Edwards.

In the case of Trumpism’s influence on US politics, should it be interpreted primarily as an expression of long-standing structural cleavages, or as the result of contingent elite strategies and institutional vulnerabilities?

Professor Sheri Berman: For me, Trump is very much a symptom. He has now caused a significant amount of democratic backsliding—an unprecedented amount, I would say—but there is simply no way to understand the Trump phenomenon without looking back, as I mentioned and as I discussed in the article you referenced at the beginning in the Journal of Democracy, at very deep structural problems in American society and the American economy.

There is no way to understand why people would, first, vote for him, and second, be so frustrated with the Democrats, without considering what are now decades of social decay and economic division. This is clearly a situation in which Trump was a symptom of underlying social, economic, and political problems and, once in power, has intensified all of the above—not only for the United States but for the rest of the world as well.

Trump and the Unraveling of a Fragile International System

Given your argument that democracy’s troubles are historically rooted, how should we interpret current claims about the “collapse” of the global liberal order—especially amid rising authoritarian powers and weakening multilateralism?

Professor Sheri Berman: That is downstream of many of the things we have been discussing here—most notably, but not exclusively, the rise of Donald Trump. Trump, as a key progenitor of democratic backsliding in the United States, has, since coming to power—particularly over the past year, but also since 2016—undermined democratic norms and institutions in a very significant way. He has also taken an axe to the liberal democratic order. But, again, that liberal democratic order was not particularly healthy beforehand.

I have used, in other writings—and I am sure others have as well—the idea of an immune system. If two people are standing in a train car and one has a compromised immune system, and someone coughs, that person might get sick, while the other simply leaves the train and continues with their life. The fact that Trump has been able to cause so much damage reflects the existence of significant structural weaknesses in the liberal democratic order to begin with.

This is a kind of iterative or cyclical process. At the same time, there is no doubt that the decay we have seen in the liberal democratic order over the past year, in particular, is very much the result of conscious choices made by the Trump administration—to increase divisions with allies, to attack institutions that had long been part of this order, and to form alliances with actors such as Russia that have been fundamentally opposed to it. All of these are clearly deliberate actions—agency, so to speak. But, again, his ability to come to power and to pursue this course reflects deeper structural weaknesses that he has been able to exploit.

Can Middle Powers Rebuild What US Leadership Abandoned?

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney attends a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Ukraine’s Independence Day in Kyiv, Ukraine on August 24, 2025. Photo: Vladyslav Musiienko / Dreamstime.

As transatlantic divergence becomes an observable reality—particularly under Trump’s renewed leadership—how should we interpret the effective “de-coupling” of the United States and Europe and its effect on the legitimacy and authority of international institutions? Does this fragmentation mark a structural erosion of the liberal international order, or the emergence of a more pluralized and contested system of governance with competing centers of norm-setting?

Professor Sheri Berman: I think it would be very hard to maintain, or to return to, some version of that liberal international order without American commitment and, alongside that, some kind of renewed alliance between the United States and Europe. I do not see that happening, even if Trump leaves, simply because at this point there is so much water under the bridge. If I were a European, even if a Democrat came to power in the next election, I would be very wary about hitching my horse to the United States, knowing that right around the corner there could come another version of Trump—Vance, Rubio, or someone similar. So, I think it is going to be very hard to recreate that, although I do think that if a Democrat comes to power, we will see some attempts to do so.

The alternative, as you mentioned, and as several people have been discussing—including Macron and Mark Carney in Canada—is to replace this American-led liberal international order with something new, potentially better, constructed by middle powers. My response to that is: more power to you. I hope you can do that. I think it would be good for those countries and for the globe. Historically, however, it is very difficult to construct an international order without some kind of hegemon, both pushing that project forward and willing to absorb some of the collective costs.

So, this is where we are right now. The American-led international order, at least for now, is pretty much dead. Whether middle powers can step in to patch things up enough to prevent further fragmentation remains to be seen. I hope they can, for the good not only of their own citizens but of the globe, but it concerns me greatly.

Rebuilding Representation as the Key to Democratic Stability

Finally, looking ahead, what are the most critical variables shaping democracy’s future in this context of geopolitical rivalry and domestic polarization: the renewal of representation, economic restructuring, or the restoration of democratic norms—and how might these interact to stabilize or further strain democratic systems?

Professor Sheri Berman: That is a very large question to end on. Let me say something broad and perhaps not particularly profound, which is that I actually think the domestic level is the key driver here. That is to say, the central challenge is figuring out how to get mainstream political parties—it does not necessarily have to be the old ones; again, some people may be fed up with social democratic, Christian democratic, and conservative parties—but parties that are committed to democracy need to figure out how to address, as we have discussed, the economic challenges their societies are facing, the social and cultural challenges they are confronting, and the technological changes that are driving so much disruption.

Can they do that? If they can, then we will see support for these anti-establishment, disruptive populist parties decline, and these political systems stabilize. I firmly believe that more stable democracies—not only in the West but also in other parts of the globe—will be in a much better position to address international challenges, whether civil wars, interstate wars, or climate change. They will also be better positioned to deal with international challenges and to recreate, as we discussed in the previous question, some form of viable international cooperation, including international institutions and organizations.

If we can reconstruct some degree of democratic stability, not just in the West but also elsewhere, the benefits would be significant. Turkey, for example, is a major actor and a bridge between the West and the Middle East. A stable, well-functioning democratic regime there would be a major boon, most importantly for Turkey’s own citizens, but also an important contribution to addressing a wide range of global challenges. So, again, I am hopeful that parties committed to liberal democracy can somehow manage to get their act together and become more effective and responsive to their citizens.

Assoc. Prof. Antal: Orbán’s Election Project Seeks Public Backing for Dictatorial Turn, Not Democratic Legitimacy

April 7, 2026

by ECPS_admin Authoritarianism Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Interviews

As Hungary approaches the April 12 elections, Viktor Orbán’s long-standing rule faces a critical test shaped by both domestic discontent and geopolitical realignments. In this interview, Associate Professor Attila Antal characterizes the regime as a “constitutional dictatorship,” arguing that the election is not about democratic legitimacy but about securing “public support for its own dictatorial turn.” He highlights how authoritarian legality, sustained through a “dual state” and permanent emergency governance, has hollowed out democratic competition. At the same time, the rise of Péter Magyar and mounting generational and material grievances signal growing resistance. Situated within broader transnational authoritarian networks, Hungary’s election emerges as both a domestic referendum and a geopolitical fault line for European democracy.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

As Hungary approaches its pivotal parliamentary elections on April 12, 2026, the country stands at a defining juncture in the trajectory of European populism. After more than a decade and a half of rule by Viktor Orbán, the electoral contest no longer centers merely on party competition, but on whether an entrenched authoritarian-populist regime—characterized by institutional asymmetries, constitutional engineering, and the continuous production of political enemies—can still be meaningfully challenged through democratic means. At the same time, the emergence of Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party has introduced new uncertainty into a system long sustained by what Attila Antal describes as a “hegemonic power bloc,” raising the stakes of what increasingly resembles a systemic referendum.

In this context, Attila Antal, Associate Professor at Eötvös Loránd University, offers a sobering interpretation of the current moment. In his view, the Orbán regime has evolved beyond conventional electoral authoritarianism into what he terms a “constitutional dictatorship,” where formal legality coexists with substantive domination. Most strikingly, Assoc. Prof. Antal argues that “the Orbán regime is not seeking democratic legitimacy in the 2026 elections, but rather public support for its own dictatorial turn.” This diagnosis reframes the election not as a mechanism of accountability, but as a plebiscitary instrument designed to consolidate power under conditions of managed legality.

Crucially, Assoc. Prof. Antal situates Hungary’s electoral moment within a broader geopolitical reconfiguration. He underscores that Orbán has increasingly treated foreign and European policy “as a kind of geopolitical playing field,” cultivating alliances with both Eastern and Western authoritarian actors. The alignment with figures such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin reflects not only ideological affinity but also strategic positioning within an emerging transnational authoritarian network. As Assoc. Prof. Antal notes, Hungary has come to function as a “Trojan horse” for Putinist influence within the European Union, transforming the election into “a European and Western geopolitical issue and interest.” This external dimension is mirrored internally by a deepening social cleavage, as segments of Hungarian society remain firmly oriented toward the West while the regime consolidates a pro-Russian political base.

This external dimension intersects with internal tensions, including growing social discontent and a generational divide that reflects what Assoc. Prof. Antal describes as “a very strong generational revolt against Orbán’s authoritarian populism.”

At the core of Assoc. Prof. Antal’s analysis is the concept of authoritarian law and the “dual state,” where a formally normative legal order coexists with a politically driven prerogative structure. Under prolonged states of emergency and rule by decree, Hungary has become, in his words, “a contemporary example of dual state,” raising profound questions about whether elections can still function as instruments of democratic alternation. The opposition’s strategy of contesting the regime “by its own rules” thus reflects a deeper dilemma: whether authoritarian systems can be dismantled through participation in the very institutional frameworks they have reshaped.

Assoc. Prof. Antal’s assessment is stark. The durability of Orbánism, he suggests, lies in its capacity to adapt, radicalize, and survive through escalating authoritarianism. As he warns, the regime “can only survive by becoming increasingly dictatorial,” a trajectory that poses not only a domestic challenge but “a grave danger to both Hungarian and European societies as a whole.”

Here is the edited version of our interview with Associate Professor Attila Antal, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

Geopolitics and Domestic Change Reshape Orbánism

From Left: Hungary PM Viktor Orban, Poland PM Beata Szydlo, Czech PM Bohuslav Sobotka and Slovakia PM Robert Fico pose prior their meeting in Prague on February 15, 2016.

