In this commentary, Emilio Hernández examines Ecuador’s recent security crisis through the lens of punitive populism, offering a nuanced account of how crime control becomes intertwined with political legitimacy. Moving beyond conventional policy analysis, he demonstrates how states mobilize insecurity not only to justify coercive measures but to reshape the very logic of governance. By situating Ecuador’s militarized response within broader theoretical debates—from Bottoms and Garland to Simon’s “governing through crime”—the piece highlights how emergency discourse, symbolic action, and the construction of internal enemies converge to produce authority. Hernández’s analysis ultimately raises a critical question: when security becomes a political performance, what are the long-term costs for democratic institutions, rights, and accountability?
Security crises are rarely only about security. They are moments in which states redefine the boundaries of authority, recalibrate the balance between coercion and rights, and reconstruct their relationship with the public. In such contexts, crime ceases to be treated solely as a policy problem and becomes instead a central organizing principle of political action. The language of emergency, the visibility of force, and the promise of immediate control begin to shape not only how governments respond to violence, but also how they seek to be perceived. What emerges is not simply a shift in security policy, but a transformation in the political logic through which legitimacy is produced.
Ecuador provides a particularly illustrative case of these dynamics. Following a rapid deterioration of security conditions and the onset of a major crisis in early 2024, the government adopted a series of highly visible and coercive measures, including the militarization of public security, the expansion of punitive legal frameworks, and the articulation of a confrontational discourse centered on the identification of an internal enemy, often labeled as “terrorists” (Voss, 2024).
These responses, while framed as necessary to restore order, also reconfigured the relationship between crime control and political authority. Rather than operating solely as instruments of crime control, these measures point toward a broader shift in governance, where punishment, coercion, and political communication converge. In this sense, Ecuador’s response can be understood as part of a wider turn toward punitive populism, in which the management of insecurity becomes inseparable from the construction of political legitimacy.
Punishment, Power, and the Politics of Insecurity
Moments of acute insecurity tend to reorganize the relationship between crime, politics, and state authority. In such contexts, criminality is no longer framed exclusively as a social problem to be addressed through technical or institutional responses. Instead, it becomes a central axis of political articulation, around which governments construct narratives of crisis, order, and control. As Jonathan Simon (2007) argues in his notion of “governing through crime,” crime increasingly operates as a framework through which political authority is exercised and communicated. A key feature of this transformation lies in the growing importance of visibility and immediacy.
Political responses to insecurity are evaluated not only in terms of their effectiveness, but also in terms of their capacity to signal action, decisiveness, and control. As David Garland (2001) notes, contemporary crime control strategies are deeply embedded in a political logic that prioritizes responsiveness to public anxieties, often privileging symbolic action over expert-driven policy. In this sense, punitive measures acquire a dual function: they operate both as instruments of policy and as mechanisms of political communication.
It is at the intersection of crime control and political communication that the concept of punitive populism becomes analytically useful. Originally conceptualized by Anthony Bottoms (1995) and further developed by David Garland (2001) and John Pratt (2007), punitive populism refers to the political mobilization of crime and punishment in ways that appeal to public sentiment while expanding the scope and severity of penal intervention.
Crucially, as Elena Larrauri (2006) suggests, these dynamics are not merely a response to public demand but are actively shaped and amplified by political actors themselves. Under these conditions, the appeal of punitive action lies less in its long-term effectiveness than in its capacity to provide immediate reassurance and to align political authority with perceived public expectations. Punishment, in this sense, becomes not only a tool of control, but a central mechanism in the construction of political legitimacy.
From Crisis to Exception
Ecuador’s recent security crisis emerged from a rapid and profound transformation in patterns of violence, driven by the expansion and fragmentation of organized criminal groups, as well as the erosion of state control over key territories and prison systems. After years of relatively low levels of violence, homicide rates increased dramatically between 2020 and 2023, positioning the country among the most violent in the region (UNODC, 2023; Voss, 2024). This escalation culminated in early 2024 with a series of highly visible and coordinated events, including prison uprisings, attacks on public institutions, and the escape of a high-profile criminal leader, Adolfo Macías from a maximum-security prison, which exposed the limits of state capacity and intensified public perceptions of insecurity.
The government’s response took the form of a series of exceptional measures that went beyond conventional crime control strategies. These included the formal declaration of an internal armed conflict, the expanded use of the military in domestic security roles, and the legal reclassification of criminal groups as terrorist organizations (International Crisis Group, 2025).
At the same time, these policies were embedded within a broader transformation of legal frameworks and political discourse, in which insecurity was increasingly portrayed as an existential threat demanding immediate and decisive action. This approach has also relied heavily on the sustained use of emergency powers. According to the Ecuadorian Conflict Observatory (2025) some key provinces, including Guayas, Los Ríos, Manabí, and El Oro remained under states of exception for approximately 82% of the first two years of President Daniel Noboa’s administration, allowing the military to support policing functions while suspending certain constitutional protections.
Although these measures initially received broad public support and were associated with short-term reductions in violence, their longer-term impact has been more ambiguous. Levels of insecurity have remained persistently high, and in some cases have intensified, raising questions about the sustainability of this approach (International Crisis Group, 2025; Voss, 2026).
Reframing Crime as War
Crucially, these developments did not simply transform Ecuador’s security landscape; they redefined the political meaning of crime. The government’s framing of the crisis as an “internal armed conflict” marked a decisive shift from a criminal justice approach to a war-based logic of governance, in which crime is no longer treated as a social phenomenon but as an existential threat. This reframing enabled the expansion of executive power and the normalization of exceptional measures, while simultaneously constructing a clear moral boundary between “law-abiding citizens” and criminal actors, portrayed as enemies of the state.
In this context, security policy became not only a tool for controlling violence but also a central mechanism for demonstrating political authority. The visibility of coercive action, including military deployment, mass arrests, and punitive reforms, served to signal decisiveness and control, reinforcing the government’s claim to legitimacy. Rather than being evaluated solely in terms of effectiveness, these measures functioned as political performances, aligning state authority with public demands for order and protection. As recent analyses suggest, the government’s “war on gangs” has struggled to produce sustained control, instead contributing to cycles of violence and instability (Dudley, 2025; Newton, 2026).
Mechanisms of Punitive Populism and Political Legitimacy
The Ecuadorian case shows that punitive populism operates through a set of mechanisms that translate insecurity into political authority. Rather than simply responding to crime, these mechanisms reshape how it is governed and communicated. First, crisis conditions enable the expansion of executive power. The declaration of an internal armed conflict facilitated the adoption of exceptional measures and the suspension of ordinary legal constraints, contributing to the normalization of emergency governance (Observatorio Ecuatoriano de Conflictos, 2025).
Second, public security has become increasingly militarized. The deployment of the armed forces in domestic roles reinforces a war-based understanding of crime, privileging confrontation over institutional or preventive approaches.
Third, political discourse constructs criminal actors as “internal enemies,” often labeled as terrorists. This framing simplifies complex dynamics into a moral binary, legitimizing punitive responses and aligning political authority with public fears (Pratt, 2007).
Finally, punishment functions as a form of political communication. Visible and immediate measures, such as mass arrests and harsher penalties, signal control and decisiveness, often prioritizing symbolic impact over long-term effectiveness (Garland, 2001). These dynamics also carry heavy electoral implications. President Daniel Noboa’s re-election in 2025 occurred in a context shaped by sustained militarization and emergency governance, suggesting that punitive strategies can generate political legitimacy through visibility and immediacy.
Normalization of Emergency and the Costs of Punitive Governance
However, the expansion of punitive populism raises important concerns for democratic governance. Measures initially justified as temporary responses to crisis, such as states of exception and military involvement in policing, risk becoming normalized, blurring the line between extraordinary and ordinary rule. This process reshapes the balance between security and rights. When insecurity is framed as an existential threat, restrictions on due process and legal safeguards are more easily justified and publicly accepted. Over time, this can weaken institutional oversight and reduce the capacity of democratic systems to limit executive power.
At the same time, reliance on punitive strategies as a source of legitimacy may narrow the space for alternative responses. Governments become incentivized to prioritize visible and immediate action over long-term institutional solutions, reinforcing a cycle in which political authority depends on the continued performance of control.
Ecuador’s recent crisis illustrates how insecurity can be transformed into a central mechanism of political governance. Punitive populism operates not only through policy, but through the visible exercise of authority and the construction of legitimacy. As similar dynamics emerge elsewhere, understanding how crime is politically mobilized becomes essential for assessing the future of democratic governance.
(*) Emilio Hernández is an Ecuadorian lawyer and PhD candidate in Criminology at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). His research focuses on punitive populism, criminal policy, and the relationship between security crises, political narratives, and justice systems.
References
Bottoms, A. (1995). “The philosophy and politics of punishment and sentencing.” In: C. Clarkson & R. Morgan (Eds.), The politics of sentencing reform (pp. 17–50). Clarendon Press.
In an interview with the ECPS, Sheri Berman challenges dominant crisis narratives by arguing that democratic backsliding is “neither unexpected nor, in many cases, recent in origin.” Situating current turbulence within long-term structural and historical trajectories, she emphasizes that democratic instability reflects the enduring difficulty of building and sustaining democratic institutions. Critiquing post–Cold War optimism, she characterizes today’s moment as “a kind of natural correction” to overly teleological expectations. Berman further conceptualizes populism as both symptom and driver of democratic dysfunction, rooted in representation gaps, economic insecurity, and institutional decay—dynamics that continue to reshape both domestic politics and the global liberal order.
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Sheri Berman, Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University, argues that contemporary democratic erosion should not be understood as an abrupt rupture or an unprecedented crisis, but rather as the outcome of deeper structural, historical, and institutional processes long in the making.
At a time when democratic backsliding, populist mobilization, and institutional erosion are reshaping political landscapes across regions, Professor Berman’s intervention directly challenges prevailing interpretations that frame democracy’s troubles as sudden or exceptional. Instead, she insists that the current conjuncture must be situated within longer-term transformations affecting political representation, institutional trust, and the social foundations of democratic governance. As she puts it, these developments are “neither unexpected nor, in many cases, recent in origin.”
At the center of her argument lies a powerful critique of post–Cold War democratic optimism. The expansion of democracy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries fostered what she identifies as overly teleological assumptions about liberal democracy’s inevitability. Yet, drawing on historical patterns of democratic “waves” and their inevitable reversals, she emphasizes that “building stable, well-functioning democracies is extraordinarily difficult.” What many interpreted as linear progress was, in fact, always vulnerable to reversal. In this sense, today’s turbulence is best understood as “a kind of natural correction” to earlier expectations.
A central analytical contribution of Professor Berman’s framework is her insistence that populism should be understood simultaneously as symptom and driver. It reflects deep dissatisfaction with political institutions and representation—citizens do not support anti-establishment actors unless they believe existing systems are failing them. At the same time, once in power, populists can intensify polarization and further undermine democratic norms. As she notes, while populism begins as “a symptom of democratic dissatisfaction,” it can also “actively deepen the erosion of support for democracy” once it acquires political authority.
This dual perspective is closely tied to her emphasis on structural transformations, particularly the emergence of representation gaps and the long-term consequences of neoliberal economic change. Rising inequality, economic insecurity, and technological disruption—alongside cultural tensions around identity and migration—have combined to produce a multifaceted crisis of democratic legitimacy. Importantly, these forces do not operate in isolation but reinforce one another, generating a political environment marked by both widespread dissatisfaction and a striking absence of coherent ideological alternatives.
Extending her analysis to the global level, Professor Berman offers a sobering assessment of the liberal international order. In one of her most striking remarks, she observes that “the American-led international order, at least for now, is pretty much dead.” Yet even here, she resists simplistic explanations: the disruptive impact of Trumpism, she argues, reflects not only leadership choices but also preexisting structural vulnerabilities within both American democracy and the broader international system.
Taken together, Professor Berman’s reflections offer a historically grounded and analytically nuanced account of democratic decline. Rather than treating the present as an anomaly, her assessments invite a deeper reckoning with the long-term political, economic, and institutional dynamics that have made contemporary democratic backsliding both possible—and, in many respects, predictable.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Sheri Berman, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
From Democratic Waves to Undertows
Two rows of stones embedded in Berlin’s streets mark the former path of the wall dividing East and West Berlin. Photo: Ine Beerten / Dreamstime.
Professor Berman, welcome. In your recently published article “Democracy’s Troubles Should Be No Surprise,” you argue that current democratic backsliding reflects long-term structural and historical dynamics rather than a sudden rupture. In light of ongoing crises, how does this perspective challenge prevailing “crisis narratives” that frame democratic decline as unexpected or recent?
Professor Sheri Berman: I would say that the most obvious way is that these developments are neither unexpected nor, in many cases, recent in origin. Let me begin by differentiating between two types of cases. The first involves backsliding in recently transitioned countries. By this, I mean those that moved from authoritarianism to democracy during what we now refer to as the third wave—that is, the large set of countries that democratized during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These are relatively recent transitions, meaning that democracy in these contexts is still comparatively young.
Then we have a second set of countries—those with long-standing democracies, including the country I am currently in, which is at the forefront of this not very auspicious group—where we have also seen significant democratic problems, even democratic backsliding.
It is important to distinguish between these two types of cases because the nature and causes of backsliding in recent versus more established democracies differ. However, in neither set of cases should these developments be considered surprising.
Let me explain why. With regard to recent cases, when we look back at history and examine previous democratic waves—such as those following the First and Second World Wars in the 20th century, as well as in Europe in 1848—we see that all of them were followed by undertows. This is precisely why we use the term “wave”: every wave has an undertow, referring to the failure or reversal of some of these new democratic experiments. Thus, the very concept of a wave should have reminded scholars and observers that such reversals are to be expected.
This is not simply a matter of history repeating itself; there is a causal logic at work. Building stable, well-functioning democracies is extraordinarily difficult. While it may seem that the hardest task is removing an authoritarian regime—and that is indeed difficult—it is, in fact, even harder to construct a stable democracy afterward.
We can observe this in the historical record: there are far more examples of democratic transitions than of successful democratic consolidations. Therefore, we should have anticipated that many countries undergoing transitions during the third wave would struggle or fail to consolidate democracy. This should not have come as a surprise.
What is more unusual—and what we were less theoretically and historically prepared for—is the extent of the problems now facing long-established democracies such as the United States. These countries were long considered “consolidated,” a term implying that they were stable and secure. That assumption has proven incorrect.
In my recent article in the Journal of Democracy, I outline some of the reasons for this. I argue that if we had paid closer attention to the social and economic foundations upon which scholars believed democracy rested, we would have seen that these foundations had been eroding for quite some time. As a result, the institutional weaknesses and political dissatisfaction currently affecting long-established democracies should not be regarded as particularly surprising.
Today’s Democratic Turbulence as a Correction, not a Collapse
Your work suggests that earlier waves of democratic optimism—especially after the Cold War—rested on overly teleological assumptions about liberal democracy’s inevitability. To what extent is today’s turbulence, including rising geopolitical conflict and democratic polarization, better understood as a correction of those expectations rather than a systemic breakdown?
Professor Sheri Berman: They are definitely a correction of those earlier, overly optimistic expectations. The advantage of being a scholar is that you get to study both history and contemporary events. Anyone familiar with the history of democracy would have understood, based on previous democratic waves, that the idea that all the countries transitioning in the late 20th and early 21st centuries would, within a generation or two, become something like Sweden was clearly unrealistic.
At the same time, the optimism is understandable. The late 20th century was, in many ways, a remarkable period. In some respects, I wish we were still living in it. It is better to be surrounded by optimism than by pessimism, which is now quite pervasive, particularly across the West. But while that optimism reflected genuine democratic progress and the expansion of freedom and liberty in formerly authoritarian societies, it was also bound to fade.
So, on one level, what we are experiencing today is a kind of natural correction. The specific trajectories—how newer democracies have backslid or how older democracies are encountering difficulties—are hard to predict in detail. But the broader shift away from the extraordinary optimism of the late 20th century—the belief that liberal democracy would not only succeed in the short term but also consolidate over the long term, bringing freedom and prosperity to all parts of the globe, even those not yet reached in that period—was always likely to be followed by significant disappointment. Anyone with a solid understanding of history, and of what it actually takes to make democracy work, should have recognized that.
Populism as Both Symptom and Accelerator of Democratic Decay
Labour Day celebrations at Old Town Square in Prague on May 1, 2017, featuring a banner depicting democracy as a leaf eaten by caterpillars labeled Putin, Kaczyński, Orbán, Babiš, Trump, and Fico. Photo: Jolanta Wojcicka.
You have famously argued that populism is a symptom rather than a cause of democratic dysfunction. In the current conjuncture—marked by inflation, migration pressures, and governance crises—how should scholars distinguish between populism as a reactive phenomenon and as an active driver of democratic erosion?
Professor Sheri Berman: I think populism is both of those things, as you suggest. It is definitely a symptom.At the same time, once populist parties or politicians gain a certain degree of power, they acquire the ability to intensify dissatisfaction, polarization, and related dynamics. Let me unpack that a bit. Populism is a symptom in the sense that people will not vote for anti-establishment parties if they believe the establishment—that is, existing mainstream parties and political institutions—is doing a good job. That is simply a truism.
So, when politicians and parties begin to gain support by criticizing existing parties, politicians, and institutions as corrupt, ineffective, or unrepresentative, they are doing so because a significant portion of the population believes this to be true. In that sense, such parties should be understood as a symptom of dissatisfaction among a not insignificant number of citizens with the establishment and the existing order. They are, as you noted, clear indicators of democratic dysfunction.
However, once these actors begin to gain power—once they have a voice within the system, participate regularly in the political process, and perhaps even enter government or coalitions—they can further deepen this dissatisfaction. The most obvious way they do so, though not the only one, is through rhetoric. By persistently portraying the system as corrupt, demonizing opponents, and framing both rival politicians and voters not merely as people with different policy preferences but as actors opposed to the common good—people who do not have your best interests at heart or who would threaten you if they gained power—they amplify polarization and democratic discontent.
This dynamic operates alongside the policies that populists implement when in power, which, as numerous studies show, are often counterproductive. Thus, while populism originates as a symptom of democratic dissatisfaction, it can also actively deepen the erosion of support for democracy and broaden dissatisfaction once it gains voice and power within the system.
When Mainstream Parties Drift, Populists Fill the Void
How does this “symptom” framework reshape our understanding of the rise of the populist radical right in Europe and Trumpism in the United States, particularly in relation to declining trust in institutions and widening representation gaps?
Professor Sheri Berman: This is another way of getting at the same issue. It is absolutely correct for both scholars and concerned citizens to view populist parties—on both the left and the right—and actors like Trump as drivers of polarization and potential undermining of democratic institutions. However, if we fail to recognize that they are also symptoms of widespread dissatisfaction, frustration, and discontent with existing parties and political institutions, then we will never be able to, so to speak, “solve” the problem of populism.
You mentioned representation gaps, which I and many other scholars have examined closely. If we look at Europe—since this is an ECPS interview—there is no doubt that establishment parties, both center-left and center-right, have developed significant representation gaps, even with their own voters, on key issues. Center-left parties, for instance, moved away from their traditional, broadly defined left-wing economic profile in the late 1990s, which alienated many of their former working-class and otherwise disadvantaged supporters.
At the same time, both center-left and center-right parties drifted away from voters more broadly on a range of social and cultural issues, most notably immigration in the European context. Studies of party positions in the early 21st century show that these parties were often quite distant from the preferences of the median voter on this issue.
As a result, they opened up political space not only for new or challenger parties to advance positions that mainstream parties had effectively abandoned, but also for the perception to take hold that these established parties had lost either the willingness or the capacity to represent voters’ preferences.
Beyond Monocausal Explanations: The Complex Roots of Populism
In your review of populism’s causes, you emphasize the limits of monocausal explanations. In today’s context of digital campaigning, algorithmic amplification, and economic insecurity, how should we conceptualize the interaction between demand-side grievances and supply-side political entrepreneurship?
Professor Sheri Berman: This is a difficult issue, sometimes more so for scholars than for concerned citizens. When people look around today, in what feels like a world of pervasive pessimism, they see a wide range of problems. If you were to ask the proverbial man or woman on the street why Trump has been so popular, or why he was able to get elected twice, they would likely point to broad economic grievances—a sense that the economy is not doing well, that people’s futures are uncertain, and that they are worried about their children’s prospects. They might also point to perceived breakdown and dysfunction in their communities, concerns about illegal immigration and uncontrolled borders, anxieties about tech companies being out of control, and social media “frying” their children’s brains while making everyone more polarized and angrier.
In other words, the average person intuitively understands that multiple factors are contributing to dissatisfaction with the existing order and, in turn, feeding into populism. Scholars, however, tend to look for a single explanatory variable—an independent variable that allows for a clear causal account. The difficulty is that the world we are dealing with is simply too complex for such simplification.
There are clearly many forces driving the current moment, including support for populism and, more broadly, the democratic dissatisfaction and dysfunction we see today. These include significant economic challenges; the serious consequences of rapid demographic change in American and European societies, often—though not exclusively—linked to unprecedented levels of immigration; and, as you noted, technological transformations such as automation, social media, and now AI.
All of these are substantial challenges, and it would be difficult for any party or government to address them effectively. While one can imagine more effective responses than those we have seen, these pressures are nonetheless real and complex. They are shaping the current conjuncture, particularly in the West.
Democratic Erosion as the Product of Both Agency and Structural Decay
Figure from the V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026.
Given your skepticism toward rigid structure-versus-agency dichotomies, how can we better theorize elite responsibility in democratic backsliding—especially in cases where political leaders actively challenge electoral norms or judicial independence—without neglecting broader structural transformations?
Professor Sheri Berman: There is absolutely no doubt that we need, as both scholars and citizens, to focus closely on political actors who are playing fast and loose with the democratic rules of the game. If leaders pack or ignore the judiciary, sideline the legislative branch, or undermine the independence of civil society and the media, these are clear causes and drivers of democratic backsliding, and they deserve sustained attention.
Political actors who actively seek to undermine democracy are, therefore, a legitimate focus of scholarly analysis. We need to understand the processes of democratic erosion carried out by populist, illiberal, and anti-democratic politicians and parties. Citizens, too, should remain attentive to these developments, since democracy is what enables societies to function—at least potentially—in a peaceful way, to resolve conflicts, and to address collective challenges.
That said, this is the agency side of the story: the actors who are undermining norms and institutions. But we also need to recognize, as we have discussed, that widespread frustration with establishment parties, political elites, and democratic institutions is equally important. In other words, we need a kind of two-level analysis, recognizing that the actions of populist politicians and parties often represent the final step in a broader causal chain.
Donald Trump, for example, sought political office earlier, in the 2000s and again in 2012, but received virtually no support. He rose to power in 2016 when the broader context had deteriorated, and even then, the damage he caused was more limited compared to what we have seen more recently. The ability of politicians and parties to undermine democracy depends not only on their agency, but also on the strength of the institutions and norms they confront. When those institutions and norms have weakened, actors are able to exercise their agency far more effectively.
We therefore need to understand not only the multi-causal nature of democratic backsliding, but also the broader structure–agency dynamic that underpins political life in general and is especially visible in processes of democratic erosion.
Democratic Collapse Begins Long Before It Becomes Visible
Building on your engagement withHow Democracies Die, how do you assess the relative importance of formal institutional weakening versus the erosion of informal norms—such as mutual toleration—in highly polarized democracies like the United States?
Professor Sheri Berman: That is, in a way, a follow-on question to the previous one. How Democracies Die, the seminal book by Dan Ziblatt and Steve Levitsky, helped both political scientists and concerned citizens understand that we had reached a point where politicians like Donald Trump and others were beginning to undermine norms and institutions in ways that were pushing democracies toward backsliding, or even autocratization.
To my mind, what they were doing—tracing these developments historically and highlighting their dangers—was identifying the end stage of a broader process. We had reached a point where politicians and parties were coming to power and actively engaging in democratic erosion. At the same time, we are now at a stage where we understand much more about how this process unfolds. Scholars like Ziblatt, Levitsky, and many others have done an excellent job of tracing what is now often referred to as the authoritarian playbook: how democratic backsliding occurs. In the West, this typically does not happen through coups, as it often did in the past, but through a gradual process in which norms and institutions are weakened from within.
However, this should be understood as the endpoint of a longer causal process. It is a crucial stage—one at which intervention is still possible—but by the time a system reaches this point, its norms and institutions have already weakened to a degree that makes them vulnerable. In that sense, we are now moving beyond the dynamics highlighted in How Democracies Die toward a broader recognition that the processes described in that book are rooted in deeper structural conditions.
Gradual Backsliding Is Harder to Recognize—and Resist
Do you see today’s pattern of democratic erosion—often gradual, legalistic, and electorally legitimated—as fundamentally different from earlier authoritarian breakdowns, or as part of a longer historical continuum that includes past democratic crises?
Professor Sheri Berman: These questions are helpful because they build on one another. As I mentioned, and as many scholars have emphasized, coups and immediate ruptures—quick authoritarian takeovers—were quite common in the past. What we are experiencing in the West today, less so than in other parts of the world, is different. We still see coups and rapid democratic breakdowns elsewhere, but in the West, the kind of post–third wave decay we are discussing has largely occurred through what is often called the authoritarian playbook—through a much more gradual undermining and hollowing out of democracy from within.
This pattern is therefore more common today, particularly in the West, than what we have seen historically. In a way, this also makes it more difficult to respond effectively, because there is often debate about how serious the erosion really is. Are we truly facing democratic backsliding? Is any particular move decisive in either accelerating or stopping the process? This creates a kind of puzzle for both scholars and citizens.
Many people do not fully recognize what is happening until it is too late, and this dynamic also generates significant divisions within the small-d democratic camp. For example, in the United States, while most within the Democratic Party believe that Trump and the Republicans pose a threat to democracy, there are very different views about how to respond—what the appropriate strategy is and where the core problem lies.
By contrast, when there are troops in the streets, it is clear to everyone that the priority is to get them back into the barracks. In a situation like this, however, where erosion is gradual and incremental, it becomes much harder to generate consensus and to coalesce around an effective strategy for resisting democratic decline.
Why Economic Insecurity Amplifies Cultural Grievances
Dutch farmers protest against measures to reduce nitrogen emissions in the city centre of The Hague, the Netherlands, on June 28, 2022. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your work links democratic instability to the long-term consequences of neoliberal capitalism. In light of current cost-of-living crises and inequality debates, to what extent should contemporary populism be understood as a political economy crisis rather than a cultural backlash?
Professor Sheri Berman: I think it’s both. As we have discussed before, there are a number of causes. On the demand side, both economic challenges and the grievances they generate are absolutely crucial.But social and cultural grievances are also important, along with, as we noted earlier, technological changes that are increasing polarization and dissatisfaction in our societies. It is very difficult to understand the democratic dissatisfaction that is feeding populism—and, partially through populism, democratic decay—without looking at economic grievances. That is to say, without considering rising inequality, growing insecurity, and disruptions stemming from automation, trade, and, potentially in the not-too-distant future, AI.
These are all factors creating a great deal of dissatisfaction among citizens. In turn, we know from strong scholarship that in such contexts it becomes much easier to increase the salience of social and cultural grievances, which are also central to contemporary democratic dysfunction. It becomes easier to direct attention to the perceived downsides of immigration when people believe that immigrants may be taking their jobs or using scarce public resources. Why, they might ask, should their tax money go toward housing for immigrants when there is not enough public housing for them? Why should they support a welfare state that can barely respond to their own needs, rather than helping those who have come from outside? These dynamics are therefore very difficult to disentangle, and they feed off each other in deeply pernicious ways.
From Grand Ideologies to Fragmented Discontent
You describe ideological transformation as a two-stage process requiring both the de-legitimation of existing paradigms and the emergence of alternatives. Are we currently in an “interregnum” where dissatisfaction is high but coherent ideological replacements—whether on the left or right—remain underdeveloped?
Professor Sheri Berman: I would say that this is indeed true. Part of this is that, as a historically minded social scientist, when I look back at previous eras of ideological ferment—the 1930s, for instance, the interwar period, or even the post-war period—we had real ideological alternatives. In the interwar period, we had fascism, National Socialism, and communism. These were ideologies—entire Weltanschauungen, or worldviews. They were not only opposed to liberal democracy—both clearly were—but also aspired to remake society and the economy.
What we have today are rather grievance-based movements on both the right and the left that share some similarities with their predecessors. On the left, we see anti-capitalist, anti-elite rhetoric, often accompanied by a degree of illiberalism. On the right, we see strong elements of nativism, xenophobia, and racism, as part of a broader illiberal backlash, along with, in some sectors, a kind of idealization of the past—the idea that society can return to a more traditional, often implicitly Christian, social order.
