Daytime view of Akihabara in Tokyo, known as “Electric Town” for its many electronics shops, duty-free stores, and vibrant youth culture. Photo: Dreamstime.

Prof. Klein: It Is Difficult to Label Japanese PM Takaichi a Populist, Despite Her Nationalism and Anti-Feminism

by Editor’s ChoiceGenderHomeInterviews

In this incisive interview for the ECPS, Professor Axel Klein offers a nuanced assessment of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s ideological profile. While her blend of nationalism, anti-feminism, and strong-leader rhetoric has led some observers to categorize her as a populist, Professor Klein cautions against this simplification. As he notes, “nationalism and anti-feminism… are trademarks of a conservative or right-wing politician, but they are not necessarily populist phenomena per se.” Instead, he situates PM Takaichi within Japan’s broader political culture—one shaped by nostalgia, stability-seeking voters, and the enduring dominance of the LDP—arguing that her conservatism reflects continuity more than populist rupture.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Sanae Takaichi’s rise to the premiership marks one of the most significant ideological shifts in Japanese politics in recent decades. Her ascent has sparked debates not only within Japan but also among scholars of comparative populism who are examining whether her blend of nationalism, anti-feminism, and assertive leadership constitutes a new populist moment in East Asia. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Axel Klein— Professor for Social Sciences of East Asia / Japanese Politics at Institute of East Asian Studies and Faculty of Social Science, University of Duisburg-Essen and one of Europe’s leading specialists on Japanese politics and populism—offers a nuanced interpretation of her leadership style and ideological positioning.

Reflecting on the definitional complexities of populism, Professor Klein begins by cautioning against the automatic classification of PM Takaichi as a populist merely because she deploys rhetoric familiar from global right-wing movements. As he notes, “I think you would find it difficult to label her a populist… nationalism and anti-feminism… are trademarks of a conservative or right-wing politician, but they are not necessarily populist phenomena per se.” This observation forms the conceptual backbone of the interview. It foregrounds a tension between PM Takaichi’s affective, backward-looking appeals and the analytical criteria political scientists typically use to identify populist actors.

Several sections of the interview explore the symbolic and strategic dimensions of her conservatism. PM Takaichi’s frequent invocation of Margaret Thatcher, for instance, is not simply an ideological alignment but part of a deliberate performance of decisiveness and moral clarity. Professor Klein situates this “Thatcherian” posture within Japan’s evolving political culture, noting that a significant segment of the electorate has come to desire a strong, assertive leader capable of cutting through bureaucratic inertia. Her rejection of feminist policy is similarly framed as part of a broader moral and nostalgic project rather than a carefully structured ideological program.

The interview further scrutinizes PM Takaichi’s positioning in domestic and international contexts: her recourse to economic protectionism toward China, her appeal to Japan’s aging conservative base, and her relationship to emergent right-wing actors such as Sanseito. Professor Klein’s long-term analysis of Japanese democratic institutions raises critical questions about whether her brand of conservative moralism represents a stabilizing force or a potential risk for democratic quality. While Japan’s electoral patterns and party system differ markedly from Western cases of democratic backsliding, Professor Klein argues that structural conservatism, low youth engagement, and a dominant-party landscape may create conditions in which moralizing politics can flourish without substantial opposition.

Taken together, the interview provides an analytically rich and contextually grounded assessment of PM Takaichi’s leadership, situating her not as a straightforward populist but as a figure whose political significance lies in the interplay between nostalgia, nationalism, and Japan’s institutional continuity.

Axel Klein is a Professor for Social Sciences of East Asia / Japanese Politics at Institute of East Asian Studies and Faculty of Social Science, University of Duisburg-Essen and one of Europe’s leading specialists on Japanese politics and populism.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Axel Klein, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Takaichi’s Nationalism and Anti-Feminism Don’t Make Her a Populist

Professor Axel Klein, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: In your work on East Asian populism, you describe Japan’s populist movements as “muted” compared to their Western counterparts. How does Sanae Takaichi’s ascent complicate this framework? Does her blend of nationalism, charisma, and anti-feminism mark a new populist phase in Japanese politics?

Professor Axel Klein: I think it depends a bit on your definition of populism. In political science, we have three or four dominant concepts of populism, and if you applied these concepts to Mrs. Takaichi, I think you would find it difficult to label her a populist. There are also a number of less well-known concepts, and perhaps she would meet some of those criteria here and there, but personally, I find it difficult to call her a populist. That is because nationalism and anti-feminism, or a marked disregard for any feminist agenda, are trademarks of a conservative or right-wing politician, but they are not necessarily populist phenomena per se.

Takaichi’s Strong-Leader Persona Reflects Voter Desire, Not Ideological Thatcherism

PM Takaichi frequently invokes Margaret Thatcher as a role model. To what extent does this “Thatcherian populism” reflect a fusion of neoliberal economics and patriarchal conservatism unique to Japan’s political culture?

Professor Axel Klein: If you consider simple messaging and clear-cut language as a populist trait, then that’s probably something Mrs. Takaichi tries, and in that sense, she may appear similar to Margaret Thatcher. She has referred to her, as you rightly said, and the image of the Iron Lady may be something Mrs. Takaichi wants to project. But she hasn’t really had enough time to prove that she can be such a hardliner. The Japanese political system, especially the power structure within the LDP, doesn’t necessarily allow someone to push through a reform agenda. Thatcher did that with a neoliberal reform agenda, and she had Ronald Reagan at her side—these two were, so to speak, the neoliberal pioneers of that era. I don’t see that context in the case of Takaichi.

What I find interesting, despite many commentaries to the contrary, is that while some argue Japanese culture doesn’t allow for a strong leader, my experience observing Japanese politics over the last 30 or 40 years suggests that a large share of the population actually wants one. People want someone who can take decisive action. Mr. Ishiba, who was of course Mrs. Takaichi’s predecessor, tried the opposite approach. He was very considerate, spoke to many involved parties, and tried to take numerous views into account—but this slowed him down and made it difficult for people to see any progress. Mrs. Takaichi seems to try to convey the image of someone who can make decisions and push them through. And that may be exactly the kind of strong leadership many people in Japan are looking for, because they have seen that a more considerate, slower approach may not deliver the results they want, especially lowering consumer prices.

As long as people expect Mrs. Takaichi to be a decisive leader, I think her support rates will stay high, and as long as they stay high, the LDP will follow her. So, the comparison with Mrs. Thatcher may be sustained by the fact that Mrs. Takaichi is a female leader, lacks feminist motivation, and had to push aside many male competitors. But regarding tough decision-making, we are still waiting. She hasn’t had much time yet, so we need to be a bit patient.

Takaichi’s Gender ‘Takes a Backseat’ in Conservative Japan

How does PM Takaichi’s gender—combined with her rejection of feminist policy—function symbolically within a patriarchal political order? Is her leadership likely to reinforce or subtly reconfigure Japan’s gendered hierarchies of power?

Professor Axel Klein: If you look at Angela Merkel in Germany and Mrs. Thatcher in Britain, and the same is true for Mrs. Meloni in Italy, gender takes a backseat. The issue is not particularly relevant to these leaders. There are many other characteristics that matter more when trying to understand how they function and why they do what they do. And I think with Mrs. Takaichi it’s exactly the same. There may have been some naïve expectations among observers that, because Mrs. Takaichi is a woman, that alone would be reason enough for her to push issues like gender equality. But I’m afraid she may disappoint those expectations. She may instead show that Japan is not so much a patriarchal order as a very conservative one, dominated by people who have risen through the system and are willing to defend it against progressive ideas. And if you take that view, then you will see that the gender or sex of the leader isn’t really important.

Nostalgia, Not Populism, Defines Takaichi’s Leadership Style

In the comparative perspective you have applied to European and Asian populisms, how might we situate Takaichi’s brand of leadership alongside figures such as Giorgia Meloni or Marine Le Pen—female leaders who combine nationalist populism with anti-feminist discourse?

Professor Axel Klein: Let’s leave the question whether Mrs. Takaichi is a populist or not aside for the moment. First of all, she is someone who represents the wish to return to the good old days. And that, again, is indeed something that populists sometimes refer to. And when I say the good old days, I mean the time maybe in the 1980s, when Japan was economically really doing well, the 1970s, when it was economically growing, the 1960s, of course, when the LDP was still the dominant political force, running the country all by itself from 1955 to 1993, so almost four decades of LDP rule, and where everything seemed to be more predictable, stable.

And that was before, of course, there was political upheaval in Japan in the sense that other parties took over government, even though just for a very short period of time, but that created some instability. And then, of course, about 20–25 years ago, we had Prime Minister Koizumi, who introduced a number of neoliberal ideas and carried out major reforms. His key project was the privatization of the postal services. So if you are now a conservative leader who claims to protect the country and its people from many of these progressive, neoliberal ideas—also on a social level—you can argue that such reforms have made life more difficult for ordinary people.

What Mrs. Takaichi would probably refer to is more of what Abe Shinzo, former prime minister, referred to as beautiful Japan. He had this book published, he was the author, and he described a Japan that was a Japan of the good old days. Of course, Mrs. Takaichi also represents the hope of the LDP to return to that dominant position that the party was in 30 years ago.

‘Sanaenomics’ Is More PR Than Populism

Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Photo: Dreamstime.

You have written extensively about the nexus between populist rhetoric and technocratic governance in Japan. How does PM Takaichi’s economic policy—her so-called “Sanaenomics”—use populist language of protection and prosperity while maintaining elite continuity within the LDP?

Professor Axel Klein: Mrs. Takaichi claims to revive Japan, which is something that a couple of prime ministers before her have also done. Reviving Japan—that’s more or less her slogan. Looking from the outside, and as you can see, I’m not a Japanese voter, I’ve always wondered who has actually been in power over the last 30 years, because the LDP has always claimed to know how to solve the crisis Japan is in. And most election campaigns over the last decades really looked a bit like this: there is a huge crisis, only we know how to deal with it. Don’t try any experiments, Mr. or Mrs. Voter. Choose the LDP, and we will take care of it.

But what the LDP has never addressed is the question: who is in charge? Who is responsible for this crisis? Isn’t the government of the day, or the governments of previous years, also responsible for what is happening? Yet the LDP has always portrayed the crisis as something coming from the outside, caused by external factors beyond its control.

So Mrs. Takaichi speaks to what is possibly the most important wish of voters, which is stability. That’s a term that comes up a lot in the LDP’s election campaigns. If you are looking for one red line running through all LDP governments over the last decades, it is this: stability, security, and, in a way, the promise of a carefree life. By the way, that’s what Mrs. Takaichi also emphasized in her speech in Parliament—that in order to stabilize politics, she agreed to form a coalition with the Japan Restoration Party or Japan Innovation Party, whichever English translation you prefer.

This is interesting because this coalition between the LDP and the Restoration Party does not even have a majority. They are one seat short. They don’t have a majority in the lower house, and they don’t have a majority in the upper house. So if you look at it closely, you may ask yourself: where is the stability?

Takaichi’s Economic Agenda Echoes Abenomics

But anyway, leaving that aside—Sanaenomics? To me, it’s like Abenomics. It’s a PR term that professional advertisers have come up with. It may be wise not to spend too much time discussing this, because we should judge or assess her performance as prime minister by what she does, not what she says. That is universally true. And I’m not an economist, so I don’t know whether there is some secret recipe behind what she says she wants to do as prime minister.

But in preparation for this conversation with you, I have a little quotation here from her speech, and please bear with me—I’ll read it, and then you’ll see what I’m driving at. Mrs. Takaichi said in Parliament: “We endeavor to raise incomes, transform people’s mindsets regarding consumption, and boost tax revenues without raising tax rates as business earnings increase, all in keeping with our approach of responsible and proactive public finances.”

So it’s a bet on economic growth that will pay more taxes or produce more tax revenue, and all of this will supposedly be driven by domestic consumption. If that is a viable option, I wonder why the LDP hasn’t done anything like this before. And it’s a bit like promising everything to everyone. So, again, maybe we shouldn’t look at what she has announced and what she has said, but wait for what she will actually do.

Takaichi’s Hard Line Plays Domestically but Complicates Diplomacy

Photo: Dreamstime.

How do you interpret PM Takaichi’s invocation of sovereignty and economic independence from China in the context of populist “economic nationalism”? Does it resonate domestically as protectionist populism, or as pragmatic geopolitics?

Professor Axel Klein: The relationship with China has always been difficult and on thin ice. It’s easily disturbed. Since 1999, when Komeito joined the LDP as a coalition partner, Komeito acted as a stabilizing factor. For several reasons, it has very close relations with China, and I remember a very tense period between the two countries when then Prime Minister Abe sent the leader of Komeito to Beijing to mend the relationship. But now that Komeito is no longer part of the coalition, options for communication between the two governments—sometimes even discreet, below-the-surface channels that are crucial in diplomacy—have become more limited.

Mrs. Takaichi has already provoked significant protests from China. We know about the Chinese diplomat who made an inappropriate remark about her, and we have seen the usual reaction in China, especially among the public, where people cancel flights to Japan and say they no longer want to visit. So, a remark meant to signal Japan’s stance toward Taiwan brought about all these consequences.

It may be that Mrs. Takaichi still has hawkish instincts that make it difficult for her to stay consistent in her foreign policy agenda. And if she cannot control these impulses, it will be difficult to achieve more harmonious relations with China. But this is not only because of her own views; it is also because China tends to react very strongly to such statements from foreign leaders.

‘Good Old Times’ Conservatism Drives Takaichi’s Moral Appeal

Takaichi’s rhetoric fuses anti-feminist appeals with nationalist morality. Does this align with the moral populism you’ve analyzed in Japan’s right-wing discourse—where the “moral majority” is mobilized against both foreign and liberal domestic elites?

Professor Axel Klein: That’s a very important question. Mrs. Takaichi, as I said before, represents the good old times. So she clearly doesn’t stand for a socially progressive agenda. The good old times also featured a very weak political left, sometimes none to speak of, and what is generally referred to as a convoy economy—where everyone in Japan, at least those who worked in certain industries and companies and their families, joined a national effort to grow the domestic economy. And that, of course, included women staying home to take care of the family and children, and the single breadwinner model, where husbands went out to work. Everyone was supposed to benefit from this arrangement. That was the general idea.

This convoy economy doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t for quite some time. But it remains part of the nostalgic image people have of the good old days, and foreign influences and liberal forces are seen as obstacles to returning to that ideal. In the upper house election last July, we saw a right-wing party grow—Sanseito, which translates itself into English as the Do-It-Yourself Party. This refers to their idea: if there is no political party you like and want to support, then create one yourself. That was their basic message. They emerged out of the pandemic, with many people sitting at home in front of their computers, and the man who founded the party gathered enough support and followers on YouTube and other social media platforms. Then he—or they, since it wasn’t his work alone—created Sanseito.

‘Japanese First’ Spiral Pushes LDP Rightward

Poster for the Sanseito political party featuring its leader Sohei Kamiya and the slogan “Japanese First” in Tokyo, Japan on October 9, 2025: Photo: Hiroshi Mori.

But no one really cared about them at first. They had a supporter base of around 1.5 million people, which is a lot, but not enough to make decisive inroads into Japanese politics. In the lower house general election last October, they were not very successful; they had not much more than those 1.5 million supporters. But then in June this year, they started campaigning with the slogan “Japanese First.” Their agenda combined anti-liberal ideas and strong skepticism toward anything coming from abroad. And because “Japanese First” sounded like what Trump and his MAGA movement do with “America First,” the mass media picked up the story. And the mass media—and we’ve done research on this at my university—really were the ones who made Sanseito widely known.

Then you have this spiral, where the party is discussed in major newspapers and on TV, and foreign journalists also pick up the story: “Oh, finally, we have a right-wing populist party in Japan—the Sanseito—and they’re xenophobic, they don’t like foreigners.” You saw stories about tourists misbehaving, about people on social welfare without Japanese citizenship, etc. All of this reinforced itself. It was like a spiral that kept growing, and more and more people learned about Sanseito. By the upper house election last year, the result was that they gained far more seats than they would have with normal media coverage.

I think that frightened many people in the LDP. They thought a new force might overtake the LDP from the right, so they needed to move rightward to prevent that. That may have been another reason why not only Mrs. Takaichi was elected president of the LDP, but also why her policy agenda is now shifting the country further right than under Ishiba and previous prime ministers.

I don’t know if that will be enough to stop Sanseito. Sanseito, in my view, is a very immature party. It has many proposals that obviously do not work. And based on analyses of voter behavior, it seems many people who usually have little interest in politics saw a new party saying “Japanese First” and superficially liked the idea of a party that claimed it would take care of ordinary Japanese. They may not have taken it as a message against foreigners—only as a good idea: “Let’s take care of the ordinary Japanese, not big companies or banks or other elite groups,” which they think the LDP has favored for too long. And that’s why they voted for Sanseito.

But I’m not sure this success can be sustained. And I’m not very good at predicting the future, so I’ll leave it at that.

Confucian Norms Shape Japan’s Hesitation on Equality Policies

How do you assess the relationship between Japan’s deep-rooted Confucian patriarchy and the populist rejection of gender equality reforms, such as same-sex marriage or separate surnames?

Professor Axel Klein: That is a difficult question for me to answer. Since I’m in Germany, I often compare what is happening in Japan with developments here, and to a certain extent, I also look at other European countries. I observe how their societies evolve and how the legal frameworks governing these communities change. And every now and then, I’ve thought that Japan is following a similar trajectory—only, in some respects, it does so later than European countries. I don’t mean this as negative criticism; I’m simply saying that issues like the ones you raise—same-sex marriage and separate surnames—will probably eventually come.

I think Japan will, at some point, pass legislation allowing same-sex marriage, and it will also change the family-name system, but it will take a little longer. And again, I don’t know whether that is good or bad. I have a personal opinion, of course, but from an academic perspective, all I can really say is that the process takes more time. Currently, couples in Japan do have the option, when they marry, to choose which of the two family names—the husband’s or the wife’s—will become the family name. But I can clearly see why this is not sufficient for people with established careers or simply those who want to keep their own names.

I think pressure within Japanese society is building to the point where these reforms will happen, and even a prime minister like Mrs. Takaichi will not be able to prevent them.

Moral Populism in Japan Runs on Sentiment, Not Structure

A right-wing speaker delivers a public address in the Asakusa district in Tokyo, Japan on December 27, 2015. Though small in number, Japan’s right-wing groups are known for highly visible demonstrations. Photo: Sean Pavone.

To what extent is her moral populism driven by affective nostalgia—an emotional politics of loss centered on family, nation, and purity—rather than coherent ideological reasoning?

Professor Axel Klein: Very much so. As I said before, I think she speaks to a desire felt by many—especially those from their fifties onward, the senior citizens of Japan. There is this idea that in the old days things were better, and objectively, consumer prices, for example, were much lower than they are now. And I think we observe this in many countries: people seem increasingly overwhelmed by the complexities of contemporary life, and many wish to return to how things were 30 or 40 years ago. Of course, there is a great deal of nostalgia in this, and life may not actually have been as easy then as some remember it today.

But it is this deep-rooted longing that Mrs. Takaichi is drawing on, just as Abe did. It’s a kind of promise that cannot really be fulfilled—you can’t turn back time. But I agree: I would rather try to explain Mrs. Takaichi’s policies from this perspective than from any coherent ideological reasoning.

Youth Apathy, Not Populism, Is Japan’s Democratic Weak Point

And lastly, Professor Klein, from your long-term perspective on Japan’s democratic institutions, do you see Takaichi’s populist conservatism as a stabilizing corrective within Japan’s party system—or as a potential source of democratic backsliding under the guise of moral renewal?

Professor Axel Klein: Let me answer that with a question first. Where does Japan slide back to? You may ask how democratic a state can be when it has been run by one dominant party for 65 of the last 70 years. We cannot ignore the fact that Japan’s democracy, even though it is the oldest in Asia, is in this respect quite different from other industrialized countries you might use for comparison. For 65 of the last 70 years, the LDP has been in power, and for most of that time it has governed alone. And when it didn’t, it usually had just one coalition partner.

So, that’s one important characteristic of Japanese democracy. A second is that Japanese voters are overwhelmingly conservative. This is reinforced by the enormous disinterest of young people in politics. Voter turnout among those under 30 is a little over 30%, meaning that two-thirds of young people do not vote. This is a remarkably high number. I actually consider it a disaster for a democracy. You need to get young people involved and interested. I think young people in Japan are not taught what it means to be politically active, what it means to vote. And then, of course, when they grow older, they realize that many things they encounter in daily life—rules, taxes, regulations—are being decided somewhere, and they are being decided by the government. So they should get involved in politics.

I have many Japanese exchange students in my courses here at my university, and it is really frustrating to see how little they care about Japanese politics and how little they know. So my point is this: if young people are so disengaged, and senior citizens want stability and safety, and politics that promise a carefree life, then national politicians may feel they can pursue this moral renewal. But I don’t think voters care much about these ideas. What they care about right now are other problems. High consumer prices, as in most countries. The price of rice is a very symbolic issue that affects everyone in Japan.

And returning to what I said earlier, when you hear what Mrs. Takaichi has said in Parliament about how she intends to tackle these problems, I’m very curious to see whether she will succeed—because personally, I have my doubts.

Jan Kubik is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University and Professor Emeritus at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London (UCL), which he directed in 2015-17.

Professor Kubik: Populism in CEE Is Rooted in Deep Feudal Structures Rather Than in the Communist Past

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeInterviews

In a compelling interview with ECPS, Professor Jan Kubik challenges one of the most persistent assumptions about Central and Eastern Europe: that right-wing populism is primarily a legacy of communism. Instead, he argues, its roots lie in far older social hierarchies. “Many people say populists are stronger in East-Central Europe because of communism. I think that misses the point. It is much deeper. It is actual feudalism… long before communism,” he explains. Professor Kubik outlines how these deep-seated structures—traditional authority patterns, weak middle classes, and historically delayed modernization—interact with neo-traditionalist narratives deployed by parties like PiS and Fidesz. The result, he warns, is a durable populist ecosystem requiring both organic civic renewal and, potentially, a dramatic institutional reset.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In this wide-ranging and analytically rich conversation, Distinguished Professor Jan Kubik—a leading scholar of political anthropology and Central and Eastern European (CEE) politics—offers a profound rethinking of the foundations of right-wing populism in the region. Drawing on insights from two major European Commission–funded projects, FATIGUE and POPREBEL, Professor Kubik challenges one of the most enduring explanations for the region’s democratic backsliding: the legacy of communism. Instead, he underscores that the roots run far deeper. As he succinctly puts it, “Many people say populists are stronger in East-Central Europe because of communism. I think that misses the point. It is much deeper. It is actual feudalism, in a sense, and the structural composition of these societies… which started forming long before communism.”

The interview traces how this neo-feudal inheritance—characterized by hierarchical authority structures, traditionalist cultural norms, and weakly developed middle classes—interacts with the neo-traditionalist narratives mobilized by contemporary right-wing populists. Professor Kubik describes neo-traditionalism as a deliberate attempt to revive or manufacture tradition, often through cultural engineering, to legitimize a new political–economic order. In this context, parties like Fidesz and PiS sacralize national identity through education, religion, heritage, and memory politics, exploiting societies in which, as he notes, “authority is… male-chauvinistic… and that person simply belongs there… because this is how it is.” These deeply rooted cultural logics, he argues, help explain why symbolic interventions resonate so powerfully in Poland and Hungary, but far less in an urbanized and secularized Czech Republic.

Professor Kubik also provides conceptual clarity on the interdependence of political and economic power in right-wing populist regimes. POPREBEL identifies a “neo-feudal” regime type marked by weak business actors, strong political actors, and legitimation through neo-traditionalist, anti-market narratives. Programs such as Poland’s 500+—which “dramatically reduced childhood poverty”—are not merely economic interventions but cultural–political tools for consolidating authority.

A significant part of the interview concerns the durability of these systems. Professor Kubik warns that entrenched cultural substructures and polarized value systems make right-wing populism unusually resilient. This resilience is reinforced institutionally through the capture of courts, media, and cultural institutions—producing distinct patterns in Poland, Hungary, and Czechia.

Finally, the interview concludes with a discussion of democratic renewal. Professor Kubik’s twin proposal combines “organic, society-wide work”—especially civic education from an early age—with, on the other hand, “a dramatic institutional reset.” While the latter may sound radical, he argues that moments of deep crisis sometimes require systemic reinvention, citing Charles de Gaulle’s 1958 constitutional overhaul as precedent.

Taken together, Professor Kubik’s insights offer a compelling and ambitious reframing of populism in CEE—not as a post-communist aberration, but as a twenty-first-century expression of far older structural legacies.

Professor Jan Kubik co-supervised two major European Commission–funded projects: FATIGUE, which trained 15 doctoral researchers, and POPREBEL, which developed new interpretations of the rise of right-wing populism.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Jan Kubik, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Two ‘Neos’ That Define a New Populist Order

Professor Jan Kubik, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: Neo-traditionalism and neo-feudalism feature centrally in your recent work. How do these concepts refine or challenge the dominant ideational and strategic approaches to populism, and to what extent do they constitute a genuinely new regime type in Central and Eastern Europe?

Professor Jan Kubik: First of all, thank you for having me. I’m delighted to be able to share some of our work. As for the question, this project really emerged through a dialogue between our regional expertise and broader theoretical debates. When I began the project, I was directing the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL in London, and when we were writing the grant, we were approaching it explicitly from the perspective of Central and Eastern Europe. At the same time, several of us were already immersed in the literature on populism, so the project developed—perhaps in the best possible way—through a conversation between theory and deep regional knowledge.

From the very beginning, like many others, I was fascinated by the question of what drives these developments: is it culture or economy? A number of major studies suggested that both matter, but that cultural factors seem somewhat more decisive—people often felt their worlds were being disrupted or threatened by modernity. Importantly, it wasn’t only those in dire economic straits; sometimes people who were economically comfortable still felt profoundly unsettled.

So, we were always thinking about how to combine these elements. I come from anthropology, trained in both symbolic and economic approaches, so I’ve always believed we need explanations that are complex—multi-factoral but not overly complicated.

We then began looking closely at tradition as a key resource for right-wing populists and came across the concept of neo-traditionalism. We took this to mean two things: first, the revival of a tradition that had been lost or weakened, and second, the deliberate top-down manufacturing of tradition—less organic than is often assumed, involving a form of cultural engineering.

As the project developed, we brought in a group of economists from Corvinus University in Hungary, and we began studying Hungary as an extreme case of tight interdependence between political and economic actors. This soon led us to literature on neo-feudalism. Suddenly we had two “neos”—a nice symmetry, as it turned out—and then the idea came together.

I’ve always been interested in legitimacy: how systems, including economic ones, are justified through cultural constructs. And we had a kind of eureka moment: neo-feudalism describes a specific arrangement of political and economic power, and neo-traditionalism is what legitimates it—a deliberate revival or construction of national tradition. In Poland, for example, this is deeply intertwined with a particular vision of Catholicism.

