Professor Justin Gest.

Prof. Gest: The Way Countries Treat Their Most Vulnerable Is Indicative of the State of Their Democracy

by with No Comment Editor’s ChoiceHomeHuman RightsInterviewsMigration

Professor Justin Gest argues that democratic resilience depends not only on institutions but also on the citizens who remain to sustain them. In this ECPS interview, Professor Gest discusses his concept of “democratic drain”—the depletion of liberal democratic political capital through emigration—and explains how large-scale departures can weaken resistance to populist and authoritarian backsliding. He warns that democracies are “highly susceptible to demographic change” and that the phenomenon is spreading beyond its European “poster child” to countries including Turkey, Israel, India, and potentially the United States. Professor Gest also examines immigration politics, demographic ageing, and populist mobilization, arguing that migration should be framed in terms of the national interest and that “the way countries treat their most vulnerable” is indicative of the state of their democracy.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In an era when democratic backsliding is typically diagnosed through institutional erosion—the weakening of courts, legislatures, electoral safeguards, and checks on executive power—Professor Justin Gest directs attention to a less visible but potentially consequential force: the changing composition of the citizenry itself. Professor and Director of the Public Policy Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government and the award-winning author of seven books, including Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy, Professor Gest argues that understanding democratic resilience requires taking demographic change seriously. “What I think has been missing is the human dimension,” he tells the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), emphasizing that democracies “are also highly susceptible to demographic change.”

At the heart of Professor Gest’s argument is what he calls a “depletion effect”: when citizens with liberal democratic values leave in large numbers, their departure can diminish the political and civic resources available to resist authoritarianism. Migration remains, he stresses, “an expression of human freedom and human agency,” yet hundreds of thousands or millions of individual decisions to leave can produce “a very significant collective effect.” The result is a provocative reconsideration of emigration not simply as individual mobility, but as a process capable of reshaping the democratic prospects of countries of origin.

This dynamic may also strengthen populist and authoritarian governments. Professor Gest argues that the depletion of democratic human capital can allow “populist governments or authoritarian-leaning governments to get away with the backsliding” that might otherwise have been politically punished. Europe remains “the poster child for democratic drain,” particularly Central and Eastern Europe, but Professor Gest sees the phenomenon broadening to countries including Turkey, Israel, India, and potentially the United States. Indeed, he warns that “we are seeing the beginnings of a democratic drain in the United States,” even as American institutions, civic associations, and the judiciary continue to provide important sources of resilience.

The interview also situates democratic drain within the wider politics of migration, populism, and demographic transformation. Professor Gest argues that immigration politics is “principally driven by political entrepreneurs” and challenges narratives of invasion and chaos, while advocating immigration as a pursuit of the national interest. Most importantly, migration governance itself becomes a democratic test. “The way countries treat their most vulnerable,”Professor Gest argues, including foreigners and ethnic or religious minorities, “is indicative of the state of their democracy”—an observation he says may constitute an indictment of several countries, including the United States.

Here is the revised version of our interview with Professor Justin Gest, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.

Democracies Are Highly Susceptible to Demographic Change

People shop in Gamla Stan (Old Town) in Stockholm, Sweden on August 23, 2018.

Professor Gest, welcome! Your recent Journal of Democracy article challenges the conventional literature on democratic backsliding by arguing that scholars have focused too heavily on institutional erosion while overlooking the political consequences of selective emigration. In many ways, you shift the analytical focus from what governments do to who remains within the polity. Do you see democratic drain as a complementary mechanism within existing theories of democratic erosion, or are you proposing a fundamentally new paradigm that requires us to rethink how democratic resilience itself should be conceptualized?

Professor Justin Gest:  That’s a great question. No, I see this as complementary rather than a fundamentally new paradigm. There has been some excellent scholarship on the prospects for democratization, the forces that drive it, and the forces that generate backlash. What I think has been missing is the human dimension. Democracies, for all their institutions and their susceptibility to structural change, are also highly susceptible to demographic change.

So, if there is—as I argue and demonstrate—this depletion effect, whereby people with liberal democratic values leave a country in large numbers, that, too, will have consequences. It complements, supplements, and helps contextualize the institutional changes that scholars have traditionally focused on.

Migration Is an Expression of Human Freedom and Human Agency

One of the article’s most original contributions is its reinterpretation of Albert Hirschman’s “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.” Traditionally, exit has been viewed as an individual response to political dissatisfaction. Your argument suggests that, when aggregated, millions of individual exits become a collective political force with systemic consequences. Does this imply that emigration should no longer be understood merely as a personal freedom but also as a phenomenon carrying democratic externalities? How should liberal democracies reconcile the individual’s right to leave with the collective costs that large-scale democratic exit may impose on countries of origin?

Professor Justin Gest: I certainly don’t think that we should be blaming anyone for making these very personal choices, and I don’t think we should be restricting them from doing so. Ultimately, migration is an expression of human freedom and human agency, of instantiating the democracy, the rights, and the freedoms that people want. But it is certainly complicated because of the effect that it has on the prospects for future democracy in the countries that people leave behind. And, of course, one person, one family, or one household’s decision doesn’t change a country. But when hundreds of thousands or even millions of people make the same choice, then that can have a very significant collective effect.

Your work implicitly treats democracy as something sustained not only by constitutions and institutions but also by what might be called democratic human capital—citizens willing to organize, protest, deliberate, and defend democratic norms. Has political science underestimated the demographic foundations of democratic resilience? Should future democracy indices begin measuring civic composition alongside institutional quality? In other words, can a democracy remain institutionally intact while gradually losing the civic foundations necessary for its long-term survival?

Professor Justin Gest: Yes, it certainly could. And it would be brilliant to be able to measure this. It does take some monitoring, but in many ways, the large-scale departure of people with democratic political values could be a signal of what’s to come in fragile democracies, or even not-so-fragile democracies. So, it would be wise to measure these things. It’s not especially costly. These are data that are collected and can be collected via regular survey research. It can be very predictive of the prospects for democracy thereafter.

When You Have Brain Drain, You’re Also Encountering Some Democratic Drain

Brain drain.
Brain drain. Photo: Francesco Scatena / Dreamstime.

Your concept deliberately extends—but also departs from—the classic literature on brain drain. Highly educated citizens are not necessarily the same people as those most committed to democratic participation. Conceptually, what distinguishes democratic drain from brain drain, and what does each explain that the other cannot?

Professor Justin Gest: That’s a great question. Brain drain is a reference to the phenomenon of the departure and depletion of economic capital when immigrants leave. They take their intellectual capital, their ideas, and their skill set with them when they leave. What democratic drain is looking at is a phenomenon of political capital—the departure of people with certain values and proclivities.

These two very well overlap. People with democratic values tend to have middling levels of education compared to their countrymen. So it is very likely that there’s a lot of overlap—that when you have brain drain, you’re also encountering some democratic drain.

What they predict is really different because brain drain has been shown to be accompanied by what’s called a brain gain, where people can remit the ideas and the things that they learn from abroad, and in some cases the money that they make from abroad, into capital investment, remittances, and social remittances back home. It’s not clear that it’s so easy to diffuse democracy across borders in the same way. Diaspora politics are certainly lively and active, but how impactful they are in actually creating regime changes is really more dubious.

Democratic Drain and Authoritarian Resilience

Your findings suggest that politically engaged, educated, and internationally connected citizens are often the most likely to emigrate from countries experiencing democratic decline. Could this selective emigration unintentionally strengthen populist and authoritarian movements by reshaping not only the electorate but also the broader ecology of civil society? In other words, does democratic drain help explain why some populist governments appear to become electorally stronger even as dissatisfaction with their governance increases?

Professor Justin Gest: The short answer is yes. That’s, in many ways, precisely what I expect and what I observe. Because of that decline of human capital, because of that depletion, it basically allows populist governments or authoritarian-leaning governments to get away with the backsliding that we otherwise would be observing and that would otherwise be punished, potentially, if, in the counterfactual, those immigrants had never left.

One possible criticism is that emigration merely reflects democratic decline rather than contributing to it. How confident are you that democratic drain becomes a self-reinforcing mechanism of authoritarian resilience rather than simply another consequence of poor governance? What evidence would most convincingly establish that causal relationship?

Professor Justin Gest: That’s a really good question. I think it’s likely to be both. You have certain democratic-leaning, liberal-leaning citizens who are very alert to changes and quick to respond when they see that there is further decline in the future, when they anticipate that decline. So, that is possible. That is certainly possible.

In my own research, there’s good evidence to suggest that elections that place people into office who have authoritarian leanings trigger people to want to leave. In that case, we observe that it comes after. However, what I also observe in the book is that there’s everyday migration of people who are not triggered by politics but are actually triggered by economic opportunities, by the opportunity to reunify with family members, loved ones, and relatives, or by people pursuing their educations abroad. Those people are not leaving for political reasons, and they are leaving in large numbers before any authoritarian backsliding might be taking place.

So, it’s likely to be both. It’s likely that more economically driven and family-driven migration is taking place independently of political backsliding. But there are also responses to political backsliding as well.

Nostalgic Deprivation Helps Explain That Backlash

A Trump supporter holds up a “Make America Great Again” sign at presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rally in the convention center in Sioux City, Iowa, on November 6, 2016. Photo: Mark Reinstein.

Across your work—from “Roots of the Radical Right” to your comparative research on nostalgic deprivation—you argue that perceptions of social, political, and economic decline shape populist support. How do these earlier findings relate to Democratic Drain? Do you see nostalgic deprivation and democratic drain as two sides of the same process: one explaining why citizens embrace populism, the other explaining why others decide to leave?

Professor Justin Gest: That’s a really interesting point. Rarely do I deliberately connect my books together. They are certainly contributing to what we are witnessing, yes. And they are, in some ways, two sides of the same coin, because one of the biggest paradoxes of democratic drain is that when immigrants come over to the destination country, they are bringing with them ostensibly liberal, democratic political capital that they’re removing from their country of origin.

However, they’re not necessarily creating a sort of democratic renaissance in the country of destination. They’re not necessarily seeing those values enrich the democracy where they’re going. Quite the opposite: we have seen in many examples across the world today that immigrants’ arrival actually triggers a populist authoritarian backlash.

And so, yes, I think that nostalgic deprivation, which yearns for an earlier period, helps explain that backlash. But technically we’re talking about two different groups of people. We’re talking about one group of people who are remaining in their country of origin and witnessing the arrival of immigrants, and the other is referring to the immigrants themselves and their countries of origin.

Management, Order, and Control Do Not Prevent a Country from Being Open to Migration

Throughout Europe, mainstream parties have increasingly adopted stricter positions on immigration, often in an effort to contain the electoral rise of the radical right. From a comparative perspective, does this strategy reduce support for populist challengers, or does it instead contribute to the normalization of their political agenda?

Professor Justin Gest: It’s a really good, important question. I think it depends on how it’s being done by mainstream parties. I certainly think that mainstream, and particularly center-left, parties have been very politically vulnerable to attacks and criticism that they are too lenient about migration and that their approaches lead to chaos or, at least, to indiscriminate admissions policies. In some cases that might be fair.

I think that many center-left parties have historically been reluctant to talk about management, control, and order, using words like these on the campaign trail and in the design of their policies. But management, order, and control do not prevent a country from being open to migration. Having managed, controlled, and orderly flows of people coming in and out does not mean that you’re stopping people from coming in and out. It just means that you actually are in control of it. It means that you’re being discriminatory in who you are letting in and whether they support national political and policy goals, and who do not.

So I think that, yes, ostensibly it does legitimize what some of the far-right and populist parties are saying, but not in a way that necessarily obviates or prevents center-left and center-right parties from facilitating the normal flows of immigrants coming in and out of their borders. So, it’s complicated. It really does depend on the governments.

Certainly, there are going to be a lot of lazy politicians that ape what they hear on the far right rather than actually thinking about how to mechanically manage an orderly immigration system. Shame on those lazy politicians. But, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Immigration Is a Very Emotional Political Subject Matter

Your work has consistently shown that demographic change becomes politically consequential when it is interpreted through narratives of identity and belonging. To what extent is the contemporary success of populist movements driven by demographic realities themselves, and to what extent by the political entrepreneurs who frame those realities as existential threats?

Professor Justin Gest: I think it’s principally driven by political entrepreneurs. What research has shown—not my own personal research, but others’—is that the general public is broadly not very numerate when it comes to the extent to which immigrants are arriving at borders, especially in a really big country like Germany, the United Kingdom, France, or the United States.

These are large countries where immigrants can blend in very easily and diffuse across big cities and smaller suburbs. So, it’s largely a feeling. Immigration is a very emotional political subject matter, and far-right political entrepreneurs have told people that their countries are being invaded. They’ve told people of chaos and massive influxes of people coming into the country.

There certainly have been increases, and there certainly has been an upward trajectory in numerous places, particularly when you put it as a share of the national population, which is often declining due to aging and lower fertility rates. But it’s certainly not the chaos and the invasion that people are describing. So, broadly, I would say that this is driven by political entrepreneurs, even if the numbers do have an upward trend.

Immigration Should Be Framed as a Pursuit of the National Interest

Immigrants
A group of war refugees walks through a cornfield on the Serbia-Croatia border on November 3, 2015, as they seek passage to the EU. Many are Syrian refugees fleeing conflict. Photo: Ajdin Kamber.

Recent demographic projections suggest that aging societies across North America, Europe, and East Asia will increasingly depend on immigration to sustain economic growth and labor markets, even as anti-immigration politics continue to gain electoral traction. Migration is therefore often presented either as an economic necessity or as a political and cultural threat. Your scholarship suggests that this binary is overly simplistic. How do you explain the growing disconnect between demographic realities and political demand, and how should democratic societies approach migration if the objective is to preserve democratic legitimacy, social cohesion, and long-term economic sustainability?

Professor Justin Gest: They should really switch to a lens on immigration that is much more directly related to the national interest. I think that so much of the debate around immigration, and in some cases the policy design, has really been framing immigration as a humanitarian act—that immigration systems are rescuing vulnerable, susceptible, and weak people from poorer and conflict-driven societies.

And certainly humanitarian migration is an element of many countries’ immigration programs, and a very important one, I’ll say, and one that I think we ought to expand. However, the vast majority of immigrants do not fit that profile.

Immigrants are some of the most significant contributors to our economies, to the enrichment of our societies, and to the sustainability of our populations. And so, bringing them in is not doing anyone any favors except the country itself. I should say it’s doing everyone a favor, including the country itself. So, framing immigration as a pursuit of the national interest is the best and most accurate way to be pursuing it politically.

How Countries Treat Migrants Is Indicative of the State of Their Democracy

In your work on migrant rights and immigration governance, you argue that migration policy reflects broader democratic values rather than simply border management. Do you believe the treatment of migrants has become an increasingly reliable indicator of the health of democratic institutions?

Professor Justin Gest: To some extent it has been. I think there are exceptions where you have a not very democratic institution facilitating the humane entry and exit of immigrants with minimal violations of their rights. A place like that could be Singapore. I’d say Singapore is more of an exception, though.

Certainly, Singapore’s rights profile is not perfect. It’s not what you’d see in a place like Denmark or France. In Denmark, interestingly, they have an excellent rights profile and a very strong democracy, but their policies towards immigrants have become steadily less generous over time. But they’re not violating anyone’s rights, at least certainly not to the extent that we see in other countries.

So, yes, I do think that the way countries treat their most vulnerable, and treat people who are from other places who are members of ethnic or religious minorities, who are foreigners, is indicative of the state of their democracy. That’s probably an indictment of a number of countries, including the United States and its decline democratically over the last 10 years.

Much of your research emphasizes that public attitudes toward immigration are shaped not only by economic realities but also by political narratives and elite framing. In an era of misinformation and social media, have political entrepreneurs become more influential than demographic realities themselves in shaping public perceptions of migration?

Professor Justin Gest: Without a question, yes.

Immigration Is a Way of Creating a Sort of Population Equilibrium Globally

Across advanced democracies, governments increasingly face a paradox: ageing populations and labor shortages make immigration economically necessary, while anti-immigration politics remain electorally attractive. Is this contradiction becoming one of the defining governance challenges for contemporary liberal democracies?

Professor Justin Gest: It has been one of the most fundamental and intractable challenges, certainly. But my prescription really relates to what I said earlier about reframing this as a national interest. I think that each policy should be framed in such a way that the public understands that when the state is admitting people they’re not doing immigrants a favor without actually pursuing the national interest as well.

Immigration is where these different interests become mutual. They come together. And that’s one of the most wonderful things about this. It’s particularly poignant at this moment in demographic history, because we have Global North countries, fundamentally or primarily, that are experiencing rapid aging and very severe drops in fertility rates. And we have many countries in the Global South, in lower-income countries, that are experiencing population booms that are unsustainable, given their economies and their ability to give people jobs.

So, actually, immigration is a way of creating a sort of population equilibrium globally, while also addressing critical problems for politicians and public officials in both the Global South and the Global North.

We Are Seeing the Beginnings of a Democratic Drain in the United States

Labour Day celebrations
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.

Following the 2024 US presidential election, there has been renewed discussion about Americans—particularly academics, journalists, scientists, and young professionals—considering relocation abroad. Is the United States beginning to exhibit early symptoms of democratic drain, or do its institutional resilience and federal structure make it fundamentally different from the countries examined in your research?

Professor Justin Gest: I think both are true. We are seeing the beginnings of a democratic drain in the United States. The phenomenon has clearly reached US shores, and it’s beginning to take place now, even if it’s just in the early days. But at the same time, the United States possesses certain unique advantages in its institutions, civic associations, and judiciary that act as a form of resilience against this creep of democratic backsliding.

Interrupting the Democratic Drain Cycle

Across Europe, several countries that have experienced democratic backsliding—including Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia—have also witnessed sustained outward migration. Do you see Europe as the principal laboratory for democratic drain, or are similar patterns now emerging across a much broader range of democracies?

