In this commentary, Dr. Kamil Joński examines why Poland remains an exceptional case in contemporary Europe, where high levels of religiosity continue to overlap with strong right-wing political identification. Drawing on data from the 11th wave of the European Social Survey (ESS), he demonstrates that regular church attendance and conservative political identity increasingly reinforce one another, creating a distinctive “churchgoing right” that shapes both political discourse and the Catholic Church itself. Dr. Joński argues that this convergence helps explain Poland’s restrictive social policies, the enduring influence of the Church on public life, and emerging tensions between Polish conservatives and the post-Vatican II direction of the Holy See. The commentary offers fresh insights into religion, polarization, and democratic politics in Europe.
The breakup of the Polish right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party has inspired numerous analyses, commentaries, and anecdotes. One of them offers intriguing insight into the uniqueness of the Polish right on the European political landscape. The leader of the new initiative, Development Plus, M. Morawiecki (“Law and Justice” Prime Minister from 2017 to 2023), hosted its July 31, 2026, kick-off as a grill event. Among other preparations, he secured a Roman Catholic bishop’s permission to violate the canon law requirement of abstaining from eating meat on Fridays (the day of the Crucifixion), so that his fellow right-wingers could enjoy grilled sausage. Quite a bizarre touch at the gathering of a self-proclaimed modern and pro-development right, led by a former bank CEO? Only at first glance.
Many Poles Remain Religious…
The data collected during the recent (11th) wave of the European Social Survey (ESS) documents the relatively high religiosity of Poles, with nearly 60 percent of respondents describing themselves as religious (“Regardless of whether you belong to a particular religion, how religious would you say you are?”, variable rlgdgr).
…and Maintains Bond with Institutional Church
The theory predicts that “secular transition happens in three steps: first, public ritual participation declines; second, the importance of religion to individuals declines; and third, people shed religious affiliation.” In this context, it is even more important that a substantial share of Poles maintains its bond with the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. Despite the post-COVID drop in religious participation, 40 percent of respondents declare regular, weekly participation in religious services (“Apart from special occasions such as weddings and funerals, about how often do you attend religious services nowadays?”, variable rlgatnd).
The Right-Wing Is Strong…
At the same time, the Polish political landscape is skewed toward the right, with two out of five respondents placing themselves on the right end of the political spectrum (“In politics, people sometimes talk of ‘left’ and ‘right’. Using this card, where would you place yourself on this scale, where 0 means the left and 10 means the right?”, variable lrscale).
… and Overlap Matters
However, the most revealing insight emerges from combining these two dimensions: the bond with the institutional Church, as measured by religious participation, and self-placement on the political spectrum. It turns out that nearly one in four Poles declare both weekly attendance at religious services and right-wing identification.
What makes this situation truly unique on the European political landscape is that this “churchgoing right” constitutes the majority among both churchgoers and right-wingers. In other words, their sensitivities are likely to set the tone for both political rallies and sermons. As a consequence, the Polish throne and the altar remain entangled in ways that are virtually unimaginable elsewhere in contemporary Europe.
The result is, among other things, an extraordinarily restrictive abortion law, a state-enforced de facto blasphemy law (the criminal provision on “offending religious feelings”), and the rejection of same-sex civil unions (not to mention marriages). For the mechanisms of Church influence, see A. Grzymała-Busse (2015), Nations under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Policy.
“Post-Secularism” or Anti-Vatican II
The situation seems to affect the Church as well. Back in the early 2000s, when the Polish conservative Pope John Paul II made statements that were interpreted as endorsing Poland’s accession to the EU, the population of churchgoers included self-declared moderate leftists and rightists, with a firm anchor in the center.
As time went by, the mutually reinforcing processes of polarization (not to say radicalization) and secularization (people voting with their feet) shifted the proportion of right-wingers among churchgoers from 30 to nearly 60 percent. According to the 11th wave of the ESS, right-wing hardliners (i.e., those who place themselves at 10 on the ten-point left-right scale) alone account for one-fifth of churchgoers. The median churchgoer in Poland now places herself at 7 on the ten-point left-right scale. There is evidence of similar processes shaping the clergy as well.
If a right-wing churchgoer demands a firm anti-left and anti-liberal group identity (spiced with a sense of divine truth and centuries-old tradition), she is unlikely to be satisfied by Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Lampedusa. Indeed, at Morawiecki’s grill event, the very first panel discussion—entitled “The Right 2027: How to Win Elections and Widen the Supporter Base”—drifted into a discussion of the Holy See’s teaching on migration, with one participant declaring what he called “Pope-skepticism.”
That could be the indication of “post-secularism”, with politicians hand-picking suitable pieces of religious tradition, without particular regard to the religion itself. Alternatively, it could be just a nostalgia to pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic orthodoxy. All the disappointed rightists need to do, is to dust-off the writings of Pope Leo’s XIX-century namesake. In Leo XIII view, humanity is inherently “separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other of those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth … The other is the kingdom of Satan”.
That could be an indication of “post-secularism,” with politicians hand-picking suitable pieces of religious tradition without particular regard for the religion itself. Alternatively, it could be just nostalgia for pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic orthodoxy. All disappointed rightists need to do is dust off the writings of Pope Leo’s nineteenth-century namesake. In Leo XIII’s view, humanity is inherently “separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other for those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth … The other is the kingdom of Satan.”
In political life, the latter insists “that marriage belongs to the genus of commercial contracts, which can rightly be revoked by the will of those who made them … all men have the same right … each one is naturally free … power is held by the command or permission of the people, so that, when the popular will changes, rulers may lawfully be deposed … that the State should be without God; that in the various forms of religion there is no reason why one should have precedence over another … Their chief dogmas are so greatly and manifestly at variance with reason that nothing can be more perverse.”
In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja argues that waste is no longer merely an environmental management problem but an emerging question of sovereignty, justice, and environmental security. Underscoring the concept of waste sovereignty, he contends that the central issue is not simply who bears environmental burdens, but who has the authority to refuse them. Using Turkey’s transformation into a major destination for European plastic waste as a revealing case, the commentary demonstrates how the circular economy can shift environmental risks rather than reduce them when accountability is displaced across borders. Dr. Solaja calls for a new framework that links waste governance to political agency, material accountability, and environmental justice, arguing that the future of environmental security depends on empowering communities—not merely managing waste.
The world has a waste problem. But have we been asking the right question? Today, international environmental policy has focused mainly on waste as a management issue – how to collect, recycle, regulate and dispose of waste safely. Yet the growing international movement of discarded materials reveals a more fundamental political question: who has the authority to decide where the environmental consequences of global consumption will go—and who has the power to refuse them? This is not a semantic distinction. It’s about the kind of inequality that is at the core of the current world.
Now commodities, capital, and the waste flow across borders with great ease. Environmental risks do not. They tend to concentrate in specific locales, workplaces and communities — frequently in areas of weak political bargaining power and limited regulatory capacity. Some societies consume; others process; still others live with the pollution, occupational hazards and ecological damage generated along the way. Waste is therefore not simply what remains after consumption. It’s becoming more and more a question of power, sovereignty and security.
A Shipment Can Be Legal Without Being Just
Here comes the concept of waste sovereignty into play. Waste sovereignty is a shift from the question of how poorer countries can deal with the world’s waste, to why should particular countries and communities shoulder environmental risks produced elsewhere? It is about the ability of a state or community to decide what types of waste are brought into their area, how and for whom. More fundamentally, though, it’s about a political right to say ‘no.’
That right is significant because there are not two equally powerful actors conducting international waste transactions. A shipment can be legal without being just. A nation can say ‘yes’ to accepting waste and communities impacted by it have limited real say in the decision. The issue of consent can be particularly complex when the government accepts imports of waste since it benefits from jobs, foreign exchange or investment, but the environmental costs are borne by populations that have little political power.
This asymmetry is apparent in the international trade of plastic waste. Although plastic-waste trade declined between 2017 and 2022, substantial exports from OECD countries to non-OECD countries continued, particularly toward Southeast Asia. The Basel Convention’s new plastic-waste provisions have enhanced global controls, but that is not enough to overcome the issue of political inequality. The problem is not only that waste is moving across the borders in a legal fashion. It is whose interests are protected when it does.
Turkey Shows That Recycling Can Shift, Rather Than Reduce, Environmental Harm
Turkey provides a tell-tale example. It has transformed the country into a big hub for European plastic waste and worries have been raised about microplastic pollution linked to plastic recycling in the Adana area. This case has far-reaching implications beyond Turkey. It reveals a disturbing paradox in the circular economy: recycling is not necessarily good for the environment when it’s referred to as recycling.
Increased movement of the recyclable materials to locations where regulatory oversight, technological ability or environmental protection is less robust can lead to a shift of environmental risk, instead of reduction, through recycling. The questions raised are thus not limited to the question of whether something is recyclable. So, where, by whom, under what conditions and at whose environmental cost are things being recycled?
Politics of waste enters into the politics of circular economy here. While the circular economy can turn waste into resources, and resources do not circulate in neutral systems. They permeate markets, borders, labor relations and regulatory regimes. Circularity can perpetuate the very inequalities it aims to tackle if the environmental impacts of processing are continually passed down to communities who have less bargaining power.
Environmental Insecurity Often Accumulates Quietly Among the Politically Weakest
The African experience makes this even more apparent. Too often, the Global South is represented as the passive destination of unwanted materials around the world. However, in African cities, informal waste workers are collecting usable materials which are not always collected by the formal sector. In Lagos, Accra, Nairobi and elsewhere, informal recyclers perform essential resource-recovery work while often operating without adequate occupational protection, social security or political recognition.
Here lies one of the great paradoxes of contemporary environmental governance: those most excluded from environmental decision-making may be performing some of its most important work. This means that waste sovereignty cannot be reduced to the ability of governments to close borders to imported waste. It must also concern who controls the conditions under which waste is recovered, processed and transformed into economic value. Informal recyclers should not simply be incorporated into global circular value chains as inexpensive labor. A just circular economy must recognize their environmental contribution, protect their livelihoods and give them meaningful influence over the systems in which their labor and environments are embedded.
This broader understanding also changes how we think about environmental security. Environmental security is conventionally associated with climate change, water scarcity, food insecurity, disasters and displacement. Waste reveals another dimension: the insecurity produced when environmental risks are systematically displaced across borders and concentrated among politically weaker populations.
Consider the chain: Consumption → waste generation → international export → processing/recycling → environmental exposure → livelihood disruption → community resistance → political conflict.
A polluted irrigation canal can threaten agricultural livelihoods. A recycling facility can become a source of neighborhood conflict. A landfill can generate political mobilization. Informal waste workers can be criminalized even while providing essential environmental services. Environmental insecurity does not therefore always arrive as a spectacular disaster. Sometimes it accumulates quietly—in polluted waterways, degraded land, unsafe workplaces and communities living with risks generated by decisions made elsewhere.
Waste Sovereignty Asks Who Has the Power to Refuse Environmental Burdens
This is why waste should be understood as an emerging politics of environmental security.The critical issue is not merely whether environmental risks exist. It is whose security is protected and whose security is sacrificed in managing them.
This also requires abandoning the image of the Global South as simply a “dumping ground.” Such language may describe a real historical pattern, but it can obscure something equally important: contestation. The Global South is not merely where waste arrives. It is also where resistance, refusal and renegotiation can begin.
China’s 2018 restrictions on foreign waste imports disrupted established global waste routes and forced exporters to search for alternative destinations. The episode demonstrated that receiving countries are not powerless endpoints in a global waste system. They can restrict imports, renegotiate arrangements, strengthen regulation and demand greater responsibility from exporters. More recent European regulatory developments likewise reflect growing recognition that international waste movements require stronger safeguards and accountability.
But the deeper question is what happens when this capacity for refusal moves beyond governments and becomes a claim made by communities and workers themselves. This is where waste sovereignty extends the environmental-justice tradition. Environmental justice has taught us to ask: Who bears the environmental burden? Waste sovereignty adds another question: Who has the authority to decide where that burden is placed—and who has the power to refuse it? The difference is profound.
The Future of the Circular Economy Depends on Material Accountability, Not Recycling Alone
A society may be protected from environmental harm only when it possesses meaningful authority over the decisions that produce environmental exposure. Security without agency is fragile. Consent without participation is incomplete. Circularity without accountability can become another form of environmental displacement. The future of the circular economy therefore depends on more than increasing recycling rates or reducing the volume of waste sent to landfills. It requires material accountability.
Producer responsibility must extend across borders. Exporting countries should remain accountable for the environmental consequences of materials they send abroad. Importing countries must retain meaningful regulatory and refusal powers. Informal recyclers should be recognized as environmental workers rather than treated merely as obstacles to formalization. And communities living alongside waste facilities must have a meaningful voice in decisions affecting their environments. The principle is simple: No society should be expected to surrender its environmental security in exchange for another society’s convenience. This principle carries implications far beyond waste policy.
Globalization has long been understood through the movement of commodities, capital, technologies and information. Increasingly, however, we must also understand it through the movement of what societies no longer want. Environmental inequality is produced not only through the extraction of resources from poorer territories but also through the geographical displacement of unwanted materials and risks.
When the Global South Says ‘No,’ It Redefines Environmental Security
The Global South is therefore not simply where the world’s waste ends up. It is becoming a political arena in which sovereignty, economic opportunity, environmental justice and security are contested. And this may be the deeper significance of waste sovereignty.
The politics of the twenty-first century will not be shaped only by who controls oil, minerals, land or data. It will also be shaped by who controls the movement of materials that others no longer want—and, crucially, who has the right to refuse them. The question for the coming decades may therefore be deceptively simple: Who has the right to decide where the world’s unwanted materials go? The answer cannot be determined solely by those who generate the waste.
When communities and states begin answering that question for themselves, waste ceases to be merely the end of consumption. It becomes a site of political authority. And when the Global South says “no,” that refusal should not be understood simply as resistance to global trade. It may represent something more consequential: a demand to redefine who counts in the making of environmental security.
The future of environmental security will depend not only on protecting societies from environmental threats. It will depend on ensuring that no society can make itself secure by making another society environmentally insecure. That is the political promise of waste sovereignty.
As Abelardo de la Espriella assumes Colombia’s presidency on August 7, 2026, the country enters a defining moment in its democratic development. In this timely ECPS interview, Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson examines how insecurity, rather than ideological realignment alone, has reshaped Colombia’s political landscape and accelerated the rise of security-centered populism. While acknowledging widespread public demands for stronger state authority, she warns that democratic governance cannot be reduced to coercive effectiveness. Drawing on Colombia’s own experience with armed conflict, peacebuilding, and institutional reform, Arnson argues that “offering a blank check to the armed forces and police vis-à-vis accountability invites future abuse.” The interview explores the future of the Peace Accord, human rights, constitutional checks and balances, US-Colombia relations, and the broader implications of Latin America’s rightward turn for liberal democracy.
As Abelardo de la Espriella (ADLE) prepares to assume Colombia’s presidency on August 7, 2026, the country stands at a critical juncture in its democratic trajectory. His election concludes four years of Gustavo Petro’s unprecedented left-wing administration but simultaneously inaugurates a new political era shaped by mounting public insecurity, institutional distrust, and the growing appeal of punitive forms of governance. Across Latin America, deteriorating security conditions have fueled the rise of leaders who promise decisive action against crime, often accompanied by populist rhetoric that portrays liberal democratic constraints as obstacles rather than safeguards. Colombia now finds itself at the center of this regional transformation, raising fundamental questions about whether democratic resilience can be reconciled with demands for stronger executive authority and uncompromising security policies.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson—adjunct lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and former director of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars—places Colombia’s political transition within the broader evolution of Latin American democracy. Rather than viewing ADLE’s victory as evidence of a sweeping ideological realignment, Dr. Arnson argues that insecurity, disappointment with governance, and anti-incumbent dynamics provide a more persuasive explanation. While acknowledging an observable regional rightward trend, she cautions that “it’s important not to exaggerate the anti-incumbency aspect” or “the degree of ideological realignment of the electorate,” emphasizing that Colombian voters remain positioned largely in the ideological center.
The interview’s central concern, however, lies beyond electoral politics. It focuses on the democratic implications of governing through an increasingly militarized conception of public security. Arnson argues that ADLE successfully capitalized on widespread perceptions that Petro’s Paz Total strategy had failed, allowing him to dominate the campaign through promises of an “iron fist” approach. Yet she also warns that the popularity of coercive policies should not obscure the institutional dangers they entail. Drawing on Colombia’s painful experience with the “false positives” scandal and other abuses committed during previous security campaigns, she insists that military effectiveness cannot be separated from democratic accountability and respect for human rights.
This concern reaches its sharpest expression in Dr. Arnson’s warning about the incoming administration. “The temptation during the ADLE administration to do away with human rights and legal constraints on the armed forces is high,” she cautions. While recognizing the urgency of restoring public security, she argues that “offering a blank check to the armed forces and police vis-à-vis accountability invites future abuse and a delegitimization of state forces.” In her view, indiscriminate coercion ultimately undermines the very objectives it seeks to achieve by weakening citizen trust and disproportionately harming Colombia’s most vulnerable communities.
Beyond security policy, Dr. Arnson examines the future of Colombia’s 2016 Peace Accord, the resilience of judicial institutions, relations with the United States under a second Trump administration, and the broader rise of security-centered populism throughout Latin America. Throughout the interview, she offers a nuanced reminder that democratic stability depends not merely on defeating armed actors but on preserving constitutional restraints, maintaining institutional checks and balances, and ensuring that the pursuit of order never comes at the expense of the rule of law. As Colombia enters the ADLE era on August 7, these questions are likely to define not only the country’s democratic future but also broader debates over populism, security, and democratic governance across the hemisphere.
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson is an adjunct lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and former director of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Here is the revised version of our interview with Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Anti-Incumbency Mattered, but It Does Not Fully Explain the Election
Colombia’s 2026 election has been interpreted by many observers as part of a broader regional resurgence of the populist radical right. Do you see Abelardo de la Espriella’s victory primarily as an ideological realignment, a backlash against Gustavo Petro’s presidency, or as another manifestation of the increasingly anti-incumbent nature of democratic politics in Latin America?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: There is undeniably a rightward trend in Latin American politics: since Donald Trump took office in January 2025, all 7 Latin American elections in South or Central America (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, and Peru) have been won by the center- or far right. Not all those elected are populists or outsiders; and most, but not all, reflected an anti-incumbent wave. Donald Trump’s explicit endorsement of victorious presidential candidates in Honduras and Colombia may have played a role, given the importance of the United States to both countries, but the impact is difficult to quantify.
Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella (ADLE) cast himself as an outsider and in certain aspects he was. A lawyer and businessman with his own luxury brands, ADLE created his own political movement and electoral vehicle—Defensores de la Patria—outside the established party system. Prior to his election he had never held political office.
A notable feature of the 2026 presidential election was the collapse of Colombia’s traditional right, represented by Paloma Valencia of the Centro Democrático party. She was endorsed by former president Álvaro Uribe and won a primary of rightist candidates that did not include ADLE. In the first round, Valencia was attacked as one of the políticos de siempre(same old politicians) and garnered less than 7 percent of the vote. Meanwhile centrist presidential candidates together pulled in just over 5 percent, although centrist mayors govern five of Colombia’s largest cities.
There was certainly an anti-incumbent aspect to ADLE’s election, as leftist candidate Iván Cepeda pledged continuity with many of the policies of President Gustavo Petro, including the widely criticized negotiations with criminal and quasi-insurgent groups under the rubric of Paz Total. But it’s important not to exaggerate the anti-incumbency aspect. Petro’s approval rates rose to over 46 percent in February 2026, following increases in the minimum wage. Moreover, ADLE won by an extremely narrow margin—just under 252,000 votes of the over 26 million cast, less than one percent. Without the votes of 390,974 Colombians living abroad, ADLE would have lost to Cepeda.
Similarly, one must not exaggerate the degree of ideological realignment of the electorate. As political scientist Orlando Pérez has pointed out, the way Colombian voters defined themselves on a left-right spectrum changed very little between 2020 and 2024. On a scale of one to ten (with zero on the far left and 10 the far right), the Colombian average in 2024 was 5.3, up only 0.4 from 2020, and well below the 2002 peak of 6.8.