Hungary and Poland were especially valuable cases because right-wing populists were fully in power, allowing us to observe what they actually do once governing. The Czech Republic offered a different configuration—populist, but less aggressive and often described as “technocratic populism.”

So, drawing on what I know best, these three countries form a sort of analytical triangle. And that, in brief, is how the project took shape.

Culture Is Built—But Never Free From Material Conditions

Your framework draws on “embedded constructivism” and Weberian cultural–materialist analysis. How does this interpretive tradition alter the way scholars should conceptualize the relationship between populist discourse, historical memory, and everyday meaning-making among citizens?

Professor Jan Kubik: I come from anthropology, and I studied sociology and even some philosophy in Krakow before I left for the United States. I’ve always been a constructivist, but I have continually tried to understand more deeply what is really meant by that. The idea, of course, is that humans create those entities we then take for granted as natural—nations, genders, ethnicity, and all those things, including populism in some sense. And that’s fine, but I always had a kind of residue of materialism. Perhaps my studies of state socialist systems and the political economy of state socialism—which I even taught for a while—made me sensitive to the economic dimension. It is obviously central to human societies.

Weber was also a lasting influence, and he was always stretched, as he put it, between explanation and interpretation, which I found important and evocative. Eventually, I came across—or perhaps coined—the concept of being a “materialist constructivist,” based on reading other scholars. The idea is clearly present, for example, in the work of Michèle Lamont, the Harvard sociologist. When she writes about differences between working-class cultures in the United States and France, she reminds us that while we may be focused on culture, we cannot forget the material base of the situation: different economic systems, different types of capitalism, and so on.

So, I thought, yes, this is exactly what we want to do as well. Our expertise—except for our economic colleagues—is mostly on the cultural side, but we should never lose sight of the economic dimension. This concept is simply another way of bringing those two elements together.

Polarized Subcultures as Engines of Persistence

Traditional catholic event in Poland – First Holy Communion for eight year old children. Photo: Sebastian Czapnik.

In your POPREBEL conceptual architecture, you rely on three analytical oppositions (supply/demand, culture/economy, challengers/incumbents). How do these axes interact in explaining the durability—not merely the rise—of right-wing populism in CEE?

Professor Jan Kubik: Here, I am still a bit on thin ice. We are not fully there yet, but it is a great question—thank you for it. I don’t think I have ever articulated it so clearly to myself as you just did. But here are my hunches, based on several years of work—so these ideas may evolve, but for now I would say this: There is much more to be done on the demand side. There are cultures or subcultures in these societies that are conservative, traditional, traditionalist—however you would call them. And the supply side consists of political entrepreneurs, activists, intellectuals, and even some artists who lean conservative and at some point realize: oh, society is not entirely liberal, left, or centrist—there is a huge chunk of people who will listen to us because they already think this way, more or less spontaneously, due to historical circumstances.

So, I would say that this existing demand, these existing subcultures, indicate a certain durability of the phenomenon. Once this process gets going, it may be more difficult to change than we assume. In practice, this means that in Polish society—and to a large degree in American society as well—you have tremendous polarization. What emerges from this culture war is more polarization. We may be stuck with societies polarized not only politically but also culturally, at a deeper level. That is the key factor on the demand side.

Culture and economy I already explained, so I will just add that because the question of legitimation is at stake, cultural mechanisms need to be carefully observed. Whenever right-wing populists come to power—this is empirically clear—they are interested not only in taking over elements of the political system, such as the judiciary, but also in controlling institutions of cultural production: school programs, museums (I have done a lot of work on historical memory and museums), and not only historical museums but all kinds of them. They try to control theater productions, and they move into film production to ensure that more “patriotic” movies are created, and so on.

As for incumbents versus challengers—yes, we need to examine both, but for us, incumbency is crucial because in our region we have the best cases of these political formations holding full political power. We can actually observe what they do once in office. In other places, throughout Western Europe and elsewhere—India may be somewhat similar—you have parties entering coalitions and sometimes mellowing down, as observers say is happening with Meloni: once in government, she tones things down a little. Orban did not tone anything down, nor did Kaczynski. Modi does not tone down much.

Then there is Brazil, a fascinating case, because Bolsonaro never managed to get control over the judicial system—particularly the Supreme Court—which produces an interesting and somewhat scary parallel with the United States, where the court is not at the end of a telephone line from the White House, but is, everyone would agree, much more sympathetic to the president than it was under previous administrations.

Populism as a Product of Long Cultural Trajectories

In “Populism Observed,” you argue that Czech and Polish populisms are “tantalizingly different.” To what extent do these divergences stem from long-term political-cultural trajectories as opposed to variations in political agency, party organization, or media ecosystems?

Professor Jan Kubik: This is my favorite part of the project at the moment, because of my interest in history and the fact that I see myself as a historical institutionalist, so I always want to understand longer trajectories—how different institutions or cultures and subcultures emerged over time. I also have some personal links: my mother was born in Prague, and my great-grandfather was Czech, so I always felt somewhat comfortable between Czech and Polish cultures, and now I have a chance to work on it more systematically.

When you dig into the basic trajectory—and the main interest for us, because we accept, as you said, the ideational definition of populism—the thing of great interest, starting from the Polish side, is the role of religion, in this case Catholicism. But when you cross the mountains to the Czech side, you are in a completely different reality, going back to the 14th and 15th centuries—five centuries of a completely different trajectory in the interaction between religion and other cultural and political factors, mostly because of Hussitism and Jan Hus, a kind of proto–Martin Luther about a century earlier. This sets the whole field of what I call national self-understanding—who are we as Czechs versus who are we as Poles?—on very different trajectories over time.

The story is more complex, but every bit of evidence we look at adds to the picture. I am a believer in falsification—I would be happy to find evidence that contradicts my hypothesis—but almost everything falls into place, one bit after another. A quick example: in the Polish case, Romanticism in the first half of the 19th century is central. Poland is partitioned, disappears from the political map, and everyone agrees that Romanticism is at the center of Polish self-understanding: the heroic imagination, always fighting, always on the barricades, having a mission—messianic or, as one of my professors called it, “missionic”—the idea that we can save Europe from itself. Kaczynski says such things: that true Catholicism exists in Poland, that the West is decadent and has forgotten its true roots in Christianity, and that Poland can rescue Europe from itself. There is nothing like that in the Czech case.

The Czech trajectory leads to, in two words, more moderation and stronger liberalism. So, Babiš, the Czech populist who is back in power again, is much more restrained. He is much more attuned, shrewd in that sense. He is a good politician; he knows he cannot go too far. He cannot go as far as Kaczynski or Orbán and remain credible. I think he understands that will not work. And just two days ago, one of my Czech colleagues sent me a short Czech text—an interview with Orbán, who said something like: Look at the Czechs; they are less crazy than we Hungarians, but they also have doubts about supporting Ukraine. The first part of the sentence shows that Orbán recognizes that these more sober-minded Czechs also share some positions with him, but it comes from a very different cultural background.

Why Czech and Polish Populisms Reshape Institutions Differently

Participants march through the streets during Prague Pride, a major LGBTQ+ parade and celebration, in Prague, Czech Republic, on August 12, 2017. Photo: Madeleine Steinbach.

Your analysis highlights the personalistic nature of Czech populism (embodied by Babiš) versus the ideational, party-driven nature of Polish populism (PiS). How do these distinct modalities shape patterns of institutional transformation, particularly in relation to state capacity and judicial independence?

Professor Jan Kubik: I can only say something about correlations—and yes, we keep reminding our students that correlation is not causation. I do not understand the mechanism, honestly, yet. But if you observe that the Polish judiciary is decimated and cannot recover even now, two years after the defeat of PiS, there is no good way of doing that. I follow the debates among scholars of the law, activists, and people who are now in charge of the legal part of the system in the new government. And still the Supreme Court, to some degree—and the Constitutional Tribunal completely—are controlled by PiS appointees. You hit that famous dilemma: should we use undemocratic methods to undo damage to democracy done by undemocratic forces? The idea is that maybe we shouldn’t, because then we behave like them—and so on; this is a well-recognized dilemma. In the Czech case, Babiš never attacked, never tried to take over the courts. He did attack them rhetorically, but he didn’t create anything like the situation that exists in Hungary, where Orbán completely controls them, or in Poland.

So, the one thing that I can say is that now that we have quite a bit of data, one thing I know for sure is that Czechs think about the map of the political, socio-political reality in very personalistic terms. In our analysis, in Poland, Jaroslaw Kaczyński doesn’t come up, even. You have to be a bit of an expert—everybody in Poland knows—but people seem to accept his preferred way of existing in the public domain, which is behind the scenes. So, in the Polish case, it is, as you said, PiS—the Law and Justice Party—that people associate with the center of the system. And then you see this difference in the situation when it comes to, say, the judiciary.

I don’t know what the link is. I just observe that this is how the two systems are different. Maybe the answer is simply that the reformist program of Polish right-wing populists is more ambitious and more comprehensive. The Czech project is more self-constrained. It’s a hypothesis.

Why Polish and Czech Resentments Diverge

How might the conceptual networks emerging from online ethnography and semantic network analysis help explain why anti-elite resentments in Poland crystallize around specific institutions (PiS, the Church, PO), while in Czechia they coalesce around abstract concerns such as manipulation or state incompetence?

Professor Jan Kubik: This analysis is based on about 140 very long interviews in Czechia and in Poland. We use this sort of custom-made method of semantic network analysis, which allows us to create visualizations of networks of concepts, with the intensity of connections marked. This method was developed in collaboration with mathematicians, and it was a great kind of multi-method situation where they were saying, “Look, we know how to do those abstract things, but we need to know the context.” It was really refreshing to hear that from mathematicians: you are the experts on the region; we have to keep going back and forth between the data, your reading of the interviews in the original languages, and our modeling. So, this was great, and that is the product of it.

If I go back to the interviews: in both the Czech and Polish cases, one thing that is very clear is that people’s concerns are, to a large degree, divorced from the heated, polarized political–ideological war that we often observe on the front pages of newspapers—observed by people coming from abroad or even internally by those who study these things. From what we got in our interviews—and here is the very important thing—we didn’t ask, “What do you think about X?” or “What do you think about Kaczyński?” or “What do you think about populism?” Nothing like that. We assumed we would talk about life and see what comes out organically. Eventually, we decided to tighten it a bit, and the slogan organizing the interviews was well-being, which very quickly led people to talk about problems. And I think it’s very useful. We don’t tell them how something is related to populists or not. Then sometimes it pops up—whether populists can help them or not.

But what comes across is this pervasive sense that the state—its institutions, particularly when it comes to healthcare—is very, very poor. The service is very poor. People are very unhappy. And they are unhappy across the board with every political formation in some cases—quite a few of them. They look critically at the previous government, Donald Tusk’s government (which is now back in power). They look critically at PiS’s government. They seem to be very much concentrated, as people have observed from time to time in other studies, on their everyday problems.

I was thinking about what happened in the United States now, with that Democratic wave a week ago or so—particularly Mamdani. He was so effective because he talked to people about everyday problems. Affordability. That was very much what we found in those interviews.

So, at this point, I’m thinking—because this analysis is not closed; the project is still in progress—that there is an interesting disjoint, some kind of discrepancy, between the layer of national political discourse and what is really in people’s heads, what really bothers them. And there are, of course, moments of connection, and there are some influences, but the most striking feature for me is this disconnect between those two layers of culture, however you would call it.

Mapping the Political–Economic Fusion Behind Populist Power

The POPREBEL work suggests that right-wing populist regimes fuse political and economic power in a neo-feudal pattern. How does this pattern differ from classical patronalism in post-communist states, and what empirical indicators best capture it?

Professor Jan Kubik: Let me go into a bit of splitting hairs, because I’m very proud of this. This is not me; this is our colleagues—economists, particularly one, István Kollai, but also others. I was involved, though; those were fascinating discussions.

We started with the basic idea—there is a huge literature on the relationship between the business or economic domain and the political domain. So, we started with the basic logical typology: you have the situation where business is dominant and politicians are subordinate; you have the situation where they are equal; and then you have the situation where it is the other way around.  So those are the three possible types.

Then we looked at—and this is what the economists came up with—the second dimension, which you can describe as the form of legitimacy. So again, what returns is this kind of culture–economy combination. And they divide it into three again. There is the kind of secretive private interest—there is no effort to produce any form of legitimacy by whoever is in power. Second, there is the situation where there is justification through invoking market competitiveness, which is a kind of neoliberal solution or developmental state, or something like that. And then the third one is legitimacy through, by and large, neo-traditionalism combined with anti-market—what they called anti-market counter-movement.

And this you see clearly in Poland with Kaczyński, where they increased their distribution dramatically, this famous program, 500 plus for every child and then the second child, which dramatically reduced childhood poverty. So PiS has a serious success on its hands. And of course, Orbán is doing the same thing through other specific methods.

So, if you take those 3 by 3, then you generate nine types, which is maybe a little bit too much, but I don’t want to go through all of them. But here’s where feudalism, neo-feudalism, or as we sometimes call it, feudal capitalism, sits: it is weak business actors and strong political actors—one of those three types of the relationship—and legitimation is through neo-traditionalism and counter- or anti-market movement.

You can imagine that if you look logically at those nine cells, you will have different combinations of those features. Some are purely abstract, logical categories, but some are very much in existence. Just one more example: if you have strong business actors and weak political actors and a secretive tendency toward private interests, this is what is often called crony capitalism.

Why Insecurity—Not Inequality—Fuels Populist Appeals

How do you interpret the interplay between economic insecurity (transition fatigue, inequality, regional dualization) and the moral/cultural appeals mobilized by right-wing populists? To what extent is the economic dimension still under-theorized in populism studies?

Professor Jan Kubik:  Yes—this first emerged in our discussions across the whole team, which ranges from economists to people doing theater studies and similar fields. Again, the significance of cultural production came up repeatedly. And also resistance to thriving populists often comes through cultural institutions.

It actually came from the economists first that much of the economic interpretation of the rise of right-wing populism focuses on inequality. They quickly said, early in the project, that we need a concept broader than that. We do not deny the significance of inequality, but insecurity is a broader concept. Insecurity can be generated by malfunctioning political institutions, or the perception that institutions are malfunctioning, or certainly by invoking cultural fears. What is interesting is that economists—not only our economists, but others studying these phenomena—are increasingly taking seriously not just material interests, but also interpretations of the world. The stories about the world matter.

So that’s when the concept of insecurity emerged, and right-wing populism enters with its story of neo-traditionalism. A story many people tell—it’s just that ours uses slightly different words. This is the story that if we go back to our genuine culture, back to our roots, we will make our country great again. We will return to our normal state of being. It was disrupted by liberalism, by modernization, by ideas about gender equality, equality for LGBTQ+ people, the existence of more than two genders—all of this.

You can clearly see the reactions to those developments. The return to “two genders”—the president issuing a document declaring that there are only two genders, against everything we know from anthropology, my own discipline. Many cultures clearly recognized more than two genders. And I don’t even know what to do with that. Because in American universities today, people get fired for saying the president may be wrong on that.

So, yes, bringing back traditions to increase security—that’s the essence. Again, it’s not very original; many have noticed it. But we are trying to show how it works in some detail.

Deep Social Hierarchies—not Communism—Explain Populist Resonance

Tourists visit the medieval wooden church during the Easter Festival in Hollókö, Hungary, a UNESCO World Heritage village, on April 12, 2009. Photo: Attila Jandi.

Your chapters on education, religion, and heritage document a systematic attempt by populists to ‘sacralize’ national identity. What structural conditions allow these symbolic interventions to resonate so deeply, particularly in Poland and Hungary?

Professor Jan Kubik: By structural conditions we mean a certain state of society. I see pretty strong differences between Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. So, let’s put the Czechs aside quickly, because this is the society that is most urbanized and among the most secular in the world, which has a historical explanation. Structurally, this is a society with many people who do not belong to any organized religion and who are situated in the middle range of the class structure. It’s a very middle-class society—by and large. It is a little bit like England. You don’t have those classical East European landscapes of very poor villages, but rather a lot of small towns—little urban spaces—a bit like England, which, of course, has its historical roots.

And then in Poland, you have a very different story. Until World War II, this was a very peasant society, and then you have an enormous change in social structure after the war with the total elimination of the Jews, who were important in the middle range of society, and the movement of the country 300 kilometers or so to the west, and then the influx of many people from the east—more of a peasant society. Long story short, some sociologists use the term peasantism or neo-peasantism, which I take as an anthropologist and sociologist to mean attachment to a specific, rich, but distinct culture based on, for example, a very different notion of authority. That authority is kind of male-chauvinistic; “samodzielny” (autocrat) is usually the man at the center—like in extensive kinship systems—at the top of the local social pyramid. And that person simply belongs there. If you ask people, “Why is this person there?” the answer is, “Because this is how it is. This is how things should be.” So, it is a very different idea than the liberal one. In Weberian terms, it is traditional versus bureaucratic, instrumental, or rational. Liberal democracy is based on transparency, clear criteria. It’s boring, dull, mechanistic—but it is a system that generates much more accountability and transparency. In this traditionalistic system, no, this is not the concern.

And if you describe it like that, it is very close to the populist idea of the volonté générale. Once you recognize what people want, and you are with them—one of them—then that’s it. A few more steps, and we are in paradise.

In Hungary, the way I understand it, it is somewhat similar to Poland, but there are studies showing that during the interwar period, Hungary was strongly leaning fascist. It had a very strong fascist movement—also in Poland, but not as strong. Studies show a very strong tradition in the countryside. Hungary is also very polarized: you have the massive agglomeration of Budapest—very urban culture—and then countryside with a few smaller towns. And that culture is somewhat similar to the Polish culture of traditionalism, traditional forms of authority, traditional gender norms, and so on.

So, that’s the structural precondition. Many people say populists are stronger in East-Central Europe because of communism. I think that misses the point. It is much deeper. It is actual feudalism, in a sense, and the structural composition of these societies, historically, which started forming long before communism. If modernity is defined by the emergence of a middle class and specific upper classes—experts, specialists, bourgeois layers—all of this came to this part of the continent much later than in the West. And that happened much earlier than communism.

Renewal Requires Both Organic Education and Institutional Reset

And lastly, Professor Kubik, in your forthcoming work on countermeasures, you discuss possible remedies for democratic erosion. What forms of democratic renewal—institutional, economic, or cultural—are most promising in reversing neo-feudal and neo-traditionalist tendencies in CEE?

Professor Jan Kubik: The Anatomy of Right-wing Populists was based on the work of 15 doctoral students who we trained in the program. So, this is something we’re proud of—that there’s a younger generation of scholars working through this. That final chapter in the book comes from their work.

But in brief, I think there are two main avenues of reform or re-democratization. One is—and no matter how I approach it, I always end up in the same place—education. But then the question is, what kind of education? Well, civic education, and it needs to be organic. My obsession is that “organic” means really embedded in society, with a lot of people engaged in it, and it has to start early. My wife teaches kids at various levels, and she always tells me that the kids are very attuned to descriptions of social justice, democracy—they have a sense of fairness. There’s fertile ground for teaching the basics of democracy very early on. But that requires a large, massive program.

On the other hand, and at another level, you have to find a way to reform the institutions that have been damaged—maybe as quickly as possible. Poland is a perfect case. I’m trying to write about it now, time permitting. You have the Prime Minister from liberal-conservative center; that’s what PO is under Tusk. It’s a complex coalition which is a problem in itself. On the other hand, this popular right-wing populist formation. They are divided roughly as follows: the Prime Minister is a liberal democrat; the President is a right-wing populist; and the Supreme Court, along with parts of the legal system, remains dominated by right-wing populist appointees. What do you do with that after two years?

It is very difficult to change things through reform using regular democratic methods. The price you pay is a very unhappy society. Particularly women—young women—because women, and rightly so, brought Tusk to power. I mean, not only them, but they were very instrumental. They mobilized against the most draconian abortion law in the EU. And Tusk cannot do much for them, because part of his coalition is a conservative party—anti-radical populist, right-wing populist, but conservative. So, he is stuck; nothing happens. His approval rating is dismal. In some polls, it was 30% or something. It’s even lower than Trump.

And I had this somewhat crazy idea—I even tried to raise it with some people at meetings in Warsaw. It didn’t go very far, because it does sound extreme, but it came out of sheer desperation. What do you do after eight years of right-wing populist rule that has so thoroughly damaged the institutions? You have to restart the system. Begin with a new Constitutional Convention—literally reboot the entire framework. Practically, it doesn’t seem doable, but when I looked for historical precedents, I turned to Charles de Gaulle in 1958, when he shifted France from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic. It was a moment of deep crisis—the Algerian War, multiple political breakdowns—and the parliament was, in his view, ungovernable. He won a referendum decisively and created the system France has today, a strongly presidential republic. He reset the system—if the word “reset” means anything, that was it.

So, my idea is: organic, society-wide work on the one hand, and, on the other, a dramatic institutional reset. But that didn’t happen, and the system simply muddles through.

Dr. Damon Linker—Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Senior Fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, columnist, and author of The Theocons and The Religious Test

Dr. Linker: Trump Is the Worst Possible Example of a Right-wing Populist

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeInterviews

In this interview for the ECPS, Dr. Damon Linker delivers a stark assessment of Trumpism’s place in the global surge of right-wing populism. Dr. Linker argues that Donald Trump is “the worst possible example of a right-wing populist,” not only for his ideological extremism but for a uniquely volatile mix of narcissism, vindictiveness, and disregard for constitutional limits. Central to his warning is Trump’s assault on what he calls the democratic “middle layer”—the professional civil servants who “act as a layer of defense” against executive tyranny. By “uniting the bottom and the top to crush that middle layer,” Dr. Linker contends, Trumpism pushes the United States toward an authoritarian model unprecedented in its modern political history.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Damon Linker—Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Senior Fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, columnist, and author of The Theocons and The Religious Test—offers one of the clearest and most sobering analyses of Trumpism’s evolving place within the global wave of right-wing populism. Across the conversation, Dr. Linker advances a central contention: Donald Trump is “the worst possible example of a right-wing populist,” not only because of ideological extremism but because of a personally distinctive mix of narcissism, vindictiveness, and strategic opportunism that intensifies the authoritarian tendencies inherent in contemporary populist governance.

A recurring theme in the interview—and the one that speaks most directly to the headline—is Dr. Linker’s argument that Trumpism seeks to eliminate what he calls the “middle layer” of democratic states. In his formulation, liberal democracies depend on “informed, intelligent, educated… people in that middle layer of the state” who carry out laws, uphold norms, and prevent the executive from “acting like a tyrant.” Trump, by contrast, “tries to unite the bottom and the top in an effort to crush that middle layer—leaving only ‘the people’ and the strongman running the country.” This dynamic, Dr. Linker warns, places the United States closer to the logic of authoritarian rule than at any point in the modern era.

The interview situates Trumpism within both historical cycles and global patterns. Dr. Linker argues that the Republican Party is returning to an older “rejectionist” impulse rooted in its reaction to the New Deal. Yet Trump’s version is more expansive and more radical, because what the right now seeks to overturn is far larger: the post-war regulatory, administrative, and cultural state. At the same time, Dr. Linker stresses that while Trumpism shares features with “authoritarian populism” abroad, Trump himself stands out for being “personally irresponsible… rage-fueled… corrupt… [and] willing to use state power… to hurt his enemies and help his friends.”

The interview also maps the institutional consequences of this project. Dr. Linker shows how Trumpism simultaneously directs bottom-up grievance and top-down coercion to pressure universities, law firms, media, bureaucratic agencies, and cultural institutions. Some actors, he notes, resist, while others “capitulate” under threat of political or financial retaliation. The overall pattern reveals an increasingly fragmented institutional landscape marked by selective vulnerability rather than systemic resilience.

Finally, Dr. Linker reflects on the future of American party politics. If Democrats cannot adapt—by embracing a modestly populist reformism and distancing themselves from the “old, discredited establishment”—they risk long-term marginalization. Yet he remains cautiously optimistic: “As long as we have free and fair elections… my very strong suspicion is [the Democrats] will win again. We just have to be a little patient about it.”

This interview thus offers a penetrating, historically informed account of Trumpism as both a symptom and accelerant of democratic decay in the US—and a warning about what may come next.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Dr. Damon Linker, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Why Trumpism Isn’t New—But More Dangerous

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.

Dr. Damon Linker, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: You argue that Trumpism expresses a “reactive rejectionism” deeply rooted in the American right’s political DNA. To what extent do you see this as a cyclical return of buried ideological impulses versus a structural transformation of the Republican coalition in the 21st century?

Dr. Damon Linker: Well, I’ve tended to side with the idea that it is something cyclical. The Republican Party responded to the New Deal in the 1930s—Franklin Roosevelt’s vast expansion of the size and scope of the federal government in response to the Great Depression. The party reacted by rejecting that expansion entirely in the name of what we call in the United States, using the French expression, laissez-faire: the notion that the government should not play a significant role in organizing and regulating our political and economic lives, and that if it gets out of the way, the economy will grow and we will see all kinds of positive developments—economically, culturally, and politically. Because the liberal left was working to expand the scope of government, the Republicans developed a program of resistance and rejection.

This remained the party’s dominant position until 1952, when Senator Robert Taft ran for president on that platform. But in the end, the party narrowly chose a different candidate that year—Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former general who helped win the European theater in World War II. He went on to serve eight years as president and adopted a more moderate position, one that enabled the consolidation of the New Deal and continued the Cold War that had been initiated by Democrats and liberals before him.

That moment marked the emergence of a more moderate, mainstream version of the Republican Party, which remained influential on and off until the immediate aftermath of George W. Bush’s presidency. I think Donald Trump represents a return to this older rejectionist form of the Republican Party—although now it rejects much more, because government and the left-liberal agenda have expanded dramatically since the 1930s. So there is much more to contest and attempt to reverse, and I think the impulse to do so helps explain some of the radicalism we’ve seen, especially from this second Trump administration over the past year.

After the Cold War: No Brake on Radicalization

In your framing, the Cold War consensus temporarily disciplined the American right toward moderation. Without an equivalent external threat today, what kinds of internal political or social incentives—if any—could exert a similar moderating force?

Dr. Damon Linker: I’m honestly not sure. My argument is that it’s a bit mysterious what such a force could be. I didn’t go into this in the New York Times essay you’re referring to, but I’m even a little at a loss about whether an external challenge—if it happened today—would have the same effect. Suppose China made an aggressive move against Taiwan and we suddenly became much more concerned about an assertive China in geopolitics. I’m not convinced the Republican Party would respond in a moderating way. At this point, it is so wedded to a kind of Trump-oriented aggressiveness and defensiveness, and to a somewhat conspiratorial and paranoid mindset, that it might meet such a challenge by becoming even more radical about the threat posed by it.

