ECPS has inaugurated a Case Competition Series in Populism Studies and held its first competition on March 7, 2023, in Brussels with the participation of ECPS Early Career Researchers Network (ECRN) and ECPS Youth Group members to provide a unique learning experience for students and young professionals and support them in learning how to transform their academic knowledge into feasible policy suggestions.
ECPS has inaugurated a Case Competition Series in Populism Studies and held its first competition on March 7, 2023, in Brussels with the participation of ECRN (ECPS Early Career Researchers Network) and ECPS Youth members. The competition focused on a pressing issue in contemporary democracies: The rise of far-right movements in Europe, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. In order to narrow our focus, we chose to situate our case in Germany, a key player in Europe’s political and economic landscape, and we expected participants to pay special attention to Russia’s role in this context. Please consult this document for detailed information.
Photos: Umit Vural.
While case competitions are widely used and popular in consulting, finance, and risk management, we firmly believe they can also be effective tools for putting theory into practice in the fields of political science and international relations. Thus, ECPS has decided to launch the ECPS Case Competition Series, which focuses on different topics in the framework of Populism Studies. Our research has highlighted the numerous potential benefits of designing and hosting a case competition in this field, and we are confident that this series will be a valuable experience for all involved, which has been the case for the event on the 7th of March.
Case competitions are a type of event in which teams of students or professionals compete against each other to develop and pitch solutions to a business, public administration or a political and/or international relations problem. Teams are given a limited amount of time to research, analyze, develop, and pitch their solutions.
Case competitions are based on contemporary and relevant real-world problems that challenge participants to analyze complex issues and craft innovative solutions. Participants are divided into teams to work together on solving the case, allowing them to enhance their teamwork skills. The proposals of the participants are evaluated based on criteria such as creativity, feasibility, and presentation by a panel of scholars and experts in the field.
Our main goal in carrying out a case competition in the field of political science/populism studies and international relations is to provide a platform for students and professionals to showcase their analytical and problem-solving skills while addressing real-world issues that are relevant to the field. The competition forces participants to think critically and creatively as they research and develop solutions to a complex political or international relations problem. It serves as a valuable learning experience for participants, helping them develop critical skills in high demand in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing political and international landscape.
By contributing to the competition, participants gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of global and European politics and international relations. They will be better prepared for their future careers. Participants are able to apply their knowledge and skills in a competitive setting and are evaluated by a panel of experts in the field. The panel of experts that assessed the case presentation on March 7, 2023, was formed by the scholars who contributed to the ECPS report on “The Impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Right-wing Populism in Europe.”
Overall, our goal in launching this case competition series is to provide a unique and valuable learning experience for students and young professionals and support them in learning how to transform their academic knowledge into feasible policy suggestions.
Putin’s narrative of the Ukrainian government as Nazis and “junkies” is a rhetoric of legitimation of invasion and a performance of culture war. By invading Ukraine, Putin is not only taking back the land he believed to be part of Russia but also rescuing it from being the ‘puppet of the [morally corrupt] West.’ He is defending Russia’s state-civilization against globalism and liberal democracy based on plurality, human rights, and multiculturalism.
The post-Berlin wall world was lived in the belief of the victory of liberal democracy and thus the “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992), a promise never fulfilled. The deindustrialization of Europe, alongside the emergence of multipolar economic globalism with the reallocation of production in Asia, gave room for a growing skepticism in different European countries (v.g., Taggart & Szczerbiak, 2002) during the 90s and further resentment with the emergence of populist parties (v.g. Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2016), returning to the nativist ideology, with the defense of native identities vis-à-vis capitalist globalization (v.g. Lindholm & Zúquete, 2010). The increased migratory waves of Muslims from the north of Africa and the Middle East and a welfare crisis that came after the 2008 global economic and financial crisis empathize the appeal of anti-globalist and identitarians movements (Zúquete, 2018), which pièce de resistance is the great replacement theory. However, a significant part of the identitarians does not use the “ethnic, biological and racist discourse of white supremacists, but that of the defense of European culture against Islam pointed out as a vehicle of values irreconcilable with those of modern Western civilization, civic, secular and liberal” (Marchi & Bruno, 2016: 42).
