Klaudia Koxha(Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Lausanne).
Speakers
“Populist Strategies of Normalizing Demographic Fears,” by Oscar Mazzoleni (Professor in Political Science and Political Sociology at the University of Lausanne).
“The Scientific Normalization of ‘the Great Replacement’ Conspiracy,” by Alberta Giorgi (Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bergamo).
“From Demographic Winter to Civilizational Struggle: Anti-Abortion Networks and the Global Radical Right,” by Carol Mason (Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities and Professor at University of Kentucky, US).
“Mestizaje, Backlash, and the Politics of Demographic Populism: Race and Gender in Latin America,” by Carlos de la Torre (Professor at the Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Florida).
“Anti-Muslim Mobilization: Demographic Change and Radical-Right Populism in Austria,” by Reinhard Heinisch(Professor of Comparative Austrian Politics at the University of Salzburg, European Studies Center associate at the University of Pittsburgh and visiting lecturer at Renmin University of China).
Klaudia Koxha is a Senior Researcher at the University of Lausanne, where she works on an international research project examining radical right populism and conspiracy theories across four European democracies. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Paris Lodron University of Salzburg and was a visiting researcher at American University in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on populism and the radical right, European integration and EU policy, gender equality, party politics, and comparative and multi-level politics. Alongside her academic work, she has contributed expertise to regional and international organizations on issues including gender equality and inclusion, integrity, and democratic governance. She regularly contributes to public and policy debates through invited talks, lectures, and expert commentary, with her work featured in outlets including EUobserver, El Mundo, The European Correspondent, and DeFacto. She is co-editor of The Radical Right and Demographic Populism (Manchester University Press, 2026), New Dynamics of Contestation in EU–Western Balkan Relations (Palgrave, 2026), and Perspectives on Populism (Nomos, 2024). Her recent research appears in Government and Opposition journal, with further work accepted for publication in Comparative European Politics and forthcoming with Presses de l’Université Laval.
Oscar Mazzoleni is a professor in political science at the University of Lausanne where he leads the Research Observatory for regional research. He has achieved an interdisciplinary educational path, with a degree in sociology and anthropology and a PhD in contemporary history between the universities of Lausanne and Turin. He has been visiting professor and research fellow at the Universities of Columbia, Cornell, Laval, Geneva, Groningen, Torino, Sorbonne-Panthéon- Paris, Science-Po-Paris, Valencia, Salzburg, European University Institute of Florence, La Tuscia, and Roma-Sapienza. His current interests are devoted on political parties, populism, nationalism, regionalism, electoral studies, and Swiss politics in comparative perspective.
Alberta Giorgi is an associate professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bergamo. Her work explores discursive boundaries and classifications, particularly at the intersection of politics, gender, religion, and science. She has recently co-edited with H. Eslen-Ziya, (Un)silencing Academia in Times of Epistemic Conflicts. Navigating Online Violence (Routledge 2026). She is co-editing with Pauline Cullen Mapping Political Sociology Ambiguities and Complexities for Unpredictable Futures (Routledge 2026)
Carol Mason is the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities and a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky, USA. She is the author of four books on various aspects of the rise of the Right since the 1960s. University of California Press published her latest monograph, From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary, in 2025.
Carlos de la Torre is a professor at the Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. He has authored several manuscripts and edited volumes on populism. His most recent books are Populism and Fascism, Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Global Populisms with Treethep Srisa-nga (Routledge Press, 2021); Populisms: A Quick Immersion (Tibidabo editions, 2019); and Populist Seduction in Latin America (Ohio University Press, second edition, 2010).
Dr. Reinhard Heinisch is a Professor of Comparative Austrian Politics at the University of Salzburg and head of the Department of Political Science. He received his academic training in the US where he completed his PhD at Michigan State University and then taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1994 to 2009. Heinisch’s research focuses on the rise of the radical right, populism, democracy, and political parties. Dr. Heinisch is the author of over 40 research articles and more than 50 other scholarly publications including 14 books. His research appeared in journals such as Journal of European Political Research, Political Studies,Journal ofCommon Market Studies, Party Politics, West European Politics, Democratization, Representation, and many others. His book publications include Understanding Populist Party Organization: The Radical Right in Western Europe (Palgrave 2016); The People and the Nation: Populism and Ethno-Territorial Politics in Europe (Routledge 2019), Political Populism. A Handbook, Nomos (2021), and Politicizing Islam in Austria (Rutgers University Press 2024).
Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the AfD’s strength in Eastern Germany cannot be explained by poverty alone. Instead, its rise reflects the interaction of nativist attitudes, political alienation, territorial decline, demographic shrinkage, and the enduring memory of post-reunification disruption. The AfD’s political success lies in converting disparate grievances—over immigration, economic insecurity, public services, identity, and distant decision-making—into a unified anti-elite narrative. Dr. Dias stresses that the Brandmauer may remain necessary as an institutional safeguard, but it is insufficient as a political strategy. A durable democratic response, he argues, must address material insecurity, regional neglect, state capacity, immigration, and recognition while offering citizens a credible sense of belonging and a recognizable future.
Some election results change governments. Others force a country to reconsider the story it tells about itself. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt belongs to the second category. When a radical-right party comes close to winning half the electorate in a German state, it is no longer enough to speak of a “protest vote.” The question becomes a different one: how did the AfD manage, in parts of Eastern Germany, to become a socially rooted and electorally dominant political force?
The easy answer would be poverty. It is also, to a large extent, the wrong answer. The available research shows that attitudes towards immigration, national identity and political elites explain support for the AfD far better than individual economic deprivation does (Hansen & Olsen, 2024; Kailitz & Rippl, 2026; Schröder et al., 2026). But this does not mean that economics, place and abandonment are irrelevant. It points instead to something more interesting: what matters is less absolute poverty than the experience of loss — or what might be called the “fear of falling”: the loss of status, population, opportunity, recognition and control over the future. Such experiences can produce political alienation. It is the AfD, however, that supplies the nativist and anti-establishment language capable of giving that alienation meaning.
To understand this mechanism, we need to begin before the AfD itself. After 1990, Eastern Germany underwent an economic and social transformation of extraordinary intensity. Reunification was unquestionably an act of political liberation, but it also meant the disappearance of companies, careers, professional hierarchies and institutions that had structured the daily lives of millions of people. Steffen Mau describes this process in terms of status demotion, the transfer of elites, demographic transformation and the loss of biographical security (Mau, 2019). It was not simply that some people lost their jobs. For many, an entire social world suddenly lost its value.
When Economic Loss Becomes Political Memory
There is now evidence that these experiences left lasting political consequences. Kellermann (2024), studying workers affected by the privatizations carried out by the Treuhandanstalt, found lower levels of trust and greater detachment from institutions and established parties decades later. This does not mean that the Treuhand “caused” the AfD. It means that an economic experience can become a political memory when the loss is attributed to decisions made by distant institutions. There is a difference between thinking, “my job disappeared,” and thinking “they decided that the world I belonged to no longer had value.
That experience also acquired a concrete geography. Since reunification, Saxony-Anhalt has lost roughly a quarter of its population. Depopulation on this scale does not simply mean fewer inhabitants. It means young people leaving, schools with fewer pupils, shops closing, services becoming harder to sustain and communities growing progressively older. Höhne, Kölzer and Träger (2025), analyzing more than 1,400 municipalities in Eastern Germany, found a robust relationship between long-term population decline and support for the AfD. The most important finding, however, is that the same pattern does not appear with equal strength in support for the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. Territorial decline, then, does not determine political choice; it creates conditions that a party may or may not be able to mobilize.
It is in this sense that Andrés Rodríguez-Pose (2018) speaks of “the revenge of the places that don’t matter.” The problem is not simply that such places are poor. It is the feeling of living in a territory from which the future has withdrawn. A region may be materially far richer than it was thirty years ago and, at the same time, feel that it has lost relevance. Universities expand elsewhere. The most prestigious jobs appear somewhere else. Young people leave. Decision-makers live far away. The country can prosper in aggregate while particular communities see, above all, what is disappearing. Inequality then ceases to exist only between individuals; it begins to exist between places.
From Collective Disadvantage to Populist Mobilization
This is where the economic explanation meets the cultural one. Recent research is quite clear on two points that have to be held together. First, nativist, anti-immigration and anti-elite attitudes are genuine political drivers of the AfD vote; they should not be reduced to some form of economic false consciousness (Hansen & Olsen, 2024; Schröder et al., 2026). Second, political alienation and feelings of collective disadvantage are particularly strong in the East and help explain why such attitudes find more fertile ground there (Kailitz & Rippl, 2026; Pickel & Pickel, 2026). Kailitz and Rippl put it especially well: the seeds are not necessarily different; the soil is more fertile.
This is how the false choice between “economics” and “culture” can be resolved. A closed factory does not automatically produce xenophobia. A distant hospital does not produce nationalism. But accumulated experiences of loss, distance and inadequate recognition can nourish the sense that institutions no longer represent “people like us.” At that point, a populist narrative becomes more plausible: there is a forgotten people, and there are elites who govern for others. That is precisely the narrative the AfD learned to build.
The party founded in 2013 did not begin with the ideological configuration we know today. It emerged above all from the euro crisis, with a Eurosceptic, conservative and economically liberal profile. Between 2015 and 2017, however, immigration, refugees, Islam and national identity shifted the party’s center of gravity, bringing it closer to what Cas Mudde defines as the populist radical right: a combination of nativism, authoritarianism and populism (Arzheimer & Berning, 2019; Mudde, 2007). The euro crisis created the organization; the refugee crisis turned it into a mass political force.
Since then, the AfD has shown an extraordinary capacity to adapt. Hansen and Olsen (2024) describe it as a populist issue entrepreneur: a party able to retain ownership of the issues on which it already enjoys an advantage — above all immigration — while continually absorbing new conflicts. The euro, refugees, the pandemic, climate, energy, gender, Ukraine and the politics of memory are very different issues. The AfD manages to present them as manifestations of the same problem. That is its central political talent.