Professor Justin Gest: Europe is certainly the poster child for democratic drain, and it’s one of the reasons why I focus so much of my research on Central and Eastern Europe—places like Hungary, Serbia, Poland, etc. However, democratic drain is broadening now, and it surely already has before this. You know, other countries to look at would certainly include places like Turkey, Israel, India, and, as I mentioned earlier, potentially the United States.

If democratic drain becomes a self-reinforcing cycle—where democratic decline encourages emigration, which in turn further weakens democratic resistance—what practical steps can democratic governments take to interrupt that cycle? Are institutional reforms, economic opportunities, or renewed civic engagement likely to be the most effective response?

Professor Justin Gest: I’m not sure about the latter question, but certainly in terms of what to do about this at the countries-of-origin level. When you have this steady depletion of people leaving, the most direct solution is to cultivate the regeneration of more people with democratic political values. And so that comes from education and public information campaigns, and supporting movements for democracy that educate people and cultivate an appetite for freedoms and rights, such as those that democracies promise and protect. So, that is the best way: supporting the organizations, the civil society groups, the political parties that are seizing and doing their best to cultivate more liberal and democratic norms in the people that they represent.

The Future of Migration and Democracy

And lastly, Professor Gest, taken together, your scholarship explores the intersections of migration, identity, inequality, populism, and democratic representation. Looking ahead, which emerging development—whether artificial intelligence, demographic ageing, climate mobility, rising nationalism, or growing geopolitical instability—do you believe will most fundamentally reshape the relationship between migration and democracy over the coming decade?

Professor Justin Gest: It’s a strong list you put together. It’s clearly all of the above. Each of the meta-phenomena that you mentioned plays a role. Ultimately, I think that the first step we can take to address the challenges that migration poses for democracy and democratization is to recognize those challenges. I think that more and more public officials are coming to realize that there is this relationship.

There is a relationship, and that means that if you care to protect democracy, but you also understand and recognize the critical benefits of a healthy, orderly, and well-managed immigration system, then you have to work to pursue them both, and you have to be cognizant of their relationship to each other as you make policies.

You also have to recognize that there are actors in this world who do not care about the protection of democracy, who do not care for immigrants—sometimes for very hateful reasons, and others just because they don’t think that they’re necessary. In any case, those actors will seize upon the vulnerabilities of this relationship between migration and democracy.

So, people who want to protect them both have to recognize this relationship and act accordingly. Otherwise, the temptations and the allure of easy solutions, slogans, and disinformation are going to win.

Anti-Trump protesters.

Look Up, Not Across: How Elites Weaponize Migration as a Distraction from Class Inequality

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceHomeHuman RightsMigration

In this commentary, Bernard Allan V. Garcia argues that contemporary populism strategically reframes migration not simply as a policy issue but as a political instrument for redirecting public anger. Rather than confronting structural inequalities such as wealth concentration, housing crises, and labor exploitation, populist leaders shift political conflict from a vertical struggle between citizens and elites to a horizontal conflict between natives and migrants. Garcia demonstrates how this narrative preserves existing economic hierarchies, redefines political enemies, and transforms migrants into convenient scapegoats while leaving the underlying causes of social and economic insecurity untouched. The commentary offers a provocative framework for understanding anti-migration rhetoric as a mechanism of economic elite preservation rather than a genuine response to citizens’ socioeconomic grievances.

By Bernard Allan V. Garcia*

In an era of staggering wealth inequality, stagnant growth, soaring living costs, and decaying public infrastructure, populist leaders often target vulnerable populations rather than addressing systemic shortcomings. The rhetoric of modern populist movements is directed downward, frequently toward migrant populations (Wodak, 2015). This is no coincidence. It is a recurring pattern in countries led by populist governments, albeit with different variations, and has become a core strategy of contemporary populism.

To understand why human migration remains such a controversial issue in contemporary politics, we must look beyond standard and overused explanations (i.e., xenophobia and traditional economic models). The reality in countries governed by populist leaders is more structural: migration and migrants serve as instruments of political distraction and redirection (Rini, 2019). This strategy shifts political conflict from a top-down class divide to a horizontal conflict between citizens and immigrants.

The Elite’s Dilemma

Every sovereign state today has its own deep structural fractures. For ordinary citizens, difficulties such as unaffordable housing, inadequate health insurance, bankruptcy, or industrial decline naturally lead them to search for explanations. Public anger tends to flow vertically upward, toward government institutions, powerful elites, and the corporate structures that, directly or indirectly, shape people’s daily lives.

This places political and economic elites in an equally difficult position, as a society organized around a vertical, top-down understanding of power can become highly volatile. When directed upward, public anger can generate demands for wealth redistribution, higher corporate taxes, and structural reforms that threaten the status quo benefiting those who hold power. To preserve that status quo, political leaders who depend on elite donors face a fundamental dilemma: how can they acknowledge the frustrations of the working class without allowing that frustration to be directed at the elites themselves?

The Art of Anger Redirection

Migration and migrants are, unfortunately, well suited to solving this dilemma (Nayyeri, 2024). By introducing an external group into the political equation, populist leaders can dramatically redirect public attention and redefine the source of public suffering. For example, housing crises in many Western states, where rental prices are skyrocketing, are driven primarily by internal factors such as restrictive zoning laws, low interest rates, and the financialization of housing as an investment rather than a basic human right. Addressing these problems requires significant redistribution of resources and a reordering of policy priorities—measures that may be unpopular with economic elites. Instead, populist leaders attribute the problem to migrants. It is far easier to tell working-class families that housing prices have risen because of the millions of migrants who have arrived in recent years than to introduce policies that might strain relations between the government and economic elites. As a result, the political conflict instantly rotates by 90 degrees, shifting from Bottom vs. Top to Inside vs. Outside.

This substitution offers an immense political advantage. First, the redirection preserves the economic and political status quo because there is no need to raise taxes on wealthy individuals or undertake structural reforms. Second, it provides political leaders and economic elites with an easy villain in a fabricated narrative, as migrants lack both political power and media representation to defend themselves. Finally, it unites a struggling working class and powerful elites around the issue of border control, creating a shared political agenda that can be translated into electoral advantage.

Redefining the “Enemy”

Historically, the elite has consisted of those with economic power, such as business owners, landlords, and corporate executives. However, populist leaders, driven by both the desire to remain in power and the need to preserve their relationships with traditional elites, introduce a revised concept of who constitutes the elite (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). In the populist narrative, an elite is no longer a billionaire who pays workers minimum wage while benefiting from low corporate taxes. Instead, the elite becomes a progressive liberal politician, university professor, journalist, or anyone who advocates for migrants. Through this lens, those who defend migrants’ rights are portrayed as enemies of the state, while those who oppose migration are celebrated as patriots.

When populist leaders attack migrants and the migration system, they claim to be fighting the established liberal order. Working-class voters may feel a sense of victory in dismantling the so-called migrant establishment, even though their own economic exploitation remains unresolved.

The Paradox of Protecting Local Labor

The hypocrisy of populist politics can be seen in the priorities set by populist governments. One of the most common justifications for anti-migration populism is the protection of local employment opportunities. If populist leaders were truly concerned with protecting local jobs, their proposed policies would follow a logical order. They would champion strict penalties against corporate exploitation, including the abuse of both local and undocumented foreign workers. They would insist that all workers, regardless of their country of origin, be treated fairly and that no employer be allowed to use race or nationality to justify paying below-standard wages. They would also advocate pathways to citizenship or permanent residency to protect migrants’ rights and prevent employers from coercing them into accepting substandard pay.

However, such policies remain far down the list of priorities for populist leaders. Instead of penalizing corporate exploitation, they target workers themselves. The objective is rarely to eliminate the unregulated labor market—including undocumented foreign workers—but rather to preserve a system of permanent insecurity. By keeping migrants in a legal twilight zone while simultaneously using them as political punching bags, populist leaders claim two victories: a source of cheap labor for the economy and an inexhaustible political scapegoat during elections.

Stop Looking at the Border

None of this commentary suggests that migration policy is simple or that sovereign states should not manage their territorial boundaries. Managing immigration is both a legitimate and a necessary function of a sovereign state. However, there is a difference between treating migration as a complex humanitarian challenge and presenting it as an all-purpose solution to domestic political problems.

As long as public scrutiny remains focused on the horizontal conflict between locals/natives and foreigners, the underlying causes of societal inequality will remain unaddressed. The housing market will continue to suffer as long as housing is treated primarily as an asset and investment. Wealth will remain concentrated at the top of the social hierarchy. Public services will continue to deteriorate. Ultimately, despite efforts to militarize state borders, citizens may one day wake up and realize that their lives have not fundamentally improved.

Therefore, whenever political figures attempt to convince you that your main adversary is an immigrant arriving by boat or crossing a border, commentators, journalists, and citizens must remain vigilant and look upward. The central political conflict of our time is not a clash between natives and foreigners; it is a struggle between those who profit from a broken status quo and those left to bear its costs. While public attention is directed toward the border, ask yourself which policies are being quietly buried. When working people compete with one another over scraps instead of demanding a seat at the table, ask who truly benefits.


(*) Bernard Allan V. Garcia is a political demographer having earned degrees in International Studies and Population Studies. He is currently an Associate Researcher at the Asian Institute of Management in the Philippines. Email: bvgarcia@aim.edu

 

References

Mudde, C. & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Nayyeri, M. (2024). “Populism, backlash morality and immigrants.” International Journal of Law in Context, 21(1), 58–79. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1744552324000387

Rini, R. (2019). “Scapegoating and the strategic reallocation of public anger.” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 36(3), 411–428.

Wodak, R. (2015). The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. SAGE Publications.

Kutupalong Refugee Camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.

From Beneficiaries to Changemakers: Why Rohingya Youth Must Have a Voice in Their Future

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeMigrationVoice of Youth

Nearly a decade after the mass displacement of the Rohingya, an entire generation has come of age in refugee camps where their lives are shaped by decisions they rarely help make. In this compelling ECPS Voice of Youth (VoY) article, PS Ayaas, a young Rohingya writer and community organizer, challenges the humanitarian paradigm that casts refugee youth primarily as beneficiaries of aid. Drawing on both lived experience and policy analysis, he argues that young Rohingya are already leading initiatives in education, human rights, environmental protection, and community development despite severe structural constraints. The article calls for a fundamental shift from tokenistic consultation to meaningful participation, insisting that sustainable humanitarian governance must recognize refugee youth as partners, decision-makers, and changemakers in shaping their collective future.

By PS Ayaas

I have grown up watching decisions about my future being made in rooms I could not enter. I am a young Rohingya living in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and I know the particular sound of a meeting happening somewhere close by, on the other side of a fence or a tarpaulin wall, deciding something about people like me without any of us inside it. Like thousands of other young people here, I have learned to build a future inside a place designed around uncertainty — where the rain decides some days whether a path is walkable, where a shelter roof gets patched more times than anyone bothers to count, where you learn early which queues take an hour and which take a whole morning. We are surrounded by humanitarian services, policies, assessments, and programs intended to protect us. Yet too often, the people designing these responses are speaking about young Rohingya rather than listening to us.

I know what it means to be grateful for assistance and, in the very same breath, to feel that your own voice is missing from the decisions that shape your life. Both things are true at once, and I have mostly stopped trying to resolve that contradiction, because living inside it is simply what it means to be young and Rohingya right now. I have watched young people keep studying despite severe limitations, volunteer in their communities with almost nothing to give, and organize around health, education, human rights, and environmental protection anyway — not because someone funded it, but because waiting for permission has never been something any of us could actually afford. These are not small things. They have convinced me of something I now hold as a plain fact rather than an opinion: Rohingya youth should not be treated only as beneficiaries of humanitarian assistance. We must be recognized as participants, problem-solvers, and changemakers.

Nearly a decade after the 2017 exodus, Cox’s Bazar remains home to close to a million Rohingya refugees, roughly half of whom are children and adolescents (UNICEF, 2025). Yet in nearly every major decision that shapes our daily lives — what we are permitted to study, where we may travel, whether our camp stays open or closed during a national election — young Rohingya are treated overwhelmingly as recipients of policy rather than participants in it. The international response to this crisis has structurally cast youth as beneficiaries of aid rather than as capable agents of change, even as a growing, under-recognized body of youth-led organizing inside these camps tells a very different story.

A Generation Defined by Ceilings

The most concrete example of this structural ceiling is education. Rohingya children in Bangladesh are, by government policy, not permitted to study in Bangladeshi schools and are barred from enrolling in formal schools outside the camps (Human Rights Watch, 2019). A 2022 pilot finally began offering instruction based on Myanmar’s national curriculum, reaching its first 10,000 students that year (UNICEF, 2022) — a genuine milestone, but one that arrived five years late and still reaches only a fraction of eligible youth. That fragile progress is now reversing. Foreign aid cuts have forced the closure of learning centers, and as of 2025, kindergarten and primary facilities across the camps remain shuttered while youth vocational centers have shut down entirely (UNICEF, 2025). Human Rights Watch (2025) reports that roughly 437,000 school-age children in the camps have been affected. Girls face a compounding barrier: while they make up roughly half of primary-level learners, safety concerns and restrictive gender norms reduce female participation at the secondary level to roughly twenty-five percent (Global Partnership for Education, n.d.).

For me, education has never been simply a classroom experience. I have studied by whatever light was available that evening, through a connection that drops mid-sentence, with materials passed hand to hand until the pages soften at the edges, and with a persistent uncertainty about where any of it actually leads once you reach the ceiling the policy has already built for you. Studying, some days, feels less like preparation for a future and more like an act of pure persistence, undertaken without any proof it will be rewarded. I continue anyway, because education has never meant a certificate to me. It means the possibility of becoming useful to my community, whatever shape that usefulness eventually takes — and some days, on the hardest ones, it is simply the one part of the day that still belongs to me and not to the camp around it.

Movement and livelihood are constrained in much the same way. Human Rights Watch (2022) documented curfews, checkpoint harassment, and arbitrary travel denials across the camps. Ahead of Bangladesh’s February 2026 national elections, camp authorities ordered the camps “sealed,” severely restricting movement (Fortify Rights, 2026). The International Crisis Group (2024) frames these restrictions on movement and the right to work as systemic pressures that leave refugees with no formal pathway to self-sufficiency. An entire generation is coming of age inside a system explicitly built to withhold the two pillars of adult independence: higher education and legal work.

The Agency the System Doesn’t Account For

What the policy framework misses is what is already happening despite it. I have felt this agency personally through community volunteering — in the small, unglamorous work of showing up for people who live three shelters down, in conversations that happen on a doorstep rather than in a workshop, in the particular satisfaction of solving something small and real for someone you actually know. Working directly alongside other young people has taught me that refugees do not need to be taught only how to receive services. Many of us already understand the particular, textured challenges of our environment, because we live inside them every day without a break, in a way no assessment visiting for an afternoon ever quite captures. What we lack is not motivation. It is the resources, the structural recognition, and the institutional space to turn what we already know into lasting action.

Across the camps, youth-led initiatives prove this daily, in ways that rarely make it into the reports written about us. In community leadership and rights work, the Rohingya Youth Union runs mentorship and problem-solving workshops designed specifically to bridge the learning gaps the formal system leaves open (UNHCR, n.d.-a), while the Rohingya Youth Advocacy Network, established in 2023, has grown to more than 700 volunteers coordinating human rights advocacy and community programming (Rohingya Khobor, 2025d). 

In grassroots protection and media, the IOM’s Poribortok — “change makers” — program has trained 400 young Rohingya to lead neighborhood-level efforts against gender-based violence (International Organization for Migration, n.d.), and in late 2025 a four-day media workshop trained seventy young Rohingya storytellers and videographers to document their own community instead of continuing to rely on outside narrators (Rohingya Khobor, 2025a, 2025b). In ecological stewardship, the Rohingya Environmental Protection Network, founded entirely by young volunteers, coordinates practical projects and education addressing the deforestation and climate vulnerability our overcrowded camps now face (Rohingya Khobor, 2025c).

What unites all of it is that none of it waited for permission from the humanitarian structures meant to serve us. It exists as living evidence against the premise that Rohingya youth need to be spoken for.

Why the Gap Persists: A Policy Critique

If this agency is already visible, why does the policy conversation still so rarely include it? Part of the answer is structural. A camp environment built around restricted movement, capped education, and no legal right to work does not simply fail to cultivate youth leadership — it actively works against the conditions leadership normally requires. Omata’s (2022) fieldwork in Ghana’s Buduburam camp found much the same pattern: even when refugees acquired real skills through aid programs, the surrounding economic and legal environment made those skills nearly impossible to apply. Skill-building without any legal pathway to use those skills locally does not build capacity. It builds frustration.

It would be unfair to say Rohingya participation does not exist at all. Humanitarian agencies frequently engage refugee volunteers, community leaders, and informal committees, and I have been one of those volunteers. But the deeper problem is the distance between participation and decision-making. A young refugee is often asked to help implement a program, and far more rarely given any seat at the table where that program was actually designed. The problem, in other words, is not only that Rohingya youth are excluded from decision-making. It is that humanitarian systems are losing real, local knowledge every time they treat young refugees primarily as beneficiaries rather than as partners. “Nothing about us, without us” cannot remain an advocacy slogan. It has to become an operational standard — for program design, for monitoring, for evaluation, for all of it.

What Changes When Youth Become Partners

When young Rohingya are engaged as agents rather than recipients, the outcomes are not abstract. Community-based protection work led by trained young volunteers has proven significantly more effective at reducing stigma and shifting harmful social norms than top-down messaging campaigns designed elsewhere and delivered to us (UNHCR, 2025). Youth-led journalism is producing an authentic archive of camp reporting, quietly shifting narrative authority from international outlets back to the community those outlets have long written about. Youth-run environmental and advocacy networks are building local organizational capacity that outlasts funding cycles entirely, unlike the rigid, externally designed projects that tend to disappear the moment a grant runs out.