The moral panic of an unconcealable Europe and Islam was, for instance, well explored by the German party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) during the 2017 election after the 2015 refugee crisis. It is now widely admitted that misinformation and fake news played an important role in spreading moral panic and the appeal for nationalism. The anti-immigration propaganda was elaborated within fake news on refugees’ wave of sexual crimes in countries like Germany and Sweden. This helped people turn themselves to the parties who claimed that would stop the open-borders policies that gave free passage to “rapists.”
Russian Propaganda and Culture War
It is very liable and spotted that the growth of radical right movements in Europe is linked to Russia’s strategy of supposedly financial support and pro-Russian media propaganda (Juhász & Szicherle, 2017). The strategy is clear and effective: i) promoting moral panic; ii) driving the people to perceive right-wing radical parties as the solution against globalism and open borders; iii) weakening the European Union by growing nationalist parties; iv) strengthening the influence of Russia in Europe by presenting it as the example of moral strength and unity around the idea of ‘one nation.’ Thus, Russian civilization’s strength lies in its Christian moral and cultural unity and uniqueness.
Russian propaganda on the strength of its moral unity is related to the context of culture wars. The concept refers to a conflict about nonnegotiable conceptions embodied in cultural and moral spheres (Hunter, 1991, 1996; Wuthnow, 1996), such as moral sexuality, gay rights, gender parity, and abortion. Although literature emphasizes culture wars in the United States (US), it happens in different places around the globe, including Russia. According to Robinson (2014), Putin’s third presidential election in 2012 was marked by culture wars in the country. In that year, the members of Pussy Riot were arrested and sentenced for protesting against Putin. One year later, Putin promulgated a law forbidding gay ‘propaganda’ to minors, considering it an unacceptable moral disruption imported from Europe.
Putin’s rhetoric on Russian civilization’s uniqueness is presented in the idea that Russia is a ‘state-civilization’ carried by the Russian Christian orthodoxy and the joint of other religions in Russian territory around a common concern for preserving traditional moral values. For the Russian leader, globalization brought a different kind of international tension:“Many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between people and cultures. Society is now required not only to recognize everyone’s right to the freedom of consciousness, political views and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil (…)” (Robinson, 2014: 28-29).
For Putin, the erosion of traditional values – which started with the collapse of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union – is particularly evident in today’s Europe, and Pussy Riots protest sounded the alarm for him. It helps explain the urgency of invading Ukrainian territory and the long-term support of the far-right in Europe (Polyakova, 2014, 2016; Shekhovtsov, 2017). Then, Putin took new programs on the culture wars, such as the reform of school manuals, the establishment of a Military-Historical Society with the involvement of the Minister for Culture, the cultural celebration of Russian feats of arms, including new war memorials, and more prominence given to Russia’s part in World War I. Moreover, he recovered Stalin’s physical and ideological fitness program (Gotov k trudy i oborone) in 2014. He started an intense persecution of the “traitors” of the “fifth column” – the liberal intelligentsia committed to Western ideas, ethno-nationalists, and Russia’s LGBT community.
Thereby, Putin’s narrative of the Ukrainian government as Nazis and “junkies” is a rhetoric of legitimation of invasion and a performance of culture war. By invading Ukraine, Putin is not only taking back the land he believed to be part of Russia but also rescuing it from being the ‘puppet of the [morally corrupt] West.’
Not surprisingly, Putin forced the comparison of Russia’s international isolation to ‘cancel culture,’ giving J. K. Rowling – author of Harry Potter – denunciations for her views on gender as an example. By taking ‘cancel culture’ to international relations, Putin signals the cultural dimension of the war in Ukraine. He is defending Russia’s state-civilization against globalism and liberal democracy based on plurality, human rights, and multiculturalism.
References
Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. Free Press.
Hunter, J. D. (1992). Culture wars: The struggle to control the family, art, education, law, and politics in America. Avalon Publishing.