The Brandmauer Paradox and the AfD’s Anti-Elite Narrative
A railway station that closes is a transport problem. A factory that shuts down belongs to economics. Immigration is migration policy. The war in Ukraine is foreign policy. Gender belongs to the culture wars. The AfD turns all of them into a single story: the elites in Berlin and Brussels have stopped governing in the name of ordinary people. The issues change. The culprit remains the same.
Immigration occupies a central place in this narrative because it functions both as a real political issue and as a symbolic condensation of several anxieties. It can be connected to security, housing, schools, the welfare state, Islam, borders and identity. In a territory that has already experienced profound transformations decided in distant centers of power, it can also be presented as yet another change carried out “without us.” The interpretation does not need to be empirically accurate in order to be politically effective. Populism often succeeds not because it explains each problem better, but because it connects different problems within a single moral explanation.
This is also why it is no longer sufficient to speak simply of a “protest vote.” Mudde (2019) draws attention to the contemporary normalization of the radical right: ideas that once existed on the political margins gradually enter everyday politics. The Eastern German case adds a troubling generational dimension. Heinze and Scheuer (2026) find among young AfD voters not merely volatility or rebellion, but relatively stable partisan identification, closely associated with nativism. These young people did not experience the GDR, the Treuhand or reunification. Historical experience is no longer only biographical memory. It has become, at least in part, a political inheritance.
This is where the dilemma of the Brandmauer emerges: the firewall through which Germany’s mainstream parties refuse to govern with the AfD. There are powerful democratic reasons for maintaining it. Winning elections does not give any party the right to weaken fundamental rights, pluralism, or institutional independence. But an obvious political problem arises when the excluded force comes close to winning half the vote: the more all the other parties have to cooperate in order to keep it out of power, the easier it becomes for the AfD to say that “they are all the same” and that it alone represents a genuine alternative.
Why the Brandmauer Is Necessary but Not Enough
Yascha Mounk (2018) helps illuminate the paradox: populism seeks to present the liberal institutions that constrain majority power as obstacles to democracy itself. The Brandmauer (firewall) may therefore be necessary as an institutional defense and insufficient as a political strategy. It answers the question, “how do we stop the AfD from governing?” It does not answer the prior question: “why do so many people want it to govern?”
Understanding the answer to that second question does not mean excusing it. Anne Applebaum (2020) reminds us that the contemporary illiberal threat rarely begins with the immediate destruction of democracy. It can advance through the gradual occupation of institutions, administrative changes, appointments, education, culture and the media. In Saxony-Anhalt, a move by the AfD from opposition into government would give it access to precisely these areas. Sociologically explaining an electorate does not require us to minimize the consequences of the programme it chooses.
But historical memory is not enough either. Tony Judt (2010) reminded us that post-war European democracies did not survive because of constitutions alone. They built welfare states, public services, security and the expectation that the future could be better. A democratic order becomes fragile when it can tell its citizens only two things: “adapt to change” and “do not vote for them.” The first offers no security. The second offers no project.
Perhaps this is, in the end, the best way to understand the result in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD did not win simply because a population became poorer, or because nearly half the electorate suddenly became radicalized. It won because it managed to transform experiences of territorial decline, downward mobility and inadequate recognition into a political narrative combining nativism, anti-establishment alienation and the promise of national restoration.
It did not merely say: “you lost.” It said: “you lost because they chose others over you.” It is this move — from loss to resentment, from resentment to identity, and from identity to the ballot box — that helps explain its strength.
And that is also why the democratic response will have to be more demanding than copying the AfD, increasing fiscal transfers or reinforcing the firewall. It will have to combine credible control of immigration, state capacity, services and opportunity in peripheral regions, recognition of Eastern Germany’s distinctive historical experience, and an idea of national belonging strong enough to create community without having to turn minorities into enemies.
Because citizens do not abandon a political order only when they become poor. They can also drift away from it when they cease to believe that it contains a recognizable future for people like them, and for places like the ones in which they live.
References
Applebaum, A. (2020). Twilight of democracy: The seductive lure of authoritarianism. Doubleday.
Arzheimer, K., & Berning, C. C. (2019). How the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and their voters veered to the radical right, 2013–2017. Electoral Studies, 60, 102040.
Hansen, M. A., & Olsen, J. (2024). The Alternative for Germany (AfD) as populist issue entrepreneur. German Politics, 33(4), 643–667.
Heinze, A.-S., & Scheuer, T. (2026). Growing up far right? Youth support for the AfD in Eastern Germany. German Politics, 35(3), 485–515.
Höhne, B., Kölzer, J., & Träger, H. (2025). Geography of shrinkage: Local population decline and electoral support for the anti-establishment parties AfD and BSW in East German state elections. German Politics, 34(3), 449–477.
Judt, T. (2010). Ill fares the land. Penguin Press.
Kailitz, S., & Rippl, S. (2026). Same seeds, more fertile ground: Sources of AfD dominance in Eastern Germany. German Politics, 35(3), 437–462.
Kellermann, K. L. (2024). Trust we lost: The impact of the Treuhand experience on political alienation in East Germany. Journal of Comparative Economics, 52(1), 54–75.
Mau, S. (2019). Lütten Klein: Leben in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft. Suhrkamp.
Mounk, Y. (2018). The people vs. democracy. Harvard University Press.
Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.
Mudde, C. (2019). The far right today. Polity.
Pickel, G., & Pickel, S. (2026). The election of the AfD and the collective identity of East Germans. German Politics, 35(3), 412–436.
Rodríguez-Pose, A. (2018). The revenge of the places that don’t matter. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 11(1), 189–209.
Schröder, M., Rehm, M., & Röcke, A. (2026). Supporters of Germany’s far-right AfD party are concerned about immigration rather than feeling deprived. PLOS ONE, 21(7), e0350403.
In this commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias examines the migration crisis in Ceuta as a “total crisis” encompassing humanitarian obligations, political legitimacy, social cohesion, and the future of Europe’s liberal-multicultural order. Rejecting both an expansive humanitarianism that neglects the pressures experienced by receiving communities and far-right narratives that reduce migrants to a homogeneous civilizational threat, Dr. Dias argues for an approach combining compassion with effective migration governance. Drawing on research into migration, local exposure, and multicultural citizenship, he contends that diversity requires a shared civic framework grounded in democratic law, equality, rights, and obligations. For Dr. Dias, Europe’s challenge is therefore not to choose between humanitarian protection and border control, but to reconcile protection, effective borders, integration, and social stability if liberal multiculturalism is to remain politically sustainable.
The situation in Ceuta is what I would call a “total crisis”: social, political, and humanitarian at the same time. Looking at it in those terms is an attempt to escape the constraints of affective polarization (Iyengar et al., 2019), which increasingly turns political analysis into a moral exercise in deciding who deserves our sympathy.
Two dominant perspectives usually emerge in European debates on migration. One emphasizes humanitarian duties and often expands them into an almost unlimited moral obligation to receive those who reach European borders. The other responds through cultural anxiety, demographic fear and, at its extreme, the rhetoric of a “Great Replacement.” Both perspectives capture something real. Neither sees the whole picture.
Europe has unquestionable obligations towards refugees and asylum seekers. The right to seek asylum and the principle of non-refoulement are central elements of the international and European legal order. A liberal Europe cannot abandon those principles simply because applying them has become politically difficult. But neither international law nor European law establishes an unlimited right for every migrant to enter and remain permanently in Europe.
That distinction matters. States have duties towards those entitled to international protection. But governments also have duties towards the societies they govern. Migration policy cannot ignore reception capacity, housing, public services, integration, security and social stability. Humanitarianism does not operate outside politics. This is where part of the progressive discourse on migration becomes problematic. Its moral vocabulary is universal, while the social consequences of migration are unevenly distributed.
It is relatively easy to demand empathy from the inhabitants of border communities when one does not share their streets, their schools, their public services or their fears. The paradox is striking: those who correctly demand empathy towards migrants sometimes display surprisingly little empathy towards the communities expected to absorb the immediate consequences of large migratory movements.
Ceuta makes that contradiction difficult to ignore. Research also suggests that local exposure matters. Sudden demographic change can generate stronger opposition to immigration when it becomes politically salient (Hopkins, 2010). Hangartner et al. (2019), studying Greek islands exposed to the refugee crisis, found that direct exposure to large refugee arrivals produced more restrictive attitudes towards refugees, immigrants and Muslim minorities.
This does not mean that every fear expressed by local populations is justified. But it means that fear cannot simply be dismissed as ignorance or xenophobia. For the inhabitants of Ceuta, migration is not an abstract seminar on cosmopolitan ethics. It is the sudden presence of thousands of people in a geographically confined territory. It means pressure on public spaces and services, deteriorating sanitary conditions, disruption of everyday life and, inevitably, perceptions of insecurity. Some of those perceptions may be exaggerated. Others may not. But democratic politics cannot simply tell citizens that their fears are morally illegitimate.
At the same time, the opposite camp commits an equally serious mistake. Migrants are not a homogeneous civilizational bloc. Among those arriving in Europe are women escaping oppressive social environments, political dissidents, religious minorities, educated young people looking for opportunities, families seeking security and people whose values may be substantially closer to European liberalism than those of the societies they have left behind. Reducing all migrants to a demographic or cultural threat is therefore both empirically crude and morally indefensible. The crisis has two human faces: those who arrive and those who receive them. Any serious migration policy must be capable of seeing both.
Ceuta also reveals a deeper European problem: the crisis of what might be called liberal multiculturalism. The central intuition of liberal multiculturalism was both powerful and legitimate: people should not be required to erase their cultural, religious or linguistic identity in order to become equal citizens. Kymlicka’s defense of multicultural citizenship remains one of the strongest formulations of this position. But there is a difference between accepting diversity and assuming that social cohesion emerges automatically from it. It does not. A society cannot indefinitely become a patchwork of parallel cultural, ethnic and religious communities without also developing institutions capable of producing a common civic ground.
This does not mean assimilation. It means integration. Language matters. Constitutional principles matter. Equality between men and women matters. Religious freedom matters, including the freedom to abandon religion. Acceptance of democratic law matters. A shared understanding that citizenship involves both rights and obligations matters. European states themselves have increasingly recognized this. The gradual retreat from some versions of multiculturalism and the rise of civic integration policies documented by Joppke (2004, 2007) reflect precisely this concern.
