Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the AfD’s strength in Eastern Germany cannot be explained by poverty alone. Instead, its rise reflects the interaction of nativist attitudes, political alienation, territorial decline, demographic shrinkage, and the enduring memory of post-reunification disruption. The AfD’s political success lies in converting disparate grievances—over immigration, economic insecurity, public services, identity, and distant decision-making—into a unified anti-elite narrative. Dr. Dias stresses that the Brandmauer may remain necessary as an institutional safeguard, but it is insufficient as a political strategy. A durable democratic response, he argues, must address material insecurity, regional neglect, state capacity, immigration, and recognition while offering citizens a credible sense of belonging and a recognizable future.
Some election results change governments. Others force a country to reconsider the story it tells about itself. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt belongs to the second category. When a radical-right party comes close to winning half the electorate in a German state, it is no longer enough to speak of a “protest vote.” The question becomes a different one: how did the AfD manage, in parts of Eastern Germany, to become a socially rooted and electorally dominant political force?
The easy answer would be poverty. It is also, to a large extent, the wrong answer. The available research shows that attitudes towards immigration, national identity and political elites explain support for the AfD far better than individual economic deprivation does (Hansen & Olsen, 2024; Kailitz & Rippl, 2026; Schröder et al., 2026). But this does not mean that economics, place and abandonment are irrelevant. It points instead to something more interesting: what matters is less absolute poverty than the experience of loss — or what might be called the “fear of falling”: the loss of status, population, opportunity, recognition and control over the future. Such experiences can produce political alienation. It is the AfD, however, that supplies the nativist and anti-establishment language capable of giving that alienation meaning.
To understand this mechanism, we need to begin before the AfD itself. After 1990, Eastern Germany underwent an economic and social transformation of extraordinary intensity. Reunification was unquestionably an act of political liberation, but it also meant the disappearance of companies, careers, professional hierarchies and institutions that had structured the daily lives of millions of people. Steffen Mau describes this process in terms of status demotion, the transfer of elites, demographic transformation and the loss of biographical security (Mau, 2019). It was not simply that some people lost their jobs. For many, an entire social world suddenly lost its value.
When Economic Loss Becomes Political Memory
There is now evidence that these experiences left lasting political consequences. Kellermann (2024), studying workers affected by the privatizations carried out by the Treuhandanstalt, found lower levels of trust and greater detachment from institutions and established parties decades later. This does not mean that the Treuhand “caused” the AfD. It means that an economic experience can become a political memory when the loss is attributed to decisions made by distant institutions. There is a difference between thinking, “my job disappeared,” and thinking “they decided that the world I belonged to no longer had value.
That experience also acquired a concrete geography. Since reunification, Saxony-Anhalt has lost roughly a quarter of its population. Depopulation on this scale does not simply mean fewer inhabitants. It means young people leaving, schools with fewer pupils, shops closing, services becoming harder to sustain and communities growing progressively older. Höhne, Kölzer and Träger (2025), analyzing more than 1,400 municipalities in Eastern Germany, found a robust relationship between long-term population decline and support for the AfD. The most important finding, however, is that the same pattern does not appear with equal strength in support for the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. Territorial decline, then, does not determine political choice; it creates conditions that a party may or may not be able to mobilize.
It is in this sense that Andrés Rodríguez-Pose (2018) speaks of “the revenge of the places that don’t matter.” The problem is not simply that such places are poor. It is the feeling of living in a territory from which the future has withdrawn. A region may be materially far richer than it was thirty years ago and, at the same time, feel that it has lost relevance. Universities expand elsewhere. The most prestigious jobs appear somewhere else. Young people leave. Decision-makers live far away. The country can prosper in aggregate while particular communities see, above all, what is disappearing. Inequality then ceases to exist only between individuals; it begins to exist between places.
From Collective Disadvantage to Populist Mobilization
This is where the economic explanation meets the cultural one. Recent research is quite clear on two points that have to be held together. First, nativist, anti-immigration and anti-elite attitudes are genuine political drivers of the AfD vote; they should not be reduced to some form of economic false consciousness (Hansen & Olsen, 2024; Schröder et al., 2026). Second, political alienation and feelings of collective disadvantage are particularly strong in the East and help explain why such attitudes find more fertile ground there (Kailitz & Rippl, 2026; Pickel & Pickel, 2026). Kailitz and Rippl put it especially well: the seeds are not necessarily different; the soil is more fertile.
This is how the false choice between “economics” and “culture” can be resolved. A closed factory does not automatically produce xenophobia. A distant hospital does not produce nationalism. But accumulated experiences of loss, distance and inadequate recognition can nourish the sense that institutions no longer represent “people like us.” At that point, a populist narrative becomes more plausible: there is a forgotten people, and there are elites who govern for others. That is precisely the narrative the AfD learned to build.
The party founded in 2013 did not begin with the ideological configuration we know today. It emerged above all from the euro crisis, with a Eurosceptic, conservative and economically liberal profile. Between 2015 and 2017, however, immigration, refugees, Islam and national identity shifted the party’s center of gravity, bringing it closer to what Cas Mudde defines as the populist radical right: a combination of nativism, authoritarianism and populism (Arzheimer & Berning, 2019; Mudde, 2007). The euro crisis created the organization; the refugee crisis turned it into a mass political force.
Since then, the AfD has shown an extraordinary capacity to adapt. Hansen and Olsen (2024) describe it as a populist issue entrepreneur: a party able to retain ownership of the issues on which it already enjoys an advantage — above all immigration — while continually absorbing new conflicts. The euro, refugees, the pandemic, climate, energy, gender, Ukraine and the politics of memory are very different issues. The AfD manages to present them as manifestations of the same problem. That is its central political talent.
The Brandmauer Paradox and the AfD’s Anti-Elite Narrative
A railway station that closes is a transport problem. A factory that shuts down belongs to economics. Immigration is migration policy. The war in Ukraine is foreign policy. Gender belongs to the culture wars. The AfD turns all of them into a single story: the elites in Berlin and Brussels have stopped governing in the name of ordinary people. The issues change. The culprit remains the same.
Immigration occupies a central place in this narrative because it functions both as a real political issue and as a symbolic condensation of several anxieties. It can be connected to security, housing, schools, the welfare state, Islam, borders and identity. In a territory that has already experienced profound transformations decided in distant centers of power, it can also be presented as yet another change carried out “without us.” The interpretation does not need to be empirically accurate in order to be politically effective. Populism often succeeds not because it explains each problem better, but because it connects different problems within a single moral explanation.
This is also why it is no longer sufficient to speak simply of a “protest vote.” Mudde (2019) draws attention to the contemporary normalization of the radical right: ideas that once existed on the political margins gradually enter everyday politics. The Eastern German case adds a troubling generational dimension. Heinze and Scheuer (2026) find among young AfD voters not merely volatility or rebellion, but relatively stable partisan identification, closely associated with nativism. These young people did not experience the GDR, the Treuhand or reunification. Historical experience is no longer only biographical memory. It has become, at least in part, a political inheritance.
This is where the dilemma of the Brandmauer emerges: the firewall through which Germany’s mainstream parties refuse to govern with the AfD. There are powerful democratic reasons for maintaining it. Winning elections does not give any party the right to weaken fundamental rights, pluralism, or institutional independence. But an obvious political problem arises when the excluded force comes close to winning half the vote: the more all the other parties have to cooperate in order to keep it out of power, the easier it becomes for the AfD to say that “they are all the same” and that it alone represents a genuine alternative.
Why the Brandmauer Is Necessary but Not Enough
Yascha Mounk (2018) helps illuminate the paradox: populism seeks to present the liberal institutions that constrain majority power as obstacles to democracy itself. The Brandmauer (firewall) may therefore be necessary as an institutional defense and insufficient as a political strategy. It answers the question, “how do we stop the AfD from governing?” It does not answer the prior question: “why do so many people want it to govern?”
Understanding the answer to that second question does not mean excusing it. Anne Applebaum (2020) reminds us that the contemporary illiberal threat rarely begins with the immediate destruction of democracy. It can advance through the gradual occupation of institutions, administrative changes, appointments, education, culture and the media. In Saxony-Anhalt, a move by the AfD from opposition into government would give it access to precisely these areas. Sociologically explaining an electorate does not require us to minimize the consequences of the programme it chooses.
But historical memory is not enough either. Tony Judt (2010) reminded us that post-war European democracies did not survive because of constitutions alone. They built welfare states, public services, security and the expectation that the future could be better. A democratic order becomes fragile when it can tell its citizens only two things: “adapt to change” and “do not vote for them.” The first offers no security. The second offers no project.
Perhaps this is, in the end, the best way to understand the result in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD did not win simply because a population became poorer, or because nearly half the electorate suddenly became radicalized. It won because it managed to transform experiences of territorial decline, downward mobility and inadequate recognition into a political narrative combining nativism, anti-establishment alienation and the promise of national restoration.
It did not merely say: “you lost.” It said: “you lost because they chose others over you.” It is this move — from loss to resentment, from resentment to identity, and from identity to the ballot box — that helps explain its strength.
And that is also why the democratic response will have to be more demanding than copying the AfD, increasing fiscal transfers or reinforcing the firewall. It will have to combine credible control of immigration, state capacity, services and opportunity in peripheral regions, recognition of Eastern Germany’s distinctive historical experience, and an idea of national belonging strong enough to create community without having to turn minorities into enemies.
Because citizens do not abandon a political order only when they become poor. They can also drift away from it when they cease to believe that it contains a recognizable future for people like them, and for places like the ones in which they live.
References
Applebaum, A. (2020). Twilight of democracy: The seductive lure of authoritarianism. Doubleday.
Arzheimer, K., & Berning, C. C. (2019). How the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and their voters veered to the radical right, 2013–2017. Electoral Studies, 60, 102040.
Hansen, M. A., & Olsen, J. (2024). The Alternative for Germany (AfD) as populist issue entrepreneur. German Politics, 33(4), 643–667.
Heinze, A.-S., & Scheuer, T. (2026). Growing up far right? Youth support for the AfD in Eastern Germany. German Politics, 35(3), 485–515.
Höhne, B., Kölzer, J., & Träger, H. (2025). Geography of shrinkage: Local population decline and electoral support for the anti-establishment parties AfD and BSW in East German state elections. German Politics, 34(3), 449–477.
Judt, T. (2010). Ill fares the land. Penguin Press.
Kailitz, S., & Rippl, S. (2026). Same seeds, more fertile ground: Sources of AfD dominance in Eastern Germany. German Politics, 35(3), 437–462.
Kellermann, K. L. (2024). Trust we lost: The impact of the Treuhand experience on political alienation in East Germany. Journal of Comparative Economics, 52(1), 54–75.
Mau, S. (2019). Lütten Klein: Leben in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft. Suhrkamp.
Mounk, Y. (2018). The people vs. democracy. Harvard University Press.
Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.
Mudde, C. (2019). The far right today. Polity.
Pickel, G., & Pickel, S. (2026). The election of the AfD and the collective identity of East Germans. German Politics, 35(3), 412–436.
Rodríguez-Pose, A. (2018). The revenge of the places that don’t matter. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 11(1), 189–209.
Schröder, M., Rehm, M., & Röcke, A. (2026). Supporters of Germany’s far-right AfD party are concerned about immigration rather than feeling deprived. PLOS ONE, 21(7), e0350403.
Professor Howard Lavine argues that the Democratic Party’s path to renewal lies less in ideological repositioning than in economic populism, political energy, and credible material outcomes. While MAGA remains rooted in status threat and a revanchist politics of cultural restoration, Professor Lavine sees greater opportunity for Democrats in focusing on affordability, wages, healthcare, and economic security. He cautions that the “socialist” label may create unnecessary electoral vulnerability, even as the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani current helps reorient the party toward working-class concerns. For Professor Lavine, most voters are not moved primarily by ideological sophistication but by whether political leaders deliver tangible improvements. The strategic imperative is therefore clear: Democrats should “pivot purely to economics” and demonstrate what they can concretely achieve for working-class voters.
In an interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Howard Lavine, Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota and former Director of the Center for the Study of Political Psychology, argues that the Democratic Party’s central challenge is less one of ideological definition than of political branding, economic credibility, and mobilizational energy. His assessment is particularly relevant ahead of the 2026 US midterm elections, as Democrats confront both a weakened but still deeply entrenched Trumpism and the growing influence of figures associated with democratic socialist and economic-populist politics. For Professor Lavine, however, the label itself may be more liability than asset: “The Democrats are making themselves vulnerable to some degree by using the socialist label.”
Professor Lavine draws a sharp distinction between the cultural politics underpinning MAGA and the economic terrain on which Democrats may have greater room to rebuild. MAGA, he argues, remains rooted in status threat and “a revanchist impulse to restore the prior order in which white Christian men feel comfortable in their dominant status.” Yet he does not believe racial and cultural identities necessarily foreclose an economic realignment. Swing voters, he stresses, are generally not those most deeply embedded in MAGA ideology. For Democrats, the crucial question is whether they can translate economic-populist appeals into tangible results: “What matters is the economic outcomes.” Policies themselves are comparatively less important because “most people aren’t going to understand what you say. They’re going to understand what’s happening on the ground.”
This emphasis on economics also shapes Professor Lavine’s interpretation of the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani current. He resists treating it primarily as an ideological socialist project, describing it instead as an effort to rebrand Democrats as more clearly aligned with working-class interests. Indeed, he argues that “the energy is in economic populism. It’s nowhere else.” At the same time, he warns that invoking socialism risks obscuring that advantage: “Too many people don’t like it; it’s not helping Democrats.”
More broadly, Profesor Lavine questions whether ideology itself is what moves most voters. “It’s really not about ideology,” he says of progressive candidates’ recent appeal; what voters are responding to is energy, anger, and a clearer sense of political purpose. In his view, Democrats should therefore move away from cultural issues that animate the academic left and “pivot purely to economics.” The strategic lesson is straightforward: “The more it focuses on economics, the better.” But electoral success ultimately requires more than rhetoric or branding. Once in power, Democrats must demonstrate “what they can do,” and, crucially, “what they can do specifically for the white working class.”
Here is our interview with Professor Howard Lavine, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
The Trump Administration Is Ginning Up Status Threat
Donald Trump delivers a victory speech after his big win in the Nevada caucus at Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, flanked by his sons Eric (right) and Donald Jr. (left) in Las Vegas, NV. Photo: Joe Sohm.
Professor Lavine, welcome! Your recent work with Christopher Parker describes MAGA as a reactionary movement driven substantially by “status threat”—the perception among historically dominant groups that social change has diminished their standing. Two years ago, Trumpism returned to governing power. Does holding power reduce that sense of threat, or can MAGA continually regenerate feelings of cultural dispossession even while controlling the presidency?
Professor Howard Lavine: It’s a very good question. One could reasonably assume that when the party in power is doing everything it can to restore the dominance of heritage groups—white Christian men—status threat would be assuaged. Howvere, we don’t find any evidence of that. We’ve been tracking status threat since the beginning of the Biden administration through July of this year, and status threat scores have not changed.
It hasn’t changed in part because Trump is ginning it up. And I don’t mean just Trump, but the entire apparatus within the MAGA movement. These are independent actors that are coordinating with one another and reaching millions and millions of people, continuing to present them with evidence that social and demographic change is going to lead to the decline of men, the decline of Christians, and the decline of whites.
Now, part of that is demographic change that no political party can control. Whites will become a minority of the population in about 2045, and Christians sometime between 2040 and 2060. So it’s not entirely related to partisan politics. But, the Trump administration is—whether it is doing this wittingly or not, consciously or not—ginning up status threat.
The Republican Party Has Been Captured by MAGA
You describe MAGA as a movement that ultimately “has taken over a party.” Should we therefore understand today’s Republican Party as a case of movement capture rather than ordinary ideological evolution? And what particular difficulties does that create for Democrats trying to oppose a Republican Party whose identity has become so closely fused with Trumpism?
Professor Howard Lavine: No, it’s the former. The movement has captured the party. Ideological evolution would suggest something different. Think about the change in 2016. I know that most of your readers might not have seen the Republican debates in 2015, but there were 17 people on the stage, and almost all of them were presenting themselves as Reaganite Republicans. Except for Trump.
Now, what Trump might have known—again, consciously or not—was that the Republican Party was no longer a party of Reaganite supporters. It had become a party of ethno-nationalists, concerned with immigration and with the prestige of heritage Americans, who felt besieged not only by the Obama presidency but by the longer sweep of American politics since the 1990s. So, things like political correctness and other sorts of mostly insular academic movements have reverberated somewhat beyond academia, but this is too abrupt a shift to consider it cultural evolutionary change. No, it’s an abrupt capture by a movement.
What this has to say for Democrats is what you began to see under George W. Bush, was an educational realignment, mostly among whites. Whites without a college education moved over to the Republicans. Whites with a college education who were Republican moved over to the Democrats. So, that was an early indication that the Democratic Party was going to be realigned, just as the Republican Party has been captured by MAGA.
But if you’re thinking about this in narrow electoral terms, in American politics, midterm elections are really referendums on the president. What we have in 2026 is just a very clear sense of dissatisfaction with issues related to affordability and the war in Iran.
Under Biden, let’s say in 2022, inflation was 8%, and that crashed his popularity. That was the case all over the West. Inflation was just as high in Belgium, France, and Germany. So, I guess the point I’m making here is that what people are seeing now is not just that gas prices are too high, but that Trump’s actions are clearly responsible. Inflation in Western Europe is half to a third of the size that it is in the United States. And people—not only those who are highly attentive to politics, but those who are around the median, even below the median—are very angry.
So, Trump is underwater everywhere, and I don’t think it much matters. We can get more into the Democratic split, but I don’t think what the Democrats say or do matters very much.
It’s Really Not About Ideology—It’s About Energy
US President Donald Trump greets supporters at MAGA rally for Presidential election 2020 at Harrisburg airport in Middletown, PA on September 26, 2020.
MAGA offers supporters a powerful account of who “the people” are, what they have lost, and who is responsible. Democrats have a much more heterogeneous coalition and often lack an equally clear organizing narrative. Is this one of their principal psychological disadvantages—a coalition broad enough to win elections but too fragmented to generate a comparably strong political identity?
Professor Howard Lavine: The Democrats are, right now, in a very specific place: voters want to see energy. They want to see their representatives and candidates express outrage. But the public is not ideologically informed, apart from a very small stratum at the top. Ten or 15% understand left and right. So, it’s really not about that. It’s more about candidates who, in the past, mostly campaigned in a way that was not as sharply critical of the other party as Democrats are craving now. They want that. To the extent that progressive or Democratic Socialist candidates are winning—for example, in Michigan, House seats in Manhattan, and a couple of other places, including Colorado—it’s mainly about the energy and the sort of tough talk. It’s really not about ideology.
Now, you have other people surrounding the insurgent candidates, and Sean Piker, for example, and these people have millions of followers. They’re much more likely to couch their preferences in ideological terms, but they’re much less salient. They’re only reaching people who are already going to vote for Democrats, especially in a year when Democratic enthusiasm is extremely high. They’re not reaching the voters who swing elections—mostly independents and unhappy members of the incumbent party, of whom there are now more.
So it’s really not about ideology. It’s about, especially among younger voters, wanting to see their candidates become more animated, more angry, and meet Trump’s rhetoric from the opposite perspective. Mamdani is somewhat like AOC, too, but Mamdani is an executive and can do more. He’s a mayor. He has more of a socialist policy agenda, but that doesn’t really translate outside New York. The policy agenda is very concrete and easy to understand. It’s about affordability, subsidized housing, and government-owned grocery stores that will bring prices down and such. That isn’t really what the Democratic Socialists are mostly about. AOC and Mamdani are exceptions.