But these currents are much more inchoate than their predecessors. They draw on bits and pieces of earlier ideologies without the same coherence or power. I would also say they are more negative than positive on both the left and the right. They consist largely of grievances that have been brought together: dissatisfaction with capitalism on the left, anger about geopolitical issues such as Israel and Gaza, and on the right, resentment toward social change and elites.
It is important to remember, however unattractive it may seem to us now, that communism, fascism, and National Socialism also offered what I would carefully call positive visions. They articulated a sense of what a new future would look like. They did not only seek to destroy the old order but to create something new. I do not see that today.
That does not mean that these contemporary movements are not dangerous—they are, in many ways, very dangerous—but we are not dealing with the same kind of ideological conflict that characterized what Eric Hobsbawm and others have called the ideological twentieth century.
Why Exclusion of Populists Becomes Impossible
How does your framework help explain the persistence and normalization of far-right actors within democratic systems, even in relatively stable economies, and their increasing presence in mainstream coalition politics?
Professor Sheri Berman: To some degree, this is simply a result of their electoral success. It is very hard to keep out parties in proportional representation systems, as in Europe, that are getting 20–25% of the vote. The parties that have come to power in Europe have done so simply because they have won elections—not majorities, but enough that it is not possible to keep them out of power.In that sense, it is fairly straightforward to understand why they have gained the power and influence that they have. And it creates a number of knock-on effects, returning to the idea we discussed earlier about symptom and cause. If we look at a situation like the one that currently exists in Germany, the AfD is polling so high that it is almost impossible in many German states—and may very well soon be impossible at the national level—to put together a coalition government that does not include them.
You are therefore facing a situation in which the alternatives are either incoherent or minority governments, both of which have difficulty putting together coherent policy packages capable of solving society’s problems, thereby driving dissatisfaction further, or including in your coalition—especially in the German case, because the AfD is among the more radical right-wing parties in Europe today—a party that is clearly illiberal and potentially even anti-democratic.
This is a very difficult situation, simply from a mathematical perspective, in many of these countries. In other European countries, we have seen right-wing populists come to power, and, honestly, they have not had that much impact on democracy. We have had right-wing populists in power in the Netherlands, in Finland, and now, obviously, in Italy, and there, I would say that while they may be problematic in some ways, we have not seen the kind of democratic erosion that some predicted would occur.
So, you really have to look at these developments on a case-by-case basis. The AfD in Germany is something most observers are watching closely, because it is a much more radical right-wing party than its counterparts in places like the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, or even Italy.
Trumpism as a Symptom of Deep Structural Divisions
Donald Trump’s supporters wearing “In God We Trump” shirts at a rally in Bojangles’ Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, on March 2, 2020. Photo: Jeffrey Edwards.
In the case of Trumpism’s influence on US politics, should it be interpreted primarily as an expression of long-standing structural cleavages, or as the result of contingent elite strategies and institutional vulnerabilities?
Professor Sheri Berman: For me, Trump is very much a symptom. He has now caused a significant amount of democratic backsliding—an unprecedented amount, I would say—but there is simply no way to understand the Trump phenomenon without looking back, as I mentioned and as I discussed in the article you referenced at the beginning in the Journal of Democracy, at very deep structural problems in American society and the American economy.
There is no way to understand why people would, first, vote for him, and second, be so frustrated with the Democrats, without considering what are now decades of social decay and economic division. This is clearly a situation in which Trump was a symptom of underlying social, economic, and political problems and, once in power, has intensified all of the above—not only for the United States but for the rest of the world as well.
Trump and the Unraveling of a Fragile International System
Given your argument that democracy’s troubles are historically rooted, how should we interpret current claims about the “collapse” of the global liberal order—especially amid rising authoritarian powers and weakening multilateralism?
Professor Sheri Berman: That is downstream of many of the things we have been discussing here—most notably, but not exclusively, the rise of Donald Trump. Trump, as a key progenitor of democratic backsliding in the United States, has, since coming to power—particularly over the past year, but also since 2016—undermined democratic norms and institutions in a very significant way. He has also taken an axe to the liberal democratic order. But, again, that liberal democratic order was not particularly healthy beforehand.
I have used, in other writings—and I am sure others have as well—the idea of an immune system. If two people are standing in a train car and one has a compromised immune system, and someone coughs, that person might get sick, while the other simply leaves the train and continues with their life. The fact that Trump has been able to cause so much damage reflects the existence of significant structural weaknesses in the liberal democratic order to begin with.
This is a kind of iterative or cyclical process. At the same time, there is no doubt that the decay we have seen in the liberal democratic order over the past year, in particular, is very much the result of conscious choices made by the Trump administration—to increase divisions with allies, to attack institutions that had long been part of this order, and to form alliances with actors such as Russia that have been fundamentally opposed to it. All of these are clearly deliberate actions—agency, so to speak. But, again, his ability to come to power and to pursue this course reflects deeper structural weaknesses that he has been able to exploit.
Can Middle Powers Rebuild What US Leadership Abandoned?
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney attends a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Ukraine’s Independence Day in Kyiv, Ukraine on August 24, 2025. Photo: Vladyslav Musiienko / Dreamstime.
As transatlantic divergence becomes an observable reality—particularly under Trump’s renewed leadership—how should we interpret the effective “de-coupling” of the United States and Europe and its effect on the legitimacy and authority of international institutions? Does this fragmentation mark a structural erosion of the liberal international order, or the emergence of a more pluralized and contested system of governance with competing centers of norm-setting?
Professor Sheri Berman: I think it would be very hard to maintain, or to return to, some version of that liberal international order without American commitment and, alongside that, some kind of renewed alliance between the United States and Europe.I do not see that happening, even if Trump leaves, simply because at this point there is so much water under the bridge. If I were a European, even if a Democrat came to power in the next election, I would be very wary about hitching my horse to the United States, knowing that right around the corner there could come another version of Trump—Vance, Rubio, or someone similar. So, I think it is going to be very hard to recreate that, although I do think that if a Democrat comes to power, we will see some attempts to do so.
The alternative, as you mentioned, and as several people have been discussing—including Macron and Mark Carney in Canada—is to replace this American-led liberal international order with something new, potentially better, constructed by middle powers. My response to that is: more power to you. I hope you can do that. I think it would be good for those countries and for the globe. Historically, however, it is very difficult to construct an international order without some kind of hegemon, both pushing that project forward and willing to absorb some of the collective costs.
So, this is where we are right now. The American-led international order, at least for now, is pretty much dead. Whether middle powers can step in to patch things up enough to prevent further fragmentation remains to be seen. I hope they can, for the good not only of their own citizens but of the globe, but it concerns me greatly.
Rebuilding Representation as the Key to Democratic Stability
Finally, looking ahead, what are the most critical variables shaping democracy’s future in this context of geopolitical rivalry and domestic polarization: the renewal of representation, economic restructuring, or the restoration of democratic norms—and how might these interact to stabilize or further strain democratic systems?
Professor Sheri Berman: That is a very large question to end on. Let me say something broad and perhaps not particularly profound, which is that I actually think the domestic level is the key driver here. That is to say, the central challenge is figuring out how to get mainstream political parties—it does not necessarily have to be the old ones; again, some people may be fed up with social democratic, Christian democratic, and conservative parties—but parties that are committed to democracy need to figure out how to address, as we have discussed, the economic challenges their societies are facing, the social and cultural challenges they are confronting, and the technological changes that are driving so much disruption.
Can they do that? If they can, then we will see support for these anti-establishment, disruptive populist parties decline, and these political systems stabilize. I firmly believe that more stable democracies—not only in the West but also in other parts of the globe—will be in a much better position to address international challenges, whether civil wars, interstate wars, or climate change. They will also be better positioned to deal with international challenges and to recreate, as we discussed in the previous question, some form of viable international cooperation, including international institutions and organizations.
If we can reconstruct some degree of democratic stability, not just in the West but also elsewhere, the benefits would be significant. Turkey, for example, is a major actor and a bridge between the West and the Middle East. A stable, well-functioning democratic regime there would be a major boon, most importantly for Turkey’s own citizens, but also an important contribution to addressing a wide range of global challenges. So, again, I am hopeful that parties committed to liberal democracy can somehow manage to get their act together and become more effective and responsive to their citizens.
As Hungary approaches the April 12 elections, Viktor Orbán’s long-standing rule faces a critical test shaped by both domestic discontent and geopolitical realignments. In this interview, Associate Professor Attila Antal characterizes the regime as a “constitutional dictatorship,” arguing that the election is not about democratic legitimacy but about securing “public support for its own dictatorial turn.” He highlights how authoritarian legality, sustained through a “dual state” and permanent emergency governance, has hollowed out democratic competition. At the same time, the rise of Péter Magyar and mounting generational and material grievances signal growing resistance. Situated within broader transnational authoritarian networks, Hungary’s election emerges as both a domestic referendum and a geopolitical fault line for European democracy.
As Hungary approaches its pivotal parliamentary elections on April 12, 2026, the country stands at a defining juncture in the trajectory of European populism. After more than a decade and a half of rule by Viktor Orbán, the electoral contest no longer centers merely on party competition, but on whether an entrenched authoritarian-populist regime—characterized by institutional asymmetries, constitutional engineering, and the continuous production of political enemies—can still be meaningfully challenged through democratic means. At the same time, the emergence of Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party has introduced new uncertainty into a system long sustained by what Attila Antal describes as a “hegemonic power bloc,” raising the stakes of what increasingly resembles a systemic referendum.
In this context, Attila Antal, Associate Professor at Eötvös Loránd University, offers a sobering interpretation of the current moment. In his view, the Orbán regime has evolved beyond conventional electoral authoritarianism into what he terms a “constitutional dictatorship,” where formal legality coexists with substantive domination. Most strikingly, Assoc. Prof. Antal argues that “the Orbán regime is not seeking democratic legitimacy in the 2026 elections, but rather public support for its own dictatorial turn.” This diagnosis reframes the election not as a mechanism of accountability, but as a plebiscitary instrument designed to consolidate power under conditions of managed legality.
Crucially, Assoc. Prof. Antal situates Hungary’s electoral moment within a broader geopolitical reconfiguration. He underscores that Orbán has increasingly treated foreign and European policy “as a kind of geopolitical playing field,” cultivating alliances with both Eastern and Western authoritarian actors. The alignment with figures such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin reflects not only ideological affinity but also strategic positioning within an emerging transnational authoritarian network. As Assoc. Prof. Antal notes, Hungary has come to function as a “Trojan horse” for Putinist influence within the European Union, transforming the election into “a European and Western geopolitical issue and interest.” This external dimension is mirrored internally by a deepening social cleavage, as segments of Hungarian society remain firmly oriented toward the West while the regime consolidates a pro-Russian political base.
This external dimension intersects with internal tensions, including growing social discontent and a generational divide that reflects what Assoc. Prof. Antal describes as “a very strong generational revolt against Orbán’s authoritarian populism.”
At the core of Assoc. Prof. Antal’s analysis is the concept of authoritarian law and the “dual state,” where a formally normative legal order coexists with a politically driven prerogative structure. Under prolonged states of emergency and rule by decree, Hungary has become, in his words, “a contemporary example of dual state,” raising profound questions about whether elections can still function as instruments of democratic alternation. The opposition’s strategy of contesting the regime “by its own rules” thus reflects a deeper dilemma: whether authoritarian systems can be dismantled through participation in the very institutional frameworks they have reshaped.
Assoc. Prof. Antal’s assessment is stark. The durability of Orbánism, he suggests, lies in its capacity to adapt, radicalize, and survive through escalating authoritarianism. As he warns, the regime “can only survive by becoming increasingly dictatorial,” a trajectory that poses not only a domestic challenge but “a grave danger to both Hungarian and European societies as a whole.”
Here is the edited version of our interview with AssociateProfessor Attila Antal, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
Geopolitics and Domestic Change Reshape Orbánism
From Left: Hungary PM Viktor Orban, Poland PM Beata Szydlo, Czech PM Bohuslav Sobotka and Slovakia PM Robert Fico pose prior their meeting in Prague on February 15, 2016.
Professor Antal, in your work you describe Hungarian authoritarian populism as a system that fuses political identity construction, executive aggrandizement, and the legal-institutional reorganization of power. In the 2026 campaign, do you see Orbánism still functioning as a hegemonic political project, or has it entered a phase of ideological exhaustion in which its capacity to define “the people” and monopolize popular sovereignty is beginning to weaken?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: This is a key issue for understanding the Orbán regime as a whole and the current situation. Indeed, Orbán has built an authoritarian regime in which the ruling parties have reigned as a kind of hegemonic center—or, to use Antonio Gramsci’s terminology, as a hegemonic power bloc. However, the transformation of the opposition has changed the situation and shaken this hegemonic project. This is, however, a complex situation: in recent years, Orbán had become so confident that he increasingly focused on geopolitics; more precisely, he treated foreign policy and European policy as a kind of geopolitical playing field, where he built power and political alliances with both Eastern and Western authoritarian regimes. It is no coincidence that the two most significant imperialist powers, Trump and Putin, have both assured Orbán of their support. So, I see the collapse of Orbán’s hegemonic project as only partially attributable to domestic political factors: we are witnessing that Orbán’s downfall has become a European and Western geopolitical issue and interest, and this resonates with the anger of Hungarian society, which, for the most part, remains oriented toward the West.
Enemy Narratives Persist but Face Social Limits
You have argued that authoritarian populism in Hungary relies on permanent enemy-production. In the current election, where Kyiv, Brussels, liberal elites, and domestic opponents are again being woven into a single antagonistic narrative, how should we understand this strategy: as a sign of discursive resilience, or as evidence that the regime has become trapped in repetitive forms of mobilization?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: The enemy creation of the Orbán regime is a highly complex story. There is no doubt that the constant creation of enemy images is one of the most prominent components of the authoritarian populist toolkit. Since 2010, the Orbán regime has operated with the following main enemy images: migrants, George Soros, civil society, Brussels, the gender politics, and the domestic political opposition.
From this perspective, 2022 marks a turning point, as Putin’s aggression required the construction of a new enemy image – an incredibly difficult task, given that the attacked Ukraine must be transformed into the new enemy. All of this is connected to the “Putinization” that has taken place within the Orbán regime. The propaganda and discursive framework are thus in place, yet creating this new enemy image also means that Orbán and his allies face the reality that a significant portion of Hungarian society is quite averse to Russians due to Hungarian history. At the same time, Orbán and his allies have succeeded in turning their own camp into a pro-Russian faction, which has resulted in an incredibly deep social cleavage.
Anti-Orbánism Unites a Fragmented Opposition
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.
To what extent should the April 12 vote be interpreted not simply as a contest between Fidesz and Tisza, but as a referendum on whether a mature authoritarian-populist regime can still be electorally displaced despite media asymmetries, constitutional engineering, and patronage entrenchment?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: As I mentioned earlier, the Orbán regime itself and the new opposition forming against it can be understood within a geopolitical context. One could also say that, in many respects, the European Union has had enough of the Putinist influence that the Orbán regime represents as a “Trojan horse.” At the same time, this dissatisfaction is just as true of Hungarian society: at the moment, the opposition is held together by anti-Orbánism and the fact that the Orbán regime has seriously neglected governance and the basic needs of the Hungarian people. In this sense, the Hungarian election can indeed be interpreted as a referendum on the political system.
Dual State Logic Structures Political Competition
Your recent work on authoritarian law suggests that contemporary autocratic projects do not abolish legality so much as repurpose it. In the Hungarian case, how should we conceptualize the election itself: as a democratic mechanism still capable of producing alternation, or as a legally managed arena whose formal openness coexists with substantive authoritarian constraint?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: I think this is a very important question. When I analyzed the legal system of the Orbán regime, I drew on the “dual state” approach developed by Ernst Fraenkel, who studied the nature of National Socialist law in the interwar period. In this authoritarian state, there exists a legal system that is totally influenced by politics (which Fraenkel calls the Prerogative State), while at the same time there is the Normative State, which is less defined by political influence.
The Orbán regime has effectively been operating under a state of emergency since 2015, and since 2022, the prime minister has essentially been governing by decree. So, we are facing a contemporary example of dual state.
In my view, there is a very strong dilemma: can this system be overthrown by accepting its rules of the game and participating in the election, or can we overthrow the system as a result of a collective popular decision and establish new democratic electoral rules? It now appears that the opposition side of Hungarian society is choosing the former solution, that is, it wants to defeat the authoritarian system by its own rules. At the same time, it is certain that in the event of a possible change of government, we will have to face the problem posed by authoritarian law.
Enemy Logic Embedded in Governance Structures
Campaign poster of Viktor Orbán ahead of the April 12, 2026, parliamentary elections. Photo: Bettina Wagner / Dreamstime.
You have written about the “Constitutionalized Image of Enemy” embedded in the Hungarian Fundamental Law. How central is this constitutionalized enemy logic to the present campaign, especially in Orbán’s efforts to portray Tisza, Brussels, and Ukraine not as legitimate competitors, but as existential threats to the political community?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: The most recent amendment to the Fundamental Law took place in April 2025. The Hungarian Fundamental Law has indeed been used to create the prevailing political enemy images: certainly, with regard to migration and gender politics. I have termed this as the “Constitutionalized Image of the Enemy.” In this sense, therefore, the image of the enemy enshrined in the constitution did not play a role in the current campaign. At the same time, the 12th Amendment to the Fundamental Law established the Office for the Protection of National Sovereignty in December 2023, which played a very significant role in enabling the Orbán regime to essentially begin using state and bureaucratic tools against its political opponents and Hungarian society. In other words, the “dual state” mentioned earlier operates at the constitutional level as well.
Geopolitical Counterweight Shapes Opposition Rise
From the standpoint of your theory of authoritarian populism, is Péter Magyar best understood as a democratic challenger to Orbánism, or as a post-Fidesz corrective emerging from within the same political and ideological ecosystem?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: This is a very difficult question, and it would be too early to give any definitive answer at this stage. I would rather point out that the Hungarian election has a very strong geopolitical context. The Péter Magyar phenomenon and the European support structure behind it can also be understood as a geopolitical counterweight to Hungary’s shift toward Orbán and Putin. At the same time, there is no doubt that Orbán’s challenger was socialized within the Orbán regime and, in many respects, is attempting to correct the right-wing conservative politics that Orbán has betrayed. Here, however, it is worth noting once again that the vast camp behind the Tisza Party is far more complex and is currently held together by the constraints of the electoral system and anti-Orbánism.
Youth Revolt Meets Rural Entrenchment
Independent polling and current reporting suggest that younger voters are disproportionately aligning with Tisza, while Fidesz retains stronger support among older and more rural constituencies. Do you interpret this as a generational realignment against authoritarian populism, or merely as a contingent reaction to economic stagnation and elite scandal?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: This is also a key issue. There is no doubt that the authoritarian populism of the Orbán regime has, intentionally or not, created a generational and regional divide. A significant portion of rural and elderly Hungarian voters is far more susceptible to the enemy stereotypes and messages manufactured by the regime’s propaganda. Thus, there is a very strong generational revolt against Orbán’s authoritarian populism, particularly because Orbán is effectively blackmailing not only the EU but also Hungarian society: the former with constant vetoes, and the latter with constant threats of leaving the EU.
Middle-Class Erosion Fuels Political Backlash
Given your emphasis on the relationship between neoliberal restructuring and authoritarian populism, how important are material grievances—stagnant growth, inflation, deteriorating public services, and corruption fatigue—in weakening the regime’s capacity to maintain consent? Can economic deterioration disrupt a system whose legitimacy has long depended on symbolic conflict rather than policy performance?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: From a political-economic perspective, the Orbán regime was based on a class consensus in which the (upper) middle class and national big business formed an alliance. This was underpinned by pre-COVID-19 economic prosperity and massive amounts of EU funding. During this period of economic prosperity, however, a neoliberal state emerged that systematically dismantled public services, particularly in the healthcare and education sectors. When the polycrisis emerged (EU crises, pandemic, war), the dismantled Orbán state proved unable to handle the crisis: alongside the groups in the worst situations, the declining Hungarian middle class is the biggest loser of the Orbán regime. In other words, the rebellion against the Orbán regime is, in many respects, also of a material nature.
War Narrative Enables Democratic Suspension
How do you interpret Orbán’s continued “peace versus war” framing in light of your broader work on the politics of exception? Is this campaign discourse best seen as a contemporary form of emergency politics—one that converts geopolitical uncertainty into a justification for executive concentration and democratic suspension?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: As I mentioned, since 2022 the prime minister has essentially been governing by decree, encroaching even on areas of public policy where a state of emergency has no place. Meanwhile, political propaganda has constantly claimed that the Orbán regime is the only guarantee of peace. This has come to a head in the current campaign, with the Orbán machine conveying the message that the opposition is on the side of the Ukrainians and is dragging Hungary into the war. Governing through extraordinary measures is thus a political and communicative reframing: the Orbán regime has essentially suspended parliamentary democracy and portrayed the Ukrainian side (including the EU and the Hungarian opposition) as wanting war. I believe that this is not just some kind of fake news campaign, but the pure and frightening manifestation of an authoritarian state.
Sovereigntist Rhetoric Masks Strategic Dependence
Hungary’s pro-Russian posture has become a major campaign fault line. In your view, does Orbán’s Moscow-friendly stance still function as a coherent ideological expression of sovereigntist anti-liberalism, or is it increasingly becoming a liability as the war in Ukraine reshapes the moral and geopolitical boundaries of European politics?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: Orbán’s pro-Russian policy is a complex phenomenon. At least three aspects are worth highlighting. On the one hand, there is no doubt that, with regard to the international authoritarian right, there exists a kind of ideological coalition whose political-theoretical foundation is an anti-liberal conservative approach dating back to Carl Schmitt. Second, the Orbán regime has radically relinquished energy sovereignty in favor of Putinism. Third, there is also no doubt that Orbán and his regime are personally dependent on Putin’s system. Here, then, lies a radical contradiction: the Orbán regime, which is sovereignist at the level of propaganda, has deliberately renounced the sovereignty of the Hungarian state and is weakening European sovereignty in favor of Russia. The deeper implications of this can only be revealed after the election.
Militant Democracy as a Possible Path
You have shown how exceptional governance can become normalized. If Tisza were to win without a constitutional supermajority, would Hungary enter a phase of partial alternation without regime transformation—in other words, a situation in which a new government governs through institutions still structured by the old exception-centered order?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: I believe this is one of the main consequences of the dilemma I mentioned earlier: namely, how to dismantle an authoritarian system – either by adhering to its own rules or through more revolutionary means. If there is a change of government and a two-thirds majority is achieved, dismantling the authoritarian power of the Orbán regime will be a challenge. If, however, the change of government occurs with a simple majority, it may become inevitable to consider how the authoritarian system can be dismantled using the tools of militant democracy.
EU Influence and Domestic Revolt Intersect
Tisza Party volunteer collecting signatures in Mosonmagyaróvár, Hungary on June 5, 2024 during a nationwide campaign tour ahead of the European Parliament elections. Photo: Sarkadi Roland / Dreamstime.
What would a Tisza victory actually reveal about the Orbán system: that authoritarian-populist rule remains vulnerable to democratic challenge, or that only an insider-led revolt from within the regime’s broader political class can break such a system electorally?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: Based on what we’ve seen so far, I believe a potential victory for Tisza would have two implications. On the one hand, it would signal that the EU has had enough of Putinism directly influencing European politics. On the other hand, it would mean that authoritarian populism has become completely detached from social reality, and that Hungarian society has had enough of a political agenda built on constant hatemongering and the suspension of normality.
Authoritarian Consolidation Beyond Legitimacy
Conversely, if Fidesz were to retain power despite signs of economic strain, ideological repetition, corruption exposure, and opposition momentum, what would that tell us about the resilience of contemporary populist rule in Europe? Would it suggest that once authoritarian populism successfully constitutionalizes its power, elections alone become insufficient to dislodge it?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: I believe this is the most important issue of our time. Unfortunately, my grim assessment is that the Orbán regime is not seeking democratic legitimacy in the 2026 elections, but rather public support for its own dictatorial turn. I have long regarded the Orbán regime as a constitutional dictatorship, which means, on the one hand, that contemporary autocracies have a constitutional framework, and on the other hand, that certain segments of society have renounced democracy and accept the exercise of authoritarian power. Overall, therefore, the Orbán regime can only survive by becoming increasingly dictatorial, a trend that poses a grave danger to both Hungarian and European society as a whole.
Competing Visions of European Sovereignty
From the perspective of European integration, do you see this election as a struggle between two models of sovereignty: Orbán’s confrontational, anti-imperial, anti-Brussels sovereigntism and a more cooperative, rule-of-law-based claim to national interest that Tisza is trying to articulate? Or is that dichotomy too neat for the political realities of contemporary Hungary?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: First of all, the Orbán regime is indeed imperialist, and it pursues policies that serve Russian imperialist interests. The Hungarian election is crucial from the perspective of European integration, as the dilemma is whether there exists a European sovereignty that can be relied upon to stand up against authoritarian tendencies such as Trumpism and Putinism. I am committed to the idea, as Karl Loewenstein put it, that democracy must develop its own self-defense mechanisms and fight back – in our case, at both the member state and EU levels.
External Validation Meets Internal Resistance
Matryoshka dolls featuring images of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump displayed at a souvenir counter in Moscow on March 16, 2019. Photo: Shutterstock.
Hungary has become a reference point within transnational right-wing networks, and Orbán continues to attract symbolic support from US and European conservative actors. In analytical terms, how much does this external validation matter domestically? Does it strengthen the regime’s legitimacy, or does it mainly reinforce Orbán’s self-image as a global ideological entrepreneur?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: From the perspective of ideological and political networking, the Orbán regime truly acts as a mediator between Western and Eastern authoritarian tendencies. This is why organizing the European far right is of key importance to Orbán. All of this undoubtedly has an impact on his own camp. At the same time, Orbán’s status as a “global ideological entrepreneur” represents the very project against which the Hungarian opposition has been able to unite and become committed to a change of government.
De-capture vs. Persistence of Orbánism
Finally, through the lens of your work on authoritarian law and exceptional governance, what would be the most theoretically significant post-election question for scholars to watch: whether electoral alternation occurs, whether institutional de-capture proves possible, or whether the deeper legacy of Orbánism survives regardless of who forms the next government?
Associate Professor Attila Antal: This is also one of the most important dilemmas of our era from both a Hungarian and a European perspective, as the political and legal consequences of the Orbán regime are toxic to European integration as a whole. On the one hand, just as happened after World War II, we must once again grapple with the question of how to take democratic action against authoritarian legal and political systems. On the other hand, and even more importantly: we must finally prevent the distortion of liberal democracies toward authoritarianism not only through constitutional institutions but also through effective economic and cultural means. In my view, it is crucial to examine how global capitalism and neoliberalism have distorted liberal constitutionalism and how they have eroded the social foundations of democracies through austerity measures and the dismantling of welfare systems.
Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi argues that Hungary’s April 12 election represents a critical test of whether entrenched populist rule can be electorally challenged. While he notes that “it will definitely be a test of incumbency survival,” he emphasizes that deeper dynamics—“ideological adaptation, state resource asymmetries, and narrative control”—remain decisive. Assoc. Prof. Csehi highlights growing limits in Orbán’s populist discourse, which “has lost its novelty,” alongside shifting political conditions marked by economic grievances and the rise of the Tisza Party as a credible challenger. Yet, even in the event of electoral turnover, he cautions that deeply embedded institutional structures may persist, potentially leading to “a prolonged struggle over state capacity.” Hungary thus offers a crucial case for assessing the resilience and limits of populist governance in Europe.
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Robert Csehi, Associate Professor and Program Director of the Political Science Doctoral Program at the Corvinus University of Budapest, offers a nuanced and theoretically grounded assessment of Hungary’s evolving political landscape on the eve of a pivotal electoral contest.
As Hungary approaches its parliamentary elections on April 12, 2026, the country stands at a critical juncture. After sixteen years of rule under Viktor Orbán, the election has come to signify more than routine democratic competition. It represents a broader test of whether entrenched populist governance—characterized by institutional consolidation, discursive dominance, and asymmetrical resource control—can be meaningfully challenged through electoral mechanisms. The campaign unfolds amid deep polarization, intensifying geopolitical tensions, and mounting concerns over democratic resilience, media pluralism, and institutional fairness. At the same time, the emergence of Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party has introduced a new dynamic into Hungary’s political competition.