Multiculturalism without integration creates islands. Diversity without a shared civic framework can produce coexistence without community. This is why migration control should not be understood as the opposite of liberal multiculturalism. It may actually be one of its conditions of survival.
Europe needs effective borders precisely because migration will continue. It needs credible asylum procedures because humanitarian protection remains part of the European liberal order. It must distinguish between those who have legitimate claims to international protection and those who do not. It must be capable of receiving and integrating those who are entitled to remain. And it must also be capable of repatriating, humanely and legally, those who have no right to stay. Otherwise, the distinction between legal and illegal migration becomes politically meaningless.
The way Spain responds to Ceuta therefore matters beyond Ceuta. If European governments are unable simultaneously to protect refugees, control borders, manage migration and sustain social integration, voters will increasingly conclude that the entire liberal-multicultural model has failed. That conclusion would have profound political consequences. A Europe that abandons humanitarian protection abandons part of its liberal identity. But a Europe that loses control over migration, fails to integrate newcomers and refuses to acknowledge the fears of receiving communities may eventually create the political conditions for the rejection of liberalism itself.
The real choice is therefore not between compassion and control. Europe needs both. Without compassion, it ceases to be liberal. Without control and integration, it may cease to be politically capable of remaining liberal.
References
Hangartner, D.; Dinas, E.; Marbach, M.; Matakos, K. & Xefteris, D. (2019). “Does exposure to the refugee crisis make natives more hostile?” American Political Science Review, 113(2), 442–455.
Hopkins, D. J. (2010). “Politicized places: Explaining where and when immigrants provoke local opposition.” American Political Science Review, 104(1), 40–60.
Iyengar, S.; Lelkes, Y.; Levendusky, M.; Malhotra, N. & Westwood, S. J. (2019). “The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States.” Annual Review of Political Science, 22, 129–146.
Joppke, C. (2004). “The retreat of multiculturalism in the liberal state: Theory and policy.” The British Journal of Sociology, 55(2), 237–257.
Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural citizenship: A liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford University Press.
In this commentary, Dr. Bulent Kenes examines the political transformation of Sweden through the rise of the Sweden Democrats (SD) and normalization of far-right. Drawing on his experience of seeking refuge in a country once widely regarded as a “moral superpower,” Kenes contrasts Sweden’s longstanding commitments to liberal democracy, pluralism, multicultural accommodation, gender equality, minority rights, and inclusive citizenship with the SD’s increasingly influential nativist and ethno-nationalist project. He argues that the breaking of the cordon sanitaire and the Tidö Agreement have helped move ideas once confined to the far right into mainstream politics. As Sweden approaches the September 13 election, Kenes asks whether the SD’s promise to “make Sweden Sweden again” ultimately risks dismantling the very values that historically made Sweden distinctive.
A Sweden Democrats (SD) campaign poster ahead of Sweden’s September 13, 2026 parliamentary elections, featuring the slogan “This is how we make Sweden Sweden again” and highlighting the party’s policies on immigration, crime, Islamism, citizenship, welfare, and the economy.
For as long as I can remember, I have worked for human rights, the rule of law, constitutional and liberal democracy, an egalitarian and just society, and global peace. During my years as a professional journalist and media executive, I likewise sought to defend and advance these values. I vocally opposed every step taken by Erdogan’s government after 2011 as Turkey moved increasingly toward one-man rule and authoritarianism, and I never withheld my criticism. As Erdogan rapidly advanced toward one-man rule and autocracy, as every aspiring dictator does, I became a target of his repression. Because of my criticism centered on democracy, the rule of law, and human rights etc., I was subjected to countless smear campaigns in pro-Erdogan media and on social media, faced dozens of investigations, was repeatedly detained, and was briefly imprisoned.
By 2016, as Erdogan was constructing his autocratic regime step by step and there was no longer room for me to breathe in Turkey, I decided to leave the country. But where should I go? By virtue of my profession, I had by then visited more than 70 countries, including Sweden, and had lived in the United States for several years. Yet the choice for me was not so difficult. I knew that the very values and standards whose absence I had felt in my own country and for which I had struggled—democracy, human rights, transparency, the rule of law, freedom of the press and expression, gender equality, environmental rights and justice, and similar principles—shone most brightly in Sweden, which at the time was widely regarded as a “moral superpower.”
As Turkey fell into the grip of autocracy and Islamofascism, my choice was clear. Sweden stood out as a country in which virtually everything we had struggled, unsuccessfully, to establish and consolidate in Turkey had already become largely institutionalized. If, despite all our efforts, pluralist and liberal democracy, a state governed by the rule of law according to universal standards, an almost exemplary environment for freedom of the press and expression, and similar values would simply not come to us, I believed that it was my most natural right to go to them. Having overcome all the technical obstacles placed in my way by the Erdogan regime, I eventually managed to reach Sweden.
Over the ten years since then, unfortunately, Sweden—like the rest of the world—has changed considerably. Alongside some genuine problems generated by the 2015 migration wave, far-right perceptions of threat were constructed on a scale vastly exceeding the actual magnitude of those problems. In the process, both the social sensibilities that made Sweden the Sweden we knew have been eroded and political actors increasingly influenced by the far right have gradually weakened the country’s once-proud status as a “moral superpower.” Sweden, which one might have hoped would serve as one of the moral barriers against the global drift toward the far right, has itself undergone a far-reaching political transformation in the same direction.
At the center of this transformation are the Sweden Democrats (SD), who increasingly challenge the liberal, pluralist, and inclusive political culture that long underpinned Sweden’s reputation as a “moral superpower.” The ideological core of the SD combines nativism, authoritarianism, and populism, while migration, Islam, national identity, and cultural homogeneity constitute central axes of its political discourse. The party advances a more homogeneous conception of the nation grounded in ethno-nationalism and frames immigrants, particularly Muslims, as potential threats to Sweden’s cultural integrity and welfare state. At this point, however, I should not fail to acknowledge the provocative and highly irresponsible activities of certain Muslim immigrant groups.
Given the SD’s historical roots in Swedish fascism, nazism, white nationalism, and far-right milieus, one of the most consequential changes under Jimmie Åkesson has been the effort to largely free the party from the burden of this past and give it a more legitimate and parliamentary appearance. Yet despite this “normalization” and transformation of its public image, opposition to immigration and Islamophobia have retained their central place in the party’s political discourse. As early as 2009, Åkesson described various phenomena associated with Islam as “the greatest foreign threat to Sweden since the Second World War” and placed Muslims at the center of this threat narrative—one of the most striking manifestations of this ideological continuity.
Although its historical roots extend much further back, in the populist far-right political imaginary represented today by the SD, multiculturalism is portrayed not as a form of pluralism that enriches Swedish society but as a source of social fragmentation and weakening national cohesion. In its place, folkhem—the “people’s home”—is being reasserted. Yet Åkesson’s vision of folkhem differs markedly from Per Albin Hansson’s: it is a tightly integrated society based largely on the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of the native Swedish majority, shared values, and solidarity. Within this understanding, “being Swedish” means more than merely holding Swedish citizenship; immigrants are expected to adapt culturally to “Swedish values” and to the “Christian, democratic world” to which Sweden is understood to belong. The boundary between integration and assimilation consequently becomes increasingly blurred.
Islam and Muslims occupy a distinctive place in this politics of boundary-making. In Åkesson’s discourse, Christianity and its moral values are defined as foundational pillars of folkhem, whereas Islam is frequently portrayed as being in conflict with Sweden’s cultural and social order. The rise of the SD therefore cannot be understood simply as the hardening of immigration policy or the electoral success of a populist radical right party. At a deeper level, it represents a broader political transformation in which Sweden’s “exceptionalism,” built upon consociational democracy, multiculturalism, inclusive citizenship, and pluralism, is increasingly displaced by the normalization of a more closed, assimilationist, and ethno-culturally homogeneous vision of Sweden.
Many racist and far-right positions that were once considered shameful, or even unacceptable, within mainstream politics when the SD was founded have today become substantially normalized. The breaking of the cordon sanitaire surrounding the SD in 2022 did more than open greater political space for the party’s far-right and ethno-populist positions. In exchange for its external support for the coalition government formed by the center-right parties, the extensive policy agenda it secured through the Tidö Agreement gave the SD extraordinary influence over government policy. Discourses once regarded as unacceptable and incompatible with the Sweden we knew have, through the Tidö Agreement, become part of government policy and mainstream political debate. Changes to migration and terrorism legislation over the past four years, measures that have generated debate over press and freedom of expression, and new political orientations concerning gender equality have made the question of whether Sweden is steadily moving away from the Sweden we knew all the more pressing.
It is precisely here that the central irony of the SD’s promise to “making Sweden Sweden again” lies. Sweden’s extraordinary international prestige was not built merely on prosperity and effective governance. It was also grounded in liberal democracy, openness, multicultural accommodation, gender equality, strong minority rights, and an inclusive conception of citizenship. Despite certain notable deteriorations in some international indicators amid initiatives moving in the opposite direction—initiatives spearheaded by the SD—international indices show that significant parts of this institutional architecture, thankfully, remain resilient today.
The Sweden Democrats, however, offer a different answer to the question of what Sweden should be. Their political project places more restrictive immigration policies, assimilation, cultural homogeneity, and the preservation of a particular Swedish national identity grounded in ethnicity at the center of political belonging. Particularly significant is the increasingly hard-line approach toward Islam and Muslims: legitimate debates that need to be conducted about radical Islamism and problems of integration can, at times, become intertwined with broader Islamophobic narratives that treat the very presence of Muslims as a cultural threat. Opposition to multiculturalism similarly imagines social cohesion not through pluralism but through a greater degree of cultural—and implicitly ethnic—homogeneity.
Sweden now heads back to the polls on September 13 after four years of the Tidö experiment and this broader transformation. The latest polling indicates a clear advantage for the opposition. Across the four most recent major surveys, the opposition’s lead over the Tidö bloc ranges from 3.7 to 10 percentage points, while the weighted polling average as of August 27 indicates an opposition advantage of approximately seven points. Together, S, V, MP, and C stand at roughly 52.6 percent, compared with approximately 45.7 percent for SD, M, KD, and L. Moreover, with the Liberals hovering around 2 percent—well below the 4 percent parliamentary threshold—the parliamentary arithmetic becomes even more difficult for the Tidö bloc.
