MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar.

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

by Editor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeHuman RightsInterviewsMigration

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

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Return Hubs Without Legal Safeguards Betray European Values

MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar. Photo: Umit Vurel.

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

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

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

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

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

Treating Migration as a Threat Is a Terrible Mistake

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

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

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

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

Double Standards Are Undermining Europe’s Global Credibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

There Is No Brandmauer Left in European Politics

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

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

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

Progressives Have Been Better at Diagnosis Than at Therapy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Return Regulation Europeanizes the Meloni Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Human Being Should Ever Be Described as Illegal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morocco football fans.

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

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeMigration

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

By Yacine Boubia

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

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

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

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

Radical Right Populism and the Weaponization of Sporting Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Demographic Data That Nativism Cannot Answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Game and the Strategy: What Is Actually at Stake

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Liberal Democracy’s First Imperative

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

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

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

 

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UK PM Keir Starmer

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

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeMigration

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

By João Ferreira Dias

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

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

Reform as the Agenda-setter 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immigration as Reform UK’s Issue Ownership

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

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

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

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

Culture Wars as a Substitute for an Economic Programme

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

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

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

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

The Mainstream Trap

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

 

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professor Georg Lutz.

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

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeHuman RightsInterviewsMigration

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

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Switzerland-EU

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

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

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

Many Swiss Voters Chose Stability Over Uncertainty

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

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

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

Few Populist Parties Have the Historical Foundations of the SVP

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

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

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

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

The Real Victory Was Keeping Immigration at the Center of Politics

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

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

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

Migration Is Seen as Both a Cultural and an Economic Threat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concerns About Minority Rights Are Real but Often Exaggerated

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

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

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

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

There Are Very Few Institutional Safeguards in the Swiss System

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

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

Campaigns Have Always Been About Mobilizing Emotions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Direct Democracy Both Empowers and Constrains Populism

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Cannot Defeat Populists by Dismissing People’s Concerns

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

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

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

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

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

Mass Voting Remains the Most Democratic Form of Participation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Switzerland’s Direct Democracy Was a Historical Accident

Switzerland voting.
Photo: Dreamstime

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

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

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

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

Being in Government Has Not Weakened Swiss Right-Wing Populism

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

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

Information Fragmentation and Distrust Are Bigger Threats Than Institutional Design

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

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

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

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

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

Residents flee burning homes in Belfast.

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

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryExtremism & RadicalisationHomeMigration

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

By João Ferreira Dias

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Laurenz Guenther is a Research Fellow at the Toulouse School of Economics.

Dr. Guenther: European Politics Is Shifting from Economics to Culture

by Editor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeInterviewsMigration

In this provocative ECPS interview, Dr. Laurenz Guenther, Research Fellow at the Toulouse School of Economics, challenges dominant interpretations of populism, migration politics, and democratic crisis in Europe. Rather than viewing the rise of the populist radical right primarily as an external threat to liberal democracy, Dr. Guenther argues that it reflects deeper “representation gaps” between mainstream parties and large segments of European electorates, particularly on migration and cultural issues. He contends that European politics is undergoing a profound transformation in which “culture has, overall, become the more dominant dimension of political conflict.” Contrasting with many ECPS interviews emphasizing democratic backsliding and illiberalism, Dr. Guenther argues that liberal democracies can regain legitimacy not by suppressing cultural anxieties, but by responding to them more effectively within democratic and liberal constitutional frameworks.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

At a time when much of the scholarly and public debate on populism focuses on democratic backsliding, authoritarian drift, disinformation, and the dangers posed by the populist radical right, Dr. Laurenz Guenther offers a strikingly different interpretation of Europe’s political transformation. Rather than treating right-wing populism primarily as an external threat to liberal democracy, Dr. Guenther argues that its rise reflects deeper failures within liberal-democratic representation itself. In this sense, his perspective stands in contrast to many previous ECPS interviews, which have largely emphasized the illiberal, exclusionary, and anti-pluralist dangers associated with populist movements. 

A Research Fellow at the Toulouse School of Economics, Dr. Guenther has become an increasingly influential voice in debates surrounding migration politics, democratic responsiveness, cultural polarization, and the rise of the populist radical right in Europe. Through his research on “representation gaps” and issue voting, he argues that mainstream European parties have become “systematically more culturally liberal than large segments of their electorates,”particularly on immigration. According to Dr. Guenther, this disconnect has created fertile ground for populist challengers who successfully position themselves closer to voter preferences on culturally salient issues. 

Central to Dr. Guenther’s argument is the claim that European politics is undergoing a profound structural transformation. As he puts it in this interview, “politics in the average European country has shifted from something like a 60–40 balance in favor of economic issues to perhaps 40–60 in favor of cultural issues. We may even be moving toward something like 70–30.” In his view, “culture has, overall, become the more dominant dimension of political conflict.” This diagnosis sharply departs from conventional analyses that continue to treat class, redistribution, or neoliberal economics as the primary organizing principles of political competition. 

Throughout the interview, Dr. Guenther advances several arguments that challenge dominant liberal assumptions surrounding migration and populism. He contends that mainstream parties increasingly lose credibility when they dismiss or underrepresent concerns surrounding migration, demographic change, asylum policy, and cultural identity. “The main threat,” he argues, “comes from failing to represent people,” which can push voters toward increasingly radical alternatives. Unlike many scholars who interpret tougher migration policies primarily as democratic erosion, Dr. Guenther views the recent convergence of mainstream parties toward stricter border and asylum policies as, at least partly, a democratic response to voter preferences. 

At the same time, the interview also explores some of the most sensitive and controversial questions currently shaping European politics: the relationship between migration and demographic transformation, the growing salience of Islam and civilizational identity, the future of multiculturalism, and the normalization of culturally conservative politics across Europe. Yet despite his stark assessment of Europe’s political trajectory, Dr. Guenther ultimately rejects the idea that liberal democracy and more restrictive migration policies are necessarily incompatible. “If handled intelligently,” he argues, “Europe does not necessarily have to choose between these two paths.”

Here is the revised version of our interview with Dr. Laurenz Guenther, lightly edited for clarity and readability.

When Mainstream Parties Fail to Respond, Populists Fill the Void

Demonstrators of the Austrian Identitarian movement form a guard of honor of flags in Vienna, Austria on June 11, 2016. Photo: Johanna Poetsch.

Dr. Guenther, welcome! To begin, in your work on “representation gaps,” you argue that mainstream European parties have become systematically more culturally liberal than large segments of their electorates, particularly on immigration. To what extent do you see the rise of populist radical-right parties as reflecting a broader crisis of democratic representation and political responsiveness within liberal democracies?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: I think these representation gaps, and this “crisis of representation,” as you call it, are one major factor behind the rise of populism. They are certainly not the only factor, but I do think they have contributed significantly to populism’s growing appeal. The failure of mainstream parties to reflect the attitudes of many citizens has created space for new populist parties to step in and represent these voters by proposing policies that are closer to their preferences on issues such as immigration. When these issues then became much more salient — for instance, during the refugee crisis — this provided a shock that led many voters to reconsider their political choices and ultimately support populist parties instead.

Europe’s Political Elites Often Misjudge Public Opinion on Immigration

Your analysis of Germany suggests that the AfD’s rise was driven not only by anti-immigration sentiment itself, but also by the perception that established parties were unwilling to openly engage with public concerns over migration. How can democratic societies address legitimate anxieties surrounding migration while resisting xenophobia, exclusionary nationalism, and anti-minority politics?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: You are right that the key challenge for mainstream parties is to be very precise in how they approach these issues. Choosing the right policy is largely a matter of accurately assessing public opinion. You do not want to be too far to the right on immigration, but you also need to be sufficiently responsive to public concerns. At the same time, immigration is a multidimensional issue. A party may adopt a much tougher position on certain questions, such as the asylum system, while remaining more lenient on issues like skilled migration.

To find the right balance, parties need a very strong understanding — and reliable measurement — of where citizens actually stand on these questions. My impression is that many mainstream parties do not really have that understanding. There are studies asking politicians directly where they believe voters are positioned, and often even leading politicians misjudge what the majority position actually is. Without that understanding, parties cannot position themselves effectively.

Culture Has Become Europe’s Dominant Political Cleavage

Across your writings, you emphasize the growing salience of the “cultural dimension” of politics. Does this imply that traditional economic left-right divisions are increasingly being displaced by conflicts centered on migration, multiculturalism, identity, religion, and national belonging?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: Yes, I think this is true to a large extent. As you suggest, the cultural dimension of politics has become significantly more important and, in my view, continues to grow in importance. The economic dimension is still relevant, of course, but its relative weight has declined. Over roughly the last 15 years, politics in the average European country has shifted from something like a 60–40 balance in favor of economic issues to perhaps 40–60 in favor of cultural issues. We may even be moving toward something like 70–30. So, while economics still matters, culture has, overall, become the more dominant dimension of political conflict.

Ignoring Voters’ Concerns Fuels Political Extremism

You argue that even conservative mainstream parties in Europe are often more culturally liberal than the median voter. How should liberal-democratic parties respond to cultural representation gaps without normalizing anti-immigrant rhetoric, Islamophobia, or hostility toward diversity and pluralism?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: I am personally not convinced that these normalization effects are particularly strong in practice. I think the main threat comes from failing to represent people, which can lead them either to become more extreme in response or to support almost anyone who appears willing to represent their concerns, including the most extreme parties.

This goes back to your earlier question about how far mainstream parties should go in responding to these issues. I would reiterate that parties need a strong understanding of where public opinion actually stands and then position themselves in a way that fills the representation gap. In many cases, I do not think they do this effectively because they lack reliable measurements of public attitudes.

A second point I would emphasize is that mainstream parties need to have some trust in their own voters and in the broader public. One concern I often hear from politicians is that voters may be highly extreme, deeply Islamophobic, or otherwise illiberal, such that representing their views could itself become anti-liberal. But when I look at survey evidence and at what people actually say when asked about their attitudes toward Islam or related issues, I do not get the impression that most people hold highly extreme views. On the contrary, most people have fairly reasonable preferences.

And if you want democracy to function successfully, you ultimately have to trust people to some extent. Even liberal democracy, with all its institutional checks on majority rule, ultimately depends on the assumption that majorities will vote in a broadly reasonable way. If you believe that people are fundamentally unreasonable and should not be represented, leaving large representation gaps open, then it becomes difficult to sustain a genuine democratic outlook. So, even for the sake of democratic consistency, politicians need to trust people at least to some degree and take their preferences seriously.