Against this backdrop, Assoc. Prof. Csehi underscores that “it will definitely be a test of incumbency survival,” while emphasizing that the stakes extend beyond electoral turnover to questions of “ideological adaptation, state resource asymmetries, and narrative control.” In his view, the durability of Hungary’s populist system is no longer assured. He identifies emerging cracks within the governing discourse, noting that “the supply of the populist worldview… has become less creative” and “has lost its novelty,” with the government increasingly relying on repetitive narratives—particularly around the war in Ukraine—to sustain mobilization.
At the same time, structural shifts on both the supply and demand sides of politics are reshaping the electoral terrain. The rise of the Tisza Party, Assoc. Prof. Csehi observes, has created “a new channel for people to express their grievances,”while also reactivating political engagement at the grassroots level. Concurrently, worsening economic conditions have intensified public discontent, as “people’s everyday grievances are rising,” and the government finds it increasingly difficult to externalize responsibility for inflation, corruption, and declining public services.
Assoc. Prof. Csehi’s analysis situates Hungary within a broader comparative framework, highlighting the uncertain trajectory of mature populist regimes. While electoral defeat could mark “the end of the Orbán regime” in formal terms, he cautions that deeply embedded institutional structures may persist, generating “a prolonged struggle over state capacity and institutional de-capture.” Conversely, a renewed victory for Fidesz would signal that such regimes retain significant resilience, even under conditions of economic strain and ideological fatigue.
Ultimately, as Assoc. Prof. Csehi concludes, the Hungarian case offers a critical empirical test: whether “a mature, populist-authoritarian regime can still be changed… in an electoral process.” In this sense, Hungary’s 2026 election stands as a defining moment not only for the country itself, but for understanding the resilience—and limits—of populist rule across Europe.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Associate Professor Robert Csehi, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
Populist Discourse Losing Creativity
Poster from political party Fidesz showing the opponents of Hungarian PM Viktor Orban surrounding billionaire philanthropist George Soros, Budapest, April 8, 2017.
Professor Csehi, welcome. Let me begin with the broader picture: In your scholarship, you argue that Hungarian populism has endured through the continuous reconstruction of “the people,” the redefinition of “the elite,” and the rearticulation of popular sovereignty. In the current campaign, do you still see this triadic logic operating effectively, or are its mobilizational limits beginning to emerge?
Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: I don’t think we do see some limitations to the effectiveness of this renewed populist discourse in Hungary. I think there are fundamentally three changes that actually challenge Orban’s effective populist discourse.
The first one is, in essence, that the supply of the populist worldview in the discourse has become less creative. It has lost its novelty. There were references to the war, for example, in Ukraine already in the 2022 elections—so four years ago. I mean, the war had just broken out, and they already used warmongering during that period. They pushed the campaign to the extreme in 2024 during the European parliamentary elections. They used essentially the same narrative, the same discourse. And they haven’t managed to really renew this discourse, and they keep talking about the same thing. They keep appealing to people’s fear of the war now. So, in comparison to previous elections, where every four years you had a new enemy and a new elite that was conspiring against Hungary and the government, we don’t really see that in 2026 compared to 2022 or 2024. So that’s one major change.
The second one obviously also affects, or concerns, the supply side of politics, and you already mentioned the rise of the opposition Tisza Party, which means there is actually a new channel for people to express their grievances and to mobilize their political demands behind a party which seems to have more legitimacy. It’s probably not the right word, but it resonates with people much better than the old opposition parties, which, on many grounds, have lost the trust of the people over the years—not only because they were ineffective, but also because they were involved in all sorts of scandals throughout the years. And now there is a new party which actually effectively challenges the government on a lot of issues and calls attention to many things that previously the old opposition, as we refer to it now, had not done. Plus, they really go down to the countryside, and they really do talk to people. They are engaging with the people and the electorate, and that makes a huge difference. So these are on the supply side, which are extremely relevant.
And then there is one demand-side feature which really has had a great effect. Since 2022, the Hungarian economy has not been doing very well. So, this has put a lot of things on the political agenda. People’s everyday grievances are rising, from inflation to public services, corruption, etc. It is not like Fidesz or Orban is able to cover these up anymore. We had skyrocketing inflation in the past few years, and it has become extremely difficult for the government to externalize these kinds of problems. And so people don’t shove it off anymore, like, “Oh, well, we’re still doing better no matter what the government does.” “Yeah, they might be corrupt, they might be wrong on certain policy issues, et cetera, et cetera, but we’re still better off than we were four years ago.” They don’t say that anymore. So, effectively, the economy plays a huge role in this entire story as well.
Election Tests Incumbency Survival
To what extent should the April 12 election be understood not merely as a contest between Fidesz and Tisza, but as a broader test of whether long-term populist incumbency can withstand mounting economic pressures, corruption fatigue, and shifting voter expectations?
Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: That’s a good question. It will definitely be a test of incumbency survival, in a sense, but, in the background, it is really about ideological adaptation, state resource asymmetries, and narrative control—namely, the extent to which these can still be maintained and used to hold power. I’m not sure to what extent these can actually withstand all the structural- and agency-based challenges that I’ve mentioned previously. So, it is going to be an interesting test from a political science perspective as well, to see whether they actually manage to survive or not, and to what extent a mature, populist-authoritarian regime can still be changed or won over in an electoral process. The jury is still out, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens afterwards.
EU Framed As Background Enemy
Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister arrives for a meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels, Belgium on Dec. 13, 2019. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.
You have shown that Orbán’s Eurosceptic populism often adopts an anti-imperialist framing, portraying Brussels as an external elite constraining Hungarian sovereignty. How central is this narrative in the current campaign, and does it retain its resonance in a context where access to EU funds and economic stability are increasingly salient concerns?
Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: It’s a very important point in the elections. Not in terms of the EU being a central topic—by all means, that’s not the case. Really, Orbán’s campaign is focusing on the war in Ukraine. Still, they have managed to somehow link this up with the EU. They have had billboard campaigns showing Ursula von der Leyen and Manfred Weber together with Volodymyr Zelensky, suggesting that the EU is taking the money of Hungarians and channeling it to Ukraine and to President Zelensky. So, they try to mingle these things together, mix them, and bring in the EU as, again, this sort of background power that is mistaken and on the side of war.
They have populist, moralist, discursive division, where Orbán portrays himself as a pro-peace political actor, whereas everybody else who does not agree with him, by definition, becomes pro-war, even if it does not really make sense.
So, in a sense, the EU is still there; it is referenced as, once again, occupying a pro-war position. As I said previously, they try to repeat the same claims as they did in the 2024 European parliamentary elections—drawing these very fine lines between who is on the side of peace and who is on the side of war, and they clearly place Brussels and the EU on the side of the war. And as I said, it is not only about the war per se. They also try to refer to the financial side of it, bringing this back repeatedly—claiming that the EU is taking your money, holding back funds, and channeling them to Ukraine. So, they frame it as financing the war instead of supporting Hungarian people, etc.
So, it is not center stage—I would say it is still the sort of antagonistic relationship between Ukraine and Hungary at the moment—but they do try to bring this into the discussion: that the EU is somewhere in the background, conspiring and doing all sorts of shady and harmful things. And the reason why they do that is that over the past years they have managed to convert their electorate into the most Eurosceptic segment of the population. In comparison to all other party supporters—with the exception of Our Homeland, the far-right party—probably the most Eurosceptic electorate is behind Fidesz at the moment. So it is just natural that they also play those tunes for their voters.
Tisza Promises Policy Reset
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.
From the perspective of European integration, do you interpret this election as a confrontation between two competing models of EU membership—one sovereigntist and illiberal, the other oriented toward re-integration through rule-of-law compliance and institutional alignment?
Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: Yes and no. On the one hand, I would agree that Orban has had a very particular idea of defending sovereignty in the EU. He has thought that the defense of national sovereignty and national interest could only be pursued in a confrontational way. You have to use the channels of the European Council or the Council itself to block things and not really participate in negotiations and deliberations.
There have been multiple occasions where Orban was not present—they sent him out to have a coffee. From research, we know that Council negotiations have shifted somewhat in recent years. What we would describe as a kind of de-Europeanization in the Hungarian approach to EU affairs is what has occurred on multiple fronts.
Compared to that, Tisza and Magyar’s approach are definitely different from Orban’s on some issues. You mentioned the rule of law. Tisza claims that it will join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office as soon as it is in government. It also promises to resolve some of these rule-of-law issues and to bring back the funds that have been frozen under Orban’s regime. So, we can expect a return to more normal relations with the EU. This promise is also supported by the personnel envisioned to lead foreign and European affairs within the party.
That said, I say yes and no because I do think that Tisza also supports a model of European integration based on strengthening intergovernmental relations, as opposed to a supranational takeover in multiple areas. We have seen this time and again. They have run into conflicts on different policy measures, even within the European Parliament and within their own faction in the European People’s Party.
So, on the one hand, there is likely to be an effort to restore relations and the credibility of Hungary as a partner within the EU. On the other hand, there will be areas where they confront and challenge the direction of European policy. It is not going to be a return to the old days where Hungarian representatives simply nodded to everything the European Union demanded from the government. Rather, it will involve a stronger representation of national interests, but in a more cooperative—as opposed to confrontational—manner than Orban has pursued.
Turnover Won’t End Orbánism
If Péter Magyar and the Tisza party were to win, would that necessarily signify the end of the Orbán era, or has Orbánism become sufficiently institutionalized within the state, the media landscape, and patronage networks to persist beyond electoral turnover?
Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi:The easy answer, obviously, is that electorally this would be the end of the Orbán regime, at least temporarily.But when we really look into the structural features, I would say no. This will, in fact, be a very interesting period to study, to see how deep the roots of the regime actually went and grew, and how these roots actually act and behave under a new government.I would say there is fundamentally a deeper institutional structure here, which could make the life of the new government miserable on multiple accounts—from financial oversight to judicial oversight, etc. There are many aspects where the government has to govern effectively with its hands tied behind its back. So it is going to be difficult.
I would imagine that this will be something like a prolonged struggle over state capacity and institutional de-capture. They will try to take back some of these institutions with whatever legal means there are. Nevertheless, the government will have greater room for maneuver in terms of policies in many areas, and I do think that they can make changes that could have a positive outcome or resonance with the public.
And one thing we cannot really exclude as a possibility—again, the poll numbers are all over the place—but most independent pollsters show a 15 to even 20 percentage point lead for the opposition party, which could effectively also mean that Tisza would gain a two-thirds, or constitutional, majority. That would be a completely different ballgame, because with that, they could de-capture those institutions more easily. To what extent this would be done in a democratic way, or whether they would repeat something similar to what we have seen during the Fidesz era, I am not sure. I am just saying that there might be an opportunity for the new government to actually de-root the system, provided that they have a constitutional majority.
No Majority, No Regime Change
Some observers suggest that even a Tisza-led government could face significant institutional constraints stemming from constitutional engineering and entrenched loyalist networks. How should we conceptualize the possibility of electoral alternation without substantive regime transformation?
Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: This goes in line with my previous answer. Without a constitutional majority, what you will see is that there is likely to be governmental turnover, but there is not going to be a regime transformation. And then, there are different scenarios as to what will happen. If there is a constitutional majority, then we see a re-orientation or a re-democratization. If there is only governmental turnover without real regime transformation, what kind of room for maneuver does the new government have?
How do we conceptualize this? So this is definitely going to be an interesting case to analyze in terms of re-democratization attempts—whether they actually go deep or whether they are just going to hover at the surface, which we have seen before. We even had a study on this, on local governments, examining how they try to re-democratize even under a populist authoritarian regime. We might actually see something of this sort at the national level. But once again, the possible measures might be more confined if there is only a simple majority in Parliament, and that would definitely limit the options of the next government.
Loyalty And Shielding Protect Fidesz
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gives a speech to convince his respondents in Szeged on March 4, 2014.
Your work on populist resilience to corruption highlights how such regimes adapt to and withstand scandal. In Hungary today, which mechanisms—discursive reframing, institutional shielding, or partisan loyalty—appear most crucial in sustaining support for Fidesz?
Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: Given that the regime has reached its peak and is really a mature system, from a populist regime perspective, I would say, in line with our theoretical frame, that it is mostly the institutional shielding and the partisan loyalty that dominate at the moment. Let me give you an example, which is essentially a reflection of both. There is this huge scandal about the former governor of the National Bank (György Matolcsy) and his son. There is a scandal going around that hundreds of billions of forints were actually channeled out into private funds—essentially, they were just paid out to… we do not even necessarily know whom. We do know that the governor’s son really benefited from this. And what is happening now is that there is practically no police investigation going on, or, if there is, it is extremely slow. We do not really know what is happening. In the meantime, we already know that, for example, the governor’s son has tried to, or has already started to, ship his luxury car collection to Dubai, and these kinds of things.
So wealth is going out, and in the meantime, nothing is really happening. And nobody is really talking about the Matolcsy family, etc. So there is this partisan loyalty going on, and there is this institutional shielding, which does not allow these institutions to actually do anything about it. There is no prosecution going on. There might be some prosecution, but we do not really know why it is so limited, why it is so slow, why it is kept secret, and why they basically let the governor’s son do anything he pleases, given the fact that we know that hundreds of billions of forints were, in a sense, privatized. So, I do think that these two mechanisms are the most dominant ones.
Discursively, they do not even really try anymore. It is more like, “Well, we have nothing to do with the issue—let the institutions run their course,” but the institutions are not doing anything. So, it is just a sort of bogus narrative behind it.
What has really changed, on the other hand, is Péter Magyar’s rise in politics, because he is essentially an insider. And when he appeared, that was one of his biggest assets in politics, since this insider status was extremely relevant. When he talks about corruption claims against the government, it seems to mobilize anger much more effectively. This is what really matters here, because, on many issues, anger is a very strong motivational factor in politics, including in unseating incumbent governments. This is absolutely not a good feeling, I have to say, but it does trigger mobilization, and mobilization is key, obviously.
Peace Narrative Masks Polarization
The campaign has been strongly shaped by geopolitical narratives, particularly regarding Russia and Ukraine. Has Orbán’s positioning as a “peace-oriented” leader maintained its electoral appeal, or is his perceived proximity to Moscow becoming a source of political vulnerability?
Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: That’s not an easy question to answer. First of all, his portrayal of himself as “peace-oriented” is really just buying into his populist discourse of being a pro-peace person, while everybody else who does not agree with him is, by definition, pro-war. So, once again, you have this Manichean, moralistic kind of division within politics that populists are very fond of. Essentially, this type of division turns every political discussion and agenda point into a life-or-death situation. Here, it is literally portrayed as such: if we do not want this, then the next day, everybody is sent to the Ukrainian front and people will die there.
But I would not buy into this “peace-oriented leader” narrative at all. There is a columnist in one of the Hungarian weeklies who consistently describes Orbán as aggressor-oriented, and I think that is probably a better portrayal of what he actually is—without taking any normative position. If you ask what he means by peace, the government does not really have a clear idea of what peace would entail or how it should be achieved. In that sense, the aggressor-oriented description may be more accurate.
As for whether this narrative still works, I think it holds up quite well among the core electorate. We know from sociological and political studies that most of Orbán’s supporters come from the countryside, with lower levels of education and generally more limited economic means. Among these groups, the message still resonates. Talking about the war—through fearmongering, warmongering, and similar appeals—continues to be effective.
What they have also done quite effectively, and this is why they remain competitive, is to turn uncertainty around the war into anger. Studies on populism show that fear is not the main driver; anger is. Fear reflects uncertainty, whereas anger is directed—it needs a target. They have managed to convert uncertainty and fear into anger.
To some extent, President Zelensky also inadvertently contributed to this dynamic. A particular quote was picked up and amplified by pro-government media, portraying it as a threat to Orbán. This helped channel anger toward Zelensky and Ukraine.
They also continue to layer in additional discursive elements, such as claims that “they are taking your money.” Recently, the prime minister held town hall meetings across the country, where he accused protesters of siding with Ukraine and attempting to divert Hungarian resources there. This reflects a level of political rhetoric that is, frankly, quite unprecedented. Similarly, incidents such as damage to the Druzhba gas pipeline have been reframed as evidence that Ukraine is withholding Hungary’s energy supplies and weaponizing resources. This contributes to a constant, artificially orchestrated sense of anger directed at Ukraine. In that sense, the narrative still resonates with certain segments. There is some degree of creativity, but in terms of the broader narrative, they have not significantly shifted away from the war-centered discourse seen in 2022 and 2024.
Regarding Trump and Moscow, the situation is more complicated. Trump’s own actions—particularly the wars associated with his leadership—no longer support the earlier framing of him as a “pro-peace” figure. As a result, the government has largely stopped emphasizing this aspect and instead downplays it. Attempts to reinterpret such developments rhetorically have not been particularly convincing.
As for relations with Moscow, recent leaks concerning communications between Hungarian and Russian officials have raised questions. Depending on interpretation, these either reflect pragmatic diplomacy or suggest alignment with Russian interests, including the sharing of sensitive information.
Overall, both the Trump factor and the Russian connection appear to increase the government’s political vulnerability.
Trump Effect Mostly Symbolic
US President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán arrive for a working dinner at the NATO Summit in Brussels, Belgium on July 11, 2018. Photo: Gints Ivuskans / Dreamstime.
Hungary has long been embedded in a broader transnational network of right-wing populist actors. How significant is the “Trump effect” and Musk’s influence in this election, both in terms of symbolic validation and in reinforcing Orbán’s model of governance?
Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: I think it is really symbolic. I am not sure that, in terms of governance features, there is much there. Quite the reverse, I would say. It is really some American governors and high-ranking politicians who keep talking about copying this or that from Orbán, when it comes to, for example, dealing with LGBTQ issues in their states, etc. So, Orbán tries to position himself—and to some extent successfully—as a governance genius who should and could be copied by some of these international partners.
On the other hand, the extent to which they actually contribute to Orbán’s success is largely symbolic. As I said, the campaign is mainly about the war at this moment, so it is not really a question of whether there is transnational conservative endorsement or not—it does not matter that much. I do not see it that way. We had CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) Hungary, which is a sort of mimic meeting of CPAC in the US where they invite right-wing politicians and intellectuals. It is a significant event. Just a couple of days ago, they announced that J.D. Vance, the US Vice President, is coming next Tuesday to Hungary. They probably wanted Trump to come but could not manage it, so it will be J.D. Vance. And the American government has already signaled that it supports Orbán’s re-election.
But, what matters most, once again, for the future—or for the short-term political room for maneuver of the government—is really the European partners. The EU and other European right-wing leaders are closely watching the election, because it could fundamentally change dynamics within the European Council and more generally within the integration process in the EU.
Hungary Tests Populism’s Limits
Finally, Professor Csehi, from a comparative perspective, what would each plausible outcome—a renewed Fidesz victory, a Tisza-led breakthrough, or a contested post-election scenario—tell us about the broader trajectory of populist rule in Europe and the capacity of democratic systems to dislodge entrenched illiberal incumbents?
Assoc. Prof. Robert Csehi: If Fidesz wins, this is still going to be an interesting scenario and an interesting political experience, which would tell us that, despite economic strains and despite the ideological fatigue that the government shows, and despite a strong challenger—a new challenger party emerging—the system still has some resilience. Then we would need to find out what actually triggered this resilience, or what made this resilience possible.
Now, this resilience, obviously, would send a message that electoral challenge is still possible, even with a populist regime that is extremely mature in its institutional design and structural features, etc. Therefore, none of these populist regimes are actually immune to a more systemic fatigue, and, if they want to survive, they need to be more creative in how they maintain the system.
But definitely, with a Tisza win, we would get very good information on how much democratic backsliding there actually was in the system, across different aspects. Most likely, this would generate immense knowledge that we could gain, and that would be extremely valuable for future studies. So I am very much looking forward to seeing what will happen. Those are my two cents on this point.
In this interview with ECPS, Dr. Thomas Carothers offers a nuanced reassessment of contemporary democratic backsliding, challenging dominant explanations that prioritize socioeconomic grievances over political agency. He argues that elite opportunism and institutional permissiveness are central drivers of democratic erosion, cautioning against overgeneralizing from Western experiences. Emphasizing that “when institutions fail, protest becomes the last line of democratic defense,” Dr. Carothers highlights the enduring role of civic mobilization in constraining authoritarian drift. At the same time, he resists declinist narratives, noting that democratic “guardrails” continue to hold in many contexts. The interview ultimately frames global democracy as entering a new phase of contested resilience, shaped by the dynamic interplay of elites, institutions, and citizen action.
At a time when democracies across the globe face mounting pressures—from intensifying polarization in the United States and Europe to the growing assertiveness of authoritarian powers—the question of how democratic systems erode, endure, and renew themselves has taken on renewed urgency. In this context, Dr. Thomas Carothers, Director of the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program and Harvey V. Fineberg Chair for Democracy Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, offers a timely and nuanced intervention. Speaking to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Carothers challenges prevailing explanatory frameworks and calls for a more differentiated understanding of democratic backsliding and resilience.
Central to his analysis is a critique of the widely invoked “democracy-not-delivering” thesis. As he observes,“democratic backsliding has been spreading around the world for over 20 years, but we’re still struggling to figure out why it’s occurring,” urging “a bit of humility” from both scholars and policymakers. Rather than attributing democratic erosion primarily to socioeconomic grievances, Dr. Carothers emphasizes the role of “power holders—elites and elite agency” in actively constraining democratic choice. He cautions against generalizing from the American and European experience, noting that in many contexts, citizens are not opting for extremist alternatives but are instead “not being allowed to make those choices” due to authoritarian interventions.
This analytical shift foregrounds the importance of political agency and institutional dynamics over structural determinism. Dr. Carothers expresses skepticism toward rigid dichotomies, arguing that the “structure-versus-agency framework… is not a particularly useful way” to understand contemporary democratic crises. Instead, he advocates for context-sensitive analysis that recognizes the interplay between institutional vulnerabilities and strategic elite behavior.
It is within this framework that Dr. Carothers advances one of his most compelling claims: “When institutions fail, protest becomes the last line of democratic defense.” In settings where courts, media, and civil society are systematically undermined, public protest emerges as a residual yet powerful mechanism of accountability. While acknowledging that even protest can be violently suppressed—as in cases like Tanzania or Nicaragua—he underscores that, in many democracies, mass mobilization continues to function as a critical constraint on executive overreach.
At the same time, Dr. Carothers resists overly pessimistic narratives. While democratic backsliding persists, he notes that “the rapid wave of backsliding has slowed somewhat,” and that in numerous cases institutional “guardrails have been holding up.” Drawing on comparative examples from Brazil, Senegal, and beyond, he highlights the capacity of civic mobilization and institutional resilience to counteract authoritarian drift.
Taken together, this interview situates contemporary democratic challenges within a broader landscape of contestation, adaptation, and uneven resilience. Rather than signaling an inevitable decline, Dr. Carothers suggests the emergence of a more complex equilibrium—one in which democratic erosion and renewal coexist, and where the future of democracy will depend on the dynamic interaction between elites, institutions, and citizens.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Dr. Thomas Carothers, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
We Still Don’t Fully Understand Democratic Backsliding
Figure from the V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026.
Dr. Carothers, welcome. Let me begin with the broader picture: In your recent work, you challenge the “democracy-not-delivering” thesis by emphasizing elite opportunism and institutional permissiveness over socioeconomic failure. In light of current developments—from democratic strain in the United States to governance crises elsewhere—how does this shift reshape dominant explanatory frameworks, and what does it imply for the balance between structural and agency-based accounts?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: I appreciate this broad question. It’s surprising if we step back. Democratic backsliding has been spreading around the world for over 20 years, but we’re still struggling to figure out why it’s occurring. It’s interesting, and in a way surprising, that we haven’t really figured it out yet, and that there isn’t as much consensus as you might think there would be. I start with that. I think a bit of humility for all of us is in order here. If the policy community is looking to experts and saying, “Give us some answers,” I’m not sure the expert community is doing all that well, and I count myself in that.
But I would start by saying that, in a broad sense, Americans and Europeans—who have been experiencing a lot of democratic uncertainty and tremors, and in the case of the United States, some real backsliding in the last 5–10 years—are tending to take a pattern of events in their own countries and turn that into a very general explanation that I don’t think works very well in many places. What do I mean by that?
In the United States and Europe, broadly speaking, what you have seen over the last 20 years are societies where economic growth has slowed. A lot of people are angry about that, especially middle classes who don’t feel they are doing very well. At the same time, there has been significant sociocultural change in the form of immigration and broader progressive shifts across these societies. It turns out that many people are uncomfortable with that. So, many people are not happy economically, they feel quite unsettled socio-culturally, and in some cases they are opting for politicians or parties outside the mainstream, on both the right and the left. They are moving away from conventional center-left and center-right parties toward alternatives at the extremes, and that is unsettling for democracy.
But this is not a good explanation for what is happening with democratic backsliding in many other parts of the world. Let me take one case: Tanzania. Tanzania was a kind of so-so democracy in Africa—not very democratic, but not very autocratic—for a fairly long time.
Western Explanations Misread Global Democratic Decline
In the last year, however, it has undergone severe backsliding. There was an election, and people challenged the president, seeking some change. The president and her team essentially stole the election. When people protested, she cracked down in an unprecedented way. Hundreds of people were killed by security services. That is democratic backsliding. It had nothing to do with the Tanzanian middle class choosing alternatives at the extremes. They simply wanted decent reform and governance. What we see instead is a predatory power holder hanging onto power and violently suppressing dissent.
This is similar to what we see in Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega, over the last 10 years, has been challenged because he governs for the benefit of himself, his family, and a small circle of allies. When large-scale protests erupted in 2018, there was a severe crackdown—violence, repression, and more.
So, taking the American-European experience and assuming that this must be what is happening everywhere—that people are choosing the “wrong” politicians because they are unhappy with democracies not delivering—is misleading. Yes, people are unhappy in many countries, but in large parts of the world they are not choosing extremes; rather, they are choosing democratic alternatives and are not being allowed to make those choices because power holders—elites and elite agency—block them.
For this reason, I am very uncomfortable with the structure-versus-agency distinction. If we come in as analysts and say, “I think it’s mostly structure” or “I think it’s mostly agency,” we risk oversimplifying. Instead, we should take each case on its own terms, try to understand what is happening, and relax the insistence on categorizing it as one or the other. It is usually a combination of both.
Moreover, the concept of “structure” often covers a range of analytic ambiguities. Do we mean religious divisions? Immigration patterns? Social class structures? The term itself is quite vague.
In short—though I realize this is a long opening—the American-European experience is quite different from that of many other parts of the world. In those contexts, democratic backsliding often involves predatory power holders cracking down and steamrolling countervailing institutions and public protests. And the structure-versus-agency framework, in my view, is not a particularly useful way to approach such situations.
Public Protest Remains the Hardest Constraint on Elite Power
No Kings protest in New York City, USA, October 18, 2025—demonstrators rally against authoritarian policies and corruption in Donald Trump’s administration. Photo: Dreamstime.
If democratic erosion is primarily elite-driven, how should we reconceptualize citizen agency today—especially in highly polarized societies like the US and parts of Europe—where publics may appear simultaneously mobilized, constrained, and politically fragmented?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: If we recognize the power of elites to overturn constraints on their power—which is what’s happening in a lot of places, and it startles us when it happens, say, in India—we had tended to think that the rule of law in India was pretty well established. India had a very good court system for a long time. It had a high degree of judicial independence and a judicial excellence. Of course, there is a lot at the lower levels, a lot of backlogs, and all that kind of stuff, but India was a country with pretty solid rule of law in certain ways.
However, Modi has been able to undercut that in ways that have really unsettled people in India and that they did not expect. That’s through elite agency—through structure, it’s through his determined decision-making to think, I can say this, I can do that, I can put these people here, I can defy this—that’s elite agency in action.
Given that, what we have to think is: wow, the power of elite agency in many cases is formidable. And what can stop that? What can stop that is a very strong fortification of those norms, and also people protesting when that is happening, and people saying, we won’t take this. That’s why I focus so much on protests, because when elites steamroller the different institutions, they undercut the courts, they close down the media, they strangle civil society, they go through all the independent sources of power, strangle them one by one, asphyxiate them, cut them off.
The one thing they have trouble overcoming is public protest, because it’s not really an institution they can just undercut. Now, they can, once it happens, as in Tanzania or Nicaragua, get police and security services of different types to come out, detain people, arrest them, beat them up, and kill them. Unfortunately, they can override public protest. But that is, fortunately, at least in some democracies, a line that leaders don’t cross. They don’t go that far, and protests therefore have a really powerful effect, as in Nepal or Bangladesh, where protesters were able to overcome attempts to stop them, and they pushed for some really democratic change. So elite agency—the power of it—should make us think hard about what powers can stop it, and what we can do, if we care about democracy, to try to fortify those things that can limit elite agency.