Hunter, J. D. (1996). Reflections on the culture wars hypothesis.The American culture wars: Current contests and future prospects. University Press of Virginia, 243-56.
Juhász, A. & Szicherle, P. (2017). The political effects of migration-related fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories in Europe. Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Political Capital, Budapest.
Lindholm, C. & Zúquete, J. P. (2010). The struggle for the world: Liberation movements for the 21st century. Stanford University Press.
Marchi, R. & Bruno, G. (2016). A extrema-direita europeia perante a crise dos refugiados. Relações Internacionais (50), 39-56.
Mudde, C. & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2016). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
In populist rhetoric, corruption is an obvious indication of institutional decay generated by the ‘corrupt elites’ and affecting the interests of the pure people.’ More specifically, the causal path could be described as follows: Corruption exacerbates political polarization by promoting the idea that the economic elites control the agenda-setting process and shape government politics in favor of their own interests, leading to representational inequality. Yet, is always an anti-corruption crusade the shortest way for populists to come to power?
The ‘war against corruption’ has, diachronically, been the flagship of populist parties and an inherent part of both their rhetoric and election promises. The examples of politicians who instrumentalized the high perceived levels of corruption in their electoral campaign in order to rally support for their political agendas are abundant; Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Victor Orbán in Hungary, to name but a few (Porcile & Eisen, 2020; Haughton et al., 2020). The same goes for Greece, where the left-wing SYRIZA, both in 2012 and in 2015, fiercely denounced ‘the corrupt political elites and crooked bankers’ (Smith, 2012) and pledged to fight against “a political system that supports corruption and collusion” (Tsipras, 2015).
In populist rhetoric, corruption is an obvious indication of institutional decay generated by the ‘corrupt elites’ and affecting the interests of the pure people.’ More specifically, the causal path could be described as follows: Corruption exacerbates political polarization by promoting the idea that the economic elites control the agenda-setting process and shape government politics in favor of their own interests, leading to representational inequality (Gilens, 2012; Elkjær & Baggesen Klitgaard, 2021; Bartels, 2017; Drutman, 2015). This, in turn, opens a window of opportunity for populists, which present themselves as the only defenders of people’s interests and promise to restore good governance and the ties of trust with the political institutions. Additionally, the fight against corruption serves as a means for populists to be differentiated as newcomers from the established parties and to stylize themselves as outsiders that fight for voters’ interests (Kossow, 2019; Engler, 2020). In any case, the strength of their anti-corrupt message is positively affected by the levels of corruption in the country (Hawkins et al., 2018) and the levels of social inequality (Uslaner, 2008; Loveless and Whitefield, 2011), as their combination bridges institutional and economic grievances.
Yet, is always an anti-corruption crusade the shortest way for populists to come to power? The answer is not so clear-cut, even in countries that traditionally score highly on the Corruption Perception Index (CPI), such as Greece. The country consistently lags behind as far as transparency in the public sector is concerned (Figure 1). It is telling that in 2012 Greece’s score was 36/100; in 2013 was 40/100, while in 2016 —and under the government of SYRIZA— the score remained low (44/100). The data for 2021 is quite similar, as the country’s score is 49/100. Nevertheless, at the moment, neither a populist party that has declared war on corruption rules the country nor this specific issue seems to be more salient than the economy, even since the outbreak of the Qatar corruption scandal, in which the name of Eva Kaili, a Greek MEP, is involved, as well as the ‘Patsis case’, which is related to the expulsion of a New Democracy MP, Andreas Patsis, as a result of having professional activities that were not consistent with the status of the MP.
In particular, though the public debate in Greece over the last weeks is monopolized by the recently disclosed ‘Qatargate’ scandal —as it is widely referred to in the media— and the ‘Patsis case’, none of them figures at the top of citizens’ list of concerns. Put differently, at a time when the political confrontation is mainly based on which party can more efficiently combat corruption; this issue does not seem to be of great concern to the voters.