Europe May See the Rise of Economically Left but Culturally Conservative Parties

Illustration by Lightspring.

In your work on the decline of Die Linke and the rise of Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW, you suggest that culturally conservative left-wing politics may become increasingly electorally viable. Could Europe be entering a new political configuration in which economic redistribution is increasingly combined with restrictive migration and culturally conservative agendas?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: Yes, I think this could certainly happen. Wagenknecht’s party is a good example. In the beginning, it was quite successful. Although its momentum has weakened somewhat since then, its first result in a German national election was still a considerable achievement for a newly established party. It narrowly missed entering parliament.

In Germany, it is actually very rare for a new party to enter parliament in its first national election. So, compared to other parties — even compared to the AfD or the Greens in their early stages —the BSW performed very well. To me, this demonstrates the electoral potential of combining these kinds of policy positions.

Moreover, in most European countries, we still do not really have parties that combine economically left-wing policies with culturally conservative positions in a consistent way. But I do think this combination has significant potential. As political competition becomes more intense and fragmented, we are seeing more new parties emerge, and I think some parties adopting this formula could become very successful.

Europe’s Migration Shift Reflects the Growing Power of Populist Parties

Many mainstream European parties have recently adopted tougher migration policies, including externalization agreements, stricter asylum rules, and expanded border controls. Do you interpret the EU’s recent migration pact as an attempt to restore democratic legitimacy and public trust—or as evidence that populist radical-right actors have successfully shifted European politics toward a more restrictive and securitized migration paradigm?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: I think it is more the latter. It appears to me that mainstream parties are primarily responding to pressure from populist right-wing parties, as well as to broader public demands — in other words, to these representation gaps — rather than making an independent decision to become more representative or responsive. The growing electoral strength of populist right-wing parties may have pushed mainstream parties to reconsider their own positions and reflect on whether they made strategic mistakes by adopting such liberal stances on migration. But overall, this shift is driven mainly by political necessity.

In the European Parliament, for example, populist parties have become strong enough that centrist parties are increasingly compelled to cooperate with them on certain issues. I see the new migration pact as a reflection of this broader development, and I suspect this trend will continue.

At the same time, this places mainstream parties in a very difficult position. Even though they are now implementing more restrictive migration policies, they are not especially well-positioned to benefit from them electorally. Many voters are unlikely to reward them because these policy shifts are perceived as responses to populist pressure rather than as genuine convictions. 

From the perspective of mainstream parties, this creates the worst of all worlds. They are unable to pursue the policies they would actually prefer — because many mainstream politicians still personally favor more liberal migration policies — yet they also fail to gain significant electoral advantages from adopting tougher measures. To benefit electorally, they would either have needed to shift earlier or would now need to adopt a much stronger repositioning.

Uncertainty About Demographic Transformation Drives Migration Anxiety

Pakistani or Indian migrants in Copenhagen.
Pakistani or Indian migrants in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 22, 2017. Photo: Dreamstime.

Your research suggests that immigration has become one of the most politically salient issues driving right-wing populist growth across Europe. Why do you think migration possesses such extraordinary mobilizing power compared to issues such as inequality, housing, or climate change, which many critics argue are themselves deeply shaped by capitalism and broader structural economic forces?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: All of the issues you mention are very important, and they matter greatly to voters as well. It is not that issues such as inequality, housing, or climate change are unimportant; rather, immigration appears to matter even more to many voters. One reason for this — and I think this is something that is still not openly discussed, though I suspect it will become a major debate in the future because it touches on very sensitive questions — is that immigration is closely connected to demographic change.

The migration Europe is experiencing is not random. A significant share comes from non-European regions such as the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. If these migration patterns continue over a long period of time, they could fundamentally reshape the demographic structure of European societies in the long run.

This raises a number of important questions that, in my view, are often not openly addressed because of political sensitivities. Liberal democracies tend to understand people primarily as individuals, and discussions about ethnicity or the ethnic composition of societies are often viewed as potentially dangerous, especially given Europe’s historical experiences with exclusionary nationalism and discrimination.

At the same time, this reluctance to engage with such questions means that many concerns people consider legitimate are not openly discussed. As a result, citizens often do not clearly understand where political parties stand, nor do they easily find what they regard as reasonable research about how demographic changes may affect society over time. This creates a considerable degree of uncertainty, and when people face uncertainty, they often become highly risk averse. I think this uncertainty is one of the key factors driving much of the fear or caution surrounding immigration.

Migration Politics Is Reshaping Traditional Party Loyalties

In your writings, you argue that voters increasingly engage in “issue voting,” particularly on migration and cultural questions. Does this trend weaken traditional party loyalties and create structurally favorable conditions for populist outsiders, anti-establishment movements, and increasingly polarized democratic politics?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: Yes, it currently does have those implications. But in principle, it would not necessarily have to. In my view, the reason issue voting produces these effects today is precisely because of the representation gaps we discussed earlier. Take, for example, a voter who historically had strong ties to the SPD but now votes primarily based on immigration policy. That voter may no longer feel able to support the SPD because, on immigration, most people hold positions that are considerably more conservative than those of the party itself. So, issue voting weakens traditional party loyalties under these conditions, but only because parties such as the SPD have positioned themselves in a comparatively liberal way on these questions.

Liberal Democracy Can Respond to Migration Concerns Without Becoming Illiberal

One of the central arguments advanced by liberal-democratic parties is that populist radical-right actors threaten institutional checks and balances, minority protections, and democratic pluralism once in power. Yet you argue that this critique loses credibility if mainstream parties appear unwilling to acknowledge issues voters consider important. How can democracies balance responsiveness to majority concerns with the protection of liberal norms, human rights, and minority communities?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: I think this question is very similar to issues we discussed earlier, especially regarding where exactly the line should be drawn. That, in many ways, is the central challenge. One more concrete point I would make is that anti-immigration attitudes among many citizens are, in my view, largely driven by attitudes toward asylum seekers specifically. If you ask people whether there should be fewer or more asylum seekers coming into the country, most people tend to say fewer rather than more. But when you ask about other forms of immigration — and most migration actually takes place outside the asylum system — the responses are often much more moderate. Many people say they are generally fine with it, or that they might prefer slightly more or slightly less immigration, but there is no comparably strong tendency. So, when people describe themselves as “anti-immigration,” what they often mean in practice is that they want fewer asylum seekers.

For that reason, I think that a much more restrictive asylum system — for example, limiting asylum numbers to levels similar to those of 20 years ago, or designing an asylum framework that operates primarily within Europe — would likely appease many citizens and close a large part of the representation gap without necessarily being anti-liberal.

After all, this was effectively the kind of system many European countries had in the past. Before the signing of the New York Protocol, asylum systems limited largely to Europe were common across the continent. And if you look at Germany 20 years ago, the asylum system was considerably more restrictive than it is today. Germany experienced an asylum crisis in the 1990s during the Yugoslav wars, and afterward the constitution was amended specifically to prevent a similar situation from recurring.

The constitutional framework that emerged was extremely restrictive and essentially stated that anyone arriving from a safe country — which in practice applied to almost everyone entering Germany — would not qualify for asylum. Later, under Merkel, it was argued that international agreements such as the Geneva Convention overrode this constitutional interpretation. According to many critics, including some legal scholars in Germany, it was this reinterpretation that made the asylum system much more liberal in practice and created broader opportunities for migration.

So, in Germany’s case, a different interpretation of existing law alone could significantly tighten the asylum system again. It might not even require major new legislation and would, in effect, return the country to a situation more similar to that of 20 years ago. And 20 years ago, Germany was still a liberal democracy, just as it is today. It was not a hostile or oppressive environment for migrants.

Therefore, I do think it is possible to strike the right balance — one that avoids anything resembling fascism or authoritarianism while still responding to public concerns. Again, the reason I believe this is possible is that, if you actually look at what Germans and other Europeans say about immigration, very few people hold genuinely extreme views. Many of the concerns they express are, from their perspective, relatively reasonable.

Many Europeans Increasingly View Migration Through a Civilizational Lens

For right-wing populists in the Western world, “the others” primarily include immigrants but also extend to “welfare scroungers,” regional minorities, individuals with “non-traditional” lifestyles, communists, and others. Photo: Shutterstock.

Across Europe, debates over migration increasingly intersect with concerns about Islam, security, demographic change, and national identity. To what extent do you believe contemporary anti-migration politics should be understood as part of a broader civilizational and cultural backlash against multiculturalism and demographic diversity?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: We touched on this a little earlier, and I do think this is a key component of the debate. It is important that you raise this point, because I do not think it is discussed often enough. What we are witnessing in many European countries is significant demographic and ethnic change driven by patterns of immigration, the regions migrants are coming from, and differences in birth rates. Many people — on both sides of the debate — interpret these developments as part of a broader civilizational or cultural struggle. In many European societies, populations of African and Middle Eastern descent are growing, and Muslim communities are becoming more numerous as well.

Given Europe’s long history of conflict between civilizations and religious groups, these developments make many people uneasy. For that reason, the issue needs to be discussed openly and addressed seriously.

One point I have written about is the importance of political parties communicating a clearer sense of where they believe these developments are ultimately leading. The population of North African and Middle Eastern countries exceeds one billion people — larger than Europe’s population combined — and these regions generally have much younger populations, whereas Europe is aging rapidly.

There is also a strand of liberal thinking that argues borders should effectively be abolished and that people should be free to move wherever they wish. I do not think most political parties explicitly advocate such a position, but these ideas are present in public debate, and ordinary citizens encounter them regularly in newspapers and political discussions.

If such policies were ever fully implemented, Europe would, over time, become majority Muslim and majority composed of people of African and Middle Eastern descent. Many Europeans would strongly oppose such an outcome. If people begin to feel that this is the direction developments are heading, then the political reaction could become far more intense than the current rise of right-wing populism.

So, the question many people are asking is: where is this process ultimately leading? How much demographic and ethnic change is expected? Is there some kind of endpoint, or are these demographic shifts expected to continue indefinitely? If current trends persisted over many decades, then in some countries Muslims could eventually become a majority among younger generations.

The problem is that liberals often do not openly address these long-term questions. It is extremely important to have a serious discussion about them, supported by realistic projections and rigorous research examining the potential social consequences of demographic change.

At the same time, this is also a very difficult topic for researchers. Conducting serious research on these issues can be extremely challenging because, if findings portray ethnic change negatively or identify tensions associated with it, publishing such work while maintaining one’s academic career may become very difficult.