The SD, once excluded behind a cordon sanitaire, is no longer content merely to pull the Tidö parties toward the far right from outside government. It now openly expresses its ambition to enter government directly, demanding key ministerial portfolios. With a Trumpian slogan, it tells voters how, over the past four years, it has “made Sweden Sweden again” from outside government and now seeks a mandate to push its nativist, ethno-nationalist, populist, anti-Islam, and anti-immigration etc. policies even further.
Yet what made the Sweden we knew distinctly Swedish was neither racism, the legacy of neo-Nazi politics, nor opposition to multiculturalism. If there is genuinely an ambition to “make Sweden Sweden again,” the Sweden worth remembering is the Sweden of Per Albin Hansson’s folkhem ideal, Tage Erlander’s democratic welfare state, and Olof Palme’s egalitarian, internationalist, and human-rights-centered political legacy. The question facing Swedish voters on September 13, therefore, is not simply who will form the next government. The more fundamental question is this: “Making Sweden Sweden Again”—but which Sweden? And what will the Sweden the world came to know as a “moral superpower” have to sacrifice for the Sweden that the SD is now seeking to create?
In this interview, Professor Oscar Mazzoleni and Dr. Klaudia Koxha, editors of the recently published volume ‘The Radical Right and Demographic Populism,’ examine how contemporary populist radical right politics increasingly connects immigration, fertility, gender, family, religion, and national identity through the politics of demographic survival. They conceptualize “demographic populism” as a framework linking cultural survival to biological reproduction and transforming demographic change into an existential political struggle. The discussion explores demographic weaponization, conspiracy narratives, Fratelli d’Italia’s calculated ambivalence, and generational adaptations within the Austrian Freedom Party’s youth organizations. Moving beyond Europe, Professor Mazzoleni and Dr. Koxha also address transnational diffusion, political sovereignty, aging, migration, labor shortages, and AI, highlighting how demographic transformations may create new opportunities for populist radical right mobilization while posing significant challenges to democratic resilience.
Contemporary populist radical right (PRR) politics increasingly organizes questions of immigration, fertility, gender, religion, family, and national identity around a common concern: the demographic reproduction of “the people.” In this ECPS interview, Professor Oscar Mazzoleni of the University of Lausanne and Dr. Klaudia Koxha (a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Lausanne), editors of the recently published volume The Radical Right and Demographic Populism, explain how this convergence can be understood through the concept of “demographic populism.” As Professor Mazzoleni puts it, issues conventionally treated as separate increasingly converge on a fundamental political question: “Who is entitled to reproduce the true people?” Demographic populism, he argues, reveals how anti-immigration, anti-gender, and pronatalist claims can share “a single Manichean logic of demographic survival versus extinction.” Dr. Koxha sharpens this argument, explaining that “cultural survival” becomes tied to “the biological reproduction of a specific people with specific characteristics.”
The interview begins by developing this conceptual intervention and distinguishing demographic realities from their political weaponization. Aging, declining fertility, and migration are genuine policy challenges, Dr. Koxha stresses; what distinguishes populist radical-right politicization is the question of whose reproduction constitutes the desirable demographic future. This is how demographic change becomes “existential and moralized.” Professor Mazzoleni similarly identifies “demographic weaponization” as central to understanding how statistical and social transformations are reframed as political struggles over collective survival. Their approach consequently bridges populism studies and critical demography, treating demography simultaneously “as a set of conditions and as a political frame.”
The discussion then turns to how demographic populism operates in concrete political settings. Professor Mazzoleni examines Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, arguing that governmental participation has encouraged not straightforward ideological moderation but “more sophisticated strategies.” Through calculated ambivalence, coded references to “demographic winter,” and a division of discursive labor, radical ideas can be maintained while communication is adapted to broader audiences. In this formulation, demographic populism shifts the perceived threat “from political and economic dispossession to biological and cultural survival,” while immigration becomes embedded within a wider master frame encompassing natality, family, welfare, and religion.
Dr. Koxha’s analysis of the Austrian Freedom Party’s (FPÖ) youth organizations then introduces a generational dimension. While youth branches reproduce core radical-right positions, they adapt them to young people’s concerns and can sometimes “radicalize it further.” Yet Dr. Koxha also identifies greater internal heterogeneity than might be expected, particularly regarding religion, abortion, and LGBTQ+ issues. Crucially, declining religiosity does not necessarily entail rejecting cultural Christianity, which can instead operate “as a marker of national or civilizational identity.”
Finally, the interview broadens comparatively to transnational diffusion, sovereignty, demographic decline, migration, labor shortages, and artificial intelligence. Professor Mazzoleni argues that these transformations “can create a structure of opportunities for radical-right populism,” while Dr. Koxha highlights the political contradiction whereby migration can simultaneously be a practical response to aging and be reframed as evidence of “demographic displacement.” The democratic challenge, she concludes, is to confront the material consequences of demographic transformation without accepting that demographic change necessarily entails “cultural extinction” or that “one group’s security requires another’s exclusion.”
Here is our interview with Professor Oscar Mazzoleni and Dr. Klaudia Koxha, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Who Is Entitled to Reproduce the True People?
Crowds gather along the quay to visit tall ships during Sail 2010 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on August 19, 2010. Photo: Jan Kranendonk.
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni and Dr. Klaudia Koxha, welcome! Throughout the book, you argue that immigration, fertility, gender, religion, LGBTQ+ rights, and family politics should not be studied as separate cultural issues but as interconnected elements of what you call ‘demographic populism.’ What convinced you that existing theories of populism were no longer sufficient to explain these developments, and what analytical blind spots does your concept overcome?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Scholarship usually treated immigration, gender, religion, and family as separate cultural issues, also when we talk about populism, largely because of disciplinary divisions, and read them through the cultural backlash lens alone. What convinced us otherwise was recognizing that all these issues converge on one question: Who is entitled to reproduce the true people? Demographic populism overcomes the blind spot of separating nativism from reproduction, showing that anti-immigration, anti-gender, and pronatalist claims share a single Manichean logic of demographic survival versus extinction.
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: I would just briefly contextualize what this means in terms of the research that we know so far. Exactly as Oscar mentioned, research already tells us about how radical right populist parties engage with these topics separately. They started out with immigration, with these positions against non-native others, the cultural others. Then we learned how their agenda expanded and how gender equality, LGBTQ+ advocates, or advocates of diverse forms of family, of religious tolerance, etc., can become sources for fueling this typical Manichaean logic.
So, the proponents of such diversity become enemies to the people in the populist logic. However, these are not just different sources that fuel the Manichaean logic. If we put them together in one common framework, which is ‘demographic populism,’ they reveal exactly the demographic logic that Oscar just mentioned. In other words, the cultural survival, which is what these parties had been mostly politicizing, becomes tied to the biological reproduction of a specific people with specific characteristics.
Demographic Change Becomes Existential and Moralized
Your framework suggests that demographic change is not politically consequential by itself; rather, it becomes politically powerful once interpreted through narratives of existential threat. How should scholars distinguish between legitimate democratic debates about demographic trends and the populist politicization of demography?
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: The book is really clear that demographic developments are real. So, when we talk about aging, fertility decline, migration, these are legitimate policy questions. We also know that welfare regimes or pension systems depend on such characteristics. Societies try to hold on to these systems by partly relying on migration, a younger population, which is usually the active labor force. Then some of these migrants eventually form families, and this can help to offset aging populations. At the same time, we also see discussions across societies about how to support young working couples to form families, women to reconcile work and family life, so that they can have the means to follow their careers, provide for themselves, for the children. So, we have these different discussions around demographic change, and this is the broader aspect.
But for the populist radical right, these alternatives are not considered as solutions in themselves, because the populist radical right specifically asks: Who are these people, this active labor force that we need to support our welfare regimes, our pension systems, etc.? Who are these prospective families that will support our systems and push back aging populations?
Here we see the continuity for the radical right is on the so-called native population. So, the disagreement isn’t whether aging or fertility decline exists, but we go back to what Oscar mentioned in the first question: Whose reproduction is imagined as the desirable solution? And this is how demographic change becomes existential and moralized.
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: It’s important to underline the point that demographic weaponization is the key point. So, demography is at the center, it becomes at the center of political battle, in which radical right populism is a clear and an important actor, shaping and reshaping demography as a political issue. Of course, demography is, for demographers, about fertility, about immigration, is about statistics of these dynamics, but this aspect can be demographically framed in a specific way. This is exactly what radical right populism tries to do.
Demography Is Both a Set of Conditions and a Political Frame
One of the book’s most important contributions is its attempt to bridge populism studies with critical demography. Do you see this as the beginning of a new interdisciplinary research agenda, and what questions should future scholars prioritize?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Yes, of course, we try to open an interdisciplinary agenda. Critical demography’s attention to power relations behind births, fertility, mortality, and migration allows us to treat demography simultaneously as a set of conditions and as a political frame. Future research should prioritize the supply-side link between populism and conspiracy, the appeal of demographic weaponization among specific groups—youth, women, rural voters—and its institutional and policy effects on democratic resilience.
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: I don’t have anything to add to that. I guess exactly the last point, particularly, is interesting on the demand side: When and why do citizens of different societal groups accept these otherwise separate issues as parts of one whole demographic thread?
Demographic Populism Is No Longer Confined to the Radical Right
You conclude that demographic populism increasingly connects conspiracy theories with mainstream party politics. Does this suggest that conspiracy thinking has evolved from a fringe phenomenon into a governing logic of parts of the contemporary radical right?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Yes, this is a key point: demographic populism is not just about the radical right. It could be mainstream; it’s part of the contemporary discussion about the demographic winter. It’s not just about the radical right. Conspiracy can be a mediation or a fuel for this kind of increasing interest and use of demographic populism. This is an important point that we try to underline in the conclusion.
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: I think it’s exactly that—the amplification, maybe we could put it. It’s a complementary amplification force for populism. Because what conspiracy does is it adds this intentionality. So it’s not just a populist anti-elite discourse that relies on some sort of elite that looks after its own interests, but the conspiracy also adds this dimension of the elite deliberately undermining the people. So it’s like a deliberate choice, and this is how, like Oscar mentioned, conspiracy becomes an amplifier, in some ways, for populism.