What Meaningful Participation Should Look Like

Moving from tokenistic consultation to genuine policy partnership requires structural change, not better intentions. I believe four reforms matter most.

First, institutionalized youth advisory structures. Humanitarian coordination platforms should establish formal, representative Rohingya youth advisory groups with direct consultative status during the drafting of Joint Response Plans and strategic policy reviews — not consulted after the fact, but present while the plan is still being written.

Second, direct, accessible micro-funding. Donors should create streamlined, small-scale grant mechanisms specifically for legitimate refugee-led youth organizations, bypassing the bureaucratic hurdles that keep resources concentrated among established international organizations instead of the young people already doing the work.

Third, accredited education and vocational pathways. Education policy has to look past basic literacy. Aid agencies and host authorities need to expand access to accredited secondary curricula, certified digital skills training, and tertiary scholarships, so that studying leads somewhere rather than stopping at a ceiling by design.

Fourth, transparent institutional accountability. Participation needs measurable consequences. When agencies consult young refugees, they should be expected to report back — clearly, and in public — on which youth recommendations were accepted, which were modified, which were rejected, and why.

Conclusion: Living Between Uncertainty and Action

I do not know exactly where my own future will lead. Like many young Rohingya, I live with daily uncertainty about where I will study, work, or build a permanent life — whether the place I am sitting in right now, writing this, is where I will still be sitting in five years, or ten. But that uncertainty has not removed my desire to contribute. If anything, it has sharpened it, and strengthened my belief that young people must be given real opportunities to shape the communities we are already serving, whether or not anyone ever officially asked us to.

I do not ask the world to listen to Rohingya youth simply because we are young, or because we are refugees. I ask it to listen because we know our communities from the inside, in ways no external assessment can fully reach. We know what works. We know what fails. We know what our families quietly fear at night, and what young people here still hope to build, even now, even without much reason to expect it.

Nearly a decade into one of the world’s largest and most protracted refugee crises, young Rohingya are already learning, volunteering, organizing, creating, and leading — often in the same week we are also queueing for rations, patching a roof before the next rain, or walking further than we should have to for water. We are not waiting to become changemakers. We are already trying, today, with what little the system gives us, to change what we can. The only real question left is whether the international systems surrounding us will keep speaking for us — or finally make room for us to speak, participate, and help shape the future we are the ones who will actually have to live inside.

 

PS Ayaas is a young Rohingya writer based in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, currently studying Bachelor of Health Science at the University of the People. His writing draws on lived experience of displacement, statelessness, and community organizing, and focuses on repositioning Rohingya youth as active participants and changemakers rather than passive recipients of humanitarian aid. He has previously been recognized in the Mixed Migration Review writing competition, and is currently developing an essay on Rohingya it was named as Living in Limbo: Voices and Resilience of The Rohingya Protracted and displacement. Email: rohingyapubgsquad@gmail.com

 

References

Fortify Rights. (2026, February 26). “Bangladesh: Incoming government must end restrictions on freedom of movement, protect Rohingya refugees.” https://www.fortifyrights.org/bgd-inv-2026-02-11/

Global Partnership for Education. (n.d.). “Changing mindsets: Education for Rohingya girls in Bangladesh.” https://www.globalpartnership.org/results/country-journeys/changing-mindsets-education-rohingya-girls-bangladesh

Human Rights Watch. (2019, December 3). “Are we not human?”: Denial of education for Rohingya refugee children in Bangladesh.” https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/12/03/are-we-not-human/denial-education-rohingya-refugee-children-bangladesh

Human Rights Watch. (2022, April 4). “Bangladesh: New restrictions on Rohingya camps. https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/04/04/bangladesh-new-restrictions-rohingya-camps

Human Rights Watch. (2025, June 25). “Bangladesh: Foreign aid cuts affect Rohingya children’s education.” https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/06/25/bangladesh-foreign-aid-cuts-affect-rohingya-childrens-education

International Crisis Group. (2024, March 12). “Crisis mounts for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.” https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-asia/bangladesh/355-crisis-mounts-rohingya-refugees-bangladesh

International Organization for Migration. (n.d.). “Community advocates inspire positive change across Rohingya refugee camps.” IOM Storyteller. https://storyteller.iom.int/stories/community-advocates-inspire-positive-change-across-rohingya-refugee-camps

Omata, N. (2022). “Humanitarian assistance as performance? Expectations and mismatches between aid agencies and refugee beneficiaries.” Ethnos, 87(4), 789–806. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2022.2154819

Rohingya Khobor. (2025a, September 3). “Rohingya youth trained to tell their own untold stories through journalism.” https://rohingyakhobor.com/rohingya-youth-trained-to-tell-their-own-untold-stories-through-journalism/

Rohingya Khobor. (2025b, November 29). “Youth led initiative completes four day journalism workshop empowering seventy Rohingya youth storytellers.” https://rohingyakhobor.com/youth-led-initiative-completes-four-day-journalism-workshop-empowering-seventy-rohingya-youth-storytellers/

Rohingya Khobor. (2025c, December). “Rohingya youth form environmental network to protect camps from growing ecological crisis.” https://rohingyakhobor.com/rohingya-youth-form-environmental-network-to-protect-camps-from-growing-ecological-crisis/

Rohingya Khobor. (2025d, April 20). “The journey of Rohingya Youth Advocacy Network (RYAN): Empowering a generation for justice.” https://rohingyakhobor.com/the-journey-of-rohingya-youth-advocacy-network-ryan-empowering-a-generation-for-justice/

UNHCR. (n.d.-a). “Empowering Rohingya youth through education and leadership. Global Compact on Refugees.” https://globalcompactrefugees.org/good-practices/empowering-rohingya-youth-through-education-and-leadership

UNHCR. (2025, October 23). “Young Rohingya volunteers confront gender-based violence in crowded Bangladesh camps.” https://www.unhcr.org/us/news/stories/young-rohingya-volunteers-confront-gender-based-violence-crowded-bangladesh-camps

UNICEF. (2022, May 1). “Education milestone for Rohingya refugee children as Myanmar curriculum pilot reaches first 10,000 children.” https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unicef-education-milestone-rohingya-refugee-children-myanmar-curriculum-pilot

UNICEF. (2025, October 14). “Geneva Palais briefing on the situation of children in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.” https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/geneva-palais-briefing-situation-children-coxs-bazar-bangladesh

Musk, Bezos

From Wealth Concentration to Anti-Immigrant Populism: The Strategic Alliance Between Super-Rich and the Far Right

by CommentariesDigital-populismEconomicsEditor’s ChoiceHomeMigration

Why do some of the world’s wealthiest individuals openly support populist radical right and far-right movements whose central political message revolves around anti-immigrant and anti-minority mobilization? In this commentary, Dr. Bulent Kenes argues that this alliance is best understood not as an ideological convergence but as a pragmatic strategy for deflecting public attention from the structural roots of social injustice, economic inequality and wealth concentration. Drawing on John Rawls’s concept of the veil of ignorance, the article examines how immigrants—among the principal victims of contemporary economic and social inequalities—are transformed into convenient scapegoats. It further explores how the growing concentration of economic and digital power enables technology billionaires to amplify exclusionary narratives while marginalizing pluralistic voices, raising profound questions about democracy, algorithmic governance, and contemporary capitalism.

By Bulent Kenes

If we were to apply John Rawls’s famous veil of ignorance thought experiment, developed in A Theory of Justice, to today’s world, there is little doubt that immigrants would emerge as one of the most disadvantaged and the most vulnerable social groups. Immigrants, political refugees, in particular, as well as individuals forced to migrate for economic reasons, are compelled at some stage of their lives to leave behind their accumulated economic, social, and professional capital and begin life anew in a different country. Consequently, they typically enter their host societies from the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. In terms of cultural, economic, and professional resources, their starting point is often below zero.

In this respect, immigrants constitute one of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable segments of society in terms of social justice and income distribution. Yet, while attempting to rebuild their lives, they are forced to contend not only with economic and social hardships but also with the prejudices generated by the rising populist radical right (PRR) and far-right parties and movements. Moreover, by being portrayed as the principal culprits behind economic inequality and social injustice, they are turned into scapegoats, a process that imposes severe socio-psychological costs on an already vulnerable population.

One point can be stated unequivocally: economically (and even culturally) driven anti-immigrant sentiment is not a phenomenon that emerges spontaneously. Social injustice and income inequality are undoubtedly real societal problems, and angry eyes are constantly searching for those responsible for them. Unfortunately, they do not always succeed in identifying the real causes. Meanwhile, for far-right actors who incite, inflame and ride the wave of resentment generated among these groups, targeting immigrants—one of the weakest, least organized, and least capable social groups in socio-political and economic terms—is both the easiest and the least politically costly strategy. Although the attempts of far-right political actors, whose humanitarian sensitivities have been considerably weakened, to exploit and simultaneously provoke this wave for political gain deserve the strongest ethical condemnation, it is nevertheless understandable why they choose this strategy within the context of political competition, which is driven less by values than by the pursuit of power. The fact that populist far right politicians such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, Robert Fico, Jarosław Kaczyński, Jimmie Åkesson, and many others have placed anti-immigrant politics at the center of political mobilization can be understood within this framework.

What is particularly striking, however, is why dollar billionaires—and even the owners of trillion-dollar companies—whose activities are largely confined to technology and the global economy, support far-right actors, PRR parties and movements, and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

In my view, the principal explanation lies in pragmatic interests. The anti-immigration discourse of the populist radical right and the far right systematically recasts those who are most severely affected by income inequality and social injustice from victims into perpetrators of these very problems. In reality, however, immigrants—alongside other disadvantaged groups—are among the greatest losers of the contemporary global economic order and the structural inequalities it generates. This is precisely where the core of the issue lies. By systematically constructing immigrants as scapegoats, far-right actors divert public attention away from the structural sources of economic inequality and social injustice. In doing so, they help obscure the role of the super-rich, who are not only the principal beneficiaries of the existing distribution of wealth but also key beneficiaries of the economic structures that reproduce and deepen these inequalities.

It is precisely at this point that the logic behind the support given by figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—the greatest beneficiaries of the existing global economic order—to populist radical right parties and far-right actors becomes apparent. Historically, just as the East India Company and the West India Company represented the corporate actors that benefited most from the global colonial order of their time, today’s technology giants occupy a comparable position as the greatest beneficiaries of contemporary global hi-tech capitalism. The strengthening of political discourse centered on anti-immigrant sentiment diverts public attention away from these structural causes of economic inequality and wealth concentration.

Regrettably, I must note that approaches which, in recent years, have argued that anti-immigrant sentiment is fundamentally the product not of economic grievances but of a cultural backlash, even if unintentionally, contribute to strengthening this political strategy. The influence of cultural factors and identity politics cannot, of course, be denied. However, explaining anti-immigrant sentiment primarily through cultural dynamics diminishes the visibility of structural causes such as economic inequality and social injustice, while simultaneously providing the far right with an indirect—albeit problematic—source of legitimacy. The issue, therefore, is not merely one of cultural reaction; it should also be understood as a political mechanism of distraction that conceals underlying economic power relations and discourages scrutiny of the existing distribution of wealth.

If the support that the super-rich extend to the far right were merely an expression of their individual political preferences, it might not warrant such sustained attention. The issue, however, extends far beyond that. These billionaires, who have effectively acquired monopolistic positions in the technology sector, not only deploy their immense economic resources in support of far-right political movements but also possess the capacity to shape the boundaries of public discourse through the digital platforms they control, including X, Facebook, YouTube, and others. Through complex algorithmic mechanisms, these platforms are increasingly transformed into the principal channels for the circulation of far-right narratives, while alternative viewpoints, critical voices, and pluralistic perspectives experience a substantial loss of visibility.

In this process, observations suggesting that the digital visibility of actors defending liberal democratic values, pluralism, the rule of law, and humanitarian principles is being systematically weakened, while polarizing, provocative, and extremist content is algorithmically rewarded, are increasingly supported by empirical research. As a consequence, democratic actors using these platforms face not only declining public influence but also invisible, though perceptible, algorithmic barriers that make it increasingly difficult even to reach their own natural audiences.

This picture reveals the combined impact of the economic and digital power of technology barons who stand among both the principal creators and the greatest beneficiaries of the global income divide. Despite being among the primary causes and beneficiaries of wealth concentration, economic inequality, and social injustice, Elon Musk and similar actors openly support extremist, far-right political movements that systematically portray immigrants and other vulnerable socio-cultural minorities as those responsible for these problems and as convenient scapegoats. Elon Musk’s most recent extensive interview with The Economist, in which he reiterated positions supportive of the far right, together with his backing of Marine Le Pen, Alternative for Germany (AfD) and various other far-right parties and actors, is open to interpretation within this framework. The political positions, public rhetoric, and algorithmic maneuvers of Musk and other technology-baron billionaires function as a deliberate mechanism of distraction, obscuring the true sources of wealth concentration and structural economic inequality.

Perhaps the greatest contradiction that deserves attention, and the most fundamental question that requires an answer, is the following: Why do broad segments of society that are themselves victims of structural economic inequality and social injustice follow far-right political actors supported by the greatest beneficiaries of wealth concentration, rather than questioning the structural causes of these inequalities? More importantly, why are they tend to view immigrants and socio-cultural minorities—groups that share similar structural vulnerabilities—as the principal causes of these problems? This paradox points not only to the discursive success of the populist radical right and far right but also to a fundamental research problem requiring us to understand how public perceptions are reshaped through the influence of economic and administrative power over digital communication infrastructures.

Climate Change, Bangladesh.

Why Environmental Displacement Is the Next Frontier in Populist Politics

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEnvironment & ClimateHomeMigration

As climate change increasingly reshapes patterns of human mobility, it is also transforming the political foundations of democratic citizenship. In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja argues that climate-induced displacement should no longer be understood solely as a humanitarian emergency or a security challenge, but as an emerging battleground over political membership and democratic inclusion. Introducing the innovative concept of Climate Citizenship Populism, Dr. Solaja demonstrates how environmental displacement is becoming a powerful resource for exclusionary populist narratives that redefine who belongs within the democratic community. By bringing together scholarship on populism, climate mobility, and democratic citizenship, the commentary offers an original analytical framework for understanding how environmental change is reshaping contemporary political conflict and why the future of democracy will increasingly depend on how societies respond to the politics of climate-driven belonging.

By Dr. Oludele Solaja

Climate change has progressed from being an environmental issue into a central political issue in the 21st century. As the entire debate and politics concerning climate change revolved around the issues of temperature increase, carbon emission, and environmental damage, the effects of climate change do not just end there. It is transforming the patterns of human inhabitation, transforming the ways of life of people, and fundamentally changing the geographical bases on which our understanding of citizenship rests. As environmental factors drive humans away, democracies now face a crucial dilemma: Who belongs to a world changed by climate change?

This article situates climate migration at the nexus of debates surrounding democracy, citizenship and populism. While populism has been defined as the political logic that distinguishes between ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’ (Mudde, 2004; Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017), it is also shaped by debates over the ‘people’ and its boundaries. Populist movements often exploit existing anxieties over economics, culture, immigration and national identity. But in a warming, changing world, climate change-induced movement of people creates a new domain for this struggle.

Climate migration has become a key tool for constructing the ‘people,’ defining who is deserving and legitimating claims to belonging.  Evidence for this transformation is widespread. The 2022 IPCC Report (2022) points to climate change as a major driver of increased human vulnerability due to weather extremes, ecosystem degradation and impacts on food and water. In recent years, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) has documented that weather-related events cause the majority of new internal displacements worldwide. Nevertheless, climate-induced displacement cannot be understood in purely environmentalist terms but is a product of interactions among environmental changes, poverty, inequality, failures of governance, and armed conflict (Gemenne, 2011; McLeman, 2014). Therefore, climate migration reflects a broader set of unequal social and political relations that influence people’s ability to stay, adapt or leave their places of origin. The political debate on climate mobility, however, tends to remain framed within two dominant and limiting perspectives.

Firstly, it is widely regarded as a problem requiring a humanitarian response to protect vulnerable displaced people. Secondly, climate migrants are perceived as a threat to national security, welfare systems, labor markets, and cultural identity. Yet both approaches obscure a more profound transformation: climate migration is increasingly becoming a question of membership in the polity. The critical issue is not so much why people migrate as how existing political communities draw the boundaries of membership and belonging in the face of collapsing territorial stability. It is precisely within this terrain of uncertainty that populist politics appears particularly well positioned to thrive.

Populism is fundamentally concerned with issues of borders and political membership, often drawing on the divide between insiders and outsiders (Laclau, 2005; Müller, 2016). Climate-induced displacement offers a rich symbolic site for these populist efforts, since it is deeply entangled with concerns over the sovereignty of the nation-state, the administration of borders, the distribution of public goods, and the management of national culture. Climate migrants can thus be politically reframed not simply as dispossessed people, but as symbols of wider fears about social and political disorder.

Introducing Climate Citizenship Populism

To describe this new political tendency, this commentary introduces the term Climate Citizenship Populism. It is a variant of populism that uses environmental displacement to redraw the lines of democratic membership by defining climate migrants as a threat to the rights, resources, identity and sovereignty of a national community.

Climate Citizenship Populism is not like previous forms of political conflict over the climate, where the conflict might have been over whether climate change is occurring or over opposition to regulating it. It is based on the assumption of environmental disruption, but it is the social consequences that are politicized. Thus, the central conflict changes from a question of climate change to one of who pays the repercussions of climate change and who deserves political representation in a climate-changed world.