Democratic Inversion Is a Bad Thing
Your concept of “democratic inversion” suggests that citizens increasingly adjust their policy beliefs to fit their partisan identity rather than choosing parties on the basis of prior beliefs. If so, does ideological uncertainty within the Democratic Party become especially costly because the party itself is less able to provide clear cues about what being a Democrat means?
Professor Howard Lavine: The parties are extremely polarized. When the choice presented to the electorate is simply Republican versus Democrat, it doesn’t really matter what the policy is. Democrats will prefer the Democratic policy. They’re not going to scrutinize it terribly deeply, and most of them won’t understand much about its specifics. Even Democrats running for Congress realize that it’s not really about policy. It’s about showing energy to counter Donald Trump.
The idea of democratic inversion has been around for decades. It’s probably a little bit higher among Democrats, but it’s very high among partisans of both parties, in part because the structure of choice is simply one party or the other. You’re not invited to make up your own policy. Democratic inversion is a bad thing. People should arrive at their political judgments before they pick a party and a candidate. But most of the population—nearly all of it—doesn’t do that. If any sector or stratum of the population does, it’s surprisingly people who are not politically sophisticated. They don’t know what the party’s messages are, so they can’t conform to them, and therefore inversion can’t occur.
Which is ironic. You’d think that the people who are most sophisticated, most knowledgeable, and most aware would start with their own beliefs. It’s just the opposite. I’m only saying this because this is what the research shows over and over again: the most aware partisans are willing simply to adopt the positions of their parties.
Elections Turn Very Much on Recent Economic Change
The November midterms provide an unusually important test. Democrats currently appear more energized than Republicans, and Trump’s approval remains weak. Should the election primarily be understood as a referendum on Trump, or will it also tell us whether Democrats have developed a compelling affirmative identity of their own?
Professor Howard Lavine: Again, largely a referendum on Trump. People are very angry. If you look at it, the issues are inflation and affordability. It’s not about democratic decline. Americans care about democracy, but not that much. Elections turn very much on recent economic change. What we’re seeing here is not only an average 50% increase in gas prices, but also high inflation that can be traced directly to Trump’s policies. And he only seems to be making it worse.
So, a lot of Republican candidates do not want to be seen with him, which is often the case when the president has a low approval rating. Trump’s approval rating is anywhere from the mid- to high 30s, but the most recent polls are in the low 30s, so we might be seeing a decline to a point that we almost never see. Bush left office in 2008 with a 32% approval rating. That’s historic. Nixon did for other reasons, but Bush did because of the economy, and Trump for the same reason.
He’s even underwater on immigration, meaning more people oppose than support his immigration policy, and that is his most important policy. People don’t like the way it’s being implemented. They don’t believe that what was advertised is anything like what Trump is currently doing. They’ve tried to make it more on the quiet. They turned Minneapolis into Fallujah for a couple of months, realized that was unpopular, but the number of arrests and deportations is at an all-time high.
But no, I don’t think the Democrats have much. It may be that in Michigan, some voters might look at Al-Sayed somewhat more negatively than they would his more establishment opponent, but he’s ahead in all the polls. There hasn’t been a single poll where Mike Rogers was ahead, but I think the energy matters. I think Trump has really engulfed the field. There’s really almost nothing outside of Donald Trump.
The Word Socialism Is Just a Very Bad Choice
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the “Bernie Is Back” political rally in Queensbridge Park, Queens, New York, on October 19, 2019. Photo: Aleksandr Dyskin / Dreamstime.
That question becomes especially important as democratic socialist figures seek to shape what that affirmative identity might look like. Before assessing their electoral and organizational potential, however, it may be useful to clarify the concept itself. What distinguishes contemporary democratic socialism in the United States from classical socialism and communism, but also from European-style social democracy? Is the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani current best understood as a genuinely socialist project seeking a deeper transformation of capitalism, or as a more radical version of social democracy operating within a liberal-democratic framework?
Professor Howard Lavine: I don’t even think it’s a radical version of European social democracy. It’s simply projecting a brand—a reputational brand within the Democratic Party—to be more favorable toward the working class, which is probably both morally admirable and strategically correct. The Democrats did a lot better when they were able to win the working class. Since the party inverted, the Republicans have done considerably better. The Democrats simply prefer to be the party of the working class rather than the party of expensively educated elites. Because, there aren’t as many of them. They have cultural and economic power, but they don’t have political power because there aren’t enough of them.
I think the rhetoric—the word socialism—is just a very bad choice. Not that Americans know what it means; they just know they don’t like it. Socialism, Nazism, all the -isms are unpopular. What they want to hear is that the party cares more about them than it does about the more culturally based concerns of highly educated people. The Democrats have gone through a woke period, which AOC recently condemned as crazy, mostly because she realizes that there’s just no political profit in continuing to push wokeism. But because Europe is so substantially to the left in its social democratic ideology and provision, the Democrats simply want to change their brand to attract working-class people who might be disenchanted with Trump.
Meanwhile, there is a crack in the MAGA movement. A lot of MAGA voters—three-time MAGA voters—are beginning to wonder whether the Trump administration cares more about tech oligarchs than the working class. So, it’s a strategically advantageous pivot, both because it does seem to be more squarely focused on the working class economically rather than the upper middle class culturally, and also because, in the late Trump years—he’s about to be a lame duck either way—he’s losing support among Republicans specifically on economic issues.
The Republican Party has mostly been about social or cultural issues, and now the party has captured a group of people who are concerned about economic issues, but the Republicans are not delivering. That’s not just Trump; that’s standard Republican policy from the time of Reagan: cut taxes, reduce them on the wealthy, and reduce the social safety net. So it is not Trump; it’s the Republicans.
Trump probably wouldn’t have wanted to do this, but the Republicans cut Medicaid, which is a social safety net policy that does a lot of things for the elderly and the non-elderly poor, and that will reverberate over the next 12 months. Benefits will be eliminated or substantially lower for MAGA people as much as for non-MAGA people, and so MAGA people are probably looking more than they were in 2016 at specifically economic issues.
Democratic Socialism Is No Longer a Fringe
Zohran Mamdani at the Dominican Heritage Parade on 6th Ave in Manhattan, New York City, August 10, 2025. Photo: Aleksandr Dyskin.
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been joined by the success of Zohran Mamdani and a broader insurgent left, while Abdul El-Sayed’s Michigan Senate primary victory demonstrates the appeal of similar progressive economic politics even beyond explicitly democratic socialist candidates. Are we reaching the point where this tendency can no longer be regarded as the Democratic Party’s fringe?
Professor Howard Lavine: That’s a great question. I would like to think that will be true by the time of the 2028 election. That’s the goal: to rebrand the party. The party is seen by younger voters in particular—and this might include voters under 50—as somewhat ideologically stagnant. They’re not providing as strong a contrast to the Republican Party as younger voters need.
Again, this is both about energy and anger, which is what the Democratic base wants to see. But it’s also, as voters will come to find out, about preserving the safety net and refocusing the party on the working class. So, to answer the question provisionally, yes. I think it is no longer a fringe. It will become stronger.
The Democrats Have Lost Energy in the Trump Years
How seriously should we take the analogy between MAGA’s rise within the Republican Party and democratic socialism’s growing influence among Democrats? Could a movement once considered peripheral eventually reshape the Democratic Party’s agenda, candidate selection, activist base, and political vocabulary as profoundly as MAGA transformed the GOP—or are the two cases fundamentally different?
Professor Howard Lavine: No, I don’t think so. They’re fundamentally different in the sense that they’re somewhat apples and oranges. One is more focused on culture, which the Republicans always were. Now it’s ethno-nationalism. Now it’s pitting white Christians against everyone else.
It is about rebranding, as I said, and it’s about recapturing energy. The Democrats have lost energy in the Trump years. They were excited in 2020 because Trump was weakened, people were generally dissatisfied, and his approval rating was low. But the Democrats now realize they can’t rely on that. They need, as you say, an optimistic vision. They need not just to rely on negative partisanship.
I hate to refer to it as democratic socialism. They’ll drop the socialism part at some point, but that’s the only game in town. By 2028, the goal is to rebrand the party around something much more energetic. I hesitate to say policy, because policy doesn’t really move voters very much, but rather a brand, a reputation, an understanding of what the Democrats are. They need something more active.
The Democrats are also beholden to what we now call the Epstein class: billionaires. The Democrats need to shed that. Once they win the House, most likely—and they could win the Senate—but either way, they could start issuing subpoenas to people who are implicated in the Epstein situation, and that’s what Democrats want to see.
This is why Obama’s popularity, after he got into office, just plummeted, because he refinanced the banks and let ordinary Americans go bankrupt. That was very unpopular and a bad move, and I think you would agree with that now. But it’s what the Democrats need to do to re-energize their brand. Nobody knows what they stand for, at least outside of the people who are already gonna vote, no matter what.
The Energy Is in Economic Populism
From a more positive perspective, could democratic socialism help resolve the Democratic Party’s current deadlock? Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani offer ideological clarity, recognizable adversaries, grassroots enthusiasm, and a straightforward economic agenda centered on affordability, housing, healthcare, wages, and inequality. Could this provide the political identity and mobilizational energy mainstream Democrats have struggled to generate?
Professor Howard Lavine: Yes, absolutely. They need to do that. If they don’t, it will be strongly to their detriment. With a 50-50 electorate, the last three elections have basically been ties. Now, you can’t have an exact tie, so one party wins. But I think that, for the Democrats to break out and attempt to become the majority party, which they once were, that’s exactly what they’ll need to do. The energy is in economic populism. It’s nowhere else. There’s no other alternative being proposed.
Revanchist Impulse Getting Worse and Worse
Your work emphasizes that status threat is revanchist: it seeks to recover a social hierarchy perceived as lost. Democratic socialist rhetoric generally points in the opposite direction, promising future material gains and greater equality. Could this allow the left to channel dissatisfaction through an aspirational politics rather than the nostalgic politics of restoration that characterizes MAGA?
Professor Howard Lavine: It’s quite likely that what you’ll see as the result of a re-energized Democratic Party around social change is increased polarization. No, I don’t think that revanchist impulse is going to go away, because demographic change doesn’t require social change, which is what you’re talking about.
But as we get closer to becoming a majority-minority country, it will become inevitable that whites and Christians, both declining in numbers and as percentages of the population, are headed toward minority status. So, I don’t think the revanchist impulse is likely to disappear anytime soon. The question is how it’s packaged.
Trump is a rather crude communicator. I don’t mean crude simply in the sense that he says crude things, although of course he does, and that’s his calling card. But he’s not doing it in a way that, say, J.D. Vance or somebody else could, which runs counter to the conventional wisdom that Vance can’t hold together the MAGA movement.
But the MAGA movement is underpinned by what we would call status threat, as well as by a revanchist impulse to restore the prior order in which white Christian men feel comfortable in their dominant status. Right now, they’re not feeling that. So, I don’t see that revanchist impulse disappearing. I see it getting worse and worse as we move toward a more multiracial America.
What Matters Is the Economic Outcomes
Could a stronger economic-populist message help Democrats shift political conflict away from terrain favorable to Trump—race, immigration, cultural hierarchy, and status loss—and toward wages, housing, healthcare, corporate power, and economic insecurity? Or are racial and cultural identities now too deeply embedded in partisan politics for such a strategic shift to succeed?
Professor Howard Lavine: No, I don’t think they are, because the voters who swing elections are not those who are deeply embedded in MAGA’s ideology. But it’s not really about the policies. They can say anything they want; the policies will be understood only in some fractional sense. What matters is the economic outcomes. If they deliver on what they promise, they will do well. If they promise the moon and deliver none of it, they won’t. And the same is true with Mamdani. So, it’s really about economic outcomes.
But you have to start with policies, and policies have to start with branding. Of those three—branding, policies, and outcomes—policies are the least important. Most people aren’t going to understand what you say. They’re going to understand what’s happening on the ground. Are prices getting higher? Are they steadying out? Is the social safety net becoming stronger? Or is it always on the brink of leaving millions and millions of people in poverty?
If the outcomes are achieved, the brand will become more legitimate and longer-lasting, and will become more deeply embedded in the consciousness of the top 40–50% of aware voters.
Cultural Identities Versus Economics
Photo: Mar Tas / Dreamstime.
Your experimental research found that racial cues pushed Trump supporters and opponents in sharply different directions. Does this suggest a limit to the democratic-socialist assumption that material politics can reunify working-class voters? Can class-based appeals actually weaken status threat, or will economic questions themselves continue to be interpreted through racial and partisan identities?
Professor Howard Lavine: That’s another great question. I think the answer depends first on the economic context. Right now, the answer is yes. Under more prosperous conditions, I think it won’t. Then you tend to get cultural politics.
Right now, there’s a clamoring that is all about economics. I mean, not among the MAGA group. They’re concerned with restoring what they perceived—and what was, in reality—a country that privileged whites and Christians and where men ruled the roost. So, if economic times continue to be difficult, an economic-populist message will take root and be competitive.
At some point—and this is perhaps one of the largest debates in political science and political psychology—it comes down to identities, cultural identities versus economics. It really depends. At the end of the Clinton years, everything was looking great. People had every opportunity to say, “We can ignore economics because we’re all fine, and now we can become a party of identitarians,” which the Democrats began to do.
But I don’t see economics falling away from the top of the agenda anytime soon. I think it’ll dominate the 2028 elections, which will be to the great detriment of the Republican Party. I don’t think those cultural messages will be as important when people can’t afford gas, groceries, or their medical bills. People living on the edge are living much further on the edge, and I think that will matter, at least for 2028.
American politics doesn’t stay the same. It could be different in 2030, just as it was in 2010 and 2018, for that matter. Those were the first midterms of Obama and Trump. They got wiped out.
So, when we come back to outcomes, parties realize that the first Congress they have—which is when they most often have unified control of government—is the only time they’ll be able to do anything. By the end of a president’s first term, those effects are generally exhausted. And there’s usually no opportunity to do anything big again because you have lost the House of Representatives in your first midterm. That’s what happened to Clinton, that’s what happened to Obama, that’s what happened to Trump, and Biden didn’t even control the House.
Democratic Voters Will Continue to Push an Economically Populist Message
The 2026 midterms offer a particularly important test because insurgent-progressive candidates must now move from Democratic primaries into general elections. Michigan’s Senate race is especially significant. Will November help determine whether this politics can expand beyond safe urban constituencies into the competitive states and districts Democrats need to control Congress?
Professor Howard Lavine: Michigan’s gonna be looked at very carefully. But it’s one election, and it’s one state, and its dynamics are bounded by time and context. If Al-Sayed loses, I don’t think the entire apparatus of the Democratic left is going to collapse. There will be other interpretations.
So, no, I don’t think one example will be decisive. I think voters will become disenchanted if they see that the slate of candidates they regard as qualitatively different, or different in kind, from Democratic establishment candidates loses across the board. If they lose across the board, maybe they’ll come back to the drawing board.
But one election—the Michigan election—no, I don’t think that’s enough, because I think Democratic voters who control the brand of the party, to the extent that voters control the party’s brand, which I think they increasingly do, will continue to push an economically populist message.
I’d rather label it that way than democratic socialism. The word socialist is going to have to be excised. Too many people don’t like it; it’s not helping Democrats. It’s the influencers outside of party strategists who love the socialist label. Aside from that, it’s supporters of Bernie. Sadly. Trust me
A Vague Term Like Socialism Just Can’t Compete
Republicans are already trying to make socialism itself an issue in the midterms, including through congressional resolutions explicitly linking Democrats to democratic socialist politics. Does that indicate genuine electoral vulnerability for Democrats, or does it show that Republicans recognize the left’s potential to construct a competing populist narrative around economic inequality and concentrated wealth?
Professor Howard Lavine: I think both are true, but more importantly than either of those things, the Republicans don’t have much to campaign on. The running joke is that the only thing they can do is talk about trans athletes, of which there are about five in the country. They don’t really have much to say, but the Democrats are making themselves vulnerable to some degree by using the socialist label.
There will be some people who hesitate to vote for Democrats and may refuse to do so on that basis. It remains to be seen whether this is almost entirely a referendum on Trump or whether the Republicans gain any traction simply by using the word socialism. They’ve used that since Obama, and I don’t think it’s really done much, because most voters don’t understand it, and those who do are already committed to voting for one party or the other.
But this year, voters are so singularly concerned with their economic pocketbooks that a vague term like socialism just can’t compete.
Your work on resistance to persuasion shows that politically engaged voters are particularly capable of rejecting counter-attitudinal messages, sometimes becoming even more certain of their existing views. Does that mean Democrats waste too much effort trying to win committed MAGA voters? Should their priority instead be less-engaged citizens, irregular voters, younger voters, and those whose partisan identities remain relatively weak?
Professor Howard Lavine: Young MAGA voters are unstable. They haven’t formed strong partisan identities. Once they do, it’ll become a lot harder. But there is always competition for swing voters, meaning voters who don’t have a strong party identification. Then there are young voters who are not socialized into the party system. They might vote Republican, and they might even identify as MAGA, but they’re not so deeply embedded in both a belief system and a social world that they can’t be persuaded. So there is such a thing as the persuadable voter, and it’s not a trivial portion of the electorate. I think resistance to persuasion and backfire are generally seen when you’re talking about people who have strong priors.
The Persuadable Voter Is Less Burdened by Strong Party Ties
There is also a normative danger in the MAGA analogy. If democratic socialists became dominant within the Democratic Party, could they eventually reproduce the “democratic inversion” you identify on the right—where movement loyalty determines policy beliefs and internal dissent becomes suspect? What separates healthy ideological renewal from another form of partisan capture?
Professor Howard Lavine: Democratic inversion has been so robust and stable for so long that it’s a permanent feature of the dynamics of democratic citizenship, so it’s a failure of democratic citizenship. But that’s not something that’s going to go anywhere. Again, what I said earlier is that those people who tend to follow the leader, who are inverted, tend to be voters who are, first, certain to vote, second, certain to vote for their party’s candidate. So those people are lost to democratic inversion. And again, those are the people who are most aware and most interested in politics.
The persuadable voter is one who is less burdened by strong party ties and is willing to weigh the evidence, come to a conclusion, and then, potentially, move into a party based on a non-inverted process, meaning that they have come to believe certain values, hold certain policy preferences or goals for the country, and see one party or the other as the basis of that.
We see that already with respect to the growing influence of a fairly heritable personality trait called authoritarianism. That is more strongly structuring American politics, and that’s not inversion. That’s a personality—a deep, heritable personality characteristic—that is sorting the public, mostly the white public, into the Democratic and Republican Party, so inversion isn’t everything. But it’s a dominant dynamic, and there are non-inversion dynamics that are occurring as well. The authoritarianism-to-partisan-identity process is one of them.
The More It Focuses on Economics, the Better
Finally, the November midterms may offer an early answer to the Democratic Party’s larger dilemma. Could the Sanders–AOC–Mamdani phenomenon provide the economic narrative, organizational energy, and political purpose needed to rebuild the party against Trumpism? Or could moving too far toward democratic socialism sacrifice precisely the moderate and cross-pressured voters Democrats need to regain Congress and eventually the presidency?
Professor Howard Lavine: Another great question. I would say the answer is the first one. What they realized—and AOC has, by stating that woke was crazy, or woke one was crazy—is that focusing on cultural issues, especially cultural issues that animate the academic left, is extremely damaging to the party’s brand. So, what AOC and others recognize is that you have to pivot purely to economics. Again, it’s less about how extreme the policies are and more about what they do with power if they take it, and how successful they are with it.
Biden was pretty successful. But inflation and the perception of him as elderly and not fit to run again—which he had promised he wouldn’t do before changing his mind—will probably determine whether the next democratic-left projects succeed. So, the bottom line is: the more it focuses on economics, the better. Beyond that, once they take power, they have to show what they can do, and specifically what they can do for the white working class.