Calculated Ambivalence Allows Moderation and Radicalism to Come Together
A poster for the 2024 European elections featuring Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome, Italy on May 4, 2024. Photo: Stefano Chiacchiarini.
Dear Professor Mazzoleni, in your chapter on Fratelli d’Italia, you argue that the party has successfully reconciled governmental responsibility with radical-right ideology through ambivalent populist and conspiratorial discourse. Why has ambiguity become politically more effective than explicit radicalism?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Relevant parties in government face a trade-off between demarcation and accommodation, between the capacity to maintain radicalization and to integrate into the system. At the same time, they must retain radical support without losing moderate voters and coalition allies. So, it’s important to consider this trade-off, not just unethical or moral issues. It’s a question of electoral survival and electoral success. So, calculated ambivalence—this concept came from Ruth Wodak, the specialist in sociolinguistics—resolves this by producing, in the discourse, assumed associations between contradictory meanings.
This is not just anecdotal, but it’s based on a strategy, trying to cope with different audiences, decoding that there are different expectations. Because parties are not unitary actors, that’s also important. Intra-party, intra-leader ambivalence lets moderation and radicalism come together, normalizing controversial claims while avoiding public condemnation. Because we have this party needs to be in the system and they sometimes reproduce anti-establishment stances. With this kind of calculated ambivalence, and with many discursive tools, they try to do that. We show that Fratelli d’Italia is able, during the first part of the government coalition period, to achieve this kind of ambivalence strategy.
Fratelli d’Italia Adapts Its Communication While Maintaining Radicalization
Your analysis suggests that Fratelli d’Italia rarely invokes the Great Replacement theory directly, preferring coded demographic language instead. Does this represent ideological moderation, or simply a more sophisticated communication strategy aimed at broader electoral legitimacy?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Primarily, more sophisticated strategies, not ideological moderation. Meloni’s manifesto and speeches drop ethnic substitution in favor of demographic winter, so trying to have a kind of mainstream label, while ministers of Fratelli d’Italia inside the government led by Meloni, such as Lollobrigida, Roccella, and others, voice fuller conspiratorial versions of Great Replacement.
So, they resonate with Great Replacement theory, and it is important to underline this division of discursive labor + de-racialization. This question of Great Replacement theory is strongly connected with racial issues, but also denialism and euphemism allow the Great Replacement, for itself, to survive intact behind a government facade. That’s important in the sense that these discursive tools are able to adapt communication, maintaining radicalization by the party.
Demographic Populism Shifts the Threat to Biological and Cultural Survival
You have written extensively on populism for many years. Compared with earlier waves of European populism, what is genuinely new about demographic populism? Is it primarily an ideological transformation or an adaptation to new electoral realities?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: It’s important to say that populism is the defense of the true people, in terms of discursive claims—a true people under threat by different kinds of external powers. This deals with sovereignty, of course, political sovereignty, economic prosperity, and anti-establishment protests. Demographic populism shifts the threat from political and economic dispossession to biological and cultural survival.
In a sense, it’s both an ideological transformation and an adaptation to new electoral realities, trying to cope with new, emerging demands. It’s an ideological revival in which demography becomes the symbolic battlefield of the radical right’s long counter-revolution against LGBT rights, feminism, and so on. At the same time, it’s an adaptation to declining birth rates, aging, and migration, which are part of a broader demographic transformation in many countries, especially European ones, but not only.
In a sense, it’s both an ideological transformation and an adaptation to new electoral realities, trying to cope with new, emerging demands. In this sense, it’s an ideological revival in which demography becomes the symbolic battlefield of the radical right’s long counter-revolution against LGBT rights, feminism, and so on. At the same time, it is an adaptation to declining birth rates, aging, and migration, which are part of a broader demographic transformation in many countries, especially European ones, but not only.
It is interesting to say that, unlike interwar genetics in the past, today’s version is civilizational and culturally racist, rather than openly biological. It’s important to connect this aspect with biology and culture, and try to introduce this kind of demographic populism as able to frame the entire discourse nowadays by the radical right.
The Great Replacement Reframes Anti-Immigration Politics Demographically
A group of war refugees walks through a cornfield on the Serbia-Croatia border on November 3, 2015, as they seek passage to the EU. Many are Syrian refugees fleeing conflict. Photo: Ajdin Kamber.
Many populist radical-right (PRR) parties increasingly combine welfare protection, national sovereignty, and family policies into one political package. Is demographic populism gradually replacing immigration as the master frame through which these parties organize their broader ideological projects?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Immigration remains central, according to this book, but is increasingly subsumed, integrated within a demographic master frame that links natality, family, welfare, and religion. The Great Replacement is precisely the device through which anti-immigration stances are reframed demographically. So, rather than substitution, we observe absorption, integration. Immigration becomes one variable in a broader ideological project about who reproduces the nation and under what moral authority. The nation is the people, and these people and the nation are to be built under a specific moral authority—of course, the traditional family.
Youth Branches Adapt Radical-Right Politics to Generational Concerns
Dear Klaudia, your chapter examines how the youth organizations of the Austrian Freedom Party reinterpret demographic issues through specifically generational concerns. What surprised you most about the differences—and similarities—between youth activists and the senior party leadership?
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: First of all, the similarities were actually quite strong, because the youth branches do reproduce the FPÖ’s anti-immigration, anti-gender diversity, climate-skeptic positions. The difference is specifically in the generational framing. So, if the senior party tends to emphasize security, sovereignty, civil liberties, economic stability, youth branches emphasize how these issues supposedly affect young Austrians, in particular, and their future.
But to be quite frank, it was not this alignment between the youth branches and the senior party regarding core ideological positions, or this generational framing, that surprised me about the findings. What really, really struck me instead was some intra-youth variation regarding topics such as LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, or the role of the church. Now, I wouldn’t overstate this variation based on the data set, because it’s quite subtle. But it did make me think that there’s probably much more heterogeneity within radical-right youth than we tend to assume.
Being Less Religious Does Not Mean Rejecting Cultural Christianity
Young people are statistically less religious and often more socially liberal than older generations. Yet your research suggests that radical-right youth organizations remain highly receptive to demographic narratives. What explains this apparent paradox?
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: The question ties quite nicely to the point I made in the previous answer regarding this heterogeneity within youth branches. Religion, for instance, is also rather inconsistent across the youth branches. We see, for example, anti-abortion discourse as largely absent, except in Vienna. There are inconsistencies also when it comes to LGBTQ+ issues. Sometimes they’re silenced, sometimes they’re moderated. So, the youth branches don’t simply reproduce every conservative issue equally.
At the same time, they do remain strongly receptive to anti-immigration narratives and can instrumentalize gender equality against Muslim migrants. Regarding your point about the paradox, I think there’s a distinction that might help explain it. Being less religious does not necessarily mean that you reject cultural Christianity or nativist identity politics. Christianity here can also function as a marker of national or civilizational identity, rather than primarily as a religious practice.
Classical Nativism Is Underneath Demographic Populism
Your findings indicate that youth activists frame migration not only as a cultural issue but also as competition over education, employment, and future opportunities. Does demographic populism therefore represent a generational adaptation of classical nativism rather than a fundamentally new ideology?
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: Clearly, classical nativism is underneath it, so I would not claim that demographic populism is this entirely new ideology. But its analytical value is precisely in showing how different issues become connected. As you mentioned, in my chapter, migration is linked to education, to employment, to gender, to family, to youth, and ultimately to demographic survival, by focusing on the so-called native youth as, basically, the agents of reproduction of a specific kind of people. Moreover, Great Replacement also, as a way of thinking, extends beyond migration into gender equality, diversity. In this regard, I would see the analytical value precisely in demonstrating how these different issues can be connected together in the framework of demographic survival.
Youth Branches Can Reproduce Party Ideology and Radicalize It Further
European Parliamentary election posters of the FPÖ in Vienna, Austria, on May 15, 2024. Photo: Shutterstock.
Youth organizations often function as ideological laboratories for future party elites. Based on your research, do you expect today’s demographic narratives to become even more central to tomorrow’s radical-right politics?
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: The chapter in itself does not longitudinally establish that today’s youth discourse becomes tomorrow’s party discourse. That needs to be clear. But it does show that youth branches can and do reproduce party ideology. And what they also do quite well is contextualize it to their cohort and adapt it to generational concerns. Sometimes, even radicalize it further, as we’ve seen in the examples of Vienna or Tyrol, where we saw the most explicit articulations of Great Replacement narratives. For instance, while the central party actually continued to frame immigration more around security rather than these openly conspiratorial framings. This can suggest that youth branches may reproduce party ideology, but also, at times, radicalize it further. This might potentially have an impact on the main party’s discourse over time, but we would have to research that more systematically.
Your volume spans Europe as well as North and South America. Despite these different historical contexts, remarkably similar demographic narratives appear across countries. Are we witnessing policy diffusion between radical-right actors, or do these narratives emerge independently in response to similar social anxieties?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Both, and they reinforce each other. Similar anxieties related to structural transformation, declining fertility, aging, secularization, shrinking white or Christian majorities arise independently. However, they only become politically powerful once framed and mobilized by political actors. So, transnational infrastructures, such as the World Congress of Families, are relevant for the radical right across the world. US-Russia anti-abortion cooperation and social media circulation demonstrate deliberate diffusion, including astroturfing that manufactures the appearance of grassroots demand.
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: I would not have much to add. I think the transnational linkages that Oscar mentioned explain it very well, that these are not credential. Just very briefly on what the comparative question is, I would say it is basically how similar narratives are adapted to different national settings. This could be due to these transnational linkages; it could be due to diffusion through social media messaging. The mechanisms are different, but the core issue is how these similar narratives are indeed adapted across different national contexts.