Professor Antal, in your work you describe Hungarian authoritarian populism as a system that fuses political identity construction, executive aggrandizement, and the legal-institutional reorganization of power. In the 2026 campaign, do you see Orbánism still functioning as a hegemonic political project, or has it entered a phase of ideological exhaustion in which its capacity to define “the people” and monopolize popular sovereignty is beginning to weaken?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: This is a key issue for understanding the Orbán regime as a whole and the current situation. Indeed, Orbán has built an authoritarian regime in which the ruling parties have reigned as a kind of hegemonic center—or, to use Antonio Gramsci’s terminology, as a hegemonic power bloc. However, the transformation of the opposition has changed the situation and shaken this hegemonic project. This is, however, a complex situation: in recent years, Orbán had become so confident that he increasingly focused on geopolitics; more precisely, he treated foreign policy and European policy as a kind of geopolitical playing field, where he built power and political alliances with both Eastern and Western authoritarian regimes. It is no coincidence that the two most significant imperialist powers, Trump and Putin, have both assured Orbán of their support. So, I see the collapse of Orbán’s hegemonic project as only partially attributable to domestic political factors: we are witnessing that Orbán’s downfall has become a European and Western geopolitical issue and interest, and this resonates with the anger of Hungarian society, which, for the most part, remains oriented toward the West.

Enemy Narratives Persist but Face Social Limits

You have argued that authoritarian populism in Hungary relies on permanent enemy-production. In the current election, where Kyiv, Brussels, liberal elites, and domestic opponents are again being woven into a single antagonistic narrative, how should we understand this strategy: as a sign of discursive resilience, or as evidence that the regime has become trapped in repetitive forms of mobilization?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: The enemy creation of the Orbán regime is a highly complex story. There is no doubt that the constant creation of enemy images is one of the most prominent components of the authoritarian populist toolkit. Since 2010, the Orbán regime has operated with the following main enemy images: migrants, George Soros, civil society, Brussels, the gender politics, and the domestic political opposition.

From this perspective, 2022 marks a turning point, as Putin’s aggression required the construction of a new enemy image – an incredibly difficult task, given that the attacked Ukraine must be transformed into the new enemy. All of this is connected to the “Putinization” that has taken place within the Orbán regime. The propaganda and discursive framework are thus in place, yet creating this new enemy image also means that Orbán and his allies face the reality that a significant portion of Hungarian society is quite averse to Russians due to Hungarian history. At the same time, Orbán and his allies have succeeded in turning their own camp into a pro-Russian faction, which has resulted in an incredibly deep social cleavage.

Anti-Orbánism Unites a Fragmented Opposition

To what extent should the April 12 vote be interpreted not simply as a contest between Fidesz and Tisza, but as a referendum on whether a mature authoritarian-populist regime can still be electorally displaced despite media asymmetries, constitutional engineering, and patronage entrenchment?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: As I mentioned earlier, the Orbán regime itself and the new opposition forming against it can be understood within a geopolitical context. One could also say that, in many respects, the European Union has had enough of the Putinist influence that the Orbán regime represents as a “Trojan horse.” At the same time, this dissatisfaction is just as true of Hungarian society: at the moment, the opposition is held together by anti-Orbánism and the fact that the Orbán regime has seriously neglected governance and the basic needs of the Hungarian people. In this sense, the Hungarian election can indeed be interpreted as a referendum on the political system.

Dual State Logic Structures Political Competition

Your recent work on authoritarian law suggests that contemporary autocratic projects do not abolish legality so much as repurpose it. In the Hungarian case, how should we conceptualize the election itself: as a democratic mechanism still capable of producing alternation, or as a legally managed arena whose formal openness coexists with substantive authoritarian constraint?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: I think this is a very important question. When I analyzed the legal system of the Orbán regime, I drew on the “dual state” approach developed by Ernst Fraenkel, who studied the nature of National Socialist law in the interwar period. In this authoritarian state, there exists a legal system that is totally influenced by politics (which Fraenkel calls the Prerogative State), while at the same time there is the Normative State, which is less defined by political influence.

The Orbán regime has effectively been operating under a state of emergency since 2015, and since 2022, the prime minister has essentially been governing by decree. So, we are facing a contemporary example of dual state.

In my view, there is a very strong dilemma: can this system be overthrown by accepting its rules of the game and participating in the election, or can we overthrow the system as a result of a collective popular decision and establish new democratic electoral rules? It now appears that the opposition side of Hungarian society is choosing the former solution, that is, it wants to defeat the authoritarian system by its own rules. At the same time, it is certain that in the event of a possible change of government, we will have to face the problem posed by authoritarian law.

Enemy Logic Embedded in Governance Structures

You have written about the “Constitutionalized Image of Enemy” embedded in the Hungarian Fundamental Law. How central is this constitutionalized enemy logic to the present campaign, especially in Orbán’s efforts to portray Tisza, Brussels, and Ukraine not as legitimate competitors, but as existential threats to the political community?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: The most recent amendment to the Fundamental Law took place in April 2025. The Hungarian Fundamental Law has indeed been used to create the prevailing political enemy images: certainly, with regard to migration and gender politics. I have termed this as the “Constitutionalized Image of the Enemy.” In this sense, therefore, the image of the enemy enshrined in the constitution did not play a role in the current campaign. At the same time, the 12th Amendment to the Fundamental Law established the Office for the Protection of National Sovereignty in December 2023, which played a very significant role in enabling the Orbán regime to essentially begin using state and bureaucratic tools against its political opponents and Hungarian society. In other words, the “dual state” mentioned earlier operates at the constitutional level as well.

Geopolitical Counterweight Shapes Opposition Rise

From the standpoint of your theory of authoritarian populism, is Péter Magyar best understood as a democratic challenger to Orbánism, or as a post-Fidesz corrective emerging from within the same political and ideological ecosystem?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: This is a very difficult question, and it would be too early to give any definitive answer at this stage. I would rather point out that the Hungarian election has a very strong geopolitical context. The Péter Magyar phenomenon and the European support structure behind it can also be understood as a geopolitical counterweight to Hungary’s shift toward Orbán and Putin. At the same time, there is no doubt that Orbán’s challenger was socialized within the Orbán regime and, in many respects, is attempting to correct the right-wing conservative politics that Orbán has betrayed. Here, however, it is worth noting once again that the vast camp behind the Tisza Party is far more complex and is currently held together by the constraints of the electoral system and anti-Orbánism.

Youth Revolt Meets Rural Entrenchment

Independent polling and current reporting suggest that younger voters are disproportionately aligning with Tisza, while Fidesz retains stronger support among older and more rural constituencies. Do you interpret this as a generational realignment against authoritarian populism, or merely as a contingent reaction to economic stagnation and elite scandal?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: This is also a key issue. There is no doubt that the authoritarian populism of the Orbán regime has, intentionally or not, created a generational and regional divide. A significant portion of rural and elderly Hungarian voters is far more susceptible to the enemy stereotypes and messages manufactured by the regime’s propaganda. Thus, there is a very strong generational revolt against Orbán’s authoritarian populism, particularly because Orbán is effectively blackmailing not only the EU but also Hungarian society: the former with constant vetoes, and the latter with constant threats of leaving the EU.

Middle-Class Erosion Fuels Political Backlash

Given your emphasis on the relationship between neoliberal restructuring and authoritarian populism, how important are material grievances—stagnant growth, inflation, deteriorating public services, and corruption fatigue—in weakening the regime’s capacity to maintain consent? Can economic deterioration disrupt a system whose legitimacy has long depended on symbolic conflict rather than policy performance?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: From a political-economic perspective, the Orbán regime was based on a class consensus in which the (upper) middle class and national big business formed an alliance. This was underpinned by pre-COVID-19 economic prosperity and massive amounts of EU funding. During this period of economic prosperity, however, a neoliberal state emerged that systematically dismantled public services, particularly in the healthcare and education sectors. When the polycrisis emerged (EU crises, pandemic, war), the dismantled Orbán state proved unable to handle the crisis: alongside the groups in the worst situations, the declining Hungarian middle class is the biggest loser of the Orbán regime. In other words, the rebellion against the Orbán regime is, in many respects, also of a material nature.

War Narrative Enables Democratic Suspension

How do you interpret Orbán’s continued “peace versus war” framing in light of your broader work on the politics of exception? Is this campaign discourse best seen as a contemporary form of emergency politics—one that converts geopolitical uncertainty into a justification for executive concentration and democratic suspension?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: As I mentioned, since 2022 the prime minister has essentially been governing by decree, encroaching even on areas of public policy where a state of emergency has no place. Meanwhile, political propaganda has constantly claimed that the Orbán regime is the only guarantee of peace. This has come to a head in the current campaign, with the Orbán machine conveying the message that the opposition is on the side of the Ukrainians and is dragging Hungary into the war. Governing through extraordinary measures is thus a political and communicative reframing: the Orbán regime has essentially suspended parliamentary democracy and portrayed the Ukrainian side (including the EU and the Hungarian opposition) as wanting war. I believe that this is not just some kind of fake news campaign, but the pure and frightening manifestation of an authoritarian state.