Europe’s Populist Right Has Become a Stable Electoral Force

In your analysis of the European Parliament elections, you argue that culturally conservative parties are likely to continue rising until the “cultural representation gap” narrows. Does this suggest that the normalization of populist radical-right politics is becoming a long-term structural feature of European democracy rather than a temporary protest phenomenon?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: Yes, I think so. In the beginning, many mainstream parties were effectively betting that right-wing populism was simply a temporary bubble that would eventually burst. But that expectation has clearly failed. By now, survey data also show that supporters of right-wing populist parties are often among the most loyal voters — people who say they will continue voting for these parties no matter what happens. So, I think these parties are now very firmly established within European politics.

Migration Politics Now Mirrors Everyday Public Sentiment

Your work highlights how mainstream parties increasingly converge toward tougher migration positions, citing figures such as Mette Frederiksen, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz. Do you see this convergence as democratic adaptation to voter concerns—or as evidence that populist radical-right narratives are increasingly hegemonizing European political discourse?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: It is, in many ways, both. I certainly see populist actors as the main driving force behind this shift. They succeeded in making migration and cultural issues far more politically salient, and public debate has increasingly moved closer to the way populists initially framed these questions.

Part of the reason may simply be that populists often discuss these issues in a language that resembles how many ordinary people talk about them in everyday life — whether in informal conversations, bars, or other social settings. And at some point, media debates and broader public discourse inevitably adapt to public preferences and concerns. From that perspective, the response of mainstream parties can also be interpreted as a democratic adaptation — an attempt to respond to shifting voter priorities and broader public sentiment.

Democratic Stability Depends on Taking Citizens’ Concerns Seriously

Much contemporary debate frames populism primarily as a threat to liberal democracy. Yet your work suggests populist success may also reflect unresolved failures within liberal democracy itself. Do you think European democracies can regain stability and legitimacy without fundamentally rethinking representation, participation, and democratic responsiveness on culturally divisive issues such as migration and integration?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: Yes, it is definitely possible. And this ultimately comes back to my understanding of public opinion: namely, that the concerns many people — indeed, most people — have are generally reasonable, and that it is entirely possible to build political systems and adopt policy solutions that respond to those concerns. In fact, I would argue that, only a few decades ago, many European countries already had systems and policy frameworks that functioned in this way. So, in a sense, we already know how to do it. There are also countries today that have immigration policies which are broadly popular while still remaining clearly within liberal-democratic boundaries and far from anything extreme. Mette Frederiksen’s Denmark would be one example, and Sweden’s recent policymaking would be another.

Europe Can Strengthen Borders Without Abandoning Liberal Democracy

And finally, Dr. Guenther, looking ahead, do you believe Europe is moving toward a new political equilibrium in which migration restriction, stronger borders, and culturally conservative policies become normalized across both mainstream and populist parties—or do you still see the possibility of a renewed democratic consensus grounded in pluralism, human rights, diversity, and inclusive multicultural citizenship?

Dr. Laurenz Guenther: If handled intelligently, Europe does not necessarily have to choose between these two paths or treat them as mutually exclusive. I certainly believe we will see stronger borders and more restrictive asylum policies in the future. At the same time, I do not think that other forms of immigration necessarily need to be restricted, nor do I see a strong electoral incentive for parties to target them more broadly.

So, I think immigration policymaking can become much more specific and targeted, focusing primarily on restricting those forms of immigration that are perceived as having negative effects on European societies. Immigration can, of course, have both very positive and very negative effects, and much depends on who immigrates.

In my view, Europe is currently experiencing some forms of immigration that do have negative consequences, but if we look at immigration overall, I think these cases still represent a relatively small share. Addressing them therefore requires a very specific and carefully targeted policy response. And I think doing so is entirely compatible with the broader principles you mentioned. It is consistent with liberal values in general. So, while I do expect Europe to move toward more conservative immigration policies in certain areas, I still believe liberal democracy has a strong chance of being preserved.

Professor Jonathan Portes

Ten Years on with Brexit / Prof. Portes: Brexit Has Not Solved Britain’s Problems; It Made Them Worse

by EconomicsEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeInterviewsMigration

As the United Kingdom nears the tenth anniversary of the 2016 Brexit referendum, Professor Jonathan Portes offers a sober, evidence-based reassessment of its economic and political legacy. In this ECPS interview, Professor Portes argues that Brexit did not resolve the structural problems it promised to overcome; rather, “the UK still confronts the same fundamental problems it did 10 years ago,” and, in key respects, they have worsened. Drawing on a decade of research on trade, migration, labor markets, and policy autonomy, he shows how weakened investment, reduced integration, and persistent political tensions have defined the post-Brexit settlement. Moving beyond slogans, Professor Portes situates Brexit within broader debates on sovereignty, interdependence, and populist politics in an increasingly unstable international order.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

As the United Kingdom approaches the tenth anniversary of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the debate has moved decisively from slogan to scrutiny, from promises of restored sovereignty to the measurable consequences of economic and political separation. In this context, the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) is pleased to host Professor Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the School of Politics & Economics, King’s College London, whose extensive scholarship has been central to understanding the economic and labor-market consequences of Brexit. Throughout the past decade, Professor Portes has offered one of the most rigorous and evidence-based assessments of how trade, migration, policy autonomy, and public expectations have evolved under the post-Brexit settlement.

This interview is framed by a stark and sobering conclusion that runs through Professor Portes’s reflections: Brexit did not resolve the structural dilemmas it claimed it would overcome. Rather, as he puts it, “the UK still confronts the same fundamental problems it did 10 years ago.” The core promise of Brexit, he argues, was that it would allow Britain to escape the constraints associated with globalization, immigration, and post-2008 economic stagnation. Yet the reality has been quite different. “Rather than solving those problems,” he observes, Brexit “has probably made them worse.” In Professor Portes’s analysis, the UK remains what it always was: “a middle-sized, advanced Western European economy,”still grappling with familiar pressures, but now doing so from a more exposed and less advantageous position.

The interview explores this argument across several interrelated domains. On the economic front, Professor Portes notes that the evidence on growth, trade, productivity, and investment has broadly confirmed the mainstream pre-referendum consensus: Brexit was never likely to produce collapse, but it would impose “significant and material long-term damage”on British economic prospects. Trade, especially goods trade, emerges in his account as the most enduring site of disruption, while weakened investment and reduced integration with the European market suggest an adaptation process that may culminate in a “permanent loss of integration.”

On migration, Professor Portes offers an especially illuminating account of Brexit’s unintended consequences. Rather than simply reducing immigration, Brexit reconfigured it, replacing free movement from within the EU with larger-than-expected inflows from outside it. That outcome, he suggests, exposed a contradiction at the heart of the Leave campaign: the demand for both lower migration and greater economic flexibility under national control. More broadly, the interview shows how the promise of sovereignty often failed to produce meaningful control in practice. As Professor Portes cautions, sovereignty “in the abstract legal and political sense does not necessarily translate into having control.”

Taken together, Professor Portes’s reflections offer a penetrating assessment of Brexit not as a completed nationalist correction, but as a prolonged and costly reconfiguration of Britain’s political economy. His analysis challenges triumphalist narratives from both the sovereigntist and populist right, while posing deeper questions about the limits of national autonomy in an interdependent world.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Jonathan Portes, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

Brexit Has Intensified, Not Resolved, Structural Economic Pressures

A Brexit Day ‘Independence’ parade was held at Whitehall and on Parliament Square in London to celebrate the UK leaving the European Union on January 31, 2020.

Professor Portes, welcome. You have been among the most careful and empirically grounded observers of Brexit’s economic and political consequences over the past decade. As we approach the ten-year mark since the 2016 referendum, how would you characterize the overall trajectory of the UK economy and policy landscape under Brexit? What stands out most when you step back and take a long view?

Professor Jonathan Portes: I think what stands out most, perhaps, is that the UK still confronts the same fundamental problems it did 10 years ago. The UK remains very much a middle-sized, advanced Western European economy, with many of the same issues and problems as other such economies. The difference, however, is that Brexit was, in some ways, touted as a means for the UK to escape some of those problems, issues, and constraints relating to globalization, immigration, and economic stagnation since 2008, as well as a range of political problems within the UK that arose from those economic challenges.

But rather than solving those problems, as Brexit was presented as doing by some of its proponents, it has probably made them worse. This is partly because it led, obviously, to a period of political chaos in the UK. Even after that, and despite a degree of relative stability being restored, it has possibly caused some damage to the UK’s political institutions. At the same time, rather than resolving any of these political economy problems, it has arguably exacerbated them.

In other words, the difficulties of managing globalization and its impacts were already very apparent when the UK was a member of the EU. They manifested themselves partly through EU membership and partly outside it. However, outside the EU, these difficulties have become even starker. Rather than being resolved by Brexit, as was hoped, they have become more visible and more difficult. This is partly due to the structural contradiction of Brexit itself. It is also, of course, partly the result of global developments since then—most notably the election of Trump—which have made the UK’s position outside the EU more difficult for fairly obvious reasons.

Growth, Trade, and Investment Have Weakened as Expected

Much of your work highlights the gap between political expectations and economic outcomes—particularly in areas like growth, trade, and migration. Looking across the evidence now available, how should we understand the real costs of Brexit compared to what was anticipated or promised at the time?

Professor Jonathan Portes: Of course, politicians on both sides said a lot about Brexit. In terms of the economic impacts of Brexit on things like growth, trade, and investment, this is one area where we economists can actually be rather pleased with ourselves. Economic forecasts rarely turn out to be accurate, and of course there is still quite a lot of debate about the precise impacts of Brexit. But we now have a wide range of economic evidence on the impact on growth, trade, and investment, and it is pretty much entirely consistent with the mainstream economic consensus that I and others formed part of, before Brexit: that Brexit would not be a complete catastrophe for the UK economy, but it would do significant and material long-term damage to our economic prospects by reducing growth, productivity growth, trade, and investment. And all of those have been fairly clearly borne out.

The interesting difference is on migration, where both I and others thought that Brexit would reduce migration through the free movement channel within the EU, which would only be partly offset by increased inflows from outside the EU. In fact, it has turned out that the direction for both of those numbers has been correct. But the relative magnitudes were wrong, and the increase in migration from outside the EU has more than offset the reduction in flows within the EU. As a result, the UK population and labor force are actually larger than they would have been without Brexit, not smaller. That provides, not a small, offset to the negative impacts of Brexit, although it has also generated a great deal of political backlash. From an economic point of view, however, this is a positive—though certainly not by anywhere near enough to offset the negative impacts of Brexit on trade and investment.