This analysis makes a helpful contribution to the current debate on populism in three significant ways. First, it sees climate-induced mobility as a new material trigger for populist mobilization, alongside the more commonly suggested economic insecurity, immigration, and cultural backlash. Second, it suggests that the focus of populist opposition has moved from immigration to democracy itself as the political nature of citizenship is transformed by environmental change. Third, it presents a new analytical framework—Climate Citizenship Populism—to make sense of the conversion of environmental displacement into exclusionary narratives of democratic citizenship.

The idea is to connect three lines of research that have been pursued independently so far: populism studies, climate mobility research and democratic citizenship theory. While existing studies have already provided interesting findings on adaptation and displacement, as well as on citizenship and territorial belonging, there is a lack of literature on climate migration and the governance of migration. The current body of research has shed light on migration and the governance of migration, adaptation and displacement, as well as on the relationship between territorial belonging and citizenship and rights, but there is a dearth of research on climate migration and the governance of migration. But there has been little effort to grasp how environmental displacement is influencing the political boundaries of citizenship through populist mobilization.

Climate Citizenship Populism thus draws attention to a more general shift in democratic politics. Climate change is not just an issue to be added to policy agendas but also a structural condition that alters the material and political conditions shaping societies’ notions of belonging. Populist players are now also trying to re-imagine the limits of the democratic community itself as patterns of human settlement are reconfigured amid environmental disruption. In the era of environmental disruption, patterns of human settlement are being redrawn, and populist actors are seeking to redefine the limits of the democratic community itself.

From Border Politics to Democratic Exclusion

Climate Citizenship Populism is not only possible politically; its reasoning can be seen in various regions. Whether it is a matter of humanitarianism or of political membership, sovereignty, and national belonging, a pattern is becoming increasingly recognizable: environmental displacement is increasingly understood as a political issue.

Climate mobility has increasingly been linked to broader European debates on immigration, border management, and national identity. Most contemporary migration movements are not solely a consequence of climate change, but the foreshadowing of future climate displacement has become a political issue. The incorporation of the theme of environmental mobility in more comprehensive narratives of demographic change, overburdened welfare states, housing crises and the failure of political elites to keep the nation together is becoming a hallmark of populist actors. In this sense, migrants are symbolic beings through which anxieties of globalization and social change are conveyed. It is not just the quantity, but the meaning associated with displacement in the stories of populism that has political dimensions.

These trends are also seen in North America, notably in political discussions about migration from climate-vulnerable Central America and the Caribbean. Studies have shown that economic insecurity, governance problems, and social vulnerability are interlinked with environmental pressures to shape migration decisions (McLeman, 2014; IOM, 2024). Political debates, however, tend to reduce such realities to a simple narrative about the border “crisis” and national insecurity. Climate displacement is integrated into a larger anti-immigration discourse, in which migrants serve as a symbol of the waning control of the state. Thus, environmental mobility becomes a political problem, ranging from global inequality to a perceived threat to national sovereignty.

Another facet of Climate Citizenship Populism is illustrated in the African context. In the Sahel and other affected areas of the Horn of Africa, there are growing incidences of internal, rather than trans-border, displacement driven by drought, desertification, flooding and resource pressures. These movements involve complex issues of land, livelihood, access to resources and political recognition. When resources are scarce, displaced people are sometimes portrayed as rivals for economic opportunities or public services, furthering narratives of territorial identity and belonging. In these settings, Climate Citizenship Populism does not appear as much as international border politics, but rather as a contestation over who is entitled to what land, resources, and community.

Perhaps the most profound challenge to conventional understandings of citizenship is provided by Small Island Developing States. Climate mobility raises more than just migration management questions, particularly for communities under existential threat from sea-level rise. Who, then, will be able to live on a land that is becoming uninhabitable, one where citizenship is organized? Climate displacement scholars have suggested that this type of event calls into question the notions of territorialized political membership (McAdam, 2012). They show how climate change is altering mobility patterns and destabilizing the sense of territory that underpins contemporary democratic citizenship.

Contributions to the study of Populism and Democratic Theory

Climate Citizenship Populism enriches the field of populism studies by introducing the idea that environmental disruptions should be considered a novel material condition of political mobilization. Previous scholarship has offered insightful accounts of populist politics as anti-elitism, cultural backlash, nationalism and immigration politics (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017; Moffitt, 2016). Climate Citizenship Populism is not an alternative to these explanations but an expansion of them, showing how political communities draw in their insiders/outsiders in the context of environmental instability.

This way of thinking takes the focus away from migration and towards citizenship. The classic discussions tend to revolve around whether migrants should be let in, kept safe, or kept out. Climate Citizenship Populism uncovers a more fundamental issue: What is the nature of democratic citizenship in an era when climate change is emerging as a primary factor in determining who can and cannot live? In this respect, climate migration is not just an issue for migration governance – it is an issue for the normative basis of democracy.

The idea also emphasizes the issue of climate justice. The concept of climate mobility is defined by deep global inequalities, including unequal historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and unequal ability to adapt to climate change (Caney, 2010; Shue, 2014). Responses to climate migration which exclude are likely to become new forms of democratic exclusion, building on the history of unequal climate impacts. There is a need for effective adaptation and migration policies and political frameworks that acknowledge shared vulnerability and differentiated responsibilities in the context of climate mobility.

Conclusion: Citizenship in a Climate-Changed World

Climate crises have become an essential part of the democratic political landscape. Along with the changing landscape of environmental mobility, environmental disruption is also changing the political questions of belonging, rights and membership. The question for democracies is not only how to deal with climate migration, but also how to maintain democratic inclusion in a world where territorial stability is no longer guaranteed.

Climate Citizenship Populism offers a framework for understanding how environmental displacement is becoming integral to current political identity and conflicts over democratic boundaries. It shows that climate change is not only adding to migration pressures, but also to political opportunities to draw lines about who is in and who is out. What this means is important. What populism is all about is the building of “the people”—and in the future, climate change will be a major factor in the picture of “the people. Debating emissions, adaptation, and environmental governance will thus be a part of the politics of the climate age, but so too will be debates over citizenship itself.

Class, industrialization and social redistribution were significant issues of the twentieth century. The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen globalization, migration and national identity come into conflict. Climate citizenship is likely to become a recurring battle in the next decades. Democracies are now at a pivotal point where they must decide whether climate insecurity strengthens their pursuit of exclusion or provides a moment to reconsider political belonging on the basis of ideas of justice, solidarity and shared fragility.

The future of democracy in a climate-changed world will ultimately depend not only on how societies respond to environmental transformation, but on how they answer the most basic political question of all: who belongs?

 

References

Benhabib, S. (2004). The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. Cambridge University Press.

Caney, S. (2010). “Climate change and the duties of the advantaged.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 13(1), 203–228.

Gemenne, F. (2011). “Why the numbers don’t add up: A review of estimates and predictions of people displaced by environmental changes.” Global Environmental Change, 21(S1), S41–S49.

Gemenne, F. (2015). “One good reason to speak of ‘climate refugees’.” Forced Migration Review, 49, 70–71.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Cambridge University Press.

Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. (2024). Global Report on Internal Displacement 2024. IDMC.

International Organization for Migration. (2024). World Migration Report 2024. IOM.

Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. Verso.

Marshall, T. H. (1950). Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge University Press.

McAdam, J. (2012). Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law. Oxford University Press.

McLeman, R. (2014). Climate and Human Migration: Past Experiences, Future Challenges. Cambridge University Press.

Moffitt, B. (2016). The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford University Press.

Mudde, C. (2004). “The populist zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563.

Mudde, C. & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Müller, J.-W. (2016). What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press.

Shue, H. (2014). Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection. Oxford University Press.

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar.

MEP López Aguilar: The Return Regulation Is a Violation of EU Fundamental Values

by Editor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeHuman RightsInterviewsMigration

As the European Union implements its new Migration and Asylum Pact amid growing populist pressures, fundamental questions are emerging about the future of European constitutionalism. In this exclusive interview with the ECPS, MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar argues that the Return Regulation represents “a violation of EU fundamental values” and warns that migration governance is increasingly being reshaped by radical-right narratives. Reflecting on the erosion of the cordon sanitaire, the “Melonization” of European migration policy, and the normalization of exclusionary rhetoric, MEP López Aguilar contends that “migration is a fact, not a crisis,” while insisting that “asylum is a right” that must remain protected. The interview offers a timely reflection on populism, democratic backsliding, human rights, and the future of European integration.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

At a moment when migration has become one of the most polarizing issues in European politics, the European Union finds itself confronting a profound constitutional dilemma. The implementation of the Migration and Asylum Pact, together with the Return Regulation, has reignited fundamental debates about sovereignty, solidarity, fundamental rights, and the future of European integration. Once conceived as a legal and political project founded upon supranational cooperation, shared responsibility, and the protection of human dignity, the European Union is increasingly facing accusations that it is redefining migration governance under the growing influence of populist radical-right politics. Against a backdrop of geopolitical instability, demographic change, electoral realignments, and increasingly contested debates over migration, the central question is no longer simply how Europe manages migration, but whether it can continue to do so without compromising the constitutional and humanitarian values upon which the Union itself was built.

Few policymakers are better positioned to reflect on these developments than Juan Fernando López Aguilar. A Member of the European Parliament (MEP) representing Spain’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) since 2009, López Aguilar previously served as Spain’s Minister of Justice and chaired the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) between 2019 and 2024. Trained as a constitutional lawyer and widely recognized as one of Europe’s foremost authorities on constitutionalism, the rule of law, migration governance, and fundamental rights, he has played a central role in shaping EU migration and asylum legislation over the past decade. His long engagement with the negotiations surrounding the Migration and Asylum Pact places him at the heart of one of the Union’s most consequential constitutional debates.

In this wide-ranging conversation with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), MEP López Aguilar argues that the Return Regulation represents far more than a technical adjustment to migration management. Rather, he contends that it constitutes “a violation of EU fundamental values” and departs from the legal architecture painstakingly constructed through the Migration and Asylum Pact. Rejecting the growing trend toward externalizing asylum responsibilities, he warns that “migration management cannot come at the expense of the rule of law,” insisting that migration must be addressed through a genuinely European response grounded in “shared responsibility and binding solidarity” rather than bilateral arrangements with third countries.

Throughout the interview, MEP López Aguilar situates the transformation of European migration policy within broader processes of democratic and political change. He argues that the European People’s Party’s (EPP) increasing cooperation with radical-right parties has effectively dismantled the traditional Brandmauer or cordon sanitaire, allowing what he calls the “Melonization” of European migration policy to become mainstream. In his assessment, attempts to externalize migration control, normalize return hubs, and securitize asylum are inseparable from the wider normalization of populist narratives within European politics. At the same time, he cautions that Europe risks undermining its own credibility as a global defender of human rights through increasingly visible double standards in both migration and foreign policy.

Perhaps most strikingly, MEP López Aguilar rejects the assumption that migration itself constitutes Europe’s principal challenge. “Migration is a fact, not a crisis,” he argues, insisting that “reducing migration to zero is not only impossible—it is stupid.” Likewise, he defends asylum as a non-negotiable legal obligation, declaring that “asylum is a right. It must be respected, no matter the cost.” For MEP López Aguilar, the real danger lies not in migration itself but in the gradual erosion of Europe’s constitutional identity through the normalization of policies and rhetoric that once belonged exclusively to the political fringes. The interview therefore offers not merely a critique of current migration policy, but a broader reflection on populism, democratic backsliding, constitutionalism, and the future of the European project itself.

Here is the revised version of our interview with MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.

Migration Management Cannot Come at the Expense of the Rule of Law

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar
MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar is interviewed by ECPS’ Selcuk Gultasli in his office at the European Parliament on July 2, 2026. Photo: Umit Vurel.

Juan Fernando López Aguilar, welcome! You argue that the new Return Regulation marks a constitutional rupture rather than merely another migration reform. Where, in your view, is the precise red line beyond which migration management ceases to be compatible with the European constitutional project?

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar: The red line is the lack of a European scale of response and the lack of consistency with EU fundamental values. Let me explain. We worked really hard to fulfil the mandate of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which is part of the Treaty of Lisbon. Article 67 and Article 77 make it clear that there should be not only an EU migration and asylum policy but also a migration and asylum system based on EU law. It wasn’t easy because migration is obviously the most divisive issue around, and it contaminates not only asylum policy and lawmaking in the member states but also policymaking at the European level. Yet there should be a European migration and asylum system based on law, and we worked for two consecutive mandates—10 years—to make it happen by combining eight pieces of legislation.

The underlying idea is that there should be a European-scale response. You know why? Because no member state can deal with it on its own. It cannot be only a Greek problem when migrants arrive on the Greek islands in the Aegean. It cannot be an Italian problem when migrants arrive on the Pelagic Islands, such as Lampedusa, in the Mediterranean, coming from the African shore. Nor should it be a Spanish problem that we receive 47,000 people a year on the island of El Hierro in the Canaries, coming from Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea-Conakry. No, there should be a European-scale response, based on shared responsibility and binding solidarity.

That is the idea behind the Migration and Asylum Pact. But what is the idea behind the Return Regulation? It is to give the member states back the competence to negotiate bilateral agreements with third-country rulers so that, in exchange for money, they keep migrants out of our sight. Is it worthy? Is it consistent with EU values? My answer is no.

There is no European-scale response in Melonizing Europe, in Melonizing migration policy. Giving member states the authority to negotiate bilaterally with whomever is willing to be paid to keep migrants out of our sight in a so-called return hub—which is, let’s face it, a concentration camp for an unlimited period of time—should not happen under EU law. That is inconsistent with the very idea of the Migration and Asylum Pact. And, of course, in my view, it amounts to a denial of EU fundamental values, which are rooted in the principle that the EU is bound by international law, including human rights and international humanitarian law, which encompass shelter, rescue, and disease.

So, the conclusion is that this Return Regulation is not only a mistake; it is a violation of EU fundamental values and of EU law as enshrined in the Migration and Asylum Pact.

Reducing Migration to Zero Is Not Only Impossible—It Is Stupid

Only two years ago, you defended the Migration and Asylum Pact as the best achievable European compromise. Today, you argue that the Return Regulation fundamentally betrays European values. Did Europe cross a legal threshold, or has the political center itself shifted toward positions once associated exclusively with the far right?

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar: Both. We worked so hard to put in place a migration and asylum system based on EU law precisely because it is difficult and deeply divisive. It is obvious that migration is geographically divisive. The perception in the Baltics is not the same as it is in the western member states of the European Union, let alone along the southern external border—namely Greece, Italy, Malta, Cyprus, or Spain—not only in the Mediterranean but also in the Canaries. Different member states have different views of the problem, and they also have different views of the importance of a European-scale response.

Still, it was possible precisely because the balance of forces in the previous mandate of the European Parliament made it possible. Of course, it took time. It was only after a long and difficult struggle that, at the end of the previous mandate—in December 2023—we finally reached an agreement, and the entire package of regulations was ultimately adopted in June 2024. That is why, two years later, in June 2026, it has finally entered into force. But what has happened since the 2024 elections? Yes, we now have a balance of forces leaning to the right and the far right more than ever before.

For the first time in the history of the European Parliament, the EPP, together with three far-right political groups, accounts for 60% of the vote, marginalizing the second-largest group, the Socialists, as well as the Greens, Renew, and the Left. The far right is dominating the House and shaping policy. And that means a great deal when we talk about migration and asylum policy.

It means that a negative vision of migration is dominating the political landscape in Europe. In my view, that is a terrible mistake. Migration is not a threat, let alone a crisis. Migration has always been a fact. It is a permanent fact in the history of mankind. Should we panic because migrants are hoping or longing to make it to Europe? We should not panic. We can handle it. We can handle it as long as we do it together, according to EU law, and without betraying EU values. If we do it that way, then we may succeed. If we do it separately, member state by member state, in contradiction with EU values, then we are doomed to fail. And, of course, trying to reduce migration to zero is also doomed to fail. It is not only impossible, but also stupid.

Return Hubs Without Legal Safeguards Betray European Values

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar. Photo: Umit Vurel.

Supporters argue that external processing restores public confidence without abandoning humanitarian obligations. You contend that it instead erodes the Union’s constitutional identity. Why are they wrong?

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar: Because once you authorize returns to third countries with no meaningful link to the returnees, you are prepared to transfer human beings—their families, vulnerable people, trafficked women, and minors—to countries where they do not belong, where it is impossible to ensure that their fundamental and human rights are respected. It is equally impossible to ensure that the Charter of Fundamental Rights is implemented because there is no obligation to apply the Charter when they are in Egypt, Niger, Tunisia, or Rwanda. Yet this has become the obsession of too many around the table of the Council of Ministers of the Interior of the European Union and also within the European Parliament. That is absolutely inconsistent with the obligation to put in place an EU-scale response that is bound by EU law and consistent with EU values.

You’ve got to make sure that fundamental rights are observed and respected. Even when you return people, there has to be a meaningful link, whether it is a country of transit or a country of origin. But it is unacceptable to send them back anywhere, as long as you are paying the ruler there to keep them out of your sight for an unlimited period of time.

Once they are in the European Union—and this is also, of course, subject to criticism—you may hold them in a retention center, in a so-called migration facility, for two years. That’s much too long. But once they are in a third country with no meaningful link to the returnees, there is no time limit. They can be held there forever, stockpiled forever. Is that acceptable? Is that consistent with EU law? The beauty of the Charter of Fundamental Rights lies precisely in the fact that it protects all human beings, not only European citizens. That’s the beauty.

Anyone under EU law is protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights, whether you are a European citizen or not. If you, a Turkish citizen, are on European soil, you are also protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights. It is not the case that it does not apply to you because you are not a European citizen. No, you are protected by EU law, by the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, because you are under EU law and on European soil. That is the beauty of it. And that is also denied by the fact that people are being returned to third countries to which they do not belong, simply for the sake of paying a ruler who is willing to accept them. That is absolutely, in my view, in contradiction with the very idea of European law and the European Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Treating Migration as a Threat Is a Terrible Mistake

You write that asylum is no longer treated as a fundamental right but increasingly as an administrative inconvenience. Has the EU effectively redefined refugees from rights-holders into security risks?