De la Espriella Won by Owning the Security Narrative
You have long argued that Colombian democracy must be understood through the interaction of political institutions, armed conflict, and state legitimacy. To what extent does this election reveal that insecurity, rather than ideology, has become the principal driver of electoral behavior, allowing populist outsiders to redefine political competition around order rather than representation?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: One area of clear advantage for ADLE was on security issues. Petro’s signature policy of Paz Total was widely seen as a disastrous failure. Multiple indicators showed rising insecurity in rural and urban areas, including the assassination of a prominent center-right candidate in 2025, the territorial expansion of illegal armed groups and their dominance over local populations, increased kidnappings, extortion, and child recruitment, and the growth of criminal economies such as drug trafficking and illegal mining. Public opinion polls prior to the election overwhelmingly showed that “public order” was the principal concern of Colombian voters, far outstripping the second most reported issue, unemployment and the economy. Iván Cepeda’s pledge to continue Petro’s policy of negotiating with armed groups allowed De la Espriella to dominate the security narrative.
ADLE proposed numerous “iron fist” security measures, including robust military campaigns to retake territory, fumigate coca crops, build maximum security “mega-prisons” modeled on those in El Salvador, expand military budgets, and invest in intelligence, technology, and equipment for the armed forces and police. He also pledged a reinvigorated security alliance with the United States and Israel. Some of his proposals were unrealistic—he initially vowed to recapture territory in the first 90 days of his term. But his proposals, punctuated by worsening security indicators and a spate of deadly bombings in southwest Colombia before the election, resonated with the public.
Issues of social inclusion—a staple of populist politics—did not figure prominently in ADLE’s campaign. He vowed to shrink the size of the state by 40 percent and emphasized the role of free markets in growing the economy. He cited his private sector experience as the key to rapidly resolving one of Colombia’s most longstanding, thorny issues: land tenure. He also announced vague plans to address hunger by convincing prominent businessmen to purchase agricultural products in various departments of the country. At the same time, he appealed to voter sentiment by promising to come down with an “iron fist” (mano de hierro) against those who would steal public funds. He proposed the creation of an anti-corruption “search bloc,” the kind of specialized police unit that hunted down Pablo Escobar in the early 1990s.
Security Populism Has Become a Staple of Latin American Politics
Armed riot police on the streets of Bogota, Colombia on May 01, 2016. Photo: Dreamstime.
Throughout Latin America we increasingly observe candidates who combine anti-establishment rhetoric with promises of uncompromising law-and-order policies. Is Colombia witnessing the emergence of a distinctly Colombian version of right-wing populism, or does De la Espriella fit into a broader transnational family that includes leaders such as Nayib Bukele, Javier Milei, Donald Trump, and José Antonio Kast?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: The problems of crime and violence in Latin America are long-standing and profound. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “Latin America and the Caribbean remain the region most affected by organized crime and gang-related violence.” Homicide rates vary in different sub-regions and within countries, but are the highest in the world, almost four times the global average. Regional homicide rates declined between 2015 and 2023, but the UNODC reported that “the level of lethal violence remains alarmingly high.”
Homicides reflect only part of the story, however. Security analyst Robert Muggah has underscored how “lived insecurity often manifests as extortion at shopfronts, robbery on commuting routes, spectacular high-visibility incidents, and a persistent suspicion that criminals exercise de facto authority in specific neighborhoods.” In many countries, the fear of crime outstrips actual indicators of crime and violence. Muggah argues that the “disjuncture between real and perceived violent crime is most evident in places once seen as comparatively safe but where organized crime and everyday violence have become more visible.”
As a result, UNODC found that only 44 percent of citizens in Latin America feel safe walking alone in their neighborhood at night, the lowest percentage in the world and almost 30 percent lower than the global average. Chilean scholar Lucía Dammert has characterized the region’s security challenges in terms of the existence of multi-dimensional and deeply rooted structures of illegal power. These have emerged from a “perfect storm” of political crisis, corruption, criminal penetration of the state, powerful criminal economies, violent forms of dispute resolution, and the weakness of state institutions responsible for public safety.
Against this backdrop, security populism has become a staple of political campaigns, as fearful citizens demand what Muggah has called “expanded coercive power.” Governments have responded by imposing states of emergency, granting expanded powers to the military to fight crime, and pursuing judicial reforms to limit the rights of the accused and impose harsher sentences. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has adopted the most draconian measures, improving security but at a horrendous cost to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. His notorious anti-terrorism prison known as CECOT is a model which many leaders on the right look to emulate. ADLE’s pledge to construct ten mega-prisons reflects the appeal of the so-called “Bukele model.” Indeed, when a journalist asked De la Espriella to respond in one word to the name Bukele, he responded, “the future.”
Elite Connections Do Not Prevent Anti-Elite Appeals
One striking feature of election campaign was the prominence of anti-elite discourse despite the fact that several leading candidates were themselves deeply embedded in political and economic elites. Does this suggest that contemporary populism has become less about social representation than about constructing a moral narrative that divides society between virtuous citizens and corrupt establishments?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: For all his anti-elite pretensions, Colombian journalists have pointed out ADLE’s numerous connections to Colombia’s political and private sector elite. During his legal career he defended right-wing members of Congress ultimately convicted for their ties to paramilitary groups (the so-called parapolítica scandal). He also served as a defense lawyer for other business and government figures accused of corruption, including the notorious Alex Saab, accused of massive corruption and laundering money for the Venezuelan dictatorship. In addition, ADLE has surrounded himself with well-known figures in Colombia’s political class. His vice-presidential running mate, José Manuel Restrepo, held two ministerial posts during the Iván Duque presidency (Minister of Commerce, Industry, and Tourism and Minister of Finance and Public Credit) and his choice for Interior Minister, Rodrigo Lara Restrepo, served as president of the House of Representatives and in the Senate. Miguel Gómez Martínez, ADLE’s designate for Finance Minister, is a former ambassador and deputy comptroller general. These individuals are expected to provide important governing experience for the new administration.
Despite his many elite connections, ADLE’s campaign featured a staple of populist discourse—the division of society between the virtuous “people” and corrupt elites. ADLE claimed to represent “losnunca” (the nobodies) against los de siempre (the usual suspects or established political class). The anti-elite messaging struck a chord considering the low regard of Colombian citizens for key political institutions. Polling by the Colombian firm Invamer in February 2026 showed that political parties, the judicial system, and the Congress were viewed more unfavorably than any other institution in Colombia except the ELN criminal insurgency. (The armed forces and the Catholic Church scored highest).
Another feature of populism is the view that opponents are enemies to be crushed, not legitimate political actors with whom to bargain. During the campaign, ADLE declared himself the “sworn enemy” of the left (which he threatened to “disembowel”), qualifying them as “criminals,” “bandits,” and “narcoterrorists.” Invoking an all-out Manichaean struggle between good and evil, he characterized the election as a choice between “totalitarianism and democracy.” He claimed divine inspiration for his decision to run, telling Spain’s El País that God had told him to enter politics at a moment of “extreme danger” to the homeland. The battle was not just political, he said, but also “moral and spiritual” given that “evil inhabits the Casa de Nariño,” the presidential house.
ADLE emphasized conservative family values but was not above vulgar language and demonstrations of hypermasculinity. He boasted that women voters were attracted by the size of his genitals and claimed that he had the “balls” (cojones) to take on established interests.
It is an open question as to whether ADLE’s populist campaign tactics will spill over into his governing style and whether the inclusion of seasoned center-right politicians in his cabinet will moderate his propensity for disruption.
False Claims of Fraud Erode Trust Even When Elections Are Fair
Colombia’s former President Gustavo Petro. Photo: Dreamstime.
The election was accompanied by allegations of electoral irregularities and public questioning of preliminary results. You recently warned that fraud narratives without evidence can undermine democratic institutions. More broadly, how dangerous is the normalization of electoral delegitimization in countries with otherwise credible electoral systems? Can repeated attacks on electoral integrity become a form of democratic erosion even when institutions ultimately withstand them?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: No one did more to undermine confidence in the electoral system that President Petro himself. For months he spread false narratives about fraud and refused to accept ADLE’s victory; a group of his supporters have filed a judicial complaint aimed at declaring the election null and void. Petro accused the National Civil Registry (Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil), in charge of voter registration and vote tabulation, of manipulating results before the election. Petro also lashed out at Colombian and Israeli companies for their supposed electoral intervention. Even after Iván Cepeda himself recognized ADLE’s victory, Petro claimed that “the Colombian people have elected Iván Cepeda.”
The fraud narrative was amplified on social media. According to the US-based Carter Center, the campaign marked the first “widespread use of artificial intelligence” in Colombian elections, contributing to the spread of disinformation. This included “false messages about voting, out-of-context videos suggesting fraud, alleged early results, and misleading narratives about the transparency of the vote count.”
Despite repeated denunciations of fraud, Petro failed to present supporting evidence. An election observer team from the European Union praised the electoral system’s transparency, safeguards, and rapid publication of results. Observers from the Organization of American States and Colombia’s own Electoral Observation Mission (Misión de Observación Elctoral, MOE) acknowledged complaints and made recommendations to improve technical aspects of election administration but similarly found no evidence to support fraud allegations.
Had Cepeda won the election, one presumes that Gustavo Petro would have desisted from claiming fraud. Insisting on the narrative will continue to erode faith in Colombia’s institutions, fostering ongoing polarization and ultimately damaging its democracy.
Performance Matters as Much as Democratic Principles
Colombia’s 1991 Constitution was designed to broaden democratic inclusion after decades of political violence. Yet thirty-five years later, many Colombians appear willing to support leaders advocating exceptional measures against crime and armed groups. Does this suggest that constitutional democracy is increasingly being judged less by liberal principles than by its perceived capacity to deliver security and effective governance?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: It is probably not the case that citizens are indifferent to issues of democratic practices, civil liberties, and human rights. In its most recent survey in 2024, the Santiago-based polling firm Latinobarómetro found that 61 percent of Colombian’s agreed with the statement that “democracy may have its problems but it’s the best system of government.” At the same time, Latinobarómetro found that a scant 20 percent of Colombians were satisfied with the way democracy functioned. The gap demonstrates an important weakness in Colombia’s democratic system—its capacity to deliver things that citizens want and need: security and economic opportunity. An alarming majority of Colombians—52 percent—said they didn’t care if a non-democratic government came to power “if it solved problems.” Vanderbilt University’s LAPOP has consistently found that crime victimization and support for authoritarian measures go hand in hand. And in his book, The Crisis of Modern Capitalism, British financial correspondent Martin Wolf found that an essential ingredient of democratic stability was an economy that provided for a decent standard of living. Government performance, rather than abstract principles, is key to the future of representative democracy, in Colombia and elsewhere.
Security Without Accountability Invites Future Abuse
Bogotá, Colombia — January 18, 2009: Colombian soldiers march during a military parade in Plaza de Bolívar, the historic heart of Bogotá. Photo: King Ho Yim / Dreamstime.
Throughout your work you have emphasized that unresolved violence weakens democratic institutions. If Colombia shifts from Petro’s strategy of negotiation toward a far more coercive security doctrine, what lessons should policymakers draw from Colombia’s own history regarding the relationship between military effectiveness, democratic accountability, and respect for human rights?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: Of the many incoherencies of Petro’s Total Peace policy, the most important was a lack of strategic vision concerning the relationship between military force and political negotiations with insurgent or criminal groups (in recent years, the line has all but disappeared). Ceasefires with multiple armed groups allowed them to expand their territorial presence and increase their coercive control over the civilian population. By contrast, the peace accord between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and Colombia’s largest insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was concluded after a sequence of military operations, most notably between 2008 and 2012, that profoundly weakened the insurgency.
The Colombian experience also demonstrates that military and political advances absent efforts to establish legitimate state presence throughout the national territory are easily reversible. Following the FARC’s demobilization in 2017, other armed groups, not the state, filled the vacuum of power. These groups competed amongst themselves for lucrative drug routes and other sources of illegal rent. The 2016 peace accord provided an historic opportunity to extend state presence throughout the countryside, in security as well as development terms. The failure to do so began late in the Santos administration, continued under the Duque administration, and accelerated during Petro’s term.
That said, Colombia also illustrates the dangers of military force not bounded by democratic and human rights norms. Over a period of decades—but principally between 2002 and 2008—the military murdered over 7,800 young men from poor neighborhoods, dressing them up in guerrilla uniforms to inflate body counts. This was the “false positives” scandal, the worst blow to the prestige of the armed forces in recent times. Other undemocratic practices carried out in the name of security during the Uribe years included the illegal wiretapping of opposition politicians, Supreme Court justices, and journalists. This led to the dissolution of Colombia’s domestic intelligence agency, the DAS.
The temptation during the ADLE administration to do away with human rights and legal constraints on the armed forces is high. ADLE has proposed total judicial security for public security forces ….“an absolute priority to the public forces over the narcoterrorists regarding international humanitarian law.” However necessary it is to improve security in Colombia, offering a blank check to the armed forces and police vis-à-vis accountability invites future abuse and a delegitimization of state forces. The tasks of weakening violent actors and illegal economies, recovering state control of territory, and reinforcing citizen trust in the police and armed forces are undermined by indiscriminate tactics that inevitably have their greatest impact on poor communities.
Sustainable Peace Depends on Governance, Not Only Coercion
How should we understand the relationship between populism and Colombia’s long-standing armed conflict? Does persistent insecurity create unusually fertile conditions for populist leaders who promise decisive action, or does populist politics itself risk further polarizing a society that has struggled for decades to build sustainable peace?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: During Petro’s term, a dynamic of confrontation between and among armed groups largely replaced confrontation between such groups and the government, with disastrous consequences for the civilian population. According to the International Committee for the Red Cross, the humanitarian consequences of the armed conflict in 2025 reached “the most serious level in the last decade.” Restrictions on movement (confinements), extorsion, forced recruitment, and displacement reflect a perverse gobernanza criminal in Colombia’s rural areas where the state has historically been absent. The increase in the number of combatants comprising Colombia’s eight principal illegal armed groups has been staggering since the peace accord with the FARC: from approximately 6,500 in 2017 to more than 27,000 today, according to government figures compiled by the Bogotá think tank, Fundación Ideas para la Paz. While significant increases took place under the previous government of President Iván Duque, the pace of growth accelerated between 2023-2025 during Petro’s term.
This is the backdrop to ADLE’s victory. He laid out his security approach in a February 2026 interview with Colombia’s leading daily, El Tiempo. To combat all the forms of violence, he said, one had to begin by fumigating 333,000 hectares of coca, “the base of the pyramid” and source of income for criminal confederations. He also proposed bombing narcoterrorist camps and killing or capturing ten ringleaders in each Colombian department.
One does not have to discount the importance of a robust security strategy to weaken criminal groups and the illicit economies on which they rely to observe that force alone will not establish state legitimacy. Colombia’s peace agreement posited that rural development and creating the conditions for sustainable livelihoods, especially in coca-producing areas, were essential ingredients of governance and stability. That premise remains as valid today as it was in 2016.
Undermining the Peace Accord Would Be Counterproductive
The 2016 Peace Accord remains one of the most ambitious peacebuilding projects in recent history. To what extent could a more confrontational security strategy alter the political consensus surrounding the peace process? Is Colombia entering a period of policy correction, or might it risk reversing some of the institutional gains achieved since the agreement?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: One of the biggest obstacles to peace accord implementation has been, precisely, the lack of consensus over its provisions. This was reflected most dramatically in the narrow victory of the “No” vote in an October 2016 plebiscite. But since then, the accord has been embedded in Colombian law and the constitution, providing for some, albeit uneven, degree of implementation over the last decade. Most important have been programs of reinsertion for some 11,000 former combatants as well as focused development programs, known as PDET’s, to provide development opportunities for conflict- and coca-affected communities. The Petro administration oversaw some advances in land restitution but most of the rural reform agenda remains pending, as do other important aspects of the accord.
The University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute, which measures accord implementation, noted in June 2026 that “violence remains the primary impediment to sustainable peace.” The Institute noted the “gap between ambitious planning and territorial reality” and cited a “pressing need to accelerate structural reforms.”
To what extent, if at all, the ADLE administration will pursue further implementation of the 2016 accord remains to be seen, although it is unlikely. The Trump administration maneuvered in 2025 to narrow the mandate of the UN mission verifying implementation of the peace agreement, eliminating its monitoring of the accord’s ethnic chapter and the work of the transitional justice mechanism known as the JEP (Special Jurisdiction for Peace). ADLE has vowed to abolish the JEP; and although it has constitutional standing, he could simply starve the court of funds. The same holds true for other aspects of the accord, including programs to reincorporate demobilized fighters into civilian life.
Efforts to undermine the peace agreement will likely prove to be counter-productive. Without judicial guarantees and sustainable livelihoods, hundreds if not thousands of demobilized guerrillas could be tempted to return to arms, worsening the security challenges.
Human Rights Institutions Face Growing Political Pressure
Protesters march peacefully through Bogotá calling for the impeachment of President Gustavo Petro and opposing the government’s proposed reforms on April 21, 2024. Photo: Anamaria Mejía / Dreamstime.
You have written extensively about the importance of human rights in democratic consolidation. Around the world, however, populist leaders increasingly portray human rights institutions as obstacles to popular sovereignty and effective governance. How vulnerable are Colombia’s judicial institutions, constitutional safeguards, and human rights mechanisms to this increasingly widespread populist critique?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: Since winning the election, ADLE has vowed to eliminate several entities charged with overseeing peace and human rights issues, folding their functions into other ministries. Those on the chopping block include the office of the High Commissioner for Peace, and the presidential advisors for National Reconciliation and for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law. Like President Javier Milei in Argentina, ADLE has plans to slash government positions and dramatically shrink the size of the state. There is undoubtedly a need for state reform and improved inter-agency coordination in Colombia. For example, Colombian scholar Michael Weintraub has identified over two dozen government entities involved in drug policy. Colombia has two institutions with important human rights responsibilities—the Defensoría del Pueblo and the Procuraduría General de la Nación (the People’s Defender and Inspector General, respectively.) The leaders of both institutions are elected by the Colombian legislature from a slate of candidates put forward by the executive branch and the courts. The heads of these agencies serve four-year terms which end in 2028 (Defensor) and 2029 (Procurador). Hence, while activities of both institutions can be affected by budget and personnel cuts, ADLE is not at liberty to remove the existing leadership.
Especially troubling is ADLE’s hostility to multilateral organizations and human rights bodies. He has tempered pledges made in 2025 to withdraw Colombia from the UN, OAS, and Inter-American human rights system, but he has made no secret that he views these organizations as biased, inefficient, and contrary to Colombia’s interests. Eliminating or reducing the UN and OAS presence within Colombia would be especially damaging, given the rising human and economic toll of conflict and violence. Multiple parts of the UN system, including the Verification Mission for the Peace Process, the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) all play critical roles. These include verifying the implementation of the peace agreement, providing assistance to displaced populations and refugees (nearly 3 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants have entered Colombia since 2014), and addressing the worsening human rights and humanitarian crisis in rural areas. All parts of the UN system, in Colombia and elsewhere, have suffered budget cuts that are largely a product of reductions in US assistance. For its part, the OAS provided extensive monitoring of the first and second rounds of the 2026 elections, pushing back against narratives of fraud and making numerous recommendations to strengthen electoral institutions and processes; and since 2004, the OAS Mission to Support the Peace Process has also provided important support for peacebuilding.
ADLE’s plans to intensify military operations, if coupled with efforts to reduce the presence of key international actors, could significantly worsen the already dire situation facing conflict-affected populations.
Washington and Bogotá Are Entering a New Phase of Cooperation
Your recent work highlights both the enduring strategic importance of Colombia for the United States and growing tensions in bilateral relations. Under a new right-leaning Colombian administration and a second Trump presidency, do you anticipate a restoration of the traditional US-Colombia partnership, or could new disagreements emerge despite greater ideological affinity?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: US-Colombia relations will tighten substantially following the years of tension and near rupture during the Petro years. Deputy Assistant Secretary of War Joseph Humire visited Colombia in July 2026, pledging to take cooperation to “new levels” and invoking a “Plan Patriota 2.0,” an important symbolic reference to Álvaro Uribe’s 2002 security policy. Also in July, a high-level Colombian delegation visited Washington, including the incoming vice president and ministers of finance, trade, foreign affairs, and defense. The group held a whirlwind of meetings in the executive branch, Congress, and international development banks, with officials emphasizing a “new beginning” in bilateral relations.
ADLE has called for tightening relations with the United States and Israel, citing needs for new military equipment, technology, intelligence and AI capacity, and expanded troop levels. His view that narcoterrorism constitutes not just a threat to Colombia but to the national security of the United States dovetails seamlessly with that of the Trump administration. Early in his term President Trump designated drug cartels and gangs as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and late last year informed the US Congress that actions by cartels “constitute an armed attack against the United States.” In that context, the United States has carried out dozens of attacks on so-called narcolanchas in the Caribbean and Western Pacific, killing hundreds in what critics decry as violations of the laws of war.