Sovereigntist Rhetoric Masks Strategic Dependence

Hungary’s pro-Russian posture has become a major campaign fault line. In your view, does Orbán’s Moscow-friendly stance still function as a coherent ideological expression of sovereigntist anti-liberalism, or is it increasingly becoming a liability as the war in Ukraine reshapes the moral and geopolitical boundaries of European politics?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: Orbán’s pro-Russian policy is a complex phenomenon. At least three aspects are worth highlighting. On the one hand, there is no doubt that, with regard to the international authoritarian right, there exists a kind of ideological coalition whose political-theoretical foundation is an anti-liberal conservative approach dating back to Carl Schmitt. Second, the Orbán regime has radically relinquished energy sovereignty in favor of Putinism. Third, there is also no doubt that Orbán and his regime are personally dependent on Putin’s system. Here, then, lies a radical contradiction: the Orbán regime, which is sovereignist at the level of propaganda, has deliberately renounced the sovereignty of the Hungarian state and is weakening European sovereignty in favor of Russia. The deeper implications of this can only be revealed after the election.

Militant Democracy as a Possible Path

You have shown how exceptional governance can become normalized. If Tisza were to win without a constitutional supermajority, would Hungary enter a phase of partial alternation without regime transformation—in other words, a situation in which a new government governs through institutions still structured by the old exception-centered order?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: I believe this is one of the main consequences of the dilemma I mentioned earlier: namely, how to dismantle an authoritarian system – either by adhering to its own rules or through more revolutionary means. If there is a change of government and a two-thirds majority is achieved, dismantling the authoritarian power of the Orbán regime will be a challenge. If, however, the change of government occurs with a simple majority, it may become inevitable to consider how the authoritarian system can be dismantled using the tools of militant democracy.

EU Influence and Domestic Revolt Intersect

What would a Tisza victory actually reveal about the Orbán system: that authoritarian-populist rule remains vulnerable to democratic challenge, or that only an insider-led revolt from within the regime’s broader political class can break such a system electorally?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: Based on what we’ve seen so far, I believe a potential victory for Tisza would have two implications. On the one hand, it would signal that the EU has had enough of Putinism directly influencing European politics. On the other hand, it would mean that authoritarian populism has become completely detached from social reality, and that Hungarian society has had enough of a political agenda built on constant hatemongering and the suspension of normality.

Authoritarian Consolidation Beyond Legitimacy

Conversely, if Fidesz were to retain power despite signs of economic strain, ideological repetition, corruption exposure, and opposition momentum, what would that tell us about the resilience of contemporary populist rule in Europe? Would it suggest that once authoritarian populism successfully constitutionalizes its power, elections alone become insufficient to dislodge it?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: I believe this is the most important issue of our time. Unfortunately, my grim assessment is that the Orbán regime is not seeking democratic legitimacy in the 2026 elections, but rather public support for its own dictatorial turn. I have long regarded the Orbán regime as a constitutional dictatorship, which means, on the one hand, that contemporary autocracies have a constitutional framework, and on the other hand, that certain segments of society have renounced democracy and accept the exercise of authoritarian power. Overall, therefore, the Orbán regime can only survive by becoming increasingly dictatorial, a trend that poses a grave danger to both Hungarian and European society as a whole.

Competing Visions of European Sovereignty

From the perspective of European integration, do you see this election as a struggle between two models of sovereignty: Orbán’s confrontational, anti-imperial, anti-Brussels sovereigntism and a more cooperative, rule-of-law-based claim to national interest that Tisza is trying to articulate? Or is that dichotomy too neat for the political realities of contemporary Hungary?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: First of all, the Orbán regime is indeed imperialist, and it pursues policies that serve Russian imperialist interests. The Hungarian election is crucial from the perspective of European integration, as the dilemma is whether there exists a European sovereignty that can be relied upon to stand up against authoritarian tendencies such as Trumpism and Putinism. I am committed to the idea, as Karl Loewenstein put it, that democracy must develop its own self-defense mechanisms and fight back – in our case, at both the member state and EU levels.

External Validation Meets Internal Resistance

Matryoshka dolls featuring images of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump displayed at a souvenir counter in Moscow on March 16, 2019. Photo: Shutterstock.

Hungary has become a reference point within transnational right-wing networks, and Orbán continues to attract symbolic support from US and European conservative actors. In analytical terms, how much does this external validation matter domestically? Does it strengthen the regime’s legitimacy, or does it mainly reinforce Orbán’s self-image as a global ideological entrepreneur?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: From the perspective of ideological and political networking, the Orbán regime truly acts as a mediator between Western and Eastern authoritarian tendencies. This is why organizing the European far right is of key importance to Orbán. All of this undoubtedly has an impact on his own camp. At the same time, Orbán’s status as a “global ideological entrepreneur” represents the very project against which the Hungarian opposition has been able to unite and become committed to a change of government.

De-capture vs. Persistence of Orbánism

Finally, through the lens of your work on authoritarian law and exceptional governance, what would be the most theoretically significant post-election question for scholars to watch: whether electoral alternation occurs, whether institutional de-capture proves possible, or whether the deeper legacy of Orbánism survives regardless of who forms the next government?

Associate Professor Attila Antal: This is also one of the most important dilemmas of our era from both a Hungarian and a European perspective, as the political and legal consequences of the Orbán regime are toxic to European integration as a whole. On the one hand, just as happened after World War II, we must once again grapple with the question of how to take democratic action against authoritarian legal and political systems. On the other hand, and even more importantly: we must finally prevent the distortion of liberal democracies toward authoritarianism not only through constitutional institutions but also through effective economic and cultural means. In my view, it is crucial to examine how global capitalism and neoliberalism have distorted liberal constitutionalism and how they have eroded the social foundations of democracies through austerity measures and the dismantling of welfare systems.

Assoc. Prof. Csehi: Hungary’s Election to Test the Resilience and Limits of Populist Rule in Europe

April 3, 2026

by ECPS_admin Authoritarianism Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Interviews

Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi argues that Hungary’s April 12 election represents a critical test of whether entrenched populist rule can be electorally challenged. While he notes that “it will definitely be a test of incumbency survival,” he emphasizes that deeper dynamics—“ideological adaptation, state resource asymmetries, and narrative control”—remain decisive. Assoc. Prof. Csehi highlights growing limits in Orbán’s populist discourse, which “has lost its novelty,” alongside shifting political conditions marked by economic grievances and the rise of the Tisza Party as a credible challenger. Yet, even in the event of electoral turnover, he cautions that deeply embedded institutional structures may persist, potentially leading to “a prolonged struggle over state capacity.” Hungary thus offers a crucial case for assessing the resilience and limits of populist governance in Europe.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Robert Csehi, Associate Professor and Program Director of the Political Science Doctoral Program at the Corvinus University of Budapest, offers a nuanced and theoretically grounded assessment of Hungary’s evolving political landscape on the eve of a pivotal electoral contest.

As Hungary approaches its parliamentary elections on April 12, 2026, the country stands at a critical juncture. After sixteen years of rule under Viktor Orbán, the election has come to signify more than routine democratic competition. It represents a broader test of whether entrenched populist governance—characterized by institutional consolidation, discursive dominance, and asymmetrical resource control—can be meaningfully challenged through electoral mechanisms. The campaign unfolds amid deep polarization, intensifying geopolitical tensions, and mounting concerns over democratic resilience, media pluralism, and institutional fairness. At the same time, the emergence of Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party has introduced a new dynamic into Hungary’s political competition.

Against this backdrop, Assoc. Prof. Csehi underscores that “it will definitely be a test of incumbency survival,” while emphasizing that the stakes extend beyond electoral turnover to questions of “ideological adaptation, state resource asymmetries, and narrative control.” In his view, the durability of Hungary’s populist system is no longer assured. He identifies emerging cracks within the governing discourse, noting that “the supply of the populist worldview… has become less creative” and “has lost its novelty,” with the government increasingly relying on repetitive narratives—particularly around the war in Ukraine—to sustain mobilization.

At the same time, structural shifts on both the supply and demand sides of politics are reshaping the electoral terrain. The rise of the Tisza Party, Assoc. Prof. Csehi observes, has created “a new channel for people to express their grievances,”while also reactivating political engagement at the grassroots level. Concurrently, worsening economic conditions have intensified public discontent, as “people’s everyday grievances are rising,” and the government finds it increasingly difficult to externalize responsibility for inflation, corruption, and declining public services.

Assoc. Prof. Csehi’s analysis situates Hungary within a broader comparative framework, highlighting the uncertain trajectory of mature populist regimes. While electoral defeat could mark “the end of the Orbán regime” in formal terms, he cautions that deeply embedded institutional structures may persist, generating “a prolonged struggle over state capacity and institutional de-capture.” Conversely, a renewed victory for Fidesz would signal that such regimes retain significant resilience, even under conditions of economic strain and ideological fatigue.

Ultimately, as Assoc. Prof. Csehi concludes, the Hungarian case offers a critical empirical test: whether “a mature, populist-authoritarian regime can still be changed… in an electoral process.” In this sense, Hungary’s 2026 election stands as a defining moment not only for the country itself, but for understanding the resilience—and limits—of populist rule across Europe.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Associate Professor Robert Csehi, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

Populist Discourse Losing Creativity

Fidesz, Soros. — Poster from political party Fidesz showing the opponents of Hungarian PM Viktor Orban surrounding billionaire philanthropist George Soros, Budapest, April 8, 2017.

Professor Csehi, welcome. Let me begin with the broader picture: In your scholarship, you argue that Hungarian populism has endured through the continuous reconstruction of “the people,” the redefinition of “the elite,” and the rearticulation of popular sovereignty. In the current campaign, do you still see this triadic logic operating effectively, or are its mobilizational limits beginning to emerge?

Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: I don’t think we do see some limitations to the effectiveness of this renewed populist discourse in Hungary. I think there are fundamentally three changes that actually challenge Orban’s effective populist discourse.