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar: The EU is a union of 27 member states. But the majority, for now, is leaning in that direction. It is allowing a negative approach to migration to prevail as the dominant political view: the denial of migration, the belief that migration can be reduced by discouraging migrants, and the idea that you can simply send them back.

As the far right chanted in a stunning ovation following the adoption of the Return Regulation in the plenary session in Strasbourg—and I quote—”Send them back, send them back, send them back.” The idea that you can send back all migrants in the European Union is preposterous. It is self-damaging and ultimately self-defeating. The European Union is ageing. We are losing weight. We are losing GDP in comparison with the world’s major powers and global competitors. We are also losing population in comparative terms. So we need to change our stance on migration. 

In Spain, there is an alternative. In Spain, there is a positive view of migration because there is a progressive government. For one thing, Spain has, for several years now, surprisingly become the number one engine of growth and job creation. Spain is growing four times as fast as Germany, France, and Italy, while creating jobs and making economic growth compatible with social justice. That means the minimum wage is rising, pensions are rising, social protection is expanding, and social services also benefit from the contribution of migrants who are willing to pay taxes in order to finance the services needed to fulfil social rights and fundamental rights altogether. So, Spain is demonstrating that there is an alternative. Yet Spain is not only being minoritized; it is actually isolated in this approach. The prevailing view is a negative one, and that approach is both self-defeating and self-damaging for the future of the European Union.

Double Standards Are Undermining Europe’s Global Credibility

Row of EU Flags in front of the European Union Commission building in Brussels. Photo: VanderWolf Images.

The European Union often presents itself as a global normative power. Can Europe continue to lecture the world on human rights while simultaneously exporting asylum responsibilities beyond its own borders?

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar: Of course, I share the ambition that the European Union should grow—and grow fast—and become a relevant global actor. Of course, I agree that the European Union has to exercise hard power, not only soft power. I also agree that the European Union should join forces to build a truly credible and effective European diplomacy and combine its strengths so that it can become a meaningful actor in the global arena—one that is heard, respected, and worth listening to when engaging with other global powers. I mean talking to the United States, talking to Russia, talking to China, talking to India. That is what becoming global means. So, yes, I share that ambition. And yet I am also among those who criticise the fact that the European Union is still far from reaching that goal.

On the contrary, I am deeply critical of the evidence that the European Union is indulging in double standards. It is absolutely unforgivable that the European Union has tried to be hard and tough on Russia after Putin’s aggression against Ukraine while saying nothing about the genocide in Gaza and doing nothing about the genocide in Gaza. In my understanding, it is absolutely obnoxious and unacceptable that the Trump administration has imposed unilateral sanctions on members of the International Criminal Court who dared to call genocide a genocide.

And the European Union has not activated the Blocking Statute to protect members of the International Criminal Court who happen to reside in the EU. The International Criminal Court is located in The Hague, in the Netherlands, within the European Union. They should be protected by EU law. Yet the European Union says nothing, so as not to disturb Trump—the abuser, the bully, the bullying abuser in the global arena. That double standard, of course, damages the European Union’s reputation and credibility. I say this with sadness. I am not complacent.

I say it harshly because I am a fighter. I would like to bring about change so that we overcome those contradictions and double standards and actually gain leverage in the global arena by setting an example, by leading through example. That should be the idea. That should be the inspiration. Of course, I hope we learn how to do that in the foreseeable future.

There Is No Brandmauer Left in European Politics

You argue that the agreement became possible because the European People’s Party increasingly relies on cooperation with the radical right. Has the so-called cordon sanitaire effectively collapsed in migration policy?

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar: Absolutely. There is no cordon sanitaire anymore. In German, they call it Brandmauer. Es gibt keine Brandmauer mehr (there is no firewall anymore) in the European Union. There is no cordon sanitaire whatsoever. I have seen it with my own eyes. I have chaired the Committee on Civil Liberties and Human Rights for 10 years now, and I am the spokesperson of the S&D Group on constitutional affairs. And what do I see? Ever since we voted to invest the second European Commission with the votes of the EPP, the S&D, the Liberals, and the Greens, from that very moment—which marked the beginning of this parliamentary legislature—a so-called new majority has emerged, the Neue Mehrheit (New Majority), as they call it in German. It consists of the EPP together with three far-right political groups. They call themselves Conservatives, Patriots, and Sovereignists.

They are the majority. They are the ruling majority in the Parliament, in the Commission, and in the Council. And, of course, that means a great deal. In practical terms, it means there is certainly no cordon sanitaire anymore. None whatsoever. The EPP has broken all barriers against the rise of the far right. On the contrary, it is cooperating actively with the far right, and it is serving the far right’s self-congratulatory agenda. We saw that in the European Parliament when the far right, together with the EPP, secured the majority to adopt the Return Regulation, which was notorious and obnoxious in my view. They all stood up in a standing ovation and began chanting, “Send them back, send them back.” That is the picture. No Brandmauer, no cordon sanitaire anymore.

Progressives Have Been Better at Diagnosis Than at Therapy

Many observers argue that mainstream parties have not defeated populism but instead absorbed its migration agenda. Has populism already won the migration debate without necessarily winning elections?

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar: I’ll tell you something. I am a progressive. I am a Spanish socialist, and I have been involved in socialist- and progressive-led platforms and think tanks for many years now. That means I have taken part in countless roundtables, seminars, symposiums, congresses, and conferences of progressive parties dealing with the populist agenda and the rise of populism. My first point is this: we progressives are very good at diagnosis, but we are very bad at therapy. We are very good at analyzing what is going on, but we have not been effective so far in reversing the rising tide of populism.

Of course, we do know what populism is about. Populism is a way of simplifying complexity. It is a way of lying to people, of infantilizing them by scapegoating individuals or entire groups in order to exploit the anger directed against those who are being scapegoated. The idea is simple. You’re in pain, you’re in trouble, you’re in disarray, you feel discomfort. Are you angry? I tell you something: I don’t have a solution for you. I have something better. I have someone for you to hate, and I will point my finger at someone for you to hate.

Of course, migrants are the number one choice. But it can also be Muslims, Black people, LGBTQ people, or women, because men are supposedly becoming impoverished as women advance. That is also a very common idea on the far right. You, a young man, are told that you have fewer opportunities than your father did because your father did not have to compete with so many empowered women. Because women are empowered, you have fewer opportunities. And then young people move to the far right all over the place. It’s very tempting, but it’s stupid.

Of course, it should be challenged. It should be fought against. But still, populism is on the rise. Of course, it has heavily contaminated the migration agenda. Populism has managed, first and foremost, to spread fear everywhere: We have been invaded. Migration is out of control. Sooner or later, you’re going to be replaced. Europe is not going to be white and Christian by tomorrow evening. By tomorrow evening, Europe is going to be Black and Muslim. Don’t you see? They are invading us. They are out of control. You have to react. You have to do something about it.

That kind of fear is spreading everywhere. Of course, it is evil rhetoric. It has to be fought against. It has to be dismantled. To begin with, it is not true. It is not true that migration is massive. It is not true that migration is out of control. It is not true that it is a conspiracy. It is not true that Europe is changing color or religion. It is simply not true. It is simply a lie. But still, it works.

That is why we progressives have a challenge: not only to be good at diagnosis, but also to become good at therapy. What should we do to reverse this trend? That is a huge challenge for progressive thinking and for progressive policymaking.

The Return Regulation Europeanizes the Meloni Model

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen meet in Brussels, Belgium on November 03, 2022. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.

You have repeatedly criticized what you call the ‘Melonization’ of European migration policy. To what extent has Giorgia Meloni succeeded in redefining the migration agenda not only in Italy but across the European Union itself?

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar: Take a look at the Return Regulation. What happened? First, Meloni tried to strike a deal with neighbouring Albania in order to establish return hubs outside Italy through an agreement based on an exchange of money. But then, the Italian courts struck down what is, in my understanding, a sick idea. They rejected the initiative on the grounds of Italian law.

Meloni then went to the European Commission and essentially said: “Hey, listen, I need an umbrella. I need an EU umbrella for this because the Italian umbrella is not enough. The Italian courts are rejecting the legality of what I’m trying to do with Albania. We should put it into EU law.” And that is how they Melonized the return policy. They effectively elevated the Italian idea—the Meloni idea—to the European level. But the bad news is that the Return Regulation contradicts the very principle that migration and asylum legislation at the European level should be based on shared responsibility and binding solidarity. There is no shared responsibility in negotiating with a third-country ruler to establish a return hub financed by your own budget. There is no European added value in legalizing and Melonizing return policy and legislation.

There is simply no added value. It is left to the member states to negotiate. Of course, Spain is not compelled to do that. Spain is not doing it, as long as the Spanish government remains in progressive hands. But others may try. They may ask, “Why shouldn’t I pay the ruler of Tunisia? Why shouldn’t I pay some African dictator so that I can fly some Black people out of my country?” Of course, as I have already explained, the idea itself is evil-minded. To begin with, I heard many times during the negotiations: “Fly them to Rwanda.” And my question was always: “Why Rwanda?” Only because you think it makes no difference as long as they are Black. As long as they are Black, you think it doesn’t matter whether they are in Rwanda. It doesn’t matter whether they come from Mali, Niger, or Uganda—you simply fly them to Rwanda because, supposedly, it makes no difference there as long as they are Black.

Is that not racism? Is it racist? Absolutely racist. You have to care about people, about human beings. You cannot fly a Malian or a Nigerian to Rwanda because there is no purpose. There is simply no point in flying them to Rwanda just because you are paying Paul Kagame, the ruler of Rwanda for 35 years now. That is a preposterous idea. And yet, that is the Melonization of return policy.

Asylum Is a Right That Must Be Respected, Whatever the Cost

The Commission argues that stronger returns are indispensable for preserving public support for legal asylum. Is Europe sacrificing liberal constitutionalism in an attempt to save political legitimacy?

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar: Respect for asylum seekers must remain unwavering. The European Union is bound by international law, which includes both international humanitarian law and human rights. And, of course, the Geneva Convention relating to the protection of asylum seekers—the Refugee Convention—is international law, indeed one of the fundamental pillars of international law. So, yes, migration is a fact, not a crisis, not a threat. It is simply a fact. But you know what? Asylum is a right. It must be respected, no matter the cost, no matter what. It must be respected.

The problem is that there is now a prevailing idea within the current political landscape we have been discussing, one that is increasingly leaning to the right and the far right. That idea is that most asylum seekers are fraudulent. They are portrayed as economic migrants seeking better opportunities. According to this logic, they all have to be discouraged. Migrants are discouraged, and asylum seekers are discouraged as well. Because, as the ministers of the interior argue, most asylum seekers are actually fraudulent. They are not people being persecuted. They are not people whose physical integrity is at risk. They are simply people seeking better opportunities. So seeking asylum is presented as nothing more than legal advice given to them by their counsel. And they, too, have to be discouraged. That is deeply worrisome.

We should protect asylum seekers because that is part of the European Union’s identity and its commitment to human rights. It is both a fundamental principle and a legal obligation. Every member state, individually, is a signatory to the Geneva Convention. And the European Union itself is bound by international law, including international humanitarian law and human rights.

No Human Being Should Ever Be Described as Illegal

Disembarkation of 300 migrants from Libya from the German rescue ship Sea-Watch 3 in Pozzallo, Province of Ragusa, Italy, on June 9, 2022. Photo: Alec Tassi.

And lastly, you have warned that Europe risks normalizing practices that were once politically unthinkable. Looking beyond migration, do you see this normalization as part of a broader process of democratic backsliding within the European Union itself?

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar: We’ve got to care about it. I do care. I’m a fighter against that trend. I’ve always tried to stand up whenever I have seen signs of it unfolding before my eyes, here in the European Parliament and elsewhere. Of course, you can see that things are changing for the worse in the European Parliament in that regard as well. 

For instance, when I first came to the European Parliament, no one talked about illegal migrants. They spoke about irregular arrivals, but never about illegal human beings. Now it’s the new normal. You hear it a thousand times in every plenary session in Strasbourg. And you know what? No one notices anymore. No one stands up anymore and says, “Hey, listen, this is unacceptable. Are you talking about illegal human beings or what?” That’s unacceptable.

Migrants are not guilty because they tried, even in the worst of circumstances. Take, for instance, the boats coming to El Hierro in the Canary Islands. We receive 46,000 people a year in the Canaries, arriving by wooden boats departing from the western coast of Africa. It is the most perilous and deadliest route to the European Union. The Atlantic is much rougher than the Mediterranean. The waves are much higher in the Atlantic. And you know what? None of those trying to reach the European Union through the Canary Islands—because the Canary Islands are part of the European Union, absolutely—ignores the risk of perishing in the attempt, the risk of losing their lives. And still they try.

When they sink to the bottom of the sea, tragically, they are, in effect, saying, “Hey, listen, I’m dying, but still I had to try. I do not regret it because I had to try.” It’s terrible. That means a great deal. It means they are not taking a frivolous step, or trying to commit fraud, or trying to be troublemakers, or trying to create problems, or bring their problems to a foreign land. They are trying to do something with their lives out of despair. And that life is the only one they have. They are willing to sacrifice it for the sake of making it. That deserves respect.

The point I’m making is that the new normal is losing that human understanding of the tragedy I am describing. Instead, through aggressive rhetoric, those human beings are portrayed as illegal, as an invasion, as a threat to your security or to your identity. That is completely unworthy of the European Union. The European Union should not be like that.

So, I’m a fighter. Whenever I see that happening in the European Parliament, I react. But still, the question is: how long will it go?

Morocco football fans.

The Game They Cannot Win: Nativist Populism, Agenda-Setting, and the Weaponization of Football

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeMigration

As Morocco and the Netherlands prepare to meet in the FIFA World Cup Round of 32 on June 30, 2026, Yacine Boubia examines how European populist radical-right parties increasingly transform sporting events into opportunities for anti-immigration mobilization. Drawing on agenda-setting theory, democratic theory, and comparative political analysis, Boubia argues that football matches involving teams associated with immigrant communities have become powerful vehicles for constructing civilizational threat narratives while diverting attention from unresolved structural challenges such as housing, demographic decline, and labor shortages. From the Netherlands to Hungary, the commentary situates contemporary nativist politics within a broader crisis of governance, showing why cultural mobilization has become a substitute for policy delivery—and why liberal democracies must resist the weaponization of sport for illiberal political ends.

By Yacine Boubia

It is World Cup month, and I have been watching more football than is perhaps professionally defensible. There is something about the tournament format—the compressed stakes, the improbable trajectories, the way national narratives crystallize around eleven players on a pitch—that makes it simultaneously the most democratic and the most politically charged sporting spectacle on earth. I follow these games as a football fan. I analyze what surrounds them as a researcher with a background in media and political communication. And what surrounds tomorrow’s (June 30) Round of 32 match between Morocco and the Netherlands has very little to do with football.

Over the past week, a coordinated mobilization has taken shape across Dutch political and media ecosystems—amplified by far-right networks, social media influencers, and the deliberate interventions of Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom—that has transformed a round of 32 fixture into a site of civilizational anxiety and explicit immigration politics. The central claim propagated by Wilders and his allies is as structurally revealing as it is empirically unfalsifiable: that Moroccans will burn Amsterdam regardless of the result. If Morocco wins, the riots confirm the threat. If the Netherlands wins and incidents follow, they become evidence of Moroccan inability to accept defeat. If nothing occurs, the vigilance is credited. Every possible empirical outcome confirms the narrative that was constructed before a single player set foot on the pitch.

This is not a security analysis. It is political strategy—and it is a strategy with a recent precedent. Last month, French political and media actors spent ten days of prime media real estate anticipating disorder surrounding the PSG Champions League final, ultimately producing a few isolated incidents far smaller in scale than the anticipatory frame had constructed. The pattern is now establishing itself across European radical-right ecosystems: sporting events involving teams associated with immigrant communities are being systematically converted into opportunities for anti-immigration mobilization—moments when the cultural threat narrative can be activated, amplified, and installed as the dominant interpretive lens through which social reality is understood, at minimal political cost and with maximum emotional intensity.

This commentary examines that strategy analytically. It argues that the mobilization surrounding the June 30 match is not simply opportunistic xenophobia—though it is certainly that—but a deliberate and structurally significant political operation through which radical-right populist parties, operating within the imperatives of the contemporary attention economy, compensate for the absence of serious governing programmes addressing the structural conditions that actually shape their citizens’ lives. Understanding why requires examining both the agenda-setting mechanism that the strategy exploits and the structural conditions of European nativist populism that make sporting events politically necessary as substitutes for governance.

Radical Right Populism and the Weaponization of Sporting Events

Populist radical-right (PRR) parties share a defining structural characteristic that distinguishes them analytically from both classical conservative parties and the broader category of populist movements: they combine a maximalist identitarian programme, organized around ethnic, cultural, and civilizational threat narratives, with a conspicuous absence of serious governing proposals addressing the structural conditions that produce the material grievances their constituencies experience. Housing affordability, wage stagnation, demographic sustainability, and public service provision—the actual conditions shaping the daily lives of their voters—receive rhetorical acknowledgment but no policy architecture capable of addressing their structural causes. What these parties offer instead is what their governing vacuum requires: the permanent mobilization of cultural emergency.

Sporting events involving teams associated with immigrant communities have emerged as particularly efficient vehicles for this mobilization. They concentrate public attention at a predictable moment. They activate identity and belonging as primary emotional registers. They provide a binary narrative structure—us against them—that maps directly onto the populist frontier between the authentic people and the threatening other. And, crucially, they generate media amplification that radical-right parties cannot reliably produce through the routine operations of parliamentary politics. The anticipatory threat narrative surrounding a football match achieves in seventy-two hours what months of policy debate cannot: the installation of immigration as the dominant interpretive framework for social reality, occupying the prime media real estate that democratic governance should be using to address the structural conditions that the parties campaigning around this match have no programme to resolve.