In this interview, Imran Bayoumi examines how the weakening of multilateral institutions and the rise of transactional diplomacy are reshaping global power in ways that often favor authoritarian and populist governments. He argues that authoritarian middle powers benefit from greater flexibility to hedge between competing blocs, while democracies remain constrained by alliances, institutions, and domestic accountability. Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan emerges as a key example: Ankara has “managed to play and interact with both realms at the same time,” using populist nationalism to present strategic balancing as the defense of national interests. Bayoumi also warns that weakening Western cohesion benefits revisionist powers, while calling for a “retooled American leadership” capable of rebuilding democratic cooperation in a more fragmented international order.
In an era of intensifying geopolitical fragmentation, weakening multilateral institutions, and increasingly transactional diplomacy, authoritarian and populist governments may find themselves unusually well positioned to exploit the emerging international disorder. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Imran Bayoumi, Deputy Director and Resident Fellow with the GeoStrategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, examines how the erosion of the rules-based international order is altering the balance between democratic constraints and authoritarian flexibility. His central argument is not that autocracies are inherently stronger, but that a fragmented system can reward governments able to hedge between competing powers, bypass institutional constraints, and personalize foreign policy. As Bayoumi puts it, authoritarian middle powers “have experience with hedging” and are less constrained by the institutions and alliances that shape the choices of democratic states.
The decline of multilateralism is particularly consequential because it lowers the costs of defying established rules. According to Bayoumi, states increasingly feel comfortable “bypassing multilateral bodies,” ignoring treaties and challenging norms because the prospect of meaningful punishment has diminished. Yet he cautions against reducing this transformation simply to populism: “It’s a mix of both things: populism and power.” At the same time, the personalization of diplomacy associated with contemporary populist politics is becoming increasingly significant, as foreign policy becomes more closely tied to leaders themselves rather than institutions and professional bureaucracies.
Turkey provides one of the interview’s clearest illustrations of this emerging geopolitical flexibility. Still embedded in NATO and Western institutions, Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has simultaneously cultivated relations across competing geopolitical blocs. Bayoumi describes Turkey as a country that has “managed to play and interact with both realms at the same time.” Populist nationalism, he argues, has been crucial to legitimizing this strategy domestically: “Erdogan has been able to sell this balancing strategy as a way of being able to secure Turkey’s interests first.” The willingness to purchase Russian air-defense systems while remaining within NATO exemplifies how Ankara combines alliance membership with strategic hedging.
More broadly, Bayoumi warns that weakening Western alliances and institutional cohesion ultimately benefits revisionist authoritarian powers. “Every action that undermines the strong ties between the United States and its allies is a benefit for them,” he argues, pointing to the growing cooperation among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Yet he rejects the idea that authoritarian ascendancy is inevitable. Instead, he calls for “some sort of retooled American leadership” capable of accommodating the growing autonomy of middle powers while rebuilding institutions and democratic cooperation. The challenge, therefore, is not simply to restore the old international order, but to construct a more resilient one capable of reconciling democratic values, strategic power, and an increasingly multipolar world.
Here is our interview with Imran Bayoumi, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Authoritarian Middle Powers Are Better Equipped to Hedge
Figure from the V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026.
Mr. Bayoumi, welcome!In “Why Today’s Global Disorder Rewards Authoritarians,” you argue that autocratic middle powers are particularly well placed to benefit from today’s fragmented international system because they can hedge between larger powers and pursue highly transactional relationships. What is it specifically about authoritarian government that gives these countries greater room for maneuver than democratic middle powers? Could democratic states adopt similar strategies without weakening their democratic principles?
Imran Bayoumi: In the article, I lay out two factors that I’ve identified. The first is that these autocratic middle powers have experience with hedging. They’ve balanced between different blocs of great powers for a lot longer than these democratic middle powers are now trying to. They’re not constrained by these broader institutions and alliances that are now seeming more and more like a burden.
The second factor is that they are adept at these kinds of personalist politics that we’ve seen really dominate the second Trump administration and the broader political deal-making space. You saw Qatar donate the Boeing 747 for the new Air Force One at the start of the second Trump administration. In terms of hedging, I talk about it in the article, but Kazakhstan, for example, has signed up to both China and Washington’s flagship AI programs.
Therefore, these states are really better in this kind of disruption. They know how to gain influence in ways that democratic states would struggle with. If a democratic state was to donate a jumbo jet, there would probably be some sort of parliamentary pushback, discussions in the media, and potential repercussions that I don’t think authoritarians would be subject to.
So, can democratic states adopt these traits? Sure, it’s just harder for them to do so. There’s nothing stopping them from having a more personalist foreign policy. Nothing’s stopping them from hedging, but they face constraints. I don’t think their populations may want that. It’s harder to leave treaties if you have to have a parliament approve that. I think norms are a big thing, too. I can’t imagine that the Canadian public, for example, would be happy if Prime Minister Carney donated a large amount of military equipment to the United States in exchange for a trade deal. So, there’s nothing in theory stopping them, but the institutions and norms that they adhere to are a real limit.
Alliances Remain an Asset, but New Risks Are Emerging
You suggest that democratic middle powers such as Canada, Australia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom are constrained partly because their economies and security systems were deeply integrated into the US-led postwar order. By contrast, authoritarian middle powers were often less integrated into that system. Has the very institutional dependence that once protected democracies now become a strategic weakness in a more unstable world?
Imran Bayoumi: I’m not sure I would say that it’s a weakness. I don’t think the NATO alliance is a weakness. That’s still the most successful alliance in history, and there’s still great value to states being part of it, regardless of how disruptive and unpredictable they might see Washington as acting.
That being said, it also exposes them to new risks. I think you’ve seen the United States talk about annexing Greenland, making Canada the 51st state, putting kind of ad hoc tariffs in place, and all of this really weakens the strength of those institutions. So, I wouldn’t go so far as to say being part of them is a weakness right now, but it’s certainly a factor that undermines the security, economic interests, and sovereignty of some of these states in the current moment.
If we were really to see full-out great power war, and NATO was attacked and responded, Article 5 was invoked, I don’t think any of these states would see that as a weakness. They would see the alliance as a great benefit. So, these institutions still have great potential and promise. The problem is that we’re actively undermining them, and we need to change that course.
Bilateral Diplomacy Thrives as Institutional Constraints Weaken
Populist leaders often present international institutions, treaties, courts, and alliances as restrictions imposed by distant elites on national sovereignty. Does the weakening of the rules-based international order therefore create a particularly favorable environment not only for authoritarian governments but also for populist leaders who prefer bilateral deals and leader-to-leader diplomacy over multilateral institutions?
Imran Bayoumi: I think the current moment does. When we saw the rules-based international order with bodies like the UN supported by the US and backed by other countries, there were real costs to defying these major institutions and going against global norms. The threat of sanctions was real, as were the loss of market access and diplomatic isolation. What we’ve seen is that now states of all sizes feel more comfortable bypassing multilateral bodies to get action, ignoring treaties, ignoring what they previously signed, and maybe bucking norms because they think that the threat or possible punishment is lesser. There’s no cost associated with their revisionist actions. These bilateral deals are peaking because of that.
The stronger state can now enforce a deal that it wants and get its outcome. But, there are a few interesting threads also to pick up. One is that even though these multilateral institutions maybe are not as strong, the value and the brand of them are still strong. We still see populist autocratic leaders traveling to the UN every September to make a speech. So, there’s still value in that brand and in that address. Maybe the institution is not strong, but the broader value is and could be resurrected.
I touched on this earlier, but to return to your original question, I’m not sure it favors populist leaders so much as actors with power. Looking back, even before the Trump administration, if the United States pursued a bilateral deal with a less powerful populist leader, it would still be able to dictate the terms of that deal largely because of its relative power. So, it’s a mix of both things: populism and power.
Populism Is Accelerating the Personalization of Foreign Policy
Photo: Shutterstock.
Your argument focuses heavily on increasingly personalized and transactional diplomacy. This also seems characteristic of populist politics, where leaders frequently claim that personal strength and negotiating skill can replace institutions and professional bureaucracies. Do you see a connection between the global rise of populism and the wider shift from institutional diplomacy toward personalized diplomacy?
Imran Bayoumi: Yes, similar to my previous answer, that as populism rises and the foreign policy of countries increasingly becomes about the personalities of those leaders themselves, you do start to see this trend. People start to meet their partners where they are. I think there are some good examples here. King Charles gifted President Trump a bell from a naval submarine that bore his name. We’re even starting to see democracies meet this kind of populist trend. But I’d go back to the power thing. I think power really underpins this system. So, I’m not sure that personal strength and negotiating skill are any better than multilateral institutions if you’re still negotiating, arguing, or dealing with a more powerful state. Military and economic power are two constant underpinnings that exist regardless of the broader dynamic.
Democracies Still Face Constraints That Autocracies Escape
You write that autocratic governments are primarily concerned with regime survival rather than electoral accountability. But democratic populist governments can sometimes develop similar priorities by weakening courts, attacking independent media, politicizing the bureaucracy, and concentrating authority around the executive. Should we therefore think of the advantage you describe as belonging strictly to authoritarian regimes, or more broadly to highly centralized and personalized political systems?
Imran Bayoumi: I think it applies to both, but with the caveat that, in these still highly centralized systems that are maybe partially free democracies, the party can still lose power. If you look at Hungary, there was an election and there was a change in government.
I really tried to focus on autocratic states in my article, arguing that they don’t have to worry about these kinds of institutional checks and balances that highly centralized liberal democracies may have to worry about to a lesser extent, but that are still there. There’s still media, there are still courts, and there are still other ways that they can pressure the government.
Whereas in autocracies, they don’t have to worry about that. So, I think it applies to both, but there’s that caveat that it could change. Political systems change, and in these highly centralized, personalized systems, the media ecosystem, the justices, and the courts could be a vector for that change.
Washington Has Fully Embraced Personalized Foreign Policy
The Trump administration itself raises an important question for your argument. Trump has repeatedly criticized international organizations and alliances, emphasized personal relationships with foreign leaders, and favored transactional bargaining over traditional diplomatic institutions. To what extent has the United States under Trump begun to practice the kind of personalized foreign policy that you associate with authoritarian states?
Imran Bayoumi: Two things here. First, Washington has fully embraced this personalized approach to foreign policy. The diplomacy between President Trump and Kim Jong-un of North Korea during Trump’s first term is a good example. It involved exchanging letters and Trump addressing Kim Jong-un personally. I don’t think it was particularly successful, although it did result in a few summits. Tensions between the two countries remain high, but that kind of personalized diplomacy has clearly carried over into the second administration.
I would, however, push back somewhat on the idea that this approach is associated solely with authoritarian states. At the moment, authoritarian states may be better suited to handle it because they have more experience with this kind of diplomacy and know how to make it work. But over the longer term, they are unlikely to be the only states to practice or utilize personalist foreign policy.
Democratic Backsliding Could Carry Strategic Costs Abroad
Following from that, could there be an authoritarian dimension to the transformation of American foreign policy under Trump? I do not mean that the United States has simply become an authoritarian state, but rather whether the weakening of institutional constraints, the personalization of executive power, and the preference for loyalty and bilateral bargains are making American statecraft resemble some features traditionally associated with authoritarian governance.
Imran Bayoumi: The literature and public discourse around this topic are pretty clear. There is a very real risk of democratic backsliding in the United States, and there are concerns there. Ultimately, whatever US foreign policy looks like over the next decade, the next five years, or whatever timeframe you want to look at, there is a real risk that the kinds of factors you laid out—the personalization of executive power, the preference for blind loyalty, and bilateral deals—will weaken US foreign policy and national security writ large, rather than simply making the United States resemble an autocratic foreign policy.
I think the bigger challenge is not so much what it looks like, but what results it achieves for Washington and for American citizens. The risk is that it will produce a more dangerous world, one where we have more shaky, bilateral, ad hoc deals that are not built on these broad, treaty-bound alliances.
It would be a world where American interests are harder to define and therefore harder to defend, and where American power has lost some credibility. So, revisionist states feel more comfortable challenging it, undermining it, and acting against it. That’s a real challenge. How do we stop that? How do we change that? And what does a new, more powerful, newly designed American foreign policy look like to meet the challenges of the 21st century, deal with revisionist autocracies that are challenging Washington’s power, and also recognize the growing power of these smaller middle-power countries?
Fragmentation Rewards States That Can Move Faster and Hedge More Freely
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney attends a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Ukraine’s Independence Day in Kyiv, Ukraine on August 24, 2025. Photo: Vladyslav Musiienko / Dreamstime.
In “Don’t Fall for the Middle-Power Mirage,” you question Mark Carney’s hope that democratic middle powers can build an alternative multilateral order. Democratic states appear divided over how far they should distance themselves from Washington, while authoritarian middle powers can cooperate selectively with Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and regional powers at the same time. Does this mean that fragmentation itself structurally favors governments that are less committed to fixed alliances and common political values?
Imran Bayoumi: In the current moment, 100%. That article really talks about two factors. One is that democratic middle powers, even if they were to answer the call that Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out at the Davos World Economic Forum earlier this year, can’t agree on the approach to doing so. In that article, I talk about then-UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Mark Carney. The week after Carney’s speech, Starmer had a different approach. He said, we don’t have to choose; we can balance all sides, play all sides, something to that effect. So that’s the first challenge. Democratic middle powers are not even on the same page.
I think that, in this era of disruption and upheaval, countries that don’t have these long-standing institutional ties and alliances can play both sides. They’re more nimble and can move faster. It goes back to the other article we talked about, where their populations may not want leaders to stay committed to these institutions, or, if they do, the leaders can ignore the will of their population. So, they’re more comfortable making these deals that might invite media blowback.
They don’t necessarily have to get parliamentary approval, or, if they do, it could be rubber-stamped. So, they’re more nimble and can act in different ways. The challenge for them is that they still recognize that there’s value in alliances and in this broader dynamic. Even if you look at Canada, which under Carney is trying to advocate for this new kind of vision of the international system, it’s not about abandoning NATO or totally pulling out of NORAD, the binational command here.
Therefore, there’s still a recognition that alliances are valuable and that these kinds of treaty-bound obligations are strong for a reason. These bilateral deals may be a temporary boon, but I don’t think they should be read as an indication of long-term success.
Revisionism and Pragmatism Increasingly Coexist
You distinguish between authoritarian states that actively seek to revise the international order and those that simply exploit its weakening. But is “pragmatic opportunism” really politically neutral? When governments such as Turkey, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Kazakhstan benefit from weaker democratic norms, looser conditionality, and more transactional great-power competition, do they not also have an interest in preserving—and perhaps deepening—the erosion of the rules-based order, even if they do not openly seek to replace it?
Imran Bayoumi: This is a really important point. These states—their erosion, or actions contributing to the erosion, of the current international order—are a real risk. Going back to my previous answer, I don’t think they’re trying to build what comes next. There’s not a clearly defined broader international architecture that they’re building toward. They’re more taking advantage of the current disruption.
In the long-term, I don’t know what they will try to build. Even though they’re now preying on this disruption, it would be a mistake to say that they didn’t benefit in some way from the previous international order as well. So, even though Carney’s vision might be incredibly tough to achieve, he’s at least trying to figure out what comes next.
To your point, I think they have an interest in both sides. In some areas and sectors, they want to weaken the current international order and advance their own interests. On some topics, however, they want to strengthen it.
China, for example, is still very committed to this idea of international standard-setting when it comes to telecoms and, potentially, artificial intelligence. These are the broad multilateral structures, forums, and venues that we associate with the previous international order. But in other ways, China and other states are quite revisionist. They don’t want to cede sovereignty; they want to achieve their own goals.
So, I think it’s this balancing act, and part of this tension is a realization that there’s a real question of what comes next. You will have to build what comes next, and that might be harder than merely reacting to the current disruption.
Turkey Shows How Populist Nationalism Can Legitimize Geopolitical Hedging
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made the opening of the Natural Gas Pipeline (Turkstream) in Istanbul, Turkey on November 19, 2018.
Turkey seems to present an especially difficult case for your argument. It remains a NATO member and benefits from Western security and economic institutions, while under Erdogan it has also experienced severe democratic backsliding, increasing authoritarianism, and a highly personalized and populist foreign policy. Is Turkey effectively benefiting from both worlds—using its place inside the Western institutional order while simultaneously exploiting the strategic flexibility associated with authoritarian middle powers? And to what extent has populist nationalism enabled Erdogan to present this balancing strategy not as dependence or inconsistency, but as evidence of multi-directional foreign policy, sovereignty, and national strength?
Imran Bayoumi: Turkey’s a very interesting case, and it’s one of those countries that has really managed to play and interact with both realms at the same time. The most recent kind of development there, with President Trump talking about lifting sanctions on Turkey that he himself put in place in his first term, is really a testament to the kind of power of personalized diplomacy and the strides in relations that Turkey has developed with the Trump administration in this second term.
To the second part of your question, in terms of populist nationalism, I think that’s key. Erdogan has been able to sell this balancing strategy as a way of being able to secure Turkey’s interests first. If that means buying Russian air defense systems while also being part of NATO, that’s what it takes. But, it goes back to my earlier point, where these kinds of illiberal, partially free democracies that still have elections, these leaders are still susceptible at some stage. So, there’s still, even if it’s limited, kind of opposition media in and out of the country that can pressure these leaders, and that maybe be a weakness. Therefore, there’s also a recognition that they need to work with everyone or work to sell the message more so than true authoritarian states that may not even communicate these foreign policy decisions.
Turkey’s Dual Alignment Reflects Strategic Geography and Diplomatic Flexibility
The recently signed Mecca Joint Defense Agreement between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan seems to take this strategy a significant step further by creating a collective-defense arrangement among three important regional powers, while Turkey simultaneously remains inside NATO. Do you see the Mecca Pact as another example of Ankara hedging within an increasingly fragmented order, or does it represent something more consequential—the beginning of an alternative security architecture that could gradually reduce Turkey’s dependence on the Western alliance system? And what does Turkey’s ability to participate in both arrangements tell us about why today’s global disorder may particularly reward authoritarian or highly personalized middle powers?
Imran Bayoumi: I actually think the Mecca Pact is more about regional security. I don’t think it should be read as an attempt by Turkey, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia to build a true international order alternative to the US-led alliance system, or to China or Russia. For these three countries, it reflects a recognition that the Middle East will remain markedly different after the conclusion of the Iran war, whenever that might be. They’ve seen that Iran may be weakened in some respects. Its economy has certainly taken a beating. The Supreme Leader was killed, but at the same time, it remains quite disruptive when it wants to be. It has control of the Strait of Hormuz and has launched attacks on a lot of the Gulf countries.
This is really about ensuring these countries’ own security in the region. You have Iran on one side, and then there’s also a recognition that the long-term presence of the United States in the region can no longer be guaranteed. No one knows what that will look like. It could be a substantial drawdown, and without the US there, there are all these other long-standing security threats that may emerge.
So, I see this pact more as strengthening the security of these three countries within the Middle East, within a volatile region that all three of them occupy. It’s a long-term bet that the region will remain unstable and that there’s value in having these alliances and partnerships.
The question with the Mecca Pact in particular is: how far does it go? What does it look like when a state is actually challenged? Is there an Article 5-style response, like you would see with NATO, where other nations commit troops and commit to fighting? Or is there just the provision of economic aid or military equipment, without necessarily joining the conflict with troops on the ground?
What Turkey’s ability to participate in both arrangements tells us is that Turkey has been able to play this system well. It understands that it occupies a geographically strategic and relevant location. It’s able to maintain ties and communications with key global players, and there’s recognition among the US and other NATO countries that it’s perhaps in their interest to have Turkey able to hold discussions with Russia and facilitate that channel, while also having a strong ally in the Middle East that can represent the alliance’s interests there.