So I’m not sure. I suppose I could say that if Trump ends up being an unsuccessful president—his approval rating is already sinking quite low, and if it drops even lower than it did in his first presidency from 2016 or 2017 to early 2021—and then a Republican successor goes on to lose in 2028, there would be a very lively and rhetorically violent fight among Republicans about where to go next. Out of that struggle, and out of a desperation to win again, it’s possible the party could move even further in an extreme right-wing direction, or it could try to combine some Trump positions—maybe anti-immigration convictions—with a more moderate tone and attitude on other issues.

I’ve long thought that if the Republican Party combined an anti-immigration stance with genuine support for healthcare reform that enabled more people to have access to affordable care, that would be a very potent and powerful combination. But the party has long paired certain cultural right-wing positions with a real hostility to taxes and regulations—a strongly pro-business point of view. And that combination limits its total electoral appeal, so I think they would have to adjust that somewhat.

Populism from Below, Authoritarianism from Above

Donald Trump delivers a victory speech after his big win in the Nevada caucus at Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, flanked by his sons Eric (right) and Donald Jr. (left) in Las Vegas, NV. Photo: oe Sohm.

Many scholars describe democratic backsliding as driven by institutional capture from above and mass polarization from below. How do you interpret the interaction between Trump’s top-down attacks on institutions and the bottom-up radicalization of the Republican base?

Dr. Damon Linker: I affirm the view that combines them both. Trumpism—understood as the American form of right-wing populism we see across much of the world today—brings together exactly these two dynamics. What we have in the United States, as in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia, where potent right-populist parties and leaders have emerged, is often this same combination: grassroots, everyday voters who are deeply angry with and distrustful of the elite establishment that runs the institutions of public life, and a populist leader who comes along and seeks to champion that discontent and suspicion.

That leader—whether Trump, Erdoğan, Modi, Orban, or others—wins power and then uses the office as a kind of wrecking ball to destroy, radically reform, or undermine the elite system governing the country. We’ve seen this clearly in Trump’s approach during his second term over the past year, as he has sought to channel the desires of everyday voters by dismantling large parts of what we call the administrative state—the career bureaucratic civil servants who run the government across administrations, regardless of whether the president is a Democrat or a Republican.

Trump has tried to fire these people, push them out, or exert total control over them, insisting they conform to his vision of how to run the country “in the name of the people”—the people he claims stand with him against the elites. One way to visualize this is to imagine the base of voters at the bottom, the strongman leader at the top, and the professional civil service in the middle. What Trump tries to do is unite the bottom and the top in an effort to crush that middle layer—leaving only “the people” and the strongman running the country.

And that is very dangerous, because it resembles a dictatorship or authoritarian system far more than a liberal democratic one. In a democracy, you specifically want informed, intelligent, educated people in that middle layer of the state, running things day to day in a responsible way and serving as a buffer—a layer of defense for the rule of law and constitutional norms that prevents the person at the top from behaving like a tyrant. Trump, like many strongmen, is trying to remove that crucial middle layer.

Trumpism Beyond Trump

You describe Trumpism as a long-term phenomenon, not merely a personalistic moment. What, in your view, are the essential ideological and sociological components of Trumpism that will endure after Trump himself exits the stage?

Dr. Damon Linker: The things that I think are likely to fade a little bit are the extreme examples of Trump’s corruption. I do think that corruption is going to increase in the government—probably with both parties but especially among Republicans—simply because Trump has shown that you can be corrupt and get away with it. Now, Trump, as a long-term corrupt figure in our economy and politics—someone who’s a developer and has worked historically in New York City, where the building trades developers are quite corrupt, and he’s been doing it for his entire career of about a half century—I think he’s a kind of outlier, very extremely corrupt, and he’s been very eager in this second administration to do anything he can to enrich himself, his business, his family, and friends.

So, we’ll see some of that, but I think it probably won’t continue at quite the level we’ve seen with Trump. What will continue is the dynamic I’ve already been talking about: seeking to empower the executive branch of our politics by justifying its power in terms of defending “the people.” This kind of populist account of power suggests that it’s acceptable for the leader of the government to act in very extreme ways that seem to transgress the rule of law because it is supposedly done in the name of defending what the people say they want.

In substantive policy terms, the Republican Party will remain very hostile to immigration. It’s also going to be much more skeptical of free trade agreements than it used to be. That doesn’t mean the chaotic imposition of tariffs that Trump has attempted—tariffs he is already backing away from a little because they are hurting our economy so severely. But there is room for a more responsible form of protectionism in our political economy, one that doesn’t offshore supply chains with quite the enthusiasm we’ve seen over the last two or three decades since the 1990s, here and around the world. That trend will continue.

I also think there will be a continued tendency to combine a pro-business economic policy with social conservatism—a long-standing Republican mix since Ronald Reagan. And it will be carried out with more extremism, as Trump has done: very forcefully using the power of the state to combat examples of cultural leftism in the country—in universities, in the corporate sector—while rewarding corporations or businesses that are either explicitly anti-left-wing or simply unpolitical and willing to play ball with, or do business with, the president.

Those businesses will be rewarded with approvals for mergers, a more favorable regulatory environment, and similar benefits, whereas those that continue to push what we call wokeness—a kind of cultural left position—will face a more severe regulatory environment, more meddling, and a generally more difficult time from any Republican president who happens to win the office.

The War on the Administrative State

Demonstrators gather at the US Capitol on President’s Day to protest the actions of President Trump’s administration and billionaire Elon Musk in Washington, D.C., on February 17, 2025. Photo: Rena Schild.

Your essay in the New York Times highlights the role of the administrative state as a primary target of rejectionist conservatism. Is this assault driven more by ideological hostility to bureaucracy or by a desire to dismantle professional constraints on executive power?

Dr. Damon Linker: I would say both. There is an ideological opposition to the administrative state that has been developed by certain think tanks in the United States,
probably most prominently the Claremont Institute in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Over the last few decades, they have developed a pretty elaborate ideological critique— a critique of and attack on the administrative state—claiming that it is an undemocratic imposition on the Constitution, that the Constitution doesn’t even conceive of. It doesn’t make any provision for it, and so in that respect, it’s wholly illegitimate and should be dismantled.

But at the same time, there is a sense that the administrative state slows down and hinders the will of the president, unless it can be seized by the president and used as a kind of hammer or some other tool to advance his agenda. So what you get on the right these days in this country is this severe critique of how the administrative state has existed and functioned until now, combined with a very confused proposal about what to do about it in the future. Some people say it should simply be gotten rid of—get rid of the administrative state—which, frankly, is very unrealistic. Every modern nation has what we call an administrative state: career civil servants who make the government function and allow it to do what we ask of it, which is regulate our lives, keep us safe, make sure drugs are safe, make sure airplanes don’t fall out of the sky, make sure our cars don’t blow up when they get in a car accident—these kinds of things.

But some on the right are smarter in saying that what we actually need to do is make sure the administrative state doesn’t only help left-wing politicians when they’re in power. Their critique is that when there’s a Democrat as president, the administrative state helps them fulfill their agenda. When there’s a Republican, they do the opposite and drag their feet. They don’t do what the Republican president asks because they don’t agree with it, since
most of the people who work as career civil servants tend to be Democrats. So they come up with excuses not to fulfill the Republican agenda.

So, these people on the right say what we need to do is not get rid of the administrative state; we need to take control of it—fire the left-wing people who work in it and appoint right-wing people who will both advance our agenda when we’re in charge and, secondly, do the opposite to the left when the Democrats return to power. In other words, if the Democrat wants to do a certain thing, these new right-wing civil servants will drag their feet and not implement the proposals. This is a recipe for very wild, big swings from president to president. One advantage of an administrative state—or a career civil service— is that it creates a kind of stability across administrations. Whether you have a Republican president, a Democratic president, a Republican again, a Democrat again, the government as a whole moves a little to one side or the other, but remains anchored in the middle, never veering too far in one direction or the other.

But if all the career civil servants get fired when there’s a new party in charge of the presidency and are replaced with ideologues who agree, you’re going to get something much more volatile, where the whole government shifts 180 degrees in direction. That is a recipe for chaos and a real lack of stability in our system, I fear.

Samuel Francis’s Roadmap to the New Right

Samuel Francis and the “Middle American radicals” have gained renewed attention in analyses of the new right. How central is Francis’s worldview to understanding the intellectual architecture of contemporary Trumpism?

Dr. Damon Linker: The way I usually read prominent intellectuals of the past is a little subtle. You’re talking about a guy named Samuel Francis who died in 2005. He wrote some important essays around 1991–1992 in which he—in retrospect—proposed something that looks a lot like Trumpism. Basically, he articulated a kind of right-populist and right-wing nationalist program, arguing that Republicans needed to begin allying with middle American, middle-class workers against left-leaning bureaucrats and cultural institutions—the elite institutions of American culture. So, as I was saying earlier, you have the bottom and then the populist at the top on the right going to war against the people in the middle—the bureaucrats, the civil servants, and the leaders of universities, the corporate sector, the arts, and cultural institutions. That sounds a lot like a roadmap for Trumpism.

Where I want to hesitate a little bit is that I’m not making the claim that Sam Francis directly caused Trumpism or directly influenced it that much. I think it’s more that he saw a possibility for the right after the Cold War, and he turned out to be correct, although it took a few decades for the Republicans to find a champion in Donald Trump who could actually enact this style of politics and succeed with it politically. Pat Buchanan attempted it with Sam Francis’s influence in 1992, when he challenged George H.W. Bush’s re-election campaign.
He didn’t do that well, although he did get 38% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary that year, which damaged George H.W. Bush. It’s one reason he lost the presidency to Bill Clinton that year. But Pat Buchanan wasn’t able to turn it into that successful of a program to actually win the primaries and take over the Republican Party then. But Donald Trump has succeeded in enacting something like Sam Francis’s ideas, and that is something we need to recognize.

Who Stands Up to Trump—and Who Capitulates?

Students gather for graduation ceremonies on Commencement Day at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 29, 2014. Photo: Dreamstime.

The Republican Party’s anti-institutionalism now encompasses the judiciary, intelligence services, universities, and media. Which institutional arenas, in your view, remain most resilient—and which are most vulnerable—to coordinated illiberal pressure?

Dr. Damon Linker: I don’t know if I can say that there are any sectors as a whole that can remain resilient. Obviously, the Democratic Party is going to be independent of this and resilient. But beyond that, what you see instead is that within certain segments of the culture, the country, and the economy, certain firms, law firms, and universities are doing better at resisting than others. Some law firms have capitulated to Trump and reached deals with him. Others have said they will not reach deals, and so far it’s not entirely clear—to me at least—
that they’re being punished very severely, so maybe that resistance will continue and even expand.

Similarly with universities: some have capitulated very quickly to Trump in return for having their funding restarted, because Trump cut off a lot of funding for grants in the sciences and medicine. Large, well-endowed universities with prominent medical schools have been particularly vulnerable, like my own University of Pennsylvania, because the Trump administration has been able to shut off grants to these schools, which then gives the president leverage to try to extract concessions from them. But some universities, like Harvard, have tried to fight back, and there are others as well. They will probably continue trying and, hopefully, ride out the rest of the term. There are only three years to go in the second Trump administration. We’ll see. If somehow J.D. Vance becomes president after Trump, or if Trump dies or is incapacitated and Vance takes over during this term and then runs for re-election in 2028 and wins, in those longer-term scenarios it will obviously be harder for these institutions to keep resisting.

But for the moment, again, I wouldn’t say it’s any entire sector. It’s more selective—
people and institutions within many different sectors that are trying to stand up to him, at least a little bit.

Rebuilding the Center-Left for a New Era

You have written extensively on the erosion of the political center. What might a plausible reconstruction of a centrist or “middleground” politics look like in a post-Trump environment, and what forces—if any—could bring it into being?

Dr. Damon Linker: That’s a hard question. I don’t have a great answer for it, because I don’t, frankly, know. My instincts tell me that the road back to power for a kind of center-left coalition has to involve more populism as well. The center-left cannot remain parties of the old, discredited establishment that the right-populist parties have been so successful in targeting. There is obviously a lot of organic irritation and anger with those institutions of the establishment. In order to get a little of that populist energy for themselves, the center-left can’t just say, “Vote for us, and we’ll keep everything the way it’s been for the last
30 to 40 years,” because there aren’t enough people who want to keep things as they’ve been for the last 30 or 40 years. So, if you cede that populist critique and don’t adopt it for yourself, you’re giving ammunition to the populist right to keep winning.

So, the center-left has to acknowledge that this anger against the establishments of our liberal democratic systems is legitimate, that these institutions and the people who run them have made mistakes, they’ve gotten things wrong, and they need to not only acknowledge these errors but come up with proposals to make it better—to fix them, to reform pretty dramatically the way our systems work. Make them more nimble, less bogged down in bureaucracy and red tape, as we put it in one of our favorite metaphors here. And again, try to steal some of that populist energy for the center-left, to, in effect, say: “Yes, I hear you. You’re not happy with the present. Neither are we. We want the government—we want these institutions—to work better for your sake, for all of our sakes.
Trust me, put me into power, and we will make things better. We will make the government run more efficiently and make your lives improve. What we don’t want is those irresponsible people on the other side of the spectrum who really have no positive program at all—they just want to wreck everything. While that might be tempting because you’re angry, the end result is going to be that our lives will get worse, and the government will become even more inefficient, even more incapable of fixing things.”

That’s something like a message that could resonate, but of course you need charismatic, very effective politicians to actually say that in a way that gets people excited. That probably means people who are not the same people who are currently running the show, who clearly are not very compelling to a lot of voters these days.

The Most Extreme Variant of Populism

Former US President Donald Trump with a serious look as he delivers a speech at a campaign rally held at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Wilkes-Barre, PA – August 2, 2018. Photo: Evan El-Amin.

Trumpism increasingly blends populist grievance with state-driven coercion, such as mass deportation plans and politicized bureaucratic purges. Does this represent a uniquely American synthesis, or does it echo the global pattern of “authoritarian populism” seen elsewhere?

Dr. Damon Linker: In general, it’s continuous with what we’re seeing in other countries. There’s a range. Trump is particularly personally irresponsible and incapable of truly grasping policy details. So, like Meloni in Italy, for example, is a right-wing populist, but her governance has been relatively moderate. If other countries in Europe elected right-populist parties and they governed like Meloni has been governing in Italy, I wouldn’t be that worried about it. I would figure the old neoliberal center-right is now gone—it’s extinct—and instead we have a populist right in countries around the world. I don’t really agree with a lot of those things, but it’s okay; it’s an alternative to the center-left, and that’s now what the alternative ideological configuration is going to look like going forward. We can work with that.

Trump is distinct because he’s so personally narcissistic, so rage-fueled. He hates his enemies. He’s willing to use state power and transgress norms and the rule of law in order to hurt his enemies and help his friends. He’s so corrupt. In all of these ways, he’s sort of the worst possible example of a right-wing populist. So it’s mainly these personal things about him that make him uniquely bad.

So the big question for me is if a J.D. Vance ends up taking over after Trump and winning—how does he govern? How is he different from Trump? Is he more thoughtful, or is he actually worse because he holds the same views but is competent and able to aggressively prosecute their agenda in a way that Trump can’t quite pull off? Because, for example, Trump thinks it makes sense to impose enormous tariffs on every country in the world overnight, as he did last April. I don’t think Vance would ever have done anything that stupid and reckless. If that’s true, then Vance wouldn’t have become as unpopular as Trump has become. So that’s one question that I wonder and worry about.

A Stress Test for the American Party System

Torn American flag with Democratic and Republican party symbols, representing political division in the United States. Photo: Dreamstime.

And lastly, Dr. Linker, if Trumpism remains ascendant even after scandals, governance failures, and electoral defeats, what does this suggest about the adaptive capacity—or decay—of the American party system?

Dr. Damon Linker: It means that the Democratic Party is in trouble. Now, it’s not in trouble in the way the Republican Party was in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt won re-election in 1936 with 60.8% of the vote, and Democrats controlled the US Senate with 75 seats out of 96, and the House of Representatives—if I recall correctly—334 to 88. Absolutely lopsided margins in favor of the Democrats, where the Republicans almost looked like they were going out of business.

The Democrats today can still come close to winning. It’s very, very narrow in Congress right now—only 3 or 4 seats separate the two parties—so that means the Democrats can almost win, and they could win again. They could win in the midterm elections next year; they could win the presidency in 2028. If they lose in these elections again, that would mean that they’re in trouble. But they probably are not going to lose in a landslide that signals they have to fundamentally change. It would mean they have to adjust their message in ways like I’ve been advocating in some of the earlier things I said.

So, as long as we have free and fair elections—even if the populist-right Republican Party is winning these elections—we still have the possibility of the Democrats winning at some point in the future, and my very strong suspicion is they will win again. We just have to be a little patient about it.

Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Sociology of Gender, Migration and Racisms at Queen’s University Belfast.

Dr. Vieten: Dutch Progressive Liberalism Is Rather Cosmetic as Fractured Far Right Gains

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeInterviews

In an interview for the ECPS, Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten offers a sharp sociological reading of the 2025 Dutch elections, arguing that “progressive liberalism appears rather cosmetic, and the Dutch elections reveal a significant win for fractured far-right populist parties.” Despite Geert Wilders’ setback, Dr. Vieten stresses that the far right remains structurally resilient, with PVV, JA21, and FvD together securing 42 seats. She highlights the normalization of anti-immigration rhetoric, the co-optation of far-right frames by centrist actors, and the deepening tensions between state-centered citizenship and post-migrant identities. From femonationalism to coalition politics, Dr. Vieten situates the Dutch results within broader European trajectories of nativism, militarization, and socio-economic neglect—warning that liberal democracy risks privileging cultural cohesion over social justice.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In a political landscape marked by shifting coalitions, fragmented party systems, and the normalization of far-right discourse, Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten—Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Sociology of Gender, Migration and Racisms at Queen’s University Belfast—offers, in an interview with the European Center for Populism Studies’ (ECPS), a trenchant sociological analysis of what the recent Dutch election reveals about the deeper transformations reshaping Dutch and European politics. As she succinctly observes, “progressive liberalism appears rather cosmetic, and the Dutch elections reveal a significant win for fractured far-right populist parties.”

While Geert Wilders suffered an electoral and institutional setback, Dr. Vieten underscores that far-right forces have neither receded nor lost structural relevance. She notes that Wilders’ PVV secured “a similar outcome to D66 in terms of parliamentary seats—26,” and that new actors such as JA21 and FvD collectively pushed the far right to 42 seats, signaling the entrenched resilience of nativist politics. This development, she argues, stems from longer-term shifts accelerated by the pandemic—an evolution she previously theorized as “pandemic populism.”

Yet the interview also probes the paradoxical dynamics of the 2025 contest: a weakened Wilders paired with the persistent mainstreaming of anti-immigration rhetoric. Dr. Vieten stresses that the far right’s discursive power continues to shape “cultural belonging and national identity,” even when its institutional credibility falters. Simultaneously, she warns that centrist and center-left parties have often co-opted far-right frames, thereby reproducing segregationist logics while claiming to oppose extremism.

A major theme running through the conversation is the shifting terrain of citizenship, identity, and post-migrant belonging. Drawing on her earlier work on “new European citizens,” Dr. Vieten observes that the pandemic’s border closures and re-territorialization of state authority profoundly disrupted the transnational lives of minority citizens. She also highlights how post-migrant elites—such as VVD leader Dilek Yeşilgöz-Zegerius—may themselves align with exclusionary agendas, complicating assumptions about progressive identifications among minority communities.

The interview further explores the gendered politics of far-right rhetoric. Here Dr. Vieten draws attention to how appeals to women’s rights have been tactically mobilized to justify anti-Muslim policies, echoing Sara Farris’s concept of femonationalism. Liberal narratives of emancipation, she warns, can themselves reinforce racialized boundaries of belonging.

Looking ahead, Dr. Vieten situates the Dutch outcome within broader European trajectories marked by the rise of far-right parties, centrist recalibrations, and an EU increasingly driven by anti-migration and militarization agendas. Liberal democracy, she suggests, risks becoming a project “selling cultural cohesion instead of social cohesion,” unless it confronts underlying socio-economic inequalities.

This interview thus contributes a critical and timely perspective to ECPS’s ongoing effort to interpret the Dutch elections within a wider European and global context.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

A Splintered Far Right Still Sets the Tone in Dutch Politics

Election posters near the Binnenhof featuring Geert Wilders of the PVV in the foreground, The Hague, the Netherlands, October 12, 2025. Photo: Dreamstime.

Despite the electoral setback for Geert Wilders, far-right parties collectively gained ground. How should we interpret this outcome in terms of the structural endurance of nativist, populist politics in the Netherlands?

Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten: The official setback to Wilders leading the strongest party this year (2025) doesn’t change the fact that (a) he achieved a similar outcome to D66 in terms of parliamentary seats—26, and (b) other far-right “kids on the block,” such as JA21 and FvD, also saw a rise in their share of populist votes. This clearly illustrates that the far right (populist) parties have splintered yet continue to pose a serious threat to liberal, socially diverse, and inclusive societies. All three parties (PVV, JA21, and FvD) can claim 42 seats out of 150 (compared to 41 they won in the last election in 2023). This means nativist (autochthon-oriented) ideology has gained and consolidated political ground over the years, particularly after the pandemic—a development I warned about when writing on “pandemic populism” (Vieten, 2022).

To what extent do the recent results illustrate a reconfiguration of far-right populism—from an electoral takeover strategy toward indirect agenda-setting power that continues to shape public discourse on immigration, cultural belonging, and national identity?

Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten: Though I have not followed the election campaign closely, as I do not currently live in the Netherlands, what was striking about the success of D66 and Rob Jetten—and several national and international media outlets have emphasized this—is that Jetten sold his politics with an overall positive message of “we can do it.” Dutch voters were not impressed with the performance of Geert Wilders and the last government on central issues such as housing provision and health services. In the end, the Dutch are often viewed as very pragmatic (similar to the English, as they say), and it might be the case that Wilders’ loss is an outcome of his lack of reliability in terms of policy delivery, and only to a lesser degree driven by the ideological content his far-right populist party conveys. Anti-migration policy—let’s not forget, Wilders’ coalition government resigned because he walked out on that issue—remains a sticking point. Rob Jetten’s overarching approach to what you call “cultural belonging and national identity” was to give the Dutch national flag a more positive (prideful) meaning, not always as a defense against others, but filling it with a form of socially cohesive meaning.

Post-Migrant Elites Don’t Always Align with Progressive Politics

Billboard featuring the main candidates in the Dutch elections on June 9, 2010, in Amstelveen, the Netherlands. Photo: Dreamstime.

Given your work on “new European citizens,” what do the 2025 elections reveal about ongoing tensions between state-centered citizenship regimes and the transnational identifications of post-migrant communities?

Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten: My research and publications on European minority citizens (2016; 2018) now feel like “light years away” (Lichtjahre entfernt). It was a comparative study of three EU countries (pre-Brexit England included) that examined how hyphenated Dutch, German, and British citizens identified as European and related to the European Union. Though I interviewed Moroccan-Dutch citizens—some of them very visible in the public sphere—the general argument may also apply to Turkish or Kurdish-Dutch citizens. However, all of this was carried out pre-pandemic, and as international lockdowns and travel bans taught us, the mundanity of transnational community life was largely suspended. One of my interview partners in Germany explicitly told me that her life as a transnational—maintaining friendships and family ties in Turkey, for example—was shattered and ignored during the pandemic. Nation-states restored their authority and sovereignty over citizens’ movement and territorial borders. Between 2020 and 2022, we witnessed a strict re-territorialization of governance—perhaps a prelude to what has come since and what we see today.

When we speak about “new Europeans,” and you bring up the concept of post-migration, it seems that some minority European/national citizens have made it into the ranks of national (and even international) elites, similar to “old established Europeans.” Ideological or value orientations do not necessarily differ simply because one has a post-migration background. An interesting and perplexing example is Dilek Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, the leader of the VVD (People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy), the conservative Dutch party, who explicitly stated she would not join a coalition with the merged GroenLinks/PvdA party. This means she would rather accept a coalition with far-right parties such as JA21. Yeşilgöz served as a minister in Rutte’s government and is a very experienced politician. But this tells a story of socially classed divisions within ex-immigrant and transnational communities, who do not automatically occupy a liberal-progressive or anti-authoritarian space.

Institutional Failure, Discursive Success

Wilders’ collapsed coalition appears to have weakened his institutional credibility, yet anti-immigration rhetoric remained central in campaign debate. How do you interpret this paradox of reduced governing legitimacy but persistent discursive power?

Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten: As I mentioned before, the collapse of Wilders’ coalition discredited him in terms of reliability and triggered the recent election. Coalition building is at the heart of most Continental European countries, including the Netherlands, and—as far as I remember—it took Wilders nearly a year to form a government anyway. So, the record of being in government and in power for just a year looks quite poor. The mainstreaming (or normalization; see Vieten & Poynting, 2022) is a discursive project that has been unfolding for years—post-2008 economic crisis and with a further push post-pandemic—accelerating at a pace that makes it difficult to challenge, as the underlying socio-economic problems are not going away.

To what extent do the Dutch results reflect a broader European pattern in which centrist parties co-opt right-wing discourses—thereby reproducing segregationist and anti-immigrant logics even while formally opposing the far right?

Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten: Well, unfortunately, it is not only conservative or center-right parties that have jumped on the anti-immigrant—e.g., anti-refugee—scapegoating wagon; center-left parties such as the Labour Party in the UK and the Social Democrats in Denmark have similarly placed anti-migration policy at the top of their agendas. That said, I would go beyond Europe here, as this reflects a broader zeitgeist and a global phenomenon. Though Brazil shifted leftward after the far right damaged the country, mainstream media worldwide continue to give center stage to far-right politicians such as Trump and follow closely the agendas they set. At some point, people may have forgotten that 15 years ago (or earlier, in the early 2000s) there was a very different spirit—embracing cosmopolitanism (albeit Eurocentric), diversity, and openness toward difference.

Returning to what I said earlier about the need to build coalitions, we will now see how Jetten bridges ideological divides, as he needs to form a coalition with three other parties, while the leader of the Dutch conservatives (VVD) has expressed her dislike for including the GreenLeft/Social Democrats in the government. Jetten might end up asking one of the smaller far-right parties, e.g., the FvD, to join. And then we will see how realistic and reliable such a coalition arrangement will be. It is not all out of the woods, and formal opposition is more of a strategy than a reflection of political will and capacity post-election.

Cosmetic Liberalism Cannot Counter Deepening Inequalities

Billboard of D66 featuring Rob Jetten with the slogan Het Kan Wel in Amsterdam, the Netherlands on October 28, 2025. Photo: Robert van ’t Hoenderdaal.

Does D66’s civic-progressive liberalism meaningfully challenge racialized boundaries of European belonging, or does it risk perpetuating a “thin cosmopolitanism” that leaves structural inequalities untouched?

Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten: Your question speaks directly to what I mentioned earlier. The appealing persona of D66’s leader, Rob Jetten, may resonate with urban populations and those identifying as liberal-progressive in middle-class neighborhoods. Even the fact that he is openly gay (his partner originally from Argentina) is not, in itself, an indicator of anti–far-right trajectories. For years, Wilders politicized homosexuality in his rhetoric against Muslim communities, and Alice Weidel, the AfD leader, is a lesbian living with her partner in Switzerland. Therefore, an image of liberal pro-gayness does not say anything about how social cohesion will work in the Netherlands after the 2025 election.

A conservative agenda that is deemed not to tackle socially unfair living conditions in a post-migration society—such as access to housing, rising property prices, and the gap between living standards and affordability for young people—can easily slip into adopting far-right agendas of cultural cohesion. In that sense, a “thin cosmopolitanism” is not enough, as it fails to engage with the socio-economic concerns of a large segment of the population. Progressive liberalism appears rather cosmetic, and as we noted earlier, the election outcome shows a significant win for fractured far-right populist parties.

Fragmentation Masks the Growing Influence of Nativist Politics

With the rise of multiple smaller far-right parties (e.g., JA21, FvD), what does the diversification of the nativist field reveal about ideological differentiation, constituency segmentation, and the long-term resilience of the Dutch radical right?

Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten: I think we covered some of this before. The fragmentation of the Dutch far right—and the way center and liberal parties have adopted racist far-right political agendas, e.g., anti-migration/anti-refugee rhetoric—confirms that we are facing a normalization of far-right, nativist ideologies. The fragmentation reflects nuances as well as socially and culturally classed differences, but this does not diminish the broader presence of far-right actors. We might even see a smaller far-right party joining the government, which poses serious questions for the rule of law and for how the center-right continues to adopt policy agendas set by far-right politicians. The cordon sanitaire has already been abandoned elsewhere. An important piece of EU legislation, the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, was just modified and diluted in scope and reach—and waved through with the votes of far-right parties/politicians, just this week.

Building on your research into gendered culturalism, to what extent has the strategic mobilization of women’s rights within far-right rhetoric served to legitimize exclusionary policies toward Muslim communities—thus normalizing racialized boundaries of national belonging?

Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten: I would go beyond this argument by questioning how liberal notions of female emancipation have also played into anti-Muslim rhetoric and have not prevented the passage of generically racist legislation. The latter refers to laws banning the veil and sustaining narratives of white European supremacy. My colleague Sara Farris (2017) argues that “neoliberalism [is] a political-economic formation that institutionalizes the femo-nationalist ideology as part of the functioning of the state apparatus in order to (re)organize the productive and particularly the socially reproductive sphere” (2017: 14).

Following closely the national civic integration strategies, not only addressing Muslims, but generally migrants, Farris scrutinized data in three EU countries spelling out that Muslim women (and female migrants) are incorporated into the concrete European ‘femo-nationalist economies’ as domestic space keepers. While Muslim men (and migrants, predominantly Muslims) are constructed as outsider-threats, Muslim women are displaced into the social reproduction sphere of the different nation-state. Her argument is intriguing because it interrogates the mainstream liberal narrative that only the far right (or extremists) threatens “our way of life.” But certainly, this kind of post-Marxist analysis is not very fashionable, insisting that normal gendered belonging is already the problem as it is keeping hierarchies of exploitation untouched.

Liberal Democracy Risks Prioritizing Cultural Unity Over Social Justice

People on the street near the National Monument in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on April 14, 2018. Undocumented migrants selling shoes. Photo: Elena Rostunova.

Finally, what do the 2025 Dutch election results suggest about broader European political trajectories—especially the concurrent resilience of far-right nativism and the tactical recalibration of centrist actors seeking to contain it—and how might this interplay shape the future of liberal-democratic politics on the continent?

Dr. Ulrike M. Vieten: Like what happened in Austria and Germany where far-right parties were either coming into first place (Austria) or second (Germany) these countries managed to build coalitions, excluding the far-right for now. As I mentioned above, it now depends on how Jetten and crucial parties such as the VVD can hold their ground and compromise on a trustworthy and stable coalition. We already have far-right parties in government in Western Europe, such as in Italy, and long established in Eastern Europe, such as in Hungary. And if we think of the European Union more broadly, its anti-migration policy (e.g., anti-asylum stance) has shifted toward far-right, anti-foreigner hysteria—for example, outsourcing asylum processes—and is dominated by Angst (both in terms of real and imagined politics) of the Russian.

Accordingly, the second major theme is militarization (and its multi-billion-euro funding), which—let me guess—is undermining spending for social and cultural policies and cohesion across the EU and within European countries. The potential new Dutch government will fit this trajectory very well, as left (or socialist) visions have been rejected across the board. The problem with liberal democracy is that it continues to promote a narrative that ignores socio-economic questions of redistribution, selling cultural cohesion instead of social cohesion.

Dr. Laura Rovelli is an independent researcher at CONICET and Professor at the National University of La Plata (UNLP).

Dr. Rovelli: Milei’s Anti-Science and Denialist Policies Undermine Argentina’s Scientific Institutions

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeInterviews

Argentina is facing an unprecedented assault on its scientific and educational institutions under President Javier Milei’s libertarian administration. Sweeping budget cuts, halted research careers, and the dismantling of science and human rights agencies have destabilized the country’s knowledge ecosystem. As Dr. Laura Rovelli warns, “the government has deployed anti-science and denialist rhetoric that seeks to discredit and undermine the institutions of science and higher education.” This interview explores how Milei’s radical anti-statist agenda erodes academic autonomy, weakens evidence-based policymaking, and reshapes public education amid growing attacks on universities accused of being “ideologically captured.” Dr. Rovelli also highlights emerging networks of resistance—unions, students, feminist groups, and scholars—mobilizing to defend academic freedom, public knowledge, and democratic life.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Argentina is experiencing one of the most turbulent periods for its scientific, educational, and democratic institutions since the return of democracy in 1983. The administration of President Javier Milei—elected on a platform of radical libertarianism, state retrenchment, and market fundamentalism—has initiated sweeping transformations that profoundly reshape the country’s knowledge ecosystem. As part of these reforms, universities, research councils, and scientific bodies have faced defunding, institutional downgrading, and political delegitimization. According to Dr. Laura Rovelli, an independent researcher at CONICET and Professor at the National University of La Plata (UNLP), the government’s approach is not merely administrative restructuring but a broader ideological project. As she warns, “the government has deployed anti-science and denialist rhetoric that seeks to discredit and undermine the institutions of science and higher education.”

In this extensive interview, Dr. Rovelli analyzes how Milei’s program of market deregulation, dollarization, and shrinking of the state challenges the very idea of knowledge as a public good in Argentina’s democracy. She describes a context in which political fragmentation and austerity policies deepen long-standing inequalities and erode the social meaning of rights—especially the right to education. University autonomy, she explains, is being weakened through severe budget cuts, salary reductions, canceled scholarships, and halted research careers, leaving more than 1,200 approved researchers unable to take up their positions.

Beyond material erosion, Dr. Rovelli highlights the symbolic and epistemic dimensions of the crisis. The dismantling of ministries and agencies devoted to science, gender equality, and human rights is accompanied by a discursive offensive aimed at delegitimizing academic expertise. Denialist narratives—targeting gender, climate change, inequality, and public health—have become central to Milei’s political identity and echo global far-right trends linked to Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. This, she argues, represents a broader pattern of “global anti-statist populism,” even as Milei introduces a uniquely Argentine “anti-national component.”

Yet, amid the crisis, Dr. Rovelli identifies emerging forms of resistance and democratic renewal. Trade unions, student organizations, feminist movements, and academic networks have mobilized nationwide and internationally. Universities remain “privileged loci of dispute and possibility,” capable of defending epistemic diversity and rebuilding the common good through legal challenges, collective action, and alliances with social movements.

By foregrounding the struggles surrounding knowledge, education, and public goods, this interview offers a timely and nuanced perspective on Argentina’s democratic future. It reveals how the battle over science and universities has become a defining arena in the contest between neoliberal retrenchment and democratic-popular visions of society.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Dr. Laura Rovelli, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Milei Is Dismantling Argentina’s Knowledge Commons

Ultra-right-wing Argentine politician Javier Milei during the PASO elections in Buenos Aires, Argentina on August 13, 2023. Photo: Facundo Florit.

Dr. Laura Rovelli, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: Javier Milei’s program prioritizes radical market deregulation, dollarization, and the shrinking of the state. From a political theory perspective, how does this agenda challenge or redefine the idea of the common good in Argentina’s democracy?

Dr. Laura Rovelli: It’s a very interesting question because, in this scenario—one shaped by the conditions that current capitalism assumes in our region, based on unresolved historical tensions and inequalities—processes are unfolding that challenge the very notion of knowledge and education as common goods, as well as the idea of university education as a right. In this complex context, characterized by strong political fragmentation between various progressive movements, traditional neoconservative sectors, and, since 2023 and even earlier, extreme right forces, economic adjustment policies and different strategies are making life more precarious and affecting how we sustain common goods. Of course, this has deepened pre-existing inequalities by widening the gap in the distribution of social goods, including knowledge and education, and has reduced the political and social meaning of rights, even challenging the existence of the right to university or the right to education, and more broadly, the idea of knowledge as a common good.

Evidence-Based Governance Is Being Eroded Under Milei

Given your expertise in research policy and knowledge systems, how does Milei’s administration engage with—or marginalize—scientific and academic expertise in policymaking? What implications does this have for evidence-based governance?

Dr. Laura Rovelli: This is a crucial point. First of all, we might say that there are severe budget cuts being implemented. There is a real reduction in the salaries of teaching, research, and administrative staff, as well as cuts in scholarships, funding for research and outreach projects, and in the infrastructure and operational capacity of universities. This explicitly weakens their institutional framework and undermines their autonomy.

Secondly, the government has dismantled science, technology, and innovation bodies, agencies, departments, and programs linked to higher education, science, human rights, and culture, while also intensifying trends toward the commercialization and privatization of education and knowledge in general.

In addition, the recruitment of research careers has been at a standstill since December 2023, affecting more than 1,200 researchers who have been approved but have not been able to take their positions in the scientific system. There are very few openings for new recruits, and this has already led to a 20% drop in the number of applicants for scientific careers and doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships.

Third, the government has deployed anti-science and denialist rhetoric that seeks to discredit and undermine the institutions of science and higher education. In particular, there has been a denial or disqualification of issues such as gender, inclusion, inequality, and climate change. For example, state agencies dealing with gender and human rights issues have been dismantled, such as the Ministry of Women and the Argentine National Institute Against Discrimination, created in the mid-1990s. At the school system level, the implementation of a comprehensive sex education law, created at the beginning of the 21st century, has been subsumed into emotional literacy programs and training led by private organizations.

There is also a growing threat to the social sciences, humanities, and arts, which have been displaced from the research agenda in favor of technical areas considered “productive,” such as energy, mining, health, and genomics. In this context, the erosion of the evidence base for policymaking is compounded by government rhetoric that mixes false and biased information with a strong, aggressive tone in its interventions.

Public Education Is a Battleground in Argentina’s Democratic Crisis

Large crowds march nationwide in defence of universities and public education in Argentina—one of the biggest rallies of President Javier Milei’s government, with estimates from 100,000 to 500,000 on April 23, 2024. Photo: Dreamstime.

Historically, Argentina’s public education system has been central to shaping civic identity and democratic values. How do you assess its current role in the face of Milei’s anti-establishment discourse and market-oriented reforms?

Dr. Laura Rovelli: Clearly, the Argentine university system has traditionally been characterized by a public state matrix that constitutes its identity. This can be observed quantitatively—in terms of enrollment, distribution, supply, and the weight of public state sector resources—and symbolically, due to the central role played by national universities within higher education institutions, reflecting a system with a low level of privatization compared with other countries in our region. However, in recent years, there has been an exacerbation of privatization and commodification processes in higher education. This is not new, but it has been intensified under the Milei administration.

In that sense, we can say that Argentina is facing one of the deepest crises in its higher education and scientific systems since the return of democracy in 1983. To mention some figures: in terms of gross domestic product, the university budget fell from 0.72% in 2023 to 0.57% in 2024 and is estimated to drop to 0.43% in 2025. The real salaries of professors have also declined during the Milei administration, by almost 30% compared with November 2023.

Additionally, the President’s refusal to implement the 2025 University Financing Law—a bill approved by an overwhelming majority in both chambers of Congress that aims solely to restore funding lost due to inflation—leaves the system without a basic foundation to function. By postponing its implementation, the executive power disregards the separation of powers and violates established rights in our democratic system.

So, in this scenario, the role of Argentina’s public education system in shaping civic identity and democratic values is under siege and threatened, yet it remains a place of dispute and tension—and also a space of possibility for building more democratic educational and social projects, as those of us who are fighting to defend the public system continue to do.

Anti-University Narratives Are Fueling Censorship and Harassment

Milei and his allies have criticized public universities as “ideologically captured.” How do such narratives affect academic freedom and the social legitimacy of higher education as a space for critical thought and democratic engagement?

Dr. Laura Rovelli: Clearly, academic freedom in this context is being affected in different ways and through various actions by the government. There are harassment, persecution, and censorship of academic teachers, researchers, scientists, and artists, alongside the promotion of hate speech and violence. In material terms, there has been an elimination of opportunities for dialogue and collective bargaining with teachers’ unions and trade unions. There are also harassment and expulsion of members of migrant academic communities, as well as barriers to international academic mobility.

These measures restrict research agendas and weaken the connection between academia, local issues, public policy, and global consensus on key matters such as health and the environment. For example, the Argentine government announced its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) in February 2025. Although this process faces legal obstacles and its implementation remains under debate, many civil and academic movements are fighting against it. The government’s decision is based on alleged differences in health management and the claim that international bodies interfere with national sovereignty—echoing the rhetoric of US President Donald Trump.

There are, therefore, many consequences of these attacks on science, knowledge, and academic freedom in Argentina today.

The Commodification of Knowledge Is No Accident

Large crowds march nationwide in defence of universities and public education in Argentina—one of the biggest rallies of President Javier Milei’s government, with estimates from 100,000 to 500,000. The Congress building stands beside the marching crowd, and a raised sign reads “The Homeland is not for sale” in Buenos Aires on April 23, 2024. Photo: Dreamstime.

From your work on knowledge and open science as commons, how might we understand education itself—as both a public good and a political battleground—in Argentina’s ongoing struggle between neoliberal and democratic-populist projects?

Dr. Laura Rovelli: Regarding knowledge and science as a common good, Argentina was one of the first countries in the region to have, for example, an open access law. Public universities are the main promoters of diamond open access in the region—that is, an open access model where you don’t have to pay to publish or to read. There is also a vigorous movement of citizen science, scientific outreach, and university extension—what we call here the relationship with society—that is mainly led by universities. So, it’s not a coincidence that these institutions, the universities, are the targets of aggression and cutbacks by a pro-market and anti-statist government, and that through state defunding, private education and the commodification of knowledge are explicitly promoted.

In Argentina’s polarized climate, can any political actor—including the opposition—still credibly articulate a notion of the common good that transcends ideological fragmentation and social resentment?

Dr. Laura Rovelli: It is a very complex process at the moment, but we are confident that it is possible, in the medium and long term, to recover this notion and to strengthen the idea and the practices of common goods, particularly through sub-national and local governments, and also in dialogue with universities and social and territorial movements in Argentina.

Argentina’s Knowledge Sector Has Become a Hub of Organized Resistance

People holding books aloft from surrounding buildings join massive nationwide protests in defence of universities and public education in Argentina. One of the largest rallies of President Javier Milei’s government—drawing an estimated 100,000 to 500,000 people—fills Buenos Aires on April 23, 2024. A banner reads, “Public University for Everyone, Always.” Photo: Dreamstime.

How have trade unions, student movements, feminist groups, and universities responded to Milei’s agenda? Do you see these actors as potential sources of democratic renewal or as fragmented voices of resistance?

Dr. Laura Rovelli: There are many movements of resistance, and they are potential sources of democratic renewal. Focusing particularly on universities and science movements, higher education and scientific institutions have implemented many legal measures. They have worked closely together—for example, the National Inter-University Council remains united and has drawn up different measures, such as legal actions. They drafted the university funding bill that was presented in Congress to secure and guarantee university funding. They have made several formal requests to the government, rejected the reduction of the 2026 budget, and, of course, led federal mobilizations across the country with the support of unions and students. They have coordinated various actions to defend public goods, education, and the public education system.

We also have another important network, the Argentine Network of Science and Technology Institutes’ Authorities, which has made progress in organizing mass demonstrations with the support of ordinary citizens. They have gathered international backing and submitted requests for access to public information on scientific issues, which have been denied by the government. They are also working in different sessions to coordinate strategies and actions to demand funding resources for the scientific sector and the appointment of authorities in several areas of science that remain vacant. There is also a lack of management in the scientific sector because the government has refused to approve or assign leadership positions.

Additionally, through the Latin American Council of Social Sciences, a program on qualitative and comparative studies in the Americas has been funded to promote comparative research and expand alliances between teachers and students. At universities, deliberative and collegial spaces in some institutions have been strengthened, and some are beginning to develop protocols and action plans in response to threats against students or professors. These are some of the examples I would like to highlight.

Milei’s Project Echoes Trump and Bolsonaro

Do you see Milei’s libertarian populism as part of a broader Latin American or global pattern of anti-statist populism—perhaps connected to figures like Bolsonaro or Trump—or as a uniquely Argentine phenomenon?

Dr. Laura Rovelli: No, of course, I believe that Milei’s libertarian populism is part of a broader global anti-statist populism. He is very much in dialogue with President Trump—he admires him. He also has contact with Bolsonaro. He’s not unique, but there is a component that many colleagues in political studies have highlighted: Milei has an anti-national component that is not as present in the cases of Bolsonaro or Trump. So that is something, if we may say, singular to his profile. But of course, he is in dialogue with a more global extreme right-wing movement.

Education Is the Key Arena for Restoring Democratic Purpose

And lastly, Dr. Rovelli, looking forward, what political, institutional, or civic initiatives could help restore faith in democratic governance and reconstruct a shared sense of purpose—the common good—in Argentina’s fractured public sphere?

Dr. Laura Rovelli: The role of universities and education in general is a key point. They are privileged loci or spaces of dispute and tension surrounding different educational, knowledge, science, and society projects that are in conflict in those spaces, where common goods and public goods—epistemic diversity—and substantive possibilities for democratization face critical setbacks in this scenario.

So, there are some initiatives of resistance, and also efforts to reposition more democratizing processes at universities and in educational spaces, that are very interesting. For example, the potential dynamism of subnational policies and local and inter-institutional alliances to curb or reverse unconstitutional or anti-democratic government measures; the complementarity of legal, political, epistemological, and pedagogical strategies to reverse coercion and harassment in educational settings; and the key role of regional and international alliances and coalitions of professors, students, and scientists in favor of academic freedom.

We should also mention the articulation and intersectorality with different social struggles of popular sectors—people who are displaced, harmed, or oppressed in our regions—and ultimately the proliferation of common deliberative, collegial, educational, and university projects in dialogue with society. These are some of the strategies and actions that we are carrying out in our systems.

Election posters near the Binnenhof featuring Geert Wilders of the PVV in the foreground, The Hague, the Netherlands, October 12, 2025. Photo: Dreamstime.

Dr. Vossen: The Anti-Islam Core Is the Most Important Part of Wilders’s PVV

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeInterviews

In an in-depth interview with the ECPS, Dr. Koen Vossen, political historian and lecturer at Radboud University, analyzes the ideological evolution and endurance of Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV). He stresses that “The anti-Islam core is absolutely the most important part of this party,” noting that despite tactical moderation, its fundamental worldview remains unchanged. According to Dr. Vossen, the PVV’s “one-man structure” and lack of internal democracy make it both flexible and fragile. Wilders’s “clash of civilizations” narrative, rooted in his early attachment to Israel, continues to shape his politics. As Dr. Vossen observes, media normalization, cultural anxieties, and declining institutional barriers have allowed the PVV to become a lasting—though polarizing—force in Dutch politics.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In a wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) following the Dutch general elections of October 29, 2025, Dr. Koen Vossen, a political historian and lecturer in political science at Radboud University, offers a nuanced analysis of the ideological evolution, strategic positioning, and organizational structure of Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV). Dr. Vossen, a leading scholar on Dutch populism and right-wing movements, situates the PVV within a broader European radical-right context while emphasizing its distinctly Dutch trajectory.

As Dr. Vossen underscores, “The anti-Islam core is absolutely the most important part of this party.” While the PVV has, over time, expanded its platform to include positions on welfare, housing, and law and order, these remain secondary to its central ideological fixation. The PVV, he explains, “is really basically one man… It is purely a matter of what Wilders wants, what he does, and what he likes.” This personalization of power, combined with the party’s lack of internal democracy, explains both its tactical flexibility and its chronic difficulty in governance.

Dr. Vossen traces Wilders’s ideological consistency to what he calls a “clash of civilizations” worldview, deeply informed by his “special connection with Israel.” Having worked on a kibbutz as a young man, Wilders came to see Israel as “the main buffer against Islamization.” This perspective not only anchors the PVV’s foreign policy but also shapes its domestic narrative of cultural defense. According to Dr. Vossen, Wilders’s “absolute core ideology is this anti-Islam ideology,” while his steadfast pro-Israel stance serves as both a symbolic and programmatic pillar in PVV discourse.

On the domestic front, Dr. Vossen attributes the PVV’s durability to a combination of structural and contingent factors: the decline of pillarized institutions, the fragmentation of the Dutch party system, and the normalization of far-right rhetoric through media amplification. “Over the last ten years,” he notes, “we’ve seen the clear emergence of a very right-wing media… strongly conservative and very much anti-left. ‘Left’ as a word, as a concept, has almost become an insult in the Netherlands.” The weakening of social intermediaries and the culturalization of political conflict, he argues, have made space for a stable radical-right electorate of roughly 30%.

Despite periodic moderation—what Wilders once called putting his ideas “in the freezer”—Dr. Vossen believes the PVV’s ideological substance remains intact. Even temporary participation in government, he argues, only suspends rather than transforms its radicalism. The 2025 elections, he concludes, show both the limits and persistence of Dutch populism: a movement still revolving around one man, one message, and one enduring enemy.

Dr. Koen Vossen is a political historian and lecturer in political science at Radboud University.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Dr. Koen Vossen, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Dutch Voters Long for Stability After Polarization Fatigue

Professor Koen Vossen, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: The recent Dutch election produced a dramatic reversal for the PVV, whose brief coalition participation ended in collapse, while D66 surged to the top of the polls. To what extent should we interpret this outcome as evidence of a structural electoral realignment favoring centrist, pro-EU forces—or as a temporary recalibration following the PVV’s troubled spell in government? In other words, are we witnessing a durable shift in voter preferences or merely the electoral consequences of perceived misgovernance?

Dr. Koen Vossen: I think both. Interpreting Dutch election results is always tricky because we are a country of minorities, so there are always more stories than one story in an election result.

What you saw in the last election was a longing for more stability—for a more stable coalition among a part of the electorate. People were fed up with the old polarization and longed for more centrist politics. That was absolutely there.

At the same time, you have also seen in the Netherlands that the border between the radical right and the center-right has somehow been blurred, especially in the conservative-liberal VVD, the party once led by Mark Rutte and now by Dilan Yeşilgöz. It has moved very much to the right and wanted an exclusively center-right coalition without Wilders’s party.

So, one could also interpret the result as support for this center-right coalition or as support for a more centrist coalition. At the same time, Wilders’s party still had about 17 or 18 percent of the vote. He lost some votes but remains the second-largest party in the Netherlands, so there are different stories here.

The Radical Right’s 30% Support Shows Structural Stability

Despite near-parity in seat totals, Geert Wilders appears politically isolated, as most mainstream parties again refuse coalition cooperation. Does this effective ‘cordon sanitaire’ signal the enduring resilience of Dutch party-system norms against radical-right institutionalization? Or does the continued aggregate strength of far-right parties (including FvD and JA21) indicate a deeper, longer-term transformation in the ideological landscape that may eventually erode such exclusionary practices?

Dr. Koen Vossen: The radical right maintained its position with about 30% of the vote. So, it’s still there—this 30%. They did not really lose in the last elections, but their support was divided among different parties, maybe even 35% in total. Previously, Wilders had the largest share of this radical-right vote—around 25%. The rest went to smaller radical-right parties, but now these smaller parties have grown, and most of the voters that Wilders lost went to them. So, there’s been more of a transfer of votes within this bloc than an overall loss. A small portion, maybe, went to the VVD—the conservative liberals who also tried to attract votes in the radical-right sphere. But in the end, there remains a fairly stable 30% of the Dutch electorate that supports these parties.

The PVV’s Core Is Anti-Islam

An elderly man holds a protest sign during a PEGIDA demonstration against the perceived Islamization of Europe in Enschede, the Netherlands on September 17, 2017. Photo: Dreamstime.

You argue that Wilders cannot be understood solely within the populist frame. How has the PVV’s ideological trajectory shifted from anti-establishment protest toward a more coherent political project, and what classifications better capture this evolution?

Dr. Koen Vossen: Populism has always been a thin ideology, so it needs other ideologies. In the case of the PVV, that has always been a strong nationalism and nativism, anti-immigration, and an anti-Islamic stance based on a “clash of civilizations” type of ideology, combined with a conservative law-and-order orientation. Since around 2010, you can see some tactical changes, but overall, the ideology has become quite clear and crystallized. Its main pillars are populism—with a very strong anti-elite sentiment—anti-immigration, welfare-state chauvinism, anti-Islam, and conservatism on law and order.

It should also be noted that the party is relatively progressive on some immaterial issues, such as gay marriage, abortion, and euthanasia policy—more so than many other parties. But on most other issues, it is quite conservative, particularly anti–climate policy. In that sense, the PVV is a fairly classic radical-right populist party, comparable to Rassemblement National (RN), Farage’s movement, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), or the Swedish Democrats (SD). Some of them even sit together in the European Parliament.

What distinguishes the PVV, however, is its very strong focus on Islam—this is quite specific to the party—and Wilders has been a pioneer in this regard. The party is also pro-Israel and relatively progressive when it comes to issues such as gay marriage, women’s emancipation, and abortion. These are the main ideological characteristics of the PVV.

Right-Wing Media Have Made the Radical Right the Only Alternative

You have written that the PVV has become increasingly normalized in Dutch politics. Which institutional mechanisms—parliamentary collaboration, media treatment, coalition signaling—have most contributed to this mainstreaming?

Dr. Koen Vossen: Media treatment is very important. Over the last ten years, we’ve seen the clear emergence of a very right-wing media. One could even compare it to Fox News–type outlets—strongly conservative and very much anti-left. The left wing has become the main enemy. “Left” as a word, as a concept, has almost become an insult in the Netherlands. “Leftist people” and similar terms are not neutral—they never were, of course, but this tendency has grown stronger.