Bernard Cohen (1963) observed that the press may not tell people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling people what to think about. McCombs and Shaw’s (1972) subsequent empirical development of agenda-setting theory demonstrated that the salience of issues in media coverage directly and measurably predicts their salience in public opinion—not through direct persuasion, but through the allocation of attention that determines which problems citizens regard as most important. The radical right’s systematic deployment of sporting events as vehicles for anti-immigration mobilization represents an intuitive mastery of this mechanism, adapted to the contemporary attention economy’s imperatives of emotional intensity, narrative simplicity, and viral amplification.

The unfalsifiable structure of the Wilders threat narrative surrounding June 30’s match is the mechanism’s most sophisticated expression. A frame constructed so that no empirical outcome can disconfirm it does not function as a security assessment—it functions as a permanent agenda-installation device. It ensures that, whatever occurs on June 30 evening in and around Amsterdam, immigration will be the interpretive framework through which it is processed. The disorder that materializes in these contexts—where it occurs at all—is typically produced by a specific and demographically narrow subgroup of peripheral urban youth whose tensions are the product of structural exclusion, decades of concentrated social housing policy, spatial segregation, and underinvestment in public services, rather than of cultural disposition or community-wide political orientation. 

The conflation of this subgroup with an entire diaspora, and then with immigration as a political category, is the logical operation through which the agenda-setting strategy converts a sporting event into an immigration crisis. It is an operation that serves parties whose governing programmes offer no answer to the structural exclusion that produces the tensions they then attribute to immigration itself.

The Red Tie Without the Conditions: European Nativist Imitation and Its Structural Limitations

Populism, as Ernesto Laclau argued, is not defined by ideological content but by a specific discursive logic: the construction of a frontier between an authentic people and a corrupt elite, the equivalential articulation of diverse grievances into a unified political identity, and the emergence of a leadership that claims to embody the popular will against its institutional betrayers. This logic is structurally indifferent to ideological direction, but it is not structurally indifferent to the material conditions within which it operates. Populism requires more than rhetoric; it requires conditions of possibility that rhetoric alone cannot supply.

The global resonance of Donald Trump’s political project has generated an imitative dynamic across Western democracies that systematically misreads the sources of its success. From Wilders in the Netherlands to Milei in Argentina, from the remnants of Fidesz’s international network to the nativist movements proliferating across Central and Eastern Europe, a recognizable political style has travelled: the combative social media register, the civilizational threat narrative, and the explicit identification of immigration as the master explanation for national decline. These movements wear the red tie of European nativist respectability without the structural conditions that made the American original politically sustainable. They perform the rhetoric without the infrastructure. They campaign for cultural homogeneity in societies whose population replacement already depends on the immigrant fertility they campaign against.

Trump operated within a specific constellation of structural advantages that has no European equivalent. Continental scale—9.8 million square kilometers, of which Texas alone covers an area approximately five times the total surface area of France—that absorbs the contradictions of cultural conflict and provides physical space for demographic growth without the density pressures defining European housing politics. Military and technological supremacy—satellite infrastructure, digital platform dominance, and the algorithmic architecture of the very social media networks that Wilders uses to conduct his cultural sovereignty campaign—that insulates domestic nationalist posturing from its geopolitical consequences. And a demographic reserve in Latin America that operates within the American economic and geopolitical sphere of influence, rendering immigration restriction simultaneously performable and practically reversible: the door can be closed and reopened as political and economic conditions require because the reserve does not diminish in the interim.

Wilders possesses the aesthetic without the architecture. He campaigns against immigration in a country of 41,543 square kilometers—approximately the size of the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area—whose housing crisis is so acute that young Dutch people cannot afford to form independent households, whose fertility rate of 1.46 sits well below the 2.1 replacement threshold, and whose economy is structurally dependent on the immigrant labor force he campaigns against. 

Poland—whose successive nationalist governments have maintained some of the most hostile positions toward immigration in the EU, and whose fertility rate of 1.14 is among the lowest in Europe—simultaneously constitutes by far the largest source of EU labor migrants in the Netherlands, concentrated in the transport, logistics, and service sectors that the Dutch economy structurally requires, attracted by Dutch wages, which are among the highest in continental Europe, and by a professional environment that operates largely in English. These are not anomalies within the nativist project. They are its structural consequences: the emigration of the native workforce that pro-natalist and anti-immigration politics cannot retain, absorbed by the receiving economies that the same political movements claim to protect.

The football mobilization is the clearest possible expression of this governing vacancy. When a political movement with no serious housing programme, no credible fertility policy, and no coherent account of how its economy functions without the immigrant labor it campaigns against requires a Round of 32 World Cup fixture to generate the cultural conflict it cannot produce through governance, it reveals the depth of that vacancy. The game is not incidental to the political project. It is necessary to it—a substitute for the governing capacity the movement does not possess and the structural conditions it cannot address.

It is worth noting the precise character of the Moroccan squad’s relationship to Dutch society. Three players on the Moroccan national team hold Dutch nationality. In the Wilders framework, this detail does not complicate the nativist argument—it confirms it. Legal citizenship, in the nativist worldview, does not confer cultural belonging. A person of Moroccan origin holding a Dutch passport who chooses to represent Morocco demonstrates, for Wilders and his allies, the impossibility of genuine integration rather than its achievement: evidence of dual loyalty, of the fundamental unassimilability of a population that cannot be made Dutch regardless of its institutional status. 

The frame therefore does not turn on passport holding. It turns on ethnic and civilizational categories that civic citizenship cannot alter—which is precisely what liberal democracy’s foundational commitment to civic, rather than ethnic, citizenship is designed to reject. Wilders conducts this campaign on X, a platform owned by an American billionaire and running on American digital infrastructure. The tools of civilizational defense are provided by the very American technological dominance that the populist critique of globalism targets in other registers. The contradiction is structural, not rhetorical.

The Demographic Data That Nativism Cannot Answer

The fertility data across the European Union constitutes the most decisive empirical challenge to the nativist demographic project. According to Eurostat, the EU total fertility rate fell to 1.34 in 2024 — a historic low since the institution began tracking the aggregate figure in 2001, and a figure that stands at barely two-thirds of the 2.1 replacement threshold. Not a single EU member state reaches replacement level. The Netherlands sits at 1.46. Poland sits at 1.14. 

In 2024, 24 percent of newborns across the European Union had a foreign-born mother. European population replacement is already structurally dependent on immigrant fertility to a degree that no nativist policy programme can realistically reverse. The parties mobilizing the June 30 football match as an immigration crisis have no policy response to this demographic reality—because acknowledging it would require acknowledging that the immigrant communities they campaign against are structurally necessary to the demographic survival of the societies they claim to protect.

The contrast with the United States is material. Trump’s America possesses, in Latin America, a demographic reserve operating within its economic and geopolitical sphere of influence—hundreds of millions of people, economically motivated to migrate, geographically proximate, and available for rapid mobilization at any moment of political opening. The performative restriction of immigration does not eliminate this reserve. It holds it in suspension. European nations have no equivalent. Their demographic survival requires immigration not as a policy preference but as a structural necessity—and the media apparatus that allocates its prime real estate to the anticipated disorder surrounding football matches involving immigrant-community teams is not informing citizens about this structural reality. It is systematically displacing it in favor of a cultural threat narrative that serves the parties with the least to offer on the actual conditions of European demographic survival.

The Orbán Laboratory: What Sixteen Years of the Nativist Project Produced

The most instructive empirical test of European nativist politics is Hungary under Viktor Orbán — and the results are now available with unusual completeness. In his 2014 Băile Tușnad speech, Orbán explicitly declared his intention to construct an illiberal state, rejecting the liberal democratic framework of institutional pluralism and cultural openness in favor of ethnic nationalist cohesion and demographic protectionism. His government subsequently allocated approximately five percent of GDP to pro-natalist subsidies and maintained the most sustained anti-immigration political programme in European history for sixteen consecutive years.

The demographic results are documented with precision. Hungarian emigration to other EU member states accounted for 37.8 percent of Hungary’s total population decline between 2014 and 2024. The Come Home, Young People repatriation initiative—funded at approximately 245,000 euros—returned 105 individuals before being abandoned. Hungary’s EV battery industry, the second largest in Europe and the government’s economic showcase, operates on migrant labor, primarily Filipino and Ukrainian workers recruited internationally to fill positions that the domestically depleted workforce cannot supply. The anti-immigration government became structurally dependent on the immigration it campaigned against.

On 12 April 2026, the Hungarian electorate delivered its verdict. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party defeated Fidesz, ending Orbán’s sixteen years in power. The laboratory is closed. The most sustained European attempt to construct a viable illiberal nativist project produced a demographically weakened country, an economically contradictory labor market, and, ultimately, an electoral rejection by the citizens it claimed to represent. The movements imitating this project across Europe—mobilizing football matches because they cannot mobilize governing results—are at earlier stages of a trajectory whose destination Hungary has now reached. The message is waning. The red tie travels. The conditions do not.

The Game and the Strategy: What Is Actually at Stake

Morocco and the Netherlands will play a round of 32 World Cup match on June 30, 2026. What is at stake on the pitch is a football match — ninety minutes of sporting competition that millions of people across the world will watch as a moment of collective experience, legitimate national pride, and the particular joy that football uniquely generates across cultural and national boundaries. What is at stake in the political theatre surrounding it is something considerably more consequential: the question of whether PRR parties can successfully convert a sporting event into an immigration mobilization vehicle that displaces housing, wages, demographic sustainability, and the structural conditions of democratic life from the public agenda.

The Moroccan players—three of whom hold Dutch nationality, the remainder of whom have lived, studied, and built careers across Europe and the world—are not participants in this political theatre. They are its object. They have been constructed, through the agenda-setting operation that Wilders and his allied media networks have conducted over the past week, as the embodiment of a civilizational threat that their presence on a football pitch is made to confirm. 

The hundreds of millions of people across Morocco, the Moroccan diaspora, and the broader Global South who will watch this match are watching something that matters to them entirely independently of European radical-right politics: a moment in which their nation competes on genuinely equal terms in the world’s relatively most democratic sporting competition. That this moment has been instrumentalized—converted into prime media real estate for an immigration mobilization strategy—represents a precise and deliberate political choice by actors who have calculated that the emotional intensity generated by eleven footballers exceeds anything their governing programmes can produce.

The disorder that the anticipatory narrative predicts—and that the unfalsifiable structure of the frame will claim to have confirmed regardless of what occurs—will not, if it materializes, be the expression of a community or a culture. It will be the expression of a specific subgroup of peripheral urban youth whose relationship to structural exclusion is the product of fifty years of European urban policy, of the banlieues and the ring roads and the social housing projects built at a deliberate distance from economic opportunity and civic life. Naming that exclusion as its cause, rather than the cultural pathology that the nativist frame installs in its place, is the analytical and democratic responsibility that the media apparatus surrounding the match has thus far declined to discharge.

Conclusion: Liberal Democracy’s First Imperative

Football has historically offered democratic societies something rare and valuable: a space in which the political identities that governance enforces are temporarily suspended in favor of a shared human experience. The systematic weaponization of that space by PRR parties—its conversion into the primary vehicle through which immigration is installed as the permanent priority of the public agenda—is not incidental to the illiberal project. It is constitutive of it. Orbán declared in 2014 that he would build an illiberal state. What he built was a country that haemorrhaged its youth, imported the workers it ideologically rejected, and, on 12 April 2026, received the electoral verdict of its own citizens. The laboratory failed. The message is waning. The red tie travels across European borders. The conditions that would make the project viable do not.

Liberal democracies face a first imperative that is prior to any debate about immigration policy, border management, or cultural integration: the imperative to stabilize multicultural societies, preserve the institutional architecture that makes demographic diversity politically manageable, and refuse the transition to illiberal alternatives whose empirical record—as Hungary now conclusively demonstrates—produces the opposite of their stated goals. This imperative includes a media responsibility that the weaponization of sporting events makes urgent: to identify and name the agenda-setting strategy through which PRR parties convert football matches into vehicles for immigration mobilization, and to resist the allocation of prime media real estate to anticipatory threat narratives whose unfalsifiable structure serves no democratic function. It serves only the movements that require permanent civilizational emergency as a substitute for governing capacity—movements whose structural fragility the mobilization surrounding June 30 game reveals more clearly than any polling data could.

On June 30, 2026, Morocco and the Netherlands will play football. The players on both sides will contribute to a spectacle that brings joy to people across the world—people from the Global South who watch this tournament as one of the few arenas in which their nations compete on genuinely equal terms with the industrialized world, and who deserve to do so without their joy being instrumentalized for political projects whose failure the demographic data, the electoral record, and the structural analysis of the continent on which they are played have already confirmed. Liberal democracy should be larger than the fear of eleven players. It should be larger, above all, than the political strategy that requires eleven players to perform the work that a governing programme cannot. 

 

References

Boubia, Yacine. (2026). “When Change Becomes Conflict: Immigration and the Politics of Cultural Backlash.” European Center for Populism Studies, April 8, 2026. https://www.populismstudies.org/when-change-becomes-conflict-immigration-and-the-politics-of-cultural-backlash/

Cohen, Bernard C. (1963). The Press and Foreign Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Direkt36 / VSquare. (2025). “Inside Viktor Orbán’s Failure to Achieve His Demographic Goal.” July 10, 2025. https://vsquare.org/inside-viktor-orbans-failure-to-achieve-his-demographic-goal/

European Labour Authority. (2025). “Netherlands — Fair Mobility Board.” November 2025. https://www.ela.europa.eu/en/country/netherlands

Eurostat. (2026). “Fertility Statistics.” European Commission, Statistics Explained. March 2026. Dataset: demo_find. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Fertility_statistics

Follow the Money. (2026). “Migrant Workers Risk Missing Out on Billions in Dutch Wage Dispute.” March 31, 2026. https://www.ftm.eu/articles/netherlands-temporary-employment-agency-wage-dispute-migrant-workers

Laclau, Ernesto. (2005). On Populist Reason. London: Verso.

Levitsky, Steven and Ziblatt, Daniel. (2018). How Democracies Die. New York: Crown Publishing.

McCombs, Maxwell E. and Shaw, Donald L.. (1972). “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.” Public Opinion Quarterly, 36 (2): 176–187. https://doi.org/10.1086/267990

Migration Policy Institute. (2024). “European Immigrants in the United States.” January 11, 2024. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/european-immigrants-united-states-2022

Mudde, Cas and Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Netherlands Embassy in Warsaw. (N.d.) “Labour Migration — Poland.” https://www.netherlandsandyou.nl/web/poland/themes/labour-migration

Norris, Pippa and Inglehart, Ronald. (2019). Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ODI Global. (2024). “Learning Lessons the Hard Way: Hungary, Immigration and Competitiveness.” Overseas Development Institute. https://odi.org/en/insights/learning-lessons-the-hard-way-hungary-immigration-and-competitiveness/

Orbán, Viktor. (2014). “Speech at the XXV. Bálványos Summer University and Student Camp.” Băile Tușnad, Romania, July 26, 2014. https://budapestbeacon.com/full-text-of-viktor-orbans-speech-at-baile-tusnad-tusnadfurdo-of-26-july-2014/

Schapendonk, Joris and Steel, Griet. (2022). “Mobility Power in the Migration Industry: Polish Workers’ Trajectories in the Netherlands.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48 (19): 4694–4711. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2061931

UK PM Keir Starmer

Why Starmer Could Not Outflank Reform UK: Immigration, Culture Wars and the Collapse of Labour’s Anti-Populist Strategy

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeMigration

Why did Keir Starmer fail to neutralize Reform UK despite commanding a large parliamentary majority? In this incisive commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that Reform UK’s greatest achievement was not electoral but discursive. By transforming immigration, sovereignty, national identity, and culture-war politics into the central measures of political authority, Nigel Farage’s party compelled Labour to react on terrain it did not control. Drawing on the scholarship of populism and radical-right agenda-setting, Dr. Dias shows how attempts to accommodate populist themes often strengthen rather than weaken their appeal. The result, he argues, was a politics of defensive adaptation that left Labour trapped between technocratic governance and populist mobilization, ultimately exposing the limits of mainstream anti-populist strategies.

By João Ferreira Dias

Keir Starmer did not fall simply because he lacked charisma or because Labour mismanaged government. He fell because Britain’s populist right succeeded in turning immigration and culture-war politics into the central test of political authority, and Labour never found a convincing answer. His resignation exposed a deeper crisis: a parliamentary landslide had not become political hegemony, and one of Europe’s oldest democracies was again being reorganized by forces outside the governing party. 

The paradox of Starmer’s premiership is therefore not that a cautious leader struggled to inspire, but a government with an overwhelming majority found itself reacting to a party that did not hold power. Reform UK did not need to govern in order to discipline the government. It only needed to define what counted as political reality: borders, sovereignty, national identity, crime, “common sense,” and the betrayal of ordinary people by remote elites.

Reform as the Agenda-setter 

There is a long-term debate in academia and the public sphere on how radical-right populist parties influence public debate and mainstream parties’ agendas. This influence is not only electoral. It is also discursive. Populist parties may lose elections, remain outside government, and still force the political system to speak their language (Meguid, 2005; Minkenberg, 2001; Mudde, 2019; Schmidt, 2025; Saldivia Gonzatti & Völker, 2026).

In many circumstances, parties — and especially governments — tend to address topics such as immigration, border control, national identity, and moral panic around Muslim migrants in terms already defined by the populist right (Poynting & Morgan, 2016; Mudde, 2019). This is one of the most important mechanisms of radical-right power: it wins when its opponents accept that its issues are the real issues, and that its vocabulary is the vocabulary of political seriousness.