Along with other conservative leaders in the hemisphere, ADLE is poised to eagerly join the Trump administration’s Americas Counter Cartel initiative and participate in the security alliance known as the Shield of the Americas. It remains to be seen, however, what concrete assistance will flow through these programs, despite the pressing need for regional collaboration in combatting organized crime. At the same time, a more direct US role in Colombian security operations—something alluded to in the White House Counterterrorism Strategy—could provoke a strong backlash among ADLE opponents who constitute roughly half the electorate.
ADLE’s and the Trump administration’s militarized approach to counter-drug strategy is likely to meet its most significant obstacles in the US Congress. This will be especially true if the US mid-term elections put Democrats in control of one or, potentially, both houses of Congress. Thus far, President Trump has relied on Republican majorities in the House and Senate to support, however narrowly, his foreign policy priorities. That said, the foreign aid bill signed into law in February 2026 contained provisions advanced by Democrats that conditioned 20 percent of military financing on progress in bringing human rights violators to justice, reducing threats and attacks on civil society activists, and protecting Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities. Democrats will insist—as they have over the decades of US-Colombian cooperation—on the human rights, humanitarian, and development dimensions of bilateral relations. Restoring what had been a bipartisan consensus over the importance of US-Colombian relations will require accommodating not just the Trump administration and Republicans, but also congressional Democrats. Álvaro Uribe ignored such concerns to his peril, ultimately failing to overcome resistance to a long-sought bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) because of human rights concerns.
The Trump administration is also likely to support financing from both the US Treasury and international financial institutions to stabilize Colombia’s economy. Government spending and public debt mushroomed during Petro’s presidency as he suspended the so-called fiscal rule designed to limit the debt-to-GDP ratio. The incoming ADLE administration inherits a fiscal deficit that has already resulted in a downgrading of Colombia’s credit rating. Cutting the budget to restore fiscal balance has the potential to detonate social unrest.
Executive Ambition Will Face Legislative and Judicial Constraints
Unidentified people in the senate meeting, in congress building in Bogota, Colombia on October 22, 2017. Photo: Pablo Hidalgo / Dreamstime.
Many scholars argue that contemporary democratic crises are increasingly characterized not by abrupt authoritarian breakdowns but by gradual institutional erosion. Looking ahead, what indicators should observers watch most closely in Colombia to distinguish democratic correction from democratic backsliding under the incoming government?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: Political scientist Michael Coppedge has identified two main paths to democratic backsliding: attacks on civil liberties and a free press, and the erosion of checks and balances (what the scholarly literature calls “horizontal accountability”). Backsliding is associated with power grabs by the executive branch, the weakening of judicial institutions, and efforts to undermine the independence of electoral and other institutions.
ADLE may be tempted to rule by decree, but he is likely to face legislative and judicial checks on his power. The composition of the legislature since the March 2026 elections saw Petro and Cepeda’s Pacto Histórico party win the largest number of seats in the House and Senate, significantly more than Álvaro Uribe’s center-right Centro Democrático. According to Colombia Risk Analysis, a consultancy, Colombia’s traditional Conservative and Liberal parties, together with the centrist Partido de la U, captured 47 Senate seats. These parties constitute a “swing” bloc with which ADLE will have to negotiate, issue by issue, to enact parts of his agenda.
ADLE cannot even count on the center-right to back his priorities all the time. When the new Congress was inaugurated in July 2026, a bizarre left-right alliance between the Pacto Histórico and Centro Democrático kept ADLE’s preferred candidate from being elected legislative president. Recurrent obstacles of this sort might tempt ADLE to try to bypass the Congress altogether, but Colombia’s Constitutional Court has the ultimate authority to rule on the constitutionality of executive decrees and legislation. The Court is widely respected as a defender of Colombia’s rights-oriented 1991 Constitution.
It Is Too Early to Declare a Permanent Rightward Turn
There were lots of Venezuelans crossing the border into the land of Colombia. This was captured in La parada, Colombia. Photo: Shutterstock.
Finally, stepping back from Colombia itself, do you believe Latin America is entering a new political cycle in which populist radical-right movements increasingly replace the left-populist wave or “pink tide” of the previous decade? Or are we witnessing something more profound—a regional transformation in which ideology matters less than citizens’ demand for security, state effectiveness, and political order?
Dr. Cynthia J. Arnson: The electoral successes of the far right in Latin America are a relatively new phenomenon (this excludes right-wing military regimes that took power by force). Thus, it is perhaps too soon to make sweeping conclusions about what their electoral victories bode for the region.
Some analysts view the recent spate of right-wing successes as part of an anti-incumbency trend, in which the deep challenges of governance, particularly in confronting crime and organized crime, lead to popular frustration and a subsequent swing of the political pendulum. If this view is correct, and if the right proves no more successful in improving security and livelihoods than their left-wing predecessors, future elections could see the pendulum swing away from right-led governments. That said, three countries in Latin America—the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Mexico—bucked the anti-incumbency trend in their most recent presidential elections, suggesting that the desire for alternation may be less potent than before. Furthermore, polling by Latinobarómetro and others shows little evidence of a large ideological realignment of the region’s electorate, with most voters placing themselves towards the middle of the ideological spectrum.
Chilean political scientist Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, co-editor of a 2026 volume, The Far Right in Latin America, has identified commonalities among far-right actors in Latin America, Europe and the United States; they are “capitalizing on feelings of status loss and declining political relevance among groups unsettled by the gradual incorporation of historically marginalized populations.” Low or mediocre economic growth, stagnating or declining real wages, the high cost of living (exacerbated now by the Iran war), culture wars, and the mistrust or rejection of elites provide a common backdrop for the rise of far-right leaders.
Whereas the “rise of the left” in Latin America in the aughts was associated with a critique of neoliberalism and the structural adjustment reforms advocated by Washington-based institutions, for Rovira and other analysts, the rise of the right is linked to cultural rather than economic issues. These include family, traditional gender roles, religion, and opposition to abortion and LBGTQ rights. Today’s right-wing governments inherit a longstanding feature of rightist politics having to do with crime-fighting strategies. Two decades before Nayib Bukele imposed a 2022 state of emergency and jailed close to 1.5 percent of the Salvadoran population, El Salvador’s right-wing presidents imposed mano dura and súper mano dura policies to curb gang violence. Rightists since the 1990s have rejected rights-based efforts to fight crime through policies aimed at fostering social inclusion, community policing, and youth-oriented crime prevention. Deteriorating security conditions in Latin America—both real and perceived—have created a backlash against policies viewed as “soft on crime,” creating a fertile climate for the emergence of “punitive populism” embraced by the right long before Latin America’s most recent electoral cycle.
The anti-immigrant sentiment that has super-charged the right in Europe and the United States is reflected unevenly in Latin America. Chile’s rightist president José Antonio Kast made opposition to immigration a central tenet of his campaign, linking the rise in crime to foreign gangs such as Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua. By contrast—and despite the presence of close to three million Venezuelans in Colombia—anti-migrant sentiment did not figure in ADLE’s campaign.
It is difficult to predict how long the current rightward shift will last. The salience of identity politics means that politicians will have to satisfy not only demands for improved performance in the security and economic arenas but also appeal to voters’ sense of self in relation to others in society. Polarization is likely to deepen as core values become all-or-nothing objects of contestation. How this dynamic plays out will be central to determining liberal democracy’s future.
Dr. Amir Ali examines the emergence of India’s Cockroach Janata Party protests as the country’s first distinctive Gen Z protest movement, arguing that what began as a satirical online response to an official’s derogatory remark rapidly evolved into a nationwide campaign against educational injustice, government unresponsiveness, and democratic decline. Situating the movement within the broader trajectory of Indian politics, he explores how youth mobilization, meme culture, digital activism, and street protests combined to challenge the perceived invincibility of the Modi government. The article further assesses the movement’s implications for state-society relations, media credibility, educational governance, and the future of democratic dissent, suggesting that the Cockroach protests may represent a turning point in India’s contemporary politics.
When Gen Z protests took place in Nepal and Bangladesh in India’s neighborhood, and further afield in Morocco and Madagascar, a question arose in people’s minds whether such extraordinary political events could ever happen in India. India’s Cockroach Janata Party was the country’s very own bespoke Gen Z movement. The protests were prompted by remarks made by Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant. He disparagingly suggested that unemployed youngsters gravitating towards journalism and social activism were like cockroaches. An Indian student pursuing a master’s degree in public relations in Boston University in the US, Abhijit Dipke, saw an opportunity to make a meme out of the mention of cockroaches by the Chief Justice. He created the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), parodying the nation’s formidable ruling party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The result was an internet sensation as the CJP’s social media following easily surpassed that of the ruling BJP.
From Student Anger to Political Accountability
These events played out in the middle of May of 2026 when Dipke was still in the US. A few days earlier the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) that close to two million youngsters in India had taken to gain admission to medical courses across the country, was cancelled. Dipke was set to return to India on the 6th of June. He announced that he would be going straight from the airport to a designated protest site in Central Delhi, called the Jantar Mantar, named after an 18th century astronomical observatory, that still stands. There was speculation that Dipke would be arrested on his arrival at the airport. He emerged in the glaring presence of India’s notoriously raucous media channels. He held a copy of B.R. Ambedkar’s autobiography to indicate his respect for the man whose name is associated with the drafting of the Indian constitution, and who is the iconic leader of India’s historically oppressed Dalit community.
Dipke was not arrested and he proceeded to Jantar Mantar where there was an underwhelming crowd that received him. This was perhaps the slightly disappointing first day of the movement that would in less than two months’ time extract a resignation from Narendra Modi’s Cabinet in the form of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Modi’s government in the twelve years that it has been in power has become synonymous with not yielding to demands for resignation on moral grounds from the opposition and civil society. There have been some exceptions such as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, MJ Akbar, who had to resign in 2018 when allegations of sexual assault were made against him.
Pradhan is a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) which is an ultranationalist and supremacist political movement whose political front is the ruling BJP. The Cockroach Janata Party demanded Pradhan’s resignation as Education Minister as it was under his authority that regular leaks of questions for entrance examinations to prestigious courses like medicine and engineering happened. The NEET for medical courses that had been cancelled in mid-May, had been rescheduled for late June and there was youth discontent that the Cockroach movement was able to very effectively channelize.
How the Cockroach Movement Gathered Momentum
The Modi government throughout June and most of July remained intransigent on the question of education minister Pradhan’s resignation. The mentality of the Modi government seems to be that resignation signals weakness on its part. This stonewalling and lack of responsiveness has become something of a character trait of the Modi regime. The earlier rare exception that underlines this intransigence was in late 2021 when the Modi government backtracked on a set of farm laws it was pushing through parliament as it had angry farmers from neighboring regions blockading major arterial roads into the capital city New Delhi, with their tractors.
The Cockroach Janata Party protests received a shot in the arm when Abhijit Dipke was joined by an educational reformer and environmental activist from a remote region in the Himalayas. This was a man called Sonam Wangchuk from Ladakh. Wangchuk had recently been in jail for protests he had organized and he promptly decided to go on hunger strike to express his solidarity with the Cockroach Janata Party. One of the features of agitational Indian politics is the hunger strike undertaken as a kind of imitation of the prolonged hunger strikes that India’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi was known to take recourse to. Wangchuk’s health kept deteriorating with the Modi government showing no signs of budging.
When the Modi government finally moved on Saturday 18th July, exactly a week before Pradhan’s resignation on the next Saturday, it was to remove Sonam Wangchuk from the protest site by policemen who took him to a government hospital to monitor his health condition. Wangchuk demanded that the matter of examination paper leaks be taken up in the upcoming session of parliament, before breaking his hunger strike in the presence of senior government ministers. Meanwhile, the young ‘cockroach’ protesters at the Jantar Mantar protest site kept growing and the protests seemed to have graduated far beyond Sonam Wangchuk.
When Youth Protest Shook the Modi Government
On the first day of the new parliament session on Monday July 20 when the protesters marched to Parliament, they were met by very heavy-handed police measures. Not only were they tear gassed and baton charged by the Delhi Police, but there were also allegations of pellet guns being fired. Protests were also happening across the country and in major provincial capitals like Patna and Kolkata, where provincial assembly elections had very recently returned governments from Mr. Modi’s BJP, consolidating his formidable political grip over the country. And yet, just as electorally his political grip was being strengthened in provinces which for many years had not yielded to the BJP’s political dominance, Mr. Modi was being challenged by impudent youngsters right under his nose in New Delhi.
The week beginning from Monday 20 July when the Delhi Police brutally responded to protesters, up to Saturday 25 July, when Education Minister Pradhan resigned, progressed in a politically feverish sort of way. There was speculation that there would be a cabinet reshuffle to respond to the situation, but not a resignation.
A veritable meme revolution started as youngsters mercilessly mocked the carefully cultivated media image of Modi as a great and strong leader. Modi seemed to desperately respond with a midnight Instagram post with his haggard face far too close to the camera, eyes appearing like slits. Modi appealed to youngsters with a supposed Gen Z style of addressing them as ‘friends,’ instead of the trademark nasalized Hindi word mitron that he frequently uses. This Instagram post was interpreted and ridiculed as a sign of Modi being nervous and ruffled.
The Cockroach protests made very clear demands in addition to the resignation of the education minister, like dropping all police charges on protesting students. Soon after the resignation announcement, the protests at Jantar Mantar were a little hastily withdrawn. After yielding on the resignation, the Modi regime is unrepentantly doubling down, evident in the choice of Mr. Pradhan’s successor as Education Minister, another RSS member, which means the same educational agenda.
What Did the Cockroach Protests Achieve?
There is no doubt, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, that these were India’s unique and indeed idiosyncratic Gen Z protests. Further, the Cockroach protests are very different from the India Against Corruption movement that happened 15 years earlier in 2011, the same year as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements took place in different parts of the world. The India Against Corruption Movement did not share the global concerns of those significant protests, democracy in the case of the Arab Spring and inequality in the case of Occupy Wall Street.
The India Against Corruption movement was backed by the ultranationalist RSS. It contributed significantly to the catapulting of Modi to power three years later in 2014. On the contrary, the Cockroach protests have targeted the RSS and BJP’s polarizing politics of sowing division between majority Hindus and minority Muslims. Some of the slogans at this year’s Cockroach protests emphasized unity between the two religious communities. That way the Cockroach protests can be seen as extending the Shaheen Bagh protests initiated by Muslim women in a locality in Southeast Delhi to protest the Citizen’s Amendment Bill that was passed by the Modi Government in December 2019 and that threatened the citizenship status, especially of Muslims. Right wing media commentators supportive of the BJP argued that the Cockroach protests need to be suppressed.
Continuing with the contrast between the India Against Corruption Movement of 2011 and the Cockroach protest of 2026, the differing role of the mainstream media is glaring. The 2011 India Against Corruption Movement was supported by and virtually a creation of the mainstream electronic media. Large sections excitedly beamed visuals of protestors holding candles, waving flags, and singing the national anthem to ward off corruption, in what Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) political scientist Ajay Gudavarthy called a television soap opera. That very same mainstream media became the infamous lapdog Godi media as they are called now in India (Godi means lap in Hindi) that has thrown all journalistic standards to the wind by never questioning the Modi government. It has also injected large doses of communal animosity into the Indian body politic by organizing inflammatory prime time debates, many blatantly Islamophobic. With the Cockroach protests, the same lapdog Godi media has met its comeuppance with Gen Z protesters chasing them away and ridiculing them for their biased and skewed coverage.
The cockroach protests have made a significant dent on the impregnable character of Modi’s government. They have done so by removing a pervasive fear across the country about criticizing the government and expressing dissent. The Cockroach protests forebode the inevitable end of the Modi regime at some point in the future. Mr. Modi’s powerful Home Minister, Amit Shah has arrogantly claimed that his party will be in power for at least another fifty years. If that were to happen, then today’s Cockroach protesters would have advanced from middle age to become elderly citizens in their sixties. The BJP’s regular electoral victories in provincial assembly elections, and especially its recent success in crucial provinces like West Bengal and Bihar, have led some to believe that it is electorally invincible. This invincibility arises in the view of its critics from a combination of massive party funds, the Election Commission of India forfeiting its constitutional neutrality by favoring the BJP, and a controversial electoral roll revision exercise called the SIR (Special Intensive Revision) that seems designed to disenfranchise some sections of the electorate.
The Cockroach protests have laid bare India’s education crisis that twelve years of BJP rule have exacerbated. Those years have intensified the desperate situation of India’s Gen Z who would have been children when Mr. Modi came to power in 2014. Prior to the Modi regime, India’s educational system showed severe structural infirmities like unemployable graduates, and school children whose literacy and numeracy skills were way below desired levels. The BJP through its parent organization the RSS has foisted an educational policy that is uncritical, unscientific and chauvinistic in terms of claimed civilizational achievements. Rewritten textbooks are full of errors, spelling a lost generation. This is compounded by doubts about Mr. Modi’s claimed educational qualifications. Multiple Right to Information requests seeking details of his degrees have been routinely turned down.
Cockroach Coda
The Chief Justice of India’s choice of word to characterize India’s youngsters was extremely unfortunate. In 2022 the Editors Guild of India noted a dangerous plunging of the media discourse when it compared India’s mainstream television media with Radio Rwanda, a reference to Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines that during the 1994 Rwanda genocide conveyed the chilling message to kill the cockroaches. The embrace of the word cockroach by India’s youngsters is the most significant challenge to Modi’s populist regime, jaded and clueless about how to handle India’s restive youngsters and their demands for a good education and proper employment.
Nearly a decade after the mass displacement of the Rohingya, an entire generation has come of age in refugee camps where their lives are shaped by decisions they rarely help make. In this compelling ECPS Voice of Youth (VoY) article, PS Ayaas, a young Rohingya writer and community organizer, challenges the humanitarian paradigm that casts refugee youth primarily as beneficiaries of aid. Drawing on both lived experience and policy analysis, he argues that young Rohingya are already leading initiatives in education, human rights, environmental protection, and community development despite severe structural constraints. The article calls for a fundamental shift from tokenistic consultation to meaningful participation, insisting that sustainable humanitarian governance must recognize refugee youth as partners, decision-makers, and changemakers in shaping their collective future.
I have grown up watching decisions about my future being made in rooms I could not enter. I am a young Rohingya living in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and I know the particular sound of a meeting happening somewhere close by, on the other side of a fence or a tarpaulin wall, deciding something about people like me without any of us inside it. Like thousands of other young people here, I have learned to build a future inside a place designed around uncertainty — where the rain decides some days whether a path is walkable, where a shelter roof gets patched more times than anyone bothers to count, where you learn early which queues take an hour and which take a whole morning. We are surrounded by humanitarian services, policies, assessments, and programs intended to protect us. Yet too often, the people designing these responses are speaking about young Rohingya rather than listening to us.
I know what it means to be grateful for assistance and, in the very same breath, to feel that your own voice is missing from the decisions that shape your life. Both things are true at once, and I have mostly stopped trying to resolve that contradiction, because living inside it is simply what it means to be young and Rohingya right now. I have watched young people keep studying despite severe limitations, volunteer in their communities with almost nothing to give, and organize around health, education, human rights, and environmental protection anyway — not because someone funded it, but because waiting for permission has never been something any of us could actually afford. These are not small things. They have convinced me of something I now hold as a plain fact rather than an opinion: Rohingya youth should not be treated only as beneficiaries of humanitarian assistance. We must be recognized as participants, problem-solvers, and changemakers.
Nearly a decade after the 2017 exodus, Cox’s Bazar remains home to close to a million Rohingya refugees, roughly half of whom are children and adolescents (UNICEF, 2025). Yet in nearly every major decision that shapes our daily lives — what we are permitted to study, where we may travel, whether our camp stays open or closed during a national election — young Rohingya are treated overwhelmingly as recipients of policy rather than participants in it. The international response to this crisis has structurally cast youth as beneficiaries of aid rather than as capable agents of change, even as a growing, under-recognized body of youth-led organizing inside these camps tells a very different story.
A Generation Defined by Ceilings
The most concrete example of this structural ceiling is education. Rohingya children in Bangladesh are, by government policy, not permitted to study in Bangladeshi schools and are barred from enrolling in formal schools outside the camps (Human Rights Watch, 2019). A 2022 pilot finally began offering instruction based on Myanmar’s national curriculum, reaching its first 10,000 students that year (UNICEF, 2022) — a genuine milestone, but one that arrived five years late and still reaches only a fraction of eligible youth. That fragile progress is now reversing. Foreign aid cuts have forced the closure of learning centers, and as of 2025, kindergarten and primary facilities across the camps remain shuttered while youth vocational centers have shut down entirely (UNICEF, 2025). Human Rights Watch (2025) reports that roughly 437,000 school-age children in the camps have been affected. Girls face a compounding barrier: while they make up roughly half of primary-level learners, safety concerns and restrictive gender norms reduce female participation at the secondary level to roughly twenty-five percent (Global Partnership for Education, n.d.).
