Interviews - ECPS

Dr. Justin Patch is an Assistant Professor of Music at Vassar College.

Dr. Patch: In the Age of Populism, Politics Becomes a Struggle over Aesthetics

May 2, 2026

by ECPS_admin Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

In this ECPS interview, Dr. Justin Patch argues that, in the age of populism, politics increasingly unfolds as a struggle over aesthetics. Rather than being peripheral, cultural forms—music, memes, and DIY practices—are central to how “the people” are experienced and constructed. As he notes, “the primary terrain of public contestation becomes aesthetic,” as citizens navigate complex political realities through affect, symbolism, and participation. While democracy depends on the capacity to feel “part of something larger than yourself,” this same impulse creates openings for populist capture. By showing how art can function as both democratic expression and ideological instrument, Patch highlights a central tension: aesthetic experience sustains collective belonging yet also enables its manipulation by populist and authoritarian actors.

In this ECPS interview, Dr. Justin Patch, Assistant Professor of Music at Vassar College, offers a powerful account of how politics in the age of populism increasingly unfolds through aesthetics—through sound, image, gesture, affect, and participatory cultural forms. Rather than treating music, memes, art, or DIY production as peripheral to political life, Dr. Patch argues that they are central to how citizens experience belonging, identity, and representation. As he puts it, “the primary terrain of public contestation becomes aesthetic.”

The interview begins by situating democratic culture in practices that emerge from below. Historically, Dr. Patch notes, “the part we celebrate is the work done underneath the state.” From farmers’ organizations to populist gatherings, music, dancing, hymn singing, sewing circles, and potluck dinners created forms of sociability through which “the people” could recognize themselves as political actors. The crucial distinction, he argues, is between culture produced by communities themselves and culture appropriated by state actors or those seeking “state capture.”

This distinction becomes more urgent when Dr. Patch turns to the affective power of political mobilization. Democracy, he argues, depends on people feeling that they are “part of something larger than yourself.” Yet this same need is also democracy’s vulnerability. Populism, authoritarianism, and radical-right movements can offer the same emotional intensity and collective belonging while redirecting it toward exclusionary or leader-centered projects. “Unfortunately,”he warns, “that same need to feel part of something larger can be hijacked.”

A major theme of the conversation is how music and popular culture translate resentment into political identity. Dr. Patch explains that art can become “a proxy for political thought” because of its emotional accessibility. Whether in CasaPound’s punk and hardcore scenes, white-power music networks, or strands of country music, cultural forms can provide “social and emotional cues,” “cognitive shortcuts,” and a language through which grievance becomes durable belonging.

The interview also explores digital populism and the politics of re-signification. In Trump-era memes, parody videos, and online bricolage, Dr. Patch identifies an “aesthetic of domination” in which cultural materials are appropriated, inverted, and weaponized. The ability “to take something associated with one set of values and reframe it entirely,” he argues, becomes a symbolic victory.

Yet Dr. Patch does not reduce popular culture to manipulation. He insists on the democratic importance of self-expression, arguing that “democracy is about a kind of self-expression that communicates with others.” The challenge, then, is to cultivate aesthetic literacy without suppressing popular creativity. Art, he concludes, can be “a pedagogical tool” for learning how to live with difference—and for recognizing humanity “even in the face of profound disagreement.”

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

Political Culture Begins with Who Creates It: State or Society

Dr. Patch, welcome. In your work on the “sound of democracy,” you treat music, noise, affect, and collective embodiment not as ornamental features of politics but as constitutive of democratic experience. How should we understand the role of music and art in forming democratic subjectivities at a time when polarization, distrust, and affective partisanship increasingly structure political life?

Dr. Justin Patch: When we look historically at the democratic aspects of music performance and art-making, the part we celebrate is the work done underneath the state. Even when we are talking about the 19th century—and I am being very specific about the American case here—farm labor organizing, farmers’ organizations, and populist movements, the music, art, and dancing associated with these movements came from the people themselves. It was, and I hesitate to say this, almost like a Johann Gottfried Herder-type phenomenon, where the folk arts of farmers in places like Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and Minnesota became part of a political movement.

Here, I find the work of a historian named James Turner quite formative for my thinking. He talks about populist gatherings as places of much-needed sociability. In his article Understanding the Populus, which focuses on Texas, instead of looking purely at the economic output of populous counties versus democratic counties, he examines other factors, such as the number of churches and the average number of miles traveled to market. What he finds is that populous counties were actually more spread out, had less commerce from the outside, and had fewer traveling preachers. There were fewer churches coming from outside. Because they lacked established ways of gathering, populist gatherings became extremely important.

People would hold meetings lasting several days, where there were sewing circles, knitting circles, prayer circles, square dancing, hymn singing, and potluck dinners. In other words, there was a great deal of collective activity. But what is important is that these were things people already enjoyed doing, which they then did together in a collective setting.

So what you see is a distinction between music that people are already making within their communities, which is then directed toward a political purpose, and music that state actors—or those seeking some form of state capture—appropriate, repackage, and project onto society. It is a kind of push and pull, and sometimes it involves the same culture. The key difference lies in who initiates it. Is it culture initiated by the state, where the state defines what it means to be a citizen, to belong to “the people”? Or is it culture that people themselves create and practice, which they then bring into the public sphere as part of their political activity? This is a distinction we need to parse carefully.

Of course, things become more complicated when we consider musicians. In Melanie Schiller’s work with Mario Dunkel, for instance, there are cases of artists in Austria who have aligned themselves with the political right. Certainly CasaPound is an organization that uses music very effectively and has what the British once called “movement artists.” In the 1960s United States, for example, Phil Ochs was considered such a movement artist.

So, where I would begin is by distinguishing between music and art that are appropriated by state actors and those that people are already producing for themselves and then bring into the public sphere. If that makes sense.

Democracy’s Emotional Power Can Be Exploited by Populism

You argue that campaign soundscapes generate emotional intensity, collective participation, and a sense of shared political presence. To what extent are these affective atmospheres indispensable to democratic mobilization, and when do they become vulnerable to capture by authoritarian, radical-right, or supremacist political projects?

Dr. Justin Patch: This is where it becomes two sides of the same coin. Michael Kazin, in his book on American populism, writes that populist waves occur in America so often that he is tempted to say populism is built into American democracy.

Part of democracy—essentially being ruled by your peers—is something we tend to romanticize, but in reality it is a difficult position to be in. The system of popular democracy depends on people feeling that they are part of something. You feel part of something larger than yourself, and this is why democracy is often likened to religion. You secularize authority by saying you are not ruled by God but by a political system, yet you still seek what Freud calls an “oceanic feeling.”

You need that feeling for democracy to function effectively. People must feel that they belong to something larger, but this is also the weak link through which populism, authoritarianism, and similar forces can enter. They can provide that same sense of belonging while, at the same time, redistributing wealth upward to the top one percent. It is, in many ways, the same process.

I remember watching a campaign event in New Hampshire in 2024. My brother and I saw the same event and later discussed it on the phone. He was struck by a man they interviewed, who, when asked about January 6, 2020, and what the truth of it was, replied, “Whatever Donald Trump says is the truth.” I felt an immense sense of sadness at that moment. When we look at the Gini coefficient in the United States and the number of people who are struggling, we see individuals who are searching for something to believe in—who want to be part of something larger than themselves.

What troubles me is that what presented itself to them was Donald Trump and the MAGA movement—something that, beneath its rhetoric, is deeply pernicious—instead of something more constructive. As we mark May Day, we are reminded of the history of labor and labor movements in the United States and Europe. There were periods when people rallied around the idea of supporting working people. Even in the 19th century, many middle-class individuals expressed empathy for the plight of workers. There have been powerful movements in which people looked at the underclasses and said, “You deserve something better.”

As the Supreme Court rolls back the last elements of the Voting Rights Act this week in the United States, we are reminded that, in the 1960s, a majority believed that Black Americans deserved better. These are moments we look back on and recognize that there was a form of empathy—perhaps not radical empathy, but empathy nonetheless—which was tied to the need to feel part of something larger than oneself.

Unfortunately, that same need to feel part of something larger can be hijacked. This is part of the democratic process, at least in the United States. I am not sure there is any guarantee—there is no perfect democracy in which the threat of populism does not exist in some form.

Music Transforms Resentment into Political Belonging

In your analysis of music’s political economy, you emphasize how music provides “social and emotional cues,” creates “cognitive shortcuts,” and affirms identities. How does this help explain the power of far-right cultural ecosystems—from CasaPound’s aesthetic politics in Italy to white-power music networks, identitarian media, and nationalist festivals—to transform diffuse resentment into durable political belonging?

Dr. Justin Patch: When people spend time together, it has an effect on them. When I was younger, I played in rock bands, and when you are playing music, other issues inevitably come up in conversation. There is a process through which cultural leaders can become thought leaders. It is not necessarily a one-to-one relationship, but it often happens.

The beauty—and the danger—of this dynamic is that art becomes a proxy for political thought, partly because of its emotional accessibility. Terry Eagleton, in his early 1990s book The Ideology of the Aesthetic, examines how ideologies are embedded in aesthetics and in the social relations that produce them. Although he focuses mainly on visual art and literature, the insight applies here as well.

If we look at white-power music and CasaPound, for example, much of CasaPound’s music is punk rock and hardcore. This appeals to a very specific audience, often predominantly male. The resentment felt by men in the post-industrial West—if we look at the statistics, in Italy, much like in the United States, non-college-educated white men are falling behind—is captured and expressed through this music. Hardcore, in particular, channels that sense of grievance.

To borrow Althusserian language, it “hails” people together, aggregating them and creating a space in which they can think collectively. CasaPound is able to do this effectively. In smaller pockets, white-power music in the United States performs a similar function. However, there are other forms of music with much broader audiences that do something comparable.

In the United States, certain strands of country music, with far larger fan bases, operate in a similar way. Songs like “Try That in a Small Town” or “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which have charted, translate resentment into a popular idiom. They move it out of the language of newspapers and political speeches and embed it in everyday life.

Former Foreign Service officer, David J. Firestein, wrote an article called “The Honky Tonk Gap,” in which he examined George W. Bush and his relationship with Nashville country music. He argued that Bush was able to adopt the vocabulary of country songwriters in his political rhetoric, creating a link between how he spoke, how musicians sang, and how his audience spoke among themselves. This helped build a kind of intellectual ecosystem across those domains. In that sense, he was able to draw on a shared cultural repertoire with his intended voters and use it very effectively. Country music in the United States has done something similar—on a much larger scale—than white-power music does in more limited contexts, particularly in the mid-2000s.

Digital Populism Thrives on Inverting Cultural Symbols

In “Editing for Partisanship,” you describe Trump-era populist art as grounded not in stable formal properties but in a “relational aesthetic” marked by domination, ridicule, violence, and re-signification. How does this concept illuminate the contemporary radical right’s use of memes, parody, music videos, flags, street art, and digital bricolage to produce “the people” against feminists, migrants, racial minorities, liberals, and cosmopolitan elites?

Dr. Justin Patch: When I look at the digital ecosystem, what you have are communities that are, in many ways, pre-made. You have people who follow certain accounts and others who follow each other because they know one another. Within this context, digital culture—music videos, memes, Photoshop, and similar forms—gives people an opportunity to participate.

Part of the language of participation involves familiarity and humor, but there is also something like a culture and aesthetic of domination. This may sound unusual, but we can see a parallel in DJ culture. One of the things DJs do, especially when they know their audiences well, is to play tracks people have not heard for a while, disguise tracks by starting them in unexpected places, or mix together seemingly unrelated pieces. Sometimes they introduce something that feels almost like a non sequitur, but if it works, the audience responds enthusiastically. It demonstrates creativity and a willingness to think outside the box, but it is also a form of control. The DJ exercises aesthetic authority by blending disparate elements—disco and ragamuffin—into something seamless.

I think this aesthetic of domination operates in a similar way. It still relies on humor and ridicule, but the further one can push into unexpected or even transgressive territory—particularly into spaces perceived as belonging to an “enemy.” The more recognition one gains for creativity, the more one can appropriate elements associated with, for instance, left-leaning culture and invert their meaning, the more powerful the result becomes.

In Editing for Partisanship, I use the example of Footloose. For those unfamiliar with it, it is a 1980s feel-good film about tensions between urban and rural life in a conservative Christian town that bans dancing. A young man from the city arrives and mobilizes the youth against the older generation. In the end, as in many films of that era, there is a resolution: the youth are allowed to dance, authority is partially preserved, and the narrative concludes on an optimistic note.

Dan Scavino takes the chorus of Footloose and sets it to footage from Portland showing anti-government, anti-Trump protesters, including an incident in which one protester accidentally sets his feet on fire with a Molotov cocktail. What made that clip go viral, and what made it so striking to me, was the radical re-signification of a song associated with a more conciliatory cultural moment into something distinctly aligned with the MAGA movement.

It is precisely this capacity to invert meaning—to take something associated with one set of values and reframe it entirely—that is highly valued within this particular populist movement. The ability to appropriate and transform cultural material in this way is seen as a significant victory.

Imperfection Becomes the Currency of Political Credibility

Your work suggests that popular culture functions as a medium through which populist communities imagine themselves as authentic, embattled, and morally superior. How do movements such as MAGA, CasaPound, Generation Identity, Hindutva cultural networks, and European radical-right youth scenes use DIY (do it yourself) aesthetics to blur the line between grassroots participation and ideological discipline?

Dr. Justin Patch: DIY is such an interesting concept. George McKay, in his edited volume on DIY, cautions that DIY is not a utopia and is not always a left-leaning phenomenon. There is plenty of conservative DIY as well. The key point about DIY is that it carries a veneer of authenticity. DIY culture is always emblematic of the people who create it, but it also has an aesthetic—and it is this aesthetic that can be co-opted. We see this quite frequently. At the present moment, DIY culture is very important in constructing “the people.”

Let me step back for a moment. Some years ago, probably in the 2010s, I met an EDM (electronic dance music) producer by chance. We were chatting, and he remarked that when everything can be made perfect—when digital tools allow for perfect timing and sound—the real challenge is capturing the imperfection that makes something compelling. When you listen to artists like Aretha Franklin or Marvin Gaye, there is always something slightly off—slightly behind the beat or slightly out of tune—that listeners find appealing.

In a digital environment where perfection is possible, DIY and its associated imperfections become signifiers of authenticity. It is the difference between a perfectly staged shot and a slightly shaky, handheld recording. Even if the latter is less polished, it conveys a stronger sense of authenticity.

What we see now is that political actors are deliberately adopting this veneer of authenticity. Highly polished, “Madison Avenue”-style political advertising increasingly appears inauthentic to younger audiences. During the 2020 US election, for example, Joe Biden’s campaign invited individuals to record themselves explaining why they supported him. These clips were edited into campaign materials and proved more effective than professionally produced advertisements that cost millions of dollars.

The DIY aesthetic, then, becomes a marker of authenticity that political actors seek to harness, because voters respond to what feels genuine. One of the major criticisms of Hillary Clinton in 2016 was that she appeared inauthentic—overly scripted and guarded—which many voters rejected.

What remains, in many ways, is DIY. As Anthony Giddens argued, in the context of postmodernity, trust becomes central. The DIY aesthetic functions as an index of authenticity and humanity. The problem, however, is that it is still an aesthetic—and therefore something that can be appropriated and instrumentalized.

The Key Question Is Not What People Create, but Why

In your account, citizen-made art is central to the construction of populist identity because it is “by, of, and for the people.” How should we distinguish between genuinely democratic cultural participation and participatory authoritarianism, where citizens voluntarily reproduce exclusionary, supremacist, or leader-centered political imaginaries?

Dr. Justin Patch: This is always the big question. What are cultural outpourings that are essentially top-down, and what constitutes cultural production that is bottom-up—production from the peripheries, and so on?