Trade Took the Hardest Hit, While Services Showed Resilience

If we think of Brexit as a large, multi-dimensional economic shock, where do you see its most significant and lasting effects—across trade, investment, labor markets, and productivity—and which of these have proven more resilient than many expected?

Professor Jonathan Portes: The biggest persistent shock has been to trade, particularly trade in goods. The UK did quite well out of EU membership in terms of being integrated into pan-European and hence pan-global supply chains for goods. We have seen that small and medium-sized exporters benefited from being able to export to the EU without regulation or red tape. And, of course, British consumers benefited from frictionless imports from within the EU. None of that has disappeared completely—you still have trade under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and the EU remains by far our largest trading partner. But nonetheless, there has been a significant impact, particularly for those manufacturers integrated into global supply chains, who have faced increased costs as a result, and also for some of those small and medium-sized businesses that benefited from frictionless trade within the single market.

On the more resilient side, there has also been some damage to the financial services sector, which, of course, was a major issue in the run-up to Brexit. Again, the UK’s financial services sector is large and resilient, and London remains by far the largest financial center in Europe, but it is nonetheless somewhat smaller than it would have been without Brexit. There has been some damage there, but the sector is not going anywhere and will continue to be an important part of the UK economy.

There has been more resilience in other areas of the high-productivity tradable services sector—things like consultancy, legal services, and accountancy—where trade barriers were never that large, because there are no tariffs and there is less in the way of regulation than in financial services. Hence, the UK has actually done pretty well; it has not just been resilient but has also seen very fast growth in those sectors. This has helped preserve the overall picture and means that the economic impacts have not been as clear, as severe, or as visible as they might have been, as some people at one end of the spectrum feared.

And then on the labor market, there was considerable concern that the end of free movement would do quite a bit of damage to sectors that relied on European migration. While migration from outside the EU is not a perfect substitute—because it involves different types of people in different sectors with different skills and so on— overall, the rather large increase in non-EU migration has done a lot to cushion the UK labor market and sectors that are dependent on migrant labor from what the impacts would otherwise have been. So, it has been a mixed picture.

Short-Term Adjustment, Long-Term Disintegration

Brexit.
Photo: Dreamstime.

There is now substantial evidence that UK trade with the EU has underperformed relative to its pre-Brexit trajectory, alongside signs of weakened investment. How should we interpret these developments in structural terms—do they reflect a permanent loss of integration, or an ongoing process of economic adaptation?

Professor Jonathan Portes: I think the answer is, in some ways, both. It is an ongoing process of adaptation that, eventually, leads to a permanent loss of integration, assuming that the new situation continues as it is. Of course, because this has done significant damage to the UK economy, both politicians and the public are now trying to think of ways to reverse that damage, at least in part. So, we do not know exactly where we will be in five or ten years. But if the current status quo continues, then you have, as you suggest, a process of adaptation that has partly happened but still has some way to run, leading to a permanent loss of integration.

On the other hand, as I said, there are now active discussions acknowledging that this is a bad outcome—recognized as such from an economic perspective by the UK public and policy establishment—and efforts are being made to think of ways to reverse it, at least to some extent.

Migration Fell from the EU, Rose from Elsewhere

Your research shows that Brexit fundamentally reshaped the composition of migration rather than reducing it overall, with declines in EU-origin workers offset by increases from non-EU countries. How should we interpret this outcome in relation to the central political promise of “taking back control”?

Professor Jonathan Portes: This is absolutely fascinating, because there was a very large implicit contradiction in some of the arguments made by pro-Brexit campaigners, which sought to present it both as a way of substantially reducing immigration overall and, by taking back control, ensuring that migration policy would be tailored to the needs of the UK economy or labor market, rather than dictated by EU rules.

But it turned out that, particularly at the time of Brexit and in the aftermath of the pandemic, the interpretation of the then-government—which was the government that delivered Brexit—was that what the UK economy needed was a significant increase in migration, and that is what we got. So, you had people within the Brexit movement saying, “We have been betrayed, immigration is going up,” and others saying, “No, we have control—yes, immigration is going up, but it is immigration that is entirely under our control and dictated by the needs of the UK economy and labor market.”

That contradiction was always implicit in some of the claims made by Brexit proponents at the time of the referendum, when it was never entirely clear whether they were making a concrete pledge to reduce immigration or not. But nobody, certainly not me, expected that contradiction to become so obvious and so large as it did in the post-pandemic period, because of the significant labor shortages that emerged post-Brexit and post-pandemic in the UK, and, to some extent, in other countries as well. 

The result is that the UK political system has not really been able to cope with this. It has done a great deal of damage to the Conservative Party and has been one of the significant factors behind the rise of the Reform Party, contributing to divisions within the Conservative Party. Despite the fact that the Labour Party opposed Brexit but is now having to manage this new post-Brexit immigration system, it is also leading to very severe tensions within the Labour Party and the current government between those who believe that immigration needs to be reduced regardless of the needs of the economy, and those who, for economic or broader political reasons, think that, on the whole, a relatively liberal and open immigration system is a good thing.

Migration Policy Reveals the Limits of Political Steering

In your analysis, the UK has moved from a largely automatic free-movement regime to a highly managed, points-based system—yet with outcomes still strongly shaped by labor demand and external shocks. Does this suggest limits to how far governments can actually steer migration and labor markets?

Professor Jonathan Portes: It illustrates the difficulties and contradictions in having control. One of the perceived disadvantages, from a political point of view, of free movement was that we could not say who could come. People would simply come and go as they wished, and we had no control over that because of EU rules. But the upside, of course, was that this had two advantages. From an economic perspective, it meant that these flows were, to a significant extent, determined by the market. Labor demand led to people coming in, a weak labor market led to people leaving, and these things happened more or less automatically. From an economic perspective, that, on the whole, is a good thing.

But the second advantage was political, and I think people did not fully appreciate it. Governments could largely sit back and say, “well, these are market decisions, and we do not have the remit to interfere with them,” so migration could be somewhat removed from the political process. The disadvantage of the current system, as it has turned out, is that having control means there is a great deal of political pressure on governments to do something about migration, regardless of whether it is actually a problem in economic terms.

That leads to sharp swings in policy, and often, as we are seeing at the moment, swings that are somewhat counter cyclical. This reflects an old problem that we used to discuss as macroeconomists with demand management through fiscal policy in a Keynesian framework: in principle, it is good to cut taxes when the economy is weak and increase taxes when the economy is strong. But in practice, because governments react slowly and economic data comes through with delays, it often turns out that policies are implemented at the wrong time—by the time you cut taxes, the economy is already recovering, or by the time you raise taxes, the economy is already weakening.

We seem to be seeing something similar with migration. The government was panicked by the large rise in migration in 2022 and 2023 and has now put in place very draconian measures to reduce migration at exactly the time when migration to the UK was already falling very sharply. That is a very bad way of making policy. We have control—this is all entirely under government control—but we have ended up with policy where that control is being exercised in a way that is quite damaging economically and does not really convince the public that we actually have control. To the public, it looks as though the government is just flailing around and does not really know what it is doing. To be honest, they are not wrong about that.

Mismanaged Migration Policy Fuels Shortages and Bottlenecks

Air Travellers Proceed to Passport Control at a British Airport. Photo: Dreamstime.

You have described post-Brexit migration patterns as producing “unintended consequences,” particularly in terms of scale and sectoral distribution. To what extent do these dynamics help explain persistent labor shortages, sectoral imbalances, and broader economic bottlenecks?

Professor Jonathan Portes: I think it goes back to what I just said, which is that, as in many other things, a relatively free market is the worst possible way of managing the matching of supply and demand, except for all the other ways of doing it. So, when you have a government that is trying, in some way, to use the migration system to match supply and demand and is also doing so in an environment where it faces all these political constraints, real or imagined, it ends up getting things wrong.

Partly this is because you simply cannot manage an economy or a labor market in that way, and partly it is due to politics. Once you have said you are in control, and that everything is under control, you face pressure to make policy changes that are not necessarily justified by anything in particular, except perceived political pressures. As a result, the government ends up getting a number of things wrong.

This has been particularly evident in the health and care sector, where the government liberalized probably too much, too quickly, in a way that did not take account of the dynamics of the immigration system or the labor market, and has now tightened up too much, too quickly, again without taking those dynamics into account, or considering how the labor market works or its own role in shaping pay and conditions in this workforce.

The result is both poor policymaking and poor political outcomes—shortages, bottlenecks, and broader imbalances. It also causes significant harm to individuals caught up in this system, including migrants, who can find the rug pulled out from under them and are sometimes treated very badly, both by their employers and by the government, as well as the people who depend on care—the consumers of these services—who ultimately should be our primary concern.

Widespread Impact Undermines Claims of Uneven Gains

Brexit’s economic consequences have not been evenly distributed. How important are these distributional effects—for workers, firms, and regions—in shaping both the economic outcomes and the political sustainability of Brexit?

Professor Jonathan Portes: In one sense, there has been a great deal of work on the regional impacts of Brexit, and I am not sure it has demonstrated that they are as differential as one might expect. You can, of course, point to very specific examples, such as the loss of European regional funding in some disadvantaged areas. There has also been a particularly negative impact on parts of the food and agriculture sector. I mentioned the City of London and the financial services sector, but overall, the impact has been quite diffuse across the economy as a whole.

So, you can point to individuals or particular businesses that have been put out of business by Brexit, and there are people who are especially dependent on certain sectors. But beyond that, there has mostly been a general pattern of lower growth, lower trade, and lower investment, affecting pretty much the entire UK economy to a greater or lesser extent.

You can see that in the opinion polling. The view that Brexit has been an economic failure is very widely shared across UK society. It is very hard to find a section or interest group that says Brexit was great for them, even if it was bad for others. Rather, there is a broad consensus that, from an economic point of view, Brexit has been a failure across the board. So, while you can identify individuals or businesses that have suffered much more than someone like me, for the most part it has been a broadly shared, generalized negative impact.

Formal Sovereignty Cannot Override Economic Realities

Your work suggests that while Brexit restored formal policy autonomy, outcomes have remained difficult to control in practice. Does this point to a deeper structural tension between political sovereignty and economic interdependence in advanced economies?