Economic Development Still Stabilizes Democracy
To what extent does ongoing backsliding in relatively affluent democracies challenge modernization theory’s assumption that economic development stabilizes democracy, particularly under conditions of cultural backlash and identity-driven politics?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: It has certainly been a surprise for many political scientists that the United States is experiencing significant backsliding. The recent V-Dem report on democracy in the world charted an 18-point decline for the United States, which is a very large drop in the last year. The Freedom House report shows only a 3-point decline, but even 3 points is quite significant in the Freedom House methodology. So, we do have the case of the United States, which raises questions about the crucial work that Adam Przeworski did—showing the relationship between the level of economic development and the absence of democratic breakdown—but I think we need to be very careful.
The United States is the only wealthy established democracy—other than perhaps Israel. By “established,” I mean a pre-1989 democracy. I am not including Hungary and Poland in that category, as they are post-1989. Among long-established democracies at a certain level of wealth, it is the only one that has experienced significant backsliding in the last 10 to 15 years.
It is true that many Europeans feel unsettled by the rise of illiberal political forces in their societies, but none of those countries is experiencing significant backsliding yet. Now, it may come—there is no question that it might. So, I do not think modernization theory, or the idea that once you reach a certain level of economic development you are bound to be more stable democratically, has been overturned by events. Rather, I think the United States is a head-scratching case as to why this is happening there. What is more interesting analytically is not to discard modernization theory, but instead to ask: what is it about the United States that is so different from all the other wealthy established democracies—Canada, Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, and so on—that makes it so democratically fragile at this moment?
So, modernization theory, or at least the theory about the relationship between economic development and democracy, is still holding. However, we do have this powerful and unusual case of the United States, which requires very careful thought.
Executive Aggrandizement, Not Populism, Drives Backsliding
Nested dolls depicting authoritarian and populist leaders Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan displayed among souvenirs in Moscow on July 7, 2018. Photo: Shutterstock.
How can we analytically disentangle populism as a discursive logic from executive aggrandizement as an institutional process, especially when contemporary leaders employ formally legal mechanisms to incrementally erode democratic norms?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: Wow, there are a lot of questions here; they’re very compact. Executive aggrandizement, which is the core pattern of backsliding that we see in many places, is where an executive amasses overweening power that is able to subvert the rest of the democratic system. Executive aggrandizement is the tool by which de-democratization and greater autocratization are occurring in a whole bunch of countries. But that’s not the same as populism, and we have to be really careful here. Some of these leaders who are carrying out executive aggrandizement are populists. Hugo Chávez was such a leader—he was elected, dismantled democracy, and engaged in executive aggrandizement; he was populist to the core.
Vladimir Putin has been aggrandizing the power of the executive in Russia over the last 25 years. In my view, he is not a populist. President Putin came from within the system. A populist is someone who comes from outside the system, divides, and says, “I’m going to attack the elite; I represent the people.” President Putin was not about the people versus the elite. He was the security service rising back up and asserting its power over Russian life—hardly a populist. He rode around on a horse once with his shirt off and had a picture taken, which some Russians felt made him look pretty good. I guess you could call that a populist technique. But I hardly think of him as a populist.
President Xi in China has been carrying out executive aggrandizement by removing term limits and by attempting, for example, to bring the military under greater political control. It is classic executive aggrandizement. Again, President Xi is not someone from outside the system who is dividing the country into old elites and the new people. He is the system. He rose up—his father was a grandee—he is a very well-integrated, well-embedded part of the system.
Therefore, executive aggrandizement is a process that leaders are using, both elected leaders and non-elected leaders, as in the case of President Xi. It is a form of taking over systems that is different from military coups and from state collapse, and so forth. It is the process that is defining democratic backsliding and autocratization in many countries. It is not the same thing as populism. Some populists engage in executive aggrandizement, not all. Some figures who engage in executive aggrandizement are populist, not all. So, it is very important to keep these concepts fairly clearly separate from each other.
Deep Structural Divides Drive America’s Polarization
In the current US context—marked by renewed Trumpism, institutional contestation, and electoral polarization—should we interpret developments as a case of “backsliding from within,” or as the exposure of long-standing structural vulnerabilities in American democracy?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: That gets to the question of what constitutes a structural vulnerability. The United States has some very basic fissures in society that have long been at the root of severe episodes of polarization in American life. The country has experienced waves of extreme polarization throughout its history. The Civil War was a period of intense polarization, and the country later moved beyond it. There was less polarization afterwards. The 1930s and the New Deal were also tremendously polarizing, followed by a period of lower polarization through World War II. In the 1960s and 1970s, polarization began increasing again and has reached very high levels over the past 10 to 20 years. So, the United States has this recurrent pattern of extreme polarization.
These waves tend to be rooted in the same underlying fissures—three in particular. One is a racial divide, which has been deeply divisive, not only in Black-white terms but also in a broader sense between those who support a more inclusive society and those who prefer a less inclusive one.
Second, religion in politics. The United States is, in many ways, a fairly religious society, and there has long been debate over the role of religion in public and political life. This debate continues today and remains highly divisive. Some believe religion should play a greater role, while others advocate for a clearer separation between religion and the state.
Third, the question of federal versus state control. Should the country have a strong federal government, or should power reside primarily with the states? This debate goes back to the founding of the Republic and was deeply embedded in the Civil War. It has remained a persistent and contested issue.
So, the United States has these structures. You could describe racial realities as a structure. You could consider federal versus state power as a structure. Religion—can that be called a structure? In some sense, yes. These factors provide a foundation that is distinct from Europe, where all three are generally less pronounced as basic fissures. They help explain why the United States, unlike many European countries, has experienced recurring waves of polarization.
I think what we are seeing in the United States today is the product of the latest episode of extreme polarization. Is this due to structure or agency? As I noted, there are underlying structural features of American society that contribute to the current divisions. At the same time, elite agency is clearly playing a role. When people discuss polarization in the United States, they often point to specific political actors—this politician did this, that politician did that—as polarizing forces. So, elite agency is also part of the picture.
When Politics Turns Tribal, Democracy Suffers
To what degree does affective polarization—visible in both US and European politics—function as a permissive condition for democratic erosion, enabling citizens to tolerate or justify norm violations by co-partisan leaders?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: Affective polarization—when one side basically hates the other, doesn’t trust it, and doesn’t think it should be allowed to come to power—is no longer just “I don’t like their tax policy.” Instead, it becomes, “I think they are bad Americans and would do terrible things to the country if they came to power, and I don’t want my daughter or son marrying one of them.” Affective polarization of that type is incredibly corrosive.
Because if it is based on the idea that the people on the other side—I hate them, I don’t trust them, and I think they are going to do harm to the country if they run it—then, when an election comes along, I may say: well, the choice is between a leader who is tidy-whitey and is going to follow every democratic norm but might let the other side in, versus someone who is really strong and willing to break the dishes needed to stay in power and keep those dangerous other people out. In that case, unfortunately, people trade off democratic norms for the sake of protecting their tribe, as people like to say.
In the United States, the very distinguished political scientist at Yale University, Milan Svolik, has done fundamental work showing that under conditions of extreme polarization, people are willing to trade away democratic norms for the sake of protecting their side.
Citizen Mobilization Can Halt Democratic Backsliding
Large protests demand the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government as part of the Anti-Quota Movement and Bangladesh Quota Reform Protests. Thousands took to the streets in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on August 4, 2024. Photo: M.D. Sabbir.
Your work suggests that protests serve both as indicators of democratic strain and as potential agents of renewal. How should we theorize this dual role in light of recent protest waves in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: At Carnegie, we run something called the Global Protest Tracker, which tries to keep track of every major anti-government protest in the world. If you go to it, you’ll see a list, and you can click on a country, and it turns out, oh, look, the Philippines just had major protests last month. Why? What were they about? And so forth. So, we’ve been watching protests very closely for a while. We’ve been running the tracker for seven years, and you learn a lot just by reading it every month.
Our researchers produce—Judy Lee, who works with us, is our main researcher on this—a tremendous memo every month analyzing the latest protests around the world. And you see that a good share of protests is about democracy. They are about citizens responding to executive overreach, often in the form of a stolen or compromised election. Sometimes they respond to attempts by a leader to remove a constitutional limit on power – “I’m going to serve a third or fourth term, no matter what the Constitution says. My ally at the Supreme Court will say that’s perfectly fine.”
So, citizens are protesting a great deal about democratic backsliding. Those protests are a sign of democratic strain, as you put it in your question, or even a sign of democratic breakdown. In many cases, they are also a major source of hope for stopping that process. They have stopped a number of efforts to extend constitutional term limits and have blocked some attempts to manipulate elections, although unfortunately not in other cases, such as Georgia or Belarus.
Protests like these reflect democratic strain, but they are also an embodiment of hope for something better. In more extreme cases, such as Bangladesh—extreme in the sense that events went very far—protesters swept out an autocratic regime and called for a return to a period when the country was at least reasonably democratic. Protests are key here.
Of course, many protests today are driven by economic grievances—fuel prices rise, people cannot afford to feed their families, and they protest about that, understandably. But there are linkages. In many places, protests are sparked by some kind of economic or governance trigger. In Serbia, for example, a specific incident occurred—a train station roof collapse, if I recall correctly. People then took to the streets and said, “This government stinks, it ought to go—I’ve had it with this regime.” A protest that begins over a particular trigger can then snowball into a broader anti-regime movement that pushes a government out or at least tries to.
Nepal was somewhat similar—an initial spark related to a government attempt to limit access to social media platforms. People began protesting, and one thing led to another, and soon the prime minister was out.
So, protests are critical in this age—particularly in an era of hard-headed leaders dismantling many of the institutions that might otherwise constrain them. As I said before, protests are critical here.
Some Movements Make Democracy More Exclusionary
In these contexts, how can we distinguish between mobilizations that deepen democratic accountability—such as rights-based or institutional reform protests—and those that instead amplify anti-system, populist, or illiberal dynamics?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: Be careful about that distinction. You can have an anti-system protest that is quite rights-based. For example, the Serbian protests have turned into anti-system protests, but they are also based on the idea that there should be greater rights. Nepal was similar – “Don’t take away our right to access this information”—and that, too, turned into an anti-system protest.
Now, as you are alluding to, there are protests that, if you look at their goals or the issues that have stirred them up, may be quite different. There might be an anti-immigrant protest—an immigrant is involved in a crime, and people go out and protest, saying, “We hate these people who look like this or talk like this.” That is not especially good for democracy; it could shrink democracy and make it more exclusive.
Or people may protest against efforts to make vaccines widely available, arguing that they are dangerous and opposing public health policies. That could be described as rights-based in some sense, but it is probably not going to do much to further democracy in that country.
There are certainly many protests that pursue goals other than what we would consider core democratic rights. It is more a matter of looking at the cause—what people are trying to advance through the protest—and then deciding whether it is pro-democratic or whether it is pushing democracy in a more exclusive or limited direction.
Decentralization Empowers Protest but Weakens Strategy
With the growing prevalence of decentralized, leaderless movements, does organizational horizontality enhance democratic inclusivity and resilience, or does it risk weakening strategic coherence and long-term political impact?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: A lot of protest movements are what analysts like to call leaderless protests these days, and leaderless protests are often a reality in countries that are fairly repressive, where people are afraid or unable to form leadership councils or to organize in a very visible way, and so they are leaderless by necessity. Some are more leaderless; others are leaderless simply because that is how they arose. They may begin with a group of students who are very unhappy about something, and someone texts, “Let’s all meet at the square at 9 p.m.,” and people surge out and start protesting. Then someone else says, “Tomorrow at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, let’s meet here,” and it starts to grow. The protest becomes a movement, but there was no real guiding council at any point.
Because of technology that facilitates organization in many countries, this encourages a decentralization of authority within protest movements, which can make for quick, unpredictable, and, in some cases, powerful protests. But as you suggest in your question, once a protest is successful, there comes a point when demands have to be formulated. There also comes a point when negotiations with those in power become necessary, or when something must happen to focalize the discontent into a platform for specific change.
I remember Tahrir Square during the protests in Egypt and the Arab Spring. It was a surge of people. There were many civic groups involved, so it was not entirely leaderless, but there were many different actors trying to mobilize. At a certain point, the military said to the protesters, “We need to talk seriously about what is going to happen with Mubarak—we are ready to talk. With whom do we talk?”
A group of people did emerge within the protest. One of them happened to be a friend of mine, an Egyptian. I remember being in my office in Washington, picking up the phone, and it was him calling me from Cairo. He said, “I’m with a group of protesters, and we’ve been asked to go talk to the military. What should we ask for? What is our demand with respect to Mubarak?” That was the moment when I thought that what had started as a kind of leaderless protest—or a protest with many different elements—was now focalizing. The military wanted to negotiate with someone and say, “If we agree that Mubarak is going to step down and go to Sharm el-Sheikh or somewhere else, will you leave Tahrir Square and go home?” They needed to negotiate with someone.
It is hard to negotiate with a leaderless octopus. So, there is a moment when these movements have to coalesce, and then, if they are successful—as in Nepal, where the government is out—who is in charge? Something has to happen. Leaderlessness can be beneficial for a while, but then things need to move forward, and there needs to be a concretization of the movement into some form of institutionalized action and development.
How States Respond to Protest Defines Democracy
‘March for Europe’ demonstrations in support of EU integration and membership at Liberty Square in Tbilisi, Georgia, on October 20, 2024. Photo: Mirko Kuzmanovic.
How do different state responses—from accommodation and co-optation in liberal democracies to repression in more authoritarian settings—shape protest trajectories, and what do these patterns reveal about regime adaptability?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: There is a pretty sharp line. A protest occurs in a country; it is large, it challenges the system, and it asks for fundamental change. And here is the line: do you turn the security services on the protest and say, “We are going to detain you, arrest you, beat you up, and kill you”? Or do you say, “We are a democracy, people have rights here, and you have the right to protest, and we will talk with you and try to address your concerns so that you will go away?” At that moment, when the regime really has its back to the wall and protests are surging, do they respond with repression, or do they respond through negotiation, patience, or some other non-repressive approach? That is a defining test of whether you are in a democracy or not.
In Georgia—Georgia was a democracy for a while—protests emerged and were then fueled by the alleged stealing of elections by Georgian Dream. The political system, or the regime, began cracking down on this protest movement, detaining and arresting people and allowing a certain degree of violence. That is a sign that Georgia was moving off the democratic path and into a more repressive direction.
This is a defining moment—how protests are treated—and I pay very close attention to it. There is not always a clear threshold: sometimes three protesters are killed—is that enough? But in extreme cases like Iran, where tens of thousands appear to have been killed by security services, that is a clear sign of a profoundly repressive, anti-democratic regime in which democracy has been entirely suffocated. Georgia is suffocating its democracy. Belarus has asphyxiated and suffocated its democracy.
Whereas other countries have remained on the other side of that line. Hungary, for example, has had significant protests over the last 5–10 years. Many people are unhappy with the Fidesz government, but it has not responded with outright repression. It has taken many steps to undercut civic groups, tilt the playing field, and use state resources for party purposes. These are anti-democratic actions, but it has not turned the guns on protesters, because Hungary is still on this side of that repressive line. So that line is very fundamental to understanding the overall trajectory of a country.
Broad Mobilization Creates a Firewall Against Authoritarianism
Your research highlights the importance of civil society mobilization and opposition coordination in reversing backsliding. How do these factors interact with institutional legacies in determining whether democratic erosion can be halted or reversed?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: It relates to what I’m saying. Civil society mobilization is critical in many places, such as Brazil in 2022. Bolsonaro had been in power for four years; he was an anti-democratic leader, disrespectful of democratic norms. He sought to undercut the courts, and there were real doubts about whether he would respect an electoral outcome. Later evidence suggested that he was trying to overturn the electoral result through coup planning and so forth.
In early 2022, as elections were on the horizon, there was very broad-scale citizen mobilization. It was civic mobilization, which included a political role for established political actors, but it was civic in the sense that it brought together a broad tent of people with many different views, united around the idea that Brazil should reject an undemocratic path and pursue a democratic one. Most of those involved believed this meant voting for Lula da Silva, but it was nonetheless a civic mobilization that proved quite effective in creating a firewall against the de-democratization of Brazil.
Poland was somewhat similar before the 2023 elections. There was extensive civic mobilization, with people frustrated by the PiS government and its anti-democratic characteristics.
Civic mobilization in cases of significant backsliding is very important. In the United States, you are seeing an increasing number of protests. Recently, there was another round of the “No Kings” protests; I think up to 8 million people were involved last time. That is a significant number—about 2–3 percent of the US population—engaged in protest activity. This kind of broad-based civic mobilization is often a critical element in pushing back against democratic erosion.
Democracy Support Faces a Moment of Profound Rethink
In an international environment shaped by intensifying great-power competition, declining Western commitment, rising authoritarian influence, and intensifying geopolitical competition and conflicts such as the Iran crisis, and the global diffusion of authoritarian practices, how should democracy promotion be reimagined—does it require normative re-legitimation, institutional reinvention, or a fundamentally new model of transnational democratic support?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: International democracy support needs a lot of things. International democracy support had been struggling for 10 or 15 years in the face of democratic backsliding in the world. Backsliding was happening, and people were saying that whatever amount of democracy support we were giving—both the amount and the nature of it—was not solving the problem. Backsliding was still spreading. What we were doing was not enough, and maybe it was also not the right thing.
There was already a lot of questioning of international democracy support and then came the arrival to power of Donald Trump in January 2025. He and his team rapidly put an end to almost all US democracy aid that was directly sponsored by the government. The United States had been, by far, the largest funder of such aid in the world. It simply walked away from that field and said: no election monitoring support—we do not do that anymore; support to civic groups—we do not do that anymore; we are going to close down our public broadcasting in other places; human rights support—no, we do not do that anymore. So that was a tremendous blow to the field of international democracy support.
Unfortunately, in that same year, a number of European governments, for different reasons, also faced significant pressure on their aid budgets. There was a great deal of strain on those budgets, partly because of the need to allocate resources to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. As a result, aid budgets in Europe were tight, and 2025 was a bad year for international democracy support.
Now the field, a year on, is in a period of reassessment. My colleague Richard Youngs and I, together with Rachel Kleinfeld, are working on this issue. We published a paper last year titled What Future for International Democracy Support?, and we are preparing an updated version later this year to assess how the field is evolving.
What we are finding so far is that there is a great deal of ferment. You mentioned the need for institutional rejuvenation, normative re-legitimation, and new methods. People are actively asking these questions: what narratives should we use to describe democracy more effectively? Given the sharp decline in available aid dollars and euros, we need new forms of engagement that are more localized and more network-oriented. We need to move away from the traditional model of “the West has the answers, and the rest of the world has the problems.” Today, everyone faces challenges. How can we work on a more horizontal basis? How can we move beyond the notion of aid as a one-way process and instead recognize that we are all confronting shared difficulties?
There is a great deal happening in the field, but it is constrained by limited resources. It is on the back foot and still in a state of shock after developments over the past year or two. Many people are out of work, many are frustrated, and many are disappointed. The field is therefore in a period of reconsolidation.
At the same time, it is not disappearing. Many organizations and democratic governments still want to support democracy beyond their borders. There are also regional organizations in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere that maintain pro-democratic norms. There are multilateral institutions at the global level that remain engaged, as well as numerous international non-governmental organizations. So, there is still a substantial international democracy support community, but it is undergoing a profound process of rethinking and reorientation.
Democratic Backsliding Has Slowed—but Risks Remain
Protesters protest for the freedom of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil on April 7, 2019. Photo: Cris Faga.
And lastly, Dr. Carothers, looking ahead, given the coexistence of democratic erosion, persistent polarization, and emerging forms of resistance, do you foresee a trajectory of continued democratic decline, adaptive resilience, or the emergence of a new equilibrium of “contested democracy” in the coming decade?
Dr. Thomas Carothers: That last question of yours is common in the final questions that I get, which are basically, you’re walking across a bridge as a democracy specialist—do you jump off into the river in despair, or do you keep walking and think, we’ll probably come through this? But you put it much more elegantly than I just did.
I think over the last 5 to 7 years, the rapid wave of backsliding has slowed somewhat. There is still a lot of backsliding occurring, but there are also a number of countries where guardrails have been holding up. Brazil was an important case of that in 2022–23. One could name many others. Senegal managed to withstand a fairly concerted attack on its democratic institutions by its president in the last couple of years. The Philippines came out of the Duterte period. The successor leader is not the world’s most democratic leader, but he is not Duterte. Bangladesh is undergoing some kind of renovation. Bolivia came through a period in which the government was trying to undercut democratic norms and institutions. So, there are many countries where democracy is holding up.
I was in a conversation the other day with the research director at Freedom House, who made the important observation that about three-quarters of the countries in the world do not change their democratic status year in, year out. We tend to think, it’s like our phone, where every app is jiggling and moving around. The world is not really like that. There is actually a fair amount of stability, and the number of cases that are moving rapidly in one direction or the other is quite small. So, I’m walking across the bridge—I’m not jumping off—but, it’s going to be difficult.
In this interview with the ECPS, Dr. Amir Ahmadi Arian offers a penetrating account of Iran at a moment of war, repression, and political uncertainty. As the Israel/US–Iran conflict deepens and succession struggles intensify in Tehran, he argues that the central issue is the systematic erasure of Iranian popular agency. For Dr. Arian, the Islamic Republic has evolved from an ideological revolutionary order into an increasingly militarized system—“basically a killing machine”—while external intervention risks further marginalizing the people in whose name it claims to act. Moving from everyday micropower and censorship to the IRGC’s rise, social humiliation, and the politics of war, he underscores a stark reality: neither foreign powers nor clerical elites genuinely represent the Iranian people.
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Amir Ahmadi Arian—Iranian American writer and journalist, and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Binghamton University—offers a powerful and deeply textured analysis of Iran’s current condition at a moment of extraordinary peril. As the Israel/US–Iran war expands into a broader regional conflict marked by bombardment, civilian displacement, and intensifying regime-change rhetoric, Dr. Arian cautions against narratives that erase the agency of the Iranian people themselves. In a context where President Donald Trump has demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” openly declared an interest in shaping the country’s postwar leadership, and where succession debates have reportedly intensified following the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Dr. Arian’s central warning is stark: “neither of them has anything to do with the Iranian people.”
That insistence on popular agency—and on its systematic denial—runs through the interview as a whole. For Dr. Arian, Iran’s predicament cannot be reduced either to foreign pressure alone or to a simplistic image of “clerical rule.” Rather, he describes a political system that has evolved over 47 years from an ideological revolutionary order into something far more militarized, coercive, and socially corrosive. What began with “a very strong ideological core, surrounded by a security apparatus,” he argues, has gradually become “less and less ideological and more and more militarized.” In his starkest formulation, the regime today is “basically a killing machine,” one whose relationship to society has been reduced to a binary of “friend and enemy.”
Yet Dr. Arian’s account is not confined to the spectacular violence of war and mass repression. One of the interview’s greatest strengths lies in its insistence that authoritarian domination in Iran is reproduced through everyday practices, cultural control, and administrative routines. Recalling his own childhood and youth, he explains that in the 1980s and 1990s one “felt the presence of the state almost on your skin.” From school rituals and anti-American iconography to compulsory hijab and the disciplining of bodies, the regime exercised what he calls a “very Foucauldian kind of presence of power in daily life.” The same logic extended into literature and language: censorship, exile, and the weakening of Persian literary culture did not merely restrict expression but also narrowed the horizons of political imagination itself.
At the same time, Dr. Arian foregrounds the uneven social distribution of repression. The Islamic Republic, he notes, presents itself internationally as a defender of “the poor, the wretched of the earth, the underdog,” yet “nobody has suffered at its hands more than the poor.” Women, Baha’is, workers, and peripheral communities have borne disproportionate burdens of exclusion, persecution, and violence.
Against this backdrop, his analysis of the current war is especially sobering. If military intervention deepens, he warns, “the will of the people becomes the last thing that counts.” The core question, then, is not simply whether the regime survives, but whether Iranians themselves can recover political agency from both authoritarian rulers and external powers claiming to act in their name.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Assistant Professor Amir Ahmed Arian, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
Iran Regime’s Presence Felt Omnipresent
Billboard depicting Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei and Imam Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini on a building wall in Tehran, Iran, April 2018. The portraits honor the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini (Supreme Leader 1979–1989), and his successor Ali Khamenei (Supreme Leader 1989–2026), whose images frequently appear in public spaces as symbols of the regime’s ideological authority. Photo: Dreamstime.
Professor Amir Ahmed Arian, thank you so much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: Having grown up and begun your literary career inside Iran, how would you describe the everyday texture of life under Iran’s clerical-authoritarian system? At the level of routines—schooling, workplaces, gender norms, religion, and bureaucracy—how do these micro-practices reproduce obedience, negotiation, or subtle forms of resistance?
Dr. Amir Ahmadi Arian: In Iran, one caveat I have to give at the beginning—which will apply to all my answers—is that when we talk about the Islamic Republic, we are talking about 47 years of rule by this political system, and it has evolved and changed a lot over time. So, the practices that you mentioned—the way they were conducted in the 1980s and the 1990s—are very different from those in 2000 or 2010. The rulers have changed a lot as well. Depending on who the president was, society changed dramatically. And even more importantly, Iranian society itself sheds its skin very quickly, generation after generation.
What you see among young people now—this generation—has very little to do with my generation. People who were born around the time of the revolution are now middle-aged, and the twenty-somethings today do not really listen to us or care much about what we think. So, what I am saying is mainly founded on my own personal experience growing up there. I left Iran in 2011, and over the last fifteen years the country has changed quite dramatically. So, what I say is less a comprehensive analysis of what is going on in Iran and more an account based on my own personal experience.
To answer your question, growing up in Iran in the 1980s and the 1990s, you really did feel the presence of the state, because that was the strictest period after the revolution. After the reformist movement in the late 1990s, things began to open up. But in those first two decades, you felt the presence of the state almost on your skin.
It was overwhelming and omnipresent all the time. To give you one example, the way they tried to inculcate their foreign policy in the mind of a child was that throughout my education—during elementary school, high school, and later in college, when I attended the University of Tehran—there were massive flags of the US and Israel painted on the ground in front of the gates of all those institutions.
So, when you walked into the school or through the university gate, you could not even enter without stepping on them. Imagine doing that for twelve years in school and then five years in college—almost every day. Not just me, but millions of children across the country stepped on the US and Israeli flags in order to enter school. Just imagine what that does to your unconscious mind—how it shapes the way you see the world unwittingly, beyond what you consciously know or learn.
For women especially, there was another, much more aggressive layer, which was the compulsory hijab. This started in elementary school. Six-year-old girls had to wear uniforms and maghnaeh, these tight scarves, and they had to keep them on throughout the day. Of course, in public spaces there was also a very strict dress code for women. Women could not appear in the street without complying with it. I do not think anything embodies the aggressive presence of the state in all aspects of daily life as clearly as the compulsory hijab.
These are just two small examples.
The way the system worked was that, instead of relying only on a top-down system of propaganda, there was also the presence of micropower spread throughout society. These mechanisms were designed to strictly control bodies and constantly remind you that the state is here, and the state is watching you. So, it was a very Foucauldian kind of presence of power in daily life.
Iran’s System Is Not Just Clerical Rule—It Is a Militarized Security State
Analysts often reduce Iran’s system to “clerical rule,” yet your work suggests a far more complex configuration of institutions. How should we conceptualize the Iranian regime today—as a theocratic regime, a bureaucratic-security state, or a hybrid authoritarian system combining ideology, patronage networks, and coercive institutions?
Dr. Amir Ahmadi Arian: It’s basically all of the above. From the beginning of the revolution, the system has had a very strong ideological core, surrounded by a security apparatus. And you have the Revolutionary Guards, which constitute a very complicated and vast network of people. Within it, there are individuals who are completely cynical and technocratic, or those who are there to run their own businesses through military means, as well as truly apocalyptic warriors who want to bring about Armageddon and believe they are involved in some sort of end-of-the-world battle.
In between, you have all kinds of government bureaucracies and institutions that try to find a foothold in this network.