At a certain point, it becomes difficult to draw that distinction, because if someone genuinely supports populist candidates, there is no straightforward way to say that this is not an authentic voice of the people. When I look at Trump-related art—work produced by very young people, very old people, and those at the margins of the movement—I am hesitant to say that it is all co-opted. There are people who genuinely believe that Trump will be good for them.

For me, as an analyst, it becomes more important to ask why. Where have we failed—in terms of the economy, education, or public awareness—that someone would believe that this person’s policies would benefit them, or that this person genuinely cares about their well-being? In that sense, it becomes a second-order analysis. It is one thing to examine the art people create for a populist cause; it is another to ask why this is happening.

How is it that so many young men believe in this so strongly that they create their own podcasts, memes, graffiti, T-shirts, hats, and bumper stickers, or even decorate their vehicles as shrines? Why do they feel so passionately about this? In many cases, some of the DIY art I have examined expresses messages that run counter to official campaign messaging, yet remains unapologetically pro-Trump. What these individuals believe Trumpism to be can differ significantly from actual policies, but they believe in it nonetheless.

That kind of projection offers a window into how people manage their everyday lives. In Jim McGuigan’s sense, this can be understood as a genuine voice of the people. Whether we like it or agree with it is a separate question. From an analytical perspective, the issue is whether this reflects how people actually think.

I am hesitant to dismiss such expressions outright, unless they are clearly repeating talking points from talk radio or television. If they fall outside that realm, they are worth examining, because they reveal how people understand and experience the world. And that is important to understand.

Citizens Engage More with Feeling than Policy

An elderly woman prays amidst a busy crowd in Sydney, Australia. Photo: Martin Graf.

How should we theorize the relationship between aesthetic experience and democratic legitimacy when citizens feel more directly represented by songs, memes, symbols, and performative rituals than by parties, parliaments, or policy platforms?

Dr. Justin Patch: This is very much a Terry Eagleton question. Eagleton writes about the problems of the modern state: economic, educational, infrastructure, human policy, health policy—all of this is so complex that, as an everyday citizen, you are quite literally not equipped with either the knowledge or the totality of information needed to be a full participant in these discussions.

For those of us who enjoy discussing politics, at some point you have to admit that you do not have the full suite of information even to think about crafting policy. I often tell people that when I was working on Obama’s campaign in Texas, you had these incredibly crafted 45-minute speeches. But in the Texas Democratic Party office, we also had Barack Obama’s white papers—ten small volumes covering education policy, domestic policy, health policy, international policy, and economic policy. You could read through them, if you had the time to read ten books. These are two very different things. How we feel publicly about someone’s persona, how they come across, is very different from how we feel about policy.

Unfortunately, the complexities of the modern state are such that we cannot all fully participate in policy debates. But, to Eagleton’s point, what we can participate in is the aesthetic dimension. We respond to how something sounds, looks, and feels. Someone uses campaign music that makes us feel good; someone presents themselves in a particular way or frames an issue in a certain way. All of these are aesthetic elements.

I was once giving a talk at a conference in the Netherlands, and a political scientist said to me, “How can you call Trump populist? His policies are oligarchic, if anything.” I said, “You are not wrong. But I am talking about how he campaigns as populist, not what his policies are.” His campaign is anti-elite, people-centered, and displays many hallmarks of populism, even if his policies are not anti-elite.

So you can have an aesthetic that is populist, or even radically democratic, without having policies that reflect that. I think one of the dangers of modern society is that the knowledge required to govern is so specialized that the primary terrain of public contestation becomes aesthetic. As a result, we end up with these aesthetic shortcuts. For example, Nashville country becomes coded as conservative, while artists like Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, or throwback Motown become associated with more progressive audiences. That becomes the dividing line, rather than the ability to have a substantive debate about policy.

A good example—just from the news this morning—is vaccine policy. Vaccine policy is remarkably complex, yet it is often reduced to a binary: vaccines are bad on one side and vaccines are good on the other. The actual substantive debate is far more complicated. If I did not know people with PhDs in virology, it would be difficult for me to evaluate those arguments. I am fortunate to have access to that expertise, but most people do not. And so, what remains for public contestation is aesthetics.

Art as a Training Ground for Living with Difference

And finally, Dr. Patch, in an era of democratic backsliding, digital populism, supremacist subcultures, and authoritarian cultural politics, what responsibilities do scholars, artists, educators, and democratic institutions have in cultivating forms of aesthetic literacy capable of resisting manipulation while preserving the democratic vitality of popular culture?

Dr. Justin Patch: I think I am one of those people who, even though I teach at a conservatory, is not concerned with what kind of art people make. I am very concerned that people make art—that they are given the freedom to express themselves—because, ultimately, democracy is about a kind of self-expression that communicates with others.

From the ground up, there has to be a way for people to express themselves and share their ideas in a healthy way. When we look at partisanship, especially as it tilts toward the kind of violence we have seen in the United States, as well as in Australia and Europe, one of the issues is that there is no adequate way for people to express themselves and have healthy encounters with those who think differently.

Art is one way this can happen early on, as a kind of pedagogical training ground. One of my colleagues in Boston once described rap battles and DJ battles as a form of peer review. In academia, we write something, present it at conferences, and receive feedback; he argued that this is exactly what rappers and DJs go through. As they perform, they receive immediate feedback from audiences, who let them know in various ways how they are doing. The same applies to art exhibitions, critiques, and even “battle of the bands” events.

This kind of experience is very important for teaching people how to deal with difference. Many of the issues we face—whether in Europe, particularly regarding Muslim immigrants, or in the United States, where tensions often revolve around race, as well as religion, gender, and LGBTQ issues—reflect an inability to engage with difference and to recognize humanity beyond it.

Art, as a pedagogical tool, provides a way to learn how to engage with difference. From a young age, individuals can be placed in environments where their expressions may differ—sometimes radically—from those of others, and they can learn how to navigate those differences.

I often think about this in relation to my experience as a soccer referee. One of the things I appreciate about youth sports is that you can compete intensely with someone, but once the whistle blows, the competition ends. I think of players like Paul Scholes, who was fierce on the field but known as a genuinely kind person off it. That is, in some sense, my political ideal. People should be able to fight passionately for what they believe in and advocate strongly for what they want to create, but that process should not prevent them from recognizing the humanity of others.

Working with art—engaging in self-expression within a community, not just individually—is how we learn to live with difference. That, to me, is essential for building a society prepared for the realities of the twenty-first century, where difference is not an exception but a constant. It is something we must teach—from young people to older generations—how to engage with difference and how to recognize humanity even in the face of profound disagreement.

Dr. Filip Milacic is a senior researcher at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s "Democracy of the Future” Office.

Dr. Milacic: Outbidding Autocrats on Nationalism Only Strengthens Their Legitimacy

May 1, 2026

by ECPS_admin Authoritarianism Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

In this ECPS interview, Dr. Filip Milacic argues that democrats should not abandon patriotic language to autocrats. Instead, they must develop inclusive and emotionally resonant national counternarratives. Warning that “outbidding autocrats on nationalism only strengthens their legitimacy,” Dr. Milacic explains how authoritarian incumbents justify democratic erosion through “threat narratives” portraying the nation, sovereignty, or identity as endangered. He emphasizes that dignity, recognition, and belonging are crucial drivers of political behavior often neglected by liberal democratic theory. Drawing on cases from Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Turkey, Israel, Brazil, and the United States, he argues that democratic resilience requires institutions, strategy, and narratives—because politics is “fundamentally a battle of narratives.”

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

At a moment when democratic systems across Europe and beyond are increasingly challenged by populist mobilization, identity conflicts, and institutional erosion, the politics of nationalism has re-emerged as a central battleground. Authoritarian and illiberal actors have proven particularly adept at embedding their political projects within emotionally resonant narratives of national protection, sovereignty, and belonging. It is within this contested terrain that Dr. Filip Milacic’s intervention—captured in the striking claim that “outbidding autocrats on nationalism only strengthens their legitimacy”—acquires both analytical urgency and normative significance. His work invites a reconsideration of how democratic actors engage with the nation not as a fixed identity, but as a politically constructed and contested narrative space.

In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Milacic—senior researcher at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s “Democracy of the Future” office—offers an empirically rich account of democratic backsliding, authoritarian legitimation, and the role of narrative politics. Central to his argument is the contention that opposition forces face a strategic dilemma when confronting nationalist authoritarianism: to ignore the nation, to mimic exclusionary nationalism, or to construct an alternative vision. While the first two options remain common, Dr. Milacic insists that “the third option is the most promising”—namely, the development of a democratic counter-narrative that is both emotionally compelling and normatively inclusive.

This emphasis on narrative is not merely rhetorical but deeply structural. As Dr. Milacic underscores, authoritarian actors do not simply dismantle democratic institutions; they justify such actions through what he terms “threat narratives.” In these narratives, “the state is under attack” and “the nation, national identity, or national sovereignty [is] threatened,”thereby creating a moral and emotional framework within which democratic erosion becomes acceptable, even necessary. Crucially, these narratives resonate not because citizens misunderstand democracy, but because, as he notes, voters often support such leaders “not because of their authoritarian policies, but in spite of them.” This insight shifts the analytical focus from institutional breakdown alone to the discursive processes that legitimize it.

Equally important is Dr. Milacic’s critique of prevailing assumptions within liberal democratic theory. By foregrounding dignity, recognition, and belonging, he challenges the reduction of political behavior to economic rationality. Instead, he argues that “interests related to self-esteem, dignity, and recognition are significant,” and that the nation remains a powerful source of both identity and security. This helps explain why authoritarian narratives, particularly in contexts marked by “formative rifts” such as territorial disputes or contested identities, gain traction so effectively.

Yet Dr. Milacic resists deterministic conclusions. While some societies may be more structurally susceptible to such narratives, they are not condemned to authoritarian outcomes. Democratic resilience, he argues, depends on political agency and the capacity to craft inclusive, emotionally resonant counter-narratives. Ultimately, the interview advances a compelling thesis: that the defense of democracy today requires not only institutional safeguards but also a re-engagement with the symbolic and affective dimensions of political life—because, as Dr. Milacic concludes, politics is “fundamentally a battle of narratives.”

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

Reclaiming Patriotism Without Exclusion

Dr. Milacic, welcome. In “How to Defeat the Authoritarian Message,” you argue that democrats cannot leave patriotic language to autocrats. How can liberal-democratic actors reclaim national identity without reproducing exclusionary nationalism or validating the authoritarian framing of “the nation under siege”?

Dr. Filip Milacic: What I argue in my book, and also in a recent piece in the Journal of Democracy, is that when the opposition is faced with an authoritarian incumbent who uses national appeals as a justification for the subversion of democracy, it has two or three options. The first is to ignore the issue of the nation. The second is to try to outflank the authoritarian incumbent from the right, meaning to be more nationalist. The third is to create a counter-narrative. I think this third option is the most promising.

However, developing a counter-narrative is not easy. What I have tried to do is offer some guidance to political actors on how to draft such a narrative, based on research I have conducted in several countries. The first criterion is to identify a topic with a strong emotional underpinning. This is crucial. The topic must also be linked to the concept of the nation, because only then can it effectively mobilize voters.

At the same time, this is context-dependent. There is no single topic that fits all cases. It depends on the country. The topic could relate to national history or to contemporary issues. In choosing it, the opposition faces a trade-off. If it wants to defeat the authoritarian incumbent, it needs to win over some of the incumbent’s voters. This requires a narrative that is inclusive not only for its own supporters but also for moderate voters on the other side—those who are willing to switch and are not strongly partisan.

This task is easier in ethnically and religiously homogeneous societies, where it is more feasible to find an inclusive theme. In countries marked by so-called formative rifts—disputes over national identity or territory—it becomes much harder. These rifts are often instrumentalized by authoritarian incumbents as a justification for undermining democracy.

As a result, such issues are very difficult for the opposition to ignore. The Kosovo issue in Serbia or the Kurdish issue in Turkey, for example, is frequently used to legitimize attacks on democracy. The key question is therefore how to approach them. In my research, including cases such as Israel, I find that the opposition faces another trade-off: whether to prioritize inclusion of moderate voters from the majority population or to be more inclusive toward minorities, assuming a deep societal divide between the two.

This depends on the scale and depth of the conflict. In some cases, the divide is so entrenched that the opposition is reluctant to accommodate minority concerns. For instance, the Israeli protest movement in 2023 was more inclusive toward moderate government voters than toward Israeli Arabs. By contrast, in Turkey, the opposition has recently become more inclusive toward the Kurdish minority. Yet this raises another question: will such a strategy also appeal to some government voters? To win elections, the opposition must attract at least a portion of them.

Reconciling these groups is therefore extremely difficult. Finding a topic that addresses a formative rift while remaining sufficiently inclusive is a major challenge. Still, it is not impossible. There are windows of opportunity that allow the opposition to construct an inclusive narrative and even bypass these deeply politicized divides, which authoritarian incumbents rely on to sustain their power.

One example, though not part of my systematic research, is Sri Lanka. Despite strong ethnic cleavages, a presidential candidate recently campaigned on a platform centered on economic progress, good governance, and the provision of public goods for all citizens. However, this approach is often contingent on a severe economic crisis and widespread corruption. In such conditions, these issues acquire strong emotional resonance, extending beyond purely economic concerns.

In this context, it becomes possible to construct a patriotic counter-narrative based on good governance, partially bypassing identity-based conflicts. This is not a universally applicable or particularly reassuring solution, as it implies that such narratives emerge under conditions of crisis. Nonetheless, we observe similar dynamics elsewhere. In Hungary, for example, dissatisfaction with economic performance and corruption has enabled figures like Peter Magyar to develop elements of a counter-narrative centered on good governance.

In some contexts, therefore, widespread corruption and economic failure can open a window of opportunity to bridge divides between electoral groups and construct a patriotic narrative focused on good governance.

Backsliding Is Also a Battle Over the Nation

Your argument suggests that authoritarian incumbents succeed not simply by attacking institutions, but by embedding those attacks in emotionally resonant narratives of national protection. Should we therefore understand democratic backsliding primarily as an institutional process, or as a discursive struggle over who legitimately embodies the nation?

Dr. Filip Milacic: I do not deny that democratic backsliding is primarily institutional, based on attacks against different elements of democracy, especially so-called executive aggrandizement. However, what I am trying to suggest is that we need to take a step back.

In my work, I have conducted numerous surveys across different countries, and I can say that even voters of parties associated with democratic backsliding—such as Fidesz in Hungary, PiS in Poland, or SNS in Serbia—also endorse and value democracy. This raises an important question: do they perhaps not understand what democracy is? My colleagues and I examined this by asking questions related to so-called democratic competence, and we found that most of them do understand what democracy is and what it is not. Yet they continue to re-elect leaders such as Orbán, Kaczyński previously, and Vučić in Serbia.

So the question becomes: if the majority is pro-democratic and understands democracy, why do they still support these leaders? What I try to do is take a step back and show that they are not voting for these leaders because of their authoritarian policies, but in spite of them. I then investigated this further and found substantial evidence for what I call a “threat narrative.” In the cases I analyzed, before attacks on democracy occurred, there was consistently a narrative suggesting that the state was under attack—that the nation, national identity, or national sovereignty was threatened.

This narrative serves as a crucial justification for attacks on democracy in the name of the nation. In other words, we need to pay attention not only to the institutional dimension of democratic backsliding but also to how such actions are justified. Authoritarian incumbents do not simply undermine democratic institutions and expect voters to accept it; justification is key. My argument is that, before subverting democracy in the name of the nation, these actors construct a narrative in which the nation itself is under threat—and this narrative resonates with voters.

Dignity and Belonging Drive Politics

You emphasize dignity, recognition, and belonging as neglected dimensions of political behavior. To what extent has liberal democratic theory underestimated the affective power of the nation, and how should democratic strategy change once nationalism is understood as a source of personal and collective dignity?

Dr. Filip Milacic: I personally think that we have at least a partially flawed conception of human nature. Much of the literature is based on the assumption that actors are rational individuals whose primary aim is to maximize their economic benefits. While this is partly true, it does not provide a complete picture. There are also interests that are not related to the economy but are nonetheless very important to voters, such as recognition and personal dignity.