So, as much as I think it’s a testament to Turkey’s ability to navigate this disruption, there’s also probably a bit more give than we may want to admit on Washington’s side, London’s side, and Berlin’s side. It’s helpful to have states that can both be your ally and talk to other still powerful, if not revisionist, countries.
Revisionist Autocracies Benefit Whenever Western Cohesion Weakens
In your New Statesman article on the “axis of autocracies,” you emphasize that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea do not constitute anything like an authoritarian NATO. Their interests differ, and their cooperation remains limited and transactional. Yet you argue that they can still benefit from American strategic mistakes. Is it therefore misleading to focus too much on whether authoritarian states form a coherent alliance, when the more important issue may be that they benefit from the same weakening of Western institutions?
Imran Bayoumi: That’s right. To be clear, they’re working very closely together. Russia, for example, is providing targeting data to Iran to assist with Iran’s war that the United States is fighting. China has been an economic lifeline to Russia during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and North Korea is providing troops to Russia to fight in Ukraine. Even though there’s no formal alliance system, these kinds of levers of cooperation and ties are deepening between these states.
You’re also right that we don’t need to focus on, or wait for, them to sign a formal alliance before being worried about the threat they pose. Every action that undermines the strong ties between the United States and its allies is a benefit for them. Tariffs against Washington’s trading partners that force them to look to new sources, such as China, are a weakness. Actions that undermine alliance cohesion, like threatening to take Greenland, are also a weakness, and the beneficiaries are really these revisionist autocracies.
So, we don’t need to wait for them to form a formal alliance and sign a treaty. We can be worried in the short term. I’m not sure they’ll ever get to that place, and that doesn’t mean we should wait to counter that threat.
Without Clear Goals, Tactical Victories Can Undermine Long-Term Power
Photo: Pavel Kusmartsev / Dreamstime.
Your analysis of the Iran war makes an important distinction between tactical success and strategic success. The United States might weaken Iran militarily while simultaneously increasing Russian energy revenues, diverting American military resources away from Asia, and creating tensions with European allies. Does this reflect a wider problem in American strategy—an ability to win individual confrontations while gradually weakening the alliances and resources that underpin its long-term power?
Imran Bayoumi: This has been a recurring challenge for the United States since it launched the 2003 Iraq War. It has been hard for the US to win decisively, and looking back to the first Trump administration, there was more of a recognition of that. This administration—the second Trump administration—may have been somewhat falsely emboldened by the relatively well-executed operation to remove Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and bring him back to the United States to face trial. Militarily and tactically, that was quite a spectacular operation, with no lives lost. You can debate whether there has really been a transition to democracy or whether the lives of Venezuelan people have markedly improved, but more broadly, this was seen as a success and may have given a false sense of security moving into the Iran war.
One interesting thing to note about the Iran war, and this demonstrates that values still matter, is that if you look at the start of the war and German Chancellor Merz’s statements, he was initially in support of it when President Trump was framing the war as an opportunity for the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their leaders. Then, once we saw the United States abandon that goal—though it was never really clear whether that was one of the core goals to begin with—and there was a recognition that this was going to be a longer-term conflict, you then saw Merz and other leaders come out against it.
There are a few things here. First, there is definitely a difference between tactical military success on the battlefield and translating that into strategic success in the long term. That’s a long-standing challenge. But the other point that’s maybe a bit more interesting and harder to tease out is that there is still support for these broad values-based interventions. The problem is that, in Iran specifically, I don’t think the war is being executed with a level of strategy and clear goals that would allow allies to support it.
That’s the challenge. Now we’re in this stalemate where both Iran and the United States increase leverage week over week. Sometimes one has more than the other, and there’s no clear off-ramp. That undermines US power and credibility and raises the question, in the eyes of allies: what does the US want here?
Rebuilding Allied Trust Will Take Much Longer Than Losing It
There may also be a populist dimension to this problem. Populist foreign policy often favors highly visible demonstrations of strength—tariffs, military strikes, threats, sanctions, territorial claims—because they can be presented domestically as proof of decisive leadership. But can policies that are politically attractive at home produce strategic costs abroad that only become visible years later?
Imran Bayoumi: That’s a real challenge, and we’re starting to see that now. With the Iran war—and more broadly with the actions this administration has taken—it will take a long time to rebuild the trust that the US had with its allies and partners. That trust still exists on some level. I don’t think it’s totally gone, but it has diminished. The next administration—or this administration, if it decides to change course going forward—will face a key question: how do we manage our relationships with allies, recognizing that they will now want more? They’ve diversified, they’ve taken steps to increase their defense spending, and they want to ensure their sovereignty as well. So what does this broader dynamic look like going forward? That’s a real challenge that I’m not sure many are thinking about.
What the future of the international order looks like is going to be a real challenge. I don’t think everything we’ve taken for granted over the past 80 years can continue to be taken for granted. Things will have to change. Some of these challenges might not be evident in the immediate future.
China Gains Influence by Showing Up Where Democracies Do Not
Map: Shutterstock.
In your work on China’s policing partnerships in the Pacific, you show that Beijing gains influence not simply through military power but through police training, surveillance systems, security assistance, infrastructure, and relationships with political elites. Does authoritarian influence spread partly because authoritarian governments are particularly willing to connect foreign policy with internal security and regime protection? And how should democracies compete without supporting similar forms of political control?
Imran Bayoumi: I think that’s certainly part of it. There is this recognition in authoritarian states that the technology China is selling can help preserve their power. But in the Pacific specifically, it’s more about the fact that China showed up and is willing to offer these goods for cheap. Public safety is a real concern for these governments, and if China is the one offering to help with policing when the US, Australia, or New Zealand is not there, most countries would take that offer of help.
The broader challenge is for the US and its allies to show up and offer cheap or affordable solutions and policies. In terms of what can be done differently, the Pacific is actually almost a success story now. You’ve seen Australia really invest in deepening its security ties across the region, and I’m focusing on that since that was the starting point of this article, or this question. It’s built out these broad security deals. It’s providing police training. There’s a big Pan-Pacific policing initiative, security initiative, and Australia has invested in cultural ties as well. Fore example, it’s used rugby as a way to strengthen support and ties and really build those stronger connections.
So, I don’t think democracies can’t compete or can’t still be attractive partners. The challenge, though, is that they have to offer something as good or better at a competitive price point. It’s hard when that can’t be underwritten by the state.
Democracy Remains a Valuable Organizing Principle
You have also criticized Washington for overlooking democratic backsliding or human-rights violations when dealing with strategically important partners. But if great-power competition gives authoritarian governments more alternatives, American pressure becomes harder to apply because governments can threaten to turn toward China or Russia. How can democracies defend democratic standards without pushing strategically important states toward authoritarian powers?
Imran Bayoumi: I’ll focus specifically on the US here. The United States still has a ton to offer, and countries still want to partner with it, regardless of how disruptive it may be in the current moment. It’s partly about the United States being comfortable using its leverage and its power. We’re seeing it use that power and leverage in ways that undermine its relationships and weaken them writ large. So I would pull that back and instead focus on how we build stronger relationships and how we present the US as a still attractive partner especially in terms of economic and military power.
Then, what are the conditions for partnering with the US? I don’t think that’s really any different from the past. There are opportunities to condition arms sales, trade agreements, and broad diplomatic agreements. So, Washington still has this kind of draw. Even though authoritarian states may be able to hedge better, they’re still hedging, which means there are still two powers—or multiple great powers. They’re not blindly allying themselves with Russia or China, or some combination of that. There’s still something they want from Washington.
It’s all about how we use what Washington has to incentivize changes in behavior. One last point: Democracy is still a valuable organizing principle. You could look at Madagascar last year, which had a youth movement that toppled the government and helped push it toward what may be some sort of democratic transition. So, there is still support for these values, and Washington needs to find a way to elevate that and try to create conditions for that change.
Renewed American Leadership Must Accommodate a More Decentralized World
Finally, you do not argue that authoritarian victory is inevitable. Russia and China have serious economic and demographic weaknesses, and authoritarian partnerships remain much less reliable than democratic alliances. If today’s disorder currently rewards authoritarian and populist forms of politics, what changes would be necessary for the international system to reward democratic cooperation again? And does that require simply restoring American leadership, or developing a new model in which democratic middle powers have much greater autonomy?
Imran Bayoumi: I’m not sure I know the answer to what changes the international system needs to make. But one important point, which I’ve touched on before and which you picked up in the question, is that the international system will look different going forward. What we will have to grapple with—we being the United States, or policymakers here in the United States—is that middle powers, both democratic and authoritarian, will have more power. They might not be able to build a whole new international system, but they will have the power to advance their interests in certain sectors, on certain topics, and in certain regions. So, the new international system will have to deal with their desire for autonomy.
That being said, I still think there is value in having a hegemon. The system still needs one strong power that can draw all of these states together, make them work together, and enforce the rules of the system while maintaining and growing it. Going forward, what we’ll need is some sort of retooled American leadership—one that recognizes the growing power of smaller states and the defining challenges of the moment, whether those come from revisionist states or from non-state threats such as climate change and the challenge of dealing with technology. It also needs to be able to build new institutions or revitalize existing ones in order to spur cooperation and continue that momentum.
In this interview with ECPS, Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde examines how authoritarianism, populism, and democratic backsliding increasingly intersect with struggles over civil society and international norms. She argues that autocracies view independent civic mobilization as a strategic threat because rights-based movements can generate broader networks of resistance. The conversation also explores how conservative and populist actors use transnational networks to contest LGBTQ+ rights, human rights norms, and the role of international organizations. Dr. Valverde highlights the growing polarization of international civil society, the strategic use of migration as interstate leverage, and the resurgence of sovereignty-based challenges to the liberal international order. Together, these developments reveal how democratic erosion increasingly unfolds across both domestic and international arenas.
In an era marked by democratic backsliding, transnational populism, and growing contestation over international norms, the struggle over civic space has become increasingly central to the future of liberal democracy. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde, Assistant Professor in the Department of International Studies at ITAM in Mexico, argues that authoritarian governments do not merely resist particular rights claims; they are deeply concerned with the broader political capacity that autonomous civil society can generate. As she puts it, “Any rights-based mobilization becomes a focal point around which other regime opponents can build networks to resist the regime’s power.”
This insight lies at the heart of Dr. Valverde’s analysis of authoritarian opposition to LGBTQ+ rights. Drawing on her Journal of Democracy research with Gino Pauselli, she emphasizes that conservative ideology alone cannot explain authoritarian behavior. Their argument instead identifies a threefold logic: “repression of civil society, opposition to the liberal international order, and the instrumental use of conservative ideology.” For Dr. Valverde, the civil-society mechanism is especially revealing because rights-based mobilization can create organizational capacities that extend well beyond a single policy issue. Hence her conclusion that “both liberal and illiberal networks and governments understand civic space access itself as a strategic asset.”
The interview also broadens this argument beyond domestic authoritarianism. International organizations themselves, Dr. Valverde argues, have become arenas of normative competition. Conservative NGOs and governments increasingly use the same institutional channels once associated primarily with progressive advocacy, while seeking to influence judges, commissioners, and policy agendas. What is at stake, she stresses, is “not only outcomes, but also the IO’s function itself.” This process can produce what she calls “neutralization”: weakening an international organization’s capacity to advance norms without formally reversing its previous commitments.
These dynamics are closely connected to populism. Dr. Valverde rejects the idea that populists simply learn from autocracies; she instead points to “shared transnational infrastructure” linking conservative and populist actors across borders. She also warns against reducing democracy to electoral legitimacy. Populist leaders, she notes, often reason that “If I won the election, then I represent the people, and if I represent the people, I can do no wrong.” Such logic, she argues, can rapidly undermine checks and balances and weaken non-elected institutions essential to democracy.
Taken together, the conversation presents civic space not as a secondary democratic concern, but as a core arena in which authoritarianism, populism, human rights, and international order increasingly intersect.
Here is our interview with Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Rights from Above Do Not Empower Civil Society
United Nations headquarters in New York City, US. Photo: Dreamstime.
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde, welcome! YourJournal of Democracyarticle argues that authoritarian governments oppose LGBTQ+ rights not simply because of cultural conservatism but because these rights strengthen civil society, reinforce liberal international norms, and potentially expand spaces for political contestation. This moves the discussion beyond morality into regime survival. To what extent should we understand contemporary anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns as instruments of authoritarian governance rather than merely expressions of conservative ideology?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: That’s a fantastic question, and first of all, thank you very much for your interest in my article with Gino Pauselli in the Journal of Democracy. As scholars, we always dream of being read and of our scholarship being of interest. Responding to your question, I think that the dichotomy is analytically useful, but empirically, maybe it’s too clean. Our article shows that autocracies vote against SOGI, or Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Resolutions at the United Nations Human Rights Council, over 80% of the time. It explains this through a threefold logic: repression of civil society, opposition to the liberal international order, and the instrumental use of conservative ideology, not ideology alone.
I think that maybe the civil society repression channel is the most diagnostic. Social rights function as a proof of concept that a minority, once granted rights, mobilizes to expand them, or also just to gain them. That, exactly, is a capacity autocracies need to suppress, regardless of the issue. The clearest evidence in our article that the governance logic beyond ideology is what works best is Cuba: an authoritarian government that voted in favor of all five United Nations Human Rights Council social resolutions between 2011 and 2022, while never empowering independent LGBTQ+ civil society. So, rights granted from above, with no domestic accountability and mobilization attached.
So, yes, conservative ideology is one of the three interacting levers in our article, but we think about it as deployed instrumentally, where useful for legitimation and alliance building, and dispensable where regime survival logic points elsewhere, as in Cuba.
Civic Space Is a Strategic Asset
Your explanation places civil society at the center of authoritarian calculations. Rather than fearing LGBTQ+ communities themselves, authoritarian governments appear to fear the broader mobilizational capacity that rights-based movements generate. Does this suggest that authoritarian regimes increasingly perceive all forms of autonomous civic organization as interconnected threats, regardless of the specific issue around which they initially mobilize?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: Yes, I do think so. I think that the mechanism doesn’t necessarily depend on said rights specifically. Any rights-based mobilization becomes a focal point around which other regime opponents can build networks to resist the regime’s power. So, this generalizes empirically to the tools autocracies more generally use, like foreign agent laws, NGO registration barriers, and propaganda status.
I’m currently working on anti-gender network mobilization at the Organization of American States (OAS), which shows the same generalized logic from the opposite ideological direction: conservative civil society networks treating access to international organizations (IOs) as an important focal point for infrastructure building, so, like, for training, coalition formation, and the creation of relevant normative frameworks, independent of any single policy win. And so, I think both liberal and illiberal networks and governments understand civic space access itself as a strategic asset.
Transnational Networks Matter More Than Autocratic Learning
Across Europe and Latin America, populist leaders frequently portray LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality, migration, and multiculturalism as elements of a single ideological project imposed by liberal elites. Do you see evidence that contemporary populists have learned from authoritarian regimes how to transform cultural issues into broader narratives about national sovereignty and democratic legitimacy?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: That’s also a great question. I would resist learning from autocracies as the primary mechanism. It is better explained by shared transnational infrastructure than by diffusion from authoritarian regimes to populist governments.
I’ve been working on gender ideology at the OAS, and that gender ideology, as a concept, is a deliberately elastic floating signifier that articulates SOGI, reproductive rights, education, and public health into a single civilizational frame. In the case of the OAS, that infrastructure is facilitated by some very famous NGOs and networks, like Alliance Defending Freedom, CitizenGo, the International Organization for the Family, and the Congreso por la Vida y la Familia, which train and finance authoritarian-adjacent but also democratically elected populist actors at the same time.
So, I would say that, in the case of Latin America, the populist right couples sovereigntist nationalism with a religiously coded foreign threat, rather than immigration-centered nativism, which is also interesting. But this is a parallel development to the frameworks used and the narratives employed by authoritarian regimes. I wouldn’t say that populist governments learn from authoritarian regimes.
International Norms Create Lasting Institutional Effects
Participants march through the streets during Prague Pride, a major LGBTQ+ parade and celebration, in Prague, Czech Republic, on August 12, 2017. Photo: Madeleine Steinbach.
Your research demonstrates that battles over LGBTQ+ rights increasingly unfold within international organizations, particularly the United Nations Human Rights Council. Some observers assume these debates are largely symbolic. Yet your work suggests they have genuine political consequences. Why do authoritarian governments invest so much diplomatic capital in resisting seemingly non-binding international norms?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: That’s a great question as well. I would say that non-binding norms matter. Non-binding doesn’t mean costless or inconsequential, so precedent accumulates. Also, regarding United Nations Human Rights Council resolutions specifically, they might be non-binding, but at the same time they establish mandates. For example, in the case of SOGI resolutions at the United Nations, they created the Independent Expert on SOGI rights in 2016, whose mandate was renewed by the resolutions of 2019 and 2022. That creates institutional machinery, reporting, monitoring, and a reference point that autocracies correctly read as a foothold for further, maybe even binding, developments.
In the case of autocracies, what happens at the domestic level matters less because of their repression of civil society and the lack of pathways for different domestic actors to influence politics. But in the case of democracies, even non-binding resolutions may serve as mobilization focal points for domestic policy wins. So, non-binding norms have evidently become relevant sites of contestation for both authoritarian regimes and opposing democratic regimes. And that has made such resolutions rare items at the United Nations Human Rights Council because they are consistently forced to a formal vote.
So, unlike the 74% of resolutions passed by consensus at the Council between 2006 and 2020, SOGI resolutions are usually voted on because of the relevance attached to them, and they draw above-average opposition, with up to 43% voting no against a 21% baseline. I would also say that what happens at the United Nations Human Rights Council is relevant as a coordination good for autocracies and other anti-SOGI rights actors themselves, because participation and opposition allow them to build what we can call backlash networks and rehearse a shared vocabulary that travels to other normative fights in international and national forums.
International Organizations Are Arenas of Normative Competition
Your doctoral research examines how civil society gains access to international organizations and transforms access into political influence. At a time when authoritarian governments seek to restrict civic participation both domestically and internationally, have international organizations themselves become contested arenas where democracy and authoritarianism increasingly compete for normative influence?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: Yes, I would say definitely so, and increasingly in more symmetric ways. You mentioned my doctoral thesis, and in my thesis I work on civil society access to international organizations. In my thesis, I show, for example, conservative NGO participation at the Organization of American States (OAS), which is an organization I mentioned before but didn’t quite explain. The OAS is the main regional, multi-purpose organization of the Americas. The United States, Canada, Latin American countries, and the Caribbean countries participate in this organization, and it has been very relevant in terms of normative developments in the human rights arena, as well as in other issues.
In the case of human rights, it has a commission, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which closely parallels the European Court of Human Rights, if people reading this interview are familiar with the European Court. Individuals can access the Commission and the Court in order to get redress for human rights violations at the national level. And it’s very interesting how the Inter-American human rights system has driven progress on SOGI rights, especially in Latin America.
It, for example, led to the adoption of same-sex marriage in Costa Rica, and that has generated backlash. Conservative NGO participation—anti-SOGI rights NGO participation at the OAS, especially at the General Assembly—went from zero in the 1990s to 128 organizations by 2019, reaching close to a third of civil society participation at its peak, using identical access channels and similar strategies to those of pro-SOGI rights NGOs.
Conservative NGOs and conservative governments are also lobbying for the election of conservative judges and commissioners, so what’s contested is not only outcomes, but also the IO’s function itself.
In a later paper, which builds around my work on my doctoral dissertation, I talk about neutralization, which is disabling an IO as a driver of norm expansion without reversing prior commitments. That’s what we see today at the OAS, where discussions on SOGI rights are being stalled because of backlash and fear of backlash. I think that’s a very interesting development happening at IOs today.