The media treatment means that if the right-wing parties did not deliver in coalitions, the left was not seen as an alternative. Then the radical right became the alternative. If the radical right proved not to be the alternative, people looked to other right-wing parties—never to the left. The left has been out of the race, especially in these media. So, the radical right has become the alternative.

This also has to do with the fact that, in 2023, after eleven years of cordon sanitaire, the VVD decided to open the door again for collaboration with Wilders’s party, the PVV—purely strategically. They thought, we always have to go into coalitions, we always have to look to left-wing parties; now they wanted to look to a right-wing party, even an extreme right-wing party, to have more options. This proved to be a strategic blunder because now, for many parties, Wilders became an option. Before, they could always say, “Well, that’s a wasted vote because he will never govern.” But now it was not a wasted vote anymore—it became an option, and for a lot of these voters, even a better one.

So, helped by the media and by the end of the cordon sanitaire, one could say that the PVV emerged as the winner in 2023.

A newspaper rack displaying several Dutch newspapers, including De Telegraaf, Trouw, AD, and regional papers. Photo: Dreamstime.

Anti-Islam Is the Core; Everything Else Is Secondary

Anti-Islam alarmism remains central to the PVV. Do recent policy expansions toward welfare and housing reflect ideological maturation, tactical vote-seeking, or merely cosmetic adjustment that leaves the anti-Islam core intact?

Dr. Koen Vossen: The anti-Islam core is absolutely the most important part of this party. I say party, but the thing is, with the PVV, it’s really basically one man. Although he has more than 2.5 million votes, talking about the PVV—especially on a national level—is talking about one man: his considerations, his thinking, and his decisions. The rest is not really relevant. So, one has to look into his head to find out what he thinks, as there are no public discussions or debates in this party. There’s no party organization, no conferences, no party manifesto, or party newspaper. It is purely a matter of what Wilders wants, what he does, and what he likes. Wilders’s absolute core ideology is this anti-Islam ideology. The rest of it—maybe calling it purely tactical is a little too cynical—but it is certainly not the main issue for him.

PVV Support Is Driven by Cultural Fear, Not Economic Anxiety

To what degree has the erosion of pillarized structures and intermediary institutions created the social fragmentation necessary for PVV success? Do cultural anxieties outweigh economic grievances in explaining the party’s appeal?

Dr. Koen Vossen: I think it’s mainly a cultural matter—it’s all about immigration. These voters’ main concern is immigration, absolutely. Housing is second, but it’s connected to immigration. If you look at the socioeconomic profile of the PVV voter, one cannot say that these are the less fortunate ones economically. Of course, you also see them in the lower-income classes, but also in the middle- and higher-income classes, where people do not really experience economic anxiety. Economically, the Netherlands is doing quite well.

So, it is mainly a cultural thing—a fear of immigration, fear especially of asylum seekers, which has become a very big issue in the Netherlands. Incidents involving asylum seekers have attracted a lot of attention in the media, and as a result, these issues became the most salient in the election campaign. Immigration was the issue people talked about, and Wilders benefited from this. So, if you see immigration more as a cultural issue, then I would say it was more on a cultural level than on an economic one.

Wilders’s ‘People’ Are Defined Against the Leftist Elite

How does the PVV’s construction of ‘de volk’ differ from earlier Dutch nationalist discourses? Is the imagined community increasingly defined through civilizational frames—especially Judeo-Christian identity—rather than ethnic or civic nationalism?

Dr. Koen Vossen: That’s an interesting one. The main difference is that, first of all, until the 1960s or 1970s, the Netherlands was a pillarized country. You had these different minorities—the Catholics, the Protestants, the Socialists, the Liberals. These pillars have disappeared, and in a way, we have now become one big population, without this idea anymore of four different groups.

There is actually a majority culture—secular, quite progressive in many ways, but also liberal in an economic sense. So, there has been a kind of majority culture. What has now become the new cleavage for many people is between the elite, which is often associated with the left, and the people—and that is what Wilders capitalizes on.

This imagined community of Wilders is very much an anti-elite community, especially anti–cultural elites. In the Netherlands, we call this the Amsterdam Canal District—that’s the center of Amsterdam—and that’s where, in this imagined community, live the elites who disparage the common people. A little bit like the Rive Gauche in Paris, or similar places elsewhere—these left-wing people who, in his narrative, look down on ordinary citizens. That has mainly become his imagined community: a “good people” who have been betrayed by a leftist elite. So, it’s an anti-elitist conception of the people. That is the main difference between now and the past.

In Dutch Elections, Two or Three Percent Can Decide Everything

Billboard featuring the main candidates in the Dutch elections on June 9, 2010, in Amstelveen, the Netherlands. Photo: Dreamstime.

Was the PVV’s 2023 electoral breakthrough driven primarily by long-term ideological convergence between party and electorate, or did short-term crises—housing, asylum pressure, inflation—create an episodic opportunity?

Dr. Koen Vossen: What happens in the Netherlands is that election campaigns matter a lot. We are a country with many parties—very fragmented, without any single dominant one. So, you usually have three or four major contenders—it’s almost like a cycling tour. In the end, a few escape the peloton, race toward the finish, and then there’s a sprint where two or three percent makes the difference. Sometimes, a small push at the end—some luck, a sudden event, or a strong debate performance—can deliver those few extra percentage points.

So, the PVV this time, because of what I already mentioned—the end of the cordon sanitaire, the VVD signaling that the PVV was now an option, immigration becoming a hot topic, and Wilders presenting himself as a bit more moderate—these factors, combined with a few strong debate performances, especially one widely watched debate where he clearly came out as the winner, gave him that final two, three, or four percent that made him the victor in these elections.

Had this not happened, it might just as well have been the centrist liberals who caught that last bit of momentum—with a good campaign and a little luck—and made the final sprint to become the largest party.

It’s a One-Man Party—And That’s Its Greatest Weakness

The PVV’s unique one-member structure creates tactical agility yet hinders institutionalization. How does this model shape accountability, policy competence, and the party’s ability to govern?

Dr. Koen Vossen: The main problem for the PVV is absolutely the fact that they lack personnel. They lack good people. And that should not have been a problem, except that Wilders is a very distrustful man. He does not trust anyone outside his very small circle of people. So, if he needs ministers, junior ministers, or people he can send to do a job, he has to rely on this small circle of people who have been around him for 10 to 15 years. These are people without any experience in governing. Their only experience is helping Wilders in his opposition work. So, they are not people who can govern a whole ministry.

This is the main problem—and he does not want to recruit people from outside because he does not trust them. He’s also afraid that other people could become more popular than he is, and all these kinds of things. So, that’s really the main problem of the PVV, and that’s why he basically failed in government—because he lacks both people and quality within his party.

Wilders’s Longevity Is Partly a Matter of Luck

Compared with LPF and FvD, the PVV has exhibited remarkable longevity. Does this durability reflect ideological clarity, organizational discipline—even if minimal—or simply an absence of credible far-right competition?

Dr. Koen Vossen: I think there’s even a fourth option—and that’s luck. For instance, the FvD seemed to be a really good competitor, but then the coronavirus hit suddenly. At the moment when the FvD made its breakthrough and was really campaigning across the whole country, the pandemic broke out. Everybody had to go into lockdown. For Wilders, this was nothing new, because he’s basically been in lockdown for the last 20 years, living under strong security measures. But for Thierry Baudet, for Forum voor Democratie, this proved to be a real disaster, because he got tangled up in all kinds of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and vaccination. So, Wilders was just lucky that Baudet made a mess of things in his own party and made himself impossible.

Having said that, the story of the FvD isn’t over. They won again with a new leader—a young female leader, 28 years old—and became more attractive again for some voters. But for Wilders, what also matters is that he’s a political professional. He knows how to play the game. He’s very experienced in debates and in how to attract media attention—not too much and not too little. He knows exactly how to do these things. So, it’s also a skill that plays a role here.

Wilders Has Returned to His Old Anti-Islam Routine

The collapse of the most recent governing arrangement highlighted constitutional constraints on Wilders’ maximalist proposals. Has the forced “freezing” of radical positions substantively moderated the movement, or merely deferred ideological confrontation?

Dr. Koen Vossen: I think they lost. Since they are out of government, he’s kind of back to his old anti-Islam routine. He moderated his viewpoints for a while—he always said, “I put them in the refrigerator for a while, in the freezer.” But now the refrigerator is open again, and all the old viewpoints are back. One could even say that, in a way, he contaminated the conservative liberals and the Farmers Party, his partners in the coalition. He influenced them with his ideology because they also became more anti-Islam and very much pro-Israel. There’s, maybe, not a clear answer here, either.

Wilders Is the Ultimate Insider Who Plays the Outsider

Geert Wilders (PVV) in House of Representatives during a debating at the Tweede Kamer on April 5, 2023 in Den Haag, Netherlands. Photo: Jeroen Meuwsen.

You note that Wilders seems most effective in opposition. If the PVV returns to government, might governance responsibilities erode its anti-system identity, or does the “Schrödinger’s populism” phenomenon enable Wilders to frame himself as both insider and outsider simultaneously?

Dr. Koen Vossen: I didn’t know the Schrödinger’s paradox, so I’ll have to look it up. Wilders has been an insider from the very beginning. He’s been in politics since 1990—first working for the conservative-liberal parliamentary group as an assistant, then becoming a member of the parliamentary group in 1998. He started his own party in 2004. So, he’s always been there. He’s an insider as much as one can be an insider in politics in The Hague, in the Netherlands. He has the longest tenure of all parliamentarians in the Netherlands, absolutely. But he has always managed to give himself an outsider profile by provoking and making these harsh statements. So, in that sense, he can really play with these elements. I don’t know the exact article about this Schrödinger’s populism, so I’m hesitant to go deeper into it, but at first glance, I would say yes—he plays this insider–outsider role very well.

Wilders’s Anti-Islam Discourse Grew from His Pro-Israel Stance

PVV foreign policy is heavily filtered through a clash-of-civilizations narrative. How does this framing shape its positions on Israel-Palestine, NATO, Russia, and Ukraine, and does it distort pragmatic assessment of national interests?

Dr. Koen Vossen: He’s very much pro-Israel, pro-Netanyahu. He doesn’t allow any criticism of Israel, and all the victims there—that’s just part of a war. So, in that sense, he’s very much pro-Netanyahu. When he was 19 years old and had just left school, he went to work on a kibbutz. He’s not Jewish himself, but he went there to spend a gap year. Before starting his studies, he wanted to do something different, so he did this. And since then—this was 1980 or 1981—he has had a special connection with Israel. One could even say that this special connection with Israel shaped his worldview early on. Already in the 1990s, he really saw the enemies of Israel as Islamic enemies. So, his whole anti-Islamic discourse partly comes from this pro-Israel stance, and he still sees Israel as the main buffer against Islamization. This whole story is still very much there.

With regard to Ukraine and Russia, the story is more complicated. Around 2017–2018, for a while, he made some remarks that were more pro-Russia. He even went to Moscow, but never as much as the Front National, Salvini, or Orbán. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he really distanced himself from Russia. But at the same time, he was not a very enthusiastic supporter of Zelensky or of Ukraine either. So, he tries to keep a little bit of distance there.

It’s the same with NATO. On the one hand, he’s very pro-Trump. On the other hand, Trump demands the 5% expenditure on defense, and that’s also something that for Wilders is problematic—that’s quite a lot, in his opinion. So, in foreign policy, does it sometimes hurt national interests? Yes, sometimes it does. In trade with Arab countries, with Islamic countries, Wilders can really be a problem for the Netherlands with all his remarks. For him, it’s not a reason to say, “Okay, I’ll tone down my voice a little bit.” No, he just says, “We should not deliver any weapons to Islamic countries,”for example, and things like that. So, he’s quite principled on these matters.

Israel Is Seen as the Vanguard Against Islamization

You have argued that the PVV positions Israel as the civilizational vanguard of the West. Is this symbolic architecture primarily a theological-civilizational justification for its anti-Islam platform, or does it carry genuine programmatic implications for Dutch foreign policy?

Dr. Koen Vossen: It did. The last government, which is still there now as a caretaker government, was also quite pro-Israel—one of the most pro-Israel governments in the European Union for a long time. So, there was not much criticism of Netanyahu for a long time. They were very much against sanctions. For example, when there was the question of some sick children going to the Netherlands for treatment, the PVV was very much against it, and this government was also against it. So, in that sense, it really had programmatic implications, absolutely.

But does it have theological roots? That’s difficult to say. It’s this whole idea of “Israel first” as well—there are different reasons for supporting Israel. There is this historical feeling of guilt toward the Jewish population in the Netherlands. The Netherlands was one of the countries with the highest percentage of Jews deported during the war, so there’s this lingering feeling of guilt. Then there’s the idea of Israel as the vanguard against Islamization, as part of this clash-of-civilizations narrative. There’s also a specific Christian motive in supporting Israel—you see this among Orthodox Christians. There’s a whole Christian theory behind that, similar to what you see in the United States. So, these are the three main reasons to support Israel in the Netherlands, and you see this reflected in the programmatic policy toward Israel.

Wilders Learned That Nexit Was an Unwinnable Battle

Concept illustration with road sign reading “Nexit.” Photo: Dreamstime.

And lastly, Professor Vossen, the PVV has oscillated between advocating Nexit and merely proposing a referendum. Does this reflect strategic ambiguity intended to broaden its electorate, internal ideological uncertainty, or recognition that Euroscepticism is increasingly cultural rather than institutional?

Dr. Koen Vossen: Here you can really see a tactical motive. Nexit is not really popular in the Netherlands. It has never, in any poll, come even close to a majority. At most, 20–25% of the Dutch electorate favors some kind of Nexit. Because it’s such a trading country, it would be economically very stupid to have a Nexit. We are completely dependent on Germany economically. And people saw what happened in the UK with Brexit. So, Wilders thought, “Maybe with Nexit, I will never win this battle.” Like Le Pen did in France, he said, “I’ll drop the whole Nexit idea.” He mentioned something about a referendum, but in his last program for the European Parliament elections, he was quite vague and moderate about the European Union. He’s not a fan—he will never be a fan of the European Union—but Nexit is also a bridge too far for him.

Dr. Monika de Silva is a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg.

Dr. de Silva: Anti-Gender Narratives Are Highly Interlinked and Interconnected Across Borders

by Editor’s ChoiceGenderHomeHuman RightsInterviews

“Anti-gender discourses are very interlinked and interconnected; we see these floating narratives repeated across countries like Latvia, Poland, and Russia,” says Dr. Monika de Silva. She explains that populist actors strategically exploit linguistic ambiguity around concepts such as gender, transforming technical legal terms into polarizing political symbols. “Language is never neutral… this linguistic openness is used to argue that because gender replaces the word sex, we can no longer talk about men and women,” she notes. The Istanbul Convention—intended to prevent violence against women—has thus been reframed as an LGBTQ+ threat or “radical feminist project.” Yet Dr. de Silva stresses the importance of civic resistance: Latvia’s mass protests “undoubtedly shaped” the president’s decision to return the withdrawal bill to parliament.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In recent weeks, Latvia has become a focal point in Europe’s ongoing struggle over gender equality, human rights, and democratic resilience. On October 31, 2025, the Saeima (Latvian Parliament) voted 56–32 to withdraw from the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention—only a year after ratifying the treaty designed to prevent and combat violence against women. The move relied heavily on claims that the Convention promotes “radical feminism” and “gender ideology,” echoing narratives with well-documented transnational origins. President Edgars Rinkēvičs soon returned the bill to parliament for reconsideration, warning that overturning ratification within a single legislative term would send “a contradictory message… to Latvian society and Latvia’s allies internationally.” He urged postponement until after upcoming elections, noting that Latvia risked becoming the first EU member state to renounce a human-rights treaty.

The backlash triggered the country’s largest civic protests since the 1990s. On November 6, 2025, more than 10,000 demonstrators gathered in Riga under the slogan “Let’s Protect Mother Latvia,” signaling a groundswell of civic resistance. At stake is not only the institutional integrity of gender-equality policy but also the credibility of Latvia’s constitutional and international commitments, especially given that the EU itself acceded to the Convention in 2023, making certain provisions binding regardless of national withdrawal.

It is against this turbulent backdrop that the European Center for the Study of Populism (ECPS) spoke with Dr. Monika de Silva, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg. Her research, situated at the intersection of international relations and EU studies, examines how contested normative frameworks travel across borders. Her 2025 doctoral dissertation, “‘Gender Wars’ in Europe: Diplomatic Practice under Polarized Conditions,” traces how bilateral diplomacy and Council of the EU negotiations have been reshaped by conflicts over gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights. She is also affiliated with the Gender and Diplomacy project (GenDip) and the Centre for European Research (CERGU).

In the interview, Dr. de Silva argues that anti-gender discourse is best understood as a transnationally circulating narrative rather than merely a domestic reaction: “Anti-gender discourses are very interlinked and interconnected… we see manifestations of that as floating narratives that are very similar, whether we look at Latvia, Poland or Russia, etc.”

She identifies both supply and demand factors driving the spread of “gender ideology” rhetoric across Europe, noting that populist radical right actors strategically translate technical legal language into ideologically charged frames, exploiting linguistic ambiguity: “Language is never neutral… this linguistic openness is definitely used to advance such narratives.”

Dr. de Silva further highlights how withdrawal debates are reframing the Istanbul Convention away from its core purpose—preventing violence against women—toward narratives that depict it as an LGBTQ+ threat or “radical feminist project.” These interpretations, she warns, are not new; similar tropes have circulated across Europe for nearly a decade.

Yet her analysis also highlights agents of democratic resilience. Civil society mobilization, she observes, has already influenced decision-making: “The president… decided to return the  law to parliament, and I am sure that seeing the largest protests in Latvia helped shape this decision.”

Finally, she issues a clear warning about governance consequences. Withdrawal would remove Latvia from GREVIO’s monitoring regime, generating critical transparency and implementation gaps: “A state not part of the Convention would not report to GREVIO… whatever it does is therefore less transparent, especially internationally.”

This interview thus offers rich insight into how legal, discursive, and geopolitical forces converge to shape contemporary anti-gender mobilization—and how democratic institutions and civil society may yet respond.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Dr. Monika de Silva, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Latvia’s Withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention Signals Deep Democratic Trouble

Demonstrators in Riga on April 25, 2023, demand accountability after a woman’s murder, calling for political responsibility over Latvia’s years-long failure to ratify the Istanbul Convention. Photo: Gints Ivuskans.

Dr. Monica de Silva, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: Latvia became the first EU state to vote to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention—just a year after ratifying it. The move, driven by the right-wing Latvia First party and backed by a governing coalition partner, relied on claims that the treaty promotes “gender ideology,” echoing Kremlin-style narratives. It triggered Latvia’s largest civic protests since the 1990s, despite the country having the highest femicide rate in Europe; President Edgars Rinkēvičs has since sent the bill back to parliament for review. How do you interpret this backlash—primarily as a cyclical conservative reaction, a structural anti-gender countermovement, or a strategic tool of PRR mobilization?

Dr. Monika de Silva: Of course, the fact that populist radical right parties like Latvia First mobilized around the Istanbul Convention and now seek to withdraw from it is not surprising; it is a continued strategy of populist radical right parties. What is different—and concerning—in this case is that a conservative party, the Union of Farmers and Greens, has joined these radical right actors in pursuing withdrawal from the Convention.

The Union has always had reservations about the Convention, which is typical not only of radical or far-right parties but also of more mainstream conservative parties. However, what distinguishes this situation is that the Union is part of the government, and, as such, agreed to a coalition deal in which the Latvian government committed to ratifying the Istanbul Convention. Now they are backing away from a commitment they made to the Latvian public and to their coalition partners, which is deeply troubling for the state of our democracy.

It has been a very long process from Latvia’s signing of the Istanbul Convention to its ratification just last year. During this period, we saw extensive democratic debate in parliament, as well as a case before the Constitutional Court, which confirmed that the Convention complies with the Latvian Constitution. Upon ratification, Latvia also adopted an interpretive declaration affirming that it would not replace the word “sex” with “gender” in national legislation, and so on. Many voices participated in this process, and concerns—for example, about the legal implications of the Convention—were duly assessed.

It is therefore very worrying that, at this stage, we still face efforts to retract this commitment. This raises questions not only about Latvia’s commitment to its own citizens—particularly women—but also to other states that are parties to the Convention.

The Supply and Demand of Anti-Gender Politics in Europe

In your view, what explains the political salience of “gender ideology” narratives in opposition to the Istanbul Convention across such varied contexts as Latvia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Hungary?

Dr. Monika de Silva: I like to think about the gender ideology narrative as having a supply side and a demand side. On the supply side, we have in all of these countries very strong populist radical right parties, but also other political movements that are very effective at mobilizing against the Convention and transnationalizing this issue. So this is the supply side of the narrative.

But what is even more interesting is the demand side. This strategy would not work without the resonance of this argument among a certain part of the population. What is similar in all of these countries—you mentioned Latvia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Hungary—is that they all participate in European integration but are not at the core of this project. They are not Western European countries; they are Central and Eastern European countries, or even countries on the boundary between Europe and other continents.

There are also many interlinkages between European identity and gender equality norms. We see that adopting certain norms or laws gives states a certain status within European integration. The case of Turkey is illustrative. The Istanbul Convention is named the Istanbul Convention for a reason. It was adopted in Turkey, and Turkey gained a lot of status points by hosting the conference; it was able to brand itself as European, liberal, etc.

But let’s remember that this was over 10-15 years ago, and now we live in a different moment. Today, Turkey’s accession to the European Union is much less likely. We also live in a moment where the European Union does not have as much power as it used to. So, this linkage between Europeanness and gender equality does not work as well as it once did, and it creates backlash. 

Gender equality norms are very dear to people; they are part of people’s social identity, whether on the left or on the right. So, it is not something that can be easily changed. People also do not want to feel that something is being imposed on them, so it is very easy to mobilize against this narrative in these countries—arguing that this is Western Europe, or the EU, or the Council of Europe, etc., or the elites forcing them to change their core norms.

Women and LGBTQ+ activists in İzmir, Turkey, rally for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, highlighting femicide and the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention. Photo: Idil Toffolo.

Populism, Geopolitics, and the Cross-Border Spread of Gender Backlash

To what extent is anti-gender discourse a domestic phenomenon, and to what extent is it borrowing transnational scripts, including Kremlin-linked rhetoric that frames the Convention as destroying “traditional family values”?

Dr. Monika de Silva: Of course, anti-gender discourses are very interlinked and interconnected, and we see manifestations of that as floating narratives that are very similar, whether we look at Latvia, Poland or Russia.

In the Latvian case, for example, I have not seen any new tropes in the anti-gender discourse, even though we have had this conversation since 2015–2016. So now, almost ten years on, there is nothing new. The Istanbul Convention is presented as a threat to the family, sneaking in certain gender-equality or feminist or LGBT norms that states did not initially think were in the Convention, or that it will make states allow for non-binarity in their legal systems, or make more lenient laws regarding transgender rights.

We see this over and over again, across time and space. What is the reason for that? To some extent, it is coordinated. We have coalitions of states that cooperate with each other in venues like the United Nations—traditional-values coalitions and so on—and they exchange and build their discourses together. We also have non-state, transnational organizations like the World Congress of Families that do this.

Regarding the link between these narratives and Russia or the Kremlin: we definitely see why there would be an incentive for Russia to stir up the conversation around the Istanbul Convention in Latvia and other Baltic states. This creates a lot of mistrust between countries like Latvia and other Western European countries and the EU, especially in a situation where we have this aggression on the eastern border of Europe. This is a problem that can steer the fate of this country one way or another.

We have elections in Latvia next year, and the Istanbul Convention will surely be a significant part of the campaigns. Hopefully, it will not steer the political scene in this country toward a pro-Russian direction. I hope we will see well-informed, democratic debate on the Istanbul Convention. But of course, since this is such a polarizing topic, there are certain risks involved.

Populist Actors Exploit Linguistic Ambiguity in EU Gender Debates

How do PRR actors transform technical legal language into ideologically charged rhetoric, especially around contested terms like “gender,” which your work has shown can be strategically mistranslated or emptied of meaning in EU negotiation spaces?

Dr. Monika de Silva: The discussion around the term “gender” shows us that language is never neutral. It is always politically charged, whether it is adopted as technical or legal. In the case I studied, several EU member states at some point decided that they did not want to use the word “gender” in EU-adopted documents. This, of course, stirred a lot of contestations around what gender even means for the EU, and so on. The fact is that what gender means, or what gender equality means for the EU, has never been a settled issue.

As you know, all EU languages have equal legal value. In different languages, gender equality is translated basically as equality between men and women. This had not been an issue for a long time because it did not spark as much discussion as it does now, with many states being very attached to the idea that gender should include more than men and women, and some countries being attached to the idea that it should not.

So, there is this discursive openness in what gender means for the EU. It existed before the so-called gender-language crisis. Populist parties, populist governments, are very skilled at using this discursive openness. Because if we do not know what the exact boundaries of a certain word are—and this is not atypical in political discourse—it is very easy to argue that this word means something essentially ridiculous. For example, because gender replaces the word sex, we can no longer talk about men and women. This is, of course, not what the word “gender” means, but this linguistic openness is definitely used to advance such narratives.

Why Some States Avoid Ratification: The Limits of EU Influence

European Union flags against European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium.

In your research, you explore “language bargaining” and diplomatic-legal talk. How have these dynamics influenced EU-level negotiations on the Istanbul Convention, and how did they enable states such as Hungary or Slovakia to avoid ratification?

Dr. Monika de Silva: Definitions and decisions in the EU are always outcomes of negotiations. There are diplomacy and negotiation involved in reaching a jointly acceptable outcome. That, of course, is a good, healthy thing if we have parties that are not always expecting to arrive at their maximalist outcome. This is not possible in an organization with 27 member states.

The ability to make these compromises and negotiate was something that enabled the European Union to accede to the Istanbul Convention, even though several member states decided that they themselves would not accede to the Convention. But they accepted the fact that, within a legitimate process and based on the rule of law—with also a case in the Court of Justice of the EU confirming that the EU can accede to the Istanbul Convention—yes, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

So, there is very little that the EU can do to make other member states ratify the Convention. This is their sovereign decision; they are not obliged to ratify the Convention under EU law. Even given the narratives that we talked about—the imposition from the EU and so on—this may actually have a reverse effect, a backlash against this sort of narrative of imposition.

So, I think the way to go is to maintain a culture of compromise, which assures these governments and their populations that this is the way we work in the EU, including in cases like the Istanbul Convention.

How a Women’s Protection Treaty Became a Culture-War Symbol

Could you reflect on how the Istanbul Convention became symbolically detached from its core purpose—preventing violence against women—and reframed instead as an LGBTQ+ threat or “radical feminist” project?