But the point is that, as time has gone on—from the beginning of the revolution to now, over these 47 years—the Iranian government has become less and less ideological and more and more militarized. So right now, more than anything, it resembles something like a European fascist regime in the 1930s and 1940s, one that was completely reduced to security forces. It is basically a killing machine. And the last moment when we saw that very clearly was this January.
On January 8 and 9, they opened fire with live ammunition on unarmed protesters all over the country and killed at least 8,000 people. I know that number is very contested, but at this point we have 8,000 names identified without a shadow of doubt. The organization that documented this is also working on verifying 11,000 more names. Many of them are already partially verified, but the process of full verification is ongoing. So even if half of that is true, we are looking at a five-digit death toll in basically 36 hours, which would make it the bloodiest massacre a state has committed against its own population in modern history.
That alone should make it very clear that the ideological façade and the bureaucratic elements are collapsing. The ideological façade is gone, because what they did then cannot be justified by any religious doctrine—or, frankly, by any ideological doctrine other than some form of fascism, perhaps something like Shia fascism. And the bureaucratic veneer is also very thin now; I would even argue that it has largely disappeared. Because no reasonable governing entity—whether a state or any other governing body—would do that simply to control society. You only do that when you see your own people as the enemy. There is really no other explanation.
So right now, the system has been reduced to a very hardcore security corps composed of armed elements of the Basij, the Revolutionary Guards, and parts of the police. And their relationship with the Iranian people is essentially one of friend and enemy. You are either in their camp, or you are not. And if you are not, they are out there to eliminate you. They do not really want you to exist anymore. So, of all the political systems that have existed, from what little I know of European history, they remind me of Franco’s regime in Spain—something that functions in a very similar way or resembles certain forms of 20th-century fascism.
The Revolutionary Guards Have Become a Military–Political–Economic Juggernaut
Platoon of Iranian army soldiers carrying the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran during the international military competition ARMY-2018 in Pesochnoye, Kostroma Region, Russia, June 2018. Photo: Dreamstime.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps occupies a central position in Iran’s political and economic life. Should the IRGC be understood primarily as a military institution, a security apparatus, a sprawling economic conglomerate, or even a ruling class? What does its economic embeddedness mean for reform, regime durability, or potential transition?
Dr. Amir Ahmadi Arian: So again, that’s another case with the IRGC, or the Sepah. It started off as a military organization at the beginning of the revolution, mainly to help the official army during the Iran–Iraq War. It was almost exclusively military in the beginning. Then, as time went on, it started consolidating power, accruing more and more influence through the decades. This became especially evident during the reformist movement, because the commanders of the IRGC were opposed to Khatami and the reformists in power, as well as to the political elite that came to power in the late 1990s. After that, they decided to become increasingly involved in politics.
Another turning point came later with the economic sanctions imposed after the controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. Following these disputes, Western countries began imposing some of the harshest sanctions in the world on Iran. As we know, such conditions often become a recipe for corruption. In my view, these sanctions cast something like a net over Iran’s economy. They disrupted the natural flow of exports and imports, especially oil exports. However, there was a significant hole in this net: Iran’s access to China. China was simply too powerful to fully comply with the sanctions and follow the United States’ lead, so it continued to purchase oil from Iran. Because China has an enormous and constant appetite for energy, Iran could sell oil to it below market price and still sell large volumes. As a result, even under very harsh sanctions, Iran was still able to generate a considerable amount of revenue through oil sales to China.
The problem, however, was that this revenue flowed through only one channel: the Revolutionary Guards. As a result, large segments of the economy gradually became concentrated in their hands, which almost inevitably led to corruption. Over time, within the ranks of the Revolutionary Guards, you can see an oligarchy beginning to take shape. And not just within the Revolutionary Guards—the broader political elite, especially their children and relatives, also joined this oligarchic network. Perhaps a few thousand people became involved in the export and import of oil with very little accountability. As a result, they began making themselves extremely rich, often at the expense of the well-being of ordinary Iranians and their daily lives.
At that point—perhaps by the mid-2010s—you could see that the Revolutionary Guards, which had started as a military organization and later evolved into a military–political organization, were becoming a military–political–economic juggernaut. It became something like an octopus, with tentacles reaching into almost every aspect of Iranian society, and that has continued to be the case until now.
Humiliation Is One of the Main Engines of Protest in Iran
Your writings frequently evoke emotions such as humiliation, anger, fear, and exhaustion. How do these affective dimensions shape political mobilization in Iran? In particular, how do humiliation and generational frustration interact with social fatigue to influence the timing and intensity of protest movements?
Dr. Amir Ahmadi Arian: I think humiliation is really key, especially if you watch the state media in Iran. It is a relentless and non-stop process of insulting your intelligence through the way propaganda is produced. It is really as absurd as looking at the sky in broad daylight while the TV tells you that it is nighttime. And they say it very aggressively, with zero respect for the intelligence and dignity of their audience.
Iranians are very well aware of the source of their problems. They know that the main source of their misery is their rulers, the Islamic Republic. Yes, sanctions have contributed heavily. The hostility from Israel, all the stories about the nuclear program—some exaggerated, some fabricated—and the accusations coming from a state that possesses far more nuclear weapons than Iran will ever have all contain a degree of hypocrisy. Iranians recognize that. But when you look at the political landscape of Iran, it is very clear to everyone that most of what we have gone through is the responsibility of the Islamic Republic. And the rulers know that too. It is not a secret to them.
But for 47 years, you look at their behavior and see that they have not taken a single step toward the people of Iran. Not one. They have never shown any willingness to make concessions to civil society or to protesters in the streets. They have never demonstrated any real interest in listening to them. Every time people have come out to protest, the regime initially responded with batons, and as protests intensified, with bullets. And we saw just last month what a wholesale massacre was essentially.
Even today, they continue to deny most of their responsibility for the absolute disaster they have inflicted on Iranian lives. So, when you look at this while living inside Iran, you see a government responsible for the immiseration of multiple generations yet unwilling to take even a shred of responsibility for what it has done. They have shown no willingness to change course.
This is the frustration, the rage, and the humiliation that it instills. And it can very easily boil over and drive people into the streets.
Iranians know how brutal their rulers are, how willing the regime is to kill them, and yet protests continue. In fact, you have rarely seen street protests as frequently anywhere in the world as in Iran over the past 10 or 15 years. Every couple of years there is a major wave of mass protest—whether over economic conditions, the compulsory hijab, or other issues.
Each time, people know they will be met with extreme violence, with bullets and batons. Every time they go out into the streets, they know they may never return home. Yet they still do it, because the sense of humiliation and frustration runs so deep that, in their minds, risking death can feel worthwhile simply to express it publicly.
Iranian woman standing in middle of Iranian protests for equal rights for women. Burning headscarves in protest against the government. Illustration: Digital Asset Art.
Women, Minorities, and the Poor Bear the Heaviest Burdens of Repression
For those who challenge the regime—writers, activists, workers, or ordinary protesters—what does the spectrum of repression look like in practice? How are risks such as censorship, economic exclusion, detention, torture, or exile distributed across class, gender, ethnicity, and geography?
Dr. Amir Ahmadi Arian: Probably the biggest irony of the Islamic Republic is that its outward presence to the world—its public face—and unfortunately many in the West buy into that, especially people on the left, is that it presents itself as standing up for the poor, for the wretched of the earth, for the underdog, for the downtrodden, and so on. So, it defines itself as one of the few states in the world that stands with the underdog. But when you go inside Iran, nobody has suffered at its hands more than the poor, working people, and those who do not have the means to make ends meet.
And this has been the case for decades, at least since the 1990s. You could argue that in the 1980s the regime implemented some policies aimed at creating a degree of economic equality. But definitely since the 1990s, after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, it has essentially operated as an economic system that consistently favors the rich while suppressing the poor. It has only worsened over time, and as I mentioned earlier, the sanctions have also contributed to this dynamic.
So if you are poor—and there is a reason why in more recent demonstrations and protests you see more working people and poor citizens from the margins of society, from smaller towns near the borders where poverty is particularly severe—those are often the people who take to the streets and risk their lives more than people in the major cities. That was not the case back in 2009 during the Green Movement.
Then, of course, there are religious minorities, especially the Baha’is. It is actually a principle of their religion not to engage in political activism, so they have never posed any significant threat to the political order in Iran. Yet, because of the dogmatism and fanaticism of the Shia clerics in power, that community has been persecuted more savagely than almost any other group.
So, you have the persecution of the poor through economic means, the persecution of the Baha’is for religious reasons, and of course the situation of women, who have effectively been treated as second-class citizens since the beginning of the revolution. They have been fighting for very basic rights for a very long time. And just three years ago, during the Women, Life, Freedom movement, they finally managed to force the state to abandon the enforcement of compulsory hijab—though at enormous cost—after months of civil protests across the country.
So, this is also a form of gender apartheid. You have extreme economic discrimination against the poor, religious discrimination against minorities, and what amounts to a flat-out system of gender apartheid from which women have suffered enormously over the last half century.
Iran Regime Is Not a Well-Oiled Machine, It Is Corroded by Corruption
You have often suggested that repression in Iran operates through mundane institutional routines rather than overt ideological fanaticism. To what extent does this resemble Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil,” where ordinary bureaucratic practices normalize authoritarian violence?
Dr. Amir Ahmadi Arian: I think there is an important difference there. In Arendt’s articulation of the banality of evil, it emerges from a bureaucratic machine that actually functions extremely well. You have a system whose cogs rotate together very efficiently. The Nazi extermination process was, in that sense, a highly organized and well-oiled machine. Every officer was a small cog within that machine, carrying out their assigned tasks without really reflecting on the consequences of what they were doing.
In the case of Iran, however, what you see is incompetence—sheer incompetence. Part of the problem is that the state has essentially collapsed, and its bureaucratic institutions are no longer functioning properly. There is so much corruption, so much nepotism, and so much discrimination based on factors such as religious beliefs, social background, or political loyalty—especially when it comes to employment in government institutions, even in very basic administrative matters.
Over time, this has corroded the system of governance to such an extent that it simply no longer works effectively. Even very simple things—like renewing a driver’s license or dealing with routine banking procedures—can become extremely frustrating experiences when you live inside Iran.
So, the way government authority grates on people’s nerves stems less from a highly efficient bureaucratic machine and more from pervasive incompetence and corruption, rather than from a system operating smoothly but devoid of moral reflection.
No One Has Damaged Persian Literature More Than the Islamic Republic
Drawing on your own experience with literary censorship, how does the state’s control over cultural production shape not only what can be said publicly but also what can be imagined politically? In other words, how does censorship function as a technology of power over narrative and collective imagination?
Dr. Amir Ahmadi Arian: There is another irony here. The state in Iran has always prided itself on having a kind of nationalist element. They made a great deal out of independence when you go back to the beginning of the revolution. The main slogan was “Independence, freedom, the Islamic Republic.” So, independence came first. There was always a kind of Islamic nationalism embedded within the discourse. And the Persian language was always part of that. Especially Mr. Khamenei, the supreme leader who was recently killed—he was very much into Persian poetry. He was a very skilled orator, a very good speaker, and he knew Persian very well. They were enamored with Persian literature and the history of Persian poetry, and so on. Yet no one has damaged the Persian language or launched such a profound assault on Persian literature as the Islamic Republic has through censorship.
I am just one example. Until I was 30 years old, I was a writer in Iran. I published a number of books and many articles, and I loved writing in my mother tongue. But they basically forced me out of Iran. At some point after the Green Movement, it became impossible to continue living there. So, I had to move out of Iran—first to Australia and then to the United States—and I had to switch to writing in English.
I am just one small example. I could have contributed to that language and to that literary culture. I could have added something to it. I was doing well there as a writer. But over extremely small and trivial issues, the censorship office started banning my books, and they effectively took away my job as a newspaper writer. So, I had to leave. And I am just one example among thousands of writers like me who loved that language and that culture and were more than willing to contribute to it and devote their lives to it. But the state did not want us around.
Through censorship, what has happened is an extreme weakening of the Persian language itself. When you talk about political imagination, language is crucial. When a language is battered for so long—when it has been depleted of its resources through censorship for half a century—it inevitably loses many of its tools. Its toolbox becomes depleted.
Some of those tools have started to return since the emergence of the internet, but it is very different to have a formal written culture in a society than to have a writing culture mainly on social media. These are two very different phenomena.
What the state has done is to erode the abilities and capabilities of the Persian language, which historically has been a very strong force in maintaining the fabric of Iranian society. Through that erosion, they have negatively affected not only Iranian culture and literature but also the broader cohesion of Iranian society as a whole.
Military Intervention Often Pushes the Will of the People to the Margins
Large poster of Mahsa Amini displayed by the Iranian Diaspora Collective in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, November 23, 2022. Photo: Erin Alexis Randolph / Dreamstime.
In the context of the ongoing confrontation between Iran and the US–Israel alliance, how might external military pressure reshape internal political dynamics? Historically, do wars weaken authoritarian regimes by exposing their fragility, or strengthen them by mobilizing nationalism and securitizing dissent?
Dr. Amir Ahmadi Arian: It is very hard to say now. We are right in the middle of the war, and it is very unclear how it will turn out—at least it is unclear to me. Right now, there are so many contradictory accounts and reports about who has the upper hand, whose military is in a weaker position, who is running out of ammunition, and who is running out of defensive shields, and so on. So, it is very difficult to draw conclusions at this point.
But at the end of the day, we have many examples of military intervention, especially in Middle Eastern countries, and none of them have ended well. The way events are unfolding now can already be seen in the recent quarrel over the selection of the next Supreme Leader.
The Assembly—the council of elders, as it is sometimes called in Iran—consists of the people who choose the next leader. There are about 80 very old clerics, all men and all clerics. They are very old and do not represent Iranian society in any meaningful way. In fact, they are about as far removed from Iranian society as possible, yet they are tasked with choosing the next leader. So, whoever they choose will have nothing to do with the Iranian people. It does not matter who it is; it is simply not a democratic process.
On the other hand, you have Donald Trump, who just yesterday said that he wants to have a say in choosing the next Supreme Leader of Iran. He almost sounded as if he meant it, so I will take him at his word. He said something like, “I need to be there when they choose the next Supreme Leader. I want to have a say.”
So, you see two entities talking about selecting the Supreme Leader—the highest political position in Iran—and neither of them has anything to do with the Iranian people. This is often what happens in the aftermath of military intervention. The will of the people becomes the last thing that counts. The agency of the Iranian population is already pushed aside, unless, after this war, they somehow manage to reclaim it.
A Political Vacuum Could Activate Long-Dormant Ethnic Fault Lines
One of the most catastrophic scenarios involves state fragmentation, separatist mobilization, and armed conflict across border regions. Given Iran’s complex ethnic landscape—including Kurds, Baluch, Arabs, Azeris, etc.—how real is the risk of civil conflict if state authority weakens, and what might a pluralistic settlement look like in such conditions?
Dr. Amir Ahmadi Arian: That’s another thing I can’t really say. I have no idea how that will turn out. Iran is a little different from other Middle Eastern countries that have this sort of ethnic tension, in that it has existed within roughly the same borders for about 400 years now. I mean, it has lost some territories over time, but since the Safavid era in the 17th century, Iran has largely remained the same territorial entity that it is today. It is smaller than it was back then, but the core of the country has remained intact.
In this area, all of the ethnic minorities you mentioned have been living together fairly peacefully for hundreds of years. So, Iran is not a colonial construction in the same way that Syria or Iraq are. Because of that, there is more cohesion and a greater possibility of coexistence. Civil war and ethnic conflict are probably less likely in Iran than people sometimes assume, given the long history of these communities living together for many centuries.
But when you have a political vacuum at the center, combined with a deep accumulation of discontent and rage toward the central government, anything can happen. When you bring down a sledgehammer on a society—or a double-stage sledgehammer, both from the government and from a foreign invader—you activate all these fault lines that may have been dormant for centuries, perhaps even millennia. Those fault lines can then produce tremors and earthquakes here and there. How destructive they might become is anyone’s guess. But they could potentially end up destroying this political entity that has existed for many centuries.
When Soldiers Defect, the End of the Regime May Be Near
Lastly, Professor Arian, looking ahead over the next months, what early-warning indicators should observers watch—elite defections, labor strikes, inflation thresholds, prison dynamics, clerical positioning, IRGC cohesion, or international mediation—to determine which trajectory Iran is moving toward? And do you see the emergence of a “fifth scenario,” a hybrid outcome that analysts currently underestimate?
Dr. Amir Ahmadi Arian: I think defection, definitely. Defection—and also what you mentioned about IRGC cohesion, which is kind of synonymous with defection. As I said before, the government in Iran has been reduced to a security force. Right now, more than anything, it is essentially a military entity that is fighting both its own people and the United States and Israel. So, labor strikes are a fantasy at this point. Under bombs, no one can organize a labor strike.
And what the clerics say or think really does not matter anymore. In this situation, you always have to look at the armed forces—the people in uniform. If you see any form of substantial defection in their ranks, both in terms of rank and numbers—meaning defections among high-ranking officers as well as a significant number of personnel—then I think that would be the strongest indication that regime collapse is imminent. But as long as you do not see that, other scenarios should still be considered. I think defection is the key sign we should be looking for.
In this ECPS interview, Professor Elin Bjarnegård (Uppsala University) argues that gender is no longer a side issue but “a useful, malleable concept for authoritarian leaders”—and will become “an increasingly central fault line” separating liberal democracy from authoritarian populism. Moving beyond a simple backlash thesis, she shows how regimes alternate between ‘genderbashing’ and ‘genderwashing’, weaponizing equality talk for legitimacy at home and abroad. Professor Bjarnegård also links democratic backsliding to gendered intimidation, online harassment, and what she calls “sexual corruption.” Noting that the Epstein files revealed abuses “in the corridors of power” in democratic settings too, she warns that personalistic rule heightens risk—especially the “impunity surrounding them.” She urges resisting polarization, scrutinizing symbols, and asking where gender concretely matters in policy.
In an era marked by democratic erosion and the global rise of authoritarian populism, gender politics has emerged not merely as a cultural battleground but as a strategic axis of regime competition. In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Elin Bjarnegård of Uppsala University argues that gender will increasingly function as a defining fault line separating liberal democratic governance from authoritarian populist rule. Moving beyond conventional explanations that frame anti-gender politics primarily as ideological backlash, Professor Bjarnegård emphasizes the instrumentalization of gender as a tool of political survival, legitimacy, and international signaling. As she explains, “gender becomes a useful, malleable concept for authoritarian leaders—a powerful symbol that can be mobilized for regime purposes,” underscoring how strategic deployment rather than doctrinal conviction often drives contemporary gender politics.
This strategic perspective helps explain why gender rights are likely to intensify as a central arena of geopolitical and normative contestation. Professor Bjarnegård anticipates that “gender rights, or perhaps the strategic use of gender, will become an increasingly central fault line,” not only because of ideological polarization but also because gender provides an “easy, simplistic narrative to deploy strategically” in polarized societies. Such narratives enable regimes to oscillate between exclusionary rhetoric and symbolic inclusion, reinforcing domestic authority while communicating selectively with international audiences.
The interview also highlights the darker governance implications of weakened accountability in populist and authoritarian systems, particularly regarding gendered abuses of power. Drawing on her concept of “sexual corruption,” Professor Bjarnegård reframes such abuses as systemic governance failures rather than isolated misconduct. Referencing the recent release of the Epstein files, she cautions against simplistic regime-type explanations, noting that “these gendered abuses of authority have also proliferated in the corridors of power in predominantly democratic contexts in Europe and the United States.” Yet she stresses that personalistic rule and eroded oversight create heightened risks in authoritarian settings, where such systems are “more at risk both of experiencing these gendered abuses and, perhaps especially, of the impunity surrounding them—of people not reporting them, of them remaining unseen, and of not being addressed.” This dynamic speaks directly to the broader vulnerability of populist authoritarian governance to gendered exploitation and unaccountable power.
More broadly, Professor Bjarnegård situates these patterns within a continuum of gendered violence that includes psychological intimidation, reputational attacks, and digitally mediated harassment—forms of coercion that undermine democratic participation without overt repression. Taken together, her analysis suggests that gender politics is becoming a diagnostic lens through which scholars can assess democratic resilience, institutional integrity, and the trajectory of global political competition. The interview thus positions gender not as a peripheral social issue but as a central structural dimension of contemporary struggles between liberal democracy and authoritarian populism.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Elin Bjarnegård, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
Gender Is a Strategic Resource for Authoritarian Survival
Illustration: Dreamstime.
Professor Elin Bjarnegård, thank you so much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: In your scholarship, you argue that authoritarian leaders treat gender not primarily as ideology but as a strategic resource for regime survival. How does this perspective revise dominant interpretations of populism’s relationship to gender politics beyond the conventional “backlash against feminism” thesis?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: Thank you for that question. I would say that what this perspective really adds is a strategic dimension. It is not that we want to suggest there is no ideology involved—of course ideology plays a role. The relationship between populism and gender politics, and the backlash narrative in particular, still has analytical value. However, what is often overlooked is the presence of a very important strategic component. That is what we seek to foreground by adding this strategic dimension to the equation.
So we are not arguing that ideology is irrelevant, but rather that strategy deserves more attention. In this sense, gender becomes a useful, malleable concept for authoritarian leaders—a powerful symbol that can be mobilized for regime purposes.
From an ideological perspective, one must focus on policy positions and attempts to persuade opponents. A strategic perspective, by contrast, emphasizes negotiation and maneuvering. This is why I believe it is an important lens to introduce. It opens possibilities for collaboration in a polarized world and encourages us to see political opponents as actors with whom dialogue remains possible, particularly when we recognize the strategic component of their actions.
Gender Equality as Both Shield and Weapon in Global Politics
Your work distinguishes between “genderbashing” and “genderwashing” as complementary authoritarian strategies. Under what structural and international conditions do regimes oscillate between these tactics, and how does the global bundling of democracy and gender equality norms enable such strategic manipulation?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: We see this oscillation, as you say, more clearly now and in recent years because we have had a fairly strong global norm of gender equality for the past three decades or so. That norm is now evaporating, or at least stagnating, and we also see alternative norms emerging. As the global order itself is increasingly questioned, the norm of gender equality is likewise being challenged. In a multipolar world, actors may view gender mainstreaming—as promoted by the UN or the EU—as no longer the only legitimate path. This creates space, particularly for authoritarian actors, to use gender equality as an instrument to portray themselves as modern, progressive, or even democratic, especially since gender equality and democracy have long been bundled together in major democracy-promotion efforts.
At the same time, however, this shift opens the door to a different interpretation, in which gender is used to distance regimes from global institutions such as the UN and the EU by rejecting what they frame as the foreign imposition of values in favor of traditional family norms. What was once a relatively stable landscape—where countries knew their allies, audiences, and signaling targets—has become more fluid. States now communicate simultaneously with multiple audiences. As a result, the same country may present itself as supportive of gender equality and committed to combating violence against women on the one hand, while simultaneously promoting homophobic narratives to justify, for example, military engagement with other countries.
Feminationalism Turns Inclusion Into a Weapon
Photo: Dreamstime.
Many populist actors claim to defend women’s rights selectively — for instance, against migrants or minorities — while undermining broader gender equality. How does this selective emancipation differ from classical authoritarian gender politics, and what dilemmas does it pose for liberal and intersectional feminism?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: This type of politics—sometimes called feminationalism, or homonationalism, depending on the target group—is also part of the broader package I mentioned earlier about bringing strategy into gender politics and into authoritarian politics. It is a clear illustration of how highly strategic these dynamics can be, because in these narratives, inclusion is deployed, as you say, only selectively or strategically—and ultimately for the purpose of excluding certain groups.
If the intersectional perspective, as originally conceived, aimed to ensure that we identify the most vulnerable groups and recognize multiple systems of oppression so that people do not fall between the cracks but instead benefit from policies designed to protect them, this type of feminationalism—or the selective defense of women’s rights deployed against minorities, for instance—does the opposite: it pits these systems of oppression against each other.
In a way, it draws on our knowledge about intersectional layers of oppression but turns them against one another, claiming, for example, that gender equality and women’s rights are under threat from migration. The dilemma it poses is quite similar to that of genderbashing and genderwashing. Insofar as there is a solution, it requires caution. We need to scrutinize these narratives carefully and be specific—not simply respond to symbolism or easy answers, but examine what is actually being claimed and who is being favored—in order to look beyond the strategy.
Your research on militarized masculinity suggests that patriarchal norms can coexist with formal democratic institutions and fuel political violence. How does the persistence of such masculinist political cultures help explain the gendered appeal of authoritarian populism across diverse contexts?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: I think masculinist cultures are both persistent, as you say, and increasingly revealing themselves and being strengthened in many places. We can begin with the fact that they coexist with, and also exist within, democratic settings. Democratic institutions were originally built by men, for men, and are imbued with male norms; studies of feminist institutionalism, for instance, have made this argument for a long time. Patriarchal norms have therefore always coexisted, to some extent, with formal democratic institutions. However, they have been challenged in recent decades, and they certainly vary and take different forms across contexts.
Many of us associate the political with masculinity to such an extent that it becomes difficult to pinpoint. While there has been significant focus on women in politics, there has been far less attention to men and masculinity in politics. Several research projects in Europe are now examining political science questions from a masculinity perspective, reflecting the rise of new forms of hegemonic and militarized masculinities that make clear the need for deeper understanding. “Men4Them” is one such project, examining radicalized young men as well as leadership and the spillover effects between the two. As part of this project, we seek both to understand the masculine ideals that politicians and leaders attempt to embody and, importantly, how these ideals can be transformed. We know change is possible: not long ago, in my country, Sweden, party leaders competed to present themselves as feminists, which is no longer the case.
This shift is likely related to the broader global order. We see geopolitical tensions and increasing militarization, alongside a reversal of the movement from soft power toward hard power. Narratives emphasizing traditionally masculine traits—such as strength over cooperation—are returning. Research shows these cultures have always existed, but what is striking today is that they are once again becoming, if not hegemonic, at least highly prominent.
Protection Narratives and the Return of Strongman Politics
Women rally in Istanbul to protest proposed anti-abortion legislation by then–Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, June 18, 2012. Photo: Sadık Güleç.
Relatedly, how do hypermasculine narratives and honor ideologies shape the emotional and symbolic appeal of strongman leadership, particularly among male constituencies experiencing status anxiety in periods of social transformation?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: This goes back again to the question we have just discussed, because, of course, it is about leadership and about what an ideal leader is supposed to be in a specific context at a particular point in time. But as I mentioned, it is really important to consider the spillover and interaction between leaders and their constituents. There is a constant interplay between the two.
In this context of status anxiety and social transformation, there is a great deal of fear and uncertainty, which tends to favor the presentation of easy solutions to complex problems. I think one of the easiest sentiments to mobilize is a sense of lost entitlement, and looking back at traditional gender roles can provide a feeling of security.
These honor ideologies often build on an idea of protection, which speaks to a basic need for security. At the same time, we need to scrutinize this and critically examine strongman ideology. Protection may be necessary, but the key question becomes who is positioned to protect whom. It also relies on a separation between genders and assigns different values to them. This reflects a return to hard-power narratives that signal traditional strongman characteristics—protection achieved not through collaboration, but through the display of force, coercion, and strength.
You have shown that violence against women in politics often operates along a continuum that includes psychological intimidation and reputational attacks. How does this less visible violence function as an informal mechanism of democratic backsliding even in electoral regimes?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: Violence against women, as well as violence against political actors in general, operates along this continuum. But we do see that violence against political actors has gendered components.
Specifically, if we look at those gendered components and include the continuum you mentioned, it becomes important to recognize violations that occur not only physically but also psychologically and online, because the types of reputation-damaging slander that women and men encounter are fundamentally different in character. It is not that men are protected online—that is not the case—but if we examine the types of slander campaigns deployed against men and women politicians, we see that, to a much larger extent, women politicians face narratives targeting them as persons, often highly sexualized and directed at their family members, whereas men are more often, sometimes harshly and unfairly, criticized for their policy stances or political positions.
I, therefore, think it is important to demonstrate this continuum and to include psychological intimidation and reputational attacks, because they can be equally damaging to democratic procedures. They reflect a similar readiness to violate democratic integrity as physical forms of violence. Although such actions may not violate bodily integrity to the same extent as physical violence, they certainly violate personal integrity just as much. If we are concerned with threats to democracy and with disrespect for democratic procedures and institutions, I believe that violations occurring online must also be included in that continuum.