International Civil Society Is More Polarized Than We Thought
Much of the democratic backsliding literature focuses on elections, constitutions, and judicial independence. Your scholarship instead highlights civil society, international norms, and transnational advocacy networks. Has political science underestimated the extent to which democratic erosion occurs through the gradual weakening of societal actors rather than through dramatic institutional change?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: I am a student of international relations, a scholar of international relations, so I would say that, yes, political science has indeed underestimated the extent to which democratic erosion might also be advanced at the international level—at that level, through the weakening of societal actors rather than through dramatic institutional change. I wouldn’t necessarily generalize to research on domestic politics.
But I do think that, at the international level, in international relations, we have tended to think of societal actors as pretty homogeneous. So, most of the literature and research of the 1990s on civil society actors in IOs and transnational advocacy networks focused on pro-progressive human rights actors, or progressive actors more generally. And it was, like, the conventional knowledge that only those actors actually cared about what happened at the international level and accessed the international level to exercise pressure on their domestic governments to advance human rights causes, for example.
We have learned more recently that that’s definitely not the case, and that we even ignored, for a long time, how diverse civil society is, not only at the domestic level but also at the international level, and the polarization dynamics that emerge when civil society organizations that have contrasting ideas on certain topics, like SOGI rights, all access and all try to push forward their agendas in IOs.
I do think that this is a phenomenon that is usually not observed as dramatic institutional change, but rather as something that builds more progressively in IOs, and that has interesting implications for what IOs can do in terms of advancing human rights and advancing democracy. And I think that neutralization, for example, which I already mentioned, is a category that talks about this more nuanced and more progressive, little-by-little institutional change.
‘Backlash Networks’ Are Still Mostly Defensive
In yourJournal of Democracyarticle, you describe how authoritarian governments cooperate internationally to resist the expansion of LGBTQ+ rights through what might be called “backlash networks.” These coalitions appear increasingly coordinated across regions. Are we witnessing the emergence of an alternative international normative order, or are these alliances better understood as defensive coalitions seeking to slow liberal norm diffusion?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: Based on the empirical evidence, I would say that, up until today, the system is more defensive. So, for example, the anti-gender networks’ litigation at the OAS is reactive, no? It tries to diminish the influence of progressive actors at the OAS, for example, by submitting amici curiae in cases brought by others. So, I read that as a response to an unfavorable opportunity structure in the Inter-American human rights system, and that might change over time.
But I do think that, right now, what we see is not reversal yet. I think reversal might happen, but right now, we don’t see decisions at the OAS or at the United Nations Human Rights Council that adopt substantive alternative standards from anti-SOGI rights networks. So, we do not see resolutions regarding, for example, an absolute right to life, or gender ideology being used as a category to talk about a threat, as it is usually framed by anti-SOGI rights actors.
So, rather, we see defensive coalitions seeking to slow liberal norm diffusion, as you mentioned. Influence shows up in stalled agendas and dissenting opinions, not new international norms. That said, I would say that the coordination infrastructure of backlash networks—for example, lobbying for ideologically proximate judges and commissioners at the OAS, training pipelines, and north-south funding flows—is being built for the long run.
And elected officials now sympathetic to these agendas are positioned to eventually build an alternative international normative order. So, I would say that being defensive today and building an alternative order later are not mutually exclusive, and we might see that in the future.
Migration Control Creates Interstate Leverage
Disembarkation of 300 migrants from Libya from the German rescue ship Sea-Watch 3 in Pozzallo, Province of Ragusa, Italy, on June 9, 2022. Photo: Alec Tassi.
Your more recent work introduces the concepts of migration power and migration statecraft, arguing that migration flows themselves have become instruments of interstate influence. This shifts migration from being merely a humanitarian or domestic policy issue to becoming a foreign policy resource. How does this conceptualization change the way political scientists should understand migration in an era of geopolitical competition?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: That’s an interesting question, and also thank you for reading that paper with Natalia Saltalamacchia. In that paper, we reconceptualized migration flows themselves as a power resource, comparable in kind, not just in effect, to more conventional instruments of statecraft.
Using Baldwin’s relational anatomy of power, the key conceptual move is that migration power is constituted, so it exists only because destination states have decided domestically that controlling migration is a vital interest.
So, the target zone securitization of migration is what turns a transit or origin state’s population movements into leverage, or an instrument of statecraft. I think this is interesting. It reframes the weapon of the weak intuition as conditional, not structural. Exercising migration power credibly requires real institutional capacity, so border enforcement and processing infrastructures, which some fragile states lack.
But that’s why we see the strongest cases, like Morocco, Turkey, and Egypt. They are all states with functioning migration bureaucracies. But I do think that it’s an interesting turn to think not necessarily in terms of geopolitical competition. I think it’s more interesting for thinking about North-South relations.
What typically is the leverage that less powerful states have vis-à-vis more powerful states? So, for example, the case of Mexico vis-à-vis the United States. For the United States, for the government of Donald Trump, it is very important that Mexico engages and cooperates with the US in terms of the containment of migrants at the US-Mexico border. That gives Mexico some leverage vis-à-vis the United States, even when we as Mexicans have always been very aware of how asymmetrical our relationship with the US is. So, it’s very interesting to think about how North-South dynamics change when this leverage exists on the side of southern countries, and this leverage is, paradoxically, created in part by northern states that see migration as a threat.
Migration has increasingly become a bargaining tool in relations between states—from the Belarus–EU border crisis to Turkey’s agreements with the European Union and Morocco’s management of migration toward Spain. Does your framework suggest that migration is evolving into a standard instrument of statecraft comparable to sanctions, trade policy, or energy diplomacy?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: I am not a scholar of migration, but I think this is a conceptual article. It is trying to provide some analytical tools and some relevant concepts to understand dynamics that we are indeed observing today, including some of the relevant empirical examples you just mentioned. I would also mention the very recent crisis regarding Morocco-Spain relations in Ceuta. In late July, thousands of people left Morocco and tried to reach Spain through Ceuta, which is a Spanish territory, in an enormous flow of people that unfortunately had terrible humanitarian consequences, because many of those migrants died.
What probably happened, given the enormous number of people crossing at the same time, was that the Moroccan government facilitated the crossing, or encouraged the crossing, to exercise political pressure on Spain. Migration is being used as an instrument of statecraft. I would compare it to energy sanctions or trade policy. In this case, the one that can exercise migration statecraft is the less powerful state, which doesn’t necessarily happen with all types of statecraft. Obviously, it varies.
I just want to finish the comment by recognizing also how problematic this is in terms of ethics. Because what we’re talking about is people’s lives. Exercising migration contention, or facilitating migration flows to exercise pressure on other states, depends on governments mobilizing or containing people who are trying to move across borders to have access to better living conditions. Migration statecraft is very problematic in this sense, but it’s something that we are observing today in the world, and that it’s important to name.
Populism and Migration Diplomacy Reinforce Each Other
Populist leaders often frame migration as an existential domestic threat, while governments simultaneously employ migration strategically in international negotiations. How do these two dimensions interact? Are domestic populist narratives and international migration statecraft increasingly reinforcing one another?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: That’s a great question, and I think the two are indeed mutually reinforcing through the co-constitution mechanism at the center of Natalia Saltalamacchia’s and my article. Populist domestic narratives that frame migration as an existential threat are precisely what increase the value states place on migration control. That value, in turn, creates leverage that other states can exploit.
So, the causal relationship runs both ways. When migration statecraft succeeds, the episode can also be interpreted domestically as confirmation that migration is indeed the existential threat populists have described, thereby reinforcing the very narrative that generated the vulnerability in the first place. This creates a feedback loop with no obvious breaker.
The more governments perform toughness on migration for domestic audiences, the more valuable migration becomes as a lever for whoever controls the migration flow. That’s a genuinely understudied dynamic linking the populism and migration diplomacy literatures, which have generally developed separately.
The Liberal Order Is Being Challenged from Within
From Left: Hungary PM Viktor Orban, Poland PM Beata Szydlo, Czech PM Bohuslav Sobotka and Slovakia PM Robert Fico pose prior their meeting in Prague on February 15, 2016.
Throughout your scholarship, there is an ongoing tension between universal human rights and state sovereignty. In today’s geopolitical environment, where sovereignty has re-emerged as a central political slogan for both populist and authoritarian governments, has the balance between these principles shifted in ways that fundamentally challenge the post-Cold War liberal international order?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: That’s also a great question. I would start by recognizing that the tension between universal human rights and state sovereignty has always existed. What universal human rights seek to achieve is to protect citizens from abuses of power by their own governments. There has therefore always been this very interesting tension between international human rights norms, institutions, and mechanisms, on the one hand, and state sovereignty, on the other, because when IOs or other states criticize a country’s human rights record, they are addressing a deeply internal matter: how a government treats its own citizens. So, this is not new.
However, I do think that the sovereignty-based justification for opposing international human rights norms has become more salient in the last couple of years because of the turn toward more nationalist governments in much of the world, and also because of the rise of authoritarian governments. These governments are, of course, particularly opposed to universal human rights norms and to international actors expressing opinions about or criticizing their domestic records, because they frequently violate human rights. That’s a basic trait of authoritarianism.
But yes, this is also because they want to maintain very tight control over domestic civil society. So, I would say that, yes, definitely, this tension has become more salient over time, and this does challenge the post-Cold War liberal international order. We must also recognize that it is not only authoritarian governments or populist governments in the Global South that are opposing or contesting universal human rights. Some of the main proponents of the liberal international order itself are also doing so, with the United States being the most relevant case.
So, besides normative contestation at IOs, we must also look at what happens, for example, with funding in the next couple of years. There is a real threat that international institutions may no longer be able to deliver in areas such as monitoring mechanisms because funding that has traditionally been provided by the United States may no longer be available. I think this is also a highly relevant dynamic, beyond the more discursive contestation of universal human rights norms.
Winning Elections Is Not Enough for Democracy
Your work on civil society implicitly broadens the concept of political representation beyond elected institutions. Many populist leaders claim that elections alone provide sufficient democratic legitimacy. Yet your research suggests that democratic governance also depends upon organized civic participation and international advocacy. Should we rethink democratic representation as extending well beyond electoral politics?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: Yes, I would say it is a fundamental, core trait of populist governments to associate democratic legitimacy almost entirely with the electoral mandate, and that’s obviously worrisome. It leads populist leaders to say, “If I won the election, then I represent the people, and if I represent the people, I can do no wrong.” That kind of logic can quickly lead to dynamics of democratic erosion, for example, at the domestic level, by contesting and weakening non-elected officials who are also fundamental to democracy. A particularly emblematic case is the judiciary.
So, we must consider that democratic representation extends well beyond electoral politics and also depends on checks and balances on elected leaders, however large their mandates might be. We traditionally think of those checks and balances as domestic, and those are obviously the most relevant ones—for example, what happens at the legislative and judicial levels. But I think the international system also matters as a check and balance on the actions of domestic governments, especially in the case of human rights and other international commitments that the international community has a legitimate interest in upholding.
Gender Ideology Bundles Multiple Political Conflicts
The political contestation surrounding LGBTQ+ rights increasingly overlaps with debates about migration, gender equality, reproductive rights, and academic freedom. Do you see these issues gradually converging into a broader global struggle over the meaning of democracy itself, rather than remaining separate policy debates?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: It’s a very interesting question. There is definitely some convergence across the issue agendas you mentioned. I would not necessarily describe it as a struggle over the meaning of democracy itself, but there is certainly a real convergence in the way these issues are framed.
For example, in my research on the OAS, I examine the use of gender ideology as a unifying concept among populist-right actors and conservative NGOs. In that context, it functions as a deliberately elastic floating signifier that allows the same coalition to move across different topics—including education, public health, SOGI rights, and reproductive rights—without losing coherence.
Populist sovereigntist rhetoric performs a similar bundling function in relation to issues such as migration and multiculturalism. But I would caution against treating all of this as one undifferentiated struggle. The actors, mechanisms, and even regime-type correlations differ from one issue to another.
For example, the relationship between autocracy and LGBTQ+ rights is very robust, as we have already discussed, and autocracies are very likely to oppose SOGI rights. Migration statecraft, by contrast, operates differently. In the case of migration, it is wielded by both democracies and autocracies with roughly symmetric logics.
And regarding the meaning of democracy itself, I would say that the dispute is not so much about democracy being destroyed as about how much democracy actually matters and whether democratic regimes are still considered necessary. It is also about whether we still need the international system and the liberal international order that was constructed after World War II. Two main issues definitely contested across these different, issue agendas.
Populist-Right Trends Are Converging Across Regions
Nested dolls depicting authoritarian and populist leaders Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan displayed among souvenirs in Moscow on July 7, 2018. Photo: Shutterstock.
Having worked extensively on Latin American politics while engaging broader comparative questions, do you believe Latin America offers distinctive insights into democratic resilience that Europe and North America often overlook? Conversely, are there emerging authoritarian strategies in Europe that may increasingly influence political developments across Latin America?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: I would actually say that the current trends in Europe and Latin America are quite similar. We are seeing a rise of populist-right governments in both regions. In Latin America, over the past few months, we have seen the election of Alberto de la Espriella in Colombia and Kast in Chile. Elections are coming up in October in Brazil, and it’s unclear whether the Bolsonaros will return to government or whether Lula will be re-elected. We also see this turn in Argentina with Milei—this is not just a development of the last couple of months, but of the last couple of years.
We also see right-wing governments associated with Fujimori in Peru and with Noboa in Ecuador. And there is a broader trend, at least in the Western world, toward these right-wing governments. We might even think of them as forming a kind of transnational coalition, in the sense that there are links between different far-right and populist-right actors at both the European and Latin American levels.
For example, the influence of the Spanish far right in Latin America is very interesting. In Spain, the far right is represented by Vox, which also has a civil society branch, CitizenGo. CitizenGo and Vox have very interesting links to the populist right in Latin America, including support for political campaigns. Some of the narratives they employ are also copied and used in Latin American countries, and CitizenGo provides funding to Latin American conservative civil society organizations.
So, there are definitely political developments in both regions influencing one another. I don’t know whether Latin America offers distinctive insights into democratic resilience. I’m actually very concerned about current political developments in the region, and our institutions are weaker than those in most European countries. We will see how institutions respond to the democratic erosion dynamics that may emerge across Latin America in the next few years, and how those processes compare with developments in Europe. But the jury is still out on this particular question.
Backsliding and Institutional Backlash Are Increasingly Intertwined
And lastly, Professor Valverde, taken together, your scholarship examines civil society, international organizations, migration, human rights, and democratic governance from multiple perspectives. Looking ahead, which emerging development—whether democratic backsliding, transnational populism, migration diplomacy, digital disinformation, geopolitical fragmentation, or the weakening of international institutions—do you believe will most profoundly reshape the future of liberal democracy over the next decade, and where should scholars concentrate their attention?
Dr. María José Urzúa Valverde: I am particularly interested in democratic backsliding processes and in how international institutions might lock in certain international commitments to preserve international norms such as human rights norms, or whether they will fail to play this relevant locking role, which is something that has been theorized in international relations.
So, for example, there are some very famous articles from the 1990s, especially the one by Andrew Moravcsik on how transitioning democracies lock in international commitments in order to prevent future governments from backsliding, because there is already an international commitment to uphold. He writes about this in the context of European countries committing to the European human rights system.
I think that we are at an interesting time to test that theory and to see whether the international system will provide some safeguards against democratic backsliding, but also how international organizations and international institutions more generally will be—and already are—arenas of contestation over issues related to democratic backsliding, but also to the more general upholding of international human rights norms.
I think it’s a very interesting time to study, both from the perspective of comparative politics and from international relations, how these dynamics of democratic backsliding and the backlash against international institutions interact.
In this commentary, Filippo Palmieri examines how digital platforms are reshaping the political socialization of young Europeans. As mass parties decline, politics is increasingly encountered through personalized feeds, influencers, recommendation systems, and fragmented online publics. Palmieri argues that this transformation does not make populism inevitable, but it creates an environment in which populist appeals to immediacy, personalization, and distrust of intermediaries can travel more easily. Drawing on the concepts of “mass individualism” and “bubble democracy,” the commentary explores how digital participation can broaden political engagement while weakening durable forms of representation and accountability. The central democratic challenge, Palmieri suggests, lies in the growing gap between political expression, collective organization, and meaningful representation.
A political message on TikTok rarely arrives alone. It appears between a song, a comic sketch and a creator’s account of an ordinary day. On Instagram, a carousel explaining an election may be followed by an advertisement or a friend’s holiday photograph. For many young Europeans, this is no longer a secondary route into politics. It is where politics is first encountered.
The European Parliament’s Youth Survey 2024 gives a measure of the change. Among Europeans aged 16 to 30, 42 percent name social media as a main source of information on political and social issues. Television follows at 39 per cent (European Parliament, 2025). These figures do not prove that young people have lost interest in public affairs. They tell us something more precise: a generation is forming its political habits inside spaces built around personal profiles, recommendation systems and an endless competition for attention.
The consequences reach beyond communication. Politics learned through a feed has a different pace, different intermediaries and a different sense of proximity. This helps explain why populist language often moves easily across digital platforms. It does not mean that social media manufacture populists. The relationship is less direct, and more interesting, than that.
What the Party Used to Provide
The decline of mass parties is often measured through membership figures or electoral volatility. Those indicators matter, but they capture only part of what has disappeared. A party once offered a place where separate experiences could be translated into common claims. It trained activists, selected leaders and connected local disputes to an interpretation of society. The process was slow. It was also unequal: hierarchies were rigid, internal dissent could be suppressed, and many citizens remained outside the organizations that claimed to represent them. Yet the intermediary was visible. It had offices, rules, officials and a name.
Mauro Calise describes the new configuration as “mass individualism.” The collective actor once organized by party machines has broken into a multitude of connected individuals (Calise, 2025). The phrase is deliberately paradoxical. Users act through personal accounts, but they do so before mass audiences. They can speak and mobilize at a scale that would once have required an organization, while the content reaching each of them is increasingly personalized.
This distinction matters most for those who did not acquire political habits before the digital turn. A twenty-year-old may discover a housing protest through a short video, learn its vocabulary from a creator, share it with friends and join a demonstration organized in a group chat. Information, expression and participation take place on the same device, sometimes within a few hours. As Ohme and his colleagues observe, digital environments have brought exposure to news and political action unusually close together (Ohme et al., 2022).
That can produce real participation. Climate strikes, campaigns against gender violence and mobilizations over university costs have travelled through networks that traditional parties struggled to reach. But the same mobilization may dissolve when attention moves to another issue. A hashtag can assemble a public without building an organization able to negotiate, decide or remain accountable after the peak of visibility has passed.
There is no single European “digital generation” either. A study covering nine countries found marked class differences among young people’s conventional, community-based and online participation (Grasso & Giugni, 2022). Education, resources and political confidence still shape whose voice becomes public. Cheap access to a platform does not make political influence equally available.
Disintermediation Without the Disappearance of Intermediaries
Social media are regularly described as instruments of disintermediation. The term suggests that parties, journalists and associations have been removed from the relationship between citizens and power. Only half of that story is true. Older gatekeepers have weakened; mediation itself has not vanished. It has changed hands.
TikTok’s recommendation system decides which political clip travels beyond its original audience. Instagram gives visual advantage to claims that can be compressed into a reel or a sequence of cards. Influencers translate public controversies into the language of personal experience, while visible counts of likes and shares make some positions appear socially dominant before a user has examined them. None of these mechanisms is politically neutral, even though none resembles a party headquarters or a newspaper editorial meeting.
Damiano Palano’s notion of “bubble democracy” offers a useful description of the result. Palano argues that the public associated with earlier forms of representative democracy is fragmenting into multiple, partly self-referential audiences (Palano, 2019). A bubble is not a sealed room. Users still meet disagreement, and content moves unpredictably between networks. The deeper change concerns the distribution of attention. A controversy that feels unavoidable on one feed may be almost absent from another. Citizens do not simply reach different conclusions; they may begin from different political events.