Dr. Monika de Silva: Of course, this is very unfortunate—what we see is that a convention intended to protect women from violence, gender-based violence, and protect domestic-violence victims, not only women, suddenly becomes a token in political discussions.

Even if some political movements would like the Istanbul Convention to stand for LGBT rights and feminist projects to a larger extent, it does not do so, as populist parties would like us to believe. That is why it is very important to counter misinformation around the Istanbul Convention and always go back to what it actually stands for and what it actually says. This is how movements across Europe will succeed in ensuring that the Convention is a successful tool—by returning to its true purpose, which is largely consensual. If we look at public opinion across Europe, most people agree that violence against women is not something they want to see in their societies.

We may have different ideas about the scope of the problem and how to tackle it, but returning to this core purpose is something that can mobilize support for the Convention. Bringing the Convention back to its purpose and localizing that purpose—not as something imposed or defined by other countries on Latvia, for example, but as something important within Latvian society itself—is very important.

We see civil society learning to do that—to focus on these two things. When we look at the protests in Latvia, I have seen a lot of Latvian flags; the protest itself has this motto of protecting Mother Latvia. So, it gives you the idea that this is about the citizens and population of Latvia. It is not about the EU; it is not about how we look in the eyes of EU bureaucrats. This is a local issue.

People Power Matters: Protest as a Deterrent to Anti-Gender Politics

Women protest in Warsaw, Poland, against the abortion ban and new laws restricting the right to contest fines or penalties. Photo: Eryk Losik.

What role does civil society mobilization play against gender backlash? Latvia has seen some of its largest protests since independence—can such mobilization create durable political resistance?

Dr. Monika de Silva: Of course it matters, and we have seen this in the case of Latvia. The president of Latvia decided to return the decision about the Istanbul Convention to parliament, and I am sure that seeing the mobilization of people and witnessing the largest protests in Latvia helped shape this decision.

We have other cases as well. Poland is a very good example of how civil society mobilization really works. Think about the Women’s Strike in Poland, and the fact that even though Poland had a populist government for over eight years, very much threatening gender equality, Poland has not withdrawn from the Istanbul Convention. This was, to a large extent, the success of civil society mobilization, acting as a deterrent to incumbents—showing that if you take a decision that is against our core values and beliefs, we will not continue supporting you.

At the end of the day, people want to stay in power, and civil society mobilization shows them that they can only do so if they take into account what civil society wants. This mobilization has to continue until the elections in Latvia next year, and hopefully in a way that mobilizes a large part of society rather than polarizing it.

Can EU-Level Binding Offset National Withdrawal?

How has EU legal accession to the Istanbul Convention (2023) shaped the political field? Does EU-level binding partially compensate for national withdrawals or refusals to ratify?

Dr. Monika de Silva: This is a complex legal issue—really an issue for legal nerds—but it is important for the public to understand it, too. Some parts of the Istanbul Convention are ratified by the EU, and the majority of the Convention can be ratified by EU member states, depending on who has competence in a given issue.

So, the EU—regardless of whether member states ratified the Convention or not—will have a certain part of the Convention apply, for example in the case of Latvia, just because the EU ratified it. But this is a very limited scope: it includes transnational cooperation between national court systems on violence against women and domestic violence.

A second area is asylum and refugee policy, because the EU has competence over this policy. And third, the EU has to implement the Convention within its own institutions.

So, this is a limited scope—this is one thing. Another issue is that although in theory it may sound all well and good, a division of competences, in practice this is a bit of a mess. Even though the EU is legally responsible for asylum policy, it is actually member states that implement it. It is states that run asylum-seeking centers, states that receive asylum requests, and so on. So, in practice, it may be difficult to differentiate who is responsible for what, and we have yet to see how this will work in practice.

The Real-World Costs of Leaving the Istanbul Convention

Women and LGBTQ+ activists in İzmir, Turkey, rally on November 25 for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, highlighting femicide and the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention. Photo: Idil Toffolo.

And lastly, Dr. de Silva, from a governance-effects perspective, what are the tangible consequences of withdrawal or non-ratification for women’s lives, particularly in terms of monitoring gaps and legal reform trajectories?

Dr. Monika de Silva: In the case of Latvia specifically, the Istanbul Convention is still in force and will be so until the parliament votes otherwise. But this will likely not happen until the next parliamentary elections in Latvia next year. So, in the case of Latvia, we are so far safe.

But what would happen if Latvia withdrew from the Convention? Let’s think about this. Many provisions of the Convention are already implemented in this case, and then we would have to focus on keeping these provisions in place. This is also a strategy in countries where it is very clear that they will not ratify the Convention in any foreseeable future. Think about Hungary. This is where civil society should focus on national law on domestic violence and violence against women being as strong as possible and perhaps reflecting the provisions of the Convention to the largest extent possible.

Latvia has already reported to GREVIO, the expert body of the Convention that monitors its implementation, and from this report we know that there are still gaps. The government itself says, for example, that it does not yet have assistance centers for rape victims. Now the government is legally obliged to establish them in the foreseeable future. If Latvia were not a member of the Convention, it would not have a legal obligation to do so.

There are situations like that. But the biggest and most immediate difference we would see is that a state not part of the Convention would not report to GREVIO. Whatever it does is therefore less transparent, especially internationally. There is less scrutiny, because once a state reports to GREVIO, it is evaluated by this body of experts—experts on violence against women and domestic violence who know what the Convention requires and how it should be implemented. States outside the Convention would also not face scrutiny from other member states or from international civil society.

So, this would be the biggest difference.

Satirical carnival parade with caricatured sculptures and enthusiastic spectators in Torres Vedras, Portugal on March 4, 2025. Photo: Dreamstime.

Assoc. Prof. Frantz: The Rise of Personalist Leaders Is Fueling Unpredictable Global Conflict

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeInterviewsLeadership & Persona

In an interview with the ECPS, Associate Professor Erica Frantz warns that the growing rise of personalist leaders worldwide is undermining democratic institutions and increasing the risk of international conflict. Personalist systems—where power is concentrated around a single dominant figure—erode checks and balances, distort party structures, and heighten foreign-policy miscalculation. Reflecting on the United States, she notes that Donald Trump has transformed the GOP into a “personal political vehicle,” enabling rapid consolidation of executive power. As domestic constraints weaken, Dr. Frantz cautions, “we are increasingly setting the stage for more volatile and unpredictable conflict behavior in the international arena.” She identifies leader-created parties and media-driven mobilization as critical warning signs of emerging personalist capture.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In a wide-ranging conversation with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Associate Professor Erica Frantz of Michigan State University offers a penetrating analysis of the global resurgence of personalist politics and its destabilizing implications for democracy and international security. A leading scholar of authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, and strongman rule, Dr. Frantz situates recent developments in the United States within broader cross-national trends, underscoring how personalist leaders erode institutions, centralize power, and elevate the risk of domestic and international conflict.

Reflecting on recent US electoral outcomes in New Jersey, Virginia, California, and New York, Dr. Frantz stresses that it is “too soon to tell whether this trend will last,” though she notes the results offer “at least a small glimmer of hope for the Democrats” after months of erosion under Trump. Yet she cautions that such gains do not signify a reversal of democratic decline. Personalist rule—defined by her as governance backed by leader-centered parties—has advanced markedly under Trump. His second administration, she argues, is marked by consolidated control over the executive and a legislative majority, patterns “consistent with what research would anticipate” in cases of democratic erosion.

Personalism, Dr. Frantz warns, not only weakens democratic institutions but also escalates international danger. She emphasizes that leaders who face minimal domestic constraints are more prone to foreign policy miscalculation, explaining that “the absence of domestic constraints makes it very difficult for the two sides to figure out what the real red lines are. That potential for miscalculation elevates the chance of conflict.” Drawing on international relations scholarship, she identifies audience-cost dynamics as critical to crisis stability—factors severely undermined under highly personalized regimes. As she concludes, “as we see personalism on the rise globally, we are increasingly setting the stage for more volatile and unpredictable conflict behavior in the international arena.”

Dr. Frantz underscores that Trump’s transformation of the Republican Party represents a paradigmatic shift toward personalist structure. Though he did not found the GOP, by 2024 the party had become “fully under his control,” with elites aligning themselves behind his false election narratives. Trumpism has thus reshaped partisan dynamics in ways that may outlast his tenure.

Looking to the future, Dr. Frantz identifies leader-created parties as a key early warning sign of personalist capture—now increasingly visible in democracies and autocracies alike. She argues that the changing media environment has dramatically lowered the cost of personalist mobilization, enabling wealthy outsiders to build movements rapidly and bypass organizational constraints.

Taken together, Associate Professor Frantz’s insights illuminate how personalism—far from a regional aberration—is now a global pattern, with the United States neither insulated nor exceptional.

Erica Frantz is an Associate Professor in Political Science at Michigan State University.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Associate Professor Erica Frantz, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

Democratic Gains Offer Hope, But 2026 Remains the Real Test

Professor Erica Frantz, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: In the wake of recent Democratic victories—such as in New Jersey, Virginia, and California, as well as Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York—do you interpret these outcomes as early signs of public pushback against personalist-populist politics in the US, or are they better understood as cyclical fluctuations within a still-fragmented party system?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: That is a great question, and one that I don’t think we have a solid answer for. On the one hand, it certainly should give room for optimism that the Democrats did fairly well last week, in the November 4th elections. But at the same time, it is very possible that this was just a blip and an outlier. The real big test will be in the 2026 midterm elections. From my perspective, this was an important outcome for the Democrats in that there had been very little good news for the party since the 2024 election. So, for the first time, there was some indication that the tide of public opinion may be shifting a little bit against Trump. So, it is too soon to tell whether this trend will last, but it certainly offered at least a small glimmer of hope for the Democrats.

Small Victories Amid Deep Democratic Vulnerability

Do these electoral results indicate that institutional resilience and civic counter-mobilization remain robust in the US, or do you see them as temporary and insufficient to counter deeper trajectories of democratic erosion?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: Again, it is a little bit too soon to know what the ultimate meaning of this election result will be. From my perspective, a really big test is going to be the 2026 midterm elections.

We know a couple of things about the factors that escalate the chance of democratic erosion, and my colleagues and I have written a lot about personalist parties: when leaders come to power backed by personalist parties and the party has a legislative majority, the chance of democratic erosion increases. That is precisely what we’ve been witnessing with the second Trump administration—he now governs amid this personalist party, and the party has legislative majorities. All of that set the stage for him to consolidate power in the executive fairly rapidly in the US. So, the patterns that we’ve seen in 2025 are consistent with what research would anticipate.

To be clear, there are opportunities for citizens to push back against these efforts and signal their displeasure. This election was certainly one such opportunity. Again, the big one will be the 2026 midterm elections. It is not always the case that these leaders are able to consolidate control and destroy democracy from within; in some instances, they’re voted out of power. A good recent example would be Bolsonaro in Brazil. He was elected, did things that were harmful for Brazilian democracy, but ultimately lost his re-election bid. Slovenia would be another example. So, there is an opportunity for citizens to vote these leaders out.

But at the same time, it is not guaranteed that the 2026 midterm elections will be free and fair. Historically, US elections have been free and fair, despite allegations of fraud. The widespread consensus among experts is that we have very solid democratic elections in the US. However, there have been subtle indications that the Trump administration might try to fiddle with things in ways that threaten the integrity of the process in 2026. That is something to keep an eye on as well. Whether through gerrymandering or the disenfranchisement of key sectors of the electorate, there are certain things they could do that might not sound the alarm bell among citizens but would still threaten the integrity of the process.

Is Personalism the New Global Normal?

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan watching the August 30 Victory Day Parade in Ankara, Turkey on August 30, 2014. Photo by Mustafa Kirazli.

Given your comparative work on strongmen, how significant are these recent US elections at a global level—might they signal renewed democratic resistance, or are they isolated exceptions in a broader worldwide pattern of backsliding?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: We know that there is a broader pattern of backsliding happening, as you alluded to, and scholars debate to some degree how serious it is. But the reality is that regardless of the measure used to capture backsliding, we know that it’s occurring in places that have historically been robust to this sort of threat. Usually, wealthier democracies—democracies that have been in place for a really long time—tend to be protected from this kind of erosion.

What’s alarming about today’s backsliding wave is the ways in which countries like the United States, Poland, Hungary, and Turkey have been threatened by these sorts of incumbent takeovers. So, we know that there is a broader pattern underway, and from my own research perspective, we think that personalism is playing a very big role in fueling this dynamic.

That’s the broader global landscape. At the same time, as I mentioned earlier, just because we see a leader elected by a personalist party with a legislative majority does not mean there are no windows of opportunity for the opposition to vote these leaders out before they win re-election. I mentioned the cases of Brazil and Slovenia as examples where leaders that fit the model of what you don’t want to see, in terms of risks of incumbent takeover, did not win re-election.

So, the fact that we have this positive result for the Democratic Party—not only in terms of Mamdani, who is further to the left, winning office, but also the governors in New Jersey and Virginia, who were centrist—signals that perhaps there is some pushback against Trump’s agenda. However, it’s unclear whether that pushback is because of Trump doing things that are harmful to democracy and people not liking it, or—more likely, in my opinion—because they don’t like the direction of his economic policies. So, it would be unlikely that this result reflects frustration with what Trump has done to democracy, and far more likely that it reflects disagreement with his economic policies and the direction he has taken the economy.

From Institutional GOP to Personalist Machine

Your recent New York Times article argues that Donald Trump has transformed the GOP into a personal political vehicle. What empirical markers—organizational, ideological, or behavioral—most clearly signal the evolution of the Republican Party from a programmatic institution into a personalist structure?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: That’s a great question as well. We do a lot of research on personalized parties, and we’ve gathered a lot of data on how to capture personalism in a political party. And usually, the best indicator that a party is going to be personalist is that the leader created the party themselves—so Bukele with Nueva Ideas in El Salvador, or in Hungary with Orbán and Fidesz. Trump is unusual in that he did not create the Republican Party. This party has been around for a long time. But one indicator that his tenure as president was going to be different vis-à-vis the Republican Party was that he did not rise up within the ranks of the party to get the 2016 nomination. Instead, what happened was he was somewhat of an outsider. He, at one point, had been a Democrat, so he was not the classic candidate that the Republican Party had tended to field in their presidential campaigns.

At the time, the Republican Party happened to be divided. There were a variety of other people who were potential frontrunners for the 2016 candidacy, and Trump surprised many by virtue of winning. A lot of people at the time thought it was somewhat of a joke that he would be running for president. It was the right place at the right time for him to take over the Republican Party.

During his first term, he did not have the same control over the Republican Party that he did since 2020. And a clear indicator that the party was becoming personalized was after the insurrection on January 6, 2021. We see this really blatant, horrific episode of violence—essentially political violence—where a mob is trying to keep a democratically elected leader from taking power. That should have been a moment where Trump was completely sidelined from the Republican Party.

In the early days, a lot of Republican elites were somewhat unsure of how to respond. Should they get in line behind Trump’s false narrative that the election was stolen, or should they speak out against what happened and how much of a departure it was from our democratic norms? Slowly over time, however, Trump was able to get all of these elites to get in line with his false narrative. And so, by the time he ran for office in 2024, the Republican Party was fully under his control.

He’d gotten all of the key players within the party to support his narrative that the election was stolen, and by this point, it was pretty clear that Trump became synonymous with the party. When he would have different Republican Party events, there would be a statue of Trump or an image of Trump. Rather than promoting the party’s ideas, it was more a situation where we were seeing Trump as a person dominate. Clearly, elites started to sense that they were unlikely to maintain their political careers if they did not get in line behind Trump. So, by the time he ran for president in 2024, the party was very much one that we would consider personalist, where most elites were fearful of speaking out against Trump, and instead, he basically governs the policy agenda.

Structural Conditions Behind Trump’s Party Takeover

Elephant symbol of the Republican Party with the American flag in the background.
Photo: Chris Dorney.

Which structural conditions—party decay, institutional fragility, or shifts in public demand—have been most important in enabling Trump to centralize authority and weaken intra-party constraints?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: I don’t have a solid answer to that, because it would really be my best guess. My best guess in terms of what enabled Trump to personalize the party. I do think that the party was somewhat divided in 2016, and that was a real momentous occasion in terms of Trump being able to leverage this window of opportunity, as I mentioned. That said, the party was not fully behind Trump during his first term. Again, I can’t point to a specific cause of why he was able to fully take over the party in 2021. But we do know that slowly over time, key individuals in the party started to see themselves as not electorally viable unless they got in line behind Trump’s agenda.

In terms of the broader global landscape of why we’re able to see these sorts of things, there is some evidence that the changing media environment is enabling leaders to personalize their parties. Rather than having to build a party from the ground up, leaders can now build parties on social media. They don’t need the same organizational grassroots effort to construct a group that backs them. I mentioned earlier El Salvador with Nayib Bukele. He really is the new mold for how leaders can build movements that are personalized very rapidly and win office. He created his own political party and was very savvy in his use of social media to directly connect with voters, bypassing the need for a traditional party organization to launch his candidacy. These sorts of direct connections with citizens enable leaders to gain a following without having to rely on an established traditional party. There is some evidence that new media is facilitating the rise of personalism and personalist parties, enabling these leaders to bypass traditional institutions to gain political influence.

How Trump Hollowed Out Democratic Guardrails

Strongmen typically engage in institutional hollowing from within. Under Trump, which forms of institutional capture—of the courts, the DOJ, the Federal Reserve, or security agencies—pose the greatest long-term threat to liberal-democratic resilience in the US?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: Trump has been somewhat of an outlier in terms of the speed with which he has consolidated control. Typically, when we see these leaders come to power backed by these hollow organizations, personalist parties; it takes longer for them to get rid of executive constraints. Oftentimes, it’s strategic to do this slowly, because it’s more difficult for opponents to express alarm and mobilize against these fragmented takeovers. What has been surprising in the case of the US is the speed with which Trump has gone after multiple institutions of power and been able to do it without much pushback.

In terms of which institution is the most dangerous, in many cases we see the courts as particularly important in protecting democracy from an executive takeover. The fact that we have a Supreme Court that has seemed at least sympathetic, or willing to consider a new vision of the executive as very powerful, is particularly alarming, in that it’s possible the courts will open the door for Trump to do things like pursue a third term in office, because we have a conservative court that is not only conservative in terms of its agenda, but particularly pro-Trump. The current Supreme Court hearing over the case on tariffs and whether his tariffs are legal is going to be a very big case in terms of determining whether the courts will open the door for Trump to bypass traditional norms of behavior regarding executive power.

This is not to say that what Trump has done to gain control over other institutions is not also a problem. We ideally would like to see a bureaucracy that has people who are competent in major positions of power. Instead, what we’ve seen is that the bureaucracy has been both hollowed out—now very thin—but also staffed with his loyalists. This is going to have downstream consequences for all sorts of policy outcomes in the US. Even when we’re thinking about things like childhood vaccinations, we might see a public-health crisis on the horizon because of the ways in which Trump has appointed people in the health sector who do not have appropriate credentials for these positions.

The other domain that is also one to keep in mind is what’s going on with the military. Early on in Trump’s term, basically on a Friday night, when most people were not reading the news or maybe were asleep, he purged the top military brass of many officials. This is not the sort of thing that we are used to seeing. In a healthy democracy, the military is kept separate; it’s kept out of some of these civilian political debates. Trump seems very open-minded to trying to politicize the military. It’s been very unusual and alarming to see the ways he has deployed the National Guard to Democratic strongholds. This is not the sort of thing you’d like to see in a healthy democracy, because in theory the military is supposed to stay out of domestic political debates. The ways in which he’s used ICE to go after immigrants is also indicative of a shift where he is trying to use the security forces for political purposes in ways that are unprecedented.

Personalism and the Creation of Internal Enemies

Personalist rulers commonly manufacture “internal enemies” to justify extraordinary coercive measures. How does Trump’s rhetoric about the “deep state,” immigrants, and political opponents align with this broader strategy of threat construction?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: The ways in which Trump is fabricating a domestic enemy are very similar to what we see in dictatorships. The two cases that come to mind for me are Russia under Putin and Iran under its theocracy. In Iran, the regime very much benefits from promoting an image of the US as the enemy. It tries to get a rally-around-the-flag sort of boost in domestic support by saying that the regime is under attack from America, and that the United States is the cause of all of the country’s problems. In Russia, we’re seeing something similar with Putin’s rhetoric, saying that the United States is the cause of all of these challenges, and so forth.

Trump is not necessarily targeting a specific foreign enemy, but he likely would, at any given moment, blame a foreign country for some sort of problem that might be happening here. But he is stating that immigrants are a problem, and that immigrants are responsible for crime. He has made a number of statements completely absent any evidence about crime. In particular, he is saying false things about crime rates in Democratic cities. For people who live in these cities, this is somewhat surprising, because in many of them, they’ve actually seen their crime rates go down. So, the fact that he is deploying the National Guard to fight crime in Democratic strongholds is troubling.

It’s also his effort to rally his base. It was clear to him early on that his supporters were concerned about crime—that this was an issue he could get people to rally behind. If he paints a portrait of the United States as full of crime, as D.C. full of crime, then he can again create and craft a narrative that helps support him—an us-versus-them mentality, something that we’ve seen in many other political contexts, where leaders leverage these divides for their own political benefit.

Militarization as a Red Flag

District of Columbia National Guard soldiers patrol the National Mall after Trump activated the Guard and assumed control of the Metro Police to fight what he calls a crime epidemic, near Union Station, Washington, DC. Photo: Harper Drew.

Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and increasingly militarized immigration enforcement raises concerns about domestic coercion. Should we understand this as the early normalization of militarized rule within a democratic setting?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: In most cases of incumbent-led democratic backsliding, leaders usually first go after institutional constraints; they first go after the judiciary, or the bureaucracy, the media. Then they ultimately target elections. That’s the typical process that we see with incumbent-led backsliding. Trump’s ability to, or decision to, try to go after the security forces—and by that, I mean two things: promote loyalists, get rid of dissenting voices in the security forces, and then also politicize them by deploying them against his opponents—is not something that is typically part of the classic playbook. Usually, it’s something that we see after the democracy has transitioned to dictatorship.

The US is still a democracy by all accounts right now, because the 2024 presidential election was free and fair. That’s the most basic indicator of a democracy: the free and fairness of elections. We’re still a democracy. However, usually we don’t see these leaders militarize and politicize the security forces until after they’ve autocratized. It’s a very common tactic that they try to rely on multiple different security forces; we hear about coup-proofing and balancing the different security forces against one another. The fact that Trump is doing all of these things is both inconsistent with democratic norms in the United States and also a red flag in that healthy democracies require militaries that are not used for political purposes, particularly against domestic opponents.

Personalism and Economic Vulnerability

Photo: Shutterstock AI.

Your work suggests that personalist leaders politicize economic institutions and often embrace transactional economics. How might Trump’s pressure on the Federal Reserve, discretionary trade tactics, and patronage-based allocation threaten long-term economic stability?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: I keep mentioning personalist parties, but there’s a lot of research related to party personalism and its harmful consequences. We, my colleagues and I, just published a paper that shows that when leaders are backed by personal parties, they are more likely to attack central bank independence. This is not just something that is observed in the United States. There is a global pattern that these leaders, in their effort to ensure that no institutions can push back against them, go after the central bank as well. So, the fact that Trump has tried to interfere in the ways in which the Federal Reserve sets interest rate policies is consistent with global trends.

There is a huge body of research that shows that you want central bank independence, that this is something that political leaders should try to preserve because it’s in the country’s long-term best economic interests. So, when we have this sort of behavior, it signals that we’re likely to see disruptions in terms of inflationary policy. We are likely to have more unpredictable inflationary policy in the US. It is likely to lead to more inflation for ordinary people, and that’s already a concern among Americans. If you go to the grocery stores, prices are higher in everything. So, when I talk to my students, they can list a lot of different products that they no longer can afford because of inflation.

So, Trump’s eagerness to lower interest rates and fiddle with central bank independence is going to have long-term economic consequences. On top of this, these sorts of leaders are also likely to reward their loyalists with corruption. They’re likely to give them access to corruption and corrupt deal-making. That’s something very common, that these inner-circle elites are profiting from illicit deals. They send their money overseas to offshore bank accounts, try to hide things, and this is the way that these personalist leaders, like Trump, are able to maintain some inner-circle loyalty, by giving these sorts of kick-backs.

Corruption is not good for ordinary people. So that is another way in which these sorts of leaders, in their prioritization of their cronies and of staying in power, disrupt economic stability. So, the economic outlook for the United States does not look good. That’s not just because of the tariffs, which run counter to most economists’ advice, but because of these other layers of what’s happening with inflationary policy, interest rates, and corruption.

After Trump: Continuity or Collapse?

Former US President Donald Trump with a serious look as he delivers a speech at a campaign rally held at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Wilkes-Barre, PA – August 2, 2018. Photo: Evan El-Amin.

Personalist systems are especially fragile at succession. If the US continues along a personalist trajectory, what are the most plausible succession scenarios—heightened autocratization under loyalists, elite fragmentation, or institutional pushback?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: We don’t have a lot of research that gets into succession in personalist democracies. It’s somewhat unknown territory, what might happen if Trump were to decide not to go for a third term. That’s a big if, because he is certainly trying to put out feelers about how people would react to him going for a third term. It’s possible that he will try to stay in office beyond his term limits.

That said, in autocratic settings, we know that personalism makes it more difficult for succession to run smoothly, as you mentioned, but still, most of the time—when we have research on when leaders die of natural causes in office, for example—even in personalist places, most of the time there is a smooth succession process, at least to observers, and the regime survives it.

With personalist leaders, they can often survive even when ordinary people are doing horribly economically, because so long as they have bought off the security services and their inner circle of elites with corruption, they can maintain power.

The case I often think of when people ask what might happen next—such as whether everything would fall apart if Trump were to leave power—is Venezuela under Maduro. You know, Hugo Chávez had governed that place, autocratized it, and transformed what was once a very healthy democracy into an authoritarian system. He dies; it was around 2011. Maduro takes over, isn’t very popular, people don’t think this is going to last very long, and even though he lacks the same popularity that Chávez had, he has been able to stay in power amid an economy that’s performing disastrously. So, it would be foolish to assume that should Trump leave power—whether he dies of natural causes or whether he retires voluntarily—it’d be foolish to anticipate that that means the end of the destruction that he’s done to democracy in the United States.

Will Trumpism Outlive Trump?

Your scholarship shows that personalist parties can destabilize political competition even after their founders depart. Could Trump’s reconfiguration of the GOP generate enduring structural disruption in the US party system beyond his tenure?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: There are two points to mention here. On the one hand, because Trump did not create the Republican Party—because he took it over and co-opted it—I’m somewhat optimistic that the party could rebound and return to its former self, where it was a traditional conservative party with a conservative agenda, and where elites rose up the ranks of the party to get those positions. I think that it’s possible that we could see a reversion to the Republican Party of the past.