These interests may seem abstract. They are not as concrete as wanting more money in one’s pocket or an increase in one’s pension. However, interests related to self-esteem, dignity, and recognition are significant, even if they are less tangible, and this is precisely why they are often overlooked. I believe they are crucial drivers of voting behavior.

If we accept that dignity and recognition matter to voters, we must also acknowledge that people derive a great deal of their self-esteem from group membership. This is why belonging and community are so important. The nation, in particular, is one of the most significant groups. Belonging to a nation contributes not only to individual self-esteem but also to how people perceive their own value.

A simple example illustrates this dynamic. Whether we like it or not, we often feel proud and happy when our country succeeds in international sports competitions. This affects our sense of self-worth, even if we do not fully recognize it. It is a straightforward illustration of how group belonging reinforces self-esteem.

At the same time, groups such as the nation are not only important for self-esteem but also for security. Social psychology shows that belonging to a group provides individuals with a sense of security, which becomes particularly important in times of crisis and uncertainty, such as those we are currently experiencing.

In other words, if we accept that groups like the nation are central to individuals’ self-esteem and sense of security, we can better understand political developments over the past 10 or 15 years. Economic explanations alone are not sufficient.

Identity Conflicts Fuel Authoritarianism

Kurdish people walk by the bombed buildings after the curfew in Şırnak province of Turkey on March 3, 2016. Armed conflict between Turkish security forces and PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party) members killed hundreds of people.

In your work on stateness and democratic backsliding, you show that unresolved questions of statehood and national identity create fertile ground for ethno-political entrepreneurship. How should democrats respond when autocrats exploit formative rifts—such as Kosovo in Serbia, the Kurdish question in Turkey, or territorial disputes elsewhere—as justification for concentrating power?

Dr. Filip Milacic: As I mentioned in response to your previous question, context is crucial, particularly in my research. I have found that countries marked by so-called formative rifts—meaning disputed territory or contested national identity—are especially prone to the subversion of democracy in the name of the nation. These disputes generate nationalism and provide a powerful resource for authoritarian incumbents, as it is much easier to develop a so-called threat narrative when such issues remain unresolved. By contrast, where no such issues exist, threats to the nation often have to be constructed.

Let me compare Turkey and Hungary. In Hungary, Orbán had to invent threats to the nation, portraying immigrants or sexual minorities as dangers. For Erdoğan, this was easier because of the ongoing conflict between the Turks and Kurds. The presence of a real, unresolved dispute makes it easier to construct a convincing threat narrative.

How, then, should the opposition respond? As I suggested earlier, it should not attempt to outbid the authoritarian incumbent on nationalist grounds. In Turkey, the opposition initially pursued this strategy but eventually realized that it only reinforced the incumbent’s narrative. Instead, the opposition needs to develop a counter-narrative. A similar dynamic can be observed in Serbia, where Vučić has consistently used the Kosovo issue to justify attacks on democracy. Whenever the opposition tried to outflank him from the right, it failed.

However, developing such a counter-narrative is extremely difficult. When there is a deep conflict between majority and minority groups, the opposition faces a dilemma. To defeat the incumbent, it must win over some of their voters. This requires a narrative that does not ignore the formative rift but is still acceptable to both minority groups and segments of the government’s electorate. This is very challenging, and I do not have a definitive answer on how to resolve it.

What I can suggest is that there are moments when these conflicts become less salient, creating a window of opportunity. The opposition should use such moments to develop a narrative based on good governance, if the context allows. When the economy is underperforming, corruption is widespread, and citizens are dissatisfied with economic outcomes, these issues can become central. In such cases, it is possible to construct a patriotic narrative centered on good governance and strong institutions that deliver for all parts of society. This kind of narrative can be inclusive enough to appeal across different electoral groups.

Legislative Capture Enables Power Consolidation

Your Serbia research identifies “legislative capture” as a pathway through which Aleksandar Vučić transformed nationalist legitimacy into institutional domination. How does this pathway differ from more familiar forms of executive aggrandizement, and what early warning signs should democratic actors watch for?

Dr. Filip Milacic: I do not disagree that in Serbia the key issue is executive aggrandizement, meaning the accumulation of power in the hands of Aleksandar Vučić. However, what I sought to highlight is the role of parliament. Even though we now have a very strong executive at the expense of other branches of government, this process largely unfolded through parliament. Some scholars refer to this as so-called autocratic legalism. In this contemporary process of democratic backsliding, many measures are formally adopted through parliamentary procedures.

This is why it is called legislative capture. Full control of parliament becomes crucial for initiating democratic backsliding, and to achieve that, one must fully control the parliamentary majority. I believe this was the mechanism in Serbia, and in many other countries: a leader who fully controls the party. This is important to emphasize, as the role of political parties in democratic backsliding is often overlooked.

Once Vučić established control over the party and, consequently, over the parliamentary majority, it became much easier for him to implement anti-democratic policies and engage in attacks on various elements of democracy. In my view, the first step was his portrayal of himself as the savior of the nation and of the West as a threat to Serbia, particularly in relation to the Kosovo issue. This strengthened his legitimacy as a so-called savior of the nation, which in turn enabled him to consolidate control over his party, followed by full control of parliament. The final step is that full control of parliament allows the leader to extend control over many nominally independent institutions and to engage in broader power consolidation.

As for early warning signs, I would focus on these threat narratives. If we see an incumbent portraying himself as the savior of the nation while presenting the nation as being under threat, this should be understood as a clear warning sign of potential attacks on democracy carried out in the name of protecting the nation.

Nationalism Outbidding Strengthens Autocrats

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić participates in an SNS political campaign at Hall Čair in Niš, Serbia, on March 30, 2022. Photo: Radule Perisic.

In the Serbian case, Vučić’s self-presentation as defender of Kosovo and of the Serbian nation gave him a special legitimacy that facilitated party control, parliamentary capture, and the weakening of oversight institutions. How can opposition forces challenge such “national protector” narratives without appearing indifferent to national concerns?

Dr. Filip Milacic: For me, Serbia is a very interesting case, because Kosovo has played a central role in justifying attacks on democracy. The key question, as I also mentioned in relation to the Kurdish issue or the Israeli–Arab divide in Israel, is how to overcome these divisions and build an electoral majority.

In Serbia, opposition actors at times tried to be more nationalist on the Kosovo issue than Vučić, but this strategy failed. The question, then, is how to address voters’ concerns on these issues—on these formative rifts—without strengthening the authoritarian incumbent. I think the opposition in Serbia may now have an opportunity due to a major tragedy, when part of a railway station collapsed, killing 16 citizens. This event demonstrated that, in the absence of the rule of law and strong institutions, and in the presence of widespread corruption, it can cost lives. It is not only that the system fails to perform; people’s lives are put at risk.

This creates the kind of window of opportunity, allowing the opposition to move beyond the Kosovo issue, which strongly divides the electorate. It can instead construct a counter-narrative based on good governance, the rule of law, and democracy, but framed in patriotic terms. In other words, this tragedy illustrates what happens when a country lacks strong institutions and democratic governance.

These are the kinds of windows of opportunity—often arising from tragic circumstances—that the opposition can use to build a narrative that is inclusive enough to appeal to different segments of the electorate.

No Society Is Doomed to Authoritarianism

Your comparative work suggests that authoritarian threat narratives are most effective when they resonate with preexisting historical memories, territorial losses, demographic anxieties, or narratives of victimhood. Are some societies structurally more vulnerable to authoritarian nationalism, or can democratic counternarratives neutralize these vulnerabilities?

Dr. Filip Milacic: As I noted in response to your earlier question, justification is central to attacks on democracy, and threat narratives play a key role in that process. Research by other scholars also shows that narratives about endangered identity or sovereignty tend to resonate more strongly in societies marked by historical losses of territory or sovereignty, as well as in those shaped by formative rifts and demographic anxieties.

All the cases I analyze in my book exhibit these characteristics, which made it easier for authoritarian incumbents to develop narratives that resonated with the population. This resonance is essential, as it makes voters more willing to accept attacks on democracy in the name of protecting an allegedly endangered nation.

However, this does not imply a deterministic path dependency. Societies marked by these factors are not doomed. Poland is a good example. Despite being characterized by many of these conditions, the opposition managed to develop a counter-narrative in 2023 based on EU membership and its role in shaping Polish identity as part of the West. They also emphasized that PiS was jeopardizing this position through its authoritarian policies. This demonstrates that an inclusive counter-narrative is possible even in societies that are historically and structurally more prone to threat-driven narratives.

Another example, not covered in my book, is the United States. It is not marked by the same historical experiences of territorial or sovereignty loss, yet Donald Trump was able to construct a threat-driven narrative that resonated widely. This suggests that contemporary issues, such as immigration, can also serve as the basis for such narratives.

Ultimately, political agency plays a crucial role. It matters greatly whether the opposition is able to develop a counter-narrative that resonates with the public.

Inclusive Narratives Strengthen Democracy

Inclusion and Diversity. — Photo: Dreamstime.

You argue that democratic resistance must develop a nation-related counternarrative rather than ignore nationalism or try to outbid autocrats ethno-nationally. What distinguishes a democratic patriotic counternarrative from a merely softer version of authoritarian nationalism?

Dr. Filip Milacic: I would return to what I said at the beginning about “the three options.” Sometimes the opposition ignores this issue, but when it does not, it often tries to outbid the authoritarian incumbent or, as you mentioned, develops a softer ethno-nationalist alternative. I believe that is the wrong approach.

So how can we differentiate between trying to outflank the authoritarian incumbent and developing a genuine counter-narrative? It comes down to content. A counter-narrative must be inclusive. I am not suggesting that it needs to include 100 percent of the population, but it should be inclusive of a large majority. This is important not only for practical reasons, such as winning elections, but also because it is morally justified and helps define what an inclusive national narrative should be.

First, the choice of topic and its framing are crucial—they must be inclusive. Second, the purpose of the narrative differs. Threat-driven narratives are used to justify attacks on democracy. A counter-narrative should do the opposite: it should be designed to strengthen and safeguard democracy, rather than to serve as a justification for undermining it.

Political Agency Shapes Counter-Narratives

In Poland, Brazil, Israel, and Hungary, you identify cases where opposition actors used patriotic or nationally rooted language to mobilize resistance. What made these counternarratives persuasive, and why have similar efforts been weaker in cases such as Serbia, Turkey, India, or the United States?

Dr. Filip Milacic: For me, political agency is very important here. I conducted many interviews with political actors while researching my book, particularly from the opposition, and I identified two types of politicians. One group would say that the nation as a topic is not relevant and would therefore avoid addressing it. The second group would acknowledge its relevance but admit that they do not know how to develop a counter-narrative. This is why political agency matters so much.

I understand that developing a counter-narrative is not easy, but if a politician chooses to pursue it, some guidance can be offered. The first criterion is that the topic must be emotional, because this is the only way to mobilize people—not only in the streets but also at the ballot box. The topic may be drawn from national history, but it can also be something contemporary.

For example, in Brazil, President Lula frequently framed the contemporary international context—particularly the role of the United States—as a challenge to Brazilian sovereignty, portraying his opponents as aligned with external interests while presenting himself as a defender of national autonomy. The EU, in the case of Poland—and more recently Hungary—served as another contemporary reference point. Péter Magyar, for instance, framed the election as a choice between Hungary as a European, Western democracy or as what he called an Eastern autocracy. This illustrates how contemporary themes can be effective, although historical references can also play a powerful role.

The Israeli protest movement in 2023 provides another example. Protesters invoked the Israeli Declaration of Independence, emphasizing its vision of Israel as a liberal democracy. They argued that the government, by introducing authoritarian measures, was acting against this founding principle—that Israel is a state of all its citizens, regardless of ethnic or religious background.

These examples show that the choice of topic is highly context-dependent. Each opposition must draw on its own national context. In some cases, the economy can also be important. Where authoritarian incumbents mismanage the economy and corruption is widespread, as in Hungary, good governance can become a powerful basis for a patriotic narrative, as Magyar has demonstrated.

However, I am not suggesting that the economy is always decisive. In some contexts it matters, but not in all. For example, in Poland, GDP grew significantly during the PiS period, yet PiS was still voted out of office. This indicates that economic performance alone is not sufficient. Still, when combined with widespread corruption and public dissatisfaction, economic issues can provide a strong foundation for an inclusive and resonant counter-narrative.

Narratives Must Reinforce Community and Democratic Norms

If both ethno-national and pluralist identity claims can become grounds for democratic trade-offs, how should scholars distinguish between identity politics that strengthens liberal democracy and identity politics that weakens democratic resilience?

Dr. Filip Milacic: For me, the key issue is context. It also depends on whether identity politics is inclusive toward a large majority of citizens or whether it is exclusionary. We can, more or less, clearly distinguish between narratives that are inclusive and those that are exclusionary.

The second criterion is the purpose of these narratives. For authoritarian incumbents, the purpose is to justify attacks on democracy; such narratives serve as a cover for power grabs and as a means of legitimizing violations of democratic norms and principles. For pro-democratic opposition actors, the purpose is the opposite. Their narratives are not only aimed at defeating the authoritarian incumbent but also at strengthening democracy, reinforcing the political community, and protecting the elements of democracy that are under attack.

Politics Is a Battle of Narratives

And finally, Dr. Milacic, looking across Hungary, Poland, Israel, Serbia, Austria, Turkey, and the United States, what does democratic resilience require today: stronger institutions, better opposition strategy, more effective patriotic counternarratives, or a deeper rethinking of liberal democracy’s relationship to nationhood?

Dr. Filip Milacic: I would say all of the above. The struggle for democracy is fought on all of these fronts. However, if I may add, the focus has primarily been on the institutional dimension. This is understandable, as democratic backsliding involves the capture, weakening, or dismantling of institutions.

At the same time, the fight for democracy is also fought through words. We should therefore pay much greater attention to the narrative level. This is precisely what I try to do in my research: to explore how democracy can be defended through narratives. It is not only about electoral mobilization; it is also about strengthening democracy by showing people why it matters and why it is important in an emotionally compelling way. For a narrative to succeed, it must resonate emotionally.

I would also acknowledge that the other side—autocrats—is often more successful in this regard than democratic opposition actors. This is because democratic actors tend to focus primarily on output, on what democracy delivers. I am not suggesting that this is unimportant, but it is not sufficient. We also need to engage with authoritarian-leaning actors at the level of narratives. After all, politics is fundamentally a battle of narratives.

Ten Years on with Brexit / Prof. Calhoun: Brexit Reveals Regret, Weakened Influence, and Intensified Backsliding

April 29, 2026

by ECPS_admin Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Interviews

In this ECPS interview, Professor Craig Calhoun, Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University, revisits Brexit a decade after the 2016 referendum, arguing that it has revealed “regret, weakened influence, and intensified backsliding.” While Brexit was presented as a remedy for national decline, Professor Calhoun notes that “there is now a degree of regret,” as its economic costs—shrinking growth, declining investment, and reduced productivity—have become clearer. Yet his analysis moves beyond economics, situating Brexit within deeper struggles over English identity, regional inequality, democratic legitimacy, and geopolitical decline. He argues that Brexit has acted as a “catalytic event,” intensifying existing democratic malaise while exposing Britain’s unresolved tensions over belonging, representation, and national purpose in an increasingly unstable global order.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

A decade after the 2016 referendum, Brexit remains a defining fault line in British politics, shaping not only institutional trajectories but also the deeper contours of political identity, democratic legitimacy, and geopolitical orientation. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Craig Calhoun, Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona State University, offers a striking reassessment of Brexit’s long-term implications, foregrounding a central paradox captured in the headline insight: “Brexit reveals regret, weakened influence, and intensified backsliding.” While the referendum was initially framed as a corrective to perceived national decline, Professor Calhoun underscores that “there is now a degree of regret,” as its economic consequences—“shrinkage of the economy, loss of investment and productivity”—have become increasingly apparent.