This is why the familiar image of the echo chamber is insufficient. The problem is not only that people prefer information consistent with their beliefs. Platform publics are temporary and uneven. They gather around an election, a scandal or a war, then rearrange themselves. Public opinion begins to resemble the intermittent convergence of several streams rather than a single national conversation.
Representative politics has always involved distance. Nadia Urbinati argues that representation does not require citizens and representatives to become identical. It depends on a continuing relationship in which decisions can be judged, contested and revised (Urbinati, 2010). Social media create the impression that this distance has closed. A leader speaks from a phone, replies to followers and comments on events before the evening news. The tone is intimate. Power may remain highly concentrated.
Why Populist Narratives Travel Well
Populism fits this environment because it turns representation into a promise of direct presence. A leader speaks as the authentic voice of “the people”; whoever stands between the two can be presented as an obstacle. Parties distort. Experts complicate. Journalists hide. Procedures delay. These accusations long predate TikTok and Instagram, but platforms allow them to be repeated daily, adapted to audience reactions and attached to an individual face.
Personalization is part of the advantage. A recognizable leader circulates more easily than an organization with competing factions and a detailed programme. Speed matters too. Every event can be framed as an urgent test of whether institutions are listening. Conflict completes the pattern: the distinction between an authentic community and those allegedly frustrating its will is well suited to systems that reward reaction.
Still, there is no universal digital law favoring populists. Davidson and Enos examined more than 400 European parties between 2010 and 2020. Populist parties received more engagement than their competitors on Facebook, but the same advantage did not appear consistently on Twitter. It also varied between countries and was concentrated especially among right-wing populists (Davidson & Enos, 2025). Platform architecture matters. So do political culture, party strategy and national context.
Research from the Netherlands adds another complication. People with populist attitudes were more likely to react to political content, yet their use of social media did not consistently trap them in a populist electoral funnel (Jeroense et al., 2022). A feed is not a machine with a predetermined political output. It changes the incentives under which politics is communicated: some claims become easier to circulate, some actors become more visible, and directness acquires a persuasive value of its own.
For young citizens, this is also a question of familiarity. If politics is first experienced through personal profiles and short cycles of attention, the leader’s direct appeal may not look like a rebellion against ordinary democratic practice. It may look like ordinary democratic practice. Bargaining, party organization and institutional compromise then appear distant and evasive, even though they remain necessary whenever a demand must be converted into a collective decision.
A Different Experience of Democracy
It would be misleading to tell this story as a fall from a democratic golden age. Mass parties often demanded obedience and filtered out inconvenient voices. Digital media have allowed experiences once ignored by established organizations to enter public debate. They have made rapid mobilization across cities and borders possible. Young Europeans have used them to force climate change, racial justice, gender equality and economic insecurity onto political agendas.
What has become fragile is the link between expression and representation. A post shared hundreds of thousands of times shows intensity, not necessarily durability or representativeness. A creator can become an influential political interpreter without accepting the obligations normally attached to political leadership. A digital campaign may be remarkably effective at naming a problem and much less able to determine who can legitimately negotiate in its name.
Young Europeans have not abandoned politics. They are learning it in a public sphere whose boundaries move from one issue to the next and whose most powerful intermediaries seldom present themselves as political institutions. This does not make populism inevitable. It makes the populist promise of immediacy easier to recognize and the suspicion of mediation easier to understand.
The relevant question, then, is not whether young people are democratic enough. It is what democracy comes to mean when it is first encountered as a stream of personalized messages rather than as membership in a collective organization. The passage from mass parties to digital bubbles is therefore more than a shift in political communication. It is a change in the everyday experience through which representative politics becomes intelligible.
(*) Filippo Palmieri holds a master’s degree in International and Diplomatic Sciences, specializing in Politics and International Security, from the University of Bologna. His research focuses on democratic theory, populism, political representation, the transformation of political parties and the effects of digital communication on contemporary democracy. His master’s thesis examined the changing analytical value of the concept of populism in twenty-first-century democracies. He has presented research on democracy, populism and illiberalism at academic events hosted by the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, the Italian Political Science Association and Venice International University. Email: filippo.palmieri3@studio.unibo.it
Davidson, T. R. & Enos, J. (2025). “Engaging populism? The popularity of European populist political parties on Facebook and Twitter, 2010–2020.” Political Communication, 42(1), 171–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2024.2369118
Grasso, M. & Giugni, M. (2022). “Intra-generational inequalities in young people’s political participation in Europe: The impact of social class on youth political engagement.” Politics, 42(1), 13–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211031742
Jeroense, T.; Luimers, J.; Jacobs, K. & Spierings, N. (2022). “Political social media use and its linkage to populist and postmaterialist attitudes and vote intention in the Netherlands.” European Political Science, 21(2), 193–215. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-020-00306-6
Ohme, J.; Andersen, K.; Albæk, E. & de Vreese, C. H. (2022). “Anything goes? Youth, news, and democratic engagement in the roaring 2020s.” The International Journal of Press/Politics, 27(3), 557–568. https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221093008
Palano, D. (2019). La democrazia alla fine del “pubblico”: Sfiducia, frammentazione, polarizzazione: verso una “bubble democracy”? Governare la paura, 35–92.
In this commentary, Dr. Lilliam Arrieta examines how Nayib Bukele’s rise in El Salvador illustrates the speed with which elected populist leadership can evolve into authoritarian consolidation. Focusing on the erosion of judicial independence, she traces how the removal of Supreme Court justices, forced judicial retirements, and the weakening of constitutional safeguards have concentrated power in the executive. Dr. Arrieta situates these developments within a broader Latin American pattern in which populist leaders undermine courts, militarize public security, and weaken checks and balances in the name of popular sovereignty and order. While Bukele’s security policies have attracted “international admiration,” the article highlights their deeper institutional costs for fundamental rights, judicial protection, democratic accountability, and the long-term resilience of constitutional democracy.
El Salvador is a clear example of how quickly and extensively populist rulers can consolidate power and move towards authoritarianism once democratically elected. In the last two decades, across Latin America, several populist presidents gained office through elections but rapidly took steps to undermine democracy, such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, or Evo Morales in Bolivia. These types of leaders often present themselves as messianic figures—outsiders and saviors—claiming to be the only solution to the problems created by traditional political actors: corruption, nepotism, insecurity, inflation, to name a few, and often the more pressing issues for a concrete population. Aside from being or claiming to be outsiders, a second common trait that these strong individual politicians share is their communication skills. They do not merely communicate with the public; they claim to speak for the people, asserting that they embody the largely forgotten majorities themselves (Temelkuran, 2019). Finally, a third distinctive trait is the disregard for traditional checks and balances, especially for judicial review of the Executive’s policies.
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele embodies these three elements. One of the most pressing examples is the quick measures taken after winning the majority of seats in congress during the 2021 elections. Having obtained a large majority of congressional seats (Martinez, 2021), Bukele’s party quickly enacted laws that undermined democracy and dismissed all opposition as his party claimed to do so in the name of “the people.” During the inaugural session of that legislature, Nueva Ideas (New Ideas) party members voted to remove five justices of the Supreme Court without due process of law or any attempt to conduct a proper impeachment procedure (Arauz, 2021). This unconstitutional removal gave Bukele control over the three branches of government. In the following 2024 congressional elections, after having passed legislation to reduce congressional seats from 84 to 60, the ruling party won 57 of them, consolidating total control over the three branches of Government.
This quick overview of the Salvadoran experience shows that Bukele seems to have followed the same patterns as other Latin American populist leaders. Experiences from Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela had already demonstrated that, to consolidate and maintain power, populist leaders seek control over two main institutions. In no particular order, first, controlling the Armed Forces—and the Police—allows presidents to suppress dissent and instill fear among the population (Bernal, 2021; Infodefensa, 2021; EFE, 2021). Second, reducing the autonomy of the Judiciary.
Authoritarian leaders often seek to dominate the courts, especially the Supreme Court, to bypass legal constraints on their power (Foa, 2021). Checks and balances are considered obstacles, making the dismantling of judicial independence a priority; for example, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 2008, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua in 2010, and Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2017 were able to extend their time in office beyond the constitutional limit thanks to Supreme Court rulings (Sala de lo Constitucional del Tribunal Supremo de Justicia, 2008; Sala de lo Constitucional,sentencia No.06 Corte Suprema de Justicia, Managua, 2010; Sala Plena del Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional de Bolivia, 2017). However, before obtaining control of the judiciary, authoritarian populists often target this branch and accuse it of corruption or ineptitude to prevent unelected public officers from obstructing the Executive’s policies.
The undermining of judicial independence in El Salvador occurred especially through two actions taken as soon as the president gained congressional majority. First, on May 1 of 2021, Nuevas Ideas’ representatives voted to remove five Supreme Court justices without due process of law (Arauz, 2021). Their terms were not set to expire until 2027, but they were arbitrarily removed because of a few previous rulings that were averse to some presidential measures (DW, 2020). It was a power-grab move that violated the Constitution and existing legislation. The ruling party justified it by claiming to have acted on the people’s behalf and accordingly to their will. That same day, congress appointed five new justices whose rulings have since consistently favored the President (BBC, 2021). One of those rulings was the landmark decision that removed a corner stone of Salvadoran constitutional democracy which for more than 35 years prevented presidents from seeking reelection creating a way for Bukele to seek his second term.
Second, early retirement and transfers of career judges. On August 3, 2021, Congress passed a law forcing over 150 judges into early retirement, violating article 182 of the Salvadoran Constitution, which grants the Supreme Court the exclusive authority to appoint and discipline members of the Judiciary. Following this legislation, the Supreme Court appointed a group of new judges (Cornejo, 2021), many of whom have already reversed rulings against political opponents of the President. A few independent judges that were not removed through the early retirement act resigned due to pressures or were transferred to less influential positions (Oliva, 2022; Calderón, 2021).
An assessment by the Latinobarómetro Corporation in 2021 noted that “Bukele has shown that democracy exists only as long as it serves his needs. When it fails to do so, he imposes his will by force. El Salvador is on the verge of becoming a populist autocracy, with significant public support, reminiscent of the early days of Hugo Chávez” (Latinobarómetro Corporation, 2021). The resulting control over the three branches of government has not only undermined democracy or judicial independence in an abstract or institutional manner, but it has also affected citizens’ rights in very concrete ways, as shown by the overwhelming number of people detained under the state of exception, some for over three years, without having had their day in court.
Almost 100,000 people have been detained in El Salvador during a four-year long state of exception, but practically no one has been sentenced, and according to human rights organizations, many of these arrests can be considered arbitrary detentions under international standards (WOLA, 2024). The Constitutional Chamber has failed to rule on over 3,000 habeas corpus petitions it has received since the declaration of the state of exception in March 2022 (El Salvador.com, 2024), effectively neglecting the one judicial protection citizens have against arbitrary detentions in El Salvador (DPLF, 2024).
In May 2025, two prominent lawyers, Ruth López and Enrique Anaya Barraza,—widely recognized for their outspoken criticism of government corruption, human rights violations, and systemic abuses—were detained on charges of embezzlement and money laundering. These charges appear to have been used as a means of silencing dissent and creating a climate of intimidation among other critics and independent voices. The lack of judicial independence has had a profoundly adverse impact on their situation (EDH, 2025). Bail was denied, and both lawyers were remanded in custody pending trial. Their legal representatives have reported serious obstacles to maintaining regular and confidential communication with them. At present, no effective judicial review exists to challenge these apparently politically motivated arrests, as no judge has thus far been willing to issue rulings contrary to what are widely understood to be measures directed by the President or the Executive Branch.
Many countries today appear eager to replicate President Nayib Bukele’s approach to reducing crime and violence, often citing El Salvador’s dramatic decline in homicide rates as evidence of the effectiveness of his policies. What is less frequently acknowledged, however, is the institutional and normative cost underlying these outcomes: the dismantling of checks and balances, the erosion of judicial independence, the weakening of safeguards against human rights violations, and the expansion of a heavily militarized security apparatus. The risks of these developments have been repeatedly illustrated in recent Latin American history.
Importantly, such concentrations of authoritarian power and sustained violations of fundamental rights cannot occur without the curtailment of judicial autonomy, as independent courts constitute a central mechanism for constraining executive authority and enforcing constitutional limits. At the same time, the broader societal significance of judicial independence often remains difficult to communicate to the public, owing to a range of historical, institutional, and sociopolitical factors that lie beyond the scope of this commentary but help explain the relative ease with which judicial erosion can proceed.
These are not abstract concerns; they are lived realities in El Salvador. While the model may appear effective in the short term, its long-term implications for freedom, independent justice, and democratic governance are profound and reverting its impact may take a long time and more than one generation
(*) Dr. Lilliam Arrieta is a Salvadoran lawyer and law professor who has dedicated most of her professional career to teaching and researching topics related to the rule of law and, most recently, gender studies. Dr. Arrieta holds a PhD in Law.
Latinobarómetro Corporation, Informe 2021: Adiós a Macondo, Santiago, Chile, October 2021, p. 23(Bukele ha demostrado que la democracia llega hasta donde le funciona para lo que él necesita. Ycuándo esta no hace lo que el necesita, se impone por la fuerza. El Salvador es un candidato serio atransformarse en una autocracia populista, con altos niveles de apoyo del pueblo. Algo parecido a lascaracterísticas iniciales de Hugo Chávez), at https://www.latinobarometro.org/lat.jsp
In this commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias examines the migration crisis in Ceuta as a “total crisis” encompassing humanitarian obligations, political legitimacy, social cohesion, and the future of Europe’s liberal-multicultural order. Rejecting both an expansive humanitarianism that neglects the pressures experienced by receiving communities and far-right narratives that reduce migrants to a homogeneous civilizational threat, Dr. Dias argues for an approach combining compassion with effective migration governance. Drawing on research into migration, local exposure, and multicultural citizenship, he contends that diversity requires a shared civic framework grounded in democratic law, equality, rights, and obligations. For Dr. Dias, Europe’s challenge is therefore not to choose between humanitarian protection and border control, but to reconcile protection, effective borders, integration, and social stability if liberal multiculturalism is to remain politically sustainable.
The situation in Ceuta is what I would call a “total crisis”: social, political, and humanitarian at the same time. Looking at it in those terms is an attempt to escape the constraints of affective polarization (Iyengar et al., 2019), which increasingly turns political analysis into a moral exercise in deciding who deserves our sympathy.
Two dominant perspectives usually emerge in European debates on migration. One emphasizes humanitarian duties and often expands them into an almost unlimited moral obligation to receive those who reach European borders. The other responds through cultural anxiety, demographic fear and, at its extreme, the rhetoric of a “Great Replacement.” Both perspectives capture something real. Neither sees the whole picture.
Europe has unquestionable obligations towards refugees and asylum seekers. The right to seek asylum and the principle of non-refoulement are central elements of the international and European legal order. A liberal Europe cannot abandon those principles simply because applying them has become politically difficult. But neither international law nor European law establishes an unlimited right for every migrant to enter and remain permanently in Europe.
That distinction matters. States have duties towards those entitled to international protection. But governments also have duties towards the societies they govern. Migration policy cannot ignore reception capacity, housing, public services, integration, security and social stability. Humanitarianism does not operate outside politics. This is where part of the progressive discourse on migration becomes problematic. Its moral vocabulary is universal, while the social consequences of migration are unevenly distributed.
It is relatively easy to demand empathy from the inhabitants of border communities when one does not share their streets, their schools, their public services or their fears. The paradox is striking: those who correctly demand empathy towards migrants sometimes display surprisingly little empathy towards the communities expected to absorb the immediate consequences of large migratory movements.
Ceuta makes that contradiction difficult to ignore. Research also suggests that local exposure matters. Sudden demographic change can generate stronger opposition to immigration when it becomes politically salient (Hopkins, 2010). Hangartner et al. (2019), studying Greek islands exposed to the refugee crisis, found that direct exposure to large refugee arrivals produced more restrictive attitudes towards refugees, immigrants and Muslim minorities.
This does not mean that every fear expressed by local populations is justified. But it means that fear cannot simply be dismissed as ignorance or xenophobia. For the inhabitants of Ceuta, migration is not an abstract seminar on cosmopolitan ethics. It is the sudden presence of thousands of people in a geographically confined territory. It means pressure on public spaces and services, deteriorating sanitary conditions, disruption of everyday life and, inevitably, perceptions of insecurity. Some of those perceptions may be exaggerated. Others may not. But democratic politics cannot simply tell citizens that their fears are morally illegitimate.
At the same time, the opposite camp commits an equally serious mistake. Migrants are not a homogeneous civilizational bloc. Among those arriving in Europe are women escaping oppressive social environments, political dissidents, religious minorities, educated young people looking for opportunities, families seeking security and people whose values may be substantially closer to European liberalism than those of the societies they have left behind. Reducing all migrants to a demographic or cultural threat is therefore both empirically crude and morally indefensible. The crisis has two human faces: those who arrive and those who receive them. Any serious migration policy must be capable of seeing both.
Ceuta also reveals a deeper European problem: the crisis of what might be called liberal multiculturalism. The central intuition of liberal multiculturalism was both powerful and legitimate: people should not be required to erase their cultural, religious or linguistic identity in order to become equal citizens. Kymlicka’s defense of multicultural citizenship remains one of the strongest formulations of this position. But there is a difference between accepting diversity and assuming that social cohesion emerges automatically from it. It does not. A society cannot indefinitely become a patchwork of parallel cultural, ethnic and religious communities without also developing institutions capable of producing a common civic ground.
This does not mean assimilation. It means integration. Language matters. Constitutional principles matter. Equality between men and women matters. Religious freedom matters, including the freedom to abandon religion. Acceptance of democratic law matters. A shared understanding that citizenship involves both rights and obligations matters. European states themselves have increasingly recognized this. The gradual retreat from some versions of multiculturalism and the rise of civic integration policies documented by Joppke (2004, 2007) reflect precisely this concern.
Multiculturalism without integration creates islands. Diversity without a shared civic framework can produce coexistence without community. This is why migration control should not be understood as the opposite of liberal multiculturalism. It may actually be one of its conditions of survival.
Europe needs effective borders precisely because migration will continue. It needs credible asylum procedures because humanitarian protection remains part of the European liberal order. It must distinguish between those who have legitimate claims to international protection and those who do not. It must be capable of receiving and integrating those who are entitled to remain. And it must also be capable of repatriating, humanely and legally, those who have no right to stay. Otherwise, the distinction between legal and illegal migration becomes politically meaningless.
The way Spain responds to Ceuta therefore matters beyond Ceuta. If European governments are unable simultaneously to protect refugees, control borders, manage migration and sustain social integration, voters will increasingly conclude that the entire liberal-multicultural model has failed. That conclusion would have profound political consequences. A Europe that abandons humanitarian protection abandons part of its liberal identity. But a Europe that loses control over migration, fails to integrate newcomers and refuses to acknowledge the fears of receiving communities may eventually create the political conditions for the rejection of liberalism itself.
The real choice is therefore not between compassion and control. Europe needs both. Without compassion, it ceases to be liberal. Without control and integration, it may cease to be politically capable of remaining liberal.
References
Hangartner, D.; Dinas, E.; Marbach, M.; Matakos, K. & Xefteris, D. (2019). “Does exposure to the refugee crisis make natives more hostile?” American Political Science Review, 113(2), 442–455.
Hopkins, D. J. (2010). “Politicized places: Explaining where and when immigrants provoke local opposition.” American Political Science Review, 104(1), 40–60.
Iyengar, S.; Lelkes, Y.; Levendusky, M.; Malhotra, N. & Westwood, S. J. (2019). “The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States.” Annual Review of Political Science, 22, 129–146.
Joppke, C. (2004). “The retreat of multiculturalism in the liberal state: Theory and policy.” The British Journal of Sociology, 55(2), 237–257.
Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural citizenship: A liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford University Press.
In this commentary, Dr. Kamil Jonski examines Poland’s protracted constitutional crisis through the prospect of what he calls “Schrödinger’s Tribunals”: parallel Constitutional Tribunals simultaneously regarded as legitimate and illegitimate by opposing political constituencies. Tracing the conflict from disputes surrounding the 1997 Constitution through the Law and Justice (PiS) government’s capture of the Constitutional Tribunal and the current center-left majority’s attempts at restoration, Dr. Jonski argues that the crisis reflects deeper, competing interpretations of Poland’s constitutional identity. As rival political camps contest judicial appointments, institutional legitimacy, and constitutional authority, efforts to restore the Tribunal may reproduce rather than resolve its politicization. Dr. Jonski ultimately raises a more fundamental question: whether effective constitutional review in Poland now requires institutional solutions beyond the existing Tribunal itself.
The consequences of illiberal assault on Polish Constitutional Tribunal in 2015-2016 – and contemplated attempts to restore it – risks producing singular outcome: two parallel tribunals recognized as “legitimate” and “illegitimate” at any given time by respective sides of the political divide.
It turned out that initial opposition to the Constitution, support for Tribunal packing, and approval of the captured CT were all concentrated largely among self-identified rightists who regularly participate in religious services. Intriguingly, the results of the 2025 presidential runoff, analyzed at the level of 370 NUTS 4 regions, correlate with the results of the 1997 constitutional referendum, corroborating the claim that the current conflict over (dis)obeying the Constitution is linked to the past conflict over its adoption.
These empirical findings correspond with the narrative provided by the late professor L. Morawski – constitutional scholar and 2015 CT packing participant. As he explained during 2017 Oxford symposium, right-wingers and their opponents disagree on “how the Polish Constitution should be interpreted” with the government favoring “republican” and opposition – a “liberal way.” For him, “the republican tradition does not reject all liberal values. [Sharing] a deep respect for democracy, human rights and freedoms. But apart from this, Polish republicanism strongly emphasizes the attachment to values such as patriotism, solidarity, a strong state as a guardian of human rights, the role of the Catholic Church and religion in public life. In political reality, it means that Polish republicans defend the traditional family model and strongly oppose abortion and so on.”
I argue that lacking the majority required to amend the Constitution, right-wingers seek control of the CT – the only institution in the legal system, that is capable to saturate it with rightist values and identity (or increase the level of this saturation). That allows them to replace “liberal” meaning of the constitution with “republican” one – without altering its text at all.
The history of Polish Constitutional Tribunal dates back to communist era “normalization” after 1981 martial law. By coincidence, half of the bench had been ought to be replaced shortly after the groundbreaking semi-free elections of June 4, 1989, offering CT unique opportunity to successfully reinvent itself to the new, democratic reality.
However, the right-wing quickly became to contest the Tribunal. The first draft of the law that would enable CT purge had been submitted in 1992 (Doc. no. 458, I Term) but it was rejected by the major political forces pursuing negotiated transition to the democracy and market economy.
The issue returned to the agenda when so called “post-communist cleavage” gave way to the current divide between Civic Coalition (Platform) of Donald Tusk and Law & Justice (PiS) of Kaczyński twins.
The double elections of 2005 delivered Lech Kaczyński’s presidency and a fragile coalition government under leadership of Jaroslav Kaczyński. Although the cabinet lasted only to 2007 snap elections, it embarked “political mobbing” against CT and undertook two failed attempts to force PiS appointee as a CT Chief Justice (for first see Doc. no. 765, for second Doc. no. 2030, V Term).
Ten years later, another double election paved the way to Polish constitutional crisis of 2015. PiS’s candidate Andrzej Duda unexpectedly won presidency, and PiS itself secured first single-party majority since 1989. Perhaps mindful of the 2005-2007 excesses, outgoing parliamentary majority led by Civic Platform embarked an attempt to pack CT, passing legislation that allowed appointment “in advance” of five – instead of scheduled three – justices.
The parliamentary election of 2023, leading to the formation of center-left cabinet of Donald Tusk, inspired hope of rule of law “restoration”. On March 6, 2024 the Lower Chamber of the Parliament (Sejm) adopted resolution proclaiming that irregularities in CT amassed to the point where it is unable to carry out constitutional review and protect human rights (M.P.2024.198). That same day two draft laws had been submitted to reshape CT (Doc. no. 253 and 254, X Term). Passed on September 13, 2024, they were referred to the right-captured CT by President Duda and declared unconstitutional in its judgment of July 29, 2025 (Kp 3/24). Given that failure, on December 18, 2024, the Cabinet adopted resolution on captured CT’s inability to perform its tasks and denying promulgation of its judgments (M.P. 2024.1068).
As right-wing Karol Nawrocki replaced President Duda in 2025, it became apparent that legislative “restoration” of the CT is out of reach in the foreseeable future. The B-plan, involving judicial appointments, was launched in March 2026.
According to the Constitution, CT is composed of 15 justices. As of August 31, 2026, they can be divided into four groups, illustrating what Jakub Jaraczewski and Laurent Pech called “dualist constitutional court.”
Justyn Piskorski and Jarosław Wyrembak, who replaced two late “doubles,” are recognized as legitimate justices by right-wingers (and Chief Justice Bogdan Święczkowski), but their status is contested by the current majority citing judgments of CT, ECHR and CJEU.
Stanisław Piotrowicz, Bartłomiej Sochański (deputy Chief Justice), Jakub Stelina, Wojciech Sych, Święczkowski (Chief Justice) and Rafał Wojciechowski remain uncontested PiS-appointed justices.
Magdalena Bentkowska, Sławomir Patyra and Dariusz Szostek are uncontested appointees of the current, center-left majority, properly sworn in by the President Karol Nawrocki.
Marcin Dziurda, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, Krystian Markiewicz and Maciej Taborowski are recognized by the current majority that appointed them, but contested by right-wingers (and Chief Justice Święczkowski), as President Nawrocki denied them opportunity to be sworn in.
Regardless the differences, both scholars agreed that some sort of CT restoration is both feasible and desirable. However, that is hardly the case if “dualist constitutional court” is indeed the consequence of parallel meanings, ascribed to the Constitution by polarized politicians, lawyers and large clusters of voters.
Leaving aside specific legal tactics, CT restoration is likely to involve the following sequence: the eight appointees of the current center-left majority (at least four of them contested by the right) would somehow assume the role of the CT’s General Assembly. Next, they will use the PiS-created institution of a justice chairing the CT to bypass Chief Justice Święczkowski (either on the grounds of “doubles” involvement in his appointment or by using disciplinary charges), paving the way for review (in five-justice panels) of the key PiS-enacted laws. Most likely, the so-called interpretative judgment technique will be used, in a way similar to the judgment of November 7, 2016 (K 44/16). These judgments will be promulgated in the Journal of Laws and enforced by the cabinet.
The reaction of the right-wingers seems equally predictable—they will deny the status of the CT’s General Assembly and frame the events as an illegal court capture. Święczkowski will carry the torch of “constitutional legitimacy” until February 2031, when his term in office expires. And once elections deliver a right-wing majority, it will unconstitutionally nullify the judicial appointments—just as in the case of the 2015 CT packing—to appoint another set of “doubles” contested by the liberals.
The two parallel interpretations of the Constitution will be crowned by two distinct benches of Tribunal justices, producing their respective jurisprudence. Just like Schrödinger’s cat—simultaneously dead and alive—the parallel Tribunals would be recognized as “legitimate” and “illegitimate” by their respective constituencies at any given time, with the current majority and cabinet determining whose case law should be followed and whose judgments ought to be promulgated and enforced.
It is widely acknowledged that, since 2016 (i.e., one-fourth of contemporary Polish democratic history), the CT has lacked the capacity to carry out effective constitutional review. In the longer run, Schrödinger’s Tribunals are unlikely to work any better. In an environment of clashing interpretations of the Polish Constitution, unorthodox solutions for improving rights protection—including abolishing the CT altogether and empowering ordinary and administrative courts—are badly needed. Unfortunately, it seems that old ideas have to be tested to destruction first.
In this commentary, Dr. Bulent Kenes examines the political transformation of Sweden through the rise of the Sweden Democrats (SD) and normalization of far-right. Drawing on his experience of seeking refuge in a country once widely regarded as a “moral superpower,” Kenes contrasts Sweden’s longstanding commitments to liberal democracy, pluralism, multicultural accommodation, gender equality, minority rights, and inclusive citizenship with the SD’s increasingly influential nativist and ethno-nationalist project. He argues that the breaking of the cordon sanitaire and the Tidö Agreement have helped move ideas once confined to the far right into mainstream politics. As Sweden approaches the September 13 election, Kenes asks whether the SD’s promise to “make Sweden Sweden again” ultimately risks dismantling the very values that historically made Sweden distinctive.
A Sweden Democrats (SD) campaign poster ahead of Sweden’s September 13, 2026 parliamentary elections, featuring the slogan “This is how we make Sweden Sweden again” and highlighting the party’s policies on immigration, crime, Islamism, citizenship, welfare, and the economy.
For as long as I can remember, I have worked for human rights, the rule of law, constitutional and liberal democracy, an egalitarian and just society, and global peace. During my years as a professional journalist and media executive, I likewise sought to defend and advance these values. I vocally opposed every step taken by Erdogan’s government after 2011 as Turkey moved increasingly toward one-man rule and authoritarianism, and I never withheld my criticism. As Erdogan rapidly advanced toward one-man rule and autocracy, as every aspiring dictator does, I became a target of his repression. Because of my criticism centered on democracy, the rule of law, and human rights etc., I was subjected to countless smear campaigns in pro-Erdogan media and on social media, faced dozens of investigations, was repeatedly detained, and was briefly imprisoned.
By 2016, as Erdogan was constructing his autocratic regime step by step and there was no longer room for me to breathe in Turkey, I decided to leave the country. But where should I go? By virtue of my profession, I had by then visited more than 70 countries, including Sweden, and had lived in the United States for several years. Yet the choice for me was not so difficult. I knew that the very values and standards whose absence I had felt in my own country and for which I had struggled—democracy, human rights, transparency, the rule of law, freedom of the press and expression, gender equality, environmental rights and justice, and similar principles—shone most brightly in Sweden, which at the time was widely regarded as a “moral superpower.”
As Turkey fell into the grip of autocracy and Islamofascism, my choice was clear. Sweden stood out as a country in which virtually everything we had struggled, unsuccessfully, to establish and consolidate in Turkey had already become largely institutionalized. If, despite all our efforts, pluralist and liberal democracy, a state governed by the rule of law according to universal standards, an almost exemplary environment for freedom of the press and expression, and similar values would simply not come to us, I believed that it was my most natural right to go to them. Having overcome all the technical obstacles placed in my way by the Erdogan regime, I eventually managed to reach Sweden.
Over the ten years since then, unfortunately, Sweden—like the rest of the world—has changed considerably. Alongside some genuine problems generated by the 2015 migration wave, far-right perceptions of threat were constructed on a scale vastly exceeding the actual magnitude of those problems. In the process, both the social sensibilities that made Sweden the Sweden we knew have been eroded and political actors increasingly influenced by the far right have gradually weakened the country’s once-proud status as a “moral superpower.” Sweden, which one might have hoped would serve as one of the moral barriers against the global drift toward the far right, has itself undergone a far-reaching political transformation in the same direction.
At the center of this transformation are the Sweden Democrats (SD), who increasingly challenge the liberal, pluralist, and inclusive political culture that long underpinned Sweden’s reputation as a “moral superpower.” The ideological core of the SD combines nativism, authoritarianism, and populism, while migration, Islam, national identity, and cultural homogeneity constitute central axes of its political discourse. The party advances a more homogeneous conception of the nation grounded in ethno-nationalism and frames immigrants, particularly Muslims, as potential threats to Sweden’s cultural integrity and welfare state. At this point, however, I should not fail to acknowledge the provocative and highly irresponsible activities of certain Muslim immigrant groups.
Given the SD’s historical roots in Swedish fascism, nazism, white nationalism, and far-right milieus, one of the most consequential changes under Jimmie Åkesson has been the effort to largely free the party from the burden of this past and give it a more legitimate and parliamentary appearance. Yet despite this “normalization” and transformation of its public image, opposition to immigration and Islamophobia have retained their central place in the party’s political discourse. As early as 2009, Åkesson described various phenomena associated with Islam as “the greatest foreign threat to Sweden since the Second World War” and placed Muslims at the center of this threat narrative—one of the most striking manifestations of this ideological continuity.
Although its historical roots extend much further back, in the populist far-right political imaginary represented today by the SD, multiculturalism is portrayed not as a form of pluralism that enriches Swedish society but as a source of social fragmentation and weakening national cohesion. In its place, folkhem—the “people’s home”—is being reasserted. Yet Åkesson’s vision of folkhem differs markedly from Per Albin Hansson’s: it is a tightly integrated society based largely on the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of the native Swedish majority, shared values, and solidarity. Within this understanding, “being Swedish” means more than merely holding Swedish citizenship; immigrants are expected to adapt culturally to “Swedish values” and to the “Christian, democratic world” to which Sweden is understood to belong. The boundary between integration and assimilation consequently becomes increasingly blurred.
Islam and Muslims occupy a distinctive place in this politics of boundary-making. In Åkesson’s discourse, Christianity and its moral values are defined as foundational pillars of folkhem, whereas Islam is frequently portrayed as being in conflict with Sweden’s cultural and social order. The rise of the SD therefore cannot be understood simply as the hardening of immigration policy or the electoral success of a populist radical right party. At a deeper level, it represents a broader political transformation in which Sweden’s “exceptionalism,” built upon consociational democracy, multiculturalism, inclusive citizenship, and pluralism, is increasingly displaced by the normalization of a more closed, assimilationist, and ethno-culturally homogeneous vision of Sweden.
Many racist and far-right positions that were once considered shameful, or even unacceptable, within mainstream politics when the SD was founded have today become substantially normalized. The breaking of the cordon sanitaire surrounding the SD in 2022 did more than open greater political space for the party’s far-right and ethno-populist positions. In exchange for its external support for the coalition government formed by the center-right parties, the extensive policy agenda it secured through the Tidö Agreement gave the SD extraordinary influence over government policy. Discourses once regarded as unacceptable and incompatible with the Sweden we knew have, through the Tidö Agreement, become part of government policy and mainstream political debate. Changes to migration and terrorism legislation over the past four years, measures that have generated debate over press and freedom of expression, and new political orientations concerning gender equality have made the question of whether Sweden is steadily moving away from the Sweden we knew all the more pressing.
It is precisely here that the central irony of the SD’s promise to “making Sweden Sweden again” lies. Sweden’s extraordinary international prestige was not built merely on prosperity and effective governance. It was also grounded in liberal democracy, openness, multicultural accommodation, gender equality, strong minority rights, and an inclusive conception of citizenship. Despite certain notable deteriorations in some international indicators amid initiatives moving in the opposite direction—initiatives spearheaded by the SD—international indices show that significant parts of this institutional architecture, thankfully, remain resilient today.
The Sweden Democrats, however, offer a different answer to the question of what Sweden should be. Their political project places more restrictive immigration policies, assimilation, cultural homogeneity, and the preservation of a particular Swedish national identity grounded in ethnicity at the center of political belonging. Particularly significant is the increasingly hard-line approach toward Islam and Muslims: legitimate debates that need to be conducted about radical Islamism and problems of integration can, at times, become intertwined with broader Islamophobic narratives that treat the very presence of Muslims as a cultural threat. Opposition to multiculturalism similarly imagines social cohesion not through pluralism but through a greater degree of cultural—and implicitly ethnic—homogeneity.
Sweden now heads back to the polls on September 13 after four years of the Tidö experiment and this broader transformation. The latest polling indicates a clear advantage for the opposition. Across the four most recent major surveys, the opposition’s lead over the Tidö bloc ranges from 3.7 to 10 percentage points, while the weighted polling average as of August 27 indicates an opposition advantage of approximately seven points. Together, S, V, MP, and C stand at roughly 52.6 percent, compared with approximately 45.7 percent for SD, M, KD, and L. Moreover, with the Liberals hovering around 2 percent—well below the 4 percent parliamentary threshold—the parliamentary arithmetic becomes even more difficult for the Tidö bloc.
The SD, once excluded behind a cordon sanitaire, is no longer content merely to pull the Tidö parties toward the far right from outside government. It now openly expresses its ambition to enter government directly, demanding key ministerial portfolios. With a Trumpian slogan, it tells voters how, over the past four years, it has “made Sweden Sweden again” from outside government and now seeks a mandate to push its nativist, ethno-nationalist, populist, anti-Islam, and anti-immigration etc. policies even further.
Yet what made the Sweden we knew distinctly Swedish was neither racism, the legacy of neo-Nazi politics, nor opposition to multiculturalism. If there is genuinely an ambition to “make Sweden Sweden again,” the Sweden worth remembering is the Sweden of Per Albin Hansson’s folkhem ideal, Tage Erlander’s democratic welfare state, and Olof Palme’s egalitarian, internationalist, and human-rights-centered political legacy. The question facing Swedish voters on September 13, therefore, is not simply who will form the next government. The more fundamental question is this: “Making Sweden Sweden Again”—but which Sweden? And what will the Sweden the world came to know as a “moral superpower” have to sacrifice for the Sweden that the SD is now seeking to create?
In this interview, Professor Oscar Mazzoleni and Dr. Klaudia Koxha, editors of the recently published volume ‘The Radical Right and Demographic Populism,’ examine how contemporary populist radical right politics increasingly connects immigration, fertility, gender, family, religion, and national identity through the politics of demographic survival. They conceptualize “demographic populism” as a framework linking cultural survival to biological reproduction and transforming demographic change into an existential political struggle. The discussion explores demographic weaponization, conspiracy narratives, Fratelli d’Italia’s calculated ambivalence, and generational adaptations within the Austrian Freedom Party’s youth organizations. Moving beyond Europe, Professor Mazzoleni and Dr. Koxha also address transnational diffusion, political sovereignty, aging, migration, labor shortages, and AI, highlighting how demographic transformations may create new opportunities for populist radical right mobilization while posing significant challenges to democratic resilience.
Contemporary populist radical right (PRR) politics increasingly organizes questions of immigration, fertility, gender, religion, family, and national identity around a common concern: the demographic reproduction of “the people.” In this ECPS interview, Professor Oscar Mazzoleni of the University of Lausanne and Dr. Klaudia Koxha (a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Lausanne), editors of the recently published volume The Radical Right and Demographic Populism, explain how this convergence can be understood through the concept of “demographic populism.” As Professor Mazzoleni puts it, issues conventionally treated as separate increasingly converge on a fundamental political question: “Who is entitled to reproduce the true people?” Demographic populism, he argues, reveals how anti-immigration, anti-gender, and pronatalist claims can share “a single Manichean logic of demographic survival versus extinction.” Dr. Koxha sharpens this argument, explaining that “cultural survival” becomes tied to “the biological reproduction of a specific people with specific characteristics.”
The interview begins by developing this conceptual intervention and distinguishing demographic realities from their political weaponization. Aging, declining fertility, and migration are genuine policy challenges, Dr. Koxha stresses; what distinguishes populist radical-right politicization is the question of whose reproduction constitutes the desirable demographic future. This is how demographic change becomes “existential and moralized.” Professor Mazzoleni similarly identifies “demographic weaponization” as central to understanding how statistical and social transformations are reframed as political struggles over collective survival. Their approach consequently bridges populism studies and critical demography, treating demography simultaneously “as a set of conditions and as a political frame.”