This is evidenced by the data of a newly published report compiled by the public opinion research company Marc(fieldwork: 16-21 December 2022) which, among other things, showed that the three biggest concerns of the respondents are the “high prices/ price increases” (81.3 percent), the “national issues/Greek-Turkish relations” (41 percent) and the “criminality/violence” (37.2 percent). Contrarily, the ‘Kaili case’ and the ‘Patsis case’ are of high concern for only 9.5 percent and 5 percent of the interviewees, respectively.
It is also interesting the fact that the most popular answer among the voters of all political parties (voting intention) to the question: “Who do you think is most affected by Eva Kaili’s case?” was Greece (35.2 percent) and not the political system in general or even Kaili’s party of origin, namely the PASOK (19.2 percent). Furthermore, in the midst of political confrontation centered on corruption, 38.2 percent of the survey participants believe that it is the Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis (leader of the center-right party ‘New Democracy’) who can better handle issues of corruption and transparency and not Alexis Tsipras, leader of the left-wing populist SYRIZA (36 percent).
The findings in a series of Eurobarometers are also similar. In the Standard Eurobarometer 77, for instance, which was carried out while the so-called ‘Lagarde List’ scandal was in the headlines, 66 percent of the respondents answered that the most important issue that Greece was then facing was its economic situation, 57 percent of them responded that the major problem of the country was the unemployment and 20 percent believed that Greece’s biggest problem was the government debt.
Similarly, 40 percent of the respondents indicated as their main concern —on a personal level— during that period the economic situation in Greece, 30 percent indicated the levels of unemployment, 29 percent the financial situation in their household and 26 percent indicated the rising prices/inflation in the country.
Figure 2: Greek voters’ concerns during the Lagarde List scandal (July 2012)
Source: Standard Eurobarometer 77 (Spring 2012).
These observations, of course, do not imply that corruption is an irrelevant factor regarding the increase of demand side of populism. Rather, they indicate that we should be very cautious when we —arbitrarily— hypothesize that the politicization of corruption is both a necessary and sufficient condition for affecting the electoral fortunes of populist parties. If voters do not list corruption in their high concerns, to what extent is its political exploitation by populist parties possible?
On the other hand, if they indeed recognize corruption as a threat to their interests but lay the blame on both mainstream and challenger parties or even reject as a whole the party system, to what extent could the anti-corruption and anti-elite rhetoric of populist parties be translated into electoral gains? The outright rejection of the party system normally translates into ‘exit’ and not electoral dealignment. Therefore, a more refined approach of the theory, which would take under consideration other parameters, such as the institutional system, the levels of clientelism or even the freedom and the independence of the Press, is needed.
(*) Marina Zoe Saoulidouis a PhD candidate in Political Science and Public Administration at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). Her thesis focuses on the dynamics of both left- and right-wing populist parties in Europe in the context of economic crises.
Bartels, L. (2017). “Economic Inequality and Political Representation.” In: Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (pp. 233-268). Princeton: Princeton University Press.https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400883363-010
Drutman, Lee. (2015). “The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate.” Studies in Postwar American Political Development (New York; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Apr. 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190215514.001.0001
Elkjær, M. A., & Klitgaard, M. B. (2021). “Economic inequality and political responsiveness: A systematic review.” Perspectives on Politics. 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592721002188
Engler, S. (2020). “’Fighting corruption’ or ‘fighting the corrupt elite’? politicizing corruption within and beyond the populist divide.” Democratization. 27(4), 643–661. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2020.1713106
Eurobarometer (2012). European Commission: Standard Eurobarometer 77. Public Opinion in the European Union. Survey requested by the European Commission, requested and co-ordinated by Directorate-General for Communication (DG COMM Unit ´Strategic Communication´). https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/1063 (accessed on December 31, 2022).