Yet Brexit’s significance extends beyond material outcomes. Professor Calhoun situates it within a broader transformation of democratic politics, arguing that it has functioned not merely as an event but as an accelerant: “Brexit has functioned as a catalytic event… it has made things worse and intensified democratic backsliding.” In this respect, the UK’s trajectory reflects a wider pattern across Western democracies, where populist mobilization intersects with declining institutional trust and growing dissatisfaction with representation. Although Britain retains relatively robust institutional foundations, he notes a discernible erosion, with the country becoming “less democratic… to a noticeable degree.”

A key contribution of Professor Calhoun’s analysis lies in his emphasis on the persistence of underlying structural and cultural drivers. Far from resolving political tensions, Brexit has entrenched them. “Many of the same factors are still in place,” he observes, pointing to regional inequality, anxieties over English identity, and unresolved questions regarding immigration and belonging. These dynamics have not only sustained polarization but have also contributed to a fragmented party system and a growing perception that “organized politics does not express the concerns that ordinary people have in their lives.”

At the same time, Brexit has come to symbolize a broader narrative of national and geopolitical decline. As Professor Calhoun notes, “the UK appears less powerful, less economically prosperous, and less influential globally,” a perception that has become more visible in the post-2016 period. Crucially, while the Leave campaign acknowledged decline, it promised reversal—a promise that, in his words, “has not occurred.” This disjuncture between expectation and outcome has reinforced both disillusionment and the continued appeal of populist narratives centered on “the people” rather than systemic or institutional considerations.

By placing Brexit at the intersection of populism, nationalism, and democratic transformation, Professor Calhoun’s reflections illuminate the enduring reconfiguration of political subjectivity in contemporary democracies. His analysis suggests that Brexit is not an isolated case but part of a wider shift toward more unstable, contested, and fragmented political orders—where regret, polarization, and uncertainty coexist with persistent demands for recognition, representation, and belonging.

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

Britain Remains Stuck on Brexit’s Cultural Divisions

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

Professor Calhoun, welcome. In your early interpretation of Brexit as “a mutiny against the cosmopolitan elite,” how should we reassess that diagnosis a decade on, particularly in light of the persistence of identity-based polarization and the consolidation of Brexit as a durable axis of political subjectivity rather than a transient electoral cleavage?

Professor Craig Calhoun: Many of the same factors are still in place: regional inequalities and disparities in Britain; anxieties about English identity—often more than British identity—and about White racial identity, though not always openly expressed; and concerns about the place of immigrants and minorities in the country. These factors help explain the Brexit vote and why it was possible to mobilize people for this decision.

What has changed? I think there is now a degree of regret, as it has become apparent that the decision has been economically counterproductive. It has contributed to the shrinkage of the economy, loss of investment and productivity, and even declines in household income and trade. So, there are clear material consequences.

In terms of cultural politics, however, Britain remains stuck on many of the same issues. Efforts to reposition politics after the Brexit vote included an attempt to reassert class in Labour Party politics during the Corbyn years, followed by a reaction against that, such that the Labour Party now can hardly mention it.

More broadly, British politics has become increasingly fragmented. The current government came in with a large majority but has been unable or unwilling to take bold action, making it a weak government despite its numbers.

At the same time, the Conservative Party has been weakened by the rise of Reform UK and defections. There has been some growth in the Liberal Democrats, but not enough to offset this. Britain once appeared closer to a two-party system; now it is more complex, with significant intra-party conflicts.

As a result, fewer people feel that organized politics reflects their concerns. Across the political spectrum, there is widespread frustration that politics in Westminster does not address the everyday issues people face—whether healthcare, the cost of living, immigration, or, for some, race and anxieties about Islam.

These concerns continue to mobilize people but lack clear expression within party politics, generating ongoing tensions. This dynamic was central to Brexit itself, which represented a move outside the party system. David Cameron allowed the referendum but did not support the outcome, campaigned ineffectively, and assumed it would placate public discontent. It did not. The discontents persist, as do the cultural divisions that drive them. In that sense, Britain remains, in many ways, stuck.

Brexit Reasserted Majority English Identity

To what extent has Brexit transformed political preference into what might be theorized as a “thick” identity—embedding itself in everyday social belonging and moral worldviews in ways analogous to the forms of nationalism you describe as constitutive of modern political communities?

Professor Craig Calhoun: I would say there is a tendency in that direction, but so far it has not fully succeeded. One complication is that strong nationalism, or ethno-nationalism, in this context is English rather than British. Brexit reflected a shift away from foregrounding British identity as inherently multinational—Scots, Irish, Welsh, as well as English—toward a reassertion of a majority English identity.

This kind of majoritarianism is common across countries. Nationalist politics that constitute political communities are rarely without an element of majority identity, which often excludes certain minorities from its conception of the nation. It is never as simple as claiming that everyone is fully united by a single vision. That vision must be reflected in everyday life in multiple ways, which is why it develops over time. At the same time, it is always partly organized around projects of power or domination.

For example, one would not say that Turkish political subjectivity is completely unified by the idea of Turkish identity. It is strong in majoritarian terms, but there are significant minorities, and even within the majority there are differing interpretations of what that identity means. The same is true in Britain, and particularly in England, though the English focus further complicates the situation.

Over a fairly long period, Britain made significant progress in expanding opportunities for minorities to succeed—to attend university, gain employment, and participate in the economy. At the same time, however, there are large concentrations of minority populations, particularly Muslim communities, in specific geographic areas. This makes them highly visible and can generate dynamics of relatively closed communities.

Because populations are not evenly distributed across the country, the development of a unifying democratic nationalism is impeded. These “islands” of difference are reinforced by the dominance of London and a few other metropolitan areas. Cities such as London, and to some extent Manchester, offer more opportunities, enabling people—including minorities—to improve their socioeconomic position.

These relatively cosmopolitan centers tend to favor undoing Brexit, renewing solidarity with Europe, or embracing a more global identity, rather than English nationalism. English nationalism is relatively weak in London but stronger in other regions, and this divide is reinforced by economic disparities. Growth is concentrated in cities rather than in the countryside, which fuels resentment in areas that feel left behind.

This does not necessarily imply poverty. Much of the shift from the Conservative Party to Reform UK involves suburban populations who feel their status and prospects are declining. They are not poor, but they no longer see themselves or their children as future leaders or beneficiaries to the same extent.

As a result, there is a continuing, if partial, alliance between disaffected working-class populations and disaffected suburbanites in various parts of the country. Nigel Farage and Reform UK have been quite effective in building a kind of semi-party that mobilizes these groups through shared fears and resentments, but without offering a clear positive program.

Leave and Remain Became Struggles Over National Identity

Brexit suporters, brexiteers, in central London holding banners campaigning to leave the European Union on January 15, 2019.

Does the enduring entrenchment of “Leave” and “Remain” identities empirically reinforce your argument that nationalism—and adjacent identity formations—are not residual cultural artifacts but actively produced through ongoing political contestation and discursive construction?

Professor Craig Calhoun: Absolutely. The period leading up to Brexit, and even more so the period since the referendum, has been heavily shaped by efforts to forge a stronger sense of national identity. This includes self-declared nationalists—more often English than British—but also those who are concerned about national identity without adopting that label. As a result, the question of who the British people are has become a central political struggle, reinforced not only by the Leave–Remain divide but also by the persistence of the underlying issues that produced it.

Recent polling suggests that around 58 percent of Britons would now vote Remain if given the chance again, indicating that opinions have shifted. This change is largely driven by a growing recognition that people were misled about the material consequences of Brexit. The Leave campaign promised substantial economic benefits—recovering funds sent to Europe, compensating for lost trade through the Commonwealth—but these claims have not been borne out.

The symbolic and cultural dimensions, however, are different. While there is now greater clarity about the material effects of Brexit, identity-related frustrations remain strong for many. Yet political debate has focused primarily on economic conditions, often neglecting the importance of identity and cultural concerns.

It is also important to recognize that these dynamics are not confined to one side. In Scotland, for example, identity politics often take a more cosmopolitan, pro-European form in contrast to English nationalism. Identitarian concerns, therefore, exist across the divide.

At the same time, these issues have not been fully engaged in public debate. For many Britons, they remain somewhat uncomfortable or even taboo. This has enabled right-wing populists to address them more openly than actors on the left. During the Corbyn era, there was greater space for what might be called left-wing populism, but this was followed by a reassertion of control within the Labour Party that marginalized those voices.

For many working-class and less well-off Britons, this shift was experienced as exclusion, reinforcing the perception that urban professional elites dominate Labour and fail to represent their concerns. While the removal of Corbyn increased internal cohesion within the party, it also deepened disaffection among segments of the working class.

These groups engage in identity politics as well. They were not uniformly anti-European a decade ago, nor are they now. The key issue is which political actors provide them with a platform to express concerns that are not merely abstract but tied to lived experiences and ways of life.

Such concerns often originate locally rather than in explicitly national or European debates. For instance, the closure of a local pub due to regulatory or economic changes may be experienced as a loss of community and identity. These grievances can later be framed in nationalist terms, but they typically begin as local concerns.

Frustration intensifies when national political debates appear divided between an urban, metropolitan elite—perceived as disconnected from local realities—and a right-wing populist camp that becomes the primary voice engaging directly with those communities.

Polarization Now Shapes How People Understand Reality

In light of your work on the “degenerations of democracy,” how should we interpret Brexit-era polarization as a case of hyper-partisanship in which epistemic disagreement increasingly shades into ontological division, with opponents cast not merely as adversaries but as existential threats?

Professor Craig Calhoun: You raise three important points, and I agree with all of them. Let me separate them slightly differently, though, and raise a complication about one. I think Britain is highly polarized. The breakdown of the party system means that this polarization is not merely partisan in the traditional sense of competition between major political parties. There are sharp differences in views about how the world works, how things are going, and what is desirable, but these divisions often follow lines such as metropolitan versus non-metropolitan, rather than aligning neatly with party affiliation.

Second, you rightly emphasize the epistemic dimension. People’s basic understandings of how society works—what they take to be facts and valid knowledge—are increasingly contested. The widely discussed breakdown in trust is not simply about attitudes toward politicians; it concerns whether people believe that mainstream media, social institutions, and educational systems provide an accurate account of reality. Many do not, and they question dominant claims about what is true.

This was a major factor in Brexit. Many people accepted statements—often misleading or plainly false—about issues such as the financial relationship between Britain and the EU. Although most academics and journalists demonstrated that these claims were incorrect, this did not persuade a large portion of the electorate. Instead, such corrections were often dismissed as the opinions of pro-European elites, lacking any special epistemic authority. Being an economist or political scientist no longer confers greater credibility than figures such as Nigel Farage.

The erosion of epistemic authority is real. This is not to suggest that experts are always right, but rather that there once existed a broader social consensus about what counts as knowledge and how it should be verified. Today, when individuals encounter claims, the growing tendency is to “do their own research,” not by consulting established media or academic sources, but by browsing a handful of websites or following social media influencers. In this environment, information that is not systematically verified often prevails over more reliable forms of knowledge. This is not unique to Britain; it reflects a broader global trend.

What we often describe as the rise of populism is partly driven by the discrediting of elite claims to knowledge. This, however, raises an immediate question: where can people turn for alternative perspectives that reflect popular concerns while remaining epistemically sound? There is a clear shortage of institutions capable of fulfilling that role. Rather than the emergence of a strong new press, we have seen a proliferation of influencers.

There is, of course, a significant right-wing press, but it is not uniformly populist. It includes some who support more populist positions, alongside others who define themselves as traditional conservatives. This produces a somewhat fragmented and ambiguous informational landscape.

Finally, as you note, this is also the terrain on which political subjectivity is formed. This is not simply about electoral choices; it shapes how individuals understand who they are. Part of the process of polarization involves the development of durable identities. These are not limited to “Leave” and “Remain,” but encompass broader frameworks through which people interpret themselves, their fellow citizens, and what counts as credible knowledge about the world.

To reiterate, the extent to which established mainstream sources have been discredited among large segments of the population is significant. This includes major parts of the media, academia, and political parties. In the past, people tended to trust institutions such as party research offices or political leaders to provide reliable information. That trust has diminished. Many now assume they are receiving partisan messaging from politicians seeking to remain in power, fostering distrust not only toward opponents but also toward those they once supported.

Britain Still Has Institutions, But Democratic Norms Are Eroding

Party leader Nigel Farage speaks during the Brexit Party general election tour event at Little Mill village hall near Pontypool, Monmouthshire, Wales on November 8 2019.

The continued mobilization of Brexit sentiment by actors such as Nigel Farage and the electoral positioning of Reform UK suggest that populism remains a potent force in British politics. Do these developments represent a stabilization of populism within democratic competition, or do they exemplify the longer-term erosion of liberal-democratic norms you associate with populist mobilization?

Professor Craig Calhoun: I think there is a longer-term destabilization of democratic norms. I would hasten to add, however, that norms are not very strong if they exist only as free-floating beliefs rather than being embedded in institutional practices. The good news is that Britain still has relatively strong institutions. The courts, by and large, continue to function with a reasonable degree of independence from politics and with a serious grounding in legal reasoning and precedent.

Although it has suffered some decline, the National Health Service remains an institution to be valued and rebuilt. More broadly, Britain retains institutional foundations that help sustain the norms of a functioning democratic society.

That said, there has been erosion and decline. There are real problems, even if substantial institutional strength remains. I should also note a conceptual concern regarding how populism is often used. It is sometimes treated as a coherent body of thought, analogous to leftism or rightism, socialism or capitalism. I do not think this is accurate. Populism can appear across different points on the political spectrum because it is better understood as a style of mobilization centered on defining “the people” in opposition to elites.

In that sense, one can have both left- and right-wing populism. For example, the Corbyn campaigns represented a more populist alternative to the Starmer approach, even if this is not always recognized. Populism, in this view, prioritizes “the people” over systems—over the economy, the state, or other institutional frameworks—and centers politics on how ordinary people understand their lives and interests.

This helps explain why, during the Brexit debate, few people abandoned a Leave position when it was argued that Brexit would harm the City of London. The response was not to contest the economic analysis but to reject its relevance. Many simply did not care about the City of London; they cared about the English people. While economic consequences may shape material conditions over time, the core populist impulse remains focused on the people rather than on systemic or elite concerns.

Brexit Intensified Britain’s Democratic Backsliding

Would you characterize Brexit primarily as a symptom of deeper democratic malaise—rooted in declining perceptions of citizen efficacy, institutional trust, and representational legitimacy—or as a catalytic event that has itself intensified democratic backsliding in the UK?

Professor Craig Calhoun: I would say the former, though there is also an element of the latter. Brexit has functioned as a catalytic event: it has exacerbated existing problems and intensified democratic backsliding. In some respects, Britain has become less democratic—not to the same extent as the United States, but to a noticeable degree. Other developments, such as the pandemic, have also contributed to this trajectory.

That said, the core issue lies in what Brexit expressed: a prior deterioration in the conditions for democratic solidarity, which the 2016 vote both revealed and reinforced. This includes the factors you mentioned, but it also extends to material foundations and lived conditions. When I refer to metropolitan and non-metropolitan Britain, I use it as shorthand to highlight that people do not simply hold different views; they live under very different material circumstances that shape their priorities and values.

For many living outside major urban centers, aggregate indicators such as gross national product do not meaningfully reflect their experience of prosperity. Much of economic growth is concentrated in London, Manchester, and other large cities, with limited diffusion into local communities. This is not merely an abstract disagreement over economic metrics; it reflects everyday realities. These indicators feel distant from lived experience for material reasons, not simply due to informational deficits.

People’s outlooks are shaped by conditions in their immediate environments—the state of local labor markets, opportunities for younger generations, and access to housing. The housing crisis is particularly illustrative. Rising unaffordability has repeatedly influenced British politics and has eroded what was once a relatively stable upper working-class and middle-class position, weakening the social center.