However, it’s also important to note that we have a lot of evidence that when these leaders lose power—let’s say they lose power in democratic elections—democracy does not necessarily rebound very quickly. Two recent examples of this would be Poland with the Law and Justice Party (PiS) losing elections. There was a lot of optimism that the democratic backsliding there had come to an end, but it has still been difficult for Polish democracy to fully rebound. There are challenges that persist in the judiciary, for example, and its ability to be independent.

The same thing could be said of Brazil with Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro loses re-election, Lula takes over, but there are really long-lasting divisions in Brazilian society that have persisted. A lot of this is because of the ways in which these leaders use polarization as a political tactic. So, it’s not that they are just voted out of office and suddenly, the 50% or so supporters that they genuinely have go away. 

From that perspective, on the one hand, I am more optimistic than I would be with other places that the Republican Party could rebound and return to a more programmatic party. But at the same time, there is lasting damage that has been done to the fabric of democracy here.

Unbound Executives, Unstable Worlds

Photo: Shutterstock.

Your NYT article notes that Trump and Xi of China operate with few domestic constraints, increasing unpredictability. Why does diminished institutional constraint heighten the risks of international miscalculation and conflict, particularly among major powers?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: There is a well-established body of research in international relations that underscores the importance of domestic constraints in preventing conflict. The idea is that if leaders face domestic constraints—meaning they would face some kind of consequence for not following through on their threats—their adversaries recognize this and can interpret those threats as credible. So, if I say there is a red line—if you don’t do X, Y, or Z, we’re going to invade—and I know I face constraints at home, my adversary knows that I mean what I say.

If, however, I face no domestic consequences for making empty promises or issuing vague or meaningless threats, then my adversary no longer knows what I really mean. The absence of domestic constraints therefore makes it very difficult for both sides to discern where the real red lines are. That uncertainty increases the likelihood of miscalculation and, in turn, the risk of conflict.

As I mentioned, there is a large literature on this—called audience-cost theory—and while it is somewhat complex, it helps explain why, when personalist leaders come to power, we tend to see more conflict. Research on authoritarian systems shows that personalist leaders are the most likely to start wars; they are the most likely to escalate conflicts with democracies in particular; and they are more prone to foreign policy miscalculation.

Taken together, this suggests that as we see personalism on the rise globally, we are increasingly setting the stage for more volatile and unpredictable conflict behavior in the international arena.

Why Leader-Made Parties Signal Democratic Peril

And lastly, Professor Frantz, given rising polarization, institutional distrust, and party hollowing globally, do you expect personalist leadership to become more common across both democracies and autocracies? What early warning indicators should scholars monitor to detect incipient personalist capture?

Assoc. Prof. Erica Frantz: I mentioned this earlier, but we do think the changing media environment has facilitated the rise of personalism in both autocratic and democratic contexts. This means that all signs point toward increasing top-heavy institutional emergence. Until there is some sort of concerted effort to return to party building and grassroots organization, we are likely to continue seeing more personalism globally.

A classic red flag is when a leader creates a party. Party creation is becoming increasingly common. Many of these leaders are billionaires, leveraging their personal wealth to fund these political vehicles. So, the biggest warning sign, I would say, is when the leader on the ballot has created their own party. That usually spells trouble for democracy—and for autocracy as well.

Rory Truex is Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Assoc. Prof. Truex: We Need the GOP to Reclaim Its Role as a Check on Trump

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeInterviews

“We Need the GOP to Reclaim Its Role as a Check on Trump,” argues Associate Professor Rory Truex of Princeton University in a wide-ranging interview with ECPS. He warns that the United States is “in the middle stages of democratic backsliding,” driven by Trump’s effort to “capture the referees” through loyalist appointments across the DOJ, FBI, and Department of Defense. Dr. Truex cautions that framing opponents as “enemies from within” is a classic precursor to authoritarian repression, even as recent mass protests—“the largest in American history”—underscore civic resilience. While electoral results in New Jersey, Virginia, California, and New York signal public fatigue with Trumpism, Dr. Truex maintains that meaningful reversal hinges on Republican elites: “We need the Republican Party to come back to its senses.”

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

“We Need the GOP to Reclaim Its Role as a Check on Trump” — this stark warning from Associate Professor Rory Truex of Princeton University underscores the fragility of institutional constraints in the United States amid the continued rise of Trumpist politics. In an extended conversation with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Truex situates the contemporary US experience within a comparative framework, drawing on scholarship on democratic backsliding, authoritarian power consolidation, and the erosion of norms.

An expert on authoritarian governance—particularly in China— Dr. Truex argues that the United States is currently “in the middle stages of a process political scientists call democratic backsliding,” a trajectory in which formally democratic institutions are gradually transformed into mechanisms of asymmetric competition that systematically disadvantage opponents. While he stops short of declaring the US an autocracy, Dr. Truex emphasizes that Trump should be seen as “a proto-autocrat—someone with authoritarian ambitions whose ability to realize them remains uncertain.”

The most distinctive and dangerous dimension of the current moment, Dr. Truex suggests, is Trump’s systematic personalization of power—particularly his effort to sweep aside neutral bureaucratic oversight in favor of loyalists. Appointments at the DOJ, FBI, and Department of Defense reflect what Dr. Truex calls a classic strategy of “capturing the referees.” As he notes, “You really can’t have people around you who are going to stand up to you and check your power.” These dynamics have intensified under a second Trump administration.

The danger, however, is not limited to institutional subversion. Dr. Truex identifies a rhetorical shift that strikes at the heart of democratic culture: the demonization of political opposition. He warns that branding rivals “enemies from within” constitutes a foundational step toward authoritarian politics: “Anytime you see a phrase like ‘enemies from within’ or ‘enemy of the people,’ this is usually a precursor to some form of political violence or authoritarian crackdown.”While mass demonstrations in response—remarkably “the largest protest in American history”—have illustrated the resilience of civil society, the stakes remain high.

Against this backdrop, Dr. Truex underscores the critical role of Republican elites in determining the country’s democratic trajectory. The 2024 elections in New Jersey, Virginia, California, and New York (notably Zohran Mamdani’s victory) demonstrate, in his view, public “dissatisfaction with Trump and the Trump policy agenda.” These results also raise the possibility of a strategic recalibration within the GOP. As Dr. Truex puts it, the key question is “at what point [Republican members of Congress] will begin to try to distance themselves from Trump.” His appeal is unambiguous: “We need the Republican Party to come back to its senses. We need people to begin to check Trump.”

Whether such realignment will occur remains uncertain. But as Dr. Truex stresses, US democracy’s fate hinges not only on electoral outcomes but also on whether the institutional and normative guardrails that once constrained executive overreach can be rebuilt—and restored.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Associate Professor Rory Truex, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

A Proto-Autocrat in the White House?

Donald Trump delivers a victory speech after his big win in the Nevada caucus at Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, flanked by his sons Eric (right) and Donald Jr. (left) in Las Vegas, NV. Photo: oe Sohm.

Professor Rory Truex, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: How would you characterize the Trump administration’s current trajectory in comparative perspective—does it resemble a transition toward competitive authoritarianism, or does it constitute a novel form of “autocracy” adapted to US institutions?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: I would characterize the US right now as being in the middle stages of a process political scientists call democratic backsliding. This is when the level of democracy erodes in some meaningful direction toward autocracy. Typically, in a case like the United States—where you have a well-consolidated democracy—the backsliding would be toward what we would call competitive authoritarianism, competitive autocracy, or electoral autocracy. There are different labels, but it essentially refers to a non-democratic system that nevertheless maintains elections. The key issue is that the ruling party uses the tools of power to make those elections fundamentally not free and fair—tilting the electoral playing field and using other instruments of power to erode the opposition in fundamentally anti-democratic ways.

I think the Trump administration is moving in this direction, and there is debate in political science over how exactly we should label it. On the one hand, this is a leader who did try to overturn the results of a democratic election in 2020, so we know he has authoritarian impulses and ambitions. On the other hand, we continue to have vocal opposition in the United States. We had elections last week that went off without a hitch. We saw large-scale protests. So there is a substantial degree of pushback.

Thus, I would characterize him as a proto-autocrat—someone with authoritarian ambitions whose ability to realize them remains uncertain. As for whether this is novel, I would say this process unfolds differently in every case; there is no single path. We can look at analogs—Hungary is a common example—but many other countries, roughly 30 in the last 20 or 30 years, have gone through some version of this process. So while there are aspects unique to the United States, I don’t think the overall process is especially unusual.

Purging the Referees: A Classic Authoritarian Strategy

Recent actions targeting the DOJ, civil service, and military leadership suggest an attempt to dismantle institutional autonomy. To what extent do these moves reflect classic authoritarian strategies of purging neutral bureaucracies and creating personalist control?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: In general, what we observe in the authoritarian world is that checks and balances erode pretty darn fast, and these leaders’ style of governance does not really tolerate independent centers of power. That might manifest in the military, the judiciary, or the civil service. There just needs to be a tight relationship between the leader and all aspects of the bureaucracy. And we’ve observed that personalization of power under Trump. More so than any other president, you could argue that he’s really prioritized political loyalty, and the people he’s appointing to key positions—whether it’s in the DOJ, or Kash Patel in the FBI, or Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense—are individuals who have essentially pledged loyalty to him. This contrasts with the first Trump administration, where there were more independent centers of power around him.

So yes, I think this is a fairly well-defined, non-democratic strategy. It’s particularly important in institutions that would reasonably check his power and that are central to coercion. To be more precise, the judiciary is really important—the Department of Justice, anything associated with the legal apparatus—but also the military and police apparatus as well. This is a well-established authoritarian strategy that they’ve been quite successful at implementing over the last several months.

Managed Participation Without Democracy: Mobilizing Support, Marginalizing Dissent

Torn American flag with Democratic and Republican party symbols, representing political division in the United States. Photo: Dreamstime.

Your research on consultative authoritarianism shows how regimes create participation channels to consolidate legitimacy. How does Trumpism employ similar “managed participation”—e.g., rallies, online mobilization—to consolidate loyalty while delegitimizing dissent?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: That’s a great question. I’m a China scholar by trade, so most of my research is on the Chinese case, and one thing we’ve observed in China is that the CCP, over time, has created channels for public participation—things like mayor’s mailboxes, the petition system, the parliament—that fall well short of democracy and real, meaningful democratic channels, but nevertheless allow the CCP regime to learn something about the population and respond. That allows them to keep things stable and stay in power. This is an example of what we would call a closed authoritarian system with no elections, no opposition parties, creating some mechanisms to be just slightly more responsive. Now, in the US setting, I wouldn’t actually say that these are terribly comparable, because we have a robust democracy and civil society that is going through this authoritarian moment.

What’s happening is, unfortunately, the political system has become so bifurcated into two different communities that the overlap between them has really diminished. In political science, we talk about something called affective polarization, which is the difference between how someone feels about their own party versus the other party. Over the last three decades, people have increasingly loathed the other party and are now operating in different media ecosystems and increasingly different social ecosystems. They are living in different parts of the country; they’re not socializing across party lines. That’s how I view what’s happening. Obviously, the far right or the American right has its own media ecosystem centered around a lot of different platforms and podcasters, and there is a high degree of mobilization. Trump has a personal charisma for a lot of people in the United States, and he’s able to captivate audiences, and did that a lot on the campaign trail. So, that’s part of it, but I would say it’s quite different from what I would call consultative authoritarianism.

Labeling Rivals ‘Enemies’ as a Prelude to Crackdown

Trump and senior advisers have framed political opponents as “enemies from within.” How significant is this reframing in eroding the democratic norm of loyal opposition, and does it constitute a foundational step toward autocratic rule?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: This language—“enemies from within” is deeply troubling. Again, I’m a China scholar, so anytime you see a phrase like “enemies from within” or “enemy of the people,” this is usually a precursor to some form of political violence or authoritarian crackdown. So it’s really problematic language.

In a democracy, parties need to recognize each other as legitimate opposition and treat one another with a degree of respect, even if there is some underlying disdain. The minute you start talking about people as enemies of the American population, or link them to terrorist groups—using words like “terrorist” or “foreign government”—that’s a significant escalation in rhetoric. What we saw in the US was that this escalation occurred just prior—it’s been ongoing, but it really ramped up—in the lead-up to the No Kings protest of mid-October.

What was notable is that, in turn, those protests wound up being overwhelmingly peaceful—and the largest protest in American history. I don’t think people fully grasp that. The estimates are anywhere from 5 to 7 million people; whatever number you use, it’s the largest protest in American history. It wasn’t a bunch of violent Antifa people running around throwing Molotov cocktails. It was a bunch of normal people out with signs, wearing costumes, playing guitars, and it was quite beautiful. I was there with my family in Connecticut, and it was quite a striking moment.

So, one notable development is that the Trump administration is trying to paint the opposition as anti-American, disloyal, an enemy of the people—and trying to paint them as violent. The reality is quite different, and the protest event just a couple of weeks ago revealed the Trump narrative to be fundamentally off-base, and hopefully that was a turning point.

Emergency as Strategy: How Autocrats Exploit Chaos

Memorial for Charlie Kirk outside Turning Point USA Headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, on September 13, 2025, following his fatal shooting while speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Photo: Dreamstime.

The administration’s weaponization of crises—such as the assassination of Charlie Kirk—as pretexts for expanding executive power evokes comparisons to the Reichstag Fire. How does this align with historical and theoretical models of emergency-driven authoritarian consolidation?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: We know that instability is good for a would-be autocrat. This is a general historical pattern where a lot of these guys try to create, foment, or exploit some form of instability or threat to justify crackdowns. And crackdowns are usually done in the name of national security, peace and stability. Anytime violence emerges, or a foreign conflict emerges, it really plays into the hands of these leaders, because they appeal to a broader feeling among some of the population that you need a strong ruler to keep the peace and maintain law and order. That’s a very classic authoritarian trope. We’ve seen this play out, as you alluded to.

Nazi Germany—I don’t think that’s the best comparison for the United States—but we saw it this past year in South Korea, when there was a brief declaration of martial law on the grounds that the country had been infiltrated by communists and other groups. And in El Salvador, the drug war provided the pretext for Bukele’s consolidation of power. So it is a very common strategy.

I think the killing of Charlie Kirk was a national tragedy, not because I particularly agree with Charlie Kirk on many issues, but because once we start to see violence really emerge, violence tends to spiral. I was quite worried, in the aftermath of that event, that we would see retaliatory killings going back and forth, leading to greater violence and potentially consolidation of control through Trump. Surprisingly, to date, we have not seen that emerge. In fact, the protests—their overwhelmingly peaceful nature—and then the election result, which is also a bit of a rebuke to Trump, may have broken the cycle and poked a hole in this narrative, and that is noteworthy.

So anyway, it’s something to keep an eye on. I worry about Venezuela and the kind of emerging security narrative there. I worry about the use of the National Guard in our cities and how that’s being deployed. Then, of course, the big foreign threat they’ve been discussing is illegal immigration, which has been used to justify the augmentation of ICE and other measures. So there are plenty of threats to go around for this administration to use. I don’t think they’ve been 100% successful quite yet on this front.

Can Institutional Resistance Survive Political Militarization?

The politicization of the US military or militarization of US politics, including calls to deploy troops domestically against supposed internal enemies, signals erosion of military neutrality. Based on your work, how likely is institutional resistance to remain effective under escalating partisan pressure?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: This is really important, and what we know, again, about authoritarian governments is they need to have a tight relationship with the military to be able to control domestic opposition, especially when it spills out into the streets. The US military is a very highly respected organization in American society, and it has a long tradition of neutrality and staying out of politics. This is not a military that stages coups like we see in much of the world. This is a military that does its job and has extremely high standards of professionalism. We’ve seen pretty dramatic efforts to bring them to heel. We saw this meeting with Pete Hegseth and basically the top military brass from all over the world, which was unprecedented, bringing them all into one space. And he gave them a talking-to about fitness and DEI issues and many other things. So I think there is an effort to rein the military in. The fact that you have someone like Hegseth in charge, who’s a tried-and-true loyalist, is notable.

There’s a difference between that and the really dirty stuff of putting down a protest, potentially using violence against the people. You see these images in American streets where you have these National Guard people deployed in places like D.C. or other places. They’re normal people; they don’t really want to be there. They’re maybe away from their families, and then you see normal Americans interacting with them, telling jokes and stuff. So I don’t think there is that sense that this is an authoritarian military force that’s going to crack down on the American people. I don’t see that in the National Guard in particular.

ICE is slightly different, because ICE has been deliberately augmented under the Trump administration. There’s an ideological component to working for ICE. I don’t mean to disparage the integrity of the folks working for ICE—I’m sure it’s an extremely hard job, and there are many dedicated civil servants. But I also think there’s a deliberate effort to recruit folks into that organization right now who are loyal to Trump, and that is a little bit more concerning to me.

But in general, I don’t think we’re quite there yet, where the American military is going to do Trump’s bidding, especially if it does come to putting down mass mobilization like we’ve seen militaries do in other parts of the world.

Capturing the Referees: Purges as a Path to Power

To what extent do recent attempts to purge “disloyal” military officers, federal prosecutors, and civil servants reflect a broader effort to replace professional staff with patronage networks typical of personalist authoritarian regimes?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: We’ve already talked a little bit about this. I think there’s a well-established pattern—what Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their book How Democracies Die, call “capturing the referees.” And again, if you’re going to be engaging in norm-violating behavior, potentially even illegal behavior, you really can’t have people around you who are going to stand up to you and check your power.

Trump has been very deliberate in firing large numbers of lawyers from the military. He fired a lot of JAGs from the military. He fired a lot of lawyers in the DOJ, and then has either not rehired those folks or put people into power like Kash Patel or Pam Bondi, or many of these other figures who are fully loyal to him. So I do think they’ve been successful on that front.

The other thing to note is, of course, with the advent of the Trump administration, we saw this massive effort to downsize the federal bureaucracy and spending in a very haphazard way. I know folks who work for the US government, and that type of capacity isn’t rebuilt overnight. I think part of the purpose of those moves was just to destroy.

So if you destroy the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), or if you destroy the Department of Education, and all these people who have been working there for decades leave, they’re not coming back in four years—or if they do, it’s going to take a while for them to come back online and rebuild. So I do think part of the underlying goal of Project 2025 and the broader conservative movement with respect to government is just to destroy. So, it didn’t matter, really, that it was so haphazard. That was, in some sense, part of the point.

A Two-Tier State: Punishing Blue America

How do you interpret the Trump administration’s systematic punitive strategies—such as withholding federal funds from Democratic states—as a mechanism to cultivate a two-tiered partisan state? Could this accelerate democratic fragmentation?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: I think it’s disgusting. I tend not to use hyperbole, but the fact that if a disaster occurs in your state and your state voted for Biden, that could affect whether you get relief from FEMA is disgusting, and it’s a completely inappropriate use of power.

I do think there’s an undercurrent in American society right now of, as I said, polarization, but the more extreme version of that would be: can the system hold together at all? And if you have blue states, which are feeding a lot of tax dollars into the federal government, and those funds are now being withheld and funneled elsewhere—and being withheld as a punishment—that’s not a sustainable equilibrium.

I personally think that quite a lot of what’s going on under the Trump administration is revealing fundamental issues within the American political system. It’s revealing the role of money in politics, the ease with which we can politicize the judiciary and other institutions, and how broken our two-party system really is.

So my hope, perhaps irrational, is that when this chapter is over—it might be over in three years, it might be over in 15 or 16; these spells often last longer than people think—there will be a period of rebuilding and reform. The practice you just referenced is obviously heinous and inappropriate, and the American people will see that and hopefully put better institutional guardrails in place to prevent this type of behavior moving forward.

Threats, Fear, and the Future of Free Expression

Members of the Writers Guild of America protest the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel outside ABC headquarters in New York City on September 19, 2025. Photo: Dreamstime.

You have written on self-censorship under repressive systems. Do current patterns in the US—media intimidation, citizen fear, legal retribution—suggest the emergence of similar dynamics of preference falsification?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: “Preference falsification” is a very academic word, and it’s basically the situation where people don’t feel comfortable saying how they really feel about politics. For that reason, they would not speak out, or they might even affirm the regime or the government, even if they don’t really feel it in their heart of hearts. That disconnect between what you say in public and what you feel in private—that’s preference falsification or self-censorship.

We know that in authoritarian systems, this behavior can take hold. I often think of authoritarianism as a chill, where people learn that speaking up about politics and criticizing the leader of the government gets you in trouble. Once that chill takes hold, it can be hard to reverse, and it can spread quite quickly.

What I’ve noticed, though—and I find it very inspiring—is that this is America. We have a long tradition of democracy. We are an unruly people, and we don’t like to be told what to do or think. We’ve seen efforts by the administration to intimidate the American people. You could interpret the National Guard deployments as a form of intimidation.

We’ve seen prominent people—they’ve tried to silence people like Jimmy Kimmel, who’s a very prominent comedian here. It’s backfired. People rallied behind Jimmy Kimmel, they put pressure on Disney, he’s back on the air. I don’t see many comedians on late-night TV self-censoring about what they think about what’s going on. Then you saw the largest protest in American history—normal people out there, and they weren’t wearing masks. They were out there with their friends and family in full view, and I was really inspired by that. There has been an attempt at intimidation. Because we have such a vibrant democracy, our people don’t know that, and they reacted the other way, becoming more vocal and more critical. That’s not to say it will forever be that way.

The other thing I would keep an eye on is violence. There’s an undercurrent, as we talked about, of political violence in the US, where a lot of judges, congresspeople, prominent writers, thinkers are being threatened with violence on a regular basis. We don’t observe it because the violence doesn’t usually come to fruition. But the fact that if you speak out, if you oppose Trump, you might be subjected to violent threats—and your family might have to spend Thanksgiving in a hotel—that is noteworthy, and that is actually the more likely force that would create self-censorship.

But to date, I would say there’s pretty darn vibrant opposition, and that’s been really inspiring, frankly.

Trumpism Without Borders: The Making of a Far-Right Network

The global diffusion of authoritarianism often takes place through ideological and strategic alliances. How is Trumpism embedding itself within a transnational far-right ecosystem—collaborating with illiberal leaders in Europe, Russia, China, and elsewhere?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: This is a big story, and people like Anne Applebaum have written about this network of authoritarian leaders that are becoming more assertive on the global stage. It’s important to remember, Trump is a certain type of proto-autocrat, whatever we want to call him, and he naturally has affinity for people like Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, or Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Even Vladimir Putin—obviously, we know there has been an unusually close relationship between Putin and Trump over the years. That doesn’t extend all the way to Xi Jinping; their relationship is more fraught, for many reasons that I’m happy to talk about. What I’m trying to say is that there is a natural affinity here, and what is interesting is this diffusion of tactics across the backsliding world. We know that there was a close relationship between Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party and Project 2025. Orbán has spoken at CPAC in Hungary. It’s noteworthy that these illiberal leaders are operating out in the open with their friendship and affinity. We know that Trump has extended support to Bolsonaro while he faces his own criminal investigations.

These guys are learning from each other, and they’re providing moral support for each other. That’s the shortest way to say it. That matters and that leaves the democratic world—in much of Europe, and I spent time in Taiwan this summer, places like Japan, Korea, Australia—wondering what to do here. Who can we count on? Can we count on the United States in particular? What is the normative commitment of the Trump administration to helping the democratic world, helping traditional allies and partners? So there’s a bigger-picture foreign policy implication there.

Flooding the Zone: Trump’s Most Notable Innovation

Donald Trump appears on Eyewitness News at the ABC Times Square studio in Manhattan, NY, promising: “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for it.” Photo: Mira Agron.

In your view, does Trumpism export an actionable governance model—expanding beyond rhetoric to institutional templates—that could assist foreign autocrats in consolidating power?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: That’s a great question. I think he’s using the model of others.  So it’s not the Trump model; it’s a model that your institute studies quite well, which is this sort of populist authoritarian model, where these leaders project masculinity, charisma, strength, talk in the language of “enemies of the people,” fight against some corrupt elite, and speak the language of nationalism and national rejuvenation. That’s a compelling pitch, and it tends to take hold in a lot of different places, in a lot of different historical moments. So, Trump could be understood as just one of many leaders in that mold.

But then there’s also the question of what he has innovated—what he has done differently that could be used elsewhere. So, for some would-be Trump in another country 10 or 15 years from now, what could they learn from him? We’ll see how the story unfolds, but I think one thing we’ve noticed in political science—I run a small podcast called The Civic Forum, and I had Steve Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, Sue Stokes, and Adam Sheingate on, who are some of the most significant scholars of authoritarianism and democracy—is the pace at which this is unfolding in the United States.

We are only 10 months into this thing, and the rapid, blitzkrieg nature of what the Trump administration has done is deliberate. This is not an accident. Steve Bannon, among others, has talked about “flooding the zone,” the idea that you overwhelm the opponent by doing so many different things at once that they don’t know how to respond. So, they’ve been quite brazen. If you had asked me a year ago, “Are we gonna see troops in the streets by November?” I’d have said we probably won’t. “Are we going to see them attempt to take prominent comedians off the air?” No, we’re not going to see that. But they’ve been quite brazen, going on all these different fronts at once.

I do think there’s a degree to which it has overwhelmed folks. The opposition and the institutional checks are starting to kick in. What Garry Kasparov has called the “democratic immune system” is starting to fire up, so we’ll see. But, if I were to point to one thing the Trump administration has really been innovative about, it’s just the pace and the boldness of what they’re doing. Maybe it’s because this is not his first time in office. He was in office for four years; he had four years to prepare for this. So, in some sense, it’s part of a longer arc.

Strongmen in Parallel: A Cooler US–China Rivalry?

How do you foresee a second Trump administration shaping US-China relations? Could intensified ideological confrontation—coupled with domestic authoritarian drift—produce a more unstable bilateral equilibrium, or might mutual illiberal tendencies paradoxically enable pragmatic coordination?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: This is actively unfolding. So whatever I say could be irrelevant in the next few days. But, there have been a few notable developments. The first is that the Trump administration hasn’t prioritized the China issue overall like it did in the first go-around. When the Trump administration first came in, there was a concerted effort to shift US-China relations in a very new direction. That direction has largely remained constant, even under the Biden administration, so there’s not the same need to break—or disrupt—US-China relations as there was the first time. Now, they view China as just another thing to be dealt with—another object of this trade war. So that’s one notable development.

The second notable development is that they haven’t really been effective in doing this, and China has pushed back in a much stronger way. The Chinese government learned from the first go-around and figured out how to target the Trump administration politically, whether through soybeans or the more extreme measure of rare earths. So I don’t think the trade war has gone well for Trump, and he’s trying to get out of it now—minimize damage to the economy but still claim a win.