Gilens, M. (2012). Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7s1jn
Haughton, T.; Rybář, M. & Deegan-Krause, K. (2021). “Corruption, campaigning, and novelty: The 2020 parliamentary elections and the evolving patterns of party politics in Slovakia.” East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures. 36(3), 728–752. https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254211012765
Hawkins, K. A.; Carlin, R. E.; Littvay, L. & Kaltwasser, C. R. (Eds.). (2018). The ideational approach to populism: Concept, theory, and analysis. Routledge
Kossow, Niklas. (2019). “Transparency International Knowledge Hub.” Transparency International.https://knowledgehub.transparency.org/ (accessed on December 31, 2022).
Loveless, M. & Whitefield, S. (2011). “Being unequal and seeing inequality: Explaining the political significance of social inequality in new market democracies.” European Journal of Political Research. 50(2), 239–266. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2010.01929.x
Uslaner, E. (2008). Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law: The Bulging Pocket Makes the Easy Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511510410
The “two Brazil” theory is now stressed, as never before. From now on, culture wars will have a civil confrontation dimension. It remains to be seen in what terms and on what scale. From the divided families to the broken country, the march goes on. The thesis of an actual split of the country, a break-up of the Federal Union, is on the table. In a more mitigated scenario, the security forces can prevent the escalation and leave democracy safe, but in a state of permanent alert whose political effects in the Senate are still challenging to predict.
From the very beginning of Bolsonaro’s presidential path, still in the campaign that led him to the presidency of Brazil in 2018, the former Brazilian president sought to copy Trump’s strategy (Baptista, Hauber & Orlandini, 2022), taking prejudice to the center of the campaign (Martins, 2002). The so-called culture wars (Hunter, 1992) have definitively entered the political arena, perfectly demarcated between (a) the regions that are majority white and expressing animosity toward the North-East, the evangelical sector of society which is transversal in terms of class but dominated by the elites, advocating a conservative turn in terms of customs for the country and the confluence between state and church, and (b) the non-evangelical lower social classes, the progressive left, and the LGBTQ+ and anti-racist militant and activist sectors. In Brazil, it includes the sense of loss of the historical privileges of the Brazilian upper and middle classes, who inherited a form of the social organization of colonial matrix –which Quijano (1997) named coloniality – and did everything to preserve it through the ideology of the state.
The battle for the heart of Brazil took place. The Right radicalized and regimented itself around Bolsonaro, which made use of the corruption that surrounded the PT (Lula’s party) governments to implement the so-called agenda of customs (conservative moral values) and the neoliberal agenda in the economy, with an inclination for privatization and exploitation of natural resources, such as the deforestation of the Amazon. The Ox-Bull-Bible axis (Stefanoni, 2018) created the conditions for Bolsonarism to become vigorous.
The basis of this strength lies in the middle class, which has always attended the best universities (and which, in some cases, has been overtaken by more able young people from the lower classes due to the social policies of the PT governments), which works in the leading newspapers of the big cities like São Paulo, which saw its capacity to exploit poor labor diminished by the PT’s labor legislation that imposed guarantees on workers. Jessé Souza asks categorically, in The Elite of Backwardness (2017), “how someone who exploits the other classes below her in the form of a vile wage to save time on domestic chores, and supports the indiscriminate killing of poor people by the police, or even the slaughter of defenseless prisoners, can have the nerve to believe oneself morally elevated?”
Now, the intersection between a sense of injustice in the face of the loss of class privilege, the natural displeasure with structural corruption (truly structural, insofar as it is found in the very formation of Brazil as a state), the importation of the most alienated Trumpist conspiracy and populist theories, and the deep messianic belief in a providential leader and an elected people (themselves; Ferreira Dias, 2020), produces a mass of voters with a mission, which because they consider providential owes no respect to the Constitution and democratic rules.
Having rehearsed an ambiguous Trumpist posture of defeat without defeat, Bolsonaro has fed the hosts, letting marinate the belief of electoral fraud, which his party has continued and amplified.
We can affirm that we are facing a movement of a fascist nature (following the plastic definition of Stanley (2020)) of the caudillo type, which refuses electoral results, does not accept democracy, and wants a single identity for the country (ideology of the nation), centralized in a vital state apparatus, of “law and order,” strongly classist and racial, and deeply conservative-religious (evangelical).