Homosocial Recruitment Sustains Male Dominance in Populist Parties
Your feminist institutionalist research highlights how informal party networks and homosocial recruitment reproduce male dominance. To what extent do populist radical right parties intensify these exclusionary mechanisms compared to mainstream parties?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: It is a difference in degree rather than in kind. In general, what we see in parties and organizations alike is that if you only or primarily network with like-minded people who tend to think, act, and behave like you, and if you mainly recognize competence in those you perceive as similar to yourself, you may be able to shape a very strong and coherent message. Collaboration may be smooth in that group, and you will be surrounded by people who agree with you.
But you will not have broad representation, you will not hear other perspectives, and you will not be challenged by—or learn from—others. Insofar as populist radical right parties tend to build more on loyalties than on representational claims, and more on personal relationships than on bureaucratic recruitment procedures, we can certainly see this type of homosocial recruitment producing male dominance there as well. It becomes a kind of celebration of like-mindedness rather than a reflection of a diversity of ideas. This plays a significant role in the masculine dominance we observe both among constituents and within these parties themselves.
Gender Equality as a Tool of Authoritarian Legitimacy
Giorgia Meloni, Prime Minister of Italy and leader of the Fratelli d’Italia party, speaks at an electoral rally ahead of the national elections in Turin, Italy, September 13, 2022. Photo: Antonello Marangi / Dreamstime.
Authoritarian regimes sometimes increase women’s descriptive representation through quotas while simultaneously restricting civil liberties. Does such symbolic inclusion risk legitimizing illiberal rule by projecting an image of progress without substantive empowerment?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: That is exactly the risk of what my colleague Per Setterberg and I have come to call autocratic genderwashing, especially when this descriptive representation does not lead to substantive representation, or when it is limited and includes only women affiliated with the government, for instance.
In many places, with Rwanda perhaps as one of the clearest examples, we do see that the introduction of gender quotas really boosts the representation of women. But if we take a closer look, we see that it mainly boosts the representation of government-affiliated women. This then leads to an even stronger electoral dominance of an already dominant authoritarian party, at the same time as it generates goodwill and international prestige, because the country is seen as favoring and promoting gender equality and women’s representation. It can present itself as modern and progressive and, interestingly enough, because of this bundling of democracy and gender, even as a democratic country.
All the while, if we look more closely at what happens behind the scenes, we also know that this is a country that keeps jailing opponents, restricting civil liberties, and remains authoritarian. So it is about taking a closer look and considering what kinds of signals they are able to send and who this reform actually favors. It can be that it favors both. We can end up in tricky situations where a gender equality reform improves conditions for women—perhaps for a select group of women, but nevertheless for women—while at the same time strengthening the hold on power of an autocratic regime.
That is, in a way, an impossible conundrum we are faced with, but we nevertheless have to recognize it. That is really what we hope to spur discussion on: not to see it as one thing or the other, or simply accept the image these regimes want to portray, but to recognize these value clashes, these conundrums, and discuss what we should do in such cases.
Democratization Does Not Automatically Deliver Gender Equality
Your work suggests democratization does not automatically produce gender equality and may even coexist with patriarchal power structures. How should scholars rethink linear assumptions linking democratic transitions to women’s rights advancements?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: In principle, if you ask most scholars, my guess would be that this linear assumption has been rethought. At the same time, it remains a very relevant question, because versions of it still persist in people’s minds. Even when asked explicitly, people may not believe in a strictly linear progression where one development automatically produces the other. As I have often noted, in democracy promotion and in discussions about how to advance democracy, the inclusion of women has become a core component.
While many would define democracy as something that cannot exist without the proper inclusion of all groups—and the inclusion of women is, of course, necessary and important for a genuine democracy—it does not follow that inclusion can compensate for a lack of competition. This is where we have often gone wrong, allowing inclusion to substitute for the absence of political competition in the eyes of the international community, for instance.
Looking back historically, if we examine the issue more closely, some cosmetic gender-equality reforms—for example, in many communist countries where equality was a prominent ideological principle and women were relatively well represented in parliament—did not make those systems democratic. We have also seen in many contexts that women played crucial roles in democratic transition movements, only to be marginalized once parties and institutions were established. The relationship is therefore far more complex than the linear assumption suggests. At the same time, the connection is not entirely absent, because inclusion remains an important principle of democracy; it is simply not the only one.
Sexual Corruption Is a Systemic, Not Isolated, Problem
Float featuring a caricature of Jeffrey Epstein and the slogan “Everyone protected the criminals and ignored the victims” at the Rosenmontag carnival parade in Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia. Photo: Elena Frolova / Dreamstime.
Your concept of “sexual corruption” reframes gendered abuses of authority as governance failures rather than isolated misconduct. Do such practices proliferate under populist or authoritarian rule where institutional accountability mechanisms are weakened?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: Yes, such practices proliferate anywhere institutional accountability mechanisms are weak. But then again, as the recent release of the Epstein files, for instance, has clearly demonstrated, these gendered abuses of authority have also proliferated in the corridors of power in predominantly democratic contexts in Europe and the United States. So it is not as simple as a matter of them and us when it comes to sexual corruption and this kind of gendered abuse of power. The problem exists everywhere.
Interestingly, it has perhaps received the most attention in areas like Sub-Saharan Africa, where there have been significant campaigns against practices such as teachers handing out grades in exchange for sex. But we have to look at different contexts and recognize that they carry different types of risks in different areas.
Insofar as your question concerns populist and authoritarian rule, these systems generally have a greater propensity to overlook institutional accountability mechanisms in favor of, as we discussed earlier, more personalistic loyalties. They are therefore certainly more at risk both of experiencing these gendered abuses and, perhaps especially, of the impunity surrounding them—of people not reporting them, of them remaining unseen, and of not being addressed.
Digital Harassment as a Tool to Exclude Women from Politics
How are online harassment, disinformation, and gendered hate speech transforming the authoritarian toolkit, particularly as methods for discouraging women’s political participation without overt repression?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: Yes, we talked a bit about this earlier when we discussed the continuum of violence, which of course includes psychological forms of violence, intimidation, and hate speech that increasingly take place online. The use of technology in this type of harassment, disinformation, and hate speech is making an already effective and efficient authoritarian toolkit even more efficient, because it gives it wider reach, causes more harm than before, and can project images and ideas that are simply not true.
The fact that these violations have increasingly moved online, or are also spread online, means that technology is now used both to spread fear and to disseminate propaganda in new ways. It also represents a move away from ideological discussion, because it often disregards ideological stances entirely, relying instead on targeted messaging and algorithms to influence different groups in a particular direction, making it more like marketing than politics in a sense. It is not about convincing people; it is about moving them in a specific direction, even if it means misinforming them. This is an area where the authoritarian toolkit is clearly expanding. For women’s political participation, as well as participation in general, we see a number of new methods emerging here.
Trumpism Normalized Anti-Gender Rhetoric Globally
Woman wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat prays at a “Stop the Steal” rally in Helena, Montana, on November 7, 2020, in support of Donald Trump and claims that the election was stolen by Joe Biden. Photo: Dreamstime.
From a comparative perspective, how do you evaluate the global impact of Donald Trump’s presidency on gender politics? Did Trumpism normalize gender-based rhetoric and policy rollbacks that other populist leaders subsequently emulated?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: It is almost hard to overestimate the impact, but nevertheless I think that what we see happening in the US did not come from nowhere. There was already a platform for this kind of discussion. Political leaders like Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğan had already drawn media attention for both sexist remarks and derogatory statements about what they called “gender ideology,” a broad concept often deployed to describe perceived threats to gender equality against traditional family values. So I think that during Donald Trump’s second term in office, he could simply follow these already existing international narratives, and he did so even in his inaugural address. He vowed to dismantle gender mainstreaming and announced an executive order for government agencies to remove statements, policies, and regulations that promote or otherwise incorporate gender ideology.
This is certainly rhetoric he could build on, and we could say that sometimes it functions mainly as a strategy to align himself with certain parts of the population while distancing himself from others. But the potential danger with these narratives, and with genderbashing in general, is that to be a credible leader, one sometimes also has to follow through. We see that in the US: it has not just stopped at rhetoric. We have also seen the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across various sectors.
This shows that he had a platform to build on and could follow suit, but when both this rhetoric and these policy rollbacks occur in the US, they also normalize these types of discussions and narratives, portraying gender not necessarily as something positive but as something potentially dangerous and harmful.
The Rise and Fall of Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy
Sweden’s feminist foreign policy was widely seen as a pioneering normative project yet was later discontinued. What does this reversal reveal about the resilience — or fragility — of gender-progressive policies amid shifting political coalitions and populist radical right pressures?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: Sweden’s feminist foreign policy is an interesting case in point because it vividly illustrates how much the world has changed in just a few years. When the feminist foreign policy was first adopted and launched in Sweden in 2014, it was the first of its kind. It was, as you said, seen as pioneering. We were in a world where being feminist was seen as a good thing and where this was something people competed over in Sweden and elsewhere, and we could also see that a lot of countries followed suit. It is a bit difficult to know exactly what constitutes a feminist foreign policy, but at least 15 or 16 other countries declared, in one way or another, that they also wanted to pursue a feminist foreign policy.
But then, just a few years later, in 2022, when we had a new government, the very first thing they did was to withdraw the feminist foreign policy, claiming that they were not against gender equality but against these labels, which were more about showcasing and using the word feminist than about actually doing things. It is interesting that the first country in the world to adopt a feminist foreign policy was also the first country in the world to withdraw it, and it is very symptomatic of the development we are seeing.
I think it goes back to many of the issues we discussed, particularly the potential danger that gender as a word, and gender equality as a norm, has been so all-encompassing. In gender mainstreaming, for instance, it has been something said to apply to all sectors, all policies, and all genders. In the success story of gender equality over the past few decades, we may have run the risk of not being specific enough, of not saying what matters and why it matters. That leaves the door open for interpretations, misinterpretations, and adaptations of what gender as this big concept actually is and could be.
That is what we are seeing now, and it explains why leaders can juxtapose using gender equality as a good thing with using gender ideology as a bad thing, oscillating between the two, because it is not necessarily clear what it is supposed to mean. That is also why it has been difficult, to some extent, to evaluate policies like the feminist foreign policy. But what we did see is that it was, at least, more than a label. It did change the way things were carried out in Swedish foreign policy, even though it was in place for only a few years.
Gender Rights as the Next Global Fault Line
And lastly, Professor Bjarnegård, looking ahead, do you anticipate that gender rights will become an increasingly central fault line in the global contest between liberal democracy and authoritarian populism — and what forms might meaningful resistance and democratic renewal take?
Professor Elin Bjarnegård: That is the million-dollar question. I do, unfortunately, anticipate that gender rights, or perhaps the strategic use of gender, will become an increasingly central fault line. But I also think that this is why the strategic component we are trying to remind people of is important, because it means that we can find areas where it may not be all about sexism, misogyny, and ideological differences, but also about how gender has become a useful, easy, and simplistic narrative to deploy strategically.
If we try to resist not by increasing polarization but rather by finding spaces for negotiation and discussion, it helps—at least it does for me—to think that part of this is strategy, not only ideological conviction. I really think the first step is to be a bit more cautious whenever we see people speaking about gender, either in the form of potential genderbashing—building this large phantasm of so-called gender ideology—or genderwashing, emphasizing all the good things a country or regime has done for gender equality. We should be careful not to fall into the trap of letting gender become a single, overarching symbol, but instead try to be specific: where and how does it matter in a particular policy area?
Sometimes we also have to be clear about the trade-offs and value clashes that are part of politics. We cannot always have everything that is good, and not everything that is good is compatible. At least for me, looking back at the past decades, it has been an unprecedentedly positive era for women’s rights, and it is in many ways remarkable that gender equality achieved such status as a global norm. But that also means we now need to take a second look in this different era and ask where we need to be more careful and more specific about why it matters, focusing on concrete issues rather than treating gender merely as a symbol, because it is important for many other reasons as well.
In this interview with the ECPS, Professor Nandini Sundar (Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University) delivers a stark assessment of India’s institutional trajectory under the BJP and its ideological parent, the RSS. Her central claim is unequivocal: “Almost every institution in this country has now collapsed, or has been subverted, in order to further the supremacist agenda.” She situates current developments within the longer history of Hindutva ideology, emphasizing the RSS’s founding goal of a Hindu supremacist state. Professor Sundar argues that a narrative of majoritarian victimhood underpins historical revisionism, institutional capture, and restrictions on academic freedom. She also highlights transnational pressures, noting that a “very active Hindutva diaspora” has targeted scholars abroad, constraining research and debate globally.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Nandini Sundar— Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, and one of India’s most prominent sociologists and a leading voice on democracy, violence, and state power—offers a stark assessment of the trajectory of Indian institutions under the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Her central claim is unequivocal: “Almost every institution in this country has now collapsed, or has been subverted, in order to further the supremacist agenda.” Situating contemporary developments within the longer history of Hindutva ideology, Professor Sundar argues that the BJP cannot be understood apart from the RSS, “an unregistered, secretive organization” founded in 1925 “to establish a Hindu supremacist state in which all others would be second-class citizens.”
At the heart of this project, she explains, lies a powerful narrative of majoritarian victimhood. RSS discourse portrays Hindus as historical victims of “800 years of colonialism,” conflating Muslim rule with British imperialism and mobilizing a sense of lost civilizational pride. This paradox—an overwhelming majority imagining itself as dispossessed—underpins a wide array of policies, from historical revisionism to institutional capture. According to Professor Sundar, the claim to represent a wronged majority translates into concrete restrictions on academic freedom through ideological appointments, funding pressures, surveillance, and curricular transformation. Universities, in particular, have been reshaped to ensure that “only our narrative, only our voice, should count,” transforming spaces once associated with pluralism into arenas of political conformity and patronage.
The interview highlights how Hindutva governance operates not only through formal state mechanisms but also through diffuse networks of affiliated organizations and vigilante actors. Student groups such as the ABVP (the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) and other RSS-linked formations function simultaneously as political mobilizers and instruments of intimidation, embedding campuses within what Professor Sundar calls a broader “ecosystem of vigilantism.” Meanwhile, democratic institutions—from courts to electoral bodies and media regulators—are portrayed as formally intact yet substantively hollowed out, enabling what she describes as the preservation of democratic form alongside the erosion of democratic substance.
Professor Sundar also draws attention to the transnational dimension of these dynamics. A “very active Hindutva diaspora,” she notes, has targeted scholars abroad, orchestrating harassment campaigns and reputational attacks that restrict academic inquiry on India globally. As a result, she warns, it has become “very difficult for anyone working on India to be able to research, write, and think freely, whether inside the country or outside the country.”
Taken together, her analysis presents Hindutva not merely as a domestic political ideology but as a comprehensive project of institutional transformation, cultural redefinition, and epistemic control. By foregrounding the links between majoritarian resentment, institutional subversion, and the policing of knowledge, this interview offers a sobering account of how democratic systems can be repurposed to sustain exclusionary rule while maintaining the appearance of constitutional continuity.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Nandini Sundar, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
The BJP Cannot Be Understood Apart from the RSS and Its Supremacist Project
A man chanting songs with a dummy cow in the background during the Golden Jubilee celebration of VHP – a Hindu nationalist organization on December 20, 2014 in Kolkata, India. Photo: Arindam Banerjee.
Professor Nandini Sundar, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: In your recent work on majoritarian resentment and the inversion of victimhood, how do you conceptualize the BJP’s claim to represent a historically wronged “majority,” and how does that claim translate into concrete restrictions on academic freedom (appointments, funding, policing, curricula)?
Professor Nandini Sundar: The BJP was founded by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an unregistered, secretive organization that has proliferated into many different fronts—education, labor, and virtually every sector, each with its own affiliated bodies. The BJP is the political wing of the RSS, which was founded exactly 100 years ago, in 1925, to establish a Hindu supremacist state in which all others would be second-class citizens.
If you look at RSS literature, it consistently portrays Hindus as victims suffering from what they call 800 years of colonialism, because they conflate periods of Muslim rule with British colonialism. This reflects a deep sense that India was ruled by Muslim rulers for many centuries and that a lost Hindu pride must now be regained. The past they invoke—often framed as a glorious Vedic age—overlooks the fact that ancient India consisted of many different communities practicing a variety of religions, rather than a unified “Hindu” civilization.
This constructed sense of victimhood, despite Hindus being the overwhelming majority—over 80 percent of the population—translates into efforts to rewrite history, for example by erasing the Mughal period. Yet it is impossible to understand India without considering the Mughal era or the various sultanates that existed from the 12th to the 18th centuries.
It also manifests in demographic anxieties, such as claims that Hindus are being overtaken by Muslims due to allegedly higher Muslim fertility rates—claims that are not supported by empirical evidence, since fertility rates among Muslims have declined sharply and vary across regions. In short, historical narratives, demographic fears, and broader perceptions of victimhood are mobilized together.
As noted, this translates first into historical revisionism. Second, in universities, vacancies have been systematically filled with individuals aligned with their ideology. This is not simply a matter of feeling victimized, because in the past, although the system was not always perfect, there was at least a perception that appointments were based on merit. If their candidates were not selected, it was often due to a lack of scholarly expertise rather than ideological exclusion.
Now, victimhood is invoked to claim that “our people” were neglected while positions were monopolized by the left. In reality, universities have been systematically reshaped to reflect their ideological preferences, and this has also become a source of patronage for their cadre.
Taken together, these developments reveal not only a discourse of victimhood but also a broader assertion of dominance—the belief that they are now the only legitimate force, and that only their narrative and voice should prevail.
Democratic Institutions Have Been Hollowed Out from Within
Indian Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi addressing the Nation on the occasion of 75th Independence Day from the ramparts of Red Fort, in Delhi on August 15, 2021.
In “Inside Modi’s Assault on Academic Freedom,” you trace how formally democratic institutions can be repurposed to discipline dissent. What are the key mechanisms—legal, bureaucratic, and vigilante—through which democratic form is preserved while democratic substance is hollowed out?
Professor Nandini Sundar: Almost every institution in this country has now collapsed, or has been subverted, in order to further the supremacist agenda. If you look at the judiciary—take the Supreme Court, for instance—we have had several BJP chief ministers issuing hate speeches. There was a recent incident involving the chief minister of Assam, which has quite a sizable Muslim minority, putting out a video of him shooting Muslims with a gun, targeting them so that you could see Muslims in the viewfinder being shot at. People took this to the Supreme Court, and the Court refused to intervene, saying that you are only targeting BJP chief ministers, and has basically refused to do anything about hate speech coming from the highest constitutional authorities. If you look at any number of judicial pronouncements in the last decade and a half, they have consistently favored the BJP.
If you look at the Election Commission, which again has been packed with chosen bureaucrats, right now they are conducting a massive exercise across the country to register voters. Historically, everybody who has been living here has been considered a voter, apart from immigrants or others. The onus used to be on the state to find and register voters. Now the onus is on voters to prove that they are citizens of this country and produce birth certificates of their parents, grandparents, their own exam mark sheets, and a whole range of certificates to show that they are indeed genuine citizens. That has led to the disenfranchisement of large numbers—hundreds of thousands of people in each state. For example, about 600,000 in one state. It is just ridiculous, because these are all actual, genuine voters who have not been able to produce the right certificates, often because they are poor, or especially women who migrate. So, you can see that elections, too, are completely controlled by the BJP.
When it comes to the media, if you look at the Modi government’s spending on advertisements, the amount that goes to favored media, and the way that media critical of the government has repeatedly had court cases slapped on them, with independent journalists arrested—every field is under attack. Universities are one major field—higher education in particular, but education more generally—where the BJP and the RSS have been attacking all conventions, all democratic procedures, and installing their own people.
Precarity in Universities Is Undermining Academic Freedom
How do budget cuts, contractualization, and precaritization in higher education function as governance tools—producing compliance not only through ideology, but also through material dependence and career risk?
Professor Nandini Sundar: There’s been a change in the way universities are funded. Many university colleges are being asked to go autonomous, which means that they will be responsible for raising their own funding. This increases fees for students, and at the same time, minority students—say Muslims and Christians who were receiving fellowships—have seen those fellowships cut down. So, there has been a general reduction in student fellowships.
In terms of faculty recruitment, we see that even earlier there were a number of precarious positions—contractual teachers—and that still continues quite widely across private colleges. Precarious teachers, those without fixed contracts, obviously find it hard to be critical of anything that is going on and hard to teach freely. But you also see that now, whenever the precarity issue among teachers has been addressed, those positions have been filled with their own people.
So, in either situation, both among students and among faculty, contractualization and the reduction of fellowships are making it difficult for there to be a strong autonomous voice from students and faculty.
Terror Laws Are Weaponized Against Democratic Protest
Protest against the CAA and NRC at Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University (BAMU), Aurangabad, Maharashtra, India, as students and citizens demonstrate in defense of constitutional rights. Photo: Imran Shaikh.
Many accounts emphasize arrests, sedition/terror charges, and prolonged pre-trial detention. Analytically, how should we understand “process as punishment” as a populist-authoritarian technique of rule in India?
Professor Nandini Sundar: Absolutely. The whole judicial system is designed for process without punishment. If you take the case of Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid, two student leaders who have been arrested for over five years now without the case even coming to trial. The charges relate to their involvement in a movement for equal citizenship. In 2019, the government passed an act that would grant citizenship to refugees from every other country except Pakistan and Bangladesh, and to every other religion except Islam. This was also seen as the first step toward disenfranchising Indian Muslims, and there was a massive protest against it—a huge, peaceful, democratic protest, predominantly led by women in many parts of the country, but especially in Delhi.
These students, both from JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) and from Jamia (Jamia Millia Islamia), were involved in this democratic protest, and it was actually a very powerful democratic moment in this country’s history. But many students—predominantly Muslim students—were arrested. There were many people who took part in that protest, Muslims and Hindus, but only the Muslim students were arrested, and they have been in jail for the last five years. We have recorded speeches from them talking about the need for unity, upholding the Constitution, and love, yet they have been accused under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which deals with terror.
They have been accused of terror conspiracies, which is completely ludicrous. The case has not even come to trial, and the evidence against them is completely flimsy. But everyone knows that they are being kept in jail because they are articulate student leaders who had a democratic vision for this country.
Campuses Are Embedded in a Wider Ecosystem of Vigilantism
How do you interpret the role of affiliated organizations (student wings, vigilante groups, informal “sentiment” enforcers) in expanding state capacity to intimidate universities while maintaining deniable distance?
Professor Nandini Sundar: The RSS has the biggest student wing in the whole country, the ABVP, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, which has been engaged in a number of attacks on other student organizations. It has also attacked various seminars that have gone against BJP ideology. It functions both as a student wing—providing the kind of membership and mobilization for ordinary student activities that any student organization does—and as a vigilante force.
There are also a number of other fronts of the RSS—the Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and various other wings—which intimidate students and faculty on campuses. This is part of a more generalized surge in vigilantism, as vigilantes have been attacking Muslim traders, Muslims transporting cattle across state boundaries, Muslim shopkeepers, and Christian pastors. There is a whole range of vigilante forces that the RSS tacitly supports and grants immunity and impunity. So, the university is not free of this; it is completely embedded in that wider ecosystem of vigilantism.
Universities Modeling Diversity Became Central Adversaries
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a public central university in New Delhi, India. Photo: Mrinal Pal.
Why do institutions like JNU become such central targets in majoritarian projects? Is it their historical role in mass politics, their social composition, their epistemic authority—or the way they model pluralism?
Professor Nandini Sundar: All of the above, I should say. Many universities in India were set up as part of a nationalist project. For instance, Jamia, which was established before independence, was founded by nationalist leaders to provide an alternative form of education to the British colonial model, and it has had a very long, rich tradition of scholarship and student mobilization.
JNU was set up in the 1970s on a very distinct model of higher education, where the effort was to bring in students from all across the country, especially from underserved regions. It had an extremely interesting system of deprivation points, whereby students from backward regions would receive extra marks in addition to whatever they obtained in the entrance test. In this way, it managed to achieve a real plurality of students from across the country. They also had excellent faculty, and some departments were truly the best in the country, known for their academic excellence. Even today, it remains one of the strongest universities academically in India.
Partly because of this academic excellence and the pluralism of its students, JNU also developed a very strong left tradition. It is one place where left student unions have consistently won student elections, and it has had a distinctive style of politics in which debates on a wide range of national issues would continue late into the night, alongside campus concerns such as hostel bills, food, accommodation, and fees. So, it has been a very unusual kind of university, an iconic institution for liberal-left education, and that was something the BJP felt it had to attack and destroy.
Rewriting the Past to Control the Nation’s Narrative
How do textbook “rationalization” and selective historical erasure operate as a struggle over national temporality—who gets to narrate the past, and who is authorized to speak for the nation?
Professor Nandini Sundar: The RSS thinks that it is authorized to speak for the nation, and since it has control over the government and textbooks—because under the Indian system education is a matter both for the central (federal) government and for the states—there are also some boards that operate nationally, in addition to the state boards. So, the major producer of textbooks in India is the NCERT, the National Council of Educational Research and Training, which produces textbooks that are then used by these different boards or even used by state boards as models.
What the BJP has been doing is systematically changing these NCERT textbooks. For instance, removing references to caste, removing all traces of Mughal history from middle school textbooks, and giving more space to certain false narratives that promote Hindu rulers at the expense of others. So, it has huge power. I mean, the central government has enormous power to rewrite historical narratives. It is also, if you look at other fields—archaeology, for instance—it underplays the contributions of the South in historical research.
I don’t know how to put it, but it is enormously powerful in rewriting history and rewriting sociology, rewriting politics—everything, really.
National Security as a Catch-All Tool of Suppression
The state’s framing of “internal affairs,” “sensitive issues,” and “national security” often appears deliberately expansive. What does this elasticity reveal about authoritarian boundary-making in the knowledge sphere?
Professor Nandini Sundar: It also reveals something about authoritarian fragility. Just to give you a very recent example.The Wire, which is a news portal, ran a 52-second clip showing Prime Minister Modi running away from Parliament. This was during a debate in Parliament about how he had not taken a resolute stand when the Chinese were coming into India in 2020, and then he claimed that women MPs were threatening to bite him, and that’s why he didn’t attend Parliament. So, this was just a somewhat humorous video about how Modi was supposedly scared of being bitten by women MPs. The Wire’s Instagram page was shut down, there was a privilege motion against them from Parliament, and it was described as a national security issue. Now, there was nothing remotely related to national security about a small cartoon of Modi running away from women MPs.
But anything and everything can be described as a national security issue. People are being arrested, especially journalists in Kashmir, or students in Kashmir, who are really living under a state of terror. It is such a loosely applied concept, and the problem is that the law puts the onus squarely on the person who is accused under such laws. It is very hard to get bail under UAPA (Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act), which is why people like Umar and Sharjeel and other human rights activists in what is called the BK16 case (the 16 individuals locked up without a trial in the Bhima Koregaon case. S.G.), or across the country more generally, are finding it very difficult to get out of this, because they are accused under national security acts.
So, it is a very expansive definition. It is very, very open to abuse, and these laws should have no place in any democracy.
Food, Caste, and Control under Hindutva Governance
Volunteers of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) on Vijyadashmi festival, a large gathering or annual meeting during Ramanavami a Hindu festival in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh on October 19, 2018. Photo: Pradeep Gaurs.
Beyond overt ideological control, what is the relationship between Hindutva governance and everyday disciplinary practices (food regimes, hostel rules, policing intimacy), and how do these practices intersect with gendered and caste-based hierarchies?
Professor Nandini Sundar: One of the things that the RSS, the Hindutva regime, has been trying to promote is the idea that India is a vegetarian country, and that people who eat meat are in some way inferior or should not be eating meat. They have been trying to associate that with Muslims and use it to target Muslims or Dalits, who were formerly called untouchables and who are still treated very badly and exploited by the system.
In fact, about 80% of India is non-vegetarian. But this has become a big issue in certain hostels. For instance, some of the Indian Institutes of Technology have had separate messes in hostels for vegetarians and non-vegetarians. In the past, people were free to eat whatever they wanted, and they could sit together and eat, but this kind of segregation creates a hierarchical divide in which those who eat pure vegetarian food are seen as somehow superior, because historically it has also been a caste issue.
There have been student movements against this segregation and hierarchy, but they have again been suppressed by the administration. A lot of what the Hindutva regime is doing is feeding into existing caste and religious prejudices, aggravating them, and creating a hierarchy in which Hindu upper-caste voices are seen as representing the whole nation.