As Cas Mudde argues, mainstream parties cannot address the radical-right agenda in its original terms. They must face the debate, the problems and public perceptions, but they must do so in democratic and moderate terms. Otherwise, they become contaminated by radical solutions or are perceived as opportunistic copies (Mudde, 2007, 2019).

This was Starmer’s first failure: the temptation to neutralize Reform UK by hardening Labour’s language on immigration and cultural values. The second failure was to do so while failing to recover public confidence, show authority, and offer ideological clarity.

Reform UK did not need to govern to impose its agenda. It shifted the debate to borders, sovereignty, national identity, crime, elites, and “common sense.” It made immigration not just one policy area among others, but the central test of whether the state still controlled the country.

That was the asymmetry. Farage could radicalize. Starmer had to calibrate. Reform could accuse. Labour had to administer. Reform could speak in symbols. Labour answered with management. And in a political moment dominated by anxiety, management was not enough.

Immigration as Reform UK’s Issue Ownership

Reform UK succeeded because it turned immigration into a symbol of state failure. It was no longer only about numbers, visas, asylum backlogs, or labor-market needs. It became a story about control, sovereignty and betrayal. This is why the issue was so powerful. Immigration became a metonymy for everything that seemed broken in Britain: pressure on housing, waiting lists, low wages, crime, cultural change, weak borders, and distant elites. The point was not simply that immigration was high. The point was that immigration could be used to explain almost every other failure.

For Reform UK, immigration was evidence that the state protected others before its own citizens. This is a classic populist grammar. The “people” are presented as abandoned; migrants become the visible beneficiaries of elite betrayal; and mainstream parties are accused of refusing to say what everyone allegedly knows (Mudde, 2007; Poynting & Morgan, 2016; Norris & Inglehart, 2019).

The concept of issue ownership helps explain why this was so damaging for Labour. Once Reform UK became the party most strongly associated with immigration control, any Labour attempt to sound tougher risked confirming Reform’s authority over the issue. Mainstream parties can change their position, but they do not automatically change who voters trust on the issue itself (Meguid, 2005; Bale et al., 2010; Abou-Chadi & Krause, 2020).

Starmer never found a convincing answer to this framing. When he hardened the discourse, he validated Reform’s premise that immigration was the central problem. When he moderated, he looked evasive or weak. He was trapped between moral discomfort and electoral fear.

Culture Wars as a Substitute for an Economic Programme

Reform UK did not need to present a detailed economic programme if it could keep politics focused on immigration, “woke politics,” crime, free speech, gender, patriotism, and resentment against Westminster. These themes worked because they were not just policy topics. They were identity markers.

The advantage of culture-war politics is that it simplifies the political field. It divides the country between those who allegedly see reality and those who hide behind elite language. It allows Reform UK to present itself as the party of “common sense,” while Labour appears as the party of caution, procedure, and institutional restraint.

This was another Starmer problem. Labour answered with competence, seriousness, and technocracy. Reform answered with conflict, identity, and emotion. Starmer promised delivery. Farage offered recognition. Starmer said the state could be repaired. Reform said the state had been captured.

This dynamic fits the broader cultural-backlash argument: radical-right populism does not grow only from material insecurity, but also from conflicts over identity, status, cultural change, and national belonging (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). This does not mean that Reform had better answers. It means that it had a clearer emotional structure. It knew who was guilty, who had been betrayed, and what had to be restored. Labour had policies, but Reform had a story.

The Mainstream Trap

The central mistake of mainstream parties is to believe that they can borrow the radical right’s themes without strengthening the radical right’s authority. But this rarely works. If a mainstream party copies the populist right, it confirms that the populist right identified the real problem first. If it refuses to engage, it looks detached from public anxiety.

This is the dilemma identified in much of the literature on mainstream responses to the radical right. Social-democratic parties, in particular, face a difficult strategic choice: they can ignore the radical right, confront it, or accommodate parts of its agenda. But accommodation often increases the salience of issues owned by the radical right, especially immigration and national identity (Bale et al., 2010; Akkerman et al., 2016; Meyer & Rosenberger, 2015).

This was Starmer’s dilemma. He could not ignore immigration, because silence would have allowed Reform to monopolize the issue. But he could not simply “out-Farage Farage,” because Reform would always sound more authentic on its own terrain.

The result was a politics of defensive adaptation. Labour tried to look tougher, but not too tough; moderate, but not weak; liberal, but not naïve. That balance may work in government documents. It does not work against a populist party that has reduced politics to betrayal, borders, and national decline.

Reform UK won the agenda because it forced Labour to react. And once Labour was reacting, its majority no longer looked like hegemony. It looked like “administration under pressure.”

Conclusion

Starmer’s fall shows that populist parties can shape politics before they capture power. Reform UK’s success was not only that it grew electorally. Its deeper success was that it made immigration, sovereignty, and culture-war politics the measure of political authority.

The lesson is not that mainstream parties should avoid immigration. That would be politically naïve and democratically dangerous. The lesson is that they must address immigration without accepting the populist frame that turns migrants into the master explanation for national decline.

A stronger Labour response would have linked immigration to state capacity, wages, housing, integration, public services and fairness. It would have spoken about control without cruelty, borders without scapegoating, and national solidarity without ethnic resentment.

Starmer could not outflank Reform UK because the contest was already being fought on Reform’s ground. Farage did not need to prove that he could govern. He only needed to prove that Labour was governing within a debate he had already defined.

 

References

Abou-Chadi, T., & Krause, W. (2020). “The causal effect of radical right success on mainstream parties’ policy positions: A regression discontinuity approach.” British Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 829–847.

Akkerman, T.; de Lange, S. L. & Rooduijn, M. (Eds.). (2016). Radical right-wing populist parties in Western Europe: Into the mainstream? Routledge.

Bale, T.; Green-Pedersen, C.; Krouwel, A.; Luther, K. R. & Sitter, N. (2010). “If you can’t beat them, join them? Explaining social democratic responses to the challenge from the populist radical right in Western Europe.” Political Studies, 58(3), 410–426.

Meguid, B. M. (2005). “Competition between unequals: The role of mainstream party strategy in niche party success.” American Political Science Review, 99(3), 347–359.

Meyer, S. & Rosenberger, S. (2015). “Just a shadow? The role of radical right parties in the politicization of immigration, 1995–2009.” Politics and Governance, 3(2), 1–17.

Minkenberg, M. (2001). “The radical right in public office: Agenda-setting and policy effects.” West European Politics, 24(4), 1–21.

Morgan, G. (2012). Global Islamophobia: Muslims and moral panic in the West. (S. Poynting, Ed.). Routledge.

Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, C. (2019). The far right today. Polity Press.

Norris, P. & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press.

Saldivia Gonzatti, D. & Völker, T. (2026). “Far-right agenda setting: How the far right influences the political mainstream.” European Journal of Political Research, 65(1), 101–123.

Schmidt, V. A. (2025). “Populist agenda-setting: Shaping the narrative, framing the debate, captivating the ‘people,’ upending the mainstream, capturing power.” Journal of European Public Policy, 32(5), 1073–1096.

Professor Georg Lutz.

Prof. Lutz: Population Aging Has Changed the Immigration Debate in Switzerland

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeHuman RightsInterviewsMigration

Switzerland’s rejection of the Swiss People’s Party’s proposal to cap the country’s population at ten million has been widely interpreted as a crucial test of contemporary European politics. While the referendum exposed persistent anxieties about immigration, housing, infrastructure, and national identity, it also revealed an emerging counter-narrative centered on demographic aging and labor-market needs. In this interview with the ECPS, Professor Georg Lutz examines the referendum’s implications for direct democracy, populism, and the future of liberal democracy. He discusses the resilience of the populist radical right, the role of issue ownership in electoral politics, and the opportunities and limits of direct democracy. Professor Lutz also reflects on political distrust, misinformation, democratic participation, and the evolving relationship between popular sovereignty and constitutional liberalism.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

Switzerland is frequently portrayed as the world’s most sophisticated laboratory of direct democracy—a political system in which citizens regularly decide major policy questions through referendums and popular initiatives. Yet the country’s June 2026 referendum on the Swiss People’s Party’s (SVP) proposal to cap the population at ten million revealed that even Switzerland’s celebrated democratic model is increasingly shaped by the same tensions confronting liberal democracies across Europe: migration, demographic change, economic insecurity, national identity, and the rise of the populist radical right.

Although voters ultimately rejected the initiative, the campaign exposed deep divisions over immigration and the future direction of Swiss society. More importantly, it highlighted a significant shift in public debate. As Professor Georg Lutzargues in this interview, discussions about immigration are no longer driven solely by concerns over cultural identity or social cohesion. For the first time, a prominent counter-argument emerged around demographic realities and economic necessity. In his words, “all populations in European countries are aging,” and immigration was increasingly discussed as “something that is also necessary for the labor market.” As he notes, “we see a bit of a shift in this debate compared to what we have seen in previous times.”

In this wide-ranging conversation with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Lutz—Director of FORS, the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences, and Professor of Political Science at the University of Lausanne—offers a nuanced assessment of the referendum, the resilience of the SVP, and the broader relationship between direct democracy and populism. Rejecting simplistic interpretations, he argues that the referendum result represented both a setback and a success for the SVP. While the initiative failed, “45 percent of the Swiss population voted in favor of limiting the population to 10 million,” a figure substantially higher than the party’s own electoral support.

The interview also explores whether direct democracy serves as a safeguard against populism or inadvertently empowers it. Professor Lutz challenges common assumptions on both sides of the debate. While acknowledging concerns about minority rights and majoritarian pressures, he argues that “the reality is much more nuanced” than many critics suggest. Direct democracy, he contends, is deeply intertwined with representative institutions and often acts as an indirect mechanism of accountability rather than a revolutionary alternative to parliamentary politics.

Perhaps most importantly, Professor Lutz shifts attention away from institutional design and toward what he sees as the more pressing threats facing contemporary democracies: the fragmentation of information systems, the spread of misinformation, growing political distrust, and systematic efforts to undermine confidence in democratic institutions. In an era of polarization and populist mobilization, his reflections offer important insights into both the strengths and vulnerabilities of democratic governance in Switzerland and beyond.

Here is the revised version of our interview with Professor Georg Lutz, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.

The Result Was Both a Defeat and a Success for the SVP

Switzerland-EU

Professor Lutz, welcome! To begin, Switzerland has just rejected the SVP’s proposal to cap the country’s population at ten million, despite widespread public concerns about immigration, housing, and infrastructure pressures. How should we interpret this outcome: as a defeat for the populist radical right, a rejection of anti-immigration maximalism, or evidence that Swiss voters remain more pragmatic than ideological?

Professor Georg Lutz: It’s probably a mixture of all three. If you looked at the leaders of the People’s Party (SVP) on Sunday when the results came in, you could see that they looked rather disappointed. They had hoped that the proposal could be won, because the party has succeeded with similar anti-immigration votes in the past, and the polls were quite favorable at the beginning. 

On the other hand, the party was also, to some extent, satisfied. After all, 45 percent of the Swiss population voted in favor of limiting the population to 10 million, and that is significantly higher than the party’s own vote share, which is only about 28 percent. So, the party mobilized well, particularly in rural areas, around one of the key issues on which it has been campaigning for more than 30 years now.

Many Swiss Voters Chose Stability Over Uncertainty

The referendum campaign was widely described as a “Swiss Brexit” moment because of its potential implications for relations with the European Union. Why did voters ultimately choose continuity over rupture, and what does this tell us about the limits of sovereigntist populism in Switzerland?

Professor Georg Lutz: It is probably a correct interpretation that, to some extent, the majority voted for stable relations with the European Union and also stability in terms of the labor market. There was a big debate about how limiting migration in Switzerland could potentially harm the labor market in the long term. 

But the campaign against the initiative also warned about the chaos that could result. It argued that it would create a great deal of bureaucracy for regulating the market, as in the health sector, as well as higher crime because of ending the Schengen Agreement. There would also be chaos because asylum seekers could simply come in. So, to some extent, it was a vote against this kind of chaos, which was a defining feature of the ‘No’ campaign.

Few Populist Parties Have the Historical Foundations of the SVP

The Swiss People’s Party remains one of Europe’s most successful right-wing populist parties despite this setback. What explains the long-term resilience of the SVP, particularly when many comparable populist parties elsewhere experience cycles of rapid ascent and decline?

Professor Georg Lutz: For this, it’s important to look a little bit into the history of the party, and you’re right, the Swiss People’s Party is quite unique in this respect. It is the strongest party in Switzerland. It has been the strongest party for many years, and it doesn’t experience as many fluctuations as other populist right-wing parties.

The party was founded around 100 years ago. It used to be an agrarian, more centrist, small-business-owner party and wasn’t a radical right-wing party at the very beginning. The party has also been in the Swiss government for almost 100 years, and that’s a very unique feature of Switzerland. Switzerland has a multi-member government with seven members, and the Swiss People’s Party now has two of these members. So, the party still has a strong foundation in the countryside, along with some more moderate voters.

It then started to transform, turning into a radical right party from the 1990s onward. It lost the more moderate wing and became a party strongly focused on anti-immigration, anti-EU, and anti-establishment sentiments—the classic features of other populist right-wing parties you see across the continent.

The Real Victory Was Keeping Immigration at the Center of Politics

Your research on issue ownership suggests that parties gain electorally when they are perceived as the most competent actors on salient issues. Has immigration become such a deeply “owned” issue for the SVP that even referendum defeats can reinforce its broader political influence?

Professor Georg Lutz: That’s actually not just a unique feature of the SVP; it’s a feature of all radical right parties. That’s something you see in modern campaigns. Modern political campaigns are not so much about positioning a party on all kinds of different issues that might attract voters; rather, they are about pushing the key issues with which a party is identified.

Again, it’s not unique to populist right parties. The same applies to Green parties, which are heavily identified with environmental and ecological issues. Liberal parties are generally aligned with economic issues, and social democrats, at least partially, with social issues. And that’s what the debate is about. That’s also why this vote has been a success for the party. They were able to campaign on a key issue, put it on the political agenda, and they are hoping that it will help them in the next national elections and in the many regional elections that we constantly have.

Migration Is Seen as Both a Cultural and an Economic Threat

Switzerland, immigrants, protest,
Young demonstrators in Zurich call for greater humanity and solidarity toward immigrants. Photo: Michael Müller / Dreamstime.

Across Europe, populist radical-right parties increasingly frame immigration not merely as an economic issue but as a question of national identity, demographic survival, and cultural continuity. How closely does the Swiss case resemble developments in countries such as France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands?

Professor Georg Lutz: I would probably argue that this is not necessarily a new development. It has been the defining feature explaining the success of many right-wing parties: their ability to frame migration as a cultural threat, as a threat to the cultural identity of a country. But I do believe it also goes, to some extent, a little beyond this.

There is also a perceived economic threat among part of the population, mainly those from lower income and educational backgrounds. That’s also usually the type of electorate that votes for radical right-wing parties, and it used to be, in many Western countries, a traditional social democratic stronghold. So, it’s not just cultural; it also has an economic component.

What was interesting in this campaign—and I, maybe, should have mentioned it before—is that there was also, for the first time, quite a strong debate about the need for immigration. All populations in European countries are aging. There is a demographic change. Viewing immigration as something that is also necessary for the labor market was quite prominent in this debate, and it is also one of the features that probably explains the strong opposition, or majority opposition, to this vote. So, we see a bit of a shift in this debate compared to what we have seen in previous times.

The Reality of Swiss Direct Democracy Is Far More Nuanced Than Its Critics Suggest

One of the recurring criticisms of direct democracy is that complex policy questions are often reduced to emotionally charged slogans and binary choices. Does the recent population referendum illustrate the strengths or the weaknesses of plebiscitary democracy?

Professor Georg Lutz: But, coming from Switzerland, we have a fairly relaxed approach to direct democracy. In Switzerland, you don’t find any politician who publicly opposes direct democracy. It’s so strongly embedded in the national identity and political culture, and Swiss people are quite proud of it. On the other hand, if you look abroad, direct democracy is indeed often seen as a threat and as an instrument of populism.

But, I think, the reality is much more nuanced if you look at what’s actually going on. On the one hand, direct democracy in Switzerland is very strongly interconnected with the representative system. The idea that outside political actors somehow dominate direct democracy with a populist agenda is far removed from reality. It is parties—even established parties—that usually launch direct democratic initiatives. They are also part of the campaign. All the major interest groups that intervene in the representative system are likewise part of the direct democratic campaign. So, there is a very strong interconnection.

It’s also important to say that, here, we are talking about popular initiatives—proposals that can be made by citizens with a certain number of signatures. They usually get defeated. Only about 10 percent, or one out of ten, ultimately find a majority. And usually, there is a ‘no’ vote, as was the case with this initiative.

The other thing is that if you assess the outcomes of direct democracy, you also have to assess them against the outcomes of representative democracy. You also see many radical right-wing parties pushing, sometimes successfully, for similar positions on immigration and anti-asylum-seeker policies. They, too, find majorities, and that has nothing to do with direct democracy.

Concerns About Minority Rights Are Real but Often Exaggerated

Switzerland is frequently celebrated as the world’s most advanced system of direct democracy. Yet critics argue that repeated referendums on immigration, asylum, religious minorities, and citizenship can place minority rights at the mercy of majority preferences. How serious is this concern in the Swiss context?

Professor Georg Lutz: It is a recurring concern in the Swiss context, but to some extent it is also kind of exaggerated. If you look at the track record, there have been some votes recently to ban minarets or burqas, and also some anti-immigration votes that found a majority. But they are still quite rare. There are also votes where minority protection is usually quite strong. When it comes to language minorities, there is broad acceptance that these minorities should be protected.