Sovereignty Is Also Based on the Reproduction of the People Exercising It
One of the most striking themes of the book is that demographic populism links biological reproduction with political sovereignty. Does this represent a shift away from classic economic populism toward what might be called ‘biopolitical populism,’ where the central political question becomes who has the right to reproduce the nation?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Of course, the point here is not just to talk about sovereignty as a political dimension, but sovereignty is also based on the reproduction of the people exercising this sovereignty. The question is not just the capacity of the people to respond to the threat in terms of sovereignty, or political sovereignty, but other political dimensions, in terms of elections, in terms of decision-making, but also about the way by which we reproduce ourselves in terms of cultural belonging, national dimension, religious belonging etc. So, that’s important to frame this aspect, because all these dimensions—all diaspora, religion, cultural, national belonging—pass through biological reproduction and the family. The family is considered a pillar of this reproduction of the good and the true people. In this sense, we can we talk about biopolitical populism.
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: I would just add, regarding your question about which concept could work better, that I would still retain demographic populism because, in the end, demographic populism is broader than reproduction alone. It’s not just about who gets to be reproduced and who gets to reproduce the nation, but also about under what moral authority. So, fertility is not simply about fertility; it becomes about what kind of society should continue, and here there are other mechanisms that come into play, like religion, heteronormative views of family, and so on. Therefore, I still consider demographic populism conceptually better able to capture this dynamic.
AI Can Create New Opportunities for Radical-Right Populism
Photo: Dreamstime.
And lastly, looking ahead, demographic decline, population ageing, migration, artificial intelligence, and labor shortages are likely to reshape democratic politics simultaneously. Which of these developments do you believe will most profoundly transform the future of radical-right populism, and how should democracies respond without reinforcing the very narratives they seek to challenge?
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: I think all these different aspects—aging, labor shortages, also pushed by artificial intelligence—can create a structure of opportunities for radical-right populism. They, of course, help these kinds of actors connect these developments to immigration and pro-natalist policies. In a sense, they can exploit this kind of structural transformation to propose their own demographic populist message. In this sense, I think the response is, of course, about defending gender and reproductive rights and all liberal democratic values, but at the same time, we have to be aware that this kind of defense should also address the structural transformation that I mentioned before.
Dr. Klaudia Koxha: Again, the question ties back to one of the first questions in this interview. Aging societies do need an active labor force. So far, migration has been one way of responding to that. But as we can see, the radical right can simultaneously take the same migration that comes as a solution to aging societies, transform it, and present it as evidence of demographic displacement. This is how the policy response to one demographic challenge—aging populations—becomes framed as another demographic threat, while at the same time, there are policies that actually try to address it through counteraction by relying partly on migration. So, I think this tension is perhaps the most consequential—the interaction between aging, labor shortages, and migration—precisely because of the political contradiction it creates.
I think democracies need to address the real material consequences of demographic change, so this is something that needs to be talked about and addressed, without accepting the premise that demographic change necessarily means cultural extinction. Or that one group’s security requires another’s exclusion. So, those are points that must enter the public debate to have a constructive discussion around the demographic challenges that societies experience.
Professor Oscar Mazzoleni: Can I say something more about the book? Because you stress the point that the book covers different contexts—not just European, but also American and Russian contexts. I think it’s also important to mention the methodological and disciplinary approaches, because we are political scientists and sociologists, and we also have anthropologists. In the book, we also have supply-side and demand-side approaches to these issues.
It’s important to mention these multidisciplinary, multi-method approaches that converge in the book and also in this proposal about demographic populism. There is also intergenerational scholarship in the book, ranging from PhD students to senior scholars. In this project, we really try to bring together different perspectives and, at the same time, create a convergent and common project in order to explain what is happening today in the transformation of radical-right populism.
In this reflective Voice of Youth commentary marking Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day on August 25, PS Ayaas, a young Rohingya writer, activist, and community advocate, examines the enduring relationship between genocide, statelessness, exclusion, and political belonging. Drawing on the Rohingya experience, Ayaas argues that the 2017 violence cannot be separated from decades of citizenship restrictions, majoritarian nationalism, and narratives that constructed a minority population as an alien “other.” He connects this history to broader debates on populism, showing how exclusionary definitions of the “people” can normalize discrimination and undermine democratic protections. Moving beyond remembrance, Ayaas calls for accountability, equal rights, recognized education, sustainable livelihoods, meaningful Rohingya participation, and conditions for voluntary and dignified return. His central message is unequivocal: remembrance must become responsibility, and belonging must never be conditional.
Every August 25, I remember a day that did not end when the gunfire stopped. For Rohingya families, August 25 is not simply a date in history. It is carried in memory: in the stories of parents, in the names of villages, in photographs saved after flight, and in the silence that sometimes follows a question about home. I was still a child when I first understood that leaving home could mean never knowing when, or whether, you would see it again.
Rohingya communities mark August 25 as Genocide Remembrance Day to honor those who were killed, those who survived, and those who continue to live with displacement. But remembrance also asks a harder political question: how did an entire population come to be treated as if it did not belong?
From Violence to Exclusion
The violence of 2017 cannot be understood as an isolated eruption. It emerged from a much longer history of legal, political and social exclusion. Rohingya communities in Myanmar faced restrictions on citizenship, movement, education, marriage and livelihoods long before the mass displacement of 2017.
The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar documented the scale and systematic character of abuses committed during the 2017 military operations. It reported that more than 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh and documented killings, sexual violence and the burning of villages. UN human-rights investigators also recorded patterns of violence and deliberate actions that created fear and drove Rohingya civilians from their homes.
This history matters because genocide does not begin only when the world sees bodies or burning villages. It can be preceded by years of making a population politically disposable: denying people a secure legal identity, portraying them as outsiders, restricting their movement and normalising discrimination.
The 1982 Citizenship Law became a central part of this exclusionary structure. Rohingya were increasingly treated not as a recognised national community but as foreigners in the place many had always called home. The political message was devastatingly simple: you may live here, but you do not fully belong here.
The Politics of “Us” vs “Them”
This is where the Rohingya story becomes relevant to the study of populism. Populist politics often divides society into a morally pure “people” and an allegedly dangerous “other.” The boundaries of the “people” can be constructed through ethnicity, religion, race or nationality. Once a minority is portrayed as an existential demographic, cultural or security threat, exclusion can be presented not as discrimination but as protection.
Myanmar’s experience shows how dangerous this logic can become when it interacts with majoritarian nationalism, state power and organized violence. Anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya narratives did not remain confined to rhetoric. They helped create an environment in which discrimination could be normalized, and extraordinary violence could be justified. This does not mean that every aspect of the Rohingya crisis can be explained by populism. Military authoritarianism, ethnic nationalism, citizenship policy, colonial legacies, local conflicts and political economy all matter. But the construction of an “authentic” national community while defining a minority as alien offers an important lens.
The danger is not limited to Myanmar. Across the world, migrants, refugees and minorities can be turned into symbols of national decline or threats to social cohesion. When political actors persuade citizens that rights belong primarily to the “real people” and that minorities are outsiders who deserve fewer protections, democratic institutions become vulnerable. The Rohingya experience is therefore not only a humanitarian story; it is also a warning about what happens when belonging becomes conditional.
Remembering What Statistics Cannot Say
More than 700,000 Rohingya crossed into Bangladesh following the 2017 violence. In 2026, UNHCR reported that around 1.2 million stateless Rohingya remained in Bangladesh. Numbers are essential for policy, but numbers cannot tell us what displacement feels like. A statistic cannot describe a mother deciding what to carry when a lifetime must fit into a few possessions. It cannot describe a child growing up knowing the name of a village he or she has never seen. It cannot capture the psychological weight of living in a place that is simultaneously a refuge and a reminder that the original home remains inaccessible.
Nine years after the mass displacement, displacement has become a childhood, an adolescence and, for many young Rohingya, almost an entire lifetime. Humanitarian assistance remains essential, but humanitarian assistance alone cannot constitute a political solution. UNHCR reported in 2026 that limited livelihood opportunities left Rohingya refugees heavily dependent on aid.
This creates a dangerous paradox. The international community says that the future should ultimately be sustainable, while policies surrounding displacement can leave young people with too few opportunities to acquire recognized education, build livelihoods or participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their lives.
Home Is More Than a Location
For many Rohingya, return to Myanmar remains the deepest expression of hope. But “return” cannot simply mean crossing a border. A return that leaves people stateless, unsafe, segregated or without freedom of movement would reproduce the conditions that made displacement possible. A sustainable return requires citizenship or an effective legal status guaranteeing equal rights, physical security, freedom of movement, access to education and healthcare, protection of property and meaningful participation in public life.
International law has already placed important obligations on Myanmar. In January 2020, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered provisional measures requiring Myanmar to take measures within its power to prevent acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention and to preserve evidence. In July 2022, the Court rejected Myanmar’s preliminary objections and confirmed that the case could proceed. The proceedings are not a substitute for political action, but they demonstrate that the Rohingya question is not simply a matter of humanitarian charity. It is also a matter of international law, accountability and rights. The Rohingya should therefore not be asked to choose between justice and return, or between hope and realism. A genuine pathway home must combine both.
A Future Cannot Be Built in a Waiting Room
The greatest danger of protracted displacement is that waiting becomes normal. A child who has spent nine years in a refugee settlement is not living through a temporary interruption. Those years are education, adolescence, friendships and formative memories. A generation can lose opportunities while governments continue to describe its situation as temporary. Durable solutions must therefore be broader than repatriation alone. First, Rohingya children and young people need meaningful, recognized and continuous education. Second, refugees need safe and lawful opportunities to develop skills and livelihoods rather than being treated as permanently dependent. Third, Rohingya representatives — especially women and young people — must have meaningful roles in discussions about return, protection, education, resettlement and reconstruction.
Third-country pathways should also be discussed honestly where appropriate, without turning resettlement into a substitute for the right to return. Different Rohingya families may have different futures. Some may return when conditions permit; some may pursue resettlement; others may build lives in Bangladesh or elsewhere. A rights-based approach must respect those choices rather than forcing one political solution upon an entire people.
Remembering As Resistance
On August 25, remembrance is more than mourning. It is a refusal to allow political violence to erase political responsibility. To remember is to say that the dead had names. The villages had names. The families had histories. The people who fled were not an anonymous mass. They were citizens, neighbors, students, farmers, teachers, parents and children whose lives were interrupted by violence and exclusion.