For me, education has never been simply a classroom experience. I have studied by whatever light was available that evening, through a connection that drops mid-sentence, with materials passed hand to hand until the pages soften at the edges, and with a persistent uncertainty about where any of it actually leads once you reach the ceiling the policy has already built for you. Studying, some days, feels less like preparation for a future and more like an act of pure persistence, undertaken without any proof it will be rewarded. I continue anyway, because education has never meant a certificate to me. It means the possibility of becoming useful to my community, whatever shape that usefulness eventually takes — and some days, on the hardest ones, it is simply the one part of the day that still belongs to me and not to the camp around it.
Movement and livelihood are constrained in much the same way. Human Rights Watch (2022) documented curfews, checkpoint harassment, and arbitrary travel denials across the camps. Ahead of Bangladesh’s February 2026 national elections, camp authorities ordered the camps “sealed,” severely restricting movement (Fortify Rights, 2026). The International Crisis Group (2024) frames these restrictions on movement and the right to work as systemic pressures that leave refugees with no formal pathway to self-sufficiency. An entire generation is coming of age inside a system explicitly built to withhold the two pillars of adult independence: higher education and legal work.
The Agency the System Doesn’t Account For
What the policy framework misses is what is already happening despite it. I have felt this agency personally through community volunteering — in the small, unglamorous work of showing up for people who live three shelters down, in conversations that happen on a doorstep rather than in a workshop, in the particular satisfaction of solving something small and real for someone you actually know. Working directly alongside other young people has taught me that refugees do not need to be taught only how to receive services. Many of us already understand the particular, textured challenges of our environment, because we live inside them every day without a break, in a way no assessment visiting for an afternoon ever quite captures. What we lack is not motivation. It is the resources, the structural recognition, and the institutional space to turn what we already know into lasting action.
Across the camps, youth-led initiatives prove this daily, in ways that rarely make it into the reports written about us. In community leadership and rights work, the Rohingya Youth Union runs mentorship and problem-solving workshops designed specifically to bridge the learning gaps the formal system leaves open (UNHCR, n.d.-a), while the Rohingya Youth Advocacy Network, established in 2023, has grown to more than 700 volunteers coordinating human rights advocacy and community programming (Rohingya Khobor, 2025d).
In grassroots protection and media, the IOM’s Poribortok — “change makers” — program has trained 400 young Rohingya to lead neighborhood-level efforts against gender-based violence (International Organization for Migration, n.d.), and in late 2025 a four-day media workshop trained seventy young Rohingya storytellers and videographers to document their own community instead of continuing to rely on outside narrators (Rohingya Khobor, 2025a, 2025b). In ecological stewardship, the Rohingya Environmental Protection Network, founded entirely by young volunteers, coordinates practical projects and education addressing the deforestation and climate vulnerability our overcrowded camps now face (Rohingya Khobor, 2025c).
What unites all of it is that none of it waited for permission from the humanitarian structures meant to serve us. It exists as living evidence against the premise that Rohingya youth need to be spoken for.
Why the Gap Persists: A Policy Critique
If this agency is already visible, why does the policy conversation still so rarely include it? Part of the answer is structural. A camp environment built around restricted movement, capped education, and no legal right to work does not simply fail to cultivate youth leadership — it actively works against the conditions leadership normally requires. Omata’s (2022) fieldwork in Ghana’s Buduburam camp found much the same pattern: even when refugees acquired real skills through aid programs, the surrounding economic and legal environment made those skills nearly impossible to apply. Skill-building without any legal pathway to use those skills locally does not build capacity. It builds frustration.
It would be unfair to say Rohingya participation does not exist at all. Humanitarian agencies frequently engage refugee volunteers, community leaders, and informal committees, and I have been one of those volunteers. But the deeper problem is the distance between participation and decision-making. A young refugee is often asked to help implement a program, and far more rarely given any seat at the table where that program was actually designed. The problem, in other words, is not only that Rohingya youth are excluded from decision-making. It is that humanitarian systems are losing real, local knowledge every time they treat young refugees primarily as beneficiaries rather than as partners. “Nothing about us, without us” cannot remain an advocacy slogan. It has to become an operational standard — for program design, for monitoring, for evaluation, for all of it.
What Changes When Youth Become Partners
When young Rohingya are engaged as agents rather than recipients, the outcomes are not abstract. Community-based protection work led by trained young volunteers has proven significantly more effective at reducing stigma and shifting harmful social norms than top-down messaging campaigns designed elsewhere and delivered to us (UNHCR, 2025). Youth-led journalism is producing an authentic archive of camp reporting, quietly shifting narrative authority from international outlets back to the community those outlets have long written about. Youth-run environmental and advocacy networks are building local organizational capacity that outlasts funding cycles entirely, unlike the rigid, externally designed projects that tend to disappear the moment a grant runs out.
What Meaningful Participation Should Look Like
Moving from tokenistic consultation to genuine policy partnership requires structural change, not better intentions. I believe four reforms matter most.
First, institutionalized youth advisory structures. Humanitarian coordination platforms should establish formal, representative Rohingya youth advisory groups with direct consultative status during the drafting of Joint Response Plans and strategic policy reviews — not consulted after the fact, but present while the plan is still being written.
Second, direct, accessible micro-funding. Donors should create streamlined, small-scale grant mechanisms specifically for legitimate refugee-led youth organizations, bypassing the bureaucratic hurdles that keep resources concentrated among established international organizations instead of the young people already doing the work.
Third, accredited education and vocational pathways. Education policy has to look past basic literacy. Aid agencies and host authorities need to expand access to accredited secondary curricula, certified digital skills training, and tertiary scholarships, so that studying leads somewhere rather than stopping at a ceiling by design.
Fourth, transparent institutional accountability. Participation needs measurable consequences. When agencies consult young refugees, they should be expected to report back — clearly, and in public — on which youth recommendations were accepted, which were modified, which were rejected, and why.
Conclusion: Living Between Uncertainty and Action
I do not know exactly where my own future will lead. Like many young Rohingya, I live with daily uncertainty about where I will study, work, or build a permanent life — whether the place I am sitting in right now, writing this, is where I will still be sitting in five years, or ten. But that uncertainty has not removed my desire to contribute. If anything, it has sharpened it, and strengthened my belief that young people must be given real opportunities to shape the communities we are already serving, whether or not anyone ever officially asked us to.
I do not ask the world to listen to Rohingya youth simply because we are young, or because we are refugees. I ask it to listen because we know our communities from the inside, in ways no external assessment can fully reach. We know what works. We know what fails. We know what our families quietly fear at night, and what young people here still hope to build, even now, even without much reason to expect it.
Nearly a decade into one of the world’s largest and most protracted refugee crises, young Rohingya are already learning, volunteering, organizing, creating, and leading — often in the same week we are also queueing for rations, patching a roof before the next rain, or walking further than we should have to for water. We are not waiting to become changemakers. We are already trying, today, with what little the system gives us, to change what we can. The only real question left is whether the international systems surrounding us will keep speaking for us — or finally make room for us to speak, participate, and help shape the future we are the ones who will actually have to live inside.
PS Ayaas is a young Rohingya writer based in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, currently studying Bachelor of Health Science at the University of the People. His writing draws on lived experience of displacement, statelessness, and community organizing, and focuses on repositioning Rohingya youth as active participants and changemakers rather than passive recipients of humanitarian aid. He has previously been recognized in the Mixed Migration Review writing competition, and is currently developing an essay on Rohingya it was named as Living in Limbo: Voices and Resilience of The Rohingya Protracted and displacement. Email: rohingyapubgsquad@gmail.com
US President Donald Trump’s intervention in the Smithsonian Institution signals a new phase in America’s culture wars. In this insightful commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the notion of “cultural Marxism” has evolved from a conspiracy theory into a category of governance used to legitimize state intervention in museums, universities, and other institutions that shape public knowledge. Tracing the concept’s genealogy from Nazi-era “cultural Bolshevism” to the contemporary MAGA movement, the article explores how culture-war narratives become instruments of illiberal memory politics. It further demonstrates the irony that, while denouncing a supposed Marxist “long march through the institutions,” the Trumpist right is itself engaged in a Gramscian struggle to reshape American history, national identity, and democratic citizenship.
Donald Trump’s latest intervention in the Smithsonian Institution marks a significant development in the American culture wars. The idea of “cultural Marxism” is no longer functioning solely as a conspiratorial explanation for social and cultural change. Under MAGA, it is increasingly becoming an administrative category used to justify governmental intervention in museums, universities, archives and other institutions responsible for producing public knowledge. Tracing the genealogy of this political specter from interwar Germany to the American conservative movement, this commentary argues that the campaign against “cultural Marxism” is part of a broader illiberal politics of memory. Ironically, while denouncing a supposed Marxist “long march through the institutions,” the Trumpist right is conducting its own Gramscian war of position over American history and national identity.
From Political Rhetoric to Executive Action
On July 24, 2026, Donald Trump signed an executive order entitled “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution.” The measure followed a report prepared by the White House Domestic Policy Council, Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. The executive order does not literally command the immediate removal of every “trace of Marxist ideology” from all the museums, libraries and educational collections that comprise the Smithsonian Institution. Its legal and administrative scope is more specific. It directs several federal authorities to identify and use the legal, financial and contractual mechanisms available to encourage the Smithsonian to address the alleged problems identified in the Domestic Policy Council’s report.
It also orders the installation of temporary signs and exhibitions on National Park Service property surrounding the National Museum of American History. These signs are intended to warn visitors about what the administration calls the museum’s “ideological capture” and to direct them towards supposedly more accurate interpretations of American history.
The broader political message is less restrained. In its official fact sheet, the White House accuses the Smithsonian’s leadership of replacing historical education with extreme political activism “rooted in Marxism.” Exhibitions and programmes concerning slavery, race, migration, gender, Indigenous peoples, LGBT rights and social justice are grouped together as expressions of a single ideological project allegedly designed to divide and demoralize the American people (The White House, 2026a; Domestic Policy Council, 2026).
This episode represents more than another rhetorical confrontation between Trump and progressive cultural institutions. It marks the conversion of “cultural Marxism” from a polemical label into a category legitimizing state intervention in the production of historical knowledge.
The Genealogy of a Political Specter
To understand the significance of this development, it is necessary to reconstruct the historical genealogy of the concept.One of the principal antecedents of what is now called “cultural Marxism” appeared in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. Conservative, nationalist and subsequently Nazi political actors used the term Kulturbolschewismus—“cultural Bolshevism”—to classify modern art, secularism, sexual reform and other forms of cultural experimentation as parts of a communist assault on German society.
In Nazi propaganda, modernist and avant-garde art was frequently described as the product of Jewish and communist influences allegedly seeking to weaken the German nation. “Cultural Bolshevism” thus became intertwined with the antisemitic mythology of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy against Western civilization (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2020). It would be historically reductive to claim that every contemporary use of “cultural Marxism” is simply a reproduction of Nazi ideology. There is no straightforward organizational continuity connecting the propaganda of the Third Reich to all present-day conservative actors who employ the expression. There is, nevertheless, a significant narrative continuity. In both cases, complex and decentralized social transformations are attributed to the coordinated actions of a hostile intellectual minority. Cultural change is interpreted not as the outcome of political conflict, generational replacement, technological transformation or social mobilization, but as evidence of a deliberate plan to destroy the nation, religion and the traditional family from within.
The Weimar Republic provided a particularly fertile environment for this political imaginary. Berlin became an intense laboratory of cultural modernity, associated with artistic experimentation, new forms of sexuality, cabaret culture, drugs and popular dances such as the foxtrot. Yet this cultural effervescence coexisted with political corruption, organized crime, economic instability and escalating street violence. The television series Babylon Berlin offers a dramatic representation of this atmosphere. The streets and cultural institutions of the German capital became battlegrounds between competing visions of society: Nazi racial nationalism, which glorified the German nation and its mythological past, and communism, which advanced a transnational and class-based conception of political identity.
The conflicts of this period helped shape political cosmologies that continue to reappear in altered forms. The tension between cultural progressivism and moral conservatism did not disappear with the end of the interwar period. It became one of the organizing antagonisms of modern culture-war politics.
The Frankfurt School as a Political Scapegoat
The Institute for Social Research was established in Frankfurt in 1923. Under the intellectual leadership of Max Horkheimer, it brought together thinkers including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Friedrich Pollock. The intellectual tradition subsequently known as the Frankfurt School examined capitalism, authoritarianism, antisemitism, mass culture, social psychology and fascism. Its thinkers were influenced by Marxism but did not constitute a homogeneous doctrinal bloc. Several were deeply critical of Soviet communism, economic reductionism and orthodox versions of Marxist theory (Jay, 1973).
After the Nazi seizure of power, the Institute was closed by the Gestapo. It moved first to Geneva and then, in 1934, to New York, where it became affiliated with Columbia University. Its members’ experiences of exile, fascism and antisemitism shaped their research into authoritarian personality structures, propaganda and the political uses of mass culture. The Frankfurt School unquestionably influenced sections of the post-war New Left, particularly through the writings of Herbert Marcuse. Intellectual influence, however, is not evidence of political coordination.
The contemporary conspiracy theory transforms a diverse and frequently internally divided intellectual tradition into the command center of a centralized plan to capture universities, the media, the family and the moral foundations of Western society. It retrospectively fuses the Frankfurt School with Antonio Gramsci’s writings on cultural hegemony, despite the substantial theoretical, historical and political differences between these traditions. In this account, Marxists supposedly concluded that Western workers would not support a proletarian revolution because they remained attached to Christianity, nationalism and the traditional family. The alleged solution was therefore to undermine those institutions through universities, entertainment, feminism, multiculturalism and movements for racial and sexual equality.
There is no historical evidence of such a coordinated programme. The theory produces unity at the level of the imagined enemy rather than at the level of intellectual history. Marxism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, feminism, critical race theory, queer theory and liberal multiculturalism are treated as interchangeable components of one political project, even though they emerged from different traditions and are often theoretically incompatible. As Martin Jay (2010–2011), Jérôme Jamin (2018) and Joan Braune (2019) demonstrate, the Frankfurt School has consequently become a political scapegoat onto which anxieties concerning cultural transformation can be projected.
The contemporary use of “cultural Marxism” cannot always be reduced to conscious antisemitism. Many who repeat the term may be unaware of its historical genealogy. Nevertheless, the conspiracy frequently reproduces older antisemitic structures: cosmopolitan intellectuals, often identified as Jewish, are imagined as operating behind the scenes to control education, culture and the media while dissolving religion, national identity and traditional morality.
The American Consolidation of “Cultural Marxism”
Although anti-communist paranoia remained politically active throughout the Cold War, the contemporary American narrative of “cultural Marxism” consolidated during the culture wars of the 1990s. In a 1999 “Letter to Conservatives,” the influential conservative strategist Paul Weyrich equated political correctness with cultural Marxism. He argued that universities, the entertainment industry and other cultural institutions had been deliberately captured by an ideology fundamentally hostile to Western Judeo-Christian civilization.
The following year, William S. Lind systematized this interpretation in his speech “The Origins of Political Correctness.” According to Lind, Marxism had transferred its revolutionary strategy from economics to culture. The opposition between proletarians and the bourgeoisie had supposedly been replaced by conflicts involving racial, sexual and cultural identities.Under this interpretation, women, racial minorities and LGBT people became substitute revolutionary subjects, while white people, men, Christians and heterosexuals were recast as the new bourgeoisie. Political correctness was presented as the disciplinary language of this new revolutionary order (Lind, 2000).
This formulation became part of the ideological DNA of the contemporary conservative reaction. It offered a comprehensive explanation for feminism, multiculturalism, secularization, changing sexual norms, affirmative action and the increasing public recognition of historically marginalized groups. Its analytical weakness was also the source of its political strength. Because “cultural Marxism” lacked a precise definition, it could incorporate almost any development regarded as culturally threatening. It became what might be called a conspiratorial master signifier: a category capable of transforming heterogeneous opponents into manifestations of a single hostile force.
The discourse subsequently circulated beyond the United States. As research into Australia and Brazil demonstrates, the conspiracy theory can be adapted to different national contexts while retaining its central narrative of institutional capture and moral subversion (Busbridge et al., 2020; Silva, 2021).
MAGA, Cultural Backlash and the Mythic Past
Donald Trump’s rise and the emergence of the MAGA movement revitalized this political grammar. The cultural backlash thesis developed by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart helps explain the social conditions under which such narratives become effective. Their argument does not suggest that every supporter of populist radical-right movements is economically deprived or culturally conservative. Rather, it identifies the political consequences of perceived status loss among social groups that once occupied more secure positions within dominant cultural hierarchies (Norris & Inglehart, 2019).
Changes associated with racial equality, feminism, secularization, immigration and LGBT rights can be experienced by some groups not simply as the extension of citizenship to others, but as the displacement of their own identity and social authority. Populist entrepreneurs convert these perceptions into a narrative of cultural dispossession. Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” operates through this temporal logic. As Jason Stanley argues, fascist and authoritarian politics frequently construct a mythic past: an imagined period of national greatness, social unity and moral order that existed before the nation was corrupted by internal and external enemies (Stanley, 2018).
The MAGA past does not correspond to one historically coherent period. It is a selective composite. It combines industrial prosperity, energy expansion, patriarchal family structures, white Christian morality and American geopolitical supremacy while suppressing the history of racial segregation, Jim Crow legislation, gender inequality and political exclusion. The political purpose of this myth is not historical accuracy. It is to define the present as a period of national decline and to identify those allegedly responsible for it.
In classical populist discourse, society is divided between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” (Mudde, 2004). The cultural-Marxist narrative adds another layer to this division. The elite is not merely corrupt or self-interested. It is portrayed as the institutional agent of an ideological project seeking to transform the identity of the nation. Professors, teachers, curators, journalists, civil servants and cultural workers are therefore represented as members, or at least instruments, of an internal occupying force.
The Smithsonian and Illiberal Memory Politics
The intervention in the Smithsonian reveals how this conspiratorial worldview can be translated into an illiberal politics of memory. The Domestic Policy Council’s report presents the National Museum of American History as an institution captured by an intersectional form of critical theory allegedly rooted in Marxism. Its criticism is directed not only at factual inaccuracies but also at the museum’s interpretative orientation.
The report objects to the idea that museums should “reframe” celebratory national narratives, promote social justice or examine how historical institutions reproduced racial, gendered and economic inequalities. It contrasts this approach with a conception of the museum as a patriotic institution intended to cultivate gratitude, national pride and confidence in American exceptionalism.
This is ultimately a conflict over the democratic function of public history. Museums are not ideologically neutral repositories of objects. They select events, construct narratives and determine which voices and experiences are incorporated into the national memory. A museum that addresses slavery, colonialism or racial exclusion is not necessarily replacing history with ideology. It may instead be expanding the historical community whose experiences are considered worthy of public recognition.
Legitimate disagreements can exist concerning curatorial balance, political activism, historical interpretation and the use of public funds. The conspiratorial move occurs when these disagreements are explained through a single totalizing cause: the coordinated capture of cultural institutions by Marxist activists. The Trump administration resolves the controversy by claiming that one interpretation is ideological while its own is merely truthful and patriotic. State intervention is consequently presented not as the politicization of culture but as the restoration of neutrality.
This is a characteristic illiberal operation. The government denies that it is imposing an official interpretation of history. Instead, it claims to be liberating institutions from an ideology already imposed by others. The result is a reversal of power. Although the executive possesses administrative authority, access to public funding and the capacity to pressure institutions, it continues to represent itself as the insurgent victim of an entrenched cultural elite. Governmental coercion is thereby reframed as democratic restoration.
The Gramscian Irony of the MAGA Right
There is an important intellectual irony at the center of this campaign. While condemning an alleged Marxist “long march through the institutions,” the radical right has increasingly adopted a strategy that can itself be described as Gramscian. It recognizes that political power depends not only on winning elections or controlling the state, but also on shaping common sense, collective memory and the moral vocabulary through which society understands itself.
Recent research on transnational radical conservatism demonstrates that sections of the right have consciously appropriated concepts such as hegemony, counter-hegemony, metapolitics and the “war of position” (Abrahamsen et al., 2024). Think tanks, publishing houses, universities, legal organizations, religious networks and digital platforms become sites of counter-hegemonic struggle. Their purpose is to challenge the cultural authority of liberal institutions and make previously marginal ideas appear legitimate, reasonable and eventually dominant.