In the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher promoted homeownership as a means of fostering a society of stakeholders, premised on the idea that property ownership would encourage long-term social commitment. Whatever one makes of that vision, subsequent developments have altered the landscape. After a period of relative accessibility, housing has become increasingly unaffordable due to insufficient supply, higher interest rates, regulatory constraints, and the geographic mismatch between affordable housing and employment centers. These material conditions play a central role in shaping how people interpret what might otherwise appear as abstract or theoretical propositions.

Brexit Made Britain’s Decline More Visible

How does Brexit illuminate the reconfiguration of political identity in ethnonational terms—what you have described as the contemporary shift toward the construction of “majority ethnicities” as politically salient categories?

Professor Craig Calhoun: There are two parts to this. In general, the rise of majoritarian identity politics—whether in Germany, France, England, or elsewhere—is a significant part of what is happening. It is shaping a new right wing that already has considerable political influence and may gain even more, including in the United States.

In framing it this way, I want to emphasize that it is not simply a matter of majorities uniformly embracing such identities. Rather, it involves politically mobilized majoritarian activism carried out in the name of the majority. Actors such as Reform in the UK are not themselves representative of the majority of the population—certainly not of all those who might be categorized as part of the English majority—but they claim to speak for it and mobilize around that claim. This form of mobilization has been growing in importance for decades.

The second part of the story, more specific to the UK, is that the period after Brexit coincides with a perception of decline. The UK appears less powerful, less economically prosperous, and less influential globally. One can debate whether this decline predates Brexit, but it has become more visible since 2016. The Leave campaign itself acknowledged a sense of decline but argued that Brexit would reverse it. That reversal has not occurred.

For many people who are not at the center of political or economic debates, Brexit has come to symbolize this trajectory of decline. At the same time, Europe more broadly is also experiencing challenges and, in some respects, decline. Brexit affected both the UK and the European Union, and the EU has faced internal divisions, including over migration, the war in Ukraine, energy policy, and rearmament.

More broadly, both the UK and Europe are grappling with shifting global power dynamics. The rise of China and India, increasing economic integration across Asia, and a more assertive Russia have all altered the geopolitical landscape. At the same time, the United States has become a less predictable partner, pursuing policies that have at times destabilized international relations and strained alliances.

These geopolitical shifts coincide with economic uncertainty. There is little clarity that current economic transitions will lead to improved outcomes. Even countries like Germany face employment challenges. The long-term decline of skilled manufacturing work continues, and its replacements have not fully materialized. Emerging technologies, including AI, may further intensify these pressures. As a result, personal economic insecurity is increasingly linked to a broader perception that one’s country—and the wider region—is in relative decline compared to rising global powers.

Brexit Encourages a Dangerous National Myopia

In the current geopolitical context, do you see any viable synthesis between nationalism and cosmopolitanism capable of sustaining the liberal international order, or are we witnessing their progressive decoupling under the pressures of populism and sovereigntism?

Professor Craig Calhoun: We are witnessing a breakdown of the liberal international order. Whether it can be renewed remains an open question. It is not impossible, but what we have seen is a continued erosion in the context of the war in Ukraine, energy politics, conflicts in the Middle East, and related developments.

One feature of the Brexit debates—both in 2016 and in the years since—is that they have reduced attention to the broader ways in which global changes are affecting Britain. If everything is framed in terms of Leave versus Remain, then less attention is paid to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East or to the structural causes of migration. For example, migration is often discussed as simply a matter of people arriving, rather than as the consequence of specific events such as the war in Syria, which displaced large populations.

In this sense, the framing of Brexit encourages a kind of national myopia. A similar pattern can be observed in the United States, where political debates were long focused on internal issues even as international dynamics were shifting significantly. This makes it more difficult to address fundamental questions about what would make a country secure, prosperous, or resilient in a changing global context.

This raises the question of whether the renewal of the liberal international order is either feasible or desirable. It may be possible to reconstruct elements of it, but it could also take a different form. Some argue for protecting the West as a privileged space, accepting reduced global influence while maintaining internal stability. Others point to alternative visions of world order, including those centered on China, which emphasize order rather than liberal norms.

It is not clear that the breakdown of the liberal international order necessarily implies the absence of order altogether. It could lead to a transition toward a new multilateral arrangement or even to a form of hegemonic order. At the same time, there remains the risk of continued fragmentation, with more frequent and proximate conflicts.

These dynamics also affect national self-understandings. In Britain, for instance, there has long been a perception of maritime strength, encapsulated in the idea that “Britannia rules the waves.” The postwar decline of empire already challenged this view, but more recent events have further exposed limitations in military capacity. Such realizations can undermine confidence and reinforce a sense of vulnerability.

This, in turn, raises difficult questions about how national success should be understood in the post-Brexit context. If expectations of renewed strength and autonomy are not matched by material capabilities, the tension between nationalist aspirations and geopolitical realities becomes increasingly apparent.

Populism, Nationalism, and War Politics Are Converging

Finally, looking beyond the British case, do you see Brexit—and the continued resonance of figures like Farage—as indicative of a broader transformation across Western democracies, where populism, nationalism, and democratic dissatisfaction are converging into new, potentially unstable political equilibria?

Professor Craig Calhoun: I think they may not be equilibria. So, instability, yes. There is a very widespread shift away from more or less conventional left-right party politics, and in particular from the dominance of the liberal center, into an unstable era of problematic domestic politics, with parties themselves becoming unstable, new parties emerging, and increasing influence of what is commonly called the populist right, but also of non-populist right-wing currents. Not all of the right wing is automatically populist. There are a variety of extreme right-wing ethno-nationalist movements, particularly on the European continent and in the United States, that are not clearly populist. Some of these operate within frameworks that call for a return to a kind of right-wing, quasi-medieval vision of Europe.

There is also a rise of orthodoxy, not only in regions traditionally associated with it, such as Russia or Greece, but also in the West, where some right-wing thinkers and voices have converted to Orthodoxy. Some have even relocated to other countries and view Orthodoxy as a framework for rethinking the future. Others, like Rod Dreher, have advocated what he calls the “Benedict Option,” a return to forms of quasi-monastic community life. My point is simply that there are multiple kinds of emerging right-wing formations. They vary in how populist they are: some are clearly populist, while others are more explicitly elitist, focused on preserving elite authority.

There has not yet been a corresponding revitalization of left-wing thought. There are strong thinkers on the left, and such a renewal may come, but for now the intellectual and political dynamism appears more pronounced on the right. This development dovetails with broader shifts in international politics and geopolitics. Policies such as increasing tariffs and dismantling trade agreements are nationalist in one sense but are often driven by domestic political concerns that spill over into international relations.

At the same time, the spread of wars and aggressive international actions—sometimes pursued for their own sake, or because they help leaders remain in power—adds another layer of instability. In certain respects, figures like Putin and Netanyahu are in similar positions, where being at war helps sustain their political authority. This kind of dynamic is domestically rooted in nationalist configurations but poses wider global risks.

These actors are not identical to figures like Farage, but they are part of a broader global rise of various right-wing movements, some of which are primarily oriented toward power, while others are more explicitly concerned with the moral state of society. Notably, many of these pro-military, assertive right-wing movements are also strongly masculinist. They express concerns about declining birth rates, oppose expanded roles for women in public life, and often adopt homophobic positions. These stances reflect anxieties rooted in personal and social life within their respective societies, yet they are increasingly linked to broader geopolitical projects.

In that sense, questions that may seem unrelated—such as the connection between foreign policy actions and attitudes toward sexuality—are tied together through a shared emphasis on strength, both in individual, gendered terms and in national terms.

Professor Przeworski: There Is No Worldwide Crisis of Democracy

April 29, 2026

by ECPS_admin Authoritarianism Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

In this interview, Professor Adam Przeworski, Emeritus Professor of Politics at New York University, challenges dominant narratives of a global democratic crisis. Against widespread claims of democratic recession and authoritarian resurgence, he argues: “I do not believe there is a worldwide crisis of democracy.” For Professor Przeworski, democracy remains best understood as a mechanism for processing conflict through elections rather than as a system that resolves all social, economic, or moral disagreements. While he acknowledges unprecedented developments—party-system instability, polarization, and the rise of new right-wing parties—he cautions against conflating these shifts with systemic collapse. His analysis highlights democracy’s self-preserving capacity, insisting that while “small transgressions may be tolerated,” major violations of democratic rules eventually encounter resistance.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In an era increasingly defined by claims of democratic recession, authoritarian resurgence, and the global diffusion of populist politics, few voices carry the analytical weight and empirical authority of Professor Adam Przeworski, Emeritus Professor of Politics at New York University (NYU). A foundational figure in democratic theory, Professor Przeworski has long conceptualized democracy not as a teleological endpoint, but as a contingent institutional arrangement grounded in electoral competition and the management of conflict. His minimalist definition—“a system in which governments can be selected and removed through elections”—offers a parsimonious yet powerful framework for evaluating both democratic resilience and vulnerability. In this interview, conducted against the backdrop of intensifying scholarly and public concern about democratic backsliding, Professor Przeworski advances a deliberately counterintuitive claim: “I do not believe there is a worldwide crisis of democracy.”

This assertion stands in sharp contrast to dominant narratives, including those informed by datasets such as V-Dem, which suggest a global shift toward autocratization. Yet Professor Przeworski challenges both the empirical basis and the interpretive framing of such claims. “What does it really mean to say that a majority of the world’s population lives under authoritarian governments?” he asks, expressing skepticism toward measurement strategies that, in his view, risk overstating crisis dynamics. Instead, he emphasizes a more structural and historically grounded perspective: “There are more democratic regimes—more democratic countries—in the world today than ever before.” For Professor Przeworski, the proliferation of democratic regimes, even amid evident tensions, complicates the narrative of systemic collapse.

At the core of his argument lies a reconceptualization of democratic instability. While acknowledging “recent changes that are indeed unprecedented—such as the weakening of political parties, the instability of party systems, and the emergence of new parties, particularly on the political right,” he resists interpreting these developments as evidence of a generalized breakdown. Rather, they reflect shifting configurations within democratic systems that have always been characterized by conflict, contestation, and dissatisfaction. Indeed, as he notes, “as much as half of the population is always dissatisfied with what democracy produces,” a condition intrinsic to competitive politics rather than indicative of systemic failure.

Crucially, Professor Przeworski situates contemporary democratic challenges within a broader theory of political conflict and institutional equilibrium. Democracy endures not because it resolves all conflicts, but because it provides a mechanism—elections—through which they can be processed and temporarily settled. Even processes of democratic erosion, he suggests, remain bounded by this logic. While incumbents may attempt to “undermine democracy without abolishing elections,” such strategies are neither universally successful nor irreversible. On the contrary, recent electoral developments in countries such as Poland and Brazil illustrate democracy’s capacity for self-correction. “Attempts to usurp power through various means eventually encounter resistance,” he observes, emphasizing that “small transgressions may be tolerated, but major violations of democratic rules are not.”

This perspective invites a more nuanced understanding of both populism and authoritarianism. Rather than external threats to democracy, they emerge as endogenous features of political competition under conditions of inequality, polarization, and institutional strain. At the same time, Professor Przeworski underscores the enduring appeal of democratic choice itself. “The very possibility of choosing who governs us,” he argues, “is an extraordinarily strong value to which people adhere.”

By challenging prevailing assumptions about democratic decline, this interview offers a sobering yet cautiously optimistic account of contemporary politics. It suggests that while liberal democracy faces significant pressures, its foundational mechanisms—and the normative commitments that sustain them—remain more resilient than often assumed.

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

Democracy as Conflict Management

Israelis protest in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu’s Judicial Coup in Israel. Photo: Avivi Aharon.

Professor Przeworski, welcome. Your minimalist conception defines democracy as a system in which governments can be selected and removed through elections. In light of contemporary backsliding, does this procedural definition remain analytically sufficient, or do recent developments compel us to integrate more substantive criteria concerning rights, accountability, and the rule of law?

Professor Adam Przeworski: I think that to understand my view of democracy—the minimalist view of democracy—one has to start with the observation that, in every country, at every time, there is conflict. These conflicts are often normative; that is, people expect democracy to implement certain values, such as those you mentioned. There are also economic conflicts—indeed, most conflicts are economic—dealing with the distribution of income, work, and so on. Sometimes they are purely symbolic. I often cite the example of a government in the Weimar Republic that fell because it changed the colors of the national flag. But the key point is that there was conflict.

The essence of the minimalist conception is that we must find ways to manage these conflicts—ways to resolve them, at least temporarily. After all, different people expect different things from democracy: some emphasize freedom, others equality. So how do we resolve these conflicts? This is where my argument comes in. I contend that we resolve them through elections. Whatever else people expect from democracy, we must have a mechanism through which conflicts are processed and resolved.

No Generalized Crisis of Democracy

You distinguish democracy as a mechanism for processing conflict from democracy as a normative ideal. To what extent has the growing expectation that democracy should deliver not only representation, but also economic equality and moral outcomes contributed to its current crisis of legitimacy?

Professor Adam Przeworski: I am not sure that this represents something new. As long as democracy has existed—in some countries for 200 years, and in at least 13 countries for 100 consecutive years—there have been such divergences. We have always disagreed about what we should expect of democracy, and which values it ought to implement. There is nothing new about that.

From this perspective, some people—and perhaps, in many cases, as much as half of the population—are always dissatisfied with what democracy produces. From time to time, they express this dissatisfaction by voting incumbent governments out. That is the instrument available to them, and that is how the system works.

For this reason, I do not think there is something like a generalized crisis of democracy. That said, there are recent changes that are indeed unprecedented—such as the weakening of political parties, the instability of party systems, and the emergence of new parties, particularly on the political right. These are significant developments, and they should prompt concern. But I would not characterize them as evidence of a new, generalized crisis of democracy. As I said at the outset, I do not believe such a generalized crisis exists.

The US as the Exception

Your work emphasizes that democracy endures when the stakes of losing power are not existential. How should we interpret rising inequality, identity polarization, and winner-takes-all political competition in this regard—do they structurally raise the cost of electoral defeat beyond sustainable thresholds?

Professor Adam Przeworski: The stakes in elections have indeed increased in recent years. At the same time, however, I do not see a generalized threat to democracy. There is, of course, an elephant in the room: the United States. In the United States, democracy is truly in danger. But if we consider similar countries—economically highly developed societies with comparable, perhaps somewhat lower, levels of inequality, significant political polarization, and long democratic traditions—the picture looks different.

In these countries, even when right-wing parties, including those with fascist roots, come to power—at least as members of governing coalitions—they do not necessarily threaten democracy. What strikes me is that, if you look at Italy, for example, where a party with explicit fascist roots is governing, or Austria or Sweden, where such parties have been part of coalitions, they still adhere to democratic values. They may advance unprecedented programs—programs that many of us, including myself, may strongly dislike—but they do not, in themselves, threaten democracy. In that sense, the threat to democracy appears to be largely exceptional to the United States.

Democracy Under Formal Trappings

Following the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, protests erupted across numerous cities in Turkey. Citizens took to the streets to voice their opposition to the decision and express growing discontent.
Photo: Dreamstime.

You have argued that contemporary democratic breakdowns occur primarily through elected incumbents. Does this shift from coups to endogenous erosion indicate that the institutional architecture of modern democracies has become intrinsically vulnerable to strategic capture?

Professor Adam Przeworski: That is an extremely controversial topic, but the answer is probably yes. When you look at the data, military coups have almost completely disappeared in the 21st century. Until around the year 2000, democracies were typically destroyed in a visible way—through military takeovers and coups. Since then, the only democracy that has experienced a coup is Thailand. While there have been many coups in Africa, particularly in North Africa, they have not been directed against democratic regimes. This suggests a new pattern.

It is likely new because some governments have learned that they can remain in power while preserving the formal trappings of democracy—by subordinating institutions other than the executive, controlling the media and economic resources, and employing a degree of repression, as in Turkey. In other words, they have learned to operate under the guise of democracy while using a range of instruments to entrench their rule.