I think the problem is not so much direct democracy as such, but rather the absence of safeguards in the form of constitutional limitations. The constitution can be changed quite easily, and what is in the constitution cannot be challenged by any court. That is a defining feature of how the system is implemented in Switzerland.

But again, what is important is to consider what the benchmark is. Some similar initiatives, such as banning burqas, have passed in France or Denmark through purely representative systems, and these were indeed limitations on minority rights. Similarly, LGBTQ rights have been restricted in Poland and Hungary through purely representative systems. It happens, but it is not specific to direct democratic systems.

There Are Very Few Institutional Safeguards in the Swiss System

Some theorists warn of a potential tension between popular sovereignty and liberal constitutionalism. Can direct democracy become a vehicle through which majorities gradually undermine liberal norms and minority protections while remaining formally democratic?

Professor Georg Lutz: It can happen in theory because, as I just mentioned, Switzerland has very few limitations. Only binding international law—such as prohibitions against genocide or torture—is really excluded from being the subject of a popular vote, and even then, it requires a parliamentary decision. It’s not a court decision. Parliament could potentially decide that a proposal violates binding international law and, as a consequence, cannot be put to a vote. So, there are very few safeguards. As a result, there is, within this system, a kind of hope that voters are wise enough to respect minority rights, which, in fairness, in many cases also happens.

Campaigns Have Always Been About Mobilizing Emotions

Referendum posters in Geneva.
Referendum posters displayed on panels at Plainpalais in Geneva, Switzerland, ahead of the September 20, 2020 popular vote. Photo: Dreamstime.

Your work on turnout and direct democracy suggests that information levels may matter as much as participation rates. In an era increasingly shaped by social media, misinformation, disinformation, manipulation, and political polarization, are contemporary referendums becoming more vulnerable to emotional mobilization and simplistic narratives?

Professor Georg Lutz: I also studied history at some point in my life, and I would argue that campaigns—whether in direct democracy or in elections—have never really been the moment when a sophisticated exchange of arguments and public deliberation takes place. They are always the moment when parties or campaigners try to steer emotions and mobilize people, and that’s something you usually do with emotions rather than with complicated arguments. In fairness, this is not a unique feature of the radical right. Left parties have been doing this for more than 100 years as well, if you look at some campaigns in the early twentieth century.

There is, nevertheless, a big difference in how this is done between left- and right-wing parties. Right-wing parties use a lot of elements of exclusion and construct politics in terms of “us against the other,” and that is typically not what left parties do. They are much more likely to campaign on other dimensions, such as the idea that certain proposals threaten people’s well-being. That is the big difference—not that campaigns are trying to be emotional.

Much of Direct Democracy’s Influence Is Indirect Rather Than Direct

Many populist actors claim that referendums represent the purest expression of “the will of the people.” Do you agree that direct democracy offers a corrective to representative institutions, or does this claim underestimate the complexity and diversity of modern societies?

Professor Georg Lutz: It probably does. As I argued before, the outcomes of direct democratic decisions are often quite similar to the outcomes and decisions you could see in purely parliamentary systems, in any direction. So, in a way, the people are not fundamentally different from what elites choose.

I think that’s a strong argument in Switzerland. A lot of the effects of direct democracy are indirect. In any parliamentary decision and parliamentary deliberation, it is known that any law must potentially pass a majority in the population. So that often leads to oversized majorities in Parliament because it is known that, if there is a narrow result, it may lead to a referendum, and there is a risk that the proposal will be defeated. In that sense, referendums create indirect reality checks all the time. But they also, of course, create quite direct reality checks, because a proposal is either approved by Parliament or not. In terms of initiatives, the people, then, vote in favor of or against them.

Direct Democracy Both Empowers and Constrains Populism

Referendum poster for Switzerland’s September 20, 2020.
Referendum poster for Switzerland’s September 20, 2020 immigration vote displayed at Geneva’s Cornavin railway station. Photo: Dreamstime.

Switzerland’s direct-democratic institutions are often presented as antidotes to populism because they provide citizens with regular opportunities to express grievances. Yet populist parties have also become some of the most successful users of these instruments. Does direct democracy ultimately contain populism or empower it?

Professor Georg Lutz: Again, it’s both. Direct democracy has been used by populist parties on the right and on the left, more so than by centrist parties or interest groups. They use it for agenda setting, and they also use it to try to push their proposals and find a majority in the population.

On the other hand, and this is really interesting, what happens constantly in Switzerland is that whenever there is a protest movement of any kind, it immediately becomes the subject of a public debate. The response is essentially: sure, it’s an interesting proposal—try to find a majority.

What then happens is that these groups start collecting signatures, which is a demanding logistical and, to some extent, financial endeavor. The proposal then enters a parliamentary decision-making process. It cannot be stopped by Parliament or the government, but both Parliament and the government issue recommendations. Sometimes they also formulate counter-proposals.

Then it comes to a vote. So, these kinds of protests are immediately channeled into institutionally embedded mechanisms that form part of the direct democratic decision-making process. Because the process takes so long—usually several years between the launch of an initiative and the final vote—it also modulates and dampens, to some extent, very heated movements.

You Cannot Defeat Populists by Dismissing People’s Concerns

Recent research, including work to which you have contributed, links political distrust, life dissatisfaction, and anti-immigration attitudes to support for right-wing populist parties. To what extent is contemporary populism driven less by ideology than by broader feelings of dissatisfaction and alienation?

Professor Georg Lutz: It’s probably both, assuming that I would call nationalism an ideology, which you could probably argue against. But it has many defining features of an ideology, and it is what right-wing populist parties are capitalizing on. They are trying to mobilize those who are dissatisfied with the establishment and the elite, as well as those who feel disadvantaged in the labor market, also compared to foreigners, and threatened by globalization. These are all issues that these parties put forward.

To some extent, the causality actually goes the other way around. Right-wing populist parties constantly convey the message that voters should be dissatisfied with governments, the establishment, and immigration, so that’s also part of the connection. That’s why some of their voters hold such strong views.

But, in fairness, I would nevertheless argue that there is also a political economy of radical right-wing voting. It’s not just a purely cultural issue. The cultural dimension is what drove the success of these parties, and it remains quite dominant. At the same time, many people feel left behind by the establishment, also economically. So, they have concerns, whether perceived or real is a different debate. Often, especially in Switzerland, which has such a low unemployment rate, it is much more a perception of threat than an actual threat.

But I also think this is important to take seriously. And there is a lesson here for other parties that disagree with this notion of grievance: they need to provide answers to these perceived threats as well. You can’t simply say that populist right-wing parties are wrong. These concerns exist, and you have to offer an alternative if you want to be successful against populist right-wing parties.

Mass Voting Remains the Most Democratic Form of Participation

Looking beyond Switzerland, many governments are experimenting with referendums, citizen assemblies, deliberative mini-publics, and other participatory innovations. Which of these mechanisms do you believe are most promising for strengthening democratic legitimacy without sacrificing minority protections?

Professor Georg Lutz: Overall, a lot of countries would benefit from having more meaningful referenda. A lot of referenda are not simply bottom-up instruments; they are often top-down instruments used by governments to legitimize their own propositions. But, referenda can be a good mechanism if they are well moderated and integrated into the broader decision-making process on key issues. Everybody has become a bit worried since Brexit that things can go wrong—and can go horribly wrong. But there are also cases where referenda work quite well at the national level. To some extent, they are more transparent than parliamentary decision-making, where the influence of lobbies is often enormous and quite well hidden. In direct democracy, that influence comes to light more prominently.

I’m a bit more skeptical about other forms of participatory democracy, such as mini-publics or deliberative citizens’ assemblies. They are very difficult to scale up. They tend to become isolated features, and it is hard to make them a systematic part of decision-making. They also lack the legitimacy needed for decision-making because participation is usually limited to a selected number of people, and that’s not sufficient to make binding decisions.

One thing I am also somewhat skeptical about is that the moment these forms of participatory democracy become truly meaningful, they would likely be hijacked by established political actors. That’s what happens in direct democracy. Direct democracy has very little to do with “the people.” To a large extent, it is an elite instrument used by the same actors who are part of any representative system. I always worry that if these forms of decision-making become meaningful, you would see the same thing happening.

Then there is one final reason why I remain somewhat skeptical. There is a paradox of participatory democracy. The more forms of participation you introduce—and especially when those forms are demanding, as citizens’ assemblies are, requiring people to deliberate for several hours or even days—the more selective they become. As a result, they tend to become biased toward those who are already more interested and engaged.

There is a risk—it does not have to happen, but it is a risk—that new forms of participation simply create additional channels for those who already participate more. It is very difficult to design mechanisms that genuinely give voice to the underrepresented in these forms of decision-making. So, mass decision-making processes, such as voting in elections or referenda, remain by far the most democratic.

Switzerland’s Direct Democracy Was a Historical Accident

Switzerland voting.
Photo: Dreamstime

Some observers argue that Europe is witnessing a gradual transition from representative democracy toward increasingly plebiscitary forms of politics. Do you see this as a democratic renewal or as a development that could unintentionally strengthen majoritarian and populist tendencies?

Professor Georg Lutz: I’m not sure that I can really see a big, strong push in that direction. Referenda are certainly happening, but they were happening in previous decades as well, so it is not as if there has been a massive increase. You also see other forms of participatory democracy emerging, but I have not seen them becoming a systematic part of decision-making processes. I do see potential there, but we also have to be realistic. Political institutions are shaped by elites and political actors, and they always do this in ways that maximize their influence. This is not something new. It has been a defining feature of institutional engineering from the very beginning.

To some extent, the fact that Switzerland has so much direct democracy is a historical accident. It was adopted at a very early stage, when political parties were not yet strong and dominant actors. And once established, the country never got rid of it. That is the key reason why this is not happening in many other countries. Existing elites control decision-making, including decisions about political institutions, and as a consequence, they do not want to give up power—especially power that they cannot easily control. 

As a result, I don’t really see this happening on a widespread scale, neither in the form of referenda nor through any other form of political participation.

Being in Government Has Not Weakened Swiss Right-Wing Populism

Comparative research often finds that voters support populist parties for different reasons across countries. What aspects of the Swiss experience are genuinely unique, and what broader lessons does it offer for understanding the rise of the populist radical right across liberal democracies?

Professor Georg Lutz: What is unique in Switzerland is that you can be a populist right-wing party using direct democracy while being in government. The Swiss People’s Party is the strongest party and has been in government all along. The lesson from this is that there are hopes and ongoing discussions suggesting that, once right-wing populist parties are integrated into government, they become more moderate. There is also an expectation that they will become less popular because they usually cannot deliver on the promises they put forward—which is actually the case for most parties, not just populist right-wing parties. But we don’t see this happening in Switzerland. They remain strong, they maintain their position, they do not become more moderate, and they often do not get blamed for failed policies.

Information Fragmentation and Distrust Are Bigger Threats Than Institutional Design

And lastly, Professor Lutz, looking ahead, how do you foresee the relationship between direct democracy and liberal democracy evolving over the next decade? Are mechanisms of direct citizen participation likely to become safeguards against democratic backsliding, or could they increasingly become instruments through which illiberal and exclusionary projects gain legitimacy?

Professor Georg Lutz: Again, as I just argued, I don’t see a big push toward direct democracy for all the reasons I have already mentioned. As I’ve also tried to highlight, I have a pretty pragmatic view. Direct democracy is not a major threat to representative democratic systems, but neither is it much of a cure. It can certainly become part of a political decision-making system, but it is never going to fundamentally change how decision-making is conducted. In fairness, I also don’t see the greatest threat to our democracies today in the form of decision-making itself.

The biggest threat lies in the fragmentation of the information system, fueled by social media platforms and the algorithms that, to some extent, drive polarization. None of this is transparent, and it is very difficult to understand what is actually going on. There is also the spread of misinformation, increasingly facilitated by AI systems that can produce and distribute it in an automated and controlled way. As a result, we no longer have the common understanding of facts or major trends that existed for a long time.

The other major threat I see is that some parties, particularly on the right, seek to systematically undermine the credibility of and trust in key democratic institutions. You see this most clearly in the United States, where attacks on the media, the courts, electoral integrity, and the electoral system have been extremely systematic.

This creates a climate of distrust toward the foundations of democracy and democratic institutions that will be difficult to repair. Rebuilding that trust will take considerable time and require a strong effort. But again, this is something that is largely disconnected from the decision-making process and from direct democracy itself. It is something we see in Switzerland just as we see it in any other form of democracy.

Residents flee burning homes in Belfast.

When Integration Falters, Nativism Advances: Europe’s Liberal Dilemma

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryExtremism & RadicalisationHomeMigration

Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the rise of anti-immigrant unrest across Europe reflects not simply tensions over migration, but a deeper crisis of democratic integration. In this timely commentary, he contends that diversity alone cannot sustain social cohesion without strong institutions capable of transforming difference into common citizenship. Drawing on scholarship by Robert Putnam, David Goodhart, Yascha Mounk, and others, Dr. Dias examines how weakening civic institutions, declining social trust, and unresolved integration challenges create fertile ground for nativist mobilization. Rather than framing the debate as a choice between openness and exclusion, he calls for renewed attention to the civic foundations that make pluralism politically sustainable. At stake, he argues, is Europe’s ability to reconcile diversity, solidarity, and democratic stability.

By João Ferreira Dias

Recent episodes of anti-immigrant unrest in cities such as Southampton and Belfast are often interpreted through the lens of public order, criminality, or political extremism. Yet these events may also be symptomatic of a deeper challenge confronting liberal democracies across Europe: the growing tension between openness and social cohesion.

One of the defining assumptions of the late twentieth-century liberal order was that increasingly open societies would naturally generate greater inclusion. Diversity, mobility, and multiculturalism were frequently treated not merely as compatible with democratic stability, but as self-evident expressions of it. What this assumption overlooks, however, is that openness alone does not produce integration.

Democratic societies require more than legal frameworks and economic opportunities. They depend upon a shared civic foundation capable of sustaining trust, cooperation, and political legitimacy. As Robert Putnam (2007) argued in his influential work on diversity and social capital, heterogeneity can enrich societies in the long term, but it may also create short-term challenges for social trust when institutions fail to mediate difference effectively.

The fragility of contemporary liberal democracies lies not in diversity itself, but in the weakening of the mechanisms that transform diversity into common citizenship. Schools, political parties, trade unions, local associations, and public institutions historically played a crucial role in integrating individuals from different backgrounds into a shared civic culture. When these mediating institutions weaken, identities that might otherwise coexist within a broader political community increasingly become sources of social fragmentation (Judt, 2010).

Immigration policy illustrates this dilemma particularly clearly. Contemporary European migration regimes often emerge from the intersection of several legitimate objectives: humanitarian obligations, historical responsibilities, labor market demands, and demographic decline. Yet political debate frequently neglects a more uncomfortable question: the absorptive capacity of receiving societies.

The notion that democratic states must continuously assess their capacity to integrate newcomers is often portrayed as morally suspect, as if limits necessarily imply exclusion. Yet a growing body of scholarship suggests the opposite. Sustainable inclusion requires not merely access, but incorporation into a common civic framework defined by rights and responsibilities, constitutional norms, linguistic participation, gender equality, and democratic values (Mounk, 2022; Miller, 2016).

Without such a framework, diversity risks evolving from pluralism into segmentation. Social groups become increasingly disconnected from one another, trust declines, and political entrepreneurs find fertile ground for mobilizing resentment. It is under these conditions that nativist movements gain traction.

The appeal of contemporary nativism rests on a powerful narrative: that European societies are losing control over their cultural continuity, historical identity, and political sovereignty. Whether empirically accurate or not, this perception acquires political force when citizens conclude that mainstream institutions are either unwilling or unable to address concerns related to integration, social cohesion, and public order.

Importantly, the rise of nativism should not be understood as a simple reaction to immigration itself. Such explanations are analytically insufficient. The same levels of migration can produce dramatically different political outcomes depending on the strength of institutions, the effectiveness of integration policies, and the degree of social trust present within a society (Goodhart, 2017; Krastev & Holmes, 2019).

The danger emerges when individual acts of crime, disorder, or social conflict cease to be interpreted as the actions of particular individuals and instead become symbolic markers of collective identity. In such contexts, immigrants are increasingly viewed as representatives of an undifferentiated out-group, while native populations come to see themselves as members of a threatened in-group. The resulting dynamic resembles what social psychologists have long identified as the transition from individual judgment to group-based political cognition.

History suggests that democracies become particularly vulnerable when they lose the ability to interpret and respond to the anxieties of their own citizens. Polarization thrives when complex social challenges are reduced to simplistic moral binaries, dividing societies into opposing camps of “us” and “them.” In this environment, both exclusionary nativism and uncompromising forms of ideological universalism feed off one another, narrowing the space for pragmatic democratic solutions.

The challenge facing Europe today is therefore not simply whether to accept more or fewer immigrants. It is whether liberal democracies can rebuild the institutional and civic foundations necessary to transform diversity into solidarity. The question is not openness versus closure, but whether openness can remain politically sustainable without a renewed commitment to integration.

The events witnessed in Southampton, Belfast, and elsewhere may not signal the inevitable triumph of nativism. They do, however, suggest that the political center is increasingly squeezed between competing certainties: on one side, an understanding of inclusion that often underestimates the importance of social cohesion; on the other, a nativist reaction that seeks belonging through exclusion.

Europe’s democratic future may well depend on its ability to recover the difficult middle ground between these two positions.

References

Goodhart, D. (2017). The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. London, UK: Hurst.

Judt, T. (2010). Ill Fares the Land. New York, NY: Penguin Press.

Krastev, I., & Holmes, S. (2019). The Light That Failed: A Reckoning. London, UK: Allen Lane.

Miller, D. (2016). Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mounk, Y. (2022). The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. New York, NY: Penguin Press.

Putnam, R. D. (2007). “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century.” Scandinavian Political Studies, 30(2), 137–174.