Professor Jonathan Portes: Yes, and I think that goes back to what I was saying before. You may or may not have thought it was plausible for the UK to argue, in 2016, that as a middle-sized, advanced economy—like other European countries—dependent on global trade and investment, there were nonetheless various structural, political, and economic reasons why it should not be part of the EU. Partly political—we have a different political tradition—and partly structural and economic. We are much more dependent on services trade, particularly high-value services, and while we are economically integrated with the EU, it is not to the same extent as countries like Germany or France. So, the UK could, and should, for this combination of reasons, be independent, make its own trade policy, and make its own, to some extent, foreign policy, retain close economic links with the EU, but not subordinate its political, economic, or trade decision-making to the EU. And we could make a success of it as a global economy, just as some other countries—whether Singapore or Australia, or to some extent Switzerland—have done. That case was always flawed, and most economists thought it was flawed, but it was not obviously unreasonable.

But it is now pretty clear that geopolitical developments over the last ten years have been very unfavorable to that strategy. It is much easier to pursue such a strategy when there is a benign, liberal hegemon—or perhaps two hegemonic powers, the US and China—both with a strong interest in a stable, liberal international trading order that accommodates countries in the position I have just described. You can argue about what might have happened without Trump. I think it is plausible that even without Trump, we would have been moving, to some extent, in the direction we are already going, which would have made that strategy increasingly implausible. But it is clear that Trump has accelerated this trajectory, to the point where that strategy now looks unrealistic.

That is where we are now, unfortunately. Even if Trump himself were reversed, it is very hard to see a return to the sort of benign, liberal international trading order I described—one in which a middle-sized power like the UK can comfortably pursue an independent path while still participating fully in global trade.

Brexit Reconfigures Long-Standing Migration Debates

In your work on free movement and the UK, you situate Brexit within a longer trajectory of labor mobility and political contestation. From that perspective, does Brexit represent a rupture, or a reconfiguration of deeper structural tensions within the British political economy?

Professor Jonathan Portes: It is very much the latter. Immigration—both its political, economic, and social consequences—has been an issue in British politics that has gone up and down in prominence for a very long time, certainly in the post-war era, from the mid-1950s to now, over the last 70 years. Brexit has clearly changed things. It has changed the system, as we have just discussed, and it has changed the environment. But many of the issues being contested now are very much the same as those that were contested in the 1960s, in the Powell era, were contested again in the 2000s immediately after enlargement, and are being contested today.

These include questions such as: to what extent is the UK—like other European countries, albeit in a different context—a country shaped by migration? What is the role of migration in a modern economy and labor market? What is its role given the demographic challenges and ageing that all our countries face? And what are the implications of migration for a country’s national and cultural identity?

We are not, for the most part, countries of immigration in the same way as the US, but equally, certainly in the UK—and in most of Europe—we are no longer monocultural or ethnically homogeneous societies either. Those who seek to take us back to that are very dangerous. So, the question becomes: what is the model of a multi-ethnic European democracy? That is something we are all struggling with. The UK was struggling with it before Brexit, and it is struggling with it now.

Brexit Pushed the Far Right Toward a European Strategy

Brexit was widely seen as a landmark moment for populist and sovereigntist politics, including the rise of far right and populist radical right mobilization around migration and national control. Looking back, how do you assess the relationship between Brexit and these broader political currents—both at the time and in their evolution over the past decade?

Professor Jonathan Portes: It has been quite interesting in that Brexit has, in a sense, forced European far-right movements to reconfigure their offer. What most of them seem to have recognized is that Brexit is neither a success nor is it perceived as a success, either domestically in the UK or in their own countries. So, you have far-right movements that were, at the time and immediately afterwards, flirting with their own ideas of exit from the European Union, but have now reconfigured themselves to retain the same focus on migration issues while embedding those concerns within a European frame rather than a purely domestic one.

This has, if anything, been bolstered by what we see from across the Atlantic, with figures such as J.D. Vance talking about European culture or European Christian values, rather than Italian or French values. So, you have this form of ethnically based, anti-immigrant nationalism that has, in a sense, shifted toward a European-level identity, alongside a domestic one.

In that respect, these movements have been, whether one likes it or not, quite effective in adapting. When you look at figures like Le Pen and Meloni, they have pivoted away from overt anti-Europeanism toward a form of European white nationalism.

Populist Right Is Here to Stay—but Its Shape Is Uncertain

Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party UKIP. Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, speaking at Chatham House in London on March 31, 2014. Photo: Dominic Dudley / Dreamstim.

In the same context, how do you interpret the continued prominence of Nigel Farage and the rise of Reform UK within the UK’s political landscape? Does their trajectory suggest that Brexit has consolidated a durable populist radical right (PRR) and far-right constituency, or are we witnessing a more fluid and contingent phase of political realignment?

Professor Jonathan Portes: I hesitate to make predictions on this. But the obvious answer is a bit of both. The presence of Farage and the populist right in the UK is now well established; it is no longer a flash in the pan. We now have some years of it, so I think it is not going away. But how the current political shake-up in the UK plays out is very difficult to assess.

Structurally, our political system is configured around a two or two-and-a-half-party system. We have a roughly 50–50 division between right and left blocs, with a group of voters in the middle who are willing to support either side on occasion. That is a reasonably stable political configuration. But when you have four or five parties, the system becomes much more unstable, especially when these cleavages cut across both economic and socio-cultural dimensions.

It is not clear that the current first-past-the-post system is well suited to this new context. Whatever one thinks in the abstract about first-past-the-post versus different forms of proportional representation, the dynamics look very different in a two or two-and-a-half-party system than in a four or five-party system, where instability increases significantly.

So, it is very unclear how this will shake out. Populism—and in particular far-right populism—is certainly not going away in the UK. But how it will reconfigure the right of the UK political spectrum, and to what extent the more traditional conservative right, which still has a constituency in the UK, can reassert itself and regain control, remains very uncertain at the moment.

Economic Reality Challenges Populist Narratives

To what extent do the economic and migration outcomes of Brexit challenge or reinforce the core claims of populist narratives about globalization, elites, and national sovereignty?

Professor Jonathan Portes: As discussed, they illustrate some of the limitations of national sovereignty and the fact that sovereignty in the abstract legal and political sense does not necessarily translate into having control. There is a fundamental issue here: people felt that they wanted more control over their lives, and Brexit was sold to them as a way of achieving that, yet they certainly do not feel that this has been delivered. That is a fundamental problem.

It is also a fundamental problem for politicians, because it is very difficult to explain to people that, on the one hand, politicians need to demonstrate concretely that they have given people back some control over their lives, while on the other hand they must also be honest about the fact that there are areas where national governments simply cannot exercise control and must be realistic about those limits.

We are seeing this right now with oil and gas prices. The UK government cannot stop global oil and gas prices from rising. At some point, politicians have to be honest and say that we can try to protect the most vulnerable households and mitigate the impact of this economic shock, but it remains an economic shock, and that means the country as a whole is poorer, and we have to live with that.

Populists Shift Strategy as Exit Loses Appeal

Finally, for other sovereigntist or “exit” movements across Europe that have looked to Brexit as a model, what lessons—economic, political, or institutional—should be drawn from the UK’s experience over the past decade?

Professor Jonathan Portes: As I said, populists have correctly learned that Brexit, or its equivalent, is largely going to be a political loser, and they have pivoted away from that. They have shifted towards a more pan-European, ethnically based opposition to immigration—a form of pan-European white nationalism that mirrors some of what is going on in the US at the moment. To some extent, they have done this quite successfully in countries such as France and Italy.

To my mind, the challenge is for those of us who are not part of these movements and do not want to see them succeed: what is the narrative—economic, political, and cultural—that we use to push back against this and say that this is not the sort of Europe we want? The kind of Europe we seek to build is not one that will be economically successful, nor one that most people would want to live in. That is the challenge, and frankly, I do not think we have met it yet.

Anti-Islam demonstration in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on January 20, 2017. Protesters carry signs opposing “Islamization.” Photo: Jan Kranendonk.

When Change Becomes Conflict: Immigration and the Politics of Cultural Backlash

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeMigration

This analysis by Yacine Boubia challenges the dominant economic explanations of populism by foregrounding the central role of cultural transformation. Drawing on Ronald Inglehart’s “silent revolution” and the cultural backlash thesis, it argues that immigration has become the most visible and politically charged symbol of broader shifts in identity, values, and social order. Populism, in this account, is not simply a reaction to material deprivation but a response to perceived cultural displacement and status loss. By linking economic disruption with identity-based anxieties, the article demonstrates how immigration functions as a focal point for wider conflicts over belonging, representation, and democratic legitimacy in contemporary Western societies.

By Yacine Boubia

The dominant narrative surrounding the rise of populism in Europe and the United States has long been grounded in economics. Globalization, automation, and trade shocks are often said to have produced a class of “left behind” voters who turned to populist leaders out of material deprivation. While this account captures an important dimension of structural change, it ultimately misdiagnoses the core political dynamics at work. Populism is not simply a reaction to economic hardship. It is, more fundamentally, a response to cultural transformation—one in which immigration has become the most visible and politically salient symbol of broader social change. 

To understand this shift, it is necessary to return to the long arc of value change identified by Ronald Inglehart. Beginning in the postwar decades, advanced industrial societies underwent what he termed a “silent revolution,” as rising prosperity and educational expansion reshaped public priorities. Survival-oriented values gradually gave way to self-expression, autonomy, and cosmopolitan openness (Inglehart, 1977; Inglehart & Norris, 2019). Over time, these shifts became embedded in institutions, elite discourse, and policy frameworks, particularly within urban, highly educated populations. 

Yet this transformation was never evenly distributed. Large segments of the population—often older, less formally educated, and more rooted in national or local traditions—did not merely lag behind this shift; they experienced it as a form of displacement. What appeared to some as progress appeared to others as erosion: of authority, of social cohesion, and of a familiar moral order. The political consequences of this divergence became increasingly visible after the late 1960s, when cultural liberalization accelerated across Western democracies and elite consensus around multiculturalism and individual autonomy solidified. 

It is within this context that immigration assumes its central political role. Immigration is not merely one issue among many; it is the issue through which broader cultural transformations are rendered visible, tangible, and politically immediate. Debates over borders, asylum, and integration are simultaneously debates about national identity, social trust, and the pace of cultural change itself. The European migration crisis did not create these tensions, but it crystallized them, transforming diffuse anxieties into direct political conflict across the continent. 

The differential reception of refugee populations further illustrates how cultural categorization shapes political responses. The Ukrainian refugee crisis, following Russia’s 2022 invasion, was widely framed in Europe as a conventional interstate war producing displaced populations that were more easily incorporated into existing asylum systems. By contrast, earlier inflows of refugees from Syria and parts of the Middle East were more frequently politicized through debates over long-term integration, welfare capacity, and security concerns. Material conditions alone cannot explain these differences. They reflect processes of perceived cultural proximity, geopolitical framing, and institutional response mechanisms within the European Union. 