At the same time, these governments do lose elections. They lost an election in Poland, and more recently in Hungary, contrary to many expectations and the more pessimistic forecasts of some analysts. This indicates that, while incumbents have developed strategies to gradually undermine democracy without abolishing elections or fully delegitimizing the opposition, the process is neither complete nor irreversible. For that reason, I would not characterize this as a universal phenomenon, and it remains unclear how durable it will be.

The Dilemma of Democratic Resistance

Within your strategic framework, incumbents choose whether to uphold or subvert electoral competition. How should we conceptualize “stealth authoritarianism,” where legalistic and incremental institutional changes cumulatively undermine democracy without triggering immediate resistance?

Professor Adam Przeworski: Let me begin with the question of immediate resistance. These governments win elections—Erdoğan won elections; Chávez and then Maduro won elections; Orbán won elections; and in Poland, the right-wing party won elections. They come to power on a program, and then the opposition faces a difficult choice. The opposition may see that these governments threaten democracy but opposing them can itself appear undemocratic. After all, these leaders have just won an election. Taking to the streets to say, “No, these people cannot govern,” risks being perceived as an anti-democratic act.

At some point, however, it may become too late. If these governments succeed in consolidating their partisan advantage—as in Venezuela or Turkey—then by the time the opposition decides that it can no longer tolerate the situation because democracy is being undermined, incumbents may already be too strong. They may be able to repress their opponents or otherwise entrench themselves in power. So, strategically, this is a very difficult situation. The opposition must be extremely careful about what to oppose and when to oppose it.

Public Tolerance and Democratic Erosion

Serbia protest. — Serbian students and citizens protest against government corruption following the Novi Sad railway station accident, at Slavija Square in Belgrade, Serbia, on December 22, 2024. Photo: Mirko Kuzmanovic / Dreamstime.

You suggest that democratic vulnerability can arise both from highly popular incumbents through populism and from deeply unpopular ones through polarization. How should we interpret cases where these dynamics converge, producing simultaneously mobilized support and entrenched opposition?

Professor Adam Przeworski: The way I think about it is that governments which, in fact, threaten democracy sometimes win elections. We now have extensive evidence, originally due to Professor Milan Svolik at Yale, showing that people are willing to tolerate certain violations of democratic norms and rules in exchange for substantive outcomes they value. As Svolik and Matthew H. Graham demonstrate in a well-known article, the number of unconditional democrats—that is, people who would not tolerate any violation of democratic norms for any substantive outcome—is very small in the United States. If I recall correctly, they estimate it at around 6 percent.

At the same time, evidence from Carlos Boix and his collaborators shows that when the question is framed more broadly—whether people are willing to give up democracy altogether—the answer is strongly negative. In other words, people may tolerate some transgressions, but not a complete abandonment of democracy. This creates a particular dynamic in processes of democratic backsliding. People may accept certain violations, but when governments go too far, they react—they protest, object, and sometimes vote incumbents out of office, as seen in Hungary and Poland.

In this sense, governments sometimes backslide because they can—because such actions are tolerated. At other times, however, they may backslide defensively, because failing to do so could risk electoral defeat. Thus, there are two distinct forms of backsliding: one supported by public tolerance, and another that unfolds in tension with public opinion.

Delegation, Trust, and Anti-Democratic Populism

Populist leaders frequently claim to embody a unified “people” against institutional constraints. In your analytical framework, is populism best understood as a pathology of democratic representation, or as an endogenous feature of electoral competition under conditions of high stakes and limited trust?

Professor Adam Przeworski: This is, again, a theme that is inherent in democracy. We do not like to be ruled. There is always a government that tells us what we can do and, very often, what we cannot do—and we do not like it. There have always been movements demanding a greater voice for the people in governance. As you know, there are many proposals aimed at increasing the role of voters in governing—various kinds of assemblies, referendums, participatory budgeting, and so on. Numerous reforms have sought to expand the role of citizens in their governments.

At the same time, there is a form of right-wing or anti-democratic populism in which people are willing to delegate governance to a leader, as long as that leader governs well. In such cases, people say, “We will place our trust in a government that does what we want.” Both of these tendencies can be dangerous to democracy.

Populism Is Inherent in Democracy

You have argued that citizens may knowingly tolerate democratic erosion when incumbents are perceived as highly appealing. Does this imply that populism is not external to democracy, but rather a rational equilibrium outcome within it?

Professor Adam Przeworski: I think that populism, understood as a desire among voters to have a stronger and more direct voice in governing, is inherent in democracy. Populism is a slippery concept. This is why Mudde, who popularized the term, has described it as a “thin” or weak ideology. At its core, it presents a view of the world that pits elites against the people. Some version of this dynamic has always been present. It was already visible at the time the American Constitution was being written. The Anti-Federalists, for example, were populists in this sense. They advocated very short terms of office—sometimes as short as one year—as well as prohibitions on re-election, reflecting a fear that elites would capture power and use it in their own interests rather than in those of the broader population.

This dynamic is therefore as old as democracy itself, and it resurfaces from time to time. At the same time, when the question is framed more fundamentally—whether people are willing to give up democracy altogether for some alternative—we have overwhelming evidence that they are not. People are not willing to accept that; they will defend democracy.

Dissatisfaction Is Democracy’s Constant

Given your argument that political conflict is structured by the available policy alternatives, how does populism reshape the political agenda in ways that both intensify polarization and foreclose the possibility of compromise?

Professor Adam Przeworski: We do have a great deal of evidence of polarization. The proportion of the electorate willing to change its partisan preferences is almost zero, which is somewhat surprising given that party systems themselves are quite unstable. People are increasingly likely to see one another as enemies, and as a result, they are less willing to accept compromise. That said, I do not think we are living in an era of a generalized crisis of democracy. Democracy continues to function quite well in several countries. The fact that we are often dissatisfied with the outcomes of governments and their policies is nothing new.

Consider that there are almost no democratic elections in which any party wins more than 50 percent of the vote. This means that roughly half of voters are dissatisfied with the result from the outset. Once in power, governments inevitably fail to implement all their promises, and perhaps about half of their own supporters become dissatisfied as well. What we observe, then, is a broad and persistent dissatisfaction with both electoral outcomes and government performance. Yet people continue to expect that next time they will prevail, and that the government will deliver on its promises. Elections are, in a sense, a siren song—they renew our optimism that, even if it did not work this time, it might work next time. This dynamic is inherent in democracy and is likely to persist. That is why I am not inclined to interpret current developments as evidence of a generalized crisis.

Why Some Autocracies Gain Support

The Indian Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, is pictured with the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, and the President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, in Goa, India on May 25, 2019. Photo: Shutterstock.

Your work challenges the assumption that authoritarian regimes are inherently fragile, highlighting instead their capacity to govern effectively and generate support. Does this require a fundamental revision of democratic theory’s expectations about the instability of autocracies?

Professor Adam Przeworski: It is difficult for democrats to understand why someone would be satisfied with, or even support, an authoritarian regime. We tend to assume that people would not be willing to give up their political freedom—and sometimes more than that, their cultural freedom—and trust that a government will act in their interests. As a result, much of the literature we produce in the West suggests that authoritarian regimes survive only because of misinformation, censorship, and propaganda. I do not think that is entirely true. There are authoritarian regimes that enjoy passive acceptance, and perhaps even passive support. China is one example. Why? Because authoritarian governments still have to govern—and they do govern. They repair streets, issue licenses, collect garbage; in short, they perform the everyday functions of governance. Moreover, people often do not see viable alternatives. In China, for instance, many do not seriously consider a different system; they simply live within the one they have.

So, my view is that we should not be surprised that some authoritarian regimes are relatively successful and enjoy a degree of popular support. Singapore might be one example, China another. This does not mean that all authoritarian regimes do so—many rely heavily on repression, arbitrariness, and violence in the interests of narrow elites. But the broader point is that authoritarian regimes are not sustained only by deception. Some of them do enjoy genuine support.

Development Sustains Democracy, But May Not Create It

If authoritarian regimes can derive legitimacy through economic performance, symbolic politics, or identity appeals, how does this complicate the long-standing modernization thesis linking development to democratization?

Professor Adam Przeworski: This is a long topic on which I have written extensively. What we know from the evidence is that if a democratic regime exists in an economically developed country, it is very likely to endure. That is the central lesson. In a 1997 article co-authored with Fernando Limongi, we observed that no democracy had ever fallen in a country with a per capita income higher than Argentina’s in 1976. Since then, only Thailand has experienced a democratic breakdown at a slightly higher income level. Overall, however, the evidence is clear: when democracy exists in a developed country, it tends to persist.

A different question is whether countries are more likely to become democratic as they develop economically. This was a widespread belief in the 1960s and 1970s and formed the basis of modernization theory. My conclusion, based on empirical research, is that we have no evidence supporting this claim. In other words, higher levels of economic development do not necessarily make a country more likely to become democratic. So, in a sense, one half of modernization theory is supported by the evidence, while the other half is not.

Why Some Autocracies Endure

What, in your view, distinguishes durable authoritarian regimes from fragile ones—particularly in terms of their ability to balance repression, co-optation, and everyday governance?

Professor Adam Przeworski: I do not really know; I have not studied this question directly. My view is more of a conjecture—and it is no more than that, not strongly supported by empirical evidence, largely because we do not yet have sufficient data. My sense is that when authoritarian regimes reach high levels of income, they tend to become more stable. Singapore and China, for me, are illustrative examples.

When we look at the empirical data, authoritarian regimes appear to be most vulnerable at intermediate levels of income. That is when they are more likely to collapse. By contrast, once they reach sufficiently high levels of income—and there are very few such cases—they seem more likely to endure.

At present, there is only one authoritarian regime with a per capita income comparable to that of most democracies, and that is Singapore. China, despite its significant development, has not yet reached that level. So, from this perspective, we still do not know with certainty whether authoritarian regimes are more likely to survive in developed contexts. However, the available empirical patterns suggest that they probably are.

Legitimacy Without Alternatives

You have critiqued formal models of authoritarianism for neglecting the quotidian practices of governance. How should scholars reconceptualize authoritarian stability to account for these routine, non-coercive dimensions of rule?

Professor Adam Przeworski: I have a particular view of legitimacy, which I spelled out many years ago. I think a regime is legitimate when people do not perceive organized alternatives. When you think about China, whatever else may be true, people simply do not see an alternative. More broadly, our regime preferences are, to a large extent, endogenous—endogenous in the sense that people living under particular regimes, unless those regimes are especially flagrant, tend to accept them. They accept them passively because they do not see much chance of changing them.

Someone living in the state of Iowa in the United States does not think, “What if the American system were like the Chinese one?” Similarly, someone living in Guangdong does not think, “What if our system were like the American one?” People live their everyday lives, and they do not perceive politically organized alternatives. That is simply the way things are.

When such alternatives do appear—when there is a genuinely organized democratic opposition—open conflict emerges, and some authoritarian regimes collapse. We saw this in the fall of the communist bloc, where regimes collapsed one after another.

Challenging the V-Dem Crisis Narrative

Recent V-Dem report findings indicate that a substantial majority of the world’s population now lives under authoritarian regimes, with autocracies outnumbering democracies. How should we interpret this reversal in light of your argument that democracy is historically contingent rather than teleologically progressive?

Professor Adam Przeworski: I think this claim is simply false. In a sense, I see V-Dem as a figment of the imagination. What does it really mean to say that a majority of the world’s population lives under authoritarian governments? How is that measured? I do not have much trust in V-Dem’s measurements of democracy. I think they seek media exposure by heralding crises of democracy. I do not believe there is a worldwide crisis of democracy, so I do not take this claim seriously. On the contrary, there are more democratic regimes—more democratic countries—in the world today than ever before. I am not referring to population, but to the number of countries.

Electorates Can Reverse Illiberal Drift

And finally, Professor Przeworski, recent political developments in countries such as Poland, Brazil, and—potentially—Hungary suggest that electorates can reverse authoritarian or illiberal trajectories through democratic means. To what extent do these cases support the view that democracy retains a self-correcting capacity, and what structural or institutional conditions are necessary for such reversals to succeed rather than produce only partial or fragile restorations?

Professor Adam Przeworski: You are right that what has happened in Brazil, Poland, and Hungary shows that democracies possess a kind of self-preserving capacity. When democracy is truly at stake, people are willing to set aside other values and preferences in order to defend it. There is something about the very possibility of choosing who governs us that constitutes an extraordinarily strong value, to which people remain deeply attached. The examples you cited illustrate this clearly. Attempts to usurp power through various means eventually encounter resistance. Small transgressions may be tolerated, but major violations of democratic rules are not.

Assoc. Prof. Stankov: Too Early to Say Bulgaria’s Radev Will Act as an Orbán 2.0, He Looks More Like Fico

April 27, 2026

by ECPS_admin Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Interviews

In an interview with the ECPS, Associate Professor Petar Stankov offers a nuanced assessment of Bulgaria’s post-election trajectory under Rumen Radev. Challenging alarmist comparisons, he argues that “it is too early to tell” whether Radev will become an Orbán-style leader, suggesting instead that he “looks more like Fico,” pursuing a pragmatic balancing strategy. Assoc. Prof. Stankov interprets the electoral outcome as “a demand for stabilization after prolonged institutional volatility,” rather than a clear ideological shift. While economic constraints limit disruptive policymaking, he warns that the greater risk lies in institutional capture, particularly if opportunities for judicial reform are missed. Ultimately, Bulgaria’s trajectory will depend on whether reformist or rent-seeking dynamics prevail.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In the aftermath of Bulgaria’s April 2026 parliamentary elections, the country finds itself at a critical juncture shaped by the tension between political stabilization and the risk of democratic erosion. Following years of fragmentation, repeated elections, and institutional fatigue, Rumen Radev’s newly established Progressive Bulgaria party secured a decisive majority, capitalizing on anti-corruption sentiment, voter exhaustion, and socioeconomic anxieties linked to eurozone integration. While this outcome has brought a measure of political clarity, it has also intensified debates over Bulgaria’s democratic trajectory and its positioning between the European Union and Russia.

In a written interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Associate Professor Petar Stankov, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Royal Holloway, University of London, offers a nuanced and analytically grounded interpretation of these developments. Challenging alarmist comparisons, Assoc. Prof. Stankov argues that “it is too early to tell” whether Radev will evolve into an Orbán-style leader, suggesting instead that he “looks more like Fico,” pursuing a pragmatic balancing strategy rather than an overtly confrontational illiberal project.

At the core of Assoc. Prof. Stankov’s analysis is the argument that Radev’s victory reflects “a demand for stabilization after prolonged institutional volatility,” rather than a coherent ideological realignment. The electoral coalition that brought him to power, he notes, was “mobilized against discredited incumbents, not a coherent positive ideology,” drawing support from both left- and right-leaning constituencies. This heterogeneity, in turn, underscores the enduring salience of identity politics in Bulgaria, where Radev’s “balanced position” on Russia’s war in Ukraine resonated deeply “on identity grounds.”

Situating these dynamics within his broader framework of populist cycles, Assoc. Prof. Stankov characterizes Radev as “a short-term manifestation of populist demand,” rooted less in economic distress than in identity and fairness concerns, particularly dissatisfaction with the judicial system. In this sense, Bulgaria’s political landscape reflects structural patterns rather than exceptional rupture.

The interview also addresses the central question of whether Radev’s anti-corruption mandate will lead to institutional renewal or facilitate a new phase of power concentration. Here, Assoc. Prof. Stankov highlights a fundamental tension between reformist impulses and entrenched interests, warning that outcomes will depend on whether political actors pursue “institutional repair” or the redistribution of “political rents.”

On foreign policy, Assoc. Prof. Stankov underscores the importance of strategic ambiguity. While Radev may be “a natural candidate to do the Kremlin’s bidding,” he is unlikely to pursue a confrontational course vis-à-vis the EU, instead maintaining a careful balancing act shaped by Bulgaria’s structural constraints. Economically, these constraints significantly limit his room for maneuver, but Assoc. Prof. Stankov cautions that “politically, he may do more damage” if opportunities for judicial reform are squandered.