The discussion then turns to how demographic populism operates in concrete political settings. Professor Mazzoleni examines Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, arguing that governmental participation has encouraged not straightforward ideological moderation but “more sophisticated strategies.” Through calculated ambivalence, coded references to “demographic winter,” and a division of discursive labor, radical ideas can be maintained while communication is adapted to broader audiences. In this formulation, demographic populism shifts the perceived threat “from political and economic dispossession to biological and cultural survival,” while immigration becomes embedded within a wider master frame encompassing natality, family, welfare, and religion.
Dr. Koxha’s analysis of the Austrian Freedom Party’s (FPÖ) youth organizations then introduces a generational dimension. While youth branches reproduce core radical-right positions, they adapt them to young people’s concerns and can sometimes “radicalize it further.” Yet Dr. Koxha also identifies greater internal heterogeneity than might be expected, particularly regarding religion, abortion, and LGBTQ+ issues. Crucially, declining religiosity does not necessarily entail rejecting cultural Christianity, which can instead operate “as a marker of national or civilizational identity.”
Finally, the interview broadens comparatively to transnational diffusion, sovereignty, demographic decline, migration, labor shortages, and artificial intelligence. Professor Mazzoleni argues that these transformations “can create a structure of opportunities for radical-right populism,” while Dr. Koxha highlights the political contradiction whereby migration can simultaneously be a practical response to aging and be reframed as evidence of “demographic displacement.” The democratic challenge, she concludes, is to confront the material consequences of demographic transformation without accepting that demographic change necessarily entails “cultural extinction” or that “one group’s security requires another’s exclusion.”
Here is our interview with Professor Oscar Mazzoleni and Dr. Klaudia Koxha, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Who Is Entitled to Reproduce the True People?
Crowds gather along the quay to visit tall ships during Sail 2010 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on August 19, 2010. Photo: Jan Kranendonk.
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni and Dr. Klaudia Koxha, welcome! Throughout the book, you argue that immigration, fertility, gender, religion, LGBTQ+ rights, and family politics should not be studied as separate cultural issues but as interconnected elements of what you call ‘demographic populism.’ What convinced you that existing theories of populism were no longer sufficient to explain these developments, and what analytical blind spots does your concept overcome?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Scholarship usually treated immigration, gender, religion, and family as separate cultural issues, also when we talk about populism, largely because of disciplinary divisions, and read them through the cultural backlash lens alone. What convinced us otherwise was recognizing that all these issues converge on one question: Who is entitled to reproduce the true people? Demographic populism overcomes the blind spot of separating nativism from reproduction, showing that anti-immigration, anti-gender, and pronatalist claims share a single Manichean logic of demographic survival versus extinction.
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: I would just briefly contextualize what this means in terms of the research that we know so far. Exactly as Oscar mentioned, research already tells us about how radical right populist parties engage with these topics separately. They started out with immigration, with these positions against non-native others, the cultural others. Then we learned how their agenda expanded and how gender equality, LGBTQ+ advocates, or advocates of diverse forms of family, of religious tolerance, etc., can become sources for fueling this typical Manichaean logic.
So, the proponents of such diversity become enemies to the people in the populist logic. However, these are not just different sources that fuel the Manichaean logic. If we put them together in one common framework, which is ‘demographic populism,’ they reveal exactly the demographic logic that Oscar just mentioned. In other words, the cultural survival, which is what these parties had been mostly politicizing, becomes tied to the biological reproduction of a specific people with specific characteristics.
Demographic Change Becomes Existential and Moralized
Your framework suggests that demographic change is not politically consequential by itself; rather, it becomes politically powerful once interpreted through narratives of existential threat. How should scholars distinguish between legitimate democratic debates about demographic trends and the populist politicization of demography?
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: The book is really clear that demographic developments are real. So, when we talk about aging, fertility decline, migration, these are legitimate policy questions. We also know that welfare regimes or pension systems depend on such characteristics. Societies try to hold on to these systems by partly relying on migration, a younger population, which is usually the active labor force. Then some of these migrants eventually form families, and this can help to offset aging populations. At the same time, we also see discussions across societies about how to support young working couples to form families, women to reconcile work and family life, so that they can have the means to follow their careers, provide for themselves, for the children. So, we have these different discussions around demographic change, and this is the broader aspect.
But for the populist radical right, these alternatives are not considered as solutions in themselves, because the populist radical right specifically asks: Who are these people, this active labor force that we need to support our welfare regimes, our pension systems, etc.? Who are these prospective families that will support our systems and push back aging populations?
Here we see the continuity for the radical right is on the so-called native population. So, the disagreement isn’t whether aging or fertility decline exists, but we go back to what Oscar mentioned in the first question: Whose reproduction is imagined as the desirable solution? And this is how demographic change becomes existential and moralized.
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: It’s important to underline the point that demographic weaponization is the key point. So, demography is at the center, it becomes at the center of political battle, in which radical right populism is a clear and an important actor, shaping and reshaping demography as a political issue. Of course, demography is, for demographers, about fertility, about immigration, is about statistics of these dynamics, but this aspect can be demographically framed in a specific way. This is exactly what radical right populism tries to do.
Demography Is Both a Set of Conditions and a Political Frame
One of the book’s most important contributions is its attempt to bridge populism studies with critical demography. Do you see this as the beginning of a new interdisciplinary research agenda, and what questions should future scholars prioritize?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Yes, of course, we try to open an interdisciplinary agenda. Critical demography’s attention to power relations behind births, fertility, mortality, and migration allows us to treat demography simultaneously as a set of conditions and as a political frame. Future research should prioritize the supply-side link between populism and conspiracy, the appeal of demographic weaponization among specific groups—youth, women, rural voters—and its institutional and policy effects on democratic resilience.
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: I don’t have anything to add to that. I guess exactly the last point, particularly, is interesting on the demand side: When and why do citizens of different societal groups accept these otherwise separate issues as parts of one whole demographic thread?
Demographic Populism Is No Longer Confined to the Radical Right
You conclude that demographic populism increasingly connects conspiracy theories with mainstream party politics. Does this suggest that conspiracy thinking has evolved from a fringe phenomenon into a governing logic of parts of the contemporary radical right?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Yes, this is a key point: demographic populism is not just about the radical right. It could be mainstream; it’s part of the contemporary discussion about the demographic winter. It’s not just about the radical right. Conspiracy can be a mediation or a fuel for this kind of increasing interest and use of demographic populism. This is an important point that we try to underline in the conclusion.
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: I think it’s exactly that—the amplification, maybe we could put it. It’s a complementary amplification force for populism. Because what conspiracy does is it adds this intentionality. So it’s not just a populist anti-elite discourse that relies on some sort of elite that looks after its own interests, but the conspiracy also adds this dimension of the elite deliberately undermining the people. So it’s like a deliberate choice, and this is how, like Oscar mentioned, conspiracy becomes an amplifier, in some ways, for populism.
Calculated Ambivalence Allows Moderation and Radicalism to Come Together
A poster for the 2024 European elections featuring Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome, Italy on May 4, 2024. Photo: Stefano Chiacchiarini.
Dear Professor Mazzoleni, in your chapter on Fratelli d’Italia, you argue that the party has successfully reconciled governmental responsibility with radical-right ideology through ambivalent populist and conspiratorial discourse. Why has ambiguity become politically more effective than explicit radicalism?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Relevant parties in government face a trade-off between demarcation and accommodation, between the capacity to maintain radicalization and to integrate into the system. At the same time, they must retain radical support without losing moderate voters and coalition allies. So, it’s important to consider this trade-off, not just unethical or moral issues. It’s a question of electoral survival and electoral success. So, calculated ambivalence—this concept came from Ruth Wodak, the specialist in sociolinguistics—resolves this by producing, in the discourse, assumed associations between contradictory meanings.
This is not just anecdotal, but it’s based on a strategy, trying to cope with different audiences, decoding that there are different expectations. Because parties are not unitary actors, that’s also important. Intra-party, intra-leader ambivalence lets moderation and radicalism come together, normalizing controversial claims while avoiding public condemnation. Because we have this party needs to be in the system and they sometimes reproduce anti-establishment stances. With this kind of calculated ambivalence, and with many discursive tools, they try to do that. We show that Fratelli d’Italia is able, during the first part of the government coalition period, to achieve this kind of ambivalence strategy.
Fratelli d’Italia Adapts Its Communication While Maintaining Radicalization
Your analysis suggests that Fratelli d’Italia rarely invokes the Great Replacement theory directly, preferring coded demographic language instead. Does this represent ideological moderation, or simply a more sophisticated communication strategy aimed at broader electoral legitimacy?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Primarily, more sophisticated strategies, not ideological moderation. Meloni’s manifesto and speeches drop ethnic substitution in favor of demographic winter, so trying to have a kind of mainstream label, while ministers of Fratelli d’Italia inside the government led by Meloni, such as Lollobrigida, Roccella, and others, voice fuller conspiratorial versions of Great Replacement.
So, they resonate with Great Replacement theory, and it is important to underline this division of discursive labor + de-racialization. This question of Great Replacement theory is strongly connected with racial issues, but also denialism and euphemism allow the Great Replacement, for itself, to survive intact behind a government facade. That’s important in the sense that these discursive tools are able to adapt communication, maintaining radicalization by the party.
Demographic Populism Shifts the Threat to Biological and Cultural Survival
You have written extensively on populism for many years. Compared with earlier waves of European populism, what is genuinely new about demographic populism? Is it primarily an ideological transformation or an adaptation to new electoral realities?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: It’s important to say that populism is the defense of the true people, in terms of discursive claims—a true people under threat by different kinds of external powers. This deals with sovereignty, of course, political sovereignty, economic prosperity, and anti-establishment protests. Demographic populism shifts the threat from political and economic dispossession to biological and cultural survival.
In a sense, it’s both an ideological transformation and an adaptation to new electoral realities, trying to cope with new, emerging demands. It’s an ideological revival in which demography becomes the symbolic battlefield of the radical right’s long counter-revolution against LGBT rights, feminism, and so on. At the same time, it’s an adaptation to declining birth rates, aging, and migration, which are part of a broader demographic transformation in many countries, especially European ones, but not only.
In a sense, it’s both an ideological transformation and an adaptation to new electoral realities, trying to cope with new, emerging demands. In this sense, it’s an ideological revival in which demography becomes the symbolic battlefield of the radical right’s long counter-revolution against LGBT rights, feminism, and so on. At the same time, it is an adaptation to declining birth rates, aging, and migration, which are part of a broader demographic transformation in many countries, especially European ones, but not only.
It is interesting to say that, unlike interwar genetics in the past, today’s version is civilizational and culturally racist, rather than openly biological. It’s important to connect this aspect with biology and culture, and try to introduce this kind of demographic populism as able to frame the entire discourse nowadays by the radical right.
The Great Replacement Reframes Anti-Immigration Politics Demographically
A group of war refugees walks through a cornfield on the Serbia-Croatia border on November 3, 2015, as they seek passage to the EU. Many are Syrian refugees fleeing conflict. Photo: Ajdin Kamber.
Many populist radical-right (PRR) parties increasingly combine welfare protection, national sovereignty, and family policies into one political package. Is demographic populism gradually replacing immigration as the master frame through which these parties organize their broader ideological projects?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Immigration remains central, according to this book, but is increasingly subsumed, integrated within a demographic master frame that links natality, family, welfare, and religion. The Great Replacement is precisely the device through which anti-immigration stances are reframed demographically. So, rather than substitution, we observe absorption, integration. Immigration becomes one variable in a broader ideological project about who reproduces the nation and under what moral authority. The nation is the people, and these people and the nation are to be built under a specific moral authority—of course, the traditional family.
Youth Branches Adapt Radical-Right Politics to Generational Concerns
Dear Klaudia, your chapter examines how the youth organizations of the Austrian Freedom Party reinterpret demographic issues through specifically generational concerns. What surprised you most about the differences—and similarities—between youth activists and the senior party leadership?
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: First of all, the similarities were actually quite strong, because the youth branches do reproduce the FPÖ’s anti-immigration, anti-gender diversity, climate-skeptic positions. The difference is specifically in the generational framing. So, if the senior party tends to emphasize security, sovereignty, civil liberties, economic stability, youth branches emphasize how these issues supposedly affect young Austrians, in particular, and their future.
But to be quite frank, it was not this alignment between the youth branches and the senior party regarding core ideological positions, or this generational framing, that surprised me about the findings. What really, really struck me instead was some intra-youth variation regarding topics such as LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, or the role of the church. Now, I wouldn’t overstate this variation based on the data set, because it’s quite subtle. But it did make me think that there’s probably much more heterogeneity within radical-right youth than we tend to assume.
Being Less Religious Does Not Mean Rejecting Cultural Christianity
Young people are statistically less religious and often more socially liberal than older generations. Yet your research suggests that radical-right youth organizations remain highly receptive to demographic narratives. What explains this apparent paradox?
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: The question ties quite nicely to the point I made in the previous answer regarding this heterogeneity within youth branches. Religion, for instance, is also rather inconsistent across the youth branches. We see, for example, anti-abortion discourse as largely absent, except in Vienna. There are inconsistencies also when it comes to LGBTQ+ issues. Sometimes they’re silenced, sometimes they’re moderated. So, the youth branches don’t simply reproduce every conservative issue equally.
At the same time, they do remain strongly receptive to anti-immigration narratives and can instrumentalize gender equality against Muslim migrants. Regarding your point about the paradox, I think there’s a distinction that might help explain it. Being less religious does not necessarily mean that you reject cultural Christianity or nativist identity politics. Christianity here can also function as a marker of national or civilizational identity, rather than primarily as a religious practice.
Classical Nativism Is Underneath Demographic Populism
Your findings indicate that youth activists frame migration not only as a cultural issue but also as competition over education, employment, and future opportunities. Does demographic populism therefore represent a generational adaptation of classical nativism rather than a fundamentally new ideology?
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: Clearly, classical nativism is underneath it, so I would not claim that demographic populism is this entirely new ideology. But its analytical value is precisely in showing how different issues become connected. As you mentioned, in my chapter, migration is linked to education, to employment, to gender, to family, to youth, and ultimately to demographic survival, by focusing on the so-called native youth as, basically, the agents of reproduction of a specific kind of people. Moreover, Great Replacement also, as a way of thinking, extends beyond migration into gender equality, diversity. In this regard, I would see the analytical value precisely in demonstrating how these different issues can be connected together in the framework of demographic survival.
Youth Branches Can Reproduce Party Ideology and Radicalize It Further
European Parliamentary election posters of the FPÖ in Vienna, Austria, on May 15, 2024. Photo: Shutterstock.
Youth organizations often function as ideological laboratories for future party elites. Based on your research, do you expect today’s demographic narratives to become even more central to tomorrow’s radical-right politics?
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: The chapter in itself does not longitudinally establish that today’s youth discourse becomes tomorrow’s party discourse. That needs to be clear. But it does show that youth branches can and do reproduce party ideology. And what they also do quite well is contextualize it to their cohort and adapt it to generational concerns. Sometimes, even radicalize it further, as we’ve seen in the examples of Vienna or Tyrol, where we saw the most explicit articulations of Great Replacement narratives. For instance, while the central party actually continued to frame immigration more around security rather than these openly conspiratorial framings. This can suggest that youth branches may reproduce party ideology, but also, at times, radicalize it further. This might potentially have an impact on the main party’s discourse over time, but we would have to research that more systematically.
Your volume spans Europe as well as North and South America. Despite these different historical contexts, remarkably similar demographic narratives appear across countries. Are we witnessing policy diffusion between radical-right actors, or do these narratives emerge independently in response to similar social anxieties?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Both, and they reinforce each other. Similar anxieties related to structural transformation, declining fertility, aging, secularization, shrinking white or Christian majorities arise independently. However, they only become politically powerful once framed and mobilized by political actors. So, transnational infrastructures, such as the World Congress of Families, are relevant for the radical right across the world. US-Russia anti-abortion cooperation and social media circulation demonstrate deliberate diffusion, including astroturfing that manufactures the appearance of grassroots demand.
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: I would not have much to add. I think the transnational linkages that Oscar mentioned explain it very well, that these are not credential. Just very briefly on what the comparative question is, I would say it is basically how similar narratives are adapted to different national settings. This could be due to these transnational linkages; it could be due to diffusion through social media messaging. The mechanisms are different, but the core issue is how these similar narratives are indeed adapted across different national contexts.
Sovereignty Is Also Based on the Reproduction of the People Exercising It
One of the most striking themes of the book is that demographic populism links biological reproduction with political sovereignty. Does this represent a shift away from classic economic populism toward what might be called ‘biopolitical populism,’ where the central political question becomes who has the right to reproduce the nation?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Of course, the point here is not just to talk about sovereignty as a political dimension, but sovereignty is also based on the reproduction of the people exercising this sovereignty. The question is not just the capacity of the people to respond to the threat in terms of sovereignty, or political sovereignty, but other political dimensions, in terms of elections, in terms of decision-making, but also about the way by which we reproduce ourselves in terms of cultural belonging, national dimension, religious belonging etc. So, that’s important to frame this aspect, because all these dimensions—all diaspora, religion, cultural, national belonging—pass through biological reproduction and the family. The family is considered a pillar of this reproduction of the good and the true people. In this sense, we can we talk about biopolitical populism.
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: I would just add, regarding your question about which concept could work better, that I would still retain demographic populism because, in the end, demographic populism is broader than reproduction alone. It’s not just about who gets to be reproduced and who gets to reproduce the nation, but also about under what moral authority. So, fertility is not simply about fertility; it becomes about what kind of society should continue, and here there are other mechanisms that come into play, like religion, heteronormative views of family, and so on. Therefore, I still consider demographic populism conceptually better able to capture this dynamic.
AI Can Create New Opportunities for Radical-Right Populism
Photo: Dreamstime.
And lastly, looking ahead, demographic decline, population ageing, migration, artificial intelligence, and labor shortages are likely to reshape democratic politics simultaneously. Which of these developments do you believe will most profoundly transform the future of radical-right populism, and how should democracies respond without reinforcing the very narratives they seek to challenge?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: I think all these different aspects—aging, labor shortages, also pushed by artificial intelligence—can create a structure of opportunities for radical-right populism. They, of course, help these kinds of actors connect these developments to immigration and pro-natalist policies. In a sense, they can exploit this kind of structural transformation to propose their own demographic populist message. In this sense, I think the response is, of course, about defending gender and reproductive rights and all liberal democratic values, but at the same time, we have to be aware that this kind of defense should also address the structural transformation that I mentioned before.
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: Again, the question ties back to one of the first questions in this interview. Aging societies do need an active labor force. So far, migration has been one way of responding to that. But as we can see, the radical right can simultaneously take the same migration that comes as a solution to aging societies, transform it, and present it as evidence of demographic displacement. This is how the policy response to one demographic challenge—aging populations—becomes framed as another demographic threat, while at the same time, there are policies that actually try to address it through counteraction by relying partly on migration. So, I think this tension is perhaps the most consequential—the interaction between aging, labor shortages, and migration—precisely because of the political contradiction it creates.
I think democracies need to address the real material consequences of demographic change, so this is something that needs to be talked about and addressed, without accepting the premise that demographic change necessarily means cultural extinction. Or that one group’s security requires another’s exclusion. So, those are points that must enter the public debate to have a constructive discussion around the demographic challenges that societies experience.
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Can I say something more about the book? Because you stress the point that the book covers different contexts—not just European, but also American and Russian contexts. I think it’s also important to mention the methodological and disciplinary approaches, because we are political scientists and sociologists, and we also have anthropologists. In the book, we also have supply-side and demand-side approaches to these issues.
It’s important to mention these multidisciplinary, multi-method approaches that converge in the book and also in this proposal about demographic populism. There is also intergenerational scholarship in the book, ranging from PhD students to senior scholars. In this project, we really try to bring together different perspectives and, at the same time, create a convergent and common project in order to explain what is happening today in the transformation of radical-right populism.