The first one is, in essence, that the supply of the populist worldview in the discourse has become less creative. It has lost its novelty. There were references to the war, for example, in Ukraine already in the 2022 elections—so four years ago. I mean, the war had just broken out, and they already used warmongering during that period. They pushed the campaign to the extreme in 2024 during the European parliamentary elections. They used essentially the same narrative, the same discourse. And they haven’t managed to really renew this discourse, and they keep talking about the same thing. They keep appealing to people’s fear of the war now. So, in comparison to previous elections, where every four years you had a new enemy and a new elite that was conspiring against Hungary and the government, we don’t really see that in 2026 compared to 2022 or 2024. So that’s one major change.

The second one obviously also affects, or concerns, the supply side of politics, and you already mentioned the rise of the opposition Tisza Party, which means there is actually a new channel for people to express their grievances and to mobilize their political demands behind a party which seems to have more legitimacy. It’s probably not the right word, but it resonates with people much better than the old opposition parties, which, on many grounds, have lost the trust of the people over the years—not only because they were ineffective, but also because they were involved in all sorts of scandals throughout the years. And now there is a new party which actually effectively challenges the government on a lot of issues and calls attention to many things that previously the old opposition, as we refer to it now, had not done. Plus, they really go down to the countryside, and they really do talk to people. They are engaging with the people and the electorate, and that makes a huge difference. So these are on the supply side, which are extremely relevant.

And then there is one demand-side feature which really has had a great effect. Since 2022, the Hungarian economy has not been doing very well. So, this has put a lot of things on the political agenda. People’s everyday grievances are rising, from inflation to public services, corruption, etc. It is not like Fidesz or Orban is able to cover these up anymore. We had skyrocketing inflation in the past few years, and it has become extremely difficult for the government to externalize these kinds of problems. And so people don’t shove it off anymore, like, “Oh, well, we’re still doing better no matter what the government does.” “Yeah, they might be corrupt, they might be wrong on certain policy issues, et cetera, et cetera, but we’re still better off than we were four years ago.” They don’t say that anymore. So, effectively, the economy plays a huge role in this entire story as well.

Election Tests Incumbency Survival

To what extent should the April 12 election be understood not merely as a contest between Fidesz and Tisza, but as a broader test of whether long-term populist incumbency can withstand mounting economic pressures, corruption fatigue, and shifting voter expectations?

Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: That’s a good question. It will definitely be a test of incumbency survival, in a sense, but, in the background, it is really about ideological adaptation, state resource asymmetries, and narrative control—namely, the extent to which these can still be maintained and used to hold power. I’m not sure to what extent these can actually withstand all the structural- and agency-based challenges that I’ve mentioned previously. So, it is going to be an interesting test from a political science perspective as well, to see whether they actually manage to survive or not, and to what extent a mature, populist-authoritarian regime can still be changed or won over in an electoral process. The jury is still out, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens afterwards.

EU Framed As Background Enemy

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister arrives for a meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels, Belgium on Dec. 13, 2019. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.

You have shown that Orbán’s Eurosceptic populism often adopts an anti-imperialist framing, portraying Brussels as an external elite constraining Hungarian sovereignty. How central is this narrative in the current campaign, and does it retain its resonance in a context where access to EU funds and economic stability are increasingly salient concerns?

Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: It’s a very important point in the elections. Not in terms of the EU being a central topic—by all means, that’s not the case. Really, Orbán’s campaign is focusing on the war in Ukraine. Still, they have managed to somehow link this up with the EU. They have had billboard campaigns showing Ursula von der Leyen and Manfred Weber together with Volodymyr Zelensky, suggesting that the EU is taking the money of Hungarians and channeling it to Ukraine and to President Zelensky. So, they try to mingle these things together, mix them, and bring in the EU as, again, this sort of background power that is mistaken and on the side of war.

They have populist, moralist, discursive division, where Orbán portrays himself as a pro-peace political actor, whereas everybody else who does not agree with him, by definition, becomes pro-war, even if it does not really make sense.

So, in a sense, the EU is still there; it is referenced as, once again, occupying a pro-war position. As I said previously, they try to repeat the same claims as they did in the 2024 European parliamentary elections—drawing these very fine lines between who is on the side of peace and who is on the side of war, and they clearly place Brussels and the EU on the side of the war. And as I said, it is not only about the war per se. They also try to refer to the financial side of it, bringing this back repeatedly—claiming that the EU is taking your money, holding back funds, and channeling them to Ukraine. So, they frame it as financing the war instead of supporting Hungarian people, etc.

So, it is not center stage—I would say it is still the sort of antagonistic relationship between Ukraine and Hungary at the moment—but they do try to bring this into the discussion: that the EU is somewhere in the background, conspiring and doing all sorts of shady and harmful things. And the reason why they do that is that over the past years they have managed to convert their electorate into the most Eurosceptic segment of the population. In comparison to all other party supporters—with the exception of Our Homeland, the far-right party—probably the most Eurosceptic electorate is behind Fidesz at the moment. So it is just natural that they also play those tunes for their voters.

Tisza Promises Policy Reset

From the perspective of European integration, do you interpret this election as a confrontation between two competing models of EU membership—one sovereigntist and illiberal, the other oriented toward re-integration through rule-of-law compliance and institutional alignment?

Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: Yes and no. On the one hand, I would agree that Orban has had a very particular idea of defending sovereignty in the EU. He has thought that the defense of national sovereignty and national interest could only be pursued in a confrontational way. You have to use the channels of the European Council or the Council itself to block things and not really participate in negotiations and deliberations.

There have been multiple occasions where Orban was not present—they sent him out to have a coffee. From research, we know that Council negotiations have shifted somewhat in recent years. What we would describe as a kind of de-Europeanization in the Hungarian approach to EU affairs is what has occurred on multiple fronts.

Compared to that, Tisza and Magyar’s approach are definitely different from Orban’s on some issues. You mentioned the rule of law. Tisza claims that it will join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office as soon as it is in government. It also promises to resolve some of these rule-of-law issues and to bring back the funds that have been frozen under Orban’s regime. So, we can expect a return to more normal relations with the EU. This promise is also supported by the personnel envisioned to lead foreign and European affairs within the party.

That said, I say yes and no because I do think that Tisza also supports a model of European integration based on strengthening intergovernmental relations, as opposed to a supranational takeover in multiple areas. We have seen this time and again. They have run into conflicts on different policy measures, even within the European Parliament and within their own faction in the European People’s Party.

So, on the one hand, there is likely to be an effort to restore relations and the credibility of Hungary as a partner within the EU. On the other hand, there will be areas where they confront and challenge the direction of European policy. It is not going to be a return to the old days where Hungarian representatives simply nodded to everything the European Union demanded from the government. Rather, it will involve a stronger representation of national interests, but in a more cooperative—as opposed to confrontational—manner than Orban has pursued.

Turnover Won’t End Orbánism

If Péter Magyar and the Tisza party were to win, would that necessarily signify the end of the Orbán era, or has Orbánism become sufficiently institutionalized within the state, the media landscape, and patronage networks to persist beyond electoral turnover?

Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: The easy answer, obviously, is that electorally this would be the end of the Orbán regime, at least temporarily. But when we really look into the structural features, I would say no. This will, in fact, be a very interesting period to study, to see how deep the roots of the regime actually went and grew, and how these roots actually act and behave under a new government. I would say there is fundamentally a deeper institutional structure here, which could make the life of the new government miserable on multiple accounts—from financial oversight to judicial oversight, etc. There are many aspects where the government has to govern effectively with its hands tied behind its back. So it is going to be difficult.

I would imagine that this will be something like a prolonged struggle over state capacity and institutional de-capture. They will try to take back some of these institutions with whatever legal means there are. Nevertheless, the government will have greater room for maneuver in terms of policies in many areas, and I do think that they can make changes that could have a positive outcome or resonance with the public.

And one thing we cannot really exclude as a possibility—again, the poll numbers are all over the place—but most independent pollsters show a 15 to even 20 percentage point lead for the opposition party, which could effectively also mean that Tisza would gain a two-thirds, or constitutional, majority. That would be a completely different ballgame, because with that, they could de-capture those institutions more easily. To what extent this would be done in a democratic way, or whether they would repeat something similar to what we have seen during the Fidesz era, I am not sure. I am just saying that there might be an opportunity for the new government to actually de-root the system, provided that they have a constitutional majority.

No Majority, No Regime Change

Some observers suggest that even a Tisza-led government could face significant institutional constraints stemming from constitutional engineering and entrenched loyalist networks. How should we conceptualize the possibility of electoral alternation without substantive regime transformation?

Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: This goes in line with my previous answer. Without a constitutional majority, what you will see is that there is likely to be governmental turnover, but there is not going to be a regime transformation. And then, there are different scenarios as to what will happen. If there is a constitutional majority, then we see a re-orientation or a re-democratization. If there is only governmental turnover without real regime transformation, what kind of room for maneuver does the new government have?

How do we conceptualize this? So this is definitely going to be an interesting case to analyze in terms of re-democratization attempts—whether they actually go deep or whether they are just going to hover at the surface, which we have seen before. We even had a study on this, on local governments, examining how they try to re-democratize even under a populist authoritarian regime. We might actually see something of this sort at the national level. But once again, the possible measures might be more confined if there is only a simple majority in Parliament, and that would definitely limit the options of the next government.

Loyalty And Shielding Protect Fidesz

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gives a speech to convince his respondents in Szeged on March 4, 2014.

Your work on populist resilience to corruption highlights how such regimes adapt to and withstand scandal. In Hungary today, which mechanisms—discursive reframing, institutional shielding, or partisan loyalty—appear most crucial in sustaining support for Fidesz?

Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: Given that the regime has reached its peak and is really a mature system, from a populist regime perspective, I would say, in line with our theoretical frame, that it is mostly the institutional shielding and the partisan loyalty that dominate at the moment. Let me give you an example, which is essentially a reflection of both. There is this huge scandal about the former governor of the National Bank (György Matolcsy) and his son. There is a scandal going around that hundreds of billions of forints were actually channeled out into private funds—essentially, they were just paid out to… we do not even necessarily know whom. We do know that the governor’s son really benefited from this. And what is happening now is that there is practically no police investigation going on, or, if there is, it is extremely slow. We do not really know what is happening. In the meantime, we already know that, for example, the governor’s son has tried to, or has already started to, ship his luxury car collection to Dubai, and these kinds of things.

So wealth is going out, and in the meantime, nothing is really happening. And nobody is really talking about the Matolcsy family, etc. So there is this partisan loyalty going on, and there is this institutional shielding, which does not allow these institutions to actually do anything about it. There is no prosecution going on. There might be some prosecution, but we do not really know why it is so limited, why it is so slow, why it is kept secret, and why they basically let the governor’s son do anything he pleases, given the fact that we know that hundreds of billions of forints were, in a sense, privatized. So, I do think that these two mechanisms are the most dominant ones.

Discursively, they do not even really try anymore. It is more like, “Well, we have nothing to do with the issue—let the institutions run their course,” but the institutions are not doing anything. So, it is just a sort of bogus narrative behind it.

What has really changed, on the other hand, is Péter Magyar’s rise in politics, because he is essentially an insider. And when he appeared, that was one of his biggest assets in politics, since this insider status was extremely relevant. When he talks about corruption claims against the government, it seems to mobilize anger much more effectively. This is what really matters here, because, on many issues, anger is a very strong motivational factor in politics, including in unseating incumbent governments. This is absolutely not a good feeling, I have to say, but it does trigger mobilization, and mobilization is key, obviously.

Peace Narrative Masks Polarization

The campaign has been strongly shaped by geopolitical narratives, particularly regarding Russia and Ukraine. Has Orbán’s positioning as a “peace-oriented” leader maintained its electoral appeal, or is his perceived proximity to Moscow becoming a source of political vulnerability?

Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: That’s not an easy question to answer. First of all, his portrayal of himself as “peace-oriented” is really just buying into his populist discourse of being a pro-peace person, while everybody else who does not agree with him is, by definition, pro-war. So, once again, you have this Manichean, moralistic kind of division within politics that populists are very fond of. Essentially, this type of division turns every political discussion and agenda point into a life-or-death situation. Here, it is literally portrayed as such: if we do not want this, then the next day, everybody is sent to the Ukrainian front and people will die there.

But I would not buy into this “peace-oriented leader” narrative at all. There is a columnist in one of the Hungarian weeklies who consistently describes Orbán as aggressor-oriented, and I think that is probably a better portrayal of what he actually is—without taking any normative position. If you ask what he means by peace, the government does not really have a clear idea of what peace would entail or how it should be achieved. In that sense, the aggressor-oriented description may be more accurate.

As for whether this narrative still works, I think it holds up quite well among the core electorate. We know from sociological and political studies that most of Orbán’s supporters come from the countryside, with lower levels of education and generally more limited economic means. Among these groups, the message still resonates. Talking about the war—through fearmongering, warmongering, and similar appeals—continues to be effective.

What they have also done quite effectively, and this is why they remain competitive, is to turn uncertainty around the war into anger. Studies on populism show that fear is not the main driver; anger is. Fear reflects uncertainty, whereas anger is directed—it needs a target. They have managed to convert uncertainty and fear into anger.

To some extent, President Zelensky also inadvertently contributed to this dynamic. A particular quote was picked up and amplified by pro-government media, portraying it as a threat to Orbán. This helped channel anger toward Zelensky and Ukraine.

They also continue to layer in additional discursive elements, such as claims that “they are taking your money.” Recently, the prime minister held town hall meetings across the country, where he accused protesters of siding with Ukraine and attempting to divert Hungarian resources there. This reflects a level of political rhetoric that is, frankly, quite unprecedented. Similarly, incidents such as damage to the Druzhba gas pipeline have been reframed as evidence that Ukraine is withholding Hungary’s energy supplies and weaponizing resources. This contributes to a constant, artificially orchestrated sense of anger directed at Ukraine. In that sense, the narrative still resonates with certain segments. There is some degree of creativity, but in terms of the broader narrative, they have not significantly shifted away from the war-centered discourse seen in 2022 and 2024.

Regarding Trump and Moscow, the situation is more complicated. Trump’s own actions—particularly the wars associated with his leadership—no longer support the earlier framing of him as a “pro-peace” figure. As a result, the government has largely stopped emphasizing this aspect and instead downplays it. Attempts to reinterpret such developments rhetorically have not been particularly convincing.

As for relations with Moscow, recent leaks concerning communications between Hungarian and Russian officials have raised questions. Depending on interpretation, these either reflect pragmatic diplomacy or suggest alignment with Russian interests, including the sharing of sensitive information.

Overall, both the Trump factor and the Russian connection appear to increase the government’s political vulnerability.

Trump Effect Mostly Symbolic

US President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán arrive for a working dinner at the NATO Summit in Brussels, Belgium on July 11, 2018. Photo: Gints Ivuskans / Dreamstime.

Hungary has long been embedded in a broader transnational network of right-wing populist actors. How significant is the “Trump effect” and Musk’s influence in this election, both in terms of symbolic validation and in reinforcing Orbán’s model of governance?

Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: I think it is really symbolic. I am not sure that, in terms of governance features, there is much there. Quite the reverse, I would say. It is really some American governors and high-ranking politicians who keep talking about copying this or that from Orbán, when it comes to, for example, dealing with LGBTQ issues in their states, etc. So, Orbán tries to position himself—and to some extent successfully—as a governance genius who should and could be copied by some of these international partners.

On the other hand, the extent to which they actually contribute to Orbán’s success is largely symbolic. As I said, the campaign is mainly about the war at this moment, so it is not really a question of whether there is transnational conservative endorsement or not—it does not matter that much. I do not see it that way. We had CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) Hungary, which is a sort of mimic meeting of CPAC in the US where they invite right-wing politicians and intellectuals. It is a significant event. Just a couple of days ago, they announced that J.D. Vance, the US Vice President, is coming next Tuesday to Hungary. They probably wanted Trump to come but could not manage it, so it will be J.D. Vance. And the American government has already signaled that it supports Orbán’s re-election.

But, what matters most, once again, for the future—or for the short-term political room for maneuver of the government—is really the European partners. The EU and other European right-wing leaders are closely watching the election, because it could fundamentally change dynamics within the European Council and more generally within the integration process in the EU.

Hungary Tests Populism’s Limits

Finally, Professor Csehi, from a comparative perspective, what would each plausible outcome—a renewed Fidesz victory, a Tisza-led breakthrough, or a contested post-election scenario—tell us about the broader trajectory of populist rule in Europe and the capacity of democratic systems to dislodge entrenched illiberal incumbents?

Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: If Fidesz wins, this is still going to be an interesting scenario and an interesting political experience, which would tell us that, despite economic strains and despite the ideological fatigue that the government shows, and despite a strong challenger—a new challenger party emerging—the system still has some resilience. Then we would need to find out what actually triggered this resilience, or what made this resilience possible.

Now, this resilience, obviously, would send a message that electoral challenge is still possible, even with a populist regime that is extremely mature in its institutional design and structural features, etc. Therefore, none of these populist regimes are actually immune to a more systemic fatigue, and, if they want to survive, they need to be more creative in how they maintain the system.

But definitely, with a Tisza win, we would get very good information on how much democratic backsliding there actually was in the system, across different aspects. Most likely, this would generate immense knowledge that we could gain, and that would be extremely valuable for future studies. So I am very much looking forward to seeing what will happen. Those are my two cents on this point.

Dr. Carothers: When Institutions Fail, Protest Becomes the Last Line of Democratic Defense

April 3, 2026

by ECPS_admin Authoritarianism Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

In this interview with ECPS, Dr. Thomas Carothers offers a nuanced reassessment of contemporary democratic backsliding, challenging dominant explanations that prioritize socioeconomic grievances over political agency. He argues that elite opportunism and institutional permissiveness are central drivers of democratic erosion, cautioning against overgeneralizing from Western experiences. Emphasizing that “when institutions fail, protest becomes the last line of democratic defense,” Dr. Carothers highlights the enduring role of civic mobilization in constraining authoritarian drift. At the same time, he resists declinist narratives, noting that democratic “guardrails” continue to hold in many contexts. The interview ultimately frames global democracy as entering a new phase of contested resilience, shaped by the dynamic interplay of elites, institutions, and citizen action.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

At a time when democracies across the globe face mounting pressures—from intensifying polarization in the United States and Europe to the growing assertiveness of authoritarian powers—the question of how democratic systems erode, endure, and renew themselves has taken on renewed urgency. In this context, Dr. Thomas Carothers, Director of the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program and Harvey V. Fineberg Chair for Democracy Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, offers a timely and nuanced intervention. Speaking to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Carothers challenges prevailing explanatory frameworks and calls for a more differentiated understanding of democratic backsliding and resilience.

Central to his analysis is a critique of the widely invoked “democracy-not-delivering” thesis. As he observes,“democratic backsliding has been spreading around the world for over 20 years, but we’re still struggling to figure out why it’s occurring,” urging “a bit of humility” from both scholars and policymakers. Rather than attributing democratic erosion primarily to socioeconomic grievances, Dr. Carothers emphasizes the role of “power holders—elites and elite agency” in actively constraining democratic choice. He cautions against generalizing from the American and European experience, noting that in many contexts, citizens are not opting for extremist alternatives but are instead “not being allowed to make those choices” due to authoritarian interventions.