Ultimately, this interview with ECPS presents a measured yet critical assessment of Bulgaria’s evolving political order. By rejecting simplistic analogies and foregrounding structural dynamics, Assoc. Prof. Stankov highlights both the constraints and the risks inherent in Radev’s ascent—capturing a moment in which the promise of stability coexists uneasily with the possibility of democratic backsliding.

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

A Vote for Stability, Not Ideology

Bulgarian President Rumen Radev. — Then-Bulgarian President Rumen Radev speaks to the media following his meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on January 30, 2017. Photo: Dreamstime.

Professor Stankov, what does Rumen Radev’s landslide victory tell us about Bulgaria’s current political position after eight elections in five years? Should this outcome be interpreted primarily as a demand for stability and anti-corruption reform, or as evidence of a deeper ideological realignment?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: Radev’s victory is best read as a demand for stabilization after prolonged institutional volatility, rather than a clear ideological departure from underlying voter preferences. It mobilized a coalition against discredited incumbents, not a coherent positive ideology. What earned Radev support from the electorate was also his balanced position on the war that Russia started in Ukraine. As Russia has, justifiably or not, a special place in the hearts and minds of many Bulgarians, this stance resonated deeply on identity grounds.

How should we situate Radev’s victory within your broader theory of populist cycles? Does his rise reflect a classic populist moment in which economic anxiety, elite discredit, and identity-based grievances converge into a new electoral coalition?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: Populist cycles are a long-term phenomenon. Radev is a short-term manifestation of populist demand, which is consistently strong in Bulgaria. The theory of populist cycles rests on identity, fairness, and economic pillars. If it offers the appropriate lens through which to view Bulgarian politics at the moment, then identity and fairness certainly played a role, though less so the state of the economy. Identity mattered because voters appear to have stopped associating themselves with previous pro-Western populists, finding insufficient representation in them. Fairness also played a role, as the condition of the judicial system is no longer tolerable.

Identity Over Economics, Structure Over Cycles

In your earlier work on Bulgaria and Germany, you identify unemployment, inequality, trade openness, and migration as factors associated with stronger right-wing populist support. To what extent do these structural pressures help explain Radev’s success in 2026, even if he does not fit neatly into a conventional far-right mold?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: Yes, but only imperfectly. Cyclical pressures such as inflation and emigration may have been relevant. However, Radev’s support draws from both left- and right-leaning constituencies. This is consistent with identity factors and deeper structural issues shaping Bulgarian voters, rather than the cyclical factors that typically underpin a populist rise.

Radev won on an anti-corruption platform, but anti-corruption discourse in Central and Eastern Europe often serves as a bridge between democratic renewal and populist concentration of power. In your view, does his mandate open a path toward institutional repair, or does it risk legitimizing a new phase of executive centralization in the name of cleansing the system?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: This will depend on two opposing forces. On the one hand, there are new faces in politics under Radev who would like to start from scratch. This would be consistent with the institutional repair hypothesis. On the other hand, there are also some older figures among the incoming cohort of politicians who have not yet had the chance to secure a share of “political rents.” This would be consistent with the hypothesis that consolidation of power serves the redistribution of political rents rather than the renewal of democracy in Bulgaria. Whichever force prevails will determine whether Bulgaria moves toward rebuilding or redistributing. I sincerely hope that idealism will prevail, but history suggests that, in poorer countries, political rents often outweigh ideals.

Closer to Fico Than Orbán in Europe’s Fault Lines

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico speaks at a press conference following a Visegrad Group (V4) meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, on February 15, 2016. Photo: Dreamstime.

A central question for European observers is whether Radev represents the emergence of a new Orban-type actor inside the EU. Do you see him as a potential ideological successor to Orban in the nexus of EU-Russia tensions, or is that analogy too blunt for the Bulgarian case?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: On the surface, Radev and Orban appear more aligned with the interests of the Kremlin than with those of the EU. However, I think Radev strikes a more balanced tone, at least for now. Whether he will act as an Orban 2.0 is too early to tell, but I do not expect him to go as far as Orban did in his last term in office in terms of aligning with the Kremlin. At the same time, we should not be naive about Radev’s background: he is a military officer from a period when the Bulgarian army perceived NATO as an adversary and Russia as a source of public and ideological goods. It would be unnatural for him to suddenly change his identity.

If not Orban, is Radev better understood as closer to Robert Fico: rhetorically skeptical of Brussels and supportive of “pragmatic” relations with Moscow, yet constrained by economic dependence on the EU and by Bulgaria’s embeddedness in NATO and European institutions?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: I believe Radev fits that description. I expect him to pursue a balancing act without creating major disruptions for NATO or the EU.

How should we interpret Radev’s position on Ukraine? He has opposed military support and criticized parts of the EU’s approach, yet analysts suggest he may avoid outright vetoes while preserving Bulgaria’s role in the broader European defense ecosystem. Does this amount to strategic ambiguity, domestic balancing, or a more systematic geopolitical repositioning?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: It is not natural for Radev to oppose the interests of the Kremlin; doing so would run against who he is and how he has developed as an individual and as a politician. However, I do not think he is inherently confrontational. He projects confidence and a desire for dialogue, which may serve his strategy of ambiguity. Given his current level of electoral support, I do not think he needs to balance domestically—he holds the strongest political mandate in recent memory.

Pragmatism or Russophilia? A Shifting Political Language

What do Radev’s statements about renewing ties with Russia and rethinking Europe’s security architecture tell us about the evolving vocabulary of pro-Russian politics inside the EU? Are we seeing old-style Russophilia, or a newer populist language of “pragmatism,” sovereignty, and anti-moralism designed to be more electorally acceptable?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: Because of who Radev is, he is a natural candidate to do the Kremlin’s bidding in Europe, to re-legitimize the economic and political relationships between Europe and the Kremlin, and, why not, to do their dirty laundry. Let us not forget, however, that Radev represents a small and declining nation among many others. In that sense, although Radev is a valuable asset—the Kremlin will take any asset that comes its way at this stage—he is not its prime candidate. The Kremlin’s prime European asset is not even in Europe.

Your work argues that populists weaponize identity conflicts and economic hardships for political gain. In the Bulgarian case, which mattered more in this election: material grievances such as inflation, euro adoption, and living costs, or identity and geopolitical divisions over Russia, Europe, and national sovereignty?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: I believe the latter mattered more. Russian propaganda in Bulgaria is very strong, while the economy is not performing poorly enough for cyclical factors to outweigh identity conflicts.

Balancing Brussels and Moscow While Eyeing Judicial Reform

Radev is not a newcomer; he governed for years from the presidency before stepping down to seek executive power. Looking back at his presidential record, what patterns in his political style, institutional behavior, and crisis communication most help us anticipate how he may govern now as prime minister?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: It is hard for me to predict his moves as prime minister. Although he came to power with one of the most remarkable electoral victories in Bulgarian democratic history, he will probably not rush to disrupt what has worked well so far for the Bulgarian economy. For example, he attempted to launch a referendum on joining the Eurozone in his final year as president, but he would not take Bulgaria out of the Eurozone. He may be inclined to cozy up to the Kremlin, but he would not forgo the benefits of EU membership. What he could attempt—and history may credit him for—is to secure a constitutional majority for large-scale judicial reform. Whatever his rhetoric abroad, if he manages to fix that system, which has long hindered the development of a level playing field in Bulgaria, he will be remembered for his domestic achievements rather than his external balancing act.

Do you see Progressive Bulgaria as a durable governing project, or as a typical new-party vehicle built around a single leader and a temporary coalition of discontented voters? In other words, does this victory mark the stabilization of a new political order, or simply the latest phase in Bulgaria’s volatile anti-establishment cycle?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: Like any party built around a single leader rather than a consensual political platform, Progressive Bulgaria will likely fizzle out once Radev is no longer at its helm.

Reform Window or Lost Generation?

One of the themes in your research is that not all populists are equally damaging in economic governance, especially in Europe, where institutional constraints can mute the worst forms of macroeconomic populism. Given Bulgaria’s EU obligations, eurozone membership, and fiscal constraints, how much room does Radev actually have to behave as a disruptive populist in office? Yet your work also stresses that the economic moderation of populists does not necessarily prevent damage to the rule of law, democratic accountability, or civil society. If Radev is constrained economically, should the greater concern be institutional capture rather than macroeconomic irresponsibility?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: Economically, Radev has little room to do significant damage. His external constraints are substantial, and he would therefore be unable to pursue the kind of macroeconomic populism that has plagued Latin American economies in the past.

Politically, however, he may do more damage if he squanders his opportunity to build a majority for constitutional reforms that are vital for the country’s long-term development. If he does squander it, Bulgarians may need to wait another generation—or even two—before a similarly strong political figure emerges with a popular mandate for reform.

This broader concern, that European populists may do more damage politically than economically, raises an important question: if economic constraints limit their capacity for harm, should political constraints also be strengthened? There has recently been a proposal for EU institutional reform to limit the consensus principle in certain areas, particularly foreign policy. Proposals of this kind may bring the European project closer to its original vision of uniting European nations under shared values. However, the trade-off is that many smaller states could become less influential in decision-making. To protect itself from malign external influence, the EU may need to reconsider some of its foundational principles—evolve, or else…

Looking ahead, what is your medium-term forecast for Bulgaria under Radev? Do you expect a pragmatic, nationally framed but still fundamentally European government; a creeping illiberal turn marked by pressure on the judiciary and media; or a shorter-lived experiment in which governing responsibilities quickly erode the broad electoral coalition that brought him to power?

Assoc. Prof. Petar Stankov: That depends on how quickly he starts forming a coalition for constitutional change. If this part of his agenda starts finding excuses to be pushed further back in time while mundane issues take centre stage, the medium-term forecast for Bulgaria would not be great. If a majority for constitutional changes takes centre stage in the political narrative coming from Radev, then I would be more optimistic. In general, I would be an optimist until proven wrong, which, given the Bulgarian experience of the last few decades, has never been a hard theorem to prove.

Assoc. Prof. Otova: Under Radev, the Path to Autocracy in Bulgaria Becomes All Too Easy

April 27, 2026

by ECPS_admin Authoritarianism Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Interviews

Associate Professor Ildiko Otova, in an interview with the ECPS, offers a compelling analysis of Bulgaria’s post-election trajectory under Rumen Radev. Following a landslide victory driven by anti-corruption sentiment and political fatigue, Radev has consolidated power in a system marked by institutional fragility. Assoc. Prof. Otova argues that his success reflects not a new geopolitical shift, but a strategic exploitation of existing cleavages, enabled by a “specific discursive situation” of empty rhetoric and symbolic politics. While his ambiguity has mobilized a broad electorate, it also masks deeper risks. As populism transitions from protest to governance, Assoc. Prof. Otova warns that, under conditions of concentrated power and weak safeguards, “the path to autocracy becomes all too easy.”

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In the aftermath of Bulgaria’s April 2026 parliamentary elections, the country has entered a new and uncertain political phase marked by both the promise of stability and the risk of accelerated democratic erosion. Rumen Radev’s newly formed Progressive Bulgaria party secured a decisive majority after years of political fragmentation, capitalizing on widespread anti-corruption sentiment, voter fatigue with repeated elections, and growing socioeconomic anxieties following eurozone accession. While his victory ended a prolonged cycle of unstable coalition governments, it also raised urgent questions about the future trajectory of Bulgarian democracy, particularly given Radev’s ambivalent positioning between the European Union and Russia.

Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Associate Professor Ildiko Otova, Head of Political Science Department at New Bulgarian University, offers a nuanced and analytically rigorous assessment of the structural and discursive dynamics underpinning Radev’s rise. As she argues, his victory “should not be attributed solely to Russia or to the broader Europe-Russia divide”; rather, it reflects a more complex political environment in which he has “skillfully exploited” existing cleavages, often “using minimal words and gestures to convey what different audiences want to hear.” This strategic ambiguity has allowed him to mobilize a remarkably heterogeneous electorate, ranging from pro-European reformists to nationalist and pro-Russian constituencies.

Assoc. Prof. Otova situates this development within a broader pattern of normalized populism in Bulgaria, where “what was once an episodic phenomenon has become a structural feature of the system.” In such a context, Radev’s success appears less as an anomaly than as the predictable result of a political order shaped by institutional distrust, party-system exhaustion, and what she terms a “specific discursive situation” characterized by cycles of “empty rhetoric” and symbolic politics. His campaign slogan, “We are ready, we can do it, and we will succeed,” captured this dynamic, offering not policy substance but an affective promise of exit from political stagnation.

At the same time, Assoc. Prof. Otova underscores the deeper identity tensions that continue to shape Bulgarian politics. Euroscepticism, she notes, is structured by enduring paradoxes, including the perception of the EU as an external imposition, contrasted with the framing of Russia as culturally “internal.” This ambivalence has enabled Radev to navigate competing geopolitical imaginaries while maintaining what she describes as a dual discourse, one directed at domestic audiences, another at Brussels.

Yet the central concern animating Assoc. Prof. Otova’s analysis is the transformation of populism from oppositional rhetoric into governing practice. With a consolidated parliamentary majority and limited institutional constraints, “concrete actions and policies are required,” and it is precisely under these conditions, she warns, that “the path to autocracy becomes all too easy.” In a system already marked by weak institutional safeguards and vulnerability to state capture, the concentration of executive power risks reproducing, rather than dismantling, entrenched oligarchic networks.

This interview with ECPS situates Bulgaria at a critical juncture. While Radev’s rise reflects broader global trends of democratic backsliding and populist normalization, Assoc. Prof. Otova’s insights highlight the contingent nature of political outcomes, shaped not only by leadership, but by institutional resilience, societal mobilization, and the unresolved tensions at the heart of Bulgaria’s democratic and European identity.

Ildiko Otova, an Associate Professor of Political Science and the Head of Political Science Department at New Bulgarian University.

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

Not a New Cleavage, but a Strategic Exploitation of Old Divides

Professor Otova, given your argument that Bulgarian Euroscepticism must be read through the historically embedded Europe–Russia axis, does Rumen Radev’s victory mark a new phase in this cleavage, or merely its latest institutional expression?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: Relations with Russia have long been central to Bulgarian politics, shaped by shared history, culture, personal connections, economic ties, and geopolitical factors. A widely circulated photo of Radev with Putin drew significant attention, prompting international media to describe him as “Russia’s new Trojan horse in Europe.” Experts have rightly pointed to Russia’s involvement in Radev’s political rise and raised concerns about campaign interference, online influence operations, and opaque funding sources suggesting substantial investment.

However, Radev’s victory should not be attributed solely to Russia or to the broader Europe–Russia divide. His win does not mark a new phase in this cleavage; rather, he has skillfully exploited it, using minimal words and gestures to convey what different audiences want to hear. In a campaign—and a political environment—often full of empty rhetoric, Radev has become adept at using silence, paradoxically communicating exactly what various constituencies seek.

In practice, little is known about the figures in his party, but among those who have become visible, we observe both openly provocative pro-Russian positions and the exact opposite. This is not to downplay Russia’s role; instead, it underscores the need for more comprehensive explanations.

Euroscepticism Built on Cultural Paradoxes and Identity Tensions

To what extent does Radev’s rise reflect not only geopolitical ambivalence but also a deeper identity crisis in post-communist Bulgaria, where competing civilizational imaginaries—Europeanization, Slavic-Orthodox affinity, and post-socialist nostalgia—intersect? In your framework, how does this identity fragmentation reshape the nature of Bulgarian Euroscepticism?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: Bulgarian Euroscepticism rests on several paradoxes. The first is that the EU and “Europe” are frequently depicted as external to Bulgaria and Bulgarians—as actors that impose unacceptable values and adopt a lecturing posture. Yet this hostility toward external influence does not extend to all external actors. Russia, for example, is often not perceived as foreign in the same way; rather, it is framed as culturally “internal” due to a presumed Slavic-Orthodox affinity.