Just another example: for some strange reason—because it is inconceivable that this government would do anything that progressive—the University Grants Commission (UGC), which governs the higher education space, issued rules mandating equity for students from historically discriminated backgrounds, such as Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, minorities, and OBCs (The Other Backward Classes). There was a huge protest against this by upper-caste students, who have been coming out on the streets saying that they are under threat and in danger from this equity movement. The Supreme Court has stayed the equity regulations, and the BJP government is really happy, because it has got the Supreme Court to do so. On the one hand, they put out these UGC equity regulations, but they actually did not want to implement them; their constituency of upper-caste people is against it, and fortunately for them, it has been stayed by the Supreme Court.
So, there is a very neat dovetailing between Hindutva upper-caste ideology and the various practices of this government.
Masculinist Power and the Politics of ‘Teaching a Lesson’
How do masculinist styles of leadership and majoritarian “strength” narratives shape state behavior toward universities—especially in the public performance of punishment, humiliation, and “teaching a lesson”?
Professor Nandini Sundar: It is a very masculinist ideology, and historically the RSS did not have room for women as part of its cadre; there was a separate women’s wing.
If you look at the state of Kashmir, for instance, and education in Kashmir—higher education in particular—the entire process has been about this. In 2019, the state of Jammu and Kashmir was stripped of its constitutional autonomy and reduced from a state to a union territory. The whole thing was couched in terms of teaching them a lesson, because it was seen as a source of terrorism, since it is the only Muslim-majority state in India, and there was a conscious effort to show them their place.
When it comes to universities, Kashmiri students in different parts of the country have been especially targeted and victimized, and again this is very much part of showing Muslims their place, showing Kashmiris their place in India. When it comes to women, there are many more subtle ways in which women have been affected. If you look at the entrance exams, thanks to a new system of multiple-choice entrance exams, the number of women entering colleges has dramatically declined. Even if the government officially says that its policy is inclusive of women studying, in fact many of its practical policies discriminate against women.
People wait in queues to cast votes at a polling station during the 3rd phase of Lok Sabha polls, in Guwahati, India on May 7, 2024. Photo: Hafiz Ahmed.
Targeting Scholars Abroad: Hindutva’s Reach Beyond India
To what extent do you see an externalization of repression—through harassment campaigns, institutional pressure, and reputational attacks—aimed at shaping scholarship on India outside India?
Professor Nandini Sundar: There’s a very active Hindutva diaspora that has been targeting academics who work on India in the US, the UK, and Europe. There was this conference called Dismantling Hindutva some years ago, where the active Hindutva diaspora went after the organizers of the conference. They flooded universities with so much hate mail against faculty members who were part of this conference that some of their servers collapsed.
It is really an organized, very virulent Hindutva diaspora, especially in the US, which has links with Zionists and follows the same sorts of procedures as some of the American far right. Unfortunately for them, the American far right, because they are Christian fundamentalists, has no regard for Hindu fundamentalists, so they are not really sure where they stand now. But they are just a very vicious, virulent lot when it comes to attacking people who are working on India.
For instance, there is an American historian called Audrey Truschke, who writes on Aurangzeb, the last Mughal emperor, and she has been relentlessly attacked. One could name various other people who have been singled out and attacked. The Indian government has also denied visas to a lot of academics working on India. This is really kind of inexplicable, because some of these academics have hugely contributed to the understanding of subjects the government itself promotes. For instance, there is a historian who works on Hindi. Now, the BJP government is insistent that everybody in the country should speak Hindi, that everybody should replace their own languages and know Hindi, yet this historian, who has contributed greatly to the understanding and study of Hindi, was denied a visa. There is absolutely no sense in this, even from their own perspective, because it is not like she was studying anything they would consider anti-national; she was studying Hindi literature.
So, it has become very difficult for anyone working on India to be able to research, write, and think freely, whether inside the country or outside the country.
Recasting the Past for Power
How has the language of decolonization and cultural authenticity been retooled to delegitimate critique—both within India and in global academia—while recoding censorship as civilizational self-defense?
Professor Nandini Sundar: That’s a really good question, because if you look at some of these Hindutva ideologues, they’ve adopted the language of decoloniality to claim that whatever has been done in Indian history, for instance, is colonial because it does not go back to ancient Hindu roots or does not adopt an Indic perspective.
In fact, the BJP or the RSS version of history is itself following a completely colonial template. They have adopted a periodization of Indian history based on Hindu, Muslim, and British India, which is a colonial construct, and that is what they have been following in the name of decolonization.
If you look at one major thrust of their programs, it has been to develop what they call Indic knowledge systems. By Indic knowledge systems, they basically mean Hindu and Vedic knowledge systems. This is something they have been pushing in every syllabus revision process, along with organizing a wide variety of seminars on Indic or Indigenous knowledge systems.
They have actually ignored all the work that has been done over the years, because scholars have already been working on different versions of Indian history and Indian society from a variety of perspectives, many of them indigenous. So, to say that they are coming up with some new framework is actually reinventing the colonial wheel while at the same time claiming that they are adopting some kind of great decolonial epistemology.
A Global Crisis of Academic Freedom Requires Collective Resistance
And lastly, Professor Sundar, given the risks of speaking, organizing, and even researching “sensitive” themes, what forms of collective strategy (professional associations, transnational solidarity, union politics, legal defense infrastructures) do you see as most effective—and what ethical obligations do scholars outside India have in confronting these dynamics without reproducing paternalistic frames?
Professor Nandini Sundar: I don’t think it is about scholars outside India or inside India. I think that scholars across the world are now facing similar threats, whether in Turkey, the US, or Europe. We are all being censored. We are all facing the Palestinian exception—nobody can talk about Palestine or teach about Palestine, not just in the US but in Germany and everywhere.
So, I don’t think there are any easy answers as to what can be done. We are all facing similar kinds of issues, so we need to share across countries how people have dealt with this, and work out ways in which we can collectively keep the university going as a space for research and critical thinking, and above all for teaching freely.
And I have hope that students—not the ABVP type, but ordinary students—are keen and curious about what is actually happening in the world, and I have great hope that students will be the ones who keep the university going. That is something that I think we will all have to face collectively, together across the world.
Professor Benjamin Carter Hett, a leading historian of Nazi Germany at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, joins ECPS to reflect on the promises—and pitfalls—of historical analogy in an age of democratic stress. Grounded in his research on Weimar collapse and authoritarian mobilization, Professor Hett argues that humiliation remains a key driver of populist politics, pointing to Trump’s insistence, “I am your retribution,” as a revealing signal of grievance politics. He also draws sharp structural parallels between Nazi attacks on “the system” and contemporary slogans such as “the swamp,” which work to delegitimize democracy from within. Yet Professor Hett resists false equivalence: Trump, he emphasizes, is “vastly less astute and vastly less ruthless than Hitler,” and lacks “any compelling ideological vision,” remaining “totally improvisatory.” The interview probes elite accommodation, “reality deficits,” and backlash dynamics.
In an era increasingly shaped by populist insurgencies, democratic erosion, and polarized historical analogies, few scholars are better positioned to assess the uses—and abuses—of the past than Professor Benjamin Carter Hett. A leading historian of Nazi Germany at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, Professor Hett has devoted his career to analyzing how democratic systems collapse from within. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), he reflects on the dynamics of authoritarian mobilization, the politics of grievance, and the limits of historical comparison—culminating in his striking assessment that “Trump is, of course, vastly less astute and vastly less ruthless than Hitler.”
Professor Hett’s analysis begins not with institutions but with emotions. Drawing on his research into the Nazi rise to power, he argues that humiliation—rather than ideology alone—often supplies the combustible fuel of authoritarian movements. A “core explanation” for Nazism’s ascent, he explains, was a widespread perception among supporters that they had been “humiliated by domestic elites” and by the settlement of World War I. He sees echoes of this dynamic today: “Substantial segments of the electorate in the United States and in European countries appear to be experiencing a sense of humiliation reminiscent of that felt by many Germans in the interwar period.” Trump’s campaign rhetoric, especially the promise “I am your retribution,” exemplifies how perceived loss of status can be politically weaponized.
Yet the interview’s central theme—highlighted by its title—is not crude equivalence but analytical differentiation. Professor Hett repeatedly underscores that, despite structural parallels, Trump lacks the strategic capacity and ideological coherence that made Hitler historically transformative. Whereas Nazism fused charismatic authority with a totalizing worldview—what Nazis called “the Idea”—Trumpism appears improvisational, transactional, and deeply personalist. This distinction, Professor Hett suggests, limits its authoritarian potential. Trump, he argues, possesses “no compelling ideological vision behind him” and is “totally improvisatory,” driven more by a desire for adulation and material reward than by a programmatic project of domination.
The interview also revisits Professor Hett’s influential argument that democratic breakdown can stem from “hollow victory” as well as defeat. Despite America’s triumph in the Cold War, many citizens experienced globalization, automation, and rising inequality as loss rather than success, producing resentment analogous to the disillusionment that followed World War I. Such grievances, once reframed as cultural humiliation rather than economic hardship, become fertile ground for populist mobilization.
Equally significant is Professor Hett’s discussion of elite miscalculation. Just as conservative elites in Weimar believed they could harness Hitler’s popularity, many contemporary political and economic actors initially treated Trump as a manageable aberration. History, he warns, shows how such bargains can backfire—even when the leader in question is less capable than his predecessors.
Ultimately, Professor Hett’s cautiously optimistic conclusion is that the very differences highlighted in the title—Trump’s relative lack of ruthlessness, ideological depth, and strategic discipline—may also constitute democracy’s resilience. Historical patterns may rhyme, he suggests, but they do not mechanically repeat.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Benjamin Carter Hett, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
Humiliation as the Hidden Engine of Authoritarian Politics
A copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle), displayed alongside a portrait of the author at the Technology, Aviation and Military Museum in Sinsheim, Germany. Photo: Gepapix | Dreamstime.
Professor Benjamin Carter Hett, thank you so much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: In “The Power of Grievance,” you frame humiliation as the animating force behind authoritarian mobilization. How does this concept refine—or challenge—more institutional explanations of democratic breakdown in The Death of Democracy, particularly in the US case where institutions remain formally intact?
Professor Benjamin C. Hett: Let me begin by saying that I am primarily a historian and a scholar of 20th-century Germany, particularly of the rise of the Nazis. From extensive research on the Nazis’ ascent in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s—I’ve written three books on the subject, among other works—I came to the conclusion that a core explanation for their rise was a widespread sense of humiliation among their constituency: humiliation at the hands of domestic elites, humiliation imposed by the victorious Allies of World War I, and so on.
Given what I do for a living, and the times we are living in, I am often asked about parallels between that historical episode and contemporary developments. The more I examined current events and read widely on American and European politics today, the more I felt that the explanation for much of what is happening now is broadly similar. Substantial segments of the electorate in the United States and in European countries appear to be experiencing a sense of humiliation reminiscent of that felt by many Germans in the interwar period.
As for how this perspective modifies the outlook: there are, of course, countless possible explanations for the rise of authoritarianism. Some are economic-structural, others political, social-psychological, or cultural—suggesting that certain societies may be predisposed to particular forms of authoritarian politics. Nothing in scholarship is ever absolute, and elements of all these factors are likely present in any given case where authoritarianism gains electoral traction.
But, for what it is worth, I am persuaded that if you return to what politicians are actually saying to people—and examine the resulting voting behavior in context—you repeatedly encounter the theme of humiliation. There are many examples we could discuss, but one is particularly telling: the fact that Trump campaigned so heavily on the claim, “I am your retribution.” What do his voters need retribution for? It suggests that they feel they have experienced a significant degree of humiliation in recent years or decades. I think there are many other such examples, but that one captures the point quite clearly.
From ‘The System’ to ‘The Swamp’: Recycling Anti-Democratic Rhetoric
Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign rally at the Phoenix Convention Center, where thousands gathered to hear him speak as protesters demonstrated outside. Photo: Danny Raustadt.
You show how Nazi contempt for “the system” delegitimized Weimar democracy from within. To what extent do contemporary slogans such as “the swamp” or “deep state” perform a structurally similar function in Trumpism, even without an explicitly revolutionary ideology?
Professor Benjamin C. Hett: That’s a great point, and you’re quite right, too, about the lack of an explicitly revolutionary ideology. But when Trump talks about draining the swamp and campaigns on that, it is doing exactly—indeed 100% of what Nazi rhetoric in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s did.
Just to give you an example, the Nazis always talked about “the system,” a kind of capital-S System. “The System” was their code word for Weimar democracy, which they worked very hard to paint as corrupt and weak, in very much the sort of Trump-like “swamp” rhetoric they used. Nazi propaganda would, for instance, always highlight what they saw as corruption by the democratic parties, especially by the Social Democrats, the dominant democratic party at that time. They would emphasize corruption, weakness, dysfunction, and the incompetence of democracy, always using corruption as a wedge to say: look how this system is paying off fat cats and criminals; look how this system stands behind war profiteers and gangsters. This is a fundamentally illegitimate system; therefore, you should turn to us, because we represent, in their words, cleanliness and decency.
And Trump makes exactly the same argument. Despite the—to put it mildly—rather glaring corruption of his administration, which probably even outdoes the Nazis in corruption (and the Nazis were plenty corrupt), the rhetoric is just that: rhetoric that conceals, in both cases, a much more profound kind of corruption.
Why Cold War Triumph Did Not Prevent Democratic Discontent
You emphasize that authoritarian grievance can emerge not only from defeat but also from “hollow victory.” How analytically useful is this idea for understanding American populism, given that the US emerged as the undisputed Cold War victor?
Professor Benjamin C. Hett: One thing I think is a bit of a puzzle is why the United States could have achieved, in a sense, a kind of unmitigated triumph at the end of the Cold War, and yet have pretty quickly, in historical time after the end of the Cold War, fallen prey to a movement like Trump’s—a demagogic campaign of resentment that seems to speak to people who feel they are losing from the system. So, for a historian like me, the question arises: this actually looks rather like the 1920s, an increasingly dark time that followed a seemingly spectacular democratic triumph. So, what is it about that?
If you look a little more closely, you find that, for many Americans, the end of the Cold War did not deliver anything that looked like a victory. This is largely due to economic orthodoxy and, to some extent, technological change, which have taken hold since the end of the Cold War. The two things combined—the move to greater globalization, which for many Americans meant offshoring jobs and/or losing domestic jobs in competition with foreign manufacturers—and, coupled with that, technological change, including increasing automation of the workplace. God only knows what AI is going to do to all of us, but there has been a narrative of technological change replacing jobs for some decades now.
What this has done is essentially deprive the vast majority of Americans of real economic gains over a period of the last 50 years. I think it has become acute since the 1990s, but it has been going on since the 1970s. There is quite clear data on this, and it is breathtaking that, for 99% of Americans, there has been no real gain in income or net worth since the 1970s, whereas the top 1% has achieved spectacular gains in income over the same period. And this is a result of politics. It is not anything inevitable in the economic order; it is a result of political decisions that have been made. Although many people who vote for Trump do not really know or understand this, they experience its effects, and that creates a kind of justifiable anger.
But the subtle point—and this is one of the arguments of my piece—is that it then becomes, politically, not exactly a literal economic grievance, because it gets transmuted into something else. What people receive is the message: my country, my society, does not care about me. My society does not pay attention to me; it neglects my interests. There is an elite interest that is taking precedence. That mood has increasingly taken hold in America since the 1990s, at a time when we should have been basking in democratic triumph, but it has not worked that way.
Much as—and here there is a very close parallel again—at the end of World War I, similar things happened. Following a democratic victory, various kinds of economic crises beset the Western democracies. To give an illustrative quote, I remember reading something a British veteran of World War I said, I think sometime in the 1920s: “We were promised homes for heroes at the end of World War I.” This was an election promise by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1918, when he proposed a massive housing program for returning veterans. “So, we were promised homes for heroes. Well, actually, it took a hero to live in it. I would never fight for my country again.” That speaks exactly to the kind of anger—what I call a hollow victory—that Americans have experienced in large numbers since the end of the Cold War.
Hostility to Globalization, Alliance with Wealth
Protesters demonstrate against Elon Musk and DOGE over cuts to government funding outside a Tesla showroom in New York City, March 1, 2025. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your work highlights how fascist movements selectively appropriated anti-capitalist and socialist rhetoric. How should scholars interpret Trumpism’s simultaneous hostility to globalization and embrace of oligarchic capitalism without collapsing the analogy into false equivalence?
Professor Benjamin C. Hett: In the historical case of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, the scholar who has put this most clearly and effectively is the great Robert Paxton, who has a terrific book called The Anatomy of Fascism. What Professor Paxton says, quite astutely, is that fascist movements historically moved into the political space where there was room for them, making whatever alliances worked to move them forward at that moment. In the earlier days—you see this with Mussolini in the very early phase of Italian fascism, and with Hitler a few years later—the available space was one of resentment, especially among working- or lower-middle-class people, about the nature of the economic order, with many feeling they were being shafted by a certain kind of capitalism.
So, the Nazis rhetorically moved into that space and positioned themselves as anti-capitalists, some more sincerely than others. There were, weirdly enough—you may have heard the term—we sometimes speak of “left-wing Nazis,” those who took anti-capitalism and anti-elitism more seriously. Hitler was not one of those people; he was what we call a right-wing Nazi. But he was willing to let the left-wing Nazis rhetorically have some leash, as it was politically useful. And then, of course, famously later, he had them all murdered in 1934, which shows what he really thought of that.
Trump is doing something similar without quite realizing it. What is interesting about Trump is that he is so extraordinarily stupid and tactically inept that he does these things on a very obvious level. He is tactically astute enough, usually, to figure out what he can say that will be electorally successful, but he is in no way a strategic thinker capable of putting it into any coherent package. So, with Trump you get, day by day, whatever has just passed through his mind. Especially when he was campaigning, particularly in 2016, you heard not only anti-globalization but quite directly anti-capitalist rhetoric from him.
But, of course Trump is also extremely corrupt, so once in power he wants to find ways for people to give him money. In practice, he cozies up to tech moguls and others; for example, Jeff Bezos giving $40 million for that awful movie about Melania, or Trump receiving a $400 million jet from Qatar. It is sort of mind-blowing.
Trump is both so corrupt and so devoid of tactical sense—and, I guess, of any sense of tact or taste—that he simply does all these things out in the open. So, you see it extremely clearly with Trump. You can see similar patterns with Hitler and Mussolini, though they were astute enough to slightly conceal the extent of their hypocrisy about anti-capitalism. With Trump, what you see is what you get, and what you get is what you see. It is all out there. But the basic tactical and rhetorical pattern is very much the same.
The Illusion of Control: When Elites Enable Authoritarianism
In Weimar Germany, conservative elites believed they could control Hitler. Do you see comparable patterns among US political, judicial, or economic elites who initially treated Trump as a manageable aberration rather than a systemic threat?
Professor Benjamin C. Hett: Yes, very much. Perhaps a bit less now than some years ago. This was particularly an issue in Trump’s first term in office. Back then, I wrote a book called The Death of Democracy, which is actually an account of the Nazis’ rise to power. One of the main themes in that book is that there was a sort of Faustian bargain between what you might call the establishment elites in Weimar Germany—particularly business elites and military elites—who did not like Hitler, did not like his party, and did not respect it, but couldn’t help noticing that Hitler got votes. Especially by 1932, he was getting about a third of the votes, and his party was by far the biggest in terms of electoral support. So, these elites were astute enough to think this was maybe something they could use.
They could make a deal with him, arrange for his electoral constituency to come in behind them, and that would advance their agenda—an agenda of deregulation and anti-union approaches for business, and an agenda of an arms buildup for the armed forces. Notoriously—probably no one needs me to tell them this—that deal didn’t work out very well, because many of these elite gentlemen profoundly underestimated Hitler. They underestimated his cunning and his ruthlessness. It took arguably not much more than about four weeks for them to be captured by him in power and then pushed aside from all influence.
When I wrote my book—it came out in 2018—although I never mention Trump or current politics anywhere in it, there is meant to be a rather loud subtext, and I’m pretty sure no one who has read the book has missed it. It is about parallels, and the parallel I thought was strongest and most telling was exactly this kind of elite accommodation of a dangerous and potentially authoritarian political movement that they believed would advance their own agenda and that they could control. I had a feeling the same thing would happen—that Trump would overwhelm them. Trump is, of course, vastly less astute and vastly less ruthless than Hitler. But much of the same thing has, in fact, happened. He has basically destroyed the Republican Party as an actual conservative party. There are virtually no moderate Republicans left anymore, certainly at the congressional level.
It has become very much his party, because those elites, in fact, failed to control him. They have failed to control him even more, certainly in his second term. He has done things that most elites don’t want, like tariffs and many other policies. No one is happy about his threats to Greenland; no conventional conservative is happy about his downgrading of America’s alliances or trade interests, but they simply can’t control him anymore.
I do think at least they are starting to become aware of it. There is less self-delusion among American elites now about what Trump is. It’s kind of too late. If we are going to stop this guy from doing more damage, it is not going to be the business elites who do it. We’ve seen in Minneapolis who is going to do it, but that is another question.
From the Big Lie to Algorithmic Disinformation
You describe the Weimar Republic as suffering from a fatal “reality deficit.” How does this concept translate into an era of algorithmic misinformation, partisan epistemologies, and the collapse of shared factual baselines?
Professor Benjamin C. Hett: It’s a great question. One of the things that I say a lot—and I don’t know if anyone ever agrees with me, and it’s fine if no one does—but as a historian, I tend to think there is actually never anything really new. The environment we live in of social media– and internet-driven disinformation is not incredibly new. You don’t need the internet for that. As Exhibit A for my contention, I would point to the Weimar Republic, which had a very vigorous media environment.
You see different figures, and it depends how you count them, but there were something like 40 or 50 daily papers in Berlin in the 1920s, covering the whole political spectrum—from communist to Nazi and everything in between. There was also pioneering radio, films—there were many ways for information to circulate. Posters were a very big deal. In my book The Death of Democracy, I discuss how the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels placed enormous emphasis on posters, saying, “Our election campaign is going to be all about posters.” So, there were all these ways to disseminate information.
And just because something appears in a newspaper does not mean it is not disinformation, and there was plenty of that in Weimar. A prime example is what was called, even then, the Big Lie: the idea that Germany did not really lose World War I—that Germany was on the verge of victory when cowardly, treasonous politicians, liberals, and socialists betrayed the country by surrendering to the Allies. This narrative originated with military leaders such as Field Marshal Hindenburg and General Ludendorff and was then eagerly adopted by figures like Hitler.
There are striking parallels here to Trump’s narrative about the 2020 election, claiming he did not really lose but was betrayed by a democratic establishment. That narrative has been widely circulated, and many Republicans and people on the American right believe it. It has effectively become a loyalty test: if you are to play any role in Trump’s party or administration, you must affirm that he actually won the 2020 election.
Similarly, perhaps half of Germans in the 1920s and 1930s believed that Germany had been on the verge of winning World War I—which is nonsense to exactly the same extent that it is nonsense to claim Trump won the 2020 election. Germany was, in fact, being militarily crushed when the armistice was signed in 1918.
So that Big Lie spread extremely effectively using the media technologies of the time. If the internet had existed then, it is hard to imagine it being more effective than what already existed in propagating that narrative. There is obviously an advantage today in the speed with which electronic communication spreads, but I do not think it represents a profound, fundamental difference from the past.
I do think America today is also a country suffering from a massive reality deficit, much as Weimar did in the 1920s, and for many of the same reasons: dishonest politicians exploiting the media available to them. In that sense, it is very much the same.
Personalist Power Without a Guiding Doctrine
Hitler combined charismatic authority with a coherent—if grotesque—ideological worldview. Trumpism appears far more improvisational and transactional. Does this weaken the authoritarian analogy, or does it suggest a more flexible and therefore resilient form of personalist rule?
Professor Benjamin C. Hett: Probably both, but I’m one of those people who, on these issues, is more of a glass-half-full than a glass-half-empty type. I am, for a number of reasons, fairly optimistic about the longer-term prospects of American democracy. I think we will get through Trump and continue operating as a democracy. One reason for that is exactly your point: It weakens Trump’s ability to be an effective authoritarian that he has no compelling ideological vision behind him. He is, as you put it, exactly right—totally improvisatory.
Part of what made Hitler successful—certainly with his base, his core followers who became the spine of his regime—was his ability to convince them that he was the spokesperson for a powerful idea. The Nazis talked about “the Idea” all the time, a kind of capital-I, the Idea. They internalized it deeply, and that motivated a great deal of their conduct. There is nothing remotely comparable with Trump.
As a matter of fact, the distinguished historian Timothy Snyder wrote a piece sometime last fall that I thought was spot on. He made this point, noting that one of the differences between Trump and Hitler is that Hitler had a sweeping, deeply embedded, fairly all-encompassing ideological worldview. That, in a sense, not only attracted followers but also gave a blueprint for his actions and pushed him toward what he ultimately did.
Trump has nothing remotely like that. Trump basically—among his many attributes is a shockingly profound inferiority complex—just wants to be flattered all the time. He wants to ride around in Air Force One, and he wants people to give him money. It does not go much farther than that. Honestly, for Trump, that is it. Hitler—though I do not think anyone would suggest I am advocating for him—did have a sweeping ideological vision that he worked very hard to fulfill. Trump does not. As I said, Trump wants to ride around on Air Force One, be told he is wonderful, and be given money. Ultimately, that is not something you can really package as a compelling ideology for which people would be willing to die.
The US Supreme Court building at dusk, Washington, DC. Photo: Gary Blakeley.
Drawing on your research into emergency decrees and legal normalization under Nazism, how should we interpret contemporary efforts to weaponize prosecutions, executive orders, or “law-and-order” rhetoric in ostensibly constitutional systems?
Professor Benjamin C. Hett: That has definitely been a feature of Trump’s second term. This kind of comes back to what he said about how he would be retribution for his followers. I think what he really means is that he will be retribution for himself. So, we have obviously seen targeted prosecutions of people that Trump feels have insulted him or hurt him in some way.
There is a weak parallel here to Hitler, in the sense that in the famous event of the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, when, as I mentioned earlier, Hitler had a number of people who could be seen as left-wing Nazis murdered, he also, on the same occasion, had murdered a number of people against whom he had some particular kind of grudge, going back in some cases a decade or more. He had been holding these grudges for a while. Trump is like that, except here is where we get to the difference, which is really important.
We still, basically, in America, have a democracy. We still basically have a legal system, although Trump is trying to erode it and is eroding it to an extent, but it is still basically functioning. So, he has to try to prosecute these people through the legal system, and we have seen that it does not work very well, because the legal system basically takes his efforts to corrupt it and spits them out. There have been any number of such cases. He keeps bringing, or getting his Justice Department to bring, charges against people like the former FBI Director Comey or the New York State Attorney General Letitia James. Grand juries that need to approve an indictment will not approve them, or judges will throw them out. Just yesterday, a judge threw out a case against Senator Mark Kelly, who is in a legal battle with the Defense Secretary, Hegseth, for things that he said in a video. Again, the justice system is basically rejecting these efforts. If Trump were more Hitlerian, if he were more ruthless, he would find ways to get these people anyway, but he is not doing that.
The system is, in a sense, holding against his efforts to abuse it. So, I think, so far, so good on that. I mean, what he is doing is horrific. His Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is the most corrupt and probably most incompetent Attorney General the United States has ever had, and she just does whatever he wants her to do. But it is failing. Something we need to keep in mind about Trump is that he does any number of awful things, but most of the awful things he does fail, and they fail because they run up against something in American society that resists them, as in this case with the justice system.
Public Resistance and the Constraints on Authoritarian Consolidation
Weimar politics were marked by overt paramilitary violence, whereas contemporary American politics often operates through a mix of performative menace and state-sanctioned coercion, including the expanded mobilization of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the deployment of the National Guard in ways critics describe as intimidating or terrorizing civilian populations. In your view, how much actual violence—or credible threat of violence exercised through formal state institutions—is necessary for authoritarian consolidation in a mature media democracy?
Professor Benjamin C. Hett: The answer is lots. And here again, I’m sort of a glass-half-full guy. Let me say that there is no one in this country who is more angry than I am about ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, basically a police agency, or the somewhat similar organization Customs and Border Patrol, which also has police officers of a sort that have been on the ground, notably in the last month or so in Minneapolis. There is no one who abhors that more than I do or is more angry about the violence, including the murders they have perpetrated, or the myriad abuses of the Constitution—breaking into homes without a warrant, breaking into cars without a warrant. ICE is basically a criminal organization. That said, I am actually working on writing something right now about this.