This analytical shift foregrounds the importance of political agency and institutional dynamics over structural determinism. Dr. Carothers expresses skepticism toward rigid dichotomies, arguing that the “structure-versus-agency framework… is not a particularly useful way” to understand contemporary democratic crises. Instead, he advocates for context-sensitive analysis that recognizes the interplay between institutional vulnerabilities and strategic elite behavior.

It is within this framework that Dr. Carothers advances one of his most compelling claims: “When institutions fail, protest becomes the last line of democratic defense.” In settings where courts, media, and civil society are systematically undermined, public protest emerges as a residual yet powerful mechanism of accountability. While acknowledging that even protest can be violently suppressed—as in cases like Tanzania or Nicaragua—he underscores that, in many democracies, mass mobilization continues to function as a critical constraint on executive overreach.

At the same time, Dr. Carothers resists overly pessimistic narratives. While democratic backsliding persists, he notes that “the rapid wave of backsliding has slowed somewhat,” and that in numerous cases institutional “guardrails have been holding up.” Drawing on comparative examples from Brazil, Senegal, and beyond, he highlights the capacity of civic mobilization and institutional resilience to counteract authoritarian drift.

Taken together, this interview situates contemporary democratic challenges within a broader landscape of contestation, adaptation, and uneven resilience. Rather than signaling an inevitable decline, Dr. Carothers suggests the emergence of a more complex equilibrium—one in which democratic erosion and renewal coexist, and where the future of democracy will depend on the dynamic interaction between elites, institutions, and citizens.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Dr. Thomas Carothers, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

We Still Don’t Fully Understand Democratic Backsliding

Dr. Carothers, welcome. Let me begin with the broader picture: In your recent work, you challenge the “democracy-not-delivering” thesis by emphasizing elite opportunism and institutional permissiveness over socioeconomic failure. In light of current developments—from democratic strain in the United States to governance crises elsewhere—how does this shift reshape dominant explanatory frameworks, and what does it imply for the balance between structural and agency-based accounts?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: I appreciate this broad question. It’s surprising if we step back. Democratic backsliding has been spreading around the world for over 20 years, but we’re still struggling to figure out why it’s occurring. It’s interesting, and in a way surprising, that we haven’t really figured it out yet, and that there isn’t as much consensus as you might think there would be. I start with that. I think a bit of humility for all of us is in order here. If the policy community is looking to experts and saying, “Give us some answers,” I’m not sure the expert community is doing all that well, and I count myself in that.

But I would start by saying that, in a broad sense, Americans and Europeans—who have been experiencing a lot of democratic uncertainty and tremors, and in the case of the United States, some real backsliding in the last 5–10 years—are tending to take a pattern of events in their own countries and turn that into a very general explanation that I don’t think works very well in many places. What do I mean by that?

In the United States and Europe, broadly speaking, what you have seen over the last 20 years are societies where economic growth has slowed. A lot of people are angry about that, especially middle classes who don’t feel they are doing very well. At the same time, there has been significant sociocultural change in the form of immigration and broader progressive shifts across these societies. It turns out that many people are uncomfortable with that. So, many people are not happy economically, they feel quite unsettled socio-culturally, and in some cases they are opting for politicians or parties outside the mainstream, on both the right and the left. They are moving away from conventional center-left and center-right parties toward alternatives at the extremes, and that is unsettling for democracy.

But this is not a good explanation for what is happening with democratic backsliding in many other parts of the world. Let me take one case: Tanzania. Tanzania was a kind of so-so democracy in Africa—not very democratic, but not very autocratic—for a fairly long time.

Western Explanations Misread Global Democratic Decline

In the last year, however, it has undergone severe backsliding. There was an election, and people challenged the president, seeking some change. The president and her team essentially stole the election. When people protested, she cracked down in an unprecedented way. Hundreds of people were killed by security services. That is democratic backsliding. It had nothing to do with the Tanzanian middle class choosing alternatives at the extremes. They simply wanted decent reform and governance. What we see instead is a predatory power holder hanging onto power and violently suppressing dissent.

This is similar to what we see in Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega, over the last 10 years, has been challenged because he governs for the benefit of himself, his family, and a small circle of allies. When large-scale protests erupted in 2018, there was a severe crackdown—violence, repression, and more.

So, taking the American-European experience and assuming that this must be what is happening everywhere—that people are choosing the “wrong” politicians because they are unhappy with democracies not delivering—is misleading. Yes, people are unhappy in many countries, but in large parts of the world they are not choosing extremes; rather, they are choosing democratic alternatives and are not being allowed to make those choices because power holders—elites and elite agency—block them.

For this reason, I am very uncomfortable with the structure-versus-agency distinction. If we come in as analysts and say, “I think it’s mostly structure” or “I think it’s mostly agency,” we risk oversimplifying. Instead, we should take each case on its own terms, try to understand what is happening, and relax the insistence on categorizing it as one or the other. It is usually a combination of both.

Moreover, the concept of “structure” often covers a range of analytic ambiguities. Do we mean religious divisions? Immigration patterns? Social class structures? The term itself is quite vague.

In short—though I realize this is a long opening—the American-European experience is quite different from that of many other parts of the world. In those contexts, democratic backsliding often involves predatory power holders cracking down and steamrolling countervailing institutions and public protests. And the structure-versus-agency framework, in my view, is not a particularly useful way to approach such situations.

Public Protest Remains the Hardest Constraint on Elite Power

No Kings Protests. — No Kings protest in New York City, USA, October 18, 2025—demonstrators rally against authoritarian policies and corruption in Donald Trump’s administration. Photo: Dreamstime.

If democratic erosion is primarily elite-driven, how should we reconceptualize citizen agency today—especially in highly polarized societies like the US and parts of Europe—where publics may appear simultaneously mobilized, constrained, and politically fragmented?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: If we recognize the power of elites to overturn constraints on their power—which is what’s happening in a lot of places, and it startles us when it happens, say, in India—we had tended to think that the rule of law in India was pretty well established. India had a very good court system for a long time. It had a high degree of judicial independence and a judicial excellence. Of course, there is a lot at the lower levels, a lot of backlogs, and all that kind of stuff, but India was a country with pretty solid rule of law in certain ways.

However, Modi has been able to undercut that in ways that have really unsettled people in India and that they did not expect. That’s through elite agency—through structure, it’s through his determined decision-making to think, I can say this, I can do that, I can put these people here, I can defy this—that’s elite agency in action.

Given that, what we have to think is: wow, the power of elite agency in many cases is formidable. And what can stop that? What can stop that is a very strong fortification of those norms, and also people protesting when that is happening, and people saying, we won’t take this. That’s why I focus so much on protests, because when elites steamroller the different institutions, they undercut the courts, they close down the media, they strangle civil society, they go through all the independent sources of power, strangle them one by one, asphyxiate them, cut them off.

The one thing they have trouble overcoming is public protest, because it’s not really an institution they can just undercut. Now, they can, once it happens, as in Tanzania or Nicaragua, get police and security services of different types to come out, detain people, arrest them, beat them up, and kill them. Unfortunately, they can override public protest. But that is, fortunately, at least in some democracies, a line that leaders don’t cross. They don’t go that far, and protests therefore have a really powerful effect, as in Nepal or Bangladesh, where protesters were able to overcome attempts to stop them, and they pushed for some really democratic change. So elite agency—the power of it—should make us think hard about what powers can stop it, and what we can do, if we care about democracy, to try to fortify those things that can limit elite agency.

Economic Development Still Stabilizes Democracy

To what extent does ongoing backsliding in relatively affluent democracies challenge modernization theory’s assumption that economic development stabilizes democracy, particularly under conditions of cultural backlash and identity-driven politics?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: It has certainly been a surprise for many political scientists that the United States is experiencing significant backsliding. The recent V-Dem report on democracy in the world charted an 18-point decline for the United States, which is a very large drop in the last year. The Freedom House report shows only a 3-point decline, but even 3 points is quite significant in the Freedom House methodology. So, we do have the case of the United States, which raises questions about the crucial work that Adam Przeworski did—showing the relationship between the level of economic development and the absence of democratic breakdown—but I think we need to be very careful.

The United States is the only wealthy established democracy—other than perhaps Israel. By “established,” I mean a pre-1989 democracy. I am not including Hungary and Poland in that category, as they are post-1989. Among long-established democracies at a certain level of wealth, it is the only one that has experienced significant backsliding in the last 10 to 15 years.

It is true that many Europeans feel unsettled by the rise of illiberal political forces in their societies, but none of those countries is experiencing significant backsliding yet. Now, it may come—there is no question that it might. So, I do not think modernization theory, or the idea that once you reach a certain level of economic development you are bound to be more stable democratically, has been overturned by events. Rather, I think the United States is a head-scratching case as to why this is happening there. What is more interesting analytically is not to discard modernization theory, but instead to ask: what is it about the United States that is so different from all the other wealthy established democracies—Canada, Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, and so on—that makes it so democratically fragile at this moment?

So, modernization theory, or at least the theory about the relationship between economic development and democracy, is still holding. However, we do have this powerful and unusual case of the United States, which requires very careful thought.

Executive Aggrandizement, Not Populism, Drives Backsliding

Nested dolls depicting authoritarian and populist leaders Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan displayed among souvenirs in Moscow on July 7, 2018. Photo: Shutterstock.