The MAGA campaign against the Smithsonian should be understood within this broader strategy. The objective is not merely to correct individual exhibitions. It is to redefine the legitimate purpose of a national museum, determine which interpretations of American history can receive public support and discredit critical historiography as evidence of ideological subversion. The right accuses the left of capturing institutions while developing its own programme for their political realignment. This does not mean that the two projects are normatively or historically identical. It does mean that the Trumpist right has understood a central Gramscian insight: durable political power requires the transformation of cultural authority.
From Paranoid Style to a Technology of Government
Richard Hofstadter’s concept of the “paranoid style” remains useful for understanding the emotional and narrative structure of the cultural-Marxist conspiracy. The term does not constitute a clinical diagnosis. It describes a political style in which history is interpreted as the product of an immense, coordinated and morally evil conspiracy (Hofstadter, 1964).
Yet the Smithsonian episode demonstrates that the phenomenon can no longer be understood as rhetoric alone. Under MAGA, the paranoid style is becoming a technology of government. The accusation of ideological capture creates the justification for investigations, funding restrictions, administrative pressure, public warnings and the political supervision of cultural institutions.
The operation is relatively simple. First, institutions are declared to have been captured. Second, every critical interpretation of national history is transformed into evidence of that capture. Finally, governmental intervention is presented not as the politicization of culture, but as the restoration of historical neutrality.
There is no evidence of a centralized Marxist plan controlling American universities, museums and media organizations. The narrative nevertheless fulfils an important political function. It consolidates the MAGA electorate, converts social complexity into moral conflict and transforms political opponents into agents of civilizational subversion. Trump is therefore doing more than accusing the Democratic Party and progressive institutions of Marxism. He is mobilizing his political base through a genuine war of position over the soul of America.
The struggle concerns who have the authority to tell the national story, which historical experiences deserve public recognition and whether democratic citizenship requires patriotic reassurance or the critical examination of the past. The specter of “cultural Marxism” may have little correspondence with intellectual or institutional reality. Its political consequences, however, are becoming increasingly real.
References
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Why do some of the world’s wealthiest individuals openly support populist radical right and far-right movements whose central political message revolves around anti-immigrant and anti-minority mobilization? In this commentary, Dr. Bulent Kenes argues that this alliance is best understood not as an ideological convergence but as a pragmatic strategy for deflecting public attention from the structural roots of social injustice, economic inequality and wealth concentration. Drawing on John Rawls’s concept of the veil of ignorance, the article examines how immigrants—among the principal victims of contemporary economic and social inequalities—are transformed into convenient scapegoats. It further explores how the growing concentration of economic and digital power enables technology billionaires to amplify exclusionary narratives while marginalizing pluralistic voices, raising profound questions about democracy, algorithmic governance, and contemporary capitalism.
If we were to apply John Rawls’s famous veil of ignorance thought experiment, developed in A Theory of Justice, to today’s world, there is little doubt that immigrants would emerge as one of the most disadvantaged and the most vulnerable social groups. Immigrants, political refugees, in particular, as well as individuals forced to migrate for economic reasons, are compelled at some stage of their lives to leave behind their accumulated economic, social, and professional capital and begin life anew in a different country. Consequently, they typically enter their host societies from the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. In terms of cultural, economic, and professional resources, their starting point is often below zero.
In this respect, immigrants constitute one of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable segments of society in terms of social justice and income distribution. Yet, while attempting to rebuild their lives, they are forced to contend not only with economic and social hardships but also with the prejudices generated by the rising populist radical right (PRR) and far-right parties and movements. Moreover, by being portrayed as the principal culprits behind economic inequality and social injustice, they are turned into scapegoats, a process that imposes severe socio-psychological costs on an already vulnerable population.
One point can be stated unequivocally: economically (and even culturally) driven anti-immigrant sentiment is not a phenomenon that emerges spontaneously. Social injustice and income inequality are undoubtedly real societal problems, and angry eyes are constantly searching for those responsible for them. Unfortunately, they do not always succeed in identifying the real causes. Meanwhile, for far-right actors who incite, inflame and ride the wave of resentment generated among these groups, targeting immigrants—one of the weakest, least organized, and least capable social groups in socio-political and economic terms—is both the easiest and the least politically costly strategy. Although the attempts of far-right political actors, whose humanitarian sensitivities have been considerably weakened, to exploit and simultaneously provoke this wave for political gain deserve the strongest ethical condemnation, it is nevertheless understandable why they choose this strategy within the context of political competition, which is driven less by values than by the pursuit of power. The fact that populist far right politicians such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, Robert Fico, Jarosław Kaczyński, Jimmie Åkesson, and many others have placed anti-immigrant politics at the center of political mobilization can be understood within this framework.
What is particularly striking, however, is why dollar billionaires—and even the owners of trillion-dollar companies—whose activities are largely confined to technology and the global economy, support far-right actors, PRR parties and movements, and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
In my view, the principal explanation lies in pragmatic interests. The anti-immigration discourse of the populist radical right and the far right systematically recasts those who are most severely affected by income inequality and social injustice from victims into perpetrators of these very problems. In reality, however, immigrants—alongside other disadvantaged groups—are among the greatest losers of the contemporary global economic order and the structural inequalities it generates. This is precisely where the core of the issue lies. By systematically constructing immigrants as scapegoats, far-right actors divert public attention away from the structural sources of economic inequality and social injustice. In doing so, they help obscure the role of the super-rich, who are not only the principal beneficiaries of the existing distribution of wealth but also key beneficiaries of the economic structures that reproduce and deepen these inequalities.
It is precisely at this point that the logic behind the support given by figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—the greatest beneficiaries of the existing global economic order—to populist radical right parties and far-right actors becomes apparent. Historically, just as the East India Company and the West India Company represented the corporate actors that benefited most from the global colonial order of their time, today’s technology giants occupy a comparable position as the greatest beneficiaries of contemporary global hi-tech capitalism. The strengthening of political discourse centered on anti-immigrant sentiment diverts public attention away from these structural causes of economic inequality and wealth concentration.
Regrettably, I must note that approaches which, in recent years, have argued that anti-immigrant sentiment is fundamentally the product not of economic grievances but of a cultural backlash, even if unintentionally, contribute to strengthening this political strategy. The influence of cultural factors and identity politics cannot, of course, be denied. However, explaining anti-immigrant sentiment primarily through cultural dynamics diminishes the visibility of structural causes such as economic inequality and social injustice, while simultaneously providing the far right with an indirect—albeit problematic—source of legitimacy. The issue, therefore, is not merely one of cultural reaction; it should also be understood as a political mechanism of distraction that conceals underlying economic power relations and discourages scrutiny of the existing distribution of wealth.
If the support that the super-rich extend to the far right were merely an expression of their individual political preferences, it might not warrant such sustained attention. The issue, however, extends far beyond that. These billionaires, who have effectively acquired monopolistic positions in the technology sector, not only deploy their immense economic resources in support of far-right political movements but also possess the capacity to shape the boundaries of public discourse through the digital platforms they control, including X, Facebook, YouTube, and others. Through complex algorithmic mechanisms, these platforms are increasingly transformed into the principal channels for the circulation of far-right narratives, while alternative viewpoints, critical voices, and pluralistic perspectives experience a substantial loss of visibility.
In this process, observations suggesting that the digital visibility of actors defending liberal democratic values, pluralism, the rule of law, and humanitarian principles is being systematically weakened, while polarizing, provocative, and extremist content is algorithmically rewarded, are increasingly supported by empirical research. As a consequence, democratic actors using these platforms face not only declining public influence but also invisible, though perceptible, algorithmic barriers that make it increasingly difficult even to reach their own natural audiences.
This picture reveals the combined impact of the economic and digital power of technology barons who stand among both the principal creators and the greatest beneficiaries of the global income divide. Despite being among the primary causes and beneficiaries of wealth concentration, economic inequality, and social injustice, Elon Musk and similar actors openly support extremist, far-right political movements that systematically portray immigrants and other vulnerable socio-cultural minorities as those responsible for these problems and as convenient scapegoats. Elon Musk’s most recent extensive interview with The Economist, in which he reiterated positions supportive of the far right, together with his backing of Marine Le Pen, Alternative for Germany (AfD) and various other far-right parties and actors, is open to interpretation within this framework. The political positions, public rhetoric, and algorithmic maneuvers of Musk and other technology-baron billionaires function as a deliberate mechanism of distraction, obscuring the true sources of wealth concentration and structural economic inequality.
Perhaps the greatest contradiction that deserves attention, and the most fundamental question that requires an answer, is the following: Why do broad segments of society that are themselves victims of structural economic inequality and social injustice follow far-right political actors supported by the greatest beneficiaries of wealth concentration, rather than questioning the structural causes of these inequalities? More importantly, why are they tend to view immigrants and socio-cultural minorities—groups that share similar structural vulnerabilities—as the principal causes of these problems? This paradox points not only to the discursive success of the populist radical right and far right but also to a fundamental research problem requiring us to understand how public perceptions are reshaped through the influence of economic and administrative power over digital communication infrastructures.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming far more than information ecosystems—it is reshaping the constitutional foundations of democracy itself. In this interview with the ECPS, Professor Danielle Allen argues that the central challenge of AI is not merely technological but constitutional, requiring democratic societies to rethink representation, political power, and civic agency. Rejecting technological determinism, she contends that democratic institutions can still shape AI’s trajectory, provided they strengthen rather than diminish human judgment. Discussing populism, democratic backsliding, surveillance, intermediary institutions, digital citizenship, and constitutional reform, Professor Allen presents a compelling vision of democratic renewal grounded in one core principle: artificial intelligence should complement human capacities—not replace the judgment upon which liberal democracy ultimately depends.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the institutional architecture of democratic politics. While much public debate has focused on misinformation, deepfakes, automation, and employment, a growing body of scholarship suggests that the more profound implications of generative AI lie elsewhere: in its capacity to reshape political authority, democratic representation, and the constitutional foundations of liberal self-government. As AI systems increasingly mediate public discourse, organize information, influence political preferences, and concentrate unprecedented forms of economic and computational power, the central question is no longer simply how societies should regulate a new technology, but how constitutional democracies themselves must adapt to preserve political equality, civic agency, and democratic accountability.
Few scholars are better positioned to address these challenges than Professor Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and the Democratic Knowledge Project, and one of the world’s leading political philosophers working at the intersection of constitutional democracy, citizenship, technology, and democratic renewal. In her widely discussed Journal of Democracy essay, “The Real Dangers of Generative AI,” Professor Allen argues that contemporary debates have fundamentally misidentified the nature of the challenge. Rather than treating AI as merely a technological disruption, she contends that it represents a constitutional turning point requiring a fundamental rethinking of democratic institutions themselves.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Allen offers a remarkably expansive framework for understanding how AI intersects with democratic governance. Rejecting the conventional separation between technology and constitutional politics, she argues that “political institutions are themselves technologies” and therefore cannot be understood independently of technological transformation. From this perspective, AI is not simply another digital innovation but a force capable of altering the institutional mechanisms through which democratic societies organize representation, distribute political power, and preserve constitutional order.
Throughout the conversation, Professor Allen explores the twin dangers confronting liberal democracies: democratic collapse, produced by the erosion of trustworthy informational infrastructures, and democratic singularity, arising from unprecedented concentrations of computational, informational, and economic power. At the same time, she rejects technological determinism. Instead, she insists that democratic societies retain the capacity to shape AI’s trajectory through institutional reform, constitutional safeguards, and renewed democratic participation.
A recurring theme throughout the interview is the centrality of human agency. Professor Allen argues that democratic renewal ultimately depends not upon resisting technological innovation but upon designing institutions that preserve civic judgment and constitutional self-government. As she puts it, “technology always develops out of a moral vision,” making AI fundamentally a political rather than merely technical question. Consequently, she maintains that the essential democratic task is not simply regulating machines but ensuring that “AI should strengthen human judgment, not replace it.” That principle ultimately serves as the interview’s normative anchor, connecting questions of constitutional design, democratic education, AI governance, intermediary institutions, populism, surveillance, and the future of liberal democracy into a single coherent vision of democratic resilience in the age of artificial intelligence.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Professor Danielle Allen, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Political Institutions Are Themselves Technologies
Facial recognition technology scans individuals and displays digital identity and personal data, illustrating AI-powered biometric surveillance. Photo: Piyamas Dulmunsumphun / Dreamstime.
Professor Allen, welcome!Let me begin with your recent Journal of Democracyarticle, “The Real Dangers of Generative AI.”You argue that public debate has focused too heavily on misinformation, deepfakes, and job displacement while overlooking AI’s deeper capacity to restructure political authority and democratic institutions. Why do you believe the greatest threat posed by generative AI is constitutional rather than merely technological, and how does this fundamentally change the way scholars should understand democratic backsliding?
Professor Danielle Allen: Thank you. It’s an important question. I would start by saying that I don’t draw a distinction between the merely technological and the constitutional. Political institutions are themselves technologies. Representation, when it was invented in the eighteenth century, along with electoral districts and voting methods and so forth, was a technology. It was a technology for channeling citizens’ voices into decision-making and producing a counterweight to the other forms of power that existed in monarchical and aristocratic structures. Consequently, any major technological change that affects information, communication, and related domains has the potential to disrupt that foundational technology through which we organize politics.
For the last four decades, policymaking circles have prioritized material well-being while substantially downgrading questions of political organization. As a result, we have underestimated and under-attended to the ways new technologies can disrupt our core political technologies because of this broader blind spot in thinking about politics. In that regard, what I’m trying to do is rectify a broader blind spot in policymaking—to help people remember that our political institutions, whether people have political empowerment, access to voice, and so forth, are essential parts of the story of human flourishing. We have to pay attention to those things as policymakers. And secondly, we have to pay close attention whenever a major disruptive technology directly interacts with those original technologies of representation.
The Concentration of Power Poses Dangers to Core Democratic Rights
You distinguish between what you call “democratic collapse” and “democratic singularity.” Could you explain how these two concepts differ? To what extent does the concentration of computational, informational, and economic power in a handful of corporations create conditions that resemble the concentration of political power traditionally associated with authoritarian regimes?
Professor Danielle Allen: Great question. What my co-author, E. Glen Weyl, and I were trying to do in that article was to describe two dangers that liberal democracies have to navigate. We call these the danger of collapse and the danger of singularity.
The danger of collapse is one in which the informational infrastructures on which you rely for popular sovereignty and institutionally driven decision-making no longer function because of misinformation, deepfakes, the collapse of identity systems, and things like that. That’s one danger the new technologies are provoking as they interact with the traditional technologies of representation.
The second danger is the concentration of power that you’ve been describing. That concentration can emerge in several ways. There’s the issue of capital, the concentration of capital, and the sort of political power that flows from it. There’s also the issue of the concentration of power through control of data and surveillance capacity. Both of those things harbor dangers to core democratic rights, whether those are rights of privacy or rights of equal voice in a political system, and so forth.
So, these are the two dangers: on the one hand, the possibility of chaos and collapse; on the other, the concentration of power. The hard question, then, is how the institutions of liberal democracy can steer through this period of rapid change and transformation, secure control over the new technologies, and truly integrate their capacities into the project of liberal self-government.
What We Really Have Is a Clash of Intermediaries
Truth Social displayed on a smartphone. The social media platform, owned by Donald Trump, was launched as an alternative to mainstream social media. Photo: Rokas Tenys / Dreamstime.
Across Europe and North America, populist leaders increasingly claim to represent “the people” while simultaneously attacking intermediary institutions such as independent media, universities, courts, and civil services. Does generative AI risk accelerating precisely this populist logic by allowing leaders to communicate directly with citizens while bypassing democratic intermediaries altogether?
Professor Danielle Allen: That’s a great question. I would put the situation slightly differently. I would say it’s not so much that they’re bypassing intermediaries as deploying AI as a new kind of intermediary. In that regard, yes, the traditional intermediaries are under pressure from a new set of intermediaries. Those new intermediaries are the tech infrastructures that populists are using to communicate. In other words, when President Trump establishes Truth Social as an alternative to the existing social media platforms, he is not dispensing with intermediaries but creating his own intermediary, namely that platform.
So, what we really have is a clash of intermediaries. The challenge is that the old intermediaries—universities, newspapers, the traditional institutions, and so forth—grew up in a legal environment, and actively defended a legal environment, that placed a set of basic rights at its center: freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of civil society to maintain independence from government, and the like.
The new intermediaries, by contrast, are not necessarily dependent on those basic rights for their growth or committed to protecting them. That’s where the problem arises.
This is captured, for example, in the challenge surrounding Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act. That provision has essentially exempted social media platforms from regulation on the grounds that regulating them would amount to regulating speech. It collapses speech and algorithms. We ought to be able to regulate algorithms, which essentially perform an editorial or publishing function, in the same way that the print media found itself regulated.
Print media was liable for libel, defamation, and similar harms because of its editorial decisions, whereas social media platforms have been exempted from all of that. Mistakenly exempted, that’s the point I’m making. Because they have been able to flourish without the kinds of careful mechanisms for balancing the protection of speech rights with protection against harms such as defamation and libel, we have experienced rampant problems of misinformation. So, the point I’m trying to make is simply that the old intermediaries have baked into them a more stable and useful rights-based structure than the new intermediaries do.
The Personalized Algorithmic Universe Is Becoming Completely Unreliable
Your work suggests that democracy ultimately depends upon citizens sharing a sufficiently common informational environment. Yet generative AI enables highly individualized persuasion at unprecedented scale. Are we moving from an era of mass propaganda toward what might be called algorithmic individualized populism, where every voter effectively receives a personalized political reality?
Professor Danielle Allen: That’s a great question. To some extent, I think the answer has to be ‘yes’. Although I think there’s a situation beyond that. What is really happening is that everybody is going to be thrown back on communication with their own trusted networks, and that’s what they will rely on as their source of information.
The personalized algorithmic universe is also one that people are already coming to recognize as completely unreliable. You can’t distinguish between AI-generated things and real things, and so forth. As we develop digital competence—and by that I mean the ability to use these tools ourselves so that we can understand how easily they can be manipulated and manipulate others—we will inoculate ourselves against some of the dangers of that algorithmic environment.
What that, then, means is that we will basically trust the people we actually know and our communications with those people. So, in a funny way, the very big world that we had made small through communications technology is about to become much bigger again. It is going to be harder for people to share trusted messages at scale, precisely because the level of distrust is going to be so high.
We Need Algorithms That Encourage People to Bridge Viewpoint Differences
Artificial intelligence as a next-generation technology shaping the digital era. Photo: Dreamstime.
One striking feature of contemporary populism is its capacity to transform emotional identity into political loyalty. To what extent do recommended algorithms and generative AI amplify precisely those forms of resentment, grievance, and identity polarization upon which contemporary populist movements increasingly depend?
Professor Danielle Allen: They certainly seem to be very active contributors to that. There’s important work being done now by technologists and political scientists to propose alternative structures for algorithms that are focused on pro-social incentives—algorithmic incentives that encourage people to build more bridges across viewpoint differences—and better contextualization tools so that people can see the full spread of opinion and understand where their own opinion sits within that landscape. That helps avoid some of the effects and emotional impacts that come from the siloization of opinion.
The problems you’re describing are all very real. They are the dominant problems in our social media and algorithmic landscape at the moment. At the same time, there really is innovative new work. I’m thinking of people like Aviv Ovadya and his colleague Luke Thorburn, and others who are generating an alternative set of structures for our algorithmic foundation.
Existing Scholarly Foundations Can Be Extended Into the Age of AI
Much scholarship on democratic erosion focuses on executive aggrandizement, judicial capture, electoral manipulation, and attacks on independent institutions. Does AI require us to rethink democratic backsliding itself by recognizing that democracy may now be weakened through the concentration of technological infrastructure rather than solely through constitutional manipulation?
Professor Danielle Allen: I’m not so sure if it requires fundamentally different analytical categories. When, for example, people were studying the genocides in Rwanda, Serbia, and Croatia, one of the key technologies that facilitated them was radio and its use to spread slurs, dehumanizing rhetoric, and memes that helped frame the ultimate victims of genocide as enemies and non-humans, and things like that. My point is that the study of autocracy has long included the study of technology and mass communication. Those pre-existing scholarly foundations can simply be extended into the contemporary context. I don’t think it’s a change of kind so much as a change of scale.
We Don’t Face an Emerging Problem—We Face an Already Existing One
You argue that democracy requires not merely political equality but also a broad distribution of power. Looking at the rapid consolidation of frontier AI among a handful of technology companies, do you believe liberal democracies face an emerging form of private constitutional power that existing democratic institutions are largely unequipped to regulate?
Professor Danielle Allen: I think we don’t face an emerging problem; we face an actually existent, interior problem. It has already emerged, and it’s a totally real problem. Europe has done a better job regulating this power than the US has. I’m thinking about the GDPR(The General Data Protection Regulation) and other forms of regulation, including the recent EU AI Act. That tells me it’s not that liberal democracies lack the capacity to regulate these technologies; it’s that the US, specifically, doesn’t have the capacity right now to regulate them. So, this is not a permanent problem but a political problem here in the US.