The parallel to the violence of the historical fascist era basically fails simply on scale alone. The numbers would go something like this—I have just been looking this up. There are right now about 22,000 ICE agents in the United States. We could compare ICE and the kind of violence it creates and its style—being in military-style uniforms, patrolling the streets, marauding, conducting violence rather randomly against people. That all looks quite a bit like what the Nazi stormtroopers, the famous Brownshirts, were doing in 1933 and 1934.
Except that in 1933 and 1934 there were between 3 and 4 million young men in the Brownshirts in a country that at that time had about 66 million people. If you multiplied that out to be proportional to the American population now, you would have somewhere between 16 to 21 million uniformed paramilitary people roaming the streets of the United States. What we have is 22,000. So, we need to keep in mind the actually quite mind-blowing scale of the violence that the Nazi regime in 1933 and 1934 was meting out to its own people through these stormtroopers and through agencies like the secret police, the Gestapo. In comparison to what we have in the United States now, as terrible as the violence in, for instance, Minneapolis and the murders there have been, the scale is minuscule compared to what the Nazis did. I think we need to keep that in mind.
It would probably take Nazi-scale mobilization and violence for the Trump administration to get itself into the league of being a real dictatorship, and that is just not going to happen. The other thing I want to say quickly is that, as a very close student of what happened in Germany in 1933 and 1934, I can say there was nothing remotely like the mobilization of ordinary people in Minneapolis to create networks to push back against ICE. It has been remarkable how we have been reading and seeing about this in the last month or two—the way these spontaneous networks have gotten organized, where people communicate via cell phones or whatever, and as soon as ICE agents go anywhere, people notify that neighborhood, follow and track them, film them, and put videos on social media.
All of this has hindered ICE in doing what it wants to do, but it has also shredded its public reputation. Americans now are overwhelmingly—polls show roughly two-thirds—against what ICE is doing, and as that has happened, it has also shredded Trump’s approval rating, which is now at pretty much record lows for any president. The only competition Trump has right now for a low approval rating among other presidents is himself in his first term. So, the spectacle of what ICE is doing is really not selling with Americans, and they are pushing back commendably, in ways that one did not see in Germany in 1933 and 1934. All of those differences are quite important.
Can Democratic Pushback Contain Authoritarian Populism?
Protesters demonstrate outside a Donald Trump presidential campaign rally, many criticizing his immigration stance; some hold signs depicting Adolf Hitler alongside other messages and an American flag. Photo: Dreamstime.
Drawing on your work on Weimar Germany and the dynamics of authoritarian mobilization, how resilient do you judge Trumpism and a Trump-led administration to be in the face of potential democratizing backlash—whether through electoral defeat, judicial resistance, elite defection, or mass civic mobilization? More specifically, do historical analogies suggest that such backlash tends to constrain authoritarian projects, or can it paradoxically strengthen them by reinforcing grievance narratives and siege mentalities?
Professor Benjamin C. Hett: That’s an interesting question. As I said before, I am fairly optimistic that we’re going to get through Trump. And in 2028, we’ll have a better president, and we’ll be more or less okay as a country. I don’t want to minimize the people who are really suffering the brunt of this, especially people in immigrant communities or communities of color. There is damage being done to people that is not fixable, but American democracy is going to get through this.
I have also said, pretty much since the beginning of this second Trump term, that although I cannot quite foresee the shape it will take, I do not think we’re going to get through this without a crisis of some kind. The crisis would take the form of Trump doing something—whether it is ordering soldiers onto the streets of American cities, resulting in large-scale violence (this has already happened to an extent), or trying to interfere with a free election. There is, of course, a lot of talk now about ways in which Trump is working to steal the 2026 midterms that we should be having in November. There may well be some crisis around those elections.
My hunch is that when that crisis comes, Trump’s side will lose. If, for instance, he tried to do something to subvert the elections, there would be riots in the streets to such an extent that he would have to back down—which, by the way, he usually does. Notice that on many of the worst things Trump does, he often ends up backing down. This has been true of the Greenland situation. Just yesterday, they announced they are pulling ICE out of Minneapolis. We’ll see if they actually do, but they have announced that. They have quietly pulled National Guard soldiers out of cities they had deployed them to, like Los Angeles and Chicago. They do not really admit they are doing that, but they have, in fact, done it.
Trump is a classic bully who is also weak, and when he meets pushback, he tends to retreat. So, if he tried, or when he tries, to do something questionable about the midterms this November, there will be pushback, and he will be forced off what he is trying to do.
To the other part of your question, Trumpism was not invented yesterday. This is a long current in American history. The ingredients that go into Trump and his constituency have manifested throughout American history. They appeared in the form of the Klan in the 1870s and again revived in the 1920s. They showed up in the form of Jim Crow in the South. They appeared in the form of McCarthyism in the early 1950s. This complex of nativism, racism, hostility to individual rights, and, to some extent, hostility to democracy has always been there in America. It is always going to be there. There will be a core of Trump supporters who will never abandon what they see him standing for. They may reach a point where they abandon him personally, perhaps—especially if there are further revelations from Epstein—but they will not abandon that package of ideas.
There will always be, whatever it may be, 20% or 30% of the American electorate attached to these ideas. My hope is that we can move toward a politics that contains it, so that we can still function as a liberal democracy where rights are protected, minorities feel safe, and we work with our allies. My hope is that we can contain it. I am somewhat optimistic that we can.
Telling Difficult Truths in a Polarized Age
And finally, Professor Hett, given your dual role as historian and public intellectual, how do you navigate the tension between scholarly restraint and moral urgency when historical patterns begin to rhyme in politically dangerous ways?
Professor Benjamin C. Hett: That’s a great question. I do wrestle with that a lot, to be quite honest. Sometimes I feel there are things I could say as a public-facing activist that I don’t really believe as a scholar, so I always feel that tension. I have been quite active in the last year or two. I was active in the election campaign last year with a group called Democracy First, which recruited a bunch of people like me—basically historians, political scientists, journalists, and so on—to speak about some of these issues and parallels at meetings and rallies, especially in swing states. So, I’ve been quite out there saying this stuff.
In a certain sense, to achieve the political effect I want—to rally people to democracy—I might be tempted to play up the threat more. I mean, I could say, oh, Trump’s super scary, he’s winning and so on, which I actually don’t believe. So, I try to be honest about that. I’ll give you another example of a tricky issue I navigate. I was actually just talking to some of my students about this the other day.
There are people on the right in America—Dinesh D’Souza is a prominent one—who argue that Nazism was a movement of the political left, not the right. People like D’Souza do this because they want to use that claim to discredit the political left in the present. They basically say, you liberals call Trump a Nazi, but actually you are the Nazis, and the Nazis were liberals and socialists like you, so you are the ones who bear this bad legacy.
Saying the Nazis were on the left is, in some basic way, wrong. In their time, the Nazis were seen as being on the far right by everyone in the political community. That’s why they found coalition partners on the right, why business and military elites were interested in working with them, and why the German Reich president, von Hindenburg, was willing to bring Hitler into government. They were seen as being on the right. However, it is also not entirely untrue that they drew some elements from the left. If you read the Nazis’ 25-point political program from 1920, there are many ideas that are quite congruent with a kind of social-welfare liberalism, if not something further left—profit sharing in big corporations, better health insurance programs, better educational opportunities for children from poorer backgrounds, old-age pensions, and so forth. There is a social-welfare element there.
And if you look at the name of the party—the full name was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—if you took the “national” off and had a party called the Socialist German Workers’ Party, you would conclude that it was clearly a party of the left, probably a Marxist party. Once you add “national,” it becomes more complicated—complicated rather than coherently a party of the right. So, I feel, as a historian, that I need to acknowledge that complexity, even though I regret that this may give some oxygen to bad-faith actors like Dinesh D’Souza, who will say, “See? Even Hett says the Nazis were on the left.” That is the kind of thing I feel I am always navigating.
In this in-depth ECPS interview, Professor António Costa Pinto—one of Europe’s leading scholars of authoritarianism—offers a historically grounded analysis of Chega’s meteoric rise and André Ventura’s advance to the second round of Portugal’s 2026 presidential election. Far from an electoral accident, Professor Costa Pinto situates Chega’s breakthrough within long-standing structural conditions, recurrent political crises, and the fragmentation of the center-right. He traces how Ventura mobilizes authoritarian legacies of “law and order,” welfare chauvinism, and anti-elite resentment without openly rehabilitating Salazarism. Immigration, demographic change, and plebiscitary populism emerge as key drivers of Chega’s success. Crucially, Professor Costa Pinto argues that Orbán’s Hungary—not Trump or Bolsonaro—serves as Ventura’s primary model, raising urgent questions about democratic resilience in Portugal as uncertainty on the right deepens.
In this in-depth interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor António Costa Pinto—Research Professor (ret.) at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, and a leading authority on authoritarianism and the radical right—offers a historically grounded analysis of the unprecedented rise of Chega and its leader, André Ventura. The discussion is anchored in a critical political moment: Ventura’s advance to the second round of the 2026 presidential election, which Professor Costa Pinto describes as neither a mere accident nor a sudden rupture, but the product of deeper transformations within Portuguese democracy.
As Professor Costa Pinto explains, Chega’s breakthrough cannot be understood as an isolated electoral shock. “The Chega Party and André Ventura have, in a way, a short history in Portuguese democracy,” he notes, “but over the last four years, the party has gone from one MP and 1.5 percent to 23 percent.” This rapid ascent, he argues, reflects the convergence of long-standing structural conditions—most notably the persistence of conservative authoritarian values in Portuguese society—with a series of destabilizing political crises that created what he calls “populist junctures.”
A central theme of the interview is the fragmentation of the center-right, which Professor Costa Pinto identifies as a key enabling factor. Portugal now has “three parties representing the right in Parliament,” and Chega’s strategy is explicitly hegemonic: to replace the traditional center-right as the dominant force. Ventura, Professor Costa Pinto observes, has succeeded because “he was able to mobilize his electorate,” even as his capacity to expand it in a runoff remains uncertain.
The interview also situates Chega within Portugal’s authoritarian legacies without reducing it to a simple revival of Salazarism. While Chega does not openly rehabilitate the Estado Novo (the corporatist Portuguese state installed in 1933), Professor Costa Pinto notes that it selectively draws on the past, particularly through “law and order” and moral authority. “Salazar is presented as the example of a non-corrupt dictator,” Professor Costa Pinto explains, adding that Chega appropriates “the idea of a conservative regime in which law and order prevailed,”while avoiding deeper identification with an unpopular dictatorship.
Immigration emerges as the party’s most powerful mobilizing issue. According to Professor Costa Pinto, “the central card that Chega has been playing over the last four years—and one that is closely associated with its electoral success—is immigration.” He links this to recent demographic shifts, especially increased migration from South Asia, and to growing anxieties among working-class voters. These dynamics underpin Chega’s welfare chauvinism, which combines statist social policies with exclusionary nationalism.
Crucially, Professor Costa Pinto frames Ventura within a transnational authoritarian constellation. “In a way, Orbán is the model for Ventura,” he states plainly. “The type of regime that Ventura would seek to consolidate in Portugal… is precisely the kind of competitive authoritarian regime that Orbán has managed to establish in Hungary.” While Trumpist styles and Bolsonaro’s experience in Brazil matter symbolically, Professor Costa Pinto stresses that Ventura adapts these influences pragmatically to Portuguese political culture.
Ultimately, the interview raises pressing questions about democratic resilience. While Professor Costa Pinto believes that Ventura is unlikely to win the presidency, he cautions that “the game is not over” on the right. Portugal, he concludes, faces a period of sustained uncertainty—one in which democratic institutions remain intact, but increasingly contested.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor António Costa Pinto, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
A Historic Runoff and a Fractured Right
André Ventura of the Chega party speaking during the plenary session of the Portuguese Parliament debating the government’s motion of confidence, March 11, 2025.
Professor António Costa Pinto, thank you so much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: André Ventura’s advance to the second round of the 2026 presidential election marks a historic breakthrough for the Portuguese far right. From alongue duréeperspective, how should we interpret this moment: as an electoral shock, or as the culmination of structural shifts long underway within Portuguese democracy?
Professor António Costa Pinto: Let me tell you two things. First, the Chega Party and André Ventura have, in a way, a short history in Portuguese democracy. Over the last four years, the party has gone from one MP and 1.5 percent in legislative elections to 23 percent. The reason why André Ventura will be present in the second round of the presidential elections is therefore more complicated. The Portuguese center-right and right are going through a rather curious period of party fragmentation. We now have three parties representing the right in Parliament: the center-right that is in power, a liberal right with 7.5 percent, and the Chega Party with 23 percent.
The question surrounding this presidential election is, in a way, simple. There was an independent candidate who was expected to be the winner a year ago. Admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo was a sort of hero of the response to the pandemic a couple of years ago. In this sense, the presidential election is unusual in terms of the number of candidates, with four candidates competing on the right-wing side of the political spectrum.
The reason why Ventura is in the second round is straightforward. The main reason is that he was able to mobilize his electorate. The more difficult challenge for Ventura lies in the second round: whether he will be able to expand his electorate, because, in theory, he is going to lose.
Why the Far Right Arrived Late in Portugal
Portugal was long considered an outlier in Southern Europe for its resistance to far-right populism. In your view, what factors delayed the emergence of a party like Chega, and what has changed—politically, socially, or culturally—to make its rise now possible?
Professor António Costa Pinto: There are structural factors and conjunctural factors. The structural factor is, first of all, that since the 1980s we have known already quite clearly from surveys that around 80 percent of Portuguese society has expressed conservative authoritarian values. That was very clear. The main problem, of course, was the opportunity to express these values in electoral and political terms. Until very recently, the two main parties, especially on the right-wing side of the political spectrum—and particularly the main center-right party—had the capacity, in a way, to frame and absorb this electorate to their right.
What happened in the meantime? There were two general elements. The first was what we could call a populist juncture. A couple of years ago, a Socialist prime minister, António Costa—who now holds a position in the European Union institutions—faced, while in office, an accusation from the court system. Not exactly for corruption but associated with corruption. His response was basically to resign. The president then decided to call early elections. This was the first populist juncture responsible for the initial breakthrough of the Portuguese radical right in Parliament. Over the last four years, there have been three early elections, all associated with this kind of populist juncture.
The most recent one, seven months ago, was also the result of a problem involving a conflict of interests, in which a center-right prime minister was accused in Parliament of maintaining a small family business that was incompatible with the role of prime minister. So, Portugal has experienced several electoral populist junctures over the past four years, and these conjunctural elements have driven the growth of the Chega Party during this period.
We therefore have structural dimensions, of course, but above all, we have conjunctural dynamics that explain this development. There is also a central element in this process: the leader of the Chega Party. He is a very charismatic figure, extremely well known in the media. He began as a football commentator in the press, closely connected to popular segments of Portuguese public opinion. He then emerged as a party leader, and we must admit that, for the first time in Portugal, a right-wing political entrepreneur managed to establish direct contact with potential voters of a radical right party—and he succeeded in doing so.
Old Repertoires, New Populism?
Sign of the right-wing conservative political party Chega, led by André Ventura, in Faro, Portugal, March 16, 2023. Photo: Dreamstime.
Drawing on your work on the “Estado Novo,” to what extent does Chega represent a reactivation of authoritarian political repertoires—such as moralism, punitive order, and anti-pluralism—rather than a novel populist phenomenon detached from Salazarist legacies?
Professor António Costa Pinto: When we look at populist radical right-wing parties in Europe, discussing their origins can become a political trap. Why? Because the trajectories are highly diverse. We know, for instance, that the Swedish populist party emerged from a very small neo-Nazi group; Fratelli d’Italia in Italy also originated in a marginal neo-fascist party; while in Spain, Vox comes from the center-right.
In the Portuguese case, the Chega Party has a very small core of leaders—essentially one figure—who comes from the political culture of the Portuguese extreme right of the past. However, the majority of its leadership, including André Ventura, comes from the main center-right party, as is also the case in Spain. Ventura himself ran for a municipal position many years ago through the Social Democratic Party, Portugal’s main center-right party, mobilizing a Roma-chauvinistic discourse. He contested a former communist municipality and played on anti-Roma sentiment in very populous suburbs of Lisbon, and this strategy proved effective. That was the starting point of his political career.
When it comes to the past, two elements are particularly important in the radical right’s mobilization of authoritarian legacies. These are not directly tied to Salazarism, but rather to a more homogeneous conception of the nation-state: the glorification of Portugal’s past, the narrative of the “Discoveries,” the Portuguese Empire, and, in many cases, the mobilization of veterans of the colonial wars. Portugal experienced a deeply traumatic decolonization, and this remains the central historical reference in how Chega engages with the past—especially the colonial wars in Africa, in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau.
At the same time, and this is especially interesting, Chega represents a break with the political culture of the conservative right. Traditionally, the conservative right promoted a loose or “tropical” notion of empire, arguing that the Portuguese Empire was not racist and was, overall, a positive historical experience. Chega breaks with this tradition. Its chauvinistic, anti-immigration discourse—targeting African, Brazilian, and Asian immigration—marks a clear rupture with the conservative right’s legacy in Portugal.
What emerges, then, is a new-old conception of national identity. Chega occasionally invokes Salazar, but above all it mobilizes the past through the theme of corruption: fifty years of corruption, fifty years of an oligarchic political class—coinciding, symbolically, with the fifty years of democracy Portugal celebrated last year. Salazar himself poses a problem as a reference, as he is associated with repression and with a period that remains unpopular in Portugal, except in one key dimension: law and order.
These, ultimately, are the two elements Chega draws most clearly from the authoritarian past: the myth of a glorious colonial empire and, above all, the appeal to law and order.
Presidentialization and the Rise of Plebiscitary Populism
Parliament building in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo: Dreamstime.
While Chega does not explicitly rehabilitate Salazar, do you see elements of what you have described as Salazarism’s “politics of order” and depoliticization resurfacing in Ventura’s discourse, particularly his emphasis on discipline, punishment, and national moral renewal?
Professor António Costa Pinto: As I mentioned earlier, Chega draws on Salazar primarily through two elements. First, Salazar is portrayed as an example of a non-corrupt dictator. Second, Salazarism is evoked as a conservative regime in which law and order prevailed. These are essentially the two aspects Chega appropriates from the Salazarist past. However, as I also noted, most of the references to authoritarian legacies are linked less to Salazar himself than to the former greatness of the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa.
In your comparative work on charisma and authoritarian leadership, you note that charisma need not be revolutionary or mass-mobilizing. How would you characterize Ventura’s leadership style: as plebiscitary populism, mediated celebrity politics, or a new post-charismatic form of personalization?
Professor António Costa Pinto: Ventura clearly belongs to the plebiscitary, authoritarian populist parties in Europe. By this I mean that the main elements of political mobilization of the Portuguese radical right revolve around law and order, the idea of corruption associated with the oligarchic political class that has dominated Portuguese democracy since its transition, and a set of conservative values typically linked to this form of plebiscitary authoritarian democracy—such as proposals for the sterilization of pedophiles, or even the reintroduction of the death penalty in Portugal.
These are dimensions tied to this broader political vision, and a significant segment of Portuguese society does support such ideas. As a result, this is not primarily about the functioning of parliamentary institutions, but rather about a plebiscitary, referendum-style conception of political power.
This is also how Ventura behaves in the current presidential elections. He seeks, in a sense, to use the powers of the presidency to advance many of these political proposals, through a form of presidentialization within Portugal’s semi-presidential system.
Electoral Strategies of Chega Is Cannibalizing the Right
Salazarism relied on corporatist and technocratic governance rather than mass populist mobilization. Does Chega’s rise suggest a transition from elite-managed authoritarianism to popular authoritarianism, or are we witnessing a hybrid form adapted to democratic institutions?
Professor António Costa Pinto: As with many other radical right-wing parties in Europe, Chega operates within democratic institutions. It is primarily an electoral party. There are very small segments—one could describe them as a residual effect—of neo-fascist and extreme right-wing groups, but these remain marginal. For the most part, Chega plays the electoral card.
In fact, in the current presidential election and campaign, an important dynamic concerns the right-wing side of the political spectrum in Portugal. Ventura and Chega are present, but Ventura is the only right-wing candidate to advance to the second round. His strategy is to combine two approaches: on the one hand, mobilizing the radical right and, at times, even the extreme right; on the other, presenting more conservative and moderate political proposals. The objective is straightforward: to become the main party representing the right-wing side of the political spectrum in Portugal and to cannibalize the conservative right-wing electorate.
The cards have been played, but the outcome remains highly uncertain. We will see what happens in these presidential elections, even if Ventura does not ultimately win.
Selective Moralism in Portugal’s Populist Right
Your research highlights the role of political Catholicism in shaping authoritarian moral frameworks. To what extent does Chega’s moralized discourse on family, crime, and social order echo these traditions, even in a formally secular and pluralist society?
Professor António Costa Pinto: Chega has clear, or very conservative, values associated with religion—not only with the Roman Catholic Church. We should also not underestimate the role of small evangelical groups, particularly among certain popular segments of Portuguese society. Undoubtedly, Chega has adopted pro-life positions, anti-abortion values, and other conservative stances. At the same time, however, Chega is a populist party. For that reason, it does not consistently play the anti-abortion card. Why? Because its leaders look at opinion surveys and recognize that the majority of Portuguese society supports the legalization of abortion, as is currently the case in Portugal.
What we see, then, is a core of conservative values, but above all a strong emphasis on anti-corruption rhetoric, hostility toward the political class, and the idea that Portuguese society is being held back by centrist, non-reformist center-right and center-left governments. So yes, conservative values matter for Chega, but the party does not emphasize all of them when it realizes that they do not translate into electoral gains.
There is, however, one aspect I would like to stress: As in many other European democracies, Chega is a typical social welfare–chauvinistic party. It does not embrace ultra-liberalism, unlike some other right-wing populist figures outside Europe, such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Javier Milei in Latin America. Instead, Chega clearly plays the card of a welfare state “for the Portuguese,” combined with anti-immigrant narratives that accuse immigrants of exploiting the welfare state and the national health system. At the same time, it advances a vision of social policy that is explicitly not anti-statist.
From Emigration Country to Immigration Backlash
Ventura’s campaign placed immigration at the center of political conflict, despite Portugal’s relatively recent experience as a destination country. How do you explain the salience of immigration in a context historically defined by emigration rather than immigration?
Professor António Costa Pinto: The central card that Chega has been playing over the last four years—and one that is closely associated with its electoral success—is immigration. Portugal was long accustomed to immigration from Portuguese-speaking African countries and to some extent from Brazil. However, over the past five years—a very recent development—there has been a sharp increase in immigration from Asia, which is new in the Portuguese context. Migrants from Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are now highly visible across different segments of Portuguese society and the economy, from delivery services and other forms of urban transport in major cities to the agro-export sector in the south of the country. In that sector alone, around 70 percent of the labor force now comes from Asian countries such as Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Similar patterns are visible in tourism as well.
This shift is driven, of course, by economic needs. Portugal is one of the most rapidly aging societies in Europe, and demographic aging is a central structural feature of the Portuguese economy and society. Immigrants already play a crucial role in sustaining pensions, social benefits, and key sectors of the labor market.
However, the social reaction to this new wave of immigration—particularly among lower-middle-class and working-class segments of Portuguese society—is perhaps the most important explanation for Chega’s electoral success. At the same time, as Chega has come to dominate the political agenda on immigration, the center-right government, feeling electorally threatened, has responded by negotiating with the radical right and adopting new restrictive policies on immigration, access to Portuguese nationality, and related issues.
The Crisis of the Traditional Right in Portugal
The PSD’s historically weak performance and its refusal to endorse a runoff candidate point to a crisis of the traditional right. How important is center-right fragmentation in enabling Chega’s claim to leadership of the “non-socialist space”?
Professor António Costa Pinto: Undoubtedly, Chega is cannibalizing segments of the center-right, much more so than voters on the left or the radical left. At the same time, Chega is now present in many areas of Portuguese society—particularly in the South—that were electorally communist in the past. However, this is less significant today, given that the Portuguese Communist Party now represents around 2 percent of the vote.
What is more important is that Chega has increased its vote share in many areas, especially in the south and in the outskirts of Lisbon, which previously voted for the Communists and the Socialist Party. Today, however, Chega has become a national party with a very homogeneous electorate. As a result, it is primarily cannibalizing votes from the right.
The only real challenge to Chega, aside from the center-right, comes from a small right-wing liberal party that appeals mainly to younger and more educated voters. Chega, by contrast, is clearly dominant on the right-wing side of the political spectrum among segments of Portuguese society with less than secondary education. For this reason, any further electoral growth for Chega can only come from right-wing voters.
In the last legislative elections, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the main center-right party, did increase its vote share. It is now in power with a minority government that is forced to negotiate much of its legislation with the radical right. Labor reform is a clear example: the only viable negotiating partner is the radical right, since the center-left has already decided to vote against it.
So yes, the challenge posed by the radical right is very significant, and the game is far from over. While the cards have been played, there remains considerable fluidity and uncertainty on the right-wing side of the political spectrum. On the left, by contrast, the Socialist Party lost the election and many voters, but it has nonetheless survived as the main force of the center-left.
From Trump to Orbán: How Transnational Models Shape Portugal’s Radical Right
Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister arrives to attend in an informal meeting of Heads of State or Government in Prague, Czechia on October 7, 2022. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.
Observers have described Ventura’s rise as part of the “Trumpification” of the right. To what extent do transnational populist styles, media strategies, and narratives of cultural grievance matter more today than domestic historical legacies?
Professor António Costa Pinto: Domestic legacies are important, but undoubtedly Chega and Ventura are, first of all, integrated into the radical right political family in the European Parliament. There is a strong sense of identification with Giorgio Meloni, and also with Vox in Spain.
Above all—and this is very important—even when it is not openly emphasized, there is a strong sense of identification with Orbán. In a way, Orbán is the model for Ventura. The type of regime that Ventura would seek to consolidate in Portugal, if he were to win elections and gain access to power, is precisely the kind of competitive authoritarian regime that Orbán has managed to establish in Hungary.
In the Portuguese case, and in Portuguese political culture more broadly, we should not forget Portugal’s strong links with Brazil. Chega was a strong supporter of the Bolsonaro experience in Brazil, firmly anti-Lula and anti-left, and this reflects deeper cultural and political connections between Portugal and Brazil.
More recently, however, Trump’s challenge to NATO and episodes such as the “Greenland affair” have made Ventura more cautious. He is aware that, within Portuguese public opinion, Trump’s positions on NATO and the European Union are problematic. This matters because the Portuguese electorate is generally optimistic about the European Union and not receptive to such positions, so Ventura avoids adopting them openly.
So, as in many other radical right-wing populist experiences in Europe, there is a core of values associated with right-wing authoritarianism, but there is also a popular strategy that plays the cards that are popular and avoids those that are unpopular.
Uncertainty on the Right and the Future of Portuguese Democracy
And finally, Professor Pinto, from the perspective of democratic theory and historical comparison, does the 2026 election represent a critical juncture for Portuguese democracy—or does Portugal still possess institutional and cultural buffers capable of containing far-right populism in the long run?
Professor António Costa Pinto: That is a very interesting question, and it is not easy to answer. For the first time, this presidential election has prompted a clear stance among many figures on the right, including several politicians from the center-right, in support of the moderate candidate of the left. This is the first time such a development has occurred in Portugal. Why? Because in the last legislative elections, seven months ago, the Social Democratic Party completely abandoned any strategy of maintaining red lines against the radical right and entered into negotiations with it.
For the second round of the presidential election, both the prime minister and the main leader of the conservative party supporting the government chose not to take public positions. However, they gave instructions to most local leaders—mayors and other municipal figures—to support the center-left candidate. This was also a very pragmatic decision.
They know that, as president, the center-left candidate would respect democratic norms and the formal and informal rules governing relations between the president and the government. We should not forget that Portugal is a semi-presidential democracy. They also know very clearly that if, by any chance, the radical right was to win the election and Ventura became president—which is not going to happen—it could lead to a presidentialization of the system and favor his party in terms of cabinet influence.
In that sense, Portuguese democracy could be subverted not only through legislative elections but also through presidential ones, if Ventura were to gain presidential power—and that is not going to happen.
Overall, Portuguese democracy will continue to face a degree of uncertainty, particularly on the right-wing side of the political spectrum, where the game is not over. At this stage, we do not know which party will ultimately become the dominant force on the center-right. Will Portugal move toward an Italian-style scenario, in which the radical right dominates and the center-right becomes a junior partner? Or will it continue, as it does today, with a minority center-right government supported by a liberal democratic party such as Iniciativa Liberal? With Chega holding 23 percent of the vote, the future of the right-wing political landscape in Portugal remains highly uncertain.