How can we analytically disentangle populism as a discursive logic from executive aggrandizement as an institutional process, especially when contemporary leaders employ formally legal mechanisms to incrementally erode democratic norms?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: Wow, there are a lot of questions here; they’re very compact. Executive aggrandizement, which is the core pattern of backsliding that we see in many places, is where an executive amasses overweening power that is able to subvert the rest of the democratic system. Executive aggrandizement is the tool by which de-democratization and greater autocratization are occurring in a whole bunch of countries. But that’s not the same as populism, and we have to be really careful here. Some of these leaders who are carrying out executive aggrandizement are populists. Hugo Chávez was such a leader—he was elected, dismantled democracy, and engaged in executive aggrandizement; he was populist to the core.

Vladimir Putin has been aggrandizing the power of the executive in Russia over the last 25 years. In my view, he is not a populist. President Putin came from within the system. A populist is someone who comes from outside the system, divides, and says, “I’m going to attack the elite; I represent the people.” President Putin was not about the people versus the elite. He was the security service rising back up and asserting its power over Russian life—hardly a populist. He rode around on a horse once with his shirt off and had a picture taken, which some Russians felt made him look pretty good. I guess you could call that a populist technique. But I hardly think of him as a populist.

President Xi in China has been carrying out executive aggrandizement by removing term limits and by attempting, for example, to bring the military under greater political control. It is classic executive aggrandizement. Again, President Xi is not someone from outside the system who is dividing the country into old elites and the new people. He is the system. He rose up—his father was a grandee—he is a very well-integrated, well-embedded part of the system.

Therefore, executive aggrandizement is a process that leaders are using, both elected leaders and non-elected leaders, as in the case of President Xi. It is a form of taking over systems that is different from military coups and from state collapse, and so forth. It is the process that is defining democratic backsliding and autocratization in many countries. It is not the same thing as populism. Some populists engage in executive aggrandizement, not all. Some figures who engage in executive aggrandizement are populist, not all. So, it is very important to keep these concepts fairly clearly separate from each other.

Deep Structural Divides Drive America’s Polarization

In the current US context—marked by renewed Trumpism, institutional contestation, and electoral polarization—should we interpret developments as a case of “backsliding from within,” or as the exposure of long-standing structural vulnerabilities in American democracy?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: That gets to the question of what constitutes a structural vulnerability. The United States has some very basic fissures in society that have long been at the root of severe episodes of polarization in American life. The country has experienced waves of extreme polarization throughout its history. The Civil War was a period of intense polarization, and the country later moved beyond it. There was less polarization afterwards. The 1930s and the New Deal were also tremendously polarizing, followed by a period of lower polarization through World War II. In the 1960s and 1970s, polarization began increasing again and has reached very high levels over the past 10 to 20 years. So, the United States has this recurrent pattern of extreme polarization.

These waves tend to be rooted in the same underlying fissures—three in particular. One is a racial divide, which has been deeply divisive, not only in Black-white terms but also in a broader sense between those who support a more inclusive society and those who prefer a less inclusive one.

Second, religion in politics. The United States is, in many ways, a fairly religious society, and there has long been debate over the role of religion in public and political life. This debate continues today and remains highly divisive. Some believe religion should play a greater role, while others advocate for a clearer separation between religion and the state.

Third, the question of federal versus state control. Should the country have a strong federal government, or should power reside primarily with the states? This debate goes back to the founding of the Republic and was deeply embedded in the Civil War. It has remained a persistent and contested issue.

So, the United States has these structures. You could describe racial realities as a structure. You could consider federal versus state power as a structure. Religion—can that be called a structure? In some sense, yes. These factors provide a foundation that is distinct from Europe, where all three are generally less pronounced as basic fissures. They help explain why the United States, unlike many European countries, has experienced recurring waves of polarization.

I think what we are seeing in the United States today is the product of the latest episode of extreme polarization. Is this due to structure or agency? As I noted, there are underlying structural features of American society that contribute to the current divisions. At the same time, elite agency is clearly playing a role. When people discuss polarization in the United States, they often point to specific political actors—this politician did this, that politician did that—as polarizing forces. So, elite agency is also part of the picture.

When Politics Turns Tribal, Democracy Suffers

To what degree does affective polarization—visible in both US and European politics—function as a permissive condition for democratic erosion, enabling citizens to tolerate or justify norm violations by co-partisan leaders?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: Affective polarization—when one side basically hates the other, doesn’t trust it, and doesn’t think it should be allowed to come to power—is no longer just “I don’t like their tax policy.” Instead, it becomes, “I think they are bad Americans and would do terrible things to the country if they came to power, and I don’t want my daughter or son marrying one of them.” Affective polarization of that type is incredibly corrosive.

Because if it is based on the idea that the people on the other side—I hate them, I don’t trust them, and I think they are going to do harm to the country if they run it—then, when an election comes along, I may say: well, the choice is between a leader who is tidy-whitey and is going to follow every democratic norm but might let the other side in, versus someone who is really strong and willing to break the dishes needed to stay in power and keep those dangerous other people out. In that case, unfortunately, people trade off democratic norms for the sake of protecting their tribe, as people like to say.

In the United States, the very distinguished political scientist at Yale University, Milan Svolik, has done fundamental work showing that under conditions of extreme polarization, people are willing to trade away democratic norms for the sake of protecting their side.

Citizen Mobilization Can Halt Democratic Backsliding

Large protests demand the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government as part of the Anti-Quota Movement and Bangladesh Quota Reform Protests. Thousands took to the streets in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on August 4, 2024. Photo: M.D. Sabbir.

Your work suggests that protests serve both as indicators of democratic strain and as potential agents of renewal. How should we theorize this dual role in light of recent protest waves in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: At Carnegie, we run something called the Global Protest Tracker, which tries to keep track of every major anti-government protest in the world. If you go to it, you’ll see a list, and you can click on a country, and it turns out, oh, look, the Philippines just had major protests last month. Why? What were they about? And so forth. So, we’ve been watching protests very closely for a while. We’ve been running the tracker for seven years, and you learn a lot just by reading it every month.

Our researchers produce—Judy Lee, who works with us, is our main researcher on this—a tremendous memo every month analyzing the latest protests around the world. And you see that a good share of protests is about democracy. They are about citizens responding to executive overreach, often in the form of a stolen or compromised election. Sometimes they respond to attempts by a leader to remove a constitutional limit on power – “I’m going to serve a third or fourth term, no matter what the Constitution says. My ally at the Supreme Court will say that’s perfectly fine.”

So, citizens are protesting a great deal about democratic backsliding. Those protests are a sign of democratic strain, as you put it in your question, or even a sign of democratic breakdown. In many cases, they are also a major source of hope for stopping that process. They have stopped a number of efforts to extend constitutional term limits and have blocked some attempts to manipulate elections, although unfortunately not in other cases, such as Georgia or Belarus.

Protests like these reflect democratic strain, but they are also an embodiment of hope for something better. In more extreme cases, such as Bangladesh—extreme in the sense that events went very far—protesters swept out an autocratic regime and called for a return to a period when the country was at least reasonably democratic. Protests are key here.

Of course, many protests today are driven by economic grievances—fuel prices rise, people cannot afford to feed their families, and they protest about that, understandably. But there are linkages. In many places, protests are sparked by some kind of economic or governance trigger. In Serbia, for example, a specific incident occurred—a train station roof collapse, if I recall correctly. People then took to the streets and said, “This government stinks, it ought to go—I’ve had it with this regime.” A protest that begins over a particular trigger can then snowball into a broader anti-regime movement that pushes a government out or at least tries to.

Nepal was somewhat similar—an initial spark related to a government attempt to limit access to social media platforms. People began protesting, and one thing led to another, and soon the prime minister was out.

So, protests are critical in this age—particularly in an era of hard-headed leaders dismantling many of the institutions that might otherwise constrain them. As I said before, protests are critical here.

Some Movements Make Democracy More Exclusionary

In these contexts, how can we distinguish between mobilizations that deepen democratic accountability—such as rights-based or institutional reform protests—and those that instead amplify anti-system, populist, or illiberal dynamics?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: Be careful about that distinction. You can have an anti-system protest that is quite rights-based. For example, the Serbian protests have turned into anti-system protests, but they are also based on the idea that there should be greater rights. Nepal was similar – “Don’t take away our right to access this information”—and that, too, turned into an anti-system protest.

Now, as you are alluding to, there are protests that, if you look at their goals or the issues that have stirred them up, may be quite different. There might be an anti-immigrant protest—an immigrant is involved in a crime, and people go out and protest, saying, “We hate these people who look like this or talk like this.” That is not especially good for democracy; it could shrink democracy and make it more exclusive.

Or people may protest against efforts to make vaccines widely available, arguing that they are dangerous and opposing public health policies. That could be described as rights-based in some sense, but it is probably not going to do much to further democracy in that country.

There are certainly many protests that pursue goals other than what we would consider core democratic rights. It is more a matter of looking at the cause—what people are trying to advance through the protest—and then deciding whether it is pro-democratic or whether it is pushing democracy in a more exclusive or limited direction.

Decentralization Empowers Protest but Weakens Strategy

With the growing prevalence of decentralized, leaderless movements, does organizational horizontality enhance democratic inclusivity and resilience, or does it risk weakening strategic coherence and long-term political impact?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: A lot of protest movements are what analysts like to call leaderless protests these days, and leaderless protests are often a reality in countries that are fairly repressive, where people are afraid or unable to form leadership councils or to organize in a very visible way, and so they are leaderless by necessity. Some are more leaderless; others are leaderless simply because that is how they arose. They may begin with a group of students who are very unhappy about something, and someone texts, “Let’s all meet at the square at 9 p.m.,” and people surge out and start protesting. Then someone else says, “Tomorrow at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, let’s meet here,” and it starts to grow. The protest becomes a movement, but there was no real guiding council at any point.