It is also to say that the story did not end at the Bangladesh border. The crisis continues in displacement, statelessness, insecurity in Rakhine State, shrinking humanitarian resources and the uncertainty of a generation growing up without a secure relationship to home. Remembrance is therefore a challenge to the international community. If the world recognizes atrocities but allows the political conditions that produced them to remain, remembrance becomes ritual without prevention.
The lesson of August 25 is not simply “never forget.” It is “never normalize.” Do not normalize statelessness. Do not normalize indefinite displacement. Do not normalize political narratives that define minorities as less deserving of rights. Do not normalize a humanitarian crisis that has lasted so long that an entire generation has grown up inside it.
A Future in Which Belonging Is Not Conditional
I still think about home. For my generation, home is sometimes a place we remember through our parents’ stories. It is a landscape inherited through memory. But home should not have to remain only a memory.
The future of the Rohingya should not be decided by the logic that excluded us in the first place. We should not be forced to prove that we deserve to belong. We should not have to choose between dignity and survival.
A meaningful future requires accountability for grave crimes, equal rights, political inclusion, education and livelihoods, and conditions that make return genuinely voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable. It also requires listening to Rohingya people themselves.
Every August 25, the world is invited to remember what happened. It must do more than remember. It must understand how exclusion was built, how an “other” was created, how violence became possible, and how those patterns can be prevented elsewhere.
Remembrance is the beginning of responsibility. And responsibility means building a future in which no child has to learn that belonging can be taken away.
PS Ayaasis a young Rohingya writer, activist and community advocate based in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. He is the founder of Refugee Wellness Mission, a youth-led initiative supporting community wellbeing, and currently pursuing a Bachelor of Health Science through the University of the People. His writing addresses displacement, statelessness, and the lived experience of the Rohingya community, drawing on volunteer work with organizations including BRAC and Save the Children, and participation in international fellowships focused on human rights, health, and youth empowerment. He speaks English, Bengali, Burmese, Hindi, and Rohingya. His work has previously appeared with the European Center for Populism Studies and Mixed Migration Center. Email: rohingyapubgsquad@gmail.com
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.
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. Photo: Francesco Scatena / Dreamstime.
Your concept deliberately extends—but also departs from—the classic literature onbrain 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 toDemocratic 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
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 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.
Ifdemocratic drainbecomes 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.
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.
Nearly a decade after the mass displacement of the Rohingya, an entire generation has come of age in refugee camps where their lives are shaped by decisions they rarely help make. In this compelling ECPS Voice of Youth (VoY) article, PS Ayaas, a young Rohingya writer and community organizer, challenges the humanitarian paradigm that casts refugee youth primarily as beneficiaries of aid. Drawing on both lived experience and policy analysis, he argues that young Rohingya are already leading initiatives in education, human rights, environmental protection, and community development despite severe structural constraints. The article calls for a fundamental shift from tokenistic consultation to meaningful participation, insisting that sustainable humanitarian governance must recognize refugee youth as partners, decision-makers, and changemakers in shaping their collective future.
I have grown up watching decisions about my future being made in rooms I could not enter. I am a young Rohingya living in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and I know the particular sound of a meeting happening somewhere close by, on the other side of a fence or a tarpaulin wall, deciding something about people like me without any of us inside it. Like thousands of other young people here, I have learned to build a future inside a place designed around uncertainty — where the rain decides some days whether a path is walkable, where a shelter roof gets patched more times than anyone bothers to count, where you learn early which queues take an hour and which take a whole morning. We are surrounded by humanitarian services, policies, assessments, and programs intended to protect us. Yet too often, the people designing these responses are speaking about young Rohingya rather than listening to us.
I know what it means to be grateful for assistance and, in the very same breath, to feel that your own voice is missing from the decisions that shape your life. Both things are true at once, and I have mostly stopped trying to resolve that contradiction, because living inside it is simply what it means to be young and Rohingya right now. I have watched young people keep studying despite severe limitations, volunteer in their communities with almost nothing to give, and organize around health, education, human rights, and environmental protection anyway — not because someone funded it, but because waiting for permission has never been something any of us could actually afford. These are not small things. They have convinced me of something I now hold as a plain fact rather than an opinion: Rohingya youth should not be treated only as beneficiaries of humanitarian assistance. We must be recognized as participants, problem-solvers, and changemakers.
Nearly a decade after the 2017 exodus, Cox’s Bazar remains home to close to a million Rohingya refugees, roughly half of whom are children and adolescents (UNICEF, 2025). Yet in nearly every major decision that shapes our daily lives — what we are permitted to study, where we may travel, whether our camp stays open or closed during a national election — young Rohingya are treated overwhelmingly as recipients of policy rather than participants in it. The international response to this crisis has structurally cast youth as beneficiaries of aid rather than as capable agents of change, even as a growing, under-recognized body of youth-led organizing inside these camps tells a very different story.
A Generation Defined by Ceilings
The most concrete example of this structural ceiling is education. Rohingya children in Bangladesh are, by government policy, not permitted to study in Bangladeshi schools and are barred from enrolling in formal schools outside the camps (Human Rights Watch, 2019). A 2022 pilot finally began offering instruction based on Myanmar’s national curriculum, reaching its first 10,000 students that year (UNICEF, 2022) — a genuine milestone, but one that arrived five years late and still reaches only a fraction of eligible youth. That fragile progress is now reversing. Foreign aid cuts have forced the closure of learning centers, and as of 2025, kindergarten and primary facilities across the camps remain shuttered while youth vocational centers have shut down entirely (UNICEF, 2025). Human Rights Watch (2025) reports that roughly 437,000 school-age children in the camps have been affected. Girls face a compounding barrier: while they make up roughly half of primary-level learners, safety concerns and restrictive gender norms reduce female participation at the secondary level to roughly twenty-five percent (Global Partnership for Education, n.d.).
For me, education has never been simply a classroom experience. I have studied by whatever light was available that evening, through a connection that drops mid-sentence, with materials passed hand to hand until the pages soften at the edges, and with a persistent uncertainty about where any of it actually leads once you reach the ceiling the policy has already built for you. Studying, some days, feels less like preparation for a future and more like an act of pure persistence, undertaken without any proof it will be rewarded. I continue anyway, because education has never meant a certificate to me. It means the possibility of becoming useful to my community, whatever shape that usefulness eventually takes — and some days, on the hardest ones, it is simply the one part of the day that still belongs to me and not to the camp around it.
Movement and livelihood are constrained in much the same way. Human Rights Watch (2022) documented curfews, checkpoint harassment, and arbitrary travel denials across the camps. Ahead of Bangladesh’s February 2026 national elections, camp authorities ordered the camps “sealed,” severely restricting movement (Fortify Rights, 2026). The International Crisis Group (2024) frames these restrictions on movement and the right to work as systemic pressures that leave refugees with no formal pathway to self-sufficiency. An entire generation is coming of age inside a system explicitly built to withhold the two pillars of adult independence: higher education and legal work.
The Agency the System Doesn’t Account For
What the policy framework misses is what is already happening despite it. I have felt this agency personally through community volunteering — in the small, unglamorous work of showing up for people who live three shelters down, in conversations that happen on a doorstep rather than in a workshop, in the particular satisfaction of solving something small and real for someone you actually know. Working directly alongside other young people has taught me that refugees do not need to be taught only how to receive services. Many of us already understand the particular, textured challenges of our environment, because we live inside them every day without a break, in a way no assessment visiting for an afternoon ever quite captures. What we lack is not motivation. It is the resources, the structural recognition, and the institutional space to turn what we already know into lasting action.
Across the camps, youth-led initiatives prove this daily, in ways that rarely make it into the reports written about us. In community leadership and rights work, the Rohingya Youth Union runs mentorship and problem-solving workshops designed specifically to bridge the learning gaps the formal system leaves open (UNHCR, n.d.-a), while the Rohingya Youth Advocacy Network, established in 2023, has grown to more than 700 volunteers coordinating human rights advocacy and community programming (Rohingya Khobor, 2025d).
In grassroots protection and media, the IOM’s Poribortok — “change makers” — program has trained 400 young Rohingya to lead neighborhood-level efforts against gender-based violence (International Organization for Migration, n.d.), and in late 2025 a four-day media workshop trained seventy young Rohingya storytellers and videographers to document their own community instead of continuing to rely on outside narrators (Rohingya Khobor, 2025a, 2025b). In ecological stewardship, the Rohingya Environmental Protection Network, founded entirely by young volunteers, coordinates practical projects and education addressing the deforestation and climate vulnerability our overcrowded camps now face (Rohingya Khobor, 2025c).
What unites all of it is that none of it waited for permission from the humanitarian structures meant to serve us. It exists as living evidence against the premise that Rohingya youth need to be spoken for.
Why the Gap Persists: A Policy Critique
If this agency is already visible, why does the policy conversation still so rarely include it? Part of the answer is structural. A camp environment built around restricted movement, capped education, and no legal right to work does not simply fail to cultivate youth leadership — it actively works against the conditions leadership normally requires. Omata’s (2022) fieldwork in Ghana’s Buduburam camp found much the same pattern: even when refugees acquired real skills through aid programs, the surrounding economic and legal environment made those skills nearly impossible to apply. Skill-building without any legal pathway to use those skills locally does not build capacity. It builds frustration.
It would be unfair to say Rohingya participation does not exist at all. Humanitarian agencies frequently engage refugee volunteers, community leaders, and informal committees, and I have been one of those volunteers. But the deeper problem is the distance between participation and decision-making. A young refugee is often asked to help implement a program, and far more rarely given any seat at the table where that program was actually designed. The problem, in other words, is not only that Rohingya youth are excluded from decision-making. It is that humanitarian systems are losing real, local knowledge every time they treat young refugees primarily as beneficiaries rather than as partners. “Nothing about us, without us” cannot remain an advocacy slogan. It has to become an operational standard — for program design, for monitoring, for evaluation, for all of it.