On the other side, it’s not as if Xi Jinping is doing particularly well. He’s getting older; there are rumors about health issues; he’s got a party congress coming up; and the Chinese economy is fine, but it’s not doing particularly well. Reports say youth unemployment is upwards of 20%, and the Communist Party does not like large numbers of angry young people.

So, in some sense, both of these leaders have this nationalistic, strongman style, which means there’s an upper bound to how much they can cooperate—they have to represent their respective nations. But they’re also both in a pinch, and they probably both just want to be done with each other and focus on domestic issues. Both governments are very focused on domestic stability and power consolidation.

So I actually would expect, especially given the last couple of weeks, that US-China relations stabilize a little bit. I don’t think there’s going to be war; I don’t think there’s going to be an invasion of Taiwan. I know many people are worried about that—and I care a lot about Taiwan—but I’m more confident that general stability will hold and the relationship will just muddle through. I don’t think it’s going to be some grand friendship between Trump and Xi. There’s too much skepticism among both national security communities and the people around those leaders. But I’m more confident that things will stabilize and we won’t see that level of global conflict.

How Far Will Democratic Erosion Go?

National Guard troops on standby during a downtown protest against expanded ICE operations and in support of immigrant rights in Los Angeles, US on June 8, 2025. Photo: Dreamstime.

Looking ahead, what scenarios do you see for US political institutions? Are we observing a temporary democratic recession, a stable competitive-authoritarian equilibrium, or a longer-term path toward democratic disintegration? What factors could reverse the current trajectory?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: The answer is we don’t know yet. We don’t know how this story will unfold. It’s clear that we’re in the middle stages of democratic backsliding or erosion, and the question is: how deep does that go, and how long does it last? That will depend on events; it will depend on the strength of the opposition. The Democrats had a good week. They got multiple electoral results they wanted, including governorships in New Jersey and Virginia.

So, it will depend, and a lot rides on the upcoming midterms—whether those go off without a hitch, and whether the Democrats are able to regain a bit of footing in Congress. And then, of course, there’s a presidential election two years later. So, we will see.

In general, it’s quite difficult to heal in this type of setting. Some people might think, if Trump leaves power, it’s all over. No, not really. You have a political party that has embraced a fundamentally authoritarian figure; you have large numbers of people who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election at the mass level and among Republican politicians. And they’ve learned a governance style and practice that’s going to be hard to unwind. We know that democracies rely on civility, forbearance, respecting the other side—how do we come back from this?

So, my hope—and maybe we can end on an optimistic note—is that this moment teaches us something about the issues with our system: the level of corruption, the influence of money in politics, the problems of polarization, the toxicity in our discourse. And that there’s a healing in American society, and by extension in our political system, that unfolds over the next decade. Maybe that will be what the next decade holds—this kind of rejuvenation—and that will require some political reform.

I will say, people are more engaged in politics than they’ve ever been right now, at least among the centrist and progressive side. It has re-energized our civil society. You could argue that that had been in decline, and people were becoming more and more atomized because of social media. But people care about politics again and are doing things. They’re protesting, they’re voting, they’re getting more involved—and that’s a good sign.

So, we have a long road back to being a fully functional, healthy democracy. I hope it’s a short road—but we don’t quite know yet.

Election Results Show Growing Backlash Against Trumpism

And one last question, Professor Rory Truex: what does the election of Mamdani, together with the election results in New Jersey, Virginia, and California, tell us about the trajectory of Trumpist policies?

Assoc. Prof. Rory Truex: It’s definitely a rebuke for Trump, and the margins of victory in all of these places—especially New Jersey and Virginia are much higher than people expected. And then, of course, Mamdani winning. New York politics are different than the rest of the country. But it’s definitely a sign that there’s real dissatisfaction with Trump and the Trump policy agenda.

Then the question is, among the Republican Party establishment—congresspeople running for re-election—at what point will they begin to try to distance themselves from Trump? Frankly, that’s what we need. We need the Republican Party to come back to its senses. We need people to begin to check Trump. Congress is not really checking Trump. The Republicans in Congress are not a meaningful check on his power, but if they realize that their electoral fates are getting worse and worse because Trump is so incompetent and corrupt and authoritarian, maybe they will turn.

People are already basically going to be campaigning in the next few months. The elections are coming up in a year, and so that means the electoral cycle is already starting to begin. So we’ll see. The last three weeks have been a shift in momentum back toward the opposition, and that’s been good. My guess is the pendulum will swing back; we’ll see more counter-moves from the Trump administration, but the economic costs are mounting. The pain that is being inflicted by this administration, and the cruelty being inflicted by this administration, is really front and center.

If you’re a Hispanic voter—these voters swung toward Trump in the last election—and then we’ve seen American citizens of Hispanic descent detained by ICE. We’ve seen communities destroyed by ICE. So that’s just one example, but the kind of cruelty inflicted by the Trump administration is becoming harder and harder to deny. And I do have confidence that the majority of the American people understand that and don’t want to live this way, and so hopefully we’ll see some swing back.

Geert Wilders (PVV) in House of Representatives during a debating at the Tweede Kamer on April 5, 2023 in Den Haag, Netherlands. Photo: Jeroen Meuwsen.

Professor de Lange: D66’s Victory in Dutch Elections Cannot Be Presented as a Victory over Populism

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In an in-depth interview with the ECPS, Professor Sarah de Lange of Leiden University cautions that “D66’s victory in Dutch elections cannot be presented as a victory over populism.” While the liberal centrist D66 led by Rob Jetten revitalized the political center, Professor de Lange stresses that “the total size of the radical right-wing bloc has not diminished—it’s just more fragmented.” She argues that Dutch politics is shaped less by populism than by nativism, which has “seeped so much into the mainstream.” Despite the PVV’s exclusion from government, Professor de Lange warns that illiberalism remains a significant threat, while the defense of liberal democracy has only recently become “more salient for mainstream parties and more visible to citizens.”

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In a wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Sarah de Lange, Professor of Dutch Politics at Leiden University’s Institute for Political Science, offers a sharp and nuanced interpretation of the 2024 Dutch elections, warning that “D66’s victory in Dutch elections cannot be presented as a victory over populism.” While the liberal centrist D66 emerged as the largest party, Professor de Lange argues that this outcome reflects both a revival of the political center and the continuing normalization of populist discourse within Dutch democracy.

According to Professor de Lange, the election results underscore a complex duality: “We can conclude that both things are happening at the same time.” Although centrist and Christian Democratic parties gained ground, the radical right bloc remains as strong as before—only more fragmented. This persistence, she notes, illustrates not the decline of populism but its adaptation: “The total size of the radical right-wing bloc has not diminished; it’s as strong as it was in the 2023 elections—it’s just more fragmented.”

Professor de Lange cautions against the view that the PVV’s losses signal a populist retreat. Instead, she interprets them through “traditional political science theories about governing and negative incumbency effects.” Geert Wilders’ participation in government, she explains, produced electoral backlash, but his influence on mainstream parties remains unmistakable—particularly regarding migration and national identity, now central themes even for the conservative-liberal VVD. “The VVD moved so close to the PVV in the campaign that it even supported some proposals by the radical right that had anti-constitutional implications,” she observes, underlining how populist narratives have reshaped the Dutch mainstream.

What truly defines this political transformation, Professor de Lange insists, is not merely populism but nativism. “It is this nativism that has seeped so much into the mainstream, rather than the populism,” she explains, pointing to the xenophobic nationalism that has become a structural feature of Dutch political discourse.

Reflecting on the broader European context, Professor de Lange rejects the notion that populism has been “domesticated.” Despite Wilders’ exclusion from coalition talks, she warns that illiberalism remains deeply entrenched. “There is still clearly a threat of illiberalism,” she notes, citing violent demonstrations and political intimidation during the campaign. Yet, she also detects a countermovement: “Defending liberal democracy and the rule of law has become more salient for mainstream parties… making citizens more aware of how vulnerable liberal democracy actually is.”

Ultimately, Professor de Lange’s analysis situates the Dutch case within the wider European struggle between liberal resilience and populist endurance, emphasizing that the current equilibrium represents neither populism’s decline nor liberalism’s triumph—but rather, a tense coexistence shaping the future of democratic politics in Europe.

Sarah de Lange is a Professor of Dutch Politics at Leiden University’s Institute for Political Science.

Here is the edited transcript of our interview with Professor Sarah de Lange, slightly revised for clarity and flow.

The Radical Right-Wing Bloc Has Not Diminished—Only Fragmented

Professor Sarah de Lange, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: The October 29 Dutch elections resulted in a striking balance between D66’s liberal centrism and Wilders’ populist radical right. From a comparative perspective, how should we interpret this outcome—does it mark a recalibration of Dutch democracy or the normalization of populism within it?

Professor Sarah de Lange: I think we can conclude that both things are happening at the same time. On the one hand, we’ve seen in the Dutch elections a revival of the center. Not only has the social-liberal D66 gained a lot of seats, but so have the Christian Democrats, and the two parties will be needed for any coalition government that will be formed. At the same time, we also see that Geert Wilders’ PVV has lost seats due to its government participation, but it has lost those seats to other radical right-wing populist competitors, namely JA21 and Thierry Baudet’s Forum for Democracy. So, the total size of the radical right-wing bloc has not diminished; it’s as strong as it was in the 2023 elections—just more fragmented.

Do you view the PVV’s losses as evidence of a populist retreat, or rather as a transformation of its discourse into the mainstream—particularly given the centrist parties’ increasing emphasis on migration and national identity?

Professor Sarah de Lange: The loss of the PVV should really be seen from the perspective of traditional political science theories about governing and negative incumbency effects. Geert Wilders’ PVV governed together with three other parties in the cabinet, and all four parties have lost to some extent in these elections. The loss of the PVV was significant, but perhaps not as large as one would expect for a party that participated in government. There’s a saying in politics that “the breaker pays,” and in this case, Geert Wilders did indeed pay—he did lose voters—but most of those he lost were voters who had joined his party only in 2023, when the VVD opened the door to the PVV.

Many previous non-voters turned out to support the PVV, given that there was finally a chance that the party would govern. So, it’s the newest voters of the PVV who have left again. But interestingly, although some of them came from the mainstream in 2023, few have returned to the mainstream in these elections. Some have—for example, to the conservative-liberal VVD—but in relatively small numbers, which explains why the radical right populist bloc is as strong as it was in 2023.

There’s also a second way in which Geert Wilders’ PVV has had a significant impact on these elections. All mainstream parties, and especially the conservative-liberal VVD, have taken up migration as the core theme of their campaigns and have advocated for a clear reduction in immigration, meaning stricter immigration regulations. 

That has especially been the case for the conservative-liberal VVD of former Prime Minister Mark Rutte, now NATO Secretary General. The party moved so close to the PVV during the campaign that it even supported some proposals by the radical right with anti-constitutional implications. For example, Forum for Democracy, a smaller radical right-wing populist party, proposed during the campaign in Parliament that there should be a motion to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization—very much inspired, of course, by Donald Trump’s proposal to do the same. Even though Dutch legislation is very clear on this point—namely that it is up to the judiciary to designate organizations as terrorist organizations and not to Parliament—the conservative-liberal VVD nevertheless supported this proposal.

So, in that way too, the influence of radical right-wing populist parties in the Netherlands remains significant. What I’ve seen in much of the international press is that the victory of D66 has been presented as a victory over populism, but I certainly do not think it should be interpreted that way.

Nativism, Not Populism, Defines the Radical Right in the Netherlands

Photo: Dreamstime.

To what extent does the Dutch experience illustrate the idea of a “stabilized populism,” where populist rhetoric persists even as its organizational strength fluctuates?

Professor Sarah de Lange: It’s a clear case where we see a potential for the populist radical right that cannot be easily accommodated by the mainstream parties, in the sense that it’s very difficult for mainstream parties to win back voters who, at some point, have turned to the radical right. But I would also highlight that we tend to discuss this very much in terms of populism, while what has really been key to the transformation of Dutch politics—more than populism—is nativism.

What truly defines Geert Wilders’ political platform, as well as those of other radical right parties in the Netherlands, is their nativism, their xenophobic nationalism, and their othering of groups perceived as non-native—which, in the Dutch context, for the PVV, refers mostly to Muslims but more broadly includes anyone with a migration background, even extending to the third generation now living in the Netherlands.

It is this nativism that has seeped so deeply into the mainstream, rather than the populism. In fact, in this particular campaign, populism was not as pronounced in some of the radical right parties. Take, for example, JA21, which picked up a significant number of former PVV voters and could be involved in the coalition negotiations. The party remained clearly nativist in the campaign but was far less outspokenly populist, as a way to be more acceptable as a coalition partner—a serious partner—to mainstream parties.

Populism in Europe Has Not Been Domesticated or Contained

Looking beyond the Netherlands, what do these results reveal about the broader European and global trajectory of populism? Are we witnessing its institutional domestication or the emergence of a new post-populist equilibrium?

Professor Sarah de Lange: What we’re seeing is not its domestication. What was also very clear, already from the start of the campaign, was that Geert Wilders would not be acceptable as a coalition partner to mainstream parties for the next government. Some Dutch mainstream parties have said they don’t want to work with him on principle, because his program contains proposals that are not in line with freedom of religion and that conflict with the rule of law.

Other parties don’t want to work with him again because they don’t find him a trustworthy coalition partner, as he has now toppled two Dutch governments—the last one from which he withdrew, as well as the minority government that ruled the Netherlands from 2010 to 2012 with PVV support. It was therefore very clear to him that he would not be included in the government coalition again, and he immediately reverted to his strong populist and nativist rhetoric. Any moderation that existed during the coalition government—and there was very little of it—disappeared as soon as the coalition collapsed. So, certainly no domestication.

I also don’t necessarily think that we’re in a post-populist age. As I indicated, the radical right in the Netherlands remains as strong as ever, and what was particularly notable in the first survey data from the election is that the group of voters considering support for one of the radical right parties in the Netherlands has actually grown. The potential for the radical right to expand even further in future elections is therefore certainly there.

Wilders’ Personal Control Over the PVV Is Both His Strength and His Weakness

Election posters near the Binnenhof featuring Geert Wilders of the PVV in the foreground, The Hague, the Netherlands, October 12, 2025. Photo: Dreamstime.

Building on your research on party agency and leadership, how do you assess the contrasting political performances of Rob Jetten and Geert Wilders—one mobilizing optimism and inclusivity, the other polarization and grievance?

Professor Sarah de Lange: These are two very different parties, of course, in terms of ideology but also in terms of party organization, and this is a very important part of the story for the Netherlands—one that sets it apart from other countries in Western Europe when it comes to the radical right.

Geert Wilders’ PVV joined the government in 2024, having had no significant experience with governing at the local or regional level. Why is that the case? For two reasons. First of all, Geert Wilders’ party does not have a traditional membership base. It is organized exclusively around the figure of Geert Wilders, who runs the party himself. It doesn’t have a membership base or a cadre. Even the representatives in the national parliament are not members of the party.

This means, first, that it is very difficult for him to participate in many municipal elections. He only participates in a select number of municipal elections, so there is very little opportunity for him to gain experience there. Secondly, it also means that people within the party have no executive experience—no experience with heavy management functions, etc.—and that there is no support staff within the party to assist those who need to take up government responsibility.

It was very evident in the cabinet that the PVV ministers, in particular, performed quite poorly on average. They didn’t know what their role was as ministers or junior ministers, how to deal with the bureaucracy, or how to bring legislation to a successful conclusion—meaning legislation that would be accepted by parliamentary parties and would actually be feasible, without including any anti-constitutional elements. So overall, quite poor performance.

That contributed to the early collapse of the government, because Geert Wilders saw that voters noticed this, and it is plausible that he withdrew from the government to avoid further electoral losses that might occur if voters became even more aware of how weak his pool of ministers was.

This really sets the Netherlands apart from other countries where the radical right can actually govern quite successfully because they have a trained cadre and local or regional experience. In that respect, if we compare the Netherlands to Italy, it is a completely different case.

Jetten’s Positive Campaign Reclaimed Hope and Unity

Rob Jetten attends the New Year’s Reception hosted by the King of the Netherlands in Amsterdam on January 3, 2025. Photo: Robert van T. Hoenderdaal.

Jetten’s campaign drew on emotionally resonant, populist-style messaging—“het kan wél” (“yes, we can”)—without embracing populist antagonism. Does this signal that centrist liberalism is learning to compete in the emotional arena that populists once dominated?

Professor Sarah de Lange: Yes, this is a very interesting development that we’ve seen. D66 ran a campaign that was very positive in tone, speaking of hope and unity, and even went so far as to reclaim the Dutch flag as a symbol—quite surprising for a party that, in its stances, is extremely cosmopolitan and progressive, very pro-European Union, for example.
It seems that this approach worked, as it drew voters from other left-wing, progressive, and centrist parties. One explanation for this is that research shows having a genuinely positive atmosphere around a party can be beneficial in electoral campaigns.

Has Wilders’ long-standing personalistic leadership become both a strategic advantage and a constraint—particularly in terms of coalition-building and sustaining voter trust?

Professor Sarah de Lange: Yes, as I already explained, it’s certainly a disadvantage in one sense, as it makes it very difficult for the party to be ready for government—to have qualified and experienced people who can take up ministerial and junior ministerial positions. However, at the same time, it also offers him an advantage, in that he has full control over his members of parliament. So even though his parliamentary group grew significantly, since he controls which parliamentarians can speak to the media and on what topics, and in which debates they participate and in which they don’t, his parliamentary group didn’t experience any major scandals despite this massive growth in its size. Of course, one important element made this possible: Geert Wilders was not an acceptable prime minister to the parties with which his PVV governed, and he was therefore forced to stay in parliament as leader of the parliamentary group. Had that not been the case, it would have been much more difficult for him to control his members of parliament.

Current Exclusion of Wilders Is Pragmatic, not a Principled Cordon Sanitaire

In “New Alliances,” you analyze why mainstream parties sometimes collaborate with the populist radical right. Given the refusal of other parties to govern with Wilders, do current coalition negotiations represent a reinvigorated ‘cordon sanitaire’ or a temporary tactical alignment?

Professor Sarah de Lange: This is a very good question, because my research in the past showed that once radical right parties are large enough to help mainstream right parties achieve a majority, those mainstream parties are often inclined to govern with them, even if they might have said in advance that they were not interested or thought the radical right was too extreme to govern with.

What we’re seeing now in some countries—and that’s not only in the Netherlands but also, for example, in Austria—is that, on the basis of previous coalition experiences with the radical right, the picture has become more complex. There are a number of mainstream right parties that have had such bad experiences governing with the radical right that they are no longer willing to do so.

However, I think this is very different from a cordon sanitaire, because a cordon sanitaire is motivated by a principled rejection of the radical right on the basis of its stances—because the manifestos of the radical right contain nativism and proposals that are anti-constitutional or in conflict with the rule of law. What we see here, in both the Austrian and Dutch cases, is that the reluctance is based more on the fact that previous experiences have shown that radical right parties are unreliable partners. And of course, that is a more pragmatic argument, which can also be abandoned—for example, if the radical right gets a new leader who is believed to be more trustworthy, or if the mainstream right changes leadership and feels differently about cooperating with the radical right.

So, in that sense, we should really keep these pragmatic reasons separate from the more principled exclusion represented by a cordon sanitaire.

Exclusion Strengthens Wilders’ Anti-Elite Narrative Among Supporters

Election posters of all Dutch political parties displayed at the Binnenhof in The Hague, the Netherlands, in March 2017. Photo: Dreamstime.

What are the long-term risks and benefits of excluding the PVV from coalition governance? Could such exclusion paradoxically reinforce its anti-establishment narrative, as observed in other European contexts?

Professor Sarah de Lange: This is a very valid question. Of course, the advantage is that there will be no negotiations about plans that are anti-constitutional. If we look at the previous cabinet, of which the PVV was part, that cabinet tried to declare an asylum crisis in order to introduce emergency legislation that would partially circumvent Parliament. That would have been a clear sign of democratic backsliding if it had happened. Luckily, some of the government parties changed their minds at the last minute, and it never came to fruition—but the idea was clearly on the table. Without the radical right in government, there is, of course, far less likelihood of these kinds of plans being implemented.

The downside, however, is equally clear. Excluding the PVV makes the rhetoric of the radical right more believable—namely, the idea that there is an elite governing the country that is out of touch with what citizens want because it excludes the radical right, which also represents a part of the population. In the Netherlands, this risk is particularly real, because the only four-party coalition capable of securing a majority would be a very broad ideological alliance, ranging from the Green Labour Party to the social-liberal D66, the Christian Democratic CDA, and the conservative-liberal VVD. Such a coalition, both on socio-economic issues and on matters like immigration, would have very different positions and would need to compromise extensively—only reinforcing the PVV’s narrative that it alone stands outside an isolated political elite.

The Netherlands Could Learn from Scandinavia’s Clear Left–Right Blocs

How might a centrist, multi-party coalition led by D66 influence the structure of competition in Dutch politics? Could it serve as a model for containing populist disruption in fragmented systems elsewhere?

Professor Sarah de Lange: I don’t think it’s a model to be emulated; it’s a model that exists only because the Dutch parliament is so fragmented. The largest parties are very small— even D66, which became the largest party in the elections, holds less than 20% of the votes and seats. The same applies to the other parties likely to join the coalition, each of which has around 15% of the vote. This makes the structure of the Dutch party system highly untenable in the long term, as it requires four- or five-party coalitions, which would have been necessary even if the PVV had not been excluded. Such coalitions are very likely to be unstable, leading to short-lived governments and limited policy output.

So, I think it’s actually the other way around. Looking across Western Europe, the Netherlands could benefit greatly from having a structure more like a Scandinavian party system, with a clear left-wing and right-wing bloc, rather than the highly fragmented system it currently has to manage.

Weak Party–Society Links Drive Extreme Electoral Volatility

Your work on party–civil society linkages shows that strong organizational ties stabilize voter support. Does D66’s success suggest that centrist parties can rebuild civic connections that were eroded by decades of depoliticization? Conversely, how does the PVV sustain long-term voter loyalty despite its limited organizational infrastructure and weak civic embedding?

Professor Sarah de Lange: Let’s start by observing that in the Netherlands, political parties generally have weak linkages to civil society organizations, and this partly explains why Dutch elections are so extremely volatile—they are among the most volatile in Europe.
What’s interesting is that the two largest parties in the elections, D66 and the PVV, are both known for lacking many of these traditional ties. This indicates that while they may be very successful in a given election, they could just as easily lose that support again. This applies especially to D66, which has always been a party marked by very high highs but also very deep lows. It has an extremely volatile electorate that also considers many other left- and right-wing progressive parties at election time.

The PVV is slightly different. It has no ties to civil society organizations at all, yet it has a remarkably loyal electorate that remains faithful to the party for several reasons. First, PVV voters genuinely believe that Wilders is the only person who can change immigration policy in the way they want. Election surveys show that 90% of PVV voters view immigration as the biggest social challenge the Netherlands faces, and they see Geert Wilders as the most competent and trustworthy politician to act on that issue. Second, these voters tend to have relatively high levels of political distrust, which makes them unlikely to return from the PVV to mainstream parties.

PVV Support Is Strongest Outside the Cosmopolitan Randstad Region

Women cycle through the historic Kerkebuurt (Church District) in Soest, Netherlands, known for its old farms and streets such as Eemstraat. Photo: Inge Hogenbijl.

How much of the PVV’s enduring appeal still stems from regional and class-based resentment, and how much from broader cultural anxieties related to immigration and demographic change?

Professor Sarah de Lange: I think both are connected. We see that Geert Wilders’ PVV is more successful outside the big cosmopolitan cities in the Randstad—the central area enclosed by major cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. The PVV performs better beyond that region. This is partly due to a sense of regional resentment—the perception that people in areas where the PVV is strong are not being taken seriously by the political, economic, and cultural center of the Netherlands; that they are not adequately represented; and that there is little respect for their norms, values, and traditions.

These feelings are also partly rooted in real developments in these regions, such as economic decline, the out-migration of young citizens, and the erosion of public and private services. So, even though there may not be many migrants in these areas, these socio-economic developments feed into anti-immigrant sentiment—not least because Wilders consistently draws links between immigration and other social problems.

Jetten to Become the Netherlands’ First Openly Gay Prime Minister

In your co-edited volume “Gender and Populist Radical-Right Politics,” you highlight the gendered dimensions of populist leadership. How do you interpret the symbolic contrast between Wilders’ assertive, masculine populism and Jetten’s inclusive liberal masculinity?

Professor Sarah de Lange: That’s a very interesting question, because the Netherlands will, with Rob Jetten, have its first openly gay prime minister, who is about to marry his male partner. He has always been very open about this, and it was an important element in the campaign, where he frequently spoke about his upcoming wedding. This stands in stark contrast to the traditional masculinity promoted by Wilders, and even more so by Forum for Democracy’s Thierry Baudet.

Interestingly, in terms of voter base, we see that the PVV—now that it has become such a large party—is actually quite representative of the Dutch population as a whole, including in terms of gender. We don’t see a strong gender gap among its voters, unlike with the more extreme Forum for Democracy led by Baudet. It therefore seems that female voters are not put off by Wilders’ masculine leadership style, nor by a party program that is not particularly outspoken on gender issues.

LGBTQ Acceptance Is Central to the Dutch National Self-Image

Does the normalization of openly gay political leadership in the Netherlands challenge the gendered and heteronormative foundations of populist radical-right discourse, or does it reflect a uniquely Dutch liberal exceptionalism?

Professor Sarah de Lange: This is quite an interesting question. During the campaign, it was clear that Geert Wilders could not realistically attack Jetten on the basis of his sexuality or the fact that he is marrying his male partner. This is because a core part of the Dutch national self-image is its perceived tolerance toward the LGBTQ community.

That does not mean, however, that PVV supporters share this perspective. They have very mixed attitudes when it comes to LGBTQ issues. Of course, since same-sex marriage has been legal for a long time, there is little resistance to it. But when questions turn to more contemporary sexuality issues—such as trans rights or stances on non-binarity—you can see that these voters tend to hold a very heteronormative outlook.

Radical Right Strength Shows Illiberalism Remains a Persistent Threat

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

And finally, Professor de Lange, does the Dutch election signal that liberal democracies are learning to integrate populist affect without embracing its illiberal impulses—or are we entering a phase of hybrid politics where the emotional grammar of populism becomes a permanent feature of democratic life?

Professor Sarah de Lange: The elections show that, because the radical right remains so strong, illiberalism is still present—and it was very visible in the campaign as well. There were incidents involving extreme-right demonstrations that turned violent, and numerous cases where politicians were threatened by political opponents or ordinary citizens with different political opinions. So, in that sense, there is still clearly a threat of illiberalism.

At the same time, this particular campaign also demonstrated that defending liberalism—or liberal democracy, and the rule of law has become more salient for mainstream parties, especially among more progressive forces. The issue is now more openly discussed, making citizens more aware of how vulnerable liberal democracy actually is, and that it is something that must be safeguarded rather than taken for granted.