Scholars of migration and political psychology have long noted that public attitudes toward migration are structured not only by economic calculations but also by perceived cultural distance and social trust. Emmanuel Todd’s recent work, La Défaite de l’Occident (2024), contributes to this discussion by emphasizing that societies interpret geopolitical and demographic change through deeper assumptions about cultural cohesion and civilizational identity. From this perspective, differential refugee reception reflects not simply policy design but underlying social narratives about similarity, belonging, and national self-understanding. 

The framework developed by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart captures these dynamics with particular clarity. Their “cultural backlash” thesis argues that support for populist parties is driven less by absolute economic deprivation than by perceived status loss among groups once embedded within dominant cultural hierarchies (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). Immigration, in this context, functions not merely as a policy issue but as a symbolic focal point through which broader anxieties about identity and social change are expressed. It becomes the terrain on which struggles over cultural authority are fought. 

The United States exhibits a parallel trajectory. The rise of Donald Trump cannot be fully understood through economic grievance alone. Empirical studies of the 2016 election have consistently shown that attitudes toward immigration, cultural change, and racial identity were among the strongest predictors of support for Trump (Sides et al., 2018). His appeal lay less in policy detail than in his ability to articulate a sense of loss—of border control, national coherence, and institutional trust. Immigration functioned as the central issue through which these concerns were politically mobilized. 

This mobilization was amplified by changes in the digital information environment. Scholars of political communication have highlighted how social media platforms and data-driven campaigning enabled more granular targeting of affective and identity-based grievances. While the precise influence of firms such as Cambridge Analytica is debated in the academic literature, broader research on “computational propaganda” and social listening suggests that political actors increasingly adapt messaging to pre-existing online sentiment patterns rather than shaping them from above (Bennett & Livingston, 2018). 

None of this implies that economic factors are irrelevant. On the contrary, the structural effects of globalization have played a crucial role in shaping the terrain on which cultural conflict unfolds. Trade exposure, deindustrialization, and regional inequality have increased perceptions of economic insecurity in many Western societies (Autor et al., 2013). However, these economic disruptions do not translate mechanically into political outcomes. Their salience is mediated through cultural interpretation. Economic decline becomes politically consequential when it is embedded within narratives of identity, recognition, and perceived neglect. 

In this sense, globalization operates as a force multiplier rather than a primary cause of populism. Communities experiencing economic stagnation are more likely to interpret immigration through lenses of competition and cultural threat, and more likely to view political elites as detached from their lived realities. Populist movements succeed precisely because they fuse economic anxiety with cultural grievance into a single coherent narrative—one that pits “the people” against both external pressures and internal elites (Mudde, 2004). 

Across Europe, parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the National Rally (RN) in France have institutionalized this synthesis. While differing in national context, these movements share a common structure: opposition to immigration, skepticism toward supranational governance, and a broader critique of liberal elite consensus. Their success underscores the extent to which cultural backlash has become embedded within contemporary political competition. 

The policy implications are significant. If populism were driven primarily by economic inequality, then redistribution and growth-oriented policies might be sufficient to mitigate its rise. But if it is rooted in cultural backlash, such measures will prove insufficient on their own. Economic policy cannot resolve conflicts over identity, belonging, and social norms. Nor can these conflicts be dismissed as irrational without further deepening political polarization. 

A more realistic approach begins by recognizing that populism emerges from genuine, if conflicting, experiences of social transformation. The “silent revolution” identified by Inglehart has reshaped Western societies in profound ways, but it has also produced new forms of cultural stratification. In the United States, this process was accelerated by the political economy of the 1980s and 1990s, where deregulation and neoliberal convergence under both Republican and Democratic administrations coincided with the rise of cosmopolitan urban centers and multicultural policy frameworks. These developments, reinforced during the Clinton and Obama eras, contributed to a perception among some voters that cultural and institutional change was occurring without adequate democratic mediation. 

Immigration, as the most visible manifestation of these broader transformations, will therefore remain central to political conflict in advanced democracies. Understanding populism requires moving beyond the false dichotomy between economics and culture. It is the interaction between structural change and subjective perception that drives political behavior. Until this interplay is fully acknowledged, explanations will remain partial, and policy responses will continue to fall short. 

 

References

Inglehart, R. (1977). The Silent Revolution – Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics, Princeton University Press.

Inglehart, R. & Norris, P. (2019). Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, Cambridge University Press.

Autor, D., Dorn, D., & Hanson, G. (2013). “The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade,” ANNUAL REVIEW OF ECONOMICS, Vol. 8:205-240 (Volume publication date October 2016)  https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-080315-015041

Sides, J., Tesler, M., & Vavreck, L. (2018). Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America, Princeton University Press.

Mudde, C. (2004). “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44483088

Bennett, W. L. & Livingston, S. (2018). “The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions.” European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118760317

Todd, E. (2024). La Défaite de l’Occident, Gallimard.

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen.

Dr. Henriksen: Strict Migration Policy in Denmark Fails to Contain the Radical Right

by Editor’s ChoiceEuropean ObservatoryHomeInterviewsMigration

In this ECPS interview, Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen offers an in-depth assessment of Denmark’s 2026 general election, highlighting both continuity and change in one of Europe’s most stable democracies. He characterizes the outcome as “a very poor election for the traditional governing parties,” underscoring the historic decline of established actors alongside the emergence of “a highly fragmented parliament.” While domestic concerns dominated the campaign, Dr. Henriksen emphasizes that strict migration policies have not contained the populist radical right, as evidenced by the resurgence of the Danish People’s Party. At the same time, he cautions against overstating democratic crisis, noting Denmark’s enduring institutional trust. Instead, he points to media fragmentation and digital communication as key forces reshaping political competition and voter alignment.

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

In the aftermath of Denmark’s closely contested 2026 general election on March 24, the country stands at a critical political juncture—marked by fragmented blocs, the resurgence of the populist radical right, and renewed geopolitical tensions over Greenland. While domestic issues such as the cost-of-living crisis and migration shaped the campaign, deeper transformations in political communication and democratic contestation are also unfolding. Giving an in-depth interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen, a postdoctoral researcher at Roskilde University working at the intersection of politics, media, and digital society, whose research on digital counter-publics, alternative media ecosystems, and anti-systemic populism, offers important insights into these developments. 

Reflecting on the election outcome, Dr. Henriksen underscores that “this was a very poor election for the traditional governing parties,” pointing to the historically weak performance of both the Social Democrats and the center-right Venstre. He further highlights that “we now have a highly fragmented parliament,” a development that is likely to render coalition-building both complex and protracted. Indeed, the emergence of multiple competitive actors across the political spectrum has produced what some observers describe as “Dutch conditions” of party fragmentation and even “Belgian conditions” of prolonged government formation.

At the same time, Dr. Henriksen draws attention to the resurgence of the populist radical right, particularly the Danish People’s Party, emphasizing that restrictive policy convergence has not neutralized such forces. As he notes, the Danish case illustrates that strict migration policies do not necessarily diminish the electoral appeal of the radical right, but may instead coincide with renewed voter mobilization around issues of identity, economic anxiety, and national direction.

Beyond electoral dynamics, the interview also engages with the transformation of political communication in digitally mediated environments. While cautious about attributing direct causal effects to alternative media, Dr. Henriksen observes that “it has been very difficult to define” the election in terms of a coherent overarching narrative, suggesting that media fragmentation and hybrid communication systems are reshaping how political competition is structured and understood.

Importantly, despite these shifts, Dr. Henriksen does not interpret recent developments as signaling a systemic crisis of democracy. Denmark, he argues, remains a high-trust society with robust institutional foundations. Yet, it is increasingly “no longer isolated from trends we see elsewhere in Europe,” including fragmentation, anti-incumbent voting, and the growing salience of populist communication.

Taken together, Dr. Henriksen’s reflections situate the Danish election within a broader European trajectory, where established party systems are under pressure, populist actors continue to adapt, and democratic politics is being reshaped by both structural and communicative transformations.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.

Voters Reward Clearer Political Profiles on Both Sides

Denmark votes in parliamentary elections in Copenhagen.
Denmark votes in parliamentary elections in Copenhagen, Kastrup, Denmark, on November 1, 2022. Voters head to polling stations to cast their ballots in the general election. Photo: Francis Joseph Dean / Dean Pictures / Dreamstime.

Dr. Henriksen, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me begin with the electoral outcome itself: How should we interpret the 2026 Danish election results, where both the red and blue blocs fell short of a majority? Does this fragmentation signal a structural transformation of Denmark’s party system?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: Thank you for this question—it is a very broad one. I will try to narrow it down to a few key takeaways, and then we can elaborate further during the interview.

The first takeaway is that this was a very poor election for the traditional governing parties. The Social Democrats, for instance, remained the largest party, but they fell to a historic low—their worst result since 1903. The center-right party, Venstre, as it is called in Danish, also suffered a historically weak result.

The second takeaway is that we now have a highly fragmented parliament. This means that coalition-building will be unusually difficult and potentially lengthy—at least, that is what commentators are suggesting at the moment.

The third point is that overall voter turnout was lower than usual, although still high by international standards. I interpret this as a sign that voters have been dissatisfied with the centrist government we have had over the past four years.

The fourth point is that there were clear winners outside the old or established center. The Danish People’s Party, for example, performed strongly with 9.1%, and the Socialist People’s Party on the left became the second-largest party.

Thus, the election did not simply produce fragmentation for its own sake; rather, it suggests that voters rewarded parties with clearer profiles on both sides of the political spectrum. In this sense, the Danish People’s Party can be seen as one of the main winners.

I also heard a commentator suggest that these are “Dutch conditions,” in the sense that we now have many parties represented in parliament. There is a political science measure for the effective number of parties, and it has reportedly never been higher in the Danish parliament. Another commentator added that we may face “Belgian conditions,” meaning that it could take a very long time to form a government with so many parties involved. I find this framing quite insightful.

Regarding whether this signals a structural transformation, I would say it is important to view the situation in light of the decline of the Social Democrats. They have been in government for an extended period—first leading a left-leaning government and then a centrist coalition. This development should therefore be understood in the context of their weakening position, including their time in power during COVID-19. It appears they have struggled to maintain momentum, which is reflected in the election results. At the same time, we do see clear signs of fragmentation—this is quite evident.