Because of technology that facilitates organization in many countries, this encourages a decentralization of authority within protest movements, which can make for quick, unpredictable, and, in some cases, powerful protests. But as you suggest in your question, once a protest is successful, there comes a point when demands have to be formulated. There also comes a point when negotiations with those in power become necessary, or when something must happen to focalize the discontent into a platform for specific change.

I remember Tahrir Square during the protests in Egypt and the Arab Spring. It was a surge of people. There were many civic groups involved, so it was not entirely leaderless, but there were many different actors trying to mobilize. At a certain point, the military said to the protesters, “We need to talk seriously about what is going to happen with Mubarak—we are ready to talk. With whom do we talk?”

A group of people did emerge within the protest. One of them happened to be a friend of mine, an Egyptian. I remember being in my office in Washington, picking up the phone, and it was him calling me from Cairo. He said, “I’m with a group of protesters, and we’ve been asked to go talk to the military. What should we ask for? What is our demand with respect to Mubarak?” That was the moment when I thought that what had started as a kind of leaderless protest—or a protest with many different elements—was now focalizing. The military wanted to negotiate with someone and say, “If we agree that Mubarak is going to step down and go to Sharm el-Sheikh or somewhere else, will you leave Tahrir Square and go home?” They needed to negotiate with someone.

It is hard to negotiate with a leaderless octopus. So, there is a moment when these movements have to coalesce, and then, if they are successful—as in Nepal, where the government is out—who is in charge? Something has to happen. Leaderlessness can be beneficial for a while, but then things need to move forward, and there needs to be a concretization of the movement into some form of institutionalized action and development.

How States Respond to Protest Defines Democracy

‘March for Europe’ demonstrations in support of EU integration and membership at Liberty Square in Tbilisi, Georgia, on October 20, 2024. Photo: Mirko Kuzmanovic.

How do different state responses—from accommodation and co-optation in liberal democracies to repression in more authoritarian settings—shape protest trajectories, and what do these patterns reveal about regime adaptability?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: There is a pretty sharp line. A protest occurs in a country; it is large, it challenges the system, and it asks for fundamental change. And here is the line: do you turn the security services on the protest and say, “We are going to detain you, arrest you, beat you up, and kill you”? Or do you say, “We are a democracy, people have rights here, and you have the right to protest, and we will talk with you and try to address your concerns so that you will go away?” At that moment, when the regime really has its back to the wall and protests are surging, do they respond with repression, or do they respond through negotiation, patience, or some other non-repressive approach? That is a defining test of whether you are in a democracy or not.

In Georgia—Georgia was a democracy for a while—protests emerged and were then fueled by the alleged stealing of elections by Georgian Dream. The political system, or the regime, began cracking down on this protest movement, detaining and arresting people and allowing a certain degree of violence. That is a sign that Georgia was moving off the democratic path and into a more repressive direction.

This is a defining moment—how protests are treated—and I pay very close attention to it. There is not always a clear threshold: sometimes three protesters are killed—is that enough? But in extreme cases like Iran, where tens of thousands appear to have been killed by security services, that is a clear sign of a profoundly repressive, anti-democratic regime in which democracy has been entirely suffocated. Georgia is suffocating its democracy. Belarus has asphyxiated and suffocated its democracy.

Whereas other countries have remained on the other side of that line. Hungary, for example, has had significant protests over the last 5–10 years. Many people are unhappy with the Fidesz government, but it has not responded with outright repression. It has taken many steps to undercut civic groups, tilt the playing field, and use state resources for party purposes. These are anti-democratic actions, but it has not turned the guns on protesters, because Hungary is still on this side of that repressive line. So that line is very fundamental to understanding the overall trajectory of a country.

Broad Mobilization Creates a Firewall Against Authoritarianism

Your research highlights the importance of civil society mobilization and opposition coordination in reversing backsliding. How do these factors interact with institutional legacies in determining whether democratic erosion can be halted or reversed?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: It relates to what I’m saying. Civil society mobilization is critical in many places, such as Brazil in 2022. Bolsonaro had been in power for four years; he was an anti-democratic leader, disrespectful of democratic norms. He sought to undercut the courts, and there were real doubts about whether he would respect an electoral outcome. Later evidence suggested that he was trying to overturn the electoral result through coup planning and so forth.

In early 2022, as elections were on the horizon, there was very broad-scale citizen mobilization. It was civic mobilization, which included a political role for established political actors, but it was civic in the sense that it brought together a broad tent of people with many different views, united around the idea that Brazil should reject an undemocratic path and pursue a democratic one. Most of those involved believed this meant voting for Lula da Silva, but it was nonetheless a civic mobilization that proved quite effective in creating a firewall against the de-democratization of Brazil.

Poland was somewhat similar before the 2023 elections. There was extensive civic mobilization, with people frustrated by the PiS government and its anti-democratic characteristics.

Civic mobilization in cases of significant backsliding is very important. In the United States, you are seeing an increasing number of protests. Recently, there was another round of the “No Kings” protests; I think up to 8 million people were involved last time. That is a significant number—about 2–3 percent of the US population—engaged in protest activity. This kind of broad-based civic mobilization is often a critical element in pushing back against democratic erosion.

Democracy Support Faces a Moment of Profound Rethink

In an international environment shaped by intensifying great-power competition, declining Western commitment, rising authoritarian influence, and intensifying geopolitical competition and conflicts such as the Iran crisis, and the global diffusion of authoritarian practices, how should democracy promotion be reimagined—does it require normative re-legitimation, institutional reinvention, or a fundamentally new model of transnational democratic support?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: International democracy support needs a lot of things. International democracy support had been struggling for 10 or 15 years in the face of democratic backsliding in the world. Backsliding was happening, and people were saying that whatever amount of democracy support we were giving—both the amount and the nature of it—was not solving the problem. Backsliding was still spreading. What we were doing was not enough, and maybe it was also not the right thing.

There was already a lot of questioning of international democracy support and then came the arrival to power of Donald Trump in January 2025. He and his team rapidly put an end to almost all US democracy aid that was directly sponsored by the government. The United States had been, by far, the largest funder of such aid in the world. It simply walked away from that field and said: no election monitoring support—we do not do that anymore; support to civic groups—we do not do that anymore; we are going to close down our public broadcasting in other places; human rights support—no, we do not do that anymore. So that was a tremendous blow to the field of international democracy support.

Unfortunately, in that same year, a number of European governments, for different reasons, also faced significant pressure on their aid budgets. There was a great deal of strain on those budgets, partly because of the need to allocate resources to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. As a result, aid budgets in Europe were tight, and 2025 was a bad year for international democracy support.

Now the field, a year on, is in a period of reassessment. My colleague Richard Youngs and I, together with Rachel Kleinfeld, are working on this issue. We published a paper last year titled What Future for International Democracy Support?, and we are preparing an updated version later this year to assess how the field is evolving.

What we are finding so far is that there is a great deal of ferment. You mentioned the need for institutional rejuvenation, normative re-legitimation, and new methods. People are actively asking these questions: what narratives should we use to describe democracy more effectively? Given the sharp decline in available aid dollars and euros, we need new forms of engagement that are more localized and more network-oriented. We need to move away from the traditional model of “the West has the answers, and the rest of the world has the problems.” Today, everyone faces challenges. How can we work on a more horizontal basis? How can we move beyond the notion of aid as a one-way process and instead recognize that we are all confronting shared difficulties?

There is a great deal happening in the field, but it is constrained by limited resources. It is on the back foot and still in a state of shock after developments over the past year or two. Many people are out of work, many are frustrated, and many are disappointed. The field is therefore in a period of reconsolidation.

At the same time, it is not disappearing. Many organizations and democratic governments still want to support democracy beyond their borders. There are also regional organizations in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere that maintain pro-democratic norms. There are multilateral institutions at the global level that remain engaged, as well as numerous international non-governmental organizations. So, there is still a substantial international democracy support community, but it is undergoing a profound process of rethinking and reorientation.

Democratic Backsliding Has Slowed—but Risks Remain

Protesters protest for the freedom of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil on April 7, 2019. Photo: Cris Faga.

And lastly, Dr. Carothers, looking ahead, given the coexistence of democratic erosion, persistent polarization, and emerging forms of resistance, do you foresee a trajectory of continued democratic decline, adaptive resilience, or the emergence of a new equilibrium of “contested democracy” in the coming decade?

Dr. Thomas Carothers: That last question of yours is common in the final questions that I get, which are basically, you’re walking across a bridge as a democracy specialist—do you jump off into the river in despair, or do you keep walking and think, we’ll probably come through this? But you put it much more elegantly than I just did.

I think over the last 5 to 7 years, the rapid wave of backsliding has slowed somewhat. There is still a lot of backsliding occurring, but there are also a number of countries where guardrails have been holding up. Brazil was an important case of that in 2022–23. One could name many others. Senegal managed to withstand a fairly concerted attack on its democratic institutions by its president in the last couple of years. The Philippines came out of the Duterte period. The successor leader is not the world’s most democratic leader, but he is not Duterte. Bangladesh is undergoing some kind of renovation. Bolivia came through a period in which the government was trying to undercut democratic norms and institutions. So, there are many countries where democracy is holding up.

I was in a conversation the other day with the research director at Freedom House, who made the important observation that about three-quarters of the countries in the world do not change their democratic status year in, year out. We tend to think, it’s like our phone, where every app is jiggling and moving around. The world is not really like that. There is actually a fair amount of stability, and the number of cases that are moving rapidly in one direction or the other is quite small. So, I’m walking across the bridge—I’m not jumping off—but, it’s going to be difficult.