The probable military repression to restore the normal functioning of institutions is no guarantee of the regime’s survival. Lula is seen as an anti-Christ that needs to be defeated, no matter what. The advance of the police could be interpreted as the advance of the Romans on the Christians, and the Bolsonarists could take themselves on as martyrs to their patriotic cause.
Lula’s speech of reaction to the invasion of Congress, the Planalto and the Supreme Court will do little to heal the situation by reinforcing the fight between Left and Right, by accusing Bolsonaro of being “genocidal,” by forcing social division, and by placing a negative weight on Bolsonarist supporters by calling them “fanatical fascists.” The coolness of state that one might demand has given way to continued social rupture and ideological struggle.
The “two Brazil” theory is now stressed, as never before. From now on, culture wars will have a civil confrontation dimension. It remains to be seen in what terms and on what scale. From the divided families to the broken country, the march goes on. The thesis of an actual split of the country, a break-up of the Federal Union, is on the table. In a more mitigated scenario, the security forces can prevent the escalation and leave democracy safe, but in a state of permanent alert whose political effects in the Senate are still challenging to predict.
The precedent of The United States Capitol opened the space for these tumults. What can and should be feared is replication in the West, in the forthcoming elections in several European countries, where populism, many of authoritarian inspiration, claims to be the voice of the people. We must remember the words of Georges Duhamel: “The greatest tyrants of the people have almost all emerged from the people.” For now, Brazil is the ticking time bomb, the most apparent laboratory of the culture wars and ideological alienation. This time it will be the Trumpist sector of the United States that will look to Brazil as a laboratory of potentialities. How the situation unfolds in Brazil will affect the future paths of the more polarized Western democracies.
(*) João Ferreira Dias is a researcher at the Centre for International Studies – ISCTE, Lisbon, in the Research Group Institutions, Governance, and International Relations. He is researching culture wars, politics of identity, and fundamental rights. PhD in African Studies (2016). PhD candidate in International Studies (2021- …). Columnist. http://joaoferreiradias.net
References
Baptista, Érica Anita; Hauber, Gabriela; Orlandini, Maiara. (2022). “Despolitização e populismo: as estratégias discursivas de Trump e Bolsonaro.” Media & Jornalismo. 22.40: 105-119.
Ferreira Dias, João. (2020). “O Messias já chegou e livrará ‘as pessoas de bem’ dos corruptos: messianismo político e legitimação popular, os casos Bolsonaro e André Ventura.” Polis. 2.2: 49-60.
Hunter, James Davison. (1992). Culture wars: The struggle to control the family, art, education, law, and politics in America. Avalon Publishing.
Martins, Erikssonara Thalessa da Câmara. (2022). O avanço do neoconservadorismo e a extrema-direita no Brasil: uma análise a partir da Campanha Eleitoral de 2018 ao Governo Bolsonaro. Bachelor’s Thesis. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte.
Quijano, Aníbal. (1997). “Coloniality of power in Latin America.” Anuario Mariateguiano. 9.9: 113-121.
Stefanoni, Pablo. (2018). “Biblia, buey y bala… recargados: Jair Bolsonaro, la ola conservadora en Brasil y América Latina.” Nueva Sociedad. 278: 4-11.
Souza, Jessé. (2017). A elite do atraso: da escravidão à Lava Jato. Leya.
Stanley, Jason. (2020). How fascism works: The politics of us and them. Random House Trade Paperbacks.
Our main goal in carrying out a case competition in the field of political science/populism studies and international relations is to provide a platform for students and professionals to showcase their analytical and problem-solving skills while addressing real-world issues that are relevant to the field. The competition forces participants to think critically and creatively as they research and develop solutions to a complex political or international relations problem. It serves as a valuable learning experience for participants, helping them develop critical skills in high demand in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing political and international landscape. 
The panel of experts that assessed the case presentation on March 7, 2023, was formed by the scholars who contributed to the ECPS report on “The Impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Right-wing Populism in Europe.”