We can also observe that centrist parties, such as the Moderates, have become highly important in the coalition-building phase. Although relatively small, both blocs—the left and the right—depend on their mandates to form a government. As a result, they are likely to play a very prominent role.

Finally, this election also points to the growing importance of person-driven politics rather than party-driven politics. For voters, the election itself has been quite fragmented. It is not entirely clear what the main issues have been; instead, individual political figures have played a central role. We can see that some of the key figures, such as Martin Messerschmidt and Lars Løkke Rasmussen, have attracted a significant share of the vote. This indicates a broader shift toward more person-driven politics and person-driven electoral outcomes.

Unpopular Reforms Cost the Social Democrats Voter Support

Mette Frederiksen
Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen at a press conference during the COVID-19 crisis, Copenhagen, March 17, 2020. Photo: Francis Dean | Dreamstime.

The Social Democrats emerged as the largest party but recorded one of their weakest results in over a century. To what extent does this outcome reflect voter fatigue with incumbency, and to what extent does it point to deeper shifts in political trust and democratic legitimacy?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: It’s a very good question. There is clearly an incumbency story here. It is important to situate the Social Democrats’ decline in voter support within a broader anti-incumbent mood among voters, which I alluded to, earlier. After nearly seven years in power, the party has been carrying the burdens of office. As we know from political science, this is challenging for governing parties, particularly when they are associated with unpopular reforms. One notable example is the abolition of a national holiday in 2024, known as the Great Prayer Day. This decision appears to have resonated strongly with voters across the political spectrum, and the party has been penalized for it. I think that when the government abolished the holiday, it did not anticipate the extent of its electoral impact. That is an important factor to consider.

At the same time, it would be too narrow to interpret the result solely as voter fatigue. The Social Democrats were squeezed from both sides. Some left-leaning voters felt that the party had become too restrictive on immigration, while some right-leaning voters continued to distrust it on economic issues. In this sense, the outcome reflects both incumbency effects and the limits of a centrist repositioning, which is relatively unusual in the Danish political context. So, while the party remains electorally dominant in relative terms, its broad coalition appears thinner and more fragile than before. 

That said, I do not see strong evidence—at least at this stage—of a more generalized crisis of democratic legitimacy. Denmark still has stable political institutions, and the economy is in relatively good shape compared to some other EU countries. Voter turnout also remained relatively high, and the election process was fair. Therefore, framing this as a general crisis of democratic legitimacy may be an overstatement. However, much will depend on what kind of government ultimately emerges.

The Danish People’s Party Re-Emerges as a Major Force

The election saw a notable resurgence of the Danish People’s Party and other anti-immigration actors. How do you explain this revival in light of your research on anti-systemic populism? Does it indicate that such movements have successfully re-entered the electoral mainstream?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: That is a good question. There is clearly a strong case to be made that the Danish People’s Party has re-emerged as a significant force. They moved from around 2–3% to 9.1% of the vote, effectively tripling their support compared to the previous election. They have campaigned on issues such as zero net Muslim migration and cost-of-living concerns, including proposals like abolishing petrol taxes. They have been very successful in doing so, and I would also argue that they have run one of the most effective social media campaigns, which likely contributed to their performance.

This revival suggests that anti-immigration politics have not disappeared; rather, they were partially displaced and fragmented. This election indicates that when economic anxiety, migration, and broader questions about national direction become salient again, these constituencies can be remobilized electorally.

In relation to my own research, I have focused less on elections per se and more on anti-systemic movements and forms of mobilization. From that perspective, the Danish People’s Party has been particularly successful in tapping into this kind of anti-systemic mobilization.

At the same time, we also see another far-right party, the Danish Democrats, led by former minister Inger Støjberg. While they share a similar anti-immigration stance, they have not been as successful in converting this into electoral support. To me, this suggests that additional factors are at play. One key element appears to be the effectiveness of social media campaigning, particularly on the part of the Danish People’s Party and Morten Messerschmidt.

A Key Lesson for Social Democratic Parties in Europe

The Danish case has often been cited as an example of mainstream parties absorbing far-right agendas—particularly on immigration. In light of the latest election results, do you see this strategy as containing or, paradoxically, legitimizing populist radical right discourse within mainstream political competition? Do the election results suggest that this strategy has reached its limits—or even backfired?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: Yes, I definitely think this election lends support to the argument that the strategy of normalizing far-right rhetoric and policies within the center and the center-left has its limits—perhaps even backfiring to some extent. For example, Denmark has maintained one of Europe’s toughest migration policies, and yet the Danish People’s Party still achieved a very strong electoral result.

When we examine the data, particularly in comparison to the 2022 election, we also observe one of the largest estimated voter shifts from one party to another—specifically from the Social Democrats to the Danish People’s Party. This is based on the data currently available, although it will require further analysis. At the very least, this suggests that voters are moving from the Social Democrats to the Danish People’s Party, and that this shift is closely linked to the migration issue.

What this indicates is that a strict mainstream migration policy does not automatically neutralize the radical right or the far right in electoral terms. This is an important lesson for other social democratic parties across Europe that are observing the Danish election and seeking to shape their own positions on migration and anti-immigration policies in light of these developments.

Far-Right Digital Counter-Publics Remain Highly Active

Your work emphasizes the role of alternative news media in shaping political perceptions. To what extent do you think digital counter-publics and alternative information environments influenced the electoral performance of populist and radical right actors in this election?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: Let me begin with alternative news media. I would say that, in themselves, they do not have a significant impact on electoral outcomes. I have been collecting articles from Danish alternative news media throughout the election, and only one outlet—one that is somewhat close to the Social Democrats, called PUPU—has actively covered the election. I have also followed debates on national television, where at least one editor from a right-leaning outlet was invited to participate in discussions on migration, particularly concerning Muslims and the Danish Muslim population. So, there is certainly something to this, but it is not an impact that we can clearly observe. 

When it comes to digital counter-publics connected to alternative news media, it is becoming increasingly difficult for researchers to obtain reliable data from platforms, which makes this question quite challenging to answer. Based on my intuition, however, these counter-publics—especially those associated with the far right and the Danish People’s Party—are highly active. I am quite confident that the Danish People’s Party’s social media strategy has aimed to mobilize some of these digital counter-publics. How successful these efforts have been, and the extent of their overall impact, remains difficult to determine—particularly given the ongoing challenges of accessing data from different platforms.

No Electoral Impact from the Greenland Issue

Election campaign posters featuring Liberal leader and former Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen displayed on a street during the campaign period in Copenhagen, Denmark on June 15, 2015. Photo: Francis Joseph Dean / Dean Pictures / Dreamstime.

Despite intense international attention on the Greenland crisis, domestic issues ultimately dominated the campaign. How do you interpret this gap between geopolitical salience and voter priorities? Was the so-called “Greenland effect” electorally significant or overstated?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: As I see it, the only politician who really managed to benefit from the “Greenland effect,” or to gain something from it, was the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, from the Moderates. There was a documentary film about the days leading up to and during the crisis, when it was at its peak, and Lars Løkke Rasmussen traveled to Washington to meet with American politicians. 

I think he was the only one who really gained something from this in electoral terms, at least. I am not entirely sure why. Mette Frederiksen was certainly in a position to benefit as well, since she played a significant role in managing the situation and coordinating with European counterparts. However, we do not see this reflected in the numbers, at least not in the electoral outcome.

If we consider the Greenland case more broadly, it mattered quite a lot in the run-up to the election. Mette Frederiksen called the election while still benefiting from the visibility and leadership image created by Trump’s pressure over Greenland. During the campaign itself, however, the issue was clearly overshadowed by domestic concerns. These included rising costs of living, the green transition, debates over clean drinking water, healthcare for an aging population, and, of course, immigration. These issues ultimately dominated the campaign. The established parties struggled to mobilize effectively across all of them, although the Social Democrats were more successful on issues such as the green transition and welfare, while the Danish People’s Party mobilized strongly on immigration as well as welfare and healthcare-related concerns.

Potential Spillover into Populist Narratives

At the same time, could the Greenland issue have indirectly shaped the election by reinforcing narratives of sovereignty, external threat, and national unity—particularly within populist communication frames?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: As I mentioned earlier, perhaps—but not to a very strong extent. I think it is, to some degree, a matter of time. We will have to see whether concerns over Greenland spill over into broader, more classic right-wing populist debates regarding border control, security, national cohesion, and immigration. That said, I would still be somewhat hesitant to answer definitively in the affirmative. It is also a question of timing—we will have to see, especially as the formation of a coalition government will likely take a few months, according to some political analyses. These topics could certainly resurface.

Fragmentation Elevates the Moderates to Kingmaker Status

The Moderates, now positioned as a pivotal kingmaker at the political center, occupy a decisive role in post-election coalition building. From your perspective, does this development represent a stabilizing corrective within Danish democracy, or does it instead point to a deeper fragmentation of political representation?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: I think it points to a deeper fragmentation of political representation, as you suggest. Today, the left-leaning bloc has chosen the Moderates as the kingmaker, which is entirely new information. However, the left-leaning bloc still needs the mandates from Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s party to succeed, so the most likely scenario is a left-leaning government with the Moderates as part of it—although I would not put my head on the block for that.

It is somewhat striking, because leading up to the election, many expected that Lars Løkke Rasmussen and the Moderates would assume the kingmaker role. However, learning from the last election, the Social Democrats appear to have tried to avoid that situation, as it would have placed considerable pressure on them—even as the largest party—within an increasingly fragmented party system. Time will show what role the Moderates and Lars Løkke Rasmussen—who hold 14 seats in parliament—will ultimately play in forming the government.

One additional point is that Lars Løkke Rasmussen has been the clearest advocate for forming another centrist government. He has maintained this position consistently from the outset. If the government formation process drags on, he may find himself in a particularly strong position, as having a clear and consistent stance can be advantageous in such a fragmented political landscape. There is a great deal at stake, and forming a government will be a difficult political process. It could prove especially interesting for the Moderates.

No Clear Narrative Defines This Election

Danish daily newspapers
Various major Danish daily newspapers in Copenhagen, Denmark, on April 17, 2015 displayed on a table. Photo: Francis Joseph Dean / Dean Pictures / Dreamstime.

Your research highlights how digital environments can foster echo chambers and partisan homophily. Do you see evidence that such dynamics contributed to the electoral polarization—or fragmentation—observed in this election? How might these dynamics have influenced voter alignments in this election, particularly regarding contentious issues such as immigration, economic redistribution, and national sovereignty?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: The short answer is no, but I think the fact that it was not possible for either political parties or the media to construct a very clear storyline for this election—for voters, at least—really says a lot. It is something that political commentators across the spectrum agree on: this has been an election that has been very difficult to define. It has been unclear whether the election was about policies related to the green transition, immigration, or other issues. It has been highly fragmented, and none of the parties has been able to set the agenda in a decisive way.