What Changes When Youth Become Partners
When young Rohingya are engaged as agents rather than recipients, the outcomes are not abstract. Community-based protection work led by trained young volunteers has proven significantly more effective at reducing stigma and shifting harmful social norms than top-down messaging campaigns designed elsewhere and delivered to us (UNHCR, 2025). Youth-led journalism is producing an authentic archive of camp reporting, quietly shifting narrative authority from international outlets back to the community those outlets have long written about. Youth-run environmental and advocacy networks are building local organizational capacity that outlasts funding cycles entirely, unlike the rigid, externally designed projects that tend to disappear the moment a grant runs out.
What Meaningful Participation Should Look Like
Moving from tokenistic consultation to genuine policy partnership requires structural change, not better intentions. I believe four reforms matter most.
First, institutionalized youth advisory structures. Humanitarian coordination platforms should establish formal, representative Rohingya youth advisory groups with direct consultative status during the drafting of Joint Response Plans and strategic policy reviews — not consulted after the fact, but present while the plan is still being written.
Second, direct, accessible micro-funding. Donors should create streamlined, small-scale grant mechanisms specifically for legitimate refugee-led youth organizations, bypassing the bureaucratic hurdles that keep resources concentrated among established international organizations instead of the young people already doing the work.
Third, accredited education and vocational pathways. Education policy has to look past basic literacy. Aid agencies and host authorities need to expand access to accredited secondary curricula, certified digital skills training, and tertiary scholarships, so that studying leads somewhere rather than stopping at a ceiling by design.
Fourth, transparent institutional accountability. Participation needs measurable consequences. When agencies consult young refugees, they should be expected to report back — clearly, and in public — on which youth recommendations were accepted, which were modified, which were rejected, and why.
Conclusion: Living Between Uncertainty and Action
I do not know exactly where my own future will lead. Like many young Rohingya, I live with daily uncertainty about where I will study, work, or build a permanent life — whether the place I am sitting in right now, writing this, is where I will still be sitting in five years, or ten. But that uncertainty has not removed my desire to contribute. If anything, it has sharpened it, and strengthened my belief that young people must be given real opportunities to shape the communities we are already serving, whether or not anyone ever officially asked us to.
I do not ask the world to listen to Rohingya youth simply because we are young, or because we are refugees. I ask it to listen because we know our communities from the inside, in ways no external assessment can fully reach. We know what works. We know what fails. We know what our families quietly fear at night, and what young people here still hope to build, even now, even without much reason to expect it.
Nearly a decade into one of the world’s largest and most protracted refugee crises, young Rohingya are already learning, volunteering, organizing, creating, and leading — often in the same week we are also queueing for rations, patching a roof before the next rain, or walking further than we should have to for water. We are not waiting to become changemakers. We are already trying, today, with what little the system gives us, to change what we can. The only real question left is whether the international systems surrounding us will keep speaking for us — or finally make room for us to speak, participate, and help shape the future we are the ones who will actually have to live inside.
PS Ayaas is a young Rohingya writer based in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, currently studying Bachelor of Health Science at the University of the People. His writing draws on lived experience of displacement, statelessness, and community organizing, and focuses on repositioning Rohingya youth as active participants and changemakers rather than passive recipients of humanitarian aid. He has previously been recognized in the Mixed Migration Review writing competition, and is currently developing an essay on Rohingya it was named as Living in Limbo: Voices and Resilience of The Rohingya Protracted and displacement. Email: rohingyapubgsquad@gmail.com
Why do some of the world’s wealthiest individuals openly support populist radical right and far-right movements whose central political message revolves around anti-immigrant and anti-minority mobilization? In this commentary, Dr. Bulent Kenes argues that this alliance is best understood not as an ideological convergence but as a pragmatic strategy for deflecting public attention from the structural roots of social injustice, economic inequality and wealth concentration. Drawing on John Rawls’s concept of the veil of ignorance, the article examines how immigrants—among the principal victims of contemporary economic and social inequalities—are transformed into convenient scapegoats. It further explores how the growing concentration of economic and digital power enables technology billionaires to amplify exclusionary narratives while marginalizing pluralistic voices, raising profound questions about democracy, algorithmic governance, and contemporary capitalism.
If we were to apply John Rawls’s famous veil of ignorance thought experiment, developed in A Theory of Justice, to today’s world, there is little doubt that immigrants would emerge as one of the most disadvantaged and the most vulnerable social groups. Immigrants, political refugees, in particular, as well as individuals forced to migrate for economic reasons, are compelled at some stage of their lives to leave behind their accumulated economic, social, and professional capital and begin life anew in a different country. Consequently, they typically enter their host societies from the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. In terms of cultural, economic, and professional resources, their starting point is often below zero.
In this respect, immigrants constitute one of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable segments of society in terms of social justice and income distribution. Yet, while attempting to rebuild their lives, they are forced to contend not only with economic and social hardships but also with the prejudices generated by the rising populist radical right (PRR) and far-right parties and movements. Moreover, by being portrayed as the principal culprits behind economic inequality and social injustice, they are turned into scapegoats, a process that imposes severe socio-psychological costs on an already vulnerable population.
One point can be stated unequivocally: economically (and even culturally) driven anti-immigrant sentiment is not a phenomenon that emerges spontaneously. Social injustice and income inequality are undoubtedly real societal problems, and angry eyes are constantly searching for those responsible for them. Unfortunately, they do not always succeed in identifying the real causes. Meanwhile, for far-right actors who incite, inflame and ride the wave of resentment generated among these groups, targeting immigrants—one of the weakest, least organized, and least capable social groups in socio-political and economic terms—is both the easiest and the least politically costly strategy. Although the attempts of far-right political actors, whose humanitarian sensitivities have been considerably weakened, to exploit and simultaneously provoke this wave for political gain deserve the strongest ethical condemnation, it is nevertheless understandable why they choose this strategy within the context of political competition, which is driven less by values than by the pursuit of power. The fact that populist far right politicians such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, Robert Fico, Jarosław Kaczyński, Jimmie Åkesson, and many others have placed anti-immigrant politics at the center of political mobilization can be understood within this framework.
What is particularly striking, however, is why dollar billionaires—and even the owners of trillion-dollar companies—whose activities are largely confined to technology and the global economy, support far-right actors, PRR parties and movements, and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
In my view, the principal explanation lies in pragmatic interests. The anti-immigration discourse of the populist radical right and the far right systematically recasts those who are most severely affected by income inequality and social injustice from victims into perpetrators of these very problems. In reality, however, immigrants—alongside other disadvantaged groups—are among the greatest losers of the contemporary global economic order and the structural inequalities it generates. This is precisely where the core of the issue lies. By systematically constructing immigrants as scapegoats, far-right actors divert public attention away from the structural sources of economic inequality and social injustice. In doing so, they help obscure the role of the super-rich, who are not only the principal beneficiaries of the existing distribution of wealth but also key beneficiaries of the economic structures that reproduce and deepen these inequalities.
It is precisely at this point that the logic behind the support given by figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—the greatest beneficiaries of the existing global economic order—to populist radical right parties and far-right actors becomes apparent. Historically, just as the East India Company and the West India Company represented the corporate actors that benefited most from the global colonial order of their time, today’s technology giants occupy a comparable position as the greatest beneficiaries of contemporary global hi-tech capitalism. The strengthening of political discourse centered on anti-immigrant sentiment diverts public attention away from these structural causes of economic inequality and wealth concentration.
Regrettably, I must note that approaches which, in recent years, have argued that anti-immigrant sentiment is fundamentally the product not of economic grievances but of a cultural backlash, even if unintentionally, contribute to strengthening this political strategy. The influence of cultural factors and identity politics cannot, of course, be denied. However, explaining anti-immigrant sentiment primarily through cultural dynamics diminishes the visibility of structural causes such as economic inequality and social injustice, while simultaneously providing the far right with an indirect—albeit problematic—source of legitimacy. The issue, therefore, is not merely one of cultural reaction; it should also be understood as a political mechanism of distraction that conceals underlying economic power relations and discourages scrutiny of the existing distribution of wealth.
If the support that the super-rich extend to the far right were merely an expression of their individual political preferences, it might not warrant such sustained attention. The issue, however, extends far beyond that. These billionaires, who have effectively acquired monopolistic positions in the technology sector, not only deploy their immense economic resources in support of far-right political movements but also possess the capacity to shape the boundaries of public discourse through the digital platforms they control, including X, Facebook, YouTube, and others. Through complex algorithmic mechanisms, these platforms are increasingly transformed into the principal channels for the circulation of far-right narratives, while alternative viewpoints, critical voices, and pluralistic perspectives experience a substantial loss of visibility.
In this process, observations suggesting that the digital visibility of actors defending liberal democratic values, pluralism, the rule of law, and humanitarian principles is being systematically weakened, while polarizing, provocative, and extremist content is algorithmically rewarded, are increasingly supported by empirical research. As a consequence, democratic actors using these platforms face not only declining public influence but also invisible, though perceptible, algorithmic barriers that make it increasingly difficult even to reach their own natural audiences.
This picture reveals the combined impact of the economic and digital power of technology barons who stand among both the principal creators and the greatest beneficiaries of the global income divide. Despite being among the primary causes and beneficiaries of wealth concentration, economic inequality, and social injustice, Elon Musk and similar actors openly support extremist, far-right political movements that systematically portray immigrants and other vulnerable socio-cultural minorities as those responsible for these problems and as convenient scapegoats. Elon Musk’s most recent extensive interview with The Economist, in which he reiterated positions supportive of the far right, together with his backing of Marine Le Pen, Alternative for Germany (AfD) and various other far-right parties and actors, is open to interpretation within this framework. The political positions, public rhetoric, and algorithmic maneuvers of Musk and other technology-baron billionaires function as a deliberate mechanism of distraction, obscuring the true sources of wealth concentration and structural economic inequality.
Perhaps the greatest contradiction that deserves attention, and the most fundamental question that requires an answer, is the following: Why do broad segments of society that are themselves victims of structural economic inequality and social injustice follow far-right political actors supported by the greatest beneficiaries of wealth concentration, rather than questioning the structural causes of these inequalities? More importantly, why are they tend to view immigrants and socio-cultural minorities—groups that share similar structural vulnerabilities—as the principal causes of these problems? This paradox points not only to the discursive success of the populist radical right and far right but also to a fundamental research problem requiring us to understand how public perceptions are reshaped through the influence of economic and administrative power over digital communication infrastructures.