I also think we probably have a lot to learn from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the first Gilded Age, as we call it. We’re living through a second Gilded Age, and just as in the first, industrialization produced corporations with enormous concentrations of power, robber barons, and corporations that sought monopolistic control not only of the economy but also of political structures. We’re watching a repeat of all of that.
Those concentrations of power were broken up in the early twentieth century through a very serious array of anti-trust policies. People often point to the importance of the work of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, for example. Today, there’s a whole slew of what people call neo-Brandeisian anti-monopoly policies that many are advocating. I think we do need another era of trust-busting, breaking up those concentrations of power.
I know the dynamic right now between Europe, the EU, and the US is extremely complicated and painful. I will say that I take it as good news that Europe is starting to build a path toward empowering its own tech companies. I do think that taking on the monopoly of the US firms is an important thing to do.
There’s Going to Be a Battle Between Globe-Spanning Tech Powers and Nation-States
Elon Musk—founder and CEO of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla, owner of X (formerly Twitter), and co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI—speaks at VIVA Technology (VivaTech), June 16, 2023. Photo: Frédéric Legrand / Dreamstime.
Throughout democratic history, monopolies over information have often strengthened authoritarian rule. How different is today’s AI revolution from earlier media revolutions such as radio, television, or social media? Does generative AI represent a quantitative extension of those transformations, or does it constitute a genuinely new constitutional moment?
Professor Danielle Allen: It’s a great question. To be honest, I don’t think I really have an answer. In some ways, it’s an obvious continuation, and I’ve already mentioned that. On the other hand, the speed and scale of change are wholly new for humanity. That’s honestly the part that concerns me the most: the rapidity and the totalizing nature of it.
Take the fact that somebody like Elon Musk can, in five years, manage to have half of the world’s satellites in space. It’s probably more than half of them by now. He has the capacity to intervene directly in geopolitical decision-making among the world’s nation-states. That’s what’s fundamentally different. The earlier technologies came into existence and existed essentially within nation-states. We now have corporations with a degree of political control that puts them in a more powerful position than nation-states.
It’s not that this has never happened before. In the eighteenth century, for example, Britain faced, roughly speaking, a similar kind of problem with the East India Company. Other European powers faced similar challenges with the colonial trading empires that they first allowed to grow and then discovered had gone beyond their control. That, of course, led to the struggles in the nineteenth century between nation-state governments and those colonial companies. We are likely to see another period of that kind of struggle.
I don’t think the nation-state is doomed. I don’t think it’s doomed primarily because people still live in places. Human beings are embodied, and we are instantiated in geographic locales. Our communities matter to us, and that feature of human life, which starts from the ground and extends outward, will continue to be an important part of governance and jurisdictionality. So, in that regard, there’s going to be a battle, for sure, between globe-spanning tech powers and nation-states. I do think nation-states can win in the end. And I would argue they should win. But it’s going to be a very hard period of struggle.
Technology Should Complement Human Intelligence, Not Replace It
In “How AI Fails Us,” you criticize the dominant vision of AI as autonomous intelligence and instead advocate technologies that augment human cooperation rather than replace it. How might this alternative vision reshape democratic governance? Could cooperative AI become a tool for democratic renewal rather than democratic erosion?
Professor Danielle Allen: I appreciate that question. What really matters here is that we sometimes think the way technology is currently unfolding is somehow a matter of the laws of nature or the laws of physics—that it’s simply a natural outgrowth of nature itself. That’s a mistake, and it already gives away too much power. Technology always develops out of some kind of moral vision. By moral vision, I mean a way of understanding human beings, human capacity, and the human relationship to nature and the world.
The argument of that paper is that the moral vision behind the current technological supernova rests on a flawed premise. That premise is that there is one thing called human intelligence, that it is singular, and that machines are trying to replicate and ultimately overcome it. Whereas, in fact, human intelligence is multiple. It comes in a whole range of varieties. Machine intelligence is also multiple. That plurality of our intelligences is valuable to specific societies and to humankind as a whole.
Plurality can be activated for tribalism, conflict, and division, or it can be activated for creativity, innovation, and cultural richness. One of the most important human projects, therefore, is to give ourselves the tools to activate the plurality of our intelligences for those positive outcomes.
If you begin with that basic vision of human beings and human well-being, then you can see a completely different approach to technological development. It is an approach based on activating that plurality in a positive way, one that requires complementing human intelligences rather than trying to overcome or replace them.
Very ordinary technologies, like the Zoom technology we’re using right now, provide a good example. Zoom complements what human beings can do. We can’t see across thousands of miles, so being able to do that through Zoom supplements what we are already able to do. It doesn’t actually replace anything we were previously doing. So, one can begin to envision a host of things that would be wonderful to be able to do that are all supplemental rather than replacing our core capacities.
We Need a Formally Articulated Bill of Rights Against the Powers of AI
Authoritarian governments increasingly combine sophisticated digital surveillance with artificial intelligence, while democratic governments are also rapidly adopting AI for policing, border control, and public administration. How can constitutional democracies harness AI’s administrative potential without gradually normalizing technologies of surveillance and executive concentration that undermine liberal constitutionalism?
Professor Danielle Allen: That’s a great question. I think we’re at a point where we need a formally articulated bill of rights against the powers of AI. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as nation-states were consolidating their power, people articulated bills of rights. In the US case, we have the first ten amendments to the Constitution: rights to association, rights to expression, freedom from search and seizure without warrants, rights to trial by jury, and so forth.
All of those rights apply to the AI universe, but it is worth taking the time to elaborate on what is required to ensure that they are protected under the surveillance conditions made possible by AI. That’s a project for legal scholars—to spell out, at meaningful length, what those requirements are.
I do think the GDPR was a good model for extending those rights protections into the environment of digital data and the like. We need to keep building that edifice of crystal-clear legal protections and limitations. Again, some of the lawsuits right now against Anthropic and others, for example, for stealing authors’ works, are really important. We already have this rights-based framework, and with more investment of time and effort, we could use it much more comprehensively to cover the world of generative AI.
Generative AI Is Going to Accelerate the Capacity of Everything
Photo: Dreamstime.
Recent years have witnessed growing interaction between transnational populist movements, digital platforms, and algorithmically amplified political narratives. Do you believe generative AI is likely to accelerate the emergence of increasingly coordinated transnational populist ecosystems that operate beyond the regulatory capacity of individual democratic states?
Professor Danielle Allen: Generative AI is going to accelerate the capacity of everything. It will also accelerate the capacity of pro-democracy transnational networks to operate across borders. In that regard, it only changes the balance of power if only the populists use it.
The First Thing We Need Is Functional Democratic Governance
Much current AI regulation emphasizes safety, content moderation, transparency, and risk mitigation. Yet your work argues that these approaches address symptoms rather than underlying distributions of power. What institutional reforms would be necessary if democratic governments were to regulate AI according to constitutional principles instead of primarily technological ones?
Professor Danielle Allen: The two major things we need in the US are to get rid of corruption and restore suffrage. We have experienced an incredible erosion of voting rights in the US. Those two things—corruption, by which I mean the impact of money in our politics, and the erosion of voting rights—mean that our institutions have been captured by small oligarchic minorities pursuing their own financial interests through cronyist arrangements with tech companies.
So, when people ask that question, what they’re often wondering is, “Okay, what’s the specific regulation that you need to rein in a tech company?” What I want to say is that that’s actually operating at the wrong level. The first thing you need is functional democratic governance, where power actually lies with the people. Then the people will be able to apply regulations to tech companies.
We can devise all kinds of regulations—that’s not really the problem. The problem is whether power actually lies with the people or with the people who are in bed with the tech companies. Right now, it lies with people who are in bed with tech companies. That’s why we need fundamental reforms in the basic operations of democracy in the US to change that balance of power.
Digital Competence Matters More Than Digital Literacy
Your broader scholarship consistently emphasizes citizenship, civic identity, democratic participation, and shared constitutional purpose. In an era increasingly mediated by AI-generated information, how should democratic education evolve to prepare citizens not merely to detect misinformation but to sustain democratic judgment itself?
Professor Danielle Allen: That’s a great question. There are a lot of important pieces there. I think highly of the work of Audrey Tong in Taiwan, who argues for an education in digital competence, not just digital literacy but competence. Again, if you know how to use the tools, you’re going to inoculate yourself against being abused by people who are using them.
So that’s one thing. But, to your point about judgment, cultivating the capacity for judgment is key. That means being able to—and here I’m drawing on some work by somebody named Scott Warren—to provide accurate accounts of what people who disagree with you think and why they think it. In other words, you have to train yourself out of your own silo in order to gain access to the full picture of what people are experiencing. One way to do that is by testing whether or not you can render the best version of your opponent’s argument. That’s a very basic skill, but it is no longer very common in our systems of instruction and education.
The work of judgment also requires understanding how to relate values and principles to empirical realities. To develop those skills, you actually have to spend time thinking about values. What are your values? Where do they come from? What are their sources? How do you justify them? What are other people’s values? How do they interact with each other? The work of connecting a values-based diagnosis to a values-based solution is also a learnable skill. So, those would be three things that I would point to as important to have inside our educational offerings.
We Should Deploy Technology to Elevate Human Judgment
Finally, stepping back from current technological developments, do you believe liberal democracy is entering a constitutional transformation comparable to those produced by the printing press, industrialization, or mass broadcasting? Looking ahead, what institutional innovations will be most essential if democratic societies are to ensure that artificial intelligence strengthens rather than weakens constitutional government, political equality, and democratic self-rule?
Professor Danielle Allen: Yes, I do think we are entering another period of major constitutional transformation of that kind. I wish I could give you a list of specific changes that will help us get where we want to go, but fundamentally, we need changes that strengthen human judgment. That runs a bit against the current at a moment when so much is eroding and replacing human judgment. That’s why I advocate various election system reforms in the US, because they would strengthen human judgment.
I also think there are many ways of deploying technology to elevate human judgment rather than denigrate it. AI sensemaking tools such as Polis and vTaiwan, which are deliberative democracy tools, use natural language to allow people to express themselves in their own words, while helping to bring the themes that people have generated to the surface and making us more visible to one another. Things like this can actually help strengthen human judgment.
The hard question, which I appreciate you’re asking, is this: How do we evaluate whether a technology is strengthening human judgment or weakening it? That seems to me to be one of the criteria we need to bake into our assessments of new models, new tools, and the other technologies that emerge into the world.
As climate change increasingly reshapes patterns of human mobility, it is also transforming the political foundations of democratic citizenship. In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja argues that climate-induced displacement should no longer be understood solely as a humanitarian emergency or a security challenge, but as an emerging battleground over political membership and democratic inclusion. Introducing the innovative concept of Climate Citizenship Populism, Dr. Solaja demonstrates how environmental displacement is becoming a powerful resource for exclusionary populist narratives that redefine who belongs within the democratic community. By bringing together scholarship on populism, climate mobility, and democratic citizenship, the commentary offers an original analytical framework for understanding how environmental change is reshaping contemporary political conflict and why the future of democracy will increasingly depend on how societies respond to the politics of climate-driven belonging.
Climate change has progressed from being an environmental issue into a central political issue in the 21st century. As the entire debate and politics concerning climate change revolved around the issues of temperature increase, carbon emission, and environmental damage, the effects of climate change do not just end there. It is transforming the patterns of human inhabitation, transforming the ways of life of people, and fundamentally changing the geographical bases on which our understanding of citizenship rests. As environmental factors drive humans away, democracies now face a crucial dilemma: Who belongs to a world changed by climate change?
This article situates climate migration at the nexus of debates surrounding democracy, citizenship and populism. While populism has been defined as the political logic that distinguishes between ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’ (Mudde, 2004; Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017), it is also shaped by debates over the ‘people’ and its boundaries. Populist movements often exploit existing anxieties over economics, culture, immigration and national identity. But in a warming, changing world, climate change-induced movement of people creates a new domain for this struggle.
Climate migration has become a key tool for constructing the ‘people,’ defining who is deserving and legitimating claims to belonging. Evidence for this transformation is widespread. The 2022 IPCC Report (2022) points to climate change as a major driver of increased human vulnerability due to weather extremes, ecosystem degradation and impacts on food and water. In recent years, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) has documented that weather-related events cause the majority of new internal displacements worldwide. Nevertheless, climate-induced displacement cannot be understood in purely environmentalist terms but is a product of interactions among environmental changes, poverty, inequality, failures of governance, and armed conflict (Gemenne, 2011; McLeman, 2014). Therefore, climate migration reflects a broader set of unequal social and political relations that influence people’s ability to stay, adapt or leave their places of origin. The political debate on climate mobility, however, tends to remain framed within two dominant and limiting perspectives.
Firstly, it is widely regarded as a problem requiring a humanitarian response to protect vulnerable displaced people. Secondly, climate migrants are perceived as a threat to national security, welfare systems, labor markets, and cultural identity. Yet both approaches obscure a more profound transformation: climate migration is increasingly becoming a question of membership in the polity. The critical issue is not so much why people migrate as how existing political communities draw the boundaries of membership and belonging in the face of collapsing territorial stability. It is precisely within this terrain of uncertainty that populist politics appears particularly well positioned to thrive.
Populism is fundamentally concerned with issues of borders and political membership, often drawing on the divide between insiders and outsiders (Laclau, 2005; Müller, 2016). Climate-induced displacement offers a rich symbolic site for these populist efforts, since it is deeply entangled with concerns over the sovereignty of the nation-state, the administration of borders, the distribution of public goods, and the management of national culture. Climate migrants can thus be politically reframed not simply as dispossessed people, but as symbols of wider fears about social and political disorder.
Introducing Climate Citizenship Populism
To describe this new political tendency, this commentary introduces the term Climate Citizenship Populism. It is a variant of populism that uses environmental displacement to redraw the lines of democratic membership by defining climate migrants as a threat to the rights, resources, identity and sovereignty of a national community.
Climate Citizenship Populism is not like previous forms of political conflict over the climate, where the conflict might have been over whether climate change is occurring or over opposition to regulating it. It is based on the assumption of environmental disruption, but it is the social consequences that are politicized. Thus, the central conflict changes from a question of climate change to one of who pays the repercussions of climate change and who deserves political representation in a climate-changed world.
This analysis makes a helpful contribution to the current debate on populism in three significant ways. First, it sees climate-induced mobility as a new material trigger for populist mobilization, alongside the more commonly suggested economic insecurity, immigration, and cultural backlash. Second, it suggests that the focus of populist opposition has moved from immigration to democracy itself as the political nature of citizenship is transformed by environmental change. Third, it presents a new analytical framework—Climate Citizenship Populism—to make sense of the conversion of environmental displacement into exclusionary narratives of democratic citizenship.
The idea is to connect three lines of research that have been pursued independently so far: populism studies, climate mobility research and democratic citizenship theory. While existing studies have already provided interesting findings on adaptation and displacement, as well as on citizenship and territorial belonging, there is a lack of literature on climate migration and the governance of migration. The current body of research has shed light on migration and the governance of migration, adaptation and displacement, as well as on the relationship between territorial belonging and citizenship and rights, but there is a dearth of research on climate migration and the governance of migration. But there has been little effort to grasp how environmental displacement is influencing the political boundaries of citizenship through populist mobilization.
Climate Citizenship Populism thus draws attention to a more general shift in democratic politics. Climate change is not just an issue to be added to policy agendas but also a structural condition that alters the material and political conditions shaping societies’ notions of belonging. Populist players are now also trying to re-imagine the limits of the democratic community itself as patterns of human settlement are reconfigured amid environmental disruption. In the era of environmental disruption, patterns of human settlement are being redrawn, and populist actors are seeking to redefine the limits of the democratic community itself.
From Border Politics to Democratic Exclusion
Climate Citizenship Populism is not only possible politically; its reasoning can be seen in various regions. Whether it is a matter of humanitarianism or of political membership, sovereignty, and national belonging, a pattern is becoming increasingly recognizable: environmental displacement is increasingly understood as a political issue.
Climate mobility has increasingly been linked to broader European debates on immigration, border management, and national identity. Most contemporary migration movements are not solely a consequence of climate change, but the foreshadowing of future climate displacement has become a political issue. The incorporation of the theme of environmental mobility in more comprehensive narratives of demographic change, overburdened welfare states, housing crises and the failure of political elites to keep the nation together is becoming a hallmark of populist actors. In this sense, migrants are symbolic beings through which anxieties of globalization and social change are conveyed. It is not just the quantity, but the meaning associated with displacement in the stories of populism that has political dimensions.
These trends are also seen in North America, notably in political discussions about migration from climate-vulnerable Central America and the Caribbean. Studies have shown that economic insecurity, governance problems, and social vulnerability are interlinked with environmental pressures to shape migration decisions (McLeman, 2014; IOM, 2024). Political debates, however, tend to reduce such realities to a simple narrative about the border “crisis” and national insecurity. Climate displacement is integrated into a larger anti-immigration discourse, in which migrants serve as a symbol of the waning control of the state. Thus, environmental mobility becomes a political problem, ranging from global inequality to a perceived threat to national sovereignty.
Another facet of Climate Citizenship Populism is illustrated in the African context. In the Sahel and other affected areas of the Horn of Africa, there are growing incidences of internal, rather than trans-border, displacement driven by drought, desertification, flooding and resource pressures. These movements involve complex issues of land, livelihood, access to resources and political recognition. When resources are scarce, displaced people are sometimes portrayed as rivals for economic opportunities or public services, furthering narratives of territorial identity and belonging. In these settings, Climate Citizenship Populism does not appear as much as international border politics, but rather as a contestation over who is entitled to what land, resources, and community.
Perhaps the most profound challenge to conventional understandings of citizenship is provided by Small Island Developing States. Climate mobility raises more than just migration management questions, particularly for communities under existential threat from sea-level rise. Who, then, will be able to live on a land that is becoming uninhabitable, one where citizenship is organized? Climate displacement scholars have suggested that this type of event calls into question the notions of territorialized political membership (McAdam, 2012). They show how climate change is altering mobility patterns and destabilizing the sense of territory that underpins contemporary democratic citizenship.
Contributions to the study of Populism and Democratic Theory
Climate Citizenship Populism enriches the field of populism studies by introducing the idea that environmental disruptions should be considered a novel material condition of political mobilization. Previous scholarship has offered insightful accounts of populist politics as anti-elitism, cultural backlash, nationalism and immigration politics (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017; Moffitt, 2016). Climate Citizenship Populism is not an alternative to these explanations but an expansion of them, showing how political communities draw in their insiders/outsiders in the context of environmental instability.
This way of thinking takes the focus away from migration and towards citizenship. The classic discussions tend to revolve around whether migrants should be let in, kept safe, or kept out. Climate Citizenship Populism uncovers a more fundamental issue: What is the nature of democratic citizenship in an era when climate change is emerging as a primary factor in determining who can and cannot live? In this respect, climate migration is not just an issue for migration governance – it is an issue for the normative basis of democracy.
The idea also emphasizes the issue of climate justice. The concept of climate mobility is defined by deep global inequalities, including unequal historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and unequal ability to adapt to climate change (Caney, 2010; Shue, 2014). Responses to climate migration which exclude are likely to become new forms of democratic exclusion, building on the history of unequal climate impacts. There is a need for effective adaptation and migration policies and political frameworks that acknowledge shared vulnerability and differentiated responsibilities in the context of climate mobility.
Conclusion: Citizenship in a Climate-Changed World
Climate crises have become an essential part of the democratic political landscape. Along with the changing landscape of environmental mobility, environmental disruption is also changing the political questions of belonging, rights and membership. The question for democracies is not only how to deal with climate migration, but also how to maintain democratic inclusion in a world where territorial stability is no longer guaranteed.
Climate Citizenship Populism offers a framework for understanding how environmental displacement is becoming integral to current political identity and conflicts over democratic boundaries. It shows that climate change is not only adding to migration pressures, but also to political opportunities to draw lines about who is in and who is out. What this means is important. What populism is all about is the building of “the people”—and in the future, climate change will be a major factor in the picture of “the people. Debating emissions, adaptation, and environmental governance will thus be a part of the politics of the climate age, but so too will be debates over citizenship itself.
Class, industrialization and social redistribution were significant issues of the twentieth century. The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen globalization, migration and national identity come into conflict. Climate citizenship is likely to become a recurring battle in the next decades. Democracies are now at a pivotal point where they must decide whether climate insecurity strengthens their pursuit of exclusion or provides a moment to reconsider political belonging on the basis of ideas of justice, solidarity and shared fragility.