The second paradox is temporal. Resistance to the EU did not precede Bulgaria’s accession but developed alongside it. Until the early 2000s, Bulgaria was characterized by a broad pro-European consensus.

Third, although Bulgaria has been an EU member state for years, European issues remain weakly embedded in its domestic political agenda. This does not mean that anti-EU narratives are absent. On the contrary, they are visible in discourses about massive migration allegedly changing the national gene pool, “stealing” the pensions of the elderly because EU policies and values are too liberal, and attacks on so-called “gender ideology,” among other themes.

Fourth, the deeper Bulgaria’s European integration becomes, the more its political elites tend to adopt anti-European positions. This shift occurs primarily through the normalization of populism. In this sense, within the Bulgarian context, the relationship between Euroscepticism and populism is particularly important—though not predetermined. There are also examples of populist, anti-establishment projects that remain pro-European. Among voters, too, there are those who are anti-establishment and anti-corruption yet remain pro-European. Notably, Radev has managed to mobilize them as well, including a significant portion of the so-called Generation Z.

There is also one more factor that should not be overlooked: his flirtation with the idea of a potential referendum on the euro. People do not necessarily need a rational explanation for why food is expensive; they need someone or something to blame. Prices do not even have to rise in reality—it is enough to sustain a narrative of rising costs. In this sense, the timing and the overall situation played perfectly into Radev’s hands.

Exhaustion, Silence, and the Power of Narrative Control

Bulgaria protests. — Protesters chant anti-government slogans during a demonstration in central Sofia, Bulgaria on July 26, 2013. Photo: Anton Chalakov / Dreamstime.

Should Radev’s success be understood primarily as anti-establishment populism, geopolitical revisionism, or a hybrid formation in which anti-corruption discourse masks a deeper pro-Russian reorientation?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: Any of these three explanations is valid, yet even taken together, they remain too simplistic. As a citizen, I find it increasingly difficult to remain silent about the pervasive corruption in Bulgaria and the broader condition of the country, or to withhold my solidarity with the despair my fellow citizens feel toward the political elite. After the events of recent years, and the evident futility of going to the polls for an eighth time, there is a sense of collective exhaustion. Nevertheless, I will attempt an answer within an academic framework.

In my view, the main reason for his victory lies in what I would describe as a specific discursive situation. Since 2020, Bulgaria has been caught not only in a cycle of repeated elections but also in a cycle of empty rhetoric. Radev has managed to control the narrative so effectively that he appears to tell everyone what they want to hear—largely through silence. This is neither classic anti-elitist rhetoric built on the populist trope of the corrupt elite versus the honest, long-suffering people nor a standard expression of movements grounded in a thin-centred ideology.

“We are ready, we can do it, and we will succeed”—the words with which he announced his departure from the presidency, later adopted as his campaign slogan—projected a sense of purpose. They offered not concrete details, but hope for an exit from a cycle of meaningless repetition. In a political environment where emotions and symbolic gestures carry greater weight than rational argument, and where both traditional and digital media amplify urgency and a pervasive sense of crisis, this has proven sufficient. For citizens who are exhausted and perceive threats as omnipresent, such messaging resonates deeply.

Populism as the New Normal in Bulgarian Politics

In your work with Evelina Staykova, you argue that populism in Bulgaria has become normalized through party-system exhaustion, state–economy fusion, institutional distrust, and the digital turn. Does the 2026 election represent the culmination of this normalization?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: Since 2001, Bulgaria has experienced several so-called waves of populism: the return of Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the rise of GERB, and the emergence of post-2020, protest-driven, short-lived “pop-up” political projects. Taken together, these developments illustrate how what was once an episodic phenomenon has become a structural feature of the system. Paradoxically, the populist wave has itself become a constant.

Populism is now the defining characteristic of Bulgaria’s political order—the norm rather than the exception—making it unrealistic to expect fundamentally different outcomes. Radev fits squarely within this pattern: his victory represents not an unexpected populist surge, but the predictable result of a persistently populist political environment, shaped by the specific discursive situation I mentioned.

If this moment does represent a culmination, one might expect either a subsequent decline in populism or a reversion to pre-populist politics. However, such a scenario currently appears unlikely.

Radev has long combined anti-corruption, nationalist, and anti-establishment rhetoric from within one of the state’s highest institutions. Does his transition from the presidency to executive power illustrate the transformation of populism from protest discourse into governing logic?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: This is the greatest challenge he faces. The presidency, even though he ultimately governed alone through caretaker governments and later during the pre-election period, gave him the opportunity to craft narratives. However, when one commands such a majority and holds executive power, concrete actions and policies are required.

We have had populists in power before—the GERB administration is one such example—but the dynamics were different. The coalition nature of those governments, especially the most recent one, created room to maneuver. Under Radev, there will be no such leeway. And that is the greatest challenge we face. Under these conditions, the path to autocracy becomes all too easy.

Limits of the Orbán Analogy

Editorial illustration: Rumen Radev and Viktor Orbán depicted against national flags, symbolizing political tensions between Bulgaria and Hungary. Photo: Dreamstime.

How should we assess the analogy between Radev and Orbán? Does Radev possess the ideological coherence and institutional ambition required for Orbán-style illiberal state-building, or is Bulgaria’s EU dependency likely to constrain him?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: Let us begin with the obvious: Orbán is an experienced politician with a long, well-documented, and easily traceable career. Radev, by contrast, was effectively parachuted from the military into the presidency—a role he has never fully mastered. He entered politics without a solid ideological, political, or broader conceptual foundation, essentially as an empty vessel into which almost anything could be poured.

Another obvious point is that Bulgaria is not Hungary. Radev lacks ideological consistency and has no substantial political background or prior experience; he is, to a large extent, a product of the circumstances that enabled his rise—a product of the status quo, the absence of alternatives, and the prevailing populist momentum. Looking back, we also cannot entirely rule out the possibility that his ascent was shaped by external forces. What is beyond doubt, however, is the presence of clear ambition.

In this sense, the emergence of a non-liberal form of democracy in Bulgaria cannot be ruled out. The European Union, having learned from its experience with Hungary, is likely to be far more cautious. Against this backdrop, Radev’s first major test will be the so-called judicial reform.

Is Radev better understood as an Orbán-type system builder, a Fico-type pragmatic Eurosceptic, or a specifically Bulgarian figure shaped by Russophile memory, anti-corruption politics, and institutional volatility?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: I do not think these comparisons meaningfully deepen our understanding of Radev or improve our ability to predict future developments. There are simply too many specific factors at play, and the international landscape is in constant flux. What existed elsewhere yesterday may not necessarily apply here tomorrow.

The Politics of Dual Discourse

Your research suggests that Bulgarian populism often blurs ideological distinctions. How should we classify Progressive Bulgaria: left-conservative, national-populist, technocratic-populist, or post-ideological?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: Yes, populism undoubtedly blurs ideological distinctions; this is intrinsic to its nature. Consider Progressive Bulgaria’s program: despite the label “progressive,” its economic agenda is largely far right, even though some members of its expert economic team previously worked on more left-leaning projects. This example alone illustrates the extent to which ideological lines are being blurred.

For this reason, I see the party as best fitting within a post-ideological framework. Populism can be understood as a de-ideologized ideology. It incorporates elements from other ideologies, yet remains neither left nor right, and this is precisely one of the greatest dangers it poses—the de-ideologization, and consequently the depoliticization, of the political. Progressive Bulgaria, at least for now, aligns well with this understanding.

Does Radev’s discourse of “pragmatism” toward Russia and “critical thinking” toward Europe signal a strategic foreign policy stance, or does it reveal a more profound ontological insecurity in Bulgaria’s self-understanding as both a European and historically Russia-linked polity? How does identity anxiety translate into political legitimacy for such leaders?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: I believe these statements by Radev are part of a broader strategy to tell each audience what it wants to hear. It is highly likely that he will continue to use one discourse in Bulgaria and another in Brussels. This is nothing new; Bulgarian politicians have long maintained such a dual discourse. In Radev’s case, however, it will be especially evident, likely conveyed through various spokespersons as well.

At the same time, Radev will have to speak not only to pro-Russian citizens at home. The EU still enjoys the support of more than half of Bulgarians, and some of those who backed Radev did so not because of his pro-Russian stance, but because of his anti-corruption declarations. He will have to meet their expectations with tangible actions, as narrative alone will no longer suffice.

Strategic Ambiguity Between Brussels and Moscow

Radev’s Ukraine stance appears to combine opposition to military aid with reluctance to openly block EU decisions. Is this strategic ambiguity a governing necessity, or a sign of deeper tension between his electorate’s geopolitical pluralism and his own Russophile instincts?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: I cannot say whether Radev holds Russophile instincts. If he does, it would be rather ironic given his background in American military academies. Joking aside, there is a Russian saying: “We will live and we will see”—time will tell. However, I would assume that Radev will not openly oppose EU decisions.

To what extent did Radev absorb the political space of openly pro-Russian and nationalist parties such as Revival, and does this suggest moderation of the far right or mainstreaming of its core themes?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: The myth of moderation is remarkably persistent, but I do not find it convincing. For years, analysts have claimed that once the far right gains power, it will be tamed. The opposite has happened: instead, far-right views have steadily become the norm. One need only look across the EU to observe this trend.

When it comes to Revival, Radev succeeded in attracting a significant portion of its electorate. As I have already noted, he now faces the difficult task of continuing to speak to multiple constituencies at once—and to do so convincingly through his actions. This will determine whether he fully absorbs the Revival electorate or, conversely, whether that electorate becomes further radicalized and shifts into opposition. I would not underestimate the leader of Revival, who is a seasoned political actor.

Given Bulgaria’s captured institutions, weak trust, and repeated anti-corruption mobilizations, can Radev realistically dismantle oligarchic networks, or does his concentration of power risk reproducing the same state-capture logic under a new banner?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: This issue is extremely important. The resignation of the acting chief prosecutor, coming just days after Radev’s victory, was among the first signs of a new arrangement and already signals a realignment within oligarchic networks. I would also return to the question of how Radev’s seemingly expensive campaign was funded. Where did that money come from? Even these few points leave little room for optimism.

Radev’s regime is likely to reconstitute a state-capture model—perhaps initially in a more covert and less overtly assertive form—but such a configuration is unlikely to remain restrained over time.

From Anti-Elite Narrative to Elite Reality

Anti-government protests against corruption intensified across Sofia, Bulgaria on July 15, 2020. Photo: Dreamstime.

You have argued that anti-establishment populists in power may themselves become the new elite. How quickly might this paradox confront Radev once he assumes responsibility for inflation, eurozone adjustment, corruption reform, and EU funding?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: Radev has long belonged to the elite. After all, he has been the sitting president for nearly nine years. His seemingly modest gestures—driving his own car, grumbling about the lack of parking spaces in Sofia, and publicly paying his parking tickets—are mostly for show, part of the narrative drafting.

That said, I understand the core of the question. Given the international environment and the many urgent issues awaiting resolution, the risk that mounting challenges will overwhelm the new status quo is very real. Radev’s victory will ultimately need to be substantiated through concrete actions. Let us return to the notion of a “de-ideologized ideology” and the broader process of depoliticizing politics. How can genuinely sustainable policies be designed when they are no longer anchored in a clear and coherent vision?

My concern is that the emerging political reality is stripping politics of its very essence: not only the capacity to deliver immediate solutions, but also the obligation to develop policies grounded in a substantive vision of the world and its internal order. Returning to Radev, it is entirely possible that the failure of the new elite could trigger a fresh wave of protests. The key questions are whether such protests would be strong enough and, more importantly, what kind of new political configuration they might produce.

A new, powerful actor—a new master of the narrative who can and will succeed—will not emerge overnight. The possibility that, if Radev fails, Bulgaria could enter yet another cycle of instability cannot be ruled out. Even so, I am inclined to believe that Radev and those around him will, at least for a while, remain in power.

Diaspora Divides and the Limits of Democratic Agency

In your work on contestatory citizenship, you highlight the transformative potential of civic agency. In the current context, can civic mobilization and diaspora engagement mitigate what appears to be an emerging crisis of democratic and European identity, or are these forms of participation themselves being reshaped by populist narratives of belonging and exclusion?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: Let me begin by noting that the diaspora is not necessarily pro-European—quite the contrary. While some are pro-European, others are anti-European, including Bulgarian emigrants in other EU member states. I continue to believe in the power of contestatory citizenship. However, as I have already noted, the key question is what exactly a new wave of protests might bring about.

Looking ahead, do you expect Radev’s Bulgaria to become a pragmatic EU-anchored government with Russophile rhetoric, a soft illiberal regime inside the EU, or an unstable populist experiment likely to fracture under the burdens of governance?

Assoc. Prof. Ildiko Otova: I do not think these three options are mutually exclusive.

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

April 18, 2026

by ECPS_admin Economics Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

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

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brexit Strains Britain More Than Europe

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

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

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

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

Economic Reality Undercuts Sovereignty Claims

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

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

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

Policy Shifts Signal Economic Costs

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

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

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

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

Populists Shift Debate to Identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identity Politics Deepens Divisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Narratives Replace Clear Policy

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

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

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

Reform UK Channels Public Discontent

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

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

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

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

Populists Turn EU Skepticism into Power

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

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

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

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

Brexit Accelerates Culture Wars

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brexit Costs Fail to Shift Votes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brexit Fuels UK Fragmentation Risks

UK Map — Photo: Michele Ursi / Dreamstime.

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

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

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

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

Pressures Grow Within States, Not Between Them

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

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

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

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

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

April 17, 2026

by ECPS_admin Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Interviews

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

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exhaustion, Not Erasure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear Worked Until Reality Intervened

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democratic Correction, Structural Uncertainty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ridicule as the Limit of Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality Pushes Back

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

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

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

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

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

Bread-and-Butter Politics Against Culture War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culture Wars Were Central to Orbánism

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

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

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

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

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

Orbán’s Exit Will Not End the Network

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

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

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

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

A Different Tone Toward Brussels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orbán Is Gone, the Project Is Not

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

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

Agency Matters, but So Do Structures

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 17, 2026

by ECPS_admin Economics Editor’s Choice European Observatory Home Interviews Migration

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

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brexit Has Intensified, Not Resolved, Structural Economic Pressures

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

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

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

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

Growth, Trade, and Investment Have Weakened as Expected

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

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

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

Trade Took the Hardest Hit, While Services Showed Resilience

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

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

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

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

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

Short-Term Adjustment, Long-Term Disintegration

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

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

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

Migration Fell from the EU, Rose from Elsewhere

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

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

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

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

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

Migration Policy Reveals the Limits of Political Steering

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

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

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

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

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

Mismanaged Migration Policy Fuels Shortages and Bottlenecks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Widespread Impact Undermines Claims of Uneven Gains

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

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

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

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

Formal Sovereignty Cannot Override Economic Realities

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

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

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

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

Brexit Reconfigures Long-Standing Migration Debates

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

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

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

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

Brexit Pushed the Far Right Toward a European Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economic Reality Challenges Populist Narratives

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

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

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

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

Populists Shift Strategy as Exit Loses Appeal

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

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

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

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

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

April 15, 2026

by ECPS_admin Editor’s Choice Home Interviews

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

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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

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

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

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

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

When Anti-Elitism Strengthens Rather Than Undermines Democracy

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

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

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

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

Which Grievances Make Populism More Democratic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Episodic Shocks Recalibrate Accountability

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

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

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

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

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

Blame, Narrative, and the Politics of Reform

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

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

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

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

Scandals and the Limits of Business Power

Cambridge Analytica. — Photo: Dreamstime.

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

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

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

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

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

Affect, Elections, and Democratic Pushback

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

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

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

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

Populism, Redistribution, and the Limits of State Trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Some Scandals Escape Partisan Filters

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personalizing Power, Mobilizing Outrage

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

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

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

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

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

Big Tech, Public Resentment, and Regulatory Demand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cambridge Analytica and Divergent Regulatory Paths

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Populism Corrects and When It Corrodes

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

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

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