My hypothesis—perhaps also from a researcher’s perspective—is that we are witnessing the long-term effects of media fragmentation. Legacy media and social media together are making it increasingly difficult, within this hybrid media environment, for the media to establish a coherent narrative for voters—one that clearly identifies the main dividing lines between parties and presents the election as a unified communicative and political process. Of course, social media is not new to this election, but we may now be seeing its longer-term effects more clearly.

I do not have a definitive answer as to why it has been so difficult for the media. Denmark still has a high-quality, high-trust media system, with outlets that voters generally trust. So it is somewhat puzzling why it has been so difficult to formulate a cohesive narrative about the election.

European Trends Reshape Danish Politics

Denmark is often described as a high-trust, low-polarization society. Yet your work suggests that even such contexts are not immune to the rise of anti-systemic communication. Do the current election dynamics indicate an erosion of this “Nordic exceptionalism,” or rather its adaptation under new digital conditions?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: I think the fact that the far-right party, the New Right—which we have not discussed—entered parliament in the last election is indicative of this—an erosion of Nordic exceptionalism, at least to some extent. They only entered with 2.1% of the vote, so Denmark remains a high-capacity democracy with fairly high turnout, as we have said—a little lower than in the last couple of elections—and there is still broad institutional legitimacy.

On the other hand, one could argue that Denmark is no longer isolated from trends we see elsewhere in Europe. The fragmentation we discussed, anti-incumbent voting patterns, migration-centered competition, and increased pressure on mainstream, established parties all point in that direction.

However, my analysis is that much of the anti-systemic mobilization and communication has been picked up and channeled very successfully by the Danish People’s Party, particularly through social media campaigns. The Danish People’s Party has been one of the parties that has gained the most from this election. So, it has not been a landslide erosion of democratic trust; rather, it is a sign of an increasingly polarized political landscape. We may also be observing some longer-term effects, particularly the difficulties faced by the media system in providing a clear and coherent narrative of the election for voters.

Nativist Strategies Can Backfire Electorally

Pakistani or Indian migrants in Copenhagen.
Pakistani or Indian migrants in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 22, 2017. Photo: Dreamstime.

In your view, how does the Danish election contribute to our understanding of populism beyond the traditional left–right spectrum? Do we observe forms of “valence” or “anti-systemic” populism that cut across ideological divides, especially in digitally mediated environments?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: I will have to give a somewhat boring answer to this—and also one that is not particularly favorable for my own research on anti-systemic populism—but I do not see it as the main case here. It is not the central story of this election. There is, however, an interesting argument in how the Social Democrats appropriated a far-right nativist discourse, which appears to have backfired in terms of voter transitions to the Danish People’s Party. I think this is partly because the Danish People’s Party was effective in exploiting the opportunities it was given. What I mean by this is that we do not observe the same voter transition to the Danish Democrats, who did not achieve the electoral success they had anticipated. So, to a large extent, this comes down to the social media campaigning of Morten Messerschmidt and the Danish People’s Party.

Anti-Centrist Voting Defines the Election

The election results indicate gains both for the populist radical right and for certain left-wing actors. Does this suggest that populism in Denmark is increasingly transcending the traditional left–right divide? From a comparative perspective, how does Denmark’s experience relate to broader European trends in populist radical right mobilization? Does the Danish case still represent a distinct model, or is it converging with patterns observed in countries like Germany, Austria, or Sweden?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: First of all, I would not say that the Danish case shows that populism has fully transcended the left–right divide, at least not in a symmetrical sense. What we do see, however, is a clear revolt against the status quo and the established parties. A more accurate formulation is that this represents a kind of anti-centrist voting, spread across the spectrum on both the left and the right.

On the right, we have the Danish People’s Party, whose recovery was clearly tied to classic populist radical right themes such as immigration, national protection, and related issues. They campaigned on zero net Muslim migration and on cost-of-living grievances. On the left, we see the Socialist People’s Party, which mobilized around classic welfare issues and a stronger green profile.

In comparative terms, Social Democrats in countries such as Sweden, Germany, and perhaps the Netherlands are likely looking at this election and drawing lessons from it—particularly that they should avoid adopting strategies that appropriate nativist tropes from far-right parties. I think that would be my answer to this question.

No Strong Cordon Sanitaire in Danish Politics

A Conservative Party election billboard reading “Stop Nazi Islamism” draws public attention and criticism during the campaign period in Copenhagen, Denmark on April 15, 2015.. Photo: Francis Joseph Dean / Dean Pictures / Dreamstime.

Denmark’s far right has historically been constrained by institutional and cultural factors, including elements of a cordon sanitaire. Do recent developments suggest a weakening of these barriers, particularly through digital mainstreaming processes?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: Good question. Historically, when we compare Denmark to Sweden and Germany, for instance, we do not have as strong a cordon sanitaire tradition as we see in the German context, where certain parties, such as the AfD, are very actively and explicitly excluded.

The Danish political scene is characterized by a relatively wide spectrum of voices that are allowed in. So, I do not think that the 2% threshold for entering parliament necessarily prevents a broader range of parties from gaining representation; rather, it allows for what one might call a “long tail” of parties. So, I tend to disagree slightly with that premise.

Regarding whether this relates to digital mainstreaming processes, there has certainly been a mainstreaming of nativist discourse. That is quite clear to me. And, as I mentioned before, it is now up to Social Democrats across Europe to consider whether they want to follow the same path as the Social Democrats in Denmark. 

A Left-Leaning Government Is Likely to Emerge

And finally, looking ahead: Based on these election results, what are the key risks and opportunities for Danish democracy? Do you foresee a consolidation of mainstream politics, or further growth of anti-systemic and populist forces in future elections?

Dr. Frederik Møller Henriksen: For this election, and for the government coalition-building process currently underway, I think we will see a left-leaning bloc entering government. As for the long-term effects, this relates more to how difficult it can be to form a centrist government, especially in a political party system that does not have a strong tradition of doing so. I think the three parties that formed the previous government were not very successful in this regard, and we can see that reflected in voter turnout—the voters simply did not like it.

On the other hand, this did not translate into strong anti-systemic mobilization. I think this is more closely related to Denmark being a high-trust society, where people are not concerned about fraud and are not worried about being misinformed by state media, for instance.

I think we need to center our attention on the core pillars of democracy that sustain it, rather than focusing solely on a specific election outcome. Of course, that is also very important, but to understand why we do not see strong anti-systemic mobilization on either the left or the right, we need to look at trust in the media system and the political system.

UNTOLD Europe Workshop

UNTOLD Europe Workshop – Case Study Session Report

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The interactive case study session of the UNTOLD Europe Workshop (Brussels, 21 October 2025) translated critical discussions on colonial legacies, migration narratives, gender, and human rights into comparative policy analysis. Participants worked in four groups examining labour migration to Greece, the EU Migration Pact, the EU–Tunisia Memorandum, and Spain–Morocco circular migration schemes. Across cases, recurring patterns emerged: securitization over protection, racialized labour hierarchies, gendered recruitment structures, and externalisation practices rooted in asymmetrical power relations. By combining structural analysis with creative reframing, the session encouraged participants to challenge dominant narratives and articulate rights-based alternatives. The findings underscore how colonial continuities remain embedded in contemporary migration governance—and highlight the need for dignity-centred, inclusive policy approaches across the Euro-Mediterranean space.

 

Case Study Session Overview

The case study session, held during the UNTOLD Europe Workshop on Migration Narratives on 21 October 2025 in Brussels, constituted a central interactive component of the workshop and was designed to translate the workshop’s conceptual discussions on colonial legacies, migration narratives, gender, and human rights into concrete and comparative analysis.

Participants were divided into four small working groups of 5-person, each focusing on a distinct case reflecting contemporary forms of migration governance and externalisation in the Euro-Mediterranean context. The session combined collective analysis, critical reflection, and creative reframing, encouraging participants to interrogate how historical power asymmetries and colonial continuities remain embedded in current migration frameworks.

Objectives of the Case Study Session

The case study session pursued three interrelated objectives:
– To analyse how colonial legacies, racialised hierarchies, and unequal power relations shape present-day migration policies and narratives;
– To examine the implications of these frameworks for labour rights, gender equality, and human rights;
– To encourage participants to reframe dominant migration narratives and develop alternative, rights-based perspectives.

Structure and Methodology

The session was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, groups familiarised themselves with their assigned case and identified key narrative frames, policy mechanisms, and governance logics. In the second stage, groups shifted from analysis to reflection and creative reframing. Each group concluded by formulating key observations and insights, which were later shared in the closing plenary.

Case Study Groups and Thematic Focus

Group 1: Labour Migration from Egypt and Bangladesh to Greece

This group examined labour migration pathways from Egypt and Bangladesh to Greece, focusing on temporary and irregular labour regimes in sectors such as agriculture and construction. Discussions highlighted how colonial and postcolonial labour hierarchies shape recruitment practices, legal precarity, and working conditions. Particular attention was paid to racialisation, the commodification of migrant labour, and limited access to rights and legal protection.

Group 2: The EU Migration Pact

This group analysed the EU Migration Pact as a framework reshaping migration governance across the European Union. Discussions focused on securitisation, border procedures, and differentiated treatment of migrants, as well as the broader narrative implications of managing migration primarily through control-oriented approaches.

Group 3: The EU–Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding

This group explored the EU–Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding as an example of migration externalisation. The analysis centred on asymmetrical power relations, the delegation of border management, and the implications for accountability and human rights protection.

Group 4: Spain–Morocco Circular Migration

This group focused on Spain–Morocco circular migration schemes, particularly in seasonal agricultural labour. Discussions examined how controlled mobility regimes reproduce colonial patterns of labour extraction, gendered recruitment, and structural dependency.

Conclusion

Across all four case studies, participants identified recurring themes, including the persistence of colonial and racialised hierarchies, the prioritisation of labour and security concerns over rights, and the gendered dimensions of migration governance. The session enabled participants to connect theoretical discussions with concrete cases and to reflect collectively on alternative narratives grounded in dignity and inclusion.

The case study session underscored the value of participatory and comparative analysis in understanding contemporary migration dynamics. By engaging with diverse cases, participants contributed to a shared reflection on how migration narratives can be critically examined and reimagined beyond colonial continuities.