The future of democracy in a climate-changed world will ultimately depend not only on how societies respond to environmental transformation, but on how they answer the most basic political question of all: who belongs?
References
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Caney, S. (2010). “Climate change and the duties of the advantaged.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 13(1), 203–228.
Gemenne, F. (2011). “Why the numbers don’t add up: A review of estimates and predictions of people displaced by environmental changes.” Global Environmental Change, 21(S1), S41–S49.
Gemenne, F. (2015). “One good reason to speak of ‘climate refugees’.” Forced Migration Review, 49, 70–71.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Cambridge University Press.
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. (2024). Global Report on Internal Displacement 2024. IDMC.
International Organization for Migration. (2024). World Migration Report 2024. IOM.
Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. Verso.
Marshall, T. H. (1950). Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge University Press.
McAdam, J. (2012). Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law. Oxford University Press.
McLeman, R. (2014). Climate and Human Migration: Past Experiences, Future Challenges. Cambridge University Press.
Moffitt, B. (2016). The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford University Press.
Mudde, C. (2004). “The populist zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563.
Mudde, C. & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
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Shue, H. (2014). Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection. Oxford University Press.
For years, Hungary stood as the defining case of democratic backsliding within the European Union. Yet the 2026 election has transformed it into an equally important case of democratic recovery. In this timely interview, Dr. Hanna Folsz discusses why Hungary’s political transformation challenges prevailing assumptions about the durability of competitive authoritarianism. Drawing on her recent Journal of Democracy article, she argues that authoritarian institutional engineering ultimately remains vulnerable when broad civic mobilization, credible political leadership, and innovative opposition strategies converge. The conversation explores the underestimated role of civil society, the limits of media capture and economic coercion, the challenges of rebuilding democratic institutions, and the broader lessons Hungary offers for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand democratic resilience and authoritarian reversal in the twenty-first century.
For more than a decade, Hungary occupied a unique place in the comparative study of democratic backsliding. Under Viktor Orbán and Fidesz, it became widely regarded as the paradigmatic example of competitive authoritarianism within the European Union—a political system in which elections continued to exist but were increasingly distorted by constitutional engineering, media capture, economic coercion, and the systematic weakening of institutional checks and balances. Consequently, Hungary became not merely a national case but an international reference point for understanding how democracies erode from within.
Yet Hungary’s 2026 election has fundamentally altered that conversation. The defeat of Fidesz after sixteen years in power has transformed the country into one of the most consequential contemporary cases of democratic recovery. In her recent Journal of Democracy article, How Civil Society Defeated Orbán, Dr. Hanna Folsz —an Academy Scholar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where she will begin her appointment in August 2026 before joining IE University in Madrid as Assistant Professor of Political Science in 2027— argues that this democratic breakthrough cannot be explained solely by leadership change or electoral dynamics. Instead, she offers a broader theoretical argument about the hidden vulnerabilities of competitive authoritarian regimes and the underestimated capacity of civil society to reverse authoritarian consolidation.
As Dr. Folsz observes, “Even deeply entrenched competitive authoritarian regimes have vulnerabilities.” While Hungary experienced what she describes as “one of the most extensive and severe episodes of de-democratization or authoritarian consolidation in recent decades,” the very institutions and strategies that sustained Fidesz ultimately proved insufficient to guarantee permanent rule. Institutional engineering, media dominance, financial asymmetries, and intimidation undoubtedly raised the costs of political competition, yet they could not indefinitely substitute for declining public legitimacy. As she argues, “these authoritarian strategies do not guarantee lasting—everlasting—popularity or staying in office.”
A central contribution of Dr. Folsz’s research is her reassessment of the role of civil society. Rather than attributing the opposition’s victory primarily to the emergence of the Tisza Party or the leadership of Péter Magyar, she demonstrates how more than 2,500 decentralized “Tisza Islands” transformed latent civic capacity into effective political organization. In her words, “The role of civil society… is absolutely underestimated,” while “broad civic mobilization, new and fresh opposition challengers… and a credible alternative to voters are definitely a path to democratic reversal.”
In this interview, Dr. Folsz examines the mechanisms that enabled Hungary’s democratic breakthrough and explores their broader implications for comparative politics. She discusses the hidden effects of economic coercion, the limits of media capture, the importance of credible political leadership, and the challenges of democratic restoration after authoritarian rule. She also reflects on the responsibilities facing Hungary’s new government, emphasizing that electoral victory is only the beginning: “Changing governments is definitely only a precondition for democratic recovery.” Together, these insights offer an important contribution to ongoing debates on populism, democratic resilience, competitive authoritarianism, and the conditions under which entrenched illiberal regimes can ultimately be defeated.
Here is the revised version of our interview with Dr. Hanna Folsz, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Authoritarian Strategies Do Not Guarantee Permanent Rule
Hungarian government’s anti-immigration billboard says “STOP the refugees” in Budapest, Hungary on April 4, 2018.
Dr. Folsz, welcome!Let me begin with our first question. For more than a decade, Hungary was widely regarded as the paradigmatic case of democratic backsliding and competitive authoritarianism. Yet your recent Journal of Democracy article argues that the 2026 election also represents one of the most significant democratic reversals of authoritarian consolidation in recent years. How should we interpret the Hungarian election in comparative perspective? Does it represent an exceptional case, or does it reveal broader vulnerabilities inherent in contemporary competitive authoritarian regimes?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: The Hungarian case represents a combination of factors that disadvantage opposition parties or make opposition electoral victory exceedingly difficult. It is definitely an example of—maybe one of the most extensive and severe episodes of de-democratization or authoritarian consolidation in recent decades. Nevertheless, the Hungarian case also represents many of the common factors, or common difficulties, that oppositions experience and the strategies that aspiring authoritarians employ to entrench their rule.
No wonder Hungary serves as a preliminary case, an example for aspiring autocrats worldwide. Fidesz’s dominance in the media, the extensive financial advantage that it enjoyed—or made sure it enjoyed—compared to opposition parties and independent civil society, the severe disadvantages faced by the opposition in the electoral system, as well as the fear of opposition participation due to the repercussions, are all factors that are present in other cases as well.
It was the length of Fidesz rule that made these impediments especially significant, but it also showed that these authoritarian strategies do not guarantee lasting—everlasting—popularity or staying in office. And the lessons it offers are a set of lessons for other cases. Of course, these have to be adapted to context, but the Hungarian case shows that there are vulnerabilities to be exploited, that broad civic mobilization, new and fresh opposition challengers who understand the regime and its vulnerabilities and exploit them, and who present a credible alternative to voters, are definitely a path to democratic reversal. But I’m excited to delve more into the details of this throughout this interview.
The Role of Civil Society in Democratic Change Has Been Profoundly Underestimated
One of your central arguments is that the decisive innovation was not simply the emergence of the Tisza Party, but the rapid development of the decentralized network of Tisza Islands. Why were these semi-autonomous civic organizations able to succeed where traditional opposition parties repeatedly failed? More broadly, does this suggest that democratic resistance in authoritarian settings increasingly depends on civil society rather than party organizations?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: In my article, I make the argument that existing commentary and interpretations of the opposition’s recent electoral victory in Hungary pay a lot of attention to the emergence of the Tisza Party and its novelty, the charisma and skills of its leader, as well as the broader discontent with Fidesz rule after many years of economic stagnation that, in part, could be accounted for by the suspension of EU funds, as well as by extreme corruption and authoritarian overreach by Fidesz.
I argue that this is not the full story. To understand the opposition’s victory, we must take into account the extensive and unprecedented civic mobilization that occurred in Hungary around this election. In my article, I show that Tisza Islands—these semi-autonomous civic groups, small civic groups of at most 50 participants each—emerged across the country. Over 2,500 of these existed by the election. Within a span of a year and a half, they came to dominate civic and public life in Hungary.
They played an essential role in structuring political life, providing political information in their communities, and demonstrating the credibility of the party and the opposition as an alternative through highly visible activities, including extensive volunteering and local charity work that showed the opposition movement cared about the experiences and difficulties of everyday Hungarians. They also provided, basically, the campaign infrastructure for the Tisza Party throughout the election.
The party had very little money, very limited financial resources, in large part due to Fidesz’s actions and changes to party funding, as well as simply being a very new party. This meant that it did not have the resources for the kind of classic electoral campaign that we expect from political parties in democracies most of the time—one funded by donations or state funds, especially in Europe, and relying on an extensive party infrastructure, local offices, and so on. Instead, these Islands stepped up. They basically provided the campaign activists and even the financial resources for the campaign. That played an absolutely crucial role in Tisza’s eventual victory.
What this shows is that there are specific vulnerabilities, difficulties, and challenges for opposition parties in autocratizing and competitive authoritarian contexts. These include financial disadvantage, an absolute information disadvantage under an incumbent-controlled media infrastructure, and the total—or almost total—de-mobilization of the activist base and opposition voters who have become disillusioned with politics and opposition parties. This was definitely the situation Hungary found itself in in 2026, and it showed that the usual avenues for political change were no longer possible.
This is when we saw the very innovative collaboration between the Tisza Party and civil society through the Tisza Islands—these semi-autonomous groups that were only loosely connected to the party. This points to the fact that the role of civil society, the role we expect civil society to play, is absolutely underestimated. Parties will still be crucial, but we need to think about these innovative solutions and about how the strengths of civil society, the often-latent strengths of civil society, can be channeled into electoral competition.
Changing Governments Is Only a Precondition for Democratic Recovery
Tisza leader Péter Magyar begins a symbolic “one million steps” march to Nagyvárad, Romania, addressing reporters with supporters in Budapest, Hungary on May 14, 2025. Photo: Istvan Balogh / Dreamstime.
For sixteen years, Viktor Orbán systematically weakened constitutional constraints, reshaped electoral institutions, captured much of the media, and subordinated state institutions to partisan control. Which of these legacies do you regard as the most difficult to reverse? Is democratic recovery primarily about changing governments, or about rebuilding institutions that have been deliberately hollowed out?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: Changing governments is definitely only a precondition for democratic recovery. Democratic recovery cannot be achieved without rebuilding resilient democratic institutions and norms. And this is where the main challenge in Hungary lies today.
In Hungarian case, Fidesz was voted out of office. The electoral threat that Fidesz currently represents to the Tisza Party is very low. So, it seems that we do not have to be extensively afraid of Fidesz returning to power in four years. The bigger challenge, rather, is for the Tisza Party to effectively restore democratic institutions and norms while exercising self-restraint in the process.
We have seen them begin to address this challenge very early on with a great deal of energy, which has been very encouraging for many commentators and observers. Their first constitutional amendment was recently passed. They are taking steps to remove the previous president and are also beginning to hold Fidesz-affiliated elites accountable through judicial proceedings and investigations into corruption and other authoritarian transgressions.
We also know that they will begin the constitutional process of writing a new constitution. There is also a new head of the state media who has already been appointed to oversee the transition to a more pluralistic and more independent media environment.
The biggest challenge is to make sure that there are professional and lastingly independent checks and balances across all of these spheres. Tisza has an unprecedented mandate because it achieved a two-thirds parliamentary majority in the election. That means it can amend the constitution. There are basically very few, if any, institutional restraints on how it exercises its power.
So, what we want to see is that, across all these spheres—the judiciary, the media, and state institutions—they install not necessarily party loyalists but rather truly independent actors, and that they respect their independence and decisions, even when those decisions go counter to Tisza’s goals or electoral preferences in terms of ensuring its electoral support.
Hungary Shows That Pro-Democracy Civic Energy Is Easier to Mobilize Than We Assumed
Your research highlights the importance of latent civic capacity that survives even under prolonged authoritarian pressure. What does Hungary teach us about democratic resilience? Can civil society preserve democratic norms even when formal institutions have been substantially weakened?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: The Hungarian case definitely shows me, in a striking way, that civic capacity is latent rather than absent in cases such as Hungary. This is something I highlight in my article as well, because we have a very strong assumption in political science research and in public debates about democratic resilience and resistance to authoritarian pressure.
The assumption is that if we have an institutionally weak civil society, then effective democratic resistance is very difficult. It’s sort of a precondition for democratic resistance that there are existing civil society actors that can serve as a check, hold the government accountable, organize resistance, organize protests, and restructure public opinion around resistance. When this is missing, we assume that democratic reversals are much more difficult.
They are indeed more difficult. But the Hungarian case absolutely shows that it is much easier to bring pro-democracy civic capacity to the surface than we assumed. In Hungary, the Tisza Islands provided a loose organizational frame, and the Tisza Party provided the Tisza Islands with a purpose and a potential for democratic change that mobilized the population across the country, in localities and municipalities both big and small.
This points to a case for some positivity, some optimism, as well as a call for innovative approaches and a better understanding of citizens’ motivations, because political scientists, as well as pundits, assumed that such mobilization would not be possible and were taken by surprise by its scale and effectiveness.
If we take the opportunity and make the effort to talk to citizens more, understand their relationship with this regime, and recognize that there is this latent discontent that may not be expressed for fear of repercussions, but also because of a lack of hope that things could change, and if we can understand how citizens react to the provision of a credible alternative, to hope embodied in an opposition movement, then this might not take us by surprise. We might instead focus a little more on developing these innovative civic approaches in our attempts to achieve democratic reversals.
Economic Coercion Is One of the Most Overlooked Tools of Authoritarian Control
Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
In your broader research, you argue that economic retaliation constitutes one of the most overlooked mechanisms through which aspiring autocrats weaken political competition by deterring talented opposition candidates. How central was economic coercion to Orbán’s durability, and how much did overcoming fear of retaliation contribute to the opposition’s eventual breakthrough?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: One of the focuses of my research is the authoritarian strategy that I term economic coercion. I argue in one of my papers that this is a core strategy of authoritarian consolidation and control that we tend to overlook because we focus on the physical acts of repression that these regimes carry out, be it arresting opposition politicians and activists or banning opposition parties, et cetera.
But economic coercion is another crucial strategy. I define it as a credible threat of economic retaliation for opposition political activity. This means that not just opposition candidates, but activists or those who express public support for the opposition, they themselves or their family members, might face economic difficulties as a result.
Its employment-oriented form—one of its forms—carries the potential for employment loss, dismissals from jobs in the public sector, the state sector, or in regime-adjacent businesses. Its enterprise-oriented form focuses on retaliation against business owners and firms. If you participate in opposition politics, for instance as a candidate, or if you participated in Hungary during the Orbán period, you could very well expect that your firm would be subject to targeted tax audits, targeted tax penalties, or other forms of retaliation—basically, the denial of state contracts and grants that your firm might have previously received, as well as the turning away of suppliers and other businesses that were themselves afraid of retaliation for their association with the opposition.
This was an absolutely pervasive, indeed a defining, characteristic of the Hungarian regime and a major impediment for opposition parties. My interviews with opposition politicians, together with a survey that I conducted among opposition local politicians, pointed to this pervasive fear of retaliation and Fidesz’s media dominance as the two central reasons opposition politicians identified for their parties’—or their political side’s—weakness.
There are many examples of this. I talked to a number of opposition politicians who themselves were fired from their jobs. Or, for instance, if they had a partner who was a teacher, that partner was fired, and their businesses suffered extensive retaliation. But I also heard many stories of opposition activists being too afraid to put their face, appear in photos—for fear that they would face retaliation, to register as an activist for the party, or even to become a party member.
There are countless examples that opposition politicians would tell me. They would set up stalls for campaigns or for collecting signatures for different causes, and even acquaintances whom they knew very well in their private lives would be too afraid to look at them while they were out on the streets, for fear that their employer or their neighbor might see them, and that word would then spread through their social circle that they supported the opposition.
This presented a huge difficulty for parties, both in mobilizing activists for strong campaigns and in finding good candidates for electoral office. The Tisza Party actually faced many of these same challenges.
Conversations with lawyers at the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, one of the main civil liberties protection organizations in Hungary, revealed that the number of cases of retaliatory firings, or proprietary retaliatory actions, that they encountered and were approached with actually increased significantly in the years following the emergence of the Tisza Party. My conversations and interviews with Tisza politicians themselves also revealed a staggering rate of such retaliation among their activist bases.
The way they overcame this is very remarkable and offers many important lessons. One of the most important strategies they employed was the Tisza Islands themselves, which provided a very low-visibility form of activism. Many activists I talked to in these Tisza Islands told me that they and their fellow activists could choose the level and form of activism they were comfortable with, depending on the degree of visibility. The lack of overt—or direct—association with the party also allowed them to evade some of the strongest retaliatory actions that we had previously come across.
Another important way in which the Tisza Islands contributed to mitigating the effects of retaliation was simply by affording the opposition greater visibility. This provided examples of courage and also evidence of the scale of retaliation, because fear of it often outstrips its actual occurrence.
Finally, Tisza started polling above Fidesz roughly a year and a half before the election, which was also very important because fear of economic retaliation operates on an assumption of future enforcement. If the opposition begins polling ahead of the governing party for such an extended period of time, there is at least some expectation that the governing party may lose the election, in which case retaliation will not proceed, or that any retaliation opposition activists or politicians experience will be undone once the new party comes to power.
This was crucial in progressively encouraging participation and lending confidence to the opposition. But it remained a formidable impediment, and it required a great deal of courage from all of the opposition activists I spoke to, as well as from the politicians of the Tisza Party, to stand publicly with the opposition in the way that they did. That is absolutely one of the most commendable actions one could undertake in such a political environment.
When Propaganda Collides with Lived Experience, Its Credibility Begins to Collapse
Poster from political party Fidesz showing the opponents of Hungarian PM Viktor Orban surrounding billionaire philanthropist George Soros, Budapest, April 8, 2017.
Hungary has often been cited as perhaps Europe’s most advanced example of media capture. Yet despite overwhelming informational asymmetries, the opposition ultimately managed to reach voters. Does this suggest that grassroots civic networks can compensate for authoritarian control of traditional media, or were there broader structural changes—including digital communication—that weakened the effectiveness of media capture?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: These grassroots civic networks played a very important role. There was an almost total lack of access to independent news in many parts of the country, predominantly outside of the larger cities. Almost all news sources were controlled by Fidesz by 2024, around the time of the emergence of the Tisza Party. One of the especially important early functions of the Tisza Islands was simply to provide public spaces for these new, alternative information environments where politics could be discussed.
During their first few months, many of these Tisza Islands focused primarily on inviting outside speakers or holding public discussions, talks with experts, and conversations among activists about the political situation. They identified the most important local issues and explored how Fidesz’s wrongdoing, corruption, authoritarian actions, and mismanagement of the economy and public resources contributed crucially to the local problems and difficulties Hungarians were facing. Through these speaker series, the Tisza Islands allowed people to connect the dots between their local experiences and the broader authoritarian encroachment and entrenchment of Fidesz in the country.
Having these communities in which to discuss politics was also something very new. Many of the activists I interviewed noted that this was the first time they could speak openly about politics without fear and simply discuss political developments among themselves. It created a much better shared understanding of the political situation in the country.
Nevertheless, there were three other factors that were also crucial. Beyond the emergence of these Islands and these local information spaces, the growing importance of the digital sphere was absolutely significant, as was the increasing conflict between people’s personal experiences, their economic hardships, and Fidesz’s narrative of its own successes.
In terms of the digital sphere and social media, we could see by the early 2020s, especially after the COVID pandemic, a very important shift in the way online and non-traditional news sources gained ground. YouTube, podcasts, and other social media platforms became very important sources of news in Hungary. Partizán is one of these networks—the largest podcast and YouTube network for independent news in Hungary. Its videos routinely achieved hundreds of thousands of views in a country of fewer than 10 million people. That’s very significant.
Another important way in which the rise of the digital sphere mattered was how Péter Magyar, current prime minister and the leader of the Tisza Party, exploited and leveraged it masterfully to gain popularity. His campaigns and political activities were always online. We heard from many commentators throughout the election how important it was that Péter Magyar travelled across the country, visiting Hungarian towns and villages, both large and small, after entering Hungarian politics. For two years, he was almost constantly on the ground talking to Hungarian voters.
One of the most important aspects of this, however, was that every single one of his appearances was livestreamed on his social media platforms. This created an almost constant connection with Hungarian voters, made possible by the rise of social media in politics. It further enhanced his credibility by demonstrating how hard he was working and strengthened his direct connection with voters.
Finally, another important reason why Fidesz’s media dominance—and its effectiveness—began to weaken was the increasingly apparent conflict between Hungarians’ lived experiences and Fidesz’s official narrative. Beginning in the early 2020s, and especially after 2022, Hungary experienced significant economic stagnation and record inflation. Inflation averaged around 20 percent in 2022 and remained at a similarly high, though somewhat lower, level in 2023. Food price inflation was particularly severe.
When Hungarians experienced firsthand that they could afford much less than in previous years, while Fidesz continued to emphasize its achievements and the support it was providing through its distributive programmes, this sharply contradicted people’s lived experiences. As a result, the credibility of Fidesz’s propagandistic narrative in the media outlets it controlled declined substantially, and Hungarians increasingly began seeking out alternative sources of news.
Opposition Strategy Matters Just as Much as Authoritarian Strategy
Orbán’s governments demonstrated remarkable sophistication in redesigning electoral rules, constitutional institutions, and oversight bodies without formally abandoning electoral competition. Does Hungary demonstrate that authoritarian institutional engineering eventually reaches diminishing returns, particularly when legitimacy begins to erode?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: Definitely. What the Hungarian case points to with respect to this question is simply that competitive authoritarian regimes still rely on popularity to persist. So, however much electoral rules are redesigned, institutions are amended, and oversight bodies are captured, if unpopularity starts to emerge, if the regime loses its credibility and legitimacy—especially its performance legitimacy—then these institutional changes cannot guarantee that it stays in power.
Nevertheless, there are important caveats. First, the Fidesz regime employed limited physical repression and party bans. That is something we are starting to see in cases such as Turkey, which does not have the constraints of the EU and has shown a willingness to use these tools against the opposition. This can represent much more significant constraints and make it much more difficult for the regime’s unpopularity to translate into electoral change and opposition victory.
The other important caveat is that opposition strategy does matter. Having a broad-appeal electoral strategy and offering a credible alternative that promises competent governance in the interests of the Hungarian people—and can credibly deliver on that promise—is crucial if these governing parties are to start losing elections or even come close to losing them.
Looking, for instance, at the 2022 election in Hungary, where Fidesz actually achieved its strongest performance under its rule, even though the election took place amid record inflation, economic stagnation, extreme corruption, and authoritarian overreach, shows that voters rejected the opposition alternative. There were plenty of reasons to dislike the regime, plenty of reasons to want change, but that change simply did not materialize through the opposition.
Performance Legitimacy Mattered Even More Than Ethno-populist Appeals
Orbán has frequently been analyzed as one of the architects of contemporary right-wing populism, combining majoritarian rhetoric with illiberal constitutionalism. Looking back, to what extent was Fidesz’s success primarily rooted in populism, and to what extent did it evolve into a more conventional authoritarian patronage regime whose survival depended increasingly on state control rather than popular mobilization?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: Fidesz’s populism was important to its staying in power and its ability to consolidate its rule, but it was by far not the only factor that mattered. If anything, performance legitimacy in voters’ eyes was even more important than the populist, ethno-populist appeals that we saw, especially in the second half of Fidesz’s rule.
In terms of Fidesz’s populism, we could definitely see that these radical-right nationalist ethno-populist appeals became very prevalent, especially in the second half of the 2010s. We saw this when immigration became the cornerstone issue for Fidesz, and when this sort of anti-immigration rhetoric became a very powerful tool that allowed it to win the 2018 election with resounding popularity.
But even then, Fidesz’s distributive programs were crucial. A very important element was this kind of regime-to-voter patronage—not just giving resources to a small elite but also providing financial benefits directly to voters so that they saw a financial benefit in their own pockets from supporting the regime. This was very important, and Fidesz very consciously leveraged these strategies.
We saw that when these strategies failed, when the economic gains that people felt they had experienced under Fidesz rule disappeared, Fidesz became less popular. Its deployment of nationalism, its use of this outside-threat narrative, this classic populist narrative, was not enough to ensure that it stayed in power and continued to mobilize its base.
In sum, the transformation of the economy to ensure Fidesz’s continuity in power was very important. These distributive programs directed at voters were crucial. Of course, part of that also involved establishing a political elite, an economic elite that gave Fidesz its economic base—this sort of oligarchic network that supported its control over the media and made sure that economically independent opposition actors had a very difficult time gaining ground.
Those factors were important as well. But populism is just not enough of an explanation.
Hope for Change Required a Credible Political Entrepreneur
Peter Magyar, a popular opposition politician of celebrity status meeting the press at the site of a soccer arena and miniature train station in Viktor Orban’s village in Felcsut, Hungary. on May 24, 2024. Photo: Blue Corner Studio.
Your article emphasizes that civic mobilization required not only existing social networks but also what might be called a credible political entrepreneur in Péter Magyar. How important is leadership in activating dormant democratic capacities? Could similar civic energy have emerged without a figure capable of coordinating and legitimizing it?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: Coordination and the hope of change were absolutely essential to the civic energy that we saw in Hungary, and they had to come from a credible source. They had to come from a credible political entrepreneur or group that promised this. It did not necessarily have to be Péter Magyar, but he is a highly politically skilled politician. He was able to recognize these opportunities, as well as the vulnerabilities of the regime. This was very important in activating the civic energy in the country.
One of the preconditions is simply that there has to be a vision for political change. I think what Péter Magyar did right, why he was important, and why he was able to do this was the energy that voters saw in him as he travelled around the country on his nationwide tours, day after day, rally after rally, meeting after meeting, demonstrating that he took this seriously and that he was able to connect with people. Hearing him speak, hearing him identify the problems with the regime, and also hearing him present some possible solutions was also important.
A strong performance in the 2024 European Parliament election also gave him and his party the ability to have voters’ expectations, or hopes for change, coalesce around them. That was crucial. He emerged at the right time, when there was very strong dissatisfaction with Fidesz but no opposition alternative or opposition option that voters really saw, and he had the skills to fill that role.
But it could have been someone else. It’s obviously very hard to know. What is crucial, however, is the coordinating and legitimizing role that a political entrepreneur provides.
Innovative Civic Mobilization May Be More Transferable Than Hungary’s Institutions
Many scholars have viewed Hungary as the model that inspired democratic erosion elsewhere, from Central Europe to Latin America and even the United States. Do you believe Hungary’s democratic recovery offers transferable lessons for opposition movements confronting competitive authoritarian governments elsewhere, or are Hungary’s political and institutional conditions too distinctive for meaningful comparison?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: I absolutely think that it offers lessons. Of course, if you look at a different case, you will always have to adapt the strategies and adapt the insights to the challenges that the opposition side faces against aspiring autocrats or competitive authoritarian rulers elsewhere. That is natural.
What we need is a very good understanding of the Hungarian case and of what features of the Hungarian case made this possible, and then a good understanding of the other local context to see how this could be adapted. Some notable traits of the Hungarian experience are sometimes potentially underestimated in commentary that uses the Hungarian case as a promise of hope for democratic change elsewhere.
It’s absolutely crucial that Fidesz was in power for 16 years, a very significant amount of time. In a lot of previous cases of reversal, we have seen less consolidated regimes. And there was very strong dissatisfaction with Fidesz by the time the Tisza Party came around, but that could not previously be channeled into electoral politics.
There was also very limited physical repression, so there were no arrests. There were also no party bans, et cetera, as I already mentioned. This is something that means these lessons, especially the lessons around civic mobilization, could be very different and harder to adapt in cases where such repression is very significant.
It is also important to recognize that the level of disadvantage for the opposition was actually more severe in Hungary than in a lot of other cases. This gives us hope for other cases—that if a reversal could happen here, then that can translate elsewhere. But it also might give too much comfort to opposition actors elsewhere, because it might have taken this level of disadvantage for the opposition to use innovations in civic mobilization, and for this new challenger, the Tisza Party, to emerge, and for voters to recognize that the existing opposition parties could not promise the kind of change they hoped for.
The model of this innovative civic mobilization, the model of a new credible challenger emerging that promises meaningful, positive change in Hungarian living conditions, and then promises good governance as well as the rooting out of corruption and democratic restoration, is very important.
We probably cannot get too comfortable. This level of disadvantage that the opposition had in Hungary is actually something that, maybe, shows that we do not need to reach that stage for other countries, for political entrepreneurs and political actors to take on these lessons in other cases. Maybe this avenue, this broad-based appeal that Tisza had, rather than just chipping away at Fidesz supporters or convincing only a few demobilized voters to turn out, is something that can work in other cases. Instead, creating a broad-based movement is something that can work in other cases and can promise much better opportunities for democratic restoration with a strong mandate afterward.
The Greatest Challenge Is Ensuring That the New Government Constrains Itself
A central feature of democratic backsliding in Hungary involved the gradual weakening of judicial independence and constitutional oversight. Following the recent constitutional reforms initiated by the new government, what principles should guide efforts to restore judicial autonomy without creating the perception that one form of politicization is simply replacing another?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: This is a very important challenge in Hungary right now. As I already mentioned, the Tisza Party entered office with an unprecedented mandate. It holds a two-thirds majority in parliament, which in Hungary permits constitutional amendments and essentially allows the party to unilaterally amend the constitution. There is no need for the support of the new opposition parties in parliament, and this gives Tisza extensive control over institutional reform.
They have already used this power, and they have promised to use it further in relation to the judicial system. A constitutional amendment was just approved on July 13 by the Hungarian parliament that restored a mandatory retirement age of 70 for Constitutional Court judges. This involves four of the 15 judges losing their mandates, including the president of the Constitutional Court, who was a very important Orbán appointee.
They have also promised to implement changes to the selection rules for the presidents of various judicial bodies. For instance, these changes would involve judges choosing or proposing candidates instead of the president independently selecting a nominee. But ultimately, all of these changes would still rest on ratification by a two-thirds majority in parliament. So they would still give Tisza the opportunity to make the final choice.
We see many positive changes that could introduce more independent rules and restore a more independent judicial sector in Hungary. But it is very important that the party exercises self-restraint and is potentially even braver and more resolute in making changes that constrain the Tisza Party itself.
Because even some of these proposed rules—for instance, leaving the appointment of the presidents of various judicial bodies to a two-thirds parliamentary majority—would still give the party essentially full discretion, or at least a very high degree of discretion, over who these officeholders are going to be. The biggest challenge is making sure that Tisza actually constrains itself and establishes a genuine separation of the judiciary from the executive branch and, to some degree, from the legislative branch through these reforms, thereby binding both itself and its successors. Whether Tisza ultimately carries out these changes that may also be politically uncomfortable for itself absolutely remains to be seen.
Democratic Restoration Must Never Become Political Retribution
The new government has promised to dismantle what it describes as the “Orbán system” while introducing sweeping constitutional reforms and anti-corruption measures. How can democratic governments dismantle authoritarian legacies without themselves appearing to engage in victor’s justice or constitutional overreach? Where should democratic restoration end and political retribution begin?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: This is a key challenge of democratic restoration and democratic restoration efforts. Ensuring that these efforts proceed in a rule-of-law-abiding manner is often very difficult, as we have seen, for instance, in Poland, and it is something that inevitably draws a great deal of public attention.
In Hungary, this challenge is also present. There is an exceptionally high degree of public legitimacy for dismantling the Fidesz system and holding Fidesz politicians and its oligarchic elite accountable for their wrongdoing and their actions against the national interest. Fidesz currently enjoys at most 20 percent support in the polls in Hungary, which is exceedingly low. We have also seen an absolute exodus of voters from the Fidesz camp, even after the party lost the election.
There is a clear public mandate. But this process of accountability should be pursued in a very careful manner. The most important thing, so far, is that Tisza is at least promising to pursue it through judicial channels. They have also emphasized that this will likely be a lengthy process.
That said, I do see two dangers. The first is that abandoning the judicial route could become a temptation, and that would absolutely undermine the legitimacy of dismantling the Orbán system in the eyes of many. I think it should, because democratic self-restraint is something this party has to practice and demonstrate if it wants to reintroduce it into Hungarian politics.
I also see another danger. To me, it is the possibility that Tisza may not allow Fidesz to be evaluated again by Hungarian voters as a political alternative in the full sense that we should expect in a democratic system.
For instance, Tisza’s recent proposal for a constitutional amendment introduced a 12-year term limit for MPs in Hungary that would apply retroactively. This follows the adoption of an eight-year limit for prime ministers, also applied retroactively, which many interpreted partly as satisfying voters’ demands that Orbán should not be able to return to power, while also serving as an act of self-restraint by Tisza.
That measure has enjoyed broad public support in Hungary, at least for now. But the proposed 12-year limit for MPs has generated much more public debate. Its retroactive application means that most of the high-profile Fidesz leaders we have seen in recent years would likely be unable to run for office again if this rule actually enters the Constitution.
To me, this does not give voters the opportunity to reject Fidesz themselves, which, in all likelihood, we think they would actually do at the polls in the next election. Instead, it appears more like a measure of retribution than one that serves the restoration of healthy democratic competition.
Lasting Democratic Trust Depends on Meaningful Citizen Participation
Supporters of the TISZA Party gather on Andrássy Avenue in Budapest during a national march led by Péter Magyar on Hungary’s March 15 national holiday, March 15, 2026. Photo: Istvan Balogh / Dreamstime.
Years of polarization, clientelism, and institutional capture often leave citizens deeply distrustful of politics itself. Beyond constitutional reforms, what strategies are necessary for rebuilding citizens’ confidence that democratic institutions can once again operate impartially and effectively?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: What is very interesting about the Hungarian case, and what is very closely related to the civic mobilization that we saw ahead of the election, is that there is an unprecedentedly broad interest in, and enthusiasm for, politics and following politics in Hungary, even after the election. That is very promising. The disaffection that we saw over more than a decade of Fidesz rule appears to have been reversed during this election and seems to persist even afterward.
But in many ways, there is still distrust of Tisza among many voters. Of course, the country’s experience over the past decade and a half has been one of politicians abusing public authority and public office for authoritarian entrenchment and private gain through corruption. There is, understandably, concern among Hungarian voters that any party—especially one with such a large mandate—could eventually fall victim to the same dynamics.
The more immediate concern is whether these participatory channels, this broad-based participation represented by the Tisza Islands and these activist groups, will continue to feed into politics itself or instead be discarded. Because maintaining them could build trust and strengthen the connection between citizens and politics.
Tisza has promised to institutionalize such participatory mechanisms. They are currently setting up the Institution for Functioning in Humane Hungary, which they describe as an institution for strengthening popular participation in politics through consultation with professionals, former civil society actors, as well as voters on proposed constitutional amendments, new public policies, and broader forms of public and civic involvement.
This is very promising, but it has not happened yet. We do not yet know exactly what it will look like. The party has asked voters and its activists for patience while it develops ways to channel this civic energy into politics and effective public policymaking in Hungary.
This is one of the most important questions that remains to be answered. The party can reasonably be granted some patience, especially as it is working very hard to meet the conditionalities required for EU funds to be restored to Hungary by the end of the summer. But after that, if this vision of popular participation in governance does not begin to materialize, some degree of public pressure would be very beneficial.
The EU Should Have Acted Earlier and More Decisively
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission arrives for a EU Summit, at the EU headquarters in Brussels, on June 30, 2023. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.
The European Union has frequently been criticized both for responding too slowly to Hungary’s democratic backsliding and for possessing limited enforcement tools. Looking retrospectively, what lessons should European institutions draw from the Hungarian experience regarding the defense of liberal democracy among member and candidate countries?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: There’s been a great deal of excellent research, including by R. Daniel Kelemen, on the role that the EU played through its lack of action against Hungary, and at times even its support for Hungary and Viktor Orbán, in failing to become an effective obstacle to authoritarian entrenchment. Kelemen’s research shows that European party politics in the European Parliament plays a very important role. There were incentives within the European People’s Party (EPP) to support Orbán despite his authoritarian transgressions, in order to advance the EPP’s broader political objectives within the EU. That points to an important lesson: party politics within the European Union cannot be allowed to impede efforts to stop authoritarian entrenchment in an EU member state.
There have to be clear red lines. There have to be cordons sanitaires around far-right parties within the EU. We have already seen some steps in this direction. But the other important lesson—and perhaps the more important one—is that the EU should act more quickly and be more willing to invoke the conditionality of EU funding.
A large share of EU funding to Hungary was suspended in 2022, and that was one of the key reasons for the weakening of Fidesz’s support. It contributed significantly to the lack of infrastructure investment, the slowdown in economic dynamism, and the broader economic stagnation and difficulties that Hungary experienced over the past four years, all of which substantially increased public dissatisfaction.
Conditionality is a very powerful tool, and it is a legitimate one. Invoking conditionality in determining access to EU funding is entirely legitimate, and it should be used in cases such as this.
Where Violent Repression Is Limited, Peaceful Democratic Change Remains Possible
Some scholars have argued that competitive authoritarian regimes are inherently unstable because they continue to rely on elections for legitimacy, while others view them as remarkably durable hybrid systems. Has the Hungarian case altered your own understanding of the long-term resilience—or fragility—of competitive authoritarian regimes?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: For one, 16 years of Fidesz rule in Hungary is a remarkably long time. Even if the regime ultimately proved vulnerable to an electoral challenge, it still represented an unprecedented period of authoritarian rule within the European Union that we must take seriously. The fact that an authoritarian regime could emerge under the conditions that it did in Hungary is, in itself, an absolute testament to the power of these authoritarian movements.
Nevertheless, the main lesson is that these regimes, and their continuity, ultimately rest on popularity. It requires a much greater shift of voters away from the regime than in democracies for that to translate into an opposition electoral victory. But there is hope. There is real potential for that to happen. Civic mobilization and the electoral mobilization of voters behind the opposition are what can ultimately bring these regimes to an end. As long as there is limited capacity and infrastructure for violent repression, there remains the possibility of a peaceful transfer of power.
The Hungarian case shows that this middle ground of competitive authoritarian regimes—those that resort only limitedly to physical repression, banning opposition parties, and the kinds of tools that we see in some other contexts—is ultimately fragile. These regimes are vulnerable to a sustained loss of electoral popularity.
Defeating Authoritarianism Requires Strategies Beyond Those of Ordinary Democracies
Finally, Hungary has demonstrated both how democracies can gradually erode and how authoritarian incumbents can eventually be defeated electorally. Yet democratic recovery is often considerably more difficult than democratic decline. Looking ahead, what will determine whether Hungary becomes a lasting example of democratic renewal rather than merely another episode of political alternation? And what broader lessons should scholars of populism, democratic resilience, and authoritarianism take from Hungary’s extraordinary political trajectory?
Dr. Hanna Folsz: In terms of what Hungary will ultimately become an example of, I certainly hope that it will be a lasting example of democratic renewal. But that depends on several conditions. For one, it is important that we see self-restraint from the Tisza Party. Somewhat unfortunately, this is a situation in which we have to rely on self-restraint by the governing party because of its extraordinary political mandate.
But I also think it is crucial that we see the emergence of political alternatives to the Tisza Party in the coming years in Hungary. Entering the 2030 election with the Tisza Party facing only a very weakened Fidesz as its main opposition would be very disadvantageous for Hungarian politics if Fidesz continues to weaken in the way it has over the past couple of months.
It’s very hard to see that providing an incentive for voters to evaluate the Tisza Party against the strong benchmark that we would like to see in a democracy. There is also, for now, no real political alternative to Tisza on the left or liberal side in Hungary. We effectively have a political system with three right-wing parties. Tisza is currently very much a moderate party, but nevertheless its two challengers are on the right. Mi Hazánk, the third party in parliament, is a far-right party.
If this situation persists, it is difficult to see how voters could exercise meaningful democratic choice in the 2030 election. To me, that is very important for a successful democratic recovery. It would also place healthy pressure on Tisza, so that we do not have to rely solely on self-restraint by the party and on extra-parliamentary, extra-electoral mobilization to encourage Tisza to help Hungary achieve a strong democratic renewal.
In terms of the broader lessons from the Hungarian case and Hungary’s extraordinary political trajectory, I see a couple of important lessons that focus on the opposition and on opposition to authoritarian incumbents.
Very often, when we think about these regimes and the reasons for their popularity, we focus on the authoritarian strategies that governing parties employ. We examine institutional manipulation, authoritarian entrenchment, media capture, the capture of civil society, economic coercion, as well as ethnopopulist and distributive appeals to voters, together with voters’ willingness to tolerate these transgressions. But we also need to think seriously about the role that the availability of opposition and credible alternatives plays in allowing such regimes to survive and preventing a democratic alternative from emerging. Hungary shows that the combination of a new political party and a broad-based civic movement built around semi-autonomous civic organizations and civic groups can become a powerful vehicle for democratic change.
The Hungarian experience also offers two further lessons. First, it demonstrates that broad-based civic mobilization is possible. We should therefore think much more seriously about these possibilities and about what kinds of innovations enable opposition movements to overcome the distinctive challenges they face under authoritarian incumbents. We may simply need to be much more inventive.
Second, we cannot continue to operate under assumptions about democratic competition that are derived from established democracies when we are dealing with authoritarian contexts. The rules of the game are fundamentally different. Accordingly, the strategies that opposition movements must employ in these settings are also likely to be fundamentally different from those that work in